Saturday, November 08, 2003
Warring notions of comedy in the funny pages today: the Boondocks posits comedy as something stupid, considers laughing as the opposite of thinking (oh ho no, excuse me thurr), whereas Zippy, always the savant, sees comedy as a logical response to our world. Who will win? YOU DECIDE!!!
posted by Mike B. at 10:28 AM
0 comments
Apropros of nothing, sort of: say what you will about Dave Eggers (and he does kind of annoy me these days) and his sort of stifling self-consciousness, this long exchange between him and J. Lethem about the nature of criticism is a Really Good Thing and certainly started me thinking in a whole bunch of new directions when I first read it a few years ago. Of course, the fact that Lethem is involved may have helped, but I still see a way more reasonable version of a view Dave's expressed other places here--a kind of Klostermanny view, although I can't quite articulate how that works.
Anyway, it is late, and I should probably get to bed. To be continued.
posted by Mike B. at 4:11 AM
0 comments
Speaking of the Clark ad, here are all the Dems' Rock the Vote ads. None are as good as Clark's, and some are, in fact, hilariously lame. Mmm.
posted by Mike B. at 4:04 AM
0 comments
Friday, November 07, 2003
Long Island.
posted by Mike B. at 5:28 PM
0 comments
"Leaky Tunnel" by the Fiery Furnaces starts off sounding like more or less exactly that: after a piano plink, we hear an organ riff that holds one note for a beat before spending half a beat plummeting down an octave to a note which is held for another half-beat, it's got a certain stereo spread and reverb on it that make it sound tunnelly, like an alarm echoing off concrete walls, presumably--given the title--indicating a flood, etc. A kick enters playing a strict backbeat and a low-volume guitar, miked and played in such a way that you hear a lot of string action, and heavily reverbed, so it feels like it's a long way away and played, though it electric, more for the rhythm of the strumming than the chords, more or less. Vocals enter, singing a melody semi-unrelated to anything else, miked close and only lightly reverbed, so it sounds fairly present, in contrast to the relentlessly distant backing.
At about the time the piano part comes in is when we expect the song to break out and really rock, but it doesn't; it stays in a kind of vamped breakdown, staying on the same chord except for minor, superficial changes that don't effect the two foregrounded instruments, organ and voice. Then there's something in the lyrics about jangling a tambourine (previously purchased, apparently, at the Millenium Dome in London--disembodied but specific geographic locations abound here in the way you might find them throughout Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom) and everything cuts out but that guitar, still sounding way distant and way indistinct. It flails along for a few bars before the lead comes in, and the interesting thing about the lead is that for the first few notes it sounds like it should sound like shit, like the lead on an early Beck album or something, only vaguely in tune and in rhythm, the rhythm part being particularly difficult seeing as how the established guitar has apparently taken this opportunity to spazz out at will in a kind of indie-rock rubato. But after those first two notes it resolves itself to a good, semi-conventional riff and a nice melody that re-introduces the vocals well: it's an unexpectedly expected bit of standard arrangement, and while it wants for drums, its clash with the utter weirdness of the rest of the track works a treat. (Woulda been even better as an orchestra hit, but I am apparently one of the few people left in the country who likes orchestra hits.)
Finally, at 2:33, at a totally random but somehow just-right point in the vocal line, a full rock-n-fucking-roll drum part kicks in, with cymbals and everything, and oh, it's a hell of a release, a great, crashing bwamp of energy and emotion. Besides bringing all the instruments together, it really makes the vocals work, which had seemed super free-floating and unstructured in the previous section, lacking as it did either a kick or a regular organ arpeggiator. But the goddamn drumbeat breaks down after about 5 seconds, and while it occasionally nails everything together again for a beat or two, it never really does what it did initially at any length, refusing or unable to keep the kind of rock momentum we want here.
I like this song a lot--it's about five songs in one, and it gestures at a whole bunch of other songs, at arrangements and instrumentations that you'd expect to be there but which just aren't. Adding to that is the fact that the song is sequenced at #3 on the album, typically a place for really grabby singles. This one feels like a sketch, but if you listen right, it also feels like a complete song, because you can so easily fill in what isn't there. (A lot like Manitoba.) Good stuff.
posted by Mike B. at 4:34 PM
0 comments
The other day I got a package from Stephen Notley, author of Bob the Angry Flower, containing two autographed books, which I actually won in a contest, oddly, and I just wanted to thank him publicly and give a whole pile of pointers to BTAF, which I honestly think is one of the funniest goddamn things ever.
More specifically, I love the pacing of it. If a graph of your typical three-panel strip looks something like this:
/ - - - ! __/===\ / |
-- \-------/ |_
Then a Bob strip looks more like: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
|
|
?----|  /
-----/ \ !!!!!!!!!!!!!\ /
\----\ / \ / \-------/ \_________/
Know what I mean? There's maybe a punchline halfway through, maybe not, but it drops off for a few panels, and then has an ending that just goes waaaaahhhhhhANGGGGGG!!!! If that makes any sense.
Oh, also Kofi Anaan is a regular character, which makes me very happy. Go read, if you don't already.
posted by Mike B. at 12:46 PM
0 comments
Sasha linked to this essay on language poetry by Joshua Clover a while back, and I got some things to say about it.
Speaking of assigning cultural and personal activities a political value...
First off, I guess I should give my general position. I don't like poetry. Oh, I like a lot of poetry, probably more than the majority of the population, but I like about 0.1% of the poetry being produced today, as far as I can tell. I don't like the way poetry currently is, or, really, how it's been for the last forty years or so, although again, this may simply be because I haven't been exposed to enough. I've tried from time to time to like what I read or find what I'd like, and the theoretical issues interest me to no end (see below), but I get little to no pleasure or intellectual stimulation out of actually reading the stuff. And this isn't just an issue of being exposed to too much new stuff most of which is necessarily bad, whereas the past is already filtered for me: I read a decent bit of contemporary short fiction, too, and I find a lot to love there, even if some of the more dominant strains annoy the living hell out of me. I know this particular position on poetry is fairly untenable, and it may annoy some people, and yeah, I should probably try and explain it, but I can't, really. I just don't like contemporary poetry, and I don't even feel compelled to try to.
That said, my position on the piece in question--which is really interesting, really well-written, and a great example of why I think criticism can be a far more vital medium than poetry, literature-wise--can probably be best summed up in my reaction to the following section:
The confusion here is twofold1: the first is the rather uninteresting one between whole and hole. Of essence is that this homophone starts the chain of confusion, which gets very interesting very quickly. It engenders the understanding that language is a troubled instrument. The second confusion is that between the sound "(w)hole" and the functional hole through which we escape. This is a confusion of kind between, as a Swiss grad student would have it, signifier and referent.2 And while the riddle poses this as a way out, it presents a terrible trap. If the "hole" and the hole are identical - if they occupy the same space - one can't point at the other; language suddenly can point only at itself; there is no outside.
This riddle is the riddle of our century's philosophical investigations.3 Husserl's phenomenology and Einstein's relativity offer much the same revelation as Cubism: we exist not in g-d's green meadows but within our own perceptive boundaries. Language proposes and vows to bear4 experience across such thresholds, but this solves nothing; if we're not trapped within ourselves, we're still trapped within language itself. This crisis is crystallized by a forlorn Wittgenstein: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."5
My response to which was:
Clearly, Wittgenstein never played guitar.
I need to read more of ol' Ludwig's stuff, which seems pretty key, but I really do think the whole tragic model of language, the whole riff on "the limits of my language are the limits of my world" is enormously short-sighted and the kind of thing only an overintellectualized nerd who spends too much time in his head could take seriously for too long. While it's undeniable that the language we use has a good bit of effect on how we perceive the world, and our perceptions have a big role in our experiences, nonetheless--and you can classify this as blind faith if you want--I do think there's a real, concrete world outside my own selfhood. (I also think my own selfhood is way more porous than most post-structuralist theory seems to admit when it's engaging with these kinds of issues, but that's a side point.) I know, it's very gauche to believe in reality, but eh, I do. On the other hand, I do see what he's saying; often our inability to properly describe something, out inability to bridge the gap between our perceptions and another person's, can be frustrating, and an inability to literally understand sort of ineffable feelings or cause-and-effect chains can cause a lot of problems. But in a way, those unliteralized things have their own language, and even if you can't literally grasp it in the way you understand your native tongue, you can communicate with it; there are methods beyond the verbal. And so when I play guitar, for instance, or listen to someone else playing guitar, that's a form of communication--a way of describing and understanding your world--that breaks free of the supposed prison of language. Even if the message is as simplistic as "I feel better when I hit this E chord," it's still a message that's being conveyed outside of a conventional communicative system.
In footnote #3, which references this paragraph, he gives a good explanation of why this whole debate is relevant, and it's worth reading, as it's honestly one of the smartest things I've read recently:
One might want to confine the debate to Linguistic Theory - after all, the damage seems limited to the sphere of Saussure's semiotics: important enough to merit a department at Brown University, but barely a gleam in the eyes of most curricula. Except that you will likely encounter, say, an ethics debate in which law prof Katherine Mackinnon holds that the representation of rape, in images or words, is an act of violence with an exchange-value equal to a physical rape. Or philosopher/comedian Jean Baudrillard reassuring us that we need not worry about nuclear weapons: because they work only to represent what badasses we are to other nations, they form only a language of annihilation rather than any actual damage. Or J.L. Austin's Speech Act theory, interested in language for its "performatives," the units of speech which are actions unto themselves. Or Gödel's Theorem, showing that there are more true statements than provable ones - the most common lesson drawn from this problematizes the hope of self-consistent systems, but the delightful side effect is that of rendering language as a child's "plus one" game: it will always be more than all the things we can say about it; we will never come to its frontier. Or consider the deconstructionist holding that "the text is composed of all possible readings of the text," or New Criticism's invocation of the "intentional fallacy," the main effect of which is sophomores claiming that The Odyssey is about holding on to your dreams, because "that's what I got out of it" . . .
(Hahaha, "philosopher/comedian Jean Baudrillard.") So I love this--I love that he demonstrates why these kinds of issues aren't just the province of daydreaming philosophers and poets, how widely it's spread and how the fundamental lack of understanding of this position by certain parties leads to a lot of clashes. However, I also think (and Clover may agree) that the first two examples he cites are kind of, well, retarded, and it's worth asking why this particular point, which feels like such a revelation, can lead to such dumbass conclusions. I got a flash after reading the following paragraph and its footnote:
Try to puzzle out which is the word "rose," which indicates the idea of the rose, and which stands for a particular rose . . . and you will find a scented but slippery slope. And what if you imagine the poem to mean not merely that linguistic identity is endless? Consider this reading: [The phrase] "A rose is a rose" is a rose. Not merely does this collapse the distinction between word and thing, but between phrase and thing; between proposition and thing; between metaphor and thing. Language here cannot be about roses any more than you can be about a reader7 - each falls endlessly into the other.
7 Cf. Walter Benjamin, "The sight of immediate reality has become an orchid." (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932-1940, Harvard University Press, 1992). Benjamin's study of how infinite replication obliterated the real - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Illuminations, Schocken, 1968) - takes up the actual (that is, economic) effects of the collapse of the signifying chain, laying the foundation for Baudrillard's simulation theory, and the rest of Postmodernism as well.
But this, as far as I can tell, is absolutely the wrong road to go down, especially if you're going to claim that this is the portal to "actual (that is, economic) effects." Because, first off, "the collapse of the signifying chain" is not a recent phenomenon, mechanical reproduction having been an issue since Lascaux and leading to, among other things, the tablet-etched provision against making graven images. You can't experimentally separate out the effects of mechanical reproduction because they've pretty much always been there. So, in other words, you have to assume--as a shudderingly small percentage of post-structuralists seem to--that people can quite rationally deal with things like simulacra and reproductions and like that. We're equipped to handle it--indeed, anyone who can't contain two contradictory ideas is likely to explode by age 3. They overlook, in other words, that quote I have in my blogroll there: "the death of art, until someone forgets." They can make great arguments for what X doesn't exist anymore, why it's utterly disappeared and why no one can rationally think it's still around, and everyone who reads this will read other things confirming it and, to them, it will be more or less true. But then someone forgets: someone new comes along who doesn't know that the author is dead, or that art is dead, or whatever, and they do something new and good and rejuvenating. They come from outside the discourse and make it whole again. Simulacra is only a problem for you guys: the rest of us like watching Top Model.
In other words, the trap of language is not language but literalism. Language is only confining if you think that words, deep down, do have fixed meanings, or are limited somehow, and they're just not. (Wittgenstein's meaning-as-use formulation, for instance, hilariously commits the intentional fallacy: the meaning is limited by the speaker's intentions, which is clearly not true.) The world is debased only if you honestly think that there are something like platonic ideals which mechanical reproduction and pop culture deviates from, if something has to be literally real--i.e. "authentic"--instead of just, you know, real, i.e. existing.
What this all gets down to is the way language poetry rejects narrative and, eventually, coherency for ostensibly political reasons. Viz:
Supposing I pair Roussel ("a president of the republic of dreams," per Louis Aragon) with Jacques "Language is the whirlpool which picks up the tree and throws it" Derrida: Between the former's construction of fantasy worlds out of photorealistic detail, and the latter's Deconstruction work, I would certainly end at Language poetry's political rejection of narratives of the self - because "the story of well-off European males needs no more telling" - and that would in no way be a false version. Just an incomplete one. And of course, there would be an honor in that: version is the child of verse is the child of veritas.
While I don't think this is an argument Clover is endorsing, it's still one I see a lot--that, somehow, rejecting narrative is a political act. Blech. Most of the time they're not even rejecting narrative at all, just good narrative, but in the case of language poetry, of course, there really is a rejection of narrative. But this cannot be a political act, only an apolitical one. Narrative is one of the languages of politics, symbolism being the other one, and when you reject both, you're just opting out of the game. And that's fine--but don't try and pretend that it's any different, politically, from baking cookies. If you want to make a political statement, ultimately, you have to be willing to participate in politics, and that inevitably involves playing games with power. Maybe this sucks, maybe this feels distasteful to you, but just as you can't help the poor without getting yourself some icky money, you can't play politics without using what power you have to help yourself and others. That's the way it works.
Anyway, great article. I've ordered Mr. Clover's book-and-CD set, partially at Sasha's behest and partially because inventive combos of literature and music is one of my big interests.
posted by Mike B. at 12:37 PM
0 comments
In case you're curious (and I know Harm will be), here is a FrontPage article on the place I went to college. It mostly just makes me smile. For the record, Safer Sex Night really doesn't qualify as an orgy--there's not a whole lot of public sex, never with multiple partners, and while the people may be dressed skimpily, that doesn't make them attractive, and on the whole it's not a whole lot different from most nightclubs, aside from the blowjob videos in the corners.
Oh, also, I was a member of the club mentioned that can't get chartered but which Nancy Dye ostensibly "supports." Ha. That's a good one. At any rate, the interesting thing about said club was that it's not really a leftist thing; afficianados are just as likely to be conservative, and given the conservative temperment, you might be tempted to say they're even more likely to be into That Kind Of Thing. Mais oui, the folks in our particular group would be more likely to support Gore than Bush (snicker snicker), but that's just the nature of the demographic we were drawing from, and we were almost entirely way less likely to eat organic food and go to Socialist meetings than your typical Obie. I say all this because of the opposition we encountered. Yes, the most vocal opponant was a conservative physics teacher, may he forever eat naught but overcooked beef. But the far more effective opposition took a liberal position on racial issues, arguing (one might say a bit patronizingly) that blacks would be offended by a group that seemed to be making slavery into a game (what?) and that it would discourage African-Americans from applying because it would offend their more conservative morality. The main problem with this argument, besides the fact that we weren't exactly playing games in which one of us dressed up like a plantation owner and one of us picked cotton all day, was that--as you'll note from the article-- we have a drag ball. It is, as a matter of fact, the biggest campus party of the year. We also have a very active socialist contingent, pot smoking on the quads, and a very vocal homosexual community, and good for them. So I'm a little unsure how, if you're of a conservative moral bent, black or no, a club of this type would be, like, the deciding factor, you know? Especially when such notoriously left-wing places as Princeton and Dartmouth also have such clubs without any noticable drop in enrollment.
Anyway, point being, if you're troubled by sex on college campuses, I'd think you'd be more interested in getting rid of frat houses than Safer Sex Night, and unlike most residents of said frat houses, at least Obies are participating in politics, which would seem like a neutral good, regardless of their positions.
ADDENDUM: FrontPage being David Horowitz's deal, Horowitz being the "Slavery Reparations are Racist!" dude, i.e. a guy who enjoys the fish-in-a-barrel activity of making college leftists angry a wee bit too much for my particular embarassment-o-meter.
Oh, and the point of the point is that you have to be very careful in assigning cultural and personal activities a political value, as both Obies and FrontPage should realize.
posted by Mike B. at 11:08 AM
0 comments
Wesley Clark finally takes a position on Outkast. (Via QV.)
You should probably go watch this right now.
Somewhat embarassingly, he's got my vote.
posted by Mike B. at 10:47 AM
0 comments
Thursday, November 06, 2003
Congrats to my ex-adviser, Dan Chaon, for having a story referred to as "unforgettable" in the New York Times. And a good story it is, too. A lot of Dan's stories are pretty horror-filled beneath the surface, though, genre conventions aside.
posted by Mike B. at 4:51 PM
0 comments
Word out of the Zak Wylde camp is that he's cutting an album next year with Dimebag and Eddie Van Halen, among others. They're hoping to get the chick from Evanesce to do vocals.
Keep it under your hat.
posted by Mike B. at 4:23 PM
0 comments
Well, that's it--I'm going to be screaming "Shit on my chest!" all weekend...
posted by Mike B. at 3:57 PM
0 comments
Two weird bits of Schreiberdelia today.
Re: No Doubt--OK, I get pretty annoyed at "Spiderwebs" and "Hey Baby" at times, too, but "Southside"? ""Let Me Blow Ya Mind"? Horrors? I think not. Those are fabulous songs, m'friend, and if you can't see it--well, you don't spend enough time in your car.
Ryan's WATW posts provide a nice case study of what happens to indie-snobbism when it tries to adapt to popism--it gets snobbish about liking the right pop songs, and this particular ability of taste becomes more worthwhile than the artists involved; the ability to pick out one particular No Doubt song is more admirable than actually being in No Doubt, and never do they get those beautiful realizations, those flashes of light wherein a particular song working for you for whatever reason allows you to go back and appreciate songs you had overlooked before.
As for the Baby Bash entry, it again deploys what must be one of the weirdest critical standards ever: catchy = bad. We saw this in the Fountains of Wayne entry, too; matter of fact, that's where this standard was first proposed. Oddly enough, it hasn't been widely embraced since then.
posted by Mike B. at 3:56 PM
0 comments
Played a show last night. The first band on the bill wasn't very good--sort of pub-rock, sort of college rock, shades of the Refreshments (but less catchy) or Hootie or, I dunno, the Gin Blossoms. Well, now I'm just being cruel. Anyway, so about 2/3 of the way through they announce that this is their last gig. And that's kind of sad. But then before their last number they announce that they've been playing for 10 years. And, y'know, there aren't that many people there. It was a major buzzkill. I recovered, though.
I'll try and do some posting today--lord knows I don't want to do any actual work...
posted by Mike B. at 11:00 AM
0 comments
From Pitchfork:
The box also includes a live "Miracle Man" that originally appeared on the synth-heavy U.S. single version of "Alison," though the offending mix itself is excluded.
Er, does anyone have this mix, or know where I could track it down outside of buying the original single on eBay? Because it sounds pretty awesome. I love "Alison," but I always couldn't help thinking that it could be played an entirely different--and possibly better--way.
posted by Mike B. at 10:51 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Why no posts? Well, I spent something like 16 hours in the emergency room with someone else (I'm fine), for one thing, and I've been sick since Friday, for another. And work, work, work. Trust me, this is one of the things I'd much rather be doing than everything else I'm actually doing, by and large. But so it goes.
Stuff tomorrow, I hope, on the Fiery Furnaces (thanks Matt!) and a few other things. But hey, maybe not--who knows, eh?
posted by Mike B. at 7:00 PM
0 comments
|
|