documents a year of listening, at times other forms of cultural consumption, and in rarer cases writings about the ensuing experiences, specifically focusing on the "sharity" phenomenon that made its mark in the latter half of the decade, hundreds (thousands?) of blogs giving away digital copies of experimental music that - for the most part, the exceptions drawing justified ire - had been dificult to find.
A few articles originally published here are now featured in edited/ amended form as part of a larger essay on the "Aughts" at Sweet Pea.
Please begin reading the Blog/ Blob with the essay, "'Sharity' Doesn't Begin at Home."
A Short Essay by Dave Dougas, the "Blogosphere," and Jazz Since 1972
In the course of writing an essay largely about the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians (A A C M) my research made me aware - three years too late - of a series of blog responses to a suggestion made in earnest by Dave Douglas on his own blog at Green Leaf Music's Web site.
In that post of 31 May 2006, Douglas discusses the book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America by Philip Jenkins, in the process making an astute comparison between "the conservative drift of recent [United States] history" and the "demonization of musicians who pushed the boundaries, successfully and importantly" in the 1960's and '70's. Douglas asks, "Is there a writer who can take on the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the Vietnam war?" Confusingly, Douglas then notes that, since Jenkins uses Nixon's resignation in August, 1974, as the end point of a "long" Sixties, this potential history of Free/ modern Jazz should begin then too. With all due respect to Jenkins, and as Douglas already hinted, the end of the U S A war against the Vietnamese in early 1973 serves as a better landmark, coming as it did - not coincidentally - soon after Nixon's re-election at the expense of George McGovern's tragic failure of a presidential campaign.
The discussion that resulted, impelled as it was by the first response - by a fellow musician, Ethan Iverson - took the form of a series of lists of essential Jazz albums of the 1970's and '80's, usually annotated (sometimes, though, only in the form of personal reminiscences of the music's significance to the writer).
Exploring these lists, I've found that, having generally confined myself to the realms of Free Jazz, the A A C M, and European Improvised music, I too have not given a certain kind of modern Jazz its proper place - the kind that rarely gets grouped into such "experimental" realms and yet surely expanded upon the Jazz tradition without being traditionalist. John Carter, Arthur Blythe, The World Saxophone Quartet, Keith Jarrett, Paul Motian, Don Pullen, Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler, among others.... Of course, I'd heard of these artists, and listened to them in some cases, especially Wheeler and Holland with Anthony Braxton and Carter on Horace Tapscott's double-disc The Dark Tree. But I do not have a sufficient working knowledge of the music they have diligently, and generously, contributed to our culture, as I do with Braxton or Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Evan Parker, David S Ware, John Zorn, and so on.
As exemplary as this blog-based discussion was - and as timely too, given that blogs were quickly becoming a major point of discussion in 2006 - this meme: lists of essential post-Vietnam Jazz, surely has its limitations. First of all, the diary-like nature of the blog seemingly excuses sloppiness and at times misinformation. For example, one participant gives the wrong title for an album ("Wigmore Hall Concert" by Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey, actually called First Duo Concert, the confusion apparently arising because the album was reissued at one point by U S, and Japanese, labels as Live at Wigmor [sic]); the person compiling the final list repeats the mistake, not having done much in the way of clarifying the entries. The reader is left wondering if the the lack of organization confirms for the participants the unpredictable dynamic nature of blogging.
One contribution has apparently disappeared: by David Ackerman at Godoggone. This omission from the historical record, however minor, points to another difficulty that await historians trying to delineate cultural developments taking place over the Web. Another example: the comments made to Douglas's initial post have been closed - sensibly enough - but as such have also disappeared from the site.
And, as much as I love lists and discographies, the reader is also left asking to what extent they even begin to help anyone who would want to write about the general course of Jazz music from 1973 onward. We only get the fairest trace of an outline of any conceivable history, especially in Ethan Iverson's emphasis on Keith Jarrett's "American Quartet" or Steve Smith's accolades for John Carter's five-album series collectively titled Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music.
While one could just look at the final list compiled at Visionsong ("It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago"), the discussion - as it is still exists online - took place as such (a "Wrap-Up" and "Coda," as well as three summaries of the responses, at Iverson's Do the Math disappared with that site's reorganization):
31 May 2006:
Dave Douglas, "Post (Vietnam) War Music";
26 August:
Ethan Iverson, Do the Math: "1973-1990";
26 August:
David Ryshpan, Settled in Shipping: "Playing Catchup";
31 August:
Jeff Jackson and Jeff Golick, Destination: Out: "And His Mother Called Him Muhal";
4 September:
Darcy James Argue, Secret Society: "Time Keeps on Slippin', Slippin', Slippin'";
6 September:
Steve Smith, Night After Night: "Even More Records";
6 September:
Pat Donaher, Visionsong: "More Things to Come From Those Now Gone";
the online version of a print magazine takes note:
7 September: Peter Magasak, Chicago Reader, "Overlooked Jazz," prompting a list in the comments from Jason Guthartz;
10 September:
Steve Smith, Night After Night, again: "Vote for Pedro";
28 November:
Taylor Ho Bynum, SpiderMonkey Stories, "Dixon";
and then, the "paper of record" gives its stamp of approval:
6 December:
Nate Chinen, New York Times, "In the Blogosphere, An Evolving Movement Brings Life to a Lost Era of Jazz";
followed by one of London's dailies, the Guardian:
13 December:
John Fordham, "How Behearer.com Rewrote Jazz History."
Steven Smith then wrote an article for e Music that seems to have been inspired by the discussion: "The e Music Dozen: '70s Jazz."
An attempt to turn this discussion to a Web site (Ear of the Behearer) with greater permanence and organization appears to have fallen prey to lack of interest - certainly unfortunate, given that the "wiki" format it uses works quite well for discographies, filmographies, and so on.
Pirates and Producers
A decade ending, a new generation metaphorically taking power in the person of Barack Obama [and, being a member of Generation X - yes, being born in 1961 pretty much places you in such category - appropriately this shift in power has meant next to nothing], deaths unsettling but not surprising...
Perhaps it's fitting that the phonographic legacies of some of the major artists of the Twentieth Century have finally been addressed: namely, The Beatles, Neil Young, and Kraftwerk.
For all the justified critiques coming their way, the two Beatles boxes, taken together, present the recordings made by the band during their actual existence in their entirety (except, apparently, the fan-club Christmas records) as clearly as they've ever been organized, and sounding as good as they ever have. The only glaring mistake about the whole operation is that the mono set - though with fewer discs, and not featuring the short films about each album included with the stereo set - costs more.
Of course, one could ask why the stereo and mono versions can't be put on the same discs, especially as most of the band's albums are shorter than 40 minutes. However, by giving such mainstream attention to the mono mixes, McCartney and co. have given hope to listeners who want proper re-masters of mono versions from other pre-stereophonic era. Here and there, mono versions have been included (such as the deluxe versions of Village Green Preservation Society, Da Capo, or Odyssey and Oracle) but they're certainly exceptions.
I'd assumed that the Young Archives would only feature previously-unreleased tracks. Apparently, I believed so because I wanted so: after all, Young stated clearly enough that Decade provided the model, and that triple L P had mostly been previously-released material. My mistake! Meanwhile, Young's also reissuing his past albums (the Official Release Series), though one wonders if On the Beach, American Stars 'n Bars, Hawks and Doves, and Re-ac-tor will be remastered again, having already been properly done so when finally released digitally in the '90's. And what happened to the soundtrack for Journey Through the Past?
In other words, Young's presenting us with two different versions of his musical biography: the first consists of the Archives sets: album tracks interspersed with rare and previously-unreleased material; but with the live discs (the Performance Series) not always included (or at least disc 0 not included) and being released separately either way, the series having been initiated before the first Archives box. The second consists of the albums themselves, no bonus tracks attached. For those who are purchasing the Blu-Ray versions, perhaps the extra material made available to them will eventually include the album tracks not included on the Archives discs, as well as other rare tracks so far excluded (this latter task is what the Blu-Ray updates have offered so far). One would assume, though, that Young would let potential Blu-Ray purchasers know if such was the case, so that these hardiest of spendthrift fans don't feel inclined to buy the remastered original albums only to find they weren't being ripped off after all. For now, those who want all the material - no matter how they go about it - are indeed being ripped off.
While I've not listened to the Kraftwerk Catalogue yet, it is of course closer to the Beatles sets in that they aim to present the official releases of the time (that is, beyond the first, second, and third albums...) in pristine form; no rarities, nothing new. The original C D's of their albums already sounded decent, so given the apparent care with which Ralf Hütter has remastered them, surely plenty sonic wonders await. As with The Beatles, two alternate versions of the music are presented - in this case, though, the difference comes with the vocals: English- and German-language versions, as the albums were originally released. While one could say that the mono mixes are primary in the case of the Beatles because they were done first, with greater input from the artists, in this case the notion that the German vocals come first is not so clear. On the broader, "meta" level, the band had such a remarkable effect on the music of English-speaking peoples, among many others. And for the individual English-speaking listener, the song being significant even with a band famous for its electronic instrumentation, personal listening experiences of the song in their language reign supreme (unless of course one now listens to the German-language versions so many times the memories of the other versions dissipate).
Perhaps it's fitting that the phonographic legacies of some of the major artists of the Twentieth Century have finally been addressed: namely, The Beatles, Neil Young, and Kraftwerk.
For all the justified critiques coming their way, the two Beatles boxes, taken together, present the recordings made by the band during their actual existence in their entirety (except, apparently, the fan-club Christmas records) as clearly as they've ever been organized, and sounding as good as they ever have. The only glaring mistake about the whole operation is that the mono set - though with fewer discs, and not featuring the short films about each album included with the stereo set - costs more.
Of course, one could ask why the stereo and mono versions can't be put on the same discs, especially as most of the band's albums are shorter than 40 minutes. However, by giving such mainstream attention to the mono mixes, McCartney and co. have given hope to listeners who want proper re-masters of mono versions from other pre-stereophonic era. Here and there, mono versions have been included (such as the deluxe versions of Village Green Preservation Society, Da Capo, or Odyssey and Oracle) but they're certainly exceptions.
I'd assumed that the Young Archives would only feature previously-unreleased tracks. Apparently, I believed so because I wanted so: after all, Young stated clearly enough that Decade provided the model, and that triple L P had mostly been previously-released material. My mistake! Meanwhile, Young's also reissuing his past albums (the Official Release Series), though one wonders if On the Beach, American Stars 'n Bars, Hawks and Doves, and Re-ac-tor will be remastered again, having already been properly done so when finally released digitally in the '90's. And what happened to the soundtrack for Journey Through the Past?
In other words, Young's presenting us with two different versions of his musical biography: the first consists of the Archives sets: album tracks interspersed with rare and previously-unreleased material; but with the live discs (the Performance Series) not always included (or at least disc 0 not included) and being released separately either way, the series having been initiated before the first Archives box. The second consists of the albums themselves, no bonus tracks attached. For those who are purchasing the Blu-Ray versions, perhaps the extra material made available to them will eventually include the album tracks not included on the Archives discs, as well as other rare tracks so far excluded (this latter task is what the Blu-Ray updates have offered so far). One would assume, though, that Young would let potential Blu-Ray purchasers know if such was the case, so that these hardiest of spendthrift fans don't feel inclined to buy the remastered original albums only to find they weren't being ripped off after all. For now, those who want all the material - no matter how they go about it - are indeed being ripped off.
While I've not listened to the Kraftwerk Catalogue yet, it is of course closer to the Beatles sets in that they aim to present the official releases of the time (that is, beyond the first, second, and third albums...) in pristine form; no rarities, nothing new. The original C D's of their albums already sounded decent, so given the apparent care with which Ralf Hütter has remastered them, surely plenty sonic wonders await. As with The Beatles, two alternate versions of the music are presented - in this case, though, the difference comes with the vocals: English- and German-language versions, as the albums were originally released. While one could say that the mono mixes are primary in the case of the Beatles because they were done first, with greater input from the artists, in this case the notion that the German vocals come first is not so clear. On the broader, "meta" level, the band had such a remarkable effect on the music of English-speaking peoples, among many others. And for the individual English-speaking listener, the song being significant even with a band famous for its electronic instrumentation, personal listening experiences of the song in their language reign supreme (unless of course one now listens to the German-language versions so many times the memories of the other versions dissipate).
"Sharity" - Its Greatest Hits
Given that the "sharity" phenomenon is responsible for a goodly chunk of the listening I did in 2009 - the first time I had Internet access at home for an entire year since 2002 (and yes, I'm still a little wary about its presence) - here are some exemplary posts. These albums are out-of-print; dependent upon your views on intellectual property, or of the particular artists in question, you can download the many albums available at these blogs that are still commercially available without any encouragement from me. (I'll probably add more as I dig through the blogs linked to on the sidebar a final time.)
From Allegory of Allergies:
The Inside of the Outside/ or The Outside of the Inside: Who Are They? Where Do They Come From? Whey Are They Here?,
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music, and
Alan Licht's lists of the top Minimal-music albums (1) (2) (3);
from Bravo Juju:
No Noise Reduction - The Complete No Noise Reduction;
The George Russell Sextet - Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature,
Morton Subotnick - Silver Apples of the Moon - The Wild Bull;
Women in Electronic Music (classic compilation released in 1977; a must-have for any fan of early Laurie Anderson);
from A Closet of Curiosities:
Gentle Fire (first/ only L P by an exemplary Collectivist ensemble, in this case enacting Aleatoric works by the "New York School" of Cage, Brown, and Wolff);
Gilles Gobeil - La Mecanique des Ruptures;
Evan Parker - Process and Reality;
La Monte Young - Trio for Strings;
Louis and Bebe Barron - Forbidden Planet (legendary electronic-music soundtrack);
a selection of compilation tracks and previously-unavailable recordings of Mauricio Kagel,
Oskar Scala - My Fascinating Instrument,
The Science of Sound (exactly what it says),
Stefan Wolpe,
Extended Voices,
John Cage - Empty Words Part IV,
Francois Bayle - L'Experience Acoustique (a fine introduction to an Academic Electroacoustic composer often ignored in favor of Henry, Stockhausen, Ferrari, Xenakis);
Electronic Music (a 1967 compilation, noteworthy for the inclusion of the original version of John Cage's Fontana Mix, an aletoric work but "performed" originally by Cage and others as tape music - indeed, the belabored work they did with the magnetic tape has become the stuff of legend), and
Leonard Bernstein Conducts Music of Our Time (wherein the New York Philharmonic improvises - after all, it was the Sixties);
from Direct Waves:
Musica Futurista: The Art of Noises and Luigi Russolo - Die Kunst der Geraeusche,
The Entire Musical Work of Marcel Duchamp,
Free Improvisation: New Phonic Art, Iskra 1903, Wired,
La Monte Young - The Well-Tuned Piano,
Jean Dubuffet - Musique Brut and Experiences Musicales,
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music Vol. 1 (wide-reaching compilation from Sub Rosa),
and Futura: Poesia Sonora (Cramps Records sound-poetry compilation);
from Free Jazz From Slavery:
The Revolutionary Ensemble - The People's Republic,
The Revolutionary Ensemble - Manhattan Cycles,
The Black Artists Group - In Paris, Aries 1973,
and several albums from Nmperign;
from Killed in Cars:
Keiji Haino - "C'Est Parfait" Endoctriné Tu Tombes la Tête la Première;
from I'll Read You a Story:
Alan Lamb - Original Masters: Night Passage;
Omit - Quad,
Organum - Submission;
Pelt, Keenan Lawler, and Eric Clark - Keyhole;
from Microphones in the Trees:
Pan Sonic - Kesto (234.48:4),
Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music;
from Stonerobixxx:
Boris and Sunn O))) - Altar [Japanese editions];
from Terror Noise Audio:
To Live and Shave in L A - The Wigmaker in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg;
from Twice Zonked!:
Vittorio Gelmetti - Musiche Elettroniche;
from Your Self Vanished:
Circle - Circulus,
Cecil Taylor and Max Roach - Historic Concerts.
From Allegory of Allergies:
The Inside of the Outside/ or The Outside of the Inside: Who Are They? Where Do They Come From? Whey Are They Here?,
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music, and
Alan Licht's lists of the top Minimal-music albums (1) (2) (3);
from Bravo Juju:
No Noise Reduction - The Complete No Noise Reduction;
The George Russell Sextet - Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature,
Morton Subotnick - Silver Apples of the Moon - The Wild Bull;
Women in Electronic Music (classic compilation released in 1977; a must-have for any fan of early Laurie Anderson);
from A Closet of Curiosities:
Gentle Fire (first/ only L P by an exemplary Collectivist ensemble, in this case enacting Aleatoric works by the "New York School" of Cage, Brown, and Wolff);
Gilles Gobeil - La Mecanique des Ruptures;
Evan Parker - Process and Reality;
La Monte Young - Trio for Strings;
Louis and Bebe Barron - Forbidden Planet (legendary electronic-music soundtrack);
a selection of compilation tracks and previously-unavailable recordings of Mauricio Kagel,
Oskar Scala - My Fascinating Instrument,
The Science of Sound (exactly what it says),
Stefan Wolpe,
Extended Voices,
John Cage - Empty Words Part IV,
Francois Bayle - L'Experience Acoustique (a fine introduction to an Academic Electroacoustic composer often ignored in favor of Henry, Stockhausen, Ferrari, Xenakis);
Electronic Music (a 1967 compilation, noteworthy for the inclusion of the original version of John Cage's Fontana Mix, an aletoric work but "performed" originally by Cage and others as tape music - indeed, the belabored work they did with the magnetic tape has become the stuff of legend), and
Leonard Bernstein Conducts Music of Our Time (wherein the New York Philharmonic improvises - after all, it was the Sixties);
from Direct Waves:
Musica Futurista: The Art of Noises and Luigi Russolo - Die Kunst der Geraeusche,
The Entire Musical Work of Marcel Duchamp,
Free Improvisation: New Phonic Art, Iskra 1903, Wired,
La Monte Young - The Well-Tuned Piano,
Jean Dubuffet - Musique Brut and Experiences Musicales,
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music Vol. 1 (wide-reaching compilation from Sub Rosa),
and Futura: Poesia Sonora (Cramps Records sound-poetry compilation);
from Free Jazz From Slavery:
The Revolutionary Ensemble - The People's Republic,
The Revolutionary Ensemble - Manhattan Cycles,
The Black Artists Group - In Paris, Aries 1973,
and several albums from Nmperign;
from Killed in Cars:
Keiji Haino - "C'Est Parfait" Endoctriné Tu Tombes la Tête la Première;
from I'll Read You a Story:
Alan Lamb - Original Masters: Night Passage;
Omit - Quad,
Organum - Submission;
Pelt, Keenan Lawler, and Eric Clark - Keyhole;
from Microphones in the Trees:
Pan Sonic - Kesto (234.48:4),
Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music;
from Stonerobixxx:
Boris and Sunn O))) - Altar [Japanese editions];
from Terror Noise Audio:
To Live and Shave in L A - The Wigmaker in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg;
from Twice Zonked!:
Vittorio Gelmetti - Musiche Elettroniche;
from Your Self Vanished:
Circle - Circulus,
Cecil Taylor and Max Roach - Historic Concerts.
Listening Log: December (Album of the Year: Animal Collective, 'Merriweather Post Pavilion'; Band of the Decade: Excepter)
The problems presented by the album in popular music.... With any kind of music that features long pieces, though, no problems exist - except how to efficiently fit the pieces onto the discs. You can even italicize the names of the compositions and no-one will look at you funny. But try inscribing it Dancing Queen.
Just how arbitrary is the album? The contemporary milieu, with the single song regaining its primacy (some of the time) leaves us fretting over all the mental energy spent upon thinking of albums as whole singular works of art. Were they ever really? Even with "concept" albums, didn't the form (the single or double L P, or the 74-minute, then 80-minute, C D) dictate too much?
The best songs tend toward the beginning - side A better than side B - "Heart of Glass" and Bringing It All Back Home being exceptions that prove the rule. Several albums, perfect on side A, then, if they don't falter badly, at least nod along until finally over: Roxy Music and The B-52's being conspicuous examples. Other albums put too many of the better tracks earlier on: Metal Box, for example.
So, what if we think of albums like singles? The A side is the main attraction. Or, if they want to avoid that particular rut, a couple great songs on each side are accompanied by - the old watchword of Rock critics - filler!
Also, what if I had started - way back in the younger years of my listening - with the B sides first? Having become familiar with those tracks before the A side's, would I have convinced myself that the best tracks are always put on the B side? Perhaps the "shuffle" mode on C D players is a route to take, in addition to starting with both the A side and B side first (that is, if the album comes out on vinyl). I'll have to try it in the future.
You can imagine then the ennui that comes when I force myself to go back and complete albums I only listened to partially, including multi-disc sets! Earlier in the year, I didn't consider that my obsessive-compulsive tendencies would impel me not to want to leave any portions of an album stranded in past time. Alas, the Listening Log, like any scientific experiment, exerts its influence on that which it documents. This desire to complete the circle (encircle the square?) allows me to avoid having to choose what music to listen to. More often than not, the music in these cases just drifts into the background; it's demoted to the status held by the clock radio in an old man's home, always tuned to the same station, providing some background noise to void the void. Nonetheless, I appreciate these imagined singular listenings, as if I'm truly finishing an album seven or eight months after I began listening to it, instead of embarking upon a new excursion. Sometimes I remember the earlier moments - lying in bed listening to Luciano Berio on headphones, listening to the vinyl Mobile Fidelity version of Murmur.
Alas, I failed to appease my obsessive-compulsiveness in the case of the Los Angeles Free Music Society's The Lowest Form of Music and the four-disc set compiling all the tracks originally released on seven-inch records accompanying Henri Chopin's sound-poetry journal of the 1960's (Cinquième Saison). I listened to five of the ten L A F M S discs four times each, the other five two times each; I listened to the first and fourth disc of the Chopin set three times each, the second and third only once each. I had really wanted to explore this collection more, but of course there's so much to listen to. This failure comes even as I conceived of the multi-disc sets as cohesive albums only if they were structured that way: besides the two mentioned above, Neil Young's Archives Vol. 1 and the Improvised Music From Japan ten-disc set. Young's set, actually released this year; the others I'd wanted for years, finally getting for free online. The former, an individual in control of the final product, indeed reaching a new degree of control over the legacy of his recorded output. The others, numerous projects and individuals coming together in ideal settings.
Years and decades and centuries are nearly as arbitrary as albums. Or more so.... What, after all, is the content in question? A year, or decade, of what? Here, of course, it's listening. We do like events to conform to temporal restraints. It makes history seem like it's easily transformed into art - when, in fact, history always is an art. So make it fit if you want to. Excepter started in 2002, in New York in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that only New Yorkers had the right to get upset over, but the burden of which Americans - brilliant at self-victimization as they are - took upon themselves to justify radical right-wing degradation. In such a time, the mainstreams of culture come to seem vacuous, unable to reflect upon/ embody the contents of absurdity's huge shadow; they become tainted by association. So, the vital energy lies beyond: Charalambides takes on a new improvisational approach, releases the results on C D R's; Neil Michael Hagerty, having started over as a solo artist, starts over again as The Howling Hex (and again with a different version of that project); the beguiling Free Folk of the Jewelled Antler artists and Pelt (when they "unplugged") reworks a word as common as "acoustic" and a concept as basic as Folk; the New Improvised/ Noise Rock music for which the Rock past is not a burden (The No-Neck Blues Band, Jackie-O Motherucker, Burning Star Core, Sunn, Avarus, O O I O O, Boris) rarely cease to entertain in true mind-enveloping fashion; the ever-expanding world of experimental music in its multifarious forms (for just a bare beginning, see these young-ish - relatively! - artists/ groups: Sachiko M, Zeitkratzer, Polwechsel, Pan Sonic, Jason Kahn, Aki Onda, Supersilent) reveals old disparate methods to be the symbiotic processes they always were; and of course veteran warriors refuse to buckle under the pressure (Sun City Girls, The Nihilist Spasm Band, Keith Rowe, Peter Brötzmann, Paul Flaherty, Evan Parker, Keiji Haino).
How then does any one group stand apart? For me, for the same reason Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion is the album of 2009: I listened to it the most (though I can't "prove" that I listened to Excepter more than any other artist this decade). I don't mean to assert the superiority of my year-long Log to the standard pontifications you get in journalists' year-end, and decade-end, lists. Indeed, I fully support ascertaining the wider significance of an artist or work of art, beyond one's own appreciation. After all, I found myself listening to Michael Jackson this year, both his music I enjoy (Off the Wall and Thriller) and don't (Bad and Dangerous, the behemoth flops nonetheless very evocative of that period when many artists were convinced they needed to fill up the C D's running time). One does want to tap into the zeitgeist, as demeaning as it is to the spectator. So, when Pitchfork didn't include Gnarls Barkley's St. Elsewhere among its top fifty albums of 2006, I wanted to say, "Yes, but how often did you listen to St. Elsewhere compared to those mostly-mediocre fifty you've enshrined? Are you too eager to maintain some sort of Indie cool aloofness precisely you're just another entertainment-"industry" gossip rag?"
Granted, we would've liked Excepter to finish/ publish its upcoming two-disc Presidence by the end of 2009. That would've been perfect. Or, maybe not, given that I left myself with much listening to do as the year comes to a close - with Vic Chesnutt's death adding to the bulk, his own music alleviating the sadness, for both those close to him and the entire music scene of Athens, Georgia, now surely (but not confidently) entering into a new phase of its storied history. Either way, as at the beginning, Excepter's a year too late. Appropriately so, I suppose, since I also rank them as exemplary of the decade's music precisely because they're not young. A crucial gradual shift that has taken place in popular music, post-Punk, has been the breaking-away of the connection between youth and "pop." No more 20-year-old Rock stars, thank you. They worked fine for awhile - that is, forty years ago, and to a limited extent, briefly, in Punk's early years - but no more. Let fans of Hip Hip convince themselves that 22-year-old men have anything intelligent to say.
The New Yorkers with which Excepter got grouped together - Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance, as well as Animal Collective (though by the time they got poular, they didn't live in the City) - and indeed the whole array of experimental acts arising from the Rock vanguard in Brooklyn, warrant our respect. At the time when, because of their presence, and that of T V on the Radio and a host of crappy bands whose names do not warrant mentioning, New York became Rock's epicenter for the first time since the late 1970's, the mere existence of the likes of Oneida offered glimmers of hope in an Indie Rock that has become shockingly gauche.
Oneida and Animal Collective, alongside Sunn, give Excepter plenty of competition in the race for Band of the Decade. Which is to say, if I'd listened to them nearly as much as I have listened to Excepter, I imagine - based upon the listening that I have done, and my ensuing conceptualization of their work - that I would rank them as highly. Who's to say? Perhaps not even myself, as I doubt I'll ever get a chance to listen to their music as much as I have Excepter's. Too much to listen to, too little time. Too much to read... etc.
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By the way, Black Beach is great, though I would have preferred that the album come out by itself at first, then later the film: keep the listener guessing as to the sounds' origins. The movie's daytime shots counter the imagery of the beach at night, blackened. The music and the film deserve a greater distance between them.
(This article is illustrated with the covers of the albums I listened to this year that were released this year as well.)
12/1:
Improvised Music From Japan (discs 2, 3, and 8);
Miles Davis - The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (disc 1; and disc 2, tracks 1 and 2);
Excepter - Steps: La Sala Rossa;
Vic Chesnutt - At the Cut.
12/2:
Excepter - Black Beach;
Jandek - Glasgow Friday;
Vic Chesnutt - At the Cut;
Vic Chesnutt - Skitter on Take-Off;
Pandora - Space Amazon;
Vic Chesnutt - Little;
Musica Elettronica Viva - M E V 40 (1967-2007) (disc 2);
Nirvana - Nevermind.
12/3:
The Pentangle - Basket of Light;
Miles Davis - The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (disc 4);
The Saints - (I'm) Stranded.
12/4:
The Jewelled Antler Library (disc 3);
Atlas Sound - Logos.
12/5:
Blondie;
Miles Davis - The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (disc 3);
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (discs 5 and 7);
Miles Davis - Milestones (tracks 4-6);
Vic Chesnutt - About to Choke;
Atlas Sound - Logos.
12/6:
Cecil Taylor - Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come (disc 2);
Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (disc 1, tracks 6-11);
The Smiths (tracks 6-10);
Sunn - Black One;
The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street;
Yoko Ono - Season of Glass.
12/7:
Joe McPhee - The Willisau Concert;
The Avalanches - Since I Left You;
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (disc 9);
Musica Elettronica Viva - M E V 40 (1967-2007) (disc 3);
The B-52's - Wild Planet.
12/8:
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (disc 4);
Menomena - Friend and Foe;
The People Band;
Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza - Azioni (disc 1);
Anthony Braxton - Five Pieces 1975.
12/9:
The Bug - London Zoo;
Musica Elettronica Viva - Friday;
Dinosaur Jr. - Dinosaur;
Anthony Braxton - Tentet (New York) 1996.
12/10:
The Art Ensemble of Chicago - Tutankhamun;
Anthony Braxton - Tentet (New York) 1996;
Air - Air Mail;
Vic Chesnutt - North Star Deserter;
Daft Punk - Homework.
12/11:
Vic Chesnutt - North Star Deserter;
Vic Chesnutt - At the Cut;
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (disc 5);
Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual (tracks 5-10);
Circle - Paris-Concert (disc 2);
Animal Collective - Feels.
12/12:
Morrissey - Years of Refusal (tracks 7-12);
Phil Collins - Face Value (tracks 7-12);
R E M - Murmur (tracks 7-12);
Henry Flynt - New American Ethnic Music Volume One: You Are My Everlovin'/ Celestial Power (disc 2);
Annette Krebs - Guitar Solo (tracks 4-7);
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 3: Live at the Riverboat (Toronto 1969));
Royal Trux - Singles, Live, Unreleased (disc 1);
Keith Rowe/ Sachiko M/ Toshimaru Nakamura/ Otomo Yoshihide (disc 2).
12/13:
The Dream Scene - Christmas;
Excepter - STREAMS 01 (disc 1);
Charlemagne Palestine - Four Manifestations on Six Elements;
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (discs 2: Topanga 1 (1968-1969); and 8: North Country (1971-1972)).
12/14:
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 4: Topanga 2 (1969-1970));
OU - Cinquième Saison: Complete Recordings (disc 3);
Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power, and the Amorphous Strums - Dark Developments;
The Homosexuals - Astral Glamour (disc 2).
12/15:
Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet - The Breadwinner;
Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power, and the Amorphous Strums - Dark Developments;
The Revolutionary Ensemble - The People's Republic;
Ornette Coleman - The Empty Foxhole;
X-Ray Spex - Germfree Adolescents (expanded edition, disc 2);
12/16:
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (tracks 7-11);
Robert Wyatt - Solar Flares Burn for You (tracks 5-13);
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 7: Live at Massey Hall (Toronto 1971); disc 6: Topanga 3 (1970); and disc 8: North Country (1971-1972));
Gensis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (disc 2);
Cabaret Voltaire - Methodology '74/'78. The Attic Tapes; (disc 2).
12/17:
Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind;
Derek and the Dominos - Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (tracks 8-14);
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 5: Live at the Fillmore East (New York 1970);
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (disc 2);
Roscoe Mitchell and The Note Factory - Nine to Get Ready;
Cabaret Voltaire - Methodology '74/'78. The Attic Tapes; (disc 3).
12/18:
Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind;
Quiet Hooves/The Dream Scene;
Mouser - Storm Dumps;
The Homosexuals - Astral Glamour (disc 3);
Circle - Circulus (tracks 3-5);
Cecil Taylor - Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) (track 2);
Keith Rowe/ Sachiko M/ Toshimaru Nakamura/ Otomo Yoshihide (disc 2).
12/19:
Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind;
The Jewelled Antler Library (discs 1 and 3);
Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life (disc 2, incl. A Something's Extra Bonus);
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (disc 5).
12/20:
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (disc 3);
Dave Holland - Conference of the Birds;
Nostalgie d l'Avenir (tracks 7-11);
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 1: Early Years (1963-1968));
Musica Elettronica Viva - M E V 40 (1967-2007) (disc 4, track 2).
12/21:
Improvised Music From Japan (disc 4);
Anthony Braxton - Sextet (Victoriaville) 2005;
Earth - The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull;
The Velvet Underground - The Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (disc 2);
Genesis - Selling England by the Pound (tracks 5-8).
12/22:
The Revolutionary Ensemble - The Psyche;
Keith Rowe/ Sachiko M/ Toshimaru Nakamura/ Otomo Yoshihide (disc 3);
The Art Ensemble of Chicago - The Meeting;
Magazine - The Correct Use of Soap.
12/23:
The Art Ensemble of Chicago - The Meeting;
Improvised Music From Japan (disc 5);
Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (disc 2).
12/24:
The Velvet Underground - The Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (disc 3);
Improvised Music From Japan (disc 10);
Charlie Parker - The Legendary Dial Masters (disc 1);
Vic Chesnutt - At the Cut.
12/25:
The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night;
The Beatles - Revolver;
The Beatles - Mono Masters (disc 2);
Vic Chesnutt - North Star Deserter;
Zoviet France - Popular Soviet Songs and Work Music (disc 3);
William S Burroughs - Real English Tea Made Here (disc 3);
The Beatles - Please Please Me;
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 3: Live at the Riverboat (Toronto 1969)).
12/26:
The Beatles - Beatles for Sale;
OU - Cinquième Saison: Complete Recordings (disc 1, tracks 13-22);
Sun City Girls - 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond the Rig Veda (disc 2);
The Velvet Underground - The Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (disc 1, tracks 5-11);
Ramon Sender - Worldfood (track 2);
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 5: Live at the Fillmore East (New York 1970));
The Art Ensemble of Chicago With Fontella Bass;
Vic Chesnutt - North Star Deserter;
Vic Chesnutt - Left to His Own Devices.
12/27:
Vic Chesnutt - Little;
Vic Chesnutt - Ghetto Bells;
Improvised Music From Japan (disc 9);
Throbbing Gristle - 20 Fazz Funk Greats (tracks 7-11);
Musica Elettronica Viva - M E V 40 (1967-2007) (disc 3);
The Beatles (discs 1 and 2);
The Art Ensemble of Chicago - Reese and the Smooth Ones.
12/28:
The Jewelled Antler Library (disc 3);
The Henry Threadgill Sextet - When Was That?;
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kurzwellen [L P version] (disc 1, track 2);
La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela - The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath;
Keith Rowe/ Sachiko M/ Toshimaru Nakamura/ Otomo Yoshihide (disc 3);
Vic Chesnutt - Drunk.
12/29:
Andrew Hill - Point of Departure;
Vic Chesnutt - Silver Lake;
Vic Chesnutt - About to Choke;
The Jewelled Antler Library (disc 2);
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 7: Live at Massey Hall (Toronto 1971));
The Beatles - Please Please Me;
With The Beatles;
OU - Cinquième Saison: Complete Recordings (disc 4);
Keith Rowe/ Sachiko M/ Toshimaru Nakamura/ Otomo Yoshihide (disc 3).
12/30:
Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (tracks 8-12);
Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind;
Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (disc 2);
Swans - Swans Are Dead (disc 2);
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Spiral/Wach/Japan/Pole (disc 2);
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kurzwellen (disc 2, track 2);
Philip Corner - On Tape: The Judson Years (tracks 5-11).
12/31:
The Los Angeles Free Music Society - The Lowest Form of Music (disc 9);
Brett Larner and Taku Sugimoto - Deluxe Nakamura