It was a lovely day here in New York on Sunday, suddenly warm and quite clear, in contrast to Saturday's fog which covered pretty much everything about the seventh story. I took a walk to the park that runs between Amsterdam and whatever the hell the road is that goes along the river, stretching from the weird tower thing at the back of the rec center on 174th-ish to the cross-Manhattan xpressway at 178th. (This is vague, but I am lazy.)

Once there, I walked past the basketball courts where some were playing basketball and others were hitting tennis balls with a stick and to the odd pile of rocks that lies at the park's northern edge, which you can climb and look out over pretty much everything that isn't blocked by building, which includes I-95, the bridge buildings, the river, and the Bronx.

The story we tell in the city ("we" being "people I know"--lord knows I don't want to speak for anyone) is that you can barely even tell it's fall because you don't see the leaves change color, this being particularly striking if, like me, you come from somewhere in the vicinity of leaf-peeping country and are used to a real natureboy rave-up of tones just from walking to school. But there are trees, and the leaves do change color, if you're able to look for them, if you're able to see them; the problem, it seems, is that the trees are scattered so much that you just don't notice.

But here, standing on this outcropping of rock once near a British fort and once blasted and sheered to a miniature cliff face, I see the opposite bank in the fading light and there is the aforementioned color-based rave-up, trees springing forth from the buildings and the roads to bloom into orange and yellow and something I can't quite place. Fall. It is very pretty, as is the light as it glints off the windows of housing projects, as are the cars winding their way below.

In the city, it seems to me, we lack or intentionally avoid the big picture; faced with so incredibly many people and so mind-bogglingly many places, we narrow our gaze and focus on what is right in front of us or what is brought to our intention. This is not a bad thing, really, and it is certainly necessary to get through your day without stopping short every few steps, as is the practice of common routes to and from common places, the same steps taken day after day to the places where we've settled in to one degree or another. But at the same time we don't even really have the opportunity to take in the sweep of our particular place that you do from, say, a car; perhaps if you're taking the D train in from Brooklyn or the R from Queens, you go over a bridge and get a brief glimpse of one particular small arc of the city's strangely huge horizon. But even here, or from the FDR or Riverside Drive, because of the particular shape of Manhattan, you don't get the view you do when driving into Chicago, say, or Cleveland, or Washington, or Los Angeles, I'd imagine. You do get it if you drive in along I-95 from Jersey, but then again, in Jersey they get to see the leaves change.

And then I opened up my copy of the Sunday Times and saw, well, this.

It stopped me short, it did. It was a bit like opening Newsweek and finding an article about the inside joke you and your friends share. "Rockism"? In the Times? Yikes. I guess this is simply a reflection of the fact that our particular wee li'l subculture (and I am actually a part of it? Well, let's pretend like I am) is so very isolated, so very focused on minutae, that it felt a bit like someone opening a door on activities meant to fumblingly take place in the dark, like a report issued on something you had quite consciously created just for yourself.

Some would read this as a criticism, that it's precisely the problem with what we do: it's dealing with something broad-based and maximal in very self-contained ways, trying to Leninist vanguard the pop-culture proletariat--and, worse, that this particular refusal to address the big picture, to climb the rocks and look out at the opposite shore for what we hadn't been seeing before, is horrendously limiting.

But no. This is how we're doing it. This is how people experience pop culture, and this is how people experience their lives, moment to moment, banally, with a tangental but distant relation between their own existance and the "big picture," the huge events that are happening elsewhere, always elsewhere, even when they are ostensibly happening to you, and this is precisely what makes it important, not the things themselves, which are generally pretty meaningless, but the way you experience them. It is in the day-to-day progression of narrative and controversy, in the moment-to-moment slippage of influence anxieties that we find not only comfort but understanding and structure, something to make sense of, not the broad view. It is in this way that small groups of people willfully misinterpreting what already exists can change what is about to happen. It is in this way that not only meaning is made but things are made to happen.

It is the banal and everyday that ultimately matters, and I think we don't want to accept that, but even in our striving and Nietzschean urges to overcome, our need to do the dishes or go out and buy the things you need to create 'n' stuff is ultimately paramount, the cockblocker in the mix that we end up focusing on, not only because we have to, but because it's significant. We place little importance on this for reasons I don't entirely grasp; maybe it's simply an acknowledgement of the weight they already carry. But it is the little and pointless, the stupid and everyday, that ultimately rule our lives, and that's for the good. Therein lies endless possibility and infinite power; it is in these little nooks and crannies that our lives are lived. And I like that. And I'm interested to see where it goes.

posted by Mike B. at 8:53 PM 0 comments

From a NYT article on the proliferation of chain stores in Britain:

"In the case of Britain, and especially England, there is a huge sense of
identity investment in the image of towns and cities, and the notion that this
sort of bland, gradual effacement of character is taking place has taxed people
at a deep level," said Andrew Simms, policy director for the New Economic
Foundation, an independent economic research organization that published a
report in August called "Clone Town Britain."

"It makes life boring," Mr. Simms added. "It makes our communities boring
places to be. That is one thing that has touched people deeply. People don't
want to live in towns that look all the same. It's dull."

Chain stores make life boring in small towns--say what? Did I miss something, or have towns--of whatever size, really, unless they're New York / London / Tokyo--traditionally been regarded as pretty damn boring anyway? I don't think the sudden presence of one HMV on the high street exactly created this reality. I mean, there are whole swaths of culture pretty much devoted to dealing with this fact. Now, we can have a discussion about whether or not said swaths of culture, which mainly lie within the realms of popular and specifically youth culture, cater to or simply created that fact. If we did, though, I would point out that popular culture was pretty studiously avoiding this idea for a while until some developments I think it's hard to regard as anything other than bottom-up brought this to the fore. There's no denying, c.f. Frank's Conquest of Cool, that this impulse has been commodified, repackaged, etc., but that this not only did happen but is still actively happening is if anything a testament to just how powerful this idea is. This is a real idea that would really occur to people whether Kiss and/or Starbucks were there or not.

I think that if you want to ascribe these phenomenoms--both the spread of chain stores and the prevelence of the my-town-sucks impulse--to anything, it would be the massively increased mobility we now enjoy, which we just simply didn't until very recently. You don't have a desire to drink Starbucks until you have the opportunity to go to where there is a Starbucks. Stores don't have any impetus to improve if people don't know there's anything better. The fact remains that in a non-control economy, local difference is preserved only to the degree that it is, in fact, geographically isolated. As soon as those borders significantly open, as we both see ourselves as less isolated and see what else is out there, local impact becomes less significant. So that's why I think this is not exactly a surprising thing, and why I think restricting the things that cause chain stores to spread would have far more negative effects than the chain stores themselves.

But are the chain stores actually bad? Are they somehow worse for towns than small, locally-owned shops? Well, aesthetically--which is the only case really being made here--I quite simply don't think they are. For some sort of indie-related reason, you might dislike the fact that the coffee shop here is the same as the coffee shop there, but was there really a huge difference between coffeeshops before, or did they actually kinda all look the same anyway? For instance, is there really a culturally significant difference between the monadic, non-chain Chinese food places everywhere and McDonald's? Not really. The only difference is that the non-chains were older, and hey, wait a few years and they'll be just as old, won't they? It's a silly differential for a whole host of reasons, from the fact that we haven't been a bunch of culturally isolated villages for a long time and there have been chains of one kind or another since the industrial revolution, to the fact that this really only has an impact on the high streets or business districts and leaves everything else in the town more or less alone. Plus the point I've made before that it seems odd to make an anti-consumerist argument that's basically "you should be buying stuff from this profit-centered institution rather than that one," but no need to get into that again.

I dunno. Small towns are boring all of a sudden? Were they really, like, exciting before? The boringness of a town seems the whole point--it's precisely that regularity, that continuity, that we desire, that causes us to stay in a place for a period of time. But the settledness of the buildings seems less important than the people or the shape of the overall thing itself. Changing real estate doesn't make a place any less a place any more than it being a town in England, just like all the other towns in England, did. As long as there are spaces between them, they will still exist.

posted by Mike B. at 8:12 PM 0 comments

While I obviously would like to comment on Salon's political viewpoints of TV shows article (and maybe I will, eventually), I've got other stuff I'd prefer to finish up right now, so I will instead point you to Rob's and Hillary's respective coverages of it, focusing on Gilmore Girls and King of Queens respectively. I've commented at each, whee.

Also, some great last-minute electioneering from Quo Vadimus on the Haverchuck/Graham tip.

posted by Mike B. at 5:59 PM 0 comments

You know, I'm pretty sure "Fuck It" is going to be one of my top 10 songs of the year. Is that a bad sign? Hmm.

posted by Mike B. at 1:28 PM 0 comments

Went to see the Furnaces last night in the Hoboken. Pretty much the same set as the other shows on this tour, but because it was a) the last show and b) according to them, not a very good show, they did an old-skool Matt & Eleanor quiet-songs 2nd encore: "Evergreen" with Matt on Rhodes (after both playing it in the regular set, and trying it briefly on solo guitar before scrapping that), "We Got Back the Plague" the way they'd been doing it in later shows on the last tour with Matt playing keyboards and singing the verses and Eleanor taking the choruses, and "Rub Alcohol Blues" like it usually is with Matt on guitar and Eleanor singing.

"Plague" was especially good because they hadn't played it in a while and it had only slowly dawned on me that it's an anti-Bush song. They did a brief intro, which as Eleanor said wasn't something they ever did, basically saying "go vote," and all of a sudden the tagline of the chorus--"Early November we got back the plague"--actually made sense. It's really a wonderful song, an absolute mastery of political songwriting, because it blends in perfectly with everything else on Gallowsbird's, and so it sort of just slides by you as a song with a good melody and a good hook, but then you listen to it more and more and the seemingly-obscure or purely referential lyrics are actually very specific and i.e. about Bush. Would that more anti-Bush songs were even half as good, and as subtle, as that.

It was interesting that although this is the last stop on the Blueberry Boat tour, and the buzz on the band has been, if anything, building more and more as time goes on, people were no more into the hardcore medley that leads off the set than they were at the Bowery show. It struck me this time that it's sort of a slow emergence of melody over the course of the show, but at the same time Matthew and I both agree that it's time for something else, probably.

We were right up front, and as the Maxwell's stage is short, I was able to get a look at the equipment setup. Matthew was playing a Rhodes with a Roland Juno 60 on top, both going direct into what was probably a Roland cube amp. He didn't seem to mess with the settings on the Juno at all aside from occasionally turning up the LFO. The guitar setup was a Telecaster into a small-label Fuzztone pedal of some sort, a Boss Bass Synth pedal, and a Whammy pedal that he switched between a wah function and an octave pitch-shift. The Whammy pedal I'd suspected on the basis of a radio session I heard where Matt seemed to have the octave pitch shift on the entire time (to, er, somewhat annoying effect), but the bass synth pedal was very interesting to see in action--there were times when Matt was using it and Tosh wasn't playing anything at all, so that particular synth sound is actually guitar-based. Tosh was playing what I'm blindly guessing is a Moog or some other bulky, short-keyboard analoge synth. The bass was run through a tuner and a Moogerfooger ring mod with expression pedal that he used to make various cool noises.

posted by Mike B. at 11:03 AM 0 comments

In honor of a key swing state in tomorrow's election, as well as a previous residence of mine, I am hereby offering the following song:

Brak - Ohio

Chicken nuggets in my pants indeed. I don't know, it just puts it all in perspective...

Maybe the best thing about this is that if I play all my MP3s alphabetically, this goes right into Brandy's "What About Us" and then Brassy's "I Can't Wait."

posted by Mike B. at 10:40 AM 0 comments