"hell is other people's music."

9/15/04

YOU LIKING HÜSKER DÜ MAKES ME EMO

it was my fault. i was watching channel 35, i should have known i'd see something that would piss me off. so i see this video called "walk away" by some guy named barlow. i was getting madder and madder as i was watching the video until i was out for blood. seriously. so i asked myself why i hate unremarkable middle class white people* so much. we all know someone of this sort (really, this isn't racist, read the explanatory note at the bottom), who, likely armed with an acoustic guitar, claims to be enlightened and purports to speak "universal truths" but is actually saying nothing at all and, worse, attempting to pass off his unremarkable middle class white viewpoint as universal when even passing it off as somehow minutely significant is a lie. still, i don't hate unremarkable middle class chinese people or unremarkable middle class black people or unremarkable low-income white people.

but before i get into that, more about this video. this j. crew catalogue looking white guy with a chiselled jaw (think: nick lachey) sitting in a cornfield "rapping" (think: LFO's "summer girls" or, if you can't remember what that is, 311 or that one completely indefensible barenaked ladies song are also similar in sheer awfulness) about how hard life is (think: that everlast song "what it's like" rewritten by any of the members of *nsync who isn't justin) for depressed kids. then he goes into this i-can't-believe-it's-not-matchbox twenty adult contempo chorus on top of excruciating falsettos (think: five for fighting or train). how do i know so much about the most godawful and unremarkable middle class white music that i can provide all these reference points? i have too much free time on my hands and i watch a lot more of channel 35 than i should.

anyways, this song and the accompanying video just made me seethe with rage. i completely reverted back to being sixteen and wanted to reach into the television screen, grab the guy by his banana republic shirt and scream into this face, "don't speak to me and don't you ever fucking speak for me." right, so i'm wondering why i'm so very indignant that an unremarkable middle class white guy would presume to speak to or for the youth of his time. kneel used to always wonder why things like this made me so indignant as well. but i guess if you can't see it, you'll probably never know 'cos i sure as hell can't explain it. (if you have any insight or care to hazard a guess, email me).

in other news, i'd like to share the best line from an email i got recently. i uncontrollably laughed out loud for a minute after reading it. in response to my shameful admission to the lieb that i was beginning to like the hüsker dü album new day rising, he wrote: "you liking later hüsker dü makes me emo." it strikes me that there is a lot of backstory and more than one inside joke in the brilliant quip above and maybe you had to be there. sorry if you weren't.

* i realise that i should probably qualify my use of the phrase "unremarkable middle class white people," seeing as how it comes up so much in what i just wrote. it sounds elitist and possibly even racist, but what i'm talking about, at least with my use of the world "unremarkable," is a tendency in our popular culture for completely ahistorical attitudes, things, and people to signify some kind of cultural import through a very very shallow pluralism, sense of history, or, as in this particular case, both. why middle class? because that's the targe audience ("demo"). why white? because white people are selling this to us as pluralistic and not as something that speaks from and to an ahistorical (or, if you will, "unremarkable") middle class white, more often than not male, viewpoint, which is what it really is.

9/09/04

THIS EMAIL WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN 30 SECONDS

and i quote: The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments is intended only for the personal and confidential use of the recipient(s) named above.

the above appended an email i received today from a certain doctor of philosophy. i understand that certain people's writings and ideas are hot property and they don't like to be quoted when they don't know they're on the record, but it's something i'd never seen before and i wanted to share. so, professor _________, if this quotation crosses the line, i apologise. i just thought it was funny.

speaking of emails, c-pedemails: The Continuing Correspondence of Michael Joseph Lieberman and G Leung is finally up and running. take that, narrative.

9/08/04

FUCK ME I'M EXCITED

really, fuck me. or click here. so i skipped town (that would be portland) in february and, since then, every single person my age that i know there except one has moved away. then i heard that my favourite local celebrity, julianne shepherd, moved away. then i heard that ritchey, one half of the best band in portland (take that the thermals, the get hustle, sleater-kinney, sm + the jicks, jackie, glass candy and the shattered theatre, the shins, the decemberists, and all you other pretenders to the throne), was skipping town. you know, real "p.s. portland is burning" kind of stuff.

so today i find out about this. move over TL/Rx, we've got a new album of the year. here's the background info: the badger king, said former best band in portland, were ritchey's astonishingly original but boringly executed acoustic indie-pop songs fed through the wringer that is jona, a.k.a. Y.A.C.H.T., a.k.a. 9078686. i could fumble about trying to convey the amazingly stunning production work jona did with ritchey's songs but you're just going to have to take my word for it. so, with the badger king (known to all who know about, and, thus, love, them as "team tbk") on indefinite hiatus, jona has begun working with khaela maricich, a.k.a. the blow, a.k.a. get the hell out of the way of the volcano. now khaela is the author behind the mind-blowing conceptual piece(s) the talent show tour and the concussive carress, or casey caught her mom singing along with the vaccuum and her last three records (2001's everyday examples of humans facing directly into the blow as get the hell out of the way of the volcano and 2002 and 2003's bonus album e.p. and the aforementioned concussive carress, respectively, as the blow) have successively hinted more and more strongly at changing pop music forever, something that team tbk, with their two e.p.'s and opera, also did more than their share of. cocteau and melville on les enfants terribles, the talking heads and eno, that warhol/basquiat/clemente thing, khaela working with jona is like that for me.

so i spent all of sunday mixing dr. meow meow (formerly just the meow meow)'s new and completely breathtaking double album with a certain robert gordon newell (the good doctor himself for those who don't know). when robert told me that his new work was tending towards "acoustic hip-hop," i was skeptical. what he didn't tell me was that it sounded like the last meow meow record if it were a concept album recorded and produced by the books. it's great and monoculture has done it again and i'm happy and excited and dying to have the finished version in my hands, but, to be honest, i can't even consider listening to anything but poor aim: love songs right now and i probably won't be able to for at least a couple of days.

but, back to my original theme of portland and fucking me, khaela maricich is living in portland right now. she's an artist in residence at the portland institute for the contemporary arts and is doing two pieces — one of them being blue sky vs. night sky, which she performed on the talent show tour — for pica's time based art festival next week. this weekend, she's playing musicfest nw, which is awesome this year. the last two were nothing but a bunch of empty promises and after-the-fact lies but this year, in addition to the blow, they've got deerhoof, mirah, the aforementioned thermals, xiu xiu, kinski, old time relijun, and, among the bigger and more boring but no less impressive names, lifesavas, lyrics born, the wrens, built to spill, crooked fingers, calvin johnson, dj spooky, jon auer, and the aforementioned decemberists. fuck me, those annual free musicfest wristbands i used to get, as well as a trip to portland for one glorious rock and roll weekend, (and maybe a pica-tba press pass like i got last year) would be pretty great right about now. but i'll be taking the gre instead. fuck me indeed.

9/02/04

TOWARDS A NEW CANON?

or perhaps towards one and a half new(ly proposed) lines of radical, female-oriented punk rock — towards one and a half that exclude joan jett, that is.

1. the slits —> 2. kleenex/LiLiPUT/essential logic/the delta 5 —> 3. y pants —> 4A. altered images —> 5A. lung leg/b-mob —> 6A. melt-banana —> 4B. god is my co-pilot —> 5B julie ruin —> 6B. deerhoof —> 7A. black cat #13/the sick lipstick —> 7B. shoplifting

8/27/04

THINKING ABOUT SELLING OUT

people are always calling bands out as sellouts. le tigre are sellouts. the rapture are sellouts. modest mouse are sellouts. liz phair is a sellout. ice cube is a sellout. dan the automator is a sellout. fugazi are sellouts. and so on. i'd just like to know what exactly blink 182 have sold out.

so this got me to thinking about bands that have signed to major labels and actually gotten better. i can think of exactly two: jawbox and built to spill, and both completely shat the bed after releasing their major label debuts. in both cases, having major label resources helped the bands create their finest works. both used the major label money to build their own studios and, not being on the clock as they had been throughout their careers, they explored their respective sounds much further than had been previously possible. could for your own special sweetheart and perfect from now on have been possible without all that money? probably not in the forms those albums took, though it's not to say that they wouldn't have made equally strong lower-fi albums on indie money.

my point, i suspect, is that, of all the punk/indie/etc. bands that jumped ship to major labels in the late eighties and early-to-mid nineties, only two radically changed their sounds for the better. it leads me to think that jawbox and built to spill are anomalous among the "sellouts." i'm wondering whether both bands were perhaps on a trajectory that would have resulted in radically different albums regardless of what label they were on or whether the money and especially the time that they otherwise wouldn't have had made a difference. i suspect it's a little bit of both: the two bands, unlike most bands who sign to a major label, were embarking upon their mature work (not unlike the dismemberment plan between the dismemberment plan is terrified and emergency & i) and were in a position to take advantage of more resources, as opposed to most bands who either stay the course (the donnas), put out an overproduced version of their earlier work (green day), put out an ambitious but underachieving wank of an album (the poster children), or dumb down their music to sound more acceptable and sell records (sonic youth and hüsker dü).

but i think, in the end, it's extremely hard to continue to put out strong material on a major label (the flaming lips are one anomalous example). jawbox and built to spill stand out in my mind because those are the only two bands whose major label debuts are far and away their finest works. the money caught up to both of them as jawbox followed up sweetheart with their regrettable, in parts jawbreaker dear you-esque self-titled album. then they had the good sense to disband. built to spill apparently have a new album coming out at the end of the year but, since the jawdropping perfect from now on, they have released the underwhelming old built to spill/new built to spill compromise keep it like a secret and the abysmal ancient melodies of the future. but if i have a point here, i think that it's an acknowledgement that, in rare cases, art and money can come together and, out of it, something great can result. so thank you atlantic records and warner bros. for for your own special sweetheart and perfect from now on.

but seriously, le tigre? kathleen hanna's le tigre? that's it, i'm cashing in too. i'll take the LSAT tomorrow.

ADDENDUM (9/15/04): oh my god, did you see "deceptacon" in that telus (a canadian telecommunications corporation that, coincidentally, my mom works for) commercial? it's like lost in translation, right? americans do commercials in foreign countries so "the whole world" (read: america) doesn't know that they're shills. kathleen, oh kathleen, you were my hero. maybe i should just take you off this prestigious list.

8/24/04

THIS SONG COULD BE YOUR LIFE
top ten for my imaginary life

10. god is my co-pilot "pocketful of sugar" (puss O2) i've recently been revisiting huggy bear and god is my co-pilot and it is my opinion that, were these two bands to respectively release weaponry listens to love and puss O2 today, they would be fucking huge and blow the yeah yeah yeahs and liars and any of these other "art punk" bands off of the front page of the village voice. it's no secret that karen o. would wash those dots off of her face to be chan marshall (listen to "maps") and, wouldn't you know it, chan ("shawnny")'s on this song. i saw this great new local band cadeaux this weekend and their guitarist does a lot of things similar to nick zinner and i thought to myself if every other new band in the world didn't sound like this, they would be huge. but i guess i'm wrong 'cos god is my co-pilot and huggy bear were never huge. 9. the groovie ghoulies "pet semetary" (monster club) i hadn't noticed that when lookout! records "expanded their oeuvre" as ted leo put it, they not only dropped the groovie ghoulies (as well as pansy division, the queers, and all of the other pop bands not named "the mr. t experience") but let all of those incredible records go out of print. so what do the ghoulies do? they rerecord their classics and put out a greatest hits called monster club. it was the best record of 2003 that no one had any idea was out. just like i didn't, amid all the excitement, notice the ghoulies get the boot when lookout! brought in bratmobile, TL/Rx, and the pattern, i forgot how much i loved those ghoulies monster songs until i noticed they were out of print. my favourite ghoulies memory is seeing them at the old pine street theatre in portland opening for 7 seconds. the entire show was filled with these h.c. jarheads picking fights in "the pit" and culminated in someone pulling a knife on some other guy. amid the fracas, kepi calls one enthusiastic fan up to the stage and lets him sing "pet semetary." this song takes on added significance now that johnny ramone has been diagnosed with cancer and it looks like he might join joey and dee dee in the ground, but i think i'd rather have left you with the ghoulies and their impassioned fan ripping up "pet semetary" like even joey never did. 8. slayer "raining blood" (reign in blood) the lieb was with me during the above anecdote and, ironically, they wouldn't let him into pine street because he had his pocketknife on him. he stashed it outside and got in five minutes later. anyways, the lieb and i have been using the phrase "reign in blood" to describe things we like, usually noisy bands (e.g. "i saw wolf eyes last night and they reigned in a surprisingly large amount of blood"). it can also be used to signify coolness (e.g. "have you ever read ionesco's blood-reigning-in play rhinocerous?"). it was also the lieb who reminded me that the misfits song "skulls" ("the blood drains down like devil’s rain/ we’ll bathe tonight") was a precursor to the imagery in "raining blood." well, if anything can truly be said to reign in blood, it's slayer's epochal album and its kind of title track. though i might add that if the lieb hadn't had to stash his knife outside, it would have been raining motherfucking blood at pine street that night. 7. ted leo "ex-factor" (live 2/12/99) i've seen teddy cover the impressions, the pogues, the split enz, the jam, even "dancing in the dark," but nothing compares to this and i wasn't even there. i mean, it was a pretty good lauryn hill song, though i could have done without her biting wu-tang's sample. but teddy isolates what's wrong with the song, how lauryn never quite gets the rhythm down in the bridge (the "no matter how i think we go" part that justin timberlake's "i'm lovin' it" stole), and turns it into the best part of the song. and you wouldn't think a white guy in a punk band could pull off a song like this, but ted not only hits all the notes, he matches lauryn hill's "soul" line for line, proving that he and mirah are the two best solo performers in this world. 6. throbbing gristle "i.b.m." (D.o.A.: the third and final report) twenty years ahead of their time, throbbing gristle go a step beyond their industrial contemporaries, who turned the noise of machinery into music, by turning the sounds of telecommunication into noise. "i.b.m." sounds like a modem and feedback, but i can't really be sure. what i do know is that this song contains every ringing telephone, fax machine, and dial-up modem that ever made anyone feel post-mcluhanian angst. if there was ever a case for a postmodernist recouping of dada and the historical avant-garde, this would be it. like oval's systemish and 94diskont, "i.b.m." refuses to become obsolete, even after the technology the song is based on has. and that's why genesis p-orridge is in my oxford postmodernist art textbook while blixa bargeld is still chasing a post-industrial zeitgeist. (see also: kid 606 the action packed mentalist brings you the fucking jams and johannes silentio "étude #7"). 5. the shins "pink bullets" (chutes too narrow) i have this love/hate relationship with the shins. i first saw them opening for modest mouse and i hated them. i was near violently ill, but there's more to the story. you see, it was the first time i saw mirah and the microphones and while they played, most of the crowd at the (ugh) crystal ballroom conversed very loudly in the roped off beer-drinking section. you could hardly hear mirah, who was singing, or phil, who was playing an acoustic guitar with the hole pointed at a microphone, and their current albums, you think it's like this, but actually it's like this and it was hot, we stayed in the water respectively, were my two favourite records at the time. then the shins, who were introduced as recent sub pop signees, took to the stage with their bassist, drummer, guitars plugged in amps, and lack of amateurish charm and everybody shut up and listened politely. so i hated the shins. then oh, inverted world came out and, eventually, i listened to it and, while the rest of the album didn't really do much for me, i loved "the new slang." i loved it so much that i would watch the salt lake city olympics with my crazed ex-figure skater housemate instead of doing my homework just to hear that mcdonald's commercial. i guess i should say that i have a love "the new slang"/hate relationship with the shins. so then the shins up and moved to portland and the decemberists got signed to krs and there was a boring, wants-to-be-neutral milk hotel indie rock renaissance in the city and everybody treated james mercer like he was, well, stephen malkmus. so then i hated the shins again. last week, i saw the incredible garden state and now i love "the new slang" again. so i finally got around to hearing chutes too narrow and i've decided that "pink bullets" should have been playing during the closing credits like "miss misery" was in good will hunting: since then it's been a book you read in reverse/ so you understand less as the pages turn/ or a movie so crass and awkwardly cast/ that even i could be the star. 4. saturday looks good to me "since you stole my heart" (every night) the thing about saturday looks good to me, as well as camera obscura, is that only the songs sung by girls are any good. but boy are those songs good. here's a band of white, college-educated indie rockers in ann arbor, michigan thinking they're the supremes in motown. i've previously talked about "ambulance" from their last album and this one's just as good. even the instrumentation and production look back to motown (i'm thinking especially of "i hear a symphony"); horns and keys that might have sounded "bumping" back in the sixties now sound faded and as "classical" as any american music has the right to be said to be. before saturday looks good to me, we'd heard a million retro pop bands looking back to the beach boys, the beatles of course, simon and garfunkel (cf. "the new slang"), the carpenters, big star, and the aislers set were adventurous enough to reference the shangri-la's, but influence in pop music is still segregated and it's refreshing to see a band that looks back to what is some of the finest music in pop history. 3. ted leo/pharmacists "bleeding powers" (shake the sheets) as one of the world's biggest ted leo fans, i greedily got my hands on the internet leak of his new record two months before the release date without an ounce of guilt. i've only had it for one day, but it strikes me as not as strong as his previous two releases, though it took some time for me to get into both of those. the first thing that struck me about shake the sheets was the politics. this is one of those political records that everybody's coming out with this year. i've so far caught a few cringe-worthy lines, but i'm very thankful that, of the two political songs teddy debuted on his solo e.p. tell balgeary, balgury is dead, he picked this one and not the awful "song for my sorrowful country." i just got through lauding teddy's prowess as a solo performer and the original version of this song was no exception. this song was perfect; it didn't need drums and it didn't need a bass guitar. but this re-working, driven by its lagging and counterintuitive (at least counterintuitive to those of us who had gotten used to the original version) rhythm section and fleshing out teddy's hot shit guitar solo, is easily the album's standout. i won't talk about the song's "message" 'cos i'm sick of talking about that. if you want to read about that, read my rant from 8/10/04 below. i'll only add that, lyrically, this is probably the least stupid, in fact it's not stupid at all, political song i've heard all year. 2. young people "ron jeremy" (s/t) words cannot describe, which is why it's serendipitous that this is the only song on the list with a downloadable mp3. 1. the shins "the new slang" (oh, inverted world) like i said, i saw garden state, which i think is the best film of the year. in fact, it supplants gerry as the best film i've seen since la pianiste [addendum: congratulations elfriede jelinek (i know you're out there reading) on becoming austria's newest millionaire, a cause scandale, and a target for sniping idiots]. i got wind of this film the same way i heard about good will hunting when it came out, through superlative hype from mainstream press. the parallels were eery: both were written by and star a young and quirky comedic actor (i went and saw goodwill hunting at fifth avenue because i knew matt damon and ben affleck from kevin smith's movies, which i liked at the time, and i braved yuppie central again 'cos i currently think scrubs is the finest sitcom since newsradio) with a hip, portland indie-folk singer troubadoring through the trailer. so i went into the movie thinking that if it were as good as will hunting, which wasn't really that good, i'd be happy. what i was really expecting was, given the title and the mattfleck parallel, something akin to jersey girl, which i never actually saw but imagine to be a romantic comedy masquerading as a gen-x character study, you know, like high fidelity or (gasp) singles. as soon as the movie started, my point of reference became the virgin suicides. zack braff's shots were framed like photographs the same way sofia copolla's were. the first part of the film was a barrage of remarkable shots, culminating in the waiting room scene when natalie portman's character puts her headphones on braff's head and "the new slang" starts playing and i just died. and just like i'll never hear "the new slang" sound so good ever again (unless i build a movie theatre with THX or whatever sound in my living room or buy the garden state soundtrack with the nicely remastered version of the song, neither of which will ever happen), the film was never quite as good after that point. there were long patches where it seemed like braff forgot to draw up storyboards and just shot the film on the fly. but, as david walker said, "garden state is somehow enjoyable not just despite its flaws, but in part because of them" and there were certainly enough high moments, before and after the waiting room scene, to keep the movie afloat were it not the case. he compared the film to bottle rocket and, as far as first films go, it did have as much of the tossed off and unfinished feel of bottle rocket as it did the meticulous beauty of the virgin suicides. but i think lost in translation is the best reference point for me. what lost in translation did to my bloody valentine's "sometimes," garden state does to "the new slang." the only problem is that oh, inverted world did not take three years and cost £500,000 to record. but i think it was in the spirit of the film that that one brilliant moment can never be recaptured. oops, i'm afraid i've gone all emo on you.

8/22/04

SHERRIE LEVINE BE MY VALENTINE

Jules Olitski: It strikes me that there is a terrible irony in the success of what I would call advanced or high art, the art of the fifties and sixties, artists like Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hoffman [sic.]. This success and the attention it brought, particularly to Pollock and de Kooning, led many young artists without talent to do similar things. Many people said, "My three-year-old can do that." Well those three-year-olds heard that, so much of our art has virtually nothing to do with art.

Sonja Ahlers: I don't copy I steal.

"Police dismissed that claim."
"Steal yr idols."
"Sad for Norway, good publicity for art."

8/16/04

LINKING PARK

1. how to become famous through blogging
(courtesy of dr. frank's blog)

the best quotes:

"I was only blogging for, what, less than two weeks?" she says. "Some people with blogs are never going to get famous, and they've been doing it for, like, over a year. I feel bad for them."

"Everyone should have a blog," Jessica says. "It's the most democratic thing ever."

this is an exemplary piece of "journalism." it perfectly fits the willamette week cover feature formula of HUMAN INTEREST NARRATIVE - FACTS - BACKGROUND INFO - CRAZY FUCKING TANGENT - OTHER EXAMPLES - HUMAN INTEREST RESOLUTION. a monkey at a typewriter...

2. in which the word "emo" is used to signify some sort of anxiety

weirdly, i was told by two people this weekend that they have read this blog. i always thought that zero people read this but, if you ever come back, here is a personal "hello" (you know who you are).

8/10/04

SHITTY POLITTI

"That's one thing conservative Republican presidents are good for," says Mr. Burkett, who goes by the stage name Fat Mike. "Punk rock gets a whole lot better."

i hope everybody dies.

ADDENDUM (8/12): i know i promised never to write about pop-punk ever again and i apologize. i had just seen NOFX play a song featuring political platitudes (and including the, in my eyes, aggregious, anti-democratic line "don't anybody vote for nader") and namedropping the likes of howard zinn, noam chomsky, eric schlosser, and michael moore on the conan o'brien show. but that's no excuse; again, i apologize. i never ever ever will again starting now. my point is that i loathe the "left" dogma industry, whether i agree or disagree with the specific political view being espoused. i am hereby calling out a small list of dogmatists (i am also including the names dropped above as offenders, though i don't have too much of a beef with chomsky per se, at least not as much i do with what has in the last fifteen years become the chomsky industry): punkvoter, ak press, adbusters, the anti-defamation league (though this is probably going beyond the issue at hand), and naomi klein (though this article, an anomalous moment of real insight, quite nicely dovetails my indignation on this topic). i have just finished brecht's mother courage and her children and my feelings on this matter have intensified. whosoever profits from war, bad politics, or hegemony, including a certain breed of today's protest singers (see my "state of the age," a song to protest protest songs on the occasion of the commencement of the latest war in iraq), i believe, is culpable. i guess what i'm trying to say is that propaganda is propaganda and the ends never ever, even now, justify the means. to profit from this propaganda (which is, admittedly, well-intentioned when practiced outside of the "left" dogma industry) is indefensible. all of this aside, i once more apologize.

The Centipede Letters: the continuing correspondence of Michael "proud father of two girls, aged 7 and 9" Lieberman, PTA and G Leung, esq.

8/06/04

DR. FRANK AND THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE,
or: NOW HE KNOWS WHERE DAN TREACY LIVES

i just came across an excellent blog entry by dr. frank. if, like most people who know me and converse with me on such matters, you can't understand why i love the good doctor's band the mr. t experience so much, click on the above link. dr. frank writes pop songs with the care and attention of a fan who is, though frank himself denies it, also a critic. the third paragraph could have come right out of harold bloom's the anxiety of influence, only with the name "wordsworth" replaced by "television personalities" and "shelley" exchanged with "me" — he even calls television personalities frontman dan treacy a genius.

so yes, for me, dr. frank is a real person and not just the name behind some of my favourite songs. it's not just that i read his blog or the explanatory notes to his last record or know all his songs; as with ted leo, jack spicer, hal foster, and certain other of my heroes, for everything that songs or poems or essays or interviews or transcripts of roundtable discussions or biographies or blog entries reveal to me, i add an equal amount to these — i hesitate to say characters — figures in my head. in turn, i get the dr. frank that i want: the dr. frank who wrote "i don't know where dan treacy lives," a paean to his idol who mysteriously disappeared. (note: the title follows from the television personalities song "i know where syd barrett lives," dan's paean to his own reclusive hero.)

a month and a half ago, i got an email from kirstin with the title "this is where dan treacy lives" and a picture of a prison boat attached. long story short, dan treacy has been on a prison boat this whole time and he's about to be sprung. immediately, the clash song "stay free" popped into my head, only it was dr. frank singing the lines i'll never forget the feeling i felt when i heard that you got home/ and i'll never forget the smile on my face 'cos i knew where you would be/ and if you're in the crown tonight, have a drink on me. i guess the upshot of this whole thing is that i get to be yeats, though i always saw myself more as jack spicer.

notes

1. harold bloom's the anxiety of influence argues that all canonical literary figures intentionally misread the work of their immediate forebears so that they can correct their mistakes (bloom explains this through the conceit of oedipal anxiety and the desire to kill and usurp one's father). bloom's primary example in illustrating this theory (begun in his pre-anxiety books shelley's mythmaking and yeats) was the lineage of milton, wordsworth, shelley, and yeats. bloom's latest book is unfashionably entitled and about the unfashionable concept of genius.
2. william wordsworth's blog
3. oddly, sometimes, to put faces on these figures i suppose, i confuse in my head these figures and people i actually know. in college, i had a professor whom i would mistake for harold bloom, as well as a roland barthes, an h.d., and one who weirdly changed from clement greenberg to benjamin buchloh over two and a half years.
4. read jack spicer

8/02/04

TEN MP3'S TO ALIENATE YOUR COHABITANTS

1. young people "ron jeremy" (5RC)
2. THETEETHE "don't talk (put your head on my shoulder)" (5RC)*
3. melt-banana "rough dogs have bumps" (skin graft)
4. black cat #13 "i blast off" (31G)
5. li'l pocketknife "disco dancer" (narnack)
6. deerhoof "my pal foot foot" (5RC)**
7. sightings "reduction" (load)
8. johannes silentio "étude #3" (monoculture)
9. tim hecker "the work of art in the age of cultural over production" (alien8)
10. yoko ono "cough piece" (epc)

* beach boys cover
** shaggs cover

on a completely unrelated note, has anybody heard the sex gang children's creepy as shit cover of the stones song "as tears go by"? the band is called the sex gang children, the singer sounds like and sings like a child molester, and he's singing about "watch[ing] the children play" (think: "suffer little children" by the smiths only without the narrative distance). quite different from my cover and, yep, they've ruined the song for me forever.

7/31/04

IRONIC MOMENTS IN TELEVISION HISTORY #374

as you may or may not know, carson daly of mtv's total request live fame has a talk show on nbc after conan o'brien. carson daly being one of the slowest-witted people on tv, watching the man, unable to carry a conversation with adults, being out-smarted by b-list celebrities or betraying his staggering ignorance makes for an entertaining watch. one time, chloe sevigny was in the middle of an anecdote about being at a dance club on smiths night when carson goes, "smiths night? how can they have a smiths night? what, do they play 'how soon is now' on a loop for four hours?"

but that's not what i'm here to write about. tonight, moments after conan chatted it up with patti smith over the end credits, carson's house band played a knuckle-dragging cover of pennywise's "perfect people" (yes, knuckle-dragging even compared to pennywise) and carson was playing guitar with them. that transition from conan to carson daly, from patti smith to pennywise, perfectly captured both a generation gap i seem to be caught between (born in 1981 as i was, i'm technically one of "the last year of gen x-ers") and the youth culture demographic shift (somewhere between 1995 and 1998) that came with it. generation x may be shallow, but at least they never mistook homogenised bullshit for punk rock. and at least they can appreciate irony, shallow as it might be coming out of janeane garofalo or douglas coupland. i mean, reality bites makes me want to smoke heroin and fast, but i'd rather have janeane garofalo speak to (or, heaven forbid, for) me than carson daly. before launching into his monologue, carson said to the crowd, "how many people here have heard of pennywise? google them, they're good." and he was completely unaware of it. here is a total braying moron with a pretty face with his own tv show playing along to a song with these lyrics:

all the perfect people, shallow and deceitful
staring back at me on tv and magazines
looks so good like a box of fresh wrapped twinkies
what the hell happened to me?

so i took a drive to a rich and wealthy country
saw everything i wanted and everything i need
i walked right up and i tried to join their party
you should have seen them look when they saw me

we're not much to look at, too short, dumb, and so fat
never gonna win a beauty pageant, it's a curse
always gonna be a better doorman at the best clubs
how could things be any worse?

you don't have much to go on, i don't want your opinion
don't have much to gain and i ain't got much to lose
looks like you got it all and i'd really like to get some
you got something i could use

fucked up eyes, stupid grin
the perfect people won't let me in
who's who list, where's my name? they won't let me join their game
i bet that you think that i'm insane
there's no one left for me to blame
screw the perfect people, fuck they all look the same.

constantly, i slag my mid-90's mall-punk listening past — or i deny that it existed altogether — but, had it not been for those warped touring days, i would have missed out on ironic moment in television history #374.

ADDENDUM: speaking of pop-punk (i promise this will never happen again), go to guttermouth's website and scroll down to "Guttermouth not playing the 2nd leg of the Warped Tour." apparently, they got kicked off this year's warped tour for heckling my chemical romance, a band i've actually never heard of but who are apparently mall punk superstars with considerable clout in the warped tour world. this is their half-witted, illiterate rant about the ordeal (re: staggering ignorance, i love phrases that begin with "one of the last punk bands out there who..." après moi la merde). see also: magnétophone's interview with guttermouth in which the band graciously plays along with being called out.

7/29/04

TWO PLUGS

monoculture 012:

Johannes Silentio Études 1-7

retro website of the week:

The Advantage

7/12/04

SONIC NURSE

i got the new SY today. i'm happy that they're getting art superstars to do their covers again, but they went from gerhard "europe's greatest modern painter" richter¹ to raymond "the new goya" pettibon² to mike "gross" kelley³ to... richard prince? what, was julian schnabel busy filming his autobiopic? speaking of total charlatans (in this case just someone whom i suspect of being one), i'm watching the cremaster cycle this week and i'll finally know for sure whether it means a damn thing when the new york times calls someone "the most important american artist of his generation."⁴

notes

1. michael kimmelman
2. benjamin h. d. buchloh
3. me
4. michael kimmelman (again with the superlatives)

7/06/04

POP SONGS FOR GUITAR STRINGS, TAPE HISS, AND PROLEPSIS,
or: WHEN BEING SELF-CONSCIOUS IS NOT ENOUGH

from the faq page of nra's website — Q: why do your records all sound the same? A: because you probably only listened to them once or twice.

since the release of pop songs for guitar, drums, and cégeste, i have been told by many that, because "the songs all sound the same," they had difficulty making it past the first third of the album. to them i offer this:

"[...] if Turn on the Bright Lights did have a shortcoming, it lied [sic.] with its initial sameness. The album — like Sigur Rós' Agaetis Byrjun, like The Strokes' Is This It, like The Shins' Oh, Inverted World — took a few intense listens before its second half became at all distinguishable from its first. When it did, though, it became obvious that its idiosyncrasies were due not to weak songwriting but to the record's unified production aesthetic.

"Shooting for uniform production takes confidence and ego: If the band can balance it with faultless songwriting, it pays off doubly, acting as glue to form a cohesive vision [...]" (ryan schreiber).

i'm not comparing the last r.mutt record to any of the boring and overrated albums mentioned above (though the record was influenced by such homogeneous pop albums as heavenly vs. satan, the mr. t experience's love is dead, and the entire galaxie 500 discography), but i think schreiber illustrated rather well what i was trying to do on pop songs... in using the exact same rhythm on what i think are very different songs. the songs all have very different melodies, they are structurally distinct (chord progressions, keys, etc.), and i especially wanted to explore whether compositionally inventive songs (i.e. not verse/chorus/verse) would sound different from one another if they were played the same way.

on my prolepsis e.p., i prefaced seven pop songs with a nine minute track of tape hiss and guitar noise. the conceit of the album drew from the poetic trope of prolepsis as defined in paul fry's the poet's calling in the english ode (yale up, 1980). fry argues that odes always implicitly narrate their own failures and, through this narrative allegory, the poem becomes an ode to itself. the point of prolepsis' first track, apart from its consistency with the rest of the e.p., which, being recorded on a four track, used tape hiss as a fifth instrument, was as a rhetorical gesture, a literal prolepsis, to prop the e.p.'s lyrical theme of being and not being listened to. apparently, it worked too well, as few listened through those nine minutes.

the ubiquitous rhythm on pop songs... is hardly a nine minute noise track, but the point of the album was to explore what is essential in the pop song form and to see whether it could be shown to be independent of something so inconsequential as style. but — and i hadn't realised this — as schreiber has points out, these questions can't be answered without "a few intense listens," so perhaps i have created another prolepsis.

ADDENDUM: INTRODUCING THE (IMAGINARY) POP RÉSISTANCE

it is worth noting, however, that the conceit of pop songs... was a collection of songs that nobody listens to, an aestheticist project that, i imagined, would fall into itself and be political in the C86/IPU/Slumberland/Sarah Records tradition. the album was recorded in bedrooms, closets, and laundry rooms in southeast portland and, with the exception of the thirty-first song, every sound on the album was created by either tape hiss, my voice, hand claps, a quasi sample, a red light sting sample, or an electric guitar (not plugged into the amp and with a microphone next to the fretboard or, when you hear distortion, played straight into the four track). my point was to create something at once personal and, because of this, political. the conceit of the album was someone playing guitar and singing softly to him/herself in a bedroom somewhere (hence the unplugged electric guitar), the kind of music that happens everyday that nobody hears, the kind of music you play for only yourself. in my mind, the narrative conceit was aestheticist in that it was music with no social purpose, agenda, or, above all, function, but the fact that it did exist (socially — in this case, it was recorded and does exist beyond the bedroom — and otherwise) was the point for me: a recouping of the pop song from its current economic, mercenary, spectacular, and, yes, propagandistic functions (in the way that l'art pour l'art was a just as much a political gesture in the mid-to-late nineteenth century as dada was in the early twentieth). more on this and the (imaginary) pop résistance later.

7/05/04

THEODOR ADORNO V. PAUL CELAN

1. yesterday, i saw a woman driving her mercedes benz five kilometres an hour with her dog following behind. it had to be explained to me that she was walking her dog. how do you write lyric poetry after something like that?

2. dein schönes Haar Sulamith: li'l pocketknife "disco dancer"

3. speaking of elegies, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of michel foucault's death, some likely neo-conservative moron wrote this article dissing him. now, while i think i share a few of foucault's views, i certainly don't agree with everything he has said (to be honest, there is a large body of his work i haven't read) and i do acknowledge the limits of many of foucault's better known ideas. however, the author of the article in question (which seems to only let you access it once before making you pay, so watch out) throws shit at foucault's ideas with ignorance, miscomprehension, stupidity, and, through it all, vehemence that even i cannot match (see my incoherent rant in this blog on 1/26/04). the following passage is a particularly frightful example:

Michel Foucault was not just wrong; he erased any possibility for proving himself to be right. He asserted that "the author" did not exist, that he or she is condemned to produce a work defined by customs of literature, and created through a language imposed on the mind from without. How can we believe an author who tells us the author does not exist, who writes in an objective prose that objectivity does not exist, this historian who tells us that we cannot write history? His canon is self-invalidating.

wow. had he been in my undergraduate lit theory class, bill ray would have failed his ass so quickly...

4. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the "Leningrad" symphony while Nazi bombs fell all around him, but he's not the Greatest Band of All Time. —ritchey

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