konvolut m

2006-11-28T00:46:00.000-08:00

Hey, friend: This blog is no longer updated. Relevantly similar current activity has moved here. (However, the km archives are still here for your perusal.)

2005-12-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

This is the 365th and final addition to this file. The subhead above [paraphrased from WB's Konvolut J, as it happens] has been changed to mark its completion -- or, better, stasis.

I want to reassure regular readers that laying this blog to rest has absolutely nothing to do with anything that has occurred in the 'sphere in recent months; nor, for that matter, in the Lebenswelt. (Though I've sometimes had to be reminded that the two are not co-extensive.) The decision was made, rather arbitrarily, as early as summer '04, as a way of fixing a stopping point that wouldn't just feel to me or look to you too much like giving up or flaming out. Can't say now whether I'll start up something else in the future -- but it won't happen for a year, minimum, and will probably be very different in form. Hope not to lose touch w/ those of you I've made or deepened contact w/ through this venue: though I'll be damned if I'll stoop to comment boxes, the email link at right will remain current as long as these pages stay up.

Could go on, but I've rarely seen a final post that didn't get too self-important. Thank you for checking in.

2005-12-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

In California until 12/26. Haven't been away quite long enough for returning to seem truly strange, though my first sensations, driving to Bree's sister's from Bob Hope International was of the scraggly wildlife along the sides of the fwys and the film over the air -- ugliness. (It's a damn Xmas-special set in Evanston right now.) Bree came home (a week before me) to moisture leaks and mold in her shut-up condo.; we'll hear from a toxicologist by Wed. whether it's bad-bad or just bad. Everything in the apartment has to be at least wiped down; books and sheet music, riffled and shaken out, fabric, washed. Went to a WeHo party w/ friends of her family on Friday, where one stranger seemed to be very convinced that I was, in fact, someone who had recently appeared on Desperate Housewives. This conversation would not have occurred in Chicago. Also met Ian Birney, the head of the LACMA film dept. (We had no idea the host knew him.) I've probably mentioned that Bree and I have admired him from afar for years -- not just for the good programming, but for his unpretentious manner of introducing and interviewing (Jeanne Moreau, Eva Marie Saint, many others). Just as charming in personal conversation; turns out he's from Toronto and put himself through school (until dropping out and getting involved w/ film distribution -- worked for Janus for a while) as a catalog model. Fascinating description of the way pages used to be shot -- the text would be made up on glass, and then the photo of the model was shot through that, which partly explains the weird poses in, say, a Sears catalog. Oh, where'd he drop out of? Northwestern.

Locals who happen to see this today -- Simon Pettit + local slate (Hofer, Maxwell, Apps) at The Smell tonight, approx. 6:30.

Ok, yes, you can go wrong with the Everlys -- they recorded a lot of indifferent material after leaving Cadence for Warners (apparently for major money by the standards of the time) in the early '60s. But they become interesting again later in the decade; after the US hits stopped, they were still fairly big in England, and there are several albums with a British Invasion sound. I particularly like 1966's In Your Image, pieced together from a few freestanding singles over the previous year or so -- the playing is tougher than what one associates w/ them, the vocals are still great, and there are good songs both by the bros. and outside writers -- "Leave My Girl Alone," "The Dollhouse Is Empty." I've always loved their hits (and there are early singles that aren't well-known anymore as well), but I had no idea this other stuff existed. (And why does Graham Foust, in Leave the Room to Itself, feel compelled to supply a "note" to a reference to, say, a Wilco song, but not to "All I Have to Do is Dream"?)

And Louis Jordan belongs on that list I mentioned before. And I almost certainly don't belong on this one, but thank you.

Wondering if my capacity to be argued into the valuelessness of the kinds of music I'm most capable of making is as much a big excuse as a sign of intellectual openness or probity.

"Men bought chips with markers backed by their failing businesses and unattended investments, their cars and houses; women pledged their wardropes, credit accounts, and children; and those the club managers deemed attractive enough were permitted to endorse vouchers promising future sexual labors for periods of up to five years of what would be, in fact, indentured prostitution. That lives were constantly being destroyed filled the casino with a thrilling and reckless energy, and awestruck, voyeuristic visitors were quite willing ot pay absurdly high fees simply to watch the action on the floor. Many of them, pale and trembling and sticky with cold sweat, had to be helped to their cars or rooms after an hour of two of watching the gamblers in their hopeless ecstasy." (Gilbert Sorrentino, Under The Shadow)

Negative space of the cookie sheet.

2005-12-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

1) Downside of listening to the local Top 40 station: The fact that they play "My Humps" even more often than its chart position dictates; the constant announcement for an Xmas sweepstakes, the sole prize in which is money toward a boob job ("you can make 'em smaller -- we don't care!"); an ad soliciting dancers for a gentleman's club, in the form of a conversation between a young woman who is already working there and one who has always wanted to ("it's safe -- and the hours are flexible!"); Nickelback's "Photograph," which is one foul combo of post-Goo Goos and a melodic bite from "Hard For Me to Say I'm Sorry"). Major upside, currently: Rhianna.

2) Recent talk about photography reminds me to point to the work of Jill Magid, whose work includes "performances" staged in front of various London security cameras, forming a sort of citywide narrative. (which footage she then somehow obtains and screens); basically using the extant system as her medium. Here's an interview. Oddly, she claims not to be thinking of the work politically, which on the face of it sounds disingenuous. Apparently, some of her work is in "Balance and Power: Surveillance and Performance in Video Art," up now in Champaign, but the weather's been too iffy for me to get serious about making the drive.

3) Re Ange's mention of Sasha's thought about indie-rock ("there are no children in it"): the topic is interestingly touched on by Xgau, playing Kim and Thurston (bohos-w/-kid) against Ira and Georgia (w/o). "Only childless couples enjoy the kind of slack that accrues to shy kids with a junk room." (N.B. -- he likes both bands.) Maybe worth adding that indie has preferred those who act like kids to those who raise them. This can be of use when it's a route to something else (2nd and 3rd Beat Happening album; J. Richman as founding figure of the genre); I've grown quite uninterested in the version that is actually the exploitative confusion of dysfunction with innocence.

[Knight's move to Jim B.'s recent screed on not wanting the same thing as anybody else. Are those our two choices: "Connecticut" or "Anything not fun for me for five minutes is immediately abandoned"? Lousy menu; false opposition.]

4) Just beginning Badiou's recently translated Metapolitics. Opening is bracing, and rather damning toward my customary habits/methods:

"What is political philosophy? It is the programme which, holding politics -- or better still, the political -- as an objective datum, or even invariant, of universal experience, accords philosophy the task of thinking it. Overall, philosophy's task would be to generate an analysis of the political, in fine, quite obviously to submit this analysis to ethical norms. The philosopher would then have the triple advantage of being, first, the analyst and thinker of this brutal and confused objectivity which constitutes the empirical character of real instances of politics; second, the one who determines the principles of the good politics, of politics conforming to ethical demands; and, third, in order to meet these demands, the one exempt from militant involvement in any genuine political process. Whence the philosopher could keep the Real at arm's length indefinitely in the manner most dear to him: that of judgment."

This speaks to some of what bothers me about my own recent posts; I sometimes wonder if even "protest songs" might not be a slightly less dishonorable use of my diffuse and diminishing energies. Can't say w/o getting further in what I'll think of Badiou's notion of "metapolitics," designed to replace the traditional project of political philosophy flayed above. (Would also like to get to his Ethics; though I gather he's a systematic philosopher of sorts, I suspect that I'm unlikely gain purchase on his ontological and math-y work.)

5) Book I've always meant to mention here, but never have: Robert Ray's The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (H.U.P, 1995), which uses MGM's exceedingly popular but critically neglected cycle of Mickey Rooney vehicles as the object for a variety of ludic critical procedures. Including an alphabetical one -- I had remembered this when writing AF, but couldn't refer to the book at the time -- I found my copy just before moving. But the memory of it was on my mind. The point is to uncover new possibilities for academic criticism -- Ray's associated w/ "The Florida School," though I got more out of this than anything I've read by Geoffrey Ulmer -- but, as I just suggested, it's of interest to the practical critic interested in "finding a form" as well. Seriously -- working writers might give it a spin, even if you don't share my antecedent interest in the movies discussed.

6) Just in case your list of ways we shit on the world was running short, please add dumping technowaste in (to name just one place we know about) Lagos; partly made possible by our failure to sign on to The Basel Convention against exporting hazardous waste. What's especially lovely is when the recipient countries burn CRTs to reduce the volume, thus releasing a good deal of lead into the atmosphere. Too much more at Basel Action Network.

7) It's hard, I find, to go wrong with The Everly Brothers. I think they may end up on the short list of artists -- really, just Monk and The Minutemen -- for whom I suspend my usual interest in hearing all about the reasons I'm actually supposed to hate what I love.

2005-12-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

Previous post went through a few additions/subtractions over the last few days; now stabilized. I'm pretty sick of the "avowal"/"denial" mode I've gotten myself into w/r/t that topic. If you ever have occasion to read Guenter Lewy's Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism, don't bother, unless you've forgotten what neo-con prose, too transparent to be rightly called ideological, reads like.

~~~

Peli commented on my rather compressed post on photography from a week or so back. I don't think I will be able to go on at the tedious length needed to clarify the argument here, but maybe I can say one or two things.

First, in the passage he quotes, specifically the phrase "twin cases [unintentionally achieved but otherwise qualitatively and causally identical photos," I might better have said "occurring" than "achieved." If that's any clearer, here are the terms of the debate I'm intruding into. Roger Scruton argues from the premise that photographs aren't representations to the conclusion that photography isn't a representational art form. (That article, for good or ill, sets the stage for a bunch of philosophical writing about photography -- along with Kendall Walton's essays on photographic "transparency.") I think that, for a suitable understanding of "representation," that premise can be made tenable. One way of arguing this is by pointing to the fact that, had the same photographic processes occurred w/o intentional intervention, the photograph would still be "of" the same thing, in a certain important respect. ("Causal" or "mechanical" if one needs a term for it; others use "genetic," and it's related, in a more art-historical ambit, to Rosalind Krauss' sorta-Piercean notion of "indexicality.") If one thinks that the "of" that signifies some paradigmatic representational relations ("painting/drawing of," "description of") is necessarily implicitly intentional, then photographs will not be representations in that sense. (Fine with me, and with Scruton, if there's some other use of "representation" on which photographs -- like thermometers and tree-rings -- count. The capacity of photographs to carry information isn't at issue.) But, even accepting the premise, Scruton's argument fails, I think I could convince you, because he equivocates badly on "representation" between premise and conclusion; we needn't go into the details here.

But -- the way that philosophers have argued that Scruton's conclusion about the artistic status of photography is actually false has generally involved taking on board one of his further assumptions: that the question of whether photography is a "representational art" (or an "expressive" one, for that matter) hangs on whether the photographer has a certain kind of control over the representational and/or expressive character of the photographs which s/he intentionally initiates. So, for example, it's argued that all sorts of "technical" decisions bear on these properties in something like the manner that painterly techniques do in the relevant medium. And this is supposed to show that photography "is an art" in a pretty well-worn sense. But, to the extent that these techniques are "properly photographic" (that is, ultimately dependent on the processes that make photography possible in the first place), what I suggest is that the "causal/mechanical" character of photography can be used to produce counterexamples (the twin cases mentioned in the orig. post) which have all the representational and expressive properties of the intentionally initiated photo, but not the intentional background. I think that just about the same back-and-forth applies to the selection and framing/composition of subject matter. So, the "art" status of photography is not saved, against the non-representationalist, by pointing to these sorts of decisions.

My thought is just that those on both sides of the debate confuse photographic processes and photographic practices. There are a variety of photographic practices, of course: the one relevant to art involves selecting and displaying the results of photographic processes as objects of aesthetic interest. (It would cover more cases to speak of broadly "artistic" interest; but the debate has tended to center on photographs that are of interest for something like traditionally aesthetic reasons.) The artist's "side" of this practice doesn't give the photographs their representational and expressive character, but draws attention to it. Obviously, there are many other art practices involving photography than the one described; in the argument at hand, to repeat myself, I'm mainly concerned with "art photography" as most conventionally conceived. All this has obvious links w/ the Institutional Theory of art; and possibly is prey to the objection that some conventional notions of authorship are disrupted. Which consequence, actually, doesn't much bother me. Also, with respect to techniques that combine photography with other forms of image manipulation (from plain old retouching to digital techniques), the original problematic doesn't really even get off the ground, so don't start screaming about some naturalist fallacy.

So: I actually do think something in the neighborhood of the claim that Peli assumes I couldn't possibly: that "the fact that the same photographic product can occur unintentionally as well as intentionally proves the insignifcance of authorship to the artifact." Or: something like this fact marks a significant distinction between photographic "representation" and some other paradigmatic forms of image-making. (To jump traditions: Note that if nothing like this is the case, some aspects of Benjamin's interest in photography go out the window as well.) And, per the above, mislocating certain kinds intentionality "in the image" leads to problems.

I hadn't thought about these issues in relation to the notion of an "implied author," as it's invoked in the debate over the intentional fallacy. I'd like to think about it more, but my first thought is that, where photography is concerned, the notion of an "implied perceiver" of what the photograph captures might be more relevant to capturing some of the usual modes of interpretation. But, as I say, that's off the top of my head. I think there are also some terminological differences between the way Peli's set things up and what I've said above. Sorry I can't treat these more carefully, but trust me, it would make the above look downright pithy.

~~~

Why art can't kill machanime.

2005-11-30T14:36:00.000-08:00

[Post updated and altered: please see below.]

I don't suppose that my and Jane's agreement to arrest our dialogue on the political violence/banlieues nexus at a certain stage was meant, on either end, to be some permanent check on posting further thoughts, forever and ever amen. And I think I'm on safe ground in assuming that Jane doesn't take himself to under some such obligation. At least, I hope he doesn't, and, in any case, "E proibido proibir," as they used to say in a couple of languages. But: the sad fact is that a couple of runs I've made over the last few days at stringing my thoughts together have been long, dull, and unoriginal -- failures even by the minimal standards of readability to which I hold my posts (at least substantial ones). My concern with being misunderstood is such that I'm wary of being coy or aphoristic; even so, what I've been able to salvage is the following bolus of links, notes, and quotes. I'm not doing this to stir the pot, but comments are, as always, welcome.

* Uppermost in my mind is this: anyone who thinks this story arc has been resolved just because fewer cars are burning, and even those are off our front pages (and mostly, our blogs) is not merely whistling in the dark, but staging a full production of Les Mis in a sensory deprivation tank.

* I gather that the curfew was lifted around the 17th, and that the main legislative move so far has been an all-too-typical tightening of visa controls. But it's not clear to me whether emergency powers are still, officially or really, in effect; nor have I seen reports of just what degree of force was used to (depending on your terms) calm the waters/repress the insurrection. If anyone cares to help an Anglophone out here, I'd be grateful. As interesting as it is to learn that the violence deemed newsworthy now revolves around the new Beaujolais, it's not quite what I was looking for.

* One story deemed fit to print recently was this (registration req'd), on the end of a brief rail-strike. The article's only mention of the riots is to note that they, like the strike, are a political headache for Chirac. The fact that there's no other connection made -- and, in a way, none to be made -- between this sort of relatively "normalized" labor dispute and other forms of civil unrest strikes me as symptomatic. Of what? One might consider this well-known letter from Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, April 9, 1870. In part -- "The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself."

* This discussion attempts some form of sympathy for the rioters' apparent motivations from within a liberal framework (but please see update below); it interprets these, not surprisingly, as a demand for the French government to make good on its promises of e-l-&-f; and takes it that the capacity of the government to respond to that demand is a test of its real commitment to its founding egalitarian principles. From the last paragraph:

"The upper class has simply used the Republican model as a protective shield to preserve its "privileges" through hidden networks of power and influence....What is ultimately needed is for the elite to accept the necessity of abdicating a significant part of the "privileges" they have accumulated to the detriment of the public good."

What is liberal about this, of course, is the notion that the above suggestion could and would be enacted were the elites sincere about their public commitments -- and that the system ultimately exists to resolve conflicts of this sort. The anarchist view, of course, is that to expect the state to do anything beyond scattering, or redistributing, enough crumbs to make massive continued domination possible is the biggest joke since 911. And I suppose a more specifically Marxist addition to that view is the idea that the sort of hypocrisy just described is necessary to the state's real function, that of protecting an existing economic order under the guise of "justice for all."

That's just a sketch of a fairly obvious divergence of views. What might be added is that the committed liberal need not, and likely should not, close off the possibility of extra-legal revolutionary action, violent or not, when it becomes clear that existing institutions are not living up to their advertising. Whatever else one thinks of John Locke, he was at least explicit on this entailment of his version of contractarianism: the contract can be voided when it massively fails to serve its purported purposes.

If anything, the liberal ought to be more upset, because more disappointed, at (what s/he will see as) the usurpation of institutions, whose form s/he supports, by an elite (of whatever sort) than the Marxist -- who thinks that such institutions are doing just what they arose to do. Or, as the quoted article ends: "We should rediscover the spirit of 1789. If not, some may want to rediscover the letter of it, complete with bloody consequences." While that "may" understates matters -- it ought to be "will," if not "already do" -- it seems to me that any liberal who does not take him or herself to be merely "ventriloquizing for class interests" ought to take some thought along these lines quite seriously.

[Update: Jane points out, quite correctly, that the original version of this post implied support for the entirely of Pech's analysis. There is much in the piece that is indefensible. The most glaring examples are the excuses for Sarkovsky, and the notion that the curfews were unavoidable. But there are others: even in what I quoted, the suggestion that we get the society we want when existing elites "abdicate" their privileges, out of some combination of altruism and bourgeoisie oblige, is obviously inadequate. Above, I was not as concerned to make something of these points as I might have been in another context. My primary interest was in pointing out that, even from within this framework, a breaking point is more than imaginable. And I do still think this is worth pointing out, if only to poke at what sometimes seems to be an unexamined assumption: that one must be a Marxist to ever support radical change in a putatively liberal republic. I strongly suspect that whether one is willing to take the step of saying that that breaking point has been reached -- again, from within the liberal framework -- depends largely on whether a committment to egalitarianism (not only with respect to economic redistribution, but with respect to possession of institutional power) is one's Archimedean point. Pech's notion, of course, is that reform is a method for avoiding real -- to say nothing of structural -- change; for others, the conclusion that he almost reaches in the quoted paragraph should at most be a starting point. One should also ask if the "spirit of 1789" is here understood to be embodied in the last sentence of Article 6, or in Article 17.]

* Passages relevant to cruelty, and "rigor." Communard Louise Michel, speaking to a military tribunal in 1871:

"You accuse me of having taken part in the murder of the generals? To that I would reply -- yes, if I had been in Montmartre when they wished to have the people fired on. I would not have hesitated to fire myself on those who gave such orders. But I do not understand why they were shot when they were prisoners, and I look on this action as arrant cowardice....

"...More than that, I have the honor being one of the instigators of the Commune, which by the way had nothing -- nothing, as is well known -- to do with murder and arson. I who was present at all the sittings at the Town Hall, I declare that there was never any question of murder or arson."

I'm also intrigued by (and undecided about the import of) this sentence from Debord's analysis of the Watts riots, which Jane linked to some weeks ago:

"The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: 'This was not a race riot. It was a class riot'."

[Again, I do not have at the ready some vest-pocket argument which starts from these citations. I don't think what's going on in the Debord is that approval is being extended on the grounds of certain limits being observed; instead, what the actors do and don't do is being treated as a mode of articulation, and as evidence for claims about the events' meaning.]

I haven't found time to compare Vaneigem on the particular subject matter, though much of the 1972 (post-break-w/SI) essay "Terrorism and Revolution" is of interest: "From fear that only the death logic of terrorism has the upper hand, it is necessary to open the gate to an anonymous and consciously oriented insight against the order of things, not against its servants. Ideologies are directed against people, the subversive game against conditions."

*Louis Lazare, critic of Haussmannisation, on the emerging banlieues in 1870 (quoted in T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life):

"Artisans and workers are shut up in veritable Siberias, crisscrossed with winding, unpaved paths, without lights, without shops, with no water laid on, where everthing is lacking....We have sewn rags onto the purple robe of a queen; we have built within Paris two cities, quite different and hostile: the city of luxury, surrounded, besieged by the city of misery....You have put temptation and covetousness side by side."

* [Updated Update: I had more here, but I was unhappy with both the tone and the waffling. It was exactly what I had not wanted to get into again -- not here.]

2005-11-27T22:43:00.000-08:00

To anyone who didn't notice: I added to last week's sole post, daily.

~~~

Something for everyone, down on the linkfarm; rough overall movement from music-related to critical to philosophical, so keep looking if the first don't grab you.

a) Thanks very much to Mark Givens for putting up our one-sheet and an ordering link for the new album. Toward the bottom, you will also find a link to the lyrics -- I don't particularly recommend that you read them if you have no interest in hearing the record, but I can't stop you. This version of an 0pb site is, excuse the expression, a placeholder -- Peter and I are working on something a little slicker, though it will still be fairly minimal, at least until I can get home to the archives.

b) Little Hits, an mp3-blog devoted (mostly) to '80s-'90s indie vinyl. Many obvious choices, and dude must have a huge server at his disposal -- trying older links at random, I've yet to find a broken one. Even the very first post is still up, from a fine 7-inch by The Some Loves -- though I think he picked the weaker side.

c) Not enough? Lost Bands of the New Wave Era (which kills its links much faster.)

d) Muso Warning: a site devoted to the so-called trucker's gear change, by which is intended "ostentatious key-changes in pop songs, especially as used in the final choruses to mask the fact that nothing else is going on." "Stand," "I Try," and the list goes on. ("Oliver's Army" isn't included -- too well-motivated by the bridge?)

e) This Croatian Luke Haines interview is mostly a snooze, except for some best albums/books/movies that he may have picked off the top of his head, and this exchange, especially if he's telling the truth:

T. Tell me something I would never guess abut you?

LH. Operating under another name I am the inventor of two best selling boardgames.

f) In related news, BBR's Sarah Nixey looks to be going solo -- w/ material produced by Auteurs cohort James Banbury. Current photos suggest creeping Beth Ortonism, but who knows? Haven't sought out the single yet. Best news is a reference to her guest appearance on Haines' allegedly upcoming soundtrack to the musical Property, which I'm beginning to gather isn't going to make it to a full staging....

g) I long ago meant to point to this 1972 xgau piece on The Eagles, both because it's interestingly different, stylistically, than the cram-it-in we're now familiar with, and for the 3rd graf, which begins: "Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them."

h) Frank Kogan essay I've given several tries but have never reached the end of. Maybe you'll do better.

i) A strange performance art piece based on the transcript of EC's 1979 NYC conference -- I didn't manage to mention it in the book.

j) Two resources I've sometimes found helpful: This longlived database of info on TinPanEra composers and lyricists (I've found more info on a number of names than I've been able to locate anywhere else); and this extensive movie musicals site.

k) On the other hand -- unhappy to note, via Gerard, that Footlights, the OCR/cabaret/pop vocals record store in NYC, closed its doors in June or so. I was last there in March, and struck up a conversation with a fellow who could name the writers on the two industrial shows I was buying w/o breaking a sweat. The business has morphed into an online retailer, but still -- if Manhattan can't carry this sort of shop, that's saying something.

l) I've wondered if there is an energetic visual-art blogscene comparable to poetry's. I still don't know, but here's a start, courtesy of my friend, painter [and former bandmate of Steve Turner's, if that's more exciting to you] Steve LaRose.

m) Another friend I don't think I've ever linked to: Shannon "joins" Rhapsody.

n) I don't know poet Aaron McCollough's at all, but he has demos.

o) Were you aware that Brian Evenson had made a record?

p) Dense paper by Blair French on post-object art, w/ ref to the rather interesting NZ figure Wystan Curnow.

q) Nice that this site for a Brazilian Visual Poetry show I saw in Austin in '02 has remained online. One highlight -- rather elaborate virtual version of a "dinner party" installation by Caetano V.

r) Topic for possible exploration: Conceptual Art-influenced, but self-avowedly "conservative" photographer Les Krims.

s)See also this account of nikki craft's destruction of a set of prints of Krims' "The Incredible Case of the Stack O' Wheat Murders," which, in her eyes, made light of sexual violence.

t) Free weekend? Teach yourself computational semantics.

u) Or perhaps category theory.

v) Or mise-en-scene theory.

w) "Analytical Marxist" G.A. Cohen's syllabus from a few terms back. And a decent review of his Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality.

x) U. of Ohio, Columbus philosopher of art Lee F. Brown on "Documentation and Fabrication in Phonography" w/ ref. to Eisenberg, Gracyk, and so on.

y) Q without U; ukulele sheet music; typewiter love; some common misconceptions; trompe l'oeil receipts.

z) Patented, Paris 1845: Cane Juice Defecating Machine. Scroll down for interminable description of operation.2005: A week after "normalization," hard to get English-language news any more useful than this. Oh, there's also the treaty thieves.
~~~

And this is where you find useless texts when you're tired of writing them yourself.

2005-11-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

If Brian from Iowa, who was at the reading Sat., reads this, please send me your address again; I only half-recognized you (because we last met in a very dark club), and I can't find your previous email.

Thu.-Fri.

Hear Douglas Wolk, John Shaw (w/ fragment of his setting of the Scooter Libby correspondence), Jodi Shapiro, others in this NPR piece on National Solo Album Month, which was just starting the moment I popped a CD out in the car this afternoon. I had given some thought to participating this year, getting as far as chopping up that Romeo Void drum hook in Audacity and adding some delay and a house-y synth-bass (I might still use the results), until I realized that, so far as my present position w/r/t my line of work is concerned, Nov. is more aptly described as National Get Your Act Together So You Have Some Idea by March of Where You Might Be Working Next September Month. Acronym's not catchy, though.

~~~

T-day w/ colleague, older grad student, and respective SOs. Perfectly lovely, didn't get into anything too heavy, tho host is a political philosopher in pretty much the going Rawlsian mode, host's partner is working on a diss critical of Habermas, other guest is finishing one on Arendt and Derrida on democracy [which I didn't know when I mentioned On Revolution yesterday], and his partner is a Columbian who was living in Paris until she married an Australian, and then there's whatever I and Bree are supposed to be. Called home to family in evening.

Thankful.

~~~

Main worry about Friday's photog. book is w/ his acct. of where the "intentional" character of photography lies (a now traditional defense of photography's artistic status against accts like Scruton's that emphasize the causal ground of photographic representation), which is to say in the selection of what to photograph and the composition in the frame, does any better against that objection than some earlier accounts [esp. in response to Scruton], which attempt to give the photographic techniques that artists intentionally exploit (i.e. cropping, choice of length of exposure, so on) a similar role to those we normally point to w/r/t, paradigmatically, painting. Appropriately constructed twin cases [unintentionally achieved but otherwise qualitatively and causally identical photos] work against the "composition" move as well as the "technique" move. None of that shows that one can't go ahead an do an aesthetics of photography in a somewhat traditional sense [and Friday's ch. in that direction is useful], but maybe it's more like an aesthetics of nature (or the plain old perceptual experience thereof) and less like an aesthetics of artworks as traditionally conceived. Much of the expressive as well as the representational potential of the photograph is there "in" the causal result of the photog. process, irrespective of how it was achieved; and the part that isn't rests on the part that is. My own view of this is turning toward a sort of "Institutional" account, on which it's just the fact that certain photographs are selected/displayed that gives them their "arthood," which may draw attention or bear other interesting relations to their aesthetic character, in the strict sense, but doesn't actually constitute that character. I've been writing something about this over the last 2 mos. but haven't gone on about it here except in passing.

[No, I'm not as sanguine about the autonomy of the aesthetic as the above sketch suggests.]

~~~

Finished Mathys' Forge. I guess all I can really say is that I like parts of this book significantly more than others. On the plus side, the "Inventory"s, "Ailment," and particular lines all over the place -- "filching M&Ms from tire treads." On the minus side, "Ash Wednesday," the hard-hot-sex undercurrent at a few points, and the way some pieces strain for closure (I think this is just technical -- some pieces "bring it all back home" near the end just fine. I should probably have more against closure per se than I do.) Closing "Quandaries" sequence I have to count as a success, from my idiosyncractic p.o.v., in that it does something interesting w/ material (mountain climbing/carpentry) I'd normally resist, not to mention techniques (alientated avoidance of pronouns, an elaborate sort of phrase-break w/in line-break structure) that I don't quite understand.

~~~

Evanston establishments: Dreaming of Tea, Fresh Anointment Worship Center, Fashion Tomato.

~~~

Hmm, The Wire has given their blessing to cover versions ("Often seen as a sign of creative bankruptcy....") Upon setting the issue on the counter --

Clerk: "That looks interesting."
Me: "Yeah...but this magazine can be pretty annoying sometimes."
Clerk: "All music writing can be annoying."
Me: "So true."

~~~

You all still trip down Rue Hazard regularly, I trust.

Wed.

Picked from my landlord's shelf The House That Race Built, a collection of essays (original, I think, not reprints) by Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Cornel West and so on -- flipped to David Lionel Smith's "What Is Black Culture" and was immediately confronted by a discussion of Baraka's Dutchman, in particular its central character's contention that "if Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music." (The play, you'll remember, ends with the white female interlocutor stabbing the speaker; consider also the scene in Masc/Fem inspired by the play.) Smith (who is also the poet D.L. Crockett-Smith; not seeing any links to particular poems) is not entirely taken with this position, though he's (too?) careful not to assume the character's views are precisely Baraka's: "In effect, Baraka uses the dramatic moment as a platform on which cultural criticism struts about in the guise of spontaneous emotion....The narrowness of Clay's own obsessions leads to a critical argument that is stiflingly reductive." Elsewhere, he pursues a parallel (not an identity) between Lukacs conception of the proletariat and contemporary African-Americans, insofar as their best interests are served by "a will to truth," though the essay is too short to suggest much about how that will is to be expressed.

Also working through Johnathan Friday's Aesthetics and Photography, which I was reading piecemeal for another project. More on that later, maybe.

Headed out to immense mall in Skokie to keep Bree company while she got new glasses. While waiting, briefly peered into "Krakaboom!" the contemporary version of the video arcade I grew up with -- just a bunch of desktop PCs running 1st person shooters and a bunch of, well, I guess you can supply the gender and age group of the patrons. Headed to the B&N during the hr. wait for lenses, just got depressed looking at the philosophy section of even a not-particularly-good bookstore. [I know nothing; and at the rate I read, I could probably command, say, Habermas by, oh, the 2030s.] [Something that's been disturbing me lately is the thought that even if I manage to read rought 2 books of some sort every week for the rest of my life -- say I can expect 50 lucid years -- that's only around 5,000 books, which doesn't sound like much.]

Frankfurt School anthology reminded me that I've been meaning to look up Adorno's brief "Subject and Object"; I'm obviously not the first to wonder if the question of whether one can truly dissolve that distinction in a comprehensible way might not be the epistemological issue of which many political disputes are the surface form. I'll let someone else link to "Critique of Separation."

This book -- which, curiously, I've seen in at least 3 Barnes & Noble's, and nowhere else -- fell open to the first poem/lyric on this page: "Dem charge Jim fi sus/Dem charge mi fi murdah." How does one [me] who is no stranger to Forces of Victory, or who made a small symbolic pilgrimage to Altab Ali Park also find himself finding the need to state some "ethical" position w/r/t political violence in, I don't know, the other direction? Especially given that, all parties agree, innumerable acts are performed every day [so much so that it's artificial to separate them into 'acts'] in the name of established power which, taken on their own merits, would violate any ethical standard worthy of the name. Lesson learned, perhaps: vigilance?

Of course, I'm also no stranger to "It Doesn't Make It All Right". J. Dammers, Kantian.

[I hope it's understood that the above few notes aren't a belated or hidden "rebuttal." Treat them as self-examination.]

Also paged though NYer: I'll say without hesitation that Christopher Buckley's humor piece, a satire on a college entrance essay, is small-minded, cynical in the bad sense, and about as funny as a mass email comprised of supposedly real errors in high-school compositions. Would have been a lot better off getting into the Katherine Boo piece. (Hmm, I'd been meaning at some point to be mildly contrarian about that much-disliked Ashbery profile, but I'm not sure I'll get back to it now.)

Tue.

Gave last lecture of quarter; WB's "Work of Art...." Familiar ground, though I realized as I talked that a key move is an application of the Hegelian change-in-quantity/quality pt.; obvious, but I hadn't been thinking so much about that the last time I taught it. Before class, a woman came in and asked if her father, a visiting scholar (art historian) from China, could sit in. Of course I said sure, but was aware as the class proceeded that he might be thinking that this was baby-talk or worse; also couldn't help wondering if he saw my by-now-joshing relation w/ the students as odd. Thanked me on his way out, and I realized that his English was quite limited (which I guess is why his daughter came in in the first place, but I hadn't sussed).

Finished Peter Calvert's Revolution and Counter-Revolution, a quite short book in U. of Minn.'s "Concepts in Social Thought" series. (There's a useful one on "Property" by Alan Ryan.) Not bad, as a sort of consumer guide to going theories (as of 1990, anyway) that doesn't pretend to be too unbiased. I don't really have enough background to know what to think of, to take one example, Chalmers Johnson's sixfold typology of social upheaval (jacquerie; millenarian rebellion; anarchistic rebellion; Jacobin communist revolution; coups d'etat; militarized mass insurrection -- first three relatively "spontaneous," last 3 elite-led), but it seems well-articulated enough to at least test one's historical observations against. Also makes me want to read Arendt's On Revolution (I read big chunks of The Origins of Totalitarianism for AF) -- she seems to have a nuanced, cuts-both-ways view of, in a word, America.

Lamont Sanford goes "African," decorates the house w/ masks, etc. "What's all this, son?" "A man's house should reflect his culture." "You want to reflect my culture, put up pictures of Billy Eckstine."

Watching a little too much TV lately, as you can tell; need a couple of days before turning to next halfway-sizeable chunks of work: a "job talk" in-case flyouts are in the offing around Jan/Feb. (in which case I'll be more or less expected to give it at UCLA for practice)//pulling 2 course readers together for next quarter//at least two proposals for conference presentations. Also getting back to arranging the dreaded "first book of poems" MS while things aren't too heavy otherwise; there are a couple of (non-contest) nibbles...

Bree notes that many, many commercials currently feature "Danny Elfman" music.

Mon.

Finished the Cornfoth, read Zizek's "Against Human Rights" in the New Left Review that I let sit around for a few weeks. Won't discuss now; mulling it over. Also Stanley Fish's piece on the use of relativist and po-mo rhetoric by Intelligent Design supporters in new Harper's.

Annoyed to see a song called "Charm Offensive" on a promo I just got -- I've been playing a song w/ that title off and on live since 2002, should have expected someone to get there (and I realize the phrase already appeared somewhere in the cover art/text to Radiohead's Amnesiac). I really do not record often enough.

Sent off batch of cover letters (to be added to my dossiers at UCLA and sent out from there); other than a couple of jobs w/ late deadlines, now I just wait. Called dad for b-day; went to Davenport's w/ Bree, played piano for her (which I usually don't); she's putting "Blue's The Only Color of The Rainbow" in the act. Me -- I sang "The Ladies Who Lunch" and "Acc-ent-u-ate the Positive." I think I was entertaining.

Sun.

Dreamt that "aesthetics" was actually spelled "asthaetics," and that my cover letters for job applications went out wrong by that measure. Am told that I said "I just want to make it clear that..." in my sleep.

Read most of Maurice Cornforth's Historical Materialism. The sort of account which seems concerned to strip out any mention of "dialectic" (I think it's relegated to a previous book; this is the 2nd of a 3 v. series) taking it as blandly obvious that social science can be conducted by just the same means as physical science, except for the obvious fact that abstraction has to occur by some other process than controlled experimentation. Kinda convincing when you're reading it (v. lucid-seeming prose), up until a very thin chapter on base/superstructure. Pretty much at the exact opposite end of the scale from the Winch I was reading a few weeks ago. And despite its evident disinterest in taking criticisms into serious account, the 2nd (1962) ed. preface says "extensive changes have been made in the attempt to eradicate any kind of dogmatism." Lefebvre has a similar note.

Transposed a song for Bree and helped her rehearse, but let her go to Gentry alone; worked on dull practical tasks. Feel like day slipped past -- vague notion of going to Dusty Groove or Jazz Record Mart came to nothing.

Sat.

Reading went well, respectable turnout; I replaced a certain key epiphet with "Napster" on each occurrence so I could read the "Columbus" section. Tried not to go too long. J. did himself proud, w/ a quite complex section on, mostly, how not to approach Murmur's lyrics. Picked up the current Black Clock, which is on guilty pleasures and includes Eric W.'s piece from EMP 2004. I don't know, you can keep your guilt -- give me the pleasures of accusation.

Took Bree home and tried to meet J. at Abbey Pub to see Annie Hayden. (Remember Spent? I guess when you're on Merge, you're on Merge for life.) Got there in between sets, stayed for some of The Clientele. I didn't know they were playing, and I've never followed them closely. I don't mind that they're subtle, but any of the variation between songs that I've noted and appreciated on record seemed to be absent live; leader is a bit of a muso, which made for some uneasy indiepop + jazzface moments. Didn't mind being there, didn't feel like I needed to see the whole set.

Fri.

Lunchtime talk in Hist. of Science dept. by U. of C. art historian Joel Snyder, who's been working on various problems around photography for quite a while. An overview rather than brand-new research, but helpful: takes a pox-on-both-houses attitude toward "transparency" (Cavell, Walton) and wholly "social constructionist" views of photographic relations (he commented that in the '70s, his first papers started getting mentioned in footnotes: "As Joel Snyder has shown, nothing is natural), which I find congenial. Quite interesting on photographs that aren't snapshots, e.g. the moving camera that can show win/place/show in a horse race. (Complicated technology; I got it, but can't explain here.) Seems to ultimately want some sort of distinction within "photographic representation" between "photographs" proper and "visualizations" (all the way to sonograms). I think what he's looking for could be described as a difference in the way information is conveyed; in turn based on a difference in the relation to un-mediated (in the relevant sense) perceptual information. Also, great late 19th-c. quotations from an early trial about the q. of copyright in photographs; have to track this down in Snyder's pub'd work.

Afternoon philosophy workshop by Matt Hanser, concerned w/ showing, pretty much on grammatical grounds (working off of a Davidsonian analysis of action sentences) that a certain class of ethical judgments are judgments about "the quality of agency" rather than actions per se. Some interesting points about the locution "X acted well/badly/courageously in phi-ing." Was supposed to be a purely formal account w/ no substantive implications; some comments in the Q-and-A about what's up with, say, benevolence suggested that this might not be so.

Freaky episode of Good Times in which J.J. is managing a white cabaret singer; a whole section is devoted to her "Be A Clown"/"Send In The Clowns" medley. Inexplicable in terms of what that show purported to be about; presumably Norman Lear or someone was looking for an excuse to build a show around this woman. (Still not quite as odd as the What's Happening!! I saw last week that ends w/ Rerun handing Mama his outsized belt so she can punish Raj: "My God, Rerun, I want to whup him, not hang him!" Freeze, credits.)

2005-11-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

1) I was ungracious in not thanking Joshua for the space he made, for suggesting the manner of exchange in the first place, and for his recent profession of respect, which is surprising, not in all respects warranted, and mutual. (Parties otherwise at odds seem to agree that I'm "decent." And what are you wearing?) I also respect Ange and John Shaw for engaging in a fairly fraught set of exchanges.

2) The article of Badiou's that Joshua linked to was edifying. Here are two others, one quite personal, the other (from '04, on the headscarf law) more sardonic, and a bit Derridean in tone. Of course I can't vouch for the translations.

3) "Criticism reading" doesn't have quite the thrilling ring of "poetry reading," but J. Niimi and myself will be giving one at Quimby's this Saturday, at 7 p.m..

I only brought about 6 copies of AF from Cali, and was too busy last week to remember to request more from the publisher. But I will have Taste The Flavor on hand, in case you like music.

4) I want to say this is a nadir in the annals of song-commercial placement, but it's probably a 50-way tie: EMF's "Unbelievable" reworked in an ad for Kraft Crumbles as "Crumbelievable."

5) Rockists tend to legislate as to who has taste; popists tend to legislate as to who is actually experiencing pleasure.

6) A no-longer-recent Boston/Portland Phx piece I never linked to, on Bjork and Wire one-song cover albums. (A slight coda to this summer's cover-album fest.) There's supposed to be one about Made In Sheffield and a Human League live DVD floating around somewhere by now, but heck if I can find it.

7) Fine piece by Richard Byrne on the ever-underrated Great Plains, courtesy Paul Nini. (Order their newly released live album from Old 3C.)

8) I like: "Laffy Taffy"; Voxtrot's "Long Haul"; leading Bree and family to the Joseph Cornell boxes at the Art Institute*, and noting that there's still a Tibor de Nagy tag on one; feeling homesick on encountering a Felix Gonzales-Torres candypile; the "Bank Book" section of Laura Sims' Practice, Restraint; conversing with Jacob Knabb and John Beer; Ted Mathys' semi-colons; dumplings; discussing Cavell and Danto with double philosophy/theater majors; manageable amounts of snow. I don't like: Having to miss a student production of The Threepenny Opera; leaving the house too late to get to the Minutemen documentary; the fact that I haven't seen a movie in weeks; still getting lost in town sometimes; waiting.

*Don't worry Jordan, I won't write poems to them. Would Ray Johnson be ok?

2005-11-16T21:21:00.000-08:00

Joshua says:

Violence: I, too, dislike it.

The first thing I should do, after thanking Franklin for making this space for me, is to historicize at least a tiny bit. The recent discussions of social violence (whether it’s “political,” and if so, how, seem up for grabs) come in the wake of widespread rioting in France. But they also come at a long moment when the threat of political violence to privileged white Americans, the sort of people who might work in the World Trade Center, seems closer than ever. And, I would hope, when the knowledge that what that “we” has—cars and houses, the “rule of law” and the time to expound on pacifism—rests on a foundation of violence both historical and ongoing. These are not the meaning of this moment; they are some of the conditions out of which meanings arise.

If I historicize, it’s not to psychologize my debate partners, or to argue for anything so much as history itself. One of the great ironies of arguments that absolutely reject political violence is that they pose themselves as bulwarks against some “utopian” impulse that, we’re told, leads always to Auschwitz, the gulag, the Cultural Revolution. And yet, the absolute rejection of political violence presents a transcendental value. It’s ahistorical, totalizing, and the rest; it tells others what they may and may not do regardless of their circumstances, while denying that such thinking comes out of the particular circumstances of the speaker. It claims objectivity while enforcing its subjective interests. This is the worst bargain on offer: all the foibles of utopian thinking, without even bothering to imagine a better world.

This is not to say “peace” isn’t to be desired. It is. But the residents of the banlieues weren’t at peace a month ago, any more than Rodney King was at peace five minutes before he was pulled over; any more than the Algerians were at peace in 1953. No peace was broken in the banlieues; the violence of that scene has been ubiquitous. The thing that changed was the dynamic of violence. This can’t be stressed enough. When someone critiques the actions of the banlieusards, they aren’t refusing violence. They are refusing violence to certain people in certain conditions, while defending the right to violence of others. They are choosing sides and hoping no one willl notice, perhaps including themselves.

Like Franklin, I am uncomfortable with violence. I am uncomfortable in some of the same ways: with its masculine charge, with its capacity to harm relative innocents. Nor, honestly, do I have much desire to encounter violence personally; though I’ve never hit anybody, I’ve been beaten with a nightstick all the way to the hospital. When I discuss violence, I don’t do so as an armchair idealist. But I also don’t do so as someone who, in every minute of one’s daily life, is a subject of state violence, including the violence of laws that exist to maintain one’s subjection.

That too is historicizing: to remember who I am, and what privileges I have. And to recall, further, that my sense of comfort does not come out of transcendental ethics but from historical conditions. So, to repeat: I am uncomfortable with violence. And yet, at the same time, I understand that historical change for the dispossessed has never come in ways that appeal to the comforts of the possessed. I recognize that to deny politics to the actions of the marginalized is a cliché of the empowered, not an analysis. The sentence “make a rebellion against me that I condone” is nonsensical. The sentiment that the miserable have perhaps a right to their misery but not to relieve it unless in a way I have authorized isn’t ethics; it’s leaning all your weight against the wheel of history while pretending to stand on the streetcorner whistling “Spanish Bombs.”

I’m not calling for violence, nor calling for “peace.” I’m suggesting that particular people, in particular conditions quite extraordinarily different from mine, need not vet their tactics with me, nor with Franklin or other beneficiaries of the world-as-it-is-just-now. Neither do we get to decide whether their actions are properly tactical in the first place. If you fancy yourself truly non-violent, act historically and pragmatically. Exercise your concern first with the cops and next with the corporations; if you succeed, I rather suspect the banlieues will stop burning of their own accord.

2005-11-16T17:43:00.000-08:00

Tonight, under the heading "Joshua says," I'm going to post without comment a statement of Joshua Clover's as a sort of punctuation to recent debates about events in France; he is doing the same for me, on his blog. We won't be reading each other's notes before posting.

The idea is for each of us to make space for the other to state their position clearly, and — if not finally or completely — without it being trapped in the cycle of he said/he said.

2005-11-15T17:23:00.000-08:00

1) I'm given to understand that today is the official release date of Nothing Painted Blue's Taste The Flavor (Shrimper). Frequent readers know more than enough by now about my ambivalence toward my own music, but I've kinda come around on this one, and I'm at least glad that Kyle and Peter and I got it together before we dispersed geographically. It was recorded in early 2001 (which some will find hard to believe, given a couple of lyrics), but doesn't now seem to me to have reached its sell-by -- especially in that songlessness doesn't dominate the indie landscape as it did a few years back. Too bad about the singer.

Midheaven mail-order is one reliable way to get it. (Scroll down.) Early adopters will find a direction to nothingpaintedblue.com in the liner notes (though the .com is a bit of a laugh, at this stage). There is nothing at that address. We are rectifying that.

2) How we roll: Move to Chi in Sept., get a picture in the Reader by mid-November. (Again, scroll down.) Thanks to J., Bob Mehr, and the photographer (whose name I can't read on the pdf, and who I hope pulls more glamorous assignments once in a while).

I feel that I should mention that I must have said something easily misunderstood, as I neither expect nor particularly wish to hear a response from the subject of my book. I did, on the other hand, say "bee in my bonnet," which is like -- Hey, read this book of rock criticism by your granny.

3) More self-service: Tickled to hear from the currently hibernating Anne Boyer that Armed Forces is among the readings that her non-fiction class can do papers on. "Didion, Capote, Bruno..." Yeah, I get that a lot.

4) Saturday, headed out w/ Bree, her mother and sister to Ten Chimneys, the summer estate that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne ("Fon-TAN," not "TAINE," I have learned) built near Lunt's boyhood home, 1/2 hr out of Milwaukee. Oddly, or perhaps not, some of the conversation on the drive out concerned the frequent American plaint "What can one person do?" The presumed answer to which is "Very little"; what usually does not follow is the thought that one might engage in more effective collective effort from others -- and this is backed up by the valorization of the heroic individual, the lone rebel, in our popular culture. Not, I realize, a revelatory set of thoughts; but it was odd that, in the last room of the house-and-once-working-farm tour, our guide felt compelled to discuss Robert E. Sherwood's There Shall Be No Night, a 1938 play set in Finland but intended as agit-prop for our entering WWII, and which somehow was supposed to demonstrate that "an individual can make a difference." (The play ran 115 performances, poor for Lunt/Fontanne at that stage; Montgomery Clift and Sydney Greenstreet were in the cast.)

Tour and home otherwise charming -- elegant but not opulent, w/ a good deal of whimsical decoration done by Claggett Wilson, their customary set designer (grisailles) and Lunt himself (Swedish folk art motifs). Very tempted to sneak off and play the "Noel Coward Piano," badly photographed here). While waiting for the one place in town to eat to open (well, there were two, but Bree's mom didn't seem attracted to "In Cahoots"), stopped into an antique store, where Bree found a cup and saucer of the same pattern as those laid out in one of the rooms -- we can believe, if we like, that it came from the house. All I bought was a 1955 educational comic book distributed by General Electric: "Inside the Atom."

5) Bree's been going to one or two cabaret open mic nights at piano bars per week to work on her act (which it's not really my place to describe) and make connections; I go with her when I can. Even though both the performers -- a mix of theater student/hopefuls and persons who just have a couple of songs they love to sing -- and song selection are uneven, as you'd expect, I'm very drawn to this small and friendly scene, mostly because it's so uncool, relative to the community of "music lovers" I've tended to be in contact with -- seriously, these people make the most iconoclastic indie or jazz obscurationist look like Courtney Taylor-Taylor. High point of last night, for example, would be Michael, an operatically trained singer whose dream is to play Sportin' Life in Porgy & Bess, doing "When The Sun Comes Out," a lesser-known Harold Arlen tune (not from any show, but recorded on Barbara Streisand's second album); low point would be a three-person arrangement of "Suddenly, Seymour" from Little Shop of Horrors -- translated into Italian.

The pianist lets people accompany themselves if they like, so last night I did "Like Young," [a faux-beatnik number by Andre Previn, (slightly) popularized by Buddy Greco, and not to be confused with The Like Young] and "Only A Monster" from Tempting, which I can't really sing but which Michael (Sportin' Life, above) adored and wants to learn. I think that's the first time I've performed one of my own songs since getting here. In terms of plain fun, doing two songs fairly casually has distinct advantages over playing for 45 minutes for a bunch of people who are often mainly concerned with figuring out whether its ok to like what they're hearing.

8) Picked up a disc in the "local" bin a local shop several weeks back: The Future of White America, swayed by the crappy-cass-release/liquid-paper lettering/Debord quote ("Every concept, as it takes its place on one side or another, has no foundation apart from its transformation into its opposite: reality erupts within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real.") on the insert. (Back cover, vague reversed-value photo portrait of who-knows-who, w/ speech balloon: "breed & die you worthless fucks." A little disappointed that the music inside was 2 long tracks scrapey/pulsey guitar noise, made a little more texturally interesting by the poor recording, and 1 more on the freak-folk end, w/ about 20 secs of lyrics I couldn't make out. I was hoping for at least Comet Gain or something. I'm not unhappy that I heard it, but it's certainly not the best purchase I've made on similar grounds.

9) I've been reading poetry slowly but consistently lately, but haven't had much to say b/c I'm mostly catching up with books from the last 2 or 3 years that others have discussed well (and anyway, I'm not reading them to blog about them): The Joyous Age, Blindsight, The Cave Where You Live, Word Group. Just started Ted Mathys' Forge, need to finish Water & Power, Deborah Meadows' books, and much else.

10) Best recaptioning of fictive images of Native Americans since Entertainment! (By the way, it's strange that 2 1/2 years or so in, Jim and I have spiraled along to fairly similar formats.)

10) My mood's improved lately.

2005-11-13T17:31:00.000-08:00

[I wrote the following two notes this early a.m., before Jane posted this response to yesterday's post, and then -- intending to add some non-riot-related items later, per my usual practice over the last few days -- went on to other pressing work. You will have to take my word that I am presenting them without later refinement, except for grammatical corrections and the addition of two appropriate links. Some fresher, admittedly piqued, comments follow.]

c) This will sound as though I've been tutted backchannel, but no -- I just want to see if I can explain what I meant about "adolescent boys." This term wasn't meant to paste another obfuscating label (cf. "nascent Islamists," "hip-hop copycats") over the rioters, but to suggest something like the following: Lefebvre, paraphrasing Marx, writes that "History generally proceeds by its bad side." OK. Need that mean we must not only accept but be literally thrilled by the fact that it quite often proceeds by its macho side as well -- at the level of both entrenched and "insurgent" modes of maintaining/displaying/taking power? And -- would the response that to voice any such worry is already reactionary be, in part, (i) attractive or not as much according to one's temperament as anything else and (ii) a kind of expression of a Mailerish anti-"momism," according to which which it's deeply unfortunate that putatively "feminine" influences [consider the quotations from girls in that Australian piece I linked to last time] serve to r/depress more adventuresome -- and in that, more genuine and genuinely valuable -- impulses? [On Engels' view of the family, or am I mistaken, the answer is, "Yes, and correctly so." Althusser's?]

This is not to deny that the fact that this set of thoughts occurs to me in particular may have something to do with the fact that I could hardly be described as an adventurer.

d) Perhaps multiple enviscerations of David Brooks are not strictly necessary, but I nonetheless appreciate Jody Rosen's entry into the fray. First, and least, for demonstrating that an anachronist need not be a feeb; but mostly for the sharp-eyed guesswork about just where Brooks dug up his translations of French hip-hop lyrics: well-played. And convincing, given that I too found Bitter Ministry via the "Barbarians at the Gates" piece that Jody mentions (but I didn't link to it, and still won't, because it's ass), and then did a little more looking into the group. A little, not a lot; and I frankly admit that I know very little about French hip-hop, circa either '92 or '05 -- I merely pointed out there to an object for further, potentially useful inquiry. I don't mean to sound defensive, but to add to the pile-on: I did a little more work and used a little more judgment than Brooks, even though I'm not the one being paid a salary by the paper of record to produce minimally cogent arguments based on something other than a 1/2 hour of link-hitting.

[That was around 9 a.m.. Here is what I have to add: Jane, I'm sure you're right that what I mean is not limited to what I wish to mean. And yes: both/and, not either/or; the psychosocial level of explanation (let's call it) coexists and interacts with the political one. Did I say enough for you to assume that I would think otherwise? But there is also an issue concerning our differing rhetorical modes -- which is, we will both I hope agree, trivial compared to a shared (though I know you cannot believe me) hope for real change. You mistakenly read this blog as though all or even most of what I post is written from a position of utter conviction and near-certainty, comparable to your own, about the accuracy of my analyses; or in this case, my fragmentary and I suppose to that extent ill-advised promissory notes. I feel that I have been pretty damn consistent in not presenting myself or my thoughts as either authoritative or beyond reproach; I am not a pundit, and I am not uncompromised. If you wish to believe that the deepest motivation for my writing as I do is (like, perhaps, Brooks' or Ng's) to weasel out of the incontrovertible, to grasp at any straw that allows me to take an event for anything but "exactly what it is" -- and, in so doing, to relieve and absolve others of my ilk -- that is your prerogative. Even so, the notion that even the initial framing of an expression of doubt* that the analysis you advocate exhausts what is to be said merits playing the Ace of Trumps ("standard-issue counter-revolutionary liberalism, bourgeois consciousness") is not one that strikes me as dialogically helpful. Though perhaps that was not your aim; and perhaps you aren't even being critical, but merely reminding me of the facts.

*The reader might have noticed the up-front admission what I had to say was inchoate (and is only slightly less so now); and the not-very-vivid "a part of me" language, a figure often used to indicate a degree of personal and/or intellectual conflict on the part of the writer.

Lastly, I am not much taken with the idea that a concern with the injury and possible death of don't-call-them-innocents = "a promise not to hurt you." (Omitted: catalog of non-fear-based and non-self-protective behaviors with respect to where I've lived, what I do when I travel, and when I've declined to call the police, which merely read as self-serving.) Perhaps all these very minor bona fides, which I in no way owe anyone and offer with some distaste, are more than slightly irrelevant: first, because the appearance that I have books and records that I take myself to own, until I don't, much less a car to forget to lock, is only an phantasm projected against the great featureless wall of the State's coercive power; and second, because I don't have a plan worked out for what I'll do when I'm doused with flammable liquid, especially if I actually think there's a fighting chance that my martyrdom will, in the long run, lead to, say, the Sixth Republic. (I know that will sound to many like a reductio; I don't quite mean it that way, which will in turn sound crazy, perhaps, to everyone but Jane.) Even so, snide remarks equating, at a quite general level, this sort of merely ethical concern for others with bad faith and self-protective fear are, well, as weak as any pseudo-argument I've committed; and perhaps mark another element of your overarching world-view that I have not as yet found a compelling reason to accept. Even here, however, I do not say that these ethical concerns are off-limits for criticism; I object -- as you have been known to do with respect to other views -- to their reduction to psychological motivation (though I have done something similar above in making reference to temperament).

I do hope that you and other readers, if such any longer exist, will accept that it is not a live option for me not to post, in my customary provisional manner, on certain topics, or to make use of certain texts, primarily on the basis of another writer's relationship to them, which we can assume is not the illusory one of ownership. On the other hand, since what is at stake for the principal parties to this little set-to is largely symbolic as things stand, I will try not to continue it here, in the interest of not trivializing more concrete concerns.]

2005-11-11T22:08:00.000-08:00

1) Yep -- Kael, March of '75: "Nashville isn't in its final shape yet, and all I can hope to do is suggest something of its achievement." I suppose I have to admire even the semblance of that kind of humility from a critic -- don't see that sense of serving the advocated object in, oh, Denby or Lane much. K. also compares Altman to Joyce, twice. Oh -- and on Rosenbaum, whose seriousness of purpose I admire more than his prose, this is amusing.

2) The fellow quoted here sounds like he was gene-spliced from Jane and myself: "I look forward to their expressing themselves, with appropriate respect for human life, through the media of bonfires and chaos.". Also suggests that the fact that random personal attacks did not rise in number along with the instances of property violence speaks for the "rigor" of most participants. I hope that the fact that that analysis sounds correct to me is not wishful thinking.

And still, and still -- there is just some part of me that can't get with the program. Other than the fearful, quietist part, I mean. I can't explain it well, but: adolescent boys. (Read about their sisters.)

3) I thought the No Parasan guy was just a misanthrope, but a couple more days of posts have made it clear that he's just an ass. Link removed. Here are a few more pieces I found useful -- you can all find current news and burning-car stats by yourself.:Clearest discussion I've seen of the exact connotations of "karcherise."//U. T-top pointed me to this piece by former Liberation columnist Juan Cole (I almost mistyped his name). A sober response to racist interpretations -- see also the links there, in the graf on Beur youth culture.//Gloating that "the unrest has not had any effect on the overall state of the nation's economy" seems obnoxious, even for a Finance minister.//And I'm not sure I quite catch the tone of EU Parlimentarian Daniel Cohn-Bendit's comments on some largely Turkish areas of Berlin: Kreuzberg is ""an island of happiness compared with the situation in France."

4) The other Paris: "Thank you officer, we love the police!"

5) Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 1939: "The present multiform alienation of man and of the community is grounded in the inhuman situation of certain social groups....excluded from the community, or else admitted to it only in appearance, verbally. Neither in its material nor in its spiritual condition does it share in the community, and whenever it takes action in order to do so its enemies say that it is destroying the community!" (Well played, but damn, it takes him long enough to get there -- this book isn't long, but it's a slog, pitching strangely between dogma and passing idiosyncracies, and so abstract (esp. in sections on Man in Nature/Nature in Man, that one cannot say that it is the piece of work that one would use to convince someone that the topic mentioned in the title is not mystified/fying. Lebfevre's first book, well before he could be described as "heterodox." (I wonder what exactly made Nathaniel Tarn republish it in 1968.)

6) Was about 15 pages into Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives, which I'd picked up for no particular reason at a church rummage sale a few weeks back, before I looked more closely at the jacket copy and realized that this was a series of NYer features/profiles, not a novel written quite brilliantly in the manner of same. (I know, I know, don't I know what Malcolm does? Just wasn't thinking cleaarly about it.) Either way, still an elegant, pointedly inconclusive little book, even though I have no standing interest in the topic (basically, some episodes in the tangled early history of psychoanalysis, and the eccentrics who research them). Given the paper I've been working on, I should be reading her Diana and Nikon instead.

7) Just came back [this bit was written last night] from a student-plus-a-few-professionals NU production of Was, a new Wizard of Oz-themed musical by Barry Kleinbort and Joseph Thalkennew, based on a novel by Geoffrey Ryman. You know what would have improved it? E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen. You would have to not only have a high tolerance not only for musical theater, but for the very odd, self-serious yet kitschy genre that is contemporary post-Sondheim musical theater to cotton to this. It's not Wicked; this show alternates the stories of the real life model for the book's Dorothy, and a contemporary (well, '80s) gay man who travels to Kansas in search of signs of her existence. Sexual abuse and AIDS are broached. Nothing seems to end very happily, yet there is a big finale about finding the magic. But you know, you take this sort of thing for what it has to offer -- a couple of good voices, a couple interestingly-structured scenes, one love song that sounded more like "Saturday In The Park" than anything else. Too much flat expository language in the lyrics, though -- that's for the book.

2005-11-09T08:46:00.000-08:00

1) Organizer Jacob Knabb tells me that tonight's panel (see first item) is at 33 E. Congress, not 30.

2) Sasha's not the only one screwing up. Last night, I utterly failed to locate Fulton Recital Hall for the Susan Howe/David Grubbs performance. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't behind the muffler shop I ended up in front of.) Too bad, as I enjoyed their record, and wrote a pick for their NY show. (Explaining "Melville's Marginalia" in the available space and appropriate vocabulary for Time Out New York isn't the same endeavor as explaining grills and screwtapes to NYer subscribers, but it felt like pulling teeth.)

3) After a good deal of necessarily unsystematic surfing, I find that I have little in the way of a settled understanding of the riots. To say the most banal thing possible: events await their interpretation. The "l'intafada" dog won't hunt, that's clear enough if you can read past the hot-button phrase "predominantly Muslim youths" in U.S. news reports, but I must admit -- as someone who's been slapping SI graffiti on weak-ass pop records about ruined banks and storefronts since 1993 -- that I'm as wary of Jane's version as anyone's. [Update: This post was written just before Jane's Voice piece went up. But I'm not changing it. The quotations from a seven year-old as reported by her architect/theorist aunt are beneath the author.] Again: what has "happened" depends on what happens -- if these events come to be understood and responded to as a way of demanding recognition within existing civil society, then their destabilizing energy will likely be absorbed for the time being. Is "we can't get jobs" merely to be understood as "never work" under false consciousness? On the other hand, some of the suburban violence also seems to have the end of emphasising what is already implicitly known: this is our turf. I don't imagine that the residents who organize anti-violence marches and stand guard at local buildings at night are especially ready to locate a common cuase with the rioters. (These, of course, are not "direct actions," because they're not fun enough.)

All that said, I think it's bizarre to be smug-yet-relieved about the seeming fact that tourist-life goes on. No more morally perverse, perhaps, than tourism in "normal" times -- but, I would think, more difficult to sustain without a strain. Yet this co-exists with alarmism: this strikes me as an odd headline for a story reporting car-burning down to 190 from over 1,000 in two nights. (This piece reports the number as 617; I also want to know -- who has the time to count?)

Much of what I've read, I don't care to link to -- many of the interpretations that aren't overtly racist are covertly so, especially in dismissing the violence as the stepped-up activity of already active small-time criminals. But, with the caveat that I do not necessarily endorse any link that takes you off this blog: No Parasan! seems to be one of the most frequently updated sites of relevance. Its authors' main source of energy seems to be schadenfreuede w/r/t the French govt.'s confusion, so make of it will you will. Here is the only item I've turned up that attempts to claim the "border-jumping" could extend to America, specifically Los Angeles. I think the author is, if I can put it this way, too optimistic: the most relevant question that emerges is why more didn't happen after the Devin Brown and Tony Mohammad incidents, which are, if anything, more clear-cut particular incidents of police racism than the one that was match to the flame in France. Preemptive Karma sounds more conflicted, and offers a good deal to chew on, inc. thoughts on what this means for Le Pen, and further connections to U.S. events.

From a more academic angle, this book looks as though it might be interesting, though I obviously can't vouch for that on the basis of the review. The author's view is that France's socio-economic problems are a result of a the welfare state's inegalitarianism, with entrenched (white) public sector workers benefiting unequally, as against immigrant and immigrant-descended communities. "Considering that France's bloated, grossly inefficient, and absurdly highly paid public sector also has the worst strike record in Europe does not inspire confidence that it will give up its privileges easily. In 2000, for instance, the nationalised SNCF rail workers, who constituted one per cent of French workers, accounted for forty per cent of all the nation's strike days." If that is so, it colors my view of Kristin Ross' attempts to see latter-day strikes in France as '68 (slight return).

Someone whose French is better than mine will also want to get on translating the songs of Ministre Amer, who appear in the soundtrack of La Haine. (See also members Stomy Bugsy and Passi.)

And -- do I need to say this? -- manifestations involving lighting bus passengers on fire or striking passersby with dumbbells from 15th story windows (somewhere further down on No Parasan!, w/ heavy-handed sarcastic commentary) are not to be condoned or celebrated, either as festival or rhetoric. Things are things, and their destruction may even unmask their illusory claim on us; persons are not. Call me sentimental. I hope that whatever further direction these events take, it is not this one.

I may continue to post relevant material as I encounter it, but I believe I will leave interpretation and position-taking to my betters.

2005-11-08T12:14:00.000-08:00

I'd have been there if I'd been there: Many thanks to Harlequin Knights for his detailed coverage of the n/OULIPO conference at Redcat (the official site doesn't seem to be working this sec); I'm particularly surprised to learn of the tenor of Johanna Drucker's remarks. And don't skip Joseph's link to Catherine Daly's imagined response to Spahr and Young's presentation/performance.

Btw -- Alexus Meinong, mentioned at the start of Joseph's final post, is also the fellow whose views on the reality of non-existent objects were famously critiqued by Bertrand Russell. I think Peli has to chug.

2005-11-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

1) Some people say that the internet makes dangerous information too widely available. That's ridiculous.

2) de Villepin's book of literary criticism: In Praise of Those Who Stole The Fire.

3) Whistling in the dark: "You have to go looking trouble to find it."

4) John Beer writes in, quite reasonably, re the "science of history":

I find myself a little torn, as on the one hand, I sympathize entirely with your reluctance to grant an easy acceptance of a science of history (the sort of rejection of Marx's scientism, for instance, that the Frankfurt School takes as a starting point), and at the same time, I don't have a huge problem with Joshua's rejoinder to the Slate journalist in the terms that he makes it. I suppose primarily because while Joshua's citation of aeronautics might on the surface imply a kind of scientistic reduction of the social to the physical, I think he's more charitably read as tweaking the elision from the undeniable greater unknowability of the social to a kind of mysterian rejection of generalizations (& particularly generalizations regarding power) in the social realm. Just because there isn't the kind of knowledge available through the physical sciences doesn't mean that! there aren't productive and useful theoretical generalizations to be made socially. & (this is where I'd want to say that Marxialist thoughts about false consciousness might render principles of charity intepretively inert when reading Slate journalists) the Slate remark is meant to paper over the possibility of such thinking, & that papering over is usefully exposed through the engineering analogy.

[I'll only add -- yeah, the line I was running does have to explain why any useful (strategic?) generalization can be made about the social. This is obviously not unrelated from the topics above -- esp. if the "historical law" exemplified can be expressed any more precisely than "Don't push me 'cos I'm close to the edge."]

5) What can the scientist feel at the confirmation of theory by experi(m)ent(i)al results but glee?

6) A knight's morve away from a link of Jordan's, a link to downloads of 2 non-CD Hold Steady tunes -- from a sold-out seven-inch, of all things. Only one of the files worked for me, but it's been a busy morning and I didn't have time to fuss.

7) "Time goes by so slowly": Who's Madge trying to convince?

2005-11-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

1) Weekend of missed connections. Annoying.

2) Hey, Sasha: Loud and clear. Cardinal never happened for me, but I know many for whom they did, and (irrelevantly) Bob Fay is a prince. By the by -- Suzanne Valadon was also the woman with whom Toulouse-Lautrec had the closest thing in his life to a sustained romantic relationship. Which was not very close, in that she, with her mother's help, feigned a suicide attempt in order to elicit a marriage proposal; their motive was economic. T-L was one of the few painters she modeled for and/or slept with who was respectful of her own artisitc ambitions (though that Wikipedia article says Degas encouraged her as well). Her work is, as you say, more than interesting -- I was tempted by a catalog in the Orsay this summer, back when I was cosmopolitan and Paris was merely the archive of tumult.

3) Which obliquely reminds me -- clipped this unsigned review of Tout le fer de la tour Eiffel, a novel by Michele Mari, from a bilingual in-flight magazine in August:

"The main character of Mari's book resembles the real-life Walter Benjamin down to the last detail. In the novel he has decided to compile a collection of emblematic artistic and literary artifacts: Kafka's cockroach, Proust's madeline, a soft watch out of a Dali painting, etc. But it so happens that a German philologist and Nazi sympathizer also covets the same treasures. Benjamin engages his rival in a battle of wits whiole simultaneously thwarting the schemes of a gang of a malevolent dwarves. And what about the Eiffel Tower? Perhaps you didn't know, but the iron it is made of has magical powers."

Sounds awfully trivializing -- no idea whether it will be translated.

4) Disappointed but not shocked to see which party dominates the L. Gore/K. Hanna interview that appears in the new Ms..

4) BenjyWatch, pt. 2., in which our man is "gaga" over Anna May Wong. [I also should have read Hoberman's review of Masc/Fem before seeing it again recently -- the parodied film" is Bergman's The Silence.]

5) Bullseye.

6) Re Hit It or Quit It: An earlier version of this post went off at some length about the presence of an interview question concerning my resemblance to a BBC Detective. The gist of being expressible as "wtf?," we can forgo the rest. As to what it's like to be my friend: Try it!

2005-11-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

Mostly grouchy misc.:

1) I'll be on a panel called "What Is Pop?" which has something to do with a critical writing class, but is open to the public, at Columbia College, on Nov. 9 at 4 p.m.. Their site is hard to navigate, so, here's a bit more detail: Room 421 of the 30 E. Congress Building (located @ the intersection of Congress & Wabash). Take the elevator to the 4th floor, turn right upon exiting and make your way to #421. (Actually, I think this might have been the same room as the Wheeler reading -- did I mention that I was completely surprised when the host/introducer turned out to be David Trinidad?) Other panelists include my man J., Mike Flaherty of U. of Chicago radio, a writer that I don't know named Emerson Dameron, and Jack Hoyle, an actual musician. Difficult not to remark on whiteness, maleness (though this was only the confirmed participation as of a few days ago). I'm certainly going to talk about this, especially if it doesn't look like it's going to come up otherwise -- but, man, things have really devolved if this task falls to supposed arch-formalist me.

2) Even though I realize it's only shorthand, every time Jordan makes with the baseball stats, I am made aware that what I have been seeking for my entire life so far, is some endeavor in which the point was not to score. Outside of some personal relationships, I have not found one. Hence my air of disappointment. (But, then, one also sees that Jordan has related issues.)

3) To paraphrase Jim: "There's as much poetry if not more in [popular cultural reference author in the author's purview] than in [popular culture references not in the author's purview, esp. for generational reasons]. Pull up a library chair if you want. That'll never be my thing." First: Sure, "as much," but not "more." More why? Because now? And anyway, second, if two of your examples of now are Calvin and Hobbes and Public Enemy, I think that boat has sailed and can I borrow my Tama Janowitz books back? Third, and maybe I can put this in terms members of our generation (I think Jim and I are about the same age) can grasp: "The library is cool....Ayyyy!."

4) Sometimes Sasha is so terse that I honestly can't tell if he's linking to something because he thinks it's good, or lame. I was going to use this remark as an excuse to go on to complain about Eric Matthews, but now I can't find the press release for the upcoming Elliot Smith tribute on which his contribution is a mix of a song (I think it was "Big Nothing") to which Matthews has added instrumentation that Smith explicitly rejected for the album version. This just in: That's not a tribute.

5) Just while I'm knee deep in fixing up the 12" mix of my Peggy Lee piece for publication,here comes the call for papers/final exam prompt for EMP 2006, which Matos has posted for our convenience. We are warned that "Proposals are judged by liveliness of prose as much as pertinence of topic." Whaddya think, gang, will we be able to come up with 250 words as lively as "To what extent do these issues reveal hierarchies of taste, transformed subjectivities, the effect of politics on culture, or other lines of contestation permeating popular music?" by January?

6) I sort of thought a sonneteer was a crypto-Oulipian. (Someone went completely pseudo-analytic nutters in your comments cabinet, btw.)

7) props to Hops; does this mean that there will now be less snuff-radio about the Cash family?

8) I only said "mostly grouchy": I've been meaning to say something about Monie Love's Down To Earth. If you knew more than one of the following facts, you knew more than me: (a) She's English -- from Battersea (but wasn't the video NYC double-dutch?); 1990 is fairly early for UK hip-hop of any import, or am I wrong? (b) "Monie in the Middle," the chorus of which I've carried around for, what, 15 years now, was produced by Andy Cox and David Steele of E. Beat/F.Y. Cannibals (which also explains her presence on a remix of "She Drives Me Crazy"); (c) The rest of the album is tuffer than you'd think, w/ production by Bambatta and cohort; (d) it doesn't have a hell of a lot to do with the Daisy Underground-manque suggested by the cover art and big-floppy-hat-and-shorts look; (e) there may be a Muslim thing going on; though no explicit reference is made, I don't know how else one explains the anti-pork screed "Swiney Swiney." I have not yet found the time to track down her 1993 follow-up In a Word or 2, or to figure out what she's been up to since (though I gather she's been a New York radio personality at some time).

9) I also commend to you Triptych Myth's The Beautiful, esp. if you like unusually-stuctured but not totally out piano trios (see Shipp, Mengelberg) as much as I do: Cooper-Moore is a monster.

10) I screwed up the link last time for Make Now Press. Thanks, Bill. And Joseph.

2005-11-01T17:30:00.000-08:00

Misc.:

(a) Pleased to find Steve not only giving props to Shadow of a Doubt, but to the "indelible Santa Rosa bad girl" played by the curiously obscure Janet Shaw. Please consult A Cat May Look at a Queen, AbKosh 2003, track 3, which samples her big line ("'I'd just die for a ring like that. Yes sir, for a ring like that, I'd just about die."); the cover is part of a beauty contest still of Shaw that I found in, as the song says, a "Downtown Pomona antique mall."

(b) Jody Rosen, of White Christmas fame, has a new blog: Anachronist, devoted to the sorts of pre-rock pop on which blues 'n' folk lovin' crit-types have heaped...well, silence, mostly. Check out his opening post for a manifesto; whether you agree or not, plenty to download in the days after (excellent links, too).

(c) While I'm in word-spreading mode, glad to be able to mention that L.A.-based Make Now Press has scored the rights to put Mathews' and Brotchie's Oulipo Compendium back into print. (Go past the flash page and click "Upcoming Publications.")

(d) Recently noted that among the pairs of "Iconoclasts" to be featured on an upcoming Sundance Channel series is this one: Michael Stipe + Mario Batali. Fine, whatever, make some bruschetta. But what I want to know is: is the general idea that, once you get famous enough, you just do any damn thing that comes into your head?

(e) The division of labor in the sexual act. The fetishism of small differences. The diagonal of personal ecstasy.

(f) Heard Susan Wheeler and Jean Marie Beaumont read at Columbia College, down in the Loop, about two weeks back. Was unfamiliar w/ Beaumont; what she read was accessible in its strategies, but by no means inane. Particularly liked a poem in the "voice" of a rock, and another comprised simply of all of the thrice-repeated phrases in Ariel: "marry it, marry it, marry it." Susan read "Benny the Beaver" (which, I should have noticed before, is about being a poet) and a few other lightish things from Source Codes, the "Money and God" section from Ledger, and more of the poems using her mother's diction which I first half-heard backstage at MillionPoemsLand earlier this year. I quite enjoy her reading style, sort of tough, hardly poet-y at all. Hope to get to her novel Record Palace over Xmas; at a glance, my first thought was, "I had no idea she knew this much about jazz." Then turned around and picked up Bree for a screening of Michael Liesen's Sturges-penned Easy Living -- you can see why Sturges ended up directing his own work, Leisen pushes good jokes/holds reaction shots too long. In any case, the commodities-gone-mad of the classic Automat scene was nice punctuation to Ledger. Then I went to Cass McCombs' show at the Hideout, more on that later. All this was before I noticed that I had some work to do.

(g) Mention of Sturges reminds me that I recently saw for sale the issue of Film Comment that was the original venue for both Farber's "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" and Sarris' "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962." And some pre-New Yorker Kael piece. It cost $40; not bad, as the same bookstore was selling a visiting card signed by Charles Dodgson for $3K. I stuck with a ten-buck copy of Tom Clark's Stones w/ the Brainard cover (Swiss cheese).

(h) Also saw The Awful Truth, more comfort food, I'm afraid. You know something, though -- it's not one of Cary Grant's best performances; Ralph Bellamy, as a demonstration of what you end up with if you try to deny your love for someone more "difficult," runs away with the middle third of the movie.

(h) Will have to go back to that Tropicalia show at Chicago MOCA, as there are several fairly long loops of performances and other film-clips on view: Were you aware that Os Mutantes had done a series of Brazilian TV ads for Shell Oil? Kinda kills it, no?

(i) Oh yes: about a week ago, I shook the hand of a very polite Welsh woman: Jon Langford's mother.

2005-10-30T06:35:00.000-08:00

[In case you thought I'd forgotten, here's the remainder of my rejoinder -- which is partly to Jane's response to an earlier post, partly to his original poetics post [which, jeez, you should know how to find by now if you care about this at all, but here], but mostly to nothing at all but my own worries about what one has to take on board in order to be a marxistian [can we go with "Marxalia," on this model?] which I freely admit are not specifically relevant to Jane's argument -- or perhaps, to poetics. After this post, we'll try to lighten up again around here.]

I don't think I'm exactly spooked by the ism-that-must-not-be-named, though Jane right that it's symptomatic of something that I am as prone to anyone to get distracted by its looming presence. And he's also right that little or nothing in the way of concrete economic or political theses/prescriptions need be accepted for his central argument to get off the ground. But if so, the argument does not have such a terribly controversial conclusion (so I'd have thought). One would have to take not just the existence but the efficacy of the transcendental more seriously than most parties to the discussion would be willing to do in their more sober moments to deny that what emerges emerges from history. (Why, that's just common sense!) My earlier thought was just that this is still to use "history," materialism, or both to make only a negative point, re (in this case) the poetic tendency at issue; what I might propose (though it was not what I was thinking at the time) is that giving one or another positive explanatory account of what all that Judeo-Christian language "really is" is exactly where more powerful (and thus controversial) conceptual engines, some of which are stamped "Marxist," are going to start revving. (Even Jordan's suggestion could be handled: Consider what it is that "Satanism" is standing in for in both metal and Mekon iconography.)

But, that said, and this is today's jumping-off point, I do think it possible that Jane slightly underestimates the neutrality of his premises. Minor instance -- "acting on the present to change it is the name of politics." (7.0). At best, this formulation is a "name" (I take it this means something like definition) of politics. But, on the formulation given here, it could also be a name of, oh, aerodynamics (see below). Surely not any dynamic endeavor counts as politics -- on most of the formulations I'm familiar with, the political sphere is essentially tied to one's involvement with other people. In fact, I thought the "name" of politics was something like: the sphere of theoretical and practical endeavors concerned with how to live together. But this is really beside the point -- other definitions of politics (you can look them up yourselves) seem to emphasize terms like "government" on the one hand, and "power" on the other. My point is just -- well yes, have a dynamic view of the political by all means, but note that is a view, not an truth of analysis you get for free.

But as I said, this is minor, and perhaps merely verbal. More interesting, perhaps, is the citation of the slogan "We only know one science, the science of history" (5.2). If the allusion to science is a rhetorical flourish (as I think it was not for Marx), so be it, excuse me and skip the rest. But, if the consequence of that formulation is, for example, that a certain mode of explanation constitutes a scientific theory for explaining and predicting historical events (qua changes in the way we humanly recognize and characterize these events, not under some unlikely reductive description via physical or biological categories), there is a bit of room for feeling nervous, however obscurely. For, I think, there is some reason to doubt that what's on offer could be a scientific theory. This, for me, is not because it quantifies over something other than, say, elementary particles; but simply because it recognizes, and operates in the space of, agents acting for reasons, the fulfillment of ends, and so on, as does the "theory" of everyday psychological (belief-desire) explanation. The very characterization of the sort of "events" either theory wishes to talk about presupposes this. And the key terms here -- "reasons," "ends" -- are notoriously resistant to being brought under the umbrella of "event causation" of a sort that leads -- where applicable -- to determinism. (And this is not changed by the idea that actually motivating reasons are opaque; psychoanalysis is a theory of the same kind as those at issue here.) I seriously think that the question of whether this can in principle be done -- whether by historical materialism or Churchland's "neurophilosophy" -- is at least a meaningful philosophical problem, and those whom it worries are not to be easily bought off by promissory notes. Or even more weakly: one should not be shocked by the fact that the change in self-understanding required to accept the claim would produce resistance on some fronts -- especially before the required nomological generalizations (laws, in the non-political sense) are before us.

Look, I don't get the sense that Jane is, in fact, a historical determinist, though he does have leanings that way when technology is at issue. (Though have a look in the comment box.) But I do think that when one moves from the notion of historical explanation to a "science of history," one is nudged in this direction, with questionable payoff.

Just to take some of this from a different angle, consider this later post. Jane treats a Slate columnist's disparagement of the view "that neat theories not only reflect the world but can change it as well, and in ways that can be precisely measured," with bottomless sarcasm: "Perhaps this assumption is indeed always mistaken, though numerous aeronautic engineers, say, would disagree." Yes: But surely one would have to be only a touch more charitable to the author to imagine that he had in mind "neat theories that take as their object persons and their actions." [And, if one wanted to be so charitable as to not accuse anyone who crosses one's path of bourgeois individualism, one might also imagine that to be a "person" is, in part, to enter into social relations.] If he was so read, would the complaint that Kramer simply missed the possibility that "Schelling's theory sucked" seem quite as inarguable? (Sorry to be recherche here -- if you're trying to follow this, it doesn't matter for what I'm getting at right this sec what the content of "Schelling's theory" is.) Anyway, note that the fact that aeronautics is a good predictive theory for certain kinds of entities -- including human beings, conceived merely as their bodies -- can only be a piece of inductive evidence that the theory "reflects the world," not a proof of that claim; in fact, the laws of any "special" scientific theory (that is, any short of one supplying the complete description of the physical world) are notable for not quite reflecting that world -- as we see from the fact that such laws implicitly bear ceteris paribus ("everything else being equal") clauses. The questions this raises -- e.g.if a law admits of arbitrarily many exceptions (depending on how many ways there are of all things not being equal), how is it that they have content at all? -- have been minor industries in mainstream philosophy of science; the salient point here is that it is not at all obvious that generalizations about psychology and the social sciences can rarely (if ever) be stated in an exceptionless manner for only the same reasons that this is the case generalizations about the physics of middle-sized dry goods. Why can't they? The answer I seem to be arguing for here has to do with the reasons/causes distinction bruited above; to repeat myself, notions like reasons and ends -- and the whole apparatus by which we make human and historical events intelligible to ourselves, individually and collectively -- are not the notions appropriate to a predictive theory of event causation.

To sum up: This does not mean that Marxism is a load of hooey insofar as it is not a science. (It comes close to being the former insofar as it interprets itself as the latter.) To the contrary, it is most utile, not to mention plausible, in just those forms which do not have pretenses of scientism (and, especially, determinism). It is an explanatory theory, a powerful framework of interpretation, a meaningful contributor to our project of self-understanding -- and, importantly, an improvement on many versions of that project, precisely in positing that social relations have at least as much bearing on individual wills as vice versa, and perhaps even that the former precede the latter in (if I may) explanatory or logical space. But in so far as it is more, I can only interpret it as (a) a normative and prescriptive theory, rather than a predictive one, and (b) a form of humanism, both because of the notions it must employ to recognizably describe what it takes itself to describe, and because of the nature of its prescriptive aims. A Marxism that claims to be an "anti-humanism" is, I admit, very hard for me to get my head around; but I strongly suspect that, even if I knew what I was talking about, I would plump for E.P. Thompson against Althusser (whatever the usefulness of particular Althusserian notions).

And maybe Jane would too; the foregoing is admittedly a lot to spin out from one passing reference to "the science of history." As I think I already said: (a) This post is not "against" Jane, It's just an attempt to get at something the original post and ensuing conversation got me thinking about, and (b) I'm not certain what it has to do with poetry in particular, except in leading me to pose a very broad question: Does poetic agency raise problems not raised by agency in general, and if so, what are they?

2005-10-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

I'm posting as a separate item the following [slightly edited] response of Jane's to this earlier entry just in case anyone feels the need to link to it w/o getting stuck w/ a lot of other stuff. I'll try to respond in the next week or so, and that will end this round of butting into other people's arguments; but I don't expect to post otherwise between now and then -- attention is required elsewhere.

Jane says:

I hope that I am not being simply reactive, and that you will take it in the right spirit, if I try to explain why I think that half your post re poetics gets it exactly wrong, misreads what I wrote at the most direct level; at worst, I figure I can move toward clarifying my own presentation of the issue.

The part you got right, at least from a responsive level, is about the card on the table and unturned, viz. my analysis of the turn toward Christian language. Except you give me too much credit; I hadn't actually gotten to theorizing that, and am not sure I am the guy to do it, beyond some banalities, e.g., in a very dialectically depressing way, I suspect the turn toward transcendental figures is a historical evocation of an inability to grapple with history itself: a kind of hysterical paralysis. the transcendental isn't frozen like "Truth" but frozen like a deer in headlight. But as I said, this is a very unfinished set of thoughts, and I like your ideas on it as much as mine. By the way, it was Jordan who endeavored to suggest that the God-Hating was rightfully transcendental, just displaced.

As to the other half, what I am responding to is, "It's hard to get into what's going on here without making it a referendum on all of one's doubts and questions about Marxism, getting stuck there, and never getting to poetry." I know to a certain extent you are voicing a fictionalized position rather than speaking your own, but nonetheless, I think this gets the priority of my argument exactly backward. I do believe that the whole point, about which I am fairly clear, is that, once you admit of the category "emergent poetics" (and particularly the proposition that they are "emerging with history") that this leads, fairly inevitably, to an extent of relations to politics, insofar as politics is the involvement with the forces that shape the emergence of history and is nothing else.

That is: one is not required in any way at any moment in the argument to accept anything Marxian or Marxist (more on that useful pseudodistinction shortly) before thinking about emergent poetics' relation to politics and simultaneously to criticism. Rather, if one accepts the simple propositions 4.0-1 and 6.4, one can start to think about emergent poetics' political relations. I could easily have never mentioned Marx, deleted Sec 5, and the argument works just the same [...]

At no point in the argument, for example, does anyone need to accept that class conflict is the engine of history, that the owners of means of production and the owners of their own labor constitute the classes, that surplus value of labor is where all profit comes form, etc., etc. Never not once, not even implicitly. Yet these are all constitutive of a worldview we could call "Marxist." Conversely, when folks say "Marxian," they mean, i think, something less resembling a complete worldview, and more pertaining to specifics of Marx's analysis; it would be like saying an economic idea was Keynesian, as opposed to, you know, endorsing his whole macroeconomic program. and there is, yes, exactly one Marxian idea in the poetics, distributed (somewhat awkwardly) over two propositions (4.0-1). So, does one have to believe in Marxism or even in Marxian ideas to consider section 4 and proceed? is your hypothetical referendum really necessary to my argument? Boy, i really don't think so. As i said, I could have never mentioned Marx and the argument wouldn't quiver. I think that Sec. 4 is where "emergent" and "Marxian" overlap -- yes. Yet, in no way are they cast in a determinate relationship, in this argument. Moreover, I think this overlap is straightforward: Marx (and Hegel! and other people!) says that history is driven forward by dialectical pressures that bring new things into being which bear traces of and are responsive to previous stuff. The very word "emergent" seems like its going to overlap with that, just via the dictionary, you know?

That's not to say one couldn't disagree. If one disagreed with 4.0-1 and took the transcendental position, well, that wouldn't be the first time. My argument is toward suggesting that such a disavowal wouldn't be so much a contesting of the idea of "emergent" as it would be a departure from it, and I think I can see the nature of the philosophical debate there, in which i am accused of nominalism and i insist it's strict constructivism, etc., etc.

i think my case here (in this note) has to do with the panic people have around the idea of Marxism, which I do feel like you've given rather clear voice to. If section 5 has a purpose (aside from, apparently, to frighten the horses by saying the name), it's to make clear that Marxian criticism of poetry doesn't require one to accept any of Marx's worldview aside from that stated in 4.0, to wit: art expresses the word-historical conditions in which it is produced, the end. [...]

So for me, I fear the next question is, what is it about historical conditions that causes such a panic around the concept-cluster "Marx" that simple sentences stop working?

2005-10-18T12:29:00.001-07:00

Read Colin McGinn's intellectual memoir The Making of a Philosopher. This is actually a nice non-technical introduction to some of the main areas in contemporary analytic phil of mind/language/epistemology, woven into the stirring tale of how a working-class secondary modern student from Blackpool became the Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford (and a guest on Nightline, offering soundbites on the nature of consciousness). I felt that the notion of a proposition is insufficiently glossed at one key point, in a way that would confuse the uninitiated, but otherwise, I think I can recommend this to anyone curious about the shape of the field, despite the Horatio Alger aspects. (And a few self-serving moments -- he takes credit for being the first to extenss Putnam's "externalism" about meaning to mental content in print, which might well be true; but he should really acknowledge that Tyler Burge [my dissertation chair, as it happens, though I don't really work on his stuff], who is mentioned anecdotally, in an seemingly unrelated context, did the work on this that is more widely cited.) One other book (maybe I've mentioned it here) that seems an approachable way into some of this material, though it's not a memoir, and is definitely thicker and less breezy than McGinn's, is Benjamin Lee's Talking Heads (Duke, 1997).

~~~

Headed downstairs from my office yesterday, just after posting, to find that I'd just missed a noon reading by Christina Pugh, a couple buildings away. I don't remember now what I thought of an essay of hers from Poetry earlier this year; but I've enjoyed, in a lowkey way, the poems I've seen -- I certainly would have given her my lunch (actually, blogging) hour. Ah well: Susan Wheeler at Columbia College in the Loop Wed., possibly followed by Cass McCombs at The Hideout (which is preferable to having to see him open for The Decemberists); Destroyer/New Pornogs at Metro Thurs. Nothing on for the weekend: must work.

~~~

Finally found an mp3 of "I'm Not Havin' It," which has come to mind at regular intervals ever since its brief currency on Yo! MTV Raps; perhaps you recall the video, seemingly shot for $30 in a Ramada Inn lounge? The track seems to be currently unavailable commercially. I can't honestly say I have a clear sense of Positive K's achievements, but on the basis of this and the more widely-remembered "I Got a Man", one might imagine that his entire career revolved around being shot down by Lyte (at least I think that's her on both; confirm, deny, someone?)

2005-10-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

I want to (relatively) brief and clear about this, particularly in relation to this. Jane does not quite go so far as to lump Ange's formulation in as a form of "anti-intellectualism," but comes close enough for me to wonder if he is not misreading the rather precise "ledger" metaphor. What Ange appears to be calling for, at least there, is exactly for "life" and "theory," however their separation might be useful for some purposes (such as a hoped-for abstracting away from rank self-interest and other prejudices), to be more often accounted for as part of the same economy. Call it anedcote if you like (I think that term was only used in a version of the post Ange later cut), but one would often like to know the answers to just the sort of question Jane also asks: How does your theory impinge on your life? What does it make you do: listen to more hip-hop, break up with someone, turn down lucrative work, vote, not vote? And how does your life impinge on your theory -- how does your experience (which, note, must include the experience of intellection, of interpretation of experience [which is always already to some degree "interpreted" in the having]) bear on the theories you arrive at/accept/reject? (After all, I assume that no party to this discussion imagines that the order of theories we're talking about are to be arrived at a priori.) "Keeping double books," for all that the metaphor brings to mind the rationalization of modern accounting, is here a telling figure for one possible kind of sin/crime/error of omission. Note that one common version of this error -- the abstract espousal of feminist theories whose application in one's own love relationship is not readily apparent -- might not be irrelevant to Ange's third term: "guys."

Now, all that said, I do agree quite strongly w/ Jane that the notion of a sphere -- "life" -- that always trumps another -- "theory" -- because it's, um, well, lived is an unhappy one. If there is a general point that I take to have been made quite forcefully by, among others', the language poets'* critiques of "clarity" and "transparency" (and, ruh-roh, "affect") it's just this: don't pretend you don't have a theory [in this instance, of language, but the maxim ramifies], because you do. (Corrolary, and a large part of Joshua's polemical point -- don't go around making "theory" something that's done/possessed/applied by others, thus making your own position seem like a matter of common sense or, worse, nature.) I'm so with all that -- just so you know. [Immense complication here is, of course, the entire Kantian problematic: Where do the categories w/o which it would not be apprehensible by minds-like-ours at all end, and where do theoretical/conceptual constructions on top of those categories begin? That physical objects have positions in space is not, for example, exactly a theory.]

I wish I had a line of Borges' to hand, to the effect that "when I am reading, when I am writing, then too am I living." What person to whom the making of lines, sentences, argument is daily bread does not feel the force of that?

*I've decided to stop using "LangPo"; it's become too dismissive and reductive. And please note that I take it that the points just mentioned were and are made as forcefully or more so, and in pursuit of some (to my mind) righteous ends, by female writers associated w/ the movement/moment as by male ones.

~~~

Played 3 shows, Thurs.-Sat., in my inessential but, I hope, not entirely irrelevant role as Mountain Goats* keyboardist. John brought two Chapel Hill bands as openers, both previously unkown to me: Bellefea, a guitar-drum duo w/ a quite compelling frontwoman; and The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, whose name John (and apparently everyone else who knows them) is lobbying to change.

First Chi. show at an all-ages gallery space w/ iffy sound; good, but not off the hook, suprising to hear John dusting off songs from The Hound Chronicles, highlight of my part of the set was probably "Mole," which is quite malleable. Spent time (not nearly enough) w/ Liz Clayton, also Tim Adams (Ajax/3 Beads of Sweat honcho), who hasn't written since I've been here on account of White Sox Fever, and Drew Gardner, a Claremonter whom I'd forgotten lived here, if I'd ever known. Fri.: Rabid Empty Bottle crowd; ended set by bringing out Prayers and Tears + me for songs that are, at this point, not likely to misfire: "See America Right" and "Against Pollution"; encored with "Palmcorder Yajna" and, at the request of two separate parties (one an actual birthday/bachelor party) the X-Glenns piano/vocal version of "Memories." Satisfying. Hopper says she was present, but I missed her; did see Amy Philips of EMP/Voice fame, who has apparently just moved here to work full-time as a news ed. for Pitchfork. Was fairly candid about my view of said weblication; told her I hoped she would improve it.

Sat. in Kalamazoo: Really the perfect-size town for a certain level of touring band, large enough to support a crowd that makes it worth the trip, small enough that they're happy you made it. On the other hand, it's also the sort of town where the Poetry Slam team has its own van. And both band and audience are lucky to have as friendly a venue as the Kraftbrau, which sends musicians off w/ a jug of the home brew of their choice (I went w/ the root beer). (Odd notes -- Among the decorations is, inconguously, a poster of the cover of an issue of Beardsley's Yellow Book. And, billed at another microbrewery/venue we passed on the way in, something called "The Stooges Brass Band.") Too bad someone decided, during one of the opening sets, to put her foot through the ladies' room window when her boyfriend left w/ someone else. Similar set to Chi., though I learned Berman's "Pet Politics" at soundcheck, and we threw it in. I felt redundant w/ the Prayers' keyboardist [Alex, an adept player who can also discourse on current events in the DC Universe w/ small provocation] on "Against Pollution," so I switched to (pretty hack) glockenspiel, but a piano/organ backed "Palmcorder" fell nicely into "Please Crawl Out Your Window" mode. Gathered as we were leaving for our hotel room that Prayers and Tears were off to a local afterparty/crashpad. Hanging out w/ indierockers after the indierock show: I have to admit, that even were I to tour extensively at some point in the future, that sort of activity would be less likely to feature prominently.

Bree and I tried to hit an estate sale the next morning, ended up in some neighborhood that had no address matching the one in the paper; listened to an hr. or so of the weekend big-band show on Chicago public radio, the newish Stars (best chorus: "I am trying to say/what I wanted to say/without having to say/I love you."), some Amy Denio, and most of a Steppenwolf Theater reading/staging of DeLillo's Cosmopolis, which appeared to be less of a novel than a rigged excuse for heiratic utterances on the nature of cybercapital, but was diverting nonetheless.

~~~

Quite odd: Later in the evening, back at home, houseguests gone, listening to more radio while baking eggplant, heard a 1995 talk by Bobby Seale, some combination of reminiscence and broad claims about what-is-to-be-done. Spent quite a bit of time on that sturdy old Hegelian bit about a quantititative increase or decrease leading to a qualitative leap. Then, about 3 hrs. later, picked Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy from my landlord's shelf, and found just the same formulation invoked w/r/t the origins of language, apropos misguided (according to Winch) responses to Wittgensteinian claims about rule-following and private language: "We can imagine practices gradually growing up amonst early men none of which could count as the invention of language; and yet once these practices had reached a ceertain degree of sophistication -- it would be a misunderstanding to ask what degree precisely -- one can say of such people that they have a language." Curious, in turn, b/c I've been reading Charles Travis' The Uses of Sense on some of the same issues. (Travis, a Scottish philosopher of language, is one of the reasons I'm teaching here; he left the NU dept. on short notice, publicly citing political reasons.) David Lewis' Convention is in part an attempt to put the thought expressed in the quote above on a less impressionistic footing: So, we've gotten from the Black Panthers to one of the main topics of my dissertation in two/three moves -- via Hegel, yet. Surprising, though, then again, the UCLA phil. dept. (where Lewis was in the late '60) is the very dept. that refused to fire/"harbored" Angela Davis. [Which, though I'm damn near free-associating now, is one reason some stereotypes about the politics imagined to be associated with analytic philosophy burn me.]

2005-10-13T05:39:00.000-07:00

Today's tip for effective one-sheeets: Don't use "sanctimonious" when you mean "sanctified."

~~~

Re the sardine poster in yesterday's post, Rael "The Middleman" Lewis writes, tersely and fascinatingly:

"Sidi-Ali Bey = Rene Grenier (former TL roomate/art student post-conversion to Islam).

Jossot himself converts to Islam = Abdul Karim Jossot."

I'm sure Grenier is mentioned in the Sweetman book -- which didn't make the cut for interstate travel -- but I feel like if I'd read something about conversions to Islam in a book about painting and anarchist politics the month of the London subway attacks, it might have stuck.

~~~

A record [movie] review, obviously, may have broader agendas than defending or attacking the work before it; it may be a stick with which to beat some other artist, including some earlier incarnation of the artist at hand, or even a pretext for promoting or dismissing entire genres. What it rarely is, is burdened by the apparent need to give a case for the very notion that some people enjoy listening to music [watching movies]. Cf. poetry reviews.

~~~

Recently added to ubuweb: An expansion of Strictly Kev's "Raiding the 20th C." mix-of-mixes, with some input from Paul Morley and inspired by his recent book, esp. where "I Am Sitting In A Room" is concerned. No, I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet -- 70 megs -- but I'm driving to Michigan this weekend.

~~~

If you still happen to take an interest in Elvis Costello, even the slight one of seeing just how mad his projects have become, here's a thread concerning some concerts he gave in Copenhagen debuting the songs for an eventual theatrical production -- commissioned by the Danish state opera -- based on the relationships among Hans Christian Andersen, Jenny Lind, and P.T. Barnum. Look for the couple of longer reviews, esp. by John Foyle. Somewhere, there's a torrent of one of the shows; yes, I'd listen.

~~~

"There was never a writer so learned to whom erudite friends were not useful. I in particular desire to be corrected by you in order not to be pecked at by detractors."

-- Alberti, prologue to Della pittura (trans. Spencer)

2005-10-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

Me, I've been trying to keep about five columns running in a single ledger. Problem: Incommensurability of scales of value.

~~~

Lautrec show (exclusive corporate sponsor = Sara Lee): Glad I made the effort. Good deal of surrounding work, inc. paintings, posters, cabaret invitations by contemporaries; one sees very clearly how most other artists of the time glamourize the Montmarte demimone in a far more banal way -- many of the other ads for the Moulin Rouge or Olympia could have been done by Petty or Vargas, Lautrec is the only one to give price of place to Valentin the Boneless. 7-min orientation film employs "decadent" and "anti-authoritarian" only in their most vague and innocuous senses, no surprise there. One highlight, this 1897 poster by Henri-Gustave Jossot. L to R: Sidi-Ali Bey (Arab politician of the time, can't find much on him, may have written the name down wrong), Yvette Guilbert, Henri Rochefort*, Sarah Bernhardt, Aristide Bruant. Available in the museum shop as t-shirt and as jigsaw puzzle. Noticed for third time that I respond strongly to Vuillard -- I don't know anything about his periods, but I like the fact that his work seems technically unpredictable.

*Can this be right? He was dead.

~~~

Sentence I never expected to write: Skipped out on Habermas' seminar (naturalism/free will -- we're up to Sellars) early yesterday, to catch end of Helene Cixous' talk on Derrida. I would call it a poetic reminiscence, woven with various philosophical themes, starting from a pair of occasions on which D. sent C. manuscripts "not to be opened" until some later date. Touching, though long (tendency to hammer on the polysemy of individual words by repeating them in a multitude of contexts).

~~~

Disappointed by Ben Marcus' attack on Franzen/defense of experimental fiction in Harper's. Rantishly organized, argument and even rhetoric unevenly excecuted, some appeals to authority/high-modernist namechecks that play right into hands of doubters, false statement to the effect that Stein is not a model for younger writers. Except for isolated paragraphs, he makes a better case for what he does like in the intro to a recent Viking anthology, w/o the burden of carrying on one side of a literary feud.

Very pleased, on the other hand, by Aaron Kunin's piece on Harriet the Spy (calling Tim Alborn!), Little Women, and connected matters (queer narratives of adolescence, to pigeonhole it) in a recent Rain Taxi.

~~~

Curious: Evanston manages to support two high-end guitar shops, but you have to get on 94 to buy a cheapshit keyboard stand.

~~~

Nutty, Bree's sister's cat, had to be put to sleep today. Bree very upset that she can't be there for comfort.

2005-10-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

No, not Round Two; that may have to wait until a particular piece of academic labor is not driving me to distraction. Progress steady, but slow. Just notes, in the usual mode:

Rec'd Ange's Starred Wire, finally, but I'm waiting 20 or 30 years to read it. Kidding. Need to make a date with the longish (orig. typed "longing") series near the end, but individual poems afford individual pleasures, and gain (if you've seen some in magazines) from their accumulation. An immediate startle response to rhymes I'd love to have found ("Maleviches"/"superstitious," plus, ending the previous poem, "hemistiches"), and sonic/graphic relations between single words too particular to have a name ("limp"/"iamb";"panache"/"earache"). I don't know, the light looks pretty 21st c. from here.

~~~

Double/Vanderslice last night at Schuba's (I bailed on Dungen): The Double continue to impress, moreso now that I know the songs. As I just wrote Mr. Niimi, expected but absent, I like their willingness to hurt their songs, and that there are actual songs there to bear the marks. Wish they weren't so non-communicative to the audience -- I think what they're up to is subtler than "dark and brooding," but the stage presence titls one's response in that direction. Was told that they used to not even mention they had stuff for sale; as someone who, if he were any worse at merchandising, would have people coming up asking for refunds, I empathize. JV has a new permanent band that, to be precise, doesn't so much rock as cook; fairly impressive that they didn't record Pixel Revolt w/ him, I don't think, but reproduce its tricky bits -- but I suspect/hope they'll get looser w/ it as they tour.

~~~

Watched another DVD that was sitting around, The Red House (Delmer Daves, 1947): Good, fairly showy Edward G. Robinson performance, but also interesting for the presence of a pre-singing career Julie London, playing a h.s. bombshell all the more forcefully for being 20. Two screenings, both at NU's student-run Block Cinema, both kinda comfort food for me. Arzner's Working Girls: The pet name thing between one sister and the rich guy wears thin, but otherwise, I love this movie only the slightest hair less than my favorite Arzner, Craig's Wife. This time, particularly noticed the economical set-ups -- there's this one shot through two car windows, an apt. house lobby, and into a waiting elevator; and the small parts played by intruiging actors, esp. the mad-looking switchboard operator/receptionist, two or three of the mannish women's-rooming-house residents, and Buddy Rogers' buddy "Bill," who makes the most of four dumb lines delivered drunk from an armchair. Puzzling than neither of the female leads went on to a better career, but Bree and I agreed that their unfamiliarity allows for more emotional involvement.

Also, Masculin/Feminin -- don't know, wasn't with it all the way this time, wondered if there was a Kubrick-y problem with "saying something" about "youth." Maybe it's partly that the "Marx and Coca-Cola" tag has ossified with familiarity. And the film is, obviously, unfair to Chantal Goya (both her character and, I suspect, what Godard thinks she is) in a way not the same as, but probably not unrelated to, Letter to Jane's unfairness to Jane. (I was disappointed w/ a CD of her yeye recs (inc. the songs in the film) that I picked up a few years ago; but I'm amused and sort of pleased that she went on to a long, sturdy career as an ultra-innocuous children's performer. Cheapie bins in Paris record stores are chockablock w/ 7"s on which she poses w/ Guignol, Puss-in-Boots, and the like.) But Leaud's performance hasn't dated -- the way he gradually gets worse at his cigarette-to-mouth trick, his lame sexism when he's with his friend, his complete befuddlement at how to deal with a woman he sincerely wishes to value in a different way, the crummy poetry of his make-a-record monologue. The character of the friend is interesting as well: He's a jerk, but he's also more politically committed, less content with gestures -- though it's hard to read how this fact is being judged at this juncture. Oh: And I had forgotten that the movie makes fun of Zimmy -- "Who's he?" "He's a Vietnik." "What's that?" "Half beatnik, half Vietnam." Interesting to note that it was shot by one Willy Kurant -- where was Coutard that week? Last question -- exactly what movie or kind of movie is the one the characters go see supposed to be parodying?

~~~

Bought tickets for the very last day of the big separate-admission Lautrec show at the Art Institute, which is to say, tomorrow; we tried to go the first week we were here, but I'd screwed up on which day the museum is open late; and then we put it off when Bree got sick. (She's better now, thanks.) I might not make the effort (esp. under work-related circumstances) if it didn't dot the i this summer's reading/viewing. Have until end of month to hit Flavin.

2005-10-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

So: For a while now, it's been on my mind to respond in some way to Joshua's (it seems right not to use his blogonym in this instance) meaty poetics post, not least because it does us the favor of laying some cards on the table in a considered and reasonably orderly manner. It may not be an attempt to "prove anything via some rigorous logic" (0.3), but it would likely be much sillier if it were -- but it's more than some scattered snipings here and there, and as much as I enjoy a well-aimed potshot, I'm also pleased when it's not assumed that that's all we can manage.

But -- one difficulty, and perhaps a reason that there hasn't been a little more substantive comment (at least where we can all see it, not to say there hasn't been any) is that it's hard to get into what's going on here without making it a referendum on all of one's doubts and questions about Marxism, getting stuck there, and never getting to poetry. I don't know if I'm going to manage the trick -- but, I would like it to be understood that to the extent I'm critical of what's Marxist (or marxian, I never know when I'm supposed to use one or the other) here, it is not from the vantage point of someone who would like to see that framework picked apart so that it can be dismissed and we can all go back to selling ourselves and buying everything else, but from the vantage point of someone who would like the tools invoked to do at least some of the work they were designed for, but would like to check the thread on a few of the screws before operating the machinery.

That said, there is another difficulty, which is that there is one card that is on the table but left face down. (Don't worry, that metaphor has now served its purpose.) We're not actually told what the historical materialist explanation for God's Waldo-like appearances in The Hat, or in current poetry or recent theory more generally, only that there is one. Now, if that's just because there must be such an explanation for everything, ok, yes, that follows from 4.0-4.1 (if you're not following along, that's simply the statement of the core notion of what you think about artworks -- b/c you think it about everything there is, and some things there aren't -- if you're a Marxist). And I think that this is another reason why there's been a certain dampened quality to some of the response: though the argument moves away from this starting point around, mmm, 6.1, Joshua is suggesting that, behind the recent tendency of some poets, inc. some excellent ones, to "invoke Judeo-Christian language" lies not the causal antecedent some (who? these poets? some non-Marxist reader? a demographer?) would imagine -- felt spiritual, esp. transcendental, experience -- but something in the here and now, and thus in whatever led up to here and how. (History, in a not heavily-freighted sense.)

And, though it might not interfere w/ Joshua's appreciation of a poet who can rock the enjambment, the above thought might still annoy some (not me, particularly) -- but how upsetting one finds it would probably depend on what the something just adduced turns out to be. Considering the source, I can hardly imagine that our critic has no particular notion about what analysis ought to be given. My guess would that it would have something to do with the displacement of first, a sense of political frustration and second, a painful apprehension of complicity, onto some other realm -- a displacement that is more than understandable (recall, opiates do relieve pain) but worrisome to the extent that it takes the possibility of resolution out of our hands. But this, as I say, is a guess -- even the way I've put it is probably too idealistic (in a fairly heavily-freighted sense), and not useful specific to the present moment.

More later.

2005-10-06T03:24:00.000-07:00

Rev'd The Double's Loose on the Air. No need to repeat what I said here, but I was struck that I got through a (short) review w/ no mention of the lyrics; after several listens, I had no real conception of what they were singing about -- possibly an effect of the production, possibly of the presence of lines like "hunger, gravity, lies" -- and that this didn't seem to me an issue I had to resolve, as it might have four or five years ago. Does this mean I'm lazy, or just that I've come to have a different attitude toward the "literary" claims of lyrics than this fellow. Whose blog, already maligned in some quarters, if he's actually a teen, tends to make me rather glad that there was no such thing at my age; that the few pronouncements I could make (basically, in my high school and college papers, and, even, I will not try to lie to you, in a FRP 'zine during junior high*) were unllikely to be read by those with a low tolerance for precosity. All of which in turn reminds me that, for all the ephemerality/non-material of this space, it's a hell of a lot more accessible and, barring the unforeseen, enduring than its 'zine-culture equivalents. Not heavy, I know, just hadn't thought of it for a while.

*Which, incredibly, still persists in much the same snail-mail only form -- though contributions are now photocopied rather than mimeo'd, as they were circa '84.

(Of course, I will regret this blog in a few years; a huge portion of my mental life to date consists of considering, at t2 something I wrote/recorded at t1 and thinking either/both "Jeez, I was much more productive then" and "Jeez, I was a frickin' idiot then.")

~~~

Need to temper my praise for Porton's anarchism/film book, now that I've finished it. Informed and informative, but: He's on the one hand happy to make value judgements about particular films, sometimes argued for and sometimes not -- he's particularly brusque on Les Amants du Pont Neuf ("Carax's vacuous film transforms anarchist salvos into 'art cinema' and nothing becomes rancid faster than a bloated commercial film masquerading as radical art") -- yet the book as a whole has only the lamest, survey-ish sort of conclusion: "I hope [this book] has proved that it is exceedingly difficult to say authoritatively what anarchist, plots, images, and forms are or should be: they are constantly in flux and subject to revision. Critics are rarely soothsayers, but it seems safe to say that the future will bring novel permutations of the ever-evolving anarchist aesthetic." And, despite (a) all the worrying about what aesthetic forms are appropriate matches for anarchist themes and (b) a good section on the problematic role of the anarchist intellectual/academic/pedagogue, the book's style and structure are as aludic (is that a word?) and even plodding as the sentence I'm writing right now.

~~~

A damn-sight better than Paul R. Gorman's Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1996), which I bought on remainder last Jan., stuck in storage, and then found on my landlord's shelf. This is just a small public service for anyone reading who is interested in these areas -- don't bother with this book, pretty obviously a cleaned-up dissertation (not that I don't empathize). Author's got one idea/critique which is put in various ways over and over: Critic of mass culture X was blind to the fact that its consumers could use it creatively/choose or reject particular instances of it/display agency.

And then cultural studies came down from heaven. Not to belabor the obvious, but doesn't this mode of argument tends to do to earlier theorists what Gorman claims the critic does to the "consumer"? Bonus question: what name of six letters beginning with "A" and ending with "O" appears nowhere in the book? Avoid. Try, perhaps, the M. Berube-edited The Aesthetics of Cultural Criticism (this year, Blackwell); typically lively introduction, interesting but inconclusive piece by David Sanjek, otherwise a lot of handwringing, at least some worth witnessing, about how to reconcile the terms of the title.

~~~

Speaking of Irish-American dialect fiction, here's the best bit from one of Edward W. Townsend's "Chimmie Fadden" stories. This is 1904 talking (the narrator, Bowery-born and now the "second man" for Mr. Paul, a swell of indeterminate occupation, is quoting his employer):

"Dere will soon be so many teeaters dat we all must be in de game, until Mr. Edison perfects his auto-actor. It's to be run by machinery, and warranted to make no holler, even if de ghost don't walk and all de press notices is roasts. Den will come a happy time. De critics will all be graduates of schools of engineering. 'De part of Hamlet,' de press notice will say, 'was excellently rendered by one of de new pattern, two and a half horsepower, drop forged, leading men constructed on lines invented by Mr. Mansfield. By a novel contrivance (for which de inventor has patents) its exhaust is made to resemble de sound of entusiastic applause. De power is directly geared to its legs, and, when a friction clutch is trun on dis character can be used for buck and fancy-step dances between de acts.

De Ghost was played by a high-powered, alcohol-heated, copper-tubed utility man, which slipped its eccentric in de battlement scene, and being hastily repaired, de wrong stop was pulled out, and it finished de scene with de lines of Rip Van Winkle. De Foist Grave Digger was geared a little too high for de requirements of de part, and trun Yorrick's skull into de gallery, causing a rough-house intermezzo. Furder rehoisals will no doubt smood de action in dis respect.

Ophelia was played by a low-pressure, napta, non-explosive design invented by May Irwin. We were not afforded opportunity to see dis model at its best, for in de middle of de touching mad scene an unfortunate accident to her repertoire attachment started her to singing "All Coons Look Alike to Me!" Dis was de result of engaging for de part a chilled-steel, gold-plated soubrette dat played in a Casino production last week. Furder notice is resoived, but we must urge managers to see dat de song woiks of lady-autos formerly employed in comic opera is trun out of gear when cast for de legitimate."

(Townsend, by the way, was also involved with the early comic strip The Yellow Kid -- sometimes mistakenly assumed to be a slur on Chinese immigrants, that character was actually of indeterminate ethnicity and completely silent until the creators decided to have him start spouting Bronx dialect; and, the author of the 1895 bestseller A Daughter of the Tenements which, from a quick Googling, seems to be mentioned in the same breath as Stephen Crane's Maggie as an early example of "slum fiction." DeMille, in his Lasky period, directed a couple of films based on the Chimmie Fadden character, here's a poster.

~~~

Aporia: I can't take metal seriously, and more or less can't stand it. I realize that, at the level of individual psychological explanation, this has much to do with precisely who was yelling "fag" at me as I walked home from school, and what was coming out of their Firebirds. And I accept the rudiments of a class-based analysis of the music's role as a displaced response to powerlessess; metal was by and large not the music of the college-prep/honors crowd. Yet -- I can't take metal seriously, and more or less can't stand it.

(By the way, when you think about high school, do you ever remember the moments when, on Friday, some kid was just, you know, some kid, and then the next Monday, they appeared as a fully-outfitted and apparently-committed member of one or another subculture?)

~~~

EC: Hmm, King of America + Blood & Chocolate = more than a handful. After that, I'm with you. Dylan: What can I tell you, I'm obviously not a boomer (and certainly didn't pick it up from my parents), but I listed to Love & Theft repeatedly and with pleasure upon release, not out of responsibility or self-education or some other form of shamming, but because the vocals have flow, there are a lot of great lines, and the rockers rock. I enjoy Infidels quite a lot as well, so sue me. Elliot: Sorry, you must have meant, "after Either/Or." Kanye: Couldn't he be "problematic" if you happen to have already decided what hip-hop's supposed to/allowed to be; decided, that is, on its limits? His albums are incredibly uneven, but it seems odd to lump "Crack Music" and "Golddigger," even before the K.O. overlay, in with backpacktronica. (Against myself: Seems pretty clear that what attracts critics-like-me to Late Registration is West's ambivalence about black machismo/materialism and their mutual imbrication at an explicitly disursive level, an ambivalence that is perhaps expressed rather than "explored" by much other (equally? more?) commercial hip-hop, in ways that are likely more difficult for the less-informed to read off the texts. Thus, strings aside, K. will appear "ambitious." In this light, Jay-Z's verse in the album version of "Sierra Leone," which SFJ's review treats as a bit inexplicable/irrelevant, looks to be a comment: Look, here's how someone acts when they are not bothered by what I'm bugging on in the rest of the song.) Destructiveness of Weill, K.: (1) Yeah, boy, I sure wish "Is That All There Is?" and Swordfishtrombones had never happened. (2) Yeah, again, if you had in mind the Bakunian associations of "destruction." (3) More seriously and accomodatingly, I would say Weill can be a baleful influence not so much on "pop" songwriting than on "singer-songwriting," in that nearly all of his vocal music was written for specifically theatrical situations, not as a vehicle for self-expression. Second: If by "Weill" you mean 6/8 time, minor chords, some surface dissonance, and maybe an accordion, well, sure -- Weill, without quotes, was a rather more complicated musician, well-trained in the thorny harmonic language of serialism but drawn to vocal music because he coudn't give up his love for melody (the sweet parts of, to take famous songs, "Bilbao" or "Surabaya" are as important as the jagged bits, and all this is usually missed by those who are bored by everything he did after coming to the U.S..) "Brecht/Weill" is up there with "surreal" on the list of Terms to be Shunned in Record Reviews without Due Caution, far as I'm concerned; here, we will give SFJ the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's listened to more Weill than I have Tori Amos. (And note with certainty that, whether I end up agreeing w/ his assessment or not, he would not invoke Imperial Bedroom lightly.) [Yes, there should be links all through this.]

~~~

"I gotta pick up the Berrigan collected" v. "when the hell do I have time to read the Berrigan collected?"

2005-10-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

Waco Bros., Fri. night at Hideout, doubling as an art show for Yard Dog, the Austin galler that represents High Sherrif Langford, as well as Eric/Rico Bell, Kevin Coyne, and (??) Tim Kerr. Started late, and I faded before the end, but the 45 mins. I saw was excellent: shit-kicking, economical, undeterred by a couple of power surge/PA failures. Also caught the last couple songs of fairly low-key alt-c locals The Phonographs' set; should have asked the keyboardist where he gets his gear repaired. Surprised Jon, Sally Timms by my presence; was kindly introduced to a couple of folks. Noted on the way out a Gibson hand-painted by Jon and tagged at $2,500 was marked SOLD.

~~~

Finally saw The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, but generally understood to be as much Val Lewton's baby). I love (and, after seeing this, still prefer) I Walked with a Zombie, but I'm a big enough Ashbery nerd that this got on my list b/c of his piece on it in Modern Painters (then in Selected Prose. JA credits it as a prime example of a totally studio-shot film that gives a vivid impression of New York-ness (West Villageness, specifically). I can see that, but I think my moviegoing muscle has atrophied a little -- I wasn't bored, but I was more aware of the film's ridiculous features that I would be if I were in the zone. E.g.: If you're a member of Satanic society so secret that it resolves to kill (non-violently, due to some confusing language in the charter!) those who leave, why would you use your secret triangle-in-parallelogram sigil as a logo for your cosmetics company ("La Sagesse")? Some hints of lesbian/orgiastic/"sensationalist" activity duly noted, but not as much fun as Julie Harris & Claire Bloom in The Haunting. Uneven performances: Tom Conway, who's in many of Lewton's movies, good as a George Sanders-type ("Dipsomania is so sordid"); Erford Gage totally insufferable as a "poet."

Rest of that day a bust: Was to meet J-Hop and J-Shep hereabouts, but all parties got stuck in godawful Loop traffic and we called it off.

~~~

More explicit but equally silly -- the secret sex club in Eyes Wide Shut, the DVD of which was on the shelf at the house we're renting. Firmly in that category of movie about which Pauline Kael compained: you're supposed to think it's deep because it's irreal/a dream. I guess it's fairly obvious by now that Kubrik was rather cruelly using Tom Cruise for his lack of range: the scene where he makes bland conversation at the deathbed of a woman who's about to come on to him might be the only completely effective moment in the movie. Kidman seems generally to have been accused of overacting, but I like that she's almost allowed to ruprture Kubric's system. Second worst thing about the movie: I think there's an attempt to do the sort of two-person domestic-interior scenes I love in Godard, but K. does almost nothing with the space -- all the "masterful" camera movement comes when Cruise is doing things like putting down his keys. Worst thing about the movie: I think K. may have actually believed the script's insights about "men" and "women." I haven't read the Schnitzler, but maybe K. would have done better to have kept the source material in the original period -- the Freudianism might not have seemed so moribund.

~~~

Also caught Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle's first film about a week ago. The actual elevator sequences are great, cropping and composition techniques drawing (this is a guess) on Bresson's slightly earlier A Man Escaped, but turned to, yep, genre ends. The film comes 2 years before Breathless, and has some similar elements (the self-romanticizing/ambivalently criminal young couple, the recording of new details of the Parisian landscape, here the motel where room service comes to individual bungalows by golf cart); so why is this merely a promising "start" while Breathless is, well, revolutionary? Minor reasons: The attempt at a more conventionally knotted plot, the use of the already-established Moreau, beginning to age fascinatingly and mostly wandering solo through the rainy streets accompanied only by her voiceover. Major reason: the fact that (as w/ 7th Victim, come to think of it) the inconsistencies and technical errors read as just that, rather than as energy, impatience. (How does the young couple manage to drive off in the car of the Germans they murder just after they've tried to steal it and been told the gearbox has been hidden? Who took the photographs of the principals' illicit affair, found in a camera in the final scene?) Wonderful Miles improvised-in-the-studio score, w/ Klook on drums.

~~~

Not to be all Jean-Luc-centric (and warning you that the new print of Masculine/Feminine is playing at the NU museum theater v. soon), but, hey Ange: Speaking not as a pop-analytic-philosophy-muse but as a fan, you know as well as anyone that I love Demy, right? (Just killed me that I missed the new print of Model Shop before I left L.A.) But, really, don't you think Godard, as much as any poet, has shown himself to be on to "the gamble" of art? Same for Dylan, who, like JLG, may be full of shit but also much that is not -- don't think I don't see you over in that comment box.

~~~

JLG, disingenuous in 1994 on his "committed" period:

"I have memories of recreation -- it was like school break. You pretend, and I was younger."

(Zero for conduct, Jean: I've read those interviews in Double Feature and MacCabe's Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics [1980 BFI volume, not the recent bio], and they don't really sound like playtime.)

This is quoted in Richard Porton's Film and the Anarchist Imagination (Verso, 1999), which I'm only halfway through but recommend wholeheartedly. Not that I agree with it wholeheartedly: the author makes no bones about engaging in plain old ideological critique which can sometimes underemphasize other kinds of cinematic meaning, but I'm learning tons, esp. about the various internicene squabbles among "anarchist" theories and legacies. Excellent on Clair's A Nous la liberte, and much else. Plus: Tantalizing descriptions of films I doubt I'll ever get a chance to see, like: New Babylon (1929), "Kosintzev and Trauberg's adaptation of Zola's Au bonheur des dames (a film whose delirious montage and anarchic spirit make it one of the most anomalous Soviet films ever made)"* and, especially, "Valentin R. Gonzalez's Nosostros somos asi! (That's the Way We Are, 1937), an anarcho-syndicalist musical comedy....This cinematic curio highlights debates on workers' and women's rights among precocious children who are the anarchist equivalents of Freddie Bartholomew and Shirley Temple." (And I thought I was doing well because I'd seen the '50s Hungarian operetta State-Owned Department Store, which this reviewer pegs precisely: "Under the standard Social Realist kitsch, you have the Viennese kitsch.")

*This maybe isn't that unseeable -- if anyone reading this knows that it's on video, please write.

~~~

Upset that I'm missing the Rivette retrospective back home, but at least they're not showing the only film other than The 7th Victim that JA treats in the Selected Prose, the 13 hr. Out 1.

~~~

Unrelated, far as I can see, to the previous chain: Finally listened to Interpol's Antics (mostly to compare to the new Double -- there are similarities, but they're pretty shallow). Pretty low-key and unambitious for a "hotly contested follow-up," innit? Is it possible that they're actually smart enough to know they're a pop band/not to swallow the pretension pill? (Against that, I suspect that Paul Banks is trying to be an interesting lyricist. The results are pretty awful, though I'll let you look 'em up yourself.) I don't think they're gonna be able to coast without at least one new idea for much longer. Their sense of arrangement, esp. keyboard additions, is pretty pro forma, and the performances are strangely laid-back -- the drummer (whom I basically like) lays behind the beat, the guitar lines even more so. Even as you're enjoying the thing, you notice that they're repeating melodic ideas four songs in.

Why do I care?

2005-09-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

My mistake -- The answers a couple posts below don't correspond to the Proust Questionnaire at all (and on examination, I don't think I'm up to it), but to a fairly different list of questions, set by Sophie Calle and Gregoire Bouillier, translated by Bill Berkson, and answered by Harry Matthews and Andre Codrescu in the current Jacket. Sorry, didn't mean to make the reader play Jeapordy there. (I've also changed a couple of responses since last night.)

2005-09-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

Meant to record somewhere this statement, with which I disagree with completely:

"Speech is the voice unbound, timbrely [sic] rich and thick with meaning. Song, on the other hand, forces the voice into narrow norms, stressing rules tonality, rhythm, and content that have little to do with any language." -- Nicholas Colllins, notes to Lovely Music CD of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room

2005-09-29T23:38:00.000-07:00

Just this Monday, twice.

Anxiety.

They have largely been realized; but then, they were not excessively grand.

Ambivalence, or so it often appears.

A piano; a patron.

Yes, but there is no shame in not caring to become one.

The intersection of Industry and Privilege.

Trivially so.

The belief that my musical output is a viable commodity.

Worry it.

Winnowing; organization beyond the immediately expedient.

Conversation. Watching a new print of an old film; reading something that I don't have to write about; unexpectedly hearing, in a public space, a song I had forgotten I loved. Having my back scratched.

Anything that does not suggest a misunderstanding.

Ask me about critics.

The utopian; the anachronistic.

Narcotics.

I don't know yet, but suspect it will turn out to be my back.

Letting another speak.

Diffidence, either in itself or -- among the insightful -- as an expression of arrogance; smoking.

Comes tantalizingly close to connecting me to others.

Not even a cult figure.

Any that does not require sleep, metabolizes toxins efficiently, is less easily intimidated, and possesses telepathic powers.

2005-09-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

Back at home, the red tide is worse than usual this year.

~~~

Sure, since we're listening to country radio: "Big Blue Note," a headscratcher of a Toby Keith (or, as the site just linked to has it, "Keith Toby") single that adopts a quite Jimmy Buffet island-groove while attempting to be about obsession or at least bad cathexis (see the verse where he goes to the psychiatrist!), but between Keith's cloying phrasing and the clumsy payoff lines, it's the sort of thing that's only a hit when anything you release is. On the other hand, dug Martina McBride's near polka/nortena update (plus some ABBA intro/outro strings; is that in the original) of "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden."

Oh, and if we're making fun of U2? We used to have this whole routine about what went on backstage circa The Unforgettable Fire

Other band member: "Bono, c'mon, we were supposed to be on 10 minutes ago."
Bono: "But I still haven't found what I'm looking for!" (adopt Lucky the Leprechaun accent if poss.)
OBM: "Well, where do you think you left it."
Bono: "Where the streets have no name!"

There was probably more.

~~~

dB's: the 2 new songs were, well, the new songs, but everything else was spot on, didn't seem like they had enough rehearsal time to get uptight about it, and Stamey, esp., is a fascinating guitarist; younger keyb dude was very impressive as well, nailing solo bits on "Amplifier," which turned into a kind of trading fours thing. Stamey looks a bit more comfortable w/himself as a never-quite-got-there than Holsapple, but I could just be projecting from what it must be like to stand in the shadow of Darius. I'm not in the critical mode that would allow me, here, to explain why I don't think the good stuff -- "Ask For Jill," say -- doesn't require special pleading, but, um, it doesn't. Power-pop that punk didn't have to happen to because the art-damage had come earlier (heard those Sneakers recs lately?); the particular combo of not being idiots, liking love songs, and having a good drummer on offer ("Cycles Per Second"!!) can only make me dislike Death Cab all the more. Saw a guy, 10 yrs my junior, who knew every word, but I'd say St. Louis fixture Beatle Bob, up for the weekend, would be more representative of the crowd.

On either end, caught bits of Sam Roberts (actual hits in Canada, blandly anthemic) and The Ponys (a more palatable J. Fireater); skipped out before the M's (a less-plush D. Warhols, from what I'd heard on the radio the previous day).

~~~

Also: Red Krayola at Empty Bottle. Not their best showing, honestly -- just Mayo and Tom, in town to finish a record, with Tim Kinsella sitting in on drones and Synsonics. But (this would be where they differ from the dB's), I'm still interested in hearing new material: One song here was a timeline of various colonial struggles, punctuated by "won"/"lost" as the case may be.

In case you're not sure I'm old yet, I heard a Wilco song and enjoyed it. "I Am A Wheel," if you must know.

Finally, if you're curious, Bree's been to two different cabaret open-mics w/o me (not singing quite yet, just checking out the scene), and we're two for two on (1) "Being Alive," the worst song from Company, and (2) selections from Wicked, which Bree claims are "even less well-written than 'Imagine'." (This is hard for a song to be, by her lights.)

~~~

Later for the poetry, I hope.

2005-09-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

"A breath of outside criticism means more, in the way of suffering, to an author than a gale of self-criticism." -- L.P. Hartley, The Love-Adept.

2005-09-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

A piece of mine ('poem' might be overdoing it) is up in the order and decorum one day/one poet/one member of the House of Representatives project. Today, hit "poem 29/440"; after the next one goes up, look for it in "index of poems." Either way, please scroll down once you get the text up -- there's a bit more down there than may appear in the initial window -- and read others' contributions as well, won't you?

2005-09-17T21:10:00.000-07:00

"I know what you can use for a sword -- Mom's got an old yardstick with all the numbers worn off." (Vic & Sade)

"I think I'm a little bit in love with you, Steve...we should do something violent, I don't know, knock down a cop or something." (Chase & Sanborn Hour)

~~~
Sept. 5-9:

Amarillo: Failed attempts to locate 2 Roadfood entries. Town appears to take Labor Day seriously; nearly everything but a so-so Mexican chain restaurant was shut tight, and the streets were deserted. Lots of flags out, but that could be an everyday occurence -- I have no other visit to compare it to.

Elk City, OK: Encounter out of The Birds with a flock of geese blocking a driveway into a park, all staring in one direction and slowly walking towards something. Flamingo Motel, run by an Indian women who noted that we'd come from California and made a face. Again, nothing open; stayed in and watched Singing in the Rain, and, the next a.m., the last half of The Big Lie, a vehicle for Bette Davis and Mary Astor to bitch at each other in an Arizona cabin. Like most movies, it turns boring after George Brent shows up. Stroud & Son's pawnshop (and ammo) on the way out of town -- picked up a Stars on 45 cassette and, mostly b/c it was strange to see it there, Ute Lemper's 1990 pop album Crimes of the Heart, which later turned out to be terrible.

[And the Romeo Void mentioned earlier -- a comp. tape called Warm In Your Coat. The Sam & Dave cover ("Wrap It Up") is weak, and they were spent by "A Girl In Trouble," but I still think It's A Condition kills. Someone please use the opening drum hook from "Talk Dirty to Me" (a.k.a. "casual, casual, casualties") for a mashup or a remix or something.]

Tulsa: Made sure I was taken past the memorial to the '21 race riots, which is accompanied by a notably non-conciliatory plague detailing, with individual names and amounts, several million dollars of unpaid damage claims. Otherwise, pleasant visit w/ a childhood friend of Bree's and her husband (who met in the phil. Ph.D. program at B.U. and decided to quit together and move to his hometown). Another foiled attempt to eat BBQ: The tempting-looking "Elmer's It-Be-Bad" took an extra-long Labor Day holiday (like, four days -- I even tried to stop there on the morning we left town).

St. Louis: Stayed w/ Robert Griffin and family; his daughter Rilke, who I saw as an toddler on the last couple of of 0pb jaunts, is now 9. Talked music, watched The Daily Show, was played an upcoming Scat release (a singer-songwriter w/ clear Pollard affinities, but less distractable), some Dungen. By either coincidence or subconscious plan, played Pretzel Logic, inc. "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," on the way out of town. Took a kind of stupid-but-straight route through Chicago surface streets into Evanston b/c I was afraid of getting lost; made it home, in a manner of speaking, around 8.

Beyond what I've mentioned, and several hours of news about New Orleans, all I now remember listening to is Wha'apen, 3 Feet High and Rising, a recent Ethel Merman reissue, a few Frankie Laine duets that Bree and I like to sing along with, and the first disc of the Pet Shop Boys' b-side collection (not terribly good driving music, it turns out).

~~~

Rosemary and Keith Waldrop, Discrete Reading Series, 9/16: R.W. is a lovely reader, with pauses and emphases that leave no doubt that she knows exactly what she's up to. One effect of her collage method (and the texts to which she applies it, though, is that the joining of a "general" (philosophical) claims to more grounded statements that make one wonder why you would ever believe, or even countenance, something so abstract can produce a too easy reaction; here, a titter, as if to mark "oh, aren't those philosophers silly?" But I think her work's relation to these sorts of questions is deeper than that sort of response recognizes (not something I think about every poet who invokes the apparatus -- or tone -- of 20th c. philosophy; I see that Reichenbach is a source for Blindsight*). and numerous lines hit home: "A shadow fell across clear-cut narration as I followed Wittgenstein to places. Where nothing happens." (Read, I'm pretty sure, without the sentence break audible.) A renga-ish collaboration (read together) that I didn't get traction with followed; then K.W. read from The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon with Sample Poems, a collection of dry against-the-grain commentaries (with some emphasis on the metaphysical) ascribed to a fictive "unique geezer" (per the jacket). Monsieur Teste was not alluded to in the portions read, but I was not shocked to find him mentioned early on in the book. Or, for that matter, Jabes, both b/c he's the family business, and b/c his rabbis are the obverse of the comic exegete constructed here. Excellent book -- an unstoppable read once I took it home.

*Not intended as sidelong mockery of Jane's numbering; no, rigor is not on offer, but nor is it claimed to be. Substantive comment to follow.

~~~

If you're overeating (for instance) to fulfill some other psychological need, being told this may be interesting, but doesn't actually serve to fill that need. Not sure why I had this thought just now; since we've gotten here, I've eaten more sanely that either in France or on the road trip. On the other hand, Bree and I (we've discussed it) often feel as if we're playacting at "keeping house"; it's partly to do with being surrounded by someone elses dishes, books [we're renting from a sociologist who's on sabbatical], wall hangings. But only partly. On the third hand, the weather has held since we've been here, with several simply gorgeous days. Having finished off the "tour diary," I'm not inclined to go into an even-more-boring "discovering a new town" mode, but I will say one thing: If you want to buy an LP of Marni Nixon singing Charles Ives at Vintage Vinyl, bring along fifty bucks; a Television Personalities LP will set you back a Grant and two Benjamins. Phooey.

2005-09-16T15:33:00.000-07:00

Must be needing succor and ease: Enjoyed, without my increasingly customary "it's over, ok?" reaction, the new album by The Bats (though it's also just possible that they don't suck and never did); was immensely satisfied by my first visit to The Hideout for Kelly Hogan and The Wooden Leg's monthly residency (which would have had me on song selection alone: "Kites Are Fun," "London In the Rain," "Moody's Mood for Love," "Up A Lazy River," Mae Barnes' "Umbrella Man," "'Tis Autumn", Dee Clark's "Blues, Get Off My Shoulder," to say nothing of execution, or of the perfectly-timed entrance of a guy selling tamales out of a cooler, very comforting as the same thing happens at the Silver Lake Lounge), and looking forward to tomorrow's dB's reunion at the same venue's annual block party, which, I gather, marks the end of the season for live music outdoors here. So, yes, we're getting out more, enough to stave off disorientation and disconnection until teaching starts structuring my time next week.

Invited -- no, commanded -- to make common cause w/ Muy Romantico, though in what capacity, I don't know, as J-HOVA is on the opposite coast. Perhaps I can convince them of my 1-40 epiphany that What Is Needed are "art" bands feat. saxophones instead of strings.

Will try to comment on recent reading, finish off the drive-spiel, and lean less heavily on run-on sentences soon. Off to hear the Waldrops here, where I won't know anyone.

2005-09-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

Dreamed that I was somehow involved in marketing an excessively vinegary brand of mustard named "Fancy Spread"; this dissolved into a third-person scene (advertisement?) of someone riding across the desert with Fancy Spread sandwiches as their only provisions. Woke up Bree when I woke up laughing out loud.

~~~

For those inclined -- the Monday posting at a free OTR site I sometimes visit is a rather famous 1937 episode of The Chase & Sanborn Hour featuring a Garden of Eden skit between Charlie McCarthy and Mae West that got the latter banned from radio for several years. Tame, and only funny if you have a taste for the style, but an interesting bit of cultural history.

~~~

continuing w/ notes from the drive

Sun, 9/4

stayed with Dave and Marika, and Dave's father, who's staying outside their house in the immense trailer that he's tooled around in since retirement, apparently; he's helping them work on the house, which today meant retiling the main bathroom. After breakfast, they had to pick up a sink, so Bree and I were dropped for a while at a large Sally Ann nearby: Bookshelf included a nearly complete run of '70s-'80s Tri-Quarterlys [edited from NU, as it happens]. I had spent a lot of time with some of these journals (along with, nerd alert, The Journal of Recreational Mathematics) back in, hmm, junior high, when my father would sometimes take me to San Bernardino Valley College during summer session -- I'd spend the whole day reading around in the periodical stacks. Found the issue (one of the "Ongoing American Fiction" series) in which, back then, I'd read "Cordials," a very bad, mean, but strangely vivid short story (by an author whose name I cannot seem to keep hold of) which has stuck with me since in excess of its merits: Basically, a woman who has been hiding her pregnancy goes into labor but is so intent on consummating an extra-marital affair that she manages to expel the fetus and cut the cord during violent foreplay, all without her new lover becoming aware of what's going on. It's as though one of the few Bukowski short stories I've read (e.g. "Six Inches" from Erections, Ejaculations, and Tales of Ordinary Madness -- which I remember reading, dismayed, in the Montclair Plaza Pickwick's next to Pedrini's Music Merchant, where I'd wait for my parents to pick me up after piano lessons from one Mrs. Nye, who would comment with untoward frequency on the length of my eyelashes) rewritten in a parody of the style of New Yorker short fiction of the same era. I still am not sure what this story though it was doing; anyway, I chose not buy that issue. Back at our host's house, read the Anthony & The Johnsons profile in NYT magazine, quite effective in putting me on the singer's side -- hadn't read up on him enough before to realize he'd been doing similar things in a more theatrical/drag-underground context for more than a decade. Went back out to an internet cafe to get a course description to NU; one bulletin-board announcement read "The Tuvans are Coming!" and another advertised a local bank's offer of a free bushel of green chiles for anyone opening a new checking account. Dave gave me a self-bound book of roughly 1,000 quotes on reading from the Greeks up to lang-po, something he's been compiling in one form or another since we were housemates after college; I gave him AF. Ruined some decent pants with white paint. In the evening, watched Harem Scarem, a dismally bad Elvis movie that Bree had brought along b/c she insists that one of the dancers resembles Marika; and the Steve McQueen Blob, w/ its goony Bacharach/David theme song and curiously slow-developing 1st hr. -- most interesting thing about the movie might be the way that you never get a clear sense of the layout of the town.

2005-09-13T23:17:00.000-07:00

I still believe, in principle, that a club set witnessed by 15 people might be as thrilling and valuable as one experienced by a packed house -- but when, in practice, was the last time I was actually at one?

~~~

Really, questions about affect v. language aside: as a watcher-from-the-margins, I don't know whether I'm more amazed that there's something (or is there?) called "The New Sincerity" (a term I can't shake loose from associations with features on 10,000 Maniacs and Guadacanal Diary, -- basically, anyone who ever opened for pre-arena R.E.M. -- in back-half-of-the-'80s Spin) or that those who are using it are, in some cases, not kidding. [Which, as with nearly all jaundiced comments on theoretical positions, caricatured or not, is not meant to speak against a particular poet's poems.]

~~~

You can, it turns out, be homesick for a home you were sick of. [See, the don't-end-with-a-preposition norm really sticks in my craw -- this wouldn't sound right if it read, "a home of which you were sick."] On the other hand, amazing bakery smell (not to get all last-page-of-Bright Lights, Big City) coming from somewhere near the exit from the Evanston El. (Is the orthographic idiom "El" or "L"?)

2005-09-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

How can the pleasant if guileless publicist leaving me a voicemail re P.J. Olsson know that, with every "I know you've written about Beck, and they get a lot of comparisons" and "his voice is really soulful, it's smoky and just a great voice," and "the songs are fun and quirky" (all these as close to direct quotes as I can manage w/o playing the message again), she is digging her artist's grave, as far as my critical time is concerned? [Nothing against this woman doing her job -- at least she's not writing me one of those pretending-to-be-palsy-but-actually-just-a-mass-mailing-with-my-name-macro'd-in things that several of the smaller, more 'funky' indie-publicists seem to think will make me forget that we are not even acquainted.}

Nor could she know that I would avoid pre-much-less-re-viewing this album, nearly as a matter of my own sanity: I wrote up Ollson's Dawson's-placement-driven debut for CMJ Monthly several years ago, and, as little as I wish to appear to be taking some principled stand against gutless, witless, pale-15th-gen-copy-of-"Loser" trip-hop, recall it as the very record that brought me up against the fact that actually passing my orals might be more satisfying than spending n hrs. listening to a piece-of-crap record repeatedly, toward the mere end of converting said experience into approx. 210 words of piece-of-crap prose and a R.I.Y.L. taglist. And that, as with few records before or since, I actually had to cleanse myself of the experience by driving around mid-Wilshire for an hour playing, unusually for me, a classical station, which, unusually for me, happened to be playing Morton Feldman's For Christian Wolff, its irregular crystallography a godsend at that moment.

Even less could she know that I've just moved most of the way across the country, and feel, at this moment, like the second-most psychologically isolated person alive. (The first-most being Bree, who doesn't even have contact with the clerks at payroll or campus police/parking [from which office issued, incongruously, the Live 1975 version of "Hurricane."]) Which does tend to manifest itself as a certain lack of magnaminity: I'm feeling exceedingly bitter and negative, toward [Excised: list of unfairly scorned objects that said far more about the subject. Apologies for making nonsense of JD's link, and for eliciting in the first place.] Which makes this a good time to zip it.

2005-09-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

skipping around: Yesterday's drive from Tusla to St. Louis included stops here and here. And, despite our better judgement, here, near Carthage, MO. Your jaw has not truly hung open until it has hung open in front of, stained-glass windows, mock-Sistine ceilings, and large, multiple-figure, stone statues and fountains, in which every single figure save Jesus is portrayed as a tiny adorable child in the familiar no-nose manner of these immensely popular porcelain figurines. Kitsch, one forgets (though this was a main point of Greenberg's), is typically utterly sincere -- and thus, mere mockery is not really a tenable response, not in the face of the room decidated to the deceased relatives of Precious Moments collectors, and to artist Sam Butcher's late son, who died in a car accident in 1990. What is worrisome is that some future culture will unearth all this, long after we and our cities are all dust, and reconstruct American spirituality inaccurately. Very slightly inaccurately.

2005-09-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

Unrelated to all of the above, but I'd been meaning to register this somewhere; the other show up at MOCA, concurrently w/ the Basquiat, is one of those collector-bequest shows, this time, various works gifted or to-be-gifted by one Blake Byrne. Pretty spotty -- one-of-this, one-of-that, a lot of looking pretty chilly after a hr. or two with J-M B. A couple of the tiny Orozco's that I like, a Cornell Hotel. (MOCA, I know, has a bunch of late collages that aren't usually out on public view, which is annoying.) The item of interest to me was an early Kosuth Art as Idea as Idea dictionary-entry-as-post-Reinhardt-anti-painting, from 1966-8, in the same format as the familiar ones on "meaning," etc., except this one uses the entry for "tart." From my notes (probably not exact), the text reads:

tart (2) -- n., ME tarte is adopted from MF-F tarte, perh. orig. a var of OF-F tourte, from LL tarte (panis), a round (loaf of) break, a cake, o.o.o.. The sl tart, a prostitute, is short for jam tart, a sweet 'dish.'

Interesting, in that I had not been aware that many of these works took as their linguistic/conceptual "material" a concrete term rather than an abstract/theoretical one (there's one on 'water,' though -- perhaps of interest as a mass noun?), much less one that might be seen as connecting w/ concerns associated w/ his feminist contemporaries. (I might as well note that I'm very suspicious of Kosuth's claims about the centrality or originality of his own work, and most of his critical writng [on Wittgenstein, he is nearly impenetrable]; his work is primarily interesting to me as a case, and perhaps for its pedagogical value.)

2005-09-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

Back a little early, but not really: I'm at Double Shot Coffee, a large and pleasant cafe in Tusla, OK. (n.b. that the Belle & Sebastrian playing here is much more unexpected, and hence pleasant, than the same in, say, Silver Lake; similar feeling about catching, say, Day to Day on High Plains Public Radio, or even Bill Moyers complaining about the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. That said, I have seen a Darwin-fish and a "Free Leonard Peltier" bumpersticker in the last hr., not on the same car.) Some raw travel notes --

sept. 2

out of L.A. approx. 10:05
lunch at Maria's in Blythe, typical but good Cali Mexican
3 or 4 hrs. of podshuffle, Silkworm's "Couldn't You Wait" about the 3rd song in as if it knew where I was headed
hit Tuscon around 7 p.m.; staying at Motel 6 b/c Club Congress was long sold out of this wknd, which happens to be a 25 yr celebration of Tucson music; gravitated to that vinicity anyway as it helps me get my bearings.
dinner at Pico de Gallo, killer shrimp and fish (usually manta ray) tacos as always
dropped Bree at motel, headed back to Congress, heard a couple of current bands I can't now i.d., then a one-shot reunion set by The Pedestrians, sometimes credited as the areas first punk band -- I don't think they released anything at the time, but this was a satisfying sort of cow-wave, a bit like the further out earlier AMC, caught a line something like "...sends down a perfumed angel and lifts up her skirt [skirt, skirt, skirt]." Then The Sidewinders, fairly standard-issue but spirited rootsiness; they were still playing, covering "Peace, Love, and Understanding," as I headed back to the car, too dead on my feet and anxious about next day's drive to stay up for G. Sand/Blacky Ranchette. Would have been curious as to the lineup, as John and Joey don't seem to be playing w/ Howe anymore -- they'd be playing as Spoke (the early duo-only name under which the first Calexico album was originally released) later in the weekend. Did run into Dan Seta, an old L.A. friend who played in Idaho (band, not state) for some years, his wife Jenny, and the sister of ex-Weekly crit Robert Lloyd.

Made it to around p. 370 of Sorrentino fils' Trance before leaving home -- quite sure I packed in the car, but it immediately buried itself somewhere in our sloppy packing job. Was enjoying it -- stands up to most DeLillo, which seems the obvious point of reference, though maybe not to his 2 or 3 best books. When Bree takes over driving, I'm picking through Ted Honderich's 1976 Political Violence, which I suspect is going to end with a stance against some forms of non-state-sanction forms of dissent, but is pretty withering about some of the stupider arguments against same on the way there. "We do not suppose, generally, that what can be said for or against a line of action is no more than can be said by those peresons who are or might be engaged in it. No such requirement survives reflection."

At some point, read Alec Bemis' long LA Times Magazine piece on freak-folk. Must admit to both much of this music and Alec's take on it (particular the positive valance given to its various 'quiet' forms of religiosity), and I wonder, as ever, what it is about being accompanied by music that draws some (ok, some poets) to admire lyrics whose particular mode of 'literariness' is precisely that which they would disdain on the page (pls. note Sufjan's New School MFA in fiction). And, while I'm bitching, we also have the mythmaking -- Devandra's music career took off "magically"! Freak-folks, you see, never try, never work -- see also the commonly told (though not in this piece) story of Newsom's first recordings 'just happening' to fall into Will Oldham's hands. Feh. All that said, I think Alec's piece is of real value in distilling a take on/defense of this stuff, one that is pretty reasonably seen as implicit in the work and its presentation. You should read it, even if you hate the relevant artists (I'm 50/50).

sept. 3

Taking Bree's cue not to eat a big American breakfast every single day; yogurt and plums from the co-op on 4th Ave.
Heard The Castaway's "Liar, Liar" -- one of the Nuggets-era tunes I haven't heard enough to be sick of.
dropped by Librio, a small bookstore w/ a surprising poetry section, on the way out of town; picked up Jarnot's a+bend chapbook, Bree found a $2 copy of Lust for Life
more radio, less iPod -- New Mexico oldies station played Pete Wingfield's wonderful and unfamiliar-to-me "18 With A Bullet".
hwy 26 for shortcut around Los Cruces, shaving maybe 1/2 hr. off our time on the 10 and 25; picked up program for the Great American Duck Races in Deming the previous weekend, then ran smack into the Hatch Chile Festival, many hand-cranked roasters of fresh green chiles, quesedillas, burgers, etc. topped or stuffed w/ same; noted 2005 Miss Chile -- they elect two, one red, one green, in otherwise identical homecoming queen-type satin dresses.
local senior citizen paper with oddly convincing piece on the daily cost of nursing care v. living on an endless series of Princess Cruises
local independent radio program feat. a long interview and in-studio session w/ one "Jaimi Faux," pronounced "Jamie Fox"* -- v. conventional Jewel/DiFranco stuff, plus a lot of recovery and "relationship w/ God" talk, one mildly memorable song called "High On Uncovering."
Santa Fe around 8:30; staying w/ my college friend David Carl, currently awaiting a tenure decision at St. John's, and his s.o. Marika, who's teaching creative writing and dance history at multiple colleges in SF and Albequerque while she works on a novel, and dancing in a company in the latter

*Presumably, the spelling is meant to avoid confusion w/ the star of Ray -- which I caught 1/2 hr. of in the morning on motel HBO: I note that I was not strictly correct a couple of days ago in saying that Percy Mayfield is entirely elided -- when Ray's fighting w/ the Raelette w/ whom he's having an affair, he's also working at his electric piano, and says (in a barely audible aside) "Percy only sent me the music for this one." Which is, I am pretty certain, false. I kinda dug Curtis Armstrong's Ahmet Ertegun, though; just sussed that he played the comic relief detective on Moonlighting.

enough for now

2005-09-01T21:05:00.001-07:00

Graffiti in Karma Coffeehouse on Cahuenga & Selma -- chorus of "When The Levee Breaks."

Apartment closed; car packed; blog paused for roughly one week.

2005-08-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

Coincidence that I'm posting this just after Jordan revealed his BAP-'05-in-progress, but I finally got around to Lease's "Free Again"s in Xantippe (and I just had to pack it, so this will not be very well-justified). Like, a lot, the phrasal rhythm, and the alternation between sharp, terse lists and slightly baggier/undistorted syntax. "She wants torn strips of city," and the writing is at its best when Lease obliges. Less thrilled by (1) the nature-good (noting, however, that "there is no nature")/culture-bad thematics of much of the piece [that "sense that people don't entirely regret life," and I know I don't have that verbatim, is not much in evidence], though given the scenery of toxic smoke and "brownfields" (2) the intrusive statements about the "I" [this is the part I can't quote directly] and empire that sometimes seem to function as theoretical bona fides, in a poetry that draws much of its strength from particularized observations. Interesting w/r/t J. Moxley's recent Poker essay [also packed, but coming back out of the box in Chi., not to mention, among other things, the Rousseau material I'm not done chewing over] -- from which I take away the point that there's a tension, for many poets, to be resolved between intellectual convictions re the decentered-subject-and-all-that, and what those convictions mean for "how one out of write," as against the way that sensibility generates what one actually writes (and thus implies a unifying, if not unified, subject).* And the point that this tension was only buried but not actually absent for all but the most aleatory/non-intentional of the langs-and-fellow-travelers; it doesn't stop being "lyric poetry" simply because you lopped "I saw/heard/thought of/thought/experienced/felt" off the sentences. [And I do like that Lease doesn't do this, or at least not as a matter of habit.]

*And this has some bearing also on Jane's recent post -- but not only w/r/t music and/or poetry. Why is it that one is much more likely to find an artist's statement that begins (as one I just saw recently did), "My art comes from the soul" in a non-institutional venue (here, the sort of coffeehouse where we sophisticates tend to think the "local art" laughably bad) than in the wall-text or pamphlet accompanying a show in one of our always-self-and-"self"-critiquing/yet-stil-standing-and-still-depending-on-the-star-power-of-names museums. [I'm thinking of the Basquiat show now at MOCA, though the cultural politics of JMB's reception and use, in death as in life, are obviously not a simple case.]

~~~

Warmed that Ange found something to like in John Ash -- The Branching Stairs is a book I go back to, though I lost track when he did some big prose travelly book about, I think, the remnants of the Byzantine Empire. Just this a.m., read the Andrew Duncan section in the Vanishing Points anthology (on the way back from U-Haul dropoff, see below), responding especially to "Andrew-the-German Master of Two Servants" -- also "far from British poetry," though traveling a different road away from same than Ash. But then, I have a stomach for "post-war malaise."

~~~

Long day yest. moving the bulk of my stuff to a storage space in Ontario w/ much help from Daniel. The moving of brown boxes across county lines not so bad, but bookended by various frustrations w/ the U-Haul; we started about an hr. late, having gotten back from The Press (see below) around 3 a.m., and then the particular truck they had reserved for us wouldn't start, so we were at the franchise for an hr-plus before they found a smaller replacement (which turned out to be ok) with no a/c (which was not). [Hey -- I know what, Franklin, how about this year you spend August in Los Angeles and December in Chicago?] On the other end, this particular location had no night dropoff, so our plan was to park nearby, and for me to take in the next a.m. just before opening at 7. But have you tried to park anywhere along or off of Hollywood Boulevard within about 2 miles of Vermont? Drove around following Daniel looking for a space for prob. 90 minutes before we just went back to my place and, surprisingly, found a wealth of space near the fire station -- must means that Florentine Gardens wasn't open tonight. So I got up at 6 this a.m. to make the drop -- Daniel had done the driving yest. b/c he performs similar tasks professionally, but I made it fine today, pre-traffic. Then stopped off for coffee nearby and was fully expecting to walk 40 mins. or so back home, but happened on a taxi, in which I heard, for the first time in probably a decade, a few minutes of Casey Kasem: Gwen's "Cool," some brief talk about U2 that I didn't quite catch (but no "that's the letter...and the numeral"),
Del Amitri's "Roll To Me" under the description "one of the hottest songs ten years ago," and "Since U Been Gone," "down a notch to 14."

Also heard "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" while getting coffee -- you know, the chorus is undeniable, and the revision of folk form is an attraction, but taken line-for-line, not sure Zimmy '62/3 had it all over Conor '0[x].

~~~

Press show went well, I think -- glad to see many of the old core of Empire scenesters there. Refrigerator in the best form, musically, I've seen in some time; Allen, unusually, more off-script/demonstrative than Dennis, heading a "Lonesome..." "Surprise!!" singalong. Acoustic SPGT, lovely, shambolic renditions of "Fortune Came Today," "Terrible News," and "Habeus Corporal" -- plus a decidation to Madame Wong's, who banned them after one show in '84, and a for-the-ocassion number called "Hey Bruno," for which I was prevailed upon to reprise my role the first time I ever played w/ them, eating a trayful of Crunchberries and (homemade) egg nog while they performed the rock opera "The Charles Mansion" for Jim Bogen's aesthetics class at Pitzer, c. '91. As for us, I added some new lines about the Madonna of the Trail and The Magic Lamp to "Up With Upland," and used Daniel as a ringer for a couple of old opb songs -- first time I've played "Block Colors" and "Sorely Tempted" in at least 3 years, very strange how readily the gradual changes made in the songs post-recording came back. Electric SPGT + me-and-Kyle finale, detuned as one might expect, but rather spirited: "Francis Mitterand," "International Church of Pancakes," "Marriage at 30,000 Feel," a new one called "It'll Be Better, Earwig" [seemingly written in ignorance of The Bats' "Earwig," but sounding quite like The Clean covering "Roadrunner"], and "Trash Car," w/ lyrics by Dave Carpenter's 6-year-old. We (minus Spgt) will play a similar but shorter set at The Smell, let's see how it goes w/ people who haven't heard me 40-50 times.

Also presented with evidence that I have "influenced lives," in the person of a student in the very first college class I ever taught, after my Master's, a one-night-a-week intro to phil. at Crafton Hills J.C. out in Yucaipa, who is now a high-school astronomy teacher and musician in Redlands. Full of fulsome praise for my communicative abilities at a teacher at a time at which, in my memory, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Also presented me with the mixes of an upcoming album by a collection of local musicians covering various area material inc. "In A Sourceless Light," for which they added a rhythm section and two female singers (people I don't know at all) to my orig. 4-track. (How would you classify that? Not exactly a cover, a remix, or a mash-up...) Comes off much better than I'd have predicted in advance, apparently the drummer is from some band on Temporary Residence. Anyway, all very gratifying.

~~~

Capitalism nibbled daintily at my syntax.

2005-08-25T03:17:00.001-07:00

Yes, I'm packing, making hard decisions about which books I won't see for 9 mos. or more, importing more than a 'podsworth (hmm, new unit of measure ala "hogshead"?) onto the laptop, and such. Unless facts on the order of my owning, it turns out, eighteen distinct Mekons CDs (many doubles of vinyl I'm too sentimental to discard) afford insights into my character, it's not very interesting. Should have mentioned that the shows this weekend will be a good way to acquire some cheap (or, by the shank of the evening, free) fjb/opb overstock. Extra Walt!, anybody?

~~~

Read: James Wagner, The False Sun Recordings. A month or two back, I had a small, unfortunate (and, I hope, rectified) blog-based misunderstanding with James, which, I admit, was one impetus for me finally reading this. (Or perhaps just the tipping point -- I had read more than one review and noted it down as a likely purchase well before.) Struck, early on, by the nod to The Sonnets in the two poems titled "Garntres" (anag. "stranger") in the first section, rearrangements of one another at the level of the line; and by the sentence, a few pages in, "I may not be much, but I am all I think about," a kind of contrapositive of the cogito, b/c much of the book seems to be an attempt to circumvent the truth of the second conjunct via various technical means -- at least that's one way to read, for instance, the homophonic translations of Vallejo, Reverdy, Celan, which seem very different in their purpose than, say, Michael Magee's of the Pledge of Allegiance. (And I definitely felt this "make the self disappear" vibe well before seeing that the blog has been making increasingly frequent reference to Buddhist texts and practices.) Yet -- after that first section, I was most taken by the fourth (each poem titled w/ an anag of "Lisa," which one would take to be the name of an s.o. even if he didn't mention "L." at Esther), where subject and affect are produced by slightly more conventional means -- that is, a higher proportion of the observations and descriptions of states are attached to one or another pronoun. Outside of the accidental wildness of the homophonic section ("easter mantaloupe cuz arid dice lost looms"), the tone and measure are so, um, measured that certain heterogenous lines ("X reading books by fake Ashberrrrrrrrry") stick out like seismographic spikes -- the book's rhythm was for me formed by this sort of alternation between guarded and less-guarded moments. Not so taken, by and large, with the final section, named after (and, presumably, opaquely related to) various records, but that's a personal bias, a response not a reaction.

Also enjoyed James' blog's brief period of posting poems by others, particularly one by John Beer (a Chicagoan, I gather). Had also noted a poem by Beer in miposias, esp. the turn on the advertising trope "These Are Not Your Father's x" (here, knives).

~~~

Kunin's book, by contrast, seemed to me as distanced a piece of writing as I've read in some time, in a manner more akin to the Marcus/Evenson mode of fiction-making than any current poetic formation that I've attended to recently. (Also reminded, perversely, of certain Barry Malzberg stories, in which a first-person narrator suddenly starts writing in the third, and then throws in an explicit reference to the shift.) Curious about the 3 line x 5 syllable stanza's origin in the Polke piece shown in the frontispiece (3 rows of 5 photos), which also supplies the titular image; hard to assess relation between content/container, tho Miles Champion's reference to Duchamp's "stoppages" are more useful than your usual blurb in this regard. Duly noted -- poems that seem to end with a half-phrase that gets picked up several pages later -- p. 32 "(take note"....p. 45 "of those swallows)."

~~~
Bullseye.

Bullseye.

(And -- anyone who's got a sense of my interests could probably construct several elements of my response to this. I don't think that it's insane that you might want to displace Britney, or the image of Britney, or something, as the ideal of a cultural worker in the 12-year-old imagination; but I certainly agree that the fact that she happens not to be a songwriter is hardly the ground on which this is to be done. Hell, neither was Merman. One might also consider the erasure of songwriting in Ray: Even more egregiously than in De-Lovely, "Georgia On My Mind" and "Hit The Road Jack" appear as direct emanations from Charles' personal experience -- the interpretive character of his art fails to figure, and neither do Hoagy Carmichael or Percy Mayfield. I"m now frustrated that I didn't get the chance to read a cover story on Linda Perry in some crafty/techy music magazine [EQ?, Mix? -- you know, that other kind of music writing that's usually ignored by we "critics"] when I was briefly in a room with it the other day.)

~~~

Echo & The Bunnymen, Siberia: Appealing mixtures of guitar tones are less so when one can no longer organize them around anything but the most insipid chord progressions and straight-time drumming. Bono fronts Luna. Too bad.

Hard-Fi, CCTV: "You can't get the sound from a story in a magazine/aimed at your average team," as Billy Joel said, but you can get close -- as I'd gathered, this is big, hooky rock with an infusion of techno arrangment-touches. Date-stamped, in a way, with sounds that Brits are fonder of than Yanks -- it's not "post-punk" enough to get the Franz/Bloc/Maximo love from U.S. critics, but not this-minute enough to get the Streets love from yet other U.S. critics. (Audiences? I can't predict.) I hear a pleasing touch of Strummer here and there; haven't attended closely to most of the lyrics, but it ends with a perfectly respectable entry into the living-for-the-weekend genre (called, er, "Living For The Weekend"), and the oddly mixed "Stars of CCTV," good for those times when the only way you know you're a subject is that you're under surveillance. Not at all bad.

2005-08-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Alex Abramovich and The Wayback Machine, here are archives of my pieces on catchiness, computer improve, and turntable notation (though that's been reprinted) from the otherwise offline Feed, from '00 and '01. (There's also a link to an interview w/ Eames Demetrios, Charles and Ray Eames' grandson; unfortunately, it leads to the introduction to the piece, while the interview itself doesn't appear to have been archived.) I think you could probably get to much of the mag's other content via various internal links.

~~~

Word Problem: The outdoor speakers at a mini-mall Starbucks are broadcasting early, acoustic Dylan. At the other end of the same commercial development, a seven-piece fusion band is performing on the patio of a non-chain cafe. Triangulate the point in the parking lot at which the harmonica solo from the former can be optimally heard as a harmolodic intervention into the latter.

~~~

3rd disc I've ever imported that CDDB didn't recognize: Catriona Strang and Francoise Houle's The Clamorous Alphabet (Periplum, 1999)//Key aspect of the brilliance of X: His voice is prettier than hers. There must be many others who have done this; but who? Soul duets?//Has there ever been a straight-up disco cover of "Lady Madonna"? B/c the possibility of same is implicit in the original, esp. Paul and Ringo's playing in the b-section.//Gem of Soul Jazz' Studio One Lovers Rock: Freddy McGregor & Jennifer Lara, "Too Long Will Be Too Late" (Otis Blackwell song?)//Just discovered, a year after Oliver, Blossom Dearie's funky "London In the Rain." No surprise, I don't hear it as quite the "aberration" from her usual range as does O-Dub -- just more demonstrative.//To self: track down Ernst Reijseger and Franco D' Andrea I Love You So Much It Hurts (Winter & Winter)//Space left between the 6 stacks of CDs that fit in a standard 1.5 cubic-ft. packing box: good for stray 10-inches.//OK, I just looked it up after years of wondering: What Aretha sings in "Respect" is "Take care, TCB," and I assume that last stands for "Take Care [of] Business." I swear that I always thought she was singing, Take out T-C-P as if the line were some sort of rebus cryptic crossword "secondary indication" that I was just not getting: that would leave "R-E-S-E," which anag.s as "seer," sure, but what did that have to do with the song?

~~~

salsa stain darkens
page 34 of
Folding Ruler Star

2005-08-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Esther Wong -- Madame Wong to you -- who passed last Sunday, at 88. The obituary on local radio quoted The Urinals' John Talley-Jones to the effect that she banned the band from the club for bleeing on stage, and also noted that she once stopped a Ramones set to force them to clean up their dressing-room graffiti. All this was somewhat before my time: Along with those for the Starwood, the new-wave era Whiskey-A-Go-Go, and others, Madame Wong's was one of the clubs whose ads in the Sunday L.A. Times I'd pore over longingly, years before I was going to shows.

~~~

Brief 3rd-Factory-centric notes (since, like Jane, I'm pleased whenever Steve opens the gate on the chocolaterie a crack): Clicked over to Stephanie Young's photostream and paged through all 777 shots before fully waking up this a.m. Reactions: (1) Where was I in April, when she read at The Smell and took, like, 100 (well, thirty-odd) photos of Ara? (2) Mild envy of those who enjoy, to all appearances, a rich social life that also connects to their art.//Re: connection of Ron Padgett's "Nothing in that Drawer" sonnet w/ "slowness" of poetry blogs -- Yes, it feels that way on days when no one is posting, but isn't this also an effect of how fast the medium can and sometimes does move? Feuds and logrolls that would have taken months to gather momentum "in the journals" spark (and sputter) in weeks, days, hours; the effect for me is mainly that posting about some topic that's already been "cold" for a week or too feels like playing catch up.//Since Paul Anka came up, here's my short review (like an upcoming piece on the Wire/Bjork one-song 'tributes,' a parergon of the Slate covers piece. (Fact I couldn't jam in: Don Costa [Nikki's dad], one of the late-period Sinatra arrangers whose work is pretty clearly a touchstone for Rock Swings also arranged "Diana," Anka's first hit.)//Re: the response to K&nt J0hns0n's comments on heteronymity in Poker 6's "Field Notes" -- It's astute of Steve to note the greater prevalence of this in music than poetry. Those interested in the topic ought to look at Carl Wilson's EMP talk (downloadable as .pdf from linked page), which moves in the other direction, connecting the "band" = one-guy (and it usually is a guy) trend (w/ special-reference to my lo-fi homies) back to some moves in poetry -- Pessoa, natch, but also the "I Hate Speech" moment and so on. Carl also notes, correctly, that the strategy has become so common that it no longer seems to have any terribly specific signification. I think I've mentioned the piece here before -- one thing I didn't register at the time, that may just be relevant to Steve's notes as well, is that Lisa R.'s "Office of Soft Architecture" works are an interesting case, more akin to one of the ways the strategy shows up in music than to most of the poetic uses I'm aware of: The adoption of a pseudo-institutional identity. (Think of the way certain indie record-labels have used "corporate"-sounding/looking names, logos, advertising imagery to both mock and mask their shoestringiness.) In Robertson, this device underlines the point that the aspects of public life to which she attends are just those which are treated as marginal or residual by more officially constituted "offices." And, even though we know very well who the author-function finally spits out, Robertson's institutional-editorial "we" tends to enact a sort of coerced assent to moments of lyric extravagance, even when the experiences at hand are anything but universal (esp. in the piece on suburban childhood). Cf. the plural second-person in Spahr's Lungs, and, at the level of the publisher rather than the writer, Douglas Messerli's various pseudo-institutional moves ("The America Awards," "The Gertrude Stein Awards," "The PIP Anthology of...") -- transparent to those in the loop, but, I gather, not unhelpful w/ regard to grant-awarders, book-distributors, text-adopters who like to see some sign of respectability from an "indepedent" "authority."//

~~~

Lastly, I second the nomination of Kasey for some sort of above-and-beyond-the-call-of-summer-break Golden Ticket; I've meant for a while to point to both this post, which begins as a contribution into the "disposability" conversation and ends with some sharp (and, as he notes, possibly "cynical") pokes at the ends of pop criticism, relevant to issues I've decided to give a rest for all of your sakes; and the whole "What Does Poetry Mean?" sequence, with several installments through mid-July, which constitutes the sort of thing I'd hoped for from the Gerald Bruns book that fell apart in my mind like fairy gold.

By the way: Maybe I should have copped to this sooner, but is his "lime tree" the one from Apollinaire's "Annie"? (Which I spend an hr. or two on Wed. trying to turn into a country song, modifying Revell's translation, which appears to me preferable, at least as a poem in its own right, than the one just linked.)

~~~

And in response to Kasey's guest host: I think John Koethe (maybe the only U.S. poet of note teaching in a philosophy dept?) pronounces it "Katy," or very nearly so -- at least, that's what I heard someone who went to school w/ him say. And -- that Italian-American talk you're finding in M. Gizzi? It also shows up, at rare and surprising moments, in Ray Di Palma's work. (And more notoriously, of course, in Gilbert Sorrentino's.) I note it when I see it b/c I've done it myself (though at one more generation of assimilation's remove, and bearing in mind that the Italians who made it all the way to West Coast, while tight at the level of extended family and even social community, aren't quite the same as those who stayed East, especially as the latter are represented pop-culturally.)

~~~

Here's my Phoenix half-pager on The Scene Is Now, who just have finished a brief European tour w/ YLT. (1) Interview in March, article in August; nice turnaround, fjb. (2) Last line, on inspection -- chee-zee. (3) Still waiting for Chris Nelson to vet my posting some further comments here, on the origins of the term "No Wave." (4) You can't make it out as reproduced, but gtrist Greg Peterson (also of St. Christopher, and a bunch of solo material) is reading Ted Berrigan's Clear the Range in the upper left of their promo photo.

2005-08-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

Like Sasha, and, I'm certain, many others, I'm sorry to hear of John Loder's passing. We never met; but Jenny and Kristin always spoke of him with tremendous respect and affection while Simple Machines was being m&d'd by Southern. And, during that association, he mastered A Bedroom Community, at Abbey Road no less, even recutting the vinyl after I whined about some band-jumping on the test pressing. (Which was almost certainly caused by my inexperience in preparing the master tapes.) One fewer good guy.

2005-08-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

Works neither read, purchased, nor received:

John Sturrock, Structuralism
Guiseppe Ungaretti, trans. Andrew Frisardi, Selected Poems
Matthews, McWhirter (eds.), Aesthetic Subjects
Griffith, Todd (eds.), Musical Networks: Parallel Distributed Perception and Performance
John Gray, Post-Liberalism
Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics
Gregory Currie, Arts and Minds
Brady and Levinson, Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley
W.S. Gilbert, Bab Ballads
Rosemarie Waldrop, Blindsight
Michael Steinberg, The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of Capitalism
Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the 20th Century, vol. 1
Alan Berger, Terms and Truth: Reference Direct and Anaphoric
Nicholas Dent, Rousseau
Fred Moseley, Marx's Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals
Dorothea Tanning, Birthday
Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema
Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel
Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford: A Memoir
Rae Beth Gordon, Why The French Love Jerry Lewis
Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment
Barney Hoskins, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles
Monique Eleb, La société des cafés à Los Angeles
Seeling, Stabel (eds.), The Ecstasy of Things: From Functional Object to Fetish in 20th Century Photography
Jeannine Verdes-Leroux, Deconstructing Pierre Bourdieu: Against Sociological Terrorism from the Left

(compiled from 3 recent notebooks covering approx. the last 6 mos.)

2005-08-14T08:44:00.000-07:00

Jane informs me that a previous year's poster for "Paris Plage" -- the city-sponsored "beach," complete w/ sand and volleyball courts that occupies the square in front of city hall at the height of summer -- already made the mild Situationist joke I ended with above. I'm only mildly surprised: Kristin Ross to one side, there's something to be said for a culture that makes even this much explicit contact w/ its logics of failed revolt. I don't expect the advertising for Los Angeles civic events to evoke the spirit of the Watts Riots anytime soon. (Meanwhile, an NPR story mentions Chirac's repeal of the mandatory 35-hrs-max work week -- now, the French can work more if they "want to.")

~~~

Curious upcoming tour pairings: The Roots/Deerhoof; Shellac/Scout Niblett. Curious sponsorship pairing, for next leg of Go4 tour: URB and VH1 Classic.

~~~

By accident, the week or so during which I've spent the least time online in the last 2 years was also one in which the poetry segment of the 'sphere became particularly nasty. Other than issuing a promissory note* for some future pedantry about the uses and abuses of "speech act" terminology, I'm keeping out of it. Often, I regret that my finite energies make it the case that I must relegate myself to the margins of the poetry community; at times like these, I do not. (Readers who don't know already know what I'm on about, you're likely not missing out on much.)

*Eh, might as well do it now. I worry that a distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts/effects is being conflated in JM's posts on assertion, exaggeration, etc. The classical (Austinian) view is this: The illocutionary force an utterance -- asserting, asking, ordering, promising, christinening, etc. -- is characteristically connected to some verbal form or other (the first three correspond to the main grammatical moods, the others to more "specialized" formulas), at least to a great enough to degree that they can be fruitfully studied as a part of linguistic meaning, alongside the even more classical components of reference, propositional comment etc. (Austin's contribution was to propose that an interesting theory of force could be given, contra Frege.) Perlocutionary effect -- what further end an assertion, promise, and so on is for -- is not nearly so highly conventionalized. The gist being that: An assertion isn't "always" also (name your favorite rhetorical end). One may question whether this distinction holds, for Derridean reasons or others*, but I think it's dangerous to run over it w/o comment.

But "of course," I am merely correcting an exaggeration, and thus being "irritating."

Maybe we'll take up implicature another time.

~~~

Jordan:

i) What I should really be rebutting is the claim that I was on my game at Million Poems, but thank you. If I am meant to draw the conclusion that it might be healthy to stop taking theoretical claims as referenda on my practice in particular -- point taken and appreciated.

ii) "...what's about race, class, and normative privilege"? Most obviously, the relatively large amount of positive press given to, more or less, indie-rock, proportional to its cultural and/or aesthetic weight and/or ambition. And something similar can be said about "rock" more broadly. (I gather from the Newsweek I read on the plain that the new Stones album is a scrappy return to form.)

Put that way, as a point mostly internal to rock-crit and those who follow it, it all sounds pretty thimble-sized. But if some of what's at issue didn't devolve on social divisions, I doubt I'd be as interested, or as pained. In the mid-'80s/early-'90s, you could almost fool yourself that the "battle lines" were drawn between whatever the "Corporate Rock Still Sucks" bumper sticker was supposed to refer to and a smaller-scale, arguably more aesthetically vital countertradition of "independent producers." You could even think you were really doing something by showing up for the Sister tour. (But even then -- I was usually the power-popper among pigfucks; and 3 Feet High and Straight Outta Compton and Nation of Millions were on my turntable [and one is sung over on my 1st solo 7"] if not my radio show; and eventually realized that, to take an example, Cupid and Psyche '85 meant as much or more to me than, oh, New Day Rising.)

Anyway, the point is that this illusion can no longer be maintained. An indie-rocker, particularly a white, male, educated-at-a-selective-institution one, who thinks (a) that he's doing something oppositional in relation to the-vapid-products-of-the-culture-industry and (b) that he can plausibly be a quietist about the value -- or the existence! -- of some other musics is fooling himself. Badly.

iii) In insisting on some of this, and in taking on board some version of a cultural-studiesish view of such matters (whether arrived at or applied academically or not), I thought I was simply agreeing w/ the huge parts of Sasha's account which I do, in fact, agree with. Parroting them, even. [I suspect that our biggest difference is terminological: When he says "indie-rock," he's comfortable using it mainly to refer to stuff that we both dislike, and then say something exceptional about the exceptions. I dislike the term, but if I'm gonna use it, I'm less likely to use it in quite that way.]

Beyond salutary contact w/ Sahsa, Jane, Matos, Jeff C., and others, two things have troubled what was the mostly peaceful but unrefreshing formalist sleep I had sunk into by the turn of my millenium: The whole hoo-hah over the OutKast voting (not that I agree with all of the charges issued to me or others in that discussion, but it made me think); and the occasion on which, outside a New Pornographers show, a guy I'd met exactly once before and knew a little bit of my writing informed me that the LA Weekly's music section needed to cover "more white guys with guitars." So, yeah, I've become sensitized since all this (not to mention less inclined than I might have otherwise been to pitch someone a piece about Twin Cinema.)

I suppose I've gotten sidetracked, but I wanted some of this out there. As I have been advised, I will now move on.

~~~

Meanwhile, back at Bemsha, in the comment box to this post, two poets smooth over some earlier difference by bonding over Will Oldham. (Though they end by disagreeing about which version of "Gulf Streams" is better.)

2005-08-12T03:04:00.000-07:00

Will respond, if not rebut, sometime soon when I'm not in the CDG departure area.

Met Guy Bennett for lunch yest., was then taken for quick tour of Pierre La Chaise -- snapped a sweet pic of Bree at the grave of Sarah Bernhardt, saw the stones on Stein's. Then met Kurt Osment -- a comp lit (or is it straight English) doctoral candidate at Irvine, working on Cage and Feldman's commentaries on their own work, who's currently teaching composition (in English) at Nanterre ("the students want to be radical...") -- for coffee. Then North African food at L'Homme Bleu, rec. by Guy (who served the first merguez I ever ate, come to think of it), in a part of the 20th arr. heavy on international restaurants -- inc. a "New Orleans" establishment at which the BBQ assiette was called "La Frontierland."

Heard the disco (plus extended gtr solo on fade) version of "What A Difference A Day Makes" by Esther Phillips at coffee in the hotel -- new to me, and quite wonderful. Is this the inspiration for En Vogue's? Do I not know enough about disco? (Did pick up a cheap uncorr. page proof copy of Turn the Beat Around in London -- but it's not in my carry-on.)

You can't really get a sense of it w/o pictures, but re "Paris Plage" at the Hotel de Ville: On top of the paving stones, the beach!

Boarding.

2005-08-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

If you missed it, here's the Ess-Oh-Vee profile from The Guardian.

Tagline for ubiquitous ad on Paris Metro: "I speak English...Wall Street English!"

The comfort of the known (or the known in an less-than-familiar conflict) almost made me go see Animal Collective at "un junque chinoise" on the Seine last night, but...no.

All up in the love for Rachel Sweet -- and wish I could remember whether "Who Does Lisa Like" was written by Will Birch and John Wicks of The Records (who wrote a bunch of Fool Around) or her fellow Akronian Liam Sternberg (w/ whom RS also co-wrote this) -- also, like "Lisa" in that more-chant-than-tune pre-"Mickey"/Bring It On/"Hollaback Girl" mode that we wouldn't want to be the only kind of music in the world yet enjoy quite a lot when we encounter. See also Ian Hunter, "I Know Lisa Likes Rock 'n' Roll," Jayne Aire & The Belvederes, "No More Cherry Icing." [On another note -- believe it or not, I sometimes read books/hear music/see movies that I don't even mention on my blog. Clearly, I need to start putting more of my cultural capital in an interest-bearing account.)

"Lead. Lead or get out the way." "Nothing but a clean hit will do." My. Didn't I actually introduce these people by mentioning an essay about Robert Pollard's lyrics on a listserv? Sasha: Please, when ever you do get around to making like Oswald-not-Fromme, do recall that the main thing Rob (and now I) am curious about was not Why Indee Sux (we got that, and damn its makin' it hard to write a one sheet for the 0pb disc out in Nov.), but what the strategic (tactical?) objective of reiterating that point in articles about various more-or-less related musics has been.

Oh, and it's not about musicianship -- "can't sing"/"can't play" is at issue between nearly every pair of successive or adjoining popular musics you can name, hardly special to the formations at hand -- and I, personally, could give a rat's ass about "intensity" as conventionally understood. (I, myself, have stuck my head in bass-drums during long passages of feedback. fun to have done, and to be done with; I don't need a steady diet of such, on either end of the mic cord.) S'about race, class, and normative privlege: These are the places where the assessments of SFJ and others make most sense to me, and why I sound so pained when I try to work my mind around whether I have to Burn All My Records.

(This is all coming from someone who listens to much less indie-rock than his constant whining about how it would be ok to do so would lead you to expect. Tho the Art Brut CD I got in London is fun: "Modern Art...makes me want to rock out!"

Flight to L.A. tomorrow; more Paris notes later.

2005-08-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

Must stop...writing about...indie-rock.... Must not...reply to...Jordan's post. Unhh....pull...too great...getting weaker...weaker....

2005-08-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

Not fair to comment on something that won't be generally available for a while, but on reading a version of Sasha's upcoming EMP-proceedings chapter on the indie-rock, I think I can say two things: (1) I agree with so much of what S. says, esp. about particular bands, that it's unclear, even to me, if my resistance to the general stance is anything more than sentiment. (And I felt this when I heard an earlier version.) (2) When it comes to criticizing indie's insularity, how it conceived or conceives itself in relation to the larger pop/mainstream context, and so on, I'm much more at ease with metaphorical figures on the order of "coming to the party" and "joining the conversation" than with "taking over the world" (for reasons explained earlier) and "playing on the wrong team." (Similarly for, as I think I said to Jordan in another context, the "seat at the table" trope, which I don't think S. uses -- I always want to ask, what's being served?) But this, perhaps, is merely framing.

Could say more about '80s v. '90s (another place where I'm mostly with S.), and so on, but I'll follow his example and can it for now.

~~~

John Shaw asked some straightforward ?s about AF, and I tried to answer him/them straightforwardly.

~~~

Back to France from London as of Tuesday. Yesterday, we attempted w/ no success to gather mushrooms in the woods, in a location given by a local restauranteur, then returned to our natural habitats at a brocante a few towns away (antique/junk fair, that is -- heavy on the old linens and Edison Gold Sound cylinders), I bought exactly one record: Libertango, a 1974 Astor Piazzolla LP on French Polydor. (Plus a mildly beat-up 1907 ed. of Ruskin's book on Gothic -- the few English-language books at these things are usually dead cheap.) Later in the evening, we went to the annual recital of operatic repertoire held at the town's 14th century church (no longer used for services). Not my idea -- if it wasn't in a Looney Toons short, I probably don't know it* -- but pleasant enough, one dramatically impressive mezzo-soprano in particular. But, listed on the program as instrumental interlude by the pianist and cellist, between hunks of Verdi, Puccini, Gounoud, Offenbach, and so on was -- Astor Piazzolla's "Libertango"! But they didn't actually play it -- just went to the next vocal piece w/o comment. (The program ran quite long as it was -- 8:45 to midnight, with the crowd demanding more than the pro forma encore.)

Other odd moment: The only English-language selection (and the closest thing to musical comedy or light opera or whatever one calls such proto-pop) on the program was a rendition of "Old [sic] Man River" that brought home how foolish I must sound getting all the vowel values wrong in my attempts to pronounce French:

"You and me, we sweet and stran...Get a little drink, and you land in gel..."

*Well, they did do some aria that I've previously noticed sounds very much like "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You." What is that, anyway?

~~~

Have tried to write a little London recap, but it's just me sending you postcards. Afraid I'm more comfortable writing about/during the dull periods. But let's see, how quick can I do this?

Passed one of the attacked tube stations on the way in, too disoriented to be sure which one. When Bree was given advice about where to find sheet music by a v. friendly bookstore owner, his directions included a glancing mention of which way you can't go anymore. First full day there was the day the suspects from the second, failed bomb attempt were brought in; the "Got The Bastards" headline was the next morning, though most papers were more circumspect -- you could read off their politics from whether the front page photo was of the shirtless perps, or of investigators in white shroudlike outfits. I could not feel a lot of distress on the street, but I don't have any previous impression of the city to compare it to -- certainly saw any number of packed buses, crowds pouring out of tube stations, mixed race groups of kids, and not only kids, outside pups, walking down Charing Cross, and so on. Panel discussions on Islamic extremism most every time I switched on the TV in the hotel room -- except for an episode of Stargate, and an episode of a multi-part doc. on jazz in Britain from which happened to cover the beginnings of free improv, w/ talking heads from Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, etc.

Will cover Haines separately at some point, same for an improv show feat. Phil Minton/John russell/Roger Turner (+ guitar & delay cat Dave Draper and a trio called Kindness May Lash that sounded like a vitual tribute to Oxley/Bailey/Guy, all at a not-quite-completed venue in Hampstead called The Red Hedgehog) that I dragged Bree to a couple nights later. Stilton w/ celery and biscuits at Rules. Brian Friel's The Home Place w/ Tom Courtenay; text a little heavy-handed, but right-minded on eugenics, and Bree was tickled to see some real-deal theater. Neal's Yard Rough Trade playing Colossal Youth when I walked in, and stocking my book. British Museum: Orerries, steles, a bust of Ptolemy. You know, barbarism. Nelson's Column; book in socialist shop recommending the tearing down of Nelson's Column. Brick Lane Sunday market -- seriously the most right-now spot I've been in a decade, clothing designers (Bree and I bought a blouse and a tie from this guy, bootleggers, amazing macrobiotic food, contemp. art bookshop, dude selling Roy Ayers and Bryan Auger recs (and funk 45s) w/ no fixed price. Cortland Galleries at Somerset House -- sat w/ Manet's Bar as long as my eyes held out, went back for another look two days later. (A little late in the game for me to be filling out the Zola-Manet-Benjamin connections, given the title of this blog, no?) Brixton: excellent looking UK hip-hop shop not open the day I went, but I did manage to commune with an ackee and salt-fish pattie, and you know you want to buy your meat at halal stands blasting some kind of dancehall/Dre hybrid. Too rainy to look for Brockton Park. Quite odd to realize that I have now, in fact, walked down to Electric Avenue -- while Bree was visiting Buckingham Palace, returning w/ a description of dolls gifted to Elizabeth and Margaret "from all the children of France." Quick peek into the Charles Dickens museum, housed in one of his mid-career residences -- monogrammed knife-rests and such. Did have a bindi, at Douglas' rec, but stupidly scheduled a visit John Soane's Museum for the day it was closed.

Good red bookstore in London; bought books on Sinatra's left connections (day before encountering a BBC story on a documentary about his Mafia connections) and "The Red Virgin," noted and bypassed Topple The Mighty (Kuhn/Gill), a book advocating the destruction of various London monuments -- the morning after I'd seen the British Museum and Nelson's Column for the first time.

Bree scored one v. creepy clown marionette on Portabello Road; and a book that at first appeared to be a biography of Yvette Guilbert (the diseuse that was one of Lautrec's main subjects), but which turned out to be a book on theatrical technique inscribed to her by its author and re-bound in her "personal" binding, w/ her name on the spine. Not even expensive, b/c the bookstore had misfiled it. I resisted as many books and records as I bought, and bought too many, inc. Coati Mundi's 1983 solo album and The Blue Orchids' The Greatest Hit (cheap, in an Oxfam), and copy no. "J" of Elmslie/Brainard's Shiny Ride (not at all cheap, in a strange shop run by a strange American -- "I lived in LA five years for my sins" -- who at least gave me a decent break off his asking price for paying cash.)

I also have to say that I'm good with a nation where Darwin is on the fucking money.

2005-07-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

Posting from the ICA -- how novel! The Vichy Government opened, played their "Luke Haines Is Dead" (which is how they got the gig); Black Box Recorder partner John Moore played and read a poem about the death of his 17th (?) c. namesake. The late Haines himself any minute now; Sara Nixey is in the crowd, could there be a BBR reunion? Time will tell, and so will I, but not for a while -- what Sasha said about having a summer, or at least a week of one? Yeah, that.

2005-07-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

Poets who know London: Bookstore recs? Is there some Bridge St./St. Marks equiv.? Please write me, link at screen right.

~~~

Don't worry Carl: I'm not bored, I just stayed up late. (The days are long and calm here, though, the last such I expect to have for a while.) And really, if I'd been spending much of my time reading blogs, I'd have seen that your beef w/ the Pitchfork piece was essentially the same as mine, but more developed.

~~~

Douglas helps me out on the ska tip: "Shame & Scandal" = calypso by Lord Melody, apparently based on another calypso that Sir Lancelot wrote for "I Walked with a Zombie"! I first heard it through a version Ed's Redeeming Qualities (them again!) did on a tape ca. 1989....

(Speaking of calypso, a recent listen to London Is The Place For Me made me just plain sad -- Kitch's optimism, humor, and innocence -- "Underground Train" is just a light song about getting lost, forgetting your stop because you're looking at a pretty girl -- though it does eventually give way to "If Your Not White You're Black." And then he moves back to Trinidad.)

2005-07-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

Oh. Should have posted those in reverse order, really....and there are also some timing problems, so it's all cattywompus. Maybe start from the bottom of today? Or just think Ted Berrigan.

2005-07-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

One cooler-headed thought, and then I’ll actually, ah, wait for the argument: I worry that some of this action gets going because none of us are being entirely clear about which of the following (and which relations among the following) is being discussed at a given juncture:

1) indie-rock, the music and its practicioners (e.g. the folks on stage at Intonation)
2) the indie-rock audience (e.g. the folks who watched the folks on stage at Intonation)
3) writers/critics/editors/institution with a bias toward indie-rock (e.g. Pitchfork/Believer)

[and what do we do about (4) – those really good and often highly theoretically advanced poets who keep listening to Magnet-knows-what?]

OK. All the bad shit that I’m not happy about might turn out to be true. But gimme this: Finding it out kinda blows. Hard.

2005-07-25T15:39:00.000-07:00

Late-breaking, and obviously relevant to the above. Went online to post all the above, had a Spidey-sense that this would be the very moment when Sasha would step up, and sure enough. I assume that the stats included, related to the artists Rob mentioned, who SFJ mostly approves and thus aren’t what he’s talking about when he talks about indie-rock, aren’t the argument, but the preliminary to a coming post, where we will hear why it is that the monocle is so oft trained so as to focus an unflattering beam on a music marginal yet hegemonic, too commercially unseaworthy to reach the fabled golden city of Pop, surely too artistically anemic to have ever been any sort of serious “challenge” to the ascendancy of hip-hop*, and yet somehow too annoyingly present in the discourse to stop writing about.

(*clause comes off as sarcastic but isn’t meant to be so)

A music that commits the cardinal sin of not behaving as though it wants to “take over the world.” (This goes back to Tony Perkins.) Indie-rock: I too dislike it, as it stands and as it stood, esp. in its smugness, its blinkered certainty that it has found The Way. But this bit about not seeking certain forms of dominance, or valuing itself mainly on its ability to achieve same – that’s not one of the things I dislike about some of its less chartbusting practictioners. Quite the opposite. (Especially given that it is such a white music.) Why is it that these characteristics that I dislike so strongly in political figures or just in private persons are suddenly supposed to become desirable when presented features of a band’s relation to the “field,” commercial and aesthetic? I will need to have this explained to me.

But I anticipate. And it’s very difficult for me not to do so, because it is in fact an issue of, if I’m using the word correctly, praxis, for me. Look: Between 1990 and now, I’ve made about 11 full-lengths (plus however many CD-EPs, Shrimper cassettes, 7”s). I can’t see any way out of understanding them as indie-rock that does not involve even more sophistry than I managed to master on my way to a doctorate. (Though oddly, the generic facts failed to convince many “indie-rock obsessives” to direct their custom our way. One problem was that our rhythm section weren’t loadies.) I don’t think one of them has sold more than 4,000, and I’m embarrassed to tell you how few others have. With a couple of exceptions related to playing w/ kindly headliners, I don’t believe I’ve ever been paid more than $400 for a show. I enjoyed the years of heavy activity, felt poor-but-honest most of the time, but I also think I was a bit of a sucker in some respects that I won’t go into here. In any case, it’s difficult for me see how I can avoid instantiating a conclusion or at least implication of pieces like K.’s, and SFJ’s EMP piece can be entirely avoided:

You, Franklin Bruno, as an exemplar of what we’re talking about: Your records (a) suck, (b) do harm. And given who you are and what you come from, it is quite unlikely that those you make in the future will do otherwise. And curiously, part of what actually makes your music bad is that enough people do not enjoy it.

Now, in one way, this sounds funny to me; how could there be an argument whose conclusion is that I should not do what I love? (Since I don’t love, e.g., maiming fellow poets.) And of course I do not mean to say that anyone means to attack my output in particular. (I suppose I’d have thought it beneath notice, given the forces at work.) But to the extent that I've come to accept a great deal of what seems to lead in this direction, you can see how one such as I might become exercised. 'Cos we all know what silliness comes if one tries to think oneself an individual, an exception, and agent.

2005-07-25T15:38:00.000-07:00

End of that chain of thought for now.

I loved the “Boots” piece, and the Believer article needed to be written, and I have, as you know, no love of Pitchfork, and yes of course me and mine had a corpse in our mouths through much of the ‘90s and need to be told so over and over in the paper of record and elsewhere, please, sir, can I have another?, but something is nagging at me about Kalefa Sennah’s Intonation-fest review (I can’t call him K. as I’ve never met him, and it gives me weird images of Anthony Perkins), despite its very sharp rhetoric (nothing but the quotes from reviews are needed to skewer the site, v. K. Krausish, really), something about shooting fish in a barrel while pulling one’s punches, but I’ll reread and get back to you. Still, 15,000 for this sort of thing in Chicago, jeez, maybe I can still get a gig.

2005-07-25T15:36:00.001-07:00

Finally finished that Lautrec bio. Informed, non-theoretical, at times speculative (but clear about when it’s being so), good but at 500 pages it took a larger bite out of this trip that I’d intended. Worth noting, from my perspective: “Outside Paris and Brodeaux, Jews were barely visible and most discontented provincials directed their more violent impulses toward beating up Italians, who were the largest immigrant group and the one most often seen as stealers of jobs and women, the usual reasons given for hating foreigners.”

But the book was mainly of use to me for the material on a figure of whom I was basically ignorant: Félix Fénéon, critic, editor, and anarchist – one of the few figures in post-Impressionist/Symbolist/avant circles at the time to take the political sympathies typical of his circle to the point of deeds, keeping a cache of detonators in his desk at his respectable day job at the War Ministry (!), and placing, on 4/4/1894, a potted plant – a hyacinth – on the window-ledge of the Foyot Restaurant, near the Palais de Luxemborg. Sweetman:

“By rights the place should have been filled with representatives of the ruling order but by a grim coincidence, the table nearest the window was occupied by Laurent Tailhade, a young poet, known like so many for his anarchist sympathies, who was dining with a woman friend. Unfortunately for Tailhade, the plant pot contained more than a hyacinth: beheath the flower was a lethan mix of dinitrobenzene and ammonium nitrate, closely packed with bullets….By a miracle no one was illed, though the poet, who had jumped up to protect his companion, was blinded in one eye and disfigured for life.”

Not quite as wild as Timothy McVeigh.

2005-07-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

But the one untranslated French book I haven’t been able to resist buying so far, though who knows when I’ll learn to read it, is Voyage à Oarystis, an apparently brand new book, some sort of novelistic Utopia, by Raoul Vaneigem. Speaking of the happiness/delight/good fortune of women, here’s the passage on the back. I daresay even I can get this:

“Elle en avait les larmes aux yeux. Un pays où il n’y a ni temple, ni église, ni synagogue, ni mosquée, ni prêtrek, ni pasteur, ni gourou, ni barrin, ni banquier, ni marchand, ni flic, ni militaire. Quel bonheur!”

(The orthography is getting to me. Please forgive such errors as I make the rest of the trip.)

2005-07-25T15:33:00.000-07:00

Can’t find it now, but somewhere I saw a tepid review of Madness’ The Dangermen Sessions, Vol. 1. I haven’t followed The Nutty Boys (I’m really pleased that I remembered that) recently, but I gather the current line-up now sometimes plays all-classic-ska-cover gigs as “The Dangermen,”and this is the studio equivalent. Picked up the single, “Shame and Scandal (in the Family),” which has charted here in France. Don’t know the original (and can’t fake it offline), but it’s a weird little incest-themed number credited to Lord/Pinard, seems pretty marginal, and this version isn’t up to much except a good trombone solo, even w/ Dennis Bovell prod. B-side is Marley’s “So Much Trouble in the World,” well-intentioned but middling.

#1 ‘round these parts, though, is our old friend Crazy Frog; I was reminded of his global dominance when the kid behind me in the hypermarché was buying a copy. But in the modest record shop across the street from the church in Rodez, there was only an empty spindle in the top spot on the singles wall.

2005-07-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

I don’t know that I actually said “untoward,” but it’s possible.

Same week-old paper reports the Mercury Prize shortlist, which inc. Maximo Park, Bloc Party, and Kaiser Chiefs. I suppose the obvious thing is to say, esp. after last year’s F-Ferd. win, “oh, now those sounds can be ‘recognized,’ now that they’ve been, not to put to fine a point on it, defused.” But Arular is nominated as well, which goes to show, well, what? I’m a bit curious about at least one nominee that no one seems to have thought exportable to the U.S. (less so than those already mentioned, in any case): Hard-Fi, described here as “abrasive techno bloke-pop.” What, like Jesus the Unstoppable Tubthumper? And in a sidebar, some surprising words from a surprising source: “Dance music seems to be fading,” Simon Frith, the chairman of the judging panel, said. “Very few records from that genre are being nominated by judges. One of the themes which came through this year was that all these bands are about live performance.” Which goes to show, well, what?

2005-07-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

I paraphrase, but:

Me: “I’m a little uneasy about this London trip” [Thurs.]
Bree: “Because of the bombs?”
Me: “Well, not because of the ‘danger’ so much, mostly because it seems untoward to be going somewhere for fun when the world isn’t much fun.”
Bree: “Will the world be any more fun if we’re somewhere other than London?”
Me: “No, but it’s all just more vivid.”
Bree: “We can go and be miserable if you want.”
Me: “OK.”

Seeing Luke Haines – probably as close to M.I.A. as a stylistically white/Britpop artist is likely to come, as far as drawing on the symbolic power of political violence to the point of making you seriously wonder if we might be edging into advocacy (if not complicity) – on our first night there at the ICA will be a particularly complicated moment for me.

Unavailable for comment: Former National Front head/BNP founder John Tyndall, dead at 71 as of last Tuesday. The Times: “He presided over the movement’s heyday in the 1970’s, when one candidate won second place at a parliamentary election in West Bromwich.” Want more, look for an obit yourself.

2005-07-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Yes, so, did in fact see Charlie. Taking into account that I heard the dialogue in French, I have to say that unless the dialogue – in some language -- is adding entire strata of rich wit to this thing, it is an almost entirely pointless film. Or rather, its point is the same as some arbitrarily large number of recent movies (The Royal Tannenbaums comes to mind): Family fucks you up. (Unless you happen to be poor enough for enforced closeness/warmth.) “And then Willy Wonka goes into therapy”: Good as sight gag, bad as actual necessary step toward dramatic resolution. Also, taking out both the fizzy lifting drink sequence and the gobstopper makes the character of Charlie even more of a cipher: He’s not interestingly virtuous w/ no temptation to resist. For the most part, what visual imaginativeness is present is by way of a slicker “cover” of the ’71 version, a digital filling in of gaps; esp. the Mike TV sequence, which now looks a lot like the first Cruise Mission Impossible. Will give points for the Wonka Bar/2001 obelisk gag, and the changes rung on the Veruca Salt sequence. The circular design, the rather disturbing squirrel attack: Good to go, right up until the “song,” which might as well have been by the Polyfuckingphonic Spree.

I’m actually puzzled, at this point, by the status of the music – the credits read “Music: Danny Elfman//Lyrics: Roald Dahl.” But since they’d all been translated into French (no credit line that I saw for that little task!) and, even if they hadn’t, I don’t have the book here, I don’t know what this actually means – did Elfman set rhymes that are in the book, making these songs truer to the source than Newley and Briceusse’s? The original, by the way, is more of a full-on musical than is sometimes remembered: Parts of the score cloy (“Cheer Up, Charlie”) but “I Want It Now” is a terrific character number. (“I want a feast, I want a bean feast!”) And one can hardly overpraise “Candy Man”: “Separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream.” (While I’m on this, n.b that while much of Newley’s work is hard to take – the Keanu/Theron Sweet November is a remake of a movie that was plenty bad in its own right – this is the very team that wrote both “If I Could Talk to the Animals” and “Goldfinger.” Plus some other Bond themes: not a bad run.)

Very telling that neither any of the kids nor Depp is put through the paces of doing an entire number – which, you know, might require the director to coax a performance*, rather than a series of three-second gestures, out of someone other than an endlessly replicated Oompa-Loompa (who I’m sure was only paid once, speaking of cheap labor). If it’s beginning to sound like I’m more of a rockist about film (you get what I mean, I’ll take it) than about music, well, it’s case by case, but as far as preferring the film that includes joy, surprise, and bite, even if one has to fill in a couple of gaps in the promixal visual stimuli, well, call me Andre and lock me out of the Cahiers offices.

*That is, one vocal peformance and a later on-set physical performance to which to sync it.

2005-07-25T15:24:00.000-07:00

2 corrections: It’s Jennyfer, not faire, and the girls are 12.

2005-07-25T15:20:00.001-07:00

The bulk of today's posts (separated, against my usual practice, b/c of overall length) were written offline. Adding appropriate links would take another hour or two, and this is my vacation, so you’re on your own.

2005-07-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

And since I was recently informed that I personally may be the problem with late kapitalism, what with my kurious kritcal-yet-kovetous kathexis w/ kommodity-kitsch, it bears mention that when Bree and I went to the E. Leclerc Espace Culturel (sort of like a freestanding version of the media/electronics sections of Best Buy), she was given un cadeau, for no reason either of us were able to understand: a paperback of Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola’s 1883 novel on consumer/commercial culture, heavily informed by the author’s researches in Le Bon Marché. And she was just buying remained Charles Trenet and Yves Montand cassettes. (You really would have to go some distance to beat my squeeze for aesthetic consistency.) Me, with my two B. Biolay CDs and randomly chosen ragga comp, rien.

Have also picked up, at rummage sales, a 30 Euro French-made tux, in good repair and remarkably well-fitting, Mort Shuman’s late-‘60s LP Amerika (“Teenager In Love”/”Viva Las Vegas” and so on co-writer w/ Doc Pomus, later translator into English of most of the Brel you probably know, and eventually a well-known singer in France in his own right – hmm, could be an interesting figure to write about), and, most curiously, the standard English critical edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane.

2005-07-23T01:06:00.000-07:00

[slightly revised from orig. posting -- more typos than usual.]

Besides Bree's parents, there are three Americans who have houses here, but only one is around currently; V., along w/her daughter and two friends (who all go to some sort of international school at home in SF, and seem shockingly torpid to me, even for 13-year-olds, brightening only at being allowed to run loose in Jennyfair -- the French equiv. of Wet Seal/Hot Topic -- and receiving the new Harry Potter by Fed Ex). In any case, the woman visiting V. and with whom we went out to dinner a few nights ago turned out to be one Joy Askew, an English singer and session keyboardist whose credits include tours with Rodney Crowell, Joe Jackson (right after Night and Day, which is impressive b/c you figure JJ would be persnickety about the parts he plays on the rec), and Laurie Anderson. More specifically, she's the woman that Anderson calls on the phone, cross-stage and mid-set, in the Home of the Brave concert film. Which is to say: I just dined/chatted with someone who played at the second concert I ever saw in my life: Shrine Auditorium, '85 or '86?, earlier on the tour that developed into that movie. She's about 50, a little silly, willing to talk about music but not the kind of "muso" we're all supposed to dislike so much. First concert: The Who, in Newcastle (her mom taught miner's kids). Talked a bit about Steve Nieve's playing, her teenage love of Chicken Shack, how she learned digitial studio techniques (she hired a teacher), and her difficulties getting much in the way of a deal for her solo work. (She seems to know V. partly through yoga and partly through working w/ her husband, whose main gig is as Bonnie Raitt's touring drummer -- also a v. personable guy who unfortunately only spends a little bit of time down here. One summer that I didn't come here, Neil Innes passed through -- Bree found him charming.) But she also spent a good deal of time explaining the composition of various kinds of sweet/savory puddings (Yorkshire, bread-and-butter, etc.) under Bree's questioning. Anyhow, I don't think I'm gonna top that this trip unless Bernie Worrell drops by for tea.

~~~

Field report: During the same dinner, Bree and I quizzed the 13 year-olds on what music they like. "Hip-hop" was the immediate response; didn't get much on particular artists beyond Eminem. Asked if they liked any rock bands at all: "Maroon 5." And (the drummer's daughter), "The Beatles." Another of the girls agreed, and added, everyone likes the Beatles...except Natalie." (Another of their friends, I assume.) "Natalie was like, The Beatles suck, and I was like, no, you don't like The Beatles, and she was like, no, they suck." (Perhaps Natalie should take up blogging.) I asked if they or their friends still liked Britney; mostly, no, though the drummer's daughter still says she does. (She'd also heard of MIA, I think through an older sister.) They also said they weren't sure they'd ever heard Nirvana; when I mentioned that they were huge around 1992, one reminded me, "that's the year I was born."

~~~

At another dinner party, two small children, 8 or 9, didn't have much luck getting Bree and I to respond to some request or order, so they went and asked their mother why we'd been invited since we didn't speak French. The mother, whose English was excellent, relayed this -- since the host was standing around, I tried to turn it to advantage by saying that we weren't sure either, but that we were glad they did. (Actually, Bree's French is, I think, getting there, though she's not to the level of understanding rapid or highly colloquial speech; her mom's fluent, and largely accepted by the locals.) Then the mother tried, with little success, to get one of her kids to admit that he'd been learning English in school. "Ce n'est pas vrai! Ce n'est pas vrai!"

2005-07-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

I think I'm needing to really like/love something, and soon, b/c some of my current reactions are not even curmudgeonly, but just sour. E.g.: Look, if where I went wrong was that I wasn't attending with sufficient care to Main, Lorelei, and The Swirlies, ima turn in my glove and go home, 'kay?. E.g. 2: I may see Charlie et la Chocalaterie (dubbed, here in the provinces, not version originale) here in a few days w/ Bree and three 13-year-old American girls (I'll explain later) and I'll probably enjoy it fine (I could have told you in advance they'd fuck up the songs; some people also think Moulin Rouge, and I don't mean John Huston's, was a musical), but: "crappy first version"? This has gotta be a sign of some deeper aesthetic-theoretical divide than one over whether, I don't know, The Karl Hendricks Trio were ever any good.

2005-07-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

My condolences to the relatives, friends, and bandmates of Michael Dahlqist, Doug Meis, and John Glick, all killed last Thursday in Skokie on their way back from lunch when their car was rammed by a driver first thought to be drunk, though it has now developed that she was making a failed suicide attempt. (Story here.) The fact that these guys were in bands is hardly what makes this tragic, but I have to say a word about Michael, the only one I know personally, who was unfailingly sweet and friendly everytime I encountered Silkworm, and never less than completely committed every time I saw him play. I know that that band isn't for everybody, but they've been important to me -- Libertine was one of the first three records I had with me when I moved into my first grad school apt. -- and to some of my closest friends. He'll be missed.

I'm also sad to hear of the death of ska pioneer Laurel Aitken.

Don't feel like adding a bunch of unrelated stuff to this. Cheerier or argumentative or something next time.

2005-07-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

Read --

Remainder of Bruns, The Materiality of Poetry (more on which later)

Gail Scott, My Paris (on the plane, I know, corny, but I'd had it around for months...):

"Sevres saucer with man waving Marie-Antoinette's head. Man on plate gleefully collecting blood in basin."

Jack Webb, The Badge:

"The battleground is Hollywood. [...] There is the next of homosexuals, which lives under constant threat of murder, shakedown and blackmail. During the war years, the homos were victims of more than one thousand robberies and other crimes -- so many that the police appealed to the armed forces to keep their personnel out of the purple district."

(Much of the book has this mixed tone of concern w/ crime and suggestion that its victims in one way or another bring it upon themselves. Curiously, there's also a statistic concerning the number of maquereau, carefully apostrophized by Webb or his ghostwriter as "French pimps," to be found in L.A. c. 1985, but I can't find the passage. (See mack.) The chapters at the end about then Captain William Parker, and the police commission (inc. brief mention of John Ferraro, later a city councilman, whose pasta-seller father was a friend of my dad's parents)

Lisa Robertson, Xeclogue

"Power is a pink prosthesis hidden in the forest."

~~~

Halfway through --

David Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siecle.

"Some time in the 1880s a new craze began to catch on at the Moulin. It had grown out of the polka, a mildly scandalous dance for two that had come from Eastern Europe and which itself had developed from an earlier passion for the waltz....One should not, however, imagine that this was anything like the strictly choreographed can-can performed in today's Moulin Rouge by a chorus line of identically dressed dance; in the 1880s, the can-can was a wild display of individual skills. There were several names for this new dance; the most common at the time was the chahut, slang for something like a 'riot'."

and a few pages earlier --

"The crowds who crammed the Mirliton every night to hear [Aristide] Bruant's songs and see Lautrec's paintings, may have come for little more than the thrill of the vulgar but they were nevertheless obliged to hear and see something of those who lived beneath their own level of bourgeois comfort. And this mix of radical politics and popular entertainment quickly attracted other entrepeneurs."

[I don't want to get all post-(fall-of)-Commune Montmatre = post-(rise-of)-Reagan Bronx (or London 1977 or London 2003-5, whatever one takes those to be post-) on you, but it's striking that the very last sentence above, especially, could appear in a number of historical contexts w/ little or no adjustment.]

~~~

Haven't kept pace with each Lady S. track or their order of release, so I have no view on whether she's in a downhill bike race w/ "Ch-Ching," but "9 to 5"? Freakin' Two-Tone, man, explictly so in the video (which makes the song feel esp. like peak-period Madness): It's grime like "Our House" is ska. Love it. (Thank you J-Shep via Jane.)

But I'll bet she probably wasn't really sick in NY -- she had just gotten word that the Sufjan Stevens disc she'd had couriered to the club had arrived.

~~~

I bear a mild physical resemblance to Karl Rove. But also to Courbet's portrait of Proudhon.

2005-07-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

[Glad to hear Sasha's crunching the stats. The following is unrelated to that, but it does fall under "pith and marrow":]

I think that I'd better just own up to the following two precepts, which I would have to say guide both my critical practice and my plain old experience or music, poetry, and so on, and which are near-axiomatic for me:

1) A great deal of worthwhile ("good," "great," I don't much care what the evaluative term here is) art, high, mass, or whatever, has been created in support of, with inspiration from, and or by believers in all manner of false and non-explanatory theories of: art, language, the mind, the body, the emotions, the interactions between any and all of these, supernatural agents and entities, [extend list indef.]

Corollary: Since worthwhile art has been produced in the name of irreconcilable positions, (1) holds no matter which (if any) theories of any or all of the above, currently fashionable or rejected but coming up on the inside, happen to be true.

2) Your favorite musician does not, in fact, possess magical powers.

(I could have named some other kinds of artists -- painters might have been good mid-last-century -- but I'm pretty sure musician is the category this needs to be said about right now.)

2005-07-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

feu d'artifice

~~~

The Time coverage of the London bombing pushes me closer to uttering those left not-exactly-pieties I abjured before crossing. Not about the event, but the way it's being used, which is hardly a surprise, but still. Even the text on the cover, all the words that surround the image Jane posted a few days ago: INSIDE THE MANHUNT//AN IRAQ CONNECTION//AMERICA: WHY OUR TRAINS AREN'T SAFE ENOUGH -- no, no fearmongering in our house. And in the story, a characterization of America's enemies: "Men and boys with small lives and big hopes for the afterlife visit jihadist websites, meet like-minded rejects at the local mosques, pay a visit to one of the overseas imams known for radical preaching and then -- well, no one case say for sure." "Rejects" seems an unhelpful characterization, but I'm unsure what it hides. More transparently: Doesn't more or less anyone who believes in a personal afterlife have "high hopes" regarding same?

Back of the book, 2-inch Q&A w/ Maggie Gyllenhall (bad pic):

--When you said recently that the U.S. was responsible in some way for the 9/11 attacks you upset a lot of people [not a Q, n.b.]

--It's a time when if you want to say something that's complicated, you have to do it very carefully. I realized the red carpet is not the place to have that conversation. I was surprised and really hurt by the way what I said was misinterpreted.

--Do you want to clarify what you meant?

--No. I just don't think it's the right place.

Yeah, M., probably a good call. (For completeness' sake, here's a story on the original comments I hadn't even heard about until picking up Time, and the inevitable damage-controlled publicist-scripted follow-up.)

~~~

responsibility, desert: related but not synonymous.

~~~

Every so often, Sasha mentions that we're gonna see the i-rock-beat-down screed presently, but then he cannily switches to an all/alt-yogurt format. One outside possibility: Sheff aced our man, who has now realized that The Shins actually will change your life, and skipped that Lady Sovereign show to listen to Picaresque a few more times. No? Step up, before I'm reduced to repeated postings about triple-creme brebis.

~~~

Google homepage in French today...nice touch.

2005-07-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

Posting from Upland. Packed, closed up apt., drove out here yesterday afternoon, leaving car w/ parents while I'm away. Dinner at "The Royal Cut," prime rib house w/ slight Portugese influence in Chino, to which 'rents had found birthday coupon (Fri. was my mother's); interminable discussion of whether waiter would allow my father to order the free entree instead. Surprised that, after the bombing in London, no issue was raised about the safety of my trip* -- in Oct. 2001, when I was about to leave on a long tour with Jenny, I allowed my mother (and to some extent, Bree) to convince me, for her/their peace of mind, to cancel a flight and head out to D.C. by Amtrak. (Coincidentally, this was all also around the last time I moved house.) Last night, some concern about how hard LAX would be to negotiate, and, my father said something about this being a "volatile world," over cake, but that was as far as it went.

*Bree and I are taking a side trip there around the 28th.

Incongruous can of Egyptian fava-bean spread in pantry, w/ Arabic lettering -- though it's true that Italians eat something similar. Noted that Don Letts' recent doc Punk: Attitude was showing on IFC around 11, but I was too tired. (Though I ended up flipping around in Rip It Up for an hr. in bed.)

Earlier yesterday, loaded maybe 50 CDs onto computer, packed ambitiously regarding reading as well -- I've been guilty of pooh-poohing this sort of idea in the past, but yes, we need an iPod for books. (Mailman arrived just in time w/ SPD order, Xanthippe, and Belladonna pamphlets -- and returned letter w/ check to Dan Bouchard, I must've made a mistake on the address, so no Poker 6 until I return.) It's not all like that: Have Jack Webb's recently republished The Badge for the plane.

Unsure of whether and how often I will post from France -- menus/village life might be dull reading. Bree's parents are connected there, but I don't know that they've gotten DSL in the 3 years since I've visited (or even that it's available), so extended online activity may just be frustrating.

~~~
To self -- things I hope I can fit in, other than packing and related tasks, between returning here (Aug. 13) and leaving for Chi. (aiming for Sept. 1 to drive out; classes being the 20th):

--Basquiat show
--Vince's Spaghetti in Ontario
--decent Sushi somewhere
--breakfast at Pantry
--Watts Towers
--'farewell' (temp?) show @ The Press w/ Refrigerator, WCKR SPGT (tentatively, 8/19)
--similar reading @ The Smell (tentatively, 8/28)
--see Sat. eve. movie at Hollywood Forever celeb cemetery (have been trying to make it to one all summer)

2005-07-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

Yes, Ange, "no pieties," and perhaps "no bona fides" as well -- that expresses fairly well why I've blanked every time I've considered posting since Thursday morning. Say more? No. Sometimes, just -- no.

~~~

And as much as any death anywhere in the name of, among other abstractions, faith or nation is a death that does not occur in the world we wish to build (confusion of tenses = the best I can do), the person that I am cannot help be hit, not harder, but at a particular angle, by the death on February 8 of Jason Tharp, whose (presently unnamed) drill instructor appears to have thought it more important that the 19-year old Marine recruit learn to swim than that he not drown. That, at least, is my understanding from accounts that I have read or heard. According to the same AP/CNN story, the investigation so far has judged his death "accidental, but preventable," and continues:

"Additionally, the Marine Corps investigation recommended disciplinary action to be taken against three other Marine instructors for other incidents involving Tharp a day before he died. The other Marines include a swimming instructor who threatened Tharp with tossing him into the pool if he did not go into the pool on his own, a drill instructor who grabbed Tharp and struck him on his forearm and a training officer who saw Tharp being struck and did not report it."

Further information here, including a link to a story that reproduces passages from Stark's letters home, recently released by his parents. He had apparently enlisted as a way to raise money to study art, and quickly realized that he had made a mistake.

~~~

I will have to find another day and another way to express the distinct but also visceral form of disgust that grips me whenever I hear coverage, even or especially of the balanced variety, of the educational debate over "intelligent design." Listen to the Maryland highschool students quoted near the beginning of the piece, and despair. Then listen to the pastor interviewed a bit later, and rage.

~~~

Here in our United States, we mock and destroy the unfit and unwilling, the better to raise a force to protect the right of some to claim that we are all made in the divine image.

~~~

If there must be Christianity, let more of it be of the less-worldly, turn-of-the-century (19th/20th) sort expressed by Amos R. Wells, the author of Social Evenings (see previous post). The United Society of Christian Endeavorers, of which Wells was an engine, may have had some early influence on the AA movement, but the pages I have seen seem sketchy and unreliable, so no link. However, "Things," the poem of his found at the bottom of the homepage of a Lutheran thrift store in Clifton, Texas, may not be my cup of tea, prosodically speaking, but is singularly apropos to the material burden I am laboring under now. And here is the text of Photographic Courtship, a 1902 one-act musical by Wells, with music (not reproduced) by one Thomas Martin Towne. Again, not exactly Der Zar laesst sich photographieren, but certain quatrains of "We guess it won't be bad by half," the second song down, have their charm, as young lovers Mehitable and Obadiah sing:

[She]
A modern husband, modern wife,
[He]
We'll order spick-and-spandy,
[Both.]
A folding-pocket-Kodak life,
With daylight catridge handy.

~~~

At a loss as to what to make of an email that appeared today, purporting to invite me to contribute to The Huffington Post.

2005-07-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Last few days: Interfiled a few boxes of records that had never been alphebetized w/ those that are, while also culling some (not enough) for sale. Same for books, while packing about 8 boxes, with maybe 4 or 5 to go (this doesn't count those that I never unpacked in my 3 years or so in this apartment, which I thought I might be leaving on a couple of previous instances). Sold/traded to a total of 4 shops (interesting find: Tim Dlugos' Little Caesar book), took remainder, plus 2 shopping bags of cassettes, pre-recorded and otherwise, to Out of the Closet (but bought 2 LPs, Dr. Buzzard's and Livingston Taylor). Rented self-storage in Ontario, about $50/mo. less than comparable spots in L.A., carried in one carload of boxes, a drop in the bucket. Ate, at various points, at an Italian deli called Pinnochio's in Burbank (Chili John's being closed for the summer), Papa Christo's in the so-called "Latino-Byzantine District," and The Mirage on Garey Ave. in Pomona, a weird lunch buffet of really uninspiring Chinese steam table food and much better and fresher Pakistani dishes. Left the 16-bit master for 0PB record for Dennis in the presumably trustworthy hands of Nathan Wilson at Rhino Claremont. Drops in Sept., I think.

Found, in an older box that I thought might contain printed matter I no longer need, the run of Lowghost, a circulated-to-contributors publication Paul Vangelisti edited in 1998, the last few copies of my Seeing Eye chapbook (1999), and Amos R. Wells' Social Evenings, an 1894 collection of religious parlor games from which I collaged this poem. Also, many insufferably twee zines (though I come off as less of an ass in interviews conducted this millenium) and two issues of The Stalker, a 4-pager dedicated entirely to hating on Urge Overkill. Simpler times. Simpler, lamer times.

Life of the mind not v. lively at the moment, for obvious reasons. Continued cover/sample discussion backchannel w/ J., sparing those of you to whom this seemed recherche. Read most of Bruns' The Material of Poetry: Annoyed at the characterization of some notions of Levinas' as constituting a radical break with everything anyone else has ever thought about ethics. Polished off, over the last two weeks, one of the few bottles of alcohol I've ever bought primarily (as it turns out, entirely) for my own consumption.

Not feeling as dire as this probably sounded; it's the syntax.

2005-07-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

3 min. 'til 7 p.m.; manager and asst. still at work; currently hammering on my window frame.

2005-07-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I can't, but glad there was something.

~~~

Curious that Jane would choose today to write about the geography of waveforms, a mixed metaphor edging into synesthesia, because I've been spending much of the day* looking at their graphic representations while digitizing records. (Today: Woodentops and Slow Children b-sides, Tony Fox's "Shippin' Your Ass Back to Arkansas," Dynasty's "I Don't Want To Be a Freak (But I Can't Help Myself)" some Julie Andrews.) Talk about your static -- one can get lost for hours in cleaning up these things. I've been around this sort of thing in studios and mastering labs (0PB did not, in fact, record exclusively onto wet clay through a sharpened stick), but haven't really spent much time doing it "hands on" before. Just proceeding by trial and error, the effects of the noise reduction algorithms I have access to sound pretty crude to my ears, but going in and removing the more exposed pops with the little drawing tool is hours of barely-cognitive fun, a little like mastering the easy levels of a video game, or working out blackheads. (Sorry for the image.) I've never been especially loud listener to music -- is even this, I wonder, evidence of idealism?

*Except for coffee with newly-engaged and -tenured Scott Saul, during which, while flipping through the copy of AF I was giving him, I noticed that there are other places where the dates aren't consistent. Fuck fuck fuck.

~~~

While I'm there: The short answer to Jane's pointed question is just that the very notion of a "cover album," as opposed to some other kind, is itself an artifact of (white)-rock auteurism. It's not a meaningful distinction in most other genres: No one would have called a Peggy Lee or Frank Sinatra album a "cover album." I was even stretching the term by applying it to what are, generically, jazz records (DeLaria and Gold Sounds), though I'd argue that if these are cover albums in the contemporary sense, this is because they are responsive to the original recorded versions of the songs performed, as well as (or perhaps instead of) the songs "as such," as would be the case on a typical jazz date.

(Apologies to everyone who already knows this: I say "the contemporary sense" because (I apologize if everyone knows this), the terminology of "covers" dates back to song-plugging days; even the first recording of a song would have been termed a cover, in the sense of "coverage." (Lieber and Stoller used the word this way when I interviewed them.) The idea of a distinction particular record that is the primary text and "cover versions" of that comes somewhat later, and persists.)

I did not claim that covering and sampling were one and the same practice; though I did point out common features, which, I freely admit, will look more significant to one such as I who affords songs some entity-like status (or at least believes that they are treated as having same by much of our everyday and even considered critical practice, and that, where applicable, it is not so easily done without -- but you've all heard this bit before).

I agree that covering doesn't confound the identity of the author -- unless one leaves off the writing credits! -- but would nonetheless suggest that it can confound the question of whether the author is the source of meaning. This might have been clearer if I had figured out places to slip in references to Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes and Caetano's A Foreign Sound.

To get all this to cohere -- and to distinguish between a couple of possible ways race fits into it -- would take a chapter or a conference presentation. My provisional steps (i.e., deleted posts) were not edifying; for now, I'll answer Jane's pointed questions with three others.

What do we make of the fact that our man Luther Vandross got his big break placing a song in The Wiz?

What do we make of Jason Moran's prepared-jazz-piano version (cover?) of "Planet Rock"?

Why do I keep seeing the Nouvelle Vague disc, which may have digital elements but is largely acoustic, filed in "electronica"?

~~~

Don't worry, I promise I'll talk to someone else next time.

2005-07-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday to Bree! (She doesn't read this; I'm just saying.)

~~~

Heard Petra Haden and The Sell-Outs last night at the John Anson Ford. Lovely: 10 women (one pregrant), with PH singing lead and sort-of-conducting, reproducing the solo arrangements of the record, pretty much flawlessly and with greater sonic clarity. (Nice acoustics, that venue.) The record was one sort of feat, this was another -- one you almost wouldn't think her capable of bringing off, given how nervous and scattered (but good-humored) she seemed in the breaks. Highlights: What the gender switch does to "Tattoo," the changes to the original phrasing in "Maryanne with the Shaky Hands," the finger-to-the-lips wah-wah "guitar" solo, the fact that PH picks her spots instead of singing flat-out gorgeously all the time. As silly as this project is, it's also musically thoughful and detailed -- it's fun somebody cared about, which is hardly the worst thing art can be. Sat w/ Steve Cronk, who else -- but I had to move back somewhere around side 2 because we were in front of the one guy who decided that an a cappella show would be a good opportunity to drink 8 beers and keep up a running commentary.

(By the way, though I've come to realize that, for good or ill, that there was more Who [via Minutemen] in 0PB than either Beatles or Stones, Sells Out isn't an album I'm especially invested in -- I think Kyle and I were more Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy types. But when I listened to it for the first time in years to write about PH's record, I was impressed by how little it conforms to what "powerful" rock is supposed to sound like. The expanded CD has unusually strong extras -- how had I never heard "Glow Girl" before?)

Opened by Stephen Prina, who's teaching at Harvard now (I hadn't known this) but was back for the summer, resembling both Lenin and Peter Yarrow in a plaid suit. His acoustic set, roughy: Magnetic Fields' "I Don't Want To Get Over You," Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You," Anthony & The Johnsons' "You Are My Sister" (I had to have this i.d.'s for me), Loudon Wainwright's "One Man Guy," Carole King's "It's Too Late," "All The Young Dudes," and three songs from Push Comes To Love. (I may be forgetting one or two.) This set seemed less in-quotation-marks than some of his other musical performances -- I've heard about one, in a gallery context, consisting of piano/vocal versions of alternating songs from each Sonic Youth and Steely Dan album up to that time, with "Whipping Post" in the middle -- but still more distant than (to make the obvious comparison) Rodney Graham's. Prina's deal is that he's not so much covering the song as treating the original record as though it was a text that might be transcribed and reproduced by other instruments -- notably, his voice, as became obvious when he recited the spoken bit at the end of "Dudes" (which I'm not finding transcribed anywhere), deadpan, or did his best to catch every note of Joni's melismas. (The first was intentionally funny, the second, not so much -- I couldn't help notice that his vocal strengths and weaknesses are similar to my own.) Whatever this is, it's not a pop methodology.

Tenor of the whole affair was more art than alt -- it was promoted by SASSAS, the same people who put on events at Schindler House. Which isn't to say that the crowd wasn't genuinely enthusiastic -- no rock-show impress-me-ism. Nor backstaginess -- all the principals were out in front of the venue saying hi to friends w/in 10 minutes of the encore. Said hi to Prina, Weba Garretson, Ron Sures, Petra's sister Rachel, and Billboard writer Steven Mirkin, who has also been scripting voice-overs for an upcoming reality show in which the surviving members of INXS audition a new lead singer. [If you've mad it this far, this is what we call "burying the lead."] And on the way in, I was right in front of Miranda July, so I turned around and politely told her I'd enjoyed her movie (quite true, though it's the short version), which I'd just seen the night before.

~~~

Splurged on 2-disc reissue of ABC's The Lexicon of Love, which I'd only ever had on beat-up vinyl. You only need to hear about 40 seconds to realize that Trevor Horn napped his way through Dear Catastrophe Waitress, too bad. EC-isms in Fry's lyrics even more pronounced than I'd remembered. Haven't listened to the extras yet, but the booklet notes, frustratingly, the existence of early demos of songs called ""Surrender," "Do As I Say," and "Boomerang," "too rough for inclusion here." (Not to mention the prescient promo video that helped get them signed -- would have made a great enhanced CD.)

~~~

Well, just to register a mild defense of my supposed home discipline rather than cede the entire field to poetry -- philosophers, even analytic philosophers*, do come up with questions now and again. You know, "begins in wonder," all that.

*Rare, possibly mythical breed reputed to be found in the company of "indie-rockers" and "language poets."

~~~

I've finally gotten vinyl-to-mp3 worked out so that it's not a hassle to set up again every time, mostly because I keep coming across things from which I want to digitize a couple tracks as I sort and pack LPs for the move. (General plan to start posting some of these, though not until I've amassed 50 or 60.) Douglas and others have recommended the Griffin iMic, but I've bought and returned two in the last 6 months; they haven't worked correctly, and I don't think it's because I'm an idiot. It seems I'm getting a decent stereo track this way: Turntable-jacks --> 1/8" adapter --> line in to Mac --> Audacity, while monitoring as a Garageband track (which I don't save) --> edit** and export to .wav file --> drag that to iTunes and "convert to MP3" (b/c its easier than figuring out LameLib). Does the fact that this is working without the iMic have something to do with my turntable having a built-in pre-amp? (And even if it didn't, couldn't I just leave it connected to my stereo amp and go out to the computer for that?) Anyway, this works.

~~~

Deleted notes on about my packing/moving process; can't subject you to that. I haven't forgotten my promised to post something more general on covering/sampling (though the issues were on my mind re the show report above). But the week got away from me, and this entry has taken even longer than the loose time-limit I impose on myself. Tomorrow's light, so we'll see.

2005-06-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

As I haven't bought or stolen any packing boxes yet, the most productive thing in that direction I can do today is go through the file cabinet I've had for years, simultaneously alphebetizing material that may be of use and seeing what I can (a) toss or (b) leave in California for a while. Some of this material goes back to high-school, but there's a lot of college/0pb era detritus:

Lecture handouts (when? where?) on Wittgenstein's architecture, on which I've written two notes:
"The Bauhaus followed the logical positivists around -- Vienna, [unreadable], Chicago," and "I like the typography but hate the ideas -- Rudolf Carnap."

Poems clipped from magazines, by poets I've never encountered since -- S.J. Sackett? Jared Carter?

A printout of a post from the old Indiepop listserv (of which I was never a member, this was forwarded), in which someone writes that "Nothing Painted Blue means as much to me as Pearl Jam or Luther Vandross," before comparing my work unfavorably to music "from the heart of the sun" -- Chrome, Keiji Haino, and so on. Guilty as charged.

Various 'zine interviews. I come off especially jerky in For Paper Airplane Pilots, c. '94, and seem to mention chili fries from The Hat on no less than three separate occassions -- though one, to be fair, was for the food 'n' indie 'zine Gourmandizer

Script for a performance of WCKR SPGT's rock opera The Charles Mansion, for Jim Bogen's aesthetics class at Pitzer; Mark and Joel drafted me to say no more than one or two words and eat cereal throughout.

John Ashbery's "The Poems," an uncollected piece between Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath, Xeroxed from A New Folder -- which I found a damaged but readable copy of about a decade later.

Simon Reynolds' enthusiastic Melody Maker review of Beat Happening's first full-length.

Schematic drawings of Plato's cave, an assignment I had a community college intro class do in 1992.

Comics panel of Sarge from Beetle Bailey walking between two tanks, with a pensive look. Speech balloons: "Countries all over the world are becoming democracies." (Next balloon) "Democracies never start wars." Probably intended for a flyer.

Two very early (just pre-IPU, from internal evidence) issues of riot grrrl.

List of band names, undated:

The Winter Coats
The Visiting Scholars
The Shaftesbury Rules
The Meaning Holists
The Terms
The Rosicrucians
The Summer Separates
The Dry Bachelors
The Blithe Spirits
The Social Function
The Deadline Poets
The Simka Prunes [??]

VIP Club card, 11worth Cafe, Omaha, NE (valid Mon.-Thurs.)

A letterpress broadside of "To the Harbormaster" Moe's was giving out on some visit North.

One page essay "In Defense of The Spice Girls," handed out by Sally Timms on some Mekons tour.

William Gass' "And," clipped from Harper's, Feb. 1984.

Advertisement for seminars on "The Aura of Your Future You" and "The Seven Gem Stations of Human Evolution," offered for "the first time ever in California" by Universe Online Seminars, introducing "The Art & Science of Electrobics" from a Claremont address.

Handout from seminar on Elizabeth Anscombe's Intention, featuring totally impenetrable diagrams.

Lyrics, written out by various hands other than mine, to Mike Neelon's "Foundation Slips," The Bux's "Yes I Been in Love," The Only Ones' "Miles From Nowhere."

Scattered attempts at concrete poetry (often involving Letraset).

Purity test.

2005-06-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

Fri: Descanso Gardens; downtown Montrose; El Chavo [old-line Mexican restuarant w/ glowing upside-down sombreros, immense signed photo of Dolly Parton, slightly out-of-tune harpist playing "Jingle Bells," most socioculturally heterogenous clientele I've seen in an area restaurant in some time]; home too late for Madlib -- walked around corner (literally) to venue, which was already clearing around 9:30. Is there some undie-hip-hop early-show convention that no one told my supposedly "old and tired" ass? Sat.: Practiced for Mtn. Goats show; packed car for Mtn. Goats show; Mtn. Goats show [The Double's keyboardist could cut me, I suspect]. Sun: Bree to LAX; sandwich from Bay Cities Importing, on way to The Smell; reading w/ Stephanie Rioux [recent Cal Arts MFA, reading a fairly remarkable unperformable feminist masque in a deceptive tiny-girl voice], Steve Gregorapolis [of Wild Stares/W.A.C.O.], self [sorry I did not announce this, it came together very late; I may read again in August]; Suhiro. Today: Reordered misplaced ATM card; read portions of Autonomy and Estrangement, Some Mountains Removed, Indigo Bunting. No fixed plans for evening, though there's a great deal to do in the next two weeks; will probably just read more.

Will fulfill outstanding promissory notes, and otherwise attempt to be worthy of your visit, when head clears. The "Jack and Diane" sample, by the way, is in Jessica Simpson's "I Think I'm in Love with You"; not all that recent, an index of how little attention I was paying around 1999. (Thanks to Roy Kasten.) I still think someone should sample "Oblivious." Killed multiple postings, don't know what's up with that, made some other small corrections. (Thanks to Liz C.)

In memoriam, Tigger and Piglet.

2005-06-24T09:24:00.001-07:00

Can anyone i.d. for me the (fairly?) current R&B track that samples the rubbery acoustic bit from John Cougar's "Jack & Diane"? When I first heard it, I thought it was from Aztec Camera's "Oblivious" (a similarity I'd never thought of before).

~~~

Jane returns to the sphere, just in time to take me to task (with appreciated civility) for threads dropped and distinctions effaced in the covers album piece. I think I will wait to take this up in substance until Mon., when my head is clearer.

Also, am holding myself in check re the developing back-and-forth between Sasha and Rob Sheffield. Will wait until there's more on the table. If the convo goes where I think it might (must), I give fair warning that what I say will be of two minds, and pass through more idiosyncratic history than I usually indulge in.

~~~

Packed weekend: Madlib/P.B. Wolf tonight, right around the corner at Qtopia/The Vanguard; Mtn. Goats/The Double/Sarah Dougher Sat. (must relearn piano parts); possibly reading at Smell Sun. (will post details if so); Bree's departure from the landmass, two weeks in advance of my own; concomittent farewell quality time throughout. Would also like to hit a 7:30 reading at Skylight tonight w/ Miranda July, Carol Treadwell, and others for Cloverfield Press, but I doubt it's going to happen. (July's also supposed to show up for the opening of her film's run at The Nuart [I'll see it next week], around 10:00, but I think someone has misjudged the layout of the city -- this is what the phrase "pending the artist's schedule" was invented for.) Oh, and the bldg manager is constantly in and out of my apt. trying to close up the wood-rotting leak from the unit above, not good for concentration -- it's not "The Humpty Dance," let me be clear, it's the bandsaw.

~~~

A placeholder post, I know.

2005-06-23T08:34:00.002-07:00

Hey, so I still complete a thought once in a while, to the best of my ability: Recent cover albums. (NB: Couldn't include Cobra Verde's new Copycat Killers b/c it's co-released by Scat; and I got wind of Paul Anka's new Rock Swings, on which more later, here or somewhere else, after this piece was waiting to be posted -- no time to do more than add a link.)

Also worth a click, if you're at Slate: This infamous-in-some-circles clip of Uri Geller squirming on the Tonight Show, after Carson and The Amazing Randi conspired to replace his props w/ ungaffed ones. (Part of a piece on Randi and the skeptic's movement; ah, the Martin Gardner columns of my youth.)

~~~

Odd: Had been practically strafed w/ weekly emails about Oxford Collapse's L.A. shows from their publicist. Last night, they were supposed to be at Silverlake Lounge, but the listing had disappeared from The Fold's website. Went by around 10:00 last night, no sign of a show, bartender knew nothing about it. (They were at The Smell the previous night -- or were they? -- but I was at the Berdoo Black Angus with the family. Grandma rec'd Casanova in Bolzano, large print, by the way -- possibly a little more high-toned than her usual (and copious) novel-reading, but it seemed like the best possibility Vroman's had to offer.)

[Preparing to wrap presents Tue. afternoon, couldn't find a pair of scissors anywhere in the apt.; after dropping Bree off in the eve. -- took an extra 1/2 hr. to get home b/c of various freeway closures -- stopped by a 24 hr. Rite-Aid to buy a pair. Got home, happened to open a kitchen drawer for something else entirely, instantly saw scissors.]

~~~

Sorrentino's Little Casino -- more noxious, less cohesive than Lunar Follies, yet it's the one that got shortlisted for a Pen/Faulkner after relative "years of neglect," to use a phrase regarding which GS would be typically corrosive.

~~~

Go-Betweens last Sat. @ Troubadour. Crowd not as uniformly old-like-me as I might have predicted, certainly not as homogenous as, mmm, a Soft Boys show. Heartened that they've managed to get over here w/ a rhythm section for the first time since, what, '90?, and Adele Pickvance seems to be having as much or more fun as the principals) but, to be honest, it didn't allow as much space for their performing personalities (esp. Robert's) as the acoustic set-up -- big exception being "Draining The Pool For You" (such, such a great song, dedicated tonight, as Rael noted while I was distracted by something, to Billy Wilder) with the "I've been hired, I've been fired" fade extended to incantatory length. Some of the "let's play the new ones" imperative in effect -- one could sense a "we don't know this one" vibe from a chunk of the crowd -- though "Make Her Day" and "Boundary Rider," most notably, improved on the recorded versions. Good show, but not the central event of my entire month the way it might have been -- no, was, at the Roxy and the long-vanished Texas Records after Tallulah -- once.

~~~

I doubt you have the time to waste, but if you happen to be an invalid, or so overwhelmed by the thought of moving halfway across the country in a couple months, during half of which time you'll be on another continent, there's a new freeware widget called Archive (you'd think I'd like that, right?) which will play a number of public-domain full-length movies in a (tiny) quicktime viewer. Resupplied w/ 7 or so movies every Monday. Last week's included a film based on the OTR comedy Lum & Abner, one of Oscar Michaux's continuity-challenged all-black movies, and Inner Sanctum (no relation to the Rod Serling show) a pretty sharp Detour-ish noir from '48 w/ Fritz Leiber Sr. -- he keeps popping up -- and Mary Beth Hughes.* Those are gone, but this week you can watch Dishonored Lady, a '47 Hedy Lamarr vehicle -- she's your typical post-war career-girl/nymphomaniac. (The word "excitement" is the flick's key euphemism.) Why are the "neurotic" women (mainly in "not being able to decide on a man") in these movies so often in fashion/fashion-magazine-art-direction? Cf. Ginger Rogers in Lady In The Dark (which this film most resembles), Lauren Bacall in Minnelli's Designing Woman, and, to a degree, the great Kay Thompson in Donen's odious Funny Face (her character based closely on Diana Vreeland).

*Who, decades later, apparently played the mother in an item called Tanya, a.k.a. Sex Queen of the SLA, a 1976 softcore quickie "based" on the Hearst kidnapping. I doubt I'll ever see this, but David Trinidad ought to, don't you think? (Well, he probably has, come to think of it.)

~~~

Incoming:

Trygve Simon Givens, 6/10/05, 8 lbs., 5.5 oz.
Bunker Guy Rohrbaugh, 6/15/05, 7 lbs., 1 oz.
Henry ("Hank") David Guffey Callaci, 6/20/05, 10 lbs., 9. oz.

All fortunate to be born to parents who won't raise fools or creeps.

2005-06-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

Dead-heat between two candidates for Press Release of the Week:

"Guitar legend and Aerosmith founding member Joe Perry has found a new way to 'rock your world' … with a pair of signature hot sauces."

or

“We found great locations in the east side of Hollywood that doubled for the Silverlake [sic] area of LA,” says line producer Ruby Zack. “This area is full of small bars and clubs where young, music loving artists hang out, and live life on their own aesthetic." [from one-sheet for DVD release of a movie called East of Sunset.]

~~~

Boilerplate lease-language: "the premises shall not be used as a 'boarding' or 'lodging' house, nor for a school, nor to give instructions is music, dancing or singing...."

~~~

Maybe more later, but likely not. Out to Berdoo for mid-week compromise between Father's Day and Grandma's birthday. 1 1/2 hrs. each way. New Eco for dad, need to pick up something on the way, probably in the large print section of Vroman's, for grams.

2005-06-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

Not a chance in hell that Henry Hills' "Emma's Dilemma," recently praised by Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, and Nick Piombino, (should link, am lazy) will play in L.A.. It does sound like coterie art of a high order (which I have no problem with, if I'm interested in the coterie). Chicago, conceivably? Won't hold my breath.

~~~

Coffeehouse full of people who look like people in an ad for a coffeehouse (or more likely, some product or service, say wi-fi, that one would use there). Nirvana's Meat Puppets cover comes on, takes me forever to recognize it. One youth unwrapping The Fall's Peel Session box -- maybe on the strength of Douglas' Believer review?

~~~

Purple Noon, by the way, was just ok. That glossy "international production" look, almost as if the New Wave had never happened; hard to accept that several of these French and Italian-speaking characters are supposed to be Americans. Can't say much about the psychology (and haven't seen the other adaptaion of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" to compare them), but one of the attractions of the book, as I remember it, is precisely that Ripley has no interest in stealing the girlfriend of the friend he murders; what he wants is his life in some fuller sense. Alain Delon is the reason to see it, sexiest performance this side of Terence Stamp in Quartet. (Maybe it's the white pants.) And yes, White Town fans, he has hair like himself.

~~~

Keep meaning to mention Roberto Galvadon's 1960 Macario, which I happened to catch one of the last times I stayed w/ my parents during the semester. Esp. a remarkable dream sequence populated entirely by Day of the Dead figures, plus the (hungry peasant dreamer) as marionettist. Rich/bourgie dolls eat turkeys on a table; poor/worker dolls are behind bars. The dreamer releases the latter, who attack the former at table and make off with the birds (some really detailed puppet work in all this), but they don't save one for the dreamer, who wakes up screaming and soon resolves to fast until he can acquire a turkey all to himself that he doesn't have to share, even with his children. (There's something poignant to me, by the way, in the fact that the roasted turkeys one actually sees in the movie are quite small, what we'd think of as the size of chickens rather than the Pam Anderson's bred here for Thanksgiving.) There's quite a bit more to the movie (the TCM's synopsis is quite good), based, like Treasure of the Sierra Madre, on something of B. Traven's, the intial of whose pseudonym, I've recently learned, was understood to stand for "Bruno"!

Cf. K. Lyons, "A Poem for Posada" (the title poem of the section of Saline I liked best), Mekons, So Good It Hurts.

~~~

Hear that my grandmother's cataract surgery last week was wildly successful; she's already reading better than she has in several years, and insisted on going to her bridge club today to show off. My mother says that within hours of the procedure, she had 3 nurses around her bed for sauce- and cookie-making advice. She's 95 on Saturday.

~~~

Interesting tension between the section of an interview with Elizabeth Robinson quoted here (I'll be ordering Xanthippe today) and Ange's own comment on her averse-to-difficulty high school English teacher (to whom she's nonetheless grateful). Seems that the worry about perscriptiveness cuts both ways, as it ought -- I wish I could remember this precisely, but I seem to recall an interview with (I think) Lynne Dreyer in (I think) an early Aerial where she recounts the open hostility-border-on-rage of previously supportive teachers when she began to lean toward "experimentation." Isn't the dispiriting part just being told how one must not write? Cf. all the Silliman-boxers with their insistence that all will fall apart if this or than it given any credence whatever. There is no "other side," Jordan says today, and my jury's still out on that except to say that there are (a) certainly people who speak as though they're on it, and (b) there are, no doubt, extremes.

~~~

3/4 though Gilbert Sorrentino's Lunar Follies. "Representative action figures from a myriad of lead-based nauridium renderings show Picass and Matisse gazing at the only known photograph -- a sepia masterpiece! -- of the two canny masters at a baseball game at Chicago's Wrigley Field. (Photo on loan from the family of Al Capone.) The artists' Continental mouths are stuffed with a Chicago delicacy, rutabaga sausage, and their eyes filled with the sadness known only to those who follow the Cubs." A great one for clashing registers -- this time, nasty art-world satire similar to his Pack of Lies trilogy against East Coast Italian-American speech patterns. Who else does this? Pleased to note that the book has (like, I think, Splendide-Hotel and Under The Shadow) a lightly-handled alphabetical superstructure, 53 short sections named for "geographical features of the moon," per jacket copy.

~~~

Up early, polished off two half-done reviews, feeling like I already didn't fail today. Expect an afternoon of copying/mailing/faxing, could maybe try to work, for once, on a song or a poem in the evening?

2005-06-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

Mostly fucked off yesterday; manager and his workman sawing and planing in the empty apt. next door from 10 a.m., "Humpty Dance" on their radio. Down La Brea to shopping center in the heart of one of L.A.'s middle-class black neighborhoods; young woman in Nat'l Guard (I think) fatigues. Eso Wan bookstore, where I missed Chang in May, probably the only place in town you can buy Jasmine Guy's memoir, self-pub'd books on freemasonry, and Nate Mackey's Paracritical Hinge. Owner talking quietly to someone about Emmett Till before a guy comes in ranting about Ghana (while I'm looking at a Billie Holliday bio called If You Can't be Free, Be a Mystery), then helping a lady looking for a particular romance novel. (Owner: "I think it has a white-colored cover." "White-colored" instead of "white" -- intentional locution?*) Considered some Langston Hughes b/c of yesterday's note, seemed corny; stuck w/ the Mackey, which I'd almost mail-ordered last week, and an academic book on sampling. Phillips BBQ, a little east and south, take-out-only stand near Lemiert Park -- links/rib/chicken combo with their "mixed" hot+sweet sauce. In true Q-stand fashion (as opposed to soul-food cafe), the sides are perfunctory; I understand the red velvet cake and other desserts are good. (Passed a business on the way called "The Cobbler Lady." Very tempting.) Kid tries to sell me incense in the parking lot. Not even a couple of outdoor tables; attempt to eat ribs in car (is that middlebrow?) with predictable results, despite bumper-to-bumper freeway.

(*Have I ever mentioned that American Greetings, RC to Hallmark's Coke, has a line of black-aimed greeting cards that are prominently displayed under the name "In Rhythm" in the Rite-Aids that carry them? Identical to other greeting cards except for having pictures of black mothers/daughters, etc. What do they call their Hispanic cards? "Picante!"?)

Back home briefly to change shirt, answer 2 or 3 emails. Back out to Foothill Records in La Canada, not too much traffic that way. Closed (I'd called and gotten no answer, but the place is so weird one never knows). Mostly listening to Scene Is Now, The Oily Years all through this, plus snatches of KCRW and KPFK: "The Secret Sign on the Dollar Bill is yours for a $40 pledge." Stop in a nearby cafe I've liked before, can only stay there until 6 because there's been some sort of teen-curfew crackdown since I was there last; also, they've reduced their space by a third, adding an internal wall. Flipping through L.A. Weekly -- no pick for the Go-Bs or A-Trak, I got on the pitches late -- noticed that Clement's Purple Noon is at the New Beverly later, not 'til 9:30 second feat. with Le Cercle Rouge.

Home would be a sidetrack from where I am, so I decide to stop by Sea Level. Traffic much worse this direction, buses force me to miss the turn from Glendale to Alvarado twice. Get there around 6:30, a scruffy band is extending an instore soundcheck into a rehearsal, until they head across the Sunset to Rodeo Grill. Chat w/ Todd, who convinces me I need Anniemal (free button w/ purchase, which I wore the rest of the day); also locate the Scout Niblett EP with "Uptown Top Ranking," which I approach with trepidation but need to hear. Friend of Alec Bemis' passes through, kindly gives me his self-released CD from the consignment bins. Band comes back, name of Viking Moses, w/ connections, I'm told, to the equally awfully-named Supperbell Roundup: Three rotating singer/guitarists w/ ok rhythm section: First guy all Oberst, but his songs are pretty; second guy sounds, I swear, like David Crosby, actually has good vocal control; third guy, yellow bandana and a sketchy, Little Wings mein, sings like Nick Cave. Confusing. Audience made up of 7 or 8 indie kids, two local 7th-or-so graders in their softball uniforms, and Jorgen from Claremont.

Split for movie about halfway through (actually, considering their soundcheck act, probably more like 1/4). The New Bev runs on a loose schedule -- guy at the window tells me the movie won't start 'til 10. Cross street to a new bistro-styled, loose-tea-in-French-press cafe, nicely appointed w/ paisley-upholstered banquettes; right next to this neighborhood's Starbucks. A year ago, this was a Bernie's Bagelry, no competition for "Elite Catering" (SHABBAT TAKE-OUT) nearby. In restroom, notice three faint parallel sauce stains on my neck from hrs. ago, looks like I've been clawed. This is about as insightful as Crash, but I've driven today from an area where it's unusual to be a white guy not in a car, to a mostly Anglo "enclave" (except for the two middle-aged Iranians in the cafe), to the Hispanic end of Sunset in Echo Park (except for Sea Level itself, a few blocks east of an area where it would get 3 times as much walk-in business, and the two guys near the jugos cart; "Yeah, it's a little like Hrvatski"), to the Beverly/Fairfax district at dusk on Friday, where everyone on foot is Orthodox, sitting next to a table of young Korean-American women w/ wholly Californian speech patterns ("A Dilliard's is kinda like a Macy's"), killing time, writing this, before I forget the city I say I don't love.

2005-06-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

As ritual.

~~~

Did make it to Keren Ann at Tangiers. 80 or so people, maybe didn't seem like a lot, but it was the second night of a two-night stand, w/ a McCabe's show later in the week for the Westsiders, so I guess that's healthy. Banter (hesitant, charming) indicated that she was spending the whole week in town, having come from Nashville -- was she covering "Tenessee Waltz" in NYC, or did she pick it up on the way? Surpised that, except for how damn well she sings, the live presentation is fairly loose -- her two bandmates (where/when did she hook up with a US keyboardist?) are quite adept, but the lack of a rhythm section, and hence in most cases a pulse, and the up-front unslickness of KA's own guitar playing further convince me that there's an indie crowd out there that would like this fine but probably thinks itself too cool, if they think of her at all. There's one off Nolita that I don't care for (disc isn't at hand) but which could easily be a hit if a smart director licensed it; mostly, though, I'm taken with the fact that her best songs ("Spanish Song Bird" esp.) have melodies all the way through, as opposed to a hook plus some glue. Bree's verdict: "She has a pretty voice, and the songs don't all sound the same." From her, this is high praise for anything recorded in the last 40 years.

Young woman who took our money was from the I.E., recognized me from my years of Claremont flanerie, and owned 0pb recs in high school -- which she was kind enough to say she hadn't sold.

~~~

Ok, Mayhew already thought himself past middlebrow, relieving me of the need to complain, though it was the formulation "on an everyday level" I had the most trouble with. (I like the tounge-in-cheek Napoleonic abruptness of his po-reviewing suggestions -- but reviving Sulfur is a seriously good call, though not possible for various reasons -- like Temblor, it depended on a link between the lang generation and NAPoetries that may have been severed or weakened over the last decade or so. Don't forget that L.A. poet Dennis Phillips edited their review section for a long time.) Also, thank you for this -- I was going to complain a few days ago about the fact that smart people waste their time on these "quizzes" constructed by Lord-knows-who (and what's with the horoscope crap on Friendster, by the way?). But then I came up as Langston Hughes!

Similarly, Jordan seems to be well past his centralizing impulse for a "Death Star of poetry reviews", but I gotta say, when he first brought it up, by reaction was -- that would be awful.

Poets having met each other out of poetry!

~~~

Shot and printed screen-caps of Paulette Goddard's dress in Modern Times for a project of Bree's. Made fruitless search, late last night, for anywhere that could sell me a copy of Friedrich Hollaender or The Laughter of Loneliness, a 1996 CD by the Dirk Raulf Orchestra, feat. songs in German and English by Marlene Dietrich's musical right hand, sung by Joerg Ritzenhoff and Dagmar Krause. (The very notion of Krause singing "Just Because We're Kids" from 10,000 Fingers of Dr. T gives me shivers; maybe I don't even need to hear it!) Reading this Catherine Lupton book on Chris Marker -- informative, but ploddingly written, and frustrating in the absence of any way to see most of the films. Also involved w/ Notley's Coming After and Richard Moran's Autonomy & Estrangement which are not exactly about the same thing, but are more closely connected than I'd have imagined.

2005-06-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

Reading yesterday came off reasonably well, I think -- non-shameful attendance, mostly from Jen's list plus a couple people who I didn't know previously but saw it here. I might have had a little too much wine myself to do a good job now of saying anything about the poems, so all I'll say is that the immediate hits were a piece of Jen's that seemed to center around the phrase "poison box," starting as fragments and swiftly ramping up to longer chains of thought, and Joshua's poem to "Peoria, Capital of the Nineteeth Century." Also have to register JC's "covers" -- "The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton," made strange for me by his entirely different cadence, and a couple of sections of "Fresh Air" with poets' names updated: "Is Ponge of our time?" (I swear on my honor that not a week ago I had been thinking, isn't it about time someone writes "Fresh Air" again? Likely a result of reading too many po-blogs.) Bookended by Lee Ann's films (I had suggested alternation, but there were some problems with noisy projector cool-down); I don't know if anyone else did, but I liked the contrast between the relatively direct address of the films -- narrative vignette over blurred, out-the-window images of Vegas; mediation on construction in and around a wash near which, unless I caught the frame wrong, the filmmaker grew up -- with the (differently) abstract character of these particular poets' work. "Abstract" is sloppy there -- like I said, wine.

Oh yes -- there was some background noise from someone practicing blues guitar elsewhere in the building, coming up the atrium. Dispersed, but still annoying. A sort of theme of L.A. readings (probably not much different than any other urb) -- the jukebox from the bar the Smell shares a wall with; the buses that would pass by the first place Andrew held Germ readings every 6 minutes or so, Division Day above Paul V. a couple weeks ago. How tolerable this is always depends on the work -- still, why such difficulty in "finding a space for poetry," even in the most practical sense?

Thanks to everyone, esp. the poets and Kristi for the space. I forgot to collect the $4 from anyone, but then, no one got paid, except in prawns.

~~~

But it happens to musicians too: The first time the Toomey band played "Only A Monster" (voice/piano/cello only) live, we were directly above another SXSW showcase feat. metal bands. Utterly disorienting onstage, though I kind of appreciated the (non-rhythmic) mashup effect.

~~~

Most of what I thought to post re Clark Coolidge has been superseded in the last few days. That said: I'm not going to go around saying that anyone 'must' read him, but I will say that, if one is going to make any presumption of saying anything about him, esp. the early not-so-referential work [Mayhew's comment of 6.8 is accurate], even in the guise of personal preference, one might do well to first read his 1977 talk "Arrangement". (Orig. from one of the Talking Poetics volumes; I didn't know it was online until I looked just now.) Note:

1) Obvious and non-disingenuous humility of the manner he talks about his own work. Not at all perscriptive about whether what he's got to say will be useful for all poets (Ginsberg and Larry Fagin are in the audience and ask questions toward the end).

2) The surprising mix of paths that he cites as leading to what he was doing at the time: Lewis Padgett's story "Mimsy Were the Borogroves," fossils and crystals, Guston, Whalen, Aram Saroyan's one-word poems ("I don't think there is one word"), Parker and Cage. Lovecraft. Drumming is there, but not overwhelmingly -- he doesn't mention that "trilobite trilobites" sounds like a rudiment until someone points it out. And explicitly denies that the smaller poems that he spends the most time on here are rich enough to have anything to do with bop.

3) Concreteness, practicality; I remember liking how several of the talks in those Naropa books (Berrigan's and Padgett's esp.) had this roll-up-our-sleeves-quality. (You know me, the more mythtastic stuff doesn't get me.)

4) Non-combative character of the questions from people who don't get this work. (This may just be that certain battle lines had not been clearly drawn in 1977; or that CC has always stood off to the side of the way he's used by langpos. Interesting that even Bernstein's 1978 piece on Space asks itself, e.g. "Why insist on distance? On being enigmatic? Obscure? Alien? Unknowable?")

5) I had stone forgotten that he quotes La Chinoise!

In sum: About that about which one could with ease read something brief, lucid, engaging, and enlightening but has not, one must remain silent.

Most or all parties with any interest in the preceding will be aware that Space is pdf'd (along with much else) here, but there's the link, for the curious.

~~~

All bears on something I've been working on off and on (typed "on on and on" first), but this isn't that kind of blog. Today.

~~~

Other than Sun. reading and connected socializing, last week was a frustrating week of exhausting myself getting small things (revision, response, organization) done during the day and failing to get to more exciting things I intended to -- in succession, wound up too tired, dispirited, something to make it to John Doe, Sleater Kinney, and the reading connected w/ that UCLA conference Fri. Possibly, typing here that I will go see Keren Ann tomorrow will make me do so instead of staying up much too late dithering tonight and being bleary until late morning, then stressed/slightly behind by the time I ought to get out of the house to the show.

Liking the Maximo Park album 'enough.' Read Kimberly Lyon's Saline, Brian Evenson's Dark Property and The Wavering Knife, Sybille Bedford's A Compass Error ("It's always up to the suitor to present an acceptable brief"). May have a line on an Evanston apt.

2005-06-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

[I want the following to get in front of as many local eyes as possible, so expect no further postage until Mon. Oh -- and check out my guest-post of AF/EC-related songs over at moistworks.]

Please join us for a reading by poets JOSHUA CLOVER and JEN HOFER, with short films by LEE ANN SCHMITT. Bios and links below.

Date and Time: Sunday, June 12; 6 p.m.

Location: Kristi Engle Gallery, 453 S. Spring St., Suite 741
(Spring Arts Tower, 7th Floor); (213)-629-2358

Suggested Donation: $4

~~

Joshua Clover’s books are Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State), The Matrix (British Film Institute), and the forthcoming The Totality for Kids (University of California). His critical and cultural writing appears widely, from the Village Voice to the booklet accompanying a recent DVD issue of Godard’s Band of Outsiders. He lives in Berkeley, and is Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis.

Read "The Map Room."

Jen Hofer is the author of Slide Rule (subpress) and Lawless (Seeing Eye). She is the editor and translator of Sin peurtas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women; her translations of contemporary Mexican poetry are also featured in a recent issue of the journal Aufgabe. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches in The Bridge Program, a free humanities program for low-income adults, works as a court interpreter, and is a founding member of the City of Angels Ladies’ Bicycle Association, a.k.a. The Whirly Girls.

Listen to part of a recent reading.

Lee Ann Schmitt is a writer and director who works in both film and performance, making work that believes that the everyday moments of life can transcend and inspire. Her films include The Wash (2005), Nightingale (2002, Rotterdam Film Festival), and Las Vegas (2001). She lives in Los Angeles, in someone's backyard, trying to keep her few plants alive.

2005-06-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

Pretty ace-looking one-day conference on "Poetry, Pedagogy, and Alternative Internationalisms" at UCLA Friday; familiar names are Lew, Spahr, Buuck, Nowak, all giving papers during the day and readings in the late afternoon. Will try to hit as much as I can.

~~~

Courtesy Angeleno-to-be Bob Massey via betternoise, here's a modest collection of '78s ripped to mp3. Just for starters, consider Billy Murray's 1914 "Fido is a Hot Dog Now". After three listens, I can't make out whether he's suggesting that his dog has been ground up for meat, is among the damned, or both. "He won't get cold feet at that/there's too much mustard where he's at."

~~~

A urinal in China.
The Urinals in China.

~~~

I'm as likely to link to SpicyParis as I am to CampusWatch, but I was interested to learn that the Red, Hot, and Blue-d up version of Cole Porter's "I Love Paris" in the current (sorta banned?) Carl's Jr. commercial is sung by LA's own Eleni Mandell (and produced by one Rob Lopez). I like it: The tempo and generic references shift every eight bars or so, a nice way of underscoring the song's major-to-minor shift. And if it funds a couple more albums of Mandell's Polly-Jean-meets-Tom-Waits-for-a-late-afternoon-drink-at-the-Brown-Derby originals, great -- though it's also another broadcast-rights payday for a TPA estate.

~~~

Rented the once-banned La Petite Soldat, which I'd somehow never seen. (Of pre-'68 features, before the filmography gets completely confusing, that leaves Une femme mairee and Made In U.S.A..) For the first hour, I wanted to say, ah, "politics" here functions merely formally, as "crime" does in Breathless, and this is the way JLG spoke at the time ("I could just as well have invented a story based on the theft of Sophia Loren's jewels. But why not choose something current?"), but by the end I'm not so sure. "Torture is so monotonous and sad, I'll hardly speak of it," before a lengthy sequence of same, graphic for the time. Mainly struck, though, by the number of these early films where the middle third revolves around a drawn-out two-people-in-an-apartment sequence (three in A Woman is a Woman, though this one doesn't have the wit of Breathless or the visual brilliance of Contempt. Not his peppiest flick -- could have used a dance number.

~~~

I think I've compared blog comment-fields to poetics pornography before, but the ones attached to Sillimans' are more like a group snuff-film. Became almost upset enough to enter the fray re some recent inanity around Clark Coolidge, thought better just in time.

2005-06-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

Catching-up:

4 poets Sunday before last at The Smell, all pissed-off in their respective registers: William Moor, new to me, read from a project on the border of 'poetry' per se and sabotage/intervention -- pleasant-sounding but absurd query emails to various U.S. Representatives, mostly in AZ. Sort of a Lazlo Letters effect; see also his collected Amazon reviews. (From a bra review: "Good price for the product, good times for the couple!") Jane Sprague, recently returning to So. Cal. (Long Beach) from upstate NY, was far more direct. From her chapbook Port of Los Angeles:

we found ourselves perfectly pitched at the edge of globalism

the lip

it seemed like a word too big and better suited for the news

or at least CNN

we were transfixed by the ships rolling in

It made sense to learn that her Palm Press has also published Juliana Spahr's things of each possible relation hashing against each other, and Ammiel Alcalay's talk "Poetry, Politics and Translation: American Isolation & The Middle East," the very one at the center of the CampusWatch (which I refuse to dignify with a link) brouhaha.

Taylor Brady, down from SF, alternated between individual poems from his recent Yesterday's News (Factory School) and at least two sheafs of new work -- there was a sense of careful, but not transparent, organization. I've attended few readings in the Bay Area, but I got the distinct sense that this presentation was the result of involvement in a scene where you might be prevailed upon to defend your work. I hope I'm not mistaken of hearing something of Watten (there's a calm to his line, however socially fraught the content), perhaps also Daniel Davidson and Steve Farmer. (Though there also touches of a more 'pop' voice: "The only good ending would have been if Virgil came back to say, 'Uhhh, dude? You seriously left your keys at my place." I see a bit more of this in the book than in the particular selection he read.) The prose epilogue (not read) makes clear that this project is about trying to find not a defense, but a necessary role for ["abstract"?] lyric in the face of "an expanding series of accumulation crises in the progression from the first Gulf War, though the twelve years of tributary sanctions maintained by a murderous bombing campaign, to the abrupt shift from the tribute system to outright recolonization." (See also his thoughtful, infrequently posted-to inflection point.)

Final, co-series organizer Stan Apps, with whose varied online presence I was more familiar than his poems-qua-poems. Damn. I have to say that this was the evening's work that affected me most strongly, using metaphysical wit and a subtle plain-ness of statement as corrosives against unsustainable world-views. I wish I could quote a new poem about an unnamed legislative body's attempts to draft a proclamation on what objects count as "real" (hamburgers do, apparently). But his new Soft Hands (Ugly Duckling) had the juice as well:

So the reason you are not getting paid very much,
as it turns out, is that the work you are doing
is not really very useful.

["Poem With One Paranoid Sentence"]

(if sexy people were the only form of money,
the sexiest of them would have to live in banks,
reading about debt to foreign sex.)

["J'Adore L'Idee De Vous"]

Didn't resist the book table, as all of the above indicates.

~~~

2 pre-codes, a Creeley tribute at Skylight, and Losey's draggy Eva in the last few days -- and a fascinating history-of-philosophy-of-science colloquium on Hans Reichenbach. Don't know quite what I'll get to describing more fully.

2005-06-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

I presume the spike in attendance in the wake of yesterday's Alex Ross/J-Hop/Voice "blog rock" sidebar* linkage trifecta won't last, but while it does, let's make like Jon Bon Jovi and Pay It Forward:

A consortium of critics from Alex Abramovich to Yancey Strickler have a newish mp3 blog, Moistworks, that you should visit. (See esp. 5/24-25 for country standards covered by soul and jazz greats.)

I love the covers-blog copy, right. This week: All "Reaper," all the time.

Mungbeing is a new webazine (organized into "issues" and everything) edited by Mark Givens and jody franklin. It's all over the map -- in the first issue, you can find an exclusive track by The Congress, Mark's collaboration w/ John Darnielle, who also contributes a short poem.

[Mark is also the man behind hostitles (corporate brand identity or concrete poetry?), and 1/2 of Wckr Spgt, whose body of work is so overwhelming that I'll just start you off with "Freud Was Right".]

And I'd be amiss if I didn't end with some vitamins for your eyes.

*now with free line edit!

~~~

Content of the usual sort later today, depending on what else gets done. [Update: No way -- plumbers in the apt. since 10 a.m.]

2005-06-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

Find of (last) month: OCR of The Littlest Revue, a 1956 Ben Bagley production that ran 23 performances on Broadway, despite the combined talents of Joel Grey, Tammy Grimes, Charlotte Rae, and Larry Storch, and songs mostly by Vernon Duke and Ogden Nash, but with contributions from Sheldon Harnick ("The Shape of Things," revived by Blossom Dearie), Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (of "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" fame), and an opening number credited to John Latouche, Kenward Elmslie, and John Strauss, a meta-curtain raiser consisting of descriptions/sections of elaborate production numbers that the cast won't be able to put on, these in turn being satires on typical modes of the day (very like the sort of thing the Comden/Green/Judy Holliday "Revuers" were doing in the '40s). For instance, there's a parody of the cloying adults-playing-children number "Penny Candy," from New Faces of 1957. I don't know anything about John Strauss, and the nature of the piece makes it hard to say who wrote what, but tell me you don't hear KE here:

"we don't have swimming pools or baby pink spots
we don't have Madame Dietrich or The Inkspots"

and so forth.

~~~

If you're interested in the Boston-deb-cum-Unsinkable Molly Brown star Tammy Grimes, here's a thorough overview, right down to her audiobook of Daisy Miller. (What this is doing on an emusic page for the 20th-c.-classical piano duo Quattro Mani, I'm not sure.)

~~~

Close second, the Wexner's bulky catalog for Helio Oiticia's photo and film work, marked down to $4.98 for a ripped outer cover.

~~~

Otherwise, just feeding off some SFJ recommendations -- Feist (w/ Blossom Dearie covers!), Oxford Collapse (along w/ Oranges Band, best could-have-been-on-Homestead act in years). And Annie's "Heartbeat," which is swell but not, I understand, a patch on the album.

2005-06-01T16:45:00.000-07:00

Not going to get anything more substantial done in the next hour or two, so I'm back.

Monday had me listening to NPR, and this next bit won't work unless I own up to patronizing a Starbuck's, on the Atwater Village/Glendale border, near some big box stores (with vast parking lots that are much more I.E. than L.A.) where I was searching unsuccesfully for an appropriate digital camera. So, Bree is patiently listening to my running commentary on the instore music -- their usual soft-alt mix, with a liberal sprinkling of Calexico-and-extended-family. (Count me in: I gather that portions of Tempted were in rotation in late 2003, though I never heard it and rec'd a miniscule royalty check 9 mos. later.) Sweet enough cover of "On the Front Porch," a Sherman Bros. tune introduced by Burl Ives in Disney's Summer Magic; and an offensively dull one of Bobby Fuller's "Let Her Dance." (Haven't been able to track down who performed either of these versions -- I know from experience that the barristas know nothing except that this is the disc sent by corporate this fortnight.)

Then comes "Up The Wolves" from The Sunset Tree, affording me the chance to review my electric-piano part with an immediate shock of alienation. (I have to interject here: The studio was in most-respects top flight, but their in-house Wurlitzer may have been the most unresponsive keyboard I have played since UHS jazz band. On the upside, Scott and John V. are to be thanked for checking my Steely Dan tendencies -- only bad, I hasten to add, b/c the styles beyond my technique.) Is it like this for, I don't know, Clem Snide's bass player? This is a particularly weird song to be paying attention to in a public space where no one else is: "It's gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage." I don't know quite what I'm after here, really: just the strangeness of hearing even this insistent, lyrically and vocally harsh music (this is one of the less measured performances on the album) made a bit innocuous -- I'm just going by the fact that none of the patrons' heads exploded -- by volume and environment. And just the disconnect between being a part (however inessential) of a record that is making its way in the world rather nicely and my lack of identification as a "musician" as I go about my day, which is by now nearly complete.

(Addenda: Liz Clayton reports hearing John's voice emanating from another 'Buck's adjoining a Sears where she was buying pants for her boyfriend. My other recent MG-in-public experiences have been a touch more boho: Most of Tallahassee in Skylight Books on Vermont [where I'm not sure they'll give me a reading for AF], and "Love Love Love" in Nature Mart, the pleasantly old-school health-food store on Hillhurst [where Rael recently spotted k.d. lang buying in bulk], as part of an "Indie 103" Sun. eve. 'new music' show, directly between the Mekons' cover of "Heart of Stone" and Angels of Light. Listened for the back-announce, but I've forgotten what the guy said -- something about boomboxes, probably.)

~~~

Orthogonally, I wonder exactly what I was doing at the moment Ange was reading one of my poems (I had no idea!) at the Hat launch. Hmm, 7 p.m.-ish EST, 4-ish here -- yeah, I'd have been getting off the already choked 101 South to find a side-street route to Bree's.

~~~

Somewhere in between, vegetarian snack at India Sweets & Spices, Los Feliz branch, where I tried a canned ginger beer labelled "Fiery...Try it if you dare!" that completely failed to live up to its billing, and noted a large poster for Pillsbury's line of roti, naan and so forth -- tacked up in unseemly proximity to a sign reading "Religious Posters $3.99."

2005-06-01T15:33:00.001-07:00

Want to report on Sunday's Smell reading and a few other things, but I really screwed up my sleep cycle yesterday somehow, so just some linkage for today.

I see over at Simon Reynolds' blissbog that Rip It Up & Start Again, his book on postpunk, won't be out in the U.S. until 2006, apparently in a shortened version. Thinking I'll have to order the director's cut from the UK (I just took delivery on Morley's Words and Music, though that found a domestic home at University of Georgia Press). For now, one can download two chapters of Reynolds' discographical backmatter -- essays in their own right, really.

See also this antifesto by another Simon, contra "Razorlight, Maximo Park, the Killers, the Futureheads and the rest of your terminally conservative NME family." In most moods I agree, though there's always the worry that wanting 'more' than what's 'not enough' from one's rock is also problematic.

I'm sure I have readers that are already well up on this, but for those that aren't, might as well register the first-ever ringtone to hit #1 in the U.K. (Sorry the video's not loading, at least for me, on that first link. Note also that the U.K. charts now include downloads -- how is this playing out in the U.S.? -- but that the track has also been released as a CD single.)

This has gone subscriber-only since I saw it, but if you're inclined: WSJ presents Steely Dan/Doobies gtrist Skunk Baxter. Mindbending. (Thanks to Liz Bustamente of betternoise.) Note well -- he cheerfully admits that turntables are instruments, so even though he's a defense consultant, at least he's not a rockist.

2005-05-30T19:54:00.000-07:00

"This permanent, precise labor of documentation and denunciation, this molelike activity, this is what interests me."

--French left-wing publisher Francois Maspero, quoted in Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives

~~~

Confession: I spend much more time listening to NPR and complaining to myself about half-truths and don't-rock-the-boat sharing-the-assumptions "analyses" disguised as "balance" than I do placing myself in the path of our Pacifica outlet, far less smooth and far less comforting. (As I write, the latter is several hours into a series of fulminating talks from a conference on media bias.) But, if I didn't, I wouldn't have heard, slipped into the especially entertaining and tepid Day to Day, this short Memorial Day piece by the great Joe Frank, sounding, as he has for years, as though he only made it on-air by a long chain of unlikely failures of gatekeeping. Not paying attention to the intro, I thought at first it was part of a re-enactment of Norman Corwin's famous "On a Note of Triumph" victory broadcast, which I had heard was being rebroadcast sometime today. But, as you'll hear, Frank takes a turn. (I am certain that the opening is intended to be a Corwin parody -- this must have been strange for older listeners.) Is it good or bad that this is perhaps defused a bit by being clearly billed as a "poem" in the introduction? Either way, I wouldn't want to be their ombusdman this week.