"Misfits Fan"

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?

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...

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

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

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

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"

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: