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More Big Brother stuff: just take a look at how CBS spins Cassandra's near-walk-off. What the article oh-so-conveniently neglects to mention is that the disembodied voices representing Big Brother threatened to permanently cut the house's food budget by 50% unless each and every questionnaire was filled out completely. You didn't see that on the TV show -- or in the salon.com summary, either. "'There's no dignity in leaving,' Big Brother told her, and this seemed to sink in." If so, the people behind Big Brother have a pretty fucked-up idea of what constitutes dignity. Oh fuck, I'm obsessed by Big Brother. I'd really like to talk about the show right now. But right now Cassandra is having a looong session in the Red Room, likely telling the producers of the show this Salon article what a bunch of amoral assholes they are. Which, watching the webfeeds non-stop on the weekend has amply demonstrated to me. Go get 'em Cass. And stay tuned, folks. The Lives of Cute Jerks, Part Two: Wait a minute, Michael...are you saying Richard Hatch is cute?!?!? Somewhat, yes. Once he lost a little flab (whilst remaining husky) and shaved off that silly beard of his, yes, he's sorta cute. It's the eyes, I think. 'Tis a pity he's an amoral fuckhead. And a "corporate trainer," blech. Tonight was the first time I watched Survivor. The show's a manifestation of the Hobbesian "war of all against all" that certain social commentators have warned about, and still entertaining. In a limited sense. I mean, I'd prefer to think about the show than watch it, what with all its tacky portentousness and sub-sub-sub Pure Moods soundtrack. The Lives of Cute Jerks, Part One: Among the revelations of a new tell-all book about Eminem is that he's a major-league ecstasy-hound. Simon Reynolds should be ecstatic. 'cept for the fact that Em seems to have completely bypassed the loved-up phase of X-addiction and headed straight for the paranoid speedfreak phase. Ah well. I stopped by a stray branch of the New York Library after work yesterday and read Charles Mann's "The Heavenly Jukebox", a uniformly sober article about the utterly unsober consequences of Naspter. (Fabulous title, too -- must steal it sometime.) I also got Linda Montano's Art in Everyday Life, which was on sale for measly 50 cents. What drew me in was the design of the book. A real throwback -- simple, deliberately unpretentious layout, big grainy photos on page and text of the facing page. Magenta and white cover, all black & white inside. The same slightly crooked typeface as the one used all throughout The Next Whole Earth Catalog. It's very 1981, if that means anything. It's a chronicling of one artist's oeuvre during the salad days of performance art, the late sixties and early seventies. Some of the work: "I performed a chicken dance in different outdoor places in San Francisco." The intent is to blur the distinction between "art" and "life," but Christ, who among us brackets the events of their lives for the delectation of strangers? Only artists. Or entertainers -- saying that all the pieces mentioned above could be skits from The Tom Green Show. I don't mean to be too mean, though I know I must sound like it. The process with which she offers her life to the audience, in the hopes of a transcendant self-understanding is quite touching in spite of its absurdity, maybe touching because of its asburdity. "I kept feeling, if only my mother would tell me what happened to me as an infant then I could discover why life seemed imperfect. My mother kept saying how normal I was." It suddenly occurs to me that in the future, the most precious commodity on the internet will be mystery. "Cut my hair so I'll appear punk." Right on. According to the Biography Yearbook 1999, rock critic Greil Marcus is the "director of Pagnol & Cie, which operates the famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley." Also: philosopher W.V. Quine "has visited 118 countries (though a few for only a few minutes, when he was en route elsewhere) and all 50 states. (During his first 90 years, he traveled to every state but North Dakota, so, as a 90th birthday present, his son, Douglas B. Quine, and Douglas' family took him there.)" Whenever I do funny, I end up ranting: Richard's humor is so perfectly modulated that even something as extreme as his little, er..."fantasy" about Archie Manning winds up devastatingly fab. (Be careful. It's like "gay" and stuff. I mean, I know you don't care but maybe your employer