Davis

I've been trying to comment less on current events, in a feeling of what-do-I-know, but I do know that this is what murder looks like.

RIP Jordan Belson

I want to post an obit for him, but I have no words and I have next to no video. This youtube video edits down his "Samadhi" and accompanies it with the (pretty interesting) music that is the video poster's main purpose--it gives you a hint of what Belson was capable of, but not enough. Here is his "Epilogue," his latest work that I'm aware of, which, incredibly beautiful as it is, is not his best work. Watch it and remember that it's not his best work.

He was a great artist and he's dead now. If you can find more of his work (there is an excellent five movie disc that is worth whatever extremely high price you can find it for), try to encounter it.

RIP Jerry Leiber and Nick Ashford

Of course, I wasn't particularly aware that either of them was alive, but still. Jerry Leiber:







And Nick Ashford:





(That last one is on not just my short list, but my very short list of favorite Supremes songs, which for me is saying a lot.)

RIP Conrad Schnitzler

RIP Gil Scott-Heron

What a way to come back to the internet after a day away. Everyone already knows "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (rightly), so here's two others that I just happen to like right now.

"We Almost Lost Detroit" from Bridges, 1977. Fucking love those synths.



"Your Soul and Mine" from 2010's I'm New Here. If you ignore that boring-seeming remix album, what a way to go out.



BDR's got more and a link roundup. He says Scott-Heron had "fallen off my radar until last year's terrific album. That's on me." I could say exactly the same thing. The nice thing about that album, aside from how incredible it is, is that it has inspired me to go back through his catalog and pick up the thread where probably most of us lost it. It's worth it.

Getting this out of the way

I finally get back to posting again, and right away they go and do this. I'm taking it personally.

RIP Joanna Russ

I've only read two of her books--The Female Man, years ago, and We Who Are About To... more recently--but the impact they had on me was enormous. I've been meaning to read more for the longest time, and now I will. I think I'll start with a re-read of The Female Man, though--much as I loved it, and much as it changed me for the better, I don't think I was prepared then to receive all it had to give.

She was everything science fiction should be and very rarely is: experimental both in style and content, feminist, vicious, sure as hell not techno-utopian*. She recognized that "lowbrow" writing is as important as any other kind--she wrote essays on Kirk/Spock slash fiction** and if I'm not mistaken actually gave "slash" its name--but refused, as so many who share in that recognition end up doing, to infantilize that writing or to be infantilized by it herself.

*Though I may have a post in me at some point about how even the classic sci-fi writers with the worst techno-utopian reputations weren't quite so simple.
**Here the often-problematic Teresa Nielsen Hayden unproblematically and charmingly remembers Russ's interest in these things, mentioning her observation that, in some contexts, "Spock is a woman." I've long wanted to write an essay about that very thing (in contexts other than slash, which I have no knowledge of or interest in beyond the most glancing "huh" reaction), but hesitated because a) I'm not a woman myself, and b) I don't write cultural criticism essays often, though I frequently want to.

She didn't write much the last few decades of her life, due, I'm given to understand, to crippling pain resulting from a back injury. Awful. I had heard some vague rumblings in recent years that she was starting to write again, and I had always had it in the back of my head that some new late-period Joanna Russ was coming, was to be looked forward to. As with any highly brilliant, highly experimental artist, I was excited to see what later works would be like--you never know how people as singular as her will change with time. Now, who knows if there will ever be anything else from her--I tend to doubt it. Still, she has so much already on offer that I have no experience of--I've barely touched her fiction, and her essays not at all.

Still, for someone I have so little genuine knowledge of, I had quite a shock when the "Joanna Russ, 1937-2011" headlines started showing up in my reader after her death Friday. She was important, and she was wonderful.

RIP Tura Satana

Awesome (nuddy) pictures here (via io9).

RIP Gladys Horton

Tasteless, perhaps

but it's what I thought of.

From what I can gather, it's not really known yet how serious Rep. Giffords' injuries are, but the various news outlets are reporting that she's "in surgery."

What I imagine won't ever be reported on is whether, and to what extent, her treatment was prioritized over that of the others injured and killed at the same time.

FUCK

RIP, Captain Beefheart.



It's been a long time coming, but that doesn't make it any damn better.

Thirty years

RIP Chris Dedrick

I'm six days late hearing about this, but the Baronette just passed the news on to me that Chris Dedrick of the Free Design has died. Or, in the lovelier way his wife Moira put it in a post to his blog, "Chris, after a week of increasing radiance, yet with rapid physical decline, passed away peacefully at home."

The person who first introduced me to the Free Design, years ago, described them as "making the Carpenters sound abrasive." And it's true. These harmonies are sweet almost to the point of sickliness, as are the arrangements. The lyrics are the same: "I like flying kites. Kites are fun." But it can be truly exhilarating to watch them dance on that particular precipice.

Their best songs are about how little we need all the trappings of our society that feel so essential. In "Kites Are Fun," they sing (the "we" referring to the narrator of the song, who is an individual despite the multitude of voices singing his or her narrative, and to the kite itself) "We'd like to be a zillion miles away from everyone," and it's like their manifesto. They don't want to be so far away out of a desire for solitude, but rather because "Mom and Dad and and Uncle Bill" (authority figures, teaching the child narrator the rules of the society he or she must live in) "don't realize/Kites are fun." In a way that, I find, seldom works, they use not the innocence (which is nonsense, and what makes this sort of thing usually fail) but the unburdened freedom of childhood to remind us: things don't have to be this way. You can just take pleasure in simple things and let the repressions we layer upon ourselves fall away.



Later on on the same album, "Umbrellas" moves this message explicitly into the world of adults, in a joyful ode to that enemy of the workday commuter--heavy rain. In this context, if you come at it from the right angle, even the simple love songs that make up the bulk of their catalog can feel revolutionary.



Probably my favorite songs of theirs are "The Proper Ornaments," also from Kites are Fun, and "2002 - A Hit Song" (from Heaven/Earth). "The Proper Ornaments" is the message I've been talking about at its most explicit: "your brand new car," "your pretty wife whom you almost love," "your color TV set and your impressive pad," "your little baby girl you're almost glad you had," all these and more are the proper ornaments of life. But "What is in your mind and heart/That's hidden by your face/Behind the ornaments of your life?"



"2002 - A Hit Song" is pretty obviously about Dedrick's bitterness at making some of the loveliest music ever recorded and never (as of 1969, anyway) getting any real recognition for it. Maybe by 2002, they're saying, we'll have a hit. The lyrics here are clever and funny ("Hello, teenybopper/Hello, DJ/We're gonna sing a whopper/And you're gonna make it pay for us"), though admittedly not as significant to me as in some of their other songs. Still, it's fascinating to hear such bitterness sung in such a bubbly fashion, to hear the anger that results when those who attempt to live real lives and experience real joy try to play by the rules of a culture that squashes these attempts.

RIP José Saramago

Maybe I should finally get around to reading you.

RIP Rue McClanahan

I feel bad being a day late on this, but I wanted to get this video uploaded and that shit takes forever.

The Golden Girls continues to be one of my all-time favorite entertainments; the quality of its specific combination of a writing team, four actors, and a spectacularly useful formula has rarely been equaled. You could say this equally of Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, or Betty White, but: it never would have worked without Rue McClanahan.

Everyone knows Blanche, or if they don't, it's easy to find her (and they should). I'd like to leave you with something else, though. It's her brief appearance in Starship Troopers, which I have been known to describe as my favorite movie of the 1990s (this isn't always true, depending on my mood, but it's definitely up there). The scene is sadly under a minute and a half long (you can tell it was edited down from a longer take, I'd love to see those deleted scenes) and largely taken up by Denise Richards' antics, but McClanahan's blind weirdo biology teacher is worth it. I love her face in the background of the Denise Richards barf shot.

30 years ago today...

...Ian Curtis listened to Iggy Pop's The Idiot.





To bring this back to me, I have nothing but time tomorrow and the day after, and several things I want to write, so this blugg may become a bit more active. Here's hoping.

CORRECTION Of course it was thirty years ago yesterday. I'm a mess.

RIP Malcolm McLaren

I think in a vague way I always imagined he'd be immortal.

RIP Alex Chilton

Sorry about the glitch around 1:20, otherwise I love this video. Chilton's (and the rest of the band's) behavior and facial expressions are utterly bizarre and wonderful.

Actually

Damn this email posting. I do have something to say about Zinn. Wish I could update that first post now.

 

Stop Me Before I Vote Again's Michael J. Smith mentions giving A People's History of the United States to a historically minded but in many respects unaware 16-year-old, which: yes, do that! The two books most formative to my political consciousness were Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and A People's History, read, if I remember correctly, in that order, one after another, cover to cover, when I was in tenth grade or so. I wish I could remember why I read them; I think my mother or father may have suggested Zinn after I was so interested in Orwell, but I don't remember what made me pick up Homage in the first place, particularly since a misguided ninth grader's brain had made me hate 1984 a year earlier (since rectified, multiple times).

 

From Orwell I learned to distrust what I was being told in school and in the news (well, maybe that's close enough for a memoir, but it's not entirely true; I remember being disgusted by the obvious lies in the American history textbooks at least as early as 8th grade, a benefit of growing up with Indian influence, however minor mine was, and generally of being raised by my parents, as I mentioned recently). From Zinn, I learned why, and I learned (a little of) the truth.

 

My father and my brother have been bugging me to read Dostoevsky (bear with me) for a while now. About a month ago, I made the mistake of starting with The Gambler. I didn't get much out of it, and my father says it's not one of Fyodor's best. It struck me as not much different from any other comedy of manners, a mildly entertaining but largely pointless narrative of rich people panicking over how best to fritter away their money (I'm well aware that I'm probably missing something there, much as the tween version of me missed everything in 1984, but that's irrelevant to my point). The only way I could see the book being interesting to anyone was in terms of the history of Russia's relationship with western Europe, which I know some people are interested in. A great deal of the book deals with the Russian characters' discomfort in Europe, their conflicting urges to remain proudly Russian and to assimilate, to be ashamed of their insufficiently European culture. I remember learning actually quite a bit about that in middle school (or maybe early high school) history. And even though ever since that first encounter with Zinn I have been aware that the history we learned in school is not the history of anything other than rich people, it had never occurred to me before that this whole identity anxiety was really just a problem of the aristocracy. While I'm sure that much of the Russian peasantry had some elements of patriotism, they weren't spending their time learning French and playing European composers on their harpsichords or whatever, as an effort to Westernize. They were farming and trying to survive.

 

As obvious as this seems to me now, it wasn't always that obvious, and it isn't obvious to everyone. We learn so early and so intensively that what matters is what matters to the rich that it's very difficult to break out of that habit of thought. That is why Zinn's History is so important, and that is why all of us who know people whose brains are still forming owe it to them and to the world to introduce them to it, as early as possible.

Ah, shit

Howard Zinn, RIP. I have nothing to say.