Postcards of the Hanging

Reviewing Albums

2010-07-31T15:53:00.000-07:00

The first tape I ever owned was a Beach Boys greatest-hits, the first CD I ever owned was the soundtrack to the Big Chill—thanks Mom—and the first vinyl record I bought was a hardcore punk 7” EP. Were I to enter the new technological age, and purchase a digital download, it almost certainly would be a single mp3—the new Rihanna song, let’s say—in any case, as with my initial forays into all other music formats, it would not be an entire album. Ah, yes, the album—that doomed and anachronistic medium (we are told)—at every turn of my music-buying life has been diverted, chopped up, abbreviated, made irrelevant, and at the same time (we need look only to hip-hop as a genre) bloated, crammed with filler, expanded to the full 80 minutes allowed by the CD.

One need hardly point out that the “maximizing” of the album (compare Metallica’s Black Album (1991) at sixty minutes to Slayer’s Reign in Blood at twenty-nine minutes (1986) for an index of the CD’s tendency to promote, uh, “epic” ambitions in music) and the album’s increasing irrelevance are two sides of the same coin—the longer and only inconsistently-rewarding $18 album begs to be summarized, stolen, and cherry-picked from. So it is both a relief and an aggravation to remark upon Pitchfork Media’s continued dedication to the album as the only serious work of musical art (while Lil’ Wayne’s mixtapes are treated as charming “deconstructions” of the album’s untroubled supremacy).

In what does Pitchfork’s allegiance to albums consist? Alas, this can only be answered as a tautology (though it is the tautology of their aesthetic, and not mine). Pitchfork’s reviews treat albums as deep and meta-critical meditations upon…the album form itself. It is as though every album (in indie rock) were a minor recreation of Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½, with its mise-en-abyme of the director’s making a movie about making a movie (or several?) about...artistic dilemmas. Applying this ready-at-hand formula to reviewing occasionally tedious and usually unprofound contemporary rock music does, as one might expect, yield some tedious and unprofound results.

You don’t need me to tell you that the most-acclaimed and innovative art is often a meditation on the medium itself: from Velasquez’s Las Meninas to Don Quixote, until Godard’s Contempt, this is a reliable way to produce one’s masterpiece.

It’s worth doing what in grad school they call “close reading”—let’s take the opening of a Pitchfork review of some Death Cab for Cutie album:

Love isn't watching someone die, contrary to what Ben Gibbard memorably sang on Death Cab for Cutie's major-label debut. No, love is watching someone grow and change and still staying with them-- whether we're talking about family, friends, romantic interests, or a little college-town indie rock band from about an hour-and-a-half outside Seattle. Death is just the dénouement. In the three years since their platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated Plans, Gibbard and Death Cab producer/guitarist Chris Walla have both entered their thirties, coming off a wave of successes that included 2003's Transatlanticism going gold and the debut by Gibbard side project the Postal Service becoming Sub Pop's best-selling disc since Nirvana. That's a whole lotta love.

Narrow Stairs, Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall, is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, but they're still aiming for the same place: your heart. It's an album about growing and changing and becoming resigned to the fact that you'll never be truly content.

In brief, the album is about the band’s process of realizing that this was the album they needed to make. Hmm. As if that weren’t circular enough, this point is introduced by a quote from the band’s previous album!...in which I am assured that “love” and “death” are just metaphors for the vicissitudes of the music industry and creative process. That might be true, but what profit—when this produces platitudes like “You’ll never be truly content” or nonsense like “death is just the denouement.” Oops: Pitchfork insists upon the Francophile diacritical mark—dénouement.

But let’s play nice. This isn’t about pretentious spelling or Death Cab. Let me give you a sampling of other such moments from Pitchfork’s recent history, where the album’s lyrics are taken as a commentary on the art of making an album.

The sound is huge, but the song is a simple ode to being needed, about the pleasure in caring for something, whether a child or family pet… In other words, it's about accepting responsibility and most of all about growing up, which is something Animal Collective seem to be doing brilliantly, with their creativity and adventurous spirit intact.

"This loneliness ain't pretty no more," she sings on [El Perro Del Mar’s] "This Loneliness", acknowledging the melancholic draw of pop music in general and her music specifically.

On "Mushaboom", the signature track from her 2004 breakthrough album Let It Die, Leslie Feist [of Feist] claimed, "It may be years until the day my dreams will match up with my pay." Now, after countless sold-out shows across the world, close to half of a million records sold, and placement in a commercial for British bed manufacturers Silentnight, it seems safe to say this NPR darling's "pay" should be satisfactory.

Whether the implications of the line are intentional or not is difficult to say, but when, on "Paper Cup Exit", [Sonic Youth’s] Lee Ranaldo sings, "It's later than it seems," the band seem to be keenly aware of their age and relevance. That self-awareness, both of an appreciably long canon and the four lives it has traversed, makes Sonic Nurse all the more remarkable.

Is there a problem with reviewing records this way? Frankly, yes. For one, it privileges English-language pop music over other genres: the Pitchfork model is always about lyrics. For instrumental music, or music with other things on its mind than its own importance, there is precious little to say for this style of review. Further, the model is extremely well-suited to the masterpiece: 8 ½, Don Quixote, Sunset Boulevard, Remembrance of Things Past—works with something interesting to say. The “meta” remark contained in snippets of contemporary indie rock have, well, let’s say they have somewhat less insight to offer. Pop music is melancholy; we have to grow up; achieving one’s dreams is not always so great; getting old sucks: these are all cheap insights.

As English majors in college, Pitchfork’s reviewers surely know the instant reward of showing that something called “form” is reflected in something else called “content,” and vice versa. If this tawdry hermeneutics is the only way to appreciate full-length albums in 2008, perhaps it is a kind of devil’s bargain. Still, it is worth remembering that on one hand this lyric-based method is akin to reviewing a film based on a print-out of its script, and secondly that no less an artist than Bob Dylan is (famously) singularly resistant to this kind of biographical/self-referential reading; with the exception of his disastrous “Christian period.” Should a method of aesthetic appreciation not be as well suited to evaluating successes (as those of Dylan’s classic but most sphinx-like period) as to indulging the pretentiousness of failures?

"Generic Pop Music"

2010-07-25T02:47:00.000-07:00

Poptimist column from Pitchfork

There is some wrong-headedness in the above link, and also some false statements.

On the wrong-headed side, the idea of "pop music" trotted out here is totally unhistorical. Pop music is actually a really terrible vehicle for the "generic." In the obvious sense, yes, 90% of pop music at a given moment in time is very much identical to itself, and trends dominate over individual voices. But, what should be equally obvious is that, decade-to-decade, pop music is being constantly revolutionized. (Pitchfork's idea that "electro-dance" is a permanent feature of our lives is ideological in the highest degree.) And when things are outdated--constantly--they really do fall outside of their generic bounds.

Also, pop history has a distorting effect. "Innovations" (things initially falling outside of the genre) are incorporated so quickly and so lastingly that they cannot always be grasped as such from the present day. This is all very "duh," but then you read this:

a happier idea of the generic: a core of musical ideas or values, which, executed well, satisfy the fans of a genre just as much as music that moves beyond those.

1) No. This "core" is not stable or self-sustaining or core-like. In pop music, music that "moves beyond" a genre is then constantly re-absorbed within the genre as its new center.

2) The idea of musical ideas being "executed well" here is completely question-begging.

3) There is no possibility for a "deconstruction" here. The spatial metaphor laid out in this article does not consider that a great deal of innovation occurs *not only* "within" these boundaries--that is really just the spinning-off of variation--but that creativity does interesting things to the logic of boundaries: parody, pastiche, transplantation, etc. If you know anything about English poetry, you will know that meter is a similar thing. There is not "correct iambic pentameter" and "moving beyond iambic pentameter." What makes good iambic pentameter is the counter-rhythms and liberties one can take with the form. (Again, I stress this is different from just variation, which is the monkeys-on-typewriters production of permutations within a given limit.)

Now for the false statements.

I got this feeling listening to the new Kylie Minogue album, Aphrodite: Not one track stood out, but I never stopped enjoying the record. As an experience it felt rather like good customer service: seamless, efficient, friendly, and inobtrusive.

This is clever writing, even though "enjoying the record" is very question-begging. But the second sentence must give us pause: has anyone ever ENJOYED good customer service?

The generic is something one sees only at a distance in time or in taste.

Technically true--in an Aristotelian sense, one has to aggregate the essence of a genre from outside of the particular--the implication here is false.

Let's say that I want to get into some new style of music, say, folk music made with an African thumb-piano. It would be virtually impossible to get a view at the "center" of this genre "from a distance." In one sense, yes, the first 30 songs I heard would "sound alike" to me, and this would be a kind of generic similarity. But I totally refute this. Because I would be constructing this genre out of ignorance and pure phenomenality: the fact that something "showed up" on this quest would automatically incorporate it into my idea of this genre.

This happened when I was getting into the very rule-bound genre of hardcore punk. I wanted fast, fast, fast music. But a lot of things that came my way were FAST, sure (Zeke, Capitalist Casualties, Dillinger Escape Plan) but really have to be placed outside the genre as I was looking for it and as I now know it. What I *wanted* was Jerry's Kids and Mob 47, but this "generic center" was not at all discernible from outside, i.e. from the "distance" that Pitchfork writes about.

Not to be too philosophical here, but the "distance" here is not an objective one, like a fine or a coarse adjustment on a microscope (as the metaphor intends). It is really a subjective one; the phenomenon of "African thumb piano music" really exists only in my head UNTIL I have really educated myself. Once so educated, much that will seem generic on first glance will perhaps disappear (into a more correct classification) and an appreciation of nuances will show that was seemed very "usual" was in fact innovation of the highest order, etc. In short, "closing the distance" between oneself and a phenomenon that exists already in one's mind, is entirely an appreciation that the phenomenon in fact DID NOT exist in one's mind, and had to be appropriated anew in its heterogeneity.

This last paragraph is also a good description of falling in love.

Recent Swedish Hardcore

2010-04-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

Martyrdöd- Sekt LP

Let's begin phenomenologically. It is impossible to say from a first listen whether a record is "good" or not. However, it is entirely possible to say whether I enjoy something or not. I contend, though, that these are the same thing. We all know what it is like to LOVE a song: it catches your attention, you play it a bunch of times in a row, you send the video to your friends, you have it stuck in your head.

When you hear some music and this ("I love this!") does NOT happen, there is not some other thing happening: it's not as good. Does this mean that my Ornette Coleman records are not as "good" as Black Sabbath, because I do all sorts of ridiculous things in my room when I am listening to one and not the other? I enjoy them less, even over a span of years. Life is too short to worry about the difference.

The d-beat, as we know, is a beat, a rhythm. Any band playing this style has to face up, immediately, to the fact that this beat can become deadly boring. The best bands, Discharge, Disclose, Totalitär, make it their own. They take precedence over the beat. The worst bands succumb to it, and their music disappears into X minutes of sheer material.

Martyrdöd were a band I was very excited about in 2003-2005, but have not thought a great deal about since then. They were more mysterious and more metal-influenced than the bands who were going around at that time, although this appeal was subsequently undermined by rawer (and far superior) bands like Framtid and Lebenden Toten.

So, this new Martyrdöd album: what's it like? For one thing, it is startlingly cliché-free. They seem like they are working within a musical idiom rather than within a bag of tricks. Somehow they convince me that d-beat can be profoundly melodic, without resorting to the "sweet" lead-lines of early 2000's stadium crust. It does not grab your attention, necessarily, but if you put time into this record, it pays back. The best d-beat ("Fight Back") grabs your attention, despite its being incredibly predictable. Martyrdöd are more thunderously monotonous, but I am convinced they crafted these songs to be immersive. It's a good record, but I suppose I am saying it is not a punk record. The Ramones are not "immersive," y'know? It's a good METAL record, in that sense (and in that sense only).

Disfear- Live the Storm LP

I guess this band never "made it," although this album was (favorably) reviewed on indie rock website Pitchfork. Strictly speaking, this has very little in common with Discharge anymore. I mean, there is a d-beat, it is redundant as hell, the singer is still the singer from Skitsystem (and At the Gates)... but it is basically emo. I don't mean of course that it is *really* emo, that emo music will come out of your speakers if you play this... but all the embellishments, the chord progressions, the long choruses, the expressive and bummed-out vocals--none of this has to do with Discharge. It is more like Coliseum.

The whole point of Discharge was not to "rock." Discharge were a very abstract, cool-looking, almost inconceivably arty, monotone, and minimalist outfit. They weren't into tattoos or brass knuckles or sad/tough fonts. Discharge invented a timeless form of hardcore at a single stroke, by detaching melody, narrative, musicality, emotion, attitude, etc. FROM punk, reducing it to Stooges-levels of dumbed-down-high-concept. Discharge are an anthem, a protest--anything but a haphazard assemblage of rock cliches. In truth, Discharge are much more in the tradition of the Stooges, the Ramones, and Motorhead, than most any of the bands subsequent to them (although it remains a task to interpret this essence correctly).

In any case, Disfear has nothing to do with any of this. Undoubtedly that makes Disfear catchier, more "rockin," than a legitimate group could ever be, but on the other hand this is just circus music for upset teenagers (à la Cradle of Filth).

Wolfbrigade- Comalive LP

This was heralded as something of a "return to form" of this venerable band. In my opinion they haven't been good since Jonsson left (i.e. since after their second LP). Nothing here is even close to A New Dawn Fades or Lycanthro Punk, which were truly depraved slices of life from a crazy person. I'd like to see these clean-cut lads make a song called "Land Shark" or "Roll the Dice" totally convincing, which was the specialty of Wolfpack in their prime. Wolfpack certainly were not the greatest band of all time, but you definitely were afraid that they would STAB YOU. In this sense, they were in a league with Negative Approach and Poison Idea; simply scary people.

Nowadays Wolfbrigade resort more to fonts than to visceral thrills, although the production here is certainly a step above what I heard from their last album, Prey to the World. They have totally ditched the Tragedy rip-offs which informed their album on Feral Ward, and so this is entirely straight-ahead. I couldn't tell you if it is better or worse than any of their 2000s records, though. But it's impossible to imagine wanting to hear these songs again. More damningly, if someone came over to your house and played you these riffs without a huge production and a full band, i.e. just on their little practice amp, I don't think they would sound better than anything else just made up on the spot. Totally by-the-numbers.

Warcollapse- Defy LP

I don't want to make any grand claims for this, but it is by far the best of the bunch. Why? For one thing, in their own way, Warcollapse have made a "party record," a bouncy, catchy, drug-addled good time. To the uninitiated, sure, this will sound like death metal, or at least be indistinguishable from the other albums here... but this is a lesson IN small differences. Or, as I have it on my other blog, "paying attention to" Swedish hardcore. Every second of this album is enjoyable, not to say riveting. What can I say? It grabs your attention. By any other measure, it is a ridiculous album. Like the first Star Wars movie, the criticisms are as obvious as they are redundant: (in this analogy) badly acted, derivative, only for teenage boys, a climax that has little to do with the preceding small-scale plot, etc. And these odes to the crust lifestyle and heavy drug use will probably not change any minds, either.

A thesis for this blog?

2009-12-11T21:40:00.000-08:00

I was listening today to the Eno-Fripp collaboration "No Pussyfooting," and thinking, "wow this really sounds like Kraftwerk." And it seems to me that for nearly 100% of the music-discussing world, liking this album and liking Kraftwerk would go hand in hand.

You can imagine the conversation in the record store.

"I've enjoyed other Eno albums, but I don't really like King Crimson. Is this good?"
"Yeah. Do you like Kraftwerk?"
"Of course."
"You'll like this. It sounds like Kraftwerk."

Which... it does. But I guess I want to say, there is NOTHING to like about (or "in") this similarity.

I've made this argument elsewhere, but no art should ever be evaluated on its *premise*. The Mona Lisa-- on paper, it's not so great. Blade Runner *should* be a great movie, instead it is boring and anti-profound.

The great hardcore band Black Flag realized this early on, changing their sound drastically and frequently in order to keep one step ahead of their own influence in the American punk scene. Only a crazy person would say, "You'll like My War. It sounds like Nervous Breakdown." They don't "sound alike." On the other hand, these two great achievements in American music are much more similar than Eno-Fripp & Kraftwerk, which are only apparently similar.

It should be possible to like 99 records in a genre without it being a foregone conclusion that one will like the identical-sounding 100th record. I am using mostly musical examples, because, to take literature for an example, only unserious readers (like "consumers" of any mystery novel) are so faithful to a given genre. But even children did not go for just every single Harry Potter rip-off which was flung at the market after the success of J.K. Rowling's novels.

I happen to like both Eno-Fripp & Kraftwerk. But this is (or should be) completely contingent, unrelated-- or else it is not real taste. Taken to its logical conclusion, genres would disappear completely as an indicator of taste. This should happen. Liking Led Zeppelin should be as much a predictor of liking Deep Purple as it is a predictor of liking Debussy.

How to review hip-hop

2009-11-28T22:22:00.000-08:00

What first occurs to me about how to review hip-hop albums is that there is an entire tradition, both of the music, and of reviewing it--which gives little guidance. Hip-hop record reviews are often like Jack Kerouac's prose in On the Road: the writers try to approximate the musical style under consideration. I, on the other hand, feel that a rap album should be reviewed in exactly the same fashion as a death metal album.

Now, that is the long and the short of it. "How often will I listen to this? Is it memorable or paradigm-shifting? How many good songs are there in ratio to bad songs?" THESE are the questions. But I suspect my readers will not be satisfied without some examples.

Here is a sample of a small section of a (Clipse) review from the blog "Hip Hop Isn't Dead"

This song, recorded late in the game because those crackers that weren't playing fair at Jive didn't hear a single when an early version of Hell Hath No Fury was turned it, is now infamous because Pharrell made the mistake of selling the beat to Foxy Brown... Somewhere there's a rumored version of this song featuring Foxy Brown and Slim Thug's exact-same chorus: I would love to hear that one day for comparison's sake. Whatever happened to the Clipse's promised remix to this song that was supposed to feature Foxy, a compromise that was made to appease Shawn Carter?

Now, I have earlier and often made the claim that albums should be considered in two ways: first, sub specie aeterni, i.e. as close as possible to their "objective" importance and greatness, and secondly, in pragmatic terms: how often I listen to something. "Whatever happened to the promised remix of this song?" i.e.--- obsessive blogging-as-journalism and gossip mill, has nothing to do with either criteria. This might be interesting, but it has nothing to do with a record review, or with the quality of a song. Only the most perverse alchemy could transform hype or gossip or blogging into listening experience. It simply can't be done.

Here are a few reviews of Lil Wayne's last album:

Hip Hop Isn't Dead
Pitchfork
Rolling Stone

Now, to evaluate these, we need to go over what should be said about this album. It didn't age well; it is too long; 2/3 of the songs are bad; the remix of "Lollipop" was better than the album version; the Carter 2 was better; the Leak EP was better; Lil Wayne is best when there are no guests and no choruses--when he is just let loose over a beat. Well.. there's your review. Look over the reviews from its contemporary moment (last year) and I think you'll see that they all miss this basic summary.

Why is that? Why do album reviews (and, e.g., death metal is just as bad about this as hip hop) miss the question of listenability? Because they focus on "scene" components--dissing producers, sorting through hype, settling feuds, taking sides in a historical continuum, worrying about who is biting whom, evaluating egos, considering and being frustrated by popularity, and of course the highly contentious world of beat-making. Other genres have analogous problems. It simply doesn't matter to whether the music is good or not, but it is unavoidable in music journalism which "belongs" to a scene.

More from "Hip Hop Isn't Dead" (dot blogspot...)

Did Icarus and Redman have a falling out that I'm not aware of? That's the only reason I can think of that justifies Ready Roc's new position as go-to weed carrier and kidney donor alongside Meth's longtime candle warmer Streetlife.

That is from a TRACK review.

**

As fans of music, we are capable of telling whether a song is good or not, whether we enjoyed an album or not, whether a record works or doesn't or is just background music that will never become another "Daily Operations" or "Illmatic." And because these are the ways that fans approach music, it is also what a review should address.

See also my fake review of a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song for an example of how to review music.

My contention: gossip and name-dropping will never be a substitute for finding out whether a record is a classic, a near-classic, merely forgettable, or deserving of our contempt. That all pertains to the music; reviews (done poorly) thus date much worse than the albums themselves. This is of course as true for Bruce Springsteen (whose "9/11" album was received in a way completely detached from whether it had songs as good as his earlier work) as for Jay-Z.

Alternate Canon for Film

2009-11-14T20:37:00.001-08:00

I saw The Red Shoes at Film Forum the other day, in a new print, and it occurred to me that possibly I was watching the greatest movie of all time. This signals to my brain: "Yes, but on what criteria?" And the answer is something like: "pure filmmaking," or "movie magic," etc. etc. But what I mean I think is better expressed in my favorite format: the list.

The Red Shoes
Gone with the Wind
Lawrence of Arabia
Napoleon (1927)
Wizard of Oz
Ben-Hur (1959)
Citizen Kane
War & Peace (1967)
The Leopard
Modern Times
Juliet of the Spirits
Birth of a Nation
The Conformist
Lola Montes
West Side Story
2001: A Space Odyssey

Now, usually, these are not my actual favorites, nor my actual "Best" or "Most Important" films. But in all of these movies is a shocking, almost superhuman visual creativity and ambition. The colors of Gone with the Wind, the chariot race in Ben-Hur, the communicative silences of 2001, the sets in the Wizard of Oz, the choreography of West Side Story... Here I am breaking from my usual plot-centered valuations. It is a truism of course that the greatest auteurs (in film and literature) are often masters of BOTH detail and grand plan. Tolstoy and Proust in literature, and at least all of the historical epics listed above, are gigantic in scope and breathtaking in particular scenes.

One problem with this list: it is much less "art house" than my tastes really are, and considerably more Hollywood. Of the great art house directors, Fellini is the most in this line. Bergman, Kurosawa, Renoir, Lang, are obviously virtuosos and there is probably room in here for some of their more extravagant work. The New Wave is usually too cramped. Truffaut's best work, but even Rashomon or The Seventh Seal, are STILL not Gone with The Wind, if you see what I mean.

One movie that probably *does* belong here is actually one I disliked a great deal: Marketa Lazarova, a Czech black and white epic that was visually stunning from start to finish. Since it was so boring, it is disqualified as being (in another way) unwatchable. That Bergman never made a movie as "beautiful" as this one is obviously more instructive about what Bergman WAS doing, what kind of magic he *was* after, than in any way a negative remark about him.

Indie Rock and You

2009-09-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

What is it LIKE to enjoy a piece of music? This is what I want to know from a record review. Obviously, the very worst reviews of music are those that just talk about the lyrics, but from an intellectual standpoint, just as bad is the pretentious claim that reviews should "tell us what the music sounds like." Well, nothing could be more idiotic while sounding like a reasonable demand.

There is a rave review for the new GIRLS album, up on Pitchfork. Here is the part where they tell you what the music sounds like:

Musically, Album is mostly sunny Beach Boys pastiche, but it's not the kajillionth indie attempt at orchestral Pet Sounds majesty. Rather, it's simple and forthright early Beach Boys stuff: compact guitar-jangles, sha-la-la harmonies, muffled heartbeat drums. It sounds great. And even though it has a basic core sound, Album manages to cover a lot of aesthetic ground in its 44 minutes. Without being showy about it, they swing from rushing power-pop to acoustic campfire laments to "Morning Light", which is one of the most fully realized slices of shoegaze revivalism I've heard in years. If they'd made an entire album of songs like "Morning Light", Girls would be getting a ton of blog love, but they decided to go for something at once messier and simpler. And they're getting a ton of blog love anyway.

There's a pillowy quality to many of the sounds on Album, but this isn't lo-fi or glo-fi or whatever. Rather, every little production flourish is so much a part of the whole that you don't notice it until the 10th or 15th listen. On "Lust for Life", for instance, there's a melodica that bubbles up on the second half. "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker" is joyous beach-party stuff, but there's a beautifully discordant guitar solo in there. "Hellhole Ratrace" builds to an epic guitar whoosh halfway through its seven minutes, but the beat's hammer never quite falls; the drums stay just slightly off. The guitars on "Lauren Marie" twang like Duane Eddy's. All this stuff functions like the sleigh bells on Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run": subtle little intuitive details that you might never notice but that add to the devastating whole. The canniness of Album's production choices and the scuzzy depression of the lyrics and the gut-level songwriting instincts, along with everything else about the record, add up to something elusive and fascinating-- maybe even heartbreaking.

Now, that is really specific. A true description of what this album sounds like. But what remains to be pointed out is the deep irrelevance of "sounding like..." The guitars on "Lauren Marie" twang like Duane Eddy's--you don't say?? Does that mean any song will mean anything to me on first listen, on twelfth listen, in ten years? No matter how precise the description of the sound, I actually have no idea what it is like to *enjoy* this record. I only know what it is like to have *heard* this record.

Do the songs get under your skin? Do you find yourself singing them in the shower? Do you find little parts to memorize and play over and over? Or is it the sequencing? How does the filler fit in with the singles? Does it play best in short doses or all the way through? Might it be best to listen to this in the car or while doing the dishes?

Without being too autobiographical, the reviewer should tell me these things. For example, let me review an indie rock song for you. This is how it's done. This is a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song from a few years ago.

Although much of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's sound (slurred, slightly precious, affected vocals and droopy, woozy guitar) will be familiar to fans of indie rock--most recently in Modest Mouse's stirring late-career hit "Float On"--the layering of synthesizers over a predominantly bass-driven melody reminds me of nothing more than prime New Order. Meaning, if there is something like a canon of crowd-pleasers and genuine HITS in indie rock, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have tapped into this tradition. Nothing I think could be more profoundly uncool than such a move: it's like writing a poem with T.S. Eliot as your major influence, emulating The Godfather in film, or saying your favorite music is Mozart. The "cool" thing is secretly the artistic position which cuts out a certain portion of the audience in advance, the art that is less ambitious but which has obvious allusions instead. CYHSY are truly embarrassing, because they seemingly did not get this memo. On the contrary, they quietly have gone about the business of writing a song that is outstanding beyond its years: like "Sweet Child o' Mine" on Guns 'n Roses' debut album, it seems impossible that a young band could have produced such an obvious classic. CYHSY don't try to write "the perfect pop song" as though that were just the code for certain moves: they understand that "the perfect pop song" has a *unique* energy, not just the bland moodlessness of power-pop. And unlike the Jesus & Mary Chain-influenced groups that would come after, in the Brooklyn noise-pop wave of 2008, CYHSY have mastered dynamics, and... musicianship! In conclusion, that this is perfect car-commercial music is not to be doubted; but that something this propulsive and memorable is never to be produced by abstract and merely stylistic concerns, but only by real uninhibited creativity, is equally testified to in this little gem.

(In conclusion to this post, though, you will note that Pitchfork's review of the GIRLS album is different from my review of this CYHSY song, not just because the writing is different, but because no one could ever write such a thing of the boring, tepid, and suffocatingly-constrained mannerisms of GIRLS.)

Spectator (UK) list of 50 Greatest Films

2009-08-06T22:24:00.000-07:00

reposted from Rogerebert.com

This list is not outrageously wrong, but it has too many movies that are questionable as to whether they are even GOOD, much less great: #1 Night of the Hunter, #17 Blade Runner, and #50 Out of the Past, are all deeply problematic films. Interesting? Yes. But the "best movies" should only include GOOD movies, which these films are not. More discussion to come (including my list).

And no list with Citizen Kane at #14 (!!!!!!), or a David Lean film which is maybe only his 5th best film can be right. Still, some great and inspired picks here: Earrings of Madame de..., Rio Bravo, Barry Lyndon, Killer of Sheep, M, Manhattan. Fellini at #43 is painful to read, though... I guess these are the times we live in.

1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L'avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L'atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks
11. The Godfather: Part I and Part II, Coppola
12. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer
13. La Grande Illusion, Renoir
14. Citizen Kane, Welles
15. The Scarlett Empress, von Sternberg
16. Tokyo Story, Ozu
17. Blade Runner, Ridley Scott
18. Rear Window, Hitchcock
19. Point Blank, Boorman
20. The Red Shoes, Powell & Pressburger
21. The Earrings of Madame de..., Ophuls
22. Shadows, Cassavetes
23. Pickpocket, Bresson
24. Viridiana, Bunuel
25. Barry Lyndon, Kubrick
26. City Lights, Chaplin
27. Pierrot le Fou, Godard
28. Sunset Boulevard, Wilder
29. Notorious, Hitchcock
30. M, Lang
31. The Roaring Twenties, Walsh
32. Singin' in the Rain, Donen and Kelly
33. The Long Day Closes, Davies
34. Killer of Sheep, Burnett
35. Gun Crazy, Lewis
36. Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky
37. Taxi Driver, Scorsese
38. The 400 Blows, Truffaut
39. Pulp Fiction, Tarantino
40. Kind Hearts and Coronets, Hamer
41. In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai
42. Sullivan's Travels, Sturges
43. 8 1/2, Fellini
44. Pinocchio, Disney
45. Great Expectations, Lean
46. Rome, Open City, Rossellini
47. Duck Soup, McCarey
48. Jaws, Spielberg
49. Manhattan, Allen
50. Out of the Past, Tourneur

3 reviews of the Fucked Up album from last year

2009-07-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

Last year, I wrote a review of the Fucked Up album that was published online somewhere, but now it is time to compare *that* review (in its structure and criteria) with *other* reviews of the same record (ignoring things like "positivity" or what the record is "really" like).

Here's my version:
*
Being a long-time fan of hardcore punk, I have watched Fucked Up's ascent with great interest, from their first US tour, playing in a store-front in Bushwick, to the promotional frenzy that recently culminated in a 12-hour performance (stunt) and this album being reviewed in the hallowed pages of the NY Times. And there is literally nothing interesting to be said about Fucked Up's transformation from a Poison Idea-styled punk band--who gained notoriety by releasing 2-song singles in a genre (hardcore) that tends to cram a dozen songs onto a 7"--into a double-album-releasing band with flutes, choirs, and the rest. Nothing interesting to be said, for two reasons: 1) viewed sub specie aeterni, no one really cares about "transitions," we care about albums: are they good? will we want to listen to them often?, and the whole "evolution" of a band involves this very suspect metaphysics of locating a sound in its infancy, tracing it into the present, or seeing what elements were discarded to pave the way for success and breakthrough. And, 2) this record is not all that interesting. If you recall some of Black Metal's "ambient" experiments, which could only be astonishing and beautiful to the most genre-bound hesher, Fucked Up obviously are banking on a surprise factor that has no real payoff--"oh my god they have flutes!"

Whenever I don't like a band, I explain, fake-apologetically, "Well, you know me, I like the Kinks, so..."--as though I didn't want to wade in too deep, and really I wasn't qualified, but rather naive and would stick with what I knew. What this formulation means, of course, is that I like music that gets stuck in your head. Not "pop music," necessarily--probably everyone has had Mozart and Wagner stuck in their head, and probably Celtic Frost and the Bad Brains can be just as catchy. But the essential thing is that music be memorable. This is why any focus on production, who's doing the back-up vocals, lyrical themes, and extraneous instrumental touches, really misses the point--we listen to music to rock out to *parts* that we remember and like. And Fucked Up used to be really good at this. Like most music nowadays, this new album is not catchy, but it is full of parts. What the noodling, build-ups, repetitions, and whatnot are *doing* while not being catchy, is anyone's guess. The best bands at creating interesting little parts are Metallica, the Clash, and the Kinks--and on their last album, Fucked Up were in this tradition. This record is a bit like Napoleon's 1813 campaigns in Germany: although incorporating many different elements (Napoleon at Leipzig relied on allied troops from all over Europe), ultimately the strategy relies on bulk and an unimaginatively straight-forward attack, and, well, if you aren't up on your history, you can Wikipedia "Battle of the Nations" to see how this record succeeds. In short, if there is some ambition to ambient jamming that Fucked Up want to pursue, if they can make it interesting, I will follow a song full of neat parts to the ends of the earth, but you cannot dress up the plodding and unmemorable songs here. A record should be judged not by its scope or ambitions but by how often, over the years, one will listen to it. Even with the greatest enthusiasm or curiosity or goodwill, "The Chemistry of Common Life" is not a record that demands or rewards much time on your turntable. (emphasis mine)
*

Here are some key phrases from the Pitchfork review:

shimmering overdubs, fractured harmonies, almost tactile in its texture, bongo-laced, refreshing take on religion.

One reads this review in vain if searching for questions like, "Is this record catchy?" or "Will I enjoy listening to this?" or (more profoundly) "Am I *supposed* to enjoy listening to this?"

From the Dusted review, we learn helpfully that the album, on the most basic level--the combination of instruments--does not work: The disparity between these vocals and every other element on the record never gets easy to process, even on multiple listens. In a way, that should be the end of the review: except that the reviewer obviously feels that this "dissonance" (my term) might in some back-door way be incorporated into the form... which is already to give up the game, critically speaking. It's like staring at an all-white canvas and wondering whether it is "art" or not---instead of the more incisive point of view: IF THIS IS ART, WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH ME? And with the best artists (cited above--the Kinks, Metallica, previous releases by Fucked Up), the answer to this question is a no-brainer. While the Dusted reviewer realizes that what is being attempted by the album is a kind of synthesis of disparate elements into a Leviathan, what is left out by her review is whether there is any PURPOSE to such a synthesis.

What we like about a style or a genre is not *within* that style or genre. The tragedy of current tastes is to confuse these two things--the appeal of an album with the contingent trappings in which it occurs--to behave as though what made Black Flag Black Flag, what made the Velvet Underground the Velvet Underground, what made your favorite band your favorite band--to behave as though this were some algorithm of a style. And both the reviews I cited have been hoodwinked into a fixation ON this style, rather than on the (proper) fixation: is this catchy? am I enjoying this? what is the purpose of this?, etc.

Disgusting idiocy

2009-07-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

NY Times article in which a bunch of people pretend to be "really excited" for the 1990s culture of their youths, even though this includes such unwatchable nonsense as Saved by the Bell and unlistenable garbage as Britney Spears

Frankly, this is a low point. What is represents is this: people who DON'T have taste now recollecting fondly the time when NO ONE has taste (when you are are 13). Also, these references (they are little more than that) are truly the lowest common denominator (in a non-pejorative sense). *Everyone* of a certain demographic COULD have this conversation:

"Remember the ______?" with obligatory reply, "Yeah, that was so awesome; they should bring that back."

Features such nuggets of wisdom as "Buying my first Discman was huge," and “'I miss VHS tapes,' he said."

No one *really* misses VHS tapes. What's next? Fond memories of New Coke?

A tired plea for an "overlooked genius"

2009-07-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

In 2009, it is so completely established, conventional, and even academically-approved to "elevate" a "genre writer" (H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain) to the status of "high" literature, that the gesture itself has completely lost the counterintuitive wink which surely began this retrospective-canonizing project in the first place.

And yet, undaunted by the banality of this "reversal," here is an article in which the NY Times Magazine makes a plea for one Jack Vance, "overlooked" science fiction writer.

We are told that he is as good as: Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Jane Austen, Henry James, Proust, Poe-- that his being-American (instead of being from some fashionable Romance tradition) may also have contributed to his unsexiness, in addition to the perceived silliness of the genre fiction he writes.

Let me respond to this in bullet points, since my overall response is probably too predictable to readers of this blog.

I for one am completely unimpressed by the blurbing this article heavily relies on, especially that of Michael Chabon (who cares?!), and quite nonplussed by the praise of Neil Gaimon. This name-dropping is also a phantom punch, as the completely banal rhetoric here is (as always) "Your favorite writer's favorite writer." But what sick mind takes any interest in Michael Chabon's literary heroes?
In order for this enterprise to succeed, the literary worthiness of Vance's output needs to be conveyed by some demonstration (plot summaries, interesting features, some indelible character). But, sadly, Vance doesn't really *do* these things: elaborate architecture of a fictional universe (he lacks Tolkien's “impulse to synthesize a mythology for a culture"); "Intricate plotting is not Vance’s forte"; etc.
So what DOES this literary genius do well? Evidently he turns a phrase nicely (this appears to be about all). OK, so show me some nice turns of phrase. The article instead gives instance of some completely pedestrian and irritating writing.

If I am going to believe that someone is as good as Proust, James, Austen, or Borges, then I would expect better writing than THIS:

“ ‘I can resolve your perplexity,’ said Fianosther. ‘Your booth occupies the site of the old gibbet, and has absorbed unlucky essences. But I thought to notice you examining the manner in which the timbers of my booth are joined. You will obtain a better view from within, but first I must shorten the chain of the captive erb which roams the premises during the night.’

‘No need,’ said Cugel. ‘My interest was cursory.’ ”

Let me give a counter-example of good writing. It is the first paragraph of Joseph Conrad's "Outcast of the Islands," which is itself rather a bad novel. But it suffices here, and you will see that I'm not trying to overawe you with a big "name" like Moby-Dick, War and Peace, David Copperfield. Just read until you see my point.

When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect. It was going to be a short episode—a sentence in brackets, so to speak—in the flowing tale of his life: a thing of no moment, to be done unwillingly, yet neatly, and to be quickly forgotten. He imagined that he could go on afterwards looking at the sunshine, enjoying the shade, breathing in the perfume of flowers in the small garden before his house. He fancied that nothing would be changed, that he would be able as heretofore to tyrannize good-humouredly over his half-caste wife, to notice with tender contempt his pale yellow child, to patronize loftily his dark-skinned brother-in-law, who loved pink neckties and wore patent-leather boots on his little feet, and was so humble before the white husband of the lucky sister. Those were the delights of his life, and he was unable to conceive that the moral significance of any act of his could interfere with the very nature of things, could dim the light of the sun, could destroy the perfume of the flowers, the submission of his wife, the smile of his child, the awe-struck respect of Leonard da Souza and of all the Da Souza family. That family's admiration was the great luxury of his life. It rounded and completed his existence in a perpetual assurance of unquestionable superiority. He loved to breathe the coarse incense they offered before the shrine of the successful white man; the man that had done them the honour to marry their daughter, sister, cousin; the rising man sure to climb very high; the confidential clerk of Hudig & Co. They were a numerous and an unclean crowd, living in ruined bamboo houses, surrounded by neglected compounds, on the outskirts of Macassar. He kept them at arm's length and even further off, perhaps, having no illusions as to their worth. They were a half-caste, lazy lot, and he saw them as they were—ragged, lean, unwashed, undersized men of various ages, shuffling about aimlessly in slippers; motionless old women who looked like monstrous bags of pink calico stuffed with shapeless lumps of fat, and deposited askew upon decaying rattan chairs in shady corners of dusty verandahs; young women, slim and yellow, big-eyed, long-haired, moving languidly amongst the dirt and rubbish of their dwellings as if every step they took was going to be their very last. He heard their shrill quarrellings, the squalling of their children, the grunting of their pigs; he smelt the odours of the heaps of garbage in their courtyards: and he was greatly disgusted.

This is a fairly obvious point, but in order for some genre fiction (and really, Conrad IS this in his early works) to be as "great" as the High Literary canon, some example of it has to be already have been canonized. For example, Poe. Now, Poe *has* been thoroughly canonized. The problem for Vance's reputation is that this was, for Poe, instantaneous. Charles Baudelaire, the high poet of French modernity, translated and advocated for Poe near-contemporaneously. Conrad, too, was apparently of the same "height" as James and Madox Ford. Not so for Vance (or Lovecraft, or Chandler, or Cain, or Dick).
What do we have here, then? ANYTHING BUT a "raising to the level of..." (Hemingway, Proust, Austen). Instead, if you follow the rhetoric closely, what is being advocated for is a second, subsidiary, parasitical canon. A "low" canon, if you will. Let's imagine for a second that this Vance character is as good as this article says--though I am not at all persuaded that he is even as good as Frank Herbert or Ray Bradbury (writers I dislike). That is still a very long way from being "as good as" Henry James; in fact, that is an insane proposition. The only thing conceivable is that Vance might stand, in relation to other sci-fi writers, analogously to James' standing in relation to literary fiction in general. And thus, at the level of what already exists as a concept for everyone: the "classics of popular fiction": Tolkien, CS Lewis, Patrick O'Brian, Elmore Leonard, Philip K Dick.

My overarching point here is, no one is going to confuse this writer who cannot a) create vast, intricate fictional mythologies, nor b) craft a memorable plot, nor c) write a citable example of interesting dialogue-- that a writer who cannot do any of these things is not susceptible to confusion with Borges, Poe, or (let's say) Balzac's fantasy works. That is to say, not susceptible with the "greats" of world literature. It IS possible (though, in this case, unlikely), that he may be confused with Ray Bradbury, Ursula K LeGuin, Robert Heinlein... but merely this list of names shows that it is a CONSTITUTIVE PRETENSION of science fiction to be regarded in this way. That is to say, that this very tired and played-out "revisiting" of a science fiction writer who deserves to be regarded as more thoughtful than mere genre fiction.... this is what science fiction, with its allegories and cultishness, is all about from the start.

In other words, the question this NY Times article begs is the *undifferentiated* "canonical status" of a Raymond Chandler, operating on a transitive confusion... "If this writer is as good as Raymond Chandler, and I seem to have heard somewhere that Raymond Chandler is 'now' canonical.... then Jack Vance must be as great as Proust!"

And this line of thought is precisely as idiotic as I have just indicated. If you are unconvinced, please reread the above comparison of his prose with Conrad's. And remember the #1 principle of all my contentions: that the "great" does not have FEWER pleasures to offer than the "popular", but greater, richer, and more substantial in every way. And the attempt to pass off unsophisticated genre fiction AS sophisticated will only ever fool, well... you know.

the hubris of the mediocre

2009-06-23T22:18:00.001-07:00

I know a lot of people who make music, work at record labels, art galleries, work in publishing, are artists, are getting MFAs, etc. Most interesting people in NYC are involved in some sort of cultural production.

At the risk, therefore, of offending everyone I know, I would like to urge people to disassociate themselves from mediocre creative production, and to really (at whatever cost) aim for something monumental, lasting, and interesting.

Take, for instance, the tragedies of the Roman playwright and philosopher Seneca. He is well-known as a prominent Stoic, but it might also be said that his plays are the most famous and well-regarded of ~ 1500 years of western literature, in the period between Euripides and Shakespeare. And yet you could hardly persuade anyone to READ Seneca today.

This makes it seem like we have very high criteria for art: the best tragedies of 15 centuries are not good enough for our discriminating tastes! Nothing could be further from the truth.

I don't want to wage a smear campaign on any band or writer in particular: but I think our criteria for judgment are all fucked up. All our judgments revolve around whether we LIKE something, or whether it it is WORTH seeing/paying $ for/attending---i.e. held up against other uses of our money and time. And so, an album may be "worth" the 3 cappuccinos which one foregoes purchasing in order to buy, and 2 hours of a movie/show may be "better spent" than sitting at home---- but these are not the right questions, if one is honest about things. In any case, no director ever tried to get a film made on THESE grounds. The right questions are: will this last? SHOULD this last? (sub specie aeterni)

Masterpieces are unfashionable. No one will ever make a film like "Gone with the Wind" again, not because they will try and fail, but because no attempt will be made. But I would trade the entire decade of films 1999-2009 for "Gone with the Wind", and feel that I was getting a good bargain. What we have today is a lack of ambition, of the "good enough." In short, art today is terrible.

To quote Ezra Pound, speaking of Thomas Hardy: "When we, if we live long enough, come to estimate the 'poetry of the period,' against Hardy's 600 pages we will put *what*?" Now I like some current things: the White Stripes, Bob Dylan, Darkthrone, the Dardenne Brothers, Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers--to name a few. But look at this Ezra Pound quote again: obviously the answer to his question is "Ezra Pound." But what about today? Is there ANY poet of the stature of Hardy or Pound? Wouldn't you be mortally embarrassed to have to defend any answer??

The title here is "the hubris of the mediocre": wouldn't you, shouldn't you, oughtn't you--oughtn't anyone be mortally embarrassed to bring into the world, a world with more GREAT novels than hardly anyone can read! a world already graced with the complete works of Balzac, Proust, Dostoyevsky, and Shakespeare--which could keeep anyone busy for some time!!----oughtn't anyone be mortally embarrassed to write their short stories and throw them onto this pile? Most people can't find the time for CHAUCER, and yet your short story is really going to compete for my time? Think of the Flaubert novels you would never read (Salammbo, Bouvard and Pecuchet)---and yet your little novella is hardly by a Flaubert, now is it? This is the real definition of hubris!

How many albums/paintings/novels does one really have time for in life? Write something better than the "Purgatorio" (which no one reads) and I'll gladly read it; paint something better than one of Raphael's more-forgettable Madonnas, and I'll attend the opening; record a record better than Dylan's outtakes, and I'll buy it.

Probably 1% of all this year's artistic production will have any interest in 20 years. And yet EVERYTHING produced today demands my attention. So, if you make art, make it for the ages: if you *don't* think you are better than Seneca, ask why anyone would want your art to enter the world, as though it were superior to 15 centuries of western literature!!

Zola & the contemporary arts

2009-04-24T18:05:00.000-07:00

I dislike Emile Zola; his novels bore me. Nonetheless, his talent is undoubtedly a WRITERLY talent. Let's see what I mean. This is from 1880's Nana:

The "Petite Duchesse" was being rehearsed at the Varietes. The first act had just been carefully gone through, and the second was about to begin. Seated in old armchairs in front of the stage, Fauchery and Bordenave were discussing various points while the prompter, Father Cossard, a little humpbacked man perched on a straw-bottomed chair, was turning over the pages of the manuscript, a pencil between his lips.

"Well, what are they waiting for?" cried Bordenave on a sudden, tapping the floor savagely with his heavy cane. "Barillot, why don't they begin?"

"It's Monsieur Bosc that has disappeared," replied Barillot, who was acting as second stage manager.'

Then there arose a tempest, and everybody shouted for Bosc while Bordenave swore.

"Always the same thing, by God! It's all very well ringing for 'em: they're always where they've no business to be. And then they grumble when they're kept till after four o'clock."

But Bosc just then came in with supreme tranquillity.

"Eh? What? What do they want me for? Oh, it's my turn! You ought to have said so. All right! Simonne gives the cue: 'Here are the guests,' and I come in. Which way must I come in?"

"Through the door, of course," cried Fauchery in great exasperation.

"Yes, but where is the door?"

At this Bordenave fell upon Barillot and once more set to work swearing and hammering the boards with his cane.

"By God! I said a chair was to be put there to stand for the door, and every day we have to get it done again. Barillot! Where's Barillot? Another of 'em! Why, they're all going!"

Nevertheless, Barillot came and planted the chair down in person, mutely weathering the storm as he did so. And the rehearsal began again.

......

At this point, while the rehearsal was dragging monotonously on, Fauchery suddenly jumped from his chair. He had restrained himself up to that moment, but now his nerves got the better of him.

"That's not it!" he cried.

The actors paused awkwardly enough while Fontan sneered and asked in his most contemptuous voice:

"Eh? What's not it? Who's not doing it right?"

"Nobody is! You're quite wrong, quite wrong!" continued Fauchery, and, gesticulating wildly, he came striding over the stage and began himself to act the scene.

"Now look here, you Fontan, do please comprehend the way Tardiveau gets packed off. You must lean forward like this in order to catch hold of the duchess. And then you, Rose, must change your position like that but not too soon--only when you hear the kiss."

He broke off and in the heat of explanation shouted to Cossard:

"Geraldine, give the kiss! Loudly, so that it may be heard!"

Father Cossard turned toward Bosc and smacked his lips vigorously.

"Good! That's the kiss," said Fauchery triumphantly. "Once more; let's have it once more. Now you see, Rose, I've had time to move, and then I give a little cry--so: 'Oh, she's given him a kiss.' But before I do that, Tardiveau must go up the stage. D'you hear, Fontan? You go up. Come, let's try it again, all together."

The actors continued the scene again, but Fontan played his part with such an ill grace that they made no sort of progress. Twice Fauchery had to repeat his explanation, each time acting it out with more warmth than before. The actors listened to him with melancholy faces, gazed momentarily at one another, as though he had asked them to walk on their heads, and then awkwardly essayed the passage, only to pull up short directly afterward, looking as stiff as puppets whose strings have just been snapped.

"No, it beats me; I can't understand it," said Fontan at length, speaking in the insolent manner peculiar to him.

Bordenave had never once opened his lips. He had slipped quite down in his armchair, so that only the top of his hat was now visible in the doubtful flicker of the gaslight on the stand. His cane had fallen from his grasp and lay slantwise across his waistcoat. Indeed, he seemed to be asleep. But suddenly he sat bolt upright.

"It's idiotic, my boy," he announced quietly to Fauchery.

"What d'you mean, idiotic?" cried the author, growing very pale. "It's you that are the idiot, my dear boy!"

Bordenave began to get angry at once. He repeated the word "idiotic" and, seeking a more forcible expression, hit upon "imbecile" and "damned foolish." The public would hiss, and the act would never be finished! And when Fauchery, without, indeed, being very deeply wounded by these big phrases, which always recurred when a new piece was being put on, grew savage and called the other a brute, Bordenave went beyond all bounds, brandished his cane in the air, snorted like a bull and shouted:

"Good God! Why the hell can't you shut up? We've lost a quarter of an hour over this folly. Yes, folly! There's no sense in it. And it's so simple, after all's said and done! You, Fontan, mustn't move. You, Rose, must make your little movement, just that, no more; d'ye see? And then you come down. Now then, let's get it done this day. Give the kiss, Cossard."

Then ensued confusion. The scene went no better than before. Bordenave, in his turn, showed them how to act it about as gracefully as an elephant might have done, while Fauchery sneered and shrugged pityingly. After that Fontan put his word in, and even Bosc made so bold as to give advice. Rose, thoroughly tired out, had ended by sitting down on the chair which indicated the door. No one knew where they had got to, and by way of finish to it all Simonne made a premature entry, under the impression that her cue had been given her, and arrived amid the confusion.

**************

Zola is a master of this kind of scene: the confused, the tedious, the pompous, the hoarse-with-shouting, pettiness, the difficulty of managing different egos, the frustrating, the not-worthwhile.

Completely wonderful, acutely observed elements:

The title, "The Little Duchess": surely there have been dozens of boring comedies with this title. Its mediocrity is guaranteed and inborn.
Having the hunchback prompt-reader read the role of the courtesan during rehearsal, complete with kisses!
The *absence* of the chair used to stand in for the door through which the actors enter the scene.
"Rose, thoroughly tired out, had ended by sitting down on the chair which indicated the door."
The number of missed cues, while tedious, is effective at producing the "confusion" and racket which Zola is aiming at.

Now, this is just an example that jumped out at me recently. It's not the greatest writing ever. But the man was MEANT TO BE A WRITER. He is funny, versatile, effective at different "voices" and tones, gives a scene well, can be deadpan, "shows" rather than tells, but with a certain irony, etc. This is Zola.

Take, on the other hand, contemporary arts. Writing, music, painting, etc. How many MFA students are trying to write their little stories for a magazine right now, with no innate skill at the "little touches" which Zola brings to his novel? How many musicians with a mere workmanlike uncatchiness and/or a laborious pretentiousness in creating "soundscapes" with none of the UNDERSTANDING OF EFFECT which, say, Wagner brings? How many artists without the flair for the something-memorable which (to mix genres) is evident from the *very first line* of Rimbaud's "Season in Hell"??

What I want from art: the production of ARTISTS, of persons for whom their expression in artistic form is a kind of "first language," with a skill at dynamics, comedy, effects, pace. In music, think of The Clash, the melancholy of the album "London Calling"; in literature, Conrad's improbable comedy of errors, "The Secret Agent," and in cinema, Howard Hawks' dialogue. These are all form-specific, but the creators' "knack" is evident--they are creating something for us; pacing, tone, dynamics, pastiche, comedy-- I am also thinking of the name "Proust."

"Misfits Fan"

2009-04-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

Although everyone knows that the Misfits are "officially" my favorite band, when others are pondering my existence, they don't stop and ask what this means. Because, if initially the Misfits were only catchy, spooky, and had a cool image, in the years of shaping my taste and having my interests find over and over again the greatness of the music, they have come to embody several important principals of my aesthetics. I don't have time right now to go into all of this, but one principal will suffice.

The Misfits are masters of pastiche.

That this is most evidently borrowed from The Ramones, and secondarily from the MC5 and the New York Dolls, only shows what a crucial part of early punk pastiche was. The second New York Dolls album is my favorite of the two, because of its extreme use of pastiche in nearly every track; ditto for the second MC5 record. With the Ramones, one often feels that the previous twenty years of pop music have been thrown in a blender or a Ramones-o-matic and have been spit out as 3-chord punk, but bearing the trace of their origin. To call the Ramones "essentially a pop band" or to overstate the Phil Spector quality of their music, however, is to 1) brutally misunderstand the group, and 2) miss out on the element of *pastiche*.

The greatest rock pastiche is still The Who's "A Quick One While He's Away," immortalized on the Rushmore soundtrack. What style is not given the briefest possible coverage over this 9 minute track? And, album-wise, this is the great accomplishment of the Beatles White Album, the b-side of Abbey Road, and Let it Be. A mention should also be made of the Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons and the Kinks, especially on their greatest albums, "Face to Face," Something Else," "Arthur," and "Village Green Preservation Society."

This is the heritage which the Misfits take up, which sadly has *not* been taken up by many subsequent punk bands. I am thinking especially of songs like "Teenagers from Mars," "In the Doorway," "Theme for a Jackal," "Braineaters," "London Dungeon," "Rat Fink," and so forth.

I have always been against reducing the Misfits to "the spooky Ramones," and for this I point the listener to songs which are more-than-obviously playing with the Ramones formula: "Angelfuck," "Attitude," and "She."

In any case, this is to suggest another Adventure in Listening; compare the Misfits with the Who, Monty Python, and the Simpsons, and I believe they will stand out even more from their contemporaries, and from the humorless and redundant music of today.

Is Seattle really this embarrassing?

2009-01-11T19:04:00.000-08:00

NY Times article

From an article on a Seattle pastor, who reconciles "Calvinism" (a doctrine that preaches that nothing we do on earth matters for our salvation, which is predetermined) with, uh, some stuff done on earth (wearing a skull t-shirt!!).

That there will always be some WILDLY uncool "cool" Christian dude ("Hey guys do you like PEARL JAM?") with facial hair is such a given, it doesn't require any commentary. So, when you are reading this Times article, prepare for some surprises as you try to stomach the suggestion that THESE things are "edgy":

"a black skateboarder's jacket and skull T-shirt"
" 'the cussing pastor' "
"fashionably distressed jeans and taste for indie rock"
"his taste for vintage baseball caps"
"members say their favorite movie isn't "Amazing Grace" or "The Chronicles of Narnia" — it's "Fight Club." "
"The front desk, black and slick, looked as if it ought to offer lattes rather than Bibles and membership pamphlets."
"retro T-shirts and [...] intimidating facial hair"
"the worship band was warming up for an hour of hymns with Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." "

Basically, here is an article the entire subject of which is this "bad boy" preacher, but not a single word suggesting that, if you knew this person, he would be the lamest guy you knew. Vintage baseball caps! Bruce Springsteen! Bad facial hair!! This image is so ludicrously uncool, it's hard to stifle your laughter as the author of the article treats these cultural signifiers of regular dude-ness as though it were 1991. Is a latte some kind of satanic marker that I'm unaware of?

Here is the most embarrassing thing you'll hear someone say this week, but it's even more embarrassing printed in an article about how tough and renegade the speaker is:

'He came to admire Martin Luther, the vulgar, beer-swilling theological rebel who sparked the Reformation. "I found him to be something of a mentor," Driscoll says. "I didn't have all the baggage he did. But you can see him with a quill in one hand and a drink in the other. He married a brewer and renegade nun. His story is kind of indie rock."'

Yikes! This Martin Luther guy is even cooler than Joey Lawrence!

I was just talking to my mom on the phone...

2008-10-19T09:44:00.000-07:00

So here I am listening to Mahler, my room smells like cat food, 2/3 of my bed is covered in notebooks and shoes...

And I'm talking on the phone to my mother, and I ask if she's going to see the Oliver Stone movie "W."

Now, no one has taken a less sophisticated or more vitriolic stance towards George W. Bush than my mother. She hisses him. She thinks he is "stupid." She has not done her homework, and everything he has done seems to her thoroughly "Republican"--even while he has been isolating himself from his own party with his positions on, for example, immigration. My mother's view of George Bush could not be more ill-informed or more partial.

And yet, as a good Christian bourgeois, my mother tells me that she had been hesitant about seeing the Oliver Stone movie, until she heard that it was "more balanced" than one might have thought.

If anything exemplifies the moral bankruptcy of "tolerance" and "understanding," it is this superficial desire to see even war-mongers and sponsors of crimes-against-humanity (like George Bush) as "having a story" that can be presented in a "balanced" and "even-handed" manner.

This is ideology in its clearest form. Balanced. Non-partisan. We present, you decide. Both sides of the story. Explanations based on childhood biography. Surprisingly fair.

My mother, who says she was wary of a film that would be a "hatchet job," is glad to hear that the film is "fair." But what *objective judgment* demands IS a hatchet job. Nothing could be more fair than a devastating, informed, and merciless hatchet job on Bush as president and man. There *are* political nuances to Bush, which my mother and other Democrats have not noticed, and which should be emphasized against the moral-superiority of bourgeois liberal "Blue State" partisans. There are also personal qualifications that should be insisted upon--the man is most likely *not* "an idiot" in the usual sense of the term, as my parents have always insisted. Does that make him more scrupulous? No. More dangerous? Perhaps. But all of that gets lost in the "night in which all cows are black" of his famed stupidity.

In short, what is "fair" in judgment has nothing in common with what is "fair" in the minds of the middle-class who have always encouraged us as children to share, say nothing if we don't have something nice to say, and that everyone is good at something. That their world is run as amoral thievery on all levels is nothing to be "considerate" of. [Please note this post has nothing to say about the film itself, but is ONLY concerned with the critical reception which praises its "even-handedness."]

sub specie aeterni

2008-10-08T17:06:00.000-07:00

Rolling Stone used to (and may still) have an inset feature on classic bands in their reviews section, where you could read a brief bio of a group and also see an overview of their discography, wherein you would learn that, say, "London Calling" or "Houses of the Holy" were (surprise!) 5 star albums. Meaning, of course, not that Rolling Stone had given these albums five stars upon their release, but that *with hindsight*, these were impeccable and classic albums. A bit of a cop-out, from my perspective of really disliking Rolling Stone, but certainly the correct way of thinking of reviews. The only catch is, we can't always wait 20 years to find out if an album is good or not.

So: there is the "present moment" of a review, in two senses: for the "contemporary musical context" in which an album is released, and also the present moment of the listener's always-developing taste. As a 16 year old and huge fan of Black Flag, I was in no position to appreciate a timeless classic like Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush." In this respect, the "hindsight" can only be my *future* appreciation of a work, which is as imperceptible to me as its value to posterity.

The only ideal review is one that reviews the album "in-itself" or "for us" (Hegel), i.e. "sub specie aeterni" (Spinoza)--from the viewpoint of eternity, or as considered "timelessly" and with everything known.

This is not usually possible, for obvious reasons. What is possible? Well, the exact opposite. Not at all an "objective" appreciation, but the completely subjective and pragmatic one. I have a perfect test question. "How many times do you think you will listen to this record?" A "five-star" record would be the most-listened to, a four-star less listened to, etc. until the 1-star record would be the 1 or 2-listen album. By "pragmatic," I mean not treating the quality of a record as something existing IN it, and that will emerge with time (like a meaning), but only in the sense of its tool for us (as giving enjoyment).

Bad reviews confuse these two positions.

People and Ideas

2008-08-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

There is a considerable misunderstanding of human beings that arises in America every 4 years. Around election time, a bystander could almost be led to believe that people (voters) have competing and well-thought-out views on complex issues such as the economy and world affairs.

To avoid the liberal error, which is that "*we* have thought through these things, and *they* are content to watch NASCAR and follow their religious leaders," I want immediately to say, this is how things should be. People do not have coherent world-views.

This, of course, is what Marx means by "ideology" and Gramsci by "common sense"--there are NOT competing and fleshed-out conceptions of the world competing with each other, at least not among persons who are not professional ideologues, pundits, academics, politicians, etc. If there were, the "spectrum" idea of our political parties ("Obama is moving to the center in recent speeches") would fall apart immediately: a spectrum is only slightly more sophisticated at representing complex ideas than our binary political-party system is. Although I will concede that a number of issues, in their party-affiliations, have become hypostatized in clusters of "sites of real struggle"--for instance, the affinity of Black voters with the Democratic party is more or less correct, where their voting for Republicans would be sheer madness.

But I don't want to talk about politics. That is just an example. I want to demolish the idea that people for the most part "have ideas" or "hold positions" or even "act in their self-interest." Aristotle has an interesting idea that knowing something, really knowing it, is the same as knowing its cause: in this sense, I completely reject the idea that persons "know what they think" about things.

If I didn't have to go buy some clothes right now, I would call Freud into this discussion as well. Needless to say, for me the meaning of life is to "find out what I think about things."

Hating on Manohla Dargis

2008-08-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Could Manohla Dargis try any harder to show that she has read some Philip Roth novel? (No great accomplishment, really, in itself.) It's bizarrely tasteless, and so insistent that it almost feels high-concept. Roth, after all, is not Shakespeare, and so many films are adapted from novels that this is a strange one to single out for a book report. I'm a bit embarrassed for her.

This is all from a MOVIE review:

The book is fascinating and repellent, more admirable than likable, a fusion of early Roth (sex) and late Roth (death).

In the novel Kepesh is pathetic and self-loathing, but perversely enthralling because Mr. Roth's prose is.

...the humiliating revelations that, in the novel, Kepesh ritualistically bathes in.

It shares some of the book's dialogue...

a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel...

the book's blunt force, its beautiful sentences, flashes of genius and spleen.

the novel's furious bite.

"They do not know it, but they are doing it"

2008-07-05T20:51:00.000-07:00

Stuff White People Like is a well-known blog that I have just recently started looking at. Let me give you my take on it, but first (to situate my originality), here is what some idiots had to say:

Here's a stupid article about it:
new republic

"If there's one thing white people really like, it's pretending to poke fun at themselves while actually being allowed to feel superior."

and here's another:
salon

The author has received "hate mail accusing him of racist stereotyping."

The site is genius not because it is "so funny" (the writing is quite poor, actually) nor because it is "true" (being told that I like coffee and sweaters is "true" only in the most minimal way) . I see it rather as a continuation of Roland Barthes' brilliant semiological study of French culture, Mythologies--with "white people" here substituting for Barthes' (white) French bourgeoisie.

The "insight" that the site is about "yuppies" rather than about *all* white people is hardly an insight at all. THAT IS THE JOKE, if there is one. Which is to say, that is the logic of ideology: having two last names, for instance, is "invisible" within a certain class. The idea that it is something someone "likes" and similar to t-shirts or liking Barack Obama *is* the joke. "Having two last names" or "knowing what's best for poor people" are not likes and dislikes--they are truly invisible to the white urban bourgeoisie. The making-explicit of these phenomena as if they were all the same is the entire enterprise. The idea that white people "like" waiting a long time to get a table at a restaurant, and "like" threatening to move to Canada--this is the joke. We don't "like" it: we aren't even aware that we are doing it. (Marx's definition of ideology)

White people:

another Vampire Weekend post

2008-06-28T16:48:00.001-07:00

The last post about this indie-rock quartet was well-received, so I'll venture another opinion.

Vampire Weekend are a concept act about *not* wearing tight jeans in 2007-08.

70s Albums

2008-06-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

So, I have a problem with organizing my music-listening. I don't have a great deal of time to really "sit down with" my records, because I don't listen to music while I read, and when I'm not at home reading I like to be out doin' thangs or watching movies.

My procedure for a long time was to have a pile of "recently listened to/new" records out in front of my turntable, but this ended up being unmanageable. Then, for a while, I tried to restrict the number of records that were "out" at any given time to a dozen, which were to be played into the ground before moving to the next group. But, like the strange movies that work their way to the top of your netflix queue, it is hard to plan out in advance what albums you will want to hear a week from now.

My solution now is to only listen to records from the 1970s. I have already broken this rule from the start by listening to Led Zeppelin "I," Isaac Hayes "Hot Buttered Soul," and King Crimson "In the Court of the Crimson King," all from 1969. But we know deep down those are really 70s albums, because they are such 70s artists and in such 70s genres.

* * * *

Some time ago, Pitchfork Media published a list of the top 100 albums from the 1970s. I am planning to make my own list when I'm done with all this, but for now I would like to do a "reading" of the Pitchfork list, which can be found here pt 1 and here pt 2.

Negatively speaking, there are some gross errors here. The Sex Pistols album is wildly underrated (at #51), while the CBGB scene (Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Suicide) and post-punk are overrated. This is in line with the entire project's favoring of the "artsy." Most egregiously, Black Sabbath is completely absent, as is Bob Marley. There are countless inexplicable exclusions.

Positively (that is, descriptively), the list's unbelievable pretension in what got included is unmistakable: as much Krautrock and glam as possible, Brian Eno and David Bowie everywhere, while the genres of reggae, soul, jazz, and funk are represented by mere touchstones. The most cliche thing possible would be to cry "hipster!" and "pretentious!" at these values. That is mistaken. Highly overrating Sly and the Family Stone is not a "hipster" move. The earnest inclusion of several Led Zeppelin albums is not "pretentious" in itself. What is pretentious is the split desire to produce a list by and for indie-rock (pitchfork's readership) and at the same time to make grand pronouncements about the place of Funkadelic in 70s culture. Which is to say, the list is more embarrassing to the extent that it steps *outside* its hipsterism and private tastes. For instance, is Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions" REALLY the only Stevie Wonder album superior to David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane"?? I wonder if there is a single person on earth who would assert that in a non-list form.

A GREAT list has its own logic--it makes you forget what has been left off. You grow to understand what the criteria were. This list is awful, because of the striking, striking confusion of putting a Sly and the Family Stone album at #4, and the only Marvin Gaye album at #49 (by contrast, Rolling Stone has this album as the #1 album of this decade!). A really really good list should be so well-conceived that in re-making or re-working it, you accidentally just repeat it while you think you are disagreeing with it. Like, it forces you to say, "The Beatles *really are* the best band"--for instance. Or, any list of the greatest novels that has Madame Bovary or Moby Dick at the top of the list is obviously throwing down a gauntlet.

Another type of great list is the list of albums that looks like a person's real private taste. The Pushead list of the 100 best punk records of the 1980s is an excellent example of this. It is bizarre and I disagree with a great deal of it, but it is *honest* and seemingly responsive only to internal criteria. Nothing is included for the sake of representing something else.

But let me tell you what I most like about lists. We are all inclined in our personal recommendations and on our myspace pages to represent our tastes a certain way. But the Beatles really are the best band. And it is important once in a while to have some perspective as regards what is "great" and a "must-buy." It is easy to say that something is fantastic when it is not being compared to anything else, but when held up against, say, James Brown's "The Payback," that is usually much harder to assert.

In any case, here is my preliminary top 10 list (before I've done a lot of listening to my pile of 70s albums)--with pitchfork placement in parentheses.

1the stooges- fun house (12)
2bob dylan- blood on the tracks (5)
3the ramones- ramones (23)
4david bowie- ziggy stardust (81)
5sex pistols- never mind the bollocks (51)
6stevie wonder- talking book (--)
7led zeppelin- 4 (7)
8judas priest- sad wings of destiny (--)
9bob marley- catch a fire (--)
10neil young- after the gold rush (99)

My inclusion of judas priest is the only one i think is "non-canonical"--but I think if one subtracts the entire subsequent history of metal from this album, it is truly the culmination of led zeppelin, glam, and black sabbath, i.e. a masterwork.

Let's admit we (you) made a mistake

2008-06-13T21:05:00.001-07:00

Look, America. No one has tricked us except for ourselves. In reviews of the new Marky Mark film--oops, the new Donnie Wahlberg film--oops, le nouveau film de M. Night Shyamalan, nearly every critic unleashes all they've got of mockery and cynicism. Rating a terrible 20% at Rotten Tomatoes (and an even worse score among respectable "top" critics), "The Happening" is sure to bomb and may just put an end to Mr. Shyamalan's Hollywood career. Opening this weekend, it's up against an Incredible Hulk movie, but sadly--very sadly--it cannot pose as the "intelligent alternative" to the Hulk, since by all accounts, it is just as retarded.

My contention: it's not that this person's films have gotten worse. Rather, we have become increasingly aware of how hacky and boring and pretentious and badly-scripted, etc. they were in the first place. There is a handy graph of this data on Rotten Tomatoes, but here are the ratings scores for his films (in chronological order):

Sixth Sense: 84
Unbreakable: 68
Signs: 74
The Village: 43
Lady in the Water: 24
The Happening: 20

I saw the first four of those when they came out (I love movies). At the time, I too felt that Unbreakable was stylish but boring; Signs was stylish but dumb; and The Village was stylish but truly retarded. Lady in the Water starred my least favorite actor Paul Giamatti, so I didn't go see it, and who knows about the Happening. Sure it *sounds* bad.

So, it does indeed seem like this man's films get progressively worse. But I saw The Sixth Sense recently: IT IS HORRIBLE. Easily as bad/dumb as any of those other movies. And once one feels this way, it does not at all incline one to think, "Well his second and third movies were also, y'know, kind of good." Once the first illusion is dissolved, his films certainly do not look like a steady decline.

>Epistemologically, what we have hear is a randomly arranged pile of equivalently-bad films. By "random" I mean that their chronology is irrelevant on video store shelves, and in terms of absolute quality-evaluations. The *illusion* of a decline (i.e. the illusion of an initial quality) only spells out our obvious biases and desires: we wanted these movies to be good, and we kept on wanting that even when they weren't. Each time that they weren't good, we pretended that it was the fault of the object (of our criticism), when really they are all the same. Our "disappointment" in Mr. Shyamalan was really guilt at an initial mistake that we could not admit and therefore had to keep repeating

So, while I cannot defend these shitty movies, I make two charges: that everyone had a serious lapse in judgment as regards The Sixth Sense (and to a lesser degree his other positively-reviewed films); and that the venom spat at his newest work should really be turned towards reviewers themselves for encouraging him in the first place and not admitting their complicity in this pretentious, bombastic career.

New Weezer Video

2008-06-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

The video for the new Weezer song is a series of references to popular youtube phenomena (or what wikipedia calls "internet memes"). Most often, Weezer has (somehow!) gotten these losers to reprise their 3-minutes-of-fame-grabbing appearance in the video for this song, singing along or dancing, etc. Other times, the members of Weezer themselves are impersonating famous videos.

I'll be honest, I didn't "get" 80% of the references. I'll be more honest, whenever someone shows you a viral internet video, it's always really really embarrassing for that person. They are sitting next to you, saying, "yeah---oh wait here's the best part" and looking at you with this stupid grin. After you smile a little, out of pity, they say something dumb like, "well it was pretty funny the first time." Anyways, I looked up every reference made in this video, and the original youtube videos often had 20 million views, without ever being something weird or very funny. In short, I am shocked at our nation's sense of what constitutes "OMG you have to see this." Then again, I don't work in an office any more, so I am a bit removed from all this.

But even lamer is the "after-life" of the people who appear in these videos. Here they are in a Weezer video, which is a HUGE step up from the internet. But... don't they know... that they are popular in the first place for being wildly embarrassing? I contend that they don't. I mean, I don't think it is possible for someone to think that. A famously bad American Idol contestant from several years ago released an album to capitalize on his massive exposure. The question of whether he thought "he could really sing" or not is academic--his biggest mistake was thinking anyone would find him funny for a 45 minute CD. The Weezer video is funny (no, it's not, but we'll get to that) because it keeps the references short, they make the people recognizable (if you have seen their videos in the first place), and they pretend there is NO after-life for these people at all. They are here to "do their one thing." Which is all we want them to do.

What's sad is that people don't know what makes them funny in the first place. To ever read an interview with someone whose popularity was a fluke, and hear them describing their "new projects," is heart-breaking. You just wish someone would tell them, "We don't care about you now. Go back to where you came from." And I like the Weezer video's spirit in pretending that, wait, we actually like these people, they seem fun, let's all celebrate them one more time.

The reason, however, that the Weezer video is not "funny" is because... well, in what way could it be funny? I'm familiar with the concept of the joke, and there are a couple here, sure. But the majority of the youtube allusions can only be called "funny" if by that you mean "referential." Perhaps you thought someone doing something on video was funny--but does that carry over to watching them sing or dance along to a Weezer song? You can imagine millions of people seeing this video and saying, "Oh that's so funny, how did they get all those people to sing along? Do you think they used CGI or that they *really* had them all there?" etc. Where "funny" in this sentence means something like:
-improbable
-confusing
-not condescending to me
-factual
-expensively edited
-containing references understandable by me
-in front of me right now

Austin: In League with the NY Times

2008-06-03T04:38:00.000-07:00

"Oh, you lived in Austin? It's supposed to be really cool there."
"It's not."
"Oh, but I heard it was."
"It's not."
"Hm. See, I heard it was."
"It's not."
"Really, though, I think it must be."
"It's not."
"That's so strange, because there's no way that it's not cool there."

Sometimes it feels like I'm the only person in New York not enamored of the medium-sized, traffic-congested, isolated, provincial, cheap, politically-deranged, and culturally self-absorbed capital of Texas. Not that everyone has been there. Although the worst barista at my local coffee shop is from there. He wears sandals. He mentions being from Austin as though *that* were his job. I wish he would learn what pumpernickel was instead.

I understand that New York is stressful, and that also it is so great here that we have to (in bad faith) "really like" some other place that is secretly crappy so that we look all the better by comparison, but take a look at today's NY Times. Two (2) articles about Austin: 1) an indie film is opening in Austin instead of NY or LA. 2) The "Texas Hill Country" is the #1 place to visit this summer.

First off... "ooooh, an *indie* film." Indie, like organic, is one of those scams of capitalism and reification by which buying something is neat because it supports some supposedly noble venture. Austin is a real home of independent film, because of the number of college students and the University's film school. All I have to say about this is that when Bergman's last, magnificent film Sarabande played in Austin, there was one other person in the audience the night I saw it. Austin is not a town of film-lovers. It is just full of young people who don't work.

As far as the travel article, which begins "Who needs Europe?", viz. when Austin and the surrounding area is so wonderful, my only response is something like, "You fucking idiots." If the scorching heat, computer-industry yuppies, pretentious backwoods foodie-ism, and hicks hicks hicks are a substitute for Europe, really I don't see why sniffing glue is not a "travel destination" for the NY Times. It is equally disorientingly shitty, but at least you won't have 5 days left of it after you realize what a bad decision you made.

Oh and the other day this fat girl I met was telling me she wanted to move to Marfa, TX. That's not in Austin, but I still felt like I was on crazy pills. Honey, they don't have an Urban Outfitters there.

Parkerville

2008-05-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

One of the more illuminating conceptions of taste I have heard is a description my friend (with a mixture of condescension, appreciation, and vanity) applies to people's unique constellations of interests, the conceit of a town. For me, "Parkerville"--for someone else, let's imagine "Megan City" and "Larry Town."

The idea is, there are certain interests we have that are irreducibly particular to us: when we mention them, we are alienating people. What we find important or think to be famous, is actually peculiar and local. These interests weird people out and our very much strictly for us.

I like a few things about this. 1) It doesn't rule out shared, overlapping, universally agreed-upon tastes. Not everything someone likes is "within their jurisdiction." 2) It allows us to describe the interests of boring people or people with bad tastes in a more interesting way. Is there not an *interesting* (or bizarre) ur-phenomena at the root of even the most pedestrian tastes? 3) It allows us to think of people's appreciations as being never-neutral. What someone likes about the Godfather, let's say, might be completely determined by their weird local feelings.

I don't want to talk about real people who aren't me. So I'll give examples from myself:

For myself: VH1 "pop-up video"; Lord of the Rings RISK; Sergeant York; Everybody Loves Raymond; The Song of Roland; D'Aulaire's book of Norse myths; mediocre Swedish hardcore; biographies of Napoleon; the fourth Danzig solo album; etc.

Is it not true in some way that in our adult lives we are merely playing dress-up with our 10th-grade self?

Some more thoughts on Guns 'N Roses

2008-05-20T07:58:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, of course, I feel like I am the only person who knows what "filler" is. There are probably about 5 good double-albums in the history of music, but with every 74-minute CD being reviewed with a very blind eye turned towards about 30 of those minutes, "filler" seems like a dirty word for reviewers and fans to throw around. Filler is really the elephant in the room, though, which is really evident if you buy vinyl and not just cds or mp3s.

Now, the most filler-stuffed albums of all time are the double-double Use Your Illusion LPs. Over 140 minutes! What's bizarre, though, is that the filer works in precisely the opposite way that one would expect. "Sure," you are thinking, "Appetite for Destruction was a great album, but once they turned to all those piano-ballads and 8-minute songs, they just couldn't hack it."

The opposite is true. There is only one really long song on Use Your Illusion I. It is the best song. What really goes wrong wrong wrong is the number of Aerosmith-y, hard-rockin' tunes that precisely try to conjure up the first Guns 'n Roses album. In other words, their "experimentation" works, and their "sticking-to-what-they-know" does not work. The problem is not that the band "lost their touch" but that they did not go far enough.

This is not an important point, but as more and more people just don't listen to albums or don't know what they are talking about, the real character of "artistic objects" becomes veiled by circulating idle-talk with no clue.

(These albums are bad, still, though. Everyone is right about that.)

Long Songs

2008-05-15T16:53:00.001-07:00

This is a post about giving people what they want in musical form.

Most hardcore bands can't write any song over four minutes without feeling that they have achieved "epic" status, with all the trappings of a sword and sandals film: long boring stretches, needless ornamentation, pretentiousness, cellos, overtures, spoken-word sections, etc. It is moronic. Compare with the metal band Darkthrone, who probably have never written a song under four minutes, but who don't bother to fill up that time with any trappings or even more than a couple of riffs. Which is to say, the punk motivation for writing a long song has never been clear to me, as punk is so devoid of emotional content and dynamics (the elements which power Meat Loaf through all of his long songs).

Tragedy understand this perfectly. None of the songs on their last album are over 3:30.

On their last album, Fucked Up had nine songs over five minutes (compared with, say, four on the Wu-Tang album 36 Chambers). In retrospect, the problem with Hidden World is not the length of the songs, but that it is hard to remember *either* differences between the songs, or different parts within any given song. That sounds like a crippling problem, but that the record succeeds at all given this sameness is quite an accomplishment. Over an hour of mid-tempo, strumming hardcore should be way worse than this. I credit the proliferation of "neat parts" and the band's refusal of boring intros (rather, they tend to stretch out the conclusion of a song, once your interest is already held).

In contrast, I give you the monumentally boring diptych Guns and Roses released in 1991, Use Your Illusion I & II. These records are a real mess. But there are some real gems, almost all of them incredibly long, Zeppelin-esque monsters that truly pay their way: "November Rain" and "Estranged" being the best examples. Unlike Fucked Up's songs, you can tell right away "oh, this is not going to end for a while"---orchestration, pianos, no verse-chorus structure, guitar solos early and often.

I want to really draw your attention to these songs, though. They are long and boring, but they earn it with HUGE parts. On the album as a whole, Guns and Roses are excessive and over-indulgent, but one's patience is very much repaid when they succeed. The show-stopper moments in "November Rain" and "Estranged" are not mild pleasures--these are hooks big enough to hang a buffalo on.

It sounds like this will end up with me saying that bands should "stick to what they are good at" (punk bands to short songs, bands with big pretensions to long songs), but really that is such a false distinction. That is why I introduced Fucked Up earlier. THEY ARE NOT GOOD AT WRITING LONG SONGS. Their album is just a bunch of short songs stretched out. And it's not a problem at all, because those songs are good.

Many are familiar with Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return. Let me phrase it this way: would you rather spend your life listening (over and over) to a mediocre set of four two-minute hardcore songs, or one 9-minute monster with a lot of cool parts?

It is harder and more worthwhile to try to write one good 8 minute song than it is to write a 2 minute song. If you can't do it (like Fucked Up), fake it. You'll impress people. If you genuinely can't do it, your 2-minute songs probably aren't so hot anyways. Or, I dunno---string a bunch of short songs together, like The Who and The Beatles, and pretend they are a "suite." But I don't go for this low-stakes business. (The real enemy of this post is Jay Reatard.)

I also love short songs. But the pleasures should not be of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it variety. Give me something "to be intense upon" (Keats). Once you've done that, I'll forgive any amount of cello.

Or let me be *very* blunt: why don't we measure our enjoyment of music by how much pleasure it gives us? This post would be proposing a pleasure-per-minute ratio that would judge very harshly a great deal of music that, by other standards, has a lot of capital or allegedly succeeds (though without giving pleasure).

Opera: Some Boring Thoughts

2008-05-04T20:19:00.001-07:00

For those of you who felt that a blog post comparing hardcore/punk/indie shows to the opera was 1) inevitable, 2) sure to be boring, and 3) already sufficiently "previewed" in real-life conversation, feel free to tune out. You are probably dating me or hear enough of my opinions as it is.

For the rest of you, this comparison is sure to be invigorating and off-the-wall.

When one goes to the opera, one expects a great deal:
*a return on the outlay of money for tickets, in the form of world-class singing and staging
*good acoustics
*a bunch of old New Yorkers who will cough and rustle paper for the entire performance
*many guaranteed "highlights" interspersed among boring plot-advancement
*everything going off "without a hitch"
*established and world-renowned classics of the genre, confirmed by generations of fans
*showmanship, performance, excellence
*socializing optional
*class anxiety

When one goes to a "show" in Brooklyn, one ought to be prepared for:

*milling about and preening by people not really there to see the band(s)
*many people only there to see one band: their friends' band
*sound difficulties, bad sound
*unprofessional performance, drunkenness
*sets that go on for too long
*unpleasant social interactions with people you didn't know still lived here
*bands whose raison d'etre seems to be free drinks/getting laid/being talked-about
*no one even pretends that the goal is to give a memorable evening of entertainment

Now, I have seen some great shows in my life: but many of those were bands from Japan (with a completely different idea of performance than ours), and many of the others irregular "DIY" shows in basements, laundry rooms, etc.--no one was there for the ambience. On the other end of the spectrum, nearly every stadium-rock concert I've seen has been great: Judas Priest, John Fogerty, etc.

The problem, then, seems to be somewhere in the middle. A show so desperate to exist that it needs to take place in a laundry room, stands a fair chance of being good. A major concert with hundreds of staffers and million-dollar sounds, will probably be OK. It is almost a certainty that "some band" playing the Cakeshop, however, will suck hard.

Here I hope the opera comparison is useful. No one goes to hear a Mozart opera and walks away without having heard some astonishing and catchy tunes. And yet it is common in the extreme that your friends' band will play a show where, granted, the instrumentation may be fine, you may "like" the music for what that is worth, but the "take away" is nothing. A week later, you have forgotten who played completely. Only the ubiquitousness and incessant hyping of bar and club shows could produce their current dominance. No opera could be staged without a good chance of success, without elaborate composition that would ensure periodic engagement. No such "screening process" is necessary for a band to play their shitty set-list, however.

I could go on, but you take my point. "Shows" are a waste of money. The music scene in (your town) is a cluster fuck. If only bands worth seeing played shows, there would be 1/30th the number of shows there are now. The question no artist seems to ask is, "Will anyone care that we wrote these songs, five months from now?"

And to the reply that this is all an obvious point, I rejoin: is it? Then why is it that I am perpetually told that I "should come out" to X show; that it "will be fun," that Y band "is pretty good"? If I don't hear these phrases a single time this summer, then I will admit this point was obvious and unnecessary. Meanwhile, you will find me at home with my records or in line for rush orchestra seats.

2008-04-16T13:37:00.001-07:00

Please see an article I wrote about punk and politics, now posted at Shit-Fi.

2008-03-23T11:52:00.001-07:00

* Yesterday went to the Guggenheim, where Cai Guo-Qiang has taken up nearly the entire space of the museum with seven or eight gigantic pieces. This is not a "review" blog by any means, and certainly not one interested in contemporary art, so let me brief. The successful pieces are not "about" what the plaques and commentaries say they are about. The successful pieces (a stampede of stuffed wolves, a wrecked boat full of broken plates, stuffed tigers with arrows in them, a cascade of cars taking up the empty vertical middle of the museum) are successful insofar as they solve the problem of medium in art. Neither painting, nor sculpture, nor graffiti, nor computer, nor video---the genre is completely uncertain, except for the useless term "installation." Sounds simple enough. But I would go on to say that the unsuccessful pieces are precisely those that dwell too much on medium: clay figures in various states of construction, so that sometimes the wire frame is visible; the scattering of sketches and left-over construction material within the space; a prolonged meditation on gunpowder as a medium. This stuff doesn't work-- gunpowder still has to do *something* when used in lieu of paint. On the other hand, there isn't a whole lot one could do with 80 stuffed wolves that could go wrong, or that could be repeated. One mass stuffed-wolf artwork is probably all we will ever need. Ditto for the boat full of plates. The need to repeatedly employ gunpowder is a weakness of the artist, and not an interesting one. The problematic of medium is only solved when it is presented as solved, not when subjected to a number of works "thinking through" how to employ a medium. Which is all to say, aren't we all tired of the "meta"?

* How does one stand in front of a work of art like Courbet's "Origin of the World?" Essentially a frontal view of a woman's genitalia, "head on" as it were, the artwork is interesting for several reasons. For one, the body appears virtually inanimate. Second, the face is covered. Third, the painting was owned at one point by Jacques Lacan. Fourth, the painting bears a thematic and visual resemblance to Courbet's other series of painting about "origins," those depicting the origins of rivers (usually also pointing towards some sylvan cavern). It is my contention, that in 2008, no one attending the Met will be "shocked" by this painting. Further, that many clichés will be spouted in front of it. Many a dolt will inform their date that it is "strange how unsexual it is," not realizing that they are saying anything about sex itself. Or, on the other hand (but not necessarily out of different mouths!) the contradictory cliché that there is some innate beauty in the female genitalia. This one is particularly tired. For the Greeks, of course, art was a great opportunity to represent male genitals, and this ideal was re-born in, among other works, Michelangelo's David. Only in our pedantic and "sexually liberated" culture has it become fashionable to be squeamish and retarded about how "ugly" male genitals are. The genius of Courbet's painting is to silence all clichés by showing the thing "as it is." The intelligent response can ONLY be, "Well...when you put it that way..." In other words, nothing is idealized and decorated more than the object of sexual desire qua female body. The exposure of and stripping away of these idealizations is simultaneously wildly misogynist (in the "girls are gross" sense), and also very radical. Art, should, at its best, show us what it is we "really" want, and catch us in the act of not-seeing-it-at-first. Nothing can be less productive than imagining that the object of desire (here, woman) is innately this or that (beautiful, sexy). What is interesting is how we come to desire and idealize something that is itself not very appealing, rather than trying to assert (as exemplified in the feminist book Cunt) that there is something mystical and beautiful (Jungian, let's face it) about the feminine. And in this sense Courbet will probably always be ahead of the clichéd bores who treat sex (and therefore beauty) as something we are "born" in relation to.

Why I Don't Trust Anyone

2008-03-08T10:34:00.001-08:00

When reissue label Light in the Attic re-released the first two Betty Davis albums last year, they did something very stupid. They only did CDs. Some genius, noticing this, immediately bootlegged the things on vinyl (which I bought). Now, in early 2008, about 10 months after the CDs came out, the label has gotten wise and has pressed the albums on wax (with nicer packaging and bonus 7"s).

For a split second, I thought: "wouldn't it be nice to have these beautifully packaged, legit LPs?" But, you know what? These records actually are not that great. Now, let me tell you my one insight into human nature: everyone thinks the thing that only they know about, or only they have, is much better than it really is. Extremely rare is the "long-lost masterpiece" that lives up to the hype. We were all much more excited about "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" before they, you know, really existed.

Luckily, there is a built-in psychological counter-action to the deflationary effect of finding out something does not live up to its hype. This is the joy of tastemaking: "You've got to hear it!" When something is in the vaults, this enthusiasm belongs to the few; when something finally comes out, we all get to join in. "Is it as good as everyone says?" "Yeah! It's great!"

How am I to tell whether a new discovery is truly great or only marginal? One would think we could rely upon reviews, but this turns out to be the least-reliable sphere of all. What we need is historical perspective and a kind of long-term judgment. It is not accidental that these things are lacking in American culture.

Here's a good write up about the disappointment of hearing Betty Davis' albums re-issued:

"Her music is a lot more fun to read about than listen to."

"She was, point blank, an awful singer."

"The vocals might matter less if the music were consistently inspired. But few of Davis' grooves really stick. Partly you can blame the singer: Davis often ignored the beat entirely."

"Claims that her albums belong in the first rank of the funk pantheon are deluded. Such claims aren't unprecedented, of course. Think of the mid-'90s vogue for exotica, fueled by CD reissues of forgotten kitsch by Esquivel and Les Baxter, or of R&B/rock guitarist Shuggie Otis, who in 1974 made a wan little album called Inspiration Information that was hailed as a lost masterwork by dint of a 2001 reissue on David Byrne's label, Luaka Bop. That Esquivel, Otis, and Davis became their seasons' misguided icons of lost virtue isn't something we should hold against them. Their tepid music, though, is something else."

What I like about this write-up is the historical perspective, which is two-fold: 1) What we might call a canon of funk music, against which Betty Davis can be judged as a quality, and 2) a remembrance of other hyped "lost gems," the fate of which can now be viewed serenely.

The #1 thing that happens in a record store in NYC in 2008 is that someone recommends to me a reissue of a record I was not previously aware of. Some of these records will be fantastic (the Roky Erickson "Evil One" 2xLP), some of them will be just fine (the Betty Davis albums), and some of them I will listen to once and file away (oh how many!).

The point being, we all would rather "discover" a mediocre $18.99 reissue than buy the $3 Stevie Wonder album which towers above it. Myself included. This might be taken as the central question of this blog in its entirety.

Herbie Hancock wins Grammy

2008-02-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

The NY Times reported the other day on Herbie Hancock winning the Grammy for Best Album.

Well, yeah, who fucking cares?

This award ceremony is 1000x worse than the Oscars (which we love/hate), and a recent list of winners of this same award is embarrassing and will be included without discussion.

The Dixie Chicks' "political" album, U2's second "comeback" album, a Ray Charles posthumous duets album, the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack (!), and a Celine Dion record. The only real records to win in recent years: Outkast, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill.

The article points out that only Getz/Gilberto, the best-selling jazz album of all time, has ever been both a Grammy winner and a jazz record. No Coltrane. No Miles Davis. And no 60s Herbie Hancock. Certainly no jazz musician to come up *after* Coltrane. Whether this is making-up for that, we cannot tell.

Simply put, whom the Grammy goes to tells us nothing. Not about what is good, not about what is deserving, not about what is popular. It tells us only who won an arbitrary vote by out-of-touch I-don't-know-whos. Even the most clueless non-music-fan knows that Radiohead are the most *important* rock band of the last 15 years. Yet Steely Dan beats them out for the Grammy. You couldn't pay me to listen to either of those bands, but my point is, the Grammy is a barometer of precisely nothing.

Less interesting than anything, of course, would be a debate about whether this win was "deserved" or not, or who else should have one. Let's not dirty ourselves with that. Do, however, check out the jaw-droppingly-irrelevant list of past winners.

Vinyl Mythology

2008-02-10T08:56:00.001-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, an indie rock band appeared on the David Letterman program to play a song from their new album. When Dave announced them, and the song they were playing, "off of their new record, _________", he held up, instead of the familiar promo CD, a vinyl LP. "Look at the size of this CD!"

Let's be extremely naive for a moment. What is accomplished by presenting an LP instead of a CD?

The dumbest thing
we can think of would be that the album is *not* available on CD, but only on vinyl. Fans will have to purchase a turntable to play it! Well, clearly that is not the case. If the promo is meant to indicate the primary method of distribution for the album (obviously the initial intent of holding it up: see, this is what it looks like, go buy it), then Dave would have to hold up an mp3.

Still playing dumb, we have to remark on Dave's feigned surprise. In a scripted routine, he is shocked at the "size of this CD," but then Paul Schaeffer reminds him that it is vinyl, as though Dave didn't purchase vinyl albums for thirty years. That is, the (rather bad) joke is on our having forgotten that these things exist, or more likely, on a feeling of having-seen-something-like-that-somewhere-before.

What is really going on, however, is that you are being paid a compliment. "You, dear consumer, you know what's it like, being a cool white kid. These old fogeys don't understand you. But you are cool enough, we can let you in on a secret. But the secret is already us, our music. We mutually recognize each other. You know our code, and we know you are the right person to hazard this antique medium to listen to us."

Undoubtedly this is a fairly broad compliment. One does not have to own a record player to feel it (as I said, the mp3 will surely be the primary method of distribution here)--one merely has to feel special for having this piece of large plastic signify a historically-determined distinction. In the 1970s, holding up an LP would mean nothing. In the 1990s, it would only have been confusing. But in 2008, when Radiohead are releasing albums on the internet, it means something else.

An anecdote: when I first started buying records in 2001, everyone always asked me if I "scratched," that is, if I did hip-hop DJing. This was the only imaginable use for albums. Now, everyone knows that certain genres (with their own class base) will have this medium available to purchase. It is a loss leader. Vinyl is several times more expensive to produce than compact discs, but the assumption is that those who purchase it will spread the word, and act as tastemakers. They will review it, blog about it, etc. If you see the disconnect here: the person buying the *more* antiquated medium is likely *more* plugged in to the internet and advanced forms of "viral" marketing. Vinyl is a viral marketing tool.

Reading Roland Barthes' "Mythologies," one learns a great deal about the unarticulated, subtle, pervasive, and inscrutable judgments of bourgeois society, the basis of which is obscured by "ideology" but which is always the means of production and class structure. I forget if Barthes is this explicit, but he knew all this. The point to make here is that "vinyl" as a signifier in this instance can only work if it indicates the opposite of its latent message: "You are part of an exclusive club." As I wrote in a previous post, "indie is the new name for the million-seller." The omphalos, or navel, of this mass of significations, is the bourgeoisie's own myth of itself: bohemian, cultured, elite, "knowing." And it rests on the assumption (counter to the surprise of Dave or the limited nature of the vinyl pressing) that this signification *be understood.* No one will ask the buyer of this album "if they scratch."

Here's a False Problem

2008-01-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

Two recent articles on the soundtrack to the film Juno: one in a horrible free magazine "The L" and one in the NY Times .

Sample quotes from "The L":
I've always taken the stance that "indie" is, in fact, an aesthetic sensibility. And what's so striking about Juno is that they straight-up fucking mangled that shit in the film, with all the retardo dialogue, yet they managed to nail it on the soundtrack.

I'm afraid the backlash against things like Juno or the Decembrists is causing people to abandon the ideals we've all grown up with, possibly just for the sake of being contrarians.

and some complaints about "indie, the marketing niche" rather than production or aesthetic.

Let me deal with this one summarily. The distinction between production and aesthetic is a false distinction. There is no "outside" the marketing niche.

Sample quotes from the Times:
At the same time the indie soundtrack has come into its own as a stable, if modest, seller. Directors like Wes Anderson ("Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums") established the type with a mix of new independent music and older rarities, and in 2004 "Garden State" accelerated the trend by highlighting the indie band the Shins. One of their songs, Natalie Portman's character promised in the film, will "change your life, I swear."

"They have the ability to be ironic and sincere at the same time," he said. "You believe the love, the sentiment in everything they're saying, even though they're being crass or they're joking around."

[I myself "seem to choke back" vomit reading this]
Ms. Dawson closed her eyes and squinted as she sang, and although she made her share of wisecracks, she also seemed to choke back tears when pleading with her fans not to abandon her. "Just treat me normal, please," she said. After her last song she announced: "People who have to leave, leave fast. People who don't, get in a circle and hold hands." She walked into the middle of the circle and began to swirl it closely around her: a full-audience group hug.

OK, the point here isn't that "Ms. Dawson" is exceptionally crappy and embarrassing. But really aren't we tired of the image of the artist bewildered by a success they didn't desire? Is anything more warmed-over? I have to give a great deal of credit to Cat Power here (whose songs also appear on the soundtrack, natch), for not giving in to the invitation of fame to publicly-worry-about-fame. "Ms. Dawson," like many of the neurotics to be found on the NY subway, cannot help giving us her every thought in song--her music is a breathless, music-less rush of inanity--and now cannot help but turn her performances into introverted worry-fests. The worst part is that I would very much *like* to say, no one goes to concerts to hear the artists wring their hands in between songs about their personal lives, but.... fans of this music probably do go to shows for that reason. They are on a first name basis (which this blog is NOT) with "Ms. Dawson."

To clarify, briefly, the relation between the two articles--or, to solve the problem of one with the problem of the other:
is there any more palpable demonstration of the false problem of production/aesthetic than seeing this overgrown child crying onstage about how much money she is making?

Indie exists. It is not an aesthetic, however, nor is there a divide between "authentic" indie and some insidious "marketing niche" version. "Indie" IS the new name for the million-seller. Don't stay awake nights worrying about it.

Why didn't I listen to Johnny Rotten?

2008-01-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

The other day, I was killing time in St. Mark's Books, and looking for a book on Wagner in the music section. Not finding that, I pulled out a book called The Punk Rock Book of Lists to kill some time waiting for a friend. The book is uninteresting and stupid for a number of reasons I won't go into, but one caught my eye. It was a list Johnny Rotten (né Lydon) had given in a 1976 radio interview, of his 20 favorite songs, or of 20 songs that had influenced the Sex Pistols, something like that.

Okay, as a list it did not make me rethink my position on Johnny Rotten (a prick) or the Sex Pistols' influences (as the list really had little to do with their sound). But I thought, "My God, this list would be a perfect list of hipster tastes even today!" The list is basically: T. Rex, the Velvet Underground, some Krautrock, some reggae, some other glam, some absolute name-dropping.

So here are several possible directions I could take, apropos this description so far:
*What did it mean for the early punks to be much more interested in dub and krautrock than in the obvious precursors to their sound? (or to claim to be so)
*How is it that in 30 years, this list has not aged *at all*: someone with this taste today would still be far out front.
*How is it that I did not ever, in the throes of my Sex Pistols fandom, wonder what Johnny Rotten listened to, and then explore that? Instead of listening to Can and Junior Murvin, I took the Sex Pistols and ran towards boring things like MDC and TSOL.

Obviously the question about myself holds the most interest. As a huge fan of the Sex Pistols, I naturally got into The Clash, The Damned, the Ramones--and also their immediate predecessors, the Stooges, the MC5. But would I at all have been receptive to being told that Johnny Rotten really listened to reggae and krautrock? And why not?

For me, reggae meant two things to me when I was 15--either Bob Marley or some kind of ska. Both were for losers, Bob Marley's "Legend" being a kind of perennial pothead jam, and ska then enjoying a white revival. Certainly I knew (from the Clash) that early punks were reggae fans, but in my mind, that had to be a mistake. They couldn't be serious.

More depressingly, my development of taste in music, which I have worked very hard upon, in a way has been contained by what my favorite band (when I was 15) *already knew*. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, a shortcut was available for me the whole time, and I was always more or less ignoring that knowledge while circling around towards it. It's enough to take one down a notch in being self-impressed.

Of course, not only would I have not understood Krautrock (which I still am not crazy about) when I was 15, but I'm not sure that it would have gotten me anywhere. The young always fall prey to the boring. For instance, I *liked* the Birthday Party always, but I *loved* Sleater-Kinney. With Krautrock, it would have been the same, and if I had followed Johnny Rotten's tastes into Can, I probably would still have come out listening to something boring and more juvenile, like indie rock. Probably it is inevitable that we have bad taste first: that we will reject any help, fall into boring traps, and not even understand our final destination when it appears to us as a shortcut. So, to the question, "mightn't it have been possible for me to like cool music when I was 15, if only I had followed the advice of my then-favorite band?"--the answer is almost certainly "no." No one can like good music when they are 15.

Darkthrone "F.O.A.D." album review

2008-01-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

On one hand, this is the most accomplished guitar-oriented album of 2007, and on the other hand, the gatefold of the LP jacket is a giant photograph of a forest scene obscured by a can of Heineken and someone's knee. No attempt is made to hide that Fenriz is a total douchebag (his thanks list is about 40 times longer than his bandmate's); the album cover is horrible; the album title is worse; the song "Canadian Metal" is unforgivable garbage; it's barely a metal album, even less a black metal album.

The most notable two things about this album, aside from all those appalling negatives, is the painfully-apparent desire to broadcast how into punk the band now is: the single for the album had a Testors cover; they cite Poison Idea, the English Dogs, and Amebix, and Fenriz is wearing a World Burns to Death t-shirt---all this from a band that previously was the most rabidly "orthodox" black metallers! The second thing is that Fenriz, the drummer, now sings on nearly all the songs which he writes (where previously Nocturno Culto, the guitarist, did ALL the vocals).

Everything I've said up to now makes it sound like a completely different band than that which recorded the sparse and ultra-monochrome Under a Funeral Moon.

That is not at all the case, though. This is classic Darkthrone. Or classic Celtic Frost, depending on how well you understand Darkthrone. It's true that Celtic Frost released a "comeback" album this year, titled Monotheist, but the best Celtic Frost album of every year since 1991 has been recorded by the band Darkthrone (or more recently by High On Fire).

Darkthrone were already releasing "hardcore"-style records on the album Hate Them, but it is only recently that this has become full-on crusty gutter sleaze. All the songs written by Fenriz are ludicrous, punked-out "rockers," while the biggest irony is that the most "Darkthrone-sounding" songs are all written by the band member who did NOT write their classic albums. See?

Ok. So. Surface: black metal album by respected and original black metal band Darkthrone. Inside: cheesy slow rock album. Surface: cheesy rock album. Inside: insidious Celtic Frost influence. Surface: Celtic Frost influence taken to ridiculous extreme. Inside: bizarre regression to riffs from their 3rd album. Surface: Return to sounds from their 3rd album. Inside: 3rd album already a rip-off of Celtic Frost. Surface: lifelong debt to Celtic Frost. Inside: This debt split into a schizophrenic songwriting labor that isolates the two ways that the Celtic Frost influence operates on their sound. Surface: songwriting labor split, vocal duties split. Inside: most ridiculous sonic aspect of new album is not this division, but rather the numerous and not-at-all-"metal" guitar solos on every track.

In conclusion, this has to be a concept album about irony and presentation. We might even say it is about what happens when the most "true" black metal band starts spelling it "tr00." But the real joke is on the listeners (the same fools who were left in the dust when Dylan went electric) who did not see this irony as quintessential (no shit) to Panzerfaust or in the band's originary moment, the abandonment of death metal on their second album.

last note: Fenriz's vocals are so unsettlingly bad, until you realize that they are exactly splitting the difference between Tom G. Warrior (Celtic Frost) and Cronos (Venom)--essentially an impersonation. I would love to say that one's appreciation of the album rests on whether one likes "Canadian Metal" or not, but I don't pass that test myself, so...

Top 10 Lists

2007-12-29T11:06:00.000-08:00

Let's take a look at several top ten lists.
Time magazine 1
Time magazine 2
Entertainment Weekly 1 and 2
The Onion

I am not going to agree/disagree with these lists (how boring!), but I want to see if we can find some idea of the cultural logic that generates them.

Here's a summary:
Movies that were voted #1:
No Country for Old Men (4)
I'm not There (1)
Michael Clayton (1)
There Will be Blood (2)

The most common (composite) list would be, in no order:
No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, I'm not There, No End in Sight, Once, Zodiac, Sweeney Todd, Michael Clayton, Atonement, and Persepolis. (Possibly The Lives of Others and the Assassination of Jesse James would be in the last spot.)

The most interesting aspect is (you'll notice there is more than one list for each publication) how the lists from one publication mirror each other fairly closely. Time Magazine liked In The Valley of Elah, a film which appeared on none of the other lists; there is a near-consensus at the Onion on the top two spots.

But there is remarkably little agreement past No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood: films I've never heard of, films I saw that were mediocre, films I saw that were horrible, films you couldn't have paid me to see, that strange breed of film that is only made to win Oscars, etc.

Here's what we'll want to think about:
* The difference between the critics' lists and the Oscar/Golden Globe lists.
* The kind of movie that only exists in the universe of these top ten lists.
* Why there are hardly any comedies on these lists.

Here are a few examples of films that seemingly exist only to compete for Oscars: The Aviator, Master and Commander, The Hours, For a Few Good Men, American Beauty, Apollo 13. (Possibly the best example in recent memory, though, is The Good Shepherd.) It seems incomprehensible that these films were extraordinary or watchable in any year. Let's be serious for a moment. I've seen all those movies. They are all garbage. And yet there appears to be something mystical about a certain class of movie--respectability, seriousness, the holy grail of "character development".

Let Michael Clayton stand in for this entire class. If you prefer, I think you could use Atonement (haven't seen it yet). In my mind, these films exist only to indicate whether people have any taste or not. Michael Clayton was an unenjoyable would-be "guilty pleasure" for me, and yet a "real" movie to critics. A quick look at Roger Ebert's list (which has Juno at number 1!!!!) finds a whole slew of these movies: The Great Debaters, Into the Wild, and The Kite Runner. Without having seen these movies, let me say: I HAVE SEEN THESE MOVIES.

But of an entirely different class are the strange movies that creep into top ten lists (Ebert's list being the exception): The Assassination of Jesse James got nearly universal "meh" reviews when it came out, and yet has pulled ahead (on reconsideration, I suppose) of many better-reviewed films; Superbad, Knocked Up, and Grindhouse all made it onto a list or two; Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, director of Showgirls) made it onto three lists!!

Here's the best I can do: when we are listing our favorites, we include some weird things we don't expect anyone else would like, and yet our collective imagination of what everyone will agree is the best is wildly boring and crappy. Perhaps a critic really enjoyed Black Book or Juno, but when we make the awards lists, Atonement seems like a better "use" of one's voice. Why throw away your vote?

Conversations with My Parents

2007-12-22T16:35:00.000-08:00

Have had two interesting conversations with my dad in the past couple of days (being at home for christmas), of which the main lesson is, everything looks like a platitude until you restate your interpretation of an example as opposed to someone else's interpretation of the same.

Discussion 1 was me explaining my understanding of Hegel's historical aesthetics (through a somewhat marxist lens). Of course such a general discussion instantly falls into platitudes, if there aren't examples. My dad summarized what I was saying as, "everything happens in cycles," while I precisely meant the *opposite*. For instance, here will no more be a re-vival of American poetry than of Italian fresco painting. My main point was how naive it is to think that art occurs as spontaneous appearances by "talented" or "inspired" individuals. Is it a coincidence that Shakespeare and Virgil were writing at the peak of their respective cultures? Or that Socrates, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus were all alive at the same time? One either has to admit something about history and culture (i.e. advance a theory about aesthetics) or else be left with the idiotic explanation that these geniuses all "happened" to be born in the same place at around the same time.

It is extremely naive, I argued, to think that the preeminence of cinema in narrative art precludes or is siphoning off artists from producing great novels. Would it, I asked, make any sense to imagine that there are people living who *could* be producing Gothic Cathedrals, if only left to their own devices, and that they are being "siphoned off" by some other media?

****

The second conversation was today, on the very "dad" topic of Stevie Ray Vaughan. To my readers, this is a slam-dunk, of course, but here is what came out of it.

The "bluesman" is a kind of "mythology" in the Roland Barthes sense. Like all mythologies, the naturalness, the authenticity, the "type" is crucial. Stevie Ray has to appear "from out of nowhere" (and of course I can't argue that he planned his own early death). I was arguing that SRV is a "regression," a nostalgiac retrenchment that simultaneously masks the black origins of the music he plays.

Take the White Stripes as a counter-example. The White Stripes make no effort to look the part. They dress like idiots. They are, essentially, the second coming of Led Zeppelin. But compare them to the other second coming of Led Zeppelin, the Black Crowes (or Guns 'N Roses)--you could look at a picture of these bands and see what they are trying to sound like; that sound is entirely nostalgiac: one can imagine that Led Zeppelin have "come back to life" in these look alikes. With the White Stripes, there is no naturalness to their resemblence to Led Zeppelin: it is entirely a fanboy worship that makes no attempt to *be the real deal.*

In this way, the White Stripes continue the deconstruction of the "authentic" that Bob Dylan began when he abandoned his folk-troubador persona and migrated, first into rock, and then into country music. Fools, at the time, were shocked that he was not really politically committed and folksy. But by the time he appears on the cover of Nashville Skyline in a cowboy hat, no one could have thought he was trying to deceive them into thinking, this is what Bob Dylan "really" is.

This is taken further by the Velvet Underground. Basically, their greatest accomplishment is in taking the blues of Highway 61 Revisited and deconstructing it further: "Sister Ray" is basically Dylan's version of the blues, taken to its logical extreme. But, even less than Dylan do the VU "pose" as authentic bluesmen. Both Dylan and Lou Reed are playing the blues in "bad faith"--the organ is pasted on, the riffs are retreads, the redundancy exaggerated.

When my father tells me that SRV "breathed new life into the blues," what is ostensibly an interpretation is really just self-identification. As in my post about Radiohead and Wes Anderson, you think you are telling me what your opinion on art is, and all you are telling me is what age you are. To say that one thinks SRV is an innovator and took Hendrix to the next level, only enters my ears as "I am a father."

If you have read Barthes' Mythologies, I don't need to "give" that style of interpretation for Stevie Ray Vaughan here; it writes itself. But I am most proud for convincing my father on the point that everything Vaughan did was already accomplished by Eric Clapton on Cream's version of "Crossroads."

Victor Hugo, hélas!

2007-12-13T11:23:00.001-08:00

In a poll of French literary figures, Andre Gide responded to the question, "Who is the greatest French poet?" with "Victor Hugo, alas!"

I can barely imagine a more interesting answer. More on this later.

For pondering, with future resolution

2007-11-30T04:57:00.001-08:00

How is it that, in an age of ipods, ringtones, and general crush felt on our attention spans, the most immediately identifiable aspect of popular music today is anything but the classic pop HOOK, which makes an attempt at immediacy and attention-grabbing, but rather the monotony and repetition of PRODUCTION, often unchanged for the entire song?

"I'm Not There": new Bob Dylan pseudo-bio-pic

2007-11-25T06:51:00.001-08:00

A film by, for, and about douchebags.

Albert Ayler Documentary @ Anthology

2007-11-19T08:13:00.001-08:00

Last week I went to see My Name is Albert Ayler at Anthology Film Archives. It is a Swedish-made documentary about the American free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, best known for his short time in Coltrane's later bands, and for his album Spiritual Unity, a landmark in Free Jazz.

A theme running throughout the movie is that there is some kind of timeline by which radical music gets eventually appreciated. For his entire career, it seems, Ayler's shocking and annoying music was far more popular in Europe than in America, where his bands often struggled to get by. And the interviews from the time are peppered with statements like, "If they don't appreciate it now, they will," while at the same time, there is no idea that Ayler *ever* got his due. His family, shown in the film, are certainly not living off royalties.

It is hopelessly to be trapped in the 1960s to imagine that we exist on a trajectory of progress, of innovation in music (or anything). The 1960s always will be more radical than what follows. It is not that this period opened the door of total freedom, from which we have all proceeded, expanding and taking ever further the ideas of that time. Instead, we have retrenched, and the least creative effort that can be made is in trying to resuscitate that explosion.

This, of course, is completely counter to the baby-boomer narrative, whereby our victory in the Cold War, scientific progress, the smaller and smaller size of our cell phones, all suppose an equivalent in cultural progress (which is nowhere to be found).

Enough about that. The most important idea in the Ayler film is that Ayler himself was always exploring new sounds. He was on the move: from the unpleasant, blasting, and soulful music of Spiritual Unity, to the larger group with his brother Donald and a violinist, to a kind of rock/r'n'b experiment (which evidently was disastrously unpopular). The same can be seen in Ornette Coleman's career, too: the incorporation of every possible new element to try out a sound. And the idea for Ayler was that the audience would somehow "catch up," that American audiences would at some definite point arrive at the appreciation held by Swedish and Danish audiences. But, there is equally an emphasis on the necessity for learning to listen. One has to figure out how to approach this music that does anything but beckon one to approach. The real lesson about free jazz, for me, (and obviously I don't know anything), is not objective--how the bands work without confinement or composition--but rather subjective--how do I get rid of my set ways of listening to music? how do I get past the confinement of the categories by which I hear everyday music? Precisely the idea isn't how to somehow turn it into something acceptable, something that can fall back into modes of understanding we already possess. Free jazz confronts the non-free listener with a severe epistemological question, or demand: hear differently. What is necessary is a deconstruction of the terms by which western music has been constructed as natural; one that I am not at all interested in embarking upon, or even in reading!

So, that all could be said about free jazz, and would leave out the important moment in black consciousness that it represented, as well as somehow implying that free jazz has anything to do with any identical-sounding music made today, because the whole point is that this was an open field, and these artists moved very quickly. What I am more interested in is the way that, for myself at least (but I hardly think just for myself), we really do ourselves a disservice, not by having this kind of openness in our understandings.

I am proposing a kind of mobile synecdoche: free jazz is a moment in the development of jazz, but at the same time it recapitulates the open-ended development of jazz (roughly) as a whole--increasing improvisation, smaller groups, less danceable--as well as its restlessness. Exactly so, one's own encounter with *any* music is an encounter wherein one can only affirm one's restlessness or settledness. Not that everyone has to like free jazz, but I hardly think it is a matter of "personal taste" when someone doesn't. I don't even know that I do in a way that anyone would respect or give credit for, but it is NO COINCIDENCE AT ALL that bourgeois white America, the most settled society ever known, did not "go for" Albert Ayler. And as it begins to look like there is no "right side of history" to be argued here, and as I want to be a good Hegelian, I will just refuse to be settled in that particular way, in every encounter, so far as I can.

Shitty Movie Review

2007-11-10T05:45:00.001-08:00

New York Times review of "Fred Claus"

Not a "review of a shitty movie," although that is also undoubtedly the case. Manohla Dargis trashes the movie, sure, but spends about 1/2 the review acting as though this movie were a waste of talent.

Mainly it's a lackadaisical mess, though one graced with welcome talent, including Paul Giamatti and Miranda Richardson. (Here's hoping these indie stalwarts pocketed decent studio checks for keeping their gifts in idle.)

Let's look at the facts here. Paul Giamatti has been in the following movies:

Shoot 'em Up (an action film bomb with Clive Owen and Monica Bellucci)
The Nannie Diaries
Lady in the Water (the most recent M. Night Shyamalan film, starring in which puts Mr. Giamatti in a class with Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson)
The Ant Bully (a computer-animation bomb that made back less than half its $50 million budget)
Cinderella Man (a film so uninteresting to the public that the studio offered to PAY audiences their money back if they were dissatisfied)

The only reason, then, that Paul Giamatti is not the biggest name in Hollywood, its biggest star, the farthest thing possible from an "indie stalwart," is that EVERY MAJOR, BIG BUDGET FILM HE MAKES IS A COMPLETE DISASTER AND FLOP. His "successes" were in movies like Sideways, a film universally reviled by anyone who does not do all their shopping at Whole Foods, and American Splendor. But his list of embarrassments stretches back further than those successes: Storytelling, a masturbatory Todd Solondz film that no one liked; and an astonishing number of small parts on major blockbusters:

Big Momma's House
Saving Private Ryan
My Best Friend's Wedding

as well as some less-popular Hollywood fare:

Planet of the Apes (remake)
Donnie Brasco (a great film, but released in a February and so denied any Oscar glory)
Duets (a Gwenyth Paltrow vehicle with Huey Lewis)

That is to say, an honest appraisal of Paul Giamatti's career shows that he has been in almost more terrible films than any living person, excepting Angelina Jolie, that in his early career he was a mainstay of smaller roles in extremely big-budget films, and that after his success as the star of two "indie" movies, has continued to act in extremely large-budget films, only with zero success and (now) zero credibility.

Rather than saying, "I'm so surprised that this independent film stalwart, this rock of taste and integrity, Paul Giamatti, has sunk to starring in Fred Clause" (Dargis, paraphrased), what any reasonable person should say is, "I'm surprised this annoying character actor, having signed on to whatever project came his way for his entire career up to the present, an undiscriminating hack, should have happened to make two well-respected (but uninteresting, pretentious) independent films at some point in the early 2000s."

Thus, the most insulting part is *not* buying into the hype of Oscar-Winner Paul Giamatti, but:

believing there is anything noble about making garbage like Sideways or Storytelling
hoping that Paul Giamatti "pocketed [a] decent studio check" for his work here. THAT'S ALL HE DOES. He pockets decent studio checks like it was going out of style. The man was in the Frankie Muniz vehicle Big Fat Liar, for fuck's sake!

Books that Changed My Life

2007-11-04T23:53:00.001-08:00

The NY-based literary magazine N+1 recently put out a pamphlet for first-year college students, entitled "What We Should Have Known: Two Discussion," compiling two pointless and rambling, rather sophomoric panel discussions about college and what one should get out of college.

Why anyone should care what these people think is one question, and I could cite several completely arrogant and pretentious moments in this text, but for the most part it is completely banal and full of platitudes: "You shouldn't read fancy critical theory just because it's fashionable." "I wish I'd had the sense that history was still ongoing." "I'm sounding very postmodern right now." "So you have to add Gandhi to the list..." "Back then, I was going to be a poet." In short, a bad conversation that I would have been bummed out to overhear, and am disappointed to see published.

But the most annoying part (besides the name-dropping), is the bullshit "Books that Changed My Life" lists. They follow a fairly set pattern. One or two books of philosophy, Eric Hobsbawm, one or two books of "literary essays," and some 20th century fiction or short stories. A couple classics (Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare) and filled in by totally pretentious, random dinner-party books.

David Copperfield is one of my favorite novels, but I have NO CLUE what it means to say, "It changed my life." It didn't, and I don't see how it could possibly.

So, here are authors, not books (less pretentious?), who have changed my life:

Karl Marx
Sigmund Freud
Roland Barthes
Martin Heidegger
Jacques Derrida
Noam Chomsky
GFW Hegel
Marcel Proust
Michel Foucault
Friedrich Nietzsche
Immanuel Kant
Plato
Franz Fanon

A list you may as well title, "Books My Father Has Not Read." The idea of a book changing my life can only mean that it changes my *ideas* about the world. Every author on that list stresses the unmasking of ideology, of the appearance of the world, of the bourgeois order, of the thoughts we were brought up with, of how things seem, of common sense, of strict eternal definitions (here I except Plato), and stresses the endless need for reflection, analysis, and reconsideration of how things, so various and motivated, came to be presented as the bland "order of things." Proust is on there because his account of human erotic relations is to me the most convincing, and Plato for his insistence on thought and the deception of appearances. While I have learned a great deal from fiction in my life, I cannot say that even a deeply inspiring book like Middlemarch has "changed my life."

The list may seem like a "Great Books" list. I want to say, it is the opposite of the prevalent American idea that "everything I know I learned in kindergarten"; that I am very unsatisfied by the view of the world that was handed to me by my upbringing, and that everything important in my thought has come in the form of these revelatory ideas which have turned on their head the conceptions I was most comfortable with while growing up. And I am very unembarrassed by this list, although Chomsky is a cheese, and Plato is "obvious."

In any case, this list is a list of most white men; it is either very unpretentious or extremely pretentious (somewhat along the lines of declaring the Iliad to be my favorite book, as opposed to (n+1) Finnegan's Wake or Donald Barthelme). Anyways, so this is an honest list and everyone should read these books. I can recommend some other good books, too.

A fundamental philosophical question about culture and value

2007-10-31T21:26:00.001-07:00

From "We Who are Dark," a work on Black solidarity by Harvard Professor Tommie Shelby:

Should a person value the elements of a culture because they are intrinsically or instrumentally valuable; or rather, should she value them because they are components of her culture--that is, because she is black and because these elements are part of a black culture?

So excited about "American Gangster"!!

2007-10-31T21:20:00.001-07:00

Right now I am in the middle of watching an actually just-plain-crappy French film by Robert Bresson, called "Pickpocket." It's boring, the narration is intrusive, there is no music, and the plot is straight out of Dostoyevsky but without any pathos. In short, a BAD film. Nonetheless, this is probably the only time you'll ever hear it described as such. It's foreign, the DVD is on Criterion, the director is famous, the style is noir-ish but tasteful, etc. But it *is* crappy. I think our judgments are so OFF that this distinction ("What is a bad film?") is actually lost, non-existent, when it comes to a respectable, obscure foreign crime film.
There are a lot of people in the world with bad taste. It may have been suggested to them that this is out of line with standards of good taste (they prefer "The Notebook" to "Fanny and Alexander"), but I want to suggest that NO ONE *actually* thinks they have "bad taste." At most, when it comes to this question, we (people) can only "agree to disagree."
Is it true to say that something A is "more famous" than something else B, if knowing A requires a special knowledge? So, is it true to say that Lip Cream are one of the most famous Japanese hardcore bands, when it is far MORE likely that some flash-in-the-pan nowadays Japanese band who just happened to tour, are much better-known?

Death Metal v. Black Metal (a reversal of opinion)

2007-10-21T22:05:00.001-07:00

I wish this to be the definitive statement on this opposition.

Like the Renaissance as compared with the Enlightenment, here the question will be, who betrayed what? when? and when may we say that the character of the epoch was completely undermined or reversed?

A Brief History
Black metal and death metal, although no one knows it, "died" at the same time (in terms of the most famous bands, in America, retrospectively). The ends of both genres coincide; do their beginnings?

The first Death Metal bands of any importance are Death and Morbid Angel. [Obscurity counts for nothing in this argument.] The first Black Metal bands of note are Bathory and Celtic Frost. Thus, put crudely, Death Metal is originally an American genre, and Black Metal a European one. [Exceptions can be found even in this early history.]

However, both Bathory and Celtic Frost developed away from their early, raw aesthetic towards more pretentious and complicated art-metal: Bathory with 20-minute ballads about viking conquests, and Celtic Frost with violin-accompaniments of Baudelaire's poetry. (no shit) Thus, Black Metal was immediately moved away-from by its inventors. The early aesthetic was developed, more or less simultaneously, by more extreme groups such as Beherit, Sarcafago, Blasphemy, Mayhem, and Von. The most famous "intervention" in Black Metal, though, was by the Norwegian Death Metal band, Darkthrone. Jettisoning members who wanted to play the technical Death Metal of their first album, Soulside Journey, Darkthrone decidedly rejected all their talent and instead meticulously "played dumb," aiming for the sounds of early Bathory and Celtic Frost. Thus, the real invention of modern Black Metal already consists of a re-opening of a formative aesthetic moment.

The single albums which, from my viewpoint, announce the death of these genres are, Slaughter of the Soul (1995) by At the Gates, a melodic pop-punk record masquerading as Death Metal, and Panzerfaust (also 1995) by Darkthrone, the first definitive retreat of this band to "merely" playing Celtic Frost riffs. Both these death knells have been springboards for hundreds of crap bands who did not "get" it.

The Definitive Statement on the Question
Undoubtedly Darkthrone were correct in abandoning Death Metal in 1991. Just as certain is the genius of Darkthrone's later career, which approaches a hardcore punk sound and is less and less "serious." It is supremely important that Darkthrone have always been 1) ironic, despite their extreme dedication, and 2) regressive.

There are several epochal developments in rock music: Bob Dylan going electric, Sergeant Pepper, The Stooges' Fun House, Kraut Rock, and the consolidation of Punk by the Ramones. In punk, the decisive trinity is The Ramones, Black Flag, and Discharge. In Black Metal, Celtic Frost and Bathory (I believe that Bathory "contains" Venom) are IT. Within this binary is everything necessary for the sound. But the genre has been completely taken over by adjectives, rather than influence. Rather than the incredible, unfathomable development at the core of the sound, the invention of Black Metal has been rendered a mere aesthetic, a production trick, turning Bathory's sound, which was a very close thing indeed, into a "given." What is necessary is to THINK the bizarre, extreme, tasteless, uncompromising, excrescent, juvenile extremism of Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Bathory, not to take these sounds as "early" or "undeveloped" or "primitive" in the teleological sense.

What then, of Death Metal?
When I was younger, Death Metal struck me as the last refuge of D&D-playing virgins, who practiced their instruments as a form of masturbation, perfecting a style that was "needlessly technical," and ultimately just playing for other techies. I'm not sure that that is entirely wrong. But now I see it as the most straightforward honesty. The premise is, "Do you like our riffs? Was that solo perfect enough? Could this have been heavier or more interesting somehow?" THE IDEA IS PERFECTION, even quantifiable perfection. That may be dumb, but it is a meritocracy. The best bands are the most well-regarded. Respect is key. The whole thing is very "male" and analytical. That is, extremely unironic.

I said earlier that I much admired Darkthrone's irony. I see this as a very strategic, "theatrical" mode which they pioneered. Members of Darkthrone never killed anyone, burned churches, were "truly" racists, or shot themselves. My favorite anecdote about Norwegian Black Metal is where an interviewer reminds a Black Metaller that Venom were largely joking, to which the metaller responds, "In Norway, we choose to think otherwise." This is irony. But "taking something seriously that should not be" is a matter of positioning, if one is smart enough, and of "sincerity," if one is stupid. Obviously Burzum and Darkthrone fall in the former camp, and Mayhem in the latter.

Why can one NOT "choose to think otherwise" about Venom in after 1995? For one, the genius of Darkthrone, by getting there first, made evident the gap between the second wave of Black Metal, and its mythical origins. By taking the irony SO FAR, the game was "up"; the mock-seriousness exposed its target too much. And so Darkthrone, having achieved all they could, began their long retreat. And Mayhem self-destructed. Burzum went to jail. Emperor drastically changed their sound in a more "prog" direction. Immortal took on a huge Morbid Angel influence. Graveland began to explore the later meanderings of Bathory. Ulver, never a raw band, hardly a metal band, released the ultimate ironic Black Metal record, the supreme Nattens Madrigal, a completely technical achievement of the lowest-fi possible sound. "Symphonic" Black Metal became very popular. etc. etc.

Fast forward twelve years. Black Metal in America has fallen in with the "noise" scene, the ultimate in baseless pretension and image-jocking. Death Metal is absolutely dead. If you see here that I am only repeating the RUSH v. SONIC YOUTH debate printed below, you are correct. Here, Rush are Death Metal, embarrassingly outdated, and Sonic Youth are the endless pretension of post-1995 Black Metal: its limited releases, its "mystery," its redundantly "shocking" aesthetic, its disingenuousness.

Death Metal has no interesting history. Nowadays Black Metal, however, in its haste, neglects everything but the most sensational, misleading aspects of its origins.

*[When I say irony, I mean it in the most exact way, not in the loose sense of today's youths and nervous self-doubters.]

"The Opposite of Punk"

2007-10-21T20:41:00.001-07:00

[something i wrote a while ago. soon to come: a similar article about death metal and black metal that will be the ultimate statement of my aesthetics]

You know, I don't want to talk about Rush too much, b/c I don't want to come across as some sort of geek glued to the internet, but I think by now it is a truism that Rush are the "opposite of punk." Mention Rush to any one, really, but any punk in particular, and they will immediately say "that band sucks," etc. Now, I probably wouldn't be into Rush if I wasn't already into Judas Priest, which was a taste a long time in acquiring itself.

But anyways, I always say that Sonic Youth are the "opposite of punk." Rush aren't out to impress anyone or come across as rock stars. They have washing machines on stage. They are the ugliest people in the world. The drummer writes the lyrics, which tend to be pretentious, unwieldy, and kind of prosey, but which are at least never filler or an afterthought. They are a real unit, and if there are some individual show-off parts, at least they share them equally. People probably think that because Rush have 20-minute songs, that they descend into endless noodling. Never, really. Rush 's songs are sort of like The Who "A Quick One While He's Away"-- series of riffs and parts with hooks, and not just pointless jams. They cover Yardbirds songs (badly), which could not be less cool for them to do. They have an ANIMATED RAPPING SKELETON sing one part of a song on a giant video screen in their set ("roll the bones"). Now, Rush ARE NOT PUNK, but I don't think they are its opposite either.

Sonic Youth, on the other hand, *are* the opposite of punk: rock stars trying to pass off a jam band with endless wankage as something new and experimental, name-dropping every new trend like vampires hoping to suck the cool out of every fad. Unless age is prohibiting them, they have always tried to be these ironic sex symbols, and there is something 100x more offensive about Sonic Youth being on a major label than Rush (who are certainly really really really into capitalism---as huge fans of Ayn Rand, natch). The other day I heard some 90s sonic youth song in a record store, and I wasn't sure what it was, but I thought it was a new Strokes song (The Strokes, by the way, who are nothing but what they claim to be). It wasn't until Thurston's voice sunk in that I guessed what it probably was.

Ultimately, though, I think this is a personality thing. Rush are never going to win anyone's respect on the logic of The Emperor's New Clothes. They are universally lambasted, and not even all that much misunderstood. They sound (mostly) like what you think they do. On the other hand, this is EXACTLY what sonic youth (and yeah, a lot of other bands/people/art/literature) is trying to do--catch that doubt in your mind when you wonder if maybe YOU are missing it, and trust that maybe Thurston Moore knows better than you on this one. I don't know if anyone still listens to Noise (since Jessica Hopper "exposed" that genre as being "anti-fat") but basically this should apply to that music's brief reign as well.

Maybe it's too much to ask that Rush "deserve your respect," but I think having probably the best rock bassist AND the best rock drummer in the same band, and having had *any* success, given their inexplicable aesthetic and obvious deterrents, is worthy at least of notice, and not likely to recur in the '06. So yeah, thurston hearts the who.

***final word on this:
In an interview I did with Hellnation, the guitarist wisely pointed
out that "No one ever got laid by buying a Hellnation record." I'd
like to think this is true for Rush, at least since 1982. Rush are
just a few ugly guys banging out their brand of music for their fans,
who tend to be middle aged computer nerds and men with ponytails.
Sonic Youth want to be the soundtrack to your next drunk/coked-up fuck
at a loft party thrown by some magazine, and I dunno...I bet they
wouldn't even try to deny it. Too bad it wouldn't even be a good
soundtrack, either. Might I suggest The Cure "17 Seconds" instead?
ps: or The Band
pps: but not slayer

Two Questions

2007-10-12T21:09:00.001-07:00

1. What do Radiohead and Wes Anderson have in common?
Because this band and this filmmaker not only share an audience, and both have high-profile new releases out now, these are good examples of a common phenomenon that I have noticed. Let's call it the "The Best Art Was Made at Precisely the Moment I First Became Aware of Art Syndrome." In a larger field (of everything coming out) this draws a veil over that art produced *immediately prior* to one perking up one's ears-- a veil that extends backward until the moment when things can be safely seen as canonized. My personal example would be, I have zero interest in hardcore that came out in America between 1986 and 2000. This is famously a "dark ages" of US hardcore, but the famous bands (The Pist, Los Crudos, Talk is Poison, Econochrist, Aus Rotten) are still well-loved, and in a way this period still defines the way American hardcore looks on itself, before the explosion of international influences brought about by Tragedy in the early 2000s, and before the much-lamented "thrash revival." Which is only to say, my "blindspot" corresponds to an actual crappy period of that art form, but I will be the first to assert that I have never been generous to bands who were playing immediately before my interest in hardcore.

That is for an entire field. For the specific career, being encountered as "contemporary," one's age is all-important. The important years for this are like, 16, 22, and 30. When I was 16, Weezer had not yet released their Green Album. Woody Allen was still starring in his own movies, Shania Twain was the biggest thing in the world, etc.

So, I saw Rushmore in theaters when I was 15 (the same age as the main character). This seems a completely different experience from seeing Darjeeling Limited when I am 24, or renting Bottle Rocket and watching it alone at my parent's house when I was 17. In a way, then, I don't care (although I will still ask) what someone's favorite Wes Anderson movie is. But it is no different from asking how old they are (unless, which is so rare, one thinks that a person has real taste).

I haven't cared about Radiohead since I was 17. I bought (and was very excited about) Kid A but not Amnesiac (six months later). I don't know the songs off that later album, I've never really heard it, and I certainly have not heard their 2003 album. And although I think that "they suck," if their records prior-to-my-being-17 came on, I would probably not mind at all. But, because I could never hear their subsequent albums with any kind of anticipation (ie: patience), it is unlikely I will ever sit through a latter-day Radiohead song with any kind of attention.

That is just to add to the list of ways that opinions and taste have none of the absolute or *even* "subjective" force we like to imagine. One doesn't like these films or records based on the quality of those things, but rather overwhelmingly as a factor of the time when one encountered them.

(This applies only to contemporary careers. Something like On the Road, encountered retrospectively, must be read at the age of 15, but posthumous reputation has a vaccinating effect; we know what not to read, we know which are the most famous works, the manner of appreciation has already been codified.)

2. Where does bourgeois appreciation draw the line in an artist's career?
Now, in direct but not substantive contradiction to what I just said, I want to argue that the white educated bourgeois is always willing to draw a line in an artist's career--not with respect to the age of the audience, but concerning experimentation.

Take this example: the phenomenon of "Banned Books Week," "Banned Books" tables at Barnes and Noble, where banned books are valorized as heroic, righteous, challenging, sophisticated, forward-looking, etc. No one today would think of banning Madame Bovary. Nonetheless, books are banned every day in America, usually by prudish Christians in middle-American school districts, without having read said books.

This hypocrisy, applied to an artist's career, means that an earlier work that has been assimilated will always be canonized before difficult, "later" work. The best example is John Coltrane, whose Giant Steps and A Love Supreme are highly rated and coffee-shop favorites, but the line is drawn when he "starts to get really weird." See the new Ben Ratliff book on Coltrane, "The Evolution of a Sound," for a great analysis of the reception of Coltrane's later albums.

This also manifests in tropes about "maturity" and "development" of an aesthetic. Like, when you see Metallica's Black Album rated higher than their thrash metal albums, as if the effort that went into dumbing down their complex and technical metal into simple butt-rock was "maturity" itself.

So, Ulysses but not Finnegan's Wake. Kind of Blue but not Jack Johnson. La Dolce Vita but not Juliet of the Spirits.

Or, to make my point explicit (regarding the bourgeois), any black recording artist prior to making any political statement unfavorable to white people, but *not* the same artist afterwards (they're so extreme!). Cf: Lauryn Hill.

Favorite Books

2007-09-29T00:46:00.001-07:00

I have a more substantial post coming up, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I have been re-reading a few favorites in school.

The Iliad
The Odyssey
Oedipus Rex
Hamlet
Paradise Lost
The Inferno
Moby-Dick
Swann's Way
Middlemarch
David Copperfield
War and Peace
Madame Bovary
Tristram Shandy
Emma
100 Years of Solitude
Great Expectations
Macbeth
Portrait of a Lady
Absalom, Absalom!
The Great Gatsby
Beowulf
Charterhouse of Parma
The Trial
Crime and Punishment
King Lear
The Red and the Black
The Good Soldier
Pride and Prejudice
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Brothers Karamazov
Wings of the Dove
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Castle
Antigone
Borges' Collected Fictions
The Guermantes Way
Persuasion
Cities of the Plain
Jude the Obscure
Wuthering Heights
Sound and the Fury
Tropic of Cancer
In a Budding Grove
Richard III
Heart of Darkness
Things Fall Apart
Man and Superman
The Old Man and the Sea
Lolita
Tess of the D'urbervilles
Bleak House
Huckleberry Finn
Grapes of Wrath
The Fall
Nightwood
Henry V
The Stranger
Our Mutual Friend
Dubliners
Lord Jim
Le Morte D'Arthur
Julius Caesar
The Pickwick Papers
Dead Souls
Pere Goriot
Animal Farm
Disgrace
Of Mice and Men
Naked Lunch
Vanity Fair
Siddhartha
Austerlitz
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The Count of Monte Cristo
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Scarlet Letter
L'Assomoir
The Song of Roland
Notes from the Underground
Fifth Business
Romeo and Juliet
Tom Sawyer
The Maltese Falcon
1984
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Secret Agent
Elective Affinities
Sense and Sensibility
The Moonstone
Catch 22
Barchester Towers
The Monk
All Quiet on the Western Front
Edwin Mullhouse
The Long Goodbye
Mrs. Dalloway
Washington Square
Mansfield Park
New Grub Street
The Sun Also Rises

2007-09-12T21:59:00.001-07:00

I have a vexed relationship with compilations--box sets, mix tapes, et al. We are talking about music here---it would be nearly impossible to "compile" Anna Karenina or L'Avventura--easy to consume in its individual unit, the song.

I usually phrase my vexation in terms of my being "an album guy." I have always been frustrated by soundtracks, uncompiled singles, and greatest hits. I want everything to be Rubber Soul (the US version): thirty minutes long, no filler, catchy, smart.

One early appeal of punk music for me (which was later extended, even more exaggeratedly, into my interest in hardcore) was the promise of NO FILLER. Granted, every song might sound the same, but there was no chance of a "Revolution 9," or even of songs decidedly a cut below. Or so it seemed to me then. [This is how one would advertise the Ramones of course--all their songs sound the same---but in reality they have a thousand sound-alike "misses" whose failings would be hard to pin down.] One could almost advance this formula: the more sound-alike the songs on an album, the more likely that any given song will succeed, but the less likely that any one song will stand above the others. So: the more coherent, easily-apprehensible, and individualized the songs are on an album, the harder it is to not fuck up. This is why Sergeant Pepper's is so acclaimed--not that it is the best album, but that probably no one will ever write such a diffuse, quirky, song-by-song-by-song success again. I mean, go ahead and try.

Anyways, I'm a Rubber Soul man myself. And I hope that explains my dislike of compilations.

No? That's unclear?

Let's describe an album, the kind of album that I like. We'll use Rubber Soul, but I also could mean Velvet Underground or Harvest or Closer or Highway 61 Revisited or Between the Buttons or Ziggy Stardust or Pornography or Transilvanian Hunger . (see how I don't name the artists? It's called being pretentious.)

While all the songs may not sound "the same," they are definitely in a style distinguishable from the band's other work in a loose sense. Perhaps a song or two could drift over to another record, but in general the record has a "feel" that is cohesive. So, "I'm Looking Through You" would not belong on Revolver.
There's no filler. I happen to prefer the shorter US version on Capitol Records, without "Drive My Car" or "Nowhere Man," two obtrusive singles, and also missing "What Goes On" and "If I Needed Someone," two great songs. But "It's Only Love" and "I've Just Seen a Face" belong more than any of the above-mentioned songs, excepting "If I Needed Someone," a sorely-missed omission. Nonetheless, even with this shuffling about, none of the players are "filler."
I hate to use vague terms like "creativity" and "personality," but in this sense I mean these words *against* terms like "experimentation." Rubber Soul is certainly not pushing any envelopes, but it is exploring, nonetheless. Folk-rock, in its humble way, and within extremely commercial confines, allows a great deal of interesting, inimitable song-writing, without treading old ground or engaging in exercises. It is meant to be listened to by other human beings, and so has a personable, charming quality that is never condescending. Can you say all that about the last record you bought? (And while I do enjoy a lot of stand-off-ish music, I have to say that I find it increasingly irksome. Not that [and only an idiot, a real dolt, would get this from what I'm writing, but here's your warning]-- not that I am advocating a general "pop" aesthetic, but wouldn't all music be better if an imagined listener were kept in mind? And that is far from a "general" listener, but I do mean a listener and not merely a bundle of appreciations. That is, I emphasize the aural here. A "listener" and not a "record buyer."

This leaves a couple of things to say about compilations. 1) I *would* rather listen to the crappy, Johnny Cash duet of "Girl from the North Country" on Nashville Skyline as an album track than, say, "Quinn the Eskimo" as a "Greatest Hit." 2) There is (as always) the problem of genre here. Soul, reggae, rap, "KBD," are all singles genres not given to producing records like the ones I described above. So, Cam'ron is not going to produce a concept record any time soon, but Green Day and My Chemical Romance both put out concept records recently---and that is within pop-punk!! (Although maybe the most famous pop-punk record is a singles compilation, The Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady. Nonetheless, their albums do meet my criteria.) Jazz, metal, rock/pop, Finnish hardcore: these are all album genres (and not at all times). And obviously some kind of compilation is necessary for 60s girl groups: many did not release full-lengths, and even the best groups (The Supremes) put out abysmal full-lengths.

I don't intend to do a sociology of youth culture, and I have discussed one aspect of this argument previously (as "ipodization"). But if many compilations (Greatest Hits, anything you would order from TV or buy at a truck stop) serve as introductions or mixtapes to the unpretentious consumer, and some box sets are merely everything by an artist, there is a certain market for compilations of obscurities, rarities. Take any of the Soul Jazz compilations. None of these is a "good introduction" to the represented genre, except in a sonic sense: that is, you may learn what Roots Reggae sounds like, but the *most* famous artists are excluded. The best example of this is that Big Apple Rapping does not have the Sugar Hill Gang song--whereas any mainstream "New York Rap 1979-82" comp or box set certainly would (just look at the No Thanks! tracklist).

When it comes to representing whole genres, scenes, movements, or moments, the album in the sense I described above is worthless. It leaves too many holes (many great artists never get around to putting out albums). But also worthless, in any sense other than the synecdochic, are the kind of scatter-shot compilations (usually of "rarities" as opposed to "hits") that come out on vinyl and are pitched to, basically, me. Here I can only say, these records (examples 1, 2, 3, 4) make me nervous. I like these records, it's cool when people play them for me, I enjoy purchasing them, but the very specter of the infinite capacity of unseen tastemakers to cull from an inaccessible (to me) archive, spinning out innumerable such "volumes"--- it terrifies me, even as it drains my bank account. And I just want to run to my room and put on My War.

Hitler's Record Collection

2007-08-13T21:22:00.001-07:00

If you click on this link, you will read a very silly article about the recent coming-to-light of Hitler's record library, saved by Russian officers at the end of World War II. The main contention of the article is this:

The pillaged recordings, taken by a Red Army officer after Berlin fell in May 1945, show that Hitler was a hypocrite as well as a monster.

This rests on the following contradiction:
1) Hitler forbade his followers to listen to anything other than German composers. Even jazz was banned as "negro swamp music" and orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic were forbidden from playing anything other than Teutonic classics. The rest Hitler labelled "sub-human music."
AND
2) But the discovery of the recordings of Russians and Jews show that Hitler did not practice what he preached to his people.

In the most obvious way, Hitler does not need this very mild character assassination. Moreover, I don't even see the apparent contradiction.

1) In Nazi ideology, "Russians and Jews" is hardly an umbrella category as used in this article.
2) Thus, we see Tchaikovsky (Russian) but NOT Mendelssohn or Mahler (Jews).
3) There is no demonstration in the article that Hitler was even being hypocritical (its main claim): he only (informally?) prohibited "his followers" (what category is that??) from listening to Jewish and Russian music. And when? During the non-aggression pact with Russia? The article's main point about Jews is that these records had Jewish soloists playing on them--- ought he to have exhaustively researched this before having his secretary buy his albums? I hardly see how this qualifies as hypocrisy (a charge we hardly need lay at Hitler's door).
4) Hitler's comment on jazz music is a complete non-starter: there is no jazz in his collection. Further, OF COURSE THE BERLIN PHILHARMONIC IS NOT GOING TO PLAY JAZZ MUSIC.

In short, it must have been a slow news day for these items to cause a stir:

Hitler owned no music by Jewish composers
Hitler listened to Tchaikovsky

DUH. DUH. DUH.

I include this here because this is a blog about taste, under which "record collections" certainly fall, but clearly I intend something else here as well (as perhaps indicated in the last post, about race and taste). What impulse is behind the charge of "hypocrisy" in this innocuous and obvious event? I offer the following:

A relentless fascination with the unfathomable "personal life" of Adolf Hitler (in which we would trace his dubious lineage, his pathetic artistic aspirations, his perverted love life, and all other character assassination---again, complete overkill that leads to garbage like Norman Mailer's recent novel): the worst kind of historical investigation.
A strange desire which apparently cannot be helped to retroactively impose multiculturalism on a cultural climate that would not have comprehended it. Should this backwards, militaristic hick from Austria have listened to jazz music? To satisfy whom??? Surely the wry, misleading journalist of 2007 would not have been satisfied.
On the most banal level, a strange project to suggest the irresistible appeal of the censored, the banned, the underground, even when it (Tchaikovsky, banned Jewish composers) is music 90% of Americans would be unable to distinguish from Wagner. That is to say, the most insipid liberal self-congratulation on our openness and belief in the aesthetically subversive.
Finally, the bizarre double project of multiculturalism, which comes out in this article in strange ways: 1) to relativize and "tolerate" the culturally other, and 2) to make them "just like ourselves." AND most strangely, to bring HITLER into this project!!! So that he evidently could not resist the cultural products of the racially-other and against his better judgment indulged in these verboten albums. But doesn't this (perversely) make Hitler "human" and "tolerant"? (if we grant, which I don't, the premise of the article). For, if anything, making Hitler into a hypocrite here also makes him out to be lazily tolerant and lax on his dogma of anti-semitism.

In short, this is not just bad writing, boring, and astonishingly stupid, it is also offensively wrong-headed and finally makes of HITLER someone more or less "tolerant" and covertly multiculturalist!!

Race and Taste

2007-08-01T12:24:00.001-07:00

Here are two recent articles/reviews on this topic:
NY Times article on "nerds"
Shit-Fi review of "Vikings Invasion"

The unifying element of these two pieces is the idea that "cool"* can somehow be routed through an exclusively white cultural space--- one not premised on exploitation of black culture. Both punks and nerds are "traitors" to whiteness and the appropriation upon which "white youth cultures are founded" (Times).

The problem, of course, is that hyper-whiteness, or a total avoidance of other cultures, despite its neurotic apologism and OCD-style guilt avoidance, LOOKS a lot like cultural segregation. If punk is "honest" because it doesn't mimic black musicians in the manner of Mick Jagger, it is also disengaged from interaction with black people in America. Because punks tend to be middle-class white males, and black people tend to be neither middle-class white males nor punks, the "honesty" of distancing oneself from the (musical) culture of black America is itself an exercise of privilege that applauds itself while merely retreating into itself, reifying (albeit while ironizing) "whiteness."

[I should add that the Times article is extremely embarrassing, references phenomena that I have a hard time believing ("Saying 'blood' in lieu of 'friend'"), and makes no mention of Jews. Is not the supreme American nerd Woody Allen? Is "Whiteness" a category I am supposed to understand? Certainly the KKK is not "nerdy."]

Stuart Schrader's (who, I should say, is not without his nerdish qualities) review of a bootleg of a Swedish 70s hard-rock band thankfully is more about taste than identity, but also seems unable to overcome this central problem: Neither the appropriation of, nor the avoidance of, black cultural paradigms, is any indication of one's attitudes towards race. Let's pose this in terms of Mick Jagger and Kraftwerk. (We can also tie this to the other article, Jagger being clearly not-a-nerd and Kraftwerk obviously being nerds). Plenty of whack, probably-racist suburban frat boys listen to the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (white people) AND rap music (mostly black performers). THIS MEANS NOTHING. It has, of course, to be situated in mainstream culture and all its impossible-to-calculate determinations. No one would assert that listening to rap music means anyone has a more sympathetic or accurate idea of Black America. (Enter the phenomenon of the suburban "wigger," about which someone needs to write a book right away! I'm not joking.) The question seems to be, "If backwards, racist frat boys can listen to rap and black music with no shame of appropriation, *is it only this appropriation* that makes me unwilling to also listen to this music?" Mr. Schrader locates a foundational discomfort he feels about the blues. He wants to be "honest" and to be free from appropriating black culture, but sense that there is something else (an "essentializing imagination," I'll call it) that is part of that discomfort. I think there is no need to distinguish, psychically, between the two.

Are the Rolling Stones "based on cultural theft"? If you answer yes, you have to say the same about the entire history of art, a series of unacknowledged influences, appropriations, and even actual theft. To show the stakes of this answer, we then would have to re-assert the tired claim that RAP MUSIC is also "based on theft" (even more literally) because of its use of samples, which has been repudiated repeatedly.

There are experts who may want to chime in, but the very IDEA of artistic theft is a fairly-recent white capitalist notion of ownership that broadly corresponds to the idea of ownership-of-land which was used to "steal" our country from the native population. That is, the idea of ownership and the practice of theft go hand in hand. Thus, perhaps the *most "white" behavior* evidenced by these nerds is their reification of cultural property and intellectual copyright.

* on the idea of "cool," I think even hyper-nerds and the scroungiest punk are operating with an idea of cool, of social approval and distinction within their communities. That "nerd" is the opposite of the cool kid has never been tenable: Buddy Holly, Alan Ginsberg, Elvis Costello being the most obvious rebuttals. The nerd is cool within a certain framework. Thus, I think the article about nerds IS ultimately about a "cool whiteness," despite all of its protests contrariwise.

Ipods and genres, pt. 2

2007-07-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

However, it is NOT the case that, given the circumstances under which we listen to music--brief, out of context, digital--that easily-digestible pop music will inevitably triumph, just because it is most convenient. Granted, one can hardly listen to Wagner on the subway, but I propose the following:

Following my argument, there would be two types of music: accessible (we'll say) and inaccessible. Under the former category, all "hits" and forms of pop music. Basically, what one could play in an H&M. And in the latter category, cerebral and difficult music, that requires spending time with, etc.

But here is the important part: once you have assimilated, memorized, accustomed yourself to a piece of difficult music (or a fairly uniform genre), that music BECOMES accessible. The experience of listening to something already "processed" is separated by an abyss from the experience of unfamiliar ears.

Even the most abrasive, complicated, or retarded music, once it is entirely-expected, might as well be pop music.

I can imagine some exceptions to this: a perennially-difficult work or group, unable to be completely assimilated..... as well as a series of assimilations and rediscoveries of a single work in the course of a lifetime of listening, but those are separate topics.

Ipods and genres

2007-06-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

A couple of my punk friends recently got ipods, and I delicately was trying to ask them, "Do you really listen to punk on your ipod?" Because I don't.

What does it mean to say you like some art? At any given point in one's biography, one may very well not like an album or movie that later will become a defining favorite. One doesn't want to listen to Marvin Gaye while having sex (that would be monstrously lame in 2007), but maybe that is great cleaning-around-the-house music. Or, let's put it this way: where do you hear music first? and where do you listen to music?

Most people don't buy a great number of records unheard, on a whim, or even on recommendations. The radio, mp3 blogs, podcasts, parties, jukeboxes, Starbucks, DJ nights, live shows, and myspace are where most people hear about (new) music. Not me (I read record reviews for at least an hour a day)--but you can see that these are split between social and asocial types. And I would argue, the situation in which you hear music cannot be overstated. A lot of really "difficult" records rely on privacy and a lot of time--like the Minutemen's Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat; other records just leap out of whatever sound-space they are in and grab you--say, Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder they Come," or Poison Idea's Feel the Darkness.

[You can see why The Velvet Underground remain the smartest band of all time. Their eponymous first album splits between, on one hand, immediate rockers ("There She Goes Again"), sweet melodies ("Sunday Morning," "Femme Fatale"), and Dylan-esque contemporary folk-rock fare ("Waiting for My Man," "Run Run Run"), and on the other hand, difficult brooding set-pieces ("Heroin," "Venus in Furs," and "The Black Angel's Death Song"). This division is completely turned on its head on White Light White Heat, of course; the softer songs are infinitely weirder than the straight-forward but unbearably-loud rockers: nothing is easy to digest. Of course it all still "works" more than any attempted-pop record.]

Point being, listening to punk on an ipod is ineffectual. Hardcore already sounds like the subway and street noise--the vocals are usually mixed low, there are no dynamics, etc. Ipods are fucking MADE for Morrissey, though. (And rap, soul, and any pre-Hendrix rock: any really vocal-heavy music, basically). Not jazz, really. Obviously not metal :(

This seems more pertinent the more I think about it. Because very few people just sit in their rooms alone, undistracted by the internet, and just stare at the wall while listening to an album. As if hardcore, metal, free jazz, Wagner, et al, weren't unlikeable enough, they require such specific settings to absorb.

Not only a specific setting (absolute silence) for being able to hear the music, but also a specific mode of listening (complete attention) to get the music. A hardcore song is so compressed-- over very quickly, unrepetitive, and reliant on the listener to fill in a lot of gaps--that you really have to pay attention or else it becomes one big blur. (On top of already *sounding* the grating whir of a lawnmower).

Basically, music in 2007, when we all have ipods, listen to music on crappy laptop speakers, download and then only listen to 30 seconds of an mp3 before we delete an album, etc, means not only that we listen to music and buy music in different ways, but that whole genres no longer make sense. Music has to be so immediate, repetitive, unquirky, streamlined, etc. in order to grab even die-hard fans (we are the most inundated and over-burdened of all!), while casual fans have everything made so easy for them that they will rarely think, "Oh, listening to all 18 minutes of 'Sister Ray' will make this go by a lot faster!"

Further Adventures in Taste

2007-06-24T22:50:00.001-07:00

This blog contends that there is no taste that is "essential" to a person. All tastes are contingent. (See previous posts for some complications of this.)

This is seemingly self-evident from the degree to which people's love of Bukowski, Godard, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. directly correspond to the age of their first encounter. I could never argue that I "would always have loved" this or that, since, had I been of a different age when I first read/saw/heard something, it may have seemed entirely otherwise.

This is why aesthetic "close-mindedness" is so unconvincing. No one is born with their tastes, whether in favorite foods, their "type" of sexual partner, or favorite records: we are subject to so many determinants, familial, social, developmental, accidental, economic, that it is a mixture of wild arrogance and extreme self-effacement to imagine that one's tastes (principles, etc.) are not entirely a construct. A construct not entirely of our making, of course, but even a radical self-remaking cannot escape precisely what it is reacting against (and probably within).

What is frustrating, then, is the almost-unavoidable illusion that one is fundamentally this or that sort of person. In a previous post, I defined the canon as the transcendent version of this illusion: a taste for Shakespeare is still historically/linguistically contingent, and yet it cannot be imagined otherwise in any real time. On the other hand, my 17th century self certainly would have paled at hearing even Buddy Holly. What is real and more or less "one's own" is one's methodology of taste. But I refuse to admit (what culture is constantly demanding--from homophobic genetic pseudopsychology to identity-cultures) that anyone is "the sort of person" for any aesthetic particularity.

For instance, being a fan of punk music, I could easily despise Brian Eno's Ambient records outright on a number of grounds. And, in fact, I don't much care for those records. But if I bought Music For Airports and took it home, listened to it while getting ready for bed, I'm sure it would be fine. And there certainly are things I have come to prefer in music (songs, for one) that these records lack. But I would never say, 1) that I never would like such a thing, even if statistically I probably won't ever get around to it, or 2) that it has anything to do with some ME outside of what I have gone out of my way to be. Tastes are fundamentally "meta"--about themselves.

While some stuff is obvious garbage, this judgment cannot be rooted in a subject as such, but only in a force-field (of tastes, values) that conjures up that subject.

Revisions

2007-06-13T10:12:00.001-07:00

Pretty much any aesthetic topic, if you push it in the right direction, "really gets at the heart of what this blog is about," but let me relate an anecdote that really gets at the heart of what this blog is about.

When I was in high school, my friend Jeff and I were getting into punk and hardcore together.

[Brief aside: In a way, here we get to the heart of my whole aesthetic experience. On one hand, few things (Proust comes to mind) will ever be as rewarding as the experience of getting into punk, for me. On the other hand, I have become a complete junkie for "getting into things" in the hope of recapturing those ecstatic months/years. So, the irony is, I love something SO MUCH that I am always trying to find that joy in something else. C'est moi.]

We knew there was this band Napalm Death, who were maybe the fastest, heaviest, craziest band--but we had never heard them. Their name certainly was cool. So, using Jeff's dad's computer, we "downloaded" a clip of a song from a Napalm Death fan website. This was before Napster or anything, but because the average Napalm Death song is like 45 seconds, I think we were able to listen to a sizable part of a few songs.

I didn't really get it. They sounded weird. And probably a year or so went by until I ended up buying their second album. I am now completely familiar with this band's discography, they are one of my favorites, etc. And I can say, without any exaggeration, that my recollection of how they sounded bears no resemblance to any actual Napalm Death song.

We have a word for experiencing something that does not exist: "imagination." I imagined all the music I heard that day. My recollection does not correspond to whatever real songs were played over those speakers, or any music played over any speakers, ever. When I play this band today, I ALWAYS try to hear what it was that I heard the first time, but it simply is not there. The experience was completely imaginative. Or so you would think, except that I would bet $$ that Jeff heard the exact same (unreal) thing. We were listening to the same bands at the time, and were equally unprepared for Napalm Death, and had about the same reaction. We agreed that it was very fast, very heavy, and yet decidedly "off." That is, we were more confused than brutalized.

Stanley Fish writes about "interpretive communities." I would go back even one further, and posit a community of apprehension. This would largely be in the realm of imagination, of filtering new phenomena through tastes we have already developed, and expectations we can rely on.

In short, this "experience" (hallucination) is all I think about. The great irony is, while I didn't like what I "heard" that day, I am confident that if I heard anything *now* that sounded like that (which Napalm Death certainly don't), they would be my favorite band.

The Canon

2007-06-08T19:32:00.001-07:00

Here are some upcoming topics:
* Cult films/cult records
* Books/films you "had to see in high school"

Here's something I wrote down on a receipt in the subway the other day (no shit). Additions to the receipt-manuscript are in brackets:

If the materialist subject cannot be said to be adequately represented by the transitory and socially-determined fashions (intellectual, religious, or otherwise) of the day---say, if we were Greeks, we would wear Togas instead of tight jeans [Therefore our fashion cannot be said to say anything about us without relating it to a moment and its cultural field. It seems for a moment that there is nothing to "anchor" us to ourselves as existing in some metaphysical personhood; ie: our feelings of identity would be illusory and merely/entirely historically contingent.

Thus the terror of the elementary school alternative-history version of World War II: "If we had lost to the Nazis, we would all be speaking German right now." But, see, would that really be US? I mean, the same US? So my 8-year-old thinking ran.]

However, THE CANON comes to the rescue, presenting itself as a function of what would be true for this subject at any time, and so regardless of time. Sophocles is always great because of who I essentially am. So, when we say that some [work of] art is timeless, we mean this over and against the concerns of any given (historical) present concerns--ie: the particular determinations of the subject beholden to the ephemera of history.

Thus, the canon (understood in this way) is both oriented towards a set of "pasts" [with their own determinations] and constitutes a kind of permanent avant-garde in advance of its future appropriation. One would always be a Shakespeare fan, even if we dressed in metallic future-suits and ate food in pill-form: [the classic work is "outside of time" not in some mystical/bourgeois way but so that the subject might be as well.]

Contemporary Art: Uninformed Musings

2007-06-01T11:24:00.001-07:00

My critique of contemporary art is necessarily a bit uninformed. Nonetheless, I think we can proceed.

The visual arts are dictated by a different set of concerns than those that determine, say, fiction. Not unimportantly, it takes much less time to encounter a painting in a gallery than to read a novel. Visual art is more like lyric poetry in this sense.

The consequence of this, or perhaps the cause, is a (perceived) emphasis on reception and background. If the art is only in front of you for a short time, 1) why put years of work into it? and 2) the more "portable" the ideas behind the work need to be.

This viewpoint is the opposite of what might otherwise be thought of as typical of the art of the last century. I am saying, rather than "Art for Art's sake," that the concept has trumped form: that contemporary art is foremost an auto-critique of the possibilities of art and representation. The production of temporary art has become or threatens to become, merely a subset of art criticism.

Art for Art's sake I can understand. However, I find it difficult to move into so-called "conceptual art," not because I don't "get" it, but because I get it all too well and find the detour an uninteresting one. I must concede, some ideas are best expressed visually (or dramatically, or lyrically)--conceptual art is not inherently redundant. But don't we all feel that the idea behind a work all too often might have been detached and summarized for us--in short, for us to "get"--without the need for bad art? Once comprehension of a meta-critique becomes the criteria for an aesthetics, comprehensibility dethrones subtlety and the meta-critique seems pointed at all too easy targets.

Postmodern thought and aesthetics is often ridiculed for its "interrogations," "interventions" and "problematizing." I have to agree with this ridicule, without being so naive as to ask that art (or criticism) communicate Great Truths to us as their sole aim. Rather, I would ask that the meta-critique have an argument. Contemporary art seems less to have opened up an unending dialectical self-interrogation than to have run upon a kind of neurotic "block" that gets less interesting every year.

In short: we get it. Give us something more. I think it would not be inappropriate at this moment to mention (ie: demand a return to) a "pleasure of the text" in visual arts.

"How to Read"

2007-05-26T00:12:00.001-07:00

Nick Hornby recently wrote this article called "How to Read." It's a quick read, but it's basic points are these:

Reading is for pleasure. Therefore, people should read what gives them pleasure, instead of racking their brains trying to slog through "important" books or supposed "classics" that they don't enjoy. Life is short.

Oh, well, there would be more bullet-points, but actually Hornby's argument stops there, more or less. Within the piece is, covertly, a theory of the novel: transparency into a world and its characters, whom the reader is made to care about. So, Hornby's champion is Dickens, rather than Henry James. Oh, fuck, let's just name opaque novelists with unlikeable characters: James, Flaubert, Conrad, Faulkner, Madox Ford, Woolf...

So, predictably, behind this argument for practical "simplicity" is an exclusion, a prohibition on difficulty which is reproduced in the argument: read for pleasure. Supposedly, difficulty is not pleasurable. Anyone who has ever, uh...done anything will tell you otherwise. The JOY of finishing a difficult novel is not to be underrated, and not merely in the sense of relief.

My argument, if you know me, is extremely predictable: in music, I refuse to believe that the bottom, root pleasure of music is the "pure pop song," which all the variations, experimentations, and genres we wade through are just complications and disguises for 3-minute pop gems. Similarly, I reject the idea that "plot" or "caring about characters" is the BASE LINE of literary enjoyment. If I agreed with that, Hornby would be right. Pleasure would be, ultimately, the same thing for everyone, only in more and less sophisticated versions. Literature would be like alcohol: some people might prefer chardonnay, others Pabst Blue Ribbon, but the root pleasure (getting drunk) would be the same, even if some aficionados veered into wine snobbery and pretended it were otherwise.

The best example for me will be Nabokov (and therefore, covertly, Proust, you see): Nabokov's novels are written in exactly the prose that Hornby deplores: "Prose that draws attention to itself." Moreover, the plot and characters of Nabokov novels cannot be said to be their main selling points. Further still, Nabokov is not a novelist you can just pick up and go. He is difficult, allusive, and benefits greatly from the reader knowing a great many conventions and references and maneuvers that will be played with, undermined, and exploited by Nabokov. It is an aesthetic enjoyment, rather than a mimetic one. And this pleasure is like the pleasure of exercising, of building muscles or generally improving at something.

Hornby's discussion is facile because the ability to take readerly pleasure changes over time, and not just with the seasons, but with one's readings, and in response to difficulty and challenges. Anyone who has read Roland Barthes' Pleasure of the Text will have noticed that this "pleasure" is far from uniform to every text (reading Zola versus Robbe-Grillet is Barthes' great example), and is a pleasure honed over a lifetime of difficult and introspective reading.

Hornby is arguing for a path of least resistance. Enjoy! (says the superego). I hope my rebuttal is clear: no one is born being a "certain kind of reader," as Hornby's article repeatedly implies; if someone enjoys Tolstoy, it is not because they are simply that kind of person, but because they have probably suffered and been bored and had to look things up, and wondered about putting it down---and that could all happen just reading War and Peace. On the other hand, there is no greater pleasure than reading War and Peace. It's fucking good. I would say, not despite, but *because* the novel is not unmitigatedly "pleasurable," determines its greatness. The Novel, Lukacs reminds us, is the aestheticization of its own problematic. And, so, the greatest novels tend to be, well...problematic.

As for Hornby's specious conflation of entertainment novels with difficult ones (I imagine Nostromo), it is no wonder that he "begs" us to put down novels that are "making us weep with the effort of reading them." By defining books as purely ENTERTAINMENT, Hornby essentially has made his entire argument. Why, indeed, struggle to entertain yourself? But it's so stupid, because even in classic fiction, the most "entertaining" novels (Mathew Lewis' The Monk), which make no demands on the reader, are ultimately forgettable. And I should stop here before I go into a long thing about Freud and cathexis and circuits of pleasure, but let's just say that if you believe Hornsby, you cannot also believe that crossword puzzles are fun. After all, they can be frustrating.

Herzog at Film Forum

2007-05-24T07:55:00.001-07:00

The past week, I have been going to Film Forum's series of Werner Herzog documentaries. On Tuesday, I saw his 1994 film The Transformation of the World into Music, about the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth.

The most immediately interesting aspect of this film is that, where most documentaries (and Herzog's normal procedure) approach the subject as an outsider, even an ethnographer, throughout this film Herzog is simultaneously engaged in filming and in staging his own version of Wagner's Lohengrin.

This outside/inside binary is not interesting to me as an abstract dilemma faced by the instantiation of the camera--no, nothing like that. The absence of any outside is exactly pertinent to our discussion of taste. (Although, to be clever, I could point out the film's almost total lack of "exterior" shots; Bayreuth's rehearsal rooms are its whole world.) Because Wagner is such a polarizing artistic figure, often polarizing within a single person (see: Nietzsche), there is certainly a "cult" aspect to his work and following--a definite gap between the devotee and the puzzled outsider who does not see what all the fuss is about.

A recurrent motif in the film is that every single person involved in production, even down to the theater's fire sergeant, knows every word and melody of Wagner by heart. This allows for very short rehearsal times, but there are also intimations that this shared love is shielding Wagner from something: the ignorance of critics, anxieties about his music being co-opted by the Nazis (ie: whether this co-opting was somehow allowed or inherent in the music or in Wagner), and even the press of the cult upon the Bayreuth site as a destination for a pilgrimage.

[At one point, in staging Lohengrin, Herzog wants to play up the druidical cult-site that is the setting of the play, and surround the opera house with gigantic monoliths and have lasers shoot out of the building for hundreds of miles to other cult sites. I wonder how "knowing" this intention was, because the present direction of Bayreuth, under Wolfgang Wagner, is so opposed to such a "cult" and insists that everything must be INSIDE the opera house: that is where the staging takes place. But the cult scene has always-already infiltrated Wagner--the massive druidical stones are part of Lohengrin, and Bayreuth can never be "just" an opera house anyways.]

I am an outsider as regards Wagner. I don't get it. And this made the film all the more interesting, because I am such a card-carrying Proust aficionado---Proust, who is no stranger to Wagner! And the film is a kind of bizarro version of my embryonic fantasy of a world of Proust lovers, where every reference would land squarely, and scarcely another author would ever be mentioned. And in Herzog's film, you get this, and--here's the genius of it-- there is nothing creepy about it at all. Because it is about insiders shot from the inside, it is a film we might say, lacking distance, even as its subject is that very proximity. The total experience, therefore, is of having wandered into an alien world invisibly, and without crisis.

And so I would conclude that this is a film about the possibility of irony.

Prolegomena

2007-05-23T09:01:00.001-07:00

Well, here we are on the internet. You probably have a few other windows open: the New York Times, your email, the weather, and probably some kind of social-networking site (myspace, friendster, even a dating site). These sites are used for a great many things: pedophiles, spam, hyping shitty bands, seeing what your friends are up to, etc. For me, they are only about one thing: my lists of favorite movies, books, and films.

One glance at these enumerations of one's tastes immediately brings a charge of disingenuousness. One is far more likely to list Army of Shadows as one's favorite movie than the actually-superior The Godfather, or to treat one's tastes synecdochically, letting one more obscure noir stand in for a broader affection that "covers" the "obvious" but excluded Maltese Falcon.

This gets to the heart of the matter. "Taste" is for public consumption. And the very compulsion to take a lie-detector to people proclaiming Battleship Potemkin as their favorite film, is a misguided one. There IS authentic enjoyment. Aesthetic critiques are possible. However, the presentation of taste and one's actual (gustatory) taste, in their social articulations, become as indistinguishable from one another as the laws of chance and determination in Borges' "Lottery in Babylon."

What we propose is a sociology of these processes. There are apparent seams, paradoxes, glaring but unreproachable flaws, compulsions, and genius maneuvers everywhere in this field. We will cover literature, film, music, the notion of "hipsters," and New York in general.

More soon. For now, I should say that, if this blog were to have a reading list, it would be as follows (and I have not read these books, so we could get up a kind of discussion if we chose):
Immanuel Kant "Critique of the Power of Judgment"
Joseph Litvak "Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel"
Roland Barthes "The Fashion System"
Pierre Bourdieu "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste"