r.mutt's blog

1/31/05 PAZZ AND JOP, GOD'S MONEY, AND EDIBLE ANXIETY, ALL REVISITED as you will probably know by the time you read this, the village voice's pazz and jop list came out today. predictably, the seven hundred critics polled, almost to a man, ignored the records i liked from two thousand and five. even more predictably, xgau wrote something of considerable length, of no discernible insight, and of little interest to anyone. but there's always one person who sees things my way and this year, surprise of surprises, it's... michael azerrad. michael "i don't know shit about punk rock but writing about it paid for my house" azerrad, michael "rolling stone" azerrad is on top of god's money. good on him. but lest i forget, he's also michael "who wrote the book that may well have changed my life when i was thirteen"* azerrad. * i should elabourate. looking back, i'm pretty certain that it was that book which ignited my love affair with punk rock, art, reading, and writing. and, as this blog illustrates nicely, there isn't a whole lot i do that doesn't involve punk rock, art, reading, or writing. it seems funny now but what else other than hagiography could so captivate an impressionable thirteen year old boy to dedicate all of his time and attention to something? sex, drugs, and sports, i suppose. but an awful lot has come out of my thirteen year old hero worship. 1/30/05 A NEW MUSIC FOR A NEW MORMON "That's the dilemma with Gang Gang Dance. Actually, I keep playing that record [God's Money]. It flies in the face of everything I know to be true in the world." — alan sparhawk (source) 1/29/05 THIS AIN'T NO PRESS CLUB now that i'm more or less caught up on things i was going to address in this space but couldn't because my computer was broken for two weeks earlier this month, this is the end of my weeklong blogstravaganza. i hope you enjoyed it. here's the last anecdote i had saved up: roughly three weeks ago, i was speaking with an old friend's boyfriend, a ubc journalism student who moonlights at this online news publication. as an exercise for my globalisation theory seminar, i had written a review of the provocatively subtitled book loss of faith: how the air india bombers got away with murder. i thought i had done a reasonably good job of bringing together my former vocation, mainstream press writer, and my new work, cultural critic, and, heeding the advice of my professor to try to publish it in an appropriate forum, i turned to this old friend's boyfriend to find out where it would be possible. it turns out that such a forum does not exist. by the time i'd gotten around to inquiring about possible spaces for publication, the book, a pretty big deal in canada and, especially, vancouver, had already been covered by the mainstream press. i had, however, not written my review with mainstream publication in mind. in a perfect world, perhaps new york times magazine might have been appropriate but there really are no canadian spaces for what i'd done. i was explaining to my friend's boyfriend what my review did and why i thought it important that it be read. his reply: "kim bolan is a journalist and this is probably the first thing longer than 3,000 words she's ever written. nobody cares about her book's narrative frame. unless you have new evidence, there really isn't a place for this kind of criticism." so, because my review is too undertheorised for the academic press and my analysis too "meta" for non-academic press, and because my name isn't louis menand so the new yorker won't publish me, i'm reproducing the review below. one caveat: without sounding too much like a hippie, i tend to write in "grooves." i did hit a groove in this review and, i hope, the middle reflects as such. but my introduction is choppy and my parting shot is awkward and unclear. i would have fixed it up for publication but, come on, this is my blog. by now, dear readers, you are all used to more or less unrevised streams of my writing so here it is as i submitted it for school. again, it was just a little exercise, so i didn't think it bore stylistic revision or, really, any belabouring. the point of the review, i think, is how journalists represent their subjects and how they represent "the facts." perhaps, for a different venue, i might have provided a history and analysis of these problems but, again, no dice. these are, however, big issues and, furthermore, i wholeheartedly stand behind my main point of contention, bolan's representation of the Other as a symptom of the behavioural standards — i.e. acceptable and unacceptable displays of difference — enforced upon non-white english canadians by canadian "multiculturalism." Multiculturalism and its Discontents: Losing Faith with Kim Bolan           Longtime Vancouver Sun journalist Kim Bolan recently wrote of a Surrey, BC Sikh man who was unable to bring his new wife, whom he met in India, to Canada to live with him. Canada’s immigration department, it seems, is unconvinced of the sanctity of Parminder Singh Pannu’s marriage because, to quote the letter he received from a Canadian official, “[Pannu and his wife] do not depict the comfort level that is visible in photographs of a married couple. You and [Pannu] look distant and aloof in the photographs.” Bolan argues that Punjabi social codes do not necessarily correspond with Canadian codes of public affection and that the Canadian government’s designation of Pannu’s marriage as an immigration scam was hastily considered. I bring up this article because Bolan has long reported on Vancouver, BC’s Sikh community (Surrey is in the Greater Vancouver regional district) and her new book, Loss of Faith: How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder, represents the culmination of her career to date. Reading Loss of Faith, one cannot but get the sense that Bolan’s ties to Vancouver’s Sikh community are deep and that she has a personal relationship with the people that she writes about. In the article, as in her book, Bolan humanizes her subjects and takes aim at a Canadian government that marginalizes them and fails to represent their interests.           Bolan’s provocative subtitle, “How the Air-India Bombers Got Away With Murder,” is the topic of her book, but the title is more telling. Loss of Faith traces the four key suspects in the Air India Flight 182 bombing from the political situation that arose from the aftermath of Operation Blue Star — the 1984 military invasion of the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar — and the subsequent political assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the end of the Air India trial earlier this year, which resulted in the acquittal of Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik. Bolan’s theme, the loss of faith, arises twice before her final chapter of the same name, which recounts the final days of the trial and its immediate aftermath. Early in the book, Bolan writes of a letter from then-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offering his condolences to the father of an Air India victim. “Kalsi wanted to believe the Prime Minister,” she writes, “but the years kept passing and no one was held accountable, no one was being brought to justice. Overcome by despair, he began to lose faith.” Later in the book, Bolan tells of her reaction to the assassination of Indo-Canadian Times reporter Tara Singh Hayer, who would have testified in the Air India trial: “Many of Hayer’s friends said the killers knew they could get away with murder in Canada. I didn’t want to believe their cynicism.”           Loss of Faith returns time and again to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)’s inaction and ineptitude during the investigation of the Air India bombing, the shortcomings of the subsequent trial, and how the bombers would have been quickly brought to justice had the victims been white Canadians. For Bolan, the Air India bombing is a major event in Canadian history and not, as she argues the Canadian government have treated it, the unfortunate result of a foreign dispute. Furthermore, she emphasizes at many points that the victims, while by and large not members of Canada’s white majority, are in fact Canadians. Loss of Faith, then, repeatedly turns to the families of the victims, often at the expense of the continuity of Bolan’s narrative, in order to humanize the victims and to reinforce the Canadianness of the Air India tragedy.           As I have stated, Bolan clearly has a personal stake in the Air India trial and, through her career as an investigative journalist (her career began in 1984 and her first assignment was to cover the public celebrations of the first Gandhi assassination in Vancouver), she has become an active participant in the investigation and trial of the suspects. In fact, the trial may not have taken place at all had she not shared her findings with the RCMP investigators. Because of this, Loss of Faith is as much a story of Bolan’s participation in the Air India tragedy as it is about the suspects of the bombing and their legal battle. That the narrative is told from Bolan’s point of view makes the book’s narrative a compelling one but, ultimately, she tells the story from the position of a white Canadian, albeit an extremely well-informed and carefully considered one. Throughout the book, Bolan invokes the categories of ”extremists” and ”moderates.” The ”extremists,” Loss of Faith argues, are a small but violent minority whose acts of terrorism oppress the ”moderate” Sikh majority. She humanizes this majority — both the families of the victims of the bombing and those whose lives were threatened and some who were murdered during the investigation — and recounts to the reader engaging stories of real people whose lives have been deeply affected by the Air India tragedy. For Bolan, these victims are Canadians whom the Canadian government has failed in its handling of the Air India case.           Conversely, Bolan maintains a distance with the suspected bombers and conspirators and, while we encounter the victims as vivid and fully formed characters, the suspects are merely opaque "extremists." Indeed, I am left at the end of her book without a sense of the motivations of the bombers and conspirators — for Bolan, there is no doubt that these people are responsible. Reading Loss of Faith, I find myself asking whether the attack was merely, as Bolan suggests, a response to Indira Gandhi’s military invasion of Operation Blue Star or whether the political climate and mass state-sanctioned genocide of Sikhs in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination also played a large role. Bolan tells that CSIS had evidence that Air India flights were a target of Sikh ”extremists” but paid more attention to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s 1985 visit to America because they felt that the terrorists were more likely to target the younger Gandhi. Why, then, Air India? Even if Rajiv Gandhi would surely have proven untouchable, why not target politicians as the Front de Libération du Quebec and the Red Army Faction had done in recent years? Furthermore, Bolan conflates the terrorists — the Air India suspects — with the wider fundamentalist Sikh community and seems to suggest that the fundamentalist movement in Vancouver is one of extremism and violence, which I have found in my experience to be patently untrue.           Ultimately, Loss of Faith paints a picture of two kinds of Sikh-Canadian citizens: desirable “moderates” and undesirable “extremists.” In doing so, Bolan unknowingly commits the same mistake that she criticizes of the Canadian government. If she is correct that the Air India suspects are in fact responsible — and her evidence is both exhaustive and very convincing — she represents their concerns as a foreign dispute. That is, she does little to represent the concerns of the “extremists” at all, instead focusing on the “moderates,” whom Bolan portrays as having happily assimilated to the values of her idealized Canada. For Bolan, the recognition that her conception of Canada as a beacon of inclusiveness and multiculturalism is a fiction is devastating; it leads to her book’s titular loss of faith. In light of this pathos, one wonders how her continued insistence on this admittedly idealized and fictional, multicultural Canada will register if she ever sees it for what it is, an exclusionary model of moral discipline all its own. __________________________ Kim Bolan, Loss of Faith: How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder McLelland & Stewart Ltd., 2005, 380 pages, $27.95. 1/27/05 WE ARE THE ZEIT VILLAINS last month, i was having a conversation with my old friend asher about his concept "zeitgeist responsibility." my first suspicion was that it was by now an outdated modernist ideal, that the idea of a totalising zeitgeist is probably just another metanarrative. in the last one hundred and fifty years, we've had a lot slogans and terms that come into line with "zeitgeist responsiblity," from the quarante-huitards' il faut être de son temps, the concept of the avant-garde, heinrich wölfflin's zeitwillens, ezra pound's "make it new," gertrude stein's contemporaneity, and the idea of modernism itself. all of these concepts assume that culture takes on a linear trajectory in which it follows progressive politics and/or technology and that the cutting edge must "push forward" and explore the boundaries of the new ideas and machines. for an exemplary exploration of this problem, see lisa m. steinman's made in america: science, technology, and the american modernist poets. but what of "zeitgeist responsiblity" itself? asher hit me right where it hurts: my distrust of digital media. "why," he asked, "does one record music on cassettes rather than on pro-tools or [shudder —ed.] garageband?" he came to this concept via photography, which is his field of vocation: "why do we fetishise old cameras and now outdated photographic practices like developing film?" i replied that there are things that darkroom photography does that digital photography cannot. for example, the image leaves a physical imprint on the film and, though rosalind krauss' "notes on the index" is now held suspect, i still think that the idea of the photograph as an index is an interesting problem we haven't worked through. so has time passed this problem by? is the question of the photograph as a mechanically captured indexical mark now irrelevant? which got me to thinking about whether this was merely a formal problem or whether it is symptomatic of a larger cultural problem. for sure, i don't want to hold onto the authenticity of the darkroom photograph or the expertise of traditional photographers. after all, my own work is on daniel buren and gerhard richter and my foremost project is to investigate the theoretical implications of the end of painting. painting, asher and i agree, is an arbitrary and, furthermore, ridiculous practice. why oil paint? why a rectangular canvas? why canvas at all? so then, why not digital photography? so far as i can see, there is no reason not to embrace digital photography. furthermore, there are few important reasons not to pursue digital recording. there are issues of fidelity but we can probably stand to reconceptualise our relationship to recorded sound. why, after all, must a recording reflect live performance, especially when most often this reflection of live performance is represented through rhetorical and conventional means? but the obvious question, in my mind, is why must it not? the question is not pourquoi doit on être de son temps but, rather, whether son temps is in fact confined to either the newest or most popular technology? can there truly be one or even many "spirits" of an age or are we lapsing back into superstition? what i arrive at wondering is whether "zeitgeist responsibility" is not merely a dog licking itself because it can. and is then our insistence on concepts from zeitwillens to "zeitgeist responsiblity" merely an enforced majoritarianism? i have often been accused of being "elitist" because i've never seen many of the most popular films of my time, say, the matrix or schindler's list or the titanic. are they "important"? perhaps. does the fact that "everyone" has seen them prove their "importance"? probably not. is la pianiste better than these films? i would say that it is merely different but one has only so many free hours in which to watch films, read books, listen to music, and think about art. it is not possible, then, to engage, especially not engage critically, with the culture of the masses while at the same time engaging with the cultural products of one's own interest. i work on post-war conceptual art and critical theory. i'm not all of a sudden going to change my object of study to the lord of the rings trilogy or don delillo or kanye west or rirkrit tirivanija just because the false democracy of majoritarianism demands it. and, furthermore, while these cultural products affect more people than, say, a lothar baumgarten installation, much of the conceptual art i study, particularly what has now become known as "institutional critique," is precisely an intervention into issues of cultural legitimation and mass deception that allow lotr, kanye, delillo, and tirivanija to affect so many among us. and, besides, how "low" can you go? how populist are we willing to be? who are the true masses and what is the true mass culture? kanye or nickelback or randy travis? ballard or delillo or eggers or james frey or tom clancy? i am not above popular culture — i'm in a cultural studies program; i often work on popular culture — but undertheorised ideas like cultural magnitude and "importance" and one's responsiblity to them seem, well, crypto-fascist. one must not, i think, escape from our shared mass cultural products and flee to an artifice of eternity but instead investigate the institutional apparatuses that play no small part in producing their popularity. here it seems to me that the study of the institutional logic that governs these cultural products and not an exegesis of them — though there is no shortage of worthy scholars who do great things with precisely this kind of exegesis — is what is needed. but, again, i don't feel any more obligation to the "zeitgeist" of the masses than i do to the elite culture that a t. s. eliot or a clement greenberg advocated. which brings us back to technology and responsiblity. yes, a cd-r is easier to produce and will inevitably find a larger audience than a cassette of the same recording. yes, a cd-r can be just as d.i.y. as a cassette and is probably more d.i.y. than a 7" single, even one with a lovingly xeroxed sleeve. but as a cultural product, it has a different meaning. these incongruities interest me and, i think, can be explored using either the cassette, the 7" single, or the cd-r and, probably, can best be worked through in a conceptual project incorporating and investigating the cultural limits of all three. what i want to advocate here is not a return to old technology or a dismissal of the new. rather, what we need is to examine precisely this concept of "zeitgeist responsiblity" through an investigation of new and old technology. we must ask what the new means to us, how it has changed since the days of poggioli and bürger in 1968, the days of pound's doctrine of the image and of wöfflin's principles of art history in the teens, and the days of the quarante-huitards. in other words, why cd-r's and why cassettes? why digital photography and why darkrooms? 1/26/05 THIS JUST IN: NEW EXCEPTER DOESN'T SUCK recently, i panned the new belle and sebastian and cat power albums. the soon to be released built to spill and coldcut albums suck too, by the way. still, it's looking good that 2006 will be better than the last two years records-wise. a few of the records of the new year i've yet to fully ingest but that seem promising so far: the new barmitzvah brothers, the new destroyer, an excepter e.p. (sunbomber, out on 5RC) that doesn't suck, the advantage's whimsically named elf-titled, and the y.a.c.h.t. and lucky dragons split 12" we'll float around, hang out on clouds, in which every sound is sampled from a nirvana song. i also recently heard the rough mixes for the upcoming channels 3 + 4 e.p., to be released on slu records (a friend of a friend's fashion/hipster start-up) and to be produced by johnny jewel, whose "lovin' machine" on the glass candy & the shattered theatre 12" iko last year proved that he isn't just a talentless, impossibly tall and skinny charalatan. (weirdly, slu calls jewel "grandwizzard" on its website.) i was expressly ordered not to discuss the new channels on my blog until i've heard the final product, so all i'm going to say is that what i've heard is terribly exciting. i've especially enjoyed the forthcoming young people album and, while their last album wasn't that great and though what defined their amazing first album, jeff rosenberg's tossed off backing guitars, is now gone, the new one (out, weirdly, on a revamped too pure, the house that mouse on mars and stereolab built) is excellent. i can only compare the new percussive element that replaces rosenberg's guitars to the "beats" on dr. meow meow's last album. it's at once young people's most accessible album and their most courageous. they truly experiment this time, pushing themselves to develop the way they write music rather than relying, as they had in the past, on the no wave musical language they inherited readymade. the other soon to be released album that's got me excited is television personalities' my dark places. i'm listening to it for the very first time right now. the last memorable, off his fucking nut dan treacy lyric: "don't be fooled by the rocks/i'm still danny from the block." the reference is, of course, to (1) treacy's drug problem (rocks), (2) treacy's incarceration because of said drug problem (block), and (3) j-lo. daniel johnston's records were records by an insane man but only at times did they document his insanity. never, however, did johnston's work display the kind of insanity i've been hearing on my dark places. that's not necessarily a selling point for this album, it's just that the first new television personalities album in eight years (also due to the drug problem, though, later, the incarceration was also a factor) is damn interesting, in part because dan's lost his marbles. ADDENDUM (1/27): by coincidence or perhaps due to the fact that she and i have the exact same taste in music (ignoring for the moment her obsession with mainstream hip-hop and my one true love, the non-pnw pop tradition), julianne shepherd dropped a paragraph on excepter's sunbomber e.p. at the end of her pitchfork column today. jescovedoshep and i do, however, come to very different conclusions on the music we share. 1/25/05 LOUISE LAWLER IS SHOOTING AT MY HOUSE, MY HOUSE 1/24/06 WAITING FOR A FACTORY GIRL weezer are apparently going to portray the velvet underground in the upcoming edie sedgwick biopic factory girl. weezer guitarist brian bell on the band's cover of vu's inimitable "heroin": "[Mo] Tucker did have an amazing feel, but she was no Pat [Wilson of Weezer], and Pat pulled out an ‘Only In Dreams' type crescendo that I think makes that aspect of the song better." predictably, lou reed is thoroughly unimpressed by all of this bullshit: "I read that script. It's one of the most disgusting, foul things I've seen — by any illiterate retard — in a long time. There's no limit to how low some people will go to write something to make money." a decade ago, yo la tengo played the velvet underground in i shot andy warhol. reed on that film: "I wouldn't be part of I Shot Andy Warhol. They tried to turn Valerie Solanas into a heroine. They're all a bunch of whores." reed's enduring loyalty to warhol (and my own longstanding loyalty to the s.c.u.m. manifesto) notwithstanding and galaxie 500 having long since broken up by that point, yo la tengo seemed the natural choice. weezer? well that's like guy pearce playing andy warhol. in other quotable music news, it was recently brought to my attention that the ted leo/pharmacists song "the anointed one" is about republican new jersey congressman mike ferguson, a former college buddy of ted's at notre dame. ferguson declined to even comment on commenting but his chief of staff chris jones, when asked, responded, "I'm not going to comment on lyrics that don't even rhyme." burn. (quotes respectively from weezer.com, new york daily news, and the new jersey star ledger.) 1/23/06 BEGRUDGINGLY GHETTOBLASTED SOUL UNDER PSYCHOTRONIC RIOT WAVE i'm back in rochester, ny and i've given myself a month to find a favourite band in town. to date, i've only seen one passable band, carbonic, whom i saw open for dear nora in november. now, carbonic is not a good band by any stretch of the imagination, it's just that all of the other local bands i've seen in town have been unfortunate amalgams of trendy teenaged screamo and the papa roachy neo-"grunge" bullshit those kids were listening to before the w.b. introduced them to alexisonfire. all of this should change by midnight friday, as i'm going out to a/v, which is supposed to be an experimental art space run by music, film, and art students from the city's prestigious music and photography schools and world class film institution. or so they say. i recently downloaded carbonic's early, self-released, four track recorded album, begrudgingly ghettoblasted soul under psychotronic riot wave. six years later, carbonic sound like a less haphazard microphones/mount eerie (or a less terrible little wings/kyle field) who listens to an awful lot of fahey with a voice like dude from my morning jacket. hardly a ringing endorsement, but you should hear this guy's voice. it floats on top of those after the goldrush-necromancing songs like sigur ros. back in the year two-thousand, however, carbonic was just a boy and his four track. i'll quote carbonic's webpage here: "at the time influences were things like palace, smog, sonic youth, blonde redhead, cat power, guided by voices, daniel johnston, neil young, as well as many other things." the album, while not great in any musical sense, brought a smile to my face for the same reason that my westing (by musket and sextant) cassette continues to bring me joy fifteen years after its cultural moment passed. when the first pavement singles appeared, they were received as happy accidents and, on some level, it was true. this is not to say that pavement or carbonic's early work is the work of idiot savants in the way that we receive the shaggs or daniel johnston (which is, of course, also not to say that the shaggs or johnston are idiot savants), but that what we had with pavement in the late 80's and early 90's was a band that discovered and quickly internalised the independent punk rock of sonic youth, dinosaur, and the replacements and then took their own stab at it. carbonic, in the same way, had just discovered the lo-fi folk/punk/pop of daniel johnston, cat power, guided by voices, and, though it wasn't mentioned, probably westing and then put their own version to (cassette) tape. often, we find in this kind of music (we can no longer, of course, say "indie rock") a search for authenticity, which is, of course, a wild goose chase. this kind of music, especially the extremely lo-fi stuff, is always a copy. in some cases, as in the desperate bicycles, lo-fi is a nostalgic return-to-innocence kind of copy, exhuming nuggets. in other cases, lo-fi, as in crass, is a copy that rhetorically declares itself an authentic form of a fallen original ("the name is crass, not clash"). as with everything else, all lo-fi music is always a copy of a copy of a copy. but what has always vexed me are the sonic youth albums dirty and experimental, jet set, trash and no star. in the way i've set it up, a copy of a copy is not necessarily a simulacrum. the aforementioned sonic youth albums, however, are. when thurston sang "it takes a teen age riot to get me out of bed right now," he was talking about j mascis. in a moment of counter-oedipal anxiety, sonic youth decided to imitate their followers. if you've ever noticed that dirty has no cohesion, even for a sonic youth album, it's because thirds of the album are respectively devoted to apeing westing, superchunk's early singles, and nevermind — dig the butch vig production. the "happy accident" of pavement's early work, the mishmash of early sonic youth, hardcore, and a.m. radio became in sonic youth's hands tossed off randomness. westing never gets sonic youth or hardcore or pop songs right, but this failure — which, of course, is fully intentional — basically paved the lemonheads' path to the david letterman show. and sonic youth's cover of "nic fit" is but a simulacrum of "price, yeah!" in the way that everything the lemonheads ever did is a simulacrum of the underground lo-fi slacker rock — cf. the lemonheads' cover of "mrs. robinson" and dinosaur's cover of "just like heaven." by experimental, jet set, star and no trash, the members of sonic youth were among a very small number of people in this world who had heard guided by voices' pre-bee thousand tapes. all you have to do is listen to the first track, "winner's blues" to wince at sy's latest grasp at relevance. but the "happy accident" of early pavement, guided by voices, and carbonic, while intentional, contains something of the accident. it is often said that a band's earliest work is often its most authentic because it displays a band playing to no particular audience. this, of course, relies on the ridiculous superstition that there is such a thing as "unmediated expression." the truth is that these kinds of recordings display a band playing to itself. in the examples of pavement and carbonic, we hear bands head over shit over heels excited with lifechanging new music and, wanting to hear more, making it for themselves. this is the quality that sonic youth could not reproduce, not because they lacked the naïveté and not because they, who are after all the creators of it, had already mastered the musical language, but because sonic youth was simply no good at making lo-fi folk/punk/pop music. j mascis and a young stephen malkmus played the slacker to perfection. "teen age riot" shows us that sonic youth, while amused and on a detached level inspired, is only able to say the words: "it's time to go round/a one man showdown/teach us how to fail." so, while it's not bad but not particuarly good either, carbonic's begrudgingly ghettoblasted soul under psychotronic riot wave touches a nerve with me because it documents the tragic teenaged discovery, internalisation, and reproduction of late 80's and 90's lo-fi folk/pop/punk in the year two-thousand, just as the genre was breathing its very last breath (the microphones' it was hot, we stayed in the water was the end) and only a year after i discovered built to spill's the normal years, bikini kill, helium, and sebadoh III. for the same reasons i love hearing the jocks try to write f.y.p albums that don't exist and, really, for the reasons that i myself make music, i am currently being enlivened listening to begrudgingly ghettoblasted soul under psychotronic riot wave. 1/20/06 HEY STRAIGHT WORLD, HERE'S THE NEW BULLSHIT some time ago, i credited amy phillips with coining the term "indie yuppie." it turns out she was making reference to a stereogum article that quoted something dude from vice records said. now you can read all about it in newsweek. really though, the naïve comments at the bottom of the stereogum article are probably most symptomatic of indie yuppie false consciousness. one moment of semi-consciousness: "you might be an indie yuppie...if you read vice magazine." true. but if you're so cool, then what were you doing reading stereogum? jason anderson may be a broke man's jonathan richman but he sure proved prophetic when he sang "it's all just indie rock." 1/06/06 FUCKING iPODS ARE HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC "Listening to music while doing nothing else is like halfway to meditating." —mark richard-san 1/01/06 MY PAZZ AND JOP LIST BALLOT Dear r.mutt: There was a problem with your Pazz & Jop singles ballot. Evidently, you fail to comprehend the concept of a Top Ten Singles list. Your list was submitted as follows: 1. Architecture in Helsinki "Wishbone" In Case We Die 2. Glass Candy "Lovin' Machine" Iko 12" 3. Calvin Johnson "When Hearts Turn Blue" Before the Dream Faded 4. Johannes Silentio "Symphony 1, First Movement, Adagio Molto E Cantabile" (Web Only) 5. Dear Nora "Sarah, You're Not For Me" Magic Marker Presents: A House Full of Friends Compilation 6. Robyn "Robot Boy" (Self-Titled) 7. The Futureheads "Hounds of Love" (Phones' Wolves at the Door Remix) Hounds of Love CD5 8. LCD Soundsystem "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" (Self-Titled) 9. The Blow "Pile of Gold" PDX Pop Now! 2005 Compilation 10. The Pipettes "I Like a Boy in Uniform (School Uniform)" School Uniform 7" 11. The Greenhornes (ft. Holly Golightly) "There is an End" Broken Flowers Soundtrack 12. The New Pornographers "Sing Me Spanish Techno" Twin Cinema 13. Emiliana Torrini "Sunny Road" (Atom's Future Folk Mix) Sunny Road CD5 14. Ted Leo "Since U Been Gone/Maps" UGO Web Session 15. The Lucksmiths "Fiction" Warmer Corners 16. Art Brut "Emily Kane" Bang Bang Rock & Roll 17. Kelly Jean Caldwell "Long Winter" Banner of a Hundred Hearts 18. Ladytron "Destroy Everything You Touch" The Witching Hour 19. Ben Folds "Late" Songs for Silverman as with last year, i have compiled a list of songs that marked the last calendar year for me. some blew minds ("when hearts turn blue"), some were inescapable and may well go down in history as what 2005 was all about ("daft punk is playing at my house" — not necessarily an endorsement, by the way), some were early teasers of the best of 2006 ("pile of gold"), some i waited years for ("sarah, you're not for me"), some happened to resonate with my life ("long winter"), some were enjoyable symptoms of some bad zeitgeistical shit ("emily kane"), some were mindlessly singalongable pop songs ("sing me spanish techno," "fiction"), some speak to my soft spot for emotionally manipulative crap ("late"), and some were "wishbone." magnétophone entertainment magazine presents: "i like lists and lists like me" r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives