Taaau-taau

Petula Clark, "Downtown."
Petula Clark, "Ciao ciao."
Petula Clark, "Dans le temps."

Obviously they're the same song, with identical backing tracks,* which isn't the interesting thing here for me (especially since I've known "Ciao Ciao" since high school Italian class--the lyrics are completely different in meaning [as are the lyrics for "Dans le temps"], and quite good by the standards of the sentimental summer romance genre). This kind of thing is not uncommon for multilingual Clark, who was huge in France (and England) long before anyone in the U.S. had heard of her. She has French versions of most of her hits, from "Viens avec moi" ("I Know a Place") to "C'est ma chanson" ("This Is My Song"), not to mention French-language covers of English-language songs, like "Un jeune homme bien" ("A Well-Respected Man") and "Ceux qui ont un coeur" ("Anyone Who Had a Heart").**

*Except that I think the Italian and French versions are slightly sped up, though whether that's an artifact of the digitization or a deliberate thing done in the studio, I don't know. I only have the English version on original vinyl, so I can't compare directly.
**And, while I'm at it, there are her delightful French songs that as far as I know don't have equivalents in other languages, like the very yé-yé "Prends garde à toi" and the utterly silly "Ô Ô Sheriff," and of course there's also the wonderfulness that is "Chariot," later turned into "I Will Follow Him" by Little Peggy March.

But what's fascinating me is the backing vocalists--because I'm pretty sure, but not completely sure, that they're the same in each version, too. When they're led by Clark singing "Downtown," it sounds like they're saying "downtown," too--but when she's saying "Ciao ciao," they sound like they're saying "ciao ciao," and when she's singing "Dans le temps," they sound like they're saying "dans le temps." But if you listen closely (you can hear it best around 1:55 in the English video, 1:54 in the Italian, and 1:52 in the French), I think they're saying the same thing in each song, which is something like "Taaau-taau," and our contextualizing brains do the work of making them sound like they're saying the very similar-sounding words we find around them.

I might be wrong--sometimes I think they all sound the same, sometimes I think they're all different. But if I'm right--that's very clever!

Heaven and Hell

The second-to-last song on Dorothy Ashby's (probably) best album, The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby.



Wonderful as it is, for the most part the album has very few surprises; say to someone that you've got an afro-groove-jazz-pop-psych harp-centric album inspired by The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and they'll probably imagine essentially the album as it actually is, all the more so if the person is already familiar with Ashby's late-period albums.

One surprising thing (not that music has to be surprising) is that the album is, as far as I can tell, unique in Ashby's catalog for having vocals. I actually am not sure if they're by Ashby herself--I think so--but regardless, they're wonderful. They occupy a kind of middle ground between the style you usually hear singing songs so sentimental they have the word sentimental in their title, and the style of singers such as June Tyson in her work with Sun Ra (by the way, I didn't know the song at that link until I searched youtube for June Tyson to find a quick example, and wow). On this song they lean more towards the former (you can tell right off, with the peak on the word "soul" and the way she holds and releases the "l" in "invisible"), and if not for the surroundings, the lyrics, the subtle, stereo-panned echo, and the particular, peculiar but warm reverb, you might almost think the singing more showtunesy than anything else.

The big surprise on this song comes at the very end, when the production on the voice changes completely and suddenly--where before the sonic atmosphere was entirely 1970, all of a sudden the vocals hop to the other channel and seem beamed in from the 1920s or 1930s, with the tinny, canned feel peculiar to the singing human voice recorded in those decades--I think the singer even puts a little more warble into her performance, to match the popular style of that time--and it's just for one line. And not even all of it, because on top of this, as she holds the last note, a crescendo in her performance is exaggerated by the sudden laying-on of a quick burst of reverb-laden delay, staying in the vocals' new channel and then bleeding quickly back into the other, lending an almost futuristic feel to the very final moments of the song.

The upshot of all this is that I like it a lot.

Lying at the core

Just wait til you realize how clever that post title is!!

Joanna Russ, in her indispensable How to Suppress Women's Writing, has a tangent (and as always with Russ's tangents, it's so much more than just that) about Herman Melville and the silly things that can happen when critics fail--whether deliberately or by way of academic and/or privileged obtuseness--to consider social context:

I have read several pieces of criticism about "Bartleby" and although one of them compared Melville's position to Carlyle's Eternal No, not one of them began, "Did you ever work on an assembly line for ten years?" (Or in Woolworth's for six months or typing address labels for as little as one summer?) These questions are very much to the point... But then I worked as a secretary for three years and typed address labels for a mere six weeks--and that six weeks was enough to reveal Bartleby's situation to me as twenty years of reading literary criticism could not. (In a recent collection of Melville's stories, Harold Beaver sums up his remarks on "Bartleby" as follows: "Bartleby can never be wholly interpreted as either . . . Christ-figure, artist, or ascetic saint, nor is the story exhausted by such interpretations. At its root lies a theme more compelling than both: of the doppelganger . . . the figure of death . . . behind the green screen" of life. The actual nature of Bartleby's work--its isolation, its rote nature, its hideous boredom--and the social situation of employer-employee, as well as Bartleby's sitdown strike and the sentimental liberalism of his employer, are never mentioned.)

It was with considerable enjoyment that I recalled that passage while reading Adam J. Frisch's utterly pointless essay, "Language Fragmentation in Recent Science-Fiction Novels," in the utterly pointless book The Intersection of Science Fiction and Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Myers. Here's how Frisch begins his second paragraph:

Lying at the core of Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To... is an examination of language and meaning.

Oh, how I hope Russ happened upon this essay; I imagine she would have very much enjoyed savaging it. (Hint: if you're talking about what "lies at the core" of that novel, and you don't talk about patriarchy, capitalism, or at least the dark side of technological progress, you've pretty much missed the point.)

Frisch follows up his, shall we say, startling intro by giving a quick summary of the events of the book: "small group of travelers accidentally marooned on an isolated planet," violence, yadda. He makes me cringe again by saying that the "unnamed narrator becomes more and more disenchanted with her fellow travelers," because a) she starts out pretty much as disenchanted as you can be, and, more important, b) she has reasons for being so disenchanted, which aren't mentioned here*; but OK, maybe Frisch is gonna get around to it, now that the summary's taken care of.

*And also c) Frisch doesn't seem to realize that "fellow travelers" is an inappropriately meaningful phrase for his purposes here, especially since the novel deals heavily in Communism, dissent, and the totalitarian quashing of dissent.

He soon makes me a bit more nervous by quoting a passage in which the narrator quotes Emily Dickinson ("I'm Nobody, who are you? Are you Nobody, too?") without recognizing that it is a Dickinson quote, even though I'm fairly certain she doesn't have a more famous line. (In How to Suppress Women's Writing, incidentally, Russ spends quite a lot of pages talking about how the reality of a continuity of women's writing--of woman writers influencing one another and communicating with one another--has been systematically hidden, so that writers like, say, Emily Dickinson appear to have come out of nowhere and to have led nowhere; but I'm not sure why I'm bringing that up right now.) He then goes ahead and says this:

But the narrator's companions are incapable of change because they are incapable of listening. They have been nurtured in a culture that is almost devoid of the ability to discriminate sounds. The narrator finds their music mere noise that "goes deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle for half an hour and then it goes doodle just once, and you could die with excitement." Thus, when the males in the group, in an assumption of atavistic roles, decide the women must bear children immediately to insure "survival," she feels threatened and attempts to flee.

Let me take a deep breath and take this slowly. First of all, the narrator's "companions" (poor choice of word, there!) are most certainly not "incapable of listening"; they are, rather, very capable of listening to themselves, one another, and the dominant culture from which they came and of which they are desperate to think of themselves as still a part; they will listen to anyone and anything who does not stand against all of this--in the context of the novel, anyone and anything who is not the narrator (and even there, it doesn't apply to music--at least not the same way--as they do listen to her sing). Second, and here is where Frisch throws all credibility away by being utterly wrong about something that's not a matter of interpretation, the "deedle doodle" quote is dialogue spoken by a small girl--one of the other survivors--describing the serial music she loves and wants to compose, emphatically not the narrator dismissing popular music. This is not presented ambiguously in the text. It is impossible to mistake this even at the briefest of glances at the page: it is immediately preceded in this first person narration with "Then she added," and is immediately followed by "'Uh huh,' I said." (Also, distinguishing "doodle" from "deedle" and then dying with excitement is obviously not something that one does if one is "almost devoid of the ability to discriminate sounds.")

And then the paragraph takes what is to me a completely incomprehensible turn. If you can explain that "thus" to me, if you can explain how what comes after it follows from what comes before it, please, please do. Because for god's sake, the narrator doesn't "feel threatened and try to flee" because these people who want to force her to have a baby can't discriminate sounds; she feels threatened and tries to flee because she is in imminent danger of rape and forced pregnancy. Another way of saying this is that, no, the narrator does not feel threatened, she very concretely is threatened.

Clearly, Mr. Frisch, you've never typed address labels for six months, if you know what I mean. Nor have you ever, ahem, listened to anyone who has, even when one has been trying to tell you about it for 118 pages.

By now it's pretty clear that Frisch is never going to get around to mentioning what this story is about. Oh, but wait! Do I see the word "patriarchy" comin' round the bend?

Throughout the novel, the narrator is desperate to communicate [True! I wonder why? -E]. When her fellow survivors cannot or will not listen, she turns to her imagined future listener, the reader:

"Speaking" comes from a different place than "breathing." You must understand this. Those marks, "-", indicate speech. Communication. You must listen. You must understand that the patriarchy is coming back, has returned (in fact) in two days. By no design.

Although the narrator at first attributes her desire to communicate to the return of "the patriarchy" (that is, to the group's rapid reversion to male dominance), her repetition of the phrase "I must" suggests that the need for communication may arise from each individual's perception of death's inevitability. "I must speak" becomes "I must die."

[Moment of silence.]

OK, so just on a functional level: "at first" she mentions the patriarchy, then she repeats "I must"? In the passage I read, she repeats "you must," not "I must", and then, after the second repetition, she brings up the patriarchy. Hey, it's almost as if she wanted to really emphasize that, listen up, this mention of the patriarchy is really important, so don't try to dismiss it with scare quotes and that very dudely "Oh don't worry, she said patriarchy but really what she's talking about is Eternal Existential Verities for Men" nonsense.

Yes. One of the many things this book is about is death, the inevitability of death, the necessity of death, and how to go about dying. (It's not exactly hidden; the well-known completion of the title phrase is the word die, and "About to die" are the first three words of the novel; the third sentence is "We're all going to die.") However, it is about death in context, in the specific context of patriarchal, progress-oriented society, which denies, defies, mystifies, and fetishizes death; the context we pretty much all have to live and die in. (Also, how the fuck do you get from "repeating 'I must'" to "see, she's really talking about death here"? Again, when the book's title and opening words form the clause "We who are about to die," you don't have to go looking for cryptic clues and acrostics to figure out that death is on this book's mind.)

Similarly, yes, by god, We Who Are About To... is in large part about the difficulties of communication. But to talk about this like it's an end in itself is absurd. Like, oh, OK, it's a book about how it's hard to talk to people; no shit, now what? Why is communication a problem? What is the narrator so desperate to communicate? If you read this book and then feel the need to put quotation marks around "the patriarchy," you're not going to get very far in answering that question. In terms of Frisch's analysis, you'd think Russ would have been better off printing a book full of a random assortment of words in no particular order; that would have been the meaningless, apolitical representation of "language fragmentation" he's so desperate to shape the novel into.

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.)

Sometimes I laugh out loud just to crack my face

Enjoy: Chumbawamba's "Rappoport's Testament: I Never Gave Up"

RIP Conrad Schnitzler

Musical interlude

In case you were wondering, yes, we got back from our little vacation, and yes, it was goddam wonderful, and yes, there will be posting again probably soonish.

In the meantime, music.

Last night, inspired by some brief comments on it in David Toop's Ocean of Sound, I put on Brian Eno's 1993 Neroli for only about the second or third time ever, and for the first time in probably about a year. It's a lovely album, sparse even by the standards of Eno's ambient works, even by the standards of his 1990s, and is one of the two or three of his 90s albums that really stands out as being interestingly different from the rest.* Anyway, after listening to it for a bit, I wanted to go to sleep still listening to music, didn't want to stop listening to Neroli, but also wanted a fuller, more active sound.

*Not that the sea of very similar albums he released in the 90s--Kite Stories, I Dormienti, Music for Civic Recovery Centre, etc--aren't in themselves interesting, because they are. The other major standout from Eno's 90s, for me, is the fascinating field-recording manipulation Music for White Cube, which is both very much Eno and completely unlike anything else he ever did.

So somehow without thinking about it I opened up Eliane Radigue's Kyema, Intermediate States (which I believe I've mentioned before; in certain moods, it can be my single favorite album of all) in one program, Gas's Königsforst in another, and went back to the beginning of Neroli in aye-toonz, and played them all together (with Eno at top volume, the fuller Radigue a bit hushed, and the mixed-louder Gas almost all the way down). It was beautiful. On headphones, completely enfolding. Here's a random two-minute sample of it--though of course because of the imprecise timing of each track's start I didn't hear exactly this at any point; this is a reconstruction, and every reattempt will be slightly different.



In broad terms, Kyema provides a constant, constantly shifting baseline (not bass line); Königsforst provides structure, particularly with its periods with and without beats, and texture in counterpoint with Kyema's; and Neroli provides what might be called melody, as well as a second contrapuntal texture, if that makes sense to talk about. But then in less broad terms, it becomes difficult to figure out what sounds come from which source, and what sounds come solely from the interactions of them (I'm not positive, but I think at times I heard beat frequencies arising from the conflict between Eliane Radigue's tones and Gas's, for example). Despite my intimate familiarity with every second of Kyema, and my slightly lesser but still fairly extensive familiarity with Königsforst, I couldn't quite be sure what I was hearing doing what at any given moment. Each piece gave something to each other.

I gotta do this kind of thing more often.

Harpshichord sales, 1600-2010

via

Music morning

First thing this morning I blasted "Germ Free Adolescents" and sang along at the top of my lungs about a billion times while doing dishes and getting some breadmaking started.



And shifting gears almost completely, I'm sure you all know that the great Delia Derbyshire was making music like this almost fifty years ago, right?



She also invented IDM as a throwaway at least twenty-five years early, if you weren't aware.

In other news, Wendy Carlos is, as I'm sure you know, a genius. Here she is doing some Morricone-spaghetti-western-sounding delay-soaked ambient electronic music:



And here, from music she made for The Shining, a little over thirty years ago now, that Kubrick ended up not using, a track that would be called "hauntology" and be released on Ghost Box Records if it came out now:



Since I keep mentioning when these tracks were made, I should probably get around to writing that post on chronology and novelty that I keep meaning to write, but who knows if that'll ever happen.

maclises

"you are not limited to one room - there are many rooms." - angus maclise from Astral Collapse

what angus maclise gave form to – in sound, in symbols, in living – is a departure. it stands outside in its strangeness, full of reflective creation. i know so little of what he did, but what i have been exposed to makes me happy. it’s a lens for me - one of many i’ve happened across recently, all important nonetheless. to me, it doesn’t impose a mode of life. it suggests one with many faces. like a diamond, residing among others, in the many rooms of being.

for those of you who don’t know of maclise, check out this blastitude article on him.



related - i only just came across the equally wonderful hetty maclise's old site. only skimmed it, but thought i'd pass it along: http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/

Thoughts on We Who Are About To...

Well, it's five and a half weeks later and I'm finally starting my Joanna Russ-a-thon. I decided to start with a re-read, not of The Female Man as I originally planned to do first, but of We Who Are About To..., which I originally said I had read recently but which I realized I actually had read at least four years ago. In my own personal timeline, that's essentially forever. This book needed to be reread.

For those unfamiliar, the concept of the novel is rooted in (but not remotely limited by) a response to two (related) clichés of primarily pre-New Wave science fiction: first, what Kurt Vonnegut (as quoted by Samuel R. Delany in his introduction to my edition) called "the impossibly generous universe," i.e. a fucking spaceship fucking crashes on, out of all the infinite near-emptiness of the universe, a planet that just happens to be inhabitable, and everyone survives to have adventures; and second (and it sure ain't just sci-fi that's guilty of this one), the story (Delany mentions Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," but there are horrifyingly many others) in which a woman or women must be convinced to sacrifice herself or themselves for the survival of a man or men*. Where these overlap are the dozens and dozens and hundreds of stories about people crashing on an inhabitable planet and, for some hideous reason, finding it essential that they immediately begin to reproduce, populate the planet, conquer it! How the women feel about all this childbirth is, of course, not typically addressed--and when it is, there's usually a lot of simpering and delight and maternal instincts going on.

*Yes, that sentence has five sets of parentheses in it.

So Russ gives us the mixed-gender survivors of a wrecked spaceship. She even concedes to convention and throws them onto an inhabitable--or survivable, at least--planet (though as the narrator likes to point out, there are plenty of places even on friendly old Earth that will kill you in hours or minutes). But what happens there is struggle, not adventure, and when the talk of breeding starts up the already-anxious narrator gets frantic.

The book is sometimes compared to Lord of the Flies (e.g. Delany in his introduction calls it LotF's "guilty conscience" in part for being primarily about adults rather than children), but the comparison strikes me as inaccurate. (Though please note my only experience with Golding's book is of having hated it in 10th grade, so it could be that my memory and understanding of it are skewed*). My understanding of LotF is that the big Theme is that whole stupid thing of the thin veneer of Civilization, that we all are but one step from savagery, etc forever. Not so with Russ. Here, the problem is not the loss of civilization (though that is touched upon with Alan-Bobby's realization that, hey, there are no laws here, and hey, I'm the strongest person around), but rather its retention. The survivors don't waste much time thinking about simple survival before they start thinking about colonization--settling the wilderness, civilizing it and themselves. They get to work building a house (the narrator, sensibly, finds herself a decent cave), they form schedules and arrangements for reproducing ("the great womb robbery"). And more than that: these people, by and large, are not physically suited for this--they have the ailments and weaknesses and allergies that come with civilization and, as the narrator points out, "humanity had not exactly been breeding for survival for the past hundred years." Most telling of all is how quickly the two bureaucrats of the group begin facilitating themselves into leadership.

*And talking about high school English classes reminds me of all those facile constructions they taught us (or me at least)...10th grade was all about "man's inhumanity to man"--"The theme is man's inhumanity to man," my teacher would say almost every day, about every text--and the different types of conflict, "man vs. man" and "man vs. nature" and all those. Woman, of course, is assumed inhuman, to have no conflicts worth mentioning.

When I first read the book, I recognized its brilliance but found it frustrating and impossible (much the same words men have used to describe smart women for time out of mind); I kept wanting to shape its narrator, who I did sympathize with (to a point, oy, not realizing that my sympathy is entirely beside the point), into, and I hate to reveal that I thought this, someone more...rational. Someone more willing to (yeesh) compromise. More than that, I wanted to shape Russ's work into a simpler, more pleasant story of female solidarity. This was what I had expected to encounter, what I was prepared to understand and accept, so when faced with this difficult, bleak story of a difficult, bleak woman in a difficult, bleak situation, my mind rebelled, kept trying to convince me that I was seeing a differently shaped story, kept trying to force Russ into the pattern I wanted for her--my own little bit of patriarchal behavior, there. Feminism's all well and good, dear, but why can't you be nicer?

It actually astonished me how little I had gotten out of the book that first time, relative to what it has to offer--especially considering how much I did manage to get, back then.

I have seen several writers say that We Who Are About To... is about how to die, and how to live, and this is true--very true. But it is just as much about the right to say no--not just in terms of sex, or reproduction, but to anything and everything that you want to say no to, to everything that needs saying no to--or even to things that you just don't feel like saying "yes" to right now, for no good reason. It's about the right to not agree, to walk away from your society, and your culture, and your existence--and about the impossibility of exercising that right even at the most extreme remove imaginable from all these things.

When the other survivors discover that the narrator is a member of a small but well-known and much ridiculed religious group (a syncretic thing we later discover she may have played a part in creating), they taunt her; that and other of her views, such as her Communism, allow the others to safely disregard everything she has to say about their situation. One of the other survivors, the ostentatiously rich Mrs. Graham (who refuses, with the complicity of the others for a time, to acknowledge that she is no longer rich in any meaningful sense), mockingly asks how the narrator can reconcile her religion and her politics. She responds that her religion

"...is no bar to being a Communist. Which I was."

"You're not one any longer?" she said.

"Mrs. Gee," I said, "none of us is anything any longer."

"Frigid little woman," she said, stepping back. I said, "Oh, call me a salad, why don't you, that makes as much sense."

Interestingly, in her narration just two pages earlier, she had referred casually to one of the other women--one who, much later, she will describe as "The only one I liked"--as "frigid."

Towards the end, the narrator--who has (as she says several times, Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you...) by the time of the crash become a lecturer in Renaissance and baroque music--semi-hallucinating, semi-remembering, hears music from everywhere and just throws in this gorgeously accurate description:

And they played and they sang and I wept, everything I ever knew, for Baroque music is keyed into Isaac Newton's kind of time; it's the energy of that new explosion of philosophic time: perspective, mathematics, instant velocity, the great clock, the great wheel, harmonies, the Great Godly Grid.

She goes on to compare music post-Stravinsky to Einstein and relativity, unhappily ("it makes my head ache, referring to things in all dimensions and sometimes backwards"), and it's lovely musicology, but it's also, no matter how much the narrator might not want it to be, a reminder that everything is, in fact, relative, that the music we play and the religion we follow and the way society treats us and the way we treat others are all relative to the assumptions of the prevailing culture, even and especially when that culture goes away, because at this point there's nothing else left to us.

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.

I wanna marry a tube disaster

Placeholder

Here's hoping blooger will get around to reinstating the two or three missing posts sometime soon. In the meantime, David Bowie's Toy was leaked two months ago and no one told me????

UPDATE Listening to it now. I'd already known maybe half the tracks in their entirety, and the rest in 30-second clips at shit bitrates, and my impression has always been that it's an uneven album, at times quite good, at times way too modern-rock-ballad for me, but at any rate never an essential Bowie album. That last part still stands, but hearing it all together, in sequence, at a decent bitrate, with all the songs complete, it's a much better listen than I was expecting. I'd probably say it's in the second tier of his albums--no Diamond Dogs or Low, but sure as hell no Tonight, either. None of the redone versions of earlier songs replace (or even really compete with) the originals by any stretch of the imagination, but they're all nice additions to the catalog.
UPDATE II Well, the posts are back, but not the comments, which considering how good those comments were is really not good enough.

Just a tip

If you replace the inexplicably dead-sounding cover of "Across the Universe" with the unutterably beautiful and heartbreaking "Who Can I Be Now," Young Americans becomes the flawless five-star album it deserves to be.

Many thanks to the excellent Pushing Ahead of the Dame, without whom it never would have occurred to me that I could do this, even though I've known the song for years. Oh, and if you're into Bowie and didn't know about Pushing Ahead of the Dame, I apologize for stealing your life.

Today's discoveries

1. Boorman does not like Don Cherry.



(I listened anyway. By the way, Youtube tells you that that song is by him with Krzysztof Penderecki; actually the album it's on has the same group--featuring Peter Brötzmann and other free jazz big-names--led by Cherry on one side and Penderecki on the other. Both sides are excellent, and I'm sorry this video cuts the track off at the fifteen minute mark.)

2. Boorman loves corks.

The Baronette has been playing fetch with him for about half an hour now--she throws the cork, his tail bushes up and he goes flying after it, bites it, runs back for more. Wonderful! We were afraid because we vacuumed for the first time since we brought him home--oh my god much needed--and we thought he'd be freaked out for a long time after, but less than half an hour later he came out from hiding and wanted to play. He's come such a long way in the not-four-weeks-yet he's been here.

A word I don't want to use anymore and the way in which I don't want to use it

Words mean a lot of things, depending on the social circumstances in which they're used. One of the really magical things about language is that it is such a complex, nuanced structure and yet we use it reflexively, without any thought. As we use these words and don't think about them, the complex system of meanings that they have can blend together in our minds--most of the time this is a wonderful thing, but there can often be a very negative side. I don't by any means suggest that language shapes thought in any kind of strongly deterministic sense, but tiny little subconscious cues from the language do tend to carry weight, especially with repetition--if we use a word in a positive sense in one context it can carry that sense over to another context where the use should be less positive, say.

When you begin to think about the words you use reflexively, you can sometimes spot ways that your thinking has been colonized by the needs of the dominant society. On a more prosaic, but probably concretely more important, level, you can also start to see ways that what you say might communicate different things than you intend, depending on who's listening and in what context. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and thought it might be good to write about some of these words. This may or may not be a series. Should you be so inclined, let me know what you think--about this particular word, about other words, about this whole idea in general. So, the word:

Pioneer(ing)

If you're a fan of any kind of art that at whatever time or place has been considered "avant garde" you've come across this. People frequently use it to talk about, say, early electronic music--Delia Derbyshire or Wendy Carlos or Louis and Bebe Barron or whoever are "pioneers" of electronic music. When people say this, they mean that these artists did things that had never been done before--"went places," metaphorically, that no one had ever been before.

But that's not what a pioneer is. A pioneer is a colonist, a conqueror, a front liner in genocide. A pioneer claims to be the first to go where they go by virtue of redefining those who have already laid down the paths they bulldoze as insignificant, nonexistent in any meaningful sense. A pioneer "discovers" nothing, "invents" nothing; a pioneer is destructive, not creative.

Land is already there. Most of it has had human beings living on or near it for so long that, in terms that we can really feel, you might as well call it forever. Even that which hasn't is occupied--animals, plants, fungi, swarming bacteria, there's life everywhere*, and it's been exploring for a hell of a lot longer than we have--and without, I would venture to guess, this bizarre conceit that it's "discovering" anything.

*And even those places where there is no life--far enough below the Earth's surface, throughout most of the universe, whatever--those places exist, too, with their own perspectives, and have the right to be themselves.

Curiosity and even necessity need not partner with conquest. That we use the word "pioneering" to describe art that "pushes boundaries"--another deeply problematic formulation--reveals the extent to which we have been trained to view these things as inseparable. But the beautiful thing about art--and I use "art" just in the sense of any activity pursued for self-determined reasons--the beautiful thing about art is, or should be, that it's easy to be curious, easy to explore, without conquering anything.

Automatic Writing

New Fabrik song, "Automatic Writing," is up on our Bandcamp page, for free streaming and/or downloading.

RIP Gladys Horton

Lee Hazlewood, "Pray Them Bars Away" on Cowboy in Sweden

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

I'm told I should be thankful
For everything I got
So thank you for rock walls
And the brave bulls, thanks a lot
And thank you for the good job
At twenty cents a day
And thank you for the break time
To pray them bars away