Again, this is weird from an American perspective in al sorts of ways, e.g.: (1) Hedwig getting such an enthusiastic reaction on a popular television show, (2) that two distinct theatrical runs of the show have been so overwhelmingly successful in their own rights that the crowd responds ecstatically to both actors singing together on a song that would probalby be censored from American network television.
I suspect that the political situation in Korea gave the play a resonance that it might not have for even the most sympathetic American viewer. But, again, it just is the case that South Korea is cool in all sorts of way (cf. barbecue). Hedwig in Korea is all over youtube, but unfortunately none of the wikipedians have become obsessed with this yet..
Saturday, April 21, 2012
O.K. For what it's worth, putting one's own (badly recorded*) weird songs together with putatively open source cartoons and on the interwebs actually can have some payout.
There's a non-trivial chance that I might have a non-trivial involvement in a live run of Hedwig and the Angry Inch down here in Louisiana next year, directed by one of my favorite directors, but I can't say anything more about this at the moment.
Even if this comes to nothing (and it might, or my involvement might just be helping with vetting other musicians who do the actual work), just mastering and memorizing the songs this Summer in preparation for the possibility will be a whole truckload of awesome sauce. I mean, I like Hedwig as much as South Koreans, and I love South Korea all the more for Hedwig's reception there. But South Louisiana may not be so different from South Korea.
[Notes:
*My ear for melody is really quite good, but hearing loss and tinitus makes me not so good at hearing actual and potential timbre. Stuff that works live doesn't work on recordings. When an audiophile friend of mine showed me how Jack White actually put bass guitar in his studio albums (just to get the timbre perfect), even though their live shows sounded fantastic without bass guitar, I realized I had no hope here. My ears are just too messed up to spontaneously hear the difference. I'm not complaining though. My friend can help me hear things with respect to other people's music, and this is a humongous blessing with respect to my love of RAWK.]
Many, many, many people claim to be "spiritual but not religious."
This always mystified me, because I am almost compulsively the opposite, religious but acutely anti-spiritual (and I won't belabor this here other than to point out that this is an ethical issue for me, and not out of any misguided scientism).
Anyhow, as with any stance, one becomes in consequence a characteristic sort of mark, gullible with respect to various things relavent to the stance.
In THIS POST I claim to have discovered the only overtly religious songs I've ever written. But my wife Emily took umbrage, citing four other songs. But I don't think she's correct.
Exhibit A,Santa Sangre, which I've posted at right (the timbre's horrible for the first thirty seconds; hang on to the beginning of the second verse and you'll see that it actually gets much more bearable). The title means "Holy Blood," but it's really just about the movie of the same name. Anyone who has seen the movie can associate the lyrics with the relevant scenes (I actually have a video from the movie, but can't post it because of copyright; weirdly, youtube is not sure if what I did post is really open source, thus the advertisements which do not benefit me at all, but rather profit the group who claims that they might have a copyright on some of the posted visuals; it's actualy an honor that somebody thinks that they might make money off of this).
Exhibit B, The Zoo. This song mentions God, but most people would consider it irreligious, as the narrator claims in the opening verse that "God is a little retarded kid." But I actually had intended to write a song about Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" and this is what fell out. I think it becomes clear as the song progresses.
Exhibit C, song titled Sheep, twice contains the lyrics "said Lazarus to Jesus // No one will believe us // and I want to be dead." This is frankly the most nihilistic thing I've ever written in any medium. . . Weirdly though, the muse gave me the lyrics and melody in graduate school when Emily and I were walking back to the department from a restaurant called "Burritos as Big as Your Head." And it was almost exactly after realizing that I was hopelessly in love that I came up with it. But Emily did not think I was a weirdo when I shared it with her, and the rest is history. All this being said, contra Emily, I still don't think it's a religious song. The nihilistic schtick is just a common gen ex trope and isn't really about anything theological per se.
Exhibit D, song titled Babylon. This is the most minimalist melody I've written thus far. I think there are only three notes in the whole thing! But it does have the rather portentious lyrics "You're not the Whore of Babylon // I am not the Christ // But they stuck you on a tree // and they treated me real nice." But this was actually about an ex-girlfriend, not really about anything religious, and in any case, the whole thing veers dangerously close to U2 type anti-rock suckitude (for a much better, vastly more punk rock song about dead love that never actually go produced, check out THIS ONE; it's objectively better than any of the ones linked to here).
One weird thing that I've just noticed. None of the recordings of any of these songs have any distortion in the guitar. Someday (all my music friends with kids only start playing again at the point when their youngest enters first grade) I'm going to write a song with religious tropes that has distortion (as do most of my songs). I can't think of any good religious songs with distorted guitar off-hand. . . maybe something from Hedwig and the Angry Inch? I don't know; this is worth exploring.
Certain songs work both in and at the limit (in the sense of Batterman's work on emergence) of some human emotional trope. But this is exceedingly rare.
This song does not work for some people because it's just very hard to succeed at the gambit where melody, rhythm, and timbre are inappropriate to the subject matter. Sometimes this trope paradoxically captures the subject matter better, or might even be the only way to capture it, but when it does not work it's a catastrophic aesthetic failure.
Re: the subject matter- It's just an actuarial fact; anybody who lives long enough could actually write just as freaked out a song about all of the people they cherish and have have lost. When you get to a certain age you can count the people you know who have passed on in awful circumstances. But in fact you don't count them up because part of getting along in the world is suppressing exactly this.
Jim Carroll's own passion somehow gave him the ability to write a great rock song that does not forget this horror, that is, if the central gambit actually works.
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.
I can't post it here; it's just too much worse than the Royal Shakespeare Company version, `a droite. Also check out Charlotte Courdet's great song at 6:40, mourning all that we once read in Rousseau.
Collins would have pulled it off if Tom Waits had organized the music. For all of Collins' mamoth skills (among other things, she discovered Leonard Cohen) the instrumentation on her cover masks over herky jerky syncopation of the original.
Anyhow, here's lyrics from the libretto, which I just ordered from Amazon.
4 years after the revolution and the old kings execution 4 years after remember how those portia took their final bow
String up every aristocrat Out with the priests and let then live on their fat
Four years after we started fighting Marat keeps up with his writing Four years after the bastille fell He still recalls the old battle yell
Down with all of the ruling class Throw all the generals out on their ass
Why do they have the gold Why do they have the power why why why why why Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We've got nothing always had nothing Nothing but holes and millions of them Living in holes Dying in holes Holes in our bellies and Holes in our clothes
Exerpt from Blaine Hardin's Escape from Camp 14HERE.
Shin Dong-hyuk is the only person known to escape from the North Korean gulag. It's frankly amazing to me that people are born into that life because of something their ancestors did. The guardian story describes what it is like to grow up there.
Braver, Paul Livingston, and A.W. Moore are the holy trinity of contemporary pluralism, roughly analogous to the role Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie play vis a vis rock (it would be cool if this was a homology, with each philosopher corresponding to a specific glam rocker.
I don't think the book I'm working on now on analytic anti-representationalism and speculative realism (focusing mostly on Robert Brandom and Graham Harman) would be possible had I not studied Braver's A Thing of this World so closely. Analogously, learning a couple of David Bowie albums and playing them with a band made it possible for me to write songs with decent melodies (for what that's ended up being worth).
I'm interested in what might distinguish pseudo-pluralism from genuine pluralism and might post something in THIS DISCUSSION at Newapps.
HERE Levi gives voice to the most important existential freakout of our benighted age. Nothing compares in relevance. Key exerpt:
But generally the answer is that I’m literally horrified by the fact that collectively we have knowledge (and I’m not making any bullshit, postmodern qualifications about this) or that an argument is better than another, and the fact that changes nothing. We know yet nothing changes. It drives me nuts. We have the better argument (and no, I’m not saying I always have the better argument, though narcissistically I suffer from the flaw of thinking I do) and it doesn’t persuade. It drives me nuts. I’m horrified by this. My horror first began with how the American public responded following 9-11 (especially in the lead up to the Iraq war). It’s grown worse and worse in the intervening years as I’ve watched growing religious fanaticism (which is mainstream Christianity in the States… Sorry Episcopals, UU’s, and UCC’s, you’re the minority), as I’ve watched mainstream responses to our economic problems, as I watch the way in which environmental issues are shuffled off the table. It drives me crazy.
Me and Neal Hebert's favorite play has something to say about this too:
We few survivors We few survivors walk over a quaking bog of corpses always under our feet every step we take rotted bones ashes matted hair under our feet broken teeth skulls split open
A mad animal I'm a mad animal
Of course the inmates of Charenton (and Hebert actually hales from Charenton Louisiana, look it up) lived through the revolution and the coming of Napoleon. Levi, me, Neal, the lovers, the dreamers, Kermit the Frog, etc., and all the other prophets reading this, see what is coming and know the same despair.
Don't be deceived.
But what is clarity worth if it makes no difference? Maybe Episcopelianism or Presbyterianism or Hegelianism (assuming that Cassandra at least is part of Spirit knowing itself) maybe helps here, or maybe it makes it worse. I don't know.
The Jesus and Mary Chain are incredibly weird because they write these gorgeous melodies that many songwriters would sell their souls to be able to produce, and then they just about cover those melodies completely up with feedback and noise. Richter gets that this is the key tension that defines the band and makes them canonical and has all sorts of interesting things to say about it.
Local NBC affiliate HERE. I'm on screen briefly with co-writer Frankie Worrell at around 1:23 (you have to follow the link; I couldn't embed it, so the thing to right is a song whose relevance will be clear by the end of this post).
This is the second time recently that this has happened, where I get interviewed and then they get a better scoop and so use that person instead of me. Last time they showed a picture of me kissing a pig (long story) while interviewing LSU Football Coach Les Miles. My pig-kissing was a fine visual, but I couldn't compete with Miles for interview time.
The visual of me talking with Frankie is not quite as cool as the other story, both because it doesn't involve a friendly miniature pig, and because it's barely two seconds.
Anyhow, this time I was bested by one of the LSU Department of Political Science theorists (sinister hint of Strauss intended), Jim Stoner, who doesn't even coach a football team. Other than that he's a lovely man though, and I think it comes out in the interview.
I had the interviewer and the people surrounding me laughing a couple times though, which I think is why he put the extraneous two seconds in. And what is life without laughter? Can Stoner claim as much for his fifteen minutes?*
With me, the interviewer kept pushing in subtle ways to say bad things about the students, which I wasn't willing to do. And that's where it would get a little bit funny. For example, one train of questioning involved why college students would want to skip classes if they were paying for their education. I couldn't bring myself to put down my own students, so instead said that I imagined it might beat working in the real world. Then the interviewer pressed me about that, so I quoted the Elvis Costello song above, the bit about thrilling and killing, which got laughs. This kind of thing happened a number of times.
I've been nervous all day that they would go with that kind of stuff and it wouldn't come out the way it was to the interviewer and the group of people who'd gathered to watch the dialectic.
Anyhow, I'm just happy to be at a beautiful campus with telegenic colleagues and coaches at least. Joe Bob says check it out.
[Note:
*When I started this post, I'd wanted to write something about how television was a "cool" media in the McLuhanian sense, and that I'm clearly more a radio man, but I couldn't ultimately bring myself to do it. I should note that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are in line in front of me as I type this. So I must be very careful.]
The only expensive article of clothing I own is a blue Burberry raincoat.
Last week the left pocket tore, and I haven't yet sewn it up. I don't know if I can bring myself to, because of the very real chance that doing so might bring down the wrath of all of the Gods of the rock and roll pantheon.
In any case, being the pedant that I am (combined with an unseasonable amount of precipitation) of course I took the advantage to show every colleague in my department that my blue raincoat had torn.
I don't know who is less rock and roll, me for multiply making an allusion without putting any work into it to make it at least clever (the horror, the horror- spectre of "Scary Movie" type pretend humor), or my colleagues for not knowing the Leonard Cohen song. Probably me. I am at a rock and roll nadir. . . you can understand now why I don't dare fix the torn pocket.
This being said. Dammit, what happened? When I first heard the song (drinking jug burgundy and eating as many free hotdogs as my distended belly could hold, sitting on the floor of Mark Silcox's crap apartment that didn't even have its own bathroom as Cohen came out through his little Fischer Price record player) I just assumed that this was the kind of big boy music that being a philosopher entitled you to savor and understand. In retrospect, that was a dumb thought, but it felt revelatory at the time.
I think I might be teaching the first graduate seminar on Graham Harman in the United States. At least two of my students are applying for this awesome summer institute at Bonn on the new ontology (teachers including Hagglund, Brassier, Harman, Grant, and Zizek!) and as part of a class on Derrida with my colleague Francois Raffoul they should get a chance to work through some of Hagglund's work.*
We've started the semester with a huge dollop of Meillassoux and Harman on Meillassoux (many notes thus far are HERE, this week I'm going to include more stuff on Harman on Meillassoux). Two Springs from now I'm scheduled to teach a class on Meillassoux and Graham Priest which will be awesome, awesome, awesome and which Insha'Allah might form the genesis of some collaborative work with Levi Bryant (at the very least it will form the genesis of some solo work on Bryant, which would also be awesome).
One of the things we've read this semester is Meillassoux's "Spectral Dilemma" essay and Harman's exegesis of parts of Meillassoux's second (currently unpublished) magnum opus L'Inexistence Divine. Strangely, I was able to lead a discussion of some of the material in the article in the current adult sunday school class I'm doing on the Meaning of Jesus.
So I think today, February 12, 2012 might be the first time Meillassoux has been taught in an adult sunday school class (notes on that class HERE; Meillassoux is mentioned multiple times in different contexts).
I do not think my teaching bits of Meillassoux today will be the last time that conscientious Christians will struggle with his ideas in churches though, for a couple of reasons.
Being within fifty years of a folk musical culture rooted in catchy melodies where most people who can play instruments do play instruments.
Being within fifty years of a time when copyright was not enforced well.
A social milieu where it is not utterly irrational to collectively hope for things to get better.
Of course none of these things any longer hold in the United States (see the third post above for the argument).
Thus it seems to me that all of us former footsoldiers in Rock's Army really need to be asking ourselves the following empirical question. Are any parts of the world that do satisfy all three of these conditions?
My guess is that the best options are Brazil, Turkey, recent Arab Spring states (if things go well), and those sub-saharan African contries that have had really good decades (this never makes it in the American news). Possibly Indonesia as well?
I don't know enough about the ecosystem of folk music in Arab countries or Indonesia. One thing I think that might hinder rock there is that Muslim worship does not use music like Christian (especially evangelical and charismatic) worship does. I may be biased here, because I learned to play guitar myself in a charismatic church (as a child I actually provided background music to several violations of the laws of nature, and probably would not have become a philosopher had I not reacted as a child so strongly against the serial hypocrisy of Christian conservatives). But it is just true. So much of the blues and early rock had a symbiotic relationship with American Christian churches, for example Jerry Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart are first cousins and in fact learned to play piano together both at church and at honkytonk bars they'd sneak out to as teenagers.
This being said, several people have told me that Constantinople has perhaps the most exciting music scene in the world today, with what people are doing with traditional Turkish folk tunes in the manner that early rock took from the blues and Appalachian music (actually blues and Appalachian and Cajun music were all influencing each other long before recordings), and some of the music from Tahrir, Tunisia, and Libya was pretty amazing.
Who knows how all this will turn out? But just as it gives me great joy to know that it is not impossible that there is some planet in the universe with creatures like us, but not nearly so flawed, it gives me great joy to know that Rock may be being reincarnated as I speak in entirely different cultural millieus.
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've been a huge fan of Marcus' since his classic book on the Sex Pistols and the Situationism. The Atlantic has a wonderful interview about the Doors book HERE. He's really insistent that he's interpreting the songs, not focusing on the whole sad fable of Mr. Mojo Risin.
And here's a really nice bit that articulates something central to everyone who loves music (and it resonates with me now at the age of 41 even more than it would have when I was a teenage mark for this kind of thing):
There are moments when a lot is at stake, or a lot seems to be at stake, and that can be your own identity, what you’re going to do with your life, whether you’re going to walk through the rest of the day miserable and angry, or feel transported as if everything is in perfect balance. What I love in music, more than anything, is the feeling a listener can so often get, that so much is riding on whether or not the song you’re listening to is going to realize the ambitions you feel inside—whether it’ll resolve itself in a way that will make you think, “I’m so privileged to have been alive to hear the song the way I heard it just now.” That’s what I mean by stakes. When a work of art can raise the feeling that’s all out of proportion to reality. That the fate of the world depends on whether or not a song is going to come out the way it should.
And Marcus' focus on the absolute value of putting something out there into the void (best articulated in his chapter in the book about the movie Pump Up the Volume) is tonic for all of the legions of failed musicians and writers toiling in obscurity.
The long essay that that’s a part of is about the whole oppression of the 1960s as a frame of reference that’s been handed down to later generations, this whole myth of transformation and courage and rebellion, when everything was up for grabs and now it’s all over and nothing like this will happen again, and older people saying to young people “you missed it”—and god knows how many students I’ve had since 1971 when students came to Berkeley and said, “we missed it, we got here too late, it’s all over!” And I thought this is terrible, it’s not the way you’re supposed to feel when you’re 18 or 19, but I’ve heard the same things in this century. And it’s a form of oppression, the way they’ve been led to feel, that it all happened then, whether it was cultural, political, or most thrillingly you couldn’t tell the two apart, and now everything is separate.
Marcus wants to save the Doors' music from this kind of art killing nostalgia, but also to save himself and the rest of us I think.
If songs could be patron saints, this one would be.
"Dum Dum Boys" is in fact now a sort of secret code for everyone crushed by nostalgia for their old bands.
I don't even remember the names of all of the bands I've been in. Here are a few: Apocalypse Rock, Side Effects, Ben Wa Blues, Seems Green, Gods and Monsters, Devil in My Pocket. . .
Most of these bands were never very good, and sometimes acutely and painfully (for the listener) terrible. But, in the weird way of RAWK, all of them were sometimes great.
That's what I enjoy when I see live music now, those transcendent instances where people are kind of horrible and great at the same time, or even just great in spite of everything arguing against greatness.
Sometimes at Church I get so engrossed in the sign language that end up tuning out everything else. The hymns amaze me for reasons that are hard to articulate.
I don't know. My favorite novel in the whole world is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and when I see deaf people engrossed in conversation I have to make myself not stare. It's captivating, but there's something rude about being so captivated by people just having a conversation.
Anyhow, this is a really fun video made by the Deaf Professional Arts Network. The song is one of my favorites too and the performances make me happy to be alive. Kudos to the White Stripes for releasing copyright.
The little girl in purple is a force of nature too. She reminds me of my daughter Audrey.
After the jump, another sign language cover of Cee Lo's recent great R&B classic, (NSFW! NSFW! stating the very title of the song would violate core blogging rules). It's a fantastic, fantastic peformance though. So fantastic that I know I should get some idea for an aesthetics paper from it, but I'm just too busy rocking out!
I am thankful for many things that Burroughs fails to list. Among them are the fact that I don't have to eat Turkey or any of the other traditional Thanksgiving Day food today.
The thing is, none of that food is really very good. Consider: green beans, sweet potato casserole with burned marshmallows on top, flavorless mashed up potatoes, weird marshmallow and tangerine salads, tumor-like lumps of bread, pumpkin pie, sweaty/greasy "stuffing", that weird cranberry jello crap congealing in water at the bottom of your plate. . . Yuck! And everything criminally under spiced and usually overcooked (by design!) to boot. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
It's always a bum deal when you imbibe too much of something that's not very good, as almost everyone who can afford it in this country does.
In addition to not having to eat any of that stuff this year (Emily made a jambalaya) I'm thankful for many other things: not being in prison, still having my health, not being hungry, and not being in a war zone. Anyone who can be thankful for these things should be. I'd still be thankful for them even if I was overeating Turkey right now.
Positive stuff to be thankful for: family, students, church, music, literature, and philosophy.
And curmudgeons like William S. Burroughs. An American in the best sense of the word.
As of the time of uploading, this video has only been viewed seventy one times (fast-foreword to the fifty second mark for the beginning of the song proper). I find this appalling, unacceptable, indicative of a hopeless age. . . but also strangely affirming at the same time.
I mean, some things are still unpolluted. They are what they are, and that is enough. The implosion of the traditional market for music has resulted in popular musical forms being disseminated in the manner of 1920s folk art. Given all the other civilizational detritus with which we have to contend, this can be liberating.
In any case, I hope to be able to provide some evidence for the claim that the number of downloads for this band's songs should be several million more than seventy one. The justification will almost certainly involve reference both to one of Mark Lance's weird superpowers and to a noble band of chrononauts all alone, lost in time yet still sacrificing themselves on the alter of RAWK.
There's something liberating about realizing that one is so uncool that there is not even a possibility of achieving post-cool ironic coolness.
This awareness is somewhat related to the liberation that most people who attend big state schools achieve. I remember the moment when I was walking around on U.T.'s West Mall and realized that nobody walking around me cared about what I was up to.
Contrast this with high school, where you feel like you are always being watched. This is in part just adolescence, but also the shark tank aspect of American high schools.
I feel sorry for kids in fraternities and sororities. They end up stunted in various ways precisely because the whole "Greek" system is too much a continuation of the high school hegemony of cool.
Two nice (HERE and HERE) slate stories on the ludicrous way that MTV is covering Occupy Wall Stret. The first story is a general account of what has led MTV to its currrent nadir. At a couple of points the nostalgia shines through, but it's not too phony.
In any case, I don't think any Dead Kennedy's fans in 1984 could possibly have imagined Jersey Shore and the like. Maybe lead singer Jello Biafra did though, but he somehow hacked off the God Apollo so then nobody believed Biafra about any of this stuff.
And being able to say "I told you so" is just about the worst form of consolation I can imagine.
It's really amazing how the "fiddlesticks" method ends up producing something that sounds so much like the way drums can sound in Indian classical music.
This is fiddle legend Dewey Balfa singing and fretting the instrument, and his nephew Todd drumming on the strings. Keep watching through until Dewey stops bowing and Todd is still drumming. It's otherworldly.
The footage is from Yasha Aginsky's documentary "Les Blues de Balfa," which I plan to see ASAP.
This is the funnies thing I've heard since when I was a kid listening to Richard Pryor records.
It just get's funnier and funnier, until the point at the very end where Louis C.K. hypothesizes that flesh eating space-alien lizards cannot directly answer questions concerning their true nature.
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.
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