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Monday, January 26, 2009
PASSENGERS
Stephen Emmer feat. Lou Reed
Recitement
Challenge : 2007
[Buy It]
THE L TRAIN IS A SWELL TRAIN AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOU INDIES COMPLAIN
Out Hud
S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.
Kranky : 2002
[Buy It]
DOWNTOWN TRAIN
Tom Waits
Rain Dogs
Island : 1985
[Buy It]
Now Ben's gone and gotten me thinking about the train, the most metaphysical of conduits.
A train is a flightless airplane - the ostrich of the transport world.
A train is a car without options.
A train moves in one direction only - forward, into the future (how apt that a bride's trailing veil is called a train - the history she drags behind her as she crosses a threshold over which she'll never return).
A train is a machine made of time, its linked cars dividing it into discrete moments that roll onward, one after another; a train carries you forward without any effort on your part.
A train is a test tube and a womb and a loom, where threads converge via sheer proximity - a train is a tapestry of story.
Trains are repositories of romance, mystery, nostalgia, longing, boredom.
Trains are escape hatches, and cages.
There are books that engross me on trains that seem dull when I'm sitting still.
Trains are somehow excremental - above-ground trains show you the seamy hidden parts of your topograpahy; the blighted depots, the graffiti-scrawled outbuildings, the littered thruways of the world.
Underground trains rumble through bowels, below the congested consumption of cities; the underground train is the most metaphysical of trains - a tunnel within a tunnel.
"Train" also means "teach," and "focus."
Trains are made of tea and rain.
Trains are buses with one-track minds.
Trains might be late but always come.
Trains might be late but always leave.
My first travel by train was the best kind of travel by train - which is to say, European.
On that trip my friend and I rode trains like marathon runners run, which is to say, at great length, with a sort of jolly, self-immolating fortitude.
We took one train from Amsterdam straight to Sicily, which took at least 36 hours, and we didn't spring for any fancy sleeper car either - unlike the Amtrak, which lines up passengers in unidirectional rows, like people watching a movie, this train was broken up into four-seat compartments, with seats facing in pairs, making the experience less spectatorial and more parlor-esque.
If you fully recline two facing seats they form an almost-level surface on which one can rest. But we weren't much interested in sleep.
I will relate the texture of those journeys with a sort of staccato impressionism, because that's how they felt. The phrase "glide" will indicate interstitial moments of pure blank motile Zen. So:
Board and glide, looking at my dim reflection in a night-blackened window, a sense of streaming behind it, glide, hungrily devouring cheap junky snack cake proffered by matronly European lady concerned about these two young American boys in white t-shirts with no clear destination or impetus, despite small child's protestations at the consumption by strangers of his snack, glide, glide, being abruptly awoken by German border patrol in the confused darkness of early morning, having the pot we'd brought from Amsterdam confiscated amid grave threats (the promise of "dogs," the advice to relinquish now before it was "too late") that amounted to nothing, glide, the globe lights floating mistily above Utrecht on another dark morning, glide, glide, glide, smoking cigarettes out of windows labeled "No Smoking," the scrolling scenery itself seeming to tug at them, glide, briefly falling asleep with shoulder bag clutched to chest going through Italy, glide, waking up to an impossible dawn upon rolling Sicilian hills (dotted with distant white villas) to discover wallet gone, glide, finding wallet in washcloset trashcan, 50 Euro gone but debit card intact, glide, glide, glide.
These trains are my creation myth trains, from which all others will forever derive. The same way that Manhattan, the first real city I ever saw in person, will always be my Platonic city, of which all others are shadows.
Whereas my first train rides were pure myth, my subsequent ones have been more prosaic, with flashes of incident.
On a train from North Carolina to New York I sat beside a beautiful drag queen, with two teenage boys from Newark shooting me furtive, desperate glances, until finally she went to bathroom and they informed me to "be careful because she was a dude," apparently having mistaken my train-chatting for chatting-up (unlike airplanes, trains are inherently chatty, because you must have a good reason, an interesting story, for taking a train instead of a plane - except for metro trains, which are even less chatty than airplanes).
I have minded gaps on trains in London and watched gaps on trains in New York; I have indeed seen something but have not in fact said something.
I have longed for trains - for how they go, not where - and I have recorded the sound of the L train from Grand to Bedford, used the recordings to create a piece of music that sounds very much like trains and very much like hell.
Because there's no commuter rail where I live, trains for me are synonymous with long-distance travel or spending time in distant cities.
Trains are away or going away from me, or trains are enclosing me and taking me away; in this way trains can seem very much like life.
Most train songs are not really about trains.Labels: brian, trains
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, January 05, 2009
LIFE IS LONG
Brian Eno & David Byrne
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Todo Mundo : 2008
[Buy It]
October before last, I spent a few weeks camping my way through California. At the end of this week, I'm preparing to do it again. Funny how life repeats like that - funny odd, not funny ha-ha. For me, to be aware of this repetition is to experience a complex, even contradictory, mixture of feelings - it's a comfort, and a curse. The idea of reliving a positive experience is at odds with the idea of reliving an experience, period, while un-lived experiences accumulate at an astonishing clip. How much human misery is predicated upon trying to capture some old feeling, or to regain some lapsed state of grace - trying to live in memory rather than the moment? Like, all of it? And why do we cling to outmoded lifestyles, even as we speak so knowingly of the law of diminishing returns?
Of course, this trip to California will not be a reenactment of my last trip to California. I'm a different person now than I was then, even at the minor distance of a year - hell, I'm a different person today than I was yesterday. The urge to recreate the wonder and sweetness of that trip, moment by moment, is something that can be kept at bay if I stay aware of it. This is important, because I want to know how California looks and feels to me right now, not try to remember how it looked and felt a year ago. (There's a photograph of me in the corner of my partner's bathroom mirror: I'm standing on a cliff, with my back to the camera, looking out over the sea. My arms are stretched over my head, my left hand clasping my right wrist, in a posture of relaxation and relief. That's the feeling I remember from California, and it's the one I'll be tempted to try and recapture, if I let the past infect the moment. It seems as if the only surefire way to access that feeling again is to avoid striving to do so, since there is no relief in trying to split off from the present-ness of one's being - this is to be a shimmering, vague creature, caught in memory's shifting currents and not laid into the groove of the day.)
A new year comes with a sense of renewal, as if somehow the slate has been wiped clean, but it can also draw the annularity of events into excruciating focus. Around this time of year, instead of enjoying my morning coffee ritual, a sense of futility can overtake me - how many mornings have I made coffee in just this way? On how many more will I do so? And this minor, irritating awareness of routine can swell up to envelop everything in my life. In this humor my progress through time and space begins to feel less like a forest path, which has a destination, and more like a high-school track, a closed loop where the same scenery rolls by again and again. I make my bold resolutions - STOP WATCHING A DOUBLE SHOT AT LOVE WITH THE IKKI TWINS - yet continue to fold my life into tight creases of convention. Rituals that usually comfort me come to seem constricting, pointless, inevitable.
This new-year's discomfort with ritual, I experience on a couple levels. One, the futility of relatively static rituals - how many more times will I have to brush my teeth in my life, and finally, will it be the sheer tedium that kills me? To brush my teeth in this state of mind is to take an unduly mechanistic view of the human experience. To be reminded of the body's increasingly time-intensive demands for simple maintenance, as life goes on, so the act of living becomes an algorithm whose only function is to sustain itself. I am not currently as depressed as this post makes me out to be - in fact, I'm quite happy right now, and excited about my trip. The life-fatigue I'm describing is not currently upon me - if it were, I wouldn't be able to describe it as calmly as I am right now.
My current happiness is enhanced by the fact that I am coming off a solid two-week stint of depression, though, and that depression had a lot to do with what I'm talking about today. It had to do with the second level of discomfort-with-ritual I alluded to above - the sadness of rituals which are preserved despite being untenable. The holiday time has been a difficult time for me, in recent years, and this is wholly a function of the past. Some of my warmest, happiest family memories are linked to my childhood holidays, which make the current state of my family's holidays seem sadder by comparison. My dad's father - a charming rake we called "Pop," a mischievous presence among a family gently inclined toward sanctimony - died a couple years ago, and my dad's mother, almost sightless now (whose library fueled my early adoration of books), lives alone. All three of my dad's brothers have now gotten divorces or separations, dividing my cousins among various households. My mom's mother, with whom I was very close as a child, is senile now, and the joy I used to feel in her presence has bent into a heartbreaking discomfort that I can't help but beat myself up over, even though it's understandably hard on anyone to see someone they love in such a state, trapped in vapors of the past, telling the same stories and asking the same questions over and over again. There's nothing exceptional about any of this, and as family crosses go, it's not too heavy to bear. But the fact remains that the 24 hours or so I spend among my extended family around Christmas leaves me feeling incredibly drained, painfully nostalgic, wary of the future toward which this all inevitably slides, and mired in my personal history. The passage is natural, the discomfort comes from locking oars against it, which some members of my family, especially my mother, are wont to do. I would feel a great pressure lifted from me if we could devise family rituals that suited who we are right now, instead of trying to squeeze our dynamic and habits into a shoe that wore out a long time ago. But not everyone is with me on this, so I find myself in the uncomfortable position of trying to be a man in a context where I'm expected, in some ways, to remain forever a child. My mother still gave my brother and I each a stocking full of candy until she finally gave it up just a couple years ago. My grandmother, through no fault of her own, asks me what Santa Claus is bringing me, and I think, "I'm almost thirty." Again, she can't help it - the past is where she lives now. But when she asks me, I feel the jolt of an outsized and poignant metaphor.Labels: brian, repetition
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
BTWN YOU + ME
Windy & Carl
Songs for the Broken Hearted
Kranky : 2008
[Buy It]
THE THING WITH FEATHERS
James Lavino
The Woodpecker OST
Brookhaven/TuneCore : 2008
[Buy It]
TRACK3A (2WAYNICE)
Keith Fullerton Whitman
Playthroughs
Kranky : 2002
[Buy It]
Today appears to lack characteristics. Gray, blank sky. Leafless trees - it's winter. Houses washed clean by last night's rain. I can't see them anyway - windows fogged with condensation from heater, behind closed Venetian blinds. (It's cold - cold enough to numb, but not to bite.) No cars on the street, just wetness and a dull shine. The power went over night and my clock flashes 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. My books look like, just, objects. Every story the same: The tower is visible but inaccessible. The flaming horses run into the waves. The hero returns from the mountaintop only to sink into iniquity. Amado Vazquez will fall in orchids and bloom again in Malibu. My instruments struck deaf and dumb. I tried to send a Facebook message and the "Send" key didn't respond, as if my cursor were just a decoration. I'm monochromatic in black shirt and black pants. My neighbors sold their house and it's emptier than empty. My paintings look like accidents. I can see the white wall behind them. I don't have any lights on and the room is washed in dim white light. The heater's hum is voracious and empty. The phone book in the drawer is a cemetery, except portable and helpfully indexed. The world is around me but not within me. My mind a coastline vanishing into a bank of fog. No opinions, only aphorisms. This state is eternal and it will pass. I will shift again and click back into the pattern. Or so the pattern has showed me in the past. But for now I walk the road without characteristics. That road is short and never ends. My mind is voracious and empty. Things pass through it and leave no trace. I pass through things and leave no trace. My messages are not being delivered. No mail today either. If I touch the window will I leave a fingerprint? I thought and thought about what to write and found only a void. Write the void.
Sometimes I wonder where I go. Always up or down. My mind radiant with good or filled with dark birds whom I love, and do not know. I know it's me that's moving because the world is still there - but remote, as if at a distance of years. Or abstract like math - infinite half-spans between wall and wall, always one more to close. Impossible to cross the room. If you're reading this post, either we're both dreaming or we're both awake. Today I am not sure that's true. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that I might be blogging from someone's dream. If the world is still here and I am not in it but not beyond it, where am I? Quite literally lost in thought. As if under glass today. Noticing odd details that amount to nothing. The dust remover I use to clean my computer contains an agent called "Bittergent," to deter me from inhaling it. A small mound of rubber bands on my desk reminds me of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty." One of my walls is covered with what appear to be footprints. The grain of my desk alternates light and dark and resembles a plowed field viewed from high above. The letters "P L E" are vanishingly carved into the railing of my porch. My keyboard's cord is tangled around it in a way that depresses a couple keys - a partial D minor - a silent dirge latent in the air. Each of these details containing a thought, a post, a poem, a story, a novel, an encyclopedia. But, lacking characteristics, I can't interpret these messages. They notice me and move on. Each an aleph. But not today. I hear the drone of an absent chord. I should inhale dangerous chemicals. Calamity would be good for me. But I'm too quiet for calamity right now. I feel so disconnected from my actions that I wonder if I carved "P L E" into the porch myself. No evidence today that my actions connect - to each other, to the world, to my memory. I wonder if I was going to write "PLEASE." I wonder what I was asking for, and from whom. I could write poems if I would let myself. Idleness is the leading cause of poetry in white males. But the world seems coiled like a serpent, slumbering. Best not to prod it.
Today I crave music of pristine blankness. Music without characteristics. Windy & Carl are a married couple who've been making ambient and shoegaze music together for a long time. They recorded Songs for the Broken Hearted during a period of unspecified sadness. But I'm not interested in sadness today. It's the disconnection that, weirdly, I connect to. Carl made the music in one room, and it sounds like the world slipping free from its moorings, the dark field beyond it gusting in. Windy recorded the vocals in another room, mining her journals for grist. Like a small figure with a lantern, searching for Carl through an impenetrable murk. You can leave a room but the wall remains. Today I feel as if I could move to the perimeter of the world and find a barrier of sheetrock at each end - can't get out of the wall. And there's James Lavino's soundtrack for The Woodpecker, in which he hollows out every genre he can think of, rendering each as a profoundly formal exercise. Music with sense but no meaning. Then things get really endgamey with Keith Fullerton Whitman, into whose music everything else funnels down. It's the hum at the root of consciousness. My mood condensed into barely audible form, not so much filling the blankness in the air as giving it contour, color, shape.
And suddenly through this shape an opening resolves. The day's soupy mass fragments into vectors of possibility. Because boredom is always a failure of imagination, and the blankness of this music, giving form to my own, stirs my imagination in a way that seemed impossible moments ago. What if I were to turn on the radio, and sit amid a gray tide of music and voices. What if a few notes of jazz pierced my sternum, opening a dark blossom inside my chest. And what if I opened the blinds, and saw dark blossoms blowing slowly over the horizon. Now we are getting somewhere. Time returns - the faucet drips the minutes, the heater hums the hours. The dark blossoms becoming entangled in the piano wire woven through the trees. My mind stirring. A red phone in a dish of milk rings. I find a brightly wrapped package inside my piano. When I shake it, I can hear the skitter of little talons inside. My cheeks puff out and I draw a long black stocking out of my mouth. A voice wells up from the radio, proclaiming, Get your heart down out that tree, Reverend, and sing! The world returns if you can part enough veils. Important to remember that a void is not a thing but the absence of things. And this world contains no shortage of things, we can touch them and move them. This is a reminder. Writing happens against all odds. It just did. I am thinking again. I can move. I am opening the blinds.Labels: brian, nothing
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
CUT YOUR HAIR
Blake Miller
Together with Cats
Exit Stencil Recordings : 2006
[Buy It]
My hair is getting long again. I get it cut maybe three or four times a year. The asymmetrical style I favor starts tight and slick, then grows shaggy and amorphous. There's always an awkward period when it just sort of hangs over my forehead, until it gets long enough to tuck behind an ear. Eventually I begin to roughly prune it with cheap scissors - hacking out a section of bangs to give it some angle, trimming it off my neck, where it tends to flip up like a duck's tail when it gets too long. Now I have to wear a hat or pin it back when I sit on the floor to make things, so I can see. That means it's time for a trim. Yet I put it off. Is it overly dramatic to mention that every haircut brings us closer to the end of something? It is. And everything brings us closer to the end of something - of life, if you want to go that far. But for some reason, the haircut cycle draws me into a sharper awareness of the widening past and narrowing future than any of my other numberless cycles. I go in to the salon in one guise and come out in another, with a sense of eternal advance and retreat, a few steps foward and a few steps back....I find myself touching my hair a lot when I'm nervous, or anxious. It probably always looks the same to other people, but to me it looks different every day, depending on level of cleanliness, how I slept on it, how it dried after my shower. I don't even own a comb or brush. My blow dryer's only for drying paintings. I like to let my hair express itself. I look at it in mirrors and this is partially due to vanity, but not entirely.
How do you all feel about about your hair? Right now, I feel like my hair is a reflection of my interal weather, and right now, my hair feels like it's made up of different zones, like it has modules, separate modules that interact. It's modular. But I'm thinking about your hair too. It's not just my own hair I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about your hair and how it makes you look - it's making you look like some kind of person - and no, not everyone's hair is modular, but mine is, right now. You know how they say the eyes are the window to the soul. Well I feel like, maybe, for me, right now, it's....hair. (But when my bangs are long and it's too dark for sunglasses and I feel as if my eyes are giving away too much, I can let my hair fall over them like a curtain over a window.) So I was thinking about how my hair felt and this is how I got to thinking about how one's hair feels. For me, it feels like something that I can't quite put into place, something that's ajar, and that kind of reflects when I turn inward, that feeling of trying to smooth everything into place, but you smooth one thing down and something else - boing! - sticks straight up? That's why I'm thinking so hard about hair. It has important ramifications.
PULL MY HAIR
Bright Eyes
Letting Off the Happiness
Saddle Creek : 1998
[Buy It]
When I was around 7, I had a rat-tail; it curled in a little corkscrew, more like a pig's tail. In the age of Nirvana, I had that ghastly undercut style, where it's shaved on the sides and back but long on top - a weird mullet/bowl-cut hybird. Around the end of high school, I started coloring my hair with Manic Panic - blue, green, red, teal, and finally, black. I wore it black for quite a while. During this black period I got a tattoo on my back of a comic book character called Grendel, a ninja-black avatar of malevolence, bowing on my shoulderblade with menacing elan. I wore black t-shirts and a black leather jacket, black leather wristbands and black studded belts. I dropped out of college and graduated to permanent black hair dye, rich with exotic chemicals, and eventually developed an allergic reaction to it. My head broke out in supperating sores that didn't go away, for months. I kept going to dermatologists and they kept telling me to put a hot towel on it. No one suggested I might be allergic to the hair dye, which strikes me as gross negligence; then again, it didn't occur to me either. This was a terrible period for me. I was constantly uncomfortable and gross-feeling, my black hair matted with pus at the roots. This was the same time period during which my first semi-adult, "I love you" long-term relationship was unraveling. The woman I was with said the "head-rot" (that's what we called it, the "head-rot" - in this period of my life, all was black comedy to me) changed me forever. The head-rot finally went away after I shaved my head in desperation, and while my scalp corrected itself, the relationship did not. Now I don't even use any product in my hair, and I wear it natural - a dirty blonde, like a pale reflection of the blazing-white hair of my childhood.
MY IMPURE HAIR
Blonde Redhead
23
4AD : 2007
[Buy It]
Do you think about what you look like when you think about your hair? Ok, let me amend the question - can you? Can you think about what you look like when you think about your hair. You have to ask yourself that question. I can't answer it for you. If I could answer that, it would mean you where thinking about me. Not thinking about your hair, but thinking, what does Brian want from me? When all I'm asking you to do is think about what you look like when you think about your hair. And has it ever looked exactly the way it looks right now. Will it ever again.
Hair is obviously complicated - it's made of these tiny particles I can't even fathom and grows right up out of my head, like thoughts. But it's really simple too. It's hair. It frames your face. It signals your social proclivities. Gets in your mouth when you have sex. Now we are weighing hair's pros and cons. Pro: frames your face. Con: causes deep existential uncertainty. As far as I'm concerned, the hair, the face - all of it - are natural phenomena. I'm content to let those be. It's thinking about hair that gives me pause. I mean hair pertains across all social strata, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm not thinking, does my hair look cool? Is it fashionable? Or even, what kind of person does my hair make me feel like? I'm thinking about the fact that I'm cognizant of not asking those questions, I don't not know that I'm not asking those questions. I know those questions exist, and I'm not asking them. The question I am asking has something to do with existence and can somehow be expressed through the lens of hair, although hair is just the thing I've latched on to right now. Simple question: Think about what you look like when you think about what your hair looks like and how you feel about your hair. Tell me.
Latched on to, ha! More like it's latched on to me.Labels: brian, hair
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
TO ABSENT VOTERS: CHANGE GONNA COME, TODAY IS THE DAY, A MEANINGFUL MOMENT THROUGH A MEANING(LESS) PROCESS[download tracks above]TO ABSENT VOTERS The Lucksmiths Spring a LeakMatinee : 2007 [Buy It]CHANGE GONNA COME Otis Redding Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings SoulRhino : 2008 [Buy It]TODAY IS THE DAY Yo La Tengo Today is the Day EP Matador : 2003 [Buy It]A MEANINGFUL MOMENT THROUGH A MEANING(LESS) PROCESS Stars of the Lid And the Refinement of Their DeclineKranky : 2007 [Buy It]On Tuesday I woke up feeling so unloved that I decided to build a war in a bottle, to occupy my mind. I cleared the debris from my drafting table with a sweep of my arm: Bristol board, t-square, protractor, compass, pencil and fountain pen, tallow and wick, all clattered down into a great unruly pile on the floor. I assembled my materials around me: the bottle (faint whiff of rotten milk), the long thin implements, the model glue (a sniff here and there, for inspiration), the jeweler's loupe, the preassembled pieces (tabs already punched and folded, slots already spread and slotted), the headlamp and desklamp, the little tubes of brightly colored enamel, the wire brushes, the metal scraps, the ashtray, the crumpled pack of unfiltered Pall Malls, the strike-anywhere matches, the bourbon and snifter, the coffee and cakes. Leaning over the drafting table, wearing the loupe and headlamp, hands steadied by nicotine and caffeine, head fortified with bourbon and glue, I slid the long thin implements into the bottle and began to erect (carefully, carefully) the masts and sails, the concertina wire and sandbags, the anchors and gallows, the snares and trumpets, the standards and coats-of-arms, the light bulbs and halos, the monocles and gold braid, the fiber optic bundles and bales of twine, the golden arches and red crosses, the crab grass and grids, the loamy smell of swing sets, the black eggs and blue shields, the encyclopediae and cyclone fences, the snakes of Iceland and the ice of Snakeland, the unfinished bridges and flying buttresses, the helices of debt and ownership, the NO TRESSPASSING signs and bicycle chains, the fumes of munificence, the oubliettes of credit and the bores that drill them deeper, the president, the president's dog (reliable companion in times of universal strife), the president's faith, the Old Testament and the New Deal, Alaska and Russia, the red states and the blue, the white houses and the black, the volcanoes and horsts, the cirri and contrails, the weather reports (ignorable evidence of divine impartiality), the almanacs and oracles, the morning papers and evening news, the blogs and mp3 aggregators, the op-ed pages, the Atlantic and the Pacific, the ironclad ships idling in pools of offal, the buried pipelines, the independent security contractors (new cowboys of the civilized range), the baroque, the romantic, the modern, the national anthem and John Cage's prepared piano, the aleatoric explosions, the strike-anywhere ordnance, the zithers and lutes, the wolf intervals and pink noise, the lenses and celluloid, the maltese-cross-and-pin rigs, the aspect ratios and maskings, the particle accelerators and atom smashers, the light and the motes of dust, the cycles of punishment and largesse, the stochastic spin of warfare, meteorology, and rhetoric, the mavericks and messiahs, Wall Street and Main Street, the ivy and vines, the rhetors and their cunning devices (spinning against a larger spin), the postal workers and their intrigues, the comptrollers and rural dioceses, the impotent rage of the service class, the crowds and their madness, the salvation by fire, the burning effigies and subterranean cells, the devout and their terrible conviction, the evangelicals in eelskin boots, the polymers and carcinogens, the white rap critics, the dangling chads and butterfly ballots (mostly Question Marks, Monarchs, and Mourning Cloaks), the great funnel clouds of money, the effervescent rain of money, the stormy lakes and fiery pits of money, the skulls, the ulnae and tibiae, the catacombs of surveillance, the windmill farms and emission offsets, the sun and the moon, the chicken sexers and internet poets, the solar panels and mall photographers, the hall of mirrors, the glass in the hall of mirrors, the silvering on the glass in the hall of mirrors, my nested reflections in the silvering on the glass in the hall of mirrors, the nested reflections of the bottle, the nested reflections of the long thin implements, &c. When I stood back to see what I had wrought, I thought it pretty fine as wars go and named it "Snakeland." Critics, however, have pointed out (repeatedly, with glee) that there are no snakes in Iceland.
*
HELLO PEOPLE OF NEW YORK CITY AND ENVIRONS: We have a special Moistworks announcement. Regular contributor Ben Greenman will be celebrating the release of his fancy new limited-edition, handcrafted, letter-press book Correspondences at the Tenement Museum (108 Orchard Street) at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. Ben will read, along with Arthur Nersesian and Todd Zuniga. Come one, come all.Labels: brian, war
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, September 29, 2008
TWIN LAKE
Arve Henriksen
Strjon
Rune Grammofon : 2007
[Buy It]
MASK
Radicalfashion
Odori
Hefty : 2006
[Buy It]
OTHER'S GAIN
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Lie Down in the Light
Drag City : 2008
[Buy It]
"It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."
-Jorge Luis Borges, from "Borges and I"
It's the other one, it's Howe, that things happen to. I sit on my porch in Durham and pause, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the portcullis of the house next door or a hummingbird alighting on a chestnut tree. News of Howe reaches me through Technorati and I see his name on an indie rock blog or in a bio line in a poetry journal. I like detuned pianos, handmade books, postwar minimalism, the taste of coffee, and Borges's prose. The other one shares these predilections with me, but in an ostentatious way that converts them to the label tags of a blogger. It would be too much to say that our relationship is hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Howe may contrive his pop criticism and that pop crit subsidizes my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has managed to write some passable words, but those words cannot save me, perhaps because the best part no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other one, but rather to the English language or to commerce. Otherwise, I am destined to be free, definitively, and only a few scraps of me will persist in the other one. Hand over fist I am yielding him everything, although I am well aware of his perverse habit of obfuscating and overwriting. Spinoza held that all things long to preserve their own nature: the word processor wants to be a word processor forever and the CV, a CV. But I must live on in Howe, not in myself--if indeed I am anyone--though I recognize myself less in his reviews than in his poems, or than in the revelatory glissando of a harp. In recent years I have tried to free myself from him and I passed from technology- and process-based texts to poems of metaphysics and intuitions, from reviews of music to reviews of books and video games and films and visual art, but those games are Howe's now, and I will have to conceive something new. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one.
I do not know which of us two is appropriating this page.Labels: brian, homage
posted by Brian
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Monday, September 15, 2008
THE BULL WHO KNEW THE RING
Flying Canyon
Flying Canyon
Soft Abuse : 2006
[Buy It]
This old bull life, once you knew the ring
Kick it back down, open up & sing
Bring me one last song for charity
This old boat ain't gonna make it out to sea. -Cayce Lindner, ???-2007
One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one. -David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
I am not sure where to begin. All morning, I've been procrastinating - compulsively checking emails, doing my stretches, making a slow lunch, balancing my check book. I'm all out of procrastination. Something needs to be said but I'm still unsure what it is. Let's start here, just to get the page moving:
On Saturday night, I was drinking a glass of wine at a cafe, killing time before a dance party. My phone vibrated in my pocket - a text message. I opened it, expecting a "you out tonight?" or a "call me." I was not expecting this: "david foster wallace killed himself yesterday." I felt something big and dark and ominously winged land upon my chest. I didn't get it. What was it supposed to mean? Some kind of sick joke?
I scrolled down. The message was from one of my editors at a local paper - not the sickly joking type. I walked back inside, jaw swinging loosely. My partner Ashley saw my face and said, "what," alarmed. My jaw was not responding. I held up the phone, with the message. "Are you okay?" she said.
I didn't feel okay. This is starting out all wrong. This is not about me. But I didn't feel okay. I've been vaguely affected by the deaths of celebrities and artists before - Tupac, Biggie, Cobain - but I've never felt the visceral response that I've heard people describe, until now. What I felt in those instances seemed more symbolic than visceral, an awareness of some turning point that affected me more on an academic than a visceral level. Does this sound cold? I don't know how to properly grieve for people I've never met. I don't know why Wallace's self-inflicted death should be realer to me and more demanding of comment from me than, say, the 25 people killed against their will in the recent train crash outside of Los Angeles. This is starting out all wrong. It isn't about me, or shouldn't be.
David Foster Wallace has hanged himself. His wife found him. Grief belongs to her, and his parents, and his friends. My grief is inconsequential, and spectral, and real. He was my favorite writer. I don't mean this to denote simple admiration, and I don't mean it in a way that projects the idea that I'm the type of person who likes David Foster Wallace to the world. This is more personal. I don't want to write an obituary, which pretends to objectivity. I don't want to write his story, which is not mine to tell, and which is hidden from me. This is about me, even if it shouldn't be. Let me make this clear. Wallace's death is about him and his family and friends. This is about me - this post. It's about whatever emulsion of Wallace came alive in the crucible of me, and became me. It's a selfish thing to write about. But suicide is a selfish act. We're all selfish. Wallace's death isn't about me. But this is. It's all I've got.
I discovered his books in my late teens. I'd dropped out of art school, having survived a convulsive teenage period of dark nihilism, dark drugs, dark metamorphosis. I was coming back into the light. I hungered for a literature I intuited but did not know. I was reading a lot of Vonnegut, which was close but not quite the cigar I was looking for. One day, in the library, I discovered Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's second story collection. I got it because the pages looked crazy and the blurbs sounded crazy. I read it, and it was crazy. I felt as if smoke were coming out of the top of my head. In hindsight, it's not surprising that the idea of narratives coming apart would appeal to someone who'd been through a long phase where every narrative he knew seemed to come apart. This was the beginning of something.
Then I read Infinite Jest and it changed me forever. It made me moody and troubled and alive. It made me simultaneously know that I wanted to be a writer, and despair of ever doing so. Nevertheless, I became a writer. Now I've read Infinte Jest three or four times. It's hard to say that without sounding as if you're bragging, because of that book's reputation for difficulty and pretentiousness, which it does not deserve. It is such a human and humane and generous book. It wasn't a War and Peace or Ulysses kind of thing for me, a badge of honor or improving ordeal. It was bread and water, sustenance. Every time I reach the end of its thousand-odd pages, I wish there were more. It makes me greedy. It's a place I love to go, and that I long to fathom more fully. Each time, it cores me and razes me and gestures toward rebuilding me. Everything's in it.
Most importantly, it contained a mind that I seemed to recognize in some fundamental way: something inside of me coming weirdly from outside of me, a crossing of that Self/Other divide that so heavily informed Wallace's writing and, one presumes, demise. That this sense of deep identification was unilateral seemed beside the point: in my inner life, which is to say, my real life, it was real. This voice became a part of me. In spending time with it I felt as if I were spending time with myself - my sometimes-cripping self-consciousness (the animating force of Wallace's brilliance), my complex relationship with irony and fear of desire, the idea of digression as some sort of release valve, a venting of some kind of inner infinity that feels like a pressure, and a winding path leading to infinity as well. All of this I recognized before I could articulate it. What does this have to do with Wallace's life and death. This is going poorly. Try again.
I devoured the essay collections and discovered I wanted nothing more than for editors to send me to obscure events and pay me to write "long directionless essay-ish things." I ironically attended a Poison concert, then went home and wrote a discursive twenty-page essay about it, complete with artlessly long title and copious footnotes. "And but so's" began to sprout in my prose like weeds. My friend and I optioned Girl With Curious Hair for a film we never made. In the essays, particularly in the essay E Unibus Pluram, I discovered Mark Leyner and John Barth and Don DeLillo and Max Apple, and for many years postmodernism and metafiction became my obsession. I read his essay on David Lynch and suddenly got Lynch in a way I hadn't before; a filmmaker I'd been simply intrigued by became, over the course of years, one of my favorite artists ever. Understand this: I was changed. Wallace was a route into things that were already waiting for me, which I did not yet know. But this is starting out all wrong. None of this is the point. (Why should there be a point? People die.) Try again.
David Foster Wallace has hanged himself. I am shocked but not surprised. I've never been able to fathom how he lived inside of that mind, never at rest, always chasing itself in a deep involuted spiral. I don't want to slip into an easy, Beautiful Mind type narrative - Wallace frantically inscribing equations on a window, tortured to death by his own brilliance, it's too much, it supposes too much, and Wallace himself derided this narrative in his pop-bio on Georg Cantor and the concept of infinity. I don't think his death is a symptom of his writing but I suspect his writing is a symtom of his death. It's hard not to. He was a math wonk and math wonks cater to this image, they seem to know too much stuff that's useful for so little. The sound of math and the sound of a mind devouring itself are the same. I think of a machine, humming and ticking in a depopulated void. This is an easy narrative. I'm trying to avoid it and slipping into it. Back up.
I wrote a review of his third story collection, Oblivion. This part is about me. A palette cleanser before we try again. Here's something I said:
Oblivion is a difficult book, and will be frustrating to some readers. Many fiction writers take a narrative arc, then pepper it with details at intermittent points along its length to engender a sense of self-containment and completion. Wallace excises a small segment of a narrative arc, and then packs it with a dense accretion of detail (with strategic omissions that befuddle and inclusions that seem, at first, meaningless to the narrative). Traditional fiction seeks to create an illusion of contiguity in the haphazard events of our lives; Wallace undermines the illusion of sequential narrative by filling a time-span with facts that often refuse to cohere as neatly as we're conditioned to expect.
I still think that's pretty good, as a description of how Wallace's writing works. I don't want this to be an opportunity for me to flex my writing muscles, in that vaguely seamy and selfish way that postmortem considerations frequently are. But I don't want Wallace to be dead either. Nevertheless, here we are.
But think about seeing the world that way, all the time. I am dangerously close to slipping into the tortured genius narrative. It is seductive, and he was a genius, and by all appearances somewhat tortured. It's drawing a firm connection that's problematic. I don't want to impose this narrative on someone who relentlessly exploded packaged narratives. When who knows what forces prevailed upon his private life, hidden from the fictions and essays. Who know what dark whirlpool of diabolical chemicals surged in his brain. I am trying to write about an event I cannot know, and so it keeps trying to be about me. Once more, with feeling...
Re-read the essays and remember how fucking funny Wallace was - uproariously, laugh out loud, never-forget-the-image-or-turn-of-phrase funny. That's part of what I don't get - he seems too funny to die. Does that make sense? That the harrowing and the hilarious seemed to perfectly coexist in his writing, and that his unflagging humor seems like it should have kept him afloat? That's it's hard to fathom intentionally leaving a world that is so funny and so interesting and so horrible? That time is pain and death is the absence of time, that death is not long but more than long - timeless - and that time is precious, as is pain, being so brief against the timelessness of death? I know a bit about dread and intuit things about death, but I'll stick around as long as the world is still funny and painful, which it is. But what am I talking about? This part is about me in a way that it really shouldn't be. Start over, try again.
It just so happens that I - damn it, there's that "I" again - go ahead - see where it goes. It just so happens that I was re-reading Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System - definitely a young man's book, which he wrote in his early twenties, but a better and more audacious book than most writers get to create in a lifetime - at the time of his auto-apocalypse. I read some of it on Friday and some of it today; it's not the same book that it was on Friday. Now, it's like reading a library copy that someone has highlighted in (which, side note, drives me fucking bonkers - I don't write in my own books and definitely can't read one someone else has written in) - emphases are shifted, passages become stupidly portentous. Suicide is an oblierative act, cruel to friends and family - I am not here to judge, but it is cruel, say that - which obliterates totally, reverberating like an endless bell through every corner of the departed's life and work. So this morning I open The Broom of the System and read passages like
...[W]e each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vast empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other.
I mean come on. Come the fuck on. This is too poignant and too easy, bathetically leaping off the page. But maybe it absolves me for this abortive post. Maybe Wallace would understand that I can only filter this through my empty, rattling personal universe, and that this is an attempt, like all of my writing, to pierce that veil of solipsism, which is so prominently explored in his writing and seems so inextricably linked to his death. This latter might not be true. I am talking about appearances and symmetries. Because that's what we're left to sift through. At any rate, if you read the story "Good Old Neon," you have to surmise that Wallace is somewhere or in some state now where he could really give a damn about how a stranger handles his death - he is no longer a whitecap, he has sunk into the benevolent simultanaeity of the sea. This is his image. It's a poor thing to wield someone's images against them, or to use them to explain them. But the instinct is understandable. It's all we have left.
It's terribly tempting to root through Wallace's writing for clues as to how he reached the point the reached - tying the knot, slipping it around...no. That's too much. This is not a tabloid. But it's hard not to think about. He was so fucking funny! Go back to the books. Read them like a detective, it's okay - we can't really help ourselves. Read "Good Old Neon". Think about the narrator's last afternoon, and Wallace's awareness of the pathos of it, as he rehearses all the acts he's performing for the last time. Think about Wallace's benevolent view of death and suicide and hidden inner feelings of fradulence in that story. Try to make it connect to what happened. Don't feel as if he was trying to warn us of anything, unless that's how you feel, which is fine. I don't think it was a warning or a cry for help. Threads were converging. Clouds gathering. Cosmic billiards ricocheting. That's it.
