r.mutt's blog

12/29/05 YR FUCKING DEMOCRACY OTHERS... YOURSELF? "Given his heritage, Hassan could almost pass as Iraqi. His father's background helped him secure an entry visa, and native Arabs would see in his face Iraqi features and a familiar skin tone. His wispy beard was meant to help him blend in. "But underneath that Mideast veneer was full-blooded American teen, a born-and-bred Floridian sporting white Nike tennis shoes and trendy jeans. And as soon as the lanky, 6-foot teenager opened his mouth — he speaks no Arabic — his true nationality would have betrayed him. [...] "His mother, Shatha Atiya, a psychologist, said she was 'shocked and terrified.' She had told him she would take him to Iraq, but only after the country stabilizes. "'He thinks he can be an ambassador for democracy around the world. It's admirable but also agony for a parent,' Atiya said." the moral of the story? "multiculturalism" may very well, to invoke jean chrétien, "mean business," but i just saw king kong. the Other are dead-eyed zombies who want nothing more than to spear you in the back and feed you to giant gorillas, don't you know? but, setting my hobby of finding things racist aside, that king kong was just a shoddy blockbuster. for one thing, the monkey kept changing sizes — more on that later. watching the orgiastic CGI spectacle, i couldn't help seeing the blue screen. to be more precise, i couldn't help seeing the same visual juxtaposition of flat, computer-generated projection and three-dimensional human actor movements that may well have been intentional but nonetheless marred sin city. (sin city was a flat movie that never managed to suppress its three-dimensionality, while king kong seems an ambitiously illusionistic, special effects legerdemain-driven film that shows its hand at every turn.) the king kong v. 3-rex fight was so overstylised in a pro-wrestling (or, perhaps, gay porn) sort of way that you were almost forced to accept that the movie was self-consciously campy and tongue-in-cheek. and perhaps therein lies the key. this is not to say that peter jackson was thinking critically when he made this movie and, certainly, i can see no historical justification for telling this story again in the present. but those insufferable (and oh so racist) heart of darkness allusions do resonate with hassan, our iraqi-american would-be "immersion journalist." why doesn't marlowe turn back? why does he keep going up the river? oh, i don't know; ask someone from the jungle. hey, anyone seen queequeg? what was it hassan wanted to find in iraq? and who's exterminating whom? the original king kong was about fear and lynchings. the new one is about fetishising while at the same time domesticating the african-american male body, no different than our fascination with 50 cent. (sigh) would that the dangerous and exotic Other could be tamed and put to good use protecting us. and hassan? well, his river journey was two parts holy crusade and one part (old guard) anthropological investigation. if he could just go to iraq and spread freedom to one person, prove even if only in one isolated instance that an iraqi could be civilisable, he could domesticate his inner Other and truly become american. i wrote earlier about the changing size of the gorilla. while i seriously doubt that it was intentional, we are at all points getting the "gorilla" we want, whether it's in the form of kindly and avuncular evan parke, dead-eyed zombies, or a computer-animated monkey of varying proportions. and, accordingly, some critics make apologies for the film and get the king kong they want. at times, kong is like us (j. hoberman writes, "Primates prevail—hoist high the opposable thumb, Roger!"). but when he gets jealous of adrian brody — (sigh) what a fucking hero — he thumps his chest as his size seems to increase tenfold and, wait a minute, did his fur just get darker? but i think the real moral of the story is encapsulated by this review. the questions are obvious: "Is 'King Kong' racist? Lots of people say it is. And, if it is, why does the film keep getting remade? What does it say about us if the new 'Kong' is a huge hit?" the author of the review, james p. pinkerton, answers his own question in his conclusion. no, not his penultimate paragraph: "But if the movie is so loaded with race-charged imagery, why isn't it being protested? Why aren't we seeing pickets and boycotts? Perhaps it's because today, as people look around the world, they see that most political strife is, in fact, ethnic strife. Folks like to say that 'diversity is our strength,' and they resolve to fight racism, but every day's news reminds us that ethnic conflict lurks in the human heart," but his final one: "That's a gloomy reality that 'Kong' captures, in its crypto fashion, and so there's no point in getting worked up over it. Indeed, since the film is entertaining - like the similarly themed, much honored and extremely popular 'Rings' movies of a few years back - one might as well go see this one, too." why doesn't marlowe turn back? why does he keep going up the river? unfortunately, queequeg was asleep, so we had to ask the melacholic crypto-fascist. with domesticated Otherness comes diversity, which is just another way of saying "multiculturalism," and, in the film industry as in international political economy, "multiculturalism means business." why? there was no point in turning back. marlowe might as well have kept going. 12/26/05 BOXING DAY SALE all monoculture media conglomerate apparel 50% off. 12/19/05 EDIBLE ANXIETY AND THE EDIBILITY KILLER: THE EARLY 80'S REVISITED oh man, my oedipal anxiety is acting up again. this is what we in any biz like to call a "credibility killer" (absolutely no pun intended): 18: The Killers "Mr. Brightside" [Universal] In a(nother) year when new wave supposedly made a comeback, few bands successfully hit the mixture of sexual frustration and nervous energy that powered punk's more talented younger brother. And to tell the truth, the Killers were not one of those bands, even given the Sounds of the 1980s hype they carried onto the mainstream. Maybe "Mr. Brightside" would've got them there, with its paranoid anti-fantasy lyrics and synthesizer glory, but something in the production-- my money's on the Alan Moulder mix job-- made it just too huge, too arena-rock to fit into the snide, itchy clothes of new wave. Of course, this enormous arrangement, with its chiming riff, its drumrolls, the way its microchip-strings keyboard setting pushes the post-chorus climax one step farther than you thought it could go, is also the reason why "Mr. Brightside" was one of the biggest and best straight-up rock singles of 2005. Screw revivalism; a smart band will always trade the nostalgia game for timelessness. --Rob Mitchum massive cred drop aside, what is ironic is that, four spots up on the list is art brut's "emily kane" and, but for a few minor changes (say, "post-punk" for "new wave," "art brut" for "the killers"), that little write up could have been for art brut. instead, this is what came out of bobby mitchum: 14: Art Brut "Emily Kane" [Fierce Panda] Actually written for Eddie Argos' real-life first girlfriend, Emily Kane's song is, in typical Art Brut style, hilariously honest-- although unusually for Argos, its details are intentionally vague: The ripple effect of his first love is intricately drawn, the girl herself is not. It's funny 'cause it's true: The first often sets the template by which every subsequent romance is drawn, and time does nothing but make those clumsy, naïve kisses seem more ideal. But it's great because Argos doesn't know how to portray the simplest emotions as anything less than epic, and by the end of the song untamed beasts stomp around souls, torches are aflame, something resembling a theremin starts whistling away, and Ms. Kane's unexceptional moniker has been alchemized into an anthem for lost innocence. --Rob Mitchum yep, symptomatic of the myopically style-obsessed criticism of pfork, he took "emily kane" at face value. "emily" fucking "kane," which, the first time you hear it, makes you laugh out loud because it's so overly retro, so neo-avant-garde in the absolutely most peter bürger-y, non-buchlonian way imaginable, it can hardly be believed that they're now recycling (almost paradoxically) post-punk in such fashion. this song is television personalities glossed-up as if by julian schnabel and reproduced for mass consumption. "clumsy, naïve kisses," "simplest emotions"? mitchum, you stupid little dullard, there's this thing that literary critics, radio d.j.'s, teenagers, and your mom call irony. this is fucking art brut, who are basically a counter-revolutionary (marat-sadist?), ironic pastiche of the fall, swell maps, and whatever other early 80's d.i.y. post-punk band the NME is currently "rediscovering." what i really find ironic is that, in thinking about the killers' retroisation of new order (by the way, since when was synth-dance pop "new wave"?) and art brut's retroisation of television personalities, i'm feeling this strange nostalgia for early 1980's theory and criticism, specifically those dusty old "postmodernism" debates: postmodernism is fragmentation, is pastiche, is repetition, is allegorical, is simulacral; sincerity is dead, the referent is dead, duchamp is dead, dubuffet is dead, and so on (for a period piece, see the epochal anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture). so if i'm ever going to use that awful term "postmodernist" in a carefree, early 80's buzzwordy way, this would be the time.* yes, "emily kane" is all self-congratulatory and asinine cynicism but a part of me nonetheless enjoys the postmodernist easiness of it, kind of like... well, not a schnabel painting but maybe a francesco clemente. in short, "emily kane" is a guilty pleasure of the first order. but bobby socks mitchum already (and shamefully, so shamefully) used up his "fuck it, i like this shallow, retro guilty pleasure and i'm going to go overboard pretending it's actually good" line this year on the killers (n.b. mitch's hyperbolic invocation of "timelessness" and the "epic"). still, part of me wonders whether there is perhaps something zeitgeistical** about pfork's clumsily misunderstanding criticism and early 80's revival fetishism and, who knows? maybe it would be appropriate for learning from las vegas to now be retro too. * in between chucking cupcakes at the wall during my twelve hours in rochester international airport three days ago, i finally came up with a viable definition of postmodernism — and only twenty years too late for anyone to care. the killers, art brut, sean, madonna, and me: il faut être de something but it sure ain't notre temps. ** to give credit where credit is due while, at the same time, giving a solid example of what i meant by "postmodernism is...", i borrowed this term from julianne shepherd. (follow the link.) 12/14/05 AW SHIT, HE DID NOT JUST SAY THAT he did. in other current eventsy news, this whole tookie williams business is ridiculous from both sides. the "liberal media" (did i really just say that? yes i fucking did. the liberal media is soft and stupid; it panders, and not unlike the conservative media, doesn't take on the real underlying issues) keeps bringing up the fact that williams has been nominated for nobel peace and literature prizes. this is somehow supposed to legimate him? henry kissinger and t. s. eliot won those respective prizes and they were monsters. here, the issue from both sides is, i think, power, specifically the authority to speak for the Other. the left tends to misrepresent the execution of williams as a sign that gov. schwarzenegger did not find his redemption sufficient. the value of williams' work in prison, however, is not at issue here. rather, it is his refusal to admit guilt. the reason tookie williams is dead, schwarzenegger says, is because he refused to be ventriloquised. side-stepping the issue of whether or not he actually did it — i obviously can't answer that question — life or death in this case hung on whether williams would say what they wanted him to say, whether he would represent himself as others would have him represented. this is not altogether different from one line that kept popping up in news stories: "a Swiss legislator, college professors and others nominated him for the Nobel Prizes in peace and literature." a contrarian article brought up the very valid point that, "more than 140 Nobel Prize nominations annually have included Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin." but a swiss legislator and college professors. surely they have the authority to determine the value of williams' life, right? what we should really be talking about is the vulgarity of the death penalty, not whether tookie williams, for all the good he's done, was too good (in whose eyes?) to be executed. lest we forget, all people are too good to be executed. the whole point of not executing people is that such matters are beyond the judgement, that no person or persons have the right to speak for another in the most presumptuous possible way and say, "tookie williams does not deserve to live." 12/13/05 WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY 20 QUESTIONS WITH ME? my greatest regret in twenty-four years? last week, when finally given the opportunity to legimitely say, "can't talk now, i've got a class to teach," i didn't think to knock on my roommates' doors before leaving the house. being that they were both sleeping, they would have murdered me and i never would have gotten to teach that class. but it would have been worth it. 12/12/05 NOTHING TO SELL? I COULD EASILY SELL MY SOUL to no one's surprise, the decemberists signed with a major label. in an interview with pitchfork, colin meloy says, Having grown up seeing what major labels do in the early 90s, I was skeptical about it all along. I've been steeped in that mythology, Steve Albini essays and things like that. But the whole idea about selling out seems like such an antiquated notion. I don't just say that out of defensiveness. A lot has changed since Fugazi in the 90s. People have come to realize that that's a really difficult standard to maintain. now, i'm not all that interested in the rhetoric of selling out and the indiocracy and all that; usually, this rhetoric employs abstract signifiers of authenticity and autonomy as stand-ins for real, pertinent issues and, in doing so, conceals them. to respond specifically to what meloy said, the first thing that comes to mind is: fucking bullshit, colin. a lot has changed since fugazi in the 90's. people have to realize that that's a really difficult standard to maintain. that's right, colin; a lot has changed. it's much much easier to stay independent and still make a decent living these days. demographic shifts, as well as a continually growing independent distributive apparatus, have long made it possible for bands to stay independent and be able to quit their dayjobs, save money, and, in some cases, even afford health insurance for their families. it's not that the decemberists are betraying indiedom and i'm not lashing at them for selling out. to quote brent dicrescenzo, "You guys, just sell out! Independent music does not need you." i could care less what label releases the decemberists' boring music. and if you guys have college loans to pay off, if you want to buy houses, if you want to put away money for your kids' college funds, if you always wanted to do blow between lobster courses in five star restaurant bathrooms, then go ahead and grab that brass ring. what do i care about your lives and your motivations? if time/warner university approached me and offered to pay me $500,000 per annum to study at their research institution, i'd consider it. i have to pay for my own health insurance too, you know. but admit it, colin. don't sign with the man and lie through your fucking teeth about the untenability of staying independent. it's an insult to the very community that almost thirty years of punk rockers have been building which allowed you, colin meloy, to quit your dayjob and which put you in the position to sign a lucrative recording contract with capitol records. this — and not selling out — deserves an unironically heartfelt fuck you. 12/10/05 THE GOALKEEPER'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK i was speaking with a gerhard richter and marcel broodthaers scholar at the bar tonight about her texte zur kunst review of this summer's buren show at the guggenheim. she was talking about how, while she didn't think much of it, she couldn't bring herself to just out and out diss buren's mirror installation. "it's such a cliché," she said, "to say that an artist's early work was great but his later stuff is uncritical." i've been thinking about this problem myself (see, for example, what i wrote about amy phillips and my reviews of sonic youth's murray street). i bring this up now especially because the new belle and sebastian (release date: 2/07/06) and cat power (1/24) albums suck. i've had both albums for over two weeks now and, i have to say, they still suck. but i'm trying to listen to them with a sort of tintern abbey approach: they were like that but now they're like this and now my heart is sore but i meditate on the recompense that follows change. belle and sebastian will never again be the belle and sebastian of 1996-'97; they know it, i know it, and the poseur behind the counter at the "indie" record store knows it. even a song like "piazza, new york catcher" from their last album, which pisspoor critics called a "return to form," presumably the form of tigermilk, if you're feeling sinister, and the first three singles, was something new. perhaps the vocal delivery and the melody were somewhat a little bit sinister-y, but, moreso, the song featured barred chords with simple major-to-minor progressions on a solo acoustic guitar and had little to do with the carefully understated and deceptively complex composition of the '96-'97 period. that said, there are later belle and sebastian songs i like; there are two or three on almost every one of their post-'97 albums. in recent years (say, post-fold your hands child-era), these songs have absolutely nothing to do with the old chamber poppy belle and sebastian. between '98 and 2001, the band was going overboard with cheesy instrumentation but the songs themselves — the best ones, anyway — were not altogether different from their early work. i always use "the model" as an example because it could have been a great song if they'd handled it with less polish (and less keyboard) and more subtlety. ("marx and engels" may be the last proper belle and sebastian song.) but, since the storytelling soundtrack — particularly its title track, which is a bit of a watershed — belle and sebastian have been rewriting the three's company theme. but, taken on its own terms, a few of these rewritings aren't all that bad; they're just not "judy and the dream of horses." but even if the new songs are lacking the subtlety, wit, melancholy, and neo-talulah gosh, post-shambolic fragility of the early records, "wrapped up in books" is a damn catchy song. "piazza, new york catcher" is the best lucksmiths song ever. and the avalanches remix of "i'm a cuckoo" not only leaves the band's tendency to overrecord good songs in horrible fashion on the cutting room floor but is easily superior to the filler on graceland. and, on the new album, a handful of tracks are itunes library regular shuffle rotation material, including the immediately reprehensible but somewhat enduringly endearing "sukie was a kid and she liked to hang out in the graveyard." this all brings to mind the endlessly interesting line "don't look back, like dylan in the movies." a propos of this, belle and sebastian recently contributed a live performance of their career-defining album if you're feeling sinister to a series of performances of "classic albums" (others in the series, presented by all tomorrow's parties, include such canonical works as funhouse, entertainment!, you're living all over me, and, arguably, houdini, as well as crap like lemonheads and múm albums); the series is called "don't look back." several years ago, i reviewed brian wilson's pet sounds concert disc. that particular release was a complete waste of plastic — perhaps the live performance was something to behold but, from what i heard on the disc, it probably wasn't. pet sounds exists in an imaginary space and rightfully so: it is based around a studio-overdubbed depth that can't be replicated live — if for no other reason because it is impossible to properly mic brush drumming over stadium speakers. similarly, if you're feeling sinister should never ever be performed in a stadium setting. the album sounds like it was recorded in a coffee shop somewhere in glasgow and, if the band were to properly perform the album live, it would have to be in a similar space, say, a church basement or an artist's loft. and, certainly, you'd have to bring isobel(le) back. a team of backup singers, string players, and percussionists really aren't what sinister is about. in direct contrast with the band's performance of "photo jenny" during their 2002 radio one christmas party peel session, which stripped away all of the extraneous nonsense of the studio version, the "don't look back" sinister, particularly the uprock drums, kills what was great about the album in the first place. and, speaking of things that aren't "judy and the dream of horses," the "don't look back" version of the song is like a dagger through my heart. it begins promisingly enough, quiet and pretty with two warbling recorders in the background. but when the chorus begins, the drums kick in, the horns are way too loud, stuart can't hear his own voice and sings like he's on sesame street, and the backup vocals are straight out of, well, "storytelling." so the moral of this blog entry is not to look back. yeah, belle and sebastian's new album, the life pursuit (formerly known as "the goalkeeper's revenge"), sucks but there are a few keepers on it, so long as you don't think of them as belle and sebastian songs. i think i actually prefer it to another the boy with the arab strap (read: failed sinister remake). i also prefer the life pursuit to the live recording of sinister, which sounds very much like later belle and sebastian playing sinister and makes me emo. 12/08/05 THE MIRROR STAGE AS FORMATIVE OF THE FUNCTION OF THE I AS REVEALED IN GRADUATE SCHOOL EXPERIENCE some time ago, maybe a year and a half, i was looking into a shopwindow and lacan came to mind. based on a gross undergraduate misreading of him, never corrected, i posed this question: > lieb, i have a question about the mirror stage. i > think there's something fundamental about the essay > i'm misunderstanding because i was thinking about it > the other day and it doesn't make sense to me how the > child assumes a sense of subjecthood by identifying > him/herself in his/her reflection and seeing that s/he > is a whole person like everyone else. i would think > that, for this act of comparison to take place, the > child would have to already look at the world in terms > of self and other. please explain. below is the response i got. like me, he hadn't read "the mirror stage" in years; but then he hadn't misunderstood it in the first place. i'm not sure that i can do the argument justice at the moment and i haven't actually read the essay for ages, so give me a little while to brush up. i would suggest, though, that you might ponder the different kinds of "self" at issue in the piece. i think lacan presupposes a kind of primitive, extremely garbled notion of "self," which consists of little more than an awareness of a jumble of sensations, flailing limbs, etc. the gist of "the mirror stage," i think, is that the child does not recognize its "self" in the mirror, but rather misrecognizes it. the image, which correlates in an obvious way with what the child knows of its body, is possessed of a perfect unity in which the child's confusion and apprehension are not discernible. the child aspires to be the image, the ideal self (i think lacan calls it the "ideal-i," or something, but in standard psychoanalytic jargon it's just the "ego"). even if none of this makes any sense, i don't think one should see the mirror stage as leading to a discovery of subjecthood, as what is being discovered is a kind of "being for others," the character that is to be played. now that i think about it, though, i (and perhaps you) have failed to note lacan's distinction between the visual, pre-intellectual ideal-i (specular i?) and the later socially conditioned ideal-i (social i?). something to think about, anyway. go now and ponder. or not. the reason i bring this up is because i've been having these mirror-stagey feelings recently. you see, youngest and most ignorant person in my program that i am (well, second youngest, after a mind-bogglingly twenty-two year old fourth year Ph.D. student), i feel completely unformed intellectually. a propos of this, i haven't been happy with a single thing i've handed in so far but they've gotten uniformly rave reviews. i know that these papers are mine because i recognise my name on the top. but i am alienated by that name (more specifically, i feel like a complete fraud and a charlatan) because it possesses, by decree of the distinguished and widely-read professors who assigned high praise and grades to it, a wholeness that i do not. i call this the academic mirror stage. 12/04/05 AND OUT THERE WHERE YOU'RE TOOLIN' AROUND T is for tool. 12/03/05 I'M LOOKING AT THE SNOWFLAKES AND THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME it's day three of my snowy december galaxie 500 extravanza. my friend alanna sent me a care package of french cigarettes from paris (like i'm in jail or off at war) and they arrived today. i just got in from smoking a gauloise, watching the snow add to the whiteness of the city streets, listening to "when will you come home," and leaving footprints on my porch. it struck me then that galaxie 500 has achieved what few other bands could: their music is based on riffs and guitar solos, both of which i abhor, but they used riffs and solos in a de-masculinised way that i am completely in love with (this is particularly true of their second album on fire, though i prefer their third, this is our music, for other reasons). sometimes, i listen to t-rex and i enjoy it because the macho riffing takes on a pretty, muted feel in comparison to, say, soundgarden's early work. but i'm sure that i would have been totally alienated by t-rex when electric warrior came out, even though there was far more egregious boy-music polluting the airwaves at the time, e.g. led zeppelin. but dean wareham played riffs and played some pretty fucking epic solos in a way that made them unreadable as signifiers for his virility. and, while wareham's guitar is not a penis, it's not a vagina either. it's just a guitar and the materiality of galaxie 500's guitar is one of the things that makes me love the band so. how many guitar-rock bands completely demasculanised their sound without resorting to twee? off the top of my head, i can only think of galaxie 500 and their imitators (yo la tengo, low, et alia). i'm currently writing a paper on post-national identity and maybe what we need is more bands to think like galaxie 500, though not necessarily bands that try to sound like galaxie 500 (the most blatant example of galaxie-aping being things we lost in the fire). what we need, i think, is a post-gendered music. 12/02/05 IT TAKES DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE TO GET ME OUT OF BED RIGHT NOW amy phillips, she of the "indie yuppie" term-coining, tells it kind of like it is, albeit not in paranoid neo-marxist rant mode like i am wont to do. she writes, "this stuff is better suited to mid-life-crisis sufferers who rely on adult-alternative radio to tell them what's hip." three years ago, i wrote of the last folk implosion album that "fans of this record will inevitably have been college radio d.j.'s in the early nineties who are now yuppies with air, ryan adams, beck, and moby occupying the other four spaces in their five disc changer." i've never met amy phillips, but she once bought a hey baby i'm just about starving tonight 7" from me. she also co-blogs with my old editor at some national award-winning indie yuppie/yuppie indie newspaper and knew my old friend jonathan in college (a fact she brought to my attention in her note accompanying the payment for said 7"). when i got my first hate mail for dissing sonic youth's murray street (the first thing i wrote for said in-yup/yup-in paper), jonathan was like, "that's nothing. check this out." he emailed me links to phillips' village voice murray street review (she was just starting out in the biz as well) and the subsequent letters she got. it's funny, we're the same age but the hate mail i got mostly said things to the effect of, "it's not 1988 anymore, they're not going to make another daydream nation, get over it you middle-aged fuck" (i was twenty at the time) while phillips, who committed the cardinal sin of revealing her age which, along with her gendered prose, garnered hate mail (including a letter from byron coley) that attacked her from the opposite direction. admittedly, her murray street review was not the stuff of rock critic legend (one letter to the editor astutely said, "once she reaches maturity, she will be more embarrassed by this review than anything she wrote in her high school fanzine") but more embarrassing are the idiot village voice readers who attacked phillips for being a fourteen year old girl on the basis of her kathleen hanna ca. rock star prose affectations. my hate mail, as i have said, came from the opposite direction, merely invoking the predictable (and anxiously oedipal) "you're at an iMac getting paid to listen to free records, fuck you" position and was less interesting, so maybe phillips did something right. then again, coming back to opposing directions, amy phillips does work at pitchforkmedia, i.e. indie yuppie inc. incidentally, phillips began to freelance at the aforementioned in-yup/yup-in newspaper a calendar year to the week i stopped writing in it. amy phillips and i are the same age but i get the sense that, beneath the backhandedness of what she says about "the kids," she still believes that those "kids" aren't totally brainwashed zombies. i'm inclined to agree — after all, i once was, as we all once were, one of those kids — but, in my old age, i don't acknowledge it very often. those same kids, however, are being forcefed adult-contempo bullshit that we never had to contend with. sure, when phillips and i were teenagers, we had to contend with co-opted and de-revolutionised simulacra of youth culture movements [what's with all the baudrillardian readings recently? yikes. —ed.], but at least they contained a semblance to youth (sub)culture that we could latch onto and transform. today's kids are old beyond their years, listening to james taylor (read: death cab for cutie, matt pond, p.a., et alia) in their teens. a cruel cruel joke has been played on them and these poor kids will be the future audi driving cubicle-dwellers of america. mind you, this isn't cynicism; i'm not actually very cynical. what this is is a profound inability to relate to "the kids" caused by a lifetime of faking worldliness and knowing shit because everybody always thought (and still thinks, though it meant far more to me between the ages of fifteen and twenty) that i'm much younger than i actually am. (ADDENDUM) quote of the article: "Besides, everybody knows that the indie kids don't watch 'The O.C.' anymore. They watch 'Gilmore Girls'. Now there's a show that needs a box set." (ADDENDUM, II) in the spirit of amy phillips' profoundly nostalgic writing, i've reproduced below something i wrote elsewhere on my relationship with the aforementioned death cab for cooties. it's kind of common and obvious, but i hate death cab for cutie. they've somehow managed to get a million dollar contract and become the voice of an entire generation of straight, white, upper middle class teenagers, all with zero charisma and music that isn't compelling, not even in a cheap way. it would be extremely funny (or almost impressive) if i didn't hate them with the burning passion of a thousand suns. so the saying goes, you always hate most the ones who once fooled you. well, dcfc fooled me back in the late 90's with their promising self-released tape. for some reason, i thought their first album (the blue one about airplanes) was just about the most exciting new thing i'd ever heard. i'd say that i was 18 at the time, but that's still no excuse. then the band made their much less adventurous i-think-i'm-dean-wareham second album, the one without the engaging melodies or the occasionally interesting rhythms and tempo shifts, and my interest waned. against my better judgement, i saw them on their tour between the e.p. and their third album and, the minute i heard those third album songs, i vowed never to listen to that band ever again. even though i didn't really like the band anymore, what i heard that night offended me to my inner core. in the space of three years, they went from a derivative but semi-interesting pop band to the most boring scott litty bullshit. then, funny thing, i was reviewing múm's second album and i wrote something like, "this is the kind of easy to swallow, wallpapery bullshit death cab for cutie would make if they were a lap pop band." half a year later, the postal service came out. i hate that gibbard even more for making me sound like a prophet. (ADDENDUM, III) i listened to the foo fighters while writing this blog entry. 12/01/05 LISTEN, THE SNOW IS FALLING OVER TOWN there's nothing like eating cocoa pebbles and listening to galaxie 500 while watching it snow to make you feel all emo. after the awful iciness of last weekend and a few warm days at the beginning of this week, it started snowing again today and it's all pretty and winter wonderlanderful again. it began this morning as i was waiting for the bus. i looked up and saw thirteen birds flying in a "v" formation. i figured they were going somewhere warm. then they turned around and flew the way they came. then they changed direction again and started flying in circles. i think they were lost. last weekend, i was talking to my old roommate daniel discussing what music to listen to to properly enjoy the winter. i was thinking i wanted something midwesty but the replacements' "skyway" (it's got bums when it's cold like any other place) just wasn't doing it for me. he said, "what about that fucking 'omaha' song you used to always play when we lived together?" he was referring to the gloria record's "i was born in omaha." it was off the band's last record, the one where they tried to make an emo version of ok computer, and that wouldn't do either. but their first e.p., featuring "grace, the snow is here" and the incomparable "torch yourself" did nicely. in terms of emo, a genre we all know and hate, you can't do much better than the first gloria record e.p. it's got all the emo touchstones: names of seasons, names of months, and names of cities (cf. the get up kids' awful last winter, anne arbour, was all i had) but their music, especially the open snare drum, lends a grandiosity that almost elevates the formulaic emo lyrics to something palatable (much more so than that other band with emo lyrics who wanted to be galaxie 500; what were they called? oh yeah, death cab for cutie). i was trying to explain the "remember/december/ann arbor/in the winter" phenomenon to daniel and what i arrived at was a post-adolescent fascination with vague robert frostery — particularly "stopping by the woods on a snowy evening" — that employs a gimmicky raymond carver use of place names in order to simulate specificity in very tired and overly general themes. within the past week, i've grown tired of the gloria record and i've gone back to the source: galaxie 500. a band whose mastery makes me almost want to scream at my speakers, "try harder" (admittedly, i stole this line from beavis and butthead), galaxie 500 was together for a very short time but i can't think of a band that accomplished as much as they did in that span, let alone a band whose entire discography is excellent and who got noticeably better with each release. no band was more literate (i mean well-versed in the history of pop music, though dean, naomi, and damon did all go to harvard together) than galaxie 500 and that's how a guitar-based indie rock band from boston in the late 80's completely transcended the trappings of guitar-based indie rock that their contemporaries the pixies were soon to institutionalise. (try harder.) was any three-piece as good qua a three-piece as galaxie 500? the minutemen? no. dna? no. beat happening? no. nirvana? even kurt would have told you that it's not even close — it's telling that when nirvana covered the velvet underground's "here she comes now" for the first VU tribute album, they covered galaxie 500's version of the song. and in yo la tengo's wildest dreams, i can hear the heart beating as one is galaxie's this is our music. for that matter, i can think of a small number of bands who can call galaxie 500 peers (heavenly, sonic youth, television personalities, big star, umm... the velvet underground) but i can't say i would declare any band better than galaxie 500. certainly, there is no band i'd rather listen to when i'm getting all emo about the pretty snow. where the gloria record failed was their radiohead worship. their first e.p. drew numerous radiohead comparisons, mostly because of the singer's voice, but that's because none of those critics had heard galaxie 500. unfortunately, the gloria record decided to ride the wave of the favourable reviews and go more radiohead with each passing release. their second e.p., a lull in traffic, embraced the bends, all overly thick guitars and big, melodramatic choruses — a sound completely incompatible with the band's songwriting — and ended up sounding like the whimpy-sub-o.c.-screamo you'd hear in the dénouement of a one tree hill episode. the aforementioned third and final release, start here, went ok computer and, save my one guilty pleasure "i was born in omaha," i had no time for that album and sold it a week after i got my promo copy. the gloria record are tremendously gifted musicians, but they are nowhere near as smart as galaxie 500, so they had to attempt to replicate the rothkonian depth (suspend your disbelief; i mean that in a good way) of galaxie 500's pared down aesthetic with layers upon layers of guitar. what resulted was a quite enjoyable approximation of a noodlier slowdive or flying saucer attack covering galaxie 500 songs, but for the emo lyrics of course. i'm convinced that "remember/december/ann arbor/in the winter" thing will haunt me until the day i die. after all, i did write my share of high school poetry. but place names, seasons, and months, doesn't that remind you just a little bit of "the wild swans at coole"? The trees are in their autumn beauty The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans. well, i counted all my birds today, even as they were weaving into one another while flying, most likely lost, in great broken rings. this is where the emoness of blogging usually get to be too much for me and i say, facetiously, and now my heart is sore. but, being that one of my arch nemeses, paul martin, and his hegemonic canadian (neo-)liberal party that i hate so much fell from power this week, and given that the hard-blowing gilles duceppe made ridiculous and inane comments that got my moronic countrymen all riled up (read the comments on the bottom) and got me all excited for a strong bloc presence in the next government, i'd rather quote some dean wareham lines: i don't want to go to your party i don't want to talk to your friends i don't want to vote for your president i just want to be your tugboat captain. of course, there's always a chance that things will swing in a different reactionary direction and the conservative party (who waited less than two days to speak out against gay marriage, by the way) will win a majority government, but i'll worry about that in the new year. for now, i'll finish my bowl of cocoa pebbles in soy milk and watch the snow make trees, those dying generations, decompose. r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives