r.mutt's blog

10/29/06 LIPS THAT WOULD KISS FORM PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONE more songs about the sublime, songs about the unnameable, songs about hermeneutics, here. while searching for the lyrics to heavenly's "shallow" on google, (Kissing the stone wall where we once lay, Sends me to thinking of words I'd say. Missing your sweet lips, still so tongue-tied. Love's a word that I could say time and time again. Love's a thing that takes a thousand words to explain. Dragging me over the highest wall Holding me tightly for fear I'd fall. How could I ever explain in words? Hurt's a word that I could say time and time again. Hurt's a thing that takes a thousand words to explain. Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow. Words come so quickly, seem Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow. Still they're true. Singing your praises, while you're with her, Foolishly patient for your return. Silent you left me. And silence stays. Pain's a word that I could say time and time again. Pain's a thing that takes a thousand words to explain. Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow. Words come so quickly, seem Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow. Still they're true. Won't you wait and see What I could say, what I should say, what I can say. Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow. Words come so quickly, seem Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow. Words come so quickly, seem Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow, Shallow. Still they're true.) i came across this quote on the ruins of the destroyed third temple in jerusalem: There the Jews assemble every Friday afternoon to bewail the downfall of the holy city, kissing the stone wall and watering it with their tears. They repeat from their well-worn Hebrew Bibles and prayer-books the Lamentations of Jeremiah and suitable Psalms. which reminds me most of all of something that relates to something i read today (shout out to sparky) on narrative constructions of history figured in the houses of faulker and yeats' writing as a "moral closure" of actual histories that themselves possess no telos. let us remember the ending of the wild swans at coole: Thereon I made my moan, And after kissed a stone, And after that arranged it in a song Seeing that I, ignorant for so long, Had been rewarded thus In Cormac�s ruined house. as well as one of its proleptic beginnings: Now that we�re almost settled in our house I�ll name the friends that cannot sup with us Beside a fire of turf in the ancient tower, And having talked to some late hour Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed: Discoverers of forgotten truth Or mere companions of my youth, All, all are in my thoughts to-night, being dead. and the inability of narration to achieve a stable presence � or even to create an imaginary one. (expect more of the same until i finally finish this fucking paper on nico's "das lied der deutschen," the unrepresentability of the holocaust, and the sublime.) 10/28/06 WHITE BOYS IN HAMMERSMITH PALAIS in which really fucking white people argue with other really fucking white people about making fun of yet other really fucking white people. but, speaking of fish in barrels, do you guys remember this: From Michael Joseph Lieberman Tue Sep 9 20:07:12 2003 Subject: Re: web space On Tue, 9 Sep 2003: > > before, lower even than > > okay, let it go already. > > > the days when the revelation > > that you liked fair enough. i won't bring up your shameful past whenever i feel like scoring a cheap point. that was good times i ever had any. 10/23/06 THE END OF ZOMBIE JESUS from an email correspondence between me and my greatest fan: > > i saw your latest blog entry. > > did you really write those lyrics? > > oh god no. those are decemberists lyrics. i'm relieved. because if you had started writing music like that and colin meloy were responsible, i'd have to personally kill him. then i'd have to come to rochester and sneer at you until you saw the error of your ways. p.s. there's this secret shine song. it's so good i could just die. iTunes claims i've listened to it twenty-one times in the last three days. 10/20/06 FUCK YOU COLIN MELOY, PT. 2 (pt. one here.) dear colin meloy, fuck you. no seriously, fuck you. i just realised that i've written no new songs since this time last year. what was i doing this time last year? that was when i was doing research on the current indie rock for my "why indie rock sucks in '05" paper and forced myself to listen to the decemberists' oeuvre. since then, everything that's come into my head has been stupid. "They called you from a cartoon/Pulled out of your pantaloons" stupid. i can't get that stupid narrative quality of his songs out of my head. so that's it. i'm done. i'm out. i've recorded the last batch of songs i wrote pre-colin meloy. i mean, listen to this bullshit: Eli, the barrowboy, you're the old town Sells coal and marigolds and he cries out all down the day Below the tamarac she is crying Corn cobs and candlewax for the buying, all down the day Would I could afford to buy my love a fine robe Made of gold and silk arabian thread She is dead and gone and lying in a pine grove And I must push my barrow all the day And I must push my barrow all the day Eli, the barrowboy, when they found him Dressed all in corduroy, he had drowned in the river down the way They laid his body down in a churchyard But still when the moon is out, with his pushcart, he calls down the day Would I could afford to buy my love a fine gown Made of gold and silk arabian thread But I am dead and gone and lying in a church ground But still I push my barrow all the day Still I push my barrow all the day only arthur gooch could love me now (my sincerest apologies to arthur gooch). 10/17/06 YOU LOOKED LIKE A PORTRAIT OF SOMEONE WHO DARED i've blog-pimped my dear friend geoffy's photo blog before. most recently, he posted a shot from the g�nther von hagens if-you-think-hans-bellmer-is-gross-well-i'll-show-you-what-germans-are-capable-of weirdo crypto-nazi eugenics art show at science world. [science world? �ed.] it has recently come to my attention that geoffy has this here more fancy and professional-looking website. apparently, he's going by his birth name, geoffrey james tomlin-hood, now. some of you may know him better by the name i gave him when we were stoned and fifteen: tippi tyler sherwood-forrest. 10/16/06 NO RITCHEY, THIS IS THE OFFICIAL EMOEST THING EVER about a week ago, ritchey wrote in her blog of the official emoest thing she'd ever seen. then came something emoer. according to her very same blog, she was speaking on the phone with katy davidson when katy "said Chris Walla was calling her and she had to get off." i don't know if it means anything, but chris walla? to invoke the words of ted leo, "yes, i'm sure we'd all agree that [he's] very nice" and, if they're just friends, then cool. but if chris walla is working with katy, i don't know what i'd do. the new mirah remix album leaked this weekend. on it, there's this one remix of "la familia" that makes mirah sound like the postal service. it doesn't suck because mirah's songs are unfuckwithable, but postal servi�ising mirah? chris walla and katy day? ...and now my heart is emo. 10/13/06 CAREER, CAREER/CAREER, CAREER/CAREER, CAREER i love disagreeing with chris ott. not only is he consistently stupid, but he also takes on very important problems pertaining to the current state of the d.i.y. punk rock tradition. in his column today, he cites my ultimate d.i.y. punk rock hero jenny toomey. his column's abstract: The indie rock of the 1990s has grown old, sold out, made money, and lost its sense of ethics and purpose. Is it still worth fixing? well, that question was problematised by its context next to the day's featured review: the new album by boring, o.c.-soundtracking indie rockers the oxford collapse � their sub pop debut, no less. what is at stake in this question? what is at stake in the "ethics and purpose" that indie rock supposedly once possessed? it must be noted that pitchfork as we know it now would not exist if indie rock had not died in 2000. it must also be noted that pitchfork not only benefitted from this death but, in part, contributed to it and continues to sustain it. put fifteen white guys in a room to argue about which indie rock records are the best and you've got pitchfork. you've also got the decontextualising and depoliticising of the d.i.y. independent punk rock tradition's mode of production that killed indie rock. put fifty white guys on iMacs in conversation with one another on an internet message board, arguing about which indie rock albums are the best, and you've got ILX. same deal. chris ott's article identifies the real questions: whose interest does the "ethics and purpose" of indie rock serve? who even cares? not pitchfork, at least not on any actual, engaged level. ott writes: If nobody picks fights [...] you have to wonder if that's because the stakes and the ideas don't inspire much argument. i give him full marks here for questioning the "independence = good; corporate = bad" party line when it doesn't make much sense to him. the unthinking reproduction of this rhetoric also, in its own way, killed indie rock. it abstracted the real material context of d.i.y. punk rock and turned it into ideology. the actual human relations that much of this indieology glosses over, that jenny toomey fought and continues to fight tooth and nail for, doesn't make sense to ott because he doesn't understand it; he only knows it as the abstracted referent of independent record label slogans. like many of us, he inherited indie rock as a musical genre and as a readymade subculture with its own economic apparatus, as opposed to as a political engagement with the means of production. to what end community? i just ordered some LP's from k records. one of the LP's, the blow's concussive caress, is out of print and, in addition to refunding my money, they sent me a free love as laughter LP. (incidentally, i already had the c.d., so if anyone wants it, let me know and the c.d. is yours.) before i noticed that i was losing money on the hey baby, i'm just about starving tonight 7" and was selling it for $4 by mailorder, people would send me $5 bills and i'd keep a stack of ones in my desk to give them change. probably, the people ordering the records didn't care about the dollar, just as i used to throw a bit of extra money in my envelopes when i ordered records from sound virus records because mikey ott (no relation) needed the few extra bucks more than i did when i was in college and my parents were still financially supporting me. but that gesture of goodwill is important, just like i always, and k records always, includes a personal thank you note with orders. kristin thompson famously mailed leopard gecko records a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. that sandwich was probably inedible by the time it got to leopard gecko, but the relationship lasts forever. why do we do this? because, in the absence of a monolithic economic apparatus, we need each other. and we need to resist the monolithic economic apparatus and we must resist creating one of our own because these apparatuses reify what we do. it turns our specific and historically located art and practice into something abstract and something consumable. we are not the same as dave matthews and certainly don't want our work to be understood through the same assumptions that dave matthews' work is understood. on a personal level, calvin johnson has always been cold to me. but, in my encounters with him, he has always treated me as a colleague, as a "komrade" in what he calls "the passionate teenage revolt against the corporate ogre." even if i wasn't and continue not to be cool enough to hang out with him, he was happy to speak with me for a magn�phone entertainment magazine interview on the state of d.i.y. punk rock in 2001. he was happy to have k records distribute my records. we need this collegiality, these real human relations, this community. the alternative is becoming career indie rockers (the oxford collapse), career record label executives (the people at sub pop), and career music critics (chris ott). ideology, as the standard definition states, is the abstraction of real human relations. one pressing example for me is the conventional relationship between performer and audience. in recordings, bands like the oxford collapse don't record in real time and space but, rather, in an imaginary studio space (imaginary because all traces of real space are concealed in the cleanness of recording and production). live, these performers speak from an imaginary space, even when s/he is right in front of us. this latter imaginary space is ideological: the performer as privileged invididual. this distance, which separates chris ott from the music he writes about and which separates his writing from his readers, finally killed indie rock in 2000, after torturing it for the previous ten to fifteen years. 10/12/06 SEARCHING FOR THE YOUNG SOUL REBELS, or TL/Rx: A/F? speaking of white guys trying to sound jamaican and ted leo not being good enough, there's an excellent quality bootleg of ted leo/pharmacists' performance at the south street seaport festival from this august available for download in various formats here. to TL/Rx fans, this bootleg is noteworthy because it features clean sounding versions of ten new songs from the new album that won't come out until spring of next year. one such song, "crying over you," well... i don't know what to think. jerry dammers? ari up? paul simon? UB40/sting/jay malinowski? argle bargle or foofaraw? click here to vote. 10/11/06 I'M JUST NOT SO SURE I WANNA BE INCLUDED IN YOUR LITTLE WHITE ROCK BOY FUCKING HALL OF SHAME HERE okay, i know i'm way late to this ILX thing, but i'm still surprised i have to defend myself to the stupids there to this extent. is there really no one with any consciousness of race and class posting there anymore? calling julianne shepherd or jessica hopper. when asked why i decided to enroll in a (visual and) cultural studies programme instead of getting my Ph.D. in traditional art history, i often give one of three answers. the first two are lies: "it was the best program i could get into" and "i've got this hunch that it's the wave of the future." the third usually goes, "how pointless would it be to spend the next five years sitting