Read "Suicide as a Sort of Present." Try not to groan at the irony, or become angry, unless you feel angry, which is okay. Fucking Didion has manged not to pull the plug, and she... no. Don't. Read "Suicide as a Sort of Present." But try not tarry in that story for too long - it's a dead end, and it's dangerous. Counterweight it with "Death is Not the End." Now we are doing math. We are balancing an equation. Don't expect this to mean anything (this isn't about me, but I'm talking to myself, here). Read "The Depressed Person." Try to imagine that this is not his own mind he's describing, trapped in an endless spiral of solipsism and need. But then try to imagine what it means for a mind to imagine a mind, and think about whether or not there's a meaningful difference, between that, and being that mind. Remember that some of the most vivid passages in Infinite Jest described the texture of depression, a great dark winged shape pressing down. It's only natural for us to do this. But we shouldn't believe we know too much. It's too easy. Suicide is one ultimate mystery. The connection between a writer and reader is another. This is going poorly because I'm threatening to make it all sound simpler and easier than it is. I always thought writing was a bulwark for him, against the self-obliteration that always seemed the logical conclusion of his uncanny self-consciousness. I don't believe it's that simple but it's how I feel. This is getting too profound. I chose the picture of him I like best, from the Infinte Jest flap, with the bandana and the gauzy downcast expression. This is too sentimental. I don't know him. Stop trying. Simmer, in your mind. Feel don't think. Grieve for his friends and family in whatever abstract way you can. Know that he's fine now - whatever plagued him in life is over, and he's rejoined the greater flow. Try not to think about the moment of (Ben's phrase) "terrible clarity," it's too much like a movie, which is false. Know that he's fine now. Allow yourself to feel whatever you feel, and reconcile yourself to never knowing. Be quiet and small. Read the books. Let the equation remain unbalanced. Read, feel, grow. Be well. Do not say anything sentimental like "Goodbye, David." That is false. The books are still here, and the books are all you've ever known. Keep writing. Laugh at things that are funny; this is so important. Appreciate the people you know. Don't close on a poignant note. You've already gotten too fucking poignant with that Flying Canyon song, as if any two suicides were alike. Quote a passage. Choose one that isn't sentimental or poignant. Discover that this is, suddenly, impossible. Do it anyway:
A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF POSTINDUSTRIAL LIFE
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
Labels: brian, david foster wallace
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Tom Waits
Swordfishtrombones
Island : 1983
[Buy It]
HUMAN FACTOR
Milemarker
Non Plus Ultra
Paralogy : 1998
[Buy It]
PEOPLE, THE VEHICLES
Maritime
We, the Vehicles
Flameshovel : 2006
[Buy It]
Most mornings, I roll out of bed between 9:30 and 11:00, depending on whether I managed to get to sleep around 1:00 a.m. (early for me) or closer to 3:00 a.m. (more typical). My room has one big window, with a giant blue-green curtain covering the Venetian blinds. On sunny days, the light shining through the blinds and curtain conspire to make my room feel dim but shimmery, blue-tinted, like an aquarium. This pleases me. I get up and restore order to my apartment while I boil water for coffee: put away the paints and brushes strewn about, stow away musical equipment, wash cheese-and-cracker residue off of a plate. I straighten up whatever chaos I'd left behind in the night, because in the morning, I crave order and symmetry. By the time I finish the kettle is singing, and I fill up my water bottle, pour my coffee, gather books and magazines and notepads, and walk onto the porch. It's a wraparound porch, with cracking off-white paint and tapered columns, two of which frame a vista - the house across the street, the road and the tops of the cars parked there, with a frame of bushes and trees and snaking ivy - a vista I've looked at often enough that it has assumed the solidity and formal elegance of a painting to me.
There are a number of other factors that govern my waking time, most of them having to do with people, with the intrigues of coexisting with them. One of my neighbors runs a daycare center out of her home, and sometimes I'm roused by the cries of children who have perhaps been served Kool-Aid and Pop Tarts for breakfast. The sonic character of the play of children in communal, parentless situations resembles that of a horror-movie sanitorium: there are cries, meaningless screams, demented fragments of song and impromptu percussion, atavistic chants. I like children but find them frightening in these petri dish situations.
On Thursdays I typically wake up earlier than I'd like because of the garbage and recycling and yard waste trucks clamoring in the streets. Or sometimes, the young home-owning Republicans across the street (I do not know these people, but because of certain contextual cues - an American flag on the porch, a home security sign on the lawn, an undue obsession with home-and-yard maintenance, and a businesslike efficiency of interaction with each other - I mentally regard them as "the young home-owning Republicans"), rouse me with weedeaters and mulchers and lawnmowers, which they deploy around the crack of dawn because, one presumes, you've got to stay on top of these things lest they spiral out of control. I do not like these people, whom I do not know. I wonder if it ever occurs to them that deploying gas-guzzling, emission-spewing, incredibly loud machines at 8 in the morning, in the service of esoteric cosmetic imperatives, has more to do with sociopathy than civic responsibility. I feel bad about myself for disliking them without knowing them, and worse for feeling certain that, having seen me on my porch, frivously reading my books and drinking my coffee well past noon, they dislike me as well.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who do not. In the morning, when I get woken up too early by a weedeater, I am one of the former. I think that I am the kind of person who stays up late chasing ephemeral intuitions, and that these neighbors are the kind of people who get up early chasing pragmatic ones. I feel as if some fundamental schism in our worldviews is being illustrated, as in a parable. There is something imperialistic about early-morning, noisy lawn care: you're keeping up your home and letting the whole neighborhood know, almost like a challenge. Meanwhile, I paint in silence. In the mornings I am generally optimistic but can easily tilt into unease and misanthropy, if I have the wrong kind of interaction with someone, and these interactions can be very abstract, not requiring actual contact. I worry about the people around me, and how we relate to each other. My way of being can come to seem furtive and strange to me. I find myself mentally referring to the people who comprise my surroundings as "these humans," a self-excluding formulation that shocks me when it floats into my mind.
I worry that the mailman does not like me, though I've seldom stopped to consider whether or not I like the mailman. He refuses to take a letter I'm trying to mail if I put it inside the box - it just sits there, for days. I have to put any letter I want to mail in the curved metal arms depending from the bottom of the box, where it's threatened by wind and rain and I have to keep checking to make sure it hasn't blown away until he comes to take it. To me this seems unreasonable on the mailman's part - the letter is clearly stamped and printed with my return address, and I feel as if he's being a bit Draconian in adhering to mail-delivery protocols. I feel certain this is a sort of tacit revenge on me for regarding him, simply, as "the mailman." I would like to invite him to have a cup of coffee with me and find out about his family, his fantasy football league, his bachelor's degree in sociology. But he's busy, delivering the mail, and I actually don't want to chat with anyone in the morning - I want to read my books, and make grand plans for the day while my mind is agile and glittering with caffeine. I worry that he thinks I'm some kind of online shopping junkie because of all the brown padded mailers I receive every day, filled with promotional CDs; I worry that he regards me as a typical American overconsumer, sitting on the porch drinking coffee every day, waiting for my booty to arrive. I want him to ask me about all the brown padded mailers so I can set the record straight, but he doesn't ask. I'm suspicious that he's simply throwing away some of the brown padded mailers because there are so many of them and he can. We exchange hellos, him gruff, me overly enthusiastic, and go our seperate ways: malevolent mailman and depraved online shopping junkie, two ships passing in the night. We'll never know each other better than this.
There's this one guy who often walks by my place, a scruffy hipster dude, who always has an acoustic guitar (spray-painted blue) slung over his shoulder, and he plays it as he walks. He never acknowledges me when he walks by - just walks and strums, eyes fixed straight ahead. Sometimes, I carry my own acoustic guitar onto the porch in the morning, hoping that he'll walk by and I can join him in an impromptu duet. But he never appears when I have my guitar. I wonder how he would react to this: would it be an intrusion? Would he feel as if I were making fun of him? Or would he be delighted? My intention is delight, but it's impossible to say. I wonder if he's practicing, or neurotic, or just killing time on his walk. I like him without knowing him, and I like it when he walks by - I can hear him coming before I can see him, and I can hear him trailing away, like a cat with a bell on its neck. I like the unexpected intrusion of music into my life so much better than lawnmowers.
I imagine getting up and following him, playing my guitar; I imagine him not acknowledging me but continuing to play. I imagine us strumming through the neighborhood like Pied Pipers, neighbors streaming out of doors with their own instruments and falling in line behind us, strumming guitars, blowing horns, banging pots and pans, all of these people who live in such close proximity to me, whom I do know in any meaningful sense of the word: the young homeowning Republicans; my landlord, who seems hardworking and kind, and his wife, who did not want to rent me the apartment because of my "shaky finances;" the two middle-aged sisters who've made it clear they aren't much interested in even exchanging hellos with me, who own both a pickup truck and a Mercedes, who convey the impression of having construction jobs but subscribe to Cosmo (the mailman is very careless about properly seperating the mail, and I often find myself making corrective deliveries); the elderly lady who checks her mailbox a depressing number of times per day; the lady with unnaturally red hair who runs the neighborhood watch and has a face like a nervous, corrupt bird (who often walks by with her husband, each with a dog on a leash, and who chatters incessantly at the mute husband in a gossipy, preemptory way while giving me suspicious glances out of the corner of her eye, because she runs the neighborhood watch, which gives her a vested interest in my private life - I, with my strange tattoos and my porch and suspicious hand-rolled cigarettes and asymmetrical hair and coffee or glass of beer; I, with the impression I must convey of being on the verge of throwing a raucous party or trying to sell designer drugs at any moment: obviously, I do not like her either) - that we would all fall in line behind the mystery guitarist, and follow him where ever he leads us. (I would like to know where he's going, for some reason it feels like a place I would like to be.)
This morning, as I sat on my porch reading an article in Harper's, a tall, thin African-American man walked by. (Having been weaned on racial and sociocultural sensitivity, I will usually go to great lengths to avoid mentioning race when describing someone, insisting to myself that it isn't pertinent despite all evidence to the contrary - often such a conversation will involve me going, "You know, he's about this tall, has dreadlocks, sometimes wears a little goatee, favors t-shirts with the collars cut out," before my interlocuter's eyes light up with recognition and they say "Oh, the black guy?" and I sigh and say, "yes.") I mention that he was African-American only because he was older than me and he called me "sir," and I am always uncomfortable to be called "sir" or any other honorific, especially if the person calling me "sir" is older than me, and African-American. He was tall and thin and wore a baggy t-shirt, and he was slicked with sweat, and his face was a rictus of despair, mouth stretched into an almost parodic moue, like a tragedy mask. "Good morning, sir," he called up onto the porch as he walked by, and I chirped "good morning" in return, in a tone I hoped implied enthusiasm and openness, the tone of someone who does not need or want to be called "sir." And then he began to speak, in a tone of voice that sounded like pain incarnate; his voice was high and stretched and he appeared to be on the verge of tears. I listened as he told a long and incomprehensible story about diabetes and bipolar disorder and a some social or medical program that didn't entitle him to take some bus and could he show me the form. I was having trouble keeping up. "I'm sorry," I said, "but I don't understand. Why do you want to show me this form?" He was standing awkwardly in the bushes below the raised porch, talking up to me as if I were a judge. Then it came clear that he wanted bus fare from me, but I had nothing to give him - who keeps cash on hand any more? I told him I had no cash and it was true. I don't know whether or not he believed me - we looked at each other for a moment longer, at an impasse, and he trudged out of the bushes and down the street without another word. I had nothing to give him.Labels: brian, people
posted by Brian
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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
SO LONG MARIANNE
Leonard Cohen
Songs of Leonard Cohen [reissue]
Sony Legacy : 2007
[Buy It]
WEDDING BELL
Beach House
Devotion
Carpark : 2008
[Buy It]
SO INTO YOU
Shudder to Think
Pony Express Record
Sony : 1994
[Buy It]
ALL I NEED
Radiohead
In Rainbows
self-released : 2007
[Buy It]
Narcissus died for his own reflection. Orpheus followed Eurydice to Hades, lost her anyway, and invented pederasty. Helen's beauty launched a thousand ships of war. Epimetheus married the keeper of all the evils of the world. Penelope wilted while Odysseus sailed the world.
Of all the good and fine things a person can feel, is there one more precarious than devotion? To be devoted to something can be noble, enlarging, even saintly, yet it's just a hair's breadth away from states of being that are much less fine. Devotion can be a snare, as Leonard Cohen knows well. "I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web is fastening my ankle to a stone." This is a clever image, and a frightening one. Devotion makes us feel as if the alternative to it is a free-fall into a chasm. The world becomes whittled down to one infinitely bright and safe point, around which infinite chaos rages. It is a connection that is both delicate - therefore tenuous - and surprisingly difficult to get free of; like a spider web, the link of devotion is stronger than it appears, and easier to stretch than to sever.
Devotion can be an enslavement. We all choose our masters, but devotion is sneaky - it's a master that can appear in the guise of a liberator. The band Beach House has spent two albums teasing out the dark seam between devotion and thrall. The lovers in "Wedding Bell" are "swimming in the seas [they] know so well," this is comforting and confining at once. Devotion makes a stranger of other seas. "Oh, but your wish is my command," Victoria Legrand sings, slipping into her comfortable shackles. "Is your heart still mine for sale? I'd like yours, here is mine." Devotion, so close to servitude, is difficult to reconcile with personal agency. It chooses us, and our free will only comes into play in accepting or rejecting it. Either choice has the potential to skew toward darkness.
Devotion can easily bleed into obsession. The line is so thin that almost every love song ever written can tilt toward the sinister if you look at it just slightly askew. Shudder to Think made this overt with their cover of Atlanta Rhythm Section's feel-good track "So Into You". The lyrics are the same, but ARS's version sounds like a crush. Shudder to Think's seething inversion turns it into a stalker monologue:
When you walked into the room
There was voodoo in the vibes
I was captured by your style
But I could not get your eyes
Now I stand here helplessly
Hoping you'll get into me
I am so into you
I can't think of nothing else
Devotion can be a compromise, a case of diminished options. "I only stick with you," Thom Yorke sings on one haunting song from In Rainbows, "because there are no others." Devotion is obliterative, its object can come to seem like a black hole that devours the light from everything else. As a tin-foil-hatted paranoid, Yorke as written a lot of the finest songs about the ambiguous nature of romantic devotion. "All I Need" might be his finest in this vein, rendering the concept's seamy underbelly in a way that seems much more deliberate than Atlanta Rhythm Section and their ilk's accidental double-entendres. Here, Yorke is "an animal trapped in your hot car" and "all the days that you choose to ignore." He's a "moth that just wants to share your light" and "an insect trying to get out of the night." Devotion, for him, is both running-to and running-from, neither is the stable state he tacitly idealizes. He recognizes that, in the supplicated posture of devotion, he's both central and suborned: "I'm in the middle of your picture, lying in the reeds." To want something and to fear wanting it is an intractable position, and appropriately, he ends the song by metaphorically throwing up his hands: "It's all wrong, it's all right, it's all wrong."Labels: brian, devotion
posted by Brian
LINK |
Thursday, August 21, 2008
TRUE STORY
Cadence Weapon
Afterparty Babies
Anti : 2008
[Buy It]
HECATE'S DREAM
Sir Richard Bishop
Polytheistic Fragments
Drag City : 2007
[Buy It]
BLOOD FOUNTAIN
Horseback
Impale Golden Horn
Burly Time/Revolver : 2007
[Buy It]
Today I happened to hear the writer Paul Auster on NPR, chatting with Diane Rehm. Auster is...how to put this...a writer I admire a lot, even though I dislike about half of his books. The New York Trilogy? Hell yes. Timbuktu? Hell no. At any rate, hearing the interview reminded me of probably my very favorite Auster book, which he didn't even write: I Thought My Father Was God, a collection of true, personal stories told orally by non-writers. Auster worked on this project for, I think, a year, and originally, he read the stories he collected on-air for NPR's National Story Project. The show was such a hit that eventually, many of the stories would be collected in the aforementioned book, edited by Auster, but with the stories told in the voices of the people who lived them. The book has sections on animals, objects, families, "slapstick," strangers, war, love, death, and (most compelling to me) dreams. Being reminded of this book today, I thought I would share a couple of the stories with you from the "dreams" section, as a sort of follow-up to my dream post last week. Perhaps it's not surprising that many of the stories in the dream section could also have been filed in the death section, or that the dreams that involve death are most compelling to me - dreams and death seem close cousins, a point which I'd intended to develop last week, until I'd written out the dreams and felt an immense silence pass over me. To write about dreams is to basically dream again, and one cannot understand a dream while still dreaming. Perhaps dreams say all they need to say on their own, without analysis or exegesis. Here are two from Auster's project. There's no way to know, of course, whether or not they are actually true, and what "true" even means in the context of such phantoms. But they do have the ring of truth, which is good enough to give me chills:
4:05 A.M.
I sleep soundly most of the time and seldom need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning. My dreams are usually about work, and I try to forget them as quickly as possible. The dreams I do want to rememeber I usually can't. Only a few times in my life have I had a nightmare.
The dream started simply. I was driving a truck down the Kansas Turnpike. I have never driven a truck, and although I lived in Kansas City at the time, I had never been on the Kansas Turnpike. It was night in the dream, and I could see only my hands on the steering wheel and what was illuminated by the truck's headlights. Suddenly in front of me, shining in the headlights, was a human arm. Horrified, I swerved to keep from hitting it as I frantically tried to step on the brake, but I couldn't slow the truck, and as soon as I got around one body part, another appeared up ahead. The farther I went, the more body parts I saw. They kept coming up at me, faster and faster, until I finally hit one with a grisly thump. A moment later, I sat up in bed screaming.
I realized that I was having a nightmare. I took a deep breath and looked at the clock, more to reassure myself than to find out the time. It was 4:05 A.M.
I enjoyed my Saturday and forgot about the dream. Sunday, I bought the weekend paper and read it in my usual leisurely fashion. Near the end of the first section there was a two-paragraph article about a truck driver who had run over a body lying on the Kansas Turnpike. The accident had occurred on Saturday, at 4:05 A.M.
submitted by Matthew Menary of Burlingame, California
Blood
In the summer of 1972, I went home to visit my parents in Burnsville, Minnesota, for a couple of weeks. I slept downstairs in the basement. Every now and then, a fourteen-year-old boy named Matthew would come to mow the lawn. Early one morning, as I was sleeping in, I heard him outside cutting the grass. I paid no attention and went back to sleep.
I dreamt that I was in the upstairs bathroom, standing in front of the sink and looking at my face in the mirror. It looked like my face, but at the same time there was something odd about it. I could see my black hair, my blue eyes, my mustache, but the shape of my face was different. I looked down at the sink, where the water was running in a counterclockwise circle down the drain. I held my hands unde the water and started scrubbing my hands with soap. Again, I looked at the face that wasn't my face. There was something different about it, but it didn't really trouble me.
I went on scrubbing my hands, but my left thumb hurt. The pain was fairly intense, and I wondered what I had done to make it hurt so badly. It was as though it were sprained.
Then I looked down at the sink again, and there was blood running into the water, going round and round in that counterclockwise circle. "What's going on?" I said to myself. Blood was gushing from my thumb, pouring out from the fatty part just below the knuckle, then running down my arm and dripping off my elbow into the sink. I grabbed my throbbing hand and said to myself, "What did you do, Jim? What did you do, Jim?"
I heard a voice calling out to me, "Jim! Jim!" I woke up and realized that it was my mother calling me from the top of the stairs. She told me to come quickly. I threw on some clothes and rushed up to her. Matthew had hurt himself cutting the grass, she said, and she wanted me to go to the bathroom to help him.
Still half asleep, I walked into the bathroom and was astonished to see Matthew standing in front of the mirror and holding his left thumb and first finger. Blood was running down his arm and into the water, going round and round as it flowed down the drain.
submitted by James Sharpsteen of Minneapolis, Minnesota
from I Thought My Father Was God
ed. Paul Auster
Henry Holt : 2001
[Buy It]
Labels: auster, brian, dreams
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
STRANGEST DREAM
Honeydrips
Here Comes the Future
Sincerely Yours : 2007
[Buy It]
LITTLE BROTHER (ELECTRIC)
Grizzly Bear
Friend EP
Warp : 2007
[Buy It]
I KNOW THAT'S NOT REALLY YOU
American Music Club
The Golden Age
Merge : 2008
[Buy It]
I dreamt that I was dreaming. This in and of itself was somewhat exceptional to me, as I didn't recall ever having a dream within a dream before. Beyond this nested quality, the nature of the dream, and the potency of its feeling, was also a bit beyond the pale. This was a couple weeks ago and some of the details are now blurred. But it is the nature of remembered dreams to take on a waking life of their own as their particulars fade, and certain elements of it remain with me clearly.
In the dream, I woke up in the bed of my childhood home. I woke up restlessly, I didn't remember the dream-within-the-dream, but I felt its texture - I knew that I had dreamed that my romantic partner had died, or was in grave danger of dying, or was simply gone - in the dream, there was no real distinction between the three, just an unsettling presentiment of loss. All I can remember clearly was that it was something to do with her breathing; she couldn't or was having difficulty breathing. I woke into the dream confused about whether this had really happened or I had dreamed it. I got out of the bed and began walking down the stairs. It was early in the morning, that time just before or around sunrise when the whole house was sleeping and I would get up early on Saturdays, as a child, to watch pro wrestling before the cartoons started. As my feet landed on each step, taking me down toward the living room, my sense of dread mounted - each step felt an increment closer to some calamity for which I was not prepared. When I arrived in the living room, my brother was there, sitting on the couch. The television was on, but he wasn't looking at it - his forearms were on his knees as he slumped in a somewhat weary posture. I sat down in the easy chair across from him, with my feeling of dread rising to a nearly unbearable pitch, and then, he looked up at me. His face was affectless, with a great empathy and sadness lurking behind the lack of affect, and as his eyes met mine, I knew with the inexorable certainty of dreams that it was true - she was gone from this world. The certainty came upon me in a feverish rush, and I felt a great cry rising up with in me. My brother came over and took me in his arms as immense sobs wracked my body. The feeling of knowing she was gone was so complex and terrible and real that I can only begin to describe it this way: I did not know what I was going to do. I saw the days and nights without her, getting used to her absence, fanning out impossibly ahead of me, and I repeat: I did not know what I was going to do, how I would possibly be able to go on. At that moment, sobbing in my brother's arms, I woke up, in my partner's bed. She was there, sleeping soundly, breathing easily. Tears rushed into my eyes as my gratitude mingled with the lingering feeling of despair from the dream - it had been so real that it was difficult to snap out of immediately. And also, this: when you've dreamed that you were dreaming, waking up for "the second time" fees much more tenuous than waking from a nightmare normally does; you're left with the lingering suspicion that perhaps you've woken up into another dream, and that you might pass through this one into another.
I spent all of last week in Oslo, reporting on a big music festival there, and I had another disturbing dream, which also involved my brother, in an unfamiliar hotel bed. This one was more complex than the other one, and the details are sketchier, yet I can roughly reconstruct it around the ones that still stand out clearly. I had been shot in the stomach several times. I don't recall how this came to happen, although I have the impression that I'd come across a weapon by accident (no gun appeared in the dream), and that the wounds were self-inflicted. I never pulled up my shirt to look at the wounds, but I was certain they were there - in my mind's eye, I could see holes in my torso, with blood trickling out of them. Sometimes, when I looked down, the front of my shirt was soaked with blood, sometimes it was clean. I'd shoved a notebook down the front of my pants, I guess as a sort of bandage - it was one of those black marbled composition books, the same kind I'd been using to take notes at the festival all week, which has thick, cardboard covers, which made it seem like more of a shield than a bandage. I didn't feel any pain in the dream, just a panicky sense of life draining out of me. I remember making phone calls - I believe trying to get someone to take me to the hospital - but I couldn't get ahold of anyone, and my attempts were accompanied by a mounting sense of frustration, fear, and anger that no one would help me. Then, in one of those uncanny dream shifts, my brother was with me. Where we were is not clear - it was an unfamiliar room, which now strikes me as being evocative of a hotel room, not the one I was sleeping in, but a hotel room nonetheless. Suddenly my brother was standing in the corner of the room, and I lashed out at him angrily, as closely as I can remember I took out my frustration about all my thwarted attempts to get help on him. This time, it was my brother who burst into sobs, as I lashed out at him, and simultaneously, a vile green ooze burst out of his mouth. I'd recently watched the movie The Sixth Sense, which contains that truly horrifying scene where the little boy who sees dead people flees into his tent, his "safe place," and looks over to see a dead girl who'd been poisoned with a similarly greenish, vomity ooze falling out of her mouth; I believe this is where that particular image came from. The effect of my brother's sobs and vomit, in the dream, was accompanied by the feeling that they were manifestations of his pent up sadness or interior trauma rising helplessly to the surface. He said something to me through his sobs and I can't remember exactly what, but it was something along the lines of, "You've been so cruel to me, Brian," which only made me angrier - I was bleeding, I was dying! His sobs redoubled as I began to shout at him along these lines, chastizing him for putting some kind of guilt trip on me when I needed help. At last, I jerked the notebook out of my pants and lifted my shirt to show him the wounds. In fact, there were no holes in my torso - just tracers of blood slicked over the smooth skin of my stomach.Labels: brian, dreams
posted by Brian
LINK |
Thursday, July 24, 2008
FIREMAN
Lil Wayne
Tha Carter II
Cash Money : 2005
[Buy It]
FIREMAN
Jawbreaker
Dear You [enhanced reissue]
Blackball : 2004
[Buy It]
FIRE
Arthur Brown
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown
Track/Atlantic : 1968
[Buy It]
FIRESIDE
mwvm
Rotations
Silber : 2007
[Buy It]
Lil Wayne's got it, Hendrix wanted to stand next to it (yours, to be precise), M83 don't want to be saved from it - popular music is no stranger to fire and its bottomless metaphorical potential. But the true music of fire does not speak its name, does not reduce it to metaphor. The true music of fire is like fire itself, an implacably pulsating abstraction, a continual movement of energy. Last weekend, at a fire festival, I sat in a tent late at night, listening to the competing DJ tents scattered across the grounds, whose emissions blended into one gargantuan throb, which seemed from my enclosed vantage to emanate from a single source, as if Terry Riley were conducting a mad symphony just over the hill. The music of fire is diffused and all-encompassing, as if the air itself had a beating heart, reverberations condensed out of vapor and smoke, energy burning off from some ineffable source. In the presence of fire and the music with which we pay tribute to it, latent potential for transformation becomes manifest, even inevitable. In that tent, I thought of fires I have known, fires which, while retaining the universal quality of all fires, seemed to distinguish themselves for me by their overstated and personal transformative properties.
The house that my family lived in when I was seven and my brother was three had a back yard that was abutted by a largish field of broomstraw, which was the property of a neighbor down the street. One of my favorite activities at this age was to go outside with a magnifying glass, using its lens to focus the sunlight into a tight beam, burning patterns and holes into leaves, twigs, bits of paper - and ok, sometimes ants. I'm surprised I was allowed to do this unsupervised - I suppose it was decided that I'd done it enough to amass some expertise, and that I had the good sense to stay on the concrete driveway when I did it. I can't say, on a particular afternoon, what compelled me into the field of broomstraw with my magnifying glass. I can't recall the sequence of events. I know there must have been a moment, when the broomstraw began to burn, spreading quickly, that I knew things had gotten out of hand. The part I remember clearly is standing beside my brother, back in our yard, dumbly watching the field burn. From my childish perspective, it was an inferno, but I've no idea how serious the fire actually was - it must be amplified in my mind, as a neighbor who was washing his car across the street was able to extinguish it with a garden hose. I don't remember how I felt, besides awed, and maybe that was all I felt - seeing all that fire up close, uncontrolled, and knowing I was responsible for it, perhaps my awe blocked out all my fear, my guilt, my anxiety over getting in trouble. I recall the endless walk down the street to knock on the neighbor who owned the land's ornate, imposing double doors; I don't recall whether they were understanding or angry. But here is what I recall most clearly: my father, rushing out onto the patio with a look of utter panic on his face, rushing down to where my brother and I were standing. From his perspective in the house, when he saw the blaze through the window, my brother was standing behind me - my father couldn't see him, and for a moment, between seeing the fire and rushing outside, he believed my brother had been engulfed. I wonder which of us changed more that day - me, in my newfound power, or my father, suddenly possessed of a trace of dark knowledge.
Sometime around my high school graduation, I attended a small party with my group of closest friends. As usual, we were drinking, gathered around a fire in a rusty barrel in my friend's yard. Although I couldn't have expressed it at the time, there was something elegiac in the air, something tangled about the celebration's energy, a sadness veining the muted revelry. The end of high school is a pivotal time for everyone, in ways that are too common, too trite, and too profound to even get into. We'd weathered some calamities together, and perhaps we all had the latent sense that greater, more confusing, less resolvable ones lurked on the horizon, that we were trembling in some ephemeral interstice between one life and another. At a certain point, as we stood in a motley ring around the barrel fire, one of my friends, as if at some secret cue, picked up a bucket of gasoline (why we had an open bucket of gasoline handy perplexes me to this day). Moving slowly but deliberately, as if hypnotized or underwater, he began walking toward the bucket. I felt a heightened sense of reality in this moment, a strange and dreamlike lucidity - everyone else was chatting aimlessly, and I felt as if only I were witnessing the scene at hand, somehow seeing the whole thing play out simultaneously, somehow entranced and unable to speak the warning that I felt welling up in me. In slow motion, my friend cocked back the bucket of gas and hurled the entire thing into the barrel. Time sped up again as a great pillar of flame erupted from the barrel, causing everyone to leap back, seemingly pushed through the air by the flames like heroes in an action movie. Luckily, no one was burned, and the inferno quickly subsided. We gave the friend who'd thrown the bucket some shit and got back to our aimless chatting for some minutes before someone thought to look up, and discovered that the boughs overhead were aflame.
I thought about all these fires at the fire festival, during the lazy days, as my partner and I sat around singing songs with the guitar, swimming in the lake, reading from my dog-eared copy of Borges' Ficciones. (When I read Borges, my heart would like to burst with love, and yet I have never read Borges - only his translators. This relationship too seems evocative of fire - intense yet somehow deflected, a reaction to an energy coming down some cloaked and remote corridor.) A fire festival is an invitation to transform, and I witnessed the costume I wore all weekend - a full-body tiger-striped unitard, a pair of earlike feathered discs, an improvised tail (fur trim cut off of a puffy coat's hood) - manifest different selves for me. On the first night, I was a housecat, inclined to curl into and around things, staying close to the ground. Or a churchmouse, meek and perceptive - someone asked me if I wanted to try out his poi, and I said to him, "Tonight, I am a creature who watches," realizing as I said it that it was true. I had the distinct sensation of peering out at the world around me - the fire dancers and drum circles, the poi spinners and psychedelic lights - through a crack in the floorboards.
But the next night, the night of the burn (the climactic moment in any fire festival, where some sort of immense effigy is ceremonially set aflame for a great, purgative revel): same costume, different tiger. As the fire dancers circled the effigy in center camp, Ashley and I joined a great outer throng around them, dancing, playing percussion, whooping and exhorting. I beat a guiro until it split in two, then played the shards until they were pulverized. Finally the effigy was set aflame, the improbable heat of the inferno momentarily pushing everyone back a few steps - was it fifty feet high? One hundred? Large fires wreak havoc on your sense of scale. Hundreds of bodies pressed into a circular orbit around the fire, which eventually came to rest, the trippers grooving with their eyes closed, others stunned and mute in the heat. That night, I was a tiger as strong and powerful as I'd been meek and timid the previous night, a playful tiger and a fierce one. Ashley and I took up jingly bells and slinked through the crowd, moving like jungle cats, close to the fire, feeling the full power of our lithe bodies and our status as most wondrous creatures in our costumes, purifying people with bells. And I will tell you now that there is no better feeling in this world than moving through a crowd of strangers, in a ridiculous costume, purifying them with bells, and for the purity of this intention to be conveyed wordlessly and perfectly - to move through a crowd of strangers and see on their faces not wariness or scorn or apathy but a reflection of your own burning spirit, to see face after face light up at your approach, for no other reason than that it is your intention to be wonderful and to transmit this wonder, to hear them gasp and say "Thank you!" for doing something that might get you punched in everyday life (imagine walking through the subway jingling bells around people's faces and bodies) - to incarnate your desire as twinkling bells, at the root of a pillar of flame, and to be those bells, or that tiger, or whatever you want.Labels: acid rock, brian, hip-hop, indie rock
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
NEW WAVE DUST
John Wiese
Soft Punk
Troubleman Unlimited : 2007
[Buy It]
MILITARY ROAD
Prurient
Pleasure Ground
Load Records : 2006
[Buy It]
UNTITLED
Boyzone
Recycled Music
RRRecords : 2008
[Buy It]
Sometimes I feel certain that all music really does is give shape to the nebulous passage of time. Ambient music makes time into a deep, still pool. Techno dissects it into concise, manageable slices, like a really well organized day planner. Rock breaks it up into an orderly pattern of bright, simple shapes, stacking up as neatly as Yaffa Blocks. Classical music condenses it - an entire mythohistorical saga can unfold in an hour. And harsh noise simply obliterates it. The inutitive choosing of music seems mysterious - why do we need to hear this song, in this moment? - and I wonder if it's all about how we need time to feel in that moment: orderly or chaotic, compressed or expansive, becalmed or vanished. As time-management is probably the single biggest issue in my life (lucky, I know), I find myself attracting to ambient music or noise - depending on whether my mood is at the beatific or destructive end of the spectrum - more and more often. I've posted way more ambient music than noise music here, which I'm rectifying now - call it "difficult listening" day. Woe be to those who snag the songs off of mp3 aggregators without reading the text; may they dial up John Wiese on their iPod at max volume.Labels: brian, noise
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
JE N'AIME PAS DORMIR
Danny Norbury
Jean Cocteau
ONO : 2008
LA JOLIE ROUSSE
Black Toothed Grin
Guillaume Apollinaire
ONO : 2008
L'AMOUREUSE
Ikey
Paul Eluard
ONO : 2008
LES AMANTS SEPARES
Andre Hargreaves
Louis Aragon
ONO : 2008
I found out about Manchester's Danny Norbury via the Swedish musician David Wenngren, whose music as Library Tapes I adore. (Norbury played some cello on Library Tapes' superlative Fragment EP.) I quickly sought out Norbury's Dusk EP, a lovely slice of light ambient/chamber music, and have been anxiously awaiting its follow-up ever since. So it was with great delight that I opened my mailbox to discover these four (very) limited edition mini-albums from fledgling label ONO, each of which pairs a different artist with the recordings of a different Surrealist poet, complete with beautiful hand-painted sleeves (see supra). I love stuff like this - little labors of love more concerned with making a precious artifact than with album sales. In fact, these releases reside at the nexus of a number of my interests: Danny Norbury, "out" music in general, Surrealism, poetry, hand-made artifacts, the combination of recorded oration with sound environments. You won't be able to get ahold of these releases unless you can snag one of the 33 copies on sale at Piccadilly Records in Manchester, but the artists and the label have kindly allowed me to post one track from each here. What follows is something a little different I'd like to begin doing at Moistworks from time to time, the mini-interview. We'll call it
NINE-ISH QUESTIONS with DANNY NORBURY
MOISTWORKS: Hi Danny. Can you tell our readers a bit about your musical history, practice, and prior discography?
DANNY NORBURY: I began playing cello when I was nine, and went on to study it at music college, so my background is classical music. I didn't really start writing music until a few years ago. I wrote and recorded some songs at home that were released as Dusk on Static Caravan.
MW: Is this the correct website for ONO Records? Can you tell us about ONO and how you got involved with them?
DN: No! ONO hasn't got a website yet, but the catalogue is here. It's the label of my friend Michael Holland, who originally set it up to put out DJ mixes. Michael has the best record collection of anyone I know. His band is Black Toothed Grin.
MW: How many copies of each release will be made, and will they be formatted the same way the ones I received were formatted: hand-made covers, mini-discs, etc? Where can readers purchase these releases?
DN: They're coming out exactly like the ones you received. There will be 33 copies. They are being sold at Piccadilly Records in Manchester.
MW: Whose idea was it to record sound environments for the works of Surrealist poets? Can you tell us anything about the three other artists who've participated in the project?
DN: The idea came from Michael. He sent us all the sound files to do with whatever we wanted. The only thing he said to me was to not bother spending too much time on it, so I didn't. His band is very exciting - I have no idea what to expect from them. I don't know much about Ikey, except that he's a friend of Michael. Andrew Hargreaves is one half of The Boats. I'm a big fan of their music.
MW: How did you choose which Cocteau poems to use? Do you speak French?
DN: I think Michael sent me nine Cocteau poems in total, and I ended up using eight. I can understand French enough to know what the poems are about on a basic level, but I was more interested in the tone and rhythm of the speaker (the actor, Jean Mercure).
MW: Have you worked with the spoken word in your compositions before, and did doing so here present any particular challenges?
DN: I've never used words in my music before, spoken or sung. I think this is because the addition of words often gives a too precise meaning to what is, by nature, abstract. In any case, the poems suggested in a fairly obvious way the tempo, rhythm, texture and instrumentation of the music. I wrote and recorded the tracks at home over two days, using the instruments I have around me at home.
MW: More than many other 20th century artistic movements, Surrealism seems stubbornly to refuse to become irrelevant. Do you have any thoughts on the ongoing currency of Surrealism, why it never seems to exhaust its interest for us?
DN: I suppose the appeal of dream, and dreamlike states, is universal, and has always existed on either side of Breton's manifesto!
MW: As you began to compose around Cocteau's poems (presuming that this is how the process worked), were there any certain elements or qualities of them that emerged particularly strongly, themes you wanted to musically draw out or complement?
DN: The tone and timbre of the voice was the most important thing. On "Batterie" for instance, the speaker keeps the rhythm and cadence very precise, so I let that rhythmic structure dictate the tempo and length of the piece. So many decisions were taken out of my hands, and that in itself was liberating. On "Muses qui ne songez a plaire..." I felt the poem had the most gravity, so I cut up the phrases of the speaker and extended the silences between the lines. This is the longest of the pieces.
MW: You're working on a proper follow-up to your EP, if I'm not mistaken. Can you tell our readers anything about this new album and when it might be available?
DN: I hope to have it finished at some point this year. It'll be put out on ONO. I also have an ongoing collaboration with Library Tapes called Le Lendemain, and we've almost finished an album, so hopefully that too will see the light of day soon.Labels: brian, interview, surrealism
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
GIVE ME EVERY LITTLE THING
The Juan Maclean
Less Than Human
DFA : 2005
[Buy It]
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT
El Perro del Mar
From the Valley to the Stars
Control Group : 2008
[Buy It]
ECONOMIC THEORY
Christian Kiefer
Dogs & Donkeys
Undertow : 2007
[Buy It]
MOISTWORKS STORYTIME CORNER PRESENTS:
"The Devil is a Busy Man"
by David Foster Wallace
from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Back Bay Books : 2000
[Buy It]
Plus when he got something that was new or if he cleaned out the machine shed or the cellar oftentimes Daddy would find he had a item he didn't want anymore and had to get shed of and as it was a long haul to truck it to the dump or the Goodwill in town he'd just call up and put a notice in the Trading Post paper in town to give it away for nothing. Shit like a couch or a freezer or old tiller. The notice would say Free Come And Get It. Yet even so it always took some time after it run before one soul even called up and the item would sit around in Daddy's drive pissing him off until one or two folks in town would finally come out to his place to look at it. And they'd be skittery about it too and their face all closed up lik at cards and they'd walk around the thing and poke it with their toe and go Where'd you all get it at what's the matter with it how come you want shed of it so bad. They'd shake their head and talk to their Mrs. and dither around and about drive Daddy nuts because all he wanted was to give a old tiller away for nothing and get it out of the drive and here it was taking him all this time jickjacking around with these folks to get them to take it. Then so what he up and starts doing one time he wanted to get shed of something is he puts his notice in the Trading Post paper and he puts in some fool price he just makes up there on the phone with the Trading Post fellow. Some fool price next to nothing. Old Harrow With Some Teeth A Little Rusted $5, JCPenny Sleepersofa Green And Yellow $10 and like that. The oftentimes folks called up the first day the Trading Post run the notice and up and come out from town and even would haul in from further out in some little other towns that got the Trading Post and pull up spraying gravel and scarce even look at the item and press on Daddy to take the 5 or $10 right away before any other folks could take it and if it was something heavy like that one couch I'd help them load it up and they'd up and haul it off right then and there. Their faces was different and their wife's faces in the truck, fine and showing teeth and him with an arm around the Mrs. and a wave at Daddy as they back out. Tickled to death to get a old harrow for next to nothing. I asked Daddy about what lesson to draw here and he said he figured it's you don't try and teach a pig to sing and told me to go on and rake the drive's gravel back out of the ditch before it fucked up the drainage.
Labels: brian, fiction
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
TEARS ARE IN YOUR EYES
Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Matador : 2000
[Buy It]
TEARS ARE IN YOUR EYES
Adem
Takes
Domino : 2008
[Buy It]
FRONTWARDS
Pavement
Watery, Domestic
Matador : 1992
[Buy It]
FRONTWARDS
Los Campesinos!
Sticking Fingers into Sockets
Arts & Crafts : 2007
[Buy It]
Hey Moistworks, what's good? You're looking snazzy today. Me? Fine thanks-- been feeling real mellow since I got moved into my new place. Today I find myself feeling especially quiet, with nothing in particular I want to talk about. So I thought maybe we could just listen to a couple sweet, modern indie rock covers of two great songs by some vintage Matador bands (Sub Pop's 20th birthday donnybrook is coming up, and Sub Pop definitely deserves some feting, but between you and me, I always thought Matador had a stronger track record). One of these covers, I actually prefer to the original, although I'm not going to say which one (hint: "Frontwards" is probably my favorite Pavement song of all time, so...). Apologies to readers who got excited about the prospect of this post actually being about the creature known, Wheel of Fortune "Before & After" style, as Olivia Newton-John Travolta. Maybe next time (but probably not).Labels: brian, covers
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I BEEN DRINKING
DeYarmond Edison
Bickett Gallery Residency
self-released : 2006
My parents are lifelong teetotallers, so maybe it's weird that my first taste of alcohol was administered by them. I must've been in elementary school, and we were visiting my maternal grandparents. My immediate family is not a hard-drinking family, although we come from a hard-drinking line. My maternal great-grandfather smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey all his life and lived into his 80s; near the end he would just sit in his bathtub with a Texas gallon, his fingernails and toenails carbuncular with nicotine. My mother loved her grandfather but also used him as something as a cautionary tale for young Brian, and sometimes played me against him. I remember once, when I was really little, my mom told me to tell my great-grandfather that I wished he wouldn't smoke, and while I recall having no such wish, I dutifully told him what my mother instructed me to tell him. In retrospect I resent this manipulation a little, in the same way one grows to resent being lied to about Santa Claus, whatever good intentions were involved. (If finding out the truth about Santa Claus was traumatic, imagine when I found out about God.)
But so on this one visit to my grandparents' house, I found a little airplane bottle of whiskey in a drawer. I don't remember how I came to be offered a taste of it - probably I expressed curiosity. I do remember how the centimeter or so of goldish-brown, chemically scented whiskey looked at the bottom of a paper Dixie cup, and how foul and alien it tasted, and how I then resolved, much to my mother's satisfaction, that it was "yucky" and that I didn't understand why people drank it. To hear her tell it, beer tasted even worse.
There was obviously never drinking alcohol around my home, but my mother had a bottle of Creme de Menthe on a high shelf that she used to bake these really yummy Creme de Menthe brownies. In the summertime, while my parents were at work, I would get the bottle down and drink small swigs of it, much to my four-years-younger brother's trepidation and intrigue, eventually convincing him to drink it too. We never drank enough to get drunk (although perhaps my little brother got a bit loopy once or twice), or for my mother to notice the diminishing bottle. Only in adulthood have we even told my mother about this, which has joined the roster of her favorite childhood-related stories to tell about us. I realize that my current, fairly moderate alcohol ingestion still makes my mom a little uneasy, in part because her lifelong teetotalling has rendered the effects of alcohol out of all proportion to reality in her mind, partly because, never having developed a taste for it, she doesn't understand why anyone would drink it besides getting wasted and embarassing themselves, and partly (probably mostly) because of the extremely self-destructive substance use of my teenage years.
DRINK AWAY THE PAIN (SITUATIONS)
Mobb Deep
The Infamous
RCA : 1995
[Buy It]
Perhaps appropriately, my memory of the first time I actually got drunk is muddled. It might have involved Zima, although I prefer to believe this is not the case. It might have involved the day when my friend and I raided his parents liquor cabinet, made a vile concoction of pretty much everything in it, and proceeded to jump on his trampoline while we drank it (that we did this without getting sick blows my mind, but the young are made of tough stuff). But the closest thing I have to a true memory of my first time getting drunk is this: one friend of mine's family lived on a farm, and that farm had a log cabin that was remote from the house, which my friend's grandfather had built. Much of my early substance use took place at this cabin, which had a fireplace and decent chairs and a bed where we could spend the night. Up in the rafters, we found a jug of moonshine that my friend's grandfather had made. It was cloudy pink and contained floating flecks of something dark. I'm amazed it didn't blind us. But after consuming some quantity of this moonshine, I remember going to a punk show at the local Exchange Club (one of those shadowy organizations like the Elks Lodge or Rotary Club), laying on the floor with a spinny head while punk kids either pretended to or maybe actually spit on me. (Another booze related memory - coming home at 5 am after having snuck out to a party to find my father unexpectedly awake, and trying to explain A) where I'd been and B) why I was covered in chocolate pudding.) I remember going home to my friend's house and discovering that his mother had cooked up a deer (these were country people), and I remember eating some of this deer despite the fact that it turned my stomach because I was afraid of seeming strange or drunk.
After that, trying to procure and then find places to drink alcohol began to take up a significant portion of my time (although I wasn't as hard a drinker as many of my friends, who would drink hard liquor before school in the mornings - I liked to drink, but I preferred weed.) One event that stands out in my mind with great clarity was called "Plan Z." Some older boys at the high school told my friends and me that they'd had to ditch a case of some vile beer (Milwaukee's Best, I think) in the weeds by a convenience store because of some dust-up with the police, and that the booze was probably still there. In English class we drew up a map - the aforementioned "Plan Z" - that showed where the beer was suspected to be in relation to where we were, and plotted a SWAT-team-like operation to procure it. (It's not as if a map was necessary, we could have just gone and gotten it - but my budding nihilism was still warring with my native precocity, and I'm pretty sure "Plan Z" was my idea.)
We skipped the next period (the various insane ways my friends and I contrived to escape from school, like driving madly out of the student parking lot, down a steep grassy grade, and into the unguarded bus lot of the elementary school next door, are a post unto themselves) and put Plan Z into action, which involved a screeching halt at the suspected location, fake walkie-talkie cries of "Go Go Go!", a commando raid on the weeds by the convenience store in broad daylight, and, miraculously, the procurement of said case of beer, just where the older kids said it would be (I'm still amazed that this wasn't a snipe hunt, and never got clear on why the older kids didn't just go back for the beer themselves). It turns out my mother was right - beer, especially the cheap beer we favored, tasted foul, and I set about learning to like it with near-suicidal resolve. The discovery of the "beer bong," a funnel and tube that allowed you to down a beer in seconds, helped on this score.
And I did, somehow, grow to like bad beer (now I drink decent wine and good beer, and the idea of drinking 12 PBRs seems not just repulsive but impossible). But the freewheeling days of Plan Z began to shade into darker territory rather quickly. The first time I was caught driving drunk by my parents remains a black day in my memory; I remember how sad and terrified they were, and rightly so - I was so young and naive, and I gave myself so many chances to die. The first time I got caught, I'd been drinking 40s of malt liquour at a party and came home reeking - I just didn't care. The next time, I was grounded for months, months which included a new year's eve. But I just snuck out. Me and all of my friends drove drunk, we were invincible! We really were. But shortly after high school, our invincibility ran out. My friend Jeff H. left one party we were all at around 4 in the morning, after drinking keg beer and doing cocaine. For reasons we'll never know, Jeff didn't go home, but instead drove several miles past his house, doing well over 100, before he spun off the road and disintegrated in the trees. Literally disintegrated, car, Jeff, and all. I remember going to the site with my friends the next day, marveling at the skid marks and the strewn detritus, wracked with something that was grief but also more than grief - our invincibility was over. Suddenly, we were mortal. I'm looking at Jeff's initials, tattooed on my right bicep, right now - "JFH, 1979-1999." Only years later would I come to understand that this memorial for Jeff was actually a memorial for my own childhood. Six months to the day after Jeff's death, another friend of mine died in pretty much the same way, and I started angling away from this group of friends and this lifestyle, fearing what would happen in six more.
DRINKING AT THE DAM
Smog
A River Ain't Too Much to Love
Drag City : 2005
[Buy It]
Now, as previously mentioned, I drink decent wine (good wine when I can afford it) and good beer (wheat beers with lemon or orange are my current favorites). I sit on my porch and have a nice cold wheat beer with lemon and read and think about how lucky I am to have come through all that danger, scarred but intact, and how good it is to drink a cold wheat beer on one's porch rather than slamming down vile swill through a tube. Sometimes when I go out I drink vodka tonics with lime; sometimes I do still drink to excess, like the night when I went to read with a bunch of other poet friends in Atlanta a few years ago and we collectively drank a couple hundred dollars in Jaegermeister shots and my face got fucked up in the parking lot somehow. But this is more of a release valve than a way of life, and I find myself drunk less and less often. The great thing about getting older is realizing that the world is too interesting to be hazed or obscured all the time, locating interest in things outside of internal sensation. Learning to taste a beer and enjoy it because it tastes good and relaxes you. I feel grateful to have survived my excesses for long enough to receive these lessons, while others fell along the way.Labels: booze, brian
posted by Brian
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Thursday, May 29, 2008
I ALWAYS SAY YES
Glass Candy
I Always Say Yes 12"
Troubleman : 2007
[Buy It]
WE LIVE IN AN EXPANDING UNIVERSE
Kelley Polar
I Need You to Hold on While the Sky is Falling
Environ : 2008
[Buy It]
SOME SIGNS ARE GOOD
DiskJokke
Staying In
Smalltown Supersound: 2008
[Buy It]
This morning, while walking through a small rural town called Hillsborough, I noticed a flyer on a telephone pole. There was nothing particularly eye-catching about it, and it was amid many others, so I'm not sure why I noticed it. It said at the bottom, in a neat but somehow childish hand, "Go To 114 North Wake St. Hillsborough." That's all it said. The rest was blank. At first, I thought maybe the recent rain had washed away the picture or words that seemed to be missing. But the legend itself - "Go To 114 North Wake St. Hillsborough" - was unblemished, and if the rain had washed something away, it had done an excellent job of it. Not an inky ghost remained on the pure white expanse. Without context, the legend was obviously mysterious; it also seemed more like a command - or perhaps an offer - than an instruction.
It just so happens that I was having a "bad day" this morning. I'm in the middle of some heavy deadlines while I try to move into a new apartment, and the world felt very close upon me, heavy on my shoulders. I was supposed to be taking the week off from Moistworks to work on this stuff, but felt compelled to write about this today. I was indulging in my anxiety over the demands of the week, and feeling insufficient to them. Our higher selves meet these anxieties like warriors, looking at them squarely and seeing them for the chimerical indulgences they are, but our lower selves wallow in them. My lower aspect was upon me today, and somewhere, my higher nature was laughing at me scornfully. As I pondered the flyer, I was thinking about all of this and about a couple quotes I've carried around in my head like sigils lately. One is from "Don Juan"/Carlos Castaneda: "We are men and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceiveable new worlds." The other is from "F."/Leonard Cohen, from the novel Beautiful Losers: "Who am I to refuse the universe?"
As I contemplated the blankness of the flyer, paired with its mysterious imperative, the blankness began to seem like a portal. I felt as if I could enter that blankness, penetrate it, and come out on the other side, into a world richer and more intuitive than the one I found myself in this morning. A world where people grope and flounder only until the inevitable moment when they discover a message on a stone or an arrow in the clouds that will plunge them headlong into a higher purpose, a journey or quest. A world in which the human purpose is not to conquer or succeed, but simply to notice, to explore, to experiment with the possibilities of existence. This story I'm telling sounds like literary invention, a metaphysical detective story out of Auster or Borges, which, if you know me, you know are among my favorite kinds of stories. But this is not literature. I'm just talking about something that happened, a lesson I received, which, as we'll come to shortly, was actually more of a reminder than a lesson, a reminder I feel compelled to pass on, because it is so obvious and true and easy to forget, for me and for everyone.
When I talk about learning and lessons in this post, I'm going to be talking not about the acquisition of data, but of true learning - of getting to know and protect the bent of one's nature in a constructed world designed to straighten it and render it homogenous, subordinate to authority, harmless to tyranny. In this constructed world, which divides our existence into actions that "matter" and actions that don't, and where the standard for "matters" is almost wholly socio-economic, and where more and more vectors of potential get relegated to the "doesn't matter" column all the time, learning is less like gaining new knowledge than remembering old knowledge, unlearning.
Let me be clear - I didn't think the flyer was there specifically for me, and while I fantasized that if I found the address, there would be further instruction - another flyer, or some other cue - I didn't really believe this would be the case either. What mattered here was choice, and my awareness of it - here was a portal indeed, a chink in the armor of the constructed day I could step through, if I chose to, and perhaps tease out some thread in the world that would have otherwise remained concealed. If it was mine or for me, it was only because I noticed it and chose to honor that noticing.
I submit that these markers, guides, and portals are all around us, but we're so used to saying "No" to the universe that the always-latent "Yes" seldom occurs to us. I know that I miss the "Yes" frequently, even when I'm looking for it, because the "No" is automatic and easy and culturally approved and reinforces certain comfortable certainties about being in the world, and that accepting the "Yes" can be a huge demand, because it makes us direly aware of all our "No's" and calls us to account for our lives, the deadening routines to which we suborn ourselves, the inestimable waste. As I mentioned, I'm always looking for this "Yes" space, although sometimes, even when I find it, I'm not brave enough to accept it. And I was having a bad day, the kind of day you'd be glad to walk out of and into a world of clarity and purpose and chance. "All right," I said, as I stood in front of the flyer. "I'll go." Who am I to refuse the universe? My lower self muttered in my ear: "You've got too much work to do today to go traipsing off on some meaningless quest!" But I shut him up. What's work when you've been given a mission? I wanted to pursue a logic entirely different from the numbing rote of media-consumption and money-generation, and here was the world saying, Well, what's stopping you?
And so I went. Hillsborough is a small town, where many of the residents are lifers, and I was surprised and admittedly intrigued when no one I asked had heard of North Wake Street. I was prepared to go home and get on Google Maps - how compelling would it have been if this address simply didn't exist? - but as I was preparing to do so, a man on the street said he had a vague intution that it was to the north. So I drove north, and half a block away, there it was - Wake Street. 114 North Wake St. turned out to be the address of the Forrest-Cheek House (built 1901), or so a white plaque out front said. (Hillsborough is very proud of its historic houses and many of them have these plaques.) It was a T-shaped Victorian cottage, with two porches and bay windows. There was nothing at all exceptional about it. I sat in my car in front of it, feeling conspicuous, parked on the roadside in this idyllic residential area, the kind of space you either live in or pass through, but where someone who simply wants to sit on the roadside and look is met with suspicion or hostility. The kind of place that surely has arcane street-parking rules known only to the citizens who live there and exert influence over the space. I thought about knocking on the door, but that didn't feel right. What would I have said? "Hi, I'm here!" Maybe I just didn't want to discover the mundane explanation for the flyer, which surely existed. I looked around for signs or cues, but nothing stood out. Ultimately, I decided there was nothing for me there. I wrote down "Forrest-Cheek House" in my notebook to see if the Internet knew anything interesting about it (nada, it would turn out), and drove away with a mild sense of disappointment.
But that disappointment quickly faded as I contemplated what I'd found, which was the emphatic awareness of everything I'm telling you about now. The point of it was never finding, but searching. I'd said Yes to the universe and had been rewarded with a renewed sense of my agency in the world, and of my ability to construct and pursue a logic that, shorn of everyday context, was no more artifical than the logic of capital that I pursue every day, and which, moreover, was mine. I embarked on a self-defined quest through the catacombs of chance that felt good and right and worthwhile not in spite of, but because of its pointlessness. I was pointedly reminded that being is not as circumscribed as we're taught, that in fact it's a grand experiment for which we're free to devise our own rules, locate our own values. In fact, my superficially abortive quest came to full fruition in just one move, which was the act of acceptance - this lesson or reminder was its ultimate end. I didn't find another flyer there, but I found myself, simply being; my higher self, who is endlessly interested in the world, and who never reduces it to thin certainties, waiting for me there. I felt blessed to have been given this reminder of the always-latent yes at a time when I sorely needed it. The final step seemed to be passing this reminder on, which I'm doing now. I invite you to follow signs. Chase intuitions. Decipher clouds. Spend an afternoon gathering small stones and then painting them different colors, for no reason other than that it's possible to do so. Remember what you already know. Wherever you end up, you'll find yourself waiting there.
Maybe you're at home today, engaged in some kind of routine, and maybe it'll occur to you, "I should go take a walk, but I'm too busy." And then maybe you'll hear, in that moment or near to it, a voice on the radio or television saying, "I should go take a walk" or "I need to get outside" or something that echoes your own intuition, and you'll say, "What a funny coincidence!" and think nothing more of it. I invite you to say Yes to that coincidence. And maybe then, on your favorite walk, you'll pass by a certain lane off the main road, which falls away into shadow and disappears around a bend, into trees and foliage. Maybe that lane has always been seductive to you, maybe every time you pass by it you feel compelled to turn off the main path and walk down it, to find out what lies at its end, beyond the known. Maybe you haven't ever done this, because the lane has a "private property" sort of feeling. Maybe it even has a sign. But maybe this time, you'll remember that ownership of the land itself is a lie, and maybe you'll feel a bit of anger at this awareness, how so much of your world is drastically diminished and partitioned off and disallowed by these rules that someone made a long time ago, without your consent. And maybe this time, you'll ignore that cop-voice that's been implanted in your brain, and listen to your intuition, or the siren song of the path and the rustling leaves and the deepening shade itself, and you'll turn down that lane. You won't be afraid because you know your intentions are pure. Maybe at the end of it, you'll find an angry land owner, wanting to know why you're on their land, and maybe you'll explain to him what you're doing - just looking - or maybe you'll simply choose to turn and walk away, satisfied in what you've seen and understanding that you aren't beholden to this person and his anger, because anger is an indulgence, and you are strong. In fact, I'm thinking of a very specific lane in the neighborhood where I live now. As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to go and walk down it, before I leave this neighborhood for good in a couple days. I won't be afraid to do this because my intention is clear, and I'll know that somewhere, some of you are exploring your own forbidden lanes, and we'll be strengthened together in our resolve to honorably incise the arbitrarily forbidden.
And maybe, exploring our individual lanes in one spirit, we won't find an angry or perplexed land owner waiting at the end. Maybe there'll be an abandoned house or shack or barn, canted and warped with years of neglect, beautifully overgrown with weeds and untended gardens, deeply encrusted with a forgotten history waiting to be discovered. Maybe the light will slant down just right, so that the abandoned house seems strange and familiar, like something we're on the verge of remembering, or a dream, and maybe the old screen door will be hanging ajar, and the sun will be gleaming on the doorknob. And maybe there'll be a stern NO TRESPASSING sign in the broken window, but we'll recognize it as a false sign put up to obscure our view of the real ones. What you do now is up to you, because you're playing by your own rules at this point. But maybe, just maybe, we'll reach out as one, and open the door.Labels: brian, signs
posted by Brian
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
A GHOST STORY
Atlas Sound
Let the Blind Lead Those Who See but Cannot Feel
Kranky : 2008
[Buy It]
I loved scary stories when I was a child, even though they terrified me in a way that was genuine and even unpleasant. I had tons of cheap paperback ghost story collections, which at times frightened me so badly I could hardly turn the page, before I graduated to Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The kind of scary story that scared and thrilled me most was the one that began in utter normalcy. (There were a lot of these: horror stories often begin in sweetness and light, an idyll to defile.) The moment of revelation was frightening, but somehow, the build-up was more compelling - the knowledge that something awful or terrifying was going to happen imbued it with a sense of mounting dread that I knew to exist in this world, while monsters, however scary they were to imagine, did not (or so my parents told me).
In retrospect, it seems like the really chilling part of scary stories that began in normalcy was the worldview they essayed: during the brightest and happiest times, some calamity is always waiting down the line - a worldview that it's scarily easy to adopt in adult life, after one has been knocked down a few times. But as a kid, all this was intuition; I didn't really believe that bad things would ever happen to me, and, feeling safe in that knowledge, a world in which awful things suddenly happened to ordinary people seemed all the more frightening for being so foreign to what I knew.
Some of these stories, I still remember today. There was one that scared the hell out of me about a man who woke up one morning to find that he had a new face, an awful and somehow monstrous face. Even weirder, the people he knew still recognized him, as if the face he didn't recognize was the one he'd always had. The kicker comes when the man wakes up to find his own, old face staring at him in the mirror and feels relieved, until he leaves for work and passers-by recoil in horror, and his bus driver doesn't recognize him.
GO CRAZY
Young Jeezy
Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101
Def Jam : 2005
[Buy It]
This is heavy stuff for a kid, this Lynchian/Kafkan/psychogenic fugue stuff! The idea of madness - of reality slipping free from its moorings - always terrified me; Hitchcock's Vertigo, I watched with grim fascination. In fact, many of the stories that frightened me most involved slippages of identity, of the face and what lies behind it. I remember another story about a young bride who always wore a black ribbon around her neck, and refused to ever remove it. She and her husband had a happy life, yet the mystery of the black ribbon gnawed at him. Finally, one night, as his wife sleeps, he untied the black ribbon. Her head rolled off her neck and onto the floor. The disembodied head says, "I told you I couldn't take it off."
This is meant to be funny, but my god! That instant of untying, when the latent horror lurches out into the open - that chilled me. I read it as more of a cautionary parable than a joke: "Don't untie it!" I would mentally implore the husband each time I read it. "Your life is happy; leave well enough alone!" The genre of "funny" ghost stories were seldom funny, but always scary - I remember another one about a guy who goes to spend the night in an old mansion, as people in ghost stories are wont to do, for some kind of reward. A cat walks into the living room, and then, another enters, and asks the first cat, "Is it time?" "Not yet," says the first cat, "wait until Martin comes." More and more cats enter the room, one by one, each one asking the others if it's time, and being told to wait until Martin comes. Finally, the man says, "When Martin comes, tell him I couldn't wait!" and runs from the house. Ha. Ha. The mounting dread, as one cat after another entered the room, as "Martin" approached inexorably, always trumped the joke for me. These stories and God were my first introductions to the concepts of forces beyond my ken at work in this world, wild forces unbeholdened to the laws of reality that goverened me. The ghost stories always seemed more plausible, more connected to how I experienced the world every day - more similar in shape to whatever forces or sensations I intuited or imagined around me. They still do.
ONE (BLAKE'S GOT A BRAND NEW FACE)
Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend
XL : 2008
[Buy It]
The story that I remember most vividly of all was about a man who finds a dusty old jigsaw puzzle, tucked in a forgotten corner of a secondhand shop. It's in a plain cardboard box, so he doesn't know what picture it makes. He buys it and takes it home to his apartment, where he lives alone, and begins to piece it together in his living room, at night. As he works out the border, he gets a sense of eerie familiarity. As he begins to lay in pieces toward the middle, it becomes apparent that the jigsaw puzzle is an image of a room; soon, as he fleshes out the room's wallpaper and couch, it becomes apparent that it is, in fact, the very room he's in. Obviously, he gets kind of freaked out, and gets up to lower the shade over the window. Eventually, he's filled in the whole puzzle except for the window. It's his room, exactly (although he isn't pictured in it). With trembling hands, he lays in the last few pieces, which form his window (with the shade, however, up), framing an awful face, leering through the window. He looks over in alarm, and the shade on the window flies up on its own. He sees the same face at his window, and the story ends.
This face is a manifestation of pure, eruptive horror, the calamity that rushes into our lives without warning or apparent meaning. I find myself looking for this face, out of the corner of my eye, always. Last night, I was alone at home, in my room, the window was open and it was dark outside. At a certain point I felt anxious and got up to close the blinds. I told myself I didn't want to let bugs in (my window screens are shoddy, so this is a valid concern), but actually, I was afraid of seeing that face, which open windows at night seem to court. In certain humors, the idea that a horrible face will suddenly appear at your window doesn't seem silly, it seems inevitable, especially in moments when we catch an intuition of forces moving and working beyond our ken. Empty houses seem to court these forces - who hasn't, regardless of what kind of language they want to use to talk about it, felt spirits or energies moving through their houses, when they're alone? What do we mean when we write this off as "nerves" or paranoia, why is this a satisfactory explanation? Why are houses or buildings that no longer contain humans essentially frightening, if it's only our "nerves" that give the spaces their spiritual charge?
RED HOUSE
Shudder to Think
Funeral at the Movies
Dischord : 2003
[Buy It]
One Friday night, a couple weeks ago, I decided to stay in and work on poems. My roommates were out of town. The house was empty, silent, and full of spirits. I don't mean this metaphorically, but I don't mean it quite literally either, because how do you talk about spirits literally? At any rate, I felt spirits. At a certain point, I had an epiphanic or ecstatic experience that I'm not sure I can relate here without sounding vague, crazy, or both, so I won't. But after this experience I felt wide open and buzzing, as these so-called spirits flowed and pushed around me. At a certain point, I opened the door of my room and stepped into the hall. My room had been bright, the rest of the house was completley dark, and an evil or malevolent or just frighteningly powerful spirit swept down the hallway. I felt a dark presence move past me, if not malevolent then malevolent-seeming in its dark power and my utter irrelevance to it. I became frightened, not of something concealed in the dark, but of the darkness itself. Feeling almost panicked, I flipped on the hallway light, which is dim and concentrated in a small area. It illuminated a sort of shrine my roommates made, covered with skull iconography, black veils, candles. This evil or dark totem came into the light and the rest of the house became darker by comparison, and I felt keenly aware of the precarity of light, and the obliterative, always-latent strength of darkness. I went into the bathroom and the shower curtain seemed to respire, as a black cat tread silently across the door frame. And at this point, I became frightened by the epiphanic or ecstatic experience I alluded to earlier, which was connected to someone I love dearly, and which, at the time, I regarded with positivity and wonder. Yet later, immersed in this scary house energy, I became paranoid that my previous experience was a sign of some danger related to this person I love. I called her to set my mind at ease, and told her everything I've just told you, and then some. She said that not long before, quite possibly at the moment of my epiphany or ecstasy, she had experienced a moment of intense anxiety, alone at her house in the country, about something that turned out to be nothing. Coincidence, or...? What do we even mean by coincidence? All I know is that our minds rang out together in that moment, like two glasses falling simultaneously from two counters in two empty rooms. Maybe this is a mystery, how two minds locked in two heads can know each other so well, and connect. Maybe it's utterly ordinary, an alignment on the wheels of chance. But weren't we both looking for the face in the window, that night? Wasn't it, perhaps, actually there? Labels: brian, fear
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
NOTHING IS EVER LOST OR CAN BE LOST MY SCIENCE FRIEND
Liars
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
Mute : 2002
[Buy It]
When I was a kid, drawing was my thing. I started in grade school, first copying pictures out of comic books, then making up my own. But even after I began to draw my own figures, I didn't stop copying - meticulous re-creation appealed to me for reasons I still can't articulate, and photorealistic drawing became my primary creative outlet through middle school and high school. I worked in many different media in art class, but given my druthers, I always worked in pencil or ink; I loved sharp contrasts of light and dark, and I loved the level of control over line and weight these media allowed. In high school, visual art was something I constantly received praise for, and, having been reared on achievement-based praise and thus addicted to it, I pursued it with all the fervor that a rebellious and prematurely world-weary teen could muster. There was an annual contest staged by the public library in which art students drew different hisotiric buildings around town, and the winner would received one hundred dollars. (My first architectural drawing effort, which I drew in 1995 or 1996, as a sophomore or junior in high school, is pictured at the top of this post.) I won this contest multiple times, and it began my first "freelance" career, as people who had emotional investments in various houses and buildings began to hire me to draw them. This petered out pretty quickly, as I was too invested in "partying" to handle a bunch of commissions. But I remember being in art class, often stoned, and spending the entire period assiduously stippling a shadow or etching a branch, displaying a dedication to something beyond hedonism that was uncommon for me at the time, and presaging a systematic sensibility that would come to define my later artistic output. Riding a wave of praise and really not knowing what else to do with myself, I enrolled in art school after I graduated from high school, and made it through one year before dropping out and beginning a career as a writer. Even as I was getting into writing, I never dreamed it would come to so fully supplant my drawing, which had been so crucial to my identity and self-esteem throughout my formative years. Now, I paint, and sometimes I doodle abstractly, but it's been a decade or so since I've tried to create one of my old, meticulously shaded, photorealistic drawings. This is a talent I was given and have let go to waste. At least, this is what I tell myself when I'm feeling blue in general, about lost things in general. In better humors I assure myself that as long as I'm expressing creatively, the form that energy takes is beside the point - that nothing is wasted - and I tell myself that my drawing skills are simply latent, waiting to be engaged. In this I feel rather like a smoker who says he could quit at any time, but doesn't want to. That these skills may just be latent, not gone, is not much of a comfort to me when I consider that I've let them slide into latency for years. Today won't be the day I reclaim them - as usual, I've got to write. When I think about my drawing, I find myself thinking about other skills I've acquired, then let languish - what they were worth, whether they're lost or simply lapsed, what is wasted, whether or not this is sad.
LOST TIME
Health
Health
Lovepump United : 2007
[Buy It]
E.g. - from my late teens until my mid-twenties, in a protracted transition between art-school-drop-out and *gulp* professional writer, I worked full-, then part-time as a projectionist at mainstream movie theater. This was actually a fantastic job for a writer: every couple hours, there was a half-hour window where I had to start the various shows on our six screens, and then, barring any technical problems, I would have a long block of free time, alone in the cozy projection booth (which was not the squalid closet we see in movies but a big ring-shaped hallway around the entire top of the building, with a hatch leading up to the theater's roof which was perfect for cigarette breaks). I loved it in that booth, it was dim and quiet and somehow amniotic - the low whirr of the projectors, the hovering beams of light - and best of all, totally private. Sometimes I would work a 12 hour shift, and at first, I spent all my down time devouring books (this was after I dropped out of college and began to reclaim myself from the deep mesmerism of suburbia and public education, and also reclaimed my childhood love of reading). Later, after I began to write for zines and local papers, I would spend that time writing my reviews, making money from newspapers while I was on the clock at the theater. It was pretty ideal for me at the time. But beyond the privacy and the good workspace, I loved interacting with the machines themselves. I liked having all this arcane knowledge. I knew how to build a movie, which arrived on six to eight reels and had to be assembled onto a horizontal platter with end splices. I knew about cue tape and aspect ratios and maskings and film gates and lenses and emulsions and maltese crosses. I liked presiding over the moviegoers seated in the darkness below, liked that they were waiting for me to create a world for them, sometimes looking up toward the booth, anxiously trying to catch a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. There is an undeniable feeling of power in being a projectionist, of presiding over this very private experience, of being the only one in the building capable of putting the picture on the screen. I loved threading the film through the projector, which involved running a Rube Goldburg-complex series of loops through pulleys and sprockets and rollers, and it got to the point where I could do this in one minute and sixteen seconds. But I don't do projection any more. I wonder if I'll ever get to use this skill again, and why every innate talent or learned skill I possess feels at once like a blessing and a demand. What am I losing right now? I need to play the guitar more. I need to draw more. I need to write more fiction, and play basketball. I need to get back to my old blog that's been dormant forever, and I need to start making masks. I need to finish this one video and I need to brush up on my Spanish before I forget it all. I need to get a thumb in every hole in the dike, but I don't have enough thumbs.
LOSING MY TASTE FOR THE NIGHTLIFE
Arthur Russell
Another Thought
Orange Mountain Music : 2006 (originally released in 1994)
[Buy It]
As I got out of the movie theater business, I got into the barista business. At this point, I write for most of my living, but I still work once or twice per week as a barista - I like working with and being around coffee, it's good for me to make a little of my money with my hands instead of my brain, and having yuppies talk down to me keeps me humble. I also think it feeds my self-image as something of an outsider - the whole romance of the "contributing editor at national magazine by day, lowly prole by night" thing. It keeps me in touch with the impotent rage of the service class. And if threading a projector sounds complicated, it's got nothing on making good espresso. Projection is a stable algorithm, you complete certains steps and the magic happens. Espresso-making is unstable, every variable - tamping pressure, grind consistency, atmospheric quality, extraction time, etc etc etc - interacts complexly with every other variable. There's tons of room for human error and if one variable shifts, you have to shift them all, so making espresso is less an algorithm than a series of negotiations and compromises as you try to find the sweet spot where it's chalky and bitter but not too chalky and bitter, with a nice blonde color and a nice thick crema on top, at a good volume and with smooth composition. It's something you start learning with your brain but finish learning with your hands, and like writing, you never perfect it - it's a lifelong learning process. Or it can be. There's going to come a time, probably sooner than later, when I'm not a barista any more. And I wonder what it means to me to be a "good writer" if that means writing has to gradually overtake all of my other interests and skills. These skills may have sifted out of my life, and my fondest hope is that even if my brain forgets, my hands will remember, that all of this is latent but not lost.
GONE
M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Mute : 2004
[Buy It]
I know, it's overexposed. But we can stand to read it again:
"One Art"
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.Labels: brian, losing
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
DARKNESS
David Lynch
Catching the Big Fish
Penguin Audio : 2006
[Buy It]
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)
INTERPRETATION
David Lynch
Catching the Big Fish
Penguin Audio : 2006
[Buy It]
Rebbids
INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY NO. 1
David Lynch
Catching the Big Fish
Penguin Audio : 2006
[Buy It]
Industrial Symphony No. 1Labels: brian, david lynch
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
TAXMAN DUB
Israel Vibration
Israel Dub
Ras : 1996
[Buy It]
IS IS & THE IRS
Life Without Buildings
Live at the Annandale Hotel
Absolutely Kosher : 2007
[Buy It]
POOR PEOPLE MUST WORK (CARL CRAIG REMIX)
Rhythm & Sound
Sessions
K7 : 2008
[Buy It]
I like to pay taxes. It is purchasing civilization. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt. - Howard Aiken
The only thing that hurts more than paying an income tax is not having to pay an income tax. - Lord Thomas Robert Dewar
In levying taxes and in shearing sheep it is well to stop when you get down to the skin. - Austin O'Malley
If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation. - Rush Limbaugh
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others. - Oscar Wilde
If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep. - Will Rogers
When there's a single thief, it's robbery. When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation. - Vanya Cohen
What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue. - Thomas Paine
The purse of the people is the real seat of sensibility. Let it be drawn upon largely, and they will then listen to truths which could not excite them through any other organ. - Thomas Jefferson
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. - Ronald Reagan
quotations culled from About.comLabels: brian, taxes
posted by Brian
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Monday, March 31, 2008
For today's experiment in aleatoric mp3 blogging, I'm going to be posting in REAL TIME. This means that everything I'm writing about will occur within the same time frame during which the writing occurs. Like, right now, I'm sitting at my desk, or rather kind of perched (I have a weird habit of perching in my chair when I write), it's raining outside, I just reached up a straightened a stack of CDs so that it's flush with the corner of the desk, I can hear a bird singing intermittently and rainwater washing through the gutters.
I'm writing in REAL TIME because to do otherwise would compromise the experiment, which pertains to my relationship with my iPod's shuffle function. You see, I've gotten into the habit of putting my iPod on shuffle while I drink my coffee in the morning. Only recently have I realized that in doing this, I've started to view my iPod shuffle as kind of magical, part lottery, part oracle. I count on it to offer me the song that I absolutely need to hear, and when it doesn't, this seems to bode ill. Right now, Hot Chip's "Ready for the Floor" is the song that I have to hear at least once per day (and usually, twice in a row), and while I could always dial it up myself, it's somehow more satisfying when my iPod chooses it from the - hold on, let me get it out - from the 8,965 songs it contains.
When I spin the wheel of fate and "Ready for the Floor" comes up, I feel like it's gonna be a good day. Likewise, sometimes my iPod shuffle will produce nothing I want to hear, which usually signals a bad day (this makes sense - when music isn't turning me on at all, it's likely that I'm having a bad day already). On particularly bad or good days, I find that my shuffle seems to be trying to tell me something - some warning or premonition - and this is when my iPod becomes something oracular, mp3s cast into a shallow pool like bird bones.
Today - in REAL TIME - we're going to put my iPod on shuffle, listen to the first five songs that come up, and think about what they might mean through an oracular lens. I'm pledging to you right now - no re-shuffles, no omissions. I hope this doesn't wind up embarrassing for me.
*crosses fingers* noKennyChesneynoKennyChesneynoKennyChesney...
Actually, hold up - I'm realizing that we're going to have to impose a few conditions for this to work. They are as follows:
1. Sometimes, shuffle gets lazy and places two songs from the same album in close proximity. Since Moistworks never posts two songs from the same album in one day, if this should occur, the second song from the same album will be skipped, and the one following it will take its place.
2. A great deal of music on my iPod is watermarked or otherwise copy-protected. If I share this music, the FCC will send ninjas to my house to shove jewel cases under my fingernails. Any watermarked songs that come up in the shuffle will be skipped.
3. After doing Moistworks for a couple years, I've posted an awful lot of songs, and there is a chance that something I've already posted will come up in the shuffle. As this experiment does not wish to compromise end-user satisfaction with the Moistworks brand, these songs, too, will be skipped.
4. I'm torn as to the question of whether to omit skits and short interludes. I was going to say yes, but these things are often important in the oracular sense, and so I think we'll allow them.
OK! That's all settled. Let's get down to the experiment. I'm pressing the shuffle button... now.
GET OUT THE STATE
Spoon
Soft Effects EP
Matador : 1997
[Buy It]
Hmmm...this is a sweet song, although bitchin' fuzz guitar isn't exactly what I'm after first thing in the morning. Listening to Spoon also makes me feel a distant twinge of anxiety now - I was lukewarm on their most recent album, which everyone else seemed to love, and while I think about half the songs on it are really good, I never came around on the other half, which I thought cheesy and overcooked. Whenever I fall drastically away from consensus like that, I wonder if my taste is malfunctioning or something. This wasn't a divisive album, it was roundly adored. Whatever, though - as an oracle, this is spot on, as getting out of the state is something that occupies my mind more and more often lately. "I've been waiting here for so long / And I'm on the curb with everyone." I have to be careful about listening to songs like this in the morning - nothing can pull me out of the moment, all day, like thinking about where I'm going instead of where I am.
RAINBOWARRIORS
Cocorosie
The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
Touch and Go : 2007
[Buy It]
Aw, I love this song. The lyrics are ridiculous but supremely oracular; they actually sound like pronouncements from Delphi at times. Again, though, this is a dangerous morning-song for me on days when I have a lot of work to do. If I was doing my normal morning reading-and-shuffling thing instead of this post, I'd probably be reading my Carlos Castaneda book while I listened to this, a combination bound to abstract me to the point where writing about music would be impossible. Music like this can pull me out of the routine order of the day, which is a great place to be, but is not conducive to getting "stuff" done. Right now, hearing it, I'm getting that feeling of, "well, maybe I could just finish this post tomorrow, plug the guitar into the sampler and drone out for awhile right now." This transaction is what I call "losing the thread," and while it's probably more like finding one, it's not the thread I need to find to produce work and make money. Better move on quickly.
THE MORE YOU IGNORE ME THE CLOSER I GET
Morrissey
Greatest Hits
Decca : 2008
[Buy It]
I'll be honest - by this point, I'd normally be rapidly scanning through my shuffled queue, looking for some nice rap or techno. Or maybe I'd give up on shuffle entirely and put on some ambient music. This song might hold my attention for a couple minutes on a bright spring day, but today it's gray and chilly and wet. It hits my ears with a clunk - it's fine, but I've never particularly loved it, and it has no real traction in my life at this moment: happily partnered up, the situation Morrissey describes seems very remote to me. I feel a little betrayed by my iPod right now, a little let down - iPod, don't you know me at all? After all these years?
DON'T WANNA BE ALONE
Devin the Dude
Waitin' to Inhale
Rap-a-Lot : 2007
[Buy It]
Two things happen in rapid succession here - I get excited that it's a Devin the Dude song; I'm disappointed that it's this one. This soppy R&B jam plays fine in the context of the album, but doesn't do much on its own. It seems a logical follow-up to the Morrissey song, and, as such, I can't really identify with it right now. But wait a minute - is there a message here? A lesson? Should I be preparing to be alone? Is that what you're saying, iPod? Can't say I like where this is going. Let's see if things look up with number five.
FROM BLACK TO BLUE
Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Matador : 2000
[Buy It]
Oh, goddamn it.Labels: brian, ipod
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
OH GOD
The Comas
Conductor
Yep Roc : 2004
[Buy It]
omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod ...
BREATHING ROOM
Rafter
Sex Death Cassette
Asthmatic Kitty : 2008
[Buy It]
...pant, pant...
Oh my god!
GLASS PIANO
Glossolalia
Black Sail
[unreleased]
http://glossolalia-blacksail.blogspot.com
I am getting a piano today.
At last, a piano of my own!
HEAVEN IS A TRUCK
Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Matador : 1994
[Buy It]
When you're moving heavy things, the guy with the truck is your master. And the guy with the truck says, "today," so off I go.
7 DAYS
Acid House Kings
Sing Along with Acid House Kings
Twentyseven Records : 2005
[Buy It]
This means I don't have much time to write today, and the next installment of my local music series will have to wait a week.
METAMORPHOSIS 1
Philip Glass
Solo Piano
Sony : 1989
[Buy It]
But I'll leave you with some lovely piano music in the meantime.Labels: brian, piano
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Evidence that technology is making it increasingly difficult to have a sane, sensible relationship to space and time is everywhere. Consider the concept of "local music." Before recording, broadcast, and digital networking technology were available, all music was local music, and really, it still is. Even bands who stay on the road 24/7 are from somewhere. The concept of local bands would seem to imply that some bands live in outer space, and as far as I know, few musicians - barring Perry Farrell, Andre 3000, the RZA, a few others - can actually make that claim.
So when we talk about local music, we're talking about exposure, not geography. The Shins live in Portland (the Shins still live in Portland, right?), but they're hardly what you'd call a local band. There's a subtle edge to calling someone a local band - it doesn't mean they live somewhere, it means that their relevance is confined to a localized area. That there's a bit of an insult built into the concept of "local band" speaks to how thoroughly commodified music has become, as if success means spreading your product across as vast a network of strangers as possible, not engaging with your community at a hands-on level and enriching the lives of people you can see and touch and know.
After writing for nothing but national publications for a few years, I began to feel very estranged from anything that felt like a hands-on, organic culture. This can be hard to find in Chapel Hill at any rate, where the musical infrastructure is so petrified that the local culture can feel like something that grinds on with or without you - you can dip in and out of the scene at will, and there's a feeling that the club owners and touring bands and PR agencies will keep it running either way. Touring bands get booking preference, while local bands get shoved into Wednesday night showcases. And at a certain point I realized I was spending all this time thinking about the Arcade Fire, who I'm not even very interested in, while terrific bands were playing to no one down the street. Part of this was simply economic - there's obviously little money in writing about bands who aren't making any (or selling magazines with their cultural capital) themselves. And part of it was more like hypnosis; I found myself in a feedback loop of promotional cycles.
To rectify this imbalance, I started writing for the local weekly, which doens't pay very well, but has terrific editors and allowed me to have an economic and professional impetus to engage with local music again. I'm still interested in trawling the mirror-world of national music, but I needed something more down-to-earth, tactile, and unmediated to keep me sane. And in truth, North Carolina is a pretty great place for local music - now that we've finally put enough temporal distance between us and the Chapel Hill indie rock boom of the nineties, which made local music feel overdetermined and dead-horse-flogging for quite awhile, it seems as if the area's musical identity has finally loosened up again, and is producing fantastic bands in many different genres.
Today I'm starting a multi-part post highlighting some of the best music my local area has to offer. It won't be exhaustive - there are just too many bands - but I'm going to hit as many as I can. Some of these bands have a national foothold, some are virtually unknown outside of NC, and some are virtually unknown in NC - I'm using "local" in the most literal sense. It's less of an NC pride thing than a reminder, to myself and maybe to you, that culture can still happen on a human scale, should we choose to notice it. I'm still not going out to local shows as often as I could - it's not like when I was younger and had time to hang out in bars several nights per week, you know? - but I'm going when I can, and always listening to make sure I don't miss what's right in front of me.
IF BY "GAY" YOU MEAN "TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME," THEN YEAH, I GUESS IT'S PRETTY GAY
Des Ark
Battle of the Beards
Lovitt : 2007
[Buy It]
Come to think of it, one of the songs that hit me hardest last year was by a local band. Des Ark is from Durham, NC, fronted by singer/guitarist/songwriter/spitfire Aimee Argot. I risk repeating myself here - I already wrote about this song, two times. You might notice I've been flogging the Bright Eyes connection pretty hard. I should explain. When I was younger and full of hormones, I was way into Bright Eyes. Fevers & Mirrors and its predecessors just slayed me; Conor Oberst and I are about the same age and demographic and were weathering the same kinds of psychic storms at the same time. I loved how everything about his music spoke of urgency, from the raw arrangements to the overcooked lyrics to the thin pule that could suddenly swell into a terrible vibrato, the beauty that could give way to ugliness in the blink of an eye. Des Ark taps into that same kind of dark, naseous euphoria. Argot also has an awesome, towering vibrato, and a raw, percussive guitar style; the hard-bitten expletives and hair-raising strings just bittersweeten the deal.
ATTITUDE AND MIRRORS
The Nein
Luxury
Sonic Unyon : 2007
[Buy It]
I like dreamers, questers and searchers, which is why I like the band Liars so much. (I think I've said this before.) It's also why I was so stoked about Durham band The Nein's album Luxury. For some years the Nein have played heavy post-punk with necrotic patches of noise. They were a good band but there was always something tentative about them, like they were using big guitar riffs as a crutch to prop up their more academic experiments in rhythm and structure. One of the band members is someone I've corresponded with for some time, on topics from pop-criticism to John Cage, and so I know him as a searching intelligence; not a hit-seeker, but someone interested in exploring intellectual possibilities through sound. And Luxury felt like the record the Nein had always tip-toed around. For the first time, guitar riffs took a secondary position to sections of screwy dub and ambient sounds, as if the Nein had finally amassed the confidence necessary to take off the training wheels. The specter of the rock they once played haunts "Attitude and Mirrors" in the guise of the acoustic and electric guitar riffs floating through the industrial sound bed. An out of the wilderness, up to the mountain kind of record.
MEMO TO MYSELF
Dan Bryk
Lovers Leap
Scratchie : 2000
[Buy It]
Good ol' Dan Bryk. I've been trying to tell the world about this guy forever, here and here and here and elsewhere, but there've been tough breaks for Bryk. When his excellent album Lovers Leap came out in 2000, it got props from Christgau, among other valid entities. I got a promo copy of it and took it to Europe with me, where I listened to it in a rapturous daze for months. It was supposed to be released by Scratchie/Mercury, but Mercury dropped out, leaving the small indie label to do a small release on it's own. The album kind of disappeared. Bryk moved from Toronto to Chapel Hill shortly afterwards, and immigration troubles have kept him from releasing much music since then. These issues are starting to resolve, and hopefully, the long-delayed Lover's Leap reissue and the new album, Pop Psychology, with finally emerge and put an end to the absurdity of this guy still being a relative secret. He's a singer/songwriter in the classic Randy Newman sorta tradition: idiosyncratic, charismatic, classically inclined, a bit rough in the grain. He's a chubby guy who often sings about being chubby and liking chubby girls; a happily committed romantic nihilist. He's got a killer falsetto, a knack for indelible hooks, and a one-of-a-kind sensibility - a mixture of depressive cynicism, jaded wit, and maudlin earnestness. Bryk can put a line as meanly cutting as "You probably think that we touched souls/ All I did was touch you underneath your blouse" near one as touching as "I'd love to spend some time with you/ As soon as I don't need it for myself" and make it work, because there's no sense of artifice about the worldview in his lyrics - it's too odd and inconsistent to be anything but his. I love Dan Bryk because his music reminds me of the undying power of pop songcraft, even at times when my tastes are skewing abstract and obscure.
That's it for now, but next week, we'll look at three or four more NC acts of merit.Labels: brian, local music
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself still living in North Carolina. Without a doubt, one the main things that's kept me here for so long is the vibrancy of the poetry community around Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Durham and Greensboro. My coterie, the Lucifer Poetics Group, has been invaluable to my growth as a writer and a person, and when I leave this place, it's the one thing I'm truly going to miss. I salute these friends and collaborators, and in particular I'd like to salute three good friends in Lucipo who've published three outstanding books over the past year. I'm excerpting works from each of these books, with soundtracks.
THE BRIDGE
Clinic
Walking with Thee
Domino : 2002
[Buy It]
"5.march.2002"
by Ken Rumble
from Key Bridge
Responsibility to tea, to the bag,
the leaf, the noose & its kite,
the tea totaller, the tea time, the tea cup,
the reflection, the because, the where,
the question of location, the bat,
the ball, the phone, the pornography
of the juice, the pterodactyl of Bombay,
the mmmmm, the champagne of tea,
the water, the tap
Responsibility to a beverage
as if a pterodactyl as if more than
a mark of time--mark the time--
as if we didn't recall--
a centipede, as if a teacup (really
a coffee cup)--thicker,
chunky like chipped brick, for holding something
toxic, like an American or Brit,
like that reporter who'll never make a tea time,
as if the phone rang & the because where location
kite water juice responsibility
__
We kicked the walls from the houses
like fury--remember--like this,
like so--so many times--
watch--watch--every window,
every pane, a rock--gravel--a pile
where they pushed it into foundations--
watch--trails, bikes, dirt--watch--
we made it--nails in the gutter--
split beams & piss--kick drywall--
shit in the insulation--watch--houses--watched
building--watch--watch--now the bolt
needs tightening--
every coin on a string--
no beast lives
in the beautiful garden
WAVES
White Rainbow
Prism of Eternal Now
Kranky : 2007
[Buy It]
"Imaginary Synonyms"
by Tony Tost
from Complex Sleep
Eventually we take it apart
dissecting it palate by plate
only to get smaller
your mother asks me to tell her
what to think of when she says "milk"
and you say Waves
of punishment, of possibility
a rush now always on
secondary phenomena. Come home
bring goldfish for the
ponds. Cleft angels
distorted talons
stuck with the shapes we are
as waves. A cave. A nimbus
around my brother as he hums
home. Seduction of the sources
the first days of being enormous
analogous holograph of
above. My medium is
filled by quanta wants
heating the nonluminous iron bar
inner sight. Granular
the syllables are syllabic
if mouthed. Come home
to discrete levels of comfort
grief may be rotting half my brain
but I remember all of your face
faintly. An observer
you enter these memories
grief understands the poses
it is to assume. The film passes
through the gate
undulates in ways sound does
away from pronouncement. This
the very womb of evasion
the crest of each wave emits
a portrait unleashed
static enfolded in known formation
aeon overcome by error
shoulders heaving, mouth open
and moving. Come home
your father's birthday is today
for Kim Sun-il
THE DOOR OPENS THE OTHER WAY
Belong
October Language
Carpark : 2006
[Buy It]
"September 2002, Topsail Island, NC"
by Chris Vitiello
from Irresponsibility
1
Midmorning beachcombing
This rock is four letterforms
The diametric opposite of any experience
is not the absence of that experience
Rocks are graphs
Seeing is a perpetual axis // An understood axis
Brent, I have to break out of this and
not just to do something new
2
The weather changes several times a day
Iris hesitates in doorways
and has to be touched on the back of her head
Philindo uses "and" instead of "but"
The mistakes pile up
An understood subject is made parenthetical
and a captive's struggle tightens knots
Doorways frame
where inside touches outside
Not itself a space or place but a planar edge
3
Saying is another axis
In the middle of the page
becomes the poem's raison d'etre
Film has drained attention out of seeing
The lyric forgets a category of thought out of reading
A bite of Rebecca's seafood crepe between each line
Don't lie
Restrict movement, reduce the
number of variables
Comparatively define geographies
So--hesitant to write
Look at the Sun, I mean
The door is either open or closed and
there are many degrees of being openLabels: brian, poetry
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, February 18, 2008
DECIBELS AND LITTLE PILLS
American Music Club
The Golden Age
Merge : 2008
[Buy It]
A MAN NEEDS A WOMAN OR A MAN TO BE A MAN
Bill Callahan
Woke on a Whaleheart
Drag City : 2007
[Buy It]
TENNESSEE
Silver Jews
Bright Flight
Drag City : 2001
[Buy It]
The recent publication of a collection of Franz Kafka's aphorisms got me thinking about what, precisely, an aphorism is. Some of Kafka's resemble parables or short stories, but to me, a true aphorism is brief (preferably one sentence), wittily constructed (in the Oscar Wilde-ish, advising-against-any-endeavor-requiring-new-clothes sense), and has meaning in excess of its vocbulary (this is where it crosses over with the riddle).
An aphorism is distinct from a truism: the latter tends to be goopy, with exactly one discernible point; the former is more starchy, evoking an array of senses and meanings. Some of my favorite lyricists are handy with aphorisms, although truisms can be satisfying when handled with care. American Music Club's Mark Eitzel is a whiz with them. But his lyrics are animated by an emotional directness and transparency, and comprise a congnitive experience much less complex than the aphoristic one.
The aphorism hangs as much on deft wording as inner truth; there is something shifty and furtive about it; its composition is a bit like that of a joke, where even its speaker can only intuit, not fully describe, its entire payload. Bill Callahan, formerly known as Smog, is one of the finest aphorists working in music today, although he frequently blurs the line between aphorism and truism (and red herring: "Spend a night with an owl and you'll see more blood than sleep," he told me in an interview last year, which I still can't make heads or tails of in context).
Callhan tends to pepper oblique narratives with aphorisms that bolster them up philosophically, which reveals another quality of the aphorism: it is a general statement; it elaborates one system of thought so compactly and completely that it seems to elaborate everything. "There is no love where there is no obstacle," from "Say Valley Maker," is a truism. "God is a word, and the argument ends there," is more aphoristic, the sort of sweepingly obliterative aphorism we might associate with Wittgenstein: "The world is all that is the case."
But I think my favorite Callhan aphorism is from his latest album, Woke on a Whaleheart, on the song "A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man." The aphorism, obviously, is right there in the title. If the proposition were simply, "A man needs a woman to be a man," it would be a truism, and a rather silly one at that. But Callhan's rendering opens up the statement into broader realms of ambiguity, asserting a superficially simple truth while conjuring up a whole array of questions about the traditional definition of manhood.
David Berman of Silver Jews is terrific at this too (Drag City is a very aphoristic label), in his poetry ("All water is classic water") and in his music. I'm thinking specifically of this inspired turn from "Tennessee": "Punk rock died when the first kid said/ Punk's not dead." We could talk about how this statement gets at at truth about how systems become moribund when they become overly defined, but aphorisms are for marinating upon, not exegesis, and I fear that in a post about these little time-released capsules of ideation, I've already said far too much.Labels: aphorisms, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, February 04, 2008
FIVE SCENES PERIPHERAL TO A WAR
BOMBS ON THE WAY
Promute
Dark Moving
Blondena Music : 2006
[Buy It]
I. Yesterday morning, I sat outside a cute coffee shop in an ugly strip mall. North Carolina starts to thaw in February, and it felt good to sit outside. Even though I was essentially sitting in a parking lot, I had a little table and a fresh cup of coffee, and my first cigarette of the day smoldered in my hand, and the sun felt good on my face. At a table next to me, three teenagers conversed heatedly - high school aged, roughneckish in a preppyway - kids who are familiar to me, from this coffee shop, whose conversations are impossible not to overhear, and usually revolve around boastful war stories of bodily damage and degradation through excessive substance and alcohol abuse. But yesterday, they were talking about the U.S. military's arsenal, with a mix of nihilism, apathy, belligerence and pride that perfectly expressed their social milieu. I know kids like this intimately, can usually spot them on sight, because I was one of them. I recognized their haughtiness, their love for transgression, their prodigious efforts to suppress any sign of their keen suburban-bred intellects beneath a veneer of malevolence. "We have seven hundred missles," one of them was saying, with a no-nonsense, brass tacks sort of tone. They discussed how many times over we could blow up various things; they discussed the merits of just blowing up everything, because we're Americans, and we can. I saw some adults passing by, catching snippets of their conversation, grimacing or wincing or frowning disapprovingly; I saw the kids soaking up this disapproval as if it were lifeblood, blowing out ostentatious streams of Marlboro Red smoke they hadn't inhaled, only let puff out their cheeks. I felt a great empathy for them. I understood their fascination with the idea of blowing up everything, which seems like just another kick in youth (when one feels certain that one feels more of the world than adults, only to discover, usually sometime in one's twenties, that one was only feeling one's self, and that the world was still waiting). I thought about how that obliterative desire - which sometimes, in whatever phase of adulthood I'm in, still haunts me - turns darker, more feasible, more ideological, more utterly sensible. I thought about trees in windy places, how their branches twist and distort, shaped by exterior pressures. I saw the corridor stretching out ahead of these kids, looking over my shoulder, and I thought about all the disillusions they'd have to overcome, all the escape hatches into wider pastures of self-hood they'd hopefully not overlook along the way. "We could blow up the freaking moon!" one of them exclaimed, eyes wide and shining.
INDUSTRY FOR THE BLIND
Milemarker
Frigid Forms Sell
Jade Tree : 2002
[Buy It]
II. I recently had lunch with a friend of mine who's a capitalist. I don't mean in a practical sense, because in a practical sense, we are all of us capitalists. I mean he's an avowed capitalist, who believes in capitalism as a viable system for social organization that is conducive to the widespread public weal. Our conversations often revolve around politics, me aware of his, him aware of mine - a sort of embattled anarchism that does not completely disallow capitalism but absolutely disallows our grotesquely mutated late-capitalism; a confused anarchism that craves obliteration but is less handy for replacement. And here an unsourced quote floats into my mind, something about a dragon marauding a kingdom, and you want to know, after I slay the dragon, what I want to replace it with? My friend and I don't quite tiptoe around each other's politics, but neither do they clash head on - we don't see each other that often, and when we do, there's always a sense of feeling out the contours of our interface, me wondering if he's skewed too far right for us to see eye to eye, him wondering if I've slid too far in the other direction. But in fact, we always do meet in a spirit of accord, because my friend is the best kind of capitalist - one's who's deeply involved in the mechanations of the world, from development to public policy to politics (my friend was a speechwriter for Mayor Nagin before the flood), and who detests corruption and venality and excessive self-regard, and who is frighteningly intelligent and full of conviction, and who's motivated by the quest for the greater good through capitalism rather than cynical personal gain, and who genuinely believes that capitalism can be tailored to uplift the poor and sustain the constructed world. I think that if there were more capitalists like my friend, we wouldn't be in such a sorry state today. I find his enthusiam refreshing, I who spend so much time with political eschatologists; I feed off of his conviction, I who struggle with the ephermera of belief. Our political discussions aren't combative, because we seem to believe the same things in different ways; in fact, they're quite lively and enlightening, especially for me, who knows more of theory than hard policy. But there's always this intractable lump in the middle of them - we're friends who respond to each other in spirit, but have a tacit knowledge that, were ideology an actual war, we might one day have to take up arms against each other. Eventually, we talked ourselves into a corner. He bought me a burrito, and we talked about music instead.
NOCARSGO
Tam
Tam
Ecstatic Peace : 2006
[Buy It]
III. North Carolina is a red state, but the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area, where I live, is a splotch of the most lurid blue in that sea of blood. The cars all have multiple bumper stickers, expressing belief: No Blood for Oil, Impeach Bush, Invade Iraq? No! They crawl over the streets with their didactic payloads, going back and forth, up and down, exhaust shining like mirages in the air. This world is not built for belief. Sometimes I dream of a white state amid the red and blue, completing the flag - a state of nothingness and absence.
TO ABSENT VOTERS
The Lucksmiths
Spring a Leak
Matinee : 2007
[Buy It]
IV. I have a another friend who sells pot for a living. He hasn't participated in the taxable economy for years, spends his days playing complicated online war games on a computer that grows more powerful and sprawling every day. "Who are you voting for?" he asked me abruptly, when I saw him last week. He likes politics, he said, gets caught up in it, although he said it in the same way one might describe a relationship with sports, or reality television. I told him what I've been telling everyone who asks me lately, when I feel brave enough: for the first time in my adult life, I'm not sure if I'm going to vote. I tell him I'm no longer sure I care which rat is king of the maze. I tell him that whether I choose Coke or Pepsi in the blind taste test, I'm still getting bloated with brown bubbly sugar-water. At this point I'm rehearsing my speech but my mind has turned inward, into that unsolveable maze where it always goes when I think about voting lately - would not voting be a valid form of dissent, or would it be the sort of apathy and exhaustion that indicates a win for the oligarchs and tyrants? If I were to not vote, would this be a narrative of resistance, or submission? If I do vote, because I can't make a solid case to myself for not voting, will I be complicit in perpetuating the myth of representative democracy in America? And wouldn't not voting be the easiest, stupidest way to ease myself out of complicity, when almost every aspect of my life - most of them more difficult to change than my voting habits - screams of this complicity? If I'm not going to vote, then what am I going to do? Negation seems insufficient, action elusive. "Dude," he told me, apalled, "you've got to vote." And so we turned to the familiar discussion of candidates. It felt like taking a favorite walking route, familiar and well-worn, although instead of a leafy idyll, the scenery was more ravaged and dystopian. It would thrill me to see a female president, if only so that the sexist assholes in the press would stop calling her "Hillary," as if everyone can be on a first-name basis with this formidable politician because she has a vagina. But Clinton is a hardcore dynast, and dynasts frighten me. It would thrill me to see a black president, too, but Obama's message of "hope" and "change" is uncomfortably nebulous - change is coming regardless; I need to know a little more about what kind. On the level of policy, Clinton and Obama are nearly identical. Truth be told, I liked Edwards best for the Democrats, liked the transparent utility of his rhetoric and how he tended to resist political gamesmanship even when the press would try to coax him into it. But Edwards is just another white guy with a fancy-boy haircut (another friend of mine made a joke along these lines that infuriated me, as it so heedlessly emulated the pundits who spend all their time telling voters what superficial concerns - Edwards's hair, Clinton's perceived "coldness" - will decide the election for them, seldom mentioning policy or platform, in a self-perpetuating politics of pure surface). And white guys with good hair are not what this election is about. I told my friend that I'm more concerned with the Republican primary, since to vote Democratic is NC is to throw your vote away; that I'm less concerned with who gets into office than who doesn't. In this regard I like McCain, who is hawkish but also intelligent and apparently sane, and who is not an evangelical (evangelicals scare me more than hawks, and are mostly hawkish anyway). Romney is a pod person, and Huckabee is completley mad; at least McCain is a verifiable sentience, who knows as much of war's horrors as its glories. My friend and I traded the usual insights recylced from NPR and the New Yorker, as if they were baseball cards, made the usual stern proclamations, talked about how high national health care is on our list of priorities. Then I bought a bag and went home to read. On the way home, a snippet of speech on NPR caught my ear and somehow lifted my spirits: "Get your heart out of that tree, Reverend, and sing!"
DISSOLVE YOURSELF
Lucky Dragons
Widows
States Rights : 2006
[Buy It]
V. Stephen Millhauser is a writer of consistent obsessions: artificers, miniaturists, mechanical representations so subtle they blur the lines between machinery and life, mimetic slippages, the endless corridors of desire, gamesmanship at royal court...and most of all, castles. No one writes castles like Millhauser. He knows that every word is a magic word, every sentence an incantation (I say your name, and your head turns as if of its own accord; I say "hyacinth" and a purple bloom rushes into your mind; what is a spell if not a word that alters reality? and what word does not?). His castles are micro-cosmologies, circumscribed fields of play that contain the entire world in miniature (although sometimes, they aren't literal castles - the castle in Enchanted Night, for instance, is a suburban neighborhood at night, while the castle in his story "A Change in Fashion" is a woman's dress). Reading Millhauser is a confused sort of escapism - his worlds run precisely parallel to our own, but seem wholly remote from it, self-contained, at the same time. Last night, re-reading "Cathay," a glitteringly strange series of tableuax that seems like a warm-up for his more recent "King in the Tree," I felt myself submerging slowly, languidly, into Millhauser's world, which feels like sinking into a dark mirror, slowly, inexorably. "Cathay," like all of Millhauser's best work, admits nothing outside of its feverishly lucid walls. I read, and the world slipped away, another one, somehow realer and less substantial at once, growing up aroud me like an untended garden. But then I read the entry for "Dragons":
The dragons of Cathay dwell in caves in the mountains of the North and in the depths of the Eastern sea. The dragons rarely show themselves, but we are always aware of them, for the motions are responsible for storms at sea, great waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. A sea dragon rising from the waves can sink an entire fleet with one lash of its terrible tail. Sometimes a northern dragon will leave its cave and fly through the air, covering whole cities with its immense shadow. Those who have stood in the shadow of the dragon say it is accompanied by an icy wind. The tail of a dragon, glittering in the light of the sun, is said to be covered with blue and yellow scales. The head of a dragon is emerald and gold, its tongue scarlet, its eyes pits of fire. It is said that the venom which drips from its terrible jaws is hotter than boiling pitch. It is said that to see a dragon is to be changed forever. Some do not believe in dragons, because they have not seen them; it is like not believing in one's own death, because one has not yet died. I put the book down, because the spell was broken. I was thinking about the war again.
Labels: brian, war
posted by Brian
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008
COME HOME
Dismemberment Plan
Change
De Soto : 2001
[Buy It]
THE SCIENCE OF YOUR MIND
The Comas
Conductor
Yep Roc : 2004
[Buy It]
ANOTHER THOUGHT
Arthur Russell
Another Thought
Orange Mountain Music : 2006
[Buy It]
MOISTWORKS ESSAYTIME CORNER PRESENTS:
An excerpt from "Changes of Mind"
by Nicholson Baker
If your life is like my life, there are within it brief stretches, usually a week to ten days long, when your mind achieves a polished and freestanding coherence. The chanting tape-loops of poetry anthologies, the crumbly pieces of philosophy, the unsmelted barbarisms, the litter torn from huge collisions of abandoned theories - all this nomadic sub-orbital junk suddenly, like a milling street crowd in a movie-musical, re-forms itself into a proud, pinstriped, top-hatted commonwealth. Your opinions become neat and unruffleable. Every new toy design, ever abuse of privilege or gesture of philanthropy, every witnessed squabble at the supermarket checkout counter, is smoothly remade into evidence for five or six sociological truths. Puffed up enough to be charitable, you stop urging your point with twisting jabs of your fork; you happily concede winnable arguments to avoid injuring the feelings of your friends; your stock of proverbs from Samuel Johnson seems elegant and apt in every context; you are firm, you think fast, you offer delicately phrased advice.
Then one Thursday, out on a minor errand, you inexplicably come to a new conclusion ("Keynesian economics is spent"), and it - like the fetching plastic egg that cruel experimenters have discovered will cause a mother bird to thrust her own warm, speckled ones from the nest - upsets your equilibrium. The community of convictions flies apart, you sense unguessed contradictions, there are disavowals, frictions, second thoughts, please for further study; you stare in renewed perplexity out the laundromat's plate-glass window, while your pulped library card dries in a tumbling shirt pocket behind you.
Such alert intermissions happen only infrequently: most of the time we are in some inconclusive phases of changing our minds about many, if not all, things. We have no choice. Our opinions, gently nudged by circumstance, revise themselves under cover of inattention. We tell them, in a steady voice, No, I'm not interested in a change at present. But there is no stopping opinions. They don't care about whether we want to hold them or not; they do what they have to do.
And graver still, we are sometimes only minimally aware of just which new beliefs we have adopted. If one of the wire services were able to supply each subscriber wit a Personal Opinion Printout, delievered with the paper every morning, it would be a real help: then we could monitor our feelings about Pre-Raphaelite furniture, or the influences of urbanization on politeness, or the wearing of sunglasses indoors, or the effect of tort language on traditions of trust, as we adjusted our thoughts about them week by week, the way we keep an eye on lightly traded over-the-counter stocks. Instead, we stride into a discussion with our squads of unexamined opinions innocently at our heels - and, discovering that, yes, we do feel strongly about water-table rights, or unmanned space exploration, or the harvesting of undersea sponges, say, we grab the relevant opinion and, without dress rehearsals, fling it out into audibility ("Fly, you mother"), only to discover, seconds later, its radical inadequacy.
Nicholson Baker
THE SIZE OF THOUGHTS
Vintage : 1996
[Buy it]Labels: baker, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, January 21, 2008
CHECK THE RHIME
A Tribe Called Quest
The Low End Theory
Jive : 1991
[Buy It]
GIMME THE LOOT
The Notorious B.I.G.
Ready to Die
Arista : 1994
[Buy It]
IGNORANT SHIT
Jay-Z
American Gangster
Roc-A-Fella : 2007
[Buy It]
CHINESE NEW YEAR
Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
Re-Up Gang/Star Trak : 2006
[Buy It]
I'M ME
Lil Wayne
The Leak EP
Cash Money Records : 2007
[Buy It]
In terms of genre evolution, hip-hop is the hare to rock's tortoise. In its brief tenure - let's call it thirty years, give or take - hip-hop has undergone more fundamental sea-changes than rock has arguably seen in its longer life-span. There are numerous factors at play in hip-hop's rampant mutation: its modular construction and all-inclusive purview lend it a lot of flexibility, and it was born in an age when the very passage of time seemed to be speeding up recklessly. "Golden Age" rappers like A Tribe Called Quest were acutely aware of hip-hop's mercurial nature: much of their music was taken up with deifying old-school masters whose reign, while parsed in fog-shroudedly remote, creation-myth tones, had been put out to pasture just a few years before. This better-days nostalgia seems in retrospect to have been directly predicated against an on-rushing future that, if it wasn't inevitable, feels that way from our current vantage.
Did Tribe intuit that, even as they were on top of the world, they were trembling on the verge of obsolesence? In the early 90s, west coast G-funk, with its sinister yet breezy synths, and east coast crime rap, with its gunshot snares and minimal arrangements, would topple Native Tongues-style Afrocentric jazz-hop from market supremacy. It's tempting to imagine that the narrative of crime rap continues in an unbroken line to the present day, but the truth is that crime rap itself has undergone fundamental changes, which go beyond superficial style and regional sub-genres. There is always a trend in creative movements, once they've been developed enough to be crystallized, for tropes to come unstuck from what they signify - in rock, we might look to "baby"s, "come on"s and "girl"s - ejaculations that need no longer connect to any narrative enacted within a given song, but which, through sheer repetition, have become a sort of musical filler or genre-identifying shorthand. At this stage of development, the conceptual transforms into the purely aesthetic. And when I listen to modern crime rap, I wonder if it's reached this stage in its development, as its relationship to the violence that is fundamental to the genre seems to be verging on the existential - violence not as a mechanism within a greater social framework, but as a state of nature.
The Notorious B.I.G. was crucial in laying the template for New York crime rap as it would develop over the course of the 90s. Yet he seems fundamentally different than the abstracted crime rappers of today. Biggie reveled in violence, to be sure. But his violent acts were couched in a context that explained them, even if it didn't quite exonerate him. The eruptions of violence in stick-up kid anthem "Gimme the Loot" (which, somewhat ironically, samples Tribe's "Scenario" remix)were strung together with sturdy ligaments of cause and effect. Here's Biggie (taking a schizophrenic two-voice approach that has misled many to believe there's a guest rapper on the track) spelling out very clearly the impetus for his actions:
When it's time to eat a meal, I rob and steal
'Cause mom duke aint giving me shit
So for the bread and butter I leave niggaz in the gutter
And later:
Oh shit! The cops! Be cool, fool
They aint gonna roll up, all they want is fucking doughnuts
So why the fuck he keep lookin? I guess to get his life tooken
I just came home, ain't trying to see central booking
Oh shit, now he's looking in my face
You better haul ass 'cause I ain't with no fucking chase
So lace up your boots, 'cause I'm about to shoot
A true motherfucker going out for the loot
So there it is. Despite the fantastical quality of Biggie's violent urges and his unreptenent nihilism ("I wouldn't give a fuck if you're pregnant/ Give me the baby ring and the #1 Mom pendant"), his was an era when it was still necessary to make a case for outlaw-hood, and he makes that case in no uncertain terms: Stealing is a pragmatic solution to hunger and material lack, and cop-killing is a pragmatic solution to wanting to stay the fuck out of jail. There are still plenty of rappers who explore the social and cultural forces around urban violence - off the dome, I'm thinking of Pharoahe Monch, in songs like "When the Gun Draws," and Ghostface, one of our last great storytelling rappers. But more commonly, we see rappers interpreting crime-talk as a genre trope that requires no explanation or justification or even context - rappers no longer kill for a clearly-defined reason, they just kill, as inevitably as rockers pay homage to the most ambiguous babies and guuuuuuurls. Jay-Z, with his usual bulletproof pomposity, addressed this shift from meaning to form in last year's "Ignorant Shit":
This is that ignorant shit you like
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick, plus ice
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you love
Nigga, fuck, shit, maricon, puta, and drugs
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you need
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick plus weed
I'm only trying to give you what you want
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, you like it, don't front
Hova's more concerned with groupthink here than with the denaturing of meaning in crime rap - "Ignorant Shit" was born into the age of Young Jeezy, rap's great anarcho-fascist, whose obliterative presence is most saliently summarized in one part of his song "Hypnotize": "Now I command you niggaz to get money," in a bassy, implacable voice-of-god. But he does touch on the idea that crime rap's signifiers have ossified into something static. Compare Biggie's deeply causal crime rap to something more modern, like Clipse, and you'll find a fundamental layer of meaning to be absent from the latter. In "Chinese New Year," there's no context, no backstory, no justification - the killers simply show up at your door, masked and armed, somehow gleeful in the sheer act of violence, which has become a end instead of a means - Biggie was like a desperado, but Clipse more resembles a dark malefic force of nature flitting inexorably about the periphery of a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Lil Wayne might be the greatest rapper at work today because he's most fully understood, perhaps just intuitively, this semiotic shift in rap music, and most fully avails himself of the malleability it entails. He's taken violence, drugs and theft into his vocubulary while fully recognizing them as hollow ciphers that can only be useful as guideposts in a hermetic celebration of self. This allows him recourse to dizzying pop cultural pastiche, transitioning seamlessly from Dwayne Wayne name-drops to belligerent threats, or dropping non-sequiturs like "When I was five, my favorite movie was the Gremlins/ That ain't got shit to do with this, I just thought that I should mention" amid his crime-talk. Of course, Wayne's tacitly acknowledging that the crime-talk itself "ain't got shit to do with this" either - only Wayne and Wayne's greatness truly signify in Wayne's world. His new single "I'm Me" begins with an awe-inspiring ground-clearing:
Un-fuckin'-believable
Lil Wayne's the president
Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em
Even if they celibate
Notice how the temetic opening sally situates the song in a Wayne-centric world: he's not running for president, he's not saying he *should be* president - he *is* the president, point blank. It really brooks no argument. Notice how "fuck 'em" attaches itself to no specific group and boasts no specific motivation - like Clipse's crime scenario, it's a universal stance that posits the self against all comers, the struggle being enacted not between a corrupt culture and one of its disenfrachised denizens, but the known (the self) against the unknown (the other, i.e. everything).
(If you'll allow me a brief tangent, there's a lot of rad stuff going on in this song that doesn't relate to this post, most notably the abrupt yet organic-feeling shifts in tone that Wayne's free-associative style so often creates. A stupid-funny pop culture jibe ("I know the game is crazy/ It's more crazy than it's ever been/ I'm married to that crazy bitch/ Call me Kevin Federline") leads into a larger-than-life boast: "The ground shall break when they bury him." Yet here, Wayne seems to catch himself off-guard, as if his own line suddenly opened up a yawning awareness of mortality under his feet. "Bury him?" he asks, in a tone of voice that indicates he's startled himself, "I know one day they gotta bury him/ Better lock my casket tight baby so I don't let the devil in," and here the punchliney flow he's favored so far gives way to a malleable, urgent cadence, as if his own acknowledgement of limited time has renewed his hunger.)
Anyway, the chorus of "I'm Me" is perhaps the most honest, endgamey manifesto rap has ever seen, one that seems to perfectly summarize a rap climate where violence is portrayed less as a social condition and more as a natural side-effect of late-capitalism's doctrines of competition, conspicuous consumption, and self-aggrandization. It is a perfect distillation of this trend - the diminishment of meaning, the wax of the hermetic ego - and it goes a little something like this:
Bitch, I'm me, I'm me, I'm me, I'm me
Baby, I'm me, So who you, You're not me, You're not me
And I know that ain't fair, but I don't care
I'm a motherfuckin' Cash Money millionaire
I know that ain't fair, but I don't care
I'm a motherfuckin' Cash Money millionaire Labels: brian, rap
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, January 07, 2008
BIG BROTHER
Kanye West
Graduation
Roc-A-Fella : 2007
[Buy It]
In November of 2006, I posted about one of my favorite rap micro-genres: the conflicted mentor homage. In that post I focused on The Game's "Doctor's Advocate." In 2007, Kanye West checked in with his own take on the form, "Big Brother." Game's effort was almost unbearably poignant - he sounded like it physically pained him to externalize his insecurities vis-a-vis his mentor Dr. Dre, yet was compelled to do so lest the internal pressure rend him apart. Listening to "Doctor's Advocate" was accompanied by a creeping feeling of anxiety - a voyeuristic sense of watching someone's ego come helplessly unraveled in plain view. But Kanye is a different kind of creature - there's no sense of difficult revelation in "Big Brother," because this kind of emotional showmanship is simply what Kanye does. Nevertheless, Graduation is by far the least torturned of Kanye's three albums - it's his on-top-of-the-world record: he's comfy, rich, unquestionably successful, contentedly sipping expensive champagne and shopping in Italy. And so while "Big Brother" lacks the sense of desperation that undergirds "Doctor's Advocate," it is rife with poignancy. It's as if West has to invent battles he's in danger of losing so he'll be left with something - anything - to win.
One wonders if it's a coincidence that Kanye's troubled mentor song, like Game's, is couched in a prettily elegiac J.R. Rotem beat - regardless, this guy knows his way around musical pathos; his surging synths and weary rock chords here are a perfect match for Kanye's blend of behind-the-music nostalgia and wheedling interpersonal parsing. Most of us feel like figurants in our own lives, and part of Kanye's allure is that he's his own Odysseus - a hero who can see the epic proportions of his own life story. As such, it's appropriate that "Big Brother" is framed as an epic biopic by its chorus:
My big brother was Big's brother
Used to be Dame and Big's brother
Who was hip hop's brother?
Who was No I.D's friend?
No I.D my mentor
Now let the story begin
There's a lot of story packed into these lines: The "big brother" is Jay-Z, who refused to sign Kanye as an artist to Roc-A-Fella for some time, not knowing what to do with this anomalous, extravagently prolix suburban rapper, keeping him as a behind-the-scenes beatsmith. Jay-Z came up with the legendary Notorious B.I.G., arguably the greatest rapper of all time, and "Dame" is Damon Dash, with whom Jay-Z founded the rap titan Roc-A-Fella. Jay and Dame were friends with No I.D., a Chicago-based producer who taught Kanye his trade. But the important thing here isn't the details, it's the lineage - by couching his story in this temporal sequence, Kanye ekes his way into the dynasty he craves, drawing a not-quite-logical line between himself and the late Christopher Wallace. But elbowing your way into a dynasty is not necessarily a shortcut to confidence in your position in it, and Kanye spends the rest of the song alternating lauding Jay-Z's accomplishments (and tacity, slyly, his own) while torturously combing through their personal interactions for slights both real and imagined - like the aftermath of a blind date, where your first instict is to figure out, by this same kind of obscure signal-reading, whether or not the person liked you, before you even begin to consider whether or not you liked them.
Like all good bildungsromans, this one starts small - it's the "Hard Knock Life Tour," Kanye's still one of the million kids at the mall yelling out "Jigga!" He's done some bulletproof beats for Jay but still can't get him to take him seriously as a rapper, doesn't even know how to step to him:
Now he won't even step to his idol to say hi
Standing there like a mime
Let the chance pass by
Back of my mind he could change your life
With all these beats I did at least let him hear it
At least you could brag to your friends back at the gig
But he got me out my mama crib
Then he help me get my mama a crib
The verse closes on a triumphant note, but there's the sense that much has been elided in between; Kanye's outsider feelings have been glossed over but not addressed. In short, this is the airbrushed version. Unsatisfied with the artifice, Kanye loops back in the second verse, pushing toward the reconcilation that comes from the airing of hard truths. "I'd play my song in that old back room / He'd bob his head and say damn, oh, that's you?" Notice how adeptly that second line encapsulates Kanye's predicament - it's not as if Jay-Z flat-out dislikes his music, which would at least offer a resolution. He's just indifferent to it; Kanye can't get him to really listen, and it keeps him floating in some indeterminate median, like that maddening relationship period where nothing's automatic, and everything revolves around a pragmatic decision to stay together or break up. I mean, this is a tough spot for Kanye. How would you feel if you'd given your idol beats that were largely responsible for the success of his album (in this case, The Blueprint), but then, when he's doing a show at Madison Sqaure, not only did you "not get the chance to spit it," but Carleen told you you could "buy two tickets?" Ouch. "I guess big brother was thinking a little different," Kanye understates, "kept little brother at bay, at a distance." Kanye comforts himself with his success - "Big brother saw me at the bottom of the totem / Now I'm at the top and everybody on the scrotum" - but comfort is not resolution.
"Have you ever walked in the shadow of a giant?" Kanye asks at the start of the third verse, where all the cards finally fall face up on the table. There is a frustrated challenge - "New jack city gotta keep my brother / But to be number one, I'ma beat my brother!" - and an accusation: "I told Jay I did a song with Coldplay / Next thing I know he got a song with Coldplay." It's as if his frustration at not being able to connect with Jay, a father-figure despite the sibling rivalry talk, has led him to lash out blindly, and things take a turn for the Oedipal. Kanye doesn't settle his dilemma in this song, he simply palpates it, moving it around to try and organize it into some recognizable pattern. And he ends it with a modified chorus that contains a prescription so obviously self-serving, so desperately needy, that one is astonished he can say it with a straight face. But saying the unsayable without self-consciousness has been Kanye's m.o. from the start:
My big brother was Big's brother
So here's a few words from your kid brother
If you admire somebody you should go ahead and tell 'em
People never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em
A ideal in my eyes, God of the game
Heart of the city, Roc-A-Fella chain
Never be the same, never be another
Number 1 young Hov also my big brother
Labels: brian, rap
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
TOTALLY SECULAR NON-SPECIFIC HOLIDAY MIX
A gift from your friends at Moistworks, mixed by Brian
01: Hot Chip: (JUST LIKE WE) BREAKDOWN (DFA REMIX)
02: Justice: D.A.N.C.E. (HOLLERTRONIX REMIX)
03: Feist: MY MOON, MY MAN (BOYS NOIZE REMIX)
04: Pantha Du Prince: SATURN STROBE
05: Gui Boratto: XILO
06: Stardust: MUSIC SOUNDS BETTER WITH YOU
07: A-trak: WAMPERCYCLE
08: Supermayer: THE ART OF LETTING GO
09: Matthew Dear: NEIGHBORHOODS
10: Sally Shapiro: I'LL BE BY YOUR SIDE
(For best results, keep tracks in order, and set your iPod/iTunes/CD burner/etc. for gapless playback.)
Or, download the entire mix as a zip file.
Happy whatever you choose to celebrate, everyone. Enjoy the time off from work, if you've got it, and thanks for your faithful readership, your thoughtful comments (except for you, Anonymous), and your general willingness to listen to us rant and take our music. We'll see you in 2008, if not sooner.Labels: brian, holidays
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
GOING TO CALIFORNIA
Irene Kral
Gilles Peterson Digs America, Vol. 2
Luv N Haight : 2007
[Buy It]
CALIFORNIA LOVE
2Pac
All Eyez on Me
Death Row : 1996
[Buy It]
JUNE ON THE WEST COAST
Bright Eyes
Letting Off the Happiness
Saddle Creek : 1998
[Buy It]
In October, I took a much-needed 3-week vacation in California. My partner Ashley and I flew into San Luis Obispo, where she's from, and borrowed her father's car. We camped our way up the coast, all the way to Arcata, in Humbolt county. Then we camped our way back down, making tangential trips inland. It was more than a vacation - it was an experiment in radical freedom, one that I needed very badly after a grinding, monotonous summer filled with work, a summer that mostly passed me by. It seems as if all vacations should be, by nature, such experiments, but I've been on many, mostly as a child with my family, that were not: Often, when we go on vaction, we trade one restrictive schedule for another; we bring the same mindset of accomplishment that shackles us to our work to our interstice of freedom. But on this trip we got away from all that, gave ourselves over to the rhythm of the road and the basic imperatives of survival-- find shelter, build fire, prepare food. A simplification of options and a lack of goals opens the way for palpable experience. It felt like a dream as it was happening - all the more so because as we tread the landscape, always with the Pacific intuited if not seen to the West, Southern California burned and burned - and it feels like more of a dream now, sweet and distant and completely unreal. The spirit of clarity one can attain outside of one's routines is such an ephemeral thing, hard to hold onto after the fact, sand sliding through a hand. Already, I've forgotten so much, like the names and faces of people we met, the names of towns we passed through, exactly how the sun looked on the water as we wound through the cliffs of Big Sur. But for everything I've forgotten, there's something I haven't, through which I can access that spirit of freedom - the memory and possibility of it, if not the palpable reality. I remember a great cliff in Yosemite that looked like a sleeping alligator. I remember a gully in a Redwood forest, with canted walls of stone and fern, cantilevered battlements of brush and eucalyptus, cold water trickling down from unseen elevations, great trees felled like medieval battering rams. I remember tiny mushrooms holding fast against a stream. I remember walking over the fallen teeth of dragons, and waiting for a herd of sentinel-elks to finish patrolling the road. I remember the constant sense of bears padding, invisible and implacable, through the darkened forest. I remember children dressed as animals conjuring iridescent bubbles from their hoops. I remember sprawling naked on the deserted shore of Shaver Lake, blinded by the pale fire strafing the placid water. I remember a spider levitating against a silver skein of clouds, a seagull nailed to the raw gray sky over the beach at Arcata, crab husks and sculptural driftwood scattered below. I remember a crow on a post presiding over a cenacle of sunning elephant seals in San Simeon - their gentle human faces and stuffed-sausage bodies - how they spooned each other, yawned and scratched their noses with finny hands, idly scooped cooling sand onto their velvet backs. I remember standing on a bluff and capturing the moon in the meniscus of my lens, quivering. I remember meeting a leaf that lived on a stone. I remember playing a harp that had just been born, sawdust stinging in my nose, and I remember serenading a campfire burning providential wood with a small, cold singing bowl. I remember reading Eleni Sikelianos, Tony Tost, and Carlos Castaneda, from whom I learned how to turn my head into a crow. I remember peanut butter and bread and cheese and chocolate, strong black coffee in an earthenware cup, night-cooled pinot noir from the bottle. I remember my mouth being wet with the taste of apples, hair dense with ash. I remember falling asleep under Orion's bow and waking up inside a temple of bright, burnished brass. I remember cheweing a thimbleful of tubers and watching the forest come alive. I remember clambering over stream-slicked roots and polished stones, drinking through the soles of my feet, earth under my nails. I remember learning that butterflies have eyes on their genitals, and that bears can open a car like a tin can. I remember writing certain phrases in my notebook - "wolf intervals," "spooky action at a distance" - without understanding precisely why. I remember a boy with green hair showing me a tilted cabin where gravity goes to get high on secret mineral deposits or alien spores. I remember standing at a forty-five degree angle, growing taller or shorter at will, walking up the wall. I remember acres of recreational vehicles, great metal sphinxes stewing in pools of their own light and heat and excrement - unslumbering insides that follow you around. I remember pulling a corner of the night around myself like a cloak and feeling like a child trying on his father's suit. I remember a voice inside my head that sounded remarkably like my own, and a dream in which I recognized my own hands.Labels: brian, california
posted by Brian
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Monday, December 10, 2007
WARRIOR
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Show Your Bones
Interscope : 2006
[Buy It]
ACADEMY FIGHT SONG
Mission of Burma
Signals, Calls and Marches
Ace of Hearts : 1981
[Buy It]
I DON'T NEED YOU (TO SET ME FREE)
Grinderman
Grinderman
ANTI- : 2007
[Buy It]
Now, I'm a very serious reader. I read serious books in a serious way. But if we're being honest, I have to admit that I have a deep and abiding fondness for sword-and-sorcery stuff. I often get my fix sneakily, via books established as literature, but I don't think that it's any coincidence that some of my favorite books are rooted in mythology, folklore, magical Shakespearean drama, etc. - Donald Barthelme's The King maps Arthurian legend onto modern warfare, John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is grounded in Greek mythology and the 1001 Arabian Nights, Steven Millhauser's The King in the Tree retells the tragic romance of Tristan and Ysolt in wonderfully lucid and hermetic prose, David Foster Wallace's Infinte Jest is a postmodern Hamlet set in a tennis academy.
Despite this affinity, I've never really been interested in straight fantasy novels, even less so in sci-fi (although I've recently discovered Neal Stephenson's scarily prescient 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and holy cow, is it ever good - like a Pynchon novel written by a Mark Leyner with an attention span). I tend to slake my fantasy jones through other, more pictorial channels. I used to be way into the Final Fantasy series of video games, for instance, although in retrospect I think this had as much to do with my affinity for list-making, inventory management, and stat-building - this self-replenishing system of incentives and rewards that are all the more pleasing for being meaningless outside of themselves - as it does with my fantasy-adventure streak.
I also love graphic novels, particularly Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, which is just about the pinnacle of smart, engaging, historically-rooted fantasy with a heavy visual component. But beyond Sandman, I don't even read a lot of fantasy comics, and I blame Gaiman for this - no one else in comics seem to do it as well. (Bill Willingham for instance, who's supposed to be some kind of spiritual heir to Gaiman, is terrible - too self-consciously clever and ironic. Gaiman can be both of these things, but he seldom lets them get in the way of whatever classically-proportioned story he's telling, while reading Willingham feels like being constantly nudged in the ribs, like oh these stories so banal but what are you going to do.)
Anyway, this pickiness on my part means I go through sizable portions of my life without anything of substance to nourish my hunger for resonant, well-built fantasy, and so it was with great excitement that I recently discovered that I fucking love Conan the Barbarian graphic novels: both the 1970s Marvel Comics series, The Chronicles of Conan by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, and the more recent Dark Horse seres, Conan, by Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord. I picked one up at the library on a whim and was instantly immersed in its rich world, in a way that I've learned means a burgeoning obsession for me (when I find something I really like, I tend to read all of it I can get my hands on in one long stretch). The writing in these volumes in wonderfully pulpy - absolutely purple, in a self-aware and genre-suited way - and the artwork, especially Nord's, is fantastic. But I think there's more than this to my affinity for Conan, and it has to do specifically with what the character respresents. But before we get to that, a brief history:
Conan, an itinerant barbarian from the land of Cimmeria who through a long series of adventures would eventually become a king, was created by the Texas-based writer Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s, making his first appearence in Weird Tales magazine. The character, Howard wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith (he also carried on a long correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, debating the tensions between civilization and barbarism that informed so much of his work), "is simply a combination of a number of men I have known...Some mechanism in my subconscious took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil-field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I have come in contact with." Howard died in 1936, having published many Conan stories in magazines, but never seeing them collected into the paperbacks with terrifically lurid Frank Frazetta paintings on their covers you always see at secondhand bookshops. I haven't read any of Howard's original stories yet, just their retellings in the graphic novels - I still kind of balk at the idea of Conan with no pictures. But just through the graphic novels, I've isolated three characteristics of Conan and the world he inhabits that excite my imagination and my intellect, characteristics that, underlying the escapist fantasy, I find admirable and instructive.
I. Conan's primary motivation is curiousity, and he lives in a world with untapped frontiers.
It might seem that, as a barbarian, Conan's primary motivation would be pillaging, and this is true to an extent. Conan's individual adventures tend to involve getting tangled up with various supernatural entities in his pursuit of wealth. But it was more than wealth that compelled the young barbarian to leave Cimmeria in the first place - he wanted to see the world, he craved the unknown. As a mercenary, there are plenty of ways for Conan to acquire gold, but he tends to eschew the safe bets in favor of jobs that entail some sort of adventure. Story after story finds him accepting wildly dangerous missions (when, being basically invincible, he could just take what he wants from people who aren't ten-thousand-year-old malevolent sorcerers) on the premise that he "hasn't seen the city of Ophir yet" or some variation thereof. Conan, in other words, has his priorities straight - he needs to make a living, but he's never willing to sacrifice his quality of life to do so. In the modern parlance, he works to live instead of living to work, and this uncivilized brute has a deeper sense of curiousity - a greater lust for life ("with gigantic melancholies...and gigantic mirth") - than the effete cognoscenti whose ways baffle him so when he goes reaving through their walled cities. And while in our world, you can travel almost anywhere in a day, and research the place on the Internet first, Conan's world is raw and untapped: you have to triumph over the land to traverse it, and there's nothing to prepare you for what you'll find over the next hill - cities with their own architecture, gods, languages, magics, unmapped and utterly unknown. Howard's sympathies, like ours as we read, are clearly with those who move through these cities as they traverse the world, not with those cloistered in their walls, who are figurants in the real business of living, which is Conan's business - in this context, civilization seems like a paltry and point-missing thing indeed. This frontier spirit is a staple of fantasy, but I think it's more than nostalgic escapism - it's important for us to remember that inquisitory spirit of adventure in a world that seems increasingly circumscribed, and that knowing the population and customs of China isn't the same as knowing the land.
II. Conan is an anarchist.
Some of the best Conan stories involve his adventures in civilized society. Conan comes from a lawless land, without legal codes and hierarchies, where each lives by their own code, not by institutionally-conferred protections. Conan doesn't recognize the sanctity of private property - he's a thief, because he can be, because people who've surrendered their wills to the rule of law are no longer self-sufficient enough to stop him. Conan's stealing isn't necessarily admirable because it's motivated by self-interest (although within some modern anarchist discourse communities, it's possible to build a strong case for stealing from institutions as a socially and politically positive act), but it represents his realistic approach to the world - materials exist, and can be taken if one wants them, unless a greater force intervenes. Conan's world is unmediated by conceptual debris. But more saliently, he simply doesn't recognize the legal authority of men - or more accurately, he recognizes it as something artificial and constructed, a power that is prone to corruption, and which only exists insofar as the subjugated give it credence. When I think about our modern ideologues, statesmen and cops, I'm less amazed by their desire to consolidate power over us - the drive toward power is easy to understand - than I am by our collective willingness to give it to them, simply because they want it. Recognizing the falsity of this kind of power, Conan refuses to comply (this is harder for us, because we're scared of discomfort and death, and willing to trade certain freedoms to forestall them, while for Conan, the surrender of freedom is discomfort and death). In the story "The Temple of Kallian Publico," Conan is apprehended by city officials while attempting to steal a relic from the temple, where a murder, which Conan did not commit, has also taken place. The corrupt city officials immediately attempt to bring Conan into rational legal proceedings, yet Conan quickly evaporates their authority simply by refusing to acknowledge it. During the inquisition, Conan doesn't lie - when asked why he broke into the temple if not to kill the priest, he answers tersely, "to steal," and if he had killed the priest, one suspects he would have readily admitted to it, with sword drawn- or even try to defend himself against the murder charge. He simply plays along with the investigation in a bemused way, waiting, as the city officials make threats and accusations, for some definitive moment when action - fight or flee - would be called for. "Save your bullying for the fools who fear you," he says. Conan reminds us that authority is always provisional and often corrupt. Along these lines, Howard's correspondence with Lovecraft contains two passages of the highest interest: "I note that some indignation is being expressed over the country in regard to the detestable police practice of grilling prisoners. It's about time. I think police harshness is mainly because the people have become so cowed by the heel of the law, that they do not resent or resist any kind of atrocity inflicted on them by men wearing tin badges." And: "If people seem bitter against the enforcers of the law, it is but necessary to remember that perhaps they have some slight reason. When I resent things as I've mentioned, I don't consider myself a criminal. It isn't law enforcement I resent, but the vandals that parade under the cloak of law. Condoning everything a man does, simply because he happens to wear brass buttons, is something I have no patience with."
III. Conan's inborn moral imperatives often trump his social conditioning.
Conan lives in a world where might makes right. His native Cimmeria is a harsh, lawless land of warrior-competition, where one takes what one wants without regard for others. Of course, there's a tacit warrior code of honor by which Conan abides - don't stab a man in the back, don't betray your friends - but of greater interest are the times when the barbarian will put aside his immediate self-interest and act upon his instinct for righteousness instead, which seems to be out of step with his cultural conditioning for self-preservation. A notable example occurs in the very first Conan story Thomas and Windsor-Smith created for Marvel in 1970, "The Coming of Conan." If finds Conan, still a "mighty-thewed youth fresh from his first taste of battle at Venarium - and become a mercenary with this raiding-band from the nearby borders of wind-swept Aesgaard," surveying a battle between the Aesir of Aesgaard and the dishonorable reavers of the Vanir. Three Vanir set upon a single Aesir warrior - an unfair fight. "That bearded Aesir," says Conan, "besieged by a trio of yapping foes! No affair of mine. I've done my day's work for Aesir gold." Yet, the matter seemingly settled, Conan keeps pondering: "Still, why should one lion die...and three jackals live? By Crom! They should not," leaping decisively from his perch to intervene, "and, by Crom - they shall not!" Conan's willingness to let his moral instinct guide him when cultural norms seem insufficient is the third aspect of this fictional barbarian that make him such a counterintutive role-model.Labels: brian, conan
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, November 26, 2007
B.I.B.L.E. (BASIC INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE LEAVING EARTH
The GZA
Liquid Swords
Geffen : 1995
[Buy It]
MOISTWORKS STORYTIME CORNER PRESENTS:
An excerpt from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
by Carlos Castaneda
Simon & Schuster : 1968
[Buy It]
Sunday, 15 April 1962
As I was getting ready to leave, I decided to ask him once more about the enemies of a man of knowledge. I argued that I could not return for some time, and it would be a good idea to write down what he had to say and then think about it while I was away.
He hesitated for a while, but then began to talk.
'When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize, for he knows nothing of the hardship of learning.
'He slowly begins to learn - bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield.
FEAR
Clint Mansell & Kronos Quartet
Requiem for a Dream OST
Nonesuch : 2000
[Buy It]
'And thus he has tumbled upon the first of his natural enemies: Fear! A terrible enemey - treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will have put an end to his quest.'
'What will happen to the man if he runs away in fear?'
'Nothing happens to him except that he will never learn. He will never become a man of knowledge. He will perhaps be a bully or a harmless, scared man; at any rate, he will be a defeated man. His first enemy will have put an end to his cravings.'
'And what can he do to overcome his fear?'
'The answer is very simple. He must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His intent becomes stronger. Learning is no longer a terrifying task. When this joyful moment comes, the man can say without hesitation that he has defeated his first natural enemy.'
'Does it happen at once, don Juan, or little by little?'
'It happens little by little, and yet the fear is vanquished suddenly and fast.'
'But won't the man be afraid again if something new happens to him?'
'No. Once a man has vanquished fear, he is free from it for the rest of his life because, instead of fear, he has acquired clarity - a clarity of mind which erases fear. By then a man knows his desires; he knows how to satisfy those desires. He can anticipate the new steps of learning, and a sharp clarity surrounds everything. The man feels that nothing is concealed.
A MOMENT OF CLARITY
Jay-Z
The Black Album
Def Jam : 2003
[Buy It]
'And thus he has encountered his second enemy: Clarity! That clarity of mind, which is so hard to obtain, dispels fear, but also blinds.
'It forces the man never to doubt himself. It gives him the assurance he can do anything he pleases, for he sees clearly into everything. And he is courageous because he is clear, and he stops at nothing because he is clear. But all that is a mistake; it is like something incomplete. If the man yields to this make-believe power, he has succumbed to his second enemy and will fumble with learning. He will rush when he should be patient, or he will be patient when he should rush. And he will fumble with learning until he winds up incapable of learning anything more.'
'What becomes of a man who is defeated in that way, don Juan? Does he die as a result?'
'No, he doesn't die. His second enemy has just stopped him cold from trying to become a man of knowledge; instead, the man may turn into a buoyant warrior, or a clown. Yet the clarity for which he has paid so dearly will never change to darkness and fear again. He will be clear as long as he lives, but he will no longer learn, or yearn for, anything.'
'But what does he have to do to avoid being defeated?'
'He must do what he did with fear: he must defy his clarity and use it only to see, and wait patiently and measure carefully before takng new steps; he must think, above all, that his clarity is almost a mistake. And a moment will come when he will understand that his clarity was only a point before his eyes. And thus he will have overcome his second enemy, and will arrive at a position where nothing can harm him any more. This will not be a mistake. It will not be only a point before his eyes. It will be true power.
SUPERPOWERS
Dismemberment Plan
Change
De Soto : 2001
[Buy It]
He will know at this point that the power he has been pursuing for so long is finally his. He can do with it whatever he pleases. His ally is at his command. His wish is the rule. He sees all that is around him. But he has also come across his third enemy: Power!
'Power is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible. He commands; he begins by taking calculated risks, and ends in making rules, because he is a master.
'A man at this stage hardly notices his third enemy closing in on him. And suddenly, without knowing, he will certainly have lost the battle. His enemy will have turned him into a cruel, capricious man.'
'Will he lose his power?'
'No, he will never lose his clarity or his power.'
'What then will distinguish him from a man of knowledge?'
'A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power.'
'Is the defeat by any of these enemies a final defeat?'
'Of course it is final. Once one of these enemies overpowers a man there is nothing he can do.'
'Is it possible, for instance, that the ma who is defeated by power may see his error and mend his ways?'
'No. Once a man gives in he is through.'
'But what if he is temporarily blinded by power, and then refuses it?'
'That means the battle is still on. That means he is still trying to become a man of knowledge. A man is defeated only when he no longer tries, and abandons himself'
'But then, don Juan, it is possible that a man may abandon himself to fear for years, but finally conquer it.'
'No, that is not true. If he gives in to fear he will never conquer it, because he will shy away from learning and never try again. But if he tries to learn for years in the midst of his fear, he will eventually conquer it because he will never have really abandoned himself to it.'
'How can he defeat his third enemy, don Juan?'
'He has to defy it, deliberately. He has to come to realize the power he has seemingly conquered is in reality never his. He must keep himself in line at all times, handling carefully and faithfully all that he has learned. If he can see that clarity and power, without his control over himself, are worse than mistakes, he will reach a point where everything is held in check. He will know then when and how to use his power. And thus he will have defeated his third enemy.
FINAL SLEEP
Svarte Greiner
Knive
Type : 2006
[Buy It]
'The man will be, by then, at the end of his journey of learning, and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his enemies: Old age! This enemy is the cruellest of all, the one he won't be able to defeat completely, but only fight away.
'This is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of mind - a time when all his power is in check, but also the time when he has an unyielding desire to rest. If he gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will cut him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and his knowledge.
'But if the man sloughs off his tiredness, and lives his fate through, he can then be called a man of knowledge, if only for the brief moment when he succeeds in fighting off his last, invincible enemy. That moment of clarity, power, and knowledge is enough.Labels: books, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, November 19, 2007
SCATTERED SHAVINGS
Drawing Voices
Drawing Voices
Hydrahead : 2007
[Buy It]
REVEALING THE COMMAS
Michael Harrison
Revelation
Cantaloupe : 2007
[Buy It]
MERGANSER (HOODED)
Feltbattery
It Had Wings
Migration Media : 2007
[Buy It]
Sometimes I like to get really high and try to read books. I say "try" because I'm seldom able to do so - more often, a sentence or two will comprise a feedback loop in my head, a current guided by the relentless, interior annularity of pot-thought that becomes rich with the mineral silt of whatever else happens to be rattling around in my mind. I don't get much reading done this way, but find the activity profoundly relaxing, and conducive to the formulation of new ideas. In this state, instead of passively absorbing a text, I'm actively engaging with it, mingling with it, which is a profoundly different experience than *reading* a book, one to be employed strategically.
Other times, I just wind up tripping out on the utter weirdness of language itself. A book or a magazine does strange things to my sense of conceptual space - they're compact objects that feel much larger as you approach them, their conceptual depth like a vertical column of light inscribed through them. You can feel yourself diffuse along this column as you read, and that sense of feeling larger than you are - that awareness of your essence being extended through someone else's thought - can be exhilirating. When I look at my car, its conceptual dimensions fit within its physical dimensions, but when I look at at a book (or an iPod, for that matter), I see a small physical object with a great glowing quantity of web-like data around it. The conceptual exceeds the physical.
Despite the ubiquity of language, when I really think about it, it never ceases to amaze me that it's possible to condense something as anarchic as thought into these orderly, compact symbols, which, on the receiving end, are reverted to thought, albeit thought inevitably transformed from its original dimensions by the shape of the medium. The process is very similar to sending someone a zip file over the Internet: content is compressed for transmission, then extracted. This is miraculous, and perilous, because our actual language still represents only a minute sliver of total language, which is why we're always fumbling over our words and having to explain ourselves. Total language is total knowledge. The minute sliver of language to which we've access is insufficient for expressing the total knowledge we have within us. What I can think is not the same as what I can say. When these two quantities align, the essence of humanity as we understand it will be irrevocably changed.
It's often been said that a million monkeys with a million typewriters would, given world enough and time, eventually produce Shakespeare. This chestnut is meant to illustrate something about probability, but its undermining of the assumptions we make about our relationship to language is more compelling. Since Shakespeare has already produced Shakespeare, I'm more interested in the texts these millions of monkeys would produce that *have yet to be written*. And why wouldn't they? Let's take "monkeys with typewriters" out of the equation, subbing in simply "computers." In my mere 28 years on Earth I have seen the rise of technologies that would have seemed unthinkable within my lifetime. Being generous and assuming I'll live for fifty more years, I place very few limits on the wonders that might emerge within my lifetime - at this point, nothing seems too far-out (this is why the best science fiction writers of the nineties and aughties have given up on the future to write about the present - flying bubble cars seem absolutely quaint compared to the Internet). Our technological reality already exceeds our imagination.
So let's imagine our modern monkeys with typewriters, an array of supercomputers, endlessly configuring and reconfiguring the whole of language available today into every possible combination. Let's imagine some software filters that disregard the pure gibberish while weeding out any randomly generated text that scans as remotely coherent in a syntactical sense. Let's imagine a team of humans who pore over these results, and what, with persistence, they would eventually discover: Shakespeare, perhaps, but also scientific breakthroughs, philosophical insights, great poems and novels, plans for weapons of incredible destruction or cures for currently incurable diseases, et cetera...
All of these secrets are locked within our language, if only we could find the key. Traditionally, human thought has been that key - the idea precedes the langauge. Ideation is fundamental to our self-image as humans, to our sense of personal agency. But in this new paradigm, the process would be inverted: language would precede thought. What would a Shakespeare text mean to us if it had been generated via computer algorithms, if ideation was a game not of intent but of chance? Is the beauty of Shakespeare's writing inherent in the symbolically condensed thought it contains, or in the fact that a human produced it? What if we truly learned to produce knowledge without thinking? We currently regard conceptual problems as tests of the human intellect, but in this new paradigm, their solution wouldn't be a matter of intellection, it would be a game with trillion-sided dice, a matter of combining words in the correct order, aided by tireless machines, using only the language that is already available to us. On the upside, we already have a cure for AIDS, we just haven't gotten the right words in the right order yet. On the downside, we already have a recipe for a bomb that could detonate the whole world, we just haven't gotten the right words in the right order yet. The secrets lie not in our minds, but in knocking down the walls in the labyrinth of our language.
I have read and loved many writers in my life, but there are a few I can isolate that changed my worldview forever. One of those is Jorge Luis Borges, who first put this idea of total language into my head. Borges intuited this linguistic supercomputer in stories like "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand." In the former, he writes about a great library in which every possible permutation of extant language is rendered in its own tome; in the latter, he maps the same concept onto a single book, which you can never quite open to the first or last page, and never find the same page twice. He was circumscribing the infinite, which he embodied in language, where the infinite is partitioned off into discrete, digestible units. These are not fantasy stories - in the conceptual realm, the Library of Babel *exists* - we just haven't become able enough as librarians to catalog more than a fraction of its stacks. And in fact, it probably isn't within the realm of human pontential to be those librarians. But to build them is.
Once Borges taught me that total language embodied total knowledge, my conceptual filter was irrevocably changed. I had previously thought of my words as something I generated to contain my thought, but now I regard my words as little splinters plucked haphazardly off of the total mass of language, which create my thoughts. And once I perceived language as a total mass, it was impossible for me not to view art the same way: a mass of generative potential from which we steal little bits, mostly at random. I then understood myself, when I created something, as a conduit for a force that had nothing to do with me beyond being shaped, ever so minutely, by the contours of the vessel (i.e., little me.)
The randomness bothered me, and suddenly, process-based art was the only kind I was interested in creating (all the songs on today's post are in some way constained and guided by a process or technical imperative). I've since come to terms with that randomness. A common critique of poets, especially modern free-form minimalists, is that you can just put any combination of words on the page. This is true - any combination of words on a page will create a radically specific vector of thought, coherent or otherwise, and if this approach seems infertile, it's only because too many poets are using the same combinations of words in the same way. So that random element of accessing the great art mass can be fertile, if we're careful about choosing the words that call out to us and not the words that worked well for other poets. But it's still process-based art that has the greatest foothold in my imagination. (Not that process-based and intuitive art are mutually exclusive - most of my processes have aleatory agents and vast fields of unfettered play built into them. (Yeah, I know - we'll talk John Cage and Jackson Mac Low some other time.) And I still love to improvise in paint and music and words, although I tend to feed these extemporaneous acts of creativity into constrained processes after the intial fact.)
Think about it like this, as I did on a recent camping trip. Making art without a process is like sitting in the forest. You occupy a radically specific location and have a circumscribed panorama (this represents a portion of the art-mass, which is far too large to be viewed as a whole) in your field of vision. It's then up to you to choose which parts you want to write or draw or sing about, and in what order. Making art with a process in place is like doing the same thing from within your tent. You still occupy a radically specific location, and the same circumscribed panorama surrounds you. But you can only see a tiny portion of it, through a small window you've unzipped in the tent. This window represents your process, whatever concept or algorithm or intuition your project is operating under, which will desposit you at a radically specific point of entry in the art mass, perhaps allowing you to travel a continuous path toward the art-mass's interior, should you pursue the logic of your process far enough, instead of slicing random slivers from different points on its surface.
Paradoxically, by cutting yourself off from the hell of infinite options and focusing your creativity into a thin beam, you can attain greater artistic freedom, since your will, left to its own devices, will always be threatened by the pull of the market, vanity, insecurity. Enslaving yourself to a process makes that process into a shield, creating a protected field of play on which one can be free. And in making process-based art, I've been able to create texts that I've learned from, rather than texts that embody my meager learning. If I have to choose a master, I'll take a process of my own devising over the market any day.
Wow, was that discursive? I swear I'm not high.Labels: books, brian, language
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
COCAINE
UGK feat. Rick Ross
Underground Kingz
Jive : 2007
[Buy It]
CRACK MUSIC
Kanye West feat. the Game
Late Registration
Roc-a-Fella : 2005
[Buy It]
EGHCK
Clipse
some damn mixtape
circa 2005 (?)
DREAMIN'
Young Jeezy
The Inspiration
Def Jam : 2006
[Buy It]
WHITE GIRLS
Cam'ron
Killa Season
Asylum : 2006
[Buy It]
Today I was torn as to whether I wanted to follow up on Ben's post about language or James's post about crack; both topics are of high interest to me. I sat at my desk with a copy of Borges's "Library of Babel" at my right hand, Young Jeezy's The Inspiration at my left. A cursory sweep through my iTunes revealed that I have more music directly pertaining to crack than music directly pertaining to linguistic metaphysics, and some MW readers have recently indicated that they prefer our posts that pertain directly to music over our more discursive efforts (if the latter have seemed scarcer lately, it's because I, the greatest offender when it comes to, er, "untraditional mp3 blogging," have been on vacation, opening up a space for Ben's bravura run). So I decided to take the rock (groan) from James instead.
But first, here's a picture of the terminally insane Pete Doherty making his cat smoke crack.
Crack's place in the popular culture is no less prominent now than it was in the scare-mongering '80s (even Kanye West, the surburban child of an academic, wanted a piece of the crack-trend action, troublingly asserting that "This is crack music nigga/ That real black music nigga"). But if crack seems less scary now than it did then, it's because a) crack became such a pervasive topic in mainstream rap and b) mainstream rap has become a pop phenomenon. Crack, in short, has been demystified, and at this point one might reasonably expect a white suburbanite who doesn't know a crack rock from a Fraggle Rock to know that "trap" means a place where one goes to buy or sell drugs and that "white girl" doesn't refer to Natalie Portman. Thanks to documentary-style trap-hop, we're all armchair experts in the terminology and tenets of moving weight (although the experience of *smoking* crack has received a lot less attention than the experience of selling it). This is a far cry from my '80s childhood, when all I knew of crack was that it was ambiguously yet urgently bad, like nuclear war, killer bees, and satanic heavy metal, and that black people were doing it. The implication of the news reports, as I recall them, was that the real danger wasn't to the poor black communities who were using crack, but to the white families they might rob, or entice into deviant sexual practices, who were just trying to go about their business of politely sniffing uncooked cocaine and dancing awkwardly amid banks of flashing lights.
Before crack, there was cocaine (I remember once telling a friend, who asked me what I meant by the term "post-capitalism," to think of crack as "post-cocaine"), on which Bun B provides many informative tidbits in the UGK song of the same name. It's often known as "yayo," and comes from Columbia and Peru. It's been around for hundreds of years, "exploited by the rich," and they used to put it in Coca-Cola. It's a global economy with a rigid chain of production: "Grown by the cartels, protected by guerillas/ Transported by the best, to the ghettos, to straight killers." The sale of cocaine is the most glamorous enterprise, while its use is reviled. "Everything was cool, I was ice cold," Pimp C says earlier in the song, "Until I let that bitch get up in my nose."
The idea that selling crack is glamourous while using crack is reviled is dominant in modern mainstream rap, as is the idea that venting toxins into one's community is justified by the genre's rapacious drive toward amassing wealth. Cocaine rap is so compelling because it embodies the American dream - of individual success at any cost, of being one of the few winners in a field crowded with losers - at its most ruthless logical conclusion. In "Eghck," Clipse turn out many clever puns about trapping - "I pedal (peddle) to the corner like a child on a bigwheel" and "So much shake in the streets they measure my weight in Richter" - but the song most poignantly demonstrates the capitalism-rap mindset when it turns personal. The part goes: "And I'm not proud, in fact, I hate this route / It's the same game got my brother strung out / So I count the ways that it fucked up his life..." And here we hold our breath for some expression of remorse, confliction, or even renunciation. "...so I don't have a problem with upping my price."
Young Jeezy, who according to the lore parlayed a successful crack dealing career into a successful career rapping about crack dealing, takes a similarly ambivalent stance to the consequences of his wealth on "Dreamin'." This is a standard up-from-squalor motivational rap song that only becomes exceptional when Jeezy is seized by a rare bout of introspection:
Mom's smoking rocks
Same shit I'm selling
So who's wrong, her or me?
She addicted to the high
I'm addicted to the cash
I almost put my hands on her
When I caught her in my stash
In both of these examples, crack dealers are personally and viscerally confronted with the destruction they're wreaking, feel troubled, and yet, looking at their fat wallets, decide, "yeah, it's worth it" - that is, they same way an environment-raping corporate CEO or corrupt politician might feel upon surveying the fallout from their various reavings and pillagings. In retrospect, one wonders if there was more than racial hysteria at play when mainstream America was so terrified during crack's '80s vogue: perhaps we caught a glimpse, however subliminal, of the true nature of our doctrines of competition and conspicuous consumption.Labels: brian, drugs, rap
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, October 01, 2007
GET ME AWAY FROM HERE, I'M DYING
Belle & Sebastian
If You're Feeling Sinister: Live at the Barbican
iTunes : 2005
iTunes download only
LAZY LINE PAINTER JANE
Belle & Sebastian
Available on: Push Barman to Open Old Wounds
Matador : 2005
[Buy It]
MORNINGTON CRESCENT
Belle & Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
Matador : 2006
[Buy It]
Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books pairs writers and musicians with albums of import, and honestly, the results have been mixed. Some of them have been great, some have been a little heavy on fawning and light on insight (steer clear of the Aeroplane Over the Sea one unless you're a big fan of the color purple), and some have seemed like they were written over the course of a weekend (I happen to know what writers are paid for these books and that hypothesis might not be far off in some cases). But the idea of pairing writers with albums they've thought about for a long time for a tight focus in a pocket-sized book is still a great one, and while I haven't read many of the recent 33 1/3 releases, one just came out that I'm quite excited about. It's about Belle & Sebastian's 1996 classic If You're Feeling Sinister, and it's written by Scott Plagenhoef, an editor I've worked with at Pitchforkmedia for several years. I'm excited about it for several reasons - one is that, as much as I love Belle & Sebastian, they have attained such an ossified stature in my music fandom that I actually forget to listen to them amid the onslaught of new releases. A copy of Scott's book showed up in my mailbox yesterday, and it reminded to me to go back through my Belle & Sebastian albums and revisist some of my favorite songs, a few of which I'm sharing with you today. "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying" is not one of B&S's more subtle efforts, but I fell in love with it in my late-teens, which is not among life's subtlest times, and the onrush of emotion I felt listening to it then is still coded in my spine, like long-ago dropped LSD. For contrast, I've posted "Lazy Line Painter Jane" and "Mornington Crescent," the former of which is as ecstatic as the latter is retiring. But besides the chance to revisit an old favorite, I'm excited because Scott wrote it - having reads lots of his writing on Belle & Sebastian, I know he's deeply invested in the source material, and he's too smart of a writer to lapse into shallow mythmaking (and I don't think he reads Moistworks, so I'm not just sucking up). If you're unfamiliar with 33 1/3, this might be a great place to start. (If you happen to be too apocalyptically minded to get into a book about Belle & Sebastian, then Chris Ott's 33 1/3 book on Joy Division, while occasionally fawning, is well-researched and sharply observed.) You can find Scott's If You're Feeling Sinister book here on Amazon, as well as the rest of the 33 1/3 catalog.Labels: books, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, August 20, 2007
FREE
Pharoahe Monch
Desire
SRC/Universal : 2007
[Buy it]
DIRTY MONEY
Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
Re-up Gang / Star Track : 2006
[Buy it]
MONEY DON'T MATTER 2 NIGHT
Prince & the New Power Generation
Diamonds and Pearls
Warner Bros. : 1991
[Buy it]
This week, Moistworks takes up the theme of "conversion." As the week's posts will show, this theme is subject to broad interpretation. But being the first up to bat, I decided to write a little about the concept of "conversion" as it most closely relates to Moistworks and mp3 blogs in general.
This post is going to upset some of you. Let me say that I'm feeling sad today, for reasons that aren't applicable. Let me say that my sadness often manifests as anger at the capitalist mindset, with its built-in venality, its hostility to the poor, its alienating properties, its point-missing minutiae, its devaluation of art. Let me say that while I sympathize with all individuals, including artists, trying to make their way in this world, I have no sympathy for the constructs through which we move, and its those constructs, not individuals, that are at the receiving end of this post, although individuals collaborating with these constructs might feel called out. Let me say that I'm feeling too raw today to hedge my bets, so I'm going to speak from the heart, with all the intractable blind spots that entails. I'm not trying to upset you. I'm just saying how I feel. I think that's still legal.
Here at Moistworks, we give away other people's songs. That's what mp3 blogs do. I feel fine about this. If people want music for free, they can find it. We aren't giving people anything that can't get themselves. We never post songs that aren't already available commercially or as Internet leaks on filesharing services. By presenting it in context, I believe we actually improve an artist's chance of making money. The more people know your band, the more potential customers you have. But that isn't why I do Moistworks, or any of my music writing. I don't work in PR or sales. I'm not a publicist. I write about art, that's what I'm interested in. Commercial ramifications are just a nasty side effect. Plus, I've been a music journalist for long enough that I literally forget that music costs money. It's just out there, floating around in the ether, readily available. It shows up in my mailbox every day. When I download it onto my machine or give it to my friends, I don't feel a pang of remorse about it.
"But it's just like stealing!" people will say. Well, no, it's not just like stealing. I'm not saying it's not "stealing" in some commercially-defined sense. But it's not "just like" stealing at all. When you steal, you deprive someone of a physical quantity. If I take someone's stereo, they no longer have that stereo to use. I would never take that stereo. It isn't right according to my personal ethics. But if I download a song off the Internet, the owner of that song - whether defined as its creator or the person who originally purchased it - is deprived of nothing, except the possibility that I will pay them for it. Which I probably won't. If you want to share your art with me, I'll be thankful, and share my art with you. If you want to charge me for it, I'll probably say "No thanks-- I can make my own." Why would I buy something that I can make myself, and that has no concrete material value?
In legal terms, the "theft" of an abstract quantity that doesn't deprive its "owner" of that quantity is called "Criminal Conversion." Here's Wikipedia:
Criminal conversion, in criminal law, is usually defined as the crime of exerting unauthorised use or control of someone else's property. It differs from theft in that it does not include the element of intending to deprive the owner of the possession of that property. As such, it is a lesser included offense of the crime of theft.
An example might be tapping someone's wireless LAN or public utility line (which could also amount to theft of services). Another example might be taking a "joy ride" in a car, never intending to keep it from the owner. Some places have defined such conduct as a specific type of theft, perhaps with a modified penalty.
Note that the "unauthorized" use may begin after a period of authorized use, where, for example, a person rents a car then keeps it for an extra week without permission from the rental company. Another common example occurs when a person fails to report finding lost goods (including animals), intending only to keep them until someone asks for their return. When the intent becomes one of keeping them, it's a theft.
This is the complication of the digital age. Songs don't exist in discrete physical quantities which have materiality and can be depleted. They're replicants. They're nothing, smoke and air. If I take your song, what have I taken? You still have the song. "But it says right there in the phrase, CRIMINAL conversion," one might argue. It's illegal! Who cares? Lots of stupid shit is illegal. I don't care about laws. For every one that makes sense - "don't kill people" - there are five more that are nothing more than agents of social control designed by evil powerbrokers. Here in Carrboro, where I live, there's a thing called the "really really free market," where people come together to create, for an afternoon, a gift and barter economy. The cops watch like hawks, because it's illegal to share food, and while it's not technically illegal to give material goods away, it definitely seems frowned upon. What the fuck?
I know what I believe to be right and wrong. Draconian copyright law is the real theft. It deprives us, as a culture, of a healthy and organic artistic climate. It reduces the wild spaces of art to the brute baseline of money. We build our little picket fences around the things we make and litigate against one another when these boundaries are crossed. I hate this. It's soul-sucking. What can I say? I'm pretty anarcho. Art is a space for freedom! What could be less artistic than subjecting one's will to the criminal justice system? We need to learn to take responsibility for our own communities.
I realize we're ramming up against an impasse here, especially because I'm writing from the most extreme position I can imagine. I'm not so much arguing for the abolishment of the sale of music - although there are days, today included, when this is exactly what I feel is necessary - as I'm feeling it out, probing the cracks in the construct. People believe they have a right to make money from their art, and have all kinds of reasons why it's "good for music" for bands to be able to economically sustain themselves from playing music. I disagree. No one has an inborn right to make money off of art. If you can, good for you, I guess. If you can't, and this seems unfair to you, you might want to think about what's driving you to create.
This is the point where people like me and the captains of industry stare at each other, stuck. The filesharing age presents a new paradigm for music. You can't turn back the clock. Evolve or die. Personally, I like the idea of a paradigm where artistic production circulates freely and unprofitably. I'm utopian like that. I dream of entire new modes of music production emerging from it-- as it becomes harder and harder to make money off of albums, and as tools for digitally manipulating music become even cheaper and more user-friendly, what will happen? Is it possible that we'll see the denaturing of the song and the band and the artist? Will a wide variety of online users begin to upload quantities of sonic information, which will ciruclate around the Internet freely? Will we all become effectively collaborative musicans, choosing the sounds we like, manipulating them as we choose, feeding them back into the stream? Could the de-commercialization of music make its production and consumption into a new, organically evolving process in which everyone is involved and no one is star?
Probably not. The idea of a binary - creators on one side, consumers/spectators on the other - is so deeply entrenched, as is the ongoing mix-up between the intrinsic and financial value of things. But it's possible. I like the idea of this paradigm. I like the idea that the people publically making art are doing it because they're driven to, not because it's a better way to make a living than working a nine to five. I like the idea that young people will stop forming bands that record one EP before forgetting about creativity and devoting the whole of their energies to promotion. I like the idea of a social space where, discovering that someone has taken something you've made and has shared it with others, one responds with gratitude, not greed.
I'm a poet. I don't make any money from my poetry. I make music, too, and paintings. I don't make any money from that. I don't try to. There are all kinds of ways that I can make money - by writing about music, by making espresso drinks in a coffee house three times per week, by working random catering gigs, by dabbling in sub-legal underground economies - without subjecting my art to pressures of saleability. You want my art? You can't buy it, it's free! Email me if you want it, I'll send you a link to my website, where you can download my sound art and read the poems I've published online for free. You can show them to your friends or put them on your website. You can remix them or otherwise appropriate them, that makes me happy. That's community. I'll even send you the book I'm trying to get published if you want. You can do whatever you want with it. I made it, but it isn't mine. And if I do publish the book, inscribing it with a dollar value, you're still welcome, as far as I'm concerned, to type up the whole damn thing and put it on your website. Artistically, I'd rather be perceived than to make money - this is the position from which my ideas stem. I realize that they aren't popular ones. But the current paradigm, where commerical gatekeepers control access to music, is on the way out whether we like or not. We need to be thinking about what comes next, and how it might be better for us as a culture than what we have now.Labels: brian, conversion
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, August 06, 2007
WHAT A JOB
Devin the Dude feat. Snoop and Andre 3000
Waiting to Inhale
Rap A Lot : 2007
[Buy it]
Devin the Dude's Waiting to Inhale is one of my very favorite rap albums of the year - it's simply among the best-sounding, with its moist, spacy funk, which is ideally suited to the Houston-based rapper's laid-back, infinitely supple vernacular. It's a summery record. It contains skits that are genuinely funny - Devin calling local music stores posing as a producer with a bunch of rappers in the studio, affecting a hick drawl, and asking if he can come over and rent "the boom." "They need a boom per bar," he says. "I don't think they're gonna leave without it." And Devin's effortless charisma is virtually unmatched in rap - as a persona, he's up there with Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy; the kind of guy who fills up the room. Waiting to Inhale, for all its seamlessness, sounds remarkably casual and vibrant. One gets the impression that Devin behind the microphone and Devin in everyday life are differentiated only by the presence of the mike.
It's also one of the most morally troubling rap albums I've heard this year, although its misogynistic content is no more vile than it is on many other rap records I enjoy with less compunction. The reason why this is gets at the complex moral contract many of us (i.e. people who listen to mainstream rap and take it seriously) enter into when we choose to overlook language and sentiments from rappers that we would castigate indie bands for.
Why do I like Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit," while Ben Folds' version of the same song makes me want to barf? This might not be an ideal example, because there are mitigating factors: I think Ben Folds is kind of terrible, especially on this hokey cover, and I also have a deep-seated disdain for ironic covers, especially when the animating force at work in them is the idea that it's automatically funny for white, suburban performers to cover gangster rap songs - it strikes me as terribly condescending, forcing the songs' original authors into a sort of passive minstrelsy.
When we (i.e. again, people who take mainstream rap seriously as an idiom but don't share its politics) suspend moral judgement vis-a-vis rap, another element at play - and since obviously I have no idea what it's like to be a "black person" who likes mainstream rap while diverging from its ideology, I'm speaking here as a "white person" - another element at play is plain old white guilt. It's the feeling of having no right to pass any sort of judgement on a culture that emerged from the history of black oppression, and to regard this music in a purely anthropological sense. Or, more insidiously, it's the fear of passing judgement on rap, the fear that we'll get ourselves into sticky moral binds and find out things about ourselves we'd rather not know. Better to apologize for conspicuous consumption in rap, which we utterly despise in white people, as the history of black oppression in America sublimated and reborn as an understandable desire for surfeit after a long span of institutionalized deprivation. Better to regard misogyny, homophobia, and sociopathic behavior as genre tropes, no different from post-punk's "angular guitars" or dance-punk's cowbells, than as animate social forces - immutable genre components that can be riffed on and tweaked, hollow of actual significance, atmospherically pervasive. Better to interpret negative social ideals in rap music as reportage, documentary; as dispatches from the thrumming heart of social injustice - something ugly with which one is complicit, and from which one has a responsibility not to flinch.
None of this resolves into an easy answer or comfortable moral position. To the extent that we must pay heed to disenfranchised voices, we must also be wary of the corporate appropriation of these voices, of the record industry's funneling of toxic material into a neverending revenue stream. What does it mean to speak truth about the failures of American societal structure when speaking that truth has become immensely profitable? At what point are we no longer listening to genuine voices, instead engaging in a commercial construct where negative black stereotypes are perpetuated for profit? As always, the imposition of commerce on what is essentially a folk idiom presents unsolveable ontological dilemmas. For myself, I find mainstream rap to be on of the most sonically vibrant genres unfolding today, and I'm predisposed toward moral constructs that keep me off-balance - I'm content to keep listening as new vectors of understanding emerge and ramify.
But despite all my mystification as to my contract with mainstream rap, I have a better understanding of why, sometimes, a rap record that expresses sentiments no more or less vile than many others will pierce through this metaphysical veil and trouble me (and many of my peers, apparently) in a less passive, more convulsive manner. It has everything to do with the rapper's persona. The last song I remember achieving this feat - breaking through many rap fans' complacent relationship with the genre and producing genuine, widespread ire, despite the fact that the song's content was fairly typical - was the Yin Yang Twins' "The Whisper Song." In this case, it was a matter of delivery. While plenty of rap songs contain sexual innuendoes that border on threats, the whispers in which the Twins delivered theirs made all the difference. You could practically feel the hot breath on your ear, and a variety of prominent female critics (and a healthy portion of males) lashed out at the song's predatorial nature. It was an issue of proximity - "Bitches Ain't Shit" is a cultural relic, a snapshot from the near-past, but "The Whisper Song" was an atmosphere that settled all around you. Its space-invading prosody made its vileness impossible to ignore. Of course, it was also a huge hit, and many of the people who called it out for misogyny admitted that it was a really dope, innovative song. Here the ongoing clash between aesthetics and morality comes into play, but this post is already getting pretty bloated, so we'll save that for another day.
In Devin's case, the misogynistic songs (of which there are many on Waiting to Inhale) were, once again, made to seem more vile, more unforgivable, because of their context. Look at it this way - Young Jeezy is not a person. He's an imago, a superhero, a golem, a construct. A rapper who, as the story goes, made a fortune selling crack (but never using, and disdainful of users at that), then funneled his money and his experiences into a blockbusting rap career that repeatedly assures us that it is not art, not fantasy, but another hustle, another way to make money. He is the seamy underbelly of the American dream - the rags to riches story, the take-no-prisoners, survival of the fittest ideology - come to its darkest, most terrifying fruition. Jeezy emobodies American ideals in the same way that corrupt politicians and CEOs do, and as such, he seems beyond rebuke - more cautionary parable and heavy-handed metaphor than man.
But Devin is different - his whole persona revolves around being utterly human, utterly ordinary. A fun-loving guy who's fun to be around, a nice guy who doesn't paint himself as a superhero, who sometimes loses the girl, who expresses sentimentality, who is clever and funny and a bit goofy. Jeezy, in short, is a concept; Devin is, like he says, just a dude. And so when he writes a song about a fat girl who used to be fly, or a terrible synth ballad/murder fantasy like Eminem's "Stan" without the sensitivity, or generally treats all women like prostitutes, it stings us - we feel a bit betrayed. Because this guy is like us - an everyman with money problems, who doesn't shoot people or pretend to shoot people or sell drugs or seem to emanate in any way from an experience that is drastically foreign from our own. But I keep listening, sometimes gritting my teeth or skipping certain songs altogether, because it sounds so damn good. "I like Devin the Dude," Bill Callahan (nee Smog), another guy whose music often saddles the line between sonic vibrancy and moral complication, told me in a recent interview. "There's a vitality to his music. That's all I'd ask of anyone."
The song I've posted today, however, is one of Devin's best, as he turns his attention away from whatever bitch he's skeeting on at the moment for a working man's doggedly celebratory lament. In doing so, he paints himself in a much more sympathetic light, letting all his love of music and likeability shine through. Here's a guy talking about the travails of his everyday life as a recording artist, exasperated and in love with the process at once, and the resultant song displays every inch of this embattled passion. Snoop, bless his heart, even sounds good here, his almost parodically generic lyrics sounding fresh in context, and galvanized by the spirit of bonhomie that suffuses the track. And Outkast's Andre shows up just in time to drop one of his best verses in ages, perhaps the finest rap verse of the year, both for its ridiculously assured phrasing, astonishing gnomic control, and its continutaion of Devin's meta-rap first verse, all of which makes for a song that's deeply humane, intimate, personal - life-sized, no more or less. The underlying message of the song is that "we don't do it for the money," a sentiment familiar to undie rap, where there is little money to be had at any rate, but almost alien to the modern mainstream, with its unquestioned capitalist collaboration. And the assurance that Devin doesn't do it for the money, in turn, makes his morally bankrupt assertions on other songs all the more disturbing - if this record really stems from such conviction, then we have to assume that Devin's misogyny isn't a construct or unquestioned received wisdom, but what he truly believes. And that's hard to swallow. But let's end on a positive note, with a verbatim transcript of Andre's stunning verse:
We work nights, we some vampires
Niggas gather round the beat like a campfire
Singin' folk songs, but not no Kumbaya my Lord
You download it for free, we get charged back for it
I know you're saying, they won't know they won't miss it
Besides, I ain't a thief, they won't pay me a visit
So if I come to your job, take your corn on the cob
And take a couple kernels off it that would be alright with you
Hell no! Yeah, exactamundo
But we just keep recording and it ain't to get no condo
And Candy Bentley fanny with no panties in Miami
And that cute lil' chick named Tammy
that you took to the Grammys
See we do it for that boy that graduated
That looked you in your eyes real tough and said 'preciate it
And that he wouldn'ta made it
if it wasn't for your CD number 9
And he's standing with his baby momma Kiki and she cryin' talking 'bout
That they used to get high to me in high school
And they used to make love to me in college
Then they told me 'bout they first date, listenin' to my tunes
And how he, like to finger nail polish
I say hate to cut you off but I gotta go
I wish you could tell me more but I'm off to the studio, gotta write tonight
"Hey, can you put us in your raps?" I don't see why not
Devin it's the Dude, you gon' probably hear him talking 'boutLabels: brian, rap
posted by Brian
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Monday, July 16, 2007
PRAYER OF DEATH
Entrance
Prayer of Death
Tee Pee Records : 2006
[Buy it]
LIKE BIRDS POURING OUT MY SIDES
Blake Miller
Together with Cats
Exit Stencil Recordings : 2006
[Buy it]
BLACK TONGUE
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Fever to Tell
Interscope : 2003
[Buy it]
MOISTWORKS STORYTIME CORNER PRESENTS:
"Altmann's Tongue"
by Brian Evenson
After I had killed Altmann, I stood near Altmann's corpse watching the steam of the mud rising around it, obscuring what had once been Altmann. Horst was whispering to me, "You must eat his tongue. If you eat his tongue, it will make you wise," Horst was whispering. "If you eat his tongue, it will make you speak the language of birds!" I knocked Horst down and pointed the rifle, and then, as if by accident, squeezed the trigger. One moment I was listening to Horst's voice, his eyes brilliant - "the language of birds" - and the next I had killed him. I stared at the corpse next to Altmann's corpse. It had been right to kill Altmann, I thought. Given the choice to kill or not to kill Altmann, I had chosen the former and had, in fact, made the correct choice. We go through life at every moment making choices. There are people, Altmann among them, who, when you have sent a bullet through their skull, you know you have done the right thing. It is people like Altmann who make the rest of it worthwhile, I thought, while people like Horst, when killed, confuse life further. The world is populated by Altmanns and Horsts, the former of which one should riddle with bullets on the first possible occasion, the latter of which one should perhaps kill, perhaps not: Who can say? I felt remarkably calm. I prided myself that moment on my self-composure, taking a minute to sit down next to the two corpses, Altmann and Horst, and to feel the calm to its greatest extent. This calm, I supposed, was not the result of killing Horst but, as one might expect, of killing Altmann. There are two types of people, I thought - type Horst and type Altmann. All people are either Horst or Altmann. I am the sole exception. I repeated the phrase sole exception, alternating it with unique exception, trying to decide which was the better, unable to decide. I flew blackly about, smelling my foul feathers and flesh. I stuttered, spattered a path through the branches of trees, sprung fluttering into blank sky.
Brian Evenson
Altmann's Tongue
Bison Books : 2002
[Buy it]Labels: brian, fiction
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, July 09, 2007
MEAT GRINDER
Madvillain
Madvillainy
Stone's Throw : 2004
[Buy It]
GAME THEORY
The Roots
Game Theory
Def Jam : 2006
[Buy It]
IN THE KINGDOM OF KITSCH YOU WILL BE A MONSTER
Shining
Grindstone
Rune Grammaphon : 2007
[Buy It]
North Carolina isn't known for its balmy summers, and today is no exception. It's too hot to play outside and definitely too hot to think about music. I think I'm going to fritter away the afternoon with my favorite time-suck, Kingdom of Loathing, a free, online parody RPG that's like World of Warcraft without the silky framerates (stick figures, in fact), but with way more willfully bad puns and blantant absurdity. The real genius of KoL is that it works on two levels: it's a hilarious parody of more serious online games and of fantasy gaming conventions, but it's also wicked addictive in its own right.
Just as in real MMORPGs, the collection of loot has a self-sustaining logic. Eventually, you don't even care what you might do with the "filthy dread sack" you can steal, with perseverence, from a "business hippy" - you simply know that it exists in the game world, and you therefore need to have it. The point and click gameplay is immaculately simple, and the brisk cycle of incentive and reward, however meaningless, is engaging and soothing. KoL tickles my retro gaming fetish at a time when new games are so wildly complex that I usually prefer reading about them in magazines, just to keep an eye on where the technology is going (and going so quickly, toward realms of viable virtual reality a la Second Life), to actually playing them. The only downside to KoL is that you're allotted a certain number of adventures per day, and once you run out, you can't play again until the server resets late at night, no matter how close you were to nabbing those "dope tires" for your Meat Car. In the meantime, there's always Zork.Labels: brian, games
posted by Brian
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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
A VIOLENT YET FLAMMABLE WORLD
Au Revoir Simone
The Bird of Music
Our Secret Records : 2007
[Buy It]
SHIELD YOUR EYES
Jawbreaker
Bivouac
Tupelo : 1991
[Buy It]
HUMAN AFTER ALL (JUSTICE REMIX)
Daft Punk
Human After All: Remixes
Toshiba/EMI : 2006
[Buy It]
Yesterday, I had a very interesting confrontation with a white Ford Bronco full of preppy undergrads. There were four of them, all dressed in those ugly generic college sports clothes that jocks and fratboys wear when they aren't "going out" (tangent: this sort of sartorial extremism seems to characterize American undergrad life. Whenever I see the college girls on the streets, I'm always surprised by it-- they're either wearing ten pounds of stage makeup and full nightclub regalia, or the schlubbiest sweatpants and rattiest t-shirts imaginable, with very little middle ground. I wonder about the psychological impetus of this. Maybe it's that, when one is not "looking good," one wears anti-good-looking clothes to make sure everyone knows that one is not failing in the attempt to look good.)
At any rate, I was parked in a public pay lot, near UNC campus. The white Bronco was doing some strange maneuvering behind me, and I thought they were backing into a space, so I pulled out. Apparently, they weren't backing in, but preparing to move forward-- in pulling out in front of them, I had "cut them off." It was an honest mistake that a person with the slightest bit of self-knowledge would let pass, but our university system doesn't seem to inspire self-knowledge in its students, and well-to-do college undergrads are among God's stupidest, most brutal creatures. The driver made a "what the fuck" gesture with his hands. One of them, with dire predictability, yelled "faggot!" out of the window. I did what many of us might do in this situation-- I flipped them off.
This sort of confrontation isn't unusual where I live. Chapel Hill has a large population of well-to-do undergrads and a large population of effete anarcho-hipsters. Very little understanding seems to flow between these two groups, who regard each other, respectively, as boneheads and faggots. For a hetero guy, I get called "faggot" by people in moving vehicles with what seems an improbable frequency, and I figure that as long as rednecks and jocks keep calling me a faggot, I'm probably doing something right. So 9 times out of 10, I would have ignored these guys.
But for a couple reasons, I didn't want to just let it pass this time. For one, I simply wasn't in the mood to be fucked with by strangers - it's not really something you can take personally, but at the same time, it can make you feel sad about the alienating cultural scripts people lock themselves into. For another, we had this moment at the gate of the parking lot - with some dangerous driving, the Bronco I'd "cut off" managed to nose in in front of me at the exit gate. In this moment we were very close, and the driver looked me full in the face. Something passed between us, and I understood that these guys were not entirely comfortable in the roles they were playing for each other. In this instant I understood with utter clarity not only the obvious - that their pointless belligerence was a smokescreen for their insecurity - but the less obvious thing as well: that they were aware of it. The full force of their alienation from themselves and from anything resembling an authentic human existence hit me, and I felt very close to them. I felt empathy. I decided to follow them.
I'm not sure why I decided to follow them. I didn't really have a plan. I just wanted to continue the confrontation, a word that by now for me had shed its violent connotations and become more literal. I felt on the verge of a deeply human and illuminating experience with these guys, and I wanted to explore it further. I mean, there were four of them, and if it had come to a physical confrontation, solitary me would've been in a tough spot. But - and this is hard to explain, being mostly an intuition that I nevertheless didn't doubt for a second, such was its strength and clarity - in that moment at the parking lot gate when I locked eyes with the driver, I understood that a physical confrontation was not in the offing unless I escalated it in that direction, forced them into that stage of their cultural script. The uncertainty in the driver's eyes as he played his chosen role was a dead giveaway.
I didn't think I would actually catch up with them, having to stop and pay the parking attendent. But I did! I saw them parked at a stop light, waiting to turn left, and with no cars ahead of me in the lane, I was able to pull up directly beside them. Understand that in this moment I was compelled by a complex mixture of emotions, but anger was not among them. I realized that what I really wanted from this experience was to confront these guys with their own humanity, which they'd suppressed under a blanket of machismo but which I'd caught a glimpse of in the hesitancy of their performance, and I wanted them to confront mine. I wanted us to have, together, an unmediated experience, to go off-script and ad-lib for just a moment. So here's what I did: I pulled up beside them (my windows and theirs were down, and again, I felt very close to them), fixed my gaze upon them, and smiled. That's it. I don't mean to imply it was a kindness-in-the-face-of-cruelty type thing - it was not an entirely friendly smile, it was more of an "I have a secret you could never fathom smile," hovering implacably below my big, dark aviator sunglasses. I fixed them with this gaze, this smile, for the entire time we sat beside one another at the light (60, maybe 90 seconds), not speaking, not averting my gaze - just smiling, staring, silent.
And then, I watched them react. First, they noticed me, smiled mischievously and talked animatedly to one another. They all turned to look at me. At this point, the script would indicate one of two actions for me - I would be intimidated and sheepish, or aggressive and blustery. But I just looked, smiling, and the whole thing started to unravel. The two in the back redirected their gaze forward and didn't look at me again, even as they were driving away. The driver made a half-hearted "what's up wanna fight" gesture, but his face was so clouded by doubt that it appeared comical, and he didn't even finish it, sort of trailing off mid-gesture and looking forward again. Still sensing my gaze, he turned to me again and yelled, with a note of what seemed to be burgeoning panic, "What are you looking at?"
I smiled, impassive. Now here we were together in the burning heart of the thing. For the last 30 seconds or so of our encounter, they all stared straight forward, stiff and unspeaking, feeling my inexplicable gaze playing on their profiles. As I've said, I felt very close to them, especially in this moment when even their tentative bravado fell away and we all sat there, silently simmering in our identical biological processes, being humans interacting outside of the script. When the light finally turned green, it was like a bubble bursting. They made their left turn without looking back, and I gave their rear-view mirror a friendly wave, just to show them that there were no hard feelings.
I drove away feelng good, flushed from the penetratingly *real* texture of the experience I just created. I imagine that they slipped back into their script soon enough, but maybe for the rest of the day, it felt a little off. Maybe they wrote me off as some weird faggot among themselves, but thought about me later, individually, in the stillness of night. Maybe, from time to time, they'll think back to that weird guy who just smiled and stared, and intuit a world stranger, richer, and less scripted than the one they've chosen to adopt. Maybe, in the long run, I did them a favor, showed them the inkling of a way out of an alienating, constructed world that does not deliver what it promises. I like to think so. In retrospect, I only wish that I had taken off my glasses and let them see my eyes.Labels: brian
posted by Brian
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Monday, June 18, 2007
Is it possible to really, really like a song while being slightly disappointed by it? I think so. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back in time, to the beginning, back to those heady, halcyon days of 2002, when anything seemed possible...
LOOSE NUTS ON THE VELODROME
Liars
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
Mute : 2002
[Buy It]
When Liars's debut record came out in 2002, they were of a piece with a lot of the damaged, post-Gang of Four (p)arty rock coming out of Brooklyn. But a couple things distinguished them from their peers, the Interpols and Interpol-lites, with their natty attire and air of urbanity-- they happened to be fronted by an eleven foot tall Aussie caveman named Angus (imagine a functionally autistic Nick Cave), and they happened to be (or so it would seem from their music) batshit insane. Liars's debut was every inch the angular funk-punk, all shoutalong rave-ups and mangled cowbells, of their cultural moment, yet even then they showed signs of the compassless derangement they would explore on later albums. The guitars on this song are like Andy Gill's, but hurt - hurt real bad. The drummer seems to be playing with lit sticks of dynamite, and Angus vocals sound like they were disgorged with the help of a finger down his throat. This was a great album, but now it sounds like Liars on training wheels to me - they were sneaking the unhinged stuff they wanted to do into our earbuds by secreting it, Trojan horse style, inside an all too familiar idiom.
THERE'S ALWAYS ROOM ON THE BROOM
Liars
They Were Wrong, So We Drowned
Mute : 2004
[Buy It]
This album, as I recall, kind of blew everyone's mind. No one really "liked" it - it's not a very likeable album, by design - but most people I know were perplexed and fascinated by it in equal measure. The muddiness of "Velodrome" came into full flower on Liars's second LP, a sludgy and monochromatic (mostly shit-brown) dronefest that threw out the baby, the bathwater, the tub - pretty much everything except a sort of turgid, daunting roar and a ravenous Id. Liars had developed some sort of witchcraft fixation, perhaps after reading Aleister Crowley, and made a record that could very well have gotten them burned at the stake in more sensible days. I interviewed Liars around this time - Angus was wearing a sort of gold lame loincloth and was much nicer / more normal-seeming than one might have expected. Note that "Broom" is probably the most coherent, accessible song on the album, with at least a discernible, nerve-flaying shop-class clangor to latch onto. I've probably listened to this Liars album less than any of the others, although I've thought about it the most: This was a band throwing away their safety net and pushing into realms of personal obsession/transcendence. I like seekers, fanatics, and accidental iconoclasts, I was beginning to suspect that Liars were such creatures. I was curious as to where they were headed, and was prepared to follow them there.
BE QUIET MT. HEART ATTACK!
Liars
Drum's Not Dead
Mute : 2006
[Buy It]
Then came Drum's Not Dead, a miraculous album that, wonder of wonders, didn't pull back from the increasingly abstract path Liars were treading. It laid the next logical segment in what I now understand as an up-sweeping arc, toward a music guided completely by intution and personal transportation, and if Wrong found Liars cutting down their safety net, Drum did away with that pesky tightrope as well, leaving the band and the listener levitating in the cold, bright air. It was like some improbable alchemy had taken place - everything brown and sludgey on the previous album was intact, but transmuted into glass and light and vapor here. Liars moved to Berlin to record this album, which partially explains the dramatic atmospheric change. And they had simply gotten better at droning - more lucid, more alluring, more hypnotic, more transparent and untethered and mysteriously elemental. Drum iconography replacecd witch iconography and provided the music with a potent guiderail - an unrelenting ceremonial thud dressed in the most sublimely gestural, non-guitary sounding guitars. Not only did this album rock my world on a visceral, romancing-the-lizard-brain level, it confirmed for me what I had longed to believe - that Liars were true charismatics, wild-eyed desert prophets stranded amid urban islands, and that each album for them was a process of going up to the mountain and coming back violently transformed, with an album's worth of musical emulsion to document the process. How many bands can you think of that have a viable creative arc that has more to do with dogged personal vision than with, you know, market-saavy tinkering or genre-dabbling? I couldn't believe that Liars had managed to stay what I perceived as a deeply personal course over three entire albums. I've been waiting to see what they would do next ever since.
PLASTER CASTS OF EVERYTHING
Liars
Liars
Mute : 2007
[Available in August]
I found out when "Plaster Casts of Everything" (the first track to leak from Liars forthcoming, self-titled album) was featured on Pitchfork. I've subsequently heard the whole album. First off, it is fantastic - "Plaster Casts," as you can hear for yourself, is a real bruiser. And the album proper is equally "in the zone." Nevertheless, I can't help but feel a slight disappointment, and this, like all disappointment, is predicated less on the quality of the album than on my expectations for it. Liars have...I want to say "regressed," but this is only valid in my personal relationship with the music...Liars have reverted to a more rock-guitar-based, songily-structured style. The music's brusing, hypnotic quality is fully intact, but something of its mysticism has been lost. I wanted Liars to make an album that might actually murder me in my sleep, a drone-core masterpiece that left behind even the high-altitude air of Drum and departed for points extra-dimensional, where the only relationships possible to establish took place not between the music and the history of music, but within the hermetic confines of the music itself. I recognize the flaws in this thinking - that the potential trajectory I'd imagined for Liars might not be the one they'd imagined for themselves, that their personal inspiration would lead them in directions that by definition could not be predicted by me. In fact, whether Liars are playing it safe here or continuing to chase their intuition is not given to me to know, and as what the album is overwrites what I wanted it to be, I'm enjoying it more and more. Still, I can't help but wonder about this hypothetical ur-Liars album, the one that seems to culminate, not truncate, the head fakes and flailing leaps that have defined their career until now. And I wonder if this album does in fact comprise another one of those - after all, it's not what I expected, and thwarting expectations is what Liars are all about.Labels: brian, liars
posted by Brian
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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
2/1
Brian Eno
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Astralwerks : 2004 (originally released 1978)
[Buy It]
PRELUDE FOR TIME FEELERS
Eluvium
Copia
Temporary Residence : 2007
[Buy It]
A HOUSE FINCH
Feltbattery
It Had Wings
Migration Media : 2007
[Buy It]
For quite a while now, I've longed for a place of my own-- just a small apartment, sparsely appointed, with perhaps a low Japanese table and a few cushions strewn about, soft indirect lighting, and little else, a place where, to paraphrase Steven Millhauser, I might possess my soul in peace. But small apartments are hard to come by around here, and lacking the financial means to have a bigger place of my own, I continue to live with roommates.
They're good people, I like them, but they are also in a rock band, and living with a rock band is the opposite of living alone. We all just moved into a new house together. It's a great place - it's in the country, surrounded by fields and graveyards. There's a farm across the road, and a cattle pasture a litte ways down, and a variety of abandoned buildings I'm itching to explore. And yet it's only a couple miles from town (although the shoulderness road from here to there is all but unbikeable). My room has powder blue walls and built-in cupboards that I don't even have enough stuff to fill. We have a lovely back yard, fenced in, so the pets can frolic, with a brick fire pit and citronella torches to keep the insects at bay (most remarkable are the slugs that populate my new house, huge and improbable and seemingly everywhere - have you ever really watched a slug? Last week I got really high and just watched one - the biggest one I've ever seen, larger than a cigarette lighter - for half an hour. They're pretty incredible creatures).
Only problem is that it's about half the size of our old house, with the same number of people living in it. And for the first week we lived there, my room, owing to some sort of oversight, did not have a door. (A friend to whom I related this news thought at first that I meant the room lacked any portal of entry whatsoever, was completely walled-in... c'mon, dude. How would that even scan as room?) So for my first week in my new house (one of my roommate's mother was also staying with us that week, jacking the household up to five humans and two animals), my sense of privacy and personal space were direly compromised, and I felt my mental state deteriorating accordingly.
Graudally, I became irritable and out of sorts, and I understood that solitude is as necessary a nourishment for me as food and water, and that an inordinate amount of my mental energy goes into carving out little spaces for myself, since solitude, given my lifestyle and social engagements, is so hard to come by. Lacking physical space to achieve it, I have to create it in my mind, clearing out the clutter of mental furniture until only the essential remains: that low table, those cushions, that single gauze-filtered lamp. Being outside, alone, in the forest or in a field, is helpful, is necessary, is nourishing, but it isn't the same as being completely confined, in a hermetic space of fixed boundaries, a space of enclosure that creates an echo in my consciousness.
Eventually, I got my door. After a hectic social and professional week, filled with obligations and public engagements and deadlines and entire days spent in the bustle of a coffee shop because we don't have the Internet at home yet, and my work requires me to be on the Internet pretty much constantly...after all this, the need to shut myself behind it was palpable - I could feel it pulsing behind my eyes and itching in my blood. I was tired of being observed (if you look at my various bio headshots, you might notice how often my gaze is averted out of frame - sometimes, I have a thing about people looking into my eyes), tired of looking at other people, tired of talking, tired of creating the character called Brian, a character that seems totally honest and real to me when I'm pubically inhabiting it, but falls away completely in times of solitude, leaving only a cool static in its wake.
So on Saturday night, blowing off a show I had promised someone to attend, I went into my blue room, turned down the blinds, and closed the door. I breathed. And then my roommates decided to have a party. I can't blame them. It's Saturday night, we've got a new house, why not have a party? I informed them that I would be in my room regardless, and that I wouldn't be coming out. They understood. They know that for all my social energy I am essentially a private creature, and that my decision to hide from the party was less of a decision than a need. Soon enough, the house was filled with sounds-- big cloppy heels on the hardwood floors (these rock people and their amazing boots, you know), ice clinking into glasses, the over-loud and overly cheerful chatter of pre-drunk social intercourse, and people talking to, for, or about the pets whenever they ran out of things, momentarily, to say.
There are few things that drive me crazier than idle chatter, small talk, and so on - all that space-filling noise we use to keep silence at bay. What is so scary about silence? When did we, as a generation, learn to fear solitude? Why do we go to such great lengths to drown out the blare of the universe rustling in our skulls? I was in no mood to ponder these questions, I just wanted a spot of peace, and so I put on my headphones. I needed something beautifully blank yet engaging, something completely effaced, yet rich with texture and implication, and so of course, I went straight for Brian Eno, starting with my favorite, "2/1".
In an instant, the party flew away from me to somewhere remote, somewhere that, wrapped in the amniotic music and behind my sturdy new oak door, seemed almost completely abstract as it related to my objective reality. I felt my brain cool and then sort of deliquesce, the tension washing out of my nerves, the lines smooth out of my forehead, and again, I breathed. By the time the album was over, I felt a sense of great peace and centeredness, as if I was floating serenely in the absolute center of my body.
The blare of heavy metal from the living room threatened to set me off-balance again, though, and I quickly brought up Eluvium's Copia in iTunes, one of my very favorite records of the year and one of the few whose power to simultaneously soothe, captivate, and inspire is on par with Eno's for me. By the time I'd finished with this and Feltbattery's eerily beatific, naturalistic sound art, the party had dispersed. A great quiet settled around the house, and I sat in my room, moonlight slanting through the blinds, and let the music echo through my head, diminishing with each pass, until I sank into a perfect mental silence and slept, dreamlessly. With this relief in mind, I dedicate these songs to all seekers of solitude, stalkers of peace, and refugees from the desperate distraction that characterizes so much of our modern lives.Labels: ambient, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
THE PEOPLE
Common
Finding Forever
GOOD Music/Geffen : 2007
[leak]
THE LIGHT
Common feat. Erykah Badu & Bilal
Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Geffen : 2007
[Buy It]
HIP HOP IS DEAD
Nas
Hip Hop is Dead
Def Jam : 2006
[Buy It]
Last December, I traveled to Chicago to have lunch with Common for an article in Paste Magazine. To celebrate the impending release of Common's new album, Finding Forever (the first single from which is available above), I'm posting the entire interview transcript, including all the parts that I didn't use in the article, below.
You have a new album coming out, Finding Forever.
It should come out in the spring, I would say late April. (Note: Album is currently slated for July release.)
Can you tell me about the title?
It's just really talking about making timeless music and timeless art, and how we exist through this music forever if we just find this place where it's pure.
What happens if you don't find that place?
Then it becomes the moment's hit and they play it on the radio and it's like a hundred million audience, but it just passes away. There's certain songs you can hear that were big hits in 2004, where you hear it now you don't have a feeling about it. It doesn't even take you back to that time. Where as I can hear Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and it takes me to a place in my life, an emotional place, because the music has that emotion. When you find forever music and you make timeless art, it's got to have an emotion to it. NWA takes me to a certain emotion and place in my life, and I feel that music should do that. Art should do that.
So timelessness is very important to you.
I want my music to be able to last, man. I was riding with my daughter the other day and playing some old soul music, and her and her friends covered up their ears like no, we don't like this. I was like, this is good music, soulful music. She don't want to hear anything made before she was born. She's nine. But the point is that these Isley Brothers, James Brown, and John Coltrane songs that I listen to, my daughter is going to hear them, because it's timeless music. There's movies I check out like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull or On the Waterfront that I wasn't aware of up until three years ago. I watch them now and I'm still like, damn, that's an incredible movie. That's one of the ways I'm going to leave a mark on the earth. I feel like we all have a purpose in life, and through music and art I want to be able to have people become enlightened and enjoy and be entertained and encouraged, because I feel like I want people from all walks of life to get that energy from the work that I do. And that's how you do it, you gotta put your heart and soul into it. But it also takes you having certain experiences in life to be able to offer that, and you being in tune with what's going on, like Marvin Gaye - he was in tune with the people. One thing I always emphasize is that when you're doing music, you want people to enjoy it at the end of the day, whether they're learning something or not. It's enjoyment, too, and it's an escape. You gotta make it pleasurable. When we order this meal, I definitely want to get something that's good, but I want something that's healthy too. I got friends that wont get tofu, they're like, it don't taste good. You got to make it taste good.
Are you a vegetarian?
I just eat seafood. I was vegan for about three years. It's hard, but it's worth it. It takes a certain amount of discipline.
Back to what you were saying a moment ago - do you think it's important for people to be aware of themselves, of their own bodies and their place in the world, in order to do good in the world?
You just said it, man. You made me think of what it's all about. When you take care of your body, you pay more attention to the world and take care of others too.
If you aren't taking your own life seriously…
Then how you going to take anyone else's life seriously?
One exciting rumor I've heard about the new album is that you'll be working some with Dre.
Aw, man, I would love that but that's not… I'm not going to say that's not happening, because you never know what could happen, but right now this album is largely produced by Kanye West. J Dilla, who passed, has a track with D'angelo and I. I love it. Also, will.i.am and I are creating some music together. But Kanye and me is like the foundation. I met him here (in Chicago), through No I.D., who produced my first three albums. Kanye was younger, but friends with No I.D., and he would come around while we were making music. He was always hungry, always confident, always shit talking. He had potential, but potential with a purpose is what made him who he is today.
Do you have some good guests on the album?
Yeah, but at this point, for me, it's about making albums that sound good and let people know who I am. The guests who I have most of the time are vocalists singing something I cant sing, but as an MC, unless it's a song where I hear somebody on it… that's how I make music, if I get a beat and it makes me think of someone else, then I'll go get them.
So you don't go in for the cameo loading?
Even that's dying down, they know now that it don't sell records.
Is the album almost done?
We're in the third quarter. It's definitely different from Be, but you can also hear a continuity, meaning a certain boom-bap element. Me and Kanye got a certain chemistry that's going to feel familiar, but you still hear new sounds like, man, something's new about this, Common is talking about everyday life, but it's something new.
Do you approach your albums on a song-by-song basis or as concepts?
I do it on the song-by-song and then let the album have a theme. Certain songs stick together and give it a contrast, another color. I don't necessarily say, okay, Finding Forever, so all these songs need to sound like this, even though I do have a direction, something that's progressive. But I want all my songs to be wide open, so I might say, something progressive but with the boom-bap in it. I can figure out something like that as a choice and it ends up coming to a whole greater level than I thought.
Do you rhyme differently with different producers?
I respond to what they do. One thing I notice about producers with me is that they cook beats up with me mostly live, or they may have something in mind for me and let me hear it. They know I like a certain soul in my music, that's the stuff they usually give me, whether its seventies- or eighties-sounding or just straight hard.
You were close with J Dilla. Can you talk about his legacy to hip hop?
Dilla to me is like one of the greatest producers ever, not just in hip hop, but producers, period. That's my brother, man. He's a good, good person, he meant a lot to me as a homey. We were roommates in L.A. I think we're still discovering new things about what he meant to hip hop. I was on the set of Smokin' Aces and the director was playing Welcome to Detroit, and he didn't even know that I knew JD. So his music is going to reach certain people that we have yet to even know. But when I was at his funeral, I felt like, seeing the other artists there, this dude is like a Charlie Parker or Coltrane or Miles, one of our greats.
Do you ever consider your and Kanye's mediatory position in pop music, being neither gangsters nor underground ideologues?
It's hard for you to totally see what you are in the world and the music business, the way you serve, but you just kind of know your purpose and what you want and create the music you feel is pure and sincere, and you let the people decide who you are at that point. If you're like, I'm going to be this voice for this, and you just live your life knowing you want to create stuff you know people are going to rock to, knowing that you want to rock shows and for little kids to be able to sing something that's positive, have sexy girls dancing to it…I always felt like I wanted to be important in hip hop, to have a mark and have my voice be heard and be able to help people. But within the industry, you don't stop and look too much. You have your purpose and go for it. You don't stop and celebrate like, yo, this is who I am in this game, you gotta know who you are as a person.
You've been in hip hop long enough to weather it through several sea changes. How has the industry changed?
The whole business itself has changed. There's no more Tower Records. That used to be the place where, when I released albums, we would do the in-store performance. It was not long ago when I could go up to a radio station and if the DJ liked my song, he could play it. But it's at the point where it's has to be on the playlist, and the record label has to approve it, and now what's revealing itself to me is that radio doesn't control people's success as much any more. There are people whose records get played a lot, people singing it, but that don't mean they're going to go buy your album.
A good time to get into acting, then!
Even that, you got to do it with passion, man. You gotta do it from the heart, because you love it. Anything that has to do with art, you got to approach it from a place of love. All the other things that come along with it, yeah, they can be on the agenda, but the initial thing has to be the love for what you doing. Whether it's journalism or whatever that has to do with creativity and art. Even if you're working a job, man, you gotta love your job. Society is rough as far as having jobs for folks, but if you can find something you like to do, I say you should do it.
You have roles in two upcoming films, Smokin' Aces and American Gangster. Tell me about the making the transition from music to film.
I've been told that any character you play has some quality of you in him, whether you have that quality within yourself or not. What I do is try to bring a person to the character. I'm a person, you're a person, that lady that just walked by is a person - certain differences we going to have, certain things we going to connect on. We people. So I just try to bring the human elements of a person to each character. They gotta be different, they're not going to be me, that's the fun part about it. I get to be someone else, explore sides of me that I don't express.
Like gangster roles?
That was such a fun experience, and encouraging and enlightening too. I was discovering all these things about myself and learning about the process of making a movie, things I never knew. It's just good to be part of a project that's quality and innovative, in and of itself.
So you like the movies, you'd see them even if you weren't in them?
Yeah, I'd definitely go see Smokin' Aces and American Gangster. I am a moviegoer, man. I've seen The Departed like five times. It's incredible. I went to acting classes before I started auditioning for roles, to see if I wanted to make that transition, how I felt about it. I had to feel like it was something that I could do and be good at, and also I wanted to feel like it was something I would love to do, so that I could get in there and want to work and do it. Acting class is so fun for me, I look forward to acting class when I go. It's something I plan other things around.
What attracted you to these two roles?
Sir Ivy in Smokin' Aces, I love that he's a dark character that's sensitive. He is one of the sharpest killers in the movie, but he's very intelligent and warrior-like. By the same token, he has a heart. You see the heart come through.
And your American Gangster character?
First, the script was really good, and Denzel Washington Russell Crowe were in it. Denzel himself. I was like, oh man, I got to be a part of this. He's one of my favorites. Working with Denzel was an overwhelming experience, like being among royalty and people who are masters of what they do. He's a master. I was able to learn, also, about being a responsible man and a good leader. I play Turner Lucas. The story is based on Frank Lucas, this guy from Greensboro, NC. He moves to Harlem and works for this big-time hustler, this kingpin named Bumpy Johnson. Bumpy dies (Frank was his driver, very enterprising and intelligent), and during the late sixties, instead of being the middleman he decided to go over to Vietnam. He had a cousin who was over there, and they started bringing in heroin from Vietnam in government planes, in the caskets of troops. The story deals with him becoming one of the biggest hustlers at the time, but also a family man, a loving guy, and the conflict between him and Russell Crowe's character, a detective who's trying to put him away. He has his own personal problems, but as a policeman he's working hard to bring down the guys he feels are doing wrong. It's just kind of contrasting these two people - one guy bringing in heroin in caskets, but he's going to church and taking care of his family. Then the other guy's family life is fucked up, he has problems with womanizing, but he's doing right by the system. I play one of Frank Lucas's five brothers. We come up from NC and set up shop with him, bring our families up. Frank Lucas was there while we were shooting, it was crazy - kind of strange, sometimes.
How does the film world differ from the music world?
It's definitely run a little more by the book, more organized, schedules are different. You have less power in being an actor. I kind of like that, I feel good about being in a group, like everything's not on my shoulders, every interview not coming personally to me. I like being part of a team, I played sports. When you're making music, the producers are your team, but everything falls on your shoulders.
Did you catch any flack for being in those Gap ads? Do you think being known as a “socially conscious” artist creates extra responsibilities for you?
It definitely creates a responsibility. Any individual in the public eye has a responsibility to say something, mean something, do something that's helping the world, helping your people. So yeah, being a conscious artist I feel that I definitely have a certain responsibility. I think people are growing out of that, oh, he does conscious music so he can't be seen among this crowd thing. He can't be seen doing commercials. People are maturing, they're like, do what you do. You're not doing anything out of your character as an artist… most people are very happy for me, like, that's a blessing. I almost feel like it put me in another stratosphere. People will come up to me like, that's the dude from the Gap ads.
My mom knows about you now.
That's a blessing, man. I had a fight with myself one time about whether I would do a Coca Cola commercial. At that time, I made a decision that unless it was something I'm totally against, I'm going to use that platform to get out my message.
Are there film roles you would reject on principle?
That's a different thing, it's creating a character. When I do an advertisement for a company, I'm saying I, Common, endorse this. It's who I am. When I'm a character, I'm another person. You're telling that person's story for whatever reasons you find it purposeful. Like in Smokin' Aces, I'm killing people in the movie. I don't get to do that in real life. You get that feeling of wanting to release some anger, it's better to do it in a movie.
Or on some cargo pants?
That wasn't even releasing anger, that was just celebrating.
Nas's new album is called Hip Hop is Dead - what do you think he means by that?
First of all, Nas is one of the greatest ever, so what he's trying to say is the form of hip hop we grew up with doesn't exist as much any more. There's still some artists that have it, but as a whole, if you look at hip hop, you don't feel that love for art, that purity in the music, and I think that's what he's saying is dead. It definitely has become the new dope game. Drugs became not as profitable, I guess. Because most cats don't even want to be selling drugs, some people figure, this is my way to survive, but most people I know don't want to sell drugs. Rap has become people's outlet to make money, which is one reason why it doesn't have the impact that it had before.
How do you draw the line between paying heed to disenfranchised voices and blocking out socially toxic ones?
Anybody who has a voice, you got to let them tell their story. That doesn't mean I'm going to sit and listen to every story. I like John Coltrane, D'angelo, Lauryn Hill, Prince, Nas, Kanye, Mos, Jay-Z sometimes. I listen to other stuff, but you're going to like what you like. We come to the restaurant, you're going to order what you like I'm going to order what I like. I like Nas's music. I like Kanye's music. It's no knock to anybody else, but you got a certain preference. I said what I had to say about the industry in “I Used to Love H.E.R”. I do feel like an artist should allow themselves to be a voice, but they should also recognize that there's certain individual characteristics that they have, that they gotta give out. Meaning, if you aren't really looking at your voice and truly being you… I think the only problem with a lot of the things you hear, drug rap or party songs, is that you don't get to hear the other side of black culture, or just people. Black people are diverse people like a lot of other nationalities or races, we do have a set of people that deal with the pain and struggles of being in a drug-infested, gang-infested world, but at the same time there's black people that work hard every day, and take care of their families, working for the CTA, or doing construction work, or picking up trays, creating new inventions for Apple, black people that paint, black people that are artists. We have a diverse culture, but hip hop is pretty much just showing one side of it, which is why someone like Nas would say hip hop is dead. We know at one point that hip hop was NWA and KRS-One…this culture is obviously strong, affecting the way people dress and talk. This is a powerful voice, a young black voice of America. I would never be one to say you can't express that you sold drugs, but a lot of drug dealers I know aren't proud of it. It ain't the life they want to live. I think that side should be told too. That's the one thing that people aren't expressing, that we're human. You feel hurt sometimes, you cry sometimes, sometimes you lie, sometimes you want to punch people, sometimes, you feel pleasure, you feel cocky. We're people.Labels: brian, hip-hop, interview
posted by Brian
LINK |
Thursday, April 19, 2007
NITE MOVES
Grovesnor
Hot Chip's DJ-KiCKS mix
!K7 : 2007
[Pre-Order It]
BLACK REPUBLICANS
Lil Wayne feat. Juelz Santana
Da Drought 3
2007 mixtape
KRAZY WORLD
King Geedorah feat. Gigan
Take Me to Your Leader
Big Dada : 2003
[Buy It]
These are among the songs that carried me to my thwarted camping trip last weekend.
The thing about trips is that, while they feel so much realer than everyday life while you're on them, they immediately dissolve into the fragmentary dreamstuff as soon as they end. Given that we'd driven to North Carolina's outer banks to camp, given that the ferries were cancelled by the gale-force winds wracking the state, given that even our secondary plan to camp on the mainland was foiled when the wind and rain got so heavy we couldn't keep the tent on the ground, given that we wound up checking into a little motel with water that smelled of rust and brimstone in a blighted beachside town-- given the distance between all of this and our intentions, this trip feels particularly obscure in retrospect, and the images I retain of it range from dreamy to out-and-out surreal, all capped by a ubiquitous livid sky.
I remember a corridor of trees, browned by chemical spray at the bottom, purple with flowering wisteria higher up, funneling the dark river of the highway down to a thin runnel, gradually vanishing into a gray shroud of distance. I remember the smoke from the camping stove we used to make coffee in the hotel room, pooling incongruously under the shade of a wall-mounted lamp. I remember the alien landscape of the shore there-- the sun spangling hard and flat off of brackish pools, the misty plumes of sand blowing off the tops of the dunes, over inexplicable mounds of neatly stacked, decomposing Christmas trees. The beach was covered in broken glass, unidentifiable metal scraps, random plastic detritus, and many many automobile tires, half submerged in the sand at the tide's edge.
I remember feeling caught between the sadness and digust I felt at the shore's utter ruin, and the sense of wonder, of interest (the sensation I crave most), sparked in me by the tableau-- the Christmas trees lined up like mummified sentinels and a rotted wreath hanging on a raw wooden post; some of the tires so barnacled that only their shape betrayed them, clustered and weirdly beautiful, like archipelagos viewed from a plane. It was as if the debasement of the world renewed my ability to perceive it, which is the ultimate goal of all travel, and even now, several days back into my routine, some part of me is still standing on that windy dune, the malevolent refuse of a construction project looming behind me, they sky violent and bruised, rotted pine at my feet, staring down at those artificial yet glittering skerries, caught between conflicting desires-- for the world to be always transformed, yet somehow preserved.Labels: brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, April 02, 2007
BABY SAID
Hot Chip
Coming on Strong
Astralwerks : 2005
[Buy It]
BABY CAPTAIN
Xiu Xiu
La Foret
5RC : 2005
[Buy It]
BABY BLUES
The Stills
Without Feathers
Vice : 2006
[Buy It]
BABY STRANGE
T. Rex
The Slider
Repertoire : 2005 (original release : 1972)
[Buy It]
BABY, WHAT IS GOING ON
The Old Ceremony
Our One Mistake
Sonablast : 2006
[Buy It]
After witnessing a disquieting scene at a coffee shop this morning, I feel compelled to address a cultural phenomenon that seems to harbor dire, if obscure, ramifications for us all.
Whether you believe that babies are mad geniuses from outer space or just tiny, catastrophically insane humans, I think you'll agree that they have some perfectly reasonable functions. They look cute (sometimes - in the words of Cerebus the Aardvark, "All babies look like Winston Churchill to Cerebus."). They can be a nexus for the surplus of desire with which we adult humans seem unduly burdened. Certain concepts about propagating the species come to mind. But babies seem to have developed some entirely unreasonable functions as well, like this one: Adults whose lives have become so babycentric that the rituals of mature socialization no longer apply are conducting entire conversations through the media of their mute, drooling offspring.
You know what I mean. Consider this gruesome little scene: You're sitting in a coffee shop, enjoying your morning caffeine-and-reading time. You're having a hard time focusing because of the blood-curdling screams periodically issuing from the next table, where an infant presides over two young mothers. While you'd never considered it consciously before, you realize that you've been laboring under the misapprehension that babies don't drink coffee, and therefore don't really belong in coffee shops. It's not like you go to drink chai and smoke cloves at the playground (one hopes).
At any rate, while the infant occasionally becomes furious for no apparent reason, the young mothers carry on a normal, if slightly stilted, conversation, one that adheres to social norms. But suddenly, one of them does something that's at once surprising and unsettling: She turns to the baby and asks it a question. "Did you have a nice weekend, Charlie?" she coos. You are nonplused. Your mouth hovers expectantly over your coffee cup. The young mother is still leering expectantly at the infant, which has somehow removed its shoe and inserted its entire foot into the remains of an espresso milkshake. You realize, with some alarm, that you're waiting for the child to respond as well. Did it, in fact, have a nice weekend? The question hangs in the air like a punted football, holding its spin against a backdrop of infinite blue. The other young mother takes the cue: "We had a great weekend with Daddy, didn't we, Charlie?" Then, in the same high-pitched lilt, she instructs the child to speak. "Say, 'Daddy took us to Tweetsie Railroad,' Charlie." This goes on for some time.
What the fuck. Is it meant to be cute, or are there more sinister implications? Has the baby telepathically commandeered the mother's mind, using her as a mouthpiece to express its sordid desires? This premise flatters my affinity for the paranoid and fantastic, but seems unlikely. If it were the case, I imagine exchanges like the following would be more common:
YOUNG MOTHER 1: "Did you have a nice weekend, Charlie?"
YOUNG MOTHER 2 [body stiffening and eyes glazing as baby executes Vulcan mind-meld]: "Say, 'Not really,' Charlie. Say, 'I crapped myself and no one noticed for hours, since Mommy and Daddy spent most of the day arguing about which private pre-pre-school to send me to.' Say, 'I insereted a lima bean into my left nostril, and I'm pretty sure it's still there.' Say, 'It was a hundred damn degrees outside and they bundled me up like an Eskimo; I sweated like a pig. So no, I actually had a pretty shite weekend, thanks very much.'"
Or:
YOUNG MOTHER 1:"Did you have a nice weekend, Charlie?"
YOUNG MOTHER 2 [eyes glazed, in creepy monotone]: "Blah. Blah blah blooey. Milk. Crap. Milk. Attention. Pacifier. Give. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Gaaaaaaah."
And that's not all. Since I began my extensive work on this jarring expose, it's come to my attention that the phenomenon has exploded the boundaries of the infant world and infiltrated that of pets:
PET OWNER 1: "Hiya Spark, did you have a good time at the creek today?"
PET OWNER 2 [speaking in gruff, utterly inexplicable doggy voice]: "Say, 'We sure did,' Spark. Say, "We almost got into a fight with a raccoon, but other than that....'"
You fools! Dogs can't speak English. You asking a dog a question is like a bird asking you to fly, then grabbing your arms and kind of flapping them ineffectually while it and the other birds laugh at you. And it's only a short leap from pets to inanimate objects. The possibilities are manifold and surreal. Businessmen in boardrooms, making their ballpoint pens "say" things about fiscal quarters and leveraged assets. Teachers waving around chalkboard erasers that lecture students about mitosis in the voice of Bobcat Goldwaithe. Doctors making their scalpels "ask" for 50 ccs of whateverthehell, stat!
I'm not even going to get into people having conversations via their sexual organs. It's just too tragic.Labels: babies, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, March 19, 2007
BUDAPESTPoni Hoax Poni HoaxTigersushi : 2006 [Buy It]Like you, I got worry. I just did my taxes and it appears that I owe the government a sum in the quadruple-digit range. (Should "the government" happen to be reading, please recall the old saying about the infeasibility of extracting blood from stones. But the government is probably not reading...excuse me for a moment. ALLAH! JIHAD! MUSIC PIRACY! That should do it.) I just doled out for new tires, windshield wiper blades and parking lights to pass inspection, and now it turns out that my exhaust system has rusted to the strength of lace. I have a lump under my tongue that's either a cyst or the inoperable facial cancer that would be my just reward for smoking, and my bare-bones health insurance plan is basically only good for saving me from bankruptcy in the event of catastrophic illness or accident. And this is just the practical stuff, as for the existential worries and political dread...let's not even go there. Frequent Moistworks readers will have gleaned that my relationship with music tends to be...somewhat fraught. Usually, I'm constitutionally incapable of immuring myself from contexts and implications, suspicious of my own tastes and those of others, and biased toward the conceptual. But in times of greater-than-usual stress, my relationship with music seems to revert, however temporarily, to a state of relative innocence. I seek out solace in old favorites whose well-worn cadences, melodies and messages are as familiar and ritualistically comforting to me as the act of rolling a cigarette, and I fixate on new songs without much thought as to what they might mean. I seek simplicity in art when life gets overly complex, and for a time, I'm able to believe that I enjoy certain songs for no other reason than that they're awesome. I'm only offering you one song today, which I've recently discovered and deemed uncomplicatedly awesome, and if this seems miserly, I'm banking on you wanting to listen to it over and over again. One of the greatest joys of music fandom is discovering the gem that slipped through the cracks. Music journalists experience this joy too, but it's accompanied by a sort of low-level anxiety: You wonder what else you missed in year X, and look back on your year-end list with uncertainty and discomfort. Such is my experience with Poni Hoax's "Budapest". The first time I heard it, several days ago, I had the urge to go to the online spaces where my colleagues gather, shouting, "WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT PONI HOAX?" But this would be an error, since lots of people did. The French electro-rock group received a smattering of Stateside press when their album came out last year, and Pitchfork featured a glowing track review of the very song in question. I can't explain why I didn't check out Poni Hoax in depth at the time - the Pitchfork review of "Budapest" made it sound compelling, and I'd even heard and liked another Poni Hoax song, "She's on the Radio". What can I say? Until I can squeeze more hours into the day or learn to forgo sleep, there will always be things that I miss. Mea culpa, but life goes on - I'm sure the music-listening world will recover from my omission of "Budapest" in the annual tallies. As things stand, I'm rocking the hell out of it right now. The Poni Hoax album is audacious and enjoyable, if flawed-- some songs go on too long and pile too many crazy sounds onto the tracks, and the band's Joy Division meets Liquid Liquid style can be cumbersome when the theatrics are more serious than arch. But I like pretty much everything about this slinky noir. "Okay, first off, her detached Berlin cabaret electroclash shtick vocal can go to hell. How 'ominous,'" wrote a Paper Thin Walls poster of guest vocalist Olga Kouklaki's perfectly mixed cocktail of sex, nausea and stylized wartime dread, an opinion with which I can wholeheartedly agree if we interpret "go to hell" in a good way and remove the ironic tone from "ominous." I love how her voice creaks with cool anxiety on the line "you know where we are now," the boho-chic exhalations with which she pronounces the name of her dreamtime city, and how she manages to scream the word "sky" without raising her voice. I love the song's fantastical and darkly romantic conjuring of the intrigues and atmospheres of wartime Eastern Europe; a conjuring that's all the more potent for its archetypal artifice. I love the taut Italo-disco bassline that gradually becomes buzzy and baggy, the opium-den chimes, the portentous strings, and the general cabaret lounge vibe. I love the "iced game of chess, melting," the "street cars tearing up the sky," the Transylvanian guns and burning synagogues. Most of all, I love the completeness of this song's hermetic and almost wholly imaginary world, where everyone's too busy intriguing, loving and dying for income taxes to be much of a concern. Labels: brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
SICK
Giddy Motors
Do Easy
Fat Cat : 2006
[Buy It]
SICK WORLD
Sway
This is My Demo
All City : 2006
[Buy It]
FEVERED
The Stills
Logic Will Break Your Heart
Vice : 2003
[Buy It]
Chapel Hill is being ravaged by a terrible late-winter flu, and Moistworks' Chapel Hill liason has not been spared. I'm sorry for this wan post, and promise to make it up to you next time, when my body is no longer emitting blast-furnace levels of heat. If I type for any longer than this my keyboard is going to melt.
**********
*ATTENTION JOANNA NEWSOM FANS*
Ever since I posted a few songs from Joanna Newsom's live performance in Greensboro, NC, last November, Moistworks readers have been clamoring for an unscratched version of "Emily." It took some doing, but I finally got my hands on the clean version, and I'm crawling out of my fever-coma just long enough to post it here.Labels: brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
AND I WON'T CAUSE ANYTHING AT ALL
Loney, Dear
Loney Noir
Sub Pop : 2007
[Buy It]
COLLECTION OF STAMPS
I'm From Barcelona
Let Me Introduce My Friends
EMI Int'l : 2006
[Buy It]
LUCKY STAR
The Legends
Facts and Figures
Labrador : 2006
[Buy It]
YOUNG FOLKS
Peter Bjorn and John
Writer's Block
Witchita : 2006
[Buy It]
THE QUIZ
Hello Saferide
Would You Let Me Play this EP Ten Times a Day?
Razzia : 2006
[Buy It]
In the end, I think people end up busting Brian's balls because his writing can be, well, precious. - "Avery" And then she asked for a job. She's got me dead to rights though. Whenever people ask me about my influences, I'm like, Hummel figurines, baby photos, certain gems, cute kitten calendars. "Hang In There Baby!" It's probably my preciousness that causes my enduring affection for the recent bumper crop of Swedish indie pop, which is uniformly whimsical and fey (the Knife, while incredible, is obviously excluded from this taxonomy), that has flooded the States over the past couple of years. We could start by talking about Abba, but on his deathbed, my esteemed mentor in preciousness (a certain gray eminance called Chauncy Wigglesbottom), clutching my ruffled sleeve with a daintily manicured hand, said to me, "Brian, never write about Abba!" And I gave him my oath. We could talk about Camera Obscura, but they aren't really Swede-poppers due to the minor technicality of being Scottish. We could talk about Jens Lekman or Pelle Carlberg, but their mannered affectations leave me a little cold. We could also start with Acid House Kings or the Cardigans, who laid a lot of the groundwork for this new wave of Swede pop - actually, we could definitely talk about AHK's frankly terrifying cover photo (notice how the eyes just follow you. Do they have Olan Mills in Sweden? Is it haunted?) but we've only got so much bandwidth here and I'd rather share the newer stuff with you. The Concretes' Victoria Bergsman makes a terrific cameo in Peter Bjorn and John's conversation song "Young Folks", which is pretty perfect comfort pop - the whistled melody tattoos itself on your brain immediately, and the song does a great job of capturing the bubble-like quality of burgeoning romance (it makes me think of getting-to-know-you montages in movies: Throwing a medicine ball, chasing pigeons in the park, eating ice cream in front of a boardwalk arcade...). There's a really adorable video for "Young Folks" here, sort of like Linklater without the drugs and paranoia. In my Pitchfork review of Loney, Dear's Sub Pop debut, I speculated that Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Belle & Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch collaboratively authored Sweden's English curriculum, explaining why so many Swedes get starry eyed when they sing in English. As one savvy reader pointed out, this isn't actually true - the jig is up, and I salute this reader's fine-tuned bullshit detector. At any rate, Loney Dear is an utterly likeable musician with a voice that seems to be composed of some sort of chilled liquid, and his record is my current go-to record for frazzled moments. I wonder if this same reader wrote to I'm From Barcelona to inform them that they aren't, in fact, from Barcelona, and I wonder if they replied that it just sounds better than I'm From Jonkoping (umlauts sold seperately). IFB is a bouncy, jangly behemoth-- there are like 67 people in the band ("hey, I've got a kazoo and a neckbeard" - it's that kind of party), a utopian society where cute girls sing rapturous 20-voice harmonies with heinous boys and every day is school picture day. From personal research I've discovered that taking any "ba-ba-ba" section from an I'm From Barcelona song and using digital editing software to crank the speed and pitch way down turns it into a monkish chant. You should try it - it's fun, and Audacity is free! Sorry to say that I've run out of posting time before getting to The Legends and Hello Saferide (except to those of you who become personally offended when I write things, to whom I say, you're welcome), but if people want to hear more modern Swede pop or discuss it with greater depth, we could do that in the future - there's plenty of this stuff I haven't even touched on. You know your way to the comments box. Moistworks is nothing if not interactive. Until then, have a precious day! Labels: brian, indie, swede pop
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, February 12, 2007
ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG
Billy Joel
The Stranger
Columbia : 1977
[Buy It]
BAD SCENE, EVERYONE'S FAULT
Jawbreaker
Dear You
DCG : 1995
[Buy It]
THIS IS JUST A MODERN ROCK SONG
Belle & Sebastian
This is Just a Modern Rock Song single
Jeepster : 1998
[Buy It]
THIS FUNNY WORLD
Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook
Concord : 2005
[Buy It]
I was embarassed because I'd been caught listening to Billy Joel. This is not something I am prone to do, but we all indulge secret passions sometimes and I am no exception. Even worse was that I'd tried to cover it up.
By the time my relatively new friend Carla and I were buckling our seatbelts after the rock show, I had completely forgotten I'd been listening to Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Vol. 1 on the way to the club. Carla and I were sweaty; our ears were ringing, and we basked in the post-show, pre-bar glow. The dark windshield glimmered furtively in the light rain. Carla was in the passenger seat saying something I couldn't hear through my teal foam earplugs, which I proceeded to plop greasily into an empty coffee cup. I rememeber she wore a navy blue denim jacket with a lot of brightly-colored buttons, a lot of mascara and silver glitter. I turned the key in the ignition and the car woke up sputtering, gouting light everywhere.
I like to relish the moment, right after starting the car, when the CD player resumes its work, especially when I can't immediately place the music. Sometimes I wait for an appropriately anonymous section of whatever I'm listening to before I turn off my car so I might get to experience the mysterious instant of not recognizing the familiar when I return, setting up a little wonder pit-stop for myself in the future. It doesn't always work.
Then I try to prevent myself from identifying the music that's playing, delaying the jolt of recognition for as long as possible by shutting down mental file-searching and concentrating on the sound of the music. It feels great to hear something so good and unencumbered, if only for a moment. But when I started the car on my pseudo-date with Carla, something about the texture of the music, which I couldn't identify at first, bothered me. Something about its jittery piano and deep-throated vocals gave me pause. With dawning horror, I realized - Oh my god it's the freaking Billy Joel CD - and I stabbed the off button. The silence of the ocean floor flooded the car.
Carla and I had known each other for about a month - we met through a series of events that has nothing to do with this story. We definitely had a spark, but we were also co-workers and were involved in vague relationships and would probably wind up being too good of friends for anything to come of it.
My real mistake wasn't listening to Billy Joel; it was trying to hide it. It's one thing to get caught doing something embarrassing, but it's much worse to actually appear embarrassed by it, which implies that you meant it. Had I just smiled rakishly, started belting out the lyrics ironically, or made a wisecrack instead of quickly turning off the CD player as if she wouldn't notice... I can't help but wonder what might be today.
We both stared straight ahead. I affected a studious aspect; her gaze was more searching. The silence was enormous. No cars passed through the gravel lot to make a munching sound. We were almost the last to leave the club, because we always stay until the bands are heading to the afterbars.
"What was that?" Carla asked, not unreasonably or without sympathy. Still, her voice sounded like a parody of casual curiousity. Her reflection looked slightly baffled in the windshield, brushed in broad dim strokes on the dark.
"Huh? Nothing," I said, in way I hoped would register as absently, feigning surprise at her question as if she'd jarred me from a pleasant reverie. I might have even yawned and stetched my arms. I suddenly developed an intense fascination with the web of cracks I had put right above the inspection sticker on my windshield. I'd been moving large furniture. Running my finger along the bright water trapped in the black glass, I furrowed my brow as if to say, These fissures are no longer acceptable; how might I bring my ingenuity to bear on a solution?
"That was Billy Joel," Carla said defiantly.
"No, it wasn't." My god, what did I mean?
"Yes it was!" Carla said in a scandalized tone. "That was 'Only the Good Die Young.'" She was smiling, but in an astonished, kind of affonted way.
Fucking "Only the Good Die Young." It was. It really was. It wasn't exactly "We Didn't Start the Fire" bad, but still, it was bad. My jaw lolled like something with a busted hinge. I felt like maybe my eyes did something that might be construed as goggling.
She said my name plaintively, taken aback by the sudden disappearance of my usual bravado. I had to think in terms of damage control. I needed a ripping bon mot, something witty and cutting and dismissive.
"No it wasn't."
Oh dear. Like Peter in the Garden, I had opted for a third denial. I could see where it was heading. Like Peter, I was going to get called out.
Carla must have enjoyed the pliant, come-hither resistance of the stereo's knob as she purposefully depressed it with a stiffened finger. The song began right at the titular chorus. "Only the good die young," Joel proclaimed, with what seemed to me a smug satisfaction. He would not be denied. I peered intently through the windshield as if trying to discern portents in the confusion of orange street lights refracting through the irregular rain. The part of the song right after the chorus that sounds like a used car commercial accused me from the air. Carla's gaze burned into the side of my head like a brand. Defeated, I turned down the volume a little, but let the song continue to play. Carla smirked at the floorboard as we drove off into the weeping night. At last call, she left the bar with some guy wearing earlobe expanders and a neckerchief. I went home alone. Although we remained friends, the tenor of our relationship was markedly different from then on, we never spoke of that night again.
[A friend of mine told me recently that she sometimes just had to listen to the Arcade Fire even though she "felt guilty about it," and it reminded me of Joanna's recent Shins-anxiety post. Around the same time I discovered a cache of old writing, stuff from my late teens to early twenties, that I'd thought long destroyed. This little Billy Joel thing was among that writing, and it seemed of a piece with this concept of taste-based guilt that keeps popping up for me recently. I barely recall writing this and certainly don't remember living it (my late teens and early twenties being a particularly blurry period in my life), so I'm not sure how much of it is autobiographical and how much is character sketch. I still don't wear earplugs, for instance, and I never knew anyone named Carla. But I did find a burned copy of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits in an old Case Logic CD binder, and I was terribly indie at that time in my life, so...who knows? It was probably a spot of both.] Labels: brian, indie, rock
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, January 29, 2007
REAL PEOPLECommon BeGeffen : 2005 [Buy It]THE OTHER SIDEDismemberment Plan ChangeDeSoto: 2001 [Buy It]PEOPLEEl Perro Del Mar El Perro Del MarControl Group : 2006 [Buy It]People I KnowSome of us stagger through slanting rain, leaning into the wind. We run into walls and closed doors, stubbing toes and fingers. Some of us glide through curtains of sun like kites, limbs strong and smooth in concert, taking us wherever we want to go. Strangers smile at us and wonder why they did, and no doors bar our way. Some of us lurk in between, sometimes glowing, others guttering, and over all we do okay for ourselves, but still. We want to know why this is, and if it's fair. And if it is fair, then by whose standard? And if it isn't, by what oversight? Sometimes we feel like our steps turn the earth, that when we appear to turn a corner we actually continue straight while the universe swivels ninety degrees against the angle of our footfall. Sometimes we feel like we walk and walk and the universe won't move; behind us our prints fill with snow. Some of us spend a lot of time trying to be something we're not, and slowly become that thing. We regard self as autonomously created, and are unsympathetic toward cultivators of incomplete or undesirable identities. Some of us want to find out exactly who we are, and never do. We feel uncomfortable in our skin and covet others'. Some of us know just who we are and live inside that person, and are still unsatisfied. We regard self as innate, immutable, and curse the one with which we were born. Resignation brings peace; struggle breakage. Some of us don't believe in self, and wind up locating ourselves in that disbelief. Some of us just are. Some of us believe in love and some of us don't, and we can trade places in the most remarkable ways. Some of us spend our lives looking for love and never find it, and we wonder if it wasn't out there or if we were never in the right place at the right time. Some of us find love, but then decide that we enjoyed the looking, and turn our backs on it. Some of us find love, then lose it, and sometimes we pretend it isn't lost because we fear that we'll never find it again, and hope that it will return, and sometimes, it does. Some of us never even think to look for love, and we find it or we don't, and life goes on either way. We all live. We run, sometimes. We walk. We scream and sing and laugh and moan. We itch and scratch and cry and smile. We spill hot coffee all over ourselves. We watch movies and make movies and imagine movies. We eat and cough and swear and lift incredibly heavy objects clear over our heads, legs trembling like plucked strings, only to put them back down. We wink and wash and belch and sleep. Before we say things we know are cruel, we say I'm not trying to be mean but. We sneeze messily into our hands, glance around furtively, and wipe them on our seat's undercarriage. We chew gum and fingernails and remove hair from some parts of our bodies, cultivate it on others. We fake smiles. We question the reality of things we can put our hands on and feel. We hurtle through the sky in machines, skipping over clouds like a flat stone, and don't feel as if we've moved. We run down a barren stip of dirt in an amber late-afternoon light, feeling the textures of flexion and release, and we go very far. We speak. We speak with clicks and grunts and glottal stops and trilled R's and sibilant coos and firm trochees and soft glides. We string chains of polysyllables peppered with Latin and French into a cultivated stutter. We speak in ellipses and generalizations, half-truths and barbs, riddles and allusions and cliches. We speak to fill empty space, to assign value, to affirm presence. We speak to large crowds, gesturing expansively, saying nothing. We use language as a wedge to penetrate the world, and as a shield to fend it off, and as a thin dark line to divide it into things. As children, with cartoons and drawings and maps, we learn to regard the world as a field of burning color demarcated by hard boundaries, and we learn to use speech to define the spaces between the boundaries. This makes things easier and we feel comfortable, until eventually, we try to name the edges. We name all things that exist and many that don't.
We dream. We dream of invisible time travelers watching our lives like television programs, of dead relatives returning alive (but radiating a palpable menace), of being attacked by balloons, of our teeth and hair falling out, of going to school without pants. We dream of falling great distances but never rememeber the impact, of a parking lot filled with red sedans glinting dully on an overcast day, of breathing underwater. We dream of a clock with its hands frozen at 11:10, pendulum idly swinging. We dream of attending parties where everyone knows something we don't. We dream of coming undone from the earth and vanishing into the sun.
We find shapes in the clouds and force the stars into improbable constellations. We view the sky as a mystery, and an omen. We sit by foggy windows watching wet leaves fall and spin on the ground. We have strong opinions on topics we know little about, equivocal ones on topics we know well. We dress up as anthropomorphic animals and have sex with each other, and we don't understand why anyone finds this stranger than wearing a tie or playing golf. We hide keys under mats even though we all know the keys are under the mats. We gingerly avoid stepping on cracks, or we march down the sidewalk stomping on every crack we see. We only tread upon tiles of a certain color in malls, thrilling ourselves with visions of a fiery demise if we misstep. We count our steps in our heads, starting over whenever the terrain changes, looking for a rhythm or pattern. We do whatever we can to fragment the world into digestible bits, even if the divisions seem haphazard as a book's pages.
We aren't perfect, but we try. We kick sand castles. We wash our hands exactly seven times per hour. We knock down mailboxes with bats, just to hear the clang and feel the shock waves in our arms. We lock car doors when people walk by. We roll our eyes and make impatient gestures while pretending to listen to whoever's on the phone. We urinate in showers and pools. We go to great lengths to see each other naked, and some of us enjoy it more if the naked person doesn't know they're being seen, or pretends not to know. We shoplift out of necessity, idealism, or for no reason at all. We don't call our parents for weeks at a time. We don't recycle, or we do because we're afraid of appearing ignorant. We make decisions that change our lives forever, and decisions that don't change a thing. We wear mismatched socks on purpose. We dislike television yet watch it for hours. We write because it's possible to do so. We peer into reflective surfaces at every opportunity. We count the seconds between the flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder, mentally converting time into distance, and for some reason are not amazed that we can do this. We put our lips on each others' stomachs and blow. We drink liquor until we are violently ill, and we do it again. We can't remember much about our first year of college, but we never forget how someone looked tucking a lock of hair behind their ear in front of some water and a bridge. We compose long, florid letters and throw them away, to yellow and shed lilac into the dump. We invest some naturally occuring substances with great value, others with none. We tell each other we need haircuts, then compliment each other on them. We hate tourists, and are forced to stay home and abide them, or travel and join their ranks. We part our hair on one side all our lives, then suddenly spend months training it toward the other. If we hold a pen, we doodle idly on whatever's at hand. We think a lot about where we go when we die, though we rarely consider where we were before we were born. We sit by our grandfather's bedside wanting to ask him if life wound up feeling okay, but we don't, because we're afraid he'll answer.
We disregard warning labels. We loop rubber bands around our fingers until the tips swell up like sausages, just to get a rise. We run with scissors and play with matches and burn ants with magnifying glasses in dry straw fields. We take cold medicine and operate heavy machines. We hurl ourselves from bridges with cords strapped to our ankles just to feel the air move. We stand by caged propane tanks, blithely smoking. We eat ice cream so fast our heads feel like they'll burst. We keep guns under our pillows. We tumble over waterfalls in barrels. We tie blades to our feet and go sliding across plains of ice, but we hold hands while we do it. We inhale smoke even though it will kill us, and pretend we have no choice. We use needles, and share them. We do things requiring pads and helmets. We fly on trapeezes and wrestle alligators. We drive off overpasses and swallow bottles of pills and crash in planes and grab live wires and sink in the sea and contract cancer and have heart attacks and tumble down stairs and plummet from windows and ingest poison and starve and blacken in flames and are torn asunder by bombs falling from the sky and open our veins into alabaster tubs. We trust that others will deal with what remains. We shoot people to death in public places so that we may not be forgotten. We tattoo our skin to make it ours. We write symbols on bathroom walls before we know what they mean. We build monuments and tombs. We love to see our names in print. We scrawl graffiti on trains. We break windows and open hydrants and burn down houses. We splatter mud onto clean laundry flapping on lines. We spend hours grooming lawns and hedges. We flock in droves to ancient castles, making sure to take something away or leave something behind. We dye our hair unnatural colors. We choose art over life because art lasts.
We bloom into warm wet darkness and squeeze through a tunnel toward a pinprick of light. We burst into the world amid shimmering waves of chaos and color and pure sensation. We blink and wail and become the absolute center of any room we're in. We put on clothes and learn where to pee and how to walk instead of crawl and we grow. We learn to make the same sounds with our mouths that everyone else makes with theirs, and in what order to make them. We get bigger and get braces and get them off and figure stuff out, then figure out that we were wrong and start over. We go to school and graduate or drop out and get jobs and get fired or quit and get new jobs and fall in love and get married and fall out of love and get divorced or stay married. We never try to kiss someone and wish we had, or kiss them a couple times and regret it. We are frightened and depressed. We are pissed and apathetic. We are anxious and malign. We are floored and ecstatic. We say things like butterflies, and mean them. We extend to our maximum length and then recede from the space we filled. We wrinkle and fade and wither and dim. We get glasses and lose them all the time. Sometimes we find them right on top of our heads. We retire and move someplace warm and sunny, where the weather stays in the skin, not the bones. We sweat and clutch at the sheets and gasp and shudder and divide and return to the warm wet darkness from which we sprang and never really find out why.
Labels: brian, people
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
!!!MOISTWORKS EXCLUSIVE!!!
BRIDGES AND BALLOONS (LIVE IN GREENSBORO, NC)
Joanna Newsom
SADIE (LIVE IN GREENSBORO, NC)
Joanna Newsom
EMILY (LIVE IN GREENSBORO, NC)
Joanna Newsom
BRIDGES AND BALLOONS POCKET MIX
Pocket
http://www.music-by-pocket.com/
Today, a special treat from your friends at Moistworks: Three bootlegs from Joanna Newsom's performance in Greensboro, North Carolina, last November, unavailable anywhere else. You won't be disappointed (unless, to steal the best thing Dave Eggers ever said, you are the sort of person who is usually disappointed, in which case this will be yet another disappointment). And it certainly won't be a treat for the anti-Newsom crusaders at Rolling Stone, to whom I say: whatevs. Rolling Stone, you're going to let someone write for your magazine for winning a reality TV show. What are you going to do next? Actually go door to door asking readers not to take you seriously? At any rate, I already weighed in on Newsom's set that night here (and if you're feeling particularly Newsom-crazy today, you might supplement the live review with this concurrent interview), but I will repeat that it was one of the most complete-feeling sets I've ever seen: Newsom played the entirety of Ys with her band, bookended by solo renditions of favorites from The Milk-Eyed Mender. Those of you who are put off by the shrillness of her voice might be surprised to hear how nicely the brassy edge is toned down when she sings live. I've also thrown in a techno mix of "Bridges and Balloons" by Pocket (a.k.a. Richard Jankovich of the Burnside Project, you can download this mix and others for free from his website).Labels: brian, live
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
SHOUSETSU
Radicalfashion
Odori
Hefty : 2007
[buy it]
I like "dreamy" music, sure, but I love music that actually replicates the stuff of dreams. This seemingly benign composition by Japan's Radicalfashion frightens me in ways I can't quite pin down. It holds me in such perfect thrall that I don't want to say to much, save that I think it has something to do with the sense of dreamtime imposing itself on the waking world. The lovely piano nocturne is pure aether, but the rhythm track is staunchly corporeal; they hold each other in a trembling suspension, like a memory just on the verge of recollection. Do you hear it as a semi-lucid deathbed reverie too, or something entirely other? I'm listening to it right now, and everything banal in my little office seems transformed, imbued with the ineffable significance of dreams. My cigarette, in a bright shaft of sunlight, looks like something bleeding underwater. The paler sunlight playing on the walls, come to think of it, looks sub-aquatic as well, as if I'm in an aquarium. Submersion is one of the music's qualities, then, but there are others - ordinary objects are transformed into portents; I feel as if I could read the scatter of pens on my desk as if they were the bones of a bird. Birds, too, suffuse this song, ruffling dark feathers, held aloft by their delicate and perfectly balanced bone structures. Images flip and transpose, all sky-bound. Stars or starlings? Either way, it's a pleasure to observe their gentle pirouettes earthward, bathed in whatever soft glow, for these several breath-arresting minutes.Labels: brian, dreams, electronic, piano
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
PHON'S "BONELESS GIANTS" (RE-USED BY GLOSSOLALIA)
PATRICK HERRON'S "TINTINNABULATION" (RE-USED BY GLOSSOLALIA)
On December 17, I went to Washington D.C. to participate in an event called The Poetics of Re-Use with Adam Good and Buck Downs. The purpose of the event was to investigate the concept of re-use as it relates to poetics, an area in which Buck, Adam and I are all active. I wish I had a copy of Buck's talk, which was excellent, involving the use of found materials, "street pencils," and gravestone rubbings. While Buck presented his paper, I was concealed in the wings with my sampler, covertly stealing phrases. After his talk, I made an improvised and manipulated collage with the samples I had taken. I haven't transferred those samples off of my sampler yet, but they are of a piece with the Glossolalia compositions above. I regard Glossolalia as less of a musical project than a manifestation of the poetics of re-use in sound instead of text. Thanks for bearing with me; my energy is so strongly focused in this direction right now, after what I felt was a galvanizing event, that it's difficult for me to talk about anything else with any conviction, for the moment. The talk I gave after my extemporaneous sound work is as follows:
I suppose that Adam invited me here because for the past couple years, every poem I've published, and most poems I've written, have epitomized the term "poetics of re-use." I work with a process I devised called F7. F7 has involved a variety of technologically mediated poetics, but at its core, it uses MS Word's spell-check function to make poems. There's quite a lot to say about the techno-philosophical implications of this project, and shortly, I'm going to say some of them in a roundabout way. But I find that the more intensely I work on re-use, which I do across various media, primarily text and sound, the less I have to say about it. Re-use for me dovetails with my interest in spontaneity and chaos; I like to cram them all together, and the act of re-use has become less theoretical than mystical, almost divinatory. Creating this way, you get the dual pleasure of bringing something into being while simultaneously watching it emerge from the sidelines. I've found that I'm less interested, at the moment, in pontificating about re-use than in demonstrating it- its phenomenal manifestation, its unpredictability, its wonder and dread. But when I began working on F7, I was full of lofty ideas about what I was doing. I documented these over a year ago in a little essay on my blog, and while I've come to disavow some of the ideas contained herein (or, if disavow's too harsh of a word, have come to deem them irrelevant), it's still a good record of my process and the foundation upon which my project was built. After I wrote the essay about the F7 process, to turn the process back upon the essay seemed like the most logical thing in the world, especially since I talk about John Cage in the essay, and Cage would often bring the idea or process he was lecturing about to bear upon the lecture itself. So I went through the essay, corrupting the language in various ways, and then did what I always do: used the spell-checker as a sort of palette to produce what's essentially a chapbook-length prose poem. What I'd like to do now is to read you paragraphs from that essay, approximately paired with their corollaries in the poem; this way I can tell you about and show you my process at the same time, which might be interesting even if I no longer necessarily agree with everything I'm saying:
It's been said many times that a hundred monkeys with a hundred typewriters would eventually, by sheer chance, produce Shakespeare. More fascinating to me is the idea that these same monkeys would, with equal probability, produce great works that have not yet been written. Borges embodied this idea in a physical space in his Library of Babel, a great, seemingly infinite hive-like structure, filled with books that contain every possible permutation of language known to man. As a young man reading this story in the 21st century, it's natural to imagine the Library of Babel as a computer.
It's been said many times that a dunderhead donkey with a dunderhead type rider would even tally, by sheer erotica, shakeup ears. Cannier to me is the audio that these same donkeys would use to produce lewd taboos not yet knitted. Sorrow embeds this audio, a physical epic, in his library of labor, a triage, seemingly definite lifelike structure, wild with spooks that nontoxic every ration of lingo now to name.
As a writer and a human being, I find this idea both exhilarating and slightly terrifying: A powerful computer running through different permutations of language could, theoretically, eventually produce scientific and philosophical breakthroughs simply by chancing across the correct combination of words. This was the initial spark for F7 - I wanted to begin to exhume the shadow narratives latent in our technology, specifically, from the linguistic databases programmed into our machines, and generally, from the great unruly babble (Babel) of the Internet.
As a rite and a nomad gene, I deify this audio, exiled and flightless, terrific dying. This was the uniting trap for F7 - I tended to negate exams, whoosh narratives tautened in our techno, logistic debases purged into our mochas. A lower prelude purring through stiffer actions of lunge could tally optical breadth simply by dancing across the torrid cement of sorrow.
I began by simply typing meaningless clusters of letters, then using Microsoft Word's spell-check function (which is triggered with the F7 key, hence the name of the manuscript) as a palette to determine which words would comprise the final poem. But I quickly discovered that typing random clusters is harder than it sounds - certain typing motions are so entrenched in my hands that I found myself accidentally typing actual words, or typing the same clusters over and over again. I then resorted to various methods to confound this programming, including turning the keyboard in different directions, mis-orienting my hands on the keys, crossing my hands at the wrist before typing, and devising various patterns in which to move over the keyboard.
I began by gypping mean wingless flusters of rattles, then digested tiresome sorrow septic units with the F7 cheer, hence the elan of the mascara. Meridians are so centre-niche in my sand that I found myself aside, tallying lethal sorrow, gypping the same trustees over and over. Then I desired serious dithers to dumfound this program, including hurting the daybed with frontal injections, misery denting my sands, sloshing my sands at the trash after tipsy, and severing various nets to envy over the daybook.
Then I began to look to classic forms to give these poems structure, and arrayed my nonsense language in the forms of sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, epistles, ballads, prose poems etc. The next evolution of the process involved getting away from unwieldy clusters and creating a sort of nonsense language, interspersed with indefinite articles, that alluded to actual words and familiar syntactic patterns. The initial language in these poems is not unlike Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, and the end results, while still largely vacant of actual sense, bear echoes of these recognizable units just beneath the surface.
I began to tool, to chisel surf, to give these steps struts, and arrayed my noon-dense linkage in the surf of notes, phantoms, sanities, sore sleep and sea, vacant of actual eons, bearing aches of these crenate snips beneath the crease. The evil union of sorcery involved getting away from unwired rustics and tracing a sense of iguanas. The lilting lingo in this sleep is not gemlike, sawmill logroll jabbed rococo, in the end scissors.
The next logical step, which I threw myself into with abandon, involved bastardizing famous texts like the pledge of allegiance and the Lord's prayer, either by purposefully misspelling the words, or by breaking them at various points, then extrapolating a new text with the spellchecker that still resonates with the original in various ways. The poems produced in this manner tend to elicit the strongest audience response, since there is something thrilling about recognizable text gradually emerging from such chaos, yet they are also the least true to the spirit of F7, which I'll describe later.
The next gulp, fuel evolved into bandages, striding famous like the elegy of glances and the dolls grayed, by phrasal missile (the sorrow) and a new exit, the sepulcher, that still rusts with the organ in viral assay. The solemn prick in this rain duet incites the sternest dance spins, since there is something shrilling about cranial exit, gradually miring from such shock, yet the tease erupts to the spirit of F7, which I'll serrate.
The process really expanded drastically from here, as I began to use online translators, text databases, Microsoft Word's thesaurus, outline and various other built in functions, and flarf (Googled words and phrases), often feeding several processes, one into the next, within a single poem. This is where I am in the process now. After poking and prodding at it for upwards of a year without really understanding exactly what I was doing, I feel it's nearly complete - complete, in the sense that I will have soon taken it as far as I'm willing or able, not in the sense of pursuing it to its ultimate end. At this point, I'm closer than I've ever been to a comprehensive theory of F7, which I'd like to relate in its inchoate, elliptical and probably subject-to-change state, here:
I began to use trashed atoms, text dubs, those rich sorrow thesis gurus, and flair, defying lovers' prolepses, one into the net. This is where I am in the sector now. After coping and doping for sparks of a yearning that really undresses, I fear its yearlong temple - caplet, the dens I will soon waken in, as far as I'm gully or bleak, not in the eons of optimal din. A complex pensive heart of F7, which I'd like to elate in its chorus, apoplectic and probably tedious-to-anger estate, era.
A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.
-John Cage
An artifact is a mistake.
-Barrett Watten
F7 is akin to the works of the composer John Cage in numerous striking ways. For one, serial / chance operations are utilized to recede the ego, imagination, and experience of the creator, thus freeing words / sounds of an imposed value system and allowing for a more intense, less mediated experience. The emphasis is on the present moment of pure experience, not the past or future, and on the sheer being of the medium, not the influence of its creator. However, just as often as not, F7 fails in this regard - I, by accident (this is preferable, since F7 honors the accident), or by furtive choice, have found myself nudging the poems toward certain oblique, if pointed, statements about art, the academy, politics, and love.
F7 is akin to the sorrow of the morning, munitions, spouse of a spoilt mystic, aligned for a more entwined, less redeemed presence. Tugs as noted as not, it sails to this degree - by cadence (this is effable, since it rondos the cadence), or by eruptive echo, gunning the shoes toward neurotic belief, tempests about atria - the code, coltish and evil.
Nevertheless, concerns of expressivity are de-emphasized. F7 denatures poetry by making no distinction between the planned effect and the accidental one, the "sonorous" tone and the "discordant", music or noise, poem or text. Any sound intoned at any point in space / time is part of universal music, the ongoing composition comprised of every sound ever made, past / present / future.
F7 enraptures voters by making no fiction between the laded theft and the mental theft, the onerous font and the accordant one, cubism or deism, loam or text. Nevertheless, ounces of assets are hashed. Any dooms noted, any toxin in epics, the warp of verbal cubism, refined sorrow, the gnomic moonstone of every dowsing, ever dim, tape / trees / cutoff.
Likewise, every word or sound (F7 sees no distinction between words and sounds) ever intoned, whatever its intention, is part of the ongoing poem of existence. F7 shows a tiny portion of this greater whole, being itself perhaps only a single "note" in the ongoing symphony. Ideas of truth, beauty, and other aesthetic concerns are de-emphasized so that a pure approximation of language in its raw state may be experienced.
Likewise, for every dowry or noose untied, no distant action between sorrow and dunes, its intense toil, trapped in the gonging memo. Munitions off this howling trigger, being itself scrap, only an eagle's talon in the gonging symphony. Idols of youth, yeasts, and other earthen traces are damp, capsized so that a euphonious motion, angular in its warpath, may be expertly inked.
F7 has yet to attain complete unfetteredness, still busying itself with subverting established forms, locating musicality in chaos, discovering surprising logical imagery in irrational processes, etc. This intermediate phase is entirely necessary in reaching the theoretical point where language becomes pure form, pure sound, pure sense (meaning pure sensation, not logical sense), unconnected to any abstraction and existing in a singular, freestanding state.
F7 has yet to entail unfitted redness, still lubing itself with submersed and stabilized storms, shocked luminosity, glacial ambers in atonal recipes, and sea. This interim, a mediated heap, is entirely recent in hearing the theory, an ethical tonic where anger becomes eruptive (meaning sensate eruptions, not agile eons), uncanny, etched into any absurd action and twisting in ringlets, fasting estate.
Like the work of Cage, Gertrude Stein, and some Language poetry, F7 is democratic. At its most successful, no cues are included toward its interpretation, and no moral imperatives, so that interpretation is left entirely to the reader, the way that many Cage compositions simply set up parameters, defined by chance operations, that serve as otherwise unfettered fields of play. F7 is also democratic and collective in another sense - the spellchecker used as a palette was compiled by a group of persons unknown to the author, and the source material from the Googled poems may have been composed by anyone in the world.
Like the cord of ego, restrung nets, and some rotors, F7 is memorial. At its most scuffled, no etudes are inclined toward its intrepid rotation, no loamy narratives, so that rotation is left erringly to the radar, the way that many ego commotions simply tee up prim eaters, feted dials of palsy. F7 is electric in another sense - the lipless hacker used savage was compromised by a prong of nerves, unsown to the ratio, and may have been smoked by the dolor.
Anyone who puts a piece of text onto the Internet assumes potential co-authorship of F7. Anyone who has spoken a phrase or performed an action that, at whatever remote end of a chain of causality, caused someone else to put text onto the Internet, is a co-author of F7. When we see how language forms and travels collectively, we see that F7 is authored by the entire world, while I simply happen to discern, organize and record it.
Anyone who tugs a pecan of text into eternity assumes attenuated worship of F7. Anyone who has poked a harp or mirrored an ocean, in whatever tame den or hail of arsenic, is a contour of F7. Poesy can be dear in its ample erectness, the dread rising, in the outcurve it will entail edits that are even less ruminated, the act of searing the piano that is only cooling, sprung without equal oddments, intrepid emulsion, down in elation's manger in a kiln to the thigh. When we see how iguanas morph and rivets volley, we see that F7 is roofed by dolorous retinas, while I primly kneel to discord, organic, and reword it.
F7 strives to not be mimetic, although like any imperfect thing, it often fails, and despite its unusual attributes, it is a reflection of the world it inhabits. A poem constructed in a more traditional fashion, be it narrative or evocative, concerned with lyricism, meter, rhyme and sonority, truth, beauty, &c. might be conceived as a border drawn around a particular area of space - say, a window. Imagine using a grease pencil to outline the contours of the world reflected in this window. Imagine shattering the window, then reconstructing it differently, by way of chance or patterned operations. This is F7.
F7 tries not to be cosmetic, although like any immersed glint, it notes lapis, and it espies its legion attributes. It is the perfection of the word it incants. A city scourged in a more rational nation, nuked with realms, myrtles, shire and nursery, teeth, eBay, and sea, time concaved as a rude claw around an aura of epics - say, a woodwind. Imagine the doll eluder in his wonder, using a guise to obtain the rotors, rain spattering the window, then ransoming them direct, by way of shank or altered protons.
F7 describes not a limit, but a field of possibility on which infinite actions, reactions and combinations are possible and encouraged. F7 has limits of possibility, but an infinite number of things can occur between these limits, just as endless infinitesimals stretch between the integers one and two. F7 is the limits, and everything that takes place between them, but nothing more. Therefore, F7 is both finite and infinite.
Not time, but a dial of spit on which definite ructions are scoured, timbers of laity, but a definite rumble of giants can ruckus between these timbers, as a definite ruction of infamy ties malice between the mintages of ego and wit. F7 is the timbers, and the writhing that flaps between math and meat, gothic worm. Exert force, F7 is both entity and inanity.
F7 is shorn of moral and intellectual intent. Any moral imperative or critique or position that arises in the text is a function of chance, not of my own intellect or values. This only obtains completely in reference to a theoretical, idealized F7, which does not yet and might never exist. This ideal F7 would completely lack syntax, image, sign, symbol, moral and political dimension, would, in essence, be an example of pure language spinning in a void. My only role would be to record it on the page.
F7 is unhorsed by lore and instilled with actual totems, nonstop arias in the text. Any lore, impure, alive or erectile, any tease or phallic mission, is a nuance of chain, not my own entrails or vulvas. This legal doily, comely kaka yenta limbo, lore, grime and local venison would be, in seance, a temple of usurped lineage noising in a door.
F7 does not describe life, it is life, an event in the frame of a moment. It should be liege to neither the past or the archival / museum paradigm of the future. It should create itself anew, in and for every moment, both in its recording and its reception. Ideally, F7 might be an accidental glyph impressed upon sand, noticed, experienced but not interpreted, then washed away by a wave, only to be replaced by a new expression of F7, perhaps in the footprints of a walker on the shore.
F7 does not scribe veils, it is veils. The only velour doily to decode it is on the egg. It isn't eager to heathen the orchid, a vine in the earmuff of the mind, modem raid of the auteur. It should react weak fisted, in and for verse tokens. Maybe an addendum, hype inbred upon dames, dottier, to be reclined by a new precision, hashed away by an eve, peeps in the tulips of a reliant ethos.
F7 considers silence / blankness to be a value exactly equal to sound / text - not a lacuna. Therefore, any blank page (written F7) or silence (oral F7) must be considered a part of the work with a value equal to the sounded parts. It is possible that the ultimate expression of F7 is silence or a blank page, but this end cannot be jumped toward - the distance between imperfect and perfect F7 must be closed by the crossing of infinite half-spans, which, Zeno's Paradox tells us, is impossible. This is probably good for me, as a writer, since a perfect F7 would remove me from the equation completely, producing a 'text' of perfect blankness unsullied by a human influence.
F7 molders lupine, laxness, to be an eagle lauded exactly to nonuse, not an animal. Therefore, any blank cenacle must be knackered, a trap of the brow, with an avulsed quail in the doused traps. It is spoiled that the mutilated region is neither chisel nor lanky ape, but this dune cannot be mowed, wizard - the slide between imperfect and replete must be locked by the arc of faint ash-snap, sonnet, rap ax, lotus, missile. This is a doomed orgy for me, as a rider, torpedoing a text of effaced lenses, defiled by a manna knife.
F7 does not aspire to be 'musical' in the traditional sense. I have no problem with the statement that 'poetry is musical', but I reject the tacit assumption that music is necessarily harmonic and melodic. Music can be a-, pan-, or proto-tonal, monotonous, dissonant, bracing, etc. In this broader sense only can F7 be described as 'musical.'
In these orderly nests only can F7 be mimetic, more governed with ropes than customs, and any aesthetic inheritance in the totem will not maim if the octave pines to be zestful in some arid way, respires kingly, jetfoils. I have napalm for the esteem that entropy is sacred, but cheer for chatty shampoo, music as ancestral cinema, ecocide. Music can be pagan or protozoan, moonstone, sunstone, rising.
Nothing that inhabits F7's moment is separate from it. As you read the text, any sound you hear should not be considered a distraction - it is part of F7 and F7 is part of it. Any bit of outside text you happen to read or object you see while reading F7 is part of it, as is any taste or physical sensation. This speaks to a) F7's infinite possibilities for occurring within any giv |
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