As a general rule, any song containing the word "world" sucks. This is the exception that proves that.
Anyhow, for some reason, reading about the Battle of Midway provoked this song.
Given that I learned to play guitar in a charismatic church, and in fact provided background music for all sorts of purported violations of the laws of nature (healings, prophecies, speaking in tongues, etc.), it actually surprises me that I haven't written more things like this. . .
As usual, my ability to get a decent timbre in the recording is completely undermined by high frequency hearing loss and Van Gogh level tinnitus in my right ear. I mean, I can still hear underlying melodies, but that's about it. But, as usual with me and Emily's stuff, if (big if) you can get past the timbre it's actually an O.K. tune.
One final note: People are often weirdly embarrassed for you when you share creative eructations. I actually think most readers of this blog have experienced this with respect to some media, e.g. songs, poems, paintings, theatrical reinterpretations, novels, Dungeons and Dragons modules, ideas for philosophy books, uncharitably read articles, etc. etc. etc.
But here is the main irony. The phenomenology of creative activity is so passive that the humiliation from people who find our endeavors embarrassing never really registers. This is true for me and I think all of my wonderful weird friends who sustain me with analogous crap that goes far over and above the coffee spoon tasks that house and feed them (Neal Hebert, Mark Silcox, Graham Harman, Chris Bateman, Emily love of my life, Levi Bryant, Derrick Huff, Eric Ward, etc. etc. etc. . . .).
I mean, Kant was wrong about all that stuff about determining one's own teleology. Kerouac's weirdos are just not responsible for very much. If you don't like what we're up to, file your complaint with the muse.
This is the first time I've attended the Pacific Division of the American Society for Aesthetics (program HERE). I'm commenting on a paper by Robert Stecker, which is a little bit intimidating, but pretty cool nonetheless.
The other cool thing is that the conference is being held at the Asilomar Conference Center, which was designed by Julia Morgan the same architect who designed the Hearst Castle. I'm as excited about staying in one of Morgan's buildings as I am about the conference.
The food from these places is out of this world, better than most restaurant meals you get anywhere.
The fricking cool thing for me is that these are LSU graduates. It's validating that we're helping to produce students who can come straight out of school and do something this great.
I went to high school with Octavia Spencer, at "Jefferson Davis High School"* in Montgomery Alabama. I doubt she'd recognize me today, but we did have some close friends in common.
In my experience, it's not that uncommon that people from states who were on the right side in the Civil War can't quite understand how those of us in the crap states can possibly love (and yes be thankful to) these places.
You can see it here when Spencer thanks the state of Alabama at around the seventeen to twenty second point. A sizable portion of the audience laughs as if she'd just made a joke.
But she wasn't making a joke.**
Let me just say that there are worse places to live than Alabama.***
Pakistan is objectively pretty awful in all sorts of ways. But only complete idiots would get mad at Pakistan or begrudge the fact that, for example, many of the authors at 3quarksdaily clearly love Pakistan and all sorts of great things about it (and through this love they are able to provide some of the most insightful criticism of the past, present, and future horrors anywhere on the web).
If I had a quarter for every time a colleague from a nicer state laughingly called Louisiana or Alabama a "third world country" I'd have at least a twenty dollar bill. But the thing is, none of these people would talk about actual third world countries in such dehumanizing ways. . .****
I don't get it.
Oh well, I'm going to go back to being happy for Octavia. I'm almost certain (memory is almost precarious as justice*****) that I remember seeing Octavia perform actual magic in a "Jefferson Davis High School Drama Club" production of a really odd play based on Frank Zappa's song about Valley Girls.****** It was pretty difficult for my less dramatically talented friends acting with her in these things, because Octavia had this wonderful supernatural power to make people laugh. The biggest part of getting the play down was for the other actors and actresses to stay in role and not crack up. And during practices they'd improvise and by improvising without cracking up get themselves emotionally controlled enough to actually perform the play with someone of Octavia's talents.
I think this is one of the many things she was thanking Alabama for. . .
But, I must say, sometimes it would end up in more emotion than that scene in the Guenter Grass novel where all the post-War Germans are in a cellar bar, cutting up onions because that's the only way they can cry as the little frozen-in-time kid beats on the drum in the hope that they can weep without the onions. The weird practices and runthroughs of plays with Octavia were beautiful. . .
and I'm not a bad person for loving Alabama or Germany******* or the Dominican Republic and I hope that mandarins won't laugh at me (thinking they laugh with me) if I ever find myself in the position to thank the state of any of them.
[Notes:
*The middle school in the fantastic Danny MacBride vehicle, East Bound and Down, is called "Jefferson Davis Middle School." By using the evil name, MacBride is subtly mocking, with justification, my alma mater. Cue that one Ramones movie! Now! Dammit.
**Sorry. I'm actually getting close here to doing that weird Southern Man thing where you start talking about how wonderful your mother is, and it just gets more maudlin and more maudlin until finally a weeping Billy Bob Thornton throws a chair across the room and then everybody is hugging him and singing "You are my Sunshine" and the music and his waning tears make things seem alright in the universe for a brief time.
***I helped build a church and medical clinic in the Dominican Republic for a couple of weeks at the age of seventeen. It was surreal, and in some sense my theory of the world has never caught up to those experiences. Let me count some of them.
Outhouses!
So much of the time without power or running water in that heat and darkness.
Eating chickens you'd actually befriended over the last few days after seeing their necks broken by the old woman, and being grateful for the protein but also really fricking sad, hoping beyond all hope that that Native American thing where you thank the spirit of the dead bear works with chickens too.
A night so dark you can't see your feet as you try and negotiate a hill.
Waking up with a humongous poisonous spider on your mosquito net, and the guard (who spends thirty minutes every morning coughing up bits of his lungs into a dirty metal sink while the water isn't working) just casually going to work with his machete on the spider. You have to flip it off the net, bat it to the floor, then smash it, then casually dice it into little pieces.
Little stores with banana leaf roofs that sell rotten fruit and the flies. Does anyone actually purchase fly-ridden rotten fruit? They must for the stores to stay in business.
How overwhelmingly depressing are all aspects of prostitution (the "discos" of that era Dominican Republic).
Vaguely sinister spray painted stencils of animals for political parties on doors.
Realizing at the age of seventeen that you don't really lilke the Jesus in the Gospel of John and wondering if you can still be a Christian.
Evidence of voodoo, and what Dominicans think about it.
Dominican pride at not being as bad as Haiti.
A one armed preacher holding the Bible in his one hand gesticulating wildly, preaching in Spanish in a new, full, church of people in Sunday clothes. This isn't so different from Alabama after all.
Possibly the worst. The man in the bed in his shack, dying from an infection in his leg that would not have happened had people had shoes and boiled water before the fact or antibiotics after the fact.
Little barefoot kids in shorts, some with oozing eyes and dust caked into the ooze on their face.
How people without proper nutrition go from looking like little kids to almost immediately looking hunched over from middle age.
Finding oneself at a hotel eating goat (no Native American prayers) from a buffet, and Baby Doc Duvalier and his cortege are just pigging out on the same goat the next table over. They'd fled Haiti and were holed up in the same Dominican hotel. The evil was palpable.
All the missionaries from Central America who'd also fled to the Dominican Republic, but fleeing from evil rather than from justice. . . this in the late 80s, crushed, absolutely crushed, destroyed by Reagen era foreign policy combined with American companies that raped and killed both people and land. . .
The point is, the Dominican Republic objectively did at least in the 1980s suck a lot worse than Alabama in all sorts of ways. But I loved the people there. We played music together and without giving in to Orientalism, I could see beauty and nobility manifest everywhere and love the people who were working to make the place better. If I was a competent writer, I would provide a list of at least seventeen things that illuminate this aspect as much as that above. But I'm not , and this is not uncommon.
Many of us have madeleines that are objectively much more interesting than Proust's. But of course we're not Proust, so any attempt to present it would be pathetic. . . This in itself is not pathetic though, and I think maybe Proust shows as much?
****See previous footnote.
*****"A fickle thing! One law for the common man, another for the king."
******The most irritating drunk I knew in graduate school would never shut the eff up about the musical genius of Frank Zappa. Dude. Give it a rest already! Octavia Spencer won the Oscar!
*******Lived in a small farming village in the Rheinland Phalz in eighth and ninth grade. My dad was stationed there. I won't go on about it. Octavia Spencer won an Oscar.]
I missed THIS ESSAY when it came out a few years ago.
While I tend to have respect for anyone who can write catchy melodies as Joel can, Rosenbaum is really on to something with this:
I think I've identified the qualities in B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.
Then Rosenbaum goes through hit after hit illustrating the thesis.
A couple of observations:
Graham Harman has written about the "sneer from nowhere" that ironic Gen ex hipsters perfected pre-internet and that came to characterize an awful lot of the early blogosphere. I think Rosenbaum's "unearned contempt" is pretty much the same thing.
Academic philosophers give in to unearned contempt much more than people in other fields. For some reason, we feel justified saying nasty things about thinkers and movements we don't know very much about. This is probably worst with analytic and continentals who view the distinction in Baby Boomer culture war terms (not to say only Baby Boomers do this). I think this comes from a kind of anxiety in philosophy that if other people are right about certain things, then your life work might be worthless. I mean, you can't get started on a project unless you presuppose an awful lot. But if those presuppositions are kicked out, then there's no point to what you've been doing.
Incidentally, I think this bit about presuppositions is why orthodox Heideggerians don't make time for Harman. What is overwhelmingly offensive to them is not Harman's critique of correlationism, nor his neo-Aristotelian views, but rather his claim that most of Heidegger's work is just a repetitious restatement of of the tool/broken tool dichotomy. If Harman is correct about this (and he gives arguments, e.g. the discussion of time in Tool Being) then thousands and thousands of books and articles by orthodox Heideggerians might end up being beside the point. This kind of thing is pretty terrifying if you are on the receiving end of it.
Anyhow, the Billy Joel article is really interesting. Joe Bob says check it out.
Disney's old Johnny Appleseed cartoon has to be the most aggressively stupid* movie I've ever watched. The narrator's awe shucks phony ruralish speech patterns (e.g. constant gratuitous insertion of "a," dropping of final gs (we're goin a fishin), and misconjugated verbs) are as grating as anything ever recorded, more grating than Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" or that one PiL album, vastly more grating than either of those, even more grating than the Dukes of Hazard voiceover which was surely modelled on Disney's own 1950s faux populism married to conservative apologetics.
The early Disney cartoons were really quite subversive in their own ways. Think Chip and Dale versus Donald Duck or all of those wonderful old Goofy satires on how-to videos. Or even the full movies such as "The Three Mousketeers." But man the era of McCarthy was not kind to that company.
They did all manner of subliterate patriotic fiction posing as history. The Johnny Appleseed one is really bible thumpy too, which should be bizarre (Christian patriotism? have any of these people read the Gospel of Luke?) but is of course all too common.
[Notes:
*There is nothing morally wrong about stupidity per se, it's aggressive stupidity that is the problem, stupidity that either tries to make other people stupider than we already are or that turns stupidity into a virtue or that comes out of character flaws such as laziness and high self-esteem.]
Some very nice meditations with cool videos and links HERE.
One thing I love about the post is that it is not immediately clear whether the opening gambit applies to my earlier post* or Richter's own post. It could actually apply to both, as long as Richter likes Megadeth's "Peace Sells" and strange performance art involving fish skeletons and the tensions between the thought of Deleuze and Graham Harman.
But Richter's own posted videos have me scrawling through youtube and wikipedia this evening. Really fricking cool stuff.
Finally, it is clear that Richter, Debbie Harry, Mark Wilson (cf. the discussion in Wandering Significance) and I all have in common the fact that we just dig rainbow songs. That was also cool to discover. Also, check out Willie Nelson's version HERE.
[Notes-
*Apologies for instancing human-all-too-human blog recursion,** where you cite a post that cites yours.
**Funhouse hall of mirrors threatening, remembrances of an age where you could freeze someone's computer simply by defining two frames in terms of one, forcing attempted hyper-computation.]
Post mortems of cultural movements are not like real autopsies, which are preferably done while the body is fresh. With culture sometimes it is easier the more time has passed.
Well, enough time has passed. I know now not only that rock is dead but why it died.
Rock and roll has two essential properties: (1) catchy melodies rooted in folk forms (blues, dance hall routines, popular piano sheet music people played at home) that predominated before the advent of mass reproduction of recorded music, (2) the promise of some kind of liberation as part of a broader cultural milieu, whether this is explicitly political or something more inward; this kind of thing is best captured in anthemic music, which was always a part of the beating heart of rock.
Listen to non-oldies radio today and you just don't hear any decent rock. Instead, 99% of it is just aural wall paper for people who have no taste but still have pretensions to style that are themselves hangovers from the age of rock. The melodies are atrocious to non-existent and to the extent that any kind of liberation is promised, it's an absolute parody of what great rock bands (including "grunge" artists) routinely delivered.
Yes there are still a few great rockers, just like there are still people programming text adventure games really well. But bands like the White Stripes truly are the exception that proves the rule, because they would not have been nearly so exceptional in the 1970s (though no less great for that), and other recent great bands such as second through fourth album era Marylin Manson are to some extent minstrelsy (though no less great for that), and other exceptions (to the universal inabilitiy of current bands to write songs that (a) have good melodies, and (b) are meaningfully liberatory) like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Brothers of the Head, are literally minstrelsy. Note that by the end of the Bush administration, none of these bands were even still together.
What brought this about? How did rock die? Who killed it?
First, The victory of recorded over live music. This killed rock in two ways. (a) You used to have to play music to hear it. This created an incredible overabundance of musicians from which a John Lennon could emerge. This created audiences with good ears for melody that would recognize the genius of a Lennon/McCartney, or even, near the end of the era, a David Bowie (before, album after album, producer Tony Visconti allowed him to show up to the studio with bags of cocaine and no written material). Every decade since the advent of the radio, the percentage of people who play competently has decreased. This has been a disaster both in terms of creating a pool of artists, and in terms of creating competent listeners. (b) The copyright regime of the recorded music industry. Even the very best of the originally recorded folkies (Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie) shamelessly plagariazed *and refined* everything they could get their ears on, but as more and more stuff got recorded under the new copyright regime there has been more and more melodies out there that you cannot use and adapt.
Second, the Rousseauan ideal of the 60's rightfully died at Alamount, and communism rightfully so thirty years later. But then what replaced them was just as dishonest and at least far more destructive than the dimbulb liberation of Peace Bear and his little sidekick Hippy Pants, and it is possible that history will end up being less kind to neo-liberalism than to communism.
My God, but punk rock from the Soviet Union was great.
Fantastic essay HERE by Adam Curtis on music and youth rejection in the Soviet Union.
Curtis is motivated by the thought that the widespread failure of communism to deliver what it promised is currently being repeated by neo-liberal regimes in the west, and that this is going to lead to the kind of collapse of belief that produces such great music in the Soviet Union.
To right is Kommunizm's "Stop the Rollin Stones." It's fantastic, Curtis has a video form Letov's other famous band Grob for the song "Everything is Going According to Plan" and then part of a wonderful punk/folk song by Yanka Dyagileva's that includes the lyric "the television is hanging from the ceiling, and no one knows how f***ing low I'm feeling."
In the current epoch, we are all in danger of becoming exactly like Hamlet, as Curtis says, "someone who can see through the superficiality of the present age, but is unable to have any beliefs or even feelings about anything."
Genuine punk is paradoxical because the manner in which it asserts that we are all Hamlet promises the negatation of the assertion. It probably doesn't really work, but this kind of performative contradiction may be all we have left, the only way to recover some smidgeon of beauty and autonomy in a world without rock.
I want to do a post on how much Christopher Hitchens meant to me, but haven't managed to yet.
Brian Leiter's rather nasty memorium is rather mindblowing. Here is Leiter's obituary in total:
Here. A B+ stylist with a C- mind. And let's not forget this display of moral depravity, which probably explains all the fawning in the American media over him.
UPDATE: And another. The best line though goes to a Facebook friend who wrote that she "will be interested to see whether a second-rate pseudo-contrarian narcissistic gasbag KEEPS ON getting more coverage from his fellow journalists than, say, Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong il."
AND MORE from Greenwald. Hitchens's moral depravity was worse than I realized. (Thanks to Keith DeRose for this link.)
As a general rule, Nietzscheans just are not very good judges of literary style. Nietzsche's own rhetoric of loftiness is both damaging to one's ability to differentiate good from bad writing, and also the kind of thing that people who read lots of books come to find almost intolerably irritating by the time they become undergraduate seniors. And I can't believe that anyone who actually reads very much literature would call Hitchens a "B+ stylist."
Leiter is himself a decent writer, and he does a service by putting his brother's poems on his blog, so I'm going to go to an alternate hypothesis. One must ask whether any of these sneering critics have actually read Hitchens' books? The ones on Kissinger, Mother Theresa, or God? His recent memoir? Have any of these people followed all that Hitchens and Martin Amis did to resurrect the literary reputation of Phillip Larkin? Have they even read Martin Amis? Or his father for that matter? Or any of the post World War II "angry young men," and their literary sons and daughters such as Hitchens, Amis, and Tibor Fischer. Ian McCewan (who spent Hitchens' last three days with him) for God's sake? Or even any recent Booker Prize winner? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no.
What an embearassment. As if any of us are better judges of style than Martin Amis and Ian McCewan.
Somehow we've come to the point where there is just zero expectation in analytic or continental philosophy that university professors of philosophy be very well-read. How could this possibly have happened? Somehow the skill set that makes for getting tenure in academic philosophy is at variance with the skill set that produces good humanists. Or maybe the T.V. baby ethos of the age just ruins far more than we suspect.
In any case, Hitchens' God book is just leagues beyond all of the other new atheists combined. Unlike Dennett and Dawkins (excellent writers in their own right) Hitchens' transcendent mastery of style, combined with an A+ intellect, allows him to finally instantiate the appropriate moral outrage, which is why so many religious people ashamed at all of the evil they put up with form their coreligionists revere him (cf. Kierkegaard).
I don't get it! Would Leiter and friends be trashing a recently dead man in this way if that person hadn't supported the war in Iraq? Yeah, Hitchens was disastrously wrong, but everyone I know who like Hitchens has lots of Kurdish friends were wrong in exactly the same way. And if you don't understand why this is the case, then something is missing either in your powers of moral imagination or in your basic grasp of the history of the region.
More tomorrow. I'm so bugged about this right now that I'm on the border of incoherence.
The older I get, the more moved I am by G.E. Moore's two universe thought experiment.
One universe contains things of great beauty and the other does not, while neither contains creatures even sapient enough for the beauty or lack thereoff to make any difference. Moore thinks that it is clear that the beauty containing universe is more valuable than the one that does not contain beauty. If I remember right, for Moore this shows that forms of hedonism that entail that the only intrinsic good is pleasure cannot be correct.
There are all sorts of strategies for dismissing possible world type gedankenexperiments, but I don't think they should make us dismiss Moore's conclusion.
In yesterday's post I talked about Greil Marcus' new chapter on the importance of putting something out there into the void. I think that what he has in mind does the same service as Moore's experience, and moreover expresses a norm quite central to the practice of art.
Most art is never really enjoyed by anybody other than the artist. Think of somebody sitting on the back porch playing the blues. Most such performers never get discovered by anybody, they just make our universe a little bit more beautiful. Now clearly, an undiscovered artist doing this considers the unverse to be a better place for being more beautiful.
The obvious response here is that the performer gets pleasure out of the performance, so this does not show that beauty is intrinsically valuable after all. But consider this Euthyphronic problem. To sustain the anti-Moorean point you'd have to say that the act is valuable because it brings pleasure to the performer. But this is phenomenologically wrong. It goes the other way around. The extent to which the performer derives pleasure from the act is largely the extent to which the performer takes the the act to be valuable.
Moreover, the act does not always bring pleasure. Our weird obsessions with trying to make this universe more beautiful can actually diminish pleasure quite a bit (consider the Van Goghs and Gauguins who never become famous).
The moral here of course is that both beauty and pleasure are intrinsic goods. I wish I could say more about the failed Gauguin case, but I don't think I can. With the exception of propositional logic, philosophy provides no algorithms. And with the exception of digital computers, neither does the universe.
One of the things that's long struck me about that first burst of recorded music in the 1920s is how ethereal and strange the forced high pitched singing of the men could be. Often the songs sound like they are from another planet, both in virtue of the pitch and in virtue of the fact that all of these people being recorded did not initially learn from listening to hit records, but from their local communities. The sheer oddness and diversity of American folk music from the 20's is in large part a function of that. And I think musicians will always return to the recordings of this period because of that.
I've been availing myself of Ann Allen Savoy's masterful Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, which not only is great history, but also includes sheet music transcriptions of a lot of great really early songs.
One thing that fascinates me aesthetically is when people come up with interesting and plausible readings of a text that are consistent with everything the text says, but radically at odds with the author's intentions. Salon dot com has a really nice slideshow of ten prominent cases of this, where the another artwork reinterprets an earlier one, called "What if the villains actually were good?"
Recent Comments