in a room arguing about which painting is prettiest?" boy howdy, that's what they're doing on ILX right now, sitting in front of their iMacs arguing about which indie rock albums are the best. yawn. but lest it seem like i'm painting everyone on ILX with the same thoughtless brush (and, to be fair, not everyone who responded to me in the thread mentioned above lacks any basic understanding of race and class), there was this priceless exchange in the "false accents" thread today: 1: What about Sting's pretend Jamaican accent? Surely the most embarrassing and dire example of all! 2: Also, Colin Hay (Men at Work) Joe Strummer (Guns of Brixton) Gary Clail Ari Up 3: let us not forget k.r.s. one 4: yeah, but his was... nevermind, i can't actually defend it. anyway, speaking of indie rock, i saw yayoi kusama and jud yalkut's kusama's self-obliteration tonight at douglas' "lives of performers" film series. i wasn't particularly feeling the psychedelic rock, so i listened to superchunk's "art class (for yayoi kusama)" when i came home. i've caught a lot of flak in recent years for souding like belle and sebastian, but why did nobody tell me how much my vocal style completely apes later superchunk? i didn't realise it at the time, but it strikes me now that i learned how to sing the way i have on my last three records from singing along to here's to shutting up everyday for the two years after it came out (2001-2003). this was, as you may recall, when i put my music on hiatus, before i resurfaced with pop songs for guitar, drums, and c�geste. 10/09/06 WILL YR IDOLS (...LET YOU DOWN?) one of my punk rock heroes, ted leo, is coming to rochester at the end of this month. for all i'm about to say and for what i said about his last album, teddy is still one of the most resolutely punk rock of my punk rock heroes. as molly neuman (bratmobile/the peechees/co-owner of lookout! records) once said to me, "The amazing thing about Ted (besides his voice, his guitar playing, and songs) is how important community and loyalty and ethics are to the way he makes his decisions. He is a constant inspiration to me." compromises have been made, no doubt, but i'm in teddy's corner. which makes it all the more difficult to know that teddy will be here and i can't go. firstly, i don't have $27 + ny state tax + ticketmaster's ridiculous service charge to see him. secondly � and this largely determines the first reason � he's touring with death cab for cutie. in the mid-to-late 90's, just before titanic became king and guitar rock moved back to the margins of popular music, teddy's legendary old band chisel was accused of selling out for touring with radiohead and playing some shows with, yes, the cranberries. i don't know about history, but popular mass culture goes in cycles and maybe it's time to hindsight the late 90's. if the problem with the current punk rock is professionalisation, maybe the "cultural void" of the late 90's wasn't so bad. i'm not trying to be totalitarian and suggesting that we need to enforce conditions under which it's impossible to be a professional punk rocker because dudes can't help themselves, but we all definitely need to take a big step back and think this through. i've written about this period before in this space, but here's an interesting perspective from those very late 90's. of course, the indie rock has come back in a big way since the sebadoh was released in 1999 and this is particularly relevant because two very unforeseen things have happened in recent years. firstly and most unthinkably, the classic dinosaur (jr) lineup of j mascis, lou barlow, and murph reunited. i, of course, could not attend because i didn't have $60 to spend, even on dinosaur. on the reunion, lou had this to say: Looking at us playing these old songs, that runs a distant second to seeing us when we were really young and fucked up and struggling. Some really shaky, old video � I'd rather see that. Seeing us older and more confident and paunchier... I mean, we play the songs well, but so what? secondly, sebadoh is back. i saw them two years ago when the lineup was lou and jason loewenstein on acoustic guitars backed by a drum machine, but this is the classic lou, jason, gaffney lineup. fucking gaffney. sebadoh fans will remember that the band's last three albums, all recorded in the wake of gaffney's departure, were boring. boring in that white boys playing indie rock sort of way. but gaffney's affinity for the noise rock played so well with jason's love for the hardcore and lou's love for the lo-fi and this made sebadoh one of the most interesting bands of the early 90's. in this column on the epochal sebadoh III, i arrived at the necessity of the original sebadoh project in the present day, just as charlie bertsch argued for its necessity in the early 90's and how, in addition to the band's artistic stagnation, cultural forces had rendered sebadoh unnecessary in the late 90's. because, these days, ted leo just isn't good enough. the ted leo of six or seven years ago is undoubtedly what we need. but we no longer have him. will my other punk rock hero, lou barlow, give us the cure? or, better said, is his eye-rolling, cash-in-hand attitude towards the dinosaur reunion indicative of what the sebadoh reunion will be, or will sebadoh, like it was in the early 90's, be the anti-professional anti-dinosaur we all so desperately need? 10/08/06 WANTED: BLONDIE "GOOD BOYS" (SCISSOR SISTERS REMIX) the first person to email an mp3 to this address will win some sort of a prize. a good one. on a completely unrelated note, wanna have some thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears? 10/07/06 MY VINYL WEIGHS A TONNE late last night, my friend john called me up and asked me to dj a party under the I-390 overpass by the airport with him and my new friend steve. john also dj'd the revolution now installation art opening in the abandoned rochester subway tunnels that i told some of you about last winter. problem was, records are heavy. and i'm not the kind of person who knows my records and can beat-match and plan ahead and only bring what i need to bring. i'm more of the check out the on-the-fly depth of my record collection school of dj'ing, so i had to haul a really big heavy box of vinyl, about 1/5 of what i own, from the highway to this secluded space where nobody would notice that we're making noise and throwing a party. also, it was tough to find and we got lost several times and my arms were pretty fucking tired by the time we got there. but it was great. imagine a party lit by the stars and the lights from the overpass above us, aeroplanes flying overhead, and me playing this set: deerhoof "our angel's ululu" kid creole and the coconuts "endicott" boogie down productions "south bronx" x ray spex "i am a poseur"/"germ free adolescents" talking heads "this must be the place" (live, stop making sense b-side) paul simon "mother and child reunion" yoko ono and john lennon "every man has a woman who loves him" lcd soundsystem "yeah" (crass version) duchess says "black flag" atari teenage riot "deutschland (has got to die!)" the zombies "the way i feel inside" wu-tang clan "shame on a nigga" julie ruin "i wanna know what love is" sheena easton "modern girl" justice "waters of nazareth" (errol alkan's durrr durrr durrrrrr re-edit) the red light sting "dirt eating zombies" the blow "hock it" fifteen "landmine" at the same time, friends of mine in montr�al were throwing what can only have been an amazing party as part of the pop montr�al festival. the duchess says track i played is from a 12" their label slu put out and people literally went nuts for it when i played it tonight. i've heard slu's new channels 3x4 album and, when it drops, oh shit. 10/03/06 DO THE MUSSOLINI when i read the news after i woke up this morning, i was like, "oh shit. i shouldn't have named last night's blog entry 'i hope the pope gets assassinated in turkey.'" then i went to a meeting. by the time i got out, i was all, "praise be upon allah that the plane landed in italy and no one's hurt." now i'm all like, "you've got to be shitting me. this guy's an anti-muslim christian who hijacked a fucking plane to curry the holy providence of the pope? i hope they parade the nazi bastard's body up and down the streets of istanbul, mussolini-style." i wonder how many feds have read my blog in the last couple of days. 10/02/06 I HOPE THE POPE GETS ASSASSINATED IN TURKEY from now until the release of the blow's amazing paper television (10/24), the blow's equally if not more amazing poor aim: love songs e.p. is available for free download from the k records website. i probably don't have to sell this to any of you because you've all already heard it, but, for any remaining doubters of my recommendations out there, poor aim: love songs is seriously one of the five best records i've heard this decade and, in terms of accessibility, this is an incredibly catchy electro-pop record that i would compare (very favourably) to the best work of kylie or the new timba/lake or whatever. brilliant songs (written and sung by khaela maricich, whom many of us first encountered together back in the late nineties on that wonderful early microphones track "oh anna," and who went on to become an excellent performance artist) + amazing production (by jona bechtolt, who did the production on those badger king records that made my life worth living) = why the hell aren't you listening this? in other news, paper television is available right now from the k records website, three weeks before the proper release date. also, a propos of things said here, see this. r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives �