TOM CROW SHOULD TOTALLY GET OFF MY PLOT/AGAINST ART HISTORY
recently, i said some stuff about t.j. clark that didn't really make a lot of sense. but i was making fun of him; that much was clear. how much of this was due to oedipal anxiety? let's get it all out in the open: an old professor of mine with whom i had a somewhat tensed relationship was a student of thomas crow, whom i've never met but with whose work i have a very tensed relationship. crow was a student of t.j. clark. all three of these figures are, for me, inimical to the critical genealogy that i identify with (and whose train i ride).
there's this essay called "unwritten histories of conceptual art: against visual culture" that just makes me want to stick it to tom crow in print. but i can't do that — or, rather, i shouldn't because it would be the immature thing to do. through a series of unforeseen and serendipitous circumstances (who knew this would happen when i was first working through and against the essay in a seminar with crow's aforementioned former student?), i actually have the unique opportunity to publish my thoughts on "unwritten histories of conceptual art," republished (without the combative subtitle) in a recent volume called art after conceptual art. the impulse to wage a pointless one-sided battle with this almost twelve year old essay is almost too much, so i'm going to do it here and not drag tom crow's name through the mud in art journal. (full disclosure: said professor of mine who was crow's student claimed to have helped him write this essay, bemoaning that his contribution was relegated to a single acknowledgement in a footnote citation to a marginal comment on jeff wall)
i suppose my first problem with crow's essay is that silly art history v. visual culture turf battle. tom crow should totally get off my plot; here's why: crow argued that the field of visual culture, in focusing on the visual as the object of its study, falls back into the old fashioned modernist privileging of visuality as the raison d'être of art. this, he said, neglects the non-visual nature that is so integral to conceptual art. this was a silly thing to argue for three reasons.
1. you can't compare visual culture's study of the visual to greenbergian modernism's privileging of the visual because their acts of privilege work on completely different levels; what he (dubiously) accuses visual culture of doing is an arbitrary taxonomic and disciplinary limit, while the greenbergian modernist privileging of the visual is a reification thereof, a culmination of an intellectual tradition whose ideological project it was to differentiate high art from what greenberg called arbitrary objects, avant-garde from kitsch, the cultured elites from the rabble.
2. crow was wrong in his characterisation of visual culture, at least as it is practiced here in the visual and cultural studies program at rochester (who knows what they do at irvine). to quote douglas, "I see nothing to be gained in narrowing cultural studies by specifying its objects as visual." and, indeed, we don't; for us, visual culture is never about the visual qua visual. for example, i work almost exclusively on conceptual art and (needlessly abstract, as my professors keep telling me) theory and, furthermore, as any of my colleagues and professors will tell you, i care not for images. (incidentally, douglas proceeds to take on the very crow passage i'm talking about here.)
3. most importantly, crow is himself reifying the non-visual, immaterial, or "textual" nature of conceptual art, in a similar manner to alexander alberro's problematic book conceptual art and the politics of publicity (yes, i'm getting it all out now so my it won't come out in print later). for crow, the critical value of conceptual art is its non-visual nature, its resistance to what he identifies as high art's regime of visuality. of course, as crow recognises, conceptual art was soon subsumed into both the market of high art and the institution of art history, just as the readymade and dada were. what crow doesn't seem to see is that the crucial term here isn't visual v. non-visual but, rather, object v. non-object. and by object, i do not mean the material v. the immaterial but, instead, that which translates into a consumable art-commodity and that which resists it. which is not to argue that a proper conceptual art would be resistant to commodification. quite the contrary, an institutional critique, whose relationship to visuality is never the main point, must at once submit to capitalist and/or art historical reification and, in doing so, critically subvert or draw attention to it. non-visuality and/or immateriality itself is never enough (to argue against alberro). i will address what, for crow, is the redemptive element of conceptual art after its subsumption into the art market (namely, though he would never explicitly say it, the reification of art history) a little later in this entry.
my second problem with "unwritten histories of conceptual art" is with a moralising point on the ethics of writing about christopher d'arcangelo:
D'Arcangelo's obscurity as an individual creator was willed by him from the start. In one important group exhibition at Artists Space in 1978 — which helped to launch his co-participants toward wide acclaim — his contribution consisted in the removal of his name from the installation, catalogue, and publicity. No intervention could have caused greater difficulties for the critic and the historian, in that any precise citation of D'Arcangelo's piece would destroy the grounds of its existence; indeed, it is probably impossible to cite the contributions of the other three artists in light of his participation without doing the same (silence will be maintained here).
ironically, the d'arcangelo piece in question, his conribution to the 1978 ———, louise lawler, adrian piper, cindy sherman group show at artists space (the "———" denotes d'arcangelo's anonymous contribution), is "outed" in the essay immediately preceding crow's in art after conceptual art, benjamin buchloh's "allegorical procedures: appropriation and montage in contemporary art." buchloh's essay, only one example of public disclosure of d'arcangelo's participation in the artists space show, is well known the audience of crow's essay and is as old as i am. so what is crow really trying to do in maintaining d'arcangelo's silence?
for one, crow is again missing the point. d'arcangelo's co-participant and close friend at the time louise lawler said,
Chris's work for the show consisted of withdrawing his name from announcement and any other advertising. You wouldn't know about his work, as his work, unless you came to Artists Space. We were each given four pages in the catalogue; he wrote a text that was typeset to fit but left his catalogue pages blank and glued the text to the walls in various rooms at Artists Space.
crow, presumably, was not there. but, more to the point, to preserve d'arcangelo's anonymous contribution to the group show over fifteen years later is to revert back to the art historian's responsibility to the inviolable will of the artist, to subordinate the aims of the conceptual work to the (supposed) aims of the artist. the aim implied by crow's essay is, of course, a projection. he is, to borrow a phrase from douglas, getting the d'arcangelo he wants, namely an art historical d'arcangelo. that is, the critical function of d'arcangelo's contribution to the artists space group show was to draw attention to the politics of publicity that animates a work of art with its status as an art object. to preserve d'arcangelo's anonymity and to neglect to tell us about the catalogue text glued to the walls is to assume that d'arcangelo's project was merely to obscure himself as an individual creator — a pathological mute, inglorious milton — and not to obscure himself as an individual creator to a critical end. furthermore, crow assumes that revealing d'arcangelo's project wasn't the point all along. what use is d'arcangelo's contribution if we do not know that it was the artists space show and, performing research to find what crow will not tell us, learn about those texts glued to the walls, which perform an analysis of the function of time and posterity on conceptual installation art? the very interrogation of these texts glued to the walls are elided by the d'arcangelo tom crow wants.
for crow, the installation is eternal, timeless and unchanging; it is an art historical object. as lawler understands, the point of d'arcangelo's project is precisely that it changes with time and, so, disclosure is paramount. glued to the walls, the catalogue text becomes a wall text, but one that points to nothing, for there is no object. at the same time, installed, the texts are the ephemeral negative to the timelessness of the catalogue from which they are omitted. while, within the logic of the work, d'arcangelo is never "outed" as the contributor of the installation, the interrogations of the installation itself are revealed: the catalogue points to the object (which is a wall text); the wall text points to the object (which is absent); the object (absent) points to the artist (who is also absent). through a series of deferrals, the viewer understands the conceptual work through a series of deictic markers that never point to an object but nonetheless produce an object, the conceptual work; d'arcangelo's absence becomes reified as an art object (crow's essay provides a nice example of this reification) by virtue of these markers.
once the installation is gone, all we have is the catalogue, which points to nothing, which is how we get to crow's misleading characterisation of d'arcangelo's contribution to the artists space show as merely the erasure of any markers of his participation from all aspects of publicity (when these markers were precisely the point). to turn crow's ethical question about whether "outing" d'arcangelo would destroy the grounds of the piece on its head, it is not only ethically tenable to disclose d'arcangelo's participation, it is necessary to do so in order to preserve the grounds of the piece.
(very tangential note, but a propos of a few things: before today, i'd never noticed that the picture on the cover of susan howe's life-changingly brilliant book the nonconformist's memorial is a sailboat sketch from, to quote the jacket, "the final page of the note books of percy bysshe shelley." i can't say for sure that these are the same sailboats, but you may remember that the last poem shelley wrote was the unfinished triumph of life and that he reportedly drew sailboats in the margins of the last composed part of that poem in his notebook. you may also remember that shelley died sailing, before he was able to complete the triumph of life. according to at least one reputable shelley scholar, he had no business sailing, knowing full well that there was a big storm coming and, futhermore, that he was an amateur sailor at best. bas jan ader also died sailing and, like shelley, he had none of the expertise to sail under the conditions that he did. ader's solo voyage across the atlantic, part of his performance art piece in search of the miraculous, was, by all accounts, nothing short of ridiculous. ader: in search of the miraculous. shelley: "The boat fled on/With unrelaxing speed. 'Vision and love!'/The poet cried aloud, 'I have beheld/the path of thy departure. Sleep and death/Shall not divide us long!' [...] Oh storm of Death,/Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night,/And thou, colossal skeleton, that, still/Guiding its irresistible career/In thy devastating omnipotence,/Art king of this frail world," from alastor; or, the spirit of solitude.)
if anybody can think of a melody and maybe some words, let me know. as some of you may be aware, i haven't been able to write any songs since a month after moving to rochester. it was nothing the city did to me, just this study on the mainstreaming of "indie rock" i began a month after i moved here called "neo-avant-garde and the music industry." for it, i had to download and listen to the entire decemberists discography, which killed my ability to write songs without spewing out the kind of whimsically narrative bullshit colin meloy does, rhyming "cartoon" with "pantaloon," singing songs about "ely the barrowboy," and all of that nonsense. which is all to say that almost all of the songs on the joshua tree: demos, studies, and jokes c.d. were written in vancouver. if you're in rochester and you think one might be about you, you're wrong. how vain; i hadn't even met you yet. if you were in vancouver between the summers of 2004 and 2005, one of those songs could very well be about you. guess which one.
[after a discussion of howe's critique of sandra gilbert and susan gubar's reading of dickinson in the madwoman in the attic]... To pick one reading over the other or to find a conciliatory position between them is beside the point of this study. My own readings of "Publication" and "I'm Nobody" matter little in their persuasiveness. Rather, I have attempted to illustrate the questions that befall a Dickinson reader by performing a reading of two of her poems. It is, then, the poetics of Howe's reading itself that is at stake here.
a sample passage from the comments i got back when i turned it in as a seminar paper:
If I'm dazzled, I'm not necessarily persuaded, nor am I willing to relinquish persuasiveness as beside the point of the performance.
five years and a bachelor's degree later, one and half years into a top doctoral program, and i'm still pulling this shit. but, perhaps, so is charles bernstein:
DON’T BE SO SURE
(DON’T BE SAUSSURE)
My cup is my cap
& my cap is my cup
When the coffee is hot
It ruins my hat
We clap and we slap
Have sup with our pap
But won’t someone please
Get me a drink
which is not to say that it makes my scholarship qua stupid stunts okay, merely to legitimate it via avant-garde genealogy (gertrude stein — william carlos williams — louis zukofsky — charles olson — robert creeley — bernstein/howe — me?)
2/23/07
SECRETLY, I THE 1970'S BOURGEOIS FOLK-ROCK
i've been telling some of you recently that i'm secretly stupid. that wasn't so surprising, i'm sure. remember when we were sixteen and i wouldn't leave the house on friday night until i'd finished watching boy meets world? but here's a bombshell: i secretly love the 1970's bourgeois folk-rock. okay, okay, not all of it. the james taylor, the jim croce, even most simon and garfunkel and all but one carly simon song ("legend in your own time"); no dice on any of that. but this was the shit i was raised on and some of it stuck.
last fall, i was at this hipster rummage sale and i found a copy of neil young's on the beach. this was an amazing find, a holy grail for rock and roll record collectors. on the beach is a great album, has been out of print on vinyl for as long as i've been alive, was never released on cassette, and wasn't pressed on compact disc until four years ago. but i'm not one of those dudes. i like on the beach and i was happy to buy a copy in good playable condition for $5, but i was disappointed that it wasn't harvest or after the gold rush. (this is where you boo.) similarly, i happen to think that carol king's tapestry is one of the best records of the seventies. maybe not one of the ten best, but if i had to pick a hundred records from that decade to save before the fascists incinerate the archives, it would definitely be one of them. certainly, i'd save tapestry before i save any nick drake records.
not that i don't also love the sad bastard art-folk records from the same decade. most of you know i won't shut the fuck up about big star's 3rd/sister lovers or lou reed's berlin. but, earlier this week, i was listening to berlin, quite possibly the most devastatingly poignant singer-songwriter album ever, and, unfathomably, unfathomably, thought to myself, "you know, i'd rather hear 'journey through the past.'" and so i downloaded this neil young live record that's coming out next month (live in toronto, massey hall, january 19, 1971). it's so amazing in that my mom will like it way, like how tapestry took a brill building song carol king wrote for the shirelles ten years earlier, "will you still love me tomorrow?", a song that everybody knows and that a lot of people consider one of the definitive musical performances of all time, and domesticated it in a way that totally didn't suck, in a way that reminds me of listening to LP's in our living room in east vancouver with my mom. warner brothers is streaming a video from that twinkly piano and acoustic guitar solo show live album here. but the song is "ohio," which means something on an un-bourgeois folk-rock, deeper and more profound cultural level. a better example of my current 1970's bourgeois folk-rock kick would be the performances of "journey through the past," "tell me why," "cowgirl in the sand," or, yes, "heart of gold." i know i shouldn't be saying any of this, but those tracks are so tapestry and that's so awesome. it's true; secretly, i'm not cool.
that's wallace stevens being emo, by the way, not me. the same year i wrote that song about michael fried, i asked clark why he never wrote anything about art after abstract expressionism (that essay about tony oursler and modernity doesn't count). he said something about warhol and how it was all commerce. then he said something about the eighties. it was in those eighties that he melancholically wrote, in his preface to image of the people, about how there was nobody left to understand his book (first published in 1973) anymore, about how the left was stalinist and the right was only concerned with recouping the bourgeois values of art in the wake of the '68 period (the time of clark's purported radicalism). stevens' recompense:
Farewell to an idea... The cancellings,
The negations are never final
but, i suppose, by the time clark published farewell to an idea in 1999, four years before i got the chance to speak with him, we were all used to old moralising hippies waiting for the revolution. it's an altogether different kind of melancholia than michael fried's (surely fried's wallace stevens line would be blessed rage for order; if he were a character in a belle and sebastian song, it would be "me and the major"), but it would make for a nice song nonetheless.
2/20/07
ANOTHER STUNT MASQUERADING AS A POLEMIC
i have a dream — a wildly inappropriate way to begin, i know. but i recently got these four books out of the library, all with the title occidentalism. of the two i've read so far, chen xiaomei's study on what he calls "counter-discourse in post-mao china" is suggestive in its call to a critical appropriation for strategies of orientalism, turned against the west in order to reveal the structure of its discursive colonialism. the other, by couze venn, posits occidentalism as a mere inversion of orientalism, with all of the attendant psychological violence. because of the power relations between east and west, venn argues, occidentalism merely reinscribes this violence onto the occidentalist. what is valuable about venn's study is its systematic demolition of the bases of western thought, post-death of the subject discourse included. most of his conclusions in proposing an orientation to the west beyond occidentalism are, i think, imaginary resolutions, but it quite lucidly identifies, in its shortcomings, the yet unresolved ethical dead end of current philosophy and theory, namely the irreconcilability of the local and the universal.
i bring this up because i have a dream of a first nations museum exhibition in which objects acquired from "trade" with european settlers are displayed as art objects. what this would produce, for me, is a reversal of the fetishising objectification of first nations peoples and the severed metonyms that not only stand for Them but stand in for Them, that incarnate first nations people in the public imagination of a white north american culture that presupposes Them to be extinct. the call for critical reflection, i think, lies not only this (cheap) shock effect but, also, in an acknowledgement of first nations people's ability to possess subjectivity as it is understood in the western philosophical tradition. this is not to say that this exhibition would in any way reveal anything about first nations subjectivity or even provide any credible evidence to suggest its possibility. rather, it is an intervention on the level of western thought: its assumptions and its patterns of domination.
that this takes place in a museum is itself an occidentalist critique, for what good is sitting around trying to theorise an ethical museum? does it matter to Us whether they speak ethically when, in the end, they are still speaking about Us and for Us? (which is, of course, not to insinuate myself in the first nations people's struggle, merely to position myself, like Them, as Other to this discourse.) even to let Us speak in the museum, no matter how radically reconstructed, is merely to reproduce a language in which We are not actually speaking. as mieke bal said, the museum is speaking — the language is speaking and, when this language is speaking, they are speaking. it is a commonplace to observe that the idea of culture the museum presupposes does not neatly transfer to non-western societies. but We cannot yet blow it up, for We are not petit-bourgeois anarchists. without itself being museumified and fetishistically objectified, i'm not sure western thought at large can apprehend its Others as anything but de-subjectified museum pieces — the metonym is the thing (in itself); it has no referent. a critique must, then, pander to this thinking's silly concept of the universal human condition. in the consonance between literal colonialism, as incarnated by the objects acquired via "trade," and discursive colonialism, they'll get theirs.
** i should also note that i don't think i'm orientalising myself and various Others in proposing this discursive incompatibility between west and not-west. yes, there is a clear contingency to western thought, rationality, ethics, and so on among most people on this continent. however, transmodernity is (of course) itself a product of colonialism and is yet more for them to answer for. which is not to pine for my own jerusalem, but, rather, a call to break down discursive colonialism so that, unlike merely blowing it up, it cannot reassemble itself. shit is resilient, yo.
many have written about the role of the museum as an ideological tool to constitute nationhood, individuating its citizens by virtue of their ability to share its objects and its conception of national culture and, in the process, Othering those who cannot participate in this ritual. citizenry, then, is constituted by citizens' opposition to those who are excluded by citizenry's national rituals (i think carol duncan wrote the seminal text on this, but bill ray, who introduced me — and to include those of you readers who went to college with me, us — to much of the theory i/we continue to think through, makes a valuable contribution to the discussion). this once caused me great anxiety but, in the process of growing up, it turned out to be crucial in my identity formation. i have never been canadian.
so i don't like art. never have. there is, of course, no such thing as a "pure aesthetics"; nothing is inherently beautiful or sublime. rather, works of art are beautiful or sublime because they are legible as such through a network of symbolic codes, be they within the work of art itself or through the institutional apparatus (e.g. the museum, gallery, text book, art history seminar, etc.) in which they are presented. i didn't know these codes.
in response to all of this, my friend maia asked, "if you don't like art, then why do you like ted leo?" one reason is because ted leo's music is entirely legible to me, moreso, probably, than for 90% of other ted leo fans. but this legibility itself demands analysis, for there are two different kinds of legibility at play here (for me). there is, firstly, formal/historicist legibility. i understand the stylistic references in ted leo songs. i can hear the thin lizzy, dexy's midnight runners, and bruce springsteen references. i hear the tension between these references and those to gang of four and stiff little fingers, to joe jackson and elvis costello and the attractions, to the rites of spring and the nation of ulysses, and to the jam. i know my guitar rock history. but to appreciate this in of itself is to fall into a masturbatory formal aestheticism and to the self-constituting hipster effect that proclaims i have a better record collection than you. i'm cooler than you. i am more of a "real hipster" than you.
what was so significant about ted's music for me was its imbrication in social praxis. i could probably spell this out for you in an objective manner if i really tried, but i think narrating it autobiographically is more revealing. i first encountered ted leo in the fall of 1999, through an interview in punk planet. having never heard his music and his life-changingly excellent first solo record tej leo(?), Rx/pharmacist(s) being at the time very difficult to find, i was inspired by what he'd said, but never listened to his music. it was almost better that way. if the music sucked, i would never know; those words would continue to speak to me. i greatly admire the political struggle of daniel buren and i work on it. but i write about it objectively; it's not my political struggle. ted leo's political struggle was very much my political struggle. punk rock. this was the culture i grew up with (lower case "c" culture, as opposed to the capital "c" Culture of the euro/american museum that excluded and continues to exclude me).
two years later, erin smith from bratmobile, one of my heroes and, at the time, my radio contact at lookout! records, kept emailing me about the ted leo/pharmacists album that was going to come out, the tyranny of distance. she said it changed her life the way exile in guyville did. the first time she said that to me, i wrote back, "exile in guyville? how is that even possible?" now, exile in guyville is one of the all-time greats. i say that with full awareness of the presumptions behind calling anything an "all-time great"; there is a rock and roll canon and exile in guyville is in it. i may hold exile as one of my favourite albums, but, more importantly, so does rolling stone, spin, time magazine, and (i think) robert christgau. but why i love exile in guyville is very different from why these others do (three and a half years ago, i even wrote a song about this). but erin was right: the tyranny of distance was the new exile in guyville. the distinction i want to draw here is between the first example of legibility, produced by the historicity of rock criticism, and why i love(d) liz phair. rock historicity relies on 1. a backstory of formal tradition and 2. on a narrative of cultural history in which exile was a major player in the "emancipation of the woman songwriter" in the early 90's. for me, it was so much more.
tej leo(?), Rx/pharmacist(s) is objectively a pretty spotty album. there are, to be sure, a handful of excellent songs on it, but there are a lot of unlistenable tape experiments that break up its flow as an album. but i'm not robert christgau; why would i hold this great record to the arbitrary standard of the rock and roll album? tej was great because it was a bedroom pop album about making a bedroom pop album. he had disbanded his band (the at once sadly forgotten and very overrated) chisel because major labels started calling and there was infighting within chisel about how to proceed (he sort of discusses this in the punk planet interview). so, faced with the commodification of chisel, faced with the expectation of making a self-contained and organic major label album, ted took old cassettes and a four-track and made tej in his bedroom. on tej, the references weren't internal to the songs; he taped his songs on top of tapes of songs that represent the musical tradition the album was coming out of: minor threat, crass, and, displaying his project for all to see, chisel. then he taped the music of his friends (secret stars, karate) on top of his songs. the act of taping itself is significant for several reasons: 1. it speaks to the way we all used to discover bands, dubbing cassettes, dubbing over old cassettes with new music; 2. it speaks to what independent punk rock really is: making your own music, recording your shit yourself and, in many cases, on a four track in your bedroom. this is what i want to call the social praxis of punk rock.
but there is also something in the literal layering of songs on the cassette tape. much of the album was based on the poetics of the russian futurist poet velimir khlebnikov and the contingency of the linguistic sign. the idea behind russian poetics, so far as i understand it (at least in bakhtin, if not also propp, shklovsky, et alia), is that the best art is a (heteroglossic) accumulation of previous art, a speaking voice that displays a dialogue between the dialects that comprise it, the poetic line as a conversation with and between previous utterances. the songs on tej literally perform these poetics, which he ascribes to khlebnikov, whose work i don't know well enough to discuss in any detail. what i can say authoritatively is that ted's songs on tej are in conversation with secrets stars and karate, with minor threat and crass, and, because the underground can't only speak to itself and pretend that there is no outside world, with the fugees. moreover, what this strategy of accumulation on cassette tape shows us is that, in and of themselves, ted's songs are in conversation with these other voices and, to put it more precisely, the songs are conversations with these other voices.
this is what punk rock, for me, is: a conversation. it's not a neutral object to be commodified and consumed. it's a discourse that must constantly evolve and change its strategies as the strategies of the music industry and, indeed, the greater apparatus of the monolithic (mono)culture industry appropriates its strategies and spits it out as the offspring, blink 182, franz ferdinand, and death cab for cooties. the songs on tej were about how to write songs, how to make music, how to record music, as well as ruminations about the commodification of punk rock and how to remain underground, outside of the music industry, without being commodified by it anyway (as minor threat recently were).
the tyranny of distance, the subsequent album that erin compared to exile, continued this project but, as with liz phair's passage from girlysound to exile, reformulated it. for both, this was a necessary move. but i'll go back to my autobiographical mode of writing. the summer tyranny came out, the independent record store i grew up with, zulu records, was moving into a bigger space across the street and, being paid up for an extra few months, kept the old space open as a satellite store for all the shit that they couldn't sell and that they didn't have room to store in the back. the entire space was filled with cheap vinyl and one dollar c.d.'s. among other great things, i found a copy of tej. i already had an advanced copy of tyranny, but i wasn't really feeling it. in the same way as exile is filled with excellent songs but played with a boring, flat guitar tone, tyranny just didn't come out of the speakers right (of course, the flat guitar tone on both are completely the point). the project of tej made tyranny legible and, though i also consider tyranny one of my absolute favourite records ever, it "fails" as critical art insofar as it necessarily relies on tej to make its project legible. (i should also point out that erin asked me to interview ted way back then and, seeing ted leo/pharmacists play for the first time that night, the songs on tyranny made a lot more sense. as great and organic as tyranny now seems to me having long internalised it, the drumming on it was all wrong. when he eventually toured that album and brought in chris and dave as his full time band, instead of using whomever was hanging around on tyranny, the songs came at me dynamically, revealed themselves to me, and, having heard them this way, never again came out of the speakers flat.)
so the songs on tyranny are really the same bunch of songs as those on tej, only produced like songs on a real album, in a studio with brendan (fucking the blood the body the machine, not to mention fugazi) canty producing it. understanding the project of tej, the songs on tyranny, in the same way interrogating what it means to write songs and make music, as well as lyrically working through how to make independence work, break down. that is, they take the organic whole of the album apart by revealing all of its constitutive factors and both the political/economic/ideological motivations and the arbitrariness of these factors.
this is why i love ted leo. because he speaks to my struggle. because i lived that struggle (on a very different scale), because friends of mine continue to fight that battle, because, in buying "indie rock" records and going to "indie rock" shows, we always have to remember that someone built this city. and, moreover, since tej, ted has toured almost nonstop. in the early, pre-tyranny days, ted played anywhere that would have him. he travelled with his guitar and his effects pedal and performed, all by himself, in basements and in any number of VFW halls, converted warehouses, and other alternative punk rock spaces (i, unfortunately, missed this period, but, trust me, seek out the bootleg recordings; they're the best). and he still makes a point of playing at all-ages spaces whenever possible and, if a city doesn't have one, trying to track down a makeshift punk rock space instead of playing at some 19+/21+ bar. ted not only comes with the discourse, but also backs it up by living it, even though it's a tough life (ted, being the way he is, would never admit it, but ask anyone else who lives that life).
but tyranny was also objectively a "great" album and, so, teddy became famous in the "indie rock" world. he played an all-ages space in rochester last year, but i was turned away at the door because it sold out. that was a big deal to me because i love seeing ted, even though i'd seen him an average of three times a year the three years previous, but it's not really a big deal in the grand scheme. not, at least, compared to what happened to the music after tyranny. i've written before about my profound disappointment in ted's 2004 album shake the sheets. but even the critically lauded 2003 album hearts of oak disappointed.
again objectively, hearts of oak is a very good album. but it's a very good album in that formal/historicist way in which i've also come to find a pleasure in going to the museum now that i'm getting my advanced degree in (more or less) art history. often, i say i don't know shit about art. and, despite my friends and colleagues' protestations of disingenuousness, it's true (in a way). i know a lot of shit about art criticism and art historicity. and i even kind of know how to formally read works of art. many aspects of the museum that once alienated me are now fully and completely legible to me (which is not to say that i understand the message and the code fully and completely; merely that they are now both, for me, fully and completely readable). and the pleasure comes from this stupid game of identification i play, with my ability to quibble with curatorial choices, and with my understanding of the game, the code, and the message (i will never forget that message, because it made me what or who i am). but i still don't know shit about art in that i don't know how to like it. as much as i now understand the code that makes paintings instantaneously apprehensible as beautiful or sublime, it's a foreign language to me. i'm fluent, but i don't think in this language; there's always a disconnect between beauty and the historicity that produces it, and these from the material conditions and social praxis of looking at art.
with hearts of oak, there is no disconnect, which is to say that, where, in the museum, i don't have to separate beauty from historicity because they are already separated (and, so, i'm always conscious of the material conditions and social praxis of museum-going), i have to always consciously separate my experience of punk rock into these two categories. it's my native language. it's my culture. so hearts of oak, which is a very good album, disappoints on the level of social praxis, just as shake the sheets (a better than okay album) and living with the living (a bad album; release date: 3/20/07) disappoint. that last one, because i can't even enjoy it on that formal/historicist level, was doubly disappointing.
but seeing teddy play, no matter how bad the songs and no matter how strained his voice had become, has never disappointed me. i should add, however, that this is partly because i never let it do so. listening to tej is participating in punk rock in a way that listening to living with the living really isn't. but seeing ted play was always participating in punk rock. i was disapointed that i didn't get to see ted play last spring because he'd become so popular that it was sold out. but i was more disappointed by his insufficiently critical albums that came after tyranny. what i didn't allow to disappoint me was when he came to rochester and played at some big concert venue, opening for death cab for cooties (no moralizing, no accusations of having "sold out" in the other sense).
ted had to cancel his spring 2003 show in portland because his throat gave out mid-tour. after taking the time to get better, he embarked on a solo tour. i saw him that night at the meow meow in portland, singing up a storm, his voice not (and never again) what it was. but it was almost more inspiring. the grain of his voice (even i'm rolling my eyes at this reference) was an index of what he'd given to punk rock, for all the punk rock he had lived. of course, this only worked because he was on that solo tour, just like the old pre-tyranny days, playing in the middle of the hottest portland summer ever on the top floor of a converted warehouse all-ages punk rock space with no windows, no ventilation, and no air conditioning. at the time, i was working in the music department of the local paper and i got into a lot of shows for free. that summer, i walked out on a lot of bands (e.g. !!!, blood brothers) for no reason other than that it was unbearably hot, but not ted. even if i wasn't completely enraptured by the music (which i absolutely was), i couldn't do it to him because he'd never do it to me. but when he came with death cab for cooties... look ted can do whatever he wants. i'm not going to tell him what to do, my shake the sheets critique notwithstanding. but the grain of his voice at the auditoreum theatre in rochester would have been a completely different kind of index. instead of it being a marker for punk rock activity that i was witnessing and participating in right then and there, it would have been the imprint (the trace, the ghostly shadow) of punk rock activity that was absent, that was in the past. and i couldn't do that to me, precisely because i love ted leo (precisely for the reasons i gave above), and precisely because this punk rock culture is the closest thing i've ever seen to an avant-gardist sublation of art into the praxis of life (that last reference was 95% unironic).
2/14/07
SOMEDAY BOY YOU'LL REAP WHAT YOU'VE SOWN
class today was cancelled on account of us all being buried under ten million pounds of snow. but we can play passing notes from home. psst — (mp3 blog update).
now, we couldn't eat hog buchers very often. the crapulence was too much. but every now and then, we'd put a hog butcher in the oven, queue up five episodes of the simpsons, eat two slices, and collectively pass out on the couch.
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
last weekend, we made garbage plates. i would never be so disgusting as to recreate the slop they serve in the restaurants here in rochester. but i am fascinated by this wreckage upon wreckage form. so alex made the meat sauce, while i put together a classy pile of macaroni in garlic jack and pancetta oil, garlic and cheddar perogies served with sautéed onions and sliced baby portobellas, and hamburger. i call it the catastrophe.
...he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
of course, a pile of greasy food mashed on top of other greasy food is still a pile of greasy food mashed on top of other greasy food. we sat around the table for two hours after dinner, sweating garlicky, buttery grease and stupefied by meat comas.
so what is it about the hog butcher and the garbage plate that amuses me so? i don't think i could tell you outright, but perhaps these two anecdotes about the lieb (who was so kind as to host the above hog butcher picture), coupled with a passage each from two proto-existentialist poems, can shed some light. last november, the lieb and i were in chicago. but for an epic rainstorm that precluded our transportation from the o'hare airport super 8 to civilisation, we would have accomplished the goal of our trip to chicago: to eat a hog butcher stuffed inside another hog butcher.
Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.
Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec
Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal:
«Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?»
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,
Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide
Comme s'il adressait des reproches à Dieu!
* * *
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
this other time, my roommate and i had a hog butcher in the oven. the lieb came over and, naturally, we offered him some. as he's eating a slice, someone goes, "hey lieb, isn't it yom kippur?" a sly, satisfied smile comes across his face as he keeps eating.
2/06/07
PRIMARY COLOURS FOR THE SECOND TIME: A PARADIGM REPETITION OF THE NEOAVANTGARDE
--- Michael Joseph Lieberman wrote:
> > i'm usually kind of okay with dominique leone and
> he
> > was one of the few people i didn't think was a
> > complete waste of nerd glasses during my brief
> > "ethnographic investigation" of ILX and the white
> > dudes therein. anyway, i didn't read the whole
> thing,
> > but the things dom says about soul discharge...
> >
> >
> http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/ > 40783/Boredoms_Super_Roots_1_3_5
> >
> > yikes.
> >
>
> yes, missing the forest for the "indie" ideology.
> indieology. i also
> failed to muster the force of will necessary to
> proceed beyond the
> first paragraph or two, but i am suitably offended.
> or would be if i
> expected much better of a hooker from the p-fork
> stable. actually, i'm
> less offended by what he writes than by his tone: he
> writes as though
> these qualities (the ones he gets right, anyway)
> were bad things,
> rather than the finest things in all the world.
> and, of course, the boredoms material he loves so
> well is, in actual
> fact, teh suxor.
>
> this is why i'll take the copy of landspeed [the greatest hardcore album of all time —ed.] you
> misappropriated for me,
> even though i have no access to a turntable. i just
> know that
> otherwise it'd end up in the hands of some
> bespectacled ponce who'd
> treat it like a product of the larval stage of a
> band that didn't
> achieve its true potential until fucking zen arcade [boo —ed.],
> or some shit. i
> will fight and die to defend my hüsker dü narrative,
> and in a pinch
> i'll also take an album that i can't even play. the
> spite is an added
> bonus.
nb. pay attention to the aislers set song "melody not malaise," in which amy linton steals the chorus of one of my favourite songs ever, the supremes' "i hear a symphony," and slows it down, turns up the reverb, and breaks my heart. pity the aislers set are only really good when they steal outright (cf. also "hey lover").
2/03/07
WHAT ABOUT POSTMODERNISM?, or: RADIO CLASH, MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, I WAS A CHOIR BOY
but here are two good ones. very simple: two songs that go together, a few embellishments, and they're done. the first is as simple as it gets: "this is the radio clash" v. "hollaback girl," with just a bit of "another one bites the dust" when gwen quotes those lyrics. the next one takes coldcut's "seven minutes of madness" remix of "paid in full" and the white stripes' "doorbell," basically just playing one on top of the other. it works, but i don't know what to think. as with the bondo do rolê mashup, is it cool to sample someone else's sampling? is it postmodern? is it lazy? is postmodernism lazy? (yes.)
THE 1970'S BOURGEOIS FOLK-ROCK
