r.mutt's blog

1/29/07 IN WHICH THE AUTHOR HAS STILL, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, FAILED TO ACHIEVE ANY MANNER DE-CATHEXIS WITH PAVEL BURE if you perform a google search with the terms "violence," "discipline," "foucault," and "nhl," you get this. (not the exact search string i used to find it, mind you.) 1/22/07 THEY AESTHETICISE ACTIVISM; WE ACTIVISE AESTHETICS --- On January 22, 2007 Sparky wrote: > the worst > thing I think I've > seen in my life: > > Revolution On Canvas: Poetry From The Indie Music Scene > some years ago i wrote this about le shok's we are electrocution: "With the exception of The Jocks' The Top Three Answers on the Board, no album this decade has exemplied young people's exuberance for punk rock, a love affair greater than any fad, like Le Shok's one and only full length." i've been listening to the thermals all day. there's something of le shok and the jocks' exuberance for punk rock in the thermals' brilliant no culture icons e.p., their first two albums, and their most recent, the critical darling the blood the body the machine. it reminds me of the early superchunk singles and their first two albums. it makes you feel like you're in high school and writing "indypunx4life" in the margins of yr chemistry notebook. but a lot of time has passed since superchunk released their slack motherfucker 7". what made superchunk such an enduring love of mine was how the music seemingly insisted that i remember just why the fast and haphazard style and the crappy production was so captivating in the first place. those early superchunk records came at a time when the poster children, dinosaur, and nirvana were all releasing slick major label debuts. and superchunk was making scrappy buzzsaw punk rock better than any of them ever did, maybe better than anyone had since the first descendents album. the stencil/woodcut/silkscreen/xerox artwork, playing just a little too fast to keep time, the fact that all the songs sounded the same, these weren't just an aesthetic, this was the way superchunk lived their lives back then: making things yourself, not caring about measuring up to "the professionals," making art for reasons other than posterity. if the thermals remind me of the "slack motherfucker" moment, it's important to remember that their work does not and cannot participate in the early 90's life as art/art as life project. there is, instead, a profound nostalgia in the thermals. i was there five years ago when hutch harris and kathy foster formed the thermals. i remember where i was when i first heard their name, at the paradox café when krista said to me, "hutch and kathy [hutch and kathy's eponymous band before the thermals] suck, but what about the thermals?" hutch and kathy (the people) were already professional indie rockers. before hutch and kathy (the band), they were in the urban legends. hutch and kathy were also in the minders and all girl summer fun band, respectively. chris fucking walla mixed the first thermals record and it came out on sub pop. yeah, people were excited. julianne shepherd took a break from yammering about missy elliott and shat herself all over the pop list. my editor was like, "fuck your thesis. you have to write about this new band the thermals." meanwhile, the decemberists had jumped ship from hush records and the shins moved to town. rip city had its last house show several months earlier and everybody found new places to live. it was the fall of 2002 and there was no going back. so the scrappy, haphazard guitar punk of the thermals and their all the songs sound the same aesthetic is just that, an aesthetic. it looks back at a time when things like the xerox revolution were possible, before the xerox aesthetic; when lo-fi was possible, before the lo-fi aesthetic; when recording everything in the red was possible, before the strokes. but that's not to say that the thermals aren't awesome. it's just to say that their nostalgia for a punk rock degree zero [tongue firmly planted in cheek] shouldn't be taken as a return to superchunk or boyracer or whathaveyou. what we can learn from the thermals is, rather, the nature of what is now impossible and how it came to be so. we can be like le shok and pretend to be too cool to be aware that our music speaks to a nostalgia for impossible conditions. most of us can't be like the jocks were, too young to know better (such cute kids, christupher and morgan... pen pals, "martha must die," etc. — how quickly we all learned what was up). the last sentence of my le shok review: "An academic exercise to be sure, but an exercise so lovingly executed that its spirit is irresistibly infectious." and that's true of my enthusiasm for the thermals right now. but there's something else: when mass culture aestheticises activism, popular culture must in turn activise aesthetics. because if punk rock isn't activism, if it's only aesthetic, then what the hell are we all doing here? we could be watching house of carters. our enjoyment of the thermals does nothing if we don't learn anything from their pyrrhic aesthetic victory. ADDENDUM: i just received this email and, how could i resist the request when it comes with such praise? > after reading your blog, i feel i cannot live > another day without listening to > the thermals. bring it on! for a limited time only: link to a thermals playlist 1/21/07 NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF hugo chávez to u.s.: "go to hell, gringos!" 1/20/07 LA MUSÉE HAUSSMANISÉE CONTRE LA MUSÉE IMAGINAIRE according to the guardian, a museum is not an iPod. according to me, you should submit an abstract to this archive of the future/future of the archive conference. i've been doing a lot of linking recently, not because i have nothing to say but because i haven't the time to say it. i'm trying to get my shit together and work through my thoughts on body worlds, which might provoke the catch phrase "a museum is not a classroom." 1/19/07 ONE TREE HILL OUTLASTED THE O.C. as stated last time, germany doesn't want to actually have to think about the past. as you may also know, they don't want the turks around. for their part, the turks don't even acknowledge that they committed a genocide. and, certainly, they don't want to think about it. i wish dave were around to talk about this with. 1/18/07 STALINISM AND POST-WAR GERMANY A blanket ban on Holocaust denial would be a serious mistake having just completed another draft of my post-war german aesthetics essay, i should be telling you all about how banning holocaust denial and the public display of the swastika are mere rituals of dealing with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), in the place of a proper coming to terms and working through of the past (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheits). i should add that even holocaust education, at least the way it has been taught in the german schools since the war, has also been grossly inadequate and is, again, merely a ritual, a gesture of historical contemplation ("sheer reproach") in response to a still urgent demand for historical consciousness ("to comprehend even the incomprehensible"). but i'm so sick of that project right now that i can't stand to look at it or even think about it for at least a few days. if you really care to read more, you might begin with adorno's "what does coming to terms with the past mean?", in bitburg in moral and historical perspective, ed. geoffrey hartman (bloomington: u of indiana press, 1986). in very related news, "Unambiguous racist behaviour and language is not tolerated under any circumstances in the Big Brother house." ambiguous and/or subtextual racism, it seems, is fair game. jo always was my least favourite member of the s club 7. 1/17/07 HOLY SHIT read this. d.j. drama and don cannon were arrested and the gangsta grillz mixtape label was shut down for bootlegging. the d.j. drama/lil wayne gangsta grillz mixtape dedication 2, by the way, featured two of my favourite songs of last year, "sportscenter"* and "georgia... bush." and i just found out today that he put out a gangstsa grillz mixtape with saigon, which is funny because every time i hear his name i think of johnny drama. * dj drama and lil wayne "sportscenter" (handclaps and a tennis ball — the next best thing to snaps) 1/16/07 THE RETROSPECTIVE CONTINUES: BUTTHOLE MASHERS guess who has too much time on his hands? so i was dead tired all afternoon, but i couldn't sleep because i knew that if i fell asleep, i'd wake up at midnight and throw my entire sleep schedule off. and i've got class tomorrow. so i spent my afternoon recreating the butthole surfers "remix" i made on two boomboxes when i was 16. yesterday, i wrote about 2002. but what about 1996? remember when that prodigy "firestarter" song came out and everybody just about died? because, despite whatever dirt any of you might have on me, i remember when you used to listen to crystal method and orbital. i was there when you bought that amp c.d. (okay, maybe not all of you, but...). so in 1997, i got these two boomboxes, see, and i hooked up the headphones jack of one to the line-in of the other. then i put the butthole surfers' "pepper" on fast sync mode on the first boombox and recorded it using the other. with nothing other than the play, stop, and pause buttons, i spliced in some shit from n.w.a. and jane's addiction. i inserted a soundbyte from a simpsons episode at the end and, voila, i had a "remix." several years later, after i bought my four track recorder, i recreated it, only with overlapping tracks and that simpsons soundbyte stupidly and annoyingly overdubbed all over the place. but for the simpsons line, this is as close as you're probably ever going to get (unless you still have one of the thousands of mixtapes i put that original 1997 "remix" on)— "pouring like an avalanche, coming down the mountain" 1/15/07 THE RETROSPECTIVE CONTINUES: THE CRAZY LADY PET HOUSE SESSIONS 2002, it was a simpler time. i was working as a music critic at this middlebrow weekly newspaper the summer of that year and the strokes show was the event of the summer. predictably, i didn't go and didn't care to. the white stripes also came through town that summer. for shits and giggles, i tried to use my music critic connections to get tickets. it didn't happen, but, the night of the show, i did manage to get guestlisted at the get up kids show. different shits, different giggles. never did we laugh so hard at a band, including both times i saw xiu xiu, while their fans got all emo and puppy-eyed. later that summer, hot hot heat, whom i'd seen many times in vancouver, came through portland. i had just seen them half a year earlier, right after they'd changed their sound from passable new new wave to what punk scene friends of mine in vancouver came to derisively call "poodle rock." they totally sucked and had no idea how to play their new songs. they had apparently gotten a lot better at the poodle rock in the time that had passed and, besides, they were co-headlining with the radio 4, who were also super-trendy in 2002. having not yet turned twenty-one, i couldn't go. for the same reasons, i wasn't able to see the jon spencer blues explosion when they toured with liars and the yeah yeah yeahs, the two hippest bands of the above-ground underground at the time. i have other memories of 2002, but it was the silly trendiness that i mostly remember. every promo c.d. that came across my desk that summer disinterred one or several of the rolling stones, gang of four, and the cure. i was talking to one of the trendy new stonesy portland bands whose demo came across my desk that summer and, when i asked them about whether it was important for them to have "a look," the tambourine player (yes, tambourine player) said, "Let’s be honest, yeah." the guitarist adamantly added, "But nobody’s that’s been in this band was wearing sweat pants before and now they’ve got the fucking cool haircut." talking to my friends in another trendy new stonesy band about the first band, the drummer said, "That’s the thing with [them]. They expect Capitol Records to show up and just be like, 'We love your band. Sign this.' Maybe in LA stuff like that happens, but nobody here walks into a bar and be like, 'I want to throw a hundred grand advance…'" that year, it was actually a big deal to go to a certain salon and have stephen malkmus' girlfriend do your hair. it was gross. but, as usual, i wasn't above the stupidity. r.mutt was in the middle of his 2+ year sabbatical and i was planning this concept band/album/art project called the premies. it was supposed to a satire of the new trendy rock, the then-just-coined "metrosexual" fad, and middle-class suburban kids with expensive haircuts, but, looking back, how satirical was it really? (incidentally, the first thing the lieb said to me upon seeing me for the first time in three months at the beginning of that fall: "the ironic haircut..." so much admonition. you had to be there. i'd add, however, that i was cutting my own hair at the time.) as some may remember, the official premies theme song, which neatly illustrates the scope of the (never actualised) project appeared on r.mutt's "comeback" record (which turned out to be his last), pop songs for guitar, drums, and cégeste. these are the four premies demos recorded in the crazy lady pet house that summer. "hey lady i'm a sick baby" "girls keep swinging, or: stay hungry" "fashion is enaction" "fashion is enaction, pt. 2" (a shiny new nickel for the first one to catch the two references to sy's "schizophrenia" in these four songs.) more songs about being a premie: r.mutt "premie-core: a youth culture movement" f.y.p "dinky bossetti" the make-up "born on the floor" 1/11/07 PROMISES PROMISES there is much to say... more new york art scene reports, more tracks from the vaults that won't be on the monoculture retrospective c.d.'s, commentary on my favourite songs of the year list, my love letter to ca. 1992-1996 slumberland records, my first thoughts after seeing günther von hagens' body worlds, and more. but none of that will be said now, for i haven't the time. all i'll say today is that everyone who prefers be your own pet to finally punk is stupid. r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile monopöle!'s myspace profile r.mutt blog archives