Thursday, January 31, 2019

The Song Of Capitalism Exhausting Itself

A Message To Our Stockholders



In just two weeks, we have 250 page views. By the standards of 1995, k-postpunk would be considered an extremely influential and important zine. By the standards of 2019, it can only be considered a commercial failure.

Bad Faith Campaigning - No One Is To Be Trusted Not Even Ourselves

I'm not going to write his name out, in order to pretend I'm somehow above the fray, and to keep the rich stupid prick from getting the attention he so desperately craves (who are we kidding, he's already getting the attention). Let's write it out as H0ward $chultz.

None of this should be taken at face value. Nobody's intentions are to be trusted. I don't believe a singl thing about H0ward $chultz, other than he wants attention. Same goes for the people talking about him on the tv. Same for the people dragging him on Twitter. Same for the people pointing out, "Well actually FDR hasn't been president in 75 years and wanted to tax the rich." What makes you think H0ward $chultz doesn't know that? Him saying that is why everyone was talking about him yesterday instead of say, Jay Inslee (Inslee, much like my 12-year-old cat, would make a better president than H0ward $chultz).

The first goal of 21st century US life is to get attention. The second goal is to figure out how to monetize that attention. The third goal is to use that to get more attention. The fourth goal is to use that attention to get more money. I think the fifth goal is to never die. I'm not sure on that one.

Because H0ward $chultz, and the people who talk about H0ward $chultz, are all trying to fulfill goals 1-4, nothing any of them--even the people you or I might agree with--can be taken at face value. I've written elsewhere that this entire country is just one bad faith argument, and the chatter around H0ward $chultz is the perfect embodiment of this. When he says he was motivated to run by the (hypothetical, long-way-off) policy ideas of Alexandria Ocasio-C0rtez, Schultz isn't just stating his policy positions, he's using her celebrity to signal boost himself. Talk about the thing that everyone's talking about and you're more likely to be noticed.

That's true of cultural critics as well. With everything quantified and trackable, you learn real quick, wherever you are in the culture/entertainment industry (which, at this point, pretty much everything, including our politics, is definitely in that industry), you're guaranteed to get bigger numbers talking about something popular or trendy than by trying to champion something you think should get more attention.

It should be noted that the word "talking" refers to all contemporary vehicles of communication--print, website, social media, podcasting, screaming in an empty room, etc.

So anything H0ward $chultz says, or anything anyone says about him, even the historian in my Twitter feed who issued that devastating takedown of H0ward $chultz's campaign ideas (both those last words should be put in quotes to clearly point out their bullshit factor--so "campaign" "ideas"), are communicating in bad faith. Because that historian, or that pundit, or that op-ed columnist could be writing about Andrew Yang (look him up). But they aren't, because people are more likely to pay attention to them paying attention to H0ward $chultz than if they pay attention to Andrew Yang.

I mean, look at this account retweeting the ABC account fellating the H0ward $chultz account. I saw it because it was retweeted by an account I follow, a writer for what used to be called Gawker Media Account.


The NYT reporter is right, of course, but so what. Should we assume that ABC News, or Rick Klein don't already know this? Should we assume they even care about being correct? There is no better way to get attention that saying something hyperbolic and ridiculous.The stupid people who see the hyperbole will believe it, and the  intelligent people won't be able to resist their attempt to publicly demonstrate their superiority.

We are all compromised compromisers, attention addicts looking for the next fix. I am not immune to any of this, though I'm working to be more aware.

Even the company H0ward $chultz used to run makes him more marketable as a celebrity candidate than if he had been the CEO of, say, Auto Zone, or even Dunkin Donuts. Coffee, particularly gourmet coffee, conveys a certain status, a certain branding panache. If the CEO of Dollar General announced his (or hers, I have no idea who the CEO there is, but, y'know, playing the odds) candidacy, and that he (or she) was running on a pro-wealthy platform, and had a history of union-busting during their CEO days, they'd be seen as a reactionary, no-hoper. And while H0ward $chultz is all of those things, because his self-brand conjures up images of Seattle, Starbucks, images of liberalism. So even though H0ward $chultz is on record as calling universal health care "not American," his right-wing Randian horseshit can be counterbalanced by the things associated with him so that he can present himself as a centrist. And yeah, I know that hating unions and universal health care is about as "centrist" as it gets, but the Democratic party has been evolving away from that since 2008. In 2018, H0ward $chultz embodies the worst aspects of everything left of Ted Cruz. His policies are stupid, cruel, self-serving, and it's only the presence of that flabby, self-hating, waxen lump currently in the White House that keeps me from laughing at the whole goddamn pathetic spectacle.

But this isn't a political campaign, it's free publicity (once you discount whatever he's paying his PR people, of course). The only way to win is to deny this asshole the attention he's so desperately craving.

Note: While I was writing this, D0nald Tr*mp Jrrrr abbreviated the TV show Saturday Night Live as "S&L." People are currently tripping over themselves to laugh at his stupidity, but ask yourself this question. Would his message have reached as many people if he had written SNL? Also, never assume your audience holds the same views that you do. And remember that as you signal boost what, to you, seems like stupidity, his mocking of universal health care and reproductive rights is being transmitted all over the internet.

Vital Idles - "Cave Raised"

The rest of the album is absolutely fine. It sounds like the sounds that I like. But there's something about this song, this song in particular, that refuses to leave me alone. Maybe it's because I can't find the lyrics online, and so it forces me to slow down, I'm forced to allow the song to gradually reveal itself to me, the way music used to in the old days (IN THE OLD DAYS). And so my relationship with this song is less Tinder-based instant (semi) gratification and more like falling in love. Shall we dance.



This is from one of Bandcamp's Albums of 2018. If the system by which music is connected to listeners through critics and labels is completely fucking broken (and it is), in the sense that the actual music itself--its power to move, shock, surprise, and entertain--is, shall we say, low on the priority list of what critics and labels are looking for, below things like conventionally attractive physical appearance, self-promotion skills, and intra-industry connectedness, then Bandcamp is pretty much the lastest, bestest hope for reversing that trend. Although even if it does, it will one day also morph into industry-controlled hackdom. They all do. Power and money corrupt and all that.

But back to the song. Vital Idles are from Glasgow, but they are also from 21st century dystopic western culture. That is to say they sing of project managers and frustrated ambitions in a voice of proud defeat. Because everything is hard, they struggle to find the beauty in everything being hard. In this song, they find that beauty right around the two minute mark, turning the song from Hip Priest(ess) to holy transubstantiation, blood into bliss.

I am still in the process of falling in love, and so I will admit I don't know everything about this song. The best part is built like water.  And then later, The best part is rare and unexpected. These are human beings who understand things, and feel the need to communicate this understanding with as much passion and intelligence as they can muster. We can compare it to things, if you're the kind of person who likes to know where they stand (spoiler alert: the ground is shifting too much for anything resembling certainty). Young Marble Giants, Fall, Life Without Buildings. But you would do yourself, and do Vital Idles, a disservice by pinning them down, by not allowing themselves to gradually reveal themselves to you. If you're able to be patient, there's nothing in this world you can't accomplish.

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Marfa Syndrome

In the kind of twist that is the reason why this blog exists, Bradford Cox, frontperson of Deerhunter and sufferer of Marfan Syndrome (unlike me who is a sufferer of Deerhunter and...that's it), recorded his band's latest album in Marfa, Texas, a town that's like the town in No Country For Old Men if the serial killer was Terry Gross. Don't worry. It's just as boring and predictable--the album, as well as the town--as you'd expect. But imagine going to a gentrified bowl of dried oatmeal for inspiration. Crazy. Bradford Cox is truly the Ben Lerner of rock or something. You think I'm kidding?

 

Here's an article about how people who have lied in Marfa for decades, long before it became a mecca for the fashionably wealth artistic set, are getting fucked by the fashion. In the above video, the Deerhunters treat the town like the poverty tourists they've always been.

Fortunes changed for Marfa, and adobe, when the sculptor Donald Judd arrived in the 1970s and turned its empty expanses into something of a vast outdoor studio. Marfa came to signify something within the art world, people from far reaches traveled to the desert to see it, and the prices of things began to reflect the cities they came from.

Here's another quote from the NYT article.

Marfa, with fewer than 2,000 full-time residents, doesn’t have a mechanic, but it has a public radio station, and the Marfa Book Company carries an art section that rivals niche bookstores in New York. It’s a town that feeds on its pointed self-awareness: a greasy spoon called “Bad Hombres,” owned by the town’s justice of the peace, stop signs spray-painted to read “Stop Talking.”  

Actually, feeding on its pointed self-awareness might also be the best description of Deerhunter ever written.

The Jeff Mangum Truther Movement Begins Here

It's a hell of a lot easier to believe than the-earth-is-flat or the-moon-landing-was-a-hoax or Paul-McCartney-is-dead. In the process of tumbling through a squirrel-hole of 90's altrock/powerpop, I experienced a revelation, what short story theorists like to call an epiphany.

There is no such person as Jeff Mangum. It's possible there never was.

The person people call Jeff Mangum, known as the leader/mastermind of iconic underground band Neutral Milk Hotel was the creation of one Matthew Sweet. Taking a cue from the way  multi-platinum megastar Garth Brooks created a Chris Gaines persona in order to explore different creative avenues and ideas that were impossible for him to follow as Garth Brooks, Sweet--a not-quite-platinum, person-who-occasionally-appeared-on-Mtv-after-11pm, created Jeff Mangum as a way to get out from under the burden of being Matthew Sweet.

First, let's look at Sweet in action.



Yes, that is Dennis Miller, whose early 90's talk show, and the curiously good quality of his musical guests, to say nothing of Miller's descent into knee-jerk right-wing hackery, is worthy of its own article. But we don't have the energy for that. Instead, notice Matthew Sweet's physical appearance, his mannerisms & haircut & voice. Now watch this clip of Jeff Mangum, or should we say "Jeff Mangum."



You can't tell me that's not the same guy. Well, I guess you can tell me. But I won't believe you. Because I believe that my theory makes sense.

Some more evidence:

Did you know that Matthew Sweet used to live in Athens? It's true. He moved to the town in the early/mid-80s to pursue his musical dreams of fame & fortune. He quickly joined (the wonderful, outstanding) Athens group Oh-Ok, a position that he just as quickly turned into a solo major label deal with A&M records and moved to NYC. After two shitty records on A&M, he signed to something called Zoo Records, he assembled a dream backing band (the clip above features Robert Quine, Sara Lee, and a person who looks like Peter Holsapple but may be the guy from Guadalcanal Diary, who between them had a resume that included Richard Hell, Lou Reed, Gang of Four, B-52's, and possibly, uh, Guadalcanal Diary. The drummer played in Mr. Mister and on XTC's Oranges and Lemons, an album that XTC fans either love more than it deserves or hate more than it deserves.

But we're getting off track. By 1995, Sweet as a fixture on alternative radio, tied to a major label deal. That year he had a hit that signaled, loudly & clearly, that he was tired of being..well...himself.


He was tired of washing his hair (look how shiny it is!). He was tired of playing with NYC pros (that's Ivan Julian on guitar! and a drummer who definitely showed up for the gig!). Watch the clip all the way to the end and see how Sweet cranks up all his pedals at the end to create some psychedelic pulsating noise. This is a man yearning to break free from the constraints of conventional pop/rock three minute direct commercial communication. He knew Zoo Records wouldn't indulge his experimental tendencies, his anxiousness to pull a reverse Dylan and "go acoustic." He needed to find a small label, one that would let him do whatever he wanted, one that would be able to keep a secret.

So he contacted Merge Records, knowing that label owner Mac shared his disdain for major labels, to the degree that Mac's band Superchunk left Matador Records because the label signed a distribution deal with Atlantic. Then Sweet returned to Athens and put a band together for his new project, dubbed Neutral Milk Hotel.



It was a good prank. His first album, On Avery Island, garnered good reviews. The backstory he had constructed--this eccentric guy Jeff had grown up in a place called Ruston, Louisiana and made music with his friends--was both believable enough and implausible enough that no one would question it.  Even as Sweet continued to fulfill his contractual obligations to Zoo with the 1997 album Blue Sky On Mars, he was simultaneously crafting the next Neutral Milk Hotel album. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea turned out to be more than Sweet had bargained for. Oscar Wilde once said, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." ItAOtS catapulted Sweet into a different place altogether, beloved cult artist. The album created a kind of obsession among its fans, a desire to know more, to know everything, about the person who create such an incredible, moving piece of work. People began to dig. They began to ask questions.

Matthew Sweet knew that if people uncovered the truth, that the album would lose some of its magic. He had a hard choice to make. The situation had become untenable. His desperate bid for creative freedom had turned out to be yet one more trap.

Neutral Milk Hotel would never make another album. It would be nearly 15 years before Sweet, heavily bearded and paranoid about being photographed, would play another show as "Jeff Mangum." In the meantime, he left Zoo Records, continuing to release albums. 1999's In Reverse feels like Sweet's attempt to shoehorn elements of his "Elephant Six" experiments--horns, backwards guitars--into the fuzzy power-pop he was better known for. It was a compromise that satisfied no one, least of all Sweet. In his attempt to create a second identity for himself, he merely found himself more confused than ever. Here's one of his later songs, featuring a facial-haired Sweet singing a song called Hide that could easily be interpreted as being about his experience as Jeff Mangum. As the chorus says, "You hide everything you can / But the world keeps breaking through / Anywhere you run, and it always will."




To borrow one more line from Matthew Sweet, you cannot hide from the ugly truth. Matthew Sweet is/was Jeff Mangum.

Monday, January 28, 2019

The Algorithm's Gonna Get You #2 Karen O and Danger Mouse - "Woman"

I don't care that it's basically just Pumped Up Kicks with a better singer. I don't care that I can't tell if this is Karen O sounding like PJ Harvey or Karen O sounding like PJ Harvey sounding like Karen O. I don't care that it sounds like Danger Mouse sounding like Danger Mouse. I am interested in the fact that this doesn't sound cool enough to be important in the cool places, while also not sounding commercial enough to be important in the commercial places, but I'm not that interested.

Back when CD Box Sets performed an essential function, Rhino unleashed a flurry of genre-based box sets in R&B, Alt-Rock, Brit-bop, Nuggets, Children of Nuggets, 80's, 90's, etc. But probably the best, or at least definitely my favorite is the Girl Group compilation. This song reminds me of that. With Karen O singing all the parts herself, a nice 21st century update. It's all the Karen O's that make the song, Every Karen O, the "doo-doo-doo" background singer, the frontwoman, the "hey-ah-hey" background singers, the "I'm a woman I'm a woman" background singers, all sing the absolute shit out of this song. "Woman" needs to be heard on the radio, unexpectedly in public, to inflict its potential damage. On the right radio, at the right time, it could change someone's life.



Not mine. Probably not yours. But there are people out there who need this, dental assistants and elementary school secretaries, cheerleaders and undergrads. And it breaks my heart to think this probably won't reach them. But then the systems through which music is filtered through and delivered to music listeners has been broken for quite some time now. That's true regardless of your genre, regardless of your pre-conceived sensibilities.

Stray Incoherent Thoughts About Jenn Pelly's The Raincoats, A 33 1/3 Book



I've approached this thing from about three different angles, and I'm still having trouble finding the right tone. A decade ago, I would have just ranted into the abyss about everything that bothers me about this book. I would have drawn blood, not for the sake of drawing blood, but in the hope of changing the world. A couple of years ago, I would have worked and re-worked this with a scalpel until every argument was support with ample evidence. Now, I just want to be done with it. A big part of this blog's experiment is the attempt to exploit the space created by semi-deliberate obscurity & anonymity to find a freedom in writing and thinking that I feel I've lost track of. 


The more I work on this, the worse that it gets. The more examples I include, the more it comes across like I'm obsessed, when really I'm just annoyed. I think maybe I should just post what I have, the random fragments, wash my hands, and move on. To be fair, Pelly's book feels a little random-fragmented itself.

It hurts to hear the band described as "outsider artists," or Pelly using the phrase "crude musicianship." Compared to who? First off, I think Palmolive's one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock.  My partner wrote an angry letter to Simon Reynolds after he made disparaging remarks in his postpunk book (the book before the one where he complained about people living in the past). Reynolds wrote back apologizing, and admitted he'd never heard any of their Peel Sessions stuff. Anyway, here's one of the greatest drumming performances in the history of rock. That's Palomolive, who was the drummer for The Raincoats album.






Second, I challenge anyone to play these songs. Third, there is nothing crude about the ability to stop and start, and speed up, in unison. If we define musicianship as the ability to listen

The book opens with Pelly asking the question, "Who gets to be a part of history and why, and in what capacity and to what extent? I guess that could be three questions, but they all go unanswered. It


So I bought the 33 1/3 Raincoats book. I was passing through Asheville, NC on the way to some place else and stopped at the radical-leftist bookstore. I had reservations. I've never been a fan of Jenn Pelly's writing, which adheres a little too closely to the Pitchfork house style for my tastes. Still, I love that goddamn album so much, have loved it since the late 90's when I got it through a music club mail-order scam I pulled upon arriving at Boston (There are 12 people in this house! I can make up any name I want!). I still have that same DGC CD, complete with liner notes from Kurt Cobain--those notes are reproduced in full here.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy it. As much as I have loved and continue to love this album, as much as so many parts of the album have been a mystery to me, a mystery I've half-heartedly maintained for the most part, because I was afraid the mystery might be an essential part of the album (there are albums and song I've never learned on guitar for similar reasons--that it might shatter something intangible about the listening experience). But I was standing there in a radical-left bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina on my way to somewhere else, and I wanted to support this bookstore. So I bought it. I paid my own personal, hard-earned money, over an hour's worth of work at the dystopian low-wage job I currently do part-time while waiting (endlessly) as a book proposal winds its way through the labyrinth bureaucracy of an academic press.


I expected the book to be boring. But I expected the story to be exciting, because the story is about the first Raincoats album, and a story about the first Raincoats album could never be boring. Even if a writer tried to make it boring, they couldn't. There's too much there there. That's one of the sources of its power; it can't be turned into something else.


My expectations turned out to be true. That's not a boast. I would have liked the book to be as exciting, and anarchic, and fun, and filled with a poetry that is both direct and abstract at the same time, as the music itself. The fact that Jenn Pelly chose not to write the book, or lacked the courage, or the poetry, to write that book doesn't fill me with joy, or even a smug satisfaction. It makes me sad and angry at the world.


This disappointment is why I've never liked being called a cynic.


Pelly's book is, on the surface, a competently written book about the first album by UK band The Raincoats. It's written in the dry, informative conformist style that defines contemporary music writing. Pelly offers no opinions that she isn't already sure her target audience agrees with. The book's target audience appears to be the writers/editors/musicians she admires and/or wants to work with in the future. As such, the book risks nothing, to the point where you end up wondering if Pelly would be writing about The Raincoats (whose album, and lives at the time, risked everything) if it wasn't already a pre-approved part of the rockcrit canon in the circles where she travles. My favorite line in Pelly's book is a sentence from Caroline Coon, a punk writer at Melody Maker, who says you could write an entire history of punk and never include any men. It's provocative. It challenges conventional wisdom. It makes you think. And it is, from a certain perspective, not just true, but true in a way that makes you hear the genre differently. It is also, in all these respects, what is missing from Pelly's book.


A friend recently joked about how music writers use exclamation points all the time in their e-mails/social media/chats/etc., but never use them in their reviews, the point being that it's acceptable to show enthusiasm for one's self, but not the music--that music writing needs to be cool, distanced, calculating, dispassionate. It says a lot that Pelly's writing becomes the most excitingly unstable when she tells a story of seeing the Raincoats live and Gina Birch is wearing a pair of the pants with the title of an Angel Olsen song on it. Turns out Pelly had recommended Olsen's Burn Your Fire For No Witness to Ana da Silva when the two were visiting Rough Trade Shops.


i'm sure the band's live shows were sloppy, but the album is (to use an ugly masculine term) tight as hell. Nirvana were also known for their sloppy live show. I mean, by any standard of musicianship you want to apply--technical ability, originality, being "locked-in" or "tight," complexity--this is just out & out phenomenal.





 Or In Love, or any of it. This album's great. It's way tighter than, say, Swell Maps, or early Pavement. It bothers me that Pelly only hears The Raincoats influence on female bands. It's the laziest, most sexist critical argument, and it should be eradicated. Or maybe I'm jut made she didn't mention Look Blue Go Purple, or Electrelane. I mean, I don't know, let's see...sloppy, wordy, alienated...Look, there's actually an interesting conversation, or chapter, to be had about what it means to be a good musician, or a "good musician," or a "good" musician, or even a good "musician." But this book doesn't really explore anything, it jumps from thing to thing without ever really coming back to the thing, to the point where you have more questions at the end than you did when you started. But as long as we're on the subject, there is a sexist, misogynist way of speaking about musicianship that needs to immediately die. It is assumed when a male band is sloppy, like say PiL or Neutral Milk Hotel or Pavement, that the band is making a deliberate choice, an artistic statement, a protest of sorts. It is assumed, when women do this, that they just couldn't be bothered to learn how to play, or at best, that they value inspiration over technique. And in the case of The Raincoats, I would just ask anyone to pick up a bass, or sit behind a drum set, and attempt to do anything that Palmolive or Gina Birch do. Their parts are complicated, challenging, and always in time. So like, I don't know, fuck of or something.


It's okay to criticize things, even if it means hurting someone's feelings. I mean, we're only criticizing a thing, an artifact of production, not the person's essence. Besides, Jenn Pelly is a product of her environment, the inevitable result of aspiring to write about music for a living (or for a slow, prolonged death--depending on your perspective) during this specific period of existence. And while she may be guilty of perpetuating a certain mindset & style that I, for one, at least, can't read without rolling my eyes and gagging down my sleeve, she sure as shit didn't create that mindset & style. And she sure as shit isn't the person profiting the most from it. So as we go through this book, a book that hedges its bets when it should aim for the stars, and engages in hyperbole when it should probably consider walking back that bold claim, a book that appears to be written with one hand patting the writer on the back and the other hand frantically waving for attention--to the point where we feel compelled to compliment Pelly on her nimble toes, or especially sharp nose, with which she used to type out the manuscript, as we (where was I, oh yeah) as we go through this book, it is important to bear in mind that the book's specific failures aren't so much the fault of Pelly as it is the fault of the economic scarcity and fierce competition that define this era of late (I fucking hope) capitalism. And while we can criticize Pelly's conformity dressed up as rebellion and brand her a coward. Life in the neoliberal era, even for a writer who grew up (I'm more than willing to bet the money I don't have) in a more privileged situation than I've ever known, makes cowards and bootlickers of us all, at least in some situations. I have written about Pelly's book, not because I have a bone to pick with her, or because she's a woman, or because she didn't grow up in an apartment complex, I've written about the book because it clearly and easily illuminates the problems/limitations of nearly all for-profit music writing today. 

Here's some more random thoughts:

she constantly praises the raincoats for doing things that she herself would never do (disruption, rebellion, etc.), and be unable to recognize for herself if someone else was doing them.

There's nothing wrong with self-promotion, but the only thing Pelly's promoting here (beyond the album she's writing about) is Jenn Pelly. And while I'm sure the person, and even the writer, Jenn Pelly has potential unexplored depths that have yet to surface in her writing. What's ultimately being promoted here is conformity disguised as edginess.
the book's great for the info we get from the raincoats. I learned a lot about the band, and the album, and came away loving both more than ever.
I listened to the album today after I got home from work and was shoveling in my lunch. That band fucking shreds, and they're tight as hell.
but she asks a lot of questions that never get answered, that are easily answerable if you're willing to indict patriarchy or capitalism, etc.
and she REALLY doesn't give them their due as musicians
and she likes to talk about how they've personally affected her, but never gives any examples except for the Angel Olsen thing
also, bikini kill and the raincoats have nothing in common aside from being women (mostly women in the case of BK)
also it's obvious the only books she's read are the ones that appeared on he college syllabuses (syllabi?).
like, to me, i think of Dostoevsky and Kafka when i think of urban alienation. She thinks of Chris Krauss.
Pelly always talks about being out in the city, but my time spent living in cities felt mostly indoors, mostly isolated. It's that feeling I connected with in the Raincoats music, the loneliness of being in a city, self-conscious because everyone's looking at you, but also feeling invisible at the same time. 
There isn't a single cultural reference that isn't trendy and/or popular within the white college-educated set (except for Calvin Johnson, whose penchant for underage girls, to say nothing of K records artists making more off Spotify than off their record label, makes him kinda toxic in my opinion, but maybe no one's told her). And there are a LOT of cultural references.
the book is such a work of kiss-ass that it should come with her CV attached at the end.
and fuck jenn pelly trying to pass herself off as a feminist champion while parroting the same tired sexist narrative that's plagued this band for decades. 

Friday, January 25, 2019

Seven Against Thebes

Some time however many months ago I picked up a copy of Seven Against Thebes, a translation of the Aeschylus play at the local Goodwill. I put it on the bookshelf where the books go that I haven't read yet. Earlier today I needed something to read while I was taking a bath, because otherwise I would be left to my thoughts, and allah knows where they might roam. So I grabbed the book off the shelf and almost made it all the way through the introduction before the water began to get cold and it was time to get out. None of which means anything until I found myself with a couple of hours to kill before school got out, so I decided to treat myself to a movie (I am working nights these days, with more free time to myself during the day).

Our TV options are limited to the Roku box attached to our television. Luckily I live with an academic-in-training so we're eligible for Kanopy, a site that...well, hell, I'll just let them tell you. 
Kanopy is an on-demand streaming video platform for public libraries and educational institutions that offers viewers a large collection of award-winning films and documentaries.

And life being what passes for life during this our lifetimes, I've got over 100 movies in our watchlist that I haven't seen. Today, with two hours to waste, I decided to dive into the first part of the Out series, a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette that, in its entirety lasts nearly 13 hours, or about the time it takes to walk from Boston, Massachusetts to Worcester., or drive from Tucson, Arizona to San Francisco. Anyway, the opening scene features a group of actors rehearsing a scene from a play. And the play is Seven Against Thebes. The world we live in is meaningful, in the sense that seemingly random events can coalesce into something that resembles coherence.  And it is meaningless in the sense that this coherence ultimately isn't worth shit. Here's a trailer for the film, if you're interested. I'm about a half hour in, and I can say it's perfectly fine so far. Though it is jarringly uncanny watching a 1971 film in HD (my partner's dad got us a new TV when our TV broke!), but that's a post for another time.

Manifesto


Image result for manifesto

The point of any manifesto is to set one's self up as a righteous alternative, beyond the touch of the material world, and then betray every single on of your principles the second someone offers you enough money. It's, in a phrase from that old Cocteau flick, a "tale as old as time." But I have no principles beyond self-preservation. And in a sense, I betrayed that principle a long time ago.

This blog is an experiment, an attempt to cultivate some kind of freedom in a setting (both geographic & cyber) that feels less free every day. It's an attempt to enjoy myself while doing something that probably looks, to the outside eye, as something that isn't very fun at all. There's an old Bob Dylan quote somewhere about getting his kicks from people spitting on him or something.

I'm not looking to be covered in spit, or dollars, or gratitude, or (puke) social capital. Attention from others is only part of this experiment. For example, yesterday this blog has 24 page views, which is pretty good considering I've made a rule that it can only be promoted through this blog's tw**ter account, and said account only has (as of this moment) 6 followers. But how many of those views were real, how many were spambots, how many were something I don't even know or yet understand?

Ideally, this blog should function as graffiti on a train car that never leaves the station, skywriting from a plane that only sprays invisible ink, poison injected into the atmosphere that evaporates upon contact.

If it isn't even being alive in this world, in cultivating one's brand, then surely it must be easier to do the opposite.

Poem

Because I would rather endure
the humiliations of poverty
Than endure
the humiliations of compromise.

The closest thing to economic security
in 21st century US society
Is to have absolutely nothing
and to want even less.

It's easy to be prolific
When you have nothing to gain.

The Family Dollar up the street
is almost always already hiring.
And who among us doesn't yearn
to belong to a family

As for health care,
an early death can be considered
A kind of victory
in a world such as this.

Thursday, January 24, 2019

William Carlos Whitten - Burn My Letters



This music is sick. It's nauseating. It makes me feel like I'm deep sea fishing, lurching over the waves and the only thing in the water is copulating eels covered in oil. It has no right to exist. The keyboard line sounds like a toy train leading children to internment camps. Do you know these things are real. Do you know that they actually exist. I heard a theory that the rise of political correctness in the 1980s was linked to growing feelings of political powerlessness around that time. So the theory goes that as people lost, or no longer felt they had, the power to affect society on a political level, they turned their attention to affecting society on a societal level.

What the fuck was I was saying.

Oh yeah. This song conjures, to steal a line from the artist's almost-namesake, "the souring flowers of the bedraggled poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth beneath them." I burped in my mouth when I first listened to it and the taste was sour frosted mini-wheats. It has ruined my morning. It is absolutely perfect.


Bougie Jobs At Poverty Wages: An Examination


There are all kinds of jobs in 21st century America: shit jobs, bullshit jobs, side hustle jobs, decent jobs, great jobs (rumor still has it), hand jobs, blow jobs, no Steve Jobs (he's dead), but the jobs I'm interested in are bougie jobs, that is to say jobs that require, or at least expect, a college degree, but pay less than $10, or $9, or in some cases, $8 an hour.

I've had a lot of jobs in my life. Excluding my lawn mowing career in my tweens, and a joint newspaper delivery gig with a friend of mine during the summer I was 15, my first job was doing inventories for a company called RGIS while I was still in high school. This was a decent job for someone in high school, a shit job, or decent job, for an actual adult.

But right now I'd like introduce a new category of job: The Bougie Job That Pays Poverty Wages or BJ-PW for short. I've worked mostly poverty level jobs my whole life. If we limit the list to just jobs I worked at for at least six months, we've got:

1. Amusement park food service
2. Convenience store overnight clerk (twice!)
3. Hotel front desk clerk (twice!).
4. High school special ed assistant.
5. Preschool teacher assistant
6. Caterer
7. Barista
8. Library assistant
9. Transcriptionist.

Now I'm not bitter about any of these jobs. Some of them I liked more than others, usually depending more on the people I worked with than the job itself. And while US poverty has its potentially stark horrifying qualities--like most US stuff, pretty much--it's totally survivable if you don't have any material desires (I like books and music pretty much, and the library here is open 7 days a week). This isn't a story about dwindling options for college grads in the 21st century. That's a story worth talking about, but my options have been limited by my (un)willingness to devote 60 hours a week to generating wealth for someone else doing something that brings me no real pleasure.

No, what I'm interested in is jobs 4,5, and 8 up there. Those were all jobs that were bougie as hell, and yet paid the least amount of money of any of those jobs on the list. Even worse, the expected standards of decorum, meaning manners and social interaction were also bougie as fuck. Which, if you're working in the school system, I kind of get, but it's weird for people making $8 an hour working in a library to act like they're better than the janitorial staff who are...also making around $8 an hour. But because our jobs required "skills" (computer literacy, customer service, etc.), we were somehow better than them.

Also, because this is the US South, even a more "progressive" section, it almost goes without saying that the janitorial staff were universally "people of color," and the library front-of-house staff were almost universally white. It's extremely likely that, despite our almost universal leftist politics, this played a role in the way people saw themselves. Let's just say that many centuries of social conditioning in this country have gone into the "at least you have it better than ______" self-esteem management strategy, and voting Democrat--while way less morally & ethically repugnant than voting Republican--doesn't exclude you from this dynamic.

The thing that sucks the most about BJ-PWs is that you're expected, and in most cases required, to adhere to bougie white, middle-class norms. That means no cursing, no sarcasm, no humor unless it's self-directed and self-deprecating, lots of smiling, lots of talking about the weekend (either previous or upcoming), lots of talk about food, and um...that's pretty much it. And while I get the reasons for not saying fuck in a library or a pre-school, I'm talking about off-the-clock behavior. I mean, even in the parking lot people were walking around smiling and telling you to have a great night.

Which just seems unfair. Because the great thing about being on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, during a time where jobs are plentiful and wages are scarce, is that you can't sink any lower so you might as well at least try to enjoy yourself. And I don't mean breathlessly complimenting your co-workers new sweater, or the muffins at the bakery that just opened up the road. I'm saying people are working jobs where they have the freedom to let it hang out, swing their metaphorical hips a little, and they're still acting like we're working in a office.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking to turn every low-paying workplace into an R-rated bachanalia, but don't you think it's weird how many adults object to adult language. Isn't it weird that we live in an era in which porn-watching is considered the norm, esp. as it appears prestige TV shit like Girls, Game of Thrones, or whatever's trending these days. Like isn't weird, that bougie cultural consumption is so filthy and bougie public participation is so clean?

As part of my training at the transcription job (you wear headphones and type up dictated messages, usually from people working in the financial and/or insurance agency--yes it's every bit as wonderfully dystopic as it sound), I meet with one of the supervisors each week to discuss my progress and learn more about how to be a faster transcriber (there are some serious financial incentives re: speed & accuracy, so I pay attention). Last month, my supervisor, a young person of collegiate privilege, asked me what would improve my speed. My first impulse was to say, "Maybe if some of these motherfuckers could slow down on the cocaine, I could understand what they were saying." But I caught myself, because I recognized that the MF bomb, and possibly the drug reference, to say nothing of the unexpected-ness of my response, could possibly violate at least two of the workplace guidelines contract that I signed upon my employment. And while I'm all for free expression, and don't value this job as anything other than a short-term money-making venture while my partner sorts out their potentially way-more-lucrative academic future, breaking white middle-class societal norms at that moment just seemed like more trouble than it was worth, y'know?

Because if I've learned one thing from my post-collegiate elevation to BJ-PW life, it's that white middle-class societal norms revolve around demonstrating your knowledge of said norms. These are forms of etiquette that are expected to be demonstrated in all public interactions. Sort of a really boring mating dance that ends up with you drinking craft brews or something. Even if you're transcribing dictations from the ruling class (or lackeys for the ruling class) for a base pay of $8.25 p/hr, people are expected to maintain bougie norms in the face of their dwindling opportunities. After all, for most college graduates, their sense of social superiority is all they have left. Hell, in another few years there might be workplace guidelines stating you can't wear white after Labor Day.

To which most of BJ-PW job holders will say, "What the heck is Labor Day?"

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

The Algorithm's Gonna Get You #1 - Joose Keskitalo "Nyt on sinun aikasi"

So because my partner is a student at our local university she qualifies for a bundle, only available to future capitalist bootlickers and the small handful that seek to destroy them that currently make up higher eduction, of Showtime, Hulu, and Spotify for the stupidly low price of $4.99. While we did it for the Twin Peaks access, and Sorry To Bother You, the tipping point was Spotify, a platform that--much like anything else these days--could best be described as "fucking problematic."

We'll debate/argue the merits/drawback of Spotify some other time. Or maybe not at all. I'm not sure I really give that much of a fuck. Anyway, we added some stuff to our "library," and it means more music in our lives, and more music in our lives is, to a point, a good thing. But every week Spotify, or more specifically, an algorithm designed by some dickface working (or more likely interning) for Spotify recommends us some new music. And you know what? Some of it's pretty good! Good job, algorithm!

I shit you not, I actually had a dream this week where I was apologizing to my YouTube algorithm generator for clicking on such a confusing array of stuff. I have some weird goddamn dreams sometimes.

So I thought I'd do a column here about songs that move/stimulate some kind of emotion/thought in me, and see where it takes me/you/us.

I've made some rules for myself. I'm going to try and focus on songs that have less than 3,000 listens, or more than 1,000,000, at the time of writing.  I'm not going to do any research whatsoever. I'm tired of reading reviews that are more a reaction to an artist's press release and biography (and indirectly, their publicist/label/hometown) than a reaction to their music.

We begin with someone called Joose Keskitalo. I've asked around the house, but no one knows what language it is. I was thinking either eastern Europe or northern Africa but my partner (the student), said maybe Scandinavian. And I know I could find the information in under 15 seconds, but for some reason I like the not-knowing more than the knowing.

I like the song more than anything. It combines the dust of all those Tucson bands from a couple decades back with Dylan's strung-out harmonica playing from the Royal Albert Hall show and Morphine's baritone sax. And then there's the singer who intones every word with empathy and precision. There's those weird seagull sounds.

It feels like something you'd listen to as the pollution rolled off the Salton Sea and you sat in your living room with your lungs turning into rust and your eyes caked over with sugar.

These are sad times. This is a sad song. I am a sad person. There is beauty in sadness. There is something to be learned, to be processed. Above all, there is something to be felt. The mystery is in ourselves as much as it is in the song. Joose Keskialo may be the name of a group. It may be the name of a person. But whoever they are, this is something they understood a long time ago.


.

The rest of the album's kind of hit or miss. But damn, that harmonica. And I hate harmonicas.



(Note: I got deep into the weeds on the thing about the Pelly Raincoats book. And what I thought would be a few stray thoughts is taking longer than I thought. Maybe within the week.)


Wednesday, January 2, 2019

And Jesus Said Follow Me and I Will Make You Fishers of Raincoats (or something)

I read two music-related books in the past month that got under my skin (in a bad way) and apparently won't leave me alone until I write about them in an attempt to figure out what my/their problem is. The first is Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life and the second is Jenn Pelly's Raincoats book on 33 1/3.  Both books feel, to me, written from a point of view best described as "living in total terror of the neoliberal hellscape that is 21st century life." This POV is foregrounded in Fisher's work, completely obscured in Pelly's, but both books feel like someone screaming from underneath several layers of thick gauze. Or maybe duct tape (gaffer tape, I suppose, in Fisher's case; gaffa tape, I suppose, for a fan of Kate Bush's The Dreaming).

The Fisher part of this essay is based almost entirely on memory, as I've returned Ghosts of My Life to the library, and partly on the couple dozen chapters of the 2018 anthology included in the e-book sample. The anthology itself is either unavailable from on-line booksellers or $30 and rising. The e-book is available, but costs $12.99. I believe Fisher would understand my skepticism regarding the ephemeral nature of digital media, and why I balked at shelling out that much money for a book that I could only read on a device that is only five years old, but rapidly fading. There are dots to be connected here regarding planned obsolescence as a vital function of contemporary capitalism/consumerism/etc., as well as the environmental and occupational pillaging that is a part of the manufacturing of said device. A difference between writing for money (as I have done elsewhere) and writing for free (as I am doing here) is that it's real easy to justify the sacrifice of supporting evidence in the name of airtight accuracy versus shelling out money you can't afford in order to claim some extra authority. If there mistakes in my response, massive factual gaps, let's just agree to consider it emblematic of our current flood of information and misinformation, agreed?


Here's an uncanny valley biography of him to save me the time. Note that the information in the bio, dictated by a computer-generated voice, isn't miles away from this New Yorker piece about him.



Fisher killed himself early in 2017, quite possibly--if his writing is anything to go by--after reading one too many end-of-year listicles proclaiming the greatness of Beyonce. Though I'm sure Fisher wouldn't like to hear it, his taste ran predominantly white, male, hetero, grim modernist, monochrome, and joyless. Fisher's depression was real. He wrote about it constantly, even recognizing that depression is a part-truth that fools its recipient into thinking it's a whole truth. That said, Fisher projects his depression into everything, whether the virtues of Burroughs, or the empty fun of Glastonbury. He also falls for an argument as old as Ecclesiastes and as publishable as Simon Reynolds' Retromania, namely that our culture and politics (but specifically music) have ceased to evolve and all anyone does is recycle the past. Fisher says something along the lines of there's no music being made today (roughly 2010 when Fisher was writing) that would sound surprising or unfamiliar to listeners in the mid-90s. Which is bullshit of course. Never mind the fact that any lyrical reference to anything internet or social media would be completely incomprehensible, I can think of three really obvious post-1995 example off the top of my head: Outkast's Bombs Over Baghdad, Missy Elliott and Timbaland's run of 98-02 singles, and Beyonce's Single Ladies. All songs that sounded like nothing that came before. Here's one from 2012 that Fisher died without ever mentioning that's fucking weird as hell.




But then what Fisher (along with Reynolds) is really mourning is the death of new ideas in guitar-based indie rock, or the music (and music criticism) he loved as a youth. That's why he never comes close to noticing the significance of a group like Animal Collective, where instruments are secondary to samplers and computers, an indie group that filled huge theaters and headlined festivals. One can trace a line from Panda Bear's Person Pitch to twenty one pilots' Stressed Out--the way the singer intones good old days is a dead giveaway. A few years ago when I was working at the local library, I watched a room full of teenagers, black and white, poor and not-so-poor, solemnly sing along to Stressed Out because the song had great significance to them. In the face of all that, Fisher's writing about the spiritual deadness at the heart of contemporary culture, especially compared to bands in his youth like, uh, Japan, rings hollow. Ultimately, Fisher's cultural criticism says way more about Mark Fisher, and the struggles of Mark Fisher, than it does about the culture he's writing about. The fact that Fisher finds signs of life in Burial, and, god help us, Sleaford Mods, only weakens his credibility.


Depression is an affliction that both illuminates and obscures. It sends you thoughts that are true, as well as thoughts which are not. it colors and saturates everything you see and think. That saturation is the source of its power. It prevents you from knowing what is real and what is not. When Fisher wrestles with his affliction, it makes for compelling reading. When he tries to extrapolate from it, when he uses it to create meaning, seeing it rooted in depression in capitalism, or pop music, he gets out over his skis. I say this as someone who loathes both neoliberal capitalism and lockstep poptimism with every fiber of their being: even if we were to live in a socialist utopia with UBI and challenging music on the radio that made our hearts swoon with glorious melodies and breathtaking imagination, Mark Fisher still would have been depressed, and he likely still would have killed himself. 


That's my entirely subjective opinion, of course, but as I read through Ghosts of My Life, I couldn't help noticing that there was very little about Fisher's actual, you know, life. It feels a little trite for him to locate the source of his trauma at the fact that Ian Penman and Paul Morley no longer write for NME


Having said all that, I'm extremely sympathetic to many of Fisher's ideas, as well as his analysis. It's not that Fisher is wrong--about capitalism, or poptimism--it's, like any depressed person, the ferocity of his vision prevents him from seeing all of this. In one sense, the title of this site is meant as a joke, a semi-clever play on words. But in another, more accurate sense, it strives to go beyond Fisher's project, to not settle for easy answers, to not be seduced by aspects of the culture and our society that merely confirm our worst ideas about those things. We strive to also see the joy, the glorious insanity of being alive at this point in time, for however much longer this timeline lasts. A criticism of contemporary existence that doesn't include laughter, and irreverence, is a criticism that is incomplete, to the point of being dishonest. 

For the sake of space, and the short-attention-span of the typical 21st century reader, we'll get to the Pelly book in the next installment.