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Katherine Wirick, Frank I have made it a point to check out other blogs, a task which, given the accelerating rate of blogworld expansion, absolutely spells out S-I-S-Y-P-H-E-A-N. This is one find. At seventeen, her writing already has a confidence it took me years on the 'net to develop. Her blog design is absolutely lumnious, ratttling in its box of sky like a fragment of angry candy. She has a fondness for anime. She really likes Greil Marcus. She wants to experience Robert Johnson, The Anthology and Samuel Beckett. I do believe she needs to develop a wishlist, then. Robin Williams, The Non-Designer's Design Book Major dude Jonno* reaches into my wish list, and pulls out the very thing that will make me succumb to the basest urge of bloggers everywhere: PERPETUAL REDESIGN! Yes, yes, since I put it on my wish list, I have no-one but myself to blame, but...you know...I think there needs to be some borders between blog entries. For contrast. And I guess I could put each artifact in boldface. Why the hell did I settle on orange, anyway? Now let me see...where did I put my copy of Microsoft FrontPage....hmmm... *That's so sweet! And I didn't get you anything for Christmas! The words "fag" and "homo" If you're straight, you may have looked on in wonder at the ease with which some gay men freely and unmaliciously call each other names that, in the mouths of straight people, would ordinarily be considered homophobic epithets. If you're gay and you read this blog, you may -- I stress may -- have noticed noticed that I never use "fag" or "homo" or even "queer" in any context, preferring "gay," "lesbian" or, if I'm feeling snooty, "homosexual." I don't use "fag" or "homo" unless I make a belabored show at registering distance between myself and those words. For the last few months or so, I've been trying without success to write something about why I feel the need to avoid using those words. The rationales I was coming up with weren't making much sense. I have no problem with cursing, or using offensive language. And if I was uncomfortable about adopting or identifying with the language of anti-gay bullies and oppressors, I'd still feel queasy about "gay," a word which, growing up, I heard used perjoratively many more times than "fag" or "homo." Everything clicked when I was looking up some slang to use in response to something Matt had written about Snoop Dogg's house. I was trying to think up some hip-hop slang to use for purely comedic effect, since after all it was clearly ridiculous that a white suburban wimp like myself to use "playa" or "homey" or "shorty" without irony. No matter how much I love and respect hip-hop, these are not *my* words, they are the words of a culture I have very little to do with and which probably wants nothing to do with me. Then I put two and two together. It occured to me that I was bracketing African-American slang the way I normally bracket "fag" and "homo"; I was treating these words as if I had no right to them. They are the words of a gay subculture that uses them freely, one I've essentially alienated myself from. In other words, I realized that it would not be indecorous or self-loathing to refer to myself as a "fag" or a "homo"; it would be pretentious. I don't use the word "queer" either, but that's a subject for another time. Herbert Ross, The Goodbye Girl "Thank you Neil Simon for making us laugh about falling in love...again." Thank you, Neil Simon, for a movie full of obvious continuity problems, egregious product placement, wise-cracking children, homosexuality played for laffs, and David Gates at his smarmiest. Not to mention one of the most irresistably cornball movie taglines ever -- MST3K refs the above line a lot (though they judiciously shorten to "...laugh about love...again," which scans much nicer). I blog this movie because there's much in it, barely a quarter of a century old, that underlines with a big fat yellow highlighting marker the difference between us then and us now. There's the setting: New York City, 1977. I can look back at it as I can with so many other seventies movies, I can spot familiar places in unfamiliar architectural garb, and I can wonder with Guiliani-era amazement how New York City could ever have looked so dingy and mediocre. (I also wonder if we'll ever return to that decadence, now that -- just as in 1977 -- we've entered a post-boom era.) More importantly, there's a scene where, right after he's been punched in the face at a strip club, Richard Dreyfus' character starts getting..."interested" with Marsha Mason's character. (You may say "amorous"; I say it's "horny".) He locks her in the bathroom and kisses her while she's blinded with soap and water. He keeps kissing her and kissing her and she keeps squirming and protesting and it's not cute. All I can think is uh, no means no, right? The scene was serial squirmage, and after they started falling in love (even though she initially can't stand the narcissistic twerp), that's when I stopped watching altogether out of disbelief and disgust. The same thing happened to me watching The Graduate: I still can't fathom how an entire generation of movie-goers could believe Dustin Hoffman's harrassment of Katherine Ross was a token of crazy romantic yearning rather than a bunch of creepy bullshit. Having been the focus of several mild stalking and harrassment campaigns, I can only say that if I were in her situation, and if I didn't succumb to my terror by staying locked in the fetal position (as I most likely would), I'd buy a fucking gun. Yet this movie was and is considered "romantic." So I have to ask: did people really accept all this naked powerplay masquerading as true love? Were there some dissident voices, particularly amongst the feminist crowd? (I'm sure there were, but how loud were they?) And furthermore, could such scenes be made today without howls of protest? Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, "Smooth Chick" Also hard: they sound more like the SNAP! of billard bills than they do handclaps. Storm, "Time to Burn" and "Storm Animal" There's something almost elegant and rarified in these tracks' hardcore-in-everything-but-name agression; perhaps it's the spacy Liz Frasier samples in the latter, the orchestral stabs in the former, or the bassy synth wibble throughout both. Diamonds are hard, too. Bob the Builder, "Can We Fix It?" Currently the British #1 single. Really. You have to understand that the United Kingdom is a land where theme songs from kid's television shows can and do go to the toppermost of the poppermost. You have to admit that kind of chartwise openness is kinda cool. But songwise, this is a disappointment -- anthemic neo-glammy stuff with beatz and random show dialogue instead of the A Tribe Called Quest rip the title promises. Jason Kottke, kottke.org "I don't know what people find interesting about this site..." Me neither. I do believe that I actually linked to this site in my initial flush of blogging enthusiasm, but honestly, now I can't see why I bothered. Did he have a picture of himself on his site? Was he shown to be cute? That must be why. Most of it elicits no strong reactions in me whatsoever, but his reviews! Lawd. His reviews of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Requiem for a Dream bug me, maybe much much more than they should. They are so profoundly undeclarative and unanalytical, they seem to have no reason to exist other than to take up space, to say: yes, I've updated my blog, I exist. These are sentences written with all the penetrating insight of a sixth-grader padding out a book report for a book he did not read. (I know, I've been there.) They're so gormless that in my more vicious moods I've read them aloud to friends for the sake of a cheap laugh. And yes, a cheap laugh was had. My non-online friends -- who generally know about blogging only from my casual mentions of CAOTM or that New Yorker article -- they say to me, why does this guy have the rep that he does? I say, well, there's Osil8, which I find quite keen, and he's also made what I found to be a very useful font. But the blog itself? Hmm...no. Can't really explain its appeal. Sorry. Matt Mahaffey, "Top 10 Reasons Pro Tools Makes Artists Lazy & Record Producers' Lives Hell" It's a rant about all the fucked-up aspects of music recording software that shouldn't be taken all that seriously in of itself; but it's deeply symptomatic of the sexist assumptions that surround public debate of this technology like a toxic aura. Three out of the ten listings belittle women in some way. #3 is a bit of yobbish jesting over PMS -- clearly this guy regards women as impenetrable black boxes. #1's sexism actually prevents the joke from making any sense: even if every little girl on the planet learned to sing without vibrato, vibrato wouldn't necessarily disappear from the human race because that's only half the population. Minor nitpicking, to be sure, since the line's real offense is that it makes some rather patronizing assumptions about the teen pop audience. #10 jokes that female singers now just can't function without Pro Tools, but only a fool would argue that this isn't equally applicable to male singers as well. To take one example, ask yourself whether aging pusbag hacks like Luciano Pavorotti or Cliff Richard or Mick Jagger or Sting or Elton John will ever be able to resist making their voices sound as powerful as a twenty-one-year-old, particuarly the twenty-one-year-old they used to be. Well no, of course they won't; yet the search for perfection through digital manipulation continues to be seen as a particularly female kind of vanity. Why is this? All I can offer is this: fear of the technological dominiation of all aspects of rock music goes hand in hand with the fear of the music's feminization. (Really groovy Momus-like idea: what if Kraftwerk were women? What then?) What's truly insidious about Pro Tools is not that it'll make singers' voices sound weirdly unreal but that it'll make them sound all the more beholden to naturalism. If Pro Tools can remove all obviously "human" signifiers from a person's recorded voice, surely one can use it to *add* them as well, right? You say Eric Clapton laid down a vocal track that was insufficiently "bluesy"? No problem! We can put some melisma here and a little hoarseness there, maybe add a smidgen of microtonal inflections -- and voila! A piece of music that conforms to the genre expectations of the blues so perfectly that no smidgen of surprise will sneak through unawares. Once people learn how to remove all the eccentricities from Charlotte Church's voice without leaving digital burns all over the place, the next barrier for music software will be the barrier of authenticity. At the risk of sounding like yr typical two-bit McLuhan, someone whose enthusiasm for the implications of a technology moves faster than their desire to understand how the technologies actually work, I believe that one day there will be a suite of plug-ins for Pro Tools that will be able to fake "the real" with such complete perfection that if a music lover -- and that could be anyone -- tried hard enough, she will be able to create something completely indistiguishable from a Charlie Parker jam session or an Anthology outtake. There will be a plug-in to add vinyl pops and clicks, a plug-in to add the weird vocal harshness typical of the days before people learned to sing through microphones, but most of all, there will be a plug-in for patina. Use your mouse to slide the lever to your year of choice, 1926 or 1973 -- it doesn't matter which -- add a few additional parameters, and you've created some new nostalgia. David Sampson, "É Proibido Proibir" A decent enough blog, but hey -- check out that name, huh? Mighty fine pedigree. It was a track recorded in 1967 by Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso, with Veloso frothing maniacally about how "it was forbidden to forbid," with a crowd hell-bent for vengeance in the midst of a military dictatorship. It is possibly the nerviest, bravest thing a rock musician has ever done for the sake of his art. It sounds more like the Fall than anything you'll find on Nuggets. Polly Esther, "Holiday Sneer" "Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker!" Mitch Miller and the Gang, "Frosty the Snowman" and "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" Just what is it that makes Mitch Miller so unbearable? Let's forget about his notorious antipathy towards rock and his asinine treatment of Frank Sinatra. I mean, why are these songs irksome to listen to? It's because they sound so fucking smug. They collect many unpleasant signifiers of the straight white male, an archetype whose uptightness will no doubt be mocked in commercials for decades to come. A very specific kind of straight white male; not a John Wayne (too violent) or a Dwight D. Eisenhower (too serious), but something much more...umm...unNietzchean, I guess. Their unwavering, stolidly baritone voices, singing along to a defiantly unragged beat that's almost martial in its unsexiness, are the musical embodiment of Bureaucratic Man as musician. These songs are what IBM's infamous sing-a-longs must've sounded like -- presuming all those engineers and computer programmers could keep in tune. Merry Christmas to you, too. Josh Kortbein, Josh Blog I'd like to say that I consider that I consider Josh Blog to be my ideal of what a blog should be like, because it's that good, but I don't believe in having just one ideal. I having many blogging ideals. Maybe what I want to say is something not merely more laudatory but more personal as well: his blog is one version of what I'd like my own blog to be like. Josh has that perfect blogging tone: it feels personal without succumbing to the confessional. He carefully interrogates his subjects, even when the subject is himself and his emotional responses to a book, a record, an idea. It is perhaps the least self-indulgent blog I read. Josh's blog possesses a genius so comfortable in its skin it never feels the need to show off its erudition, its engagement with subjects both highbrow and lowbrow. Even when reveling in the everyday and the evanescent (the essence of blogging, if there is one), he is still nibbling away at the corners of his Great Subjects, which are -- among other things -- how artifacts and our responses to them work. I am extremely receptive to this kind of analysis, not merely because both Josh and myself share vaguely similar backgrounds, and vaguely similar temperaments. Ever since I encountered Allen Bloom and his bizarrely off descriptions of how rock works on impressionable young minds, I've been striving to formulate a rock aesthetics I feel comfortable with. I've found out early on that rock academics and journos alike have historically been pretty lousy about even thinking about these subjects, usually preferring liberal pieties or lowbrow apologias or Continental obfuscation when they don't resort outright to the evasive bullshit of "critics take rock music too seriously." So I've had to make it out on my own, pretty much. His writing, along with Tom's and only a couple others, help fill this void that thirty-five of rock criticism have left behind. I regard Josh as a fellow traveler in ways that almost no other online music writer is. And so I really treasure his writing, and hope that if he sees fit to give Josh Blog a decent burial, he will set his sights even higher. A book would be a good start. Happy 1st Anniversary, Josh Blog. Andrew Sullivan, andrewsullivan.com For better or for worse, the most famous gay online journal-writer. Or can I just say "blogger" ? No, the site doesn't use Pyra's service or anything, but can we regard "blog" and "online journal" as interchangable now, for the sake of simplicity? Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project My beloved coworker got me Benjamin's The Arcades Project for Christmas. Juicy. Reason dictates that my gift to her should have been the Anthology of American Folk Music by fellow ragpicker of the capitalist unconscious, Harry Smith. I couldn't afford it, so I got her this and this, which, cut-for-cut, are probably better than the Anthology. But who the hell buys the Anthology for mere consistency? Thinking about some of the people who must read this blog, I realize that most, being musical trainspotters like myself, will be noddingly familiar with the Anthology. There will also be some who won't know what the fuck I'm talking about. They may read the above with a glancing understanding, and imagine the Anthology in faintly negative terms. It sounds boring. But it's not that kind of document, I can assure you. It's the type of artifact that tempts to say EVERY MUSIC LOVER SHOULD GET THIS ALBUM, but that turns my passion into dogmatism. Let's just say: it has Henry Thomas' "Fishing Blues." I suppose I could make the utterly banal point that The Arcades Project is kinda like a blog, what with its quotes and fragments and multi-tendriled sense of purpose. Thing is, nowhere in Benjamin's book do I see any egregious mentions of meals past, wish lists from strike-breaking dot-com companies, or stuff about all the cute things his cats did. Steve Reich, "Come Out" After a while, the tape loops that constitute Steve Reich's "Come Out" fall out of synch. First words and their doppelgangers flciker across the stereo spectrum, then the integrity of the words start to melt and fray apart in all directions. The piece slowly dissolves from one continuous loop than a sea of loops, competing textures of staccato sonic smears. "Come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them" becomes co-Co-CO-co-Co-CO-co-Co-CO on top of MA-ma-MA-ma-MA-ma-MA on top of what eventually becomes the most prominent sonic feature of the track, the shrill metallic rasp of tSHuh-tSHuh-tSHuh-tSHuh-tSHuh-tSHuh. It's like Kraftwerk doing the ketjack. Or sheet metal being sawed. That painful. The center of "Together" is almost nothing more than a couple of incredible looped pastiches (they're too perfect to be actual samples, right?) so cheesy they dredge musical cliches you haven't given conscious thought to in about twenty years, harking back to the frothy uptempo tripe Denise Williams' "Let's Hear It For the Boy" or Debarge's "Rhythm of the Night" (though neither of them seem to have been possessed of the kind of bottom that "Together" does). Yet what girds the song are these two loops of two singers singing the word "together." One sounds almost out of tune, and maybe not accustomed to English as his native language. The other is...well, I don't know what the fuck the other is. All I know is that it's an ugly shriek of some kind. Put any conscious thought to this song, and it falls apart, becomes inexplicable. Pay attention to the loops that give its minimal structure and the song seems to pick up some of the assaultive flavor of "Come Out"; shift your attention to the buzzy synth ooze and end up wondering what mid-eighties monstrosity did they dredge up to produce that sound, that eighties feel. But I get pleasure from listening to it (what a clinical way of putting it), probably because all I'm doing is dancing to it. Even if only in my head. I'm getting Mom and my stepdad a bread machine for Christmas; they're getting me a Palm Pilot with wireless capabilities and a keyboard attachment. Among other things. I didn't give the idea of owning a Palm Pilot a moment's notice until Dan showed me his over a snack of smoothies and pastry one afternoon. And after that, I didn't actively ask for one until the folks suggsted the possibility of a cell-phone for x-mas. A cell-phone on my person would've been faintly ridiculous (I barely find use for home phone, thank you) but my mom thinks I should be easily reachable at all times. Truthfully, given my delicate psychological make-up (something I've hardly made a secret of on this blog), that's not a bad idea. At least with this I can manage my life, find a nice restaurant, blog on the LIRR, or I can read James Joyce's Ulysses on it. Excuse me. I don't think you quite heard me there. I repeat: Does that not fucking ROCK? Back to the hand-wringing. Here's what gets me about it. The cost difference between my gift and their gift(s) is rather substantial. In fact, while it's the most expensive gift I've ever given (I think), it's still about the quarter of what they're getting me. I need a Palm Pilot much more than they need a breadmaker. And I feel that, well, I'm an adult, and as an adult (albeit one who doesn't make enough money), I should be the one giving the expensive gift, right? But there continues to be an inequality here, a feeling that I owe them something for their attentions. To her credit, my mother never made an issue of this. There were no guilt trips, belive me. Indeed, for years, she spent ridiculous amounts of money to keep me amused. She should not have put up with my desire to own what must've seemed like several hundred inane non-books, or subscribe to the Franklin Mint's "Flags of the United Nations" collector ingot set. But she did. So when do I get to pay her back? Is that even possible? Hey, look! The blog layout's been spiffed up, archive pages resurrected, links are updated. (Guess which one of 'em's my mom's.) I have no idea why I can't create a proper archive page for October 2000. A whole bunch of national anthems on MP3, including those from France, Guiana, Iran, Lebanon, Albania, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, China, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and so on. How depressing to have grown up all my life having, quite in spite of myself, a very emotional attachement to our own national anthem (written by fellow Johnny Francis Scott Key) only to realize rather suddenly and brutally that it was just one of many, many examples of terminal imperialist kitsch. Plus they all sound the fucking same. Except for "N'Kosi Sikelel'i Afrika." David Brooks and Tom Frank, Breakfast Table at Slate.com God bless the good ship Slate for giving this humble reader a chance to experience these two truly insufferable cultural commentators engaging in an intellectual turf war. Shall there ever be a sharp enough scalpel with which to scrape the collective smarm off my monitor? And congratulations to Tom Frank. It takes a man of great selflessness to wave off such trivial niceties as the election or Xena's cancellation so as to get to the REAL heart of the matter: book promotion. All levity aside, it seems to me that Brooks, while liberally borrowing much of Frank's intellectual iconography in his most recent book, still, like most commentators, deeply misunderstands his idée fixee. Frank's point is not that the original spirit of the sixties has been tawdrily cheapened by its co-optation by the establishment, or that all rebels must eventually sell out. It is that the values of the 60's counterculture -- rebellion, novelty, hedonism, exoticism, multi-culti, self-expression, rugged individualism, etc. -- actually were quite consistent with those of the post-boom marketplace, and as such, all dissent based on the beats-hippie model is in fact no dissent at all. (Frank, of course, grew up with punk rock.) Whether this is true or not depends on whether you think of five-year old Fruitopia ads as a form of "commodified dissent" or cutesy-pie bullshit, I s'pose. Third Eye Blind, "Wounded" Not every crazy mixed-up teen can grow up knowing the anthemically agonized drone of The Wedding Present. But knowing Third Eye Blind will do quite nicely instead. (And who's to say who's the bigger jerk, Gedge or Stephan Jenkins?) The Baudelaire Memorial Orchestra, "Count Olaf" Stephin Merritt would make a fabulous Grinch. Brian Eno/John Cale, "Wrong Way Up" Faux soukous and fake strings, a rhythm track that sounds like Teddy Riley working his magic on some ketjak samples, all elegiacally strung along to the chord changes of Eno's "Becalmed." A true artifact from the early nineties, back when the web didn't quite exist yet and Eno wasn't farting around. It's even almost Top 40. Papa Wemba, "Moperewe" Authentic soukous that leaves the quaint burg of pleasantness for the heavenly city of sublimity at exactly 4:16: guitar trickles of the purest liquor rain down while Wemba's pleading, crying. |
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