does, kapeche?) I even toyed with the idea of giving my latest bit about Eggers to him so he could "remix" it. Because nobody asked, and because I can't put it to the side of my blog, here's my Fake Life Rock Top Ten 1. Sebadoh, "Magnet's Coil" Readers of CAOTM may have noticed a certain antipathy I feel towards "the therapeutic" in our culture, so I must say this article "Seeing Pessimism's Place in a Smiley-Faced World" fills me with a warm feeling inside. It just details how some pscyhologists are countervailing the "tyranny of the positive attitude," the belief that cheerfulness=health and negativity=bad. Good. Oh, that's right -- it's the New York Times, you'll have to register, lazy-bones. Or you could go to dratfink, where I got the link, an equally good read, I'd say. In case you're wondering, right now I'm listening to the obsessive digital roil of Kazimir's "Burn" (must play with Audiomulch, there's a new version, sucka) and avoiding cleaning the apartment. As per usual. From Ross Siegel's A Time of Techno In My Indie World: "Because I expect all music I listen to have some message no matter how prosaic it may be, it is sometimes hard for me to appreciate music with no sort of message at all. That is probably why I'm not into anything on MTV (except for Rage Against the Machine who are an anomaly)." I suspect that the demand for a "message" in music is springs from a post hoc rationalization of the music's power: [this] punk [song] affects me very deeply, [this] punk [song] has a message, therefore, I must like it because of its message. When faced with a music that (paraphrasing Kogan) you "experience as scary, and at the same time really attractive," a music speaking speaking to the contradictory jumble of your inchoate desires, the demand for a message in music becomes a way to reassure oneself that however disturbingly aggressive punk's vocals or tempos or guitar attack might be, the music's "message" -- manifested in the lyrics, band manifestos, the subculture taken as a whole -- makes it all acceptable, the saving grace ready to swoop down like the Powerpuff Girls on Townsville to make everything A-OK when the threat of empty negativity strikes. Taken on these terms, punk rock is reduced to broccoli for the soul. The secret history of rock criticism is this: smart people often feel guilty about liking dumb music. During the first generation of rock critics, some tried assuaging this guilt by raising the rock artifact to the status of the artwork or the poem; others stressed the music's roots in the aesthetically unassailable authenticity of THE PEOPLE, or in rock's potential to raise consciousness. As rock critics, we often react negatively against these awkward attempts to justify rock's existence in a status-crazed world, but these justifications -- birthed from that uniquely American insistence that what is entertaining must also be edifying, that the spoonful of sugar is what makes the ipecac go down -- remain with us today. Speaking of Joyce Maynard, the essay I linked to below is easily one of the most lugubriously awful things I've ever laid eyes on. Consider it the campily "sensitive" version of this, a memoir from a generation that wasn't spanked enough as children. After reading Powazek's regurgatation of Eggers' quotes, I think I've nailed the crux of my disgust for Eggars on its big black flabby pus-filled head: Large Group Awareness Training. Oh TOTALLY. You KNOW it. "No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message." The postivistic drippy burbles of a Leo Buscaglia with the bullying self-righteousness a la Werner Erhard -- the first cult for the ironist post-everythingist set. Oh god. Oh god , Eggers is SO set. I want to be there. I want a percentage. I want a piece of the action. Have your lawyer speak to my lawyer, and I'll ghostwrite whatever you want. I want the booktapes, Times Bestseller list, the Oprah appearances, the informercials with the gauzy camera effects masking the embarrassing plastic surgery foibles of OUR LEADER. Oh, yum. Can't you just taste it? So Michiko Kakutani won't like it. So what? She can have her own fucking cult, the shamed confessions and the hushed sex scandals. And so can Joyce Maynard, the grinning little freak. But I digress. And I am saying no, big bad no, when I should be saying yes, no make that YES in the capital letters Y-E-S!!! Yes, to the puppies and the sunshine and the flowers and my toilet and the Crystal Light (because I believe in me) and the thing and the other thing, too. Whee!!! Phew. Do you have Netscape? Good. Now type in "about:mozilla" in the location window and see what happens. Also try this page. A couple years ago I went on a methodical quest for content out of vauge feelings of guilt borne out of the fact I wasn't reading enough smart stuff on the 'net. I found the currently-hibernating Smug and found Rewired, which was moderately intriguing but ultimately too techy for me to follow up with. Then it vanished from my consciousness. Now it's back, kind of...and it mentioned ME in its blog-like thingummybob, along with stuff about Derek Powazek, Hilton Kramer and an honest-to-god GOOD piece of music writing from Ironminds sure to please a certain new resident of Berkeley, California. I'm not saying who. Unfortunately, not enough people seem to be visiting it, if the empty discussion-nooks following each item are any indication. You know, I am just this guy...I mean, I just...am. Of course. Speaking of critics... Mr. Matt "Scrubbles" Hinrichs (who I predict will be getting a small package in the mail) calls movie critic Jonathan Rosenbaum "probably the closest to a James Agee that we have today." Erg, well...I don't know. He wrote a review of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie which has stuck in my craw for years thanks to its closing lines: "Here they seem motored by sheer desperation, as are such zingers as...'He's flown into a Flemish painting' -- though the simple, hilly country landscape looks nothing like a Flemish painting. But I guess if you see a country landscape you've got to say something to prove how smart you are." Perhaps. But I guess if you hear an inaccuracy about Flemish art you've got to say something to prove how smart you are. From Tom Price's "The Heartbreaking Work of American Literature" in this month's Speak: "Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is not peopled by characters, it is peopled by the primary emotional colors of relationships that the narrator has with other characters. Furthermore, the relationships are chosen and presented in such a way as to express not the narrator's full personality, but a narrow range of that personality -- its mocking, invulnerable portions." When I was a teen, I noticed that artifacts like Big Black's music or Answer Me! fanzine had an odd kind of perfection. There was simply no safe response one could have to them. Ignoring them meant you were a member of a sheeplike masses; liking it meant you were most likely a member of a much smaller, much more pompous sheeplike mass. Criticizing them on moral grounds -- saying it was nihilistic or empty or quasi-racist or a voyeur's parlor game -- seemed prissy in light of all that steamrolling rage. Calling them boring was a cop-out. The mirror image (and perhaps the evil stepmother) of such negations would have to be the blockbuster movie or the must-see TV program, the cultural artifact that attempts to be so omnipresent and totalizing that to miss out is not to exist. (I'm exaggerating somewhat, bear with me here.) The difference between Steve Albini and James Cameron...there is no difference. Both seek complete control in the form of a total self-justification of their existence. As such, I find such these artifacts to be alluring and more than a bit suspicious because they seek to rob me of my autonomy, my right to feel and think whatever the hell I want. Between the two, there exists something like Dave Eggers and AHW and McSweeney's. In writing his life's story, Dave Eggers sought to make an alluringly airtight artifact. An artifact that will admit of no responses not already anticipated, an artisitic unmoved mover, something that will be invulnerable to criticism, or at least something that will reduce criticism into mere misinformed jealous carping. But what it really wants is to be loved. If it can't be loved, it will confound and confuse through vacuous irony. A critic can only spoil the fun. The critic seeks out hidden meanings, develops personal responses, makes connections to the world at large that were left unspoken by the artist. As such, whether praising or dissing something, the critic points out that the artifact is not as self-sufficient as its creator would like to believe. The critic is (among other things) the one who demonstrates the artist cannot achieve the fantasies of omnipotence and autonomy characteristic of small children and schizophrenics. If Tom is right in his observation that Eggers' interview has become real popular amongst bloggers (and I can't see any evidence of that, though as you can see from my blog list I don't really read the more popular blogs), then I'm just horrified that people take his anti-critic stance seriously, that people would prefer empty and tedious self-justification over the analysis of the world. To paraphrase that Pauline Kael quote I used a while back, this kind of 18th century Romanticism looks pretty damned silly in our post-everythingist online pseudo-bohemia. Two incompatible sentiments I heard, several times over, at the Insound 'Zine Conference: 1) "I absolutely HATE reading things on a computer monitor for more than a few minutes -- after a while, my eyes just start to glaze over." 2) "I like The War Against Silence quite a lot." Sink is a modest music blog concerned with many FT subjects (How could we have neglected it?) and has a go at TWAS' overwritten romantic-with-a-capital-r twaddle. 'Bout time, I say. I could say more, I don't think I should be talking about Stephin Merritt again. Alright. Lots of subjects to talk about this weekend: gamelan, Dave Eggars and autonomy, techno and meaning, and once again, Stephin Merritt. Let's talk Merritt first. Let's try this again... Here's a real Muppet News Flash for ya, kids: not only has Brent D. uncovered shocking evidence that Indieshite has links to a rival webzine, but in spite of the ease with which they bandy around their "bloody"s and "arsed"s, they may not even be British, either! Gosh! Next thing you know, Unca Brent's gonna tell us "Ernst Midgetbiter" and "Ewan McSodoff" aren't even real names! Well, after knowing him for about two-and-a-half years, I finally met Fred. And all I can really think about right now is that I left him and his s.o. mid-meal to catch a train, and I entered the taxi before I realized I didn't pay for dinner. Fuck. I have elected myself the Official Freaky Trigger East Coast Representative. I had to do it. You see, there was this fanzine convention at Tonic, and it was privately suggested that the New York FT contingent should crash the party. But Fred didn't want to go, so it was up to me to testify like a manic subway preacher about the goodness that is this webzine and heckle the discussion panels. First some words about Tonic. It's one of those bars that makes a point of letting the building's previous life shine through; originally a winery, now some of the huge casks in the basement are transformed into funky little nooks and the disintegrated paint on the walls is kept for that "deconstructed" feel. God knows what live music sounds like with all that exposed concrete, but live shows are scheduled all the time. The oh-so typique modesty of the first panel, held downstairs, made me giggle. There were about six panelists and about twenty-thirty people in the audience, with me in the front row squinting at the bright lights. The moderator, some guy from Insound, couldn't be more reserved and muttery; his body language seemed to say "I am resigned to the fact that being around others makes my skin crawl." He said his only experience with this kind of thing was sci-fi conventions. Ah. The panel included some guy from buddyhead.com who claimed the site got four million page views in ONE MONTH! (I must've remembered that wrong.) Sebastian from Signal Drench and Mike Conklin from Basement-Life were there, too. The others had websites I never heard of before, though from the sound of it, they sounded considerably more commercial than the others. The gist of the discussion was on the economics of running a webzine, a subject I was pretty much unprepared for because...well, to be perfectly honest, because most of the rockcrit sites I frequent don't run comprehensive reviews sections or run banner ads or any of the other trappings of a tony commercial website. I forget the entirety of the context -- something about the incestuousness of the webzine scene -- but Tanya was mentioned (and I didn't even have to prompt it) as was Indieshite. Nanette's site was mentioned as a good'un. Maybe some others, my notes are sketchy. At the end, I asked the panel what heights they were aiming for with their 'zines: none of the answers had anything in common, they ranged from "we want to take over the world" to "I don't want to be doing as a job." Upstairs, about thirty 'zines had their little tables with 'zines and food and whatever little knicknacks they wanted to offer. Sebastian (who's a very nice guy, I might add) had no print-outs, no t-shirts, no cupcakes. All he had were "Signal Drench" spelled out in Legos and his own bad self, and he was painfully conscious of the absurdity it all. Subtext Zine (not up and running yet) had a teensy bit more, a laptop with a bare-bones mock-up of the site, and some 'zines -- 'zines that his contributors had worked on before, not Subtext itself. Finally, basement-life.com had the laptop arrangement but also some free buttons and postcard/stickers. Doubtlessly these guys were just happy to be there, representing their online labors of love, but at next year's conference, all the webzines will doubtlessly have a a beefier selection of freebies. As for all the other 'zines at the conference, I got all the free ones and bought a couple of the not-so-free ones, particularly the newest Stay Free! and the quite excellent Bunnyhop. It was almost heartbreaking looking through the other, smaller ones. Being the bleeding-heart that I am, I felt obligated to thumb through each 'zine and show some interest in each one of them. I hated having to walk away from a 'zine-stand without buying something. Each person had a lust to reach and communicate oneself to and with others, a lust which co-existed with the understanding that in all likelihood not enough people will respond to make it worth one's while. And it made me uncomfortable to be put in a position where I have to say, no, I don't care enough to spend measly three bucks on your little labor of love. I hate being the one to say no. There were two films on 'zines (maybe someone should do a homemade documentary on blogs, hmm...), and an even better one on eight-track tape culture, which was dedicated to the dubious proposition that loving obsoleted technologies that were once shoved down folks' throats by an unfeeling music industry represents a rebellion against contemporary technologies currently being shoved down people's thoats by an unfeeling music industry. (CDs, in case you couldn't guess.) Still, quite fascinating, and I audibly gasped when they showed an eight-track cassette of Metal Machine Music. As for the T-shirt I designed especially for the occasion...nobody could decipher it. Back to the drawing board. By the way, here's a proper link to goose, and some more fontwerks from its creator, David Buck, are available at sparkytype. And while we're on the subject of Chank Diesel, check out some of his acts of rock criticism: apparently he doesn't like *Nsync or Eminem. This is Freaky Tigger. Hey, everybody! It's the first-ever Freaky Trigger T-Shirt, which I'm wearing EVEN AS I type this! The wonders! Here's the front:  Now let's take a look at the back:  Now printing one shirt of this kind cost about thirty bucks; I'll have to call the guy at the print place to see how much the shirts will cost in larger quantities. Stay tuned. Magic plays an enormous role in consumerist fantasies of control, autonomy and omnipotence, and Norman Bridwell's The Witch's Catalog from the seventies, is a good example of how such fantasies are introduced to children. Did I grow up with this book? Hella yeah. Would I have loved to have this? Sadly, yes. One wonders what a follower of Wicca would feel about this book, especially how it makes witchcraft look like a really groovy form of capitalism. Link inadvertantly provided by David K. of Giving Head, a feller who really oughta get acquainted with Stephin Merritt. Unless he already is. (Before you click on that link, remember that the site has pictures of men doing naughty things to each other. I just can't stress this enough.) Potential slogan for FT: FREAKYTRIGGER.COM WE WANT REVOLUTION BRRRITNEY-STYLE NOW!!! This website (meaning Freaky Trigger) has been written up in a major magazine. That's right, the September issue of Alternative Press -- the one with Limp Bizkit on the cover -- has named FT as one of "10 Websites Worth Cutting Class For," along with such luminaries as Your Glam Rock Name!, The Online Bartending Institute, Kozmo (!), and Blogger (!!!). Unfortunately, they spell it "Freaky Tigger." That's T-I-G-G-E-R. Noticed the missing "r" yet? I'm sure they mean well, but why is FT on there again? It seems completely out of place, since it's the only nod to music writing on the whole list, the list itself being awash in a sea of gadgets, clothes, tattoos, records, things, all the hallmarks of the lifestyle magazine. A lifestyle magazine with lipstick and backpack reviews written in 5-7-5 haiku, and record reviews prefaced with a one-to-five ranking, rather than the other way around, which not only would be waay cooler, it would no doubt doom the magazine to financial ruin. Plus, oh yes, can't forget this, there are pictures of pretty-boy Fred Durst, a man whose self-pitying puppy-dog eyes of the deepest blue, stubbly facial hair, hideous tattoos and backwards baseball cap make me want to simultaneously a) deep throat that purty mouf of his, and b) smack him in the face with a copy of Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (seems appropriate, don't know why), long and hard and repeatedly. I could complain that this is the kind of magazine I would never have bought this magazine had FT not been mentioned -- but what does that say about me? That I'd buy any old piece of media if it mentioned something that had a non-tenuous connection to me? Wow. Sounds like I'm the whore. No, really, this should be an opportunity to be grateful, especially with all the great music sites out there, like...what? Am I gonna mention Robin's site AGAIN? You betcha, honey. 1974 (SLIGHT RETURN)  link YES? AND? At last my heart is an open door... 2000 First song of my millenium: Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain" on my Nomad, as I walk down the street to see the sun rise. We've got to search for something new. I cave in and install Napster to see if I can find one, thinking that, oh, I'll just download this one Wendy Carlos track that I need a pristine copy of, and I'll just leave it at that. I spend the next few days staring at my computer doing nothing staring at my screen in sheer awe of the fact that there are people out there (many, in fact) who want my MP3s, ALL of them, the Mississippi John Hurt and Bread and Aaliyah and Alvin Lucier MP3s. My computer's just like a bazooka. The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs is awfully seductive. I actually fall asleep to it once, and wake up to with my stomach in knots at its splendorous ache. The album hits me on another level, though. I want to have the kind of mastery-of-medium that Stephin Merritt has. I think I even call Merritt an "asshole" at one point in a review of a heartbreaking Three Terrors concert, which is nothing less than a pathetic display of my intense jealousy. OK, I admit. This is the kind of thing -- well, one kind of thing -- I feel I should be doing. (It take some comfort in the fact that doubtlessly many, many critics feel the same way.) Damnit, I’m gonna make my own music. Problem is that I can't read music very well, can't play a single instrument and my singing voice is like Paul Simon only hoarser. Well, I plod on, using Cubasis and Audiomulch and Rebirth. I don’t think I’m coming back to alt.music.alternative. The action’s elsewhere now. There are mailing lists, there is private e-mail conversation, there is also blogging. After some noble efforts, CAOTM pretty much dies; with some prodding from Tom, it turns into a blog which completes my drift away from its original aphoristic style. After a year and half of floating in the breeze, I finally finish my essays on Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music and get half-way through The Rock Machine Turns You On (which I have Tom put on the site unedited -- how lame is that?), though my enthusiasm about the latter is dampened somewhat when one artist I profile in the latter e-mails me to take exception with the things I wrote. (Of course, she's completely right, and while I she accepts the amends I make to her, I still feel pretty shitty about it.) Fred and I plan on meeting for a free Kelis concert at the World Trade Center; he has to back out thanks to a doctor’s appointment, and it doesn’t even look like she performed anyway. But I get to hear what he sounds like for the first time. Josh asks me a stray question about my musical development. What originally is intended as a terse year-by-year blow-by-blow becomes what you see now. Working through it, I begin to wonder why I can recall the events of twenty years ago so easily and accurately while I get skittish about the stuff about that’s happened only a couple of years ago. I wonder: could I really be that dissatisfied with the way I’ve lived my life? I have to conclude, yes, of course, I am. I decide, once and for all, that I’m going to find an apartment or a room-share or something; I just have to get out of Bay Shore, now. This will affect my consumption of music in a very clear and obvious way: chances are my internet access won’t be as speedy as it is now, and adding anything more than a second phone line will probably be prohibitively expensive, so I might as well say bye-bye to zipless Napster action. As such, I download all sorts of crap on to my 20 GB hard drive like there’s no tomorrow. Napster appears to be in trouble, but I figure I’ll figure out how to use Gnutella in due course. And even then there are...I'll just say there are other ways of getting MP3s. Fred and I try and meet for a free Magnetic Fields concert but Fred doesn't see me in line and the poor man never gets in. I sense a jinx in the making. I finally finish up the retrospective, and while there's lots of good writers and people have given me some awfully nice compliments, I'm slightly nauseated by the fact that I've just written 12,000+ words about myself. 1999 Looking up some info on the possibility that a synth was used in the Supremes' "Reflections" (I'm still trying to write The Rock Machine Turns You On!) I encounter some stray notices on the newsgroup rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s about rare stuff that was being made available on alt.binaries.sounds.1960s.mp3s. Gosh. I mosey on over to said newsgroup. It is an orgy of music love, a silent bazaar of sound, the tacky and the canonical and the mind-bogglingly obscure perched upon low shelves for everyone's delectation. I install Forté Free Agent to automate the downloading process, and then the raison d'etre of MP3s becomes totally crystal. Boy was I wrong about MP3s. Holy goddamned FUCK was I wrong. I tell Tom: "Last week I downloaded songs by the Hoosier Hotshots, Extreme Noise Terror, America, David Bowie, Count Basie, Tommy Roe, Manu Dibango, and Squarepusher. This is a gift from God." At work, I feverishly download Beatle bootlegs, rockabillysploitation and girl group sides, old skool hip-hop, Pharaoh Sanders' Tauhid, and simply beauteous '78's from the early part of the century (which dovetails quite nicely with this, which I buy on New Year's Day). And yes, Smile outtakes. The coup de FUCKING grace: someone posts the music from the Murmurs of Earth CD-ROM, which went out of print just before I got a computer. I tear up when I finally get to hear "Jaat Kahan Ho" and "Tchakrulo," music I had been waiting to hear for...how long? Fifteen years? Fifteen years! I realize that if a significant number of music lovers encounter even one-tenth of what I've gone through, then MP3s have an opportunity to radically decenter the ruling paradigms of taste and music consumption, maybe for the better and maybe not. "Our culture now seems destined to be incapable of forgetting. All cultural rot has been postponed; everything is, if not known, already mapped out; every mystery fades away in all directions." I begin to think that if you want a music revolution on the order of acid house or disco or hip-hop or whatever -- and I increasingly think that such full-scale world-upending revolutions are unnecessary -- well, it's this one. Relating some of my observations to Tom, he uses them in his MP3 essay on his new site and in passing calls me a cultural flaneur, a title which I take a great liking to. I also fall in love with buying music on the 'net. First, a Mort Garson LP and a Hugo Montenegro CD from dustygroove.com, and then later, Prince Paul and the Olivia Tremor Control from amazon.com. Writing has its highs and lows: the aforelinked Smile essay, plus stuff I can never seem to finish about synthesizers, the Voyager Space Record, the lameness of Automatic for the People, etc. I turn the Cultural Artifacts of the Moment into an FT column, and what were once crisp aphorisms become unwieldly essays. And there's always alt.music.alternative, which picks up some later this year, and I get to encounter future bloggers Tim and Josh, whose posts and e-mails I never seem to get the intellectual wherewithal to answer. (Eventually everyone takes it to e-mail.) Speaking of stasis, it's incredible fun it is to create musical fuckery with AudioMulch and Steinberg's ReBirth RB-338 but I never, ever get a chance to create anything remotely resembling a track. The necessary structure is beyond me. I also get an MP3 player for Christmas. The last song of the millenium: Laurie Anderson's "O Superman." On MP3. 1998 I'm a familiar enough figure at a.m.a. that personal touchstones -- tapes of Basic Channel techno, the Anthology, early sampladelica, gamelan music, the Raunchy Young Lepers, girl groups, as well lovingly xeroxed copies of Swellsville -- are traded amongst various parties. The traffic in alt.music.alternative goes through one of its periodic droughts, so the conversations shift to e-mail. Tom and I write long, long, long e-mails touching on nearly every rock subject I've ever been fascinated with, plus authenticity and sincerity, the art of "theater" in the voices of Morrissey and Michael Jackson, and the misguidedness of Tom Frank, whose essay "Pop Music in the Shadow of Irony" claims that no intelligent can enjoy pop music without falling into an ironist parlor game. I get a raise and buy Rhino's Beg, Scream and Shout: The Big Ol' Box Of 60's Soul and so I tell Fred that Lorraine Ellison's "Stay With Me" is "one of those singles that when it's on, you have to GET THE FUCK OUT OF ITS' WAY OR IT'LL TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB LIKE YOU WERE FRESH-BAKED BREAD. A landmark of Western Civilization, without question." Eventually he’s also part of our web of handwringing and nifty tunes, spreading soul music into our lives. (I also inform Fred that he has synesthesia.) Eventually we set up an informal mixtape-trading e-mail discussion group. It’s great because I plan and scheme mix-tape concoctions, leaping from Magazine to Professor Longhair to parlor music to Debussy. (I also subject poor Fred to lots of folk music), and listen to other people's mixtapes. The problem with mixtape-madness is that I feel obligated to talk about songs that, while I enjoy, I can't bring myself to say anything intelligent about. On my birthday I go see Singing in the Rain and The Bandwagon at the Film Forum. Gene Kelly's dancing makes me want to cry. These films are not overrated, I think, and finally my resistance to American popular song is crumbling. As a child, I was always prone to collapsing into a state of catatonic anxiety whenever the threat of apocalypse reared its deformed head; this summer, a stray article about the susceptibility of the Soviet nuclear arsenal to Y2K problems sets me off on another downward spiral, my worst ever, culminating in two panic attacks within a week's time. It takes several months of a deep, debilitating depression before I return to a state of ordinary unhappiness. At my most emotionally crippled, music provides my with one of my few glimmers of hope, because there is always the chance that when I least expect it, some truth will catch me unawares out of the corner of my ears and illuminate my existence. By chance I receive an advance copy of Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs from Tom the day I take off a sick day. There is this disconcerting moment as I listen to the first song, "Holes," when I realize that EVERY SINGLE WORD of the song has some kind of resonance with how I feel RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT, in this absurd hour in my life when I am so lacking in energy I can barely carry the vacuum cleaner around my apartment but feel compelled for some silly reason to clean the kitchen floor anyway. Fred sends me a tape with Clarence Carter's version of "At the Dark End of the Street" and I get a similarly gutwrenching, disorienting reaction. I also cling to another tape Tom sent me earlier, Charlemagne Palestine's Four Manifestations on Six Elements, a series of piano and synth drones. Play it soft and it sounds featureless. Play it louder, and rhythms purr and ripple over the skein of the sound. Louder still, and the drone is a prime mover, a frictionless machine made of phantom parts churning away forever. It is inhuman music, pure being or becoming, complete peace. Eventually I come to realize that this might be the best album I’ve ever heard. In contemplating apocalyptic post-technology scenarios, I become fascinated with how we got to where we are, musically speaking, anyway. Prompted by the fascinatingly imperfect self-titled album by The United States of America, I buy pop albums from the sixties with synthesizers and start to plot my grandest mixtape creation yet: The Rock Machine Turns You On! I place a personal ad in the Village Voice. I figure four letters are all I need to accurately describe my musical mindset to the rest of the world: WFMU. By some weird coincidence, the three most promising candidates for significantotherhood are connected to each other in Kevin Bacon fashion, but at least I find my first boyfriend with agreeable musical tastes. Tom asks me if I know anything about MP3s. I say: "I've never been much interested in MP3's, because most of them seem so superfluous: do I really want to spend twenty minutes downloading 'Bullet with Butterfly Wings' ? I haven't yet seen things that I really want, like, say, Smile rarities." |
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