The Question Behind the Question

So my current job is about as good as you can expect a temp data entry job to be--in other words, I make enough money to live on (for now; who knows what I'll do once the job ends), it takes under an hour to get there on the bus, and the people there are all fairly to very nice. When I first started, though, I wasn't sure I would be able to take it, because of the very high level of corporate behavioral indoctrination involved in the training--videos of inspirational speakers managing to quote Martin Luther King, Jr., next to B.C. Forbes, on the importance of not aspiring to anything above your shitty station, before launching into descriptions of horrible methods of "going above and beyond" (for no additional pay, of course), inspired by the actions of quite frankly a creepily over-involved mailman, that kind of thing (if you want to look into this, it is seriously called "The Fred Factor" and it is awful). It turns out that once you get through the training, everyone for the most part ignores this stuff (except for the occasional rah-rah meeting, but you get those pretty much everywhere), so all in all the job is borderline tolerable.

Perhaps the bulliest, the shittiest, of all the bullshit was the book whose title might be rendered QBQ!: The Question Behind the Quesion^®: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life: What to Really Ask Yourself to Eliminate Blame, Complaining, and Procrastinating, written by professional white asshole John G. Miller. This 115 page, 39 chapter (work out that impressive average if you dare!) wonder is a marvel of idiocy honestly unrivaled in my experience by anything short of The Barenaked Ladies.

So, over the next few months, my plan (which, you know, who knows if I'll actually do it) is to blog about this book (book blogging, or blooking), chapter by chapter, explaining exactly what is so execrable about it. As I do, I will continually update this post to function as a blog table of contents, and each individual entry will contain a link to this post so as to make crossreferencing easy. Sound good? Ha ha! I don't care if it sounds good!

TABLE OF BLOGTENTS
Introduction: What Ever Happened To...
Chapter One: A Picture of Personal Accountability, part one and part two
Chapter Two: Making Better Choices
Chapter Three: QBQ! The Question Behind the Question
Chapter Four: Don't Ask "Why"
Chapter Five: The Victim
Chapter Six: "Why Is This Happening to Me?"
Chapter Seven: "Why Do We Have to Go Through All This Change?"
Chapter Eight: "Why Don't They Communicate Better?"
Chapter Nine: Don't Ask "When?"

Listening to the radio

In a row, just now, on 92 PRO FM:

1. David Guetta & Akon, "Sexy BitchChick"
2. Taylor Swift, "Fifteen"
3. Kesha, "Tik Tok"
4. Lady Gaga, "Bad Romance"

It's like mainstream radio is going out of its way to be an ugly, meaningless mess these days. I've already discussed "Sexy Chick" here, but the other three songs I think win out in the awfulness fight.

Taylor Swift, who started her ill-fated VMA acceptance speech with the sentence "I sing country music," continues never to do so with a song that would have sounded stale on Lilith Fair's second stage in 1998. It seems to be a sort of response to the kind of bizarrely unhealthy teen sexual/romantic model proposed by works like Twilight, though it cleverly manages to do it without rebutting the sex negativity of these narratives, so really it's useless both as music and as propaganda. (Incidentally, I have no objection to the dissolution of genre lines; if a white lady wants to perform with T-Pain on the CMT awards, and the country music people are into this, I say go for it; just do it well--or, come on, at least try--and acknowledge that what you're doing is dissolving the genre line. Don't keep calling it country, because that is a word that means something, or at least should. When I say I like country, I want people to know that I don't mean Taylor Swift. Again, I'm all for deconstructing and taking apart language and norms and whatever shit you want, but we still have to live day to day.)

Kesha is remarkable primarily because the only thing that distinguishes her from Fergie is the fact that she is an order of magnitude more annoying. A new breakthrough from the same lab, presumably. If you're into masochism, I highly recommend listening at least through 2:40ish, when the backing track drops out and she bravely attempts to sing one line unaccompanied--I'm not even sure how to describe the difficulty she has. Rivals the line "Haven't you heard/How we rock each other's world" in Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" (at around 2:40*) as the all-time worst vocal moment in pop music history. What a god damned mess.

Lady Gaga...I feel like I would need to write a book-length essay, with all the hours of research that implies, to fully explain what bothers me about Lady Gaga. But since I don't actually care nearly enough about her to do anything that labor and time intensive, suffice to say that I find her to be the epitome of the empty gesture. I mean, take a look at that video; it's trying so hard, but it says nothing; Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head" video**, eight years ago, conveyed far more with similar elements, effortlessly, and without pretending to pretentious ambitions it doesn't even try to fulfill. It's too bad, because I want to like the fact that the public is responding so strongly to a meta-pop star, a pop star deconstruction; even the fact that a huge hit song has a bridge in French should be pleasing to me. Coming from her, nothing is pleasing to me.

The common thread in these songs is a kind of deep, root-level ugliness. Now, I like a lot of what could be called ugly music. Hecker's Acid in the Style of David Tudor is probably my number one album of the year. La Monte Young, The Stooges, DNA, Captain Beefheart, Throbbing Gristle: these are all artists I thought of offhand that I love, much of whose music could defensibly be described as ugly. But in all these cases, and infinitely many more that I could name, including some on pop radio (an argument could be made for Britney Spears' "3," which I am completely head over heels for these days), the ugliness exists for a reason. It achieves a kind of beauty, and part of this beauty is that it expresses something, even if that something is a Stooges-style nihilism. The ugliness of these four pop songs is different; it feels almost accidental--though that word is wrong for several reasons, chief among them its implication that I find the artist's intentions more important than I actually do, not to mention that it doesn't begin to convey the aggression with which this ugliness imposes itself on the listener. It's an ugliness that would make me angry if it had any affect at all, but in its utter lack of affect instead leaves me sort of vaguely depressed. It's awful, and it makes me sad.

Oh, and now Citizen's Bank has an ad on pretending to be charitable because they "know bad economic times are making things difficult for everyone." Yeah, and it's your fucking fault, Royal Bank of Scotland. How much are your executives being compensated these days?

*And I don't think it's a coincidence that these two moments are at almost exactly the same point in the songs.
**Sorry for the pixelation and poor sound compression; you'd think Parlophone could do better but apparently not. You'd also think Firefox would know the word "pixelation" but, again, apparently not.

NOVEMBERZOVER

I just submitted my final word count to the NaNoWriMo site. At 40,041 words, I squeaked in juuuuust this side of...10,000 words short of winning. Partly this is due to two major periods of slacking off during the course of the month, but it's (honestly!) more due to the fact that the story I was writing just wound itself up and finished right at the 40,000 word mark. If I had gotten to this point on the 24th, when I would have if I had kept to schedule, I honestly wouldn't have known what to do for the remainder of the month. The story is just done, and no amount of aiming for 50,000 words would have changed that.

And goofy as it sounds, I feel like I won. I accomplished a hell of a lot more than I expected to. At the beginning of the month I honestly expected myself to give up by the one-week point. Instead, I never gave up, even at my laziest, even as I fell dramatically, irreparably behind. I kept trying. And I succeeded: I finished what is now by far the longest work of fiction I have ever written. And while it's awful in a lot of ways, I think there's stuff worth salvaging in there. I surprised myself especially today and yesterday with the beauty of the imagery I was coming up with (it also quite frankly surprised me when I realized that the novel was going to end on a fairly hopeful note; I didn't think I had that in me).

So: I'm goddamn proud of myself. Thanks, NaNoWriMo, for forcing me to do all this. I don't know where I'm going next, but hopefully I can keep up the writing habit. Probably not as intensively as in November, but to some degree.

As for bloggy pursuits, I do have a blogject I want to get started on, and even aside from that I'll probably be popping in here a bit more frequently than I have been to make all those witty observations that keep you coming back for more. Ha ha! Just kidding! If you could see my google analytics page, you'd know that you quite literally do not exist! Anyway, that's all. Carry on.

If I were making a Buffy Sainte-Marie best of compilation...

...it would most likely include anywhere from one to three songs from each of her first five albums, maybe four songs total from her career after 1970, and the entirety of Illuminations. If you haven't heard that album yet, fix that problem you have.

Looking over my list of albums I have that came out in its year (yes, I keep lists of my albums by year), I have no problem naming it by far the best of all of them. And we're not talking, say, 1987 here. This is 1969. I have over seventy albums from 1969. It's the year of The Beatles' Abbey Road, Can's Monster Movie, Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking, Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul, John & Yoko's Life With the Lions, Nico's The Marble Index, Pharoah Sanders' Karma, Silver Apples' Contact, Skip Spence's Oar, Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis, the full version of Stockhausen's Hymnen, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground's self-titled, two great Scott Walker albums, and Marva Whitney's It's My Thing, and if I had to I'd give them all up in order to keep Illuminations.

This thought just struck me with urgency for some reason on the verge of going to bed. I hopefully will elaborate later, but if anyone in the dire position of not having heard this album stumbles across this post, for the love of god, listen to Illuminations as soon as possible.

Despicable

I'm pretty sure that if Martin Luther King, Jr. had known that, forty-one years after he died, his words would be quoted alongside those of such other fighters for human dignity and equality as Sam Walton and B.C. Forbes in inspirational speeches given by corporate managers to their wage slaves, he probably would have inserted really vulgar words into everything he said. Anyway, when are they going to start quoting lines like "A riot is the language of the unheard" or, even better, when are they going to break out the Malcolm X quotebook?

The radio redeems itself

My "local" top 40 radio station just broadcast a Veteran's Day-themed station identification where that vaguely sinister radio-announcer-guy voice said "92 PRO FM supports our troops all around the world. Thank you."

Looking beyond the surface inanity of this, I find two things of value:

1. They acknowledge that we have troops all over the fucking world. Maybe--just maybe--one person will say, "Do we really have troops all around the world? Why would that be?" And that one person is a victory. Of course, that one person is probably 100% imaginary, but I can dream, can't I?

2. The "Thank you" sounded really sarcastic. Which of course it should be.

Everything is terrible

I just heard a commercial on the radio with a HYSTERICAL WOMAN FREAKING OUT because her son should go to college RIGHT NOW but she HEARD he's talking to a recruiter, and then her jocularly sensible husband sets her straight--actually, what HE the son is doing makes a LOT OF SENSE! He's joining the NATIONAL GUARD! And then the WOMAN, who has NO HEAD FOR FIGURES, starts FREAKING OUT ABOUT HOW ARE THEY GOING TO PAY FOR ALL THIS, and the smart sensible (condescendingly chuckling) husband SETS HER STRAIGHT ABOUT THAT TOO.

Ha ha ha! Women are stupid and your sons should want to kill people right out of high school!

In other sad news, the new Amerie album is a huge letdown. The best few songs are stale retreads of her older, greater work, and the rest sound like they're jockeying for position in the bottom half of AT40.

I should check my spam filter more often

From: dr.dave
Subject: your marks
Body: obama died of heart stroke

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month starts today. I'm giving it a shot this year. I don't know if that means that my already meager blog offerings (blofferings) will dry up even farther or if procrastination will push me to post more, but it seems like it'll certainly have an impact on my bloggy activities (blogtivities*), and I know that all of my fans are just drooling for an update on those, so...I oblige (bloguesse oblige).

Oh, and if you want to follow my NaNoWriMo word count and place bets on when I become a quitter, here's the link to my profile.

*Blactivities sounds racialismical.

Work dumb

My new job gives me internet access but blocks Blogspot, Wordpress, and Twitter, and who knows what else. What's the point of internet?!?!?

I will, incidentally, have more to say about this job. It's awfully wacky in some ways.

Dear Mr. David Guetta and Mr. Akon,

If you really are trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful, I would suggest you keep searching. "Damn, you's a sexy bitch" really didn't cut it, and your more recent attempt, "Damn, you's a sexy chick," is only an extremely minor improvement.

Yours,
Me

P.S. Also, Mr. Guetta, please get off the radio. You sound awful.

Actual Wall Street Journal headline

Colleagues Finger Billionaire

Hilarious facts about terrible songs

1. "Tears in Heaven" by Eric Clapton.

So you throw your son out a window your son jumps falls out a window and you write a song about it. Deeply personal, right? I always thought it was in questionable taste to release it as a single, but, whatever works, Mr. Clapton, whatever works. Obviously the song is very important to you--

What? You only wrote the first verse and then couldn't be bothered to finish? So you hired the guy who wrote "Looks Like We Made It" and two whole albums for Jimmy Buffett to finish it? And then when he said "I don't know, Eric, that seems awfully personal, maybe you should write it yourself?" you forced him to write it over these objections? That is hilarious. As is the fact that you only were writing it in the first place because the people who were making the soundtrack for Rush decided as an afterthought to ask you for a second song.

2. "Jack and Diane" by John Snow Leopard Mellencamp

I have a short list of songs that, every time they start, just hearing the first few unmistakable seconds hurts me more deeply than I can easily express. It's like a little piece of my soul dies, and my faith in the essential goodness of humanity is torn away and if you put a gun in my hands I might just turn it on myself at that moment. "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies is one of those songs. "Jack and Diane" is the other.

But, you know, working class hero! Mellencamp is a brave songwriter, representing the lower classes! The working man! The--

What's that you say, Wikipedia? "Mellencamp has stated in interviews that 'Jack and Diane' was originally about an interracial couple, but he realized that in the early '80s there could be backlash over such a song."

Oh, John Mellencamp. You cowardly twat!

Shakesville again

Melissa McEwan has a post about a satirical website called "Republicans for Rape" that's responding to some bit of legislative inanity that I can't be bothered to find out about because, really, anything coming out of Congress is going to be bad for me and you and anyone else who doesn't have money, so I have no patience for the details.

Anyway, basically her complaint is that these jokes aren't funny and just trigger rape survivors and are very painful for them. I tend to think that satire works best when its intended audience is horrified, but it's a complicated issue, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, so I won't take a position on that. But:

Republicans are just trying to protect their corporate sponsors, and if victims of rape are a casualty, so be it. The "Republicans for Rape" creators just hate Republicans, and if victims of rape are a casualty of hitting back at Republicans, so be it. What they share in common is that neither one of gives a fuck about rape survivors.

And you can't claim to be anti-rape if you don't give a fuck about rape survivors. It's really just. that. simple.

This, of course, comes from the woman who has posted about the Polanski case about nine million times in the past few weeks, whose group blog has posted about it more often, and who recently defended a post entitled "taking her side" equating being anti-Polanski with being pro-his victim. Which, judging from all of her public statements, the victim herself would disagree with. She has said that every time the case makes the news she feels victimized all over again. For McEwan this is irrelevant because, in her words, "justice doesn't operate on the principle of what's best for the victim; it operates on the principle of what's best for the community."

I realize, again, that this is a complicated issue, but I wish that McEwan would ever acknowledge that fact. In the world of her and her co-bloggers and her loyal readers (the comment sections there are creepy in their total agreement on everything), the world is entirely black and white, good and evil, and with the occasional recognized lapse (for which they will immediately apologize and "blub" and promise to learn from, because they are so self-righteously progressive in all things), they are 100% positive that they are on the good side.

For people who have bought into, for example, the lie that Hilary Clinton is a feminist force for good in the world and that any criticism of her can only be founded in misogyny, this is kind of a laugh riot. Of course, with that starting point, pretty much anything is gonna be a laugh riot. Or, as they would say in their twee internet talk, LOLsob.

OK, enough about Shakesville. I promise to leave them alone for a while.

(NOTE: It is solely in the interests of brevity that I ignored the Republicans vs. Democrats tribal/sport team aspects of the post, but, needless to say, oh my god how stupid can people continue to be?)

From Mars

I beg you to click on it.

In the strangest places

Paul Revere & the Raiders have an "Eleanor Rigby" ripoff called "Undecided Man" that I like quite a bit even though it's done nothing to deserve it. Nothing, that is, except for the first two lines, the second of which I think is brilliant and pretty damn profound:

I've been thinking twenty-two years all about it
The closer I get to the truth the more I doubt it

Belated

If the Nobel committee wanted to honor someone for "not being Bush," as people are saying, surely they could have found someone more distinguishable from him?

Ugh

Not to pick on Shakesville too much, but come on.

US foreign policy leads directly to situations where rape is used systematically as a weapon, all over the world. Obviously, you morons. I admit that I am in woeful ignorance of the situation in Guinea, and actually have no idea what US interests are there, if any, but I do know that similar horrible events happen all of the world, daily, as a result of the actions of our State Department. Clinton can say she's horrified all she wants, it doesn't mean she's not culpable. If I wanted to I could say I was horrified of sandwiches and it wouldn't change the fact that I just ate one.

Words don't matter, people. Ignore speeches, look at actions. Oh, and also? Woman ≠ feminist; Clinton is not on your side.

Edited to add It is always useful with public figures to pay attention not to what they say, but to what they don't say. Clinton apparently feels perfectly free to denounce brutality in Guinea. Why there? Where is there identical or worse brutality going on that she's not talking about? Why do you think that is?

Polanski

The people at Shakesville occasionally say good things, but for the most part they're pretty dumb. Is my experience, anyway. So I'm not surprised by their approach to the whole Polanski thing, but I am infuriated by it, as is my duty as a person on the internet.

First, there's Melissa McEwan's repeated posting of the names of celebrities who have become "disappoinments" to her by signing the "Free Polanski" petition. No mention of the fact that she doesn't actually know these people (they're celebrities, not acquaintances), so having a preconceived notion of their feelings about these issues is a bit silly. No mention either of the fact that there is no relationship between, say, Harrison Ford's feelings on Roman Polanski and Harrison Ford's usefulness as an actor (when it's a director or a writer I could see there being more of a link, fine, but PETA were still idiots for protesting Chicken Run because the creators of it eat chicken, if you get what I'm saying*). No mention that if all of these people that she once respected feel this way, perhaps there might be a least a little room for argument? I'm not necessarily saying that Polanski is innocent, or that he deserves to be freed (any more, I should specify, than any other imprisoned person, all of whom deserve to be freed, but that's too much to be getting into right now). All I'm saying is that if a whole bunch of people you respect are suddenly behaving in a way that you find objectionable, you could at least consider that you could be wrong. Not saying you have to come to the final conclusion that you're wrong. Just consider it.

And now, far more objectionable: co-blogger Deeky's post titled "Taking Her Side".

Aside from Kevin Smith (who tweeted this out yesterday) and Greg Grunberg (who posted this) I've not seen any other celebrities siding with Samantha Gailey, Roman Polanski's victim.

The silence is, as they say, deafening.

Leave aside for the moment that Kevin Smith's "Do the crime, do the time" is a reflexive, thoughtless repetition of someone else's reflexive, thoughtless repetition of a horrible, horrible cliché that reinforces the disgustingly punitive aspects of our culture. Leave aside the fact that Greg Grunberg seems to be posting in utter ignorance of the details of the case (Polanski pled guilty because the judge agreed to a lenient plea bargain, and fled because the judge changed his mind after Polanski made his plea--which, incidentally, is not illegal but sure as hell should be).

What's disgusting about Deeky's post is that people are not taking Ms. Gailey's side by denouncing Polanski. What she wants, as she has said repeatedly, is for everyone to drop it so she can move on. By talking about it, endlessly, the Shakesville bloggers are emphatically not taking her side. Regardless of their reasons for thinking they're in the right (some of which are convincing, some of which are not), they are not on her side. Claiming that people like themselves and Smith and Grunberg are is extremely presumptuous, and denies Ms. Gailey's right as a human being to choose for herself how to feel.

I find it extremely ironic that a bunch of self-righteous ninnies are denying Ms. Gailey her humanity in their overeager attempts to denounce someone else for denying her her humanity. Obviously there is a huge difference in degree in not respecting her wishes and (allegedly**) drugging and raping her, but both actions are efforts to strip her of her human agency in order to achieve what you want. There's also the fact that the bloggers (myself included, unfortunately) are doing it now, whereas Roman Polanski, if he did it, did it thirty years ago. He and she are different people now than they were then, and the people they are now are not in a relationship of victimizer and victim. But the people who are refusing to just fucking drop it like she wants are, in their presumably*** smaller way, victimizing her now.

The silence is, as they say, what she fucking asked for, you arrogant asshole.

Oh, and incidentally? It's possible to be a feminist and not automatically think that Polanski should be locked away forever (especially if like me you think no one should be locked away). It's also possible to be a feminist and like directors you don't. Or to find worth in works that have elements of misogyny. If it upsets you that I say that as a man (and therefore someone not directly impacted by misogyny), I'll add that I feel the same way about works that are homophobic or antisemitic. The world is a complicated place that includes bad things mixed in with good things. The ability to recognize the good things in spite of the bad does not necessarily make someone your enemy.

*Among other reasons that PETA are idiots.
**Not in legal terms, perhaps, but in human moral terms, the accusations have by no means been proven.
***Of course I have no idea if Ms. Gailey would agree with my assessment.

UPDATE: While I was writing this, the following exchange took place in comments. Commenter clauclauclaudia said "The difficult thing about speaking up to support the victim, is that the victim has publicly said [that she feels] victimized all over again every time the case gets lots of media focus. How do you support her by saying *anything*, given her feelings on the subject?" To which Melissa McEwan, the owner of the blog but not the writer of the post, responded,

Just a point: It does say "her" and not "Samantha."

Given the sex of most rape victims, and the fact that this case is indeed about justice and about rape narratives generally, like the ever-popular "he said-she said" and so forth, maybe it's relevant that it's "her" side.

Just sayin'.

Which is such a steaming load of bull. For one thing, if that was Deeky's intent, he should have said "women's" instead of "her", considering that the specific case he was referring to was about one specific person, so naturally "her" would seem to refer to, well, her. For another thing, he explicitly says "I've not seen any other celebrities siding with Samantha Gailey." So unless McEwan is trying to say that Samantha Gailey is some kind of new collective noun indicating every woman on Earth, she's full of shit. For clarity's sake, when I say "she's full of shit," the word she refers specifically to McEwan, not all women.

UPDATE II: I guess I should mention that I'm using the name "Gailey" partly because it's the one Shakesville used and partly as an attempt to be as respectful to her as I can be while, you know, disrespecting her wishes and continuing to talk about it. She uses a different name now, possibly (I don't know for sure if this is actually why, but my impression is that it is) to help disassociate herself from all this, and by not using it I am, I hope, at least not harming that effort. I just don't want to come off as disrespecting her in another way by using a name she has abandoned. I think and hope my reasons for doing so are sound.

Pitchfork: Deliberately hilarious?

I'm pretty sure it would be absolutely impossible to parody the writing style of the nincompoops who write for Pitchfork. Their writing could not be more ridiculous. I haven't decided if I'm going to write anything about their list of the best albums of the decade (links at the bottom of that page) or not, but my god has it made me laugh more than just about anything else I can think of, ever. If I do write something about it, it might have to be whole long essays about individual paragraphs, and may be very time-consuming. But hey, what else do I have to do? We'll see.

Party in the USA

Every once in a while I try to make an effort to listen to the radio, though recently these efforts have always been short-lived. Take this weekend, for example. I turned on the radio on six different occasions (actually seven, but that last one I'm going to discuss separately), and each time turned it back off within a few seconds. One of these six times there was an ad playing and I didn't have the patience to listen all the way through. The other five times I turned it off because the same song was playing, each and every time, and that song was "Party in the USA" by Miley Cyrus.

Now, I don't need to get into why that's ridiculous and also why that song is overwhelmingly terrible, right? Like, laughably inept and just startlingly bad. OK.

So then a few minutes ago I turned on the radio for the seventh time, and what should be on? Well, the end of some other song, but I didn't even hear enough of it to identify it (if I even knew it, which is unlikely these days) before "Party in the USA" came on. And I decided to listen to it all the way through.

And you know what? It's so bad that I actually find it weirdly appealing. I'm not usually much of a one for the "so bad it's good" thing--if I like something, I tend to think it's good, and whether it's good intentionally or not is irrelevant--or for the "guilty pleasure" thing, either. But I think I may just feel that way about "Party in the USA".

I do think it's interesting that in the late 90's and early 00's teen music was electro dance-pop--"Genie in a Bottle" and "Baby One More Time" and "Bye Bye Bye" and all of that. And then after that there was a big thing with guitary "singer-songwriters" coming in and everyone was saying they were gonna destroy dance-pop (I remember Avril Lavigne on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline "The Britney-Killer"). And now all of those people have moved on to adult pop (in the adult versions of their teen styles, too, with predictable results as far as quality, i.e., the dance-pop people are still good and the singer-songwriters are still terrible--when the best thing your genre has going for it, by far, is Pink, your genre has troubles). And what's teen pop now? It is a completely un-self-conscious combination of the two. "Party in the USA" is exactly halfway between Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne, at least stylistically (as far as quality goes it's far closer to Avril). In a way it reminds me of the way elements of punk and disco fused to form new wave, with the difference (among others, including the cultural use of the forms) that punk and disco happened concurrently, where these two forms of teen pop were almost entirely discrete.

Come on, Switzerland

1978 was thirty-one years ago. Polanski's alleged victim wants the charges dropped. The case is damn muddy at best. And my god, Switzerland, I thought you were supposed to be a neutral country? Like, OK, I don't know the specifics of your laws about that stuff, but surely arresting Polanski and considering shipping him off to the US so that a mishandled weak case the plaintiff doesn't want pursued can be continued three decades later violates the spirit of neutrality?

Joss Whedon, I love you...

...but your taste in music is abysmal.

Now I wish I was sick

Via Avedon Carol, who suggests expanding the idea from just H1N1 to include any illness, a scathingly good idea on how to lobby for health care reform.

Time fucking sucks

I'm really really poor right now. As in, I have about $50 to my name and currently no income. This is temporary, because I do have a job lined up, but it doesn't start until the middle of October, so I have a dicey few weeks of figuring out how to pay bills and buy food ahead of me. So I'm trying to sell some things to make enough money to tide me over. The other important thing to know is that I finally got rid of my essentially non-functional car last week (sold it for a measly $100, most of which is gone already--thanks a bunch, necessities), so I have to get to the DMV in Pawtucket (an awkward bus jaunt away) to turn in the plates. If I do it before the end of the month I can get a $30 refund on my only half-used two year registration. You can imagine how important that $30 is right now, so yes, I will do it before the end of the month.

So, selling things. The last episode of Battlestar Galactica was shitty enough that I pretty much don't ever want to watch the show ever again, and the season sets go for a decent amount of money on Amazon, so up they went. Someone bought Season 3 last night, so I have to mail it today (otherwise I have to wait until Monday, which is a delay in getting paid, and right now any delay is unacceptable).

The only post office in reasonable walking distance of my house is about ten or fifteen minutes away. It's on a college campus, so it has odd hours. I knew that it closed for forty-five minutes around lunchtime, and was thinking I remembered it being 12:15 to 1:00. I got kind of a slow start this morning (oops), so I was gonna leave my house at 11:00, mail the DVDs, pick up the 11:30ish bus from the college to downtown, and then connect to the Pawtucket bus to get to the DMV by around 12:30, plenty of time to take care of things by the time they close at 3:15.

But nope! As I was getting my things together to leave I thought to double-check the hours at the post office, and ha ha ha! It's closed from 11:15 to 12. I discover this at five past eleven, just exactly the right time for it to be too late. I'm a fucking idiot. So now I have to wait until 12 to mail the thing. But if I do that, because of the complications of coordinating two bus schedules and the intermittence of service to Pawtucket, it'll mean I can't get to the DMV until really uncomfortably close to the time they close, i.e. close enough that if there's a delay on the bus I'll get there too late and will have wasted $4.50 round trip ($1.75 to get downtown, $0.50 to transfer, and then the same fares to get back), which I can't risk doing. Which means I'll have to go Monday. God frickin' dammit.

I also wanted to change my address while I was there (my license still has my address from two moves ago, don't tell anyone), but there's a $6.50 fee to do that, which means I have to choose between spending money I can't really afford to be spending right now, and wasting an entire additional day of my life to do it later. Thanks, DMV!

I say all this as a demonstration of how, when you're poor, everything is harder, more time-consuming, and more expensive than when you're not. I don't say this to whine about my situation--I have a hell of a lot more resources than most actually poor people. I have an amazing roommate/best friend who is more financially stable than me at the moment and is willing to help out with the rent for next month until I can pay it back. I have fairly stable (though struggling) parents I could fall back on if all else failed. I have the knowledge that it'll be over soon, when that job starts. But right now I'm poor. And as a result tasks that would take a less-poor person a few hours fill up entire days. Small amounts of money ($4.50 bus fares, $6.50 DMV fees) become insurmountable obstacles. I can't even imagine how difficult this situation would be if I was currently working poor--I'd probably have to take whole days off of work, most likely unpaid (and possibly putting my continued employment in jeopardy), to get to the DMV (open Monday through Friday, 8:30-3:15) at all.

And this is just one unusual task--consider routine things like getting to the grocery store (easy for me because it's in OK walking distance and because the aforementioned roommate-friend has a car and goes once a week, so I can tag along) or doing laundry (I have machines in the house, thank god). All of these things take up enormous chunks of time, and time is extremely valuable. During that time you could be working (in which case that time is a direct expense) or if not, you could be taking a few precious moments to fucking relax. Instead, it's just more hours of time whose use is not dictated by you. More hours of slavery.

In case anyone who doesn't know this happens to breeze through here

People like Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow might be entertaining (Stewart way more than Olbermann and Maddow, in my view), and they might even be smart (same), but they only talk about what their bosses allow them to talk about. If you're going to them to find out what political outrages to get upset about, you're using them wrong.

If Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and all the rest of them are talking about an issue, it's one that Those in Charge don't care about.

What you should be upset about, and trying to push into the wider discourse, are the things they aren't talking about. Because those are the things that Those in Charge don't want you to think about.

(The same would go for people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, but unfortunately the things they crap out every day are actively, immediately harmful, rather than passively, long-term harmful like the line their "left" counterparts spew, and must be actively, immediately countered. Which is of course also part of The Plan.)

Two interesting things about 2001

There's obviously a lot more to talk about, but two quick things.

1. We see four Russians. All of them are scientists, three of them--the majority--women. We see a hell of a lot more Americans and British. Of them, the only women are secretaries, flight attendants, and two women who I guess are scientists (sitting at the table at the Clavius debriefing) who have no speaking parts or names. I don't think this was unconscious on Kubrick's part.

2. I really like the way that for at least the first half of the movie, many really startlingly exceptional, wondrous things (the discovery of an alien artifact, artificial intelligence) are rendered everyday and banal by being surrounded by small talk, while things that would actually be banal for the characters (eating in space, moving from one part of a commercial spacecraft to another, throwing away garbage, docking with a space station) are filled with more sci-fi sensawunda than you can easily deal with.

Stooopid

So the idea of redistribution of wealth, even in such a ludicrously gentle way as taxing the rich slightly more than the poor to provide social services, is unacceptable.

But banks can take huge swathes of money from people who don't have any (overdraft fees!), while simultaneously giving huge swathes of money to people who have a lot already (interest!), and that's OK.

Trying to get a sense of 2009

Aside from some TV shows (the brilliant Dollhouse in particular) and a teensy handful of movies (the disappointing Harry Potter, the amazing Inglourious Basterds, the unbearable Star Trek), I've been pretty disconnected from culture this year. Particularly where music is concerned. About a month ago I listened to about two thirds of American Top 40 and didn't recognize a single song on the countdown (I also kind of hated all of them). Until recently I had only heard about four albums that came out this year.

I'm trying to remedy that. I scanned through a bunch of recent Tiny Mix Tapes reviews, and looked through the entire top 1000 albums of the year according to Rate Your Music ratings and found what sounded interesting that was findable. So far, this is what I've got, broken down into categories. Some things I've heard won't be included because I listened to them and felt no need to keep them, and have since forgotten them, but this is the bulk of it.

Albums I've listened to that I'm on the fence about keeping
Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light
Bat for Lashes, Two Suns
Richard Youngs, Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits

Albums I've listened to and found just kind of OK
Jarvis Cocker, Further Complications
Hildur Guðnadóttir, Without Sinking

Albums that probably need to grow on me
Mos Def, The Ecstatic
Mount Eerie, Wind's Poem
Jim O'Rourke, The Visitor

Albums that are really good
Mulatu Astatke & the Heliocentrics, Inspiration Information
Cluster, Qua
Fever Ray, Fever Ray
John Zorn, Alhambra Love Songs

Albums that blew me away and really excited me
James Blackshaw, The Glass Bead Game
Hecker, Acid in the Style of David Tudor

Albums I have in my possession but haven't yet listened to
Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
Olafur Arnalds, Found Songs
William Basinski, 92982
Sir Richard Bishop, The Freak of Araby
Ciara, Fantasy Ride
Graham Coxon, The Spinning Top
Dälek, Gutter Tactics
Ekkehard Ehlers and Paul Wirkus, Ballads
Faust, C'est com...com...compliqué
Lee Fields & the Expressions, My World
Gregor Samsa, Over Air
John Hassell, Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street
Tim Hecker, An Imaginary Country
Giuseppe Ielasi, Aix
Klotzsch & Krey, Through All These Years of Trying to Belong
Long Distance Calling, Avoid the Light
Alva Noto, Xerrox vol. 2
Iggy Pop, Préliminaires
Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt II
Super Furry Animals, Dark Days Light Years
Jimi Tenor & Kabu Kabu, 4th Dimension
Throbbing Gristle, Third Mind Movements
Uochi Toki, Libro audio
Caetano Veloso, Zii e Zie: Transambas

Upcoming albums, will get as soon as released
Ghostface Killah, Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Between My Head and the Sky
Shakira, She Wolf

On the off-chance that anyone reads this, am I missing anything important that you know of?

Acid in the Style of David Tudor

I don't remember ever being so profoundly affected by music, on a physiological level, as I just was by my first listen to Hecker's new (well, several months old, but newest as of now) album, Acid in the Style of David Tudor. You can feel this music. If I read someone saying you almost feel like you can see it I would write them off as either a) Pitchfork-level retarded or b) synaesthetic to the point of not sharing my understanding of the world, but I'm tempted to say it anyway, because I really feel like I almost can. Editions Mego, who released the album, recommend playing the album loud on speakers, and avoiding headphones. Good idea. I haven't tried it on headphones (though I think I may, at very low volume, to see what that's like), but it seems risky. This stuff seems like it could easily damage your ears, not necessarily by virtue of being loud but by attacking them. Aside from that, listening on stereo speakers rather than headphones allows the music to physically fill the space you're listening in, and no matter how large that space, it will fill it. Listen loud, feel your furniture and your body shake.

There are intellectual things that could be discussed about the album (mostly things related to how entirely accurate the album's title is), but I'm not going to. On a purely visceral level this shit is amazing. It altered my involuntary physical functions. It at times scared the shit out of me, and at others made me laugh hysterically, and at times almost (almost) made me cry for the beauty. If I sound faggy, I'm sorry. If I'm talking a way I don't usually, it's because I felt this in a way I usually don't. If this strikes you as my usual hyperbole, well, don't listen to me, listen to fucking Hecker.

Even the silence when it's over feels like a goddamn revelation, and again, I'm sorry I'm talking like this. I don't know what else to say.

Split into three parts because of free fileden's limitations. I don't pull any of that linked .rar files nonsense or any password shit so there shouldn't be any difficulties.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Removing the thinnest of veils

me: God, it really pisses me off how non-male and non-white, and unapologetic about both, Yoko Ono is.
She should at least have the decency to be uncreative.
Chris: her only lyrics should be "please" and "thank you white men for letting me play"
me: "Even though I sang in Carnegie Hall when John Lennon was still throwing rocks at priests in Germany, I only latched on to him to mask my utter musical illegitimacy. Good thing he's a moronic sap who fell for it!"

I really don't give a shit about gay marriage

Or at least not as much of a shit as I seem to be supposed to. Equal rights and all, sure, but I can't help feeling that the fact that people get all incensed on one side or another of the issue (which, of course, like all issues, has more than the two sides allowed to be discussed in the mass culture), but not about the systematic incarceration of American human beings, particularly American Black human beings, or the enormous wage gap between workers and their owners, or the mass murder of foreigners for profit, or whatever, is just extremely misplaced passion and helpful to the ruling class. Not to mention that gay marriage is not the be-all and end-all (or however that's supposed to go, typographically) of gay rights, the way many people seem to think it is. Same thing goes for abortion.

Anyway, I'll read anything that criticizes Governor Carcieri, so I read this article about him speaking at an anti-gay organization in Massachusetts. No surprise from Carcieri, really. I tend to think of him as being a comic book super villain, evil for no other reason than that he enjoys it. His wife's the same way; after her husband fired all of the state's translators, she called Asian kids who were upset at their parents' now extremely limited access to already minimal state services "terrorists". For writing a letter. Um, anyway, that's beside the point. I just like to bring it up.

So I'm reading this article, standard, standard, blah blah, fags, and then I come across this passage:

A Brown University poll from May showed that 60 percent of registered voters would support a law allowing gay couples to marry, but obstacles remain for those pushing the idea: The state is heavily Catholic, and same-sex marriage is opposed by both Carcieri and Democratic legislative leaders.

Now, come on, what? Yes, that second listed obstacle is real. Our elected officials in Rhode Island are largely opposed to gay marriage, including the leadership on "both" "sides". But the second one? How can you go directly from saying that 60% of the voters are in favor to saying that the heavily Catholic population is an obstacle? Obviously that Catholicism isn't stopping a large majority from being in favor. Christ. I mean, hell, you might as well say "Spain is heavily Catholic, so there's an obstacle to legalizing gay marriage".

This is exactly the same kind of reasoning that gets support for single-payer health care or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan being branded as "far left" rather than "blandly centrist". I understand why it happens, but my god, it's so obvious.

Discussion question

"David Bowie was kind of the Radiohead of the 1970s, only more prolific and even better."

Is the statement true or false? Why? To what extent?

Reminder

Today's my last day guest posting at Daily Premise. If you missed me, I was there all week, so take a look.

It was lots of fun. Thanks, Daily Premise, for inviting me!

Katra

I just finished my first completed solo song in quite a while. I haven't stopped working on music, but I've been focusing more on making things that could be backing tracks for music I make with Chris than on my solo project (the things I "release" under the name Brain and Brain). So here it is.

Brain and Brain - Katra

A little bit about my process. I started with, of all things, the instrumental break from Leonard Nimoy's version of "Abraham, Martin & John", which had some rhythms and timbres that struck me as potentially interesting. I separated it into the left and right channels, which made one be primarily the horns and lead guitar, and the other primarily the rhythm section, though they weren't entirely separated so there was some bleed. Then I duplicated the rhythm track...well, I experimented a lot, but it ended up being twenty-four times, and staggered them so a new one started on every beat, and then set them to alternate between the left and right channels to create a kind of pulsing effect. I looped these tracks and then mixed them down into three tracks, each with eight of the original track layered over itself.

Then I made the other track mono, so it'd be centered in both speakers, and looped it a bunch of times and messed around with slicing it up and reversing it (most of it as you hear it is backwards, but some of it is forwards, too). I got it to a point where I liked it, but felt something was missing, so I consulted the Oblique Strategies, which told me to "remember those quiet evenings at home". So I quieted it down for a bit at the end by extending one of the rhythm tracks, so that at the end most of it dies out except for one (i.e., the original rhythm layered only eight times, rather than twenty-four). This little change gave the whole thing whatever extra it was that I needed, so thank you, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, once again.

The very end still seemed pretty sudden to me, and I liked the way the very last drum beat sounded, so I made it repeat a few times and fade out. Somewhat cheesy, but I like it. And there you have it. Oh, and then I named it Katra, after the Vulcan word for the soul (as a literal thing that truly exists; the mental essence of a person). Seemed appropriate both for the sound and for the source of the sample.

Here's the original song I sampled. Leonard Nimoy's an inept performer, but very charming (it helps that I love him as an actor and a person), and I pretty much love everything he's recorded. The part I took was from 1:12 to 1:30, which actually features no Leonard at all. Sometime, maybe, I'll sample his voice, but not today.

Leonard Nimoy - Abraham, Martin and John
Bonus, because it's charming: Leonard Nimoy - Put a Little Love in Your Heart

SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING

SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING
SPEECHES DON'T MEAN ANYTHING

Agatha Christie, with spoilers if you care

I'm re-reading And Then There Were None (also known as Ten Little Indians and probably several other things) right now, for some reason, which is the first time I've read Agatha Christie since I was probably like twelve*. As I read it, remembering who the murderer is but not much else (and I probably didn't pick up on much else when I originally read it), it occurs to me that while Christie is a decent enough writer, and individual books of hers are entertaining enough, her real brilliance doesn't become apparent until you've read a wide selection of her works. Because she's relentlessly experimental with the mystery format, and that's, to me, really cool.

And Then There Were None, for those unfamiliar with it, is kind of the ultimate locked room mystery, but in real time: ten people are called to an isolated island on various pretexts, whereupon it is revealed that the person who summoned them believes them all to be guilty of a murder they're getting away with, and has taken it upon him or herself to punish them for it. One by one they are murdered, and they quickly realize that there can be no one hiding on the island, so the murderer must be one of them.

The cool thing is (in part) that it's obvious all along who the murderer must be. One of the characters is a judge, which kind of gives it away seeing as the murderer has to have access to a lot of judicial information on the various people and also, you know, sees himself as a judge. He is always made to seem unpleasant and inhuman(e), described as a reptile, and right from the start a bunch of the characters suspect him. He's also the only one who consistently has comfortable opportunity to do the murders.

But then (and here's the rest of the cool part) Christie kills him off about two thirds of the way through the book. You've spent all this time thinking, well, surely, he's the only possible culprit, but then he's dead and the murders keep happening! Of course, he has faked his death (I think--either that or he's set mechanisms in place that will kill everyone else off, I haven't gotten there yet and I can't quite remember), but that possibility just doesn't occur to you.

And a bunch of her other books fuck with mystery structure in similar ways. There's the one where the narrator did it, which is a brilliant idea, made more brilliant by the fact that the book also supports the interpretation that he may be lying to protect the real murderer. There's the one where the police detective called to investigate a murder at a house--who, that is, did not show up at the house so far as we know until after the murder was committed, and who does not at first seem to have any connection with the victim--turns out to be the murderer. There's the one where almost literally everyone is the murderer, even though there's only one murder. If I remember right there's also one where the real murderer is psychically inducing others to do the killing for him, but I think she was kind of senile when she wrote that one. Regardless, there are a bunch more along those lines, and that kind of experimentalism, especially coming in such genteel, classicist packaging, is very interesting to me.

In general I'm not that interested in mysteries as a genre, largely because most of those I've read (and I'm sure this will sound to a mystery fan the way someone saying science fiction is all busty broads being kidnapped by bug-eyed monsters would sound to me) seem more interested in quirks of setting than in the actual significance of gathering clues, solving things, and the process of investigation, which is what would be more interesting to me (and why I love Sherlock Holmes). And more interesting than that would be an investigation into the (I guess) metaphysical or philosophical implications of these things. Christie's experiments are a starting point for this, a gateway allowing it to be more fully explored in works by people like Jo Walton (the trilogy starting with Farthing), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union), and Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy), among others, in all their extremely different ways.

By the way, if a real mystery fan comes across this and disagrees with my take on the genre, please, let me know. If my thinking the authors I mentioned were doing something new and exciting strikes you the way Phillip Roth saying "I had no literary models for reimagining the historical past" (idiot) strikes me, I'd love to know it, because I'd love there to be more works like this out there for me to investigate.

*Except I just realized I'm lying, because I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd about four years ago after reading a critical essay about it, because I never had read it when I was in my Agatha Christie phase.

False dichotomy

Technorati just sent me an email (I must have signed up with them at some point and forgotten about it) about a blogging survey they were conducting, and I was bored, so I took it. By and large what you'd expect: how often do you blog, what do you blog about, brands, brands, brands, products, selling things, brands, products, a little bit of politics, etc. As usual I didn't know how to answer questions on a scale of "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" because the questions were orthogonal to my concerns, and so on.

Then towards the end it asked about personal things, and it did that thing that always pisses me off where it asked for gender and supplied only the options "male" and "female." Not only were there no other specific options, but there was no "other," and not even a "do not wish to reply." If you wanted to finish the survey, you had to define yourself as male or female.

This is retarded whenever it's done, because, duhh, not everyone defines themselves as one or the other (I'm bland enough that I do, but not everyone is so boring/lucky), and it's particularly upsetting on a survey about blogging, because a) alternative culture, b) lots of tranny blogging out there, c) ENTER THE MODERN WORLD, people. It's OK not to be rigidly male or female.

Daiwy Pwemise

Doing guest posts. I'm hilarious.

Imbecile joke I was just unable to keep myself from making to myself

"Thomas Dinger's Für Mich is actually für mich, because it came out the year I was born."

Come on, me. Quit it.

The Main Attraction

Yesterday, masochist that I apparently continue to be, I was looking at Pitchfork's list of the "best" videos of the decade. Like the song list, some good stuff that just accentuates how terrible everything else is (I do have to thank them, sincerely, for introducing me to Boards of Canada's video (at #39, second on the page) for "Dayvan Cowboy", which I had missed until now and which is stunningly beautiful and actually brought me to tears. But then I think the enormity of the whole affair is summed up pretty nicely by the fact that Weezer's carnival of douchery "Pork and Beans" is actually, no exaggeration, number three. Ten years of videos and that's the third best. They also say "sometimes videos are just badass and nothing more" about The Dead Weather's laughable "Treat Me Like Your Mother" video. Yes, sometimes videos are just badass and nothing more, but not this one; I'll give you "bad" or "ass" but not both.

Anyway. Good song, mediocre video that I came across was The Avalanches' "Since I Left You". Beautiful song, puts the more recent efforts of Mr. Crap himself, Girl Talk, absolutely to shame. Oh, you mean you can rearrange and recontextualize samples of other songs to make music, rather than just to show off? Girl Talk is astonished. I hadn't by any means forgotten it, but it had been kind of a while since I listened to it, so it was pleasant to come across it again.

Then this morning at like 7 AM for some reason I decided to put on Tony Mottola's Warm, Wild and Wonderful, which is one of the calmer records Command ever released, an album of easy-listening pop covers that stands out among the millions of other such albums for being one of the very most pleasant and inventive. I've had it for years and possibly listened to it all the way through once before--I love easy listening albums from the 60s, but rarely think to put them on. Anyway, what should I find starting side two but a cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoneix", the Glenn Campbell/Johnny Rivers snoozer, which begins with what is definitely one of the major sounds in "Since I Left You"!

I spent some time trying to figure out which of the thousands of previously inexplicable (more understandable to me now that I've noticed how pleasant that intro is) interpretations of the song they sampled, just out of curiosity, but had no luck; everywhere just said Jimmy Webb wrote it or that it was a hit for Campbell but no one specified who performed the specific version sampled. Then I got distracted looking into the other samples in the song, and found that the vocals come from a song called "Everyday" by The Main Attraction. I had heard already that the original song says "since I met you" rather than "since I left you" and that the combination of the pitch shifting and the power of suggestion is what makes it sound otherwise on the Avalanches song, but I had never actually heard the song before. Very pleasant, very pleasant indeed. Sunny late sixties pop, vaguely psych and soul influenced but very much not either of them. Nothing hugely special, but nice enough that I could see listening to it frequently. Excellent, unusual vocal performance, as we already know from all the "aayaah" bits in "Since I Left You". So then I looked into the album it comes from, And Now The Main Attraction, and what's right after "Everyday" in the running order? A cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix". Huh!

Here's the whole album for you if you're interested: side a and side b (split into two because of Fileden's 50 MB upload limit for free users, and I'm poor). I'm pretty sure this isn't the version of "By the Time..." used in "Since I Left You", and I still haven't figured out which one is. Interesting curiosity that they sampled one song and then a different version of the song next to it on the same LP. Must be where they got the idea, or something. The album as a whole, again, nothing special, but remarkably pleasant.

And no, I don't know why I exclusively write blovels (BLOG NOVELS!) these days.

My second favorite invention of the new millennium...

...is Wikipedia.

(My first favorite is TV shows on DVD.)

I was reading about the band Love on there, and first of all came across this crazy fact: "Bryan MacLean died in Los Angeles of a massive heart attack at age 52 on December 25, 1998, while having dinner with a young fan who was researching a book about the band." Must have been insane for the dinner partner.

More importantly, I came across the hilarious pairing of article and image that we find here. In the event that someone makes the mistake of changing it, a description of it follows in hidden text so as not to spoil the surprise. Highlight (or maybe copy and paste) to read: it's an article about a Love tribute album but the image with the article is the cover of Toni Morrison's novel Love.

More funny: "By this stage, Love were far more popular in the UK, where the album reached #24, than in their home country, where it could only reach #154. Love, did, however, have a strong following in the U.S. at the time among cognoscenti of the cutting edge." Cognoscenti of the cutting edge. It cracks me up whenever Wikipedia suddenly bursts into exceptionally purple prose.

Then I was curious to see what Wikipedia had to say about purple prose, but then as I entered it into the search field I saw "Purple People Eater" suggested, and I had forgotten about that song, so I went there instead, where I learned that Thora Birch was in the 1988 movie named after it. How the hell old could she have been in 1988, I wondered, so I went to her page (she was six--she's my age!), where I learned, craziness: both of her parents were in Deep Throat. Her mother is Carol Connors. Weird!

And, for final hilarity, this sentence from the introduction to her article, emphasis mine: "Since the 1990s she has moved on to more mature roles, in films such as American Beauty (1999), Dungeons & Dragons (2000), and Ghost World (2001).

River Deep - Mountain High

While preparing that previous post, commemorating the passing of the world's greatest songwriter, I came across this video of Ike & Tina performing "River Deep - Mountain High", the perfect song Ellie Greenwich wrote and Phil Spector produced for them. It's possibly the most amazing video I have ever seen. Watch it. Even if you're the type to skip over videos (you still there, Megan and miriam?), watch it. You really, really won't regret it.

Ellie Greenwich

All day I've been trying to find something useful to say about Ellie Greenwich, by far the most important person who died in late August of 2009. I've been hit surprisingly hard by her death, considering that as far as I know she hasn't done much of anything (in terms of public music-making, that is) since singing backup for Blondie and Cyndi Lauper in the late 70s and early 80s.

If I were going to pick a single favorite songwriter of all time, it would most likely be her. She's certainly the best of the Brill Building geniuses. Her songs are always a brilliant mix of joy and pathos, in varying degrees (and it's sometimes hard to see one or the other of them, but there is joy in songs like "The Train from Kansas City" and "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", just as there is pathos in "Chapel of Love" and "Da Doo Ron Ron").

The pathos often arises from issues that weren't supposed to be discussed in pop hits of the early and mid 60s (but of course frequently were), like how shitty it is to be poor ("When I was a little girl I had a ragdoll/The only doll I've ever owned"), or how shitty it was to be a woman then ("He makes me do things I don't wanna do/He makes me say things I don't wanna say"). The narrator's voice in these songs isn't usually aware of these issues, but the song always is. Lesley Gore's character may not know what to do about her man who's been cheatin', but "Maybe I Know" does, and Ms. Greenwich and the listener share in the heartbreak of powerlessness.

I haven't even mentioned "Be My Baby" yet, and that's because there is nothing to say about it. If I have one favorite song, if there is one song that's objectively the greatest song in the entire world, it's "Be My Baby". It might feel like divine revelation, but Ellie Greenwich wrote it.

Some of her less well-known songs:
The Shangri-Las, "The Train from Kansas City"
The Exciters, "He's Got the Power"
The Crystals, "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)"
The Ronettes, "I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine"
The Shangri-Las, "Out in the Streets"
Blondie's early demo cover of "Out in the Streets"
And the great lady herself: Ellie Greenwich, "You Don't Know"

(If the formatting or sound on these mp3s is weird or subpar, I apologize; I found them quickly online so I could post them here. I have most on CD or record.)

Ted Kennedy

It's quite a spectacle, seeing all these liberals fawning over royalty for dropping a few scraps off the table.

Enough, Pitchfork!

They're at it again. This time about Radiohead's Amnesiac:

The strains of paranoia that had run throughout Yorke's songs for a half-decade came most sharply into view on album closer, "Life in a Glasshouse", which oddly seems to predict the post-9/11 Bush administration's misguided warmongering (in Iraq), belief that patriotism is equated with obedience, and willingness to trade liberty if they believe it will bring security. The only song on Amnesiac recorded after the release of Kid A, it would also have been the only song recorded after the election of Bush, and with its stately, funereal New Orleans jazz arrangement it provides an earthy, traditional close to the forward-looking Kid A/Amnesiac.

YEAH ODDLY.

You know, Pitchfork, it can't keep being so "odd" that all these people keep predicting the future. At this point you either have to conclude that precognition isn't unusual or they're not predicting the future at all, but rather describing the present. Doesn't take all that much of a leap to get there, and you don't need Occam's razor to tell you which one is true.

I guess I do have them to thank for the fact that I'm listening to the album now. So, uh, thanks? Of course, I listen to it anyway sometimes.

PS Radiohead is British.
PPS When is warmongering not "misguided"? I like the parenthetical "(in Iraq)". After all, if we call all of Bush's warmongering "misguided" that might imply that Obama's expansion of Af-Pak is something less than visionary hope and change!

Obama

Hey, don't force it--you could shit your pants.

Fun-ny

I was just looking at David Cicilline's wikipedia page (because what else am I gonna do at nine o'clock in the morning on Sunday, go to church?), and for some hilarious reason this picture goes with the "Political future" section:

That's Cicilline with Cliff from Cheers at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, although at first I looked at it and was like "Oh, does the mayor have a boyfriend all of a sudden? Last I knew he just hung out with a creepy entourage of dissipated dudes of various ages who sleazily hit on every guy they see."

So anyway, then I clicked on the link to Cliff from Cheers's page, and this is the main picture there:

As Kerry said, "It's like they're exes, and Cicilline is still hanging on, but Cliff is trying to snag someone new. But the only good picture he had was that one of him and Dave from the film festival."

I'm not finished

You know, I don't think I even came close to fully describing what makes me ill about Pitchfork's "B.O.B." write-up.

Working backwards, with the same quotes I used last time. The whole "painted black" thing. Regardless of the insanity of implying that Obama is Good For The Blacks, what, exactly, was the writer (Stuart Berman--which, by the way, is this the same Stuart Berman who's associated with Broken Social Scene? Because that would be hilariously perfect) trying to claim about the flag on Stankonia's cover? Is it that it somehow predicted Obama? Or maybe a plea for a Black president? Or what? Because to me it's always been black-as-in-mourning. As in, look at the death the American Empire has caused. "Burn, motherfucker, burn, American dream". And the "joyous denouement" of the song--which is not, personally, how I hear the end--what? What the hell is Stuart saying? "Oh boy," thought Big Boi and André 3000. "One of these days, they might let us have a Black man in the White House. Let's make some joyous music to indicate how we will feel on that magical day." Come on.

And the middle quote, the "warmongering evangelicals" bit. Again, this hipster fuck Berman is denying Outkast their right to observe and be outraged by the world as it is rather than as it will be. They are not "inaugurating" anyone. Again, what does he think the song is about? An eerily accurate prediction of the second Bush administration? A belated retrospective of the first? What the hell makes him think that? They aren't looking into a crystal ball, and they're not putting their song behind glass as a museum piece. It was about the present, about the world it was created in. That it remains relevant is testament to the clarity of their vision, it's true, but it is testament far more to the continuity of the American imperial project.

And, lastly. The opening of the godforsaken paragraph. "Bombs Over Baghdad", we're told, was a phrase that sounded "oddly anachronistic in 2000". Now, let's pretend for a moment that Stu's pig-ignorant assumptions are true. American bombing of Iraq stopped at the end of February in 1991. Then, once Clinton took office an era of peace broke out all over the world, and all was joy and happiness. Sadly, the evil Bush family retook control of the Oval Office, and the world was plunged into darkness only to be relieved by the hip Blackness-synonymous-with-progressivism of Obama.

Even if all this were true* then what Stewey Baby is saying is still disgusting. Look at it this way: imagine if right now, in the second half of 2009, some artist beloved of Pitchfork (doesn't matter if it's Vampire Weekend or Jay-Z or Dan Deacon or Outkast again) puts out a song called "Planes in the World Trade Center". Now try to imagine a Pitchfork writer saying that that title seems "oddly anachronistic". You can't, can you?

Well, American bombs have helped to kill three orders of magnitude more people in Iraq than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Oddly anachronistic? I say it again: fuck you, Pitchfork.

*And, incidentally, if this view of American government were actually accurate, surely it would imply that our system is fundamentally broken, wouldn't it? If just exchanging one person, the president, for another can wreak so much havoc over the world, shouldn't we change our system to one that's more stable? Hell, let's make Obama king. After all, all we need is good people with power, not good structures of power.

Ahistorical fucking jackasses

So Pitchfork published their top twenty today (the link is to the top 10 page because that's what I'm talking about here), and by and large it's less repulsive than the rest of the top 500. Fairly decent song choices, many of which ("Get Ur Freak On", "Crazy in Love", "Idioteque") I can 100% get behind.

Then we get to #1. The song choice itself is pretty great--"B.O.B." by Outkast. I don't think I would say it's the best song of the decade by any means, but it's an interesting and surprising choice (good from the point of view of a long article leading up to a denouement, like this one), and, most importantly, it's an extremely good, important song.

So, we're good. But then those dipshit, elaborately ignorant writers have to act clever, and things go downhill extremely fast.

Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it.

Are you hearing this? Not only are you entirely unaware of anything in any way related to what you're talking about, fuckhead, you're completely missing the central point of the song you're supposed to be praising above all others from the past ten years. Namely that when it was written, recorded, and released, we were bombing Iraq constantly.

Outkast wasn't formulating some kind of hypothesis that we might bomb Iraq at some point in the future. They weren't being "futurists". They were being reporters. You would know that if you weren't focused on your pretty delusion that the Bush administration was some kind of deviation in the course of American history rather than just another part of the continuing bloody story of our imperialist adventures all over the world. You would know that if you did one second of research. You would know that if you actually had any interest in being part of an alternative independent press. You have a responsibility to know that because your tax dollars, and mine, have directly caused the deaths of multiple millions of Iraqis over the past twenty years. Oh--sorry. Am I not supposed to mention the 90s in an article about the 00s? Is that what's going on here? Anything that happened the previous ten years doesn't count, whether in terms of music or the mass murder that music is responding to?

Here's a question for you. Who killed more Iraqis, Clinton or Bush? The answer: your guess is as good as mine, unless of course your guess is that it isn't close. It is a fact that Clinton's policies killed many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children alone, which Madeleine Albright referred to as a "price" that she considered "worth it".

In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear...a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals.

Considering that the Clinton administration was just as warmongering as the Bush administration (but better at framing it for liberal consumption), I have to assume that what really upsets you here is the "evangelical" part. And if you really think that Bush is somehow quantitatively worse than Clinton because he thought God was telling him to kill rather than Wall Street (which is itself a pretty debatable proposition), well, I don't even know how to hold a conversation with you. Dead people are dead, no matter why you killed them. (This is of course also ignoring the issue of how creepily religious the rhetoric Clinton and many members of his administration often was.)

We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black).

Oh please. Painted black by a man who regularly gives speeches chastising Blacks for poor behavior (also known as "trying to survive in a world that tries to murder them every day"), who threw his own pastor under the bus for being insufficiently Uncle Tomish? Painted black by a man who pretends to withdraw from Iraq while leaving enough troops there to ensure that we can continue to inflict terror on the people at will? Painted black by a man who waited only two days after his inauguration to start killing Pakistani children? Painted black by a man currently trying his hardest to create a new health care system even more harmful to the poor and middle class than our existing system? Painted black by a man who only cares about racial profiling when it (debatably) happens to a rich man who was not appreciably harmed by it, as opposed to the people imprisoned and murdered by police every day?

Yeah. "B.O.B." is about how much Republicans suck and how much the Black man loves his Democrat massa. Fuck you, Pitchfork.

Something I noticed the other day

Gaggles of geese sound like Terry Riley.

Pitchfork, Vampire Weekend, Dan Deacon: The Unholy Trinity

[Note: I, Ethan, composed this essay, but most of the material comes from a conversation between me and Chris, who deserves equal credit for it.]

I don't know why I want to hurt myself, but I'm reading through Pitchfork's ludicrous list of the "best" 500 songs of the decade. They include the occasional genuinely good song, but all that does is reinforce to me the ridiculousness of the ordering scheme. Are you really trying to tell me, editors of Pitchfork, that The Darkness's "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" is in any way better than Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around"? You put "Pass That Dutch" at #291, and then try to tell me that Feist's "Mushaboom" deserves to be #103? Coldplay's "Yellow" and Jim O'Rourke's "Good Times" are so close to one another that the fact that "Yellow" is ranked higher is even more insulting that it would be otherwise. None of this is surprising to me, coming as it does from Pitchfork, the internet's original home for precious idiocy, but my mind has kind of been paralyzed by its encounter with other minds that can simultaneously be aware that Burial's "Archangel" is a great song (which it truly is) and also think that Modest Mouse's "Float On" is better.

Perhaps the most delightful thing about the list is its ability to rekindle some old passions of mine that I had forgotten about, like how entirely fucking awful Vampire Weekend is, and how even more entirely awful their critical reception has been. Pitchfork put "Oxford Comma" at #191 (admittedly far lower on the list than I would have expected, but still, to pick a relevant example, 195 songs higher than #386, Konono No. 1's "Paradiso"). What they wrote about it inspired me to give the band one last chance. Here's what they said:

There's plenty about "Oxford Comma" that screams "Kitsch!": that Lil Jon shoutout, the fact that Vampire Weekend, already with a reputation for overbearing bookishness, wrote a song ostensibly about grammar. But "Oxford Comma" is compositionally brilliant; clocking in at 3:15, it's a microcosm of momentum-building, beginning with a slow thudding beat before, in short order, ramping to its double-chorus finale, resplendent and victorious without ever being angry or loud or fast. Montessori, finishing school, whatever it took: "Oxford Comma" is well-mannered punk rock.

Now, most of those absolutely ludicrous claims struck me as obviously false and safely dismissed, particularly the "punk rock" bit. People say this a lot, and it's a complete fucking mystery to me. Vampire Weekend is not "punk". Vampire Weekend is Paul Simon, but even wussier. Paul Simon would never be described as "punk". If Vampire Weekend is "well-mannered punk rock", everything might as well be fucking punk, so long as you put an appropriate modifier in front of it. Ciara is urban punk rock. Toby Keith is country punk rock. Britney Spears is prefab pop star punk rock. ABBA: orchestrated Spectoresque disco proto-punk rock. Ladysmith Black Mambazo: delicate, bubbling Afro-punk rock. Steve Reich: process punk. Pitchfork: Meta-journalist-bullshit punk.

So I was fully prepared to just pass over and let Pitchfork be the worthless sputum I already knew it to be, but two words brought me up short: "thudding beat". The song I remembered contained nothing that could conceivably be described that way. But surely such a simple descriptor couldn't be so hugely inaccurate, could it? So I plunged into youtube and, shudderingly, searched for "Oxford Comma".

And fuck you, Pitchfork. "Thudding beat"? Please. Might as well say Anna Nalick's "Breathe (2AM)" starts with a thudding beat. And yet, at the same time, thank you, Pitchfork, because the sheer monstrosity of Vampire Weekend is on such a level that, when one has not directly faced it in some time, it seems impossible, exaggerated. It is not. I'd go so far as to say that the only thing in the entire world that's worse than this song, aside from the Barenaked Ladies, is its video. This is of course equally true for every other Vampire Weekend song. Every one of their songs has the ability to become the worst thing in the world simply by being played, and the experience of listening to them is incomplete unless accompanied by looking at their smug fucking faces and having extremely vivid fantasies doing severe violence to them. Every cell in my body screams for murder when I encounter them. Seriously, if I had any member of that band in front of me and knew I could get away with it, I would inflict a great deal of pain on him before I let him die. The only thing I would stop and consider would be methods.

"Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" didn't make the list (unless they're holding it back for the yet-to-be-revealed top twenty, which is entirely fucking possible), which is really too bad because while each of Vampire Weekend's songs is a perfectly manufactured summary of everything that is wrong in the world, that one is quite possibly the most perfect. I mean, I don't need to say anything about how absolutely, irredeemably repellent that title is, do I? It's obvious? OK. And here's something to try if you have the stomach for it. Watch the video. Not the whole thing. Start at around 1:20, and trust me, you will vomit at 1:35. And, ridiculous as the girl in the video is, I get really pissed off on her behalf during the scene immediately following. Leave her alone, dudes. I emphasize "dudes" because they are dudes in the fullest sense of the current use of the term.

Vampire Weekend is both the sound and the look of entitled privilege, distilled to its purest form. The fact that it takes from African music just reinforces that.

And, again, why the critical respect? They are such a folk jam band. They might as well be Guster. As a matter of fact, they are exactly Guster, except more entitled and smug, less clever and catchy. This is of course saying very little. But hey, at least Guster tries to sing threateningly about joining the Hare Krishnas instead of fucking Oxford commas and Cape fucking Cod kwassa kwassa. It's amazing, the power this band has to enrage and confuse me, more than just about anything else in the world today. Of course it's not so much the band itself, which in isolation is entirely unexceptional; it's the reaction people have to them. If they were passed off in an even remotely reasonable manner, I would not even consider them for a second. I would look at them, say "ew," and then move on. They are such an atrocity that their positive reception just completely blows my mind. In all honesty, shitty crap like Nickelback deserves more praise. I'd rather hipster media swoon over Vertical Horizon than Vampire Weekend.

Moving on, after significant amounts of trauma that are less interesting to talk about, we reach #149, which is Dan Deacon's "The Crystal Cat". One of Pitchfork's excretions wrote a whole paragraph in praise of this song, but I am not lying when I tell you I was incapable of reading beyond the third sentence. This is what I managed to get through:

What a lonely, lonely sound. Dan Deacon's shows are about the high of communal experience-- about surrendering your ego to a crush of overheated strangers. But his music is solitary.

What the fuck are they talking about? This is patently ludicrous. My only theory is that this is one of the longest, most complicated typos in history, and that what the writer meant to say was something more like this:

What a bland, bland sound. Dan Deacon's shows are about standing back and watching, mystified, as morons dance insecurely, each hoping to impress more than the rest, each failing as they flail about wildly and idiotically. But his music is just boring.

Dan Deacon's music isn't about surrendering your ego or communal experiences or loneliness or any of that nonsense. Dan Deacon's music is about video games and swirls of color most sensible people forgot about sometime after the age of seven. It is the height of pretentious, spazzy shit mistaken for spirituality by hipster ninnies. People try to act like he's got some kind of claim to great art because he has a degree in electroacoustics. Big fucking deal. Condoleezza Rice has a PhD in political science, and she still managed to be a pretty good approximation of an evil moron. Even she would presumably know better than to name a release Twacky Cats.

I was just mentally preparing a big long final paragraph about how in addition to their often perplexingly awful taste in music, the Pitchfork reviewers are the single most incompetent gaggle of writers ever to be collected in one place, but then I remembered the last sentence in their paragraph about The Killers' "Mr. Brighstide" (which entirely non-notable song, incidentally, is apparently the 72nd best song released between 2000 and 2009, which would be an alarming prospect if not for the fact that it is entirely untrue). This one sentence, particularly coming at the end of an entry, says more about their awful writing than anything I could ever dream of saying myself. This is the one-two punch, the slam dunk that some writer whose name I don't want to look for (because it would involve me seeing the paragraph it's attached to again) saw fit to end his tiny masterpiece with:

Rampant melodrama is their BFF.

Re-watching Dollhouse

I picked up the Dollhouse Season 1 DVD set pretty much right when it came out and now have just started re-watching it. (I still haven't seen the aired finale or either of the two unaired episodes yet, but I've seen every other episode.) One thing that strikes me is that the studio-mandated "six pilots" structure that marred the first half of the season is actually more effective in retrospect than I thought at the time.

The fact that we in the audience have to be repeatedly re-introduced to the show's basic conceit (which, while great speculative sci-fi, is not at base all that complicated) in a way mirrors the central metaphor of the show, namely that we are all actives and human society is the Dollhouse. Fox, one of the owners of our worldwide Dollhouse, is essentially programming us every week to know what we need to know to understand the show, and apparently assuming, as Echo's manipulators at the in-show Dollhouse do, that we will be "wiped" at the end of each one and need to be re-imprinted next time.

Additionally, the constant reiteration of the concept of the show in awkwardly-written exposition is a neat little metanarrative echo* of the scripted exchange that Topher greets the actives with after each wipe, to ease them back into the tabula rasa state:

"Hello, Echo. How are you feeling?"
"Did I fall asleep?"
"For a little while."
"Shall I go?"
"If you'd like."

Not all that different from "Why don't you ask Echo? OH RIGHT SHE CAN'T REMEMBER" over and over and over.

Now, I'm not trying to be one of those overzealous fans sticking up for every single flaw in his God-Whedon's work (I reserve that kind of fan behavior for David Bowie--Never Let Me Down has redeeming qualities, I swear--and anyway that kind of fan hates Fox for making Whedon do this to Dollhouse, which, OK, I kind of do too, end paretheses). It just struck me that, while it's irritating to deal with the slow pace of the first batch of episodes leading up to "Man on the Street", there are some useful and interesting aspects to the enforced structure that really only become visible when watching the show quickly, for a second time, on DVD. Yet another case of the same material becoming entirely different when experienced in a different format.

*HA HA HA THAT'S THE CHARACTER'S NAME TOO

Note

I think it'll be good for me to start this up again, so here I am. No idea how long it'll last. I'm not working at the moment, so I've got a type of time that I hopefully won't have for very much longer...so I guess we'll see. Anyway, I have ideas and things I want to get down from time to time, so I'm gonna put them here and pretend that's productivity.