-I am no fan of hippie culture, but what makes the culture of the Dead truly odious is its cooptation by prep school kids who grow up to be bankers and other major movers of other people’s money. What riles is the readiness with which the Dead atmosphere (more than the actual music, the actual drugs, etc.) gives itself up to the smug, always already nostalgic leisure of this demographic. When I see tie-dye today I see it mainly as a class marker, doing work like an Izod alligator label used to do, but more passive aggressively.
-Songs sung by Bob Weir are mediocre at best (“Truckin’); most are execreble. Weir is also responsible for the band’s most cringy covers (“Dancing in the Street,” “Good Lovin’”), and for introducing a creepy Jimmy Buffet vibe that conflicts with (and is actually much more stupid than) the (to me) more attractive atmosphere of giggly dopiness that Jerry Garcia embodies.
-Nonetheless, the influence of the Dead on some of the greatest “slacker rock” bands of the 90s, particularly Pavement and the various incarnations of Will Oldham, is undeniable. There are several songs in particular that embody this quality, all sung by Jerry Garcia: Tennessee Jed, He’s Gone, Dire Wolf, Brown-Eyed Women, Mission in the Rain, miscellaneous Dylan covers (many of these songs don’t appear on studio albums, only in the now vast collection of authorized live recordings). It’s not hard for me to imagine Stephen Malkmus vamping through the semi-crescendoes and stops of Tennessee Jed, in particular. Indeed, Pavement sometimes sounds like the Dead plus Television, Malkmus like Garcia plus Verlaine.
-This kinship is actually not that surprising when one considers the inextricability of weed from the way Malkmus and Garcia both seem to imagine the effects of their composing, and likely from the composing itself.
-The Dead’s long live jams, which make up the bulk of the live recordings, are the essence of noodle, and sometimes almost astonishing in their monotony. However, there is a certain attraction to the way the band bends from one song to the next without stopping, and to the way these transitions continued to shift (i.e. using different songs) over the years of the band’s performances.
-I admire the Dead’s embrace of bootlegging culture. I’m sure many Deadheads consider it a loss, or irrelevant, that so many bootlegs are now official releases available for download, for money. Pearl Jam also went this route. But I wish a band or performer I really love and is a good live act—Elvis Costello comes prominently to mind—would do something like this, rather than just letting a few live recordings trickle out as he seems to be doing now.
-I’m fine with having never seen the Dead live. For one thing, they were never much to look at. Of all the bands of their vintage and, loosely, genre, the one I’d most like to have seen, by far, is The Band, whose every member was a point of interest—and who were much better looking.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Memorial for a Student
“The elements do not answer in the place where they are interrogated, or more exactly, as soon as they are interrogated somewhere, it is impossible to grasp them in their totality” –Jacques Lacan quoted by Shoshana Felman
I don’t feel as though I knew Scott very well, but there are sometimes paths of relationship between teachers and students that neither side understands completely.
I didn’t know him until his senior year, when I worked with him in a tiny seminar in the first semester and as advisor for his senior thesis project in the second. We spent a lot of time in my office, because the seminar was small enough to meet there and then we held our thesis meetings there. When he got to my office he usually seemed to be holding himself in, restraining an onslaught of thoughts and ideas that would soon overflow after a perfunctory period of listening to me try to frame the issues for our class discussion or conference. When I think of Scott he’s always in motion—striding into my office, yes, usually barefoot, rocking a bit in his chair as he stared at some point unseeable to the rest of us, or at least to me, and unleashed a pack of ideas about sound, music, identity, politics, identity politics, hip hop, Beck, M. I. A., Brittany Spears, Plato’s Phaedrus. Some Buddhists talk about imagining the self not as a container of thoughts, but as a point through which thoughts pass. For some reason when I think about Scott I think of my office as a point through which he passed, through which some, probably not all that many, of his thoughts passed. But it’s an image of movement, of direction, of energy. Of coming from and going to places that I had no access to, before and after glancing and invigorating points of contact.
Here’s something else that thinking about Scott helps me to see. Students recognize their incompleteness. Indeed, ideally, it energizes them. Some teachers teach because of the fantasy that they can offer their students some kind of completion. Others, like me, teach because of an equally phantasmatic identification with the students’ sense of incompletion, and their comfort with it. For me, Scott became a special embodiment of this capacity for being moved and motivated by things one doesn’t completely understand. Everytime Scott came into talk it was about something different. His continually palpable excitement and intelligence were in some ways the only continuous things about his intellectual life, for generally he’d show up wanting to talk--effusively, wondrously, skeptically, angrily--about something new.
As teachers, we have to set assignments for students, with due dates. Working with them on their senior theses, we sometimes have to cajole them into developing their ideas, staying focused, getting their drafts and final version in on time. This didn’t always work so well with Scott. Even as the final deadline approach, each week tended to bring in a new overall argument, a wholly new take on various facets of the phenomenon called pop music, as embodied in a frequently shifting set of figures and texts. He was one of those challenging students who can’t stop—can’t stop thinking, reading, writing, listening, feeling, talking. And here’s the thing: Scott threatened to blow my cover, reveal my secret—that I’m not that interested in making them stop. He knew so well that completion is a convenient fiction. He knew so well that minds don’t stop working because a week’s reading on the syllabus is done, because a page limit has been reached, because a due date has arrived. He probably knew, however unconsciously, how uncomfortable I was with the part of my job that demands that I be an officer of the law, that I impose limits and insist that certain conventions be followed.
And I probably knew that he knew. But at the time, we silently agreed to perform ignorance about all this knowledge. And I’m glad to have shared in this performance, and to have experienced the kind of pedagogical and personal relationship that it enabled.
I don’t feel as though I knew Scott very well, but there are sometimes paths of relationship between teachers and students that neither side understands completely.
I didn’t know him until his senior year, when I worked with him in a tiny seminar in the first semester and as advisor for his senior thesis project in the second. We spent a lot of time in my office, because the seminar was small enough to meet there and then we held our thesis meetings there. When he got to my office he usually seemed to be holding himself in, restraining an onslaught of thoughts and ideas that would soon overflow after a perfunctory period of listening to me try to frame the issues for our class discussion or conference. When I think of Scott he’s always in motion—striding into my office, yes, usually barefoot, rocking a bit in his chair as he stared at some point unseeable to the rest of us, or at least to me, and unleashed a pack of ideas about sound, music, identity, politics, identity politics, hip hop, Beck, M. I. A., Brittany Spears, Plato’s Phaedrus. Some Buddhists talk about imagining the self not as a container of thoughts, but as a point through which thoughts pass. For some reason when I think about Scott I think of my office as a point through which he passed, through which some, probably not all that many, of his thoughts passed. But it’s an image of movement, of direction, of energy. Of coming from and going to places that I had no access to, before and after glancing and invigorating points of contact.
Here’s something else that thinking about Scott helps me to see. Students recognize their incompleteness. Indeed, ideally, it energizes them. Some teachers teach because of the fantasy that they can offer their students some kind of completion. Others, like me, teach because of an equally phantasmatic identification with the students’ sense of incompletion, and their comfort with it. For me, Scott became a special embodiment of this capacity for being moved and motivated by things one doesn’t completely understand. Everytime Scott came into talk it was about something different. His continually palpable excitement and intelligence were in some ways the only continuous things about his intellectual life, for generally he’d show up wanting to talk--effusively, wondrously, skeptically, angrily--about something new.
As teachers, we have to set assignments for students, with due dates. Working with them on their senior theses, we sometimes have to cajole them into developing their ideas, staying focused, getting their drafts and final version in on time. This didn’t always work so well with Scott. Even as the final deadline approach, each week tended to bring in a new overall argument, a wholly new take on various facets of the phenomenon called pop music, as embodied in a frequently shifting set of figures and texts. He was one of those challenging students who can’t stop—can’t stop thinking, reading, writing, listening, feeling, talking. And here’s the thing: Scott threatened to blow my cover, reveal my secret—that I’m not that interested in making them stop. He knew so well that completion is a convenient fiction. He knew so well that minds don’t stop working because a week’s reading on the syllabus is done, because a page limit has been reached, because a due date has arrived. He probably knew, however unconsciously, how uncomfortable I was with the part of my job that demands that I be an officer of the law, that I impose limits and insist that certain conventions be followed.
And I probably knew that he knew. But at the time, we silently agreed to perform ignorance about all this knowledge. And I’m glad to have shared in this performance, and to have experienced the kind of pedagogical and personal relationship that it enabled.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Strategic Naivete, a work in progress (one of several)
[This was meant as my opening gambit for a Sound Studies roundtable at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting this year, which I was unable to attend.]
Andy Warhol called his cassette tape recorder his “wife,” and after he obtained it in 1965 it was his constant companion, always faithful, always turned on. In the history of audio technologies, this queer-in-every-sense-of-the-word version of matrimonial bliss stands out dramatically from the historically concurrent, masculine cult of high fidelity, not to mention the production wizardry going into albums like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper. His work as a record producer with the Velvet Underground, as Lou Reed and others have recounted, involved no knowledge of the sound board or microphones; it consisted solely in telling the band to keep it simple, to sound the way they did while rehearsing. Yet despite this apparent dilletantism, he was also one of the first people to own a cassette recorder, because of his strong relationship with the Norelco/Philips company, which also manufactured film and video equipment. This was Warhol’s standard approach to technology—a well-connected expert-insider performing naivete—strategic naivete.
As we know from punk, Dada, and elsewhere, to approach technology naively can in be a radically creative act, resisting the accumulating layers of expertise that both develop and constrain the possible uses of devices like those that reproduce sound. In a historical framework, the naïve approach stalls, reverses, or disorients the triumphalist evolutionary narratives that get told about many aspects of media and how technological “advances” make them better and better able to realize the uses that appear inherent in them and that obscure the ideological and economic forces (among others) that play a central role in shaping media histories. Warhol’s relationship to his cassette recorder was queer, and at the same time it demonstrated his penchant for reanimating the dynamics of a medium’s early historical stages, before its cultural form has taken shape—before, that is, the cultural understanding of what it is for and what it can do have fully concretized. For example, much of this work proceeds as if indifferent to, or only haphazardly dictated by, the principles of selection as to what does and does not “deserve” to be represented.
This historically revisionary aspect of his work is embodied in the content and overall tone of this exchange with interviewer David Ehrenreich in 1966:
DE: Do you like Edison?
AW: I like Edison. Oh, do I like Edison!
DE: Has Edison had a big influence on you?
AW: Oh, yes.
I’m fascinated by how the naïve and the queer undo the ways we understand mediation. I’m fascinated by how they re-orient our understanding of our relationships with technologies. And I’m also fascinated by the ways this depends on undoings of sequential, teleological history, perhaps another embodiment of the queer approaches to historicism and temporality that Beth Freeman, Valerie Rohy and others have developed so richly in recent years.
Thus, in a current project, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, the musicians who make up the electronic/sound-collage band Matmos, are re-invigorating the spirit of the word “medium” as it meant in the 19th century. In a fifteen-minute session with a collaborating non-band member, Daniel attempts to telepathically transmit his ideas for a song to appear on the band’s next album. (they are bringing this piece to Haverford next term). The collaborators then tells the band what s/he thinks the song will sound like. After a series of these sessions, the band and the collaborators produce and perform the music. This project rekindles a far earlier notion of media than the one we are familiar with, a notion that was particularly vibrant in the late 19th century as modern electronic media were emerging under the direction of Edison and others—that is, of course the notion of the psychic medium—the person, usually a woman, who transmits invisible, all but unknowable signals into the real world. The project externalizes the composition process, undermining modernist notions of genius interiority. Given our historical distance from a pre-modernist moment, and the post-modern skepticism toward psychic phenomena, the project relies on a kind of naive faith—a word that also speaks to the issue of fidelity—that something has taken place, that a relationship has been formed, even in a state of inarticulation.
Both Warhol and Matmos illustrate an intensely canny application of naivete, and that’s what I’m trying to get at here, not the type of naivete that disavows knowledge and expertise, that fuels primitivism and the normative romanticism surrounding children and childhood. But what I also want to put out on the table is the question of how such approaches might become a model for critical thought and writing, for us as scholars, intellectuals and academics: how do we make disciplinary forms of knowledge engage productively with naivete? How do we de-familiarize objects of study that we have spent months and years with? How do we come to hear our own writing and thinking habits, the phrases and conceptual routes we use over and over that not only annoy readers but limit us as writers and thinkers? How do we make the canny uncanny?
Andy Warhol called his cassette tape recorder his “wife,” and after he obtained it in 1965 it was his constant companion, always faithful, always turned on. In the history of audio technologies, this queer-in-every-sense-of-the-word version of matrimonial bliss stands out dramatically from the historically concurrent, masculine cult of high fidelity, not to mention the production wizardry going into albums like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper. His work as a record producer with the Velvet Underground, as Lou Reed and others have recounted, involved no knowledge of the sound board or microphones; it consisted solely in telling the band to keep it simple, to sound the way they did while rehearsing. Yet despite this apparent dilletantism, he was also one of the first people to own a cassette recorder, because of his strong relationship with the Norelco/Philips company, which also manufactured film and video equipment. This was Warhol’s standard approach to technology—a well-connected expert-insider performing naivete—strategic naivete.
As we know from punk, Dada, and elsewhere, to approach technology naively can in be a radically creative act, resisting the accumulating layers of expertise that both develop and constrain the possible uses of devices like those that reproduce sound. In a historical framework, the naïve approach stalls, reverses, or disorients the triumphalist evolutionary narratives that get told about many aspects of media and how technological “advances” make them better and better able to realize the uses that appear inherent in them and that obscure the ideological and economic forces (among others) that play a central role in shaping media histories. Warhol’s relationship to his cassette recorder was queer, and at the same time it demonstrated his penchant for reanimating the dynamics of a medium’s early historical stages, before its cultural form has taken shape—before, that is, the cultural understanding of what it is for and what it can do have fully concretized. For example, much of this work proceeds as if indifferent to, or only haphazardly dictated by, the principles of selection as to what does and does not “deserve” to be represented.
This historically revisionary aspect of his work is embodied in the content and overall tone of this exchange with interviewer David Ehrenreich in 1966:
DE: Do you like Edison?
AW: I like Edison. Oh, do I like Edison!
DE: Has Edison had a big influence on you?
AW: Oh, yes.
I’m fascinated by how the naïve and the queer undo the ways we understand mediation. I’m fascinated by how they re-orient our understanding of our relationships with technologies. And I’m also fascinated by the ways this depends on undoings of sequential, teleological history, perhaps another embodiment of the queer approaches to historicism and temporality that Beth Freeman, Valerie Rohy and others have developed so richly in recent years.
Thus, in a current project, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, the musicians who make up the electronic/sound-collage band Matmos, are re-invigorating the spirit of the word “medium” as it meant in the 19th century. In a fifteen-minute session with a collaborating non-band member, Daniel attempts to telepathically transmit his ideas for a song to appear on the band’s next album. (they are bringing this piece to Haverford next term). The collaborators then tells the band what s/he thinks the song will sound like. After a series of these sessions, the band and the collaborators produce and perform the music. This project rekindles a far earlier notion of media than the one we are familiar with, a notion that was particularly vibrant in the late 19th century as modern electronic media were emerging under the direction of Edison and others—that is, of course the notion of the psychic medium—the person, usually a woman, who transmits invisible, all but unknowable signals into the real world. The project externalizes the composition process, undermining modernist notions of genius interiority. Given our historical distance from a pre-modernist moment, and the post-modern skepticism toward psychic phenomena, the project relies on a kind of naive faith—a word that also speaks to the issue of fidelity—that something has taken place, that a relationship has been formed, even in a state of inarticulation.
Both Warhol and Matmos illustrate an intensely canny application of naivete, and that’s what I’m trying to get at here, not the type of naivete that disavows knowledge and expertise, that fuels primitivism and the normative romanticism surrounding children and childhood. But what I also want to put out on the table is the question of how such approaches might become a model for critical thought and writing, for us as scholars, intellectuals and academics: how do we make disciplinary forms of knowledge engage productively with naivete? How do we de-familiarize objects of study that we have spent months and years with? How do we come to hear our own writing and thinking habits, the phrases and conceptual routes we use over and over that not only annoy readers but limit us as writers and thinkers? How do we make the canny uncanny?
Saturday, September 11, 2010
On My Distaste for Will Ladislaw
I'm delighted to find that Henry James, in his young and cocky review of Middlemarch, calls the long, blonde-tressed Will an "eminent failure":
What he said.
Or to render it more from my own, un-young and un-cocky perspective, Ladislaw is tiresome because unlike every other character, there is nothing petty or contradictory about him. There is no "blot" in his self. Eliot, narrator, and Dorothea are apparently united when he is described in this way at the end of Chapter 50: ". . .he was a creature who entered into everyone's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance." But to me what this novel is so expert at, and what James likely took from it, is portraying the resistances between people, particularly people trying to become intimate with one another.
The figure of Will Ladislaw is a beautiful attempt, with many finely-completed points; but on the whole it seems to us a failure. It is the only eminent failure in the book, and its defects are therefore the more striking. It lacks sharpness of outline and depth of color; we have not found ourselves believing in Ladislaw as we believe in Dorothea, in Mary garth, in Rosamond, in Lydgate, in Mr. Brooke and Mr. Cauaubon. He is meant, indeed, to be a light creature (with a large capacity for gravity, for he finally gets into Parliament), and a light creature certainly should not be heavily drawn. The author, who is evidently very fond of him, has found for him here and there some charming and eloquent touches; but in spite of these he remains vague and impalpable to the end. He is, we may say, the one figure which a masculine intellect of the same power as George Eliot's would not have conceived with the same complacency; he is, in short, roughly speaking, a woman's man.
What he said.
Or to render it more from my own, un-young and un-cocky perspective, Ladislaw is tiresome because unlike every other character, there is nothing petty or contradictory about him. There is no "blot" in his self. Eliot, narrator, and Dorothea are apparently united when he is described in this way at the end of Chapter 50: ". . .he was a creature who entered into everyone's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance." But to me what this novel is so expert at, and what James likely took from it, is portraying the resistances between people, particularly people trying to become intimate with one another.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The Clientele @ World's Best Rock Venue
I saw the Clientele last night at Johnny Brenda’s. It was my first time at the club, and the great things I’ve been hearing were all true, and in full effect. They serve excellent food and beers; their owners are also proprietors of the Standard Tap, a Northern Liberties staple. The small size is ideal, and the stage is high—more to the point, they have a balcony that looks almost directly down on the performers, and this is a great angle to watch the musicians—you can really see the way all of them are playing, working with their instruments.
I was particularly happy with this because I wanted to watch Alisdair MacLean play guitar. He’s one of the rare figures of the past 20 years of rock who has managed to do something original with the electric guitar. In fact, he’s managed to do something with that very staple of college rock guitar, the “jangle.” In his playing, jangling is full of detail, and drawn out into blurry, dreamlike clouds of sound. He plays a lot of major 7 chords, but they never sound loungey. The main thing I was able to glean with my less than acute eyes was that he finger picks everything. I could see a pick sitting on top of his Fender Deluxe Twin Reverb. But he never touched it, that I noticed. This is extremely rare in rock and roll. And while he’s playing using a folky method, the music is still always clearly sounding pop. A few years ago a friend told me that when they play live they sound just like on their recordings—his point was, essentially, so why go see them. But it was actually impressive to see how effectively they created the sound with just four musicians; and Maclean's voice was pitch-perfect, with the exact same hushing reverb treatment that the band is probably best known for. Another aspect of the JB’s experience: the sound is excellent. Rock clubs have come such a long way since when I started going to shows over 20 years ago. That’s a form of gentrification I’ll take—a lot of the grit of the old days was simply pretention, anyways.
I was particularly happy with this because I wanted to watch Alisdair MacLean play guitar. He’s one of the rare figures of the past 20 years of rock who has managed to do something original with the electric guitar. In fact, he’s managed to do something with that very staple of college rock guitar, the “jangle.” In his playing, jangling is full of detail, and drawn out into blurry, dreamlike clouds of sound. He plays a lot of major 7 chords, but they never sound loungey. The main thing I was able to glean with my less than acute eyes was that he finger picks everything. I could see a pick sitting on top of his Fender Deluxe Twin Reverb. But he never touched it, that I noticed. This is extremely rare in rock and roll. And while he’s playing using a folky method, the music is still always clearly sounding pop. A few years ago a friend told me that when they play live they sound just like on their recordings—his point was, essentially, so why go see them. But it was actually impressive to see how effectively they created the sound with just four musicians; and Maclean's voice was pitch-perfect, with the exact same hushing reverb treatment that the band is probably best known for. Another aspect of the JB’s experience: the sound is excellent. Rock clubs have come such a long way since when I started going to shows over 20 years ago. That’s a form of gentrification I’ll take—a lot of the grit of the old days was simply pretention, anyways.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
New Yorker Tea Party article
I didn't read it very closely, admittedly, but the Ben McGrath piece in last week's New Yorker seems entirely puffy to me, and dangerously legitimizing of a deeply corrupt and insidious movement in US politics. He lets one kind of loony guy represent the fringiness of the "party," instead of asking questions like, "How does a movement claim to be populist and fight for working class people *not* to receive medical care?" Or "Why is it any more possible to associate the term socialism with Barack Obama than it is to say two plus two is five?" Such questions have just become too obvious to ask for most US journalists. Which is to say, they're so obvious, so deathly deserving of being asked, that they have to be written off immediately, or else the hours and hours of coverage given to these people would suddenly seem wholly unjustified.
A Solution?
If I had a kid, then I'd have an excuse for the shortness of my attention span, and for how little work I get done, at this ripe old middle age.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Why?
Why does the Blue Man Group make me so angry?
However, there's this, from wikipedia:
In the 12th season episode Trilogy of Error Homer describes the Blue Man Group as "a total rip off of The Smurfs". Also, in "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner", Homer - on the verge of being arrested - desperately babbles "Don't tell my kids I'm going to jail. Tell them I joined the Blue Man Group. I'm the fat one!"
However, there's this, from wikipedia:
In the 12th season episode Trilogy of Error Homer describes the Blue Man Group as "a total rip off of The Smurfs". Also, in "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner", Homer - on the verge of being arrested - desperately babbles "Don't tell my kids I'm going to jail. Tell them I joined the Blue Man Group. I'm the fat one!"
Monday, February 1, 2010
Big Star box
Emusic just posted the Big Star box set, which I've been debating whether to buy for weeks now. You can download as much as you want--at least none of the rarities are marked "album only." I've had a big revival in listening to this band lately. Alex Chilton's voice is so sublimely sweet on their records. And I've developed a rather obsessive relationship to the song "Daisy Glaze," in particular, with its lovely elongated and slurred vocals over a barely continuous beat--not to mention the direness of the lyrics, wherein the narrator, upon seeing his lost love with another in a bar, intones, "And I'm thinking, Christ, nullify my life..."
In other news, I just ate a copious amount of corned beef.
In other news, I just ate a copious amount of corned beef.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
And now back to the sunlight...
When I listen to Dennis Wilson's solo work I feel like I'm listening to records made by Jeff Lebowski. Bambu (The Caribou Sessions) on now, and it's pretty much unlistenable. I would love to hear from anyone with a cogent way of describing why it's not.
Perhaps I should start another blog to talk about the experience of writing this one. I have to say I cringed as I typed the word "experience." Right now, though, this blog is feeling like a place to write slightly longer status updates than Facebook allows.
Perhaps I should start another blog to talk about the experience of writing this one. I have to say I cringed as I typed the word "experience." Right now, though, this blog is feeling like a place to write slightly longer status updates than Facebook allows.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
An Unversion
I've been on leave this term, but in so many ways this has been an incredibly confusing and disorienting time. My father died over the summer. My girlfriend got a job where I teach. I taught a graduate class for the first time, on a topic I'm not formally trained in. I am moving back to the suburbs with said gf. There are more things, some private, some not especially so. Some people, I assume, wake up under the pressure of such an onslaught (and many people wouldn't even consider this an onslaught!)
Of course, much of this is good news, and substantially helps me with my grief over my father. But I've still been feeling in a daze lately. By "lately" I mean for the past four or so months. I've edited a journal issue, but that's about it. I never seem to want to write anymore.
Last night I was reading some entries in Lauren Berlant's blog, http://supervalentthought.com/. I've admired her as a scholar in American Studies for a long time. I've never met her, though we have so many Facebook friends in common that we friended each other. But the deep level of attention to the affective dimensions of the intellectual life resonated with me really strongly. It's something I miss from graduate school, from being around people like Eve Sedgwick. I worry that the undergrad institution where I teach is a place that doesn't cultivate, honor, nurture that particular aspect of the mind's life. I miss this level of engagement that I see still fueling the work and lives of other friends from graduate school. At the same time as I miss it, I also remember shying away from it. And I know it's scary to think so much. The scariest part is when you think and nothing happens, either on screen or inside your head. In such moments, the disconnect between your hereness and where you think you should be is a chasm of immense proportions.
I've been reading Jack Spicer. His manifesto for unverts is hilarious. "Vert" means turn, so the neologism literally means "un-turn." I'm not using the term in the same way he does, but it seems to fit what I am thinking will be a turn in this blog away from a purely musical focus, and toward, well, something more general yet more internal--and hence not a turn, or a movement, of any sort. Just staying there/here.
Of course, much of this is good news, and substantially helps me with my grief over my father. But I've still been feeling in a daze lately. By "lately" I mean for the past four or so months. I've edited a journal issue, but that's about it. I never seem to want to write anymore.
Last night I was reading some entries in Lauren Berlant's blog, http://supervalentthought.com/. I've admired her as a scholar in American Studies for a long time. I've never met her, though we have so many Facebook friends in common that we friended each other. But the deep level of attention to the affective dimensions of the intellectual life resonated with me really strongly. It's something I miss from graduate school, from being around people like Eve Sedgwick. I worry that the undergrad institution where I teach is a place that doesn't cultivate, honor, nurture that particular aspect of the mind's life. I miss this level of engagement that I see still fueling the work and lives of other friends from graduate school. At the same time as I miss it, I also remember shying away from it. And I know it's scary to think so much. The scariest part is when you think and nothing happens, either on screen or inside your head. In such moments, the disconnect between your hereness and where you think you should be is a chasm of immense proportions.
I've been reading Jack Spicer. His manifesto for unverts is hilarious. "Vert" means turn, so the neologism literally means "un-turn." I'm not using the term in the same way he does, but it seems to fit what I am thinking will be a turn in this blog away from a purely musical focus, and toward, well, something more general yet more internal--and hence not a turn, or a movement, of any sort. Just staying there/here.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Remaking Rumours
About a month ago, the artist Jennifer Delos Reyes put together a piece at Haverford (where I teach) in which she arranged for members of the community to remake the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours in its entirety. The album is legendary because, among other reasons, four of the band's members were involved in break-ups with each other while the recording was taking place. So it stands as a kind of monument to the difficulties and possibilities of collaboration.
Participants were all assigned a song to work on, mine was "I Don't Want to Know," on which I was paired with a Haverford junior named Jacob Waters, whom I'd never met before. We were the first people to record (lo and behold, my college has a recording studio in the basement of the dining hall--first I'd heard of this). The day of our assigned session, Jacob and I met in my office from 3:15 to 4 to talk about an idea I had for an arrangement of the song, then I ran off to faculty meeting, then to the studio for our session scheduled from 6 to 9. And despite all the difficulties we faced--the uncertainty of not knowing each other or each other's musical taste/approach, the age and student/prof differences, the general harried quality of the day, and so on--it came out pretty well as a Pavement-like slack sound. I'm playing drums and bass; Jacob sang and played guitars, and Julia Ryan, the Bryn Mawr student who was assisting Jen Delos Reyes, got thrown into the mix after she was caught singing harmony in the control room.
Jacob, Julia, and Me, "I Don't Want to Know"
Participants were all assigned a song to work on, mine was "I Don't Want to Know," on which I was paired with a Haverford junior named Jacob Waters, whom I'd never met before. We were the first people to record (lo and behold, my college has a recording studio in the basement of the dining hall--first I'd heard of this). The day of our assigned session, Jacob and I met in my office from 3:15 to 4 to talk about an idea I had for an arrangement of the song, then I ran off to faculty meeting, then to the studio for our session scheduled from 6 to 9. And despite all the difficulties we faced--the uncertainty of not knowing each other or each other's musical taste/approach, the age and student/prof differences, the general harried quality of the day, and so on--it came out pretty well as a Pavement-like slack sound. I'm playing drums and bass; Jacob sang and played guitars, and Julia Ryan, the Bryn Mawr student who was assisting Jen Delos Reyes, got thrown into the mix after she was caught singing harmony in the control room.
Jacob, Julia, and Me, "I Don't Want to Know"
Eight Minutes of Sun Ra Bliss
This is a beautiful song recorded in 1960 by Sun Ra and His Arkestra. It goes well with the weather we're having in the Northeast: days and days of non-committal rainstorms. It's the title track of his album Interstellar Low Ways, which I believe is still in print on CD along with the album Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth. If you were to own just one Sun Ra CD. . .
Sun Ra, "Interstellar Low Ways"
Sun Ra, "Interstellar Low Ways"
Friday, April 10, 2009
Always on the Sunny Side
This is a mini playlist, perhaps to be expanded, of songs that are so happy that they are actually sad. This could mean that they are masking some kind of desperation. It could also mean that they are rally songs sung from a place of pain or trial.
June Carter Cash, "Keep on the Sunny Side"
I’ve been obsessed with this song since it came out last year, on June’s final album. I love how it sounds like an old person, unabashedly. You can hear her struggling with the unavoidable limitations of her voice, missing notes. But, of course, she persists. Her voice has a quality I don’t recall hearing anywhere, except maybe on some old folk records—but this is crystal clear. I just love that it doesn’t mask the reality of being really old. I also love when Johnny comes in for the harmonies on the choruses; they seem like two elderly soldiers to me.
Darlene Love, "Chapel of Love"
“And we’ll never be lonely anymore.” Good luck with that.
This version has a slower tempo than the more famous one by the Dixie Cups, which enriches the sad undertone. I like this one better.
Barbara Harris, "It Don't Worry Me"
The climactic song in one of my favorite films, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and it was written by actor Keith Carradine. It’s a song that comes from a place of political trauma, very much of the Watergate era. But it could have applied equally well or better in the GWB era. “You may say that I ain’t free, but it don't worry me. . . "
Here are the songs.
June Carter Cash, "Keep on the Sunny Side"
I’ve been obsessed with this song since it came out last year, on June’s final album. I love how it sounds like an old person, unabashedly. You can hear her struggling with the unavoidable limitations of her voice, missing notes. But, of course, she persists. Her voice has a quality I don’t recall hearing anywhere, except maybe on some old folk records—but this is crystal clear. I just love that it doesn’t mask the reality of being really old. I also love when Johnny comes in for the harmonies on the choruses; they seem like two elderly soldiers to me.
Darlene Love, "Chapel of Love"
“And we’ll never be lonely anymore.” Good luck with that.
This version has a slower tempo than the more famous one by the Dixie Cups, which enriches the sad undertone. I like this one better.
Barbara Harris, "It Don't Worry Me"
The climactic song in one of my favorite films, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and it was written by actor Keith Carradine. It’s a song that comes from a place of political trauma, very much of the Watergate era. But it could have applied equally well or better in the GWB era. “You may say that I ain’t free, but it don't worry me. . . "
Here are the songs.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Singing lesson from Bob Dylan
I'm fascinated by the art of vocal intepretation. I love imagining what a singer is hearing as s/he re-casts a melody familiar to her audience. It's often said of Bob Dylan that what makes his singing interesting, in lieu of a voice that is innately pleasing tonally, is his phrasing, his interpretation of his own lyrics. I've seen Dylan live twice, both in the last three years. I've liked both shows, mostly because he seems so into it, and is aging gracefully. But interpretation for him now means the rhythm at which he spits out the lyrics, pretty much.
This version of I Want You is from a rather reknown bootleg, from a show in New Orleans in October, 1980. He was just coming out of his Christian period, just starting to sing his old songs again. And in this version, he is intepreting by really singing. He has an alternate melody in his head, one that nonetheless fits the song perfectly, and it undergirds a beautiful, rather desperate sounding performance. I think desperation is a good affective tone for this song.
There are some other gems from this show--particularly an awesome version of "Simple Twist of Fate"--that I may post at a later date.
This version of I Want You is from a rather reknown bootleg, from a show in New Orleans in October, 1980. He was just coming out of his Christian period, just starting to sing his old songs again. And in this version, he is intepreting by really singing. He has an alternate melody in his head, one that nonetheless fits the song perfectly, and it undergirds a beautiful, rather desperate sounding performance. I think desperation is a good affective tone for this song.
There are some other gems from this show--particularly an awesome version of "Simple Twist of Fate"--that I may post at a later date.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Oh!
I realized right after the posting the last post that the best song to re-start with would be the song that inspired the name of this blog. It's "Major to Minor" by the Settlers, a mid-sixties English pop band. The song is from the volume two of the excellent "Ripples" series of obscure Brit sixties pop singles, I think drawn from the Pye Records catalog. This is the best volume of seven--they're out of print but worth seeking out.
But also, from Cole Porter:
There's no love song finer;
but how strange the change
from major to minor
But also, from Cole Porter:
There's no love song finer;
but how strange the change
from major to minor
Back
I'm back. In a stripped down, very minimal form. I'm actually just planning on posting individual songs every day or two or seven, with a little blurb about the song. I guess I've entered the Twitter age. And I'm not even on Twitter!
So my first post is "Things You'll Keep" by the Apartments. They are an Australian band from the 80s. I had never heard of them until I read an interview with Dan Bejar, in which he referred to them as an influence. I really like the atmosphere of this song, especially the way it "kicks in" by going from melancholia to a slightly less lethargic melancholia. I also like the lyrical hook of "Some things you were never meant to lose."
So my first post is "Things You'll Keep" by the Apartments. They are an Australian band from the 80s. I had never heard of them until I read an interview with Dan Bejar, in which he referred to them as an influence. I really like the atmosphere of this song, especially the way it "kicks in" by going from melancholia to a slightly less lethargic melancholia. I also like the lyrical hook of "Some things you were never meant to lose."
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Breaking News from the Campaign
I'm probably the last person in the blogosphere to comment on the Presidential campaign, and the Iowa caucuses a mere thirty (approx) weeks away. Today presents the perfect opportunity. Check out this Sopranos tribute on the Hillary Clinton website--complete with an actual cast member, and mockery of Chelsea's parallel parking skills. And some surprisingly poor acting.
It's too bad this is all to announce the selection of Celine Dion's "You and I" as her official campaign song. Apparently Smashmouth's "I'm a Believer" was a strong contender; my bet is that it was scrapped to avoid the eruption of Monkeegate. It is admirable that the campaign chose a Canadian artist, throwing nationalism to the winds (currently much needed in the steamy lower 48). But the song may prove the equivalent of Dean's scream, or Muskie's tears, or being shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. Its lyrics are possibly more insipid than you'd expect, and you can listen to it three times and not recall a thing about it. Plus the right will eat the Canadian thing up like so much thin, nitrated meat product on an Egg McMuffin. I mean, if they were going foreign anyway, why not Charlotte Gainsborough, Feist, or Mika?
It's too bad this is all to announce the selection of Celine Dion's "You and I" as her official campaign song. Apparently Smashmouth's "I'm a Believer" was a strong contender; my bet is that it was scrapped to avoid the eruption of Monkeegate. It is admirable that the campaign chose a Canadian artist, throwing nationalism to the winds (currently much needed in the steamy lower 48). But the song may prove the equivalent of Dean's scream, or Muskie's tears, or being shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. Its lyrics are possibly more insipid than you'd expect, and you can listen to it three times and not recall a thing about it. Plus the right will eat the Canadian thing up like so much thin, nitrated meat product on an Egg McMuffin. I mean, if they were going foreign anyway, why not Charlotte Gainsborough, Feist, or Mika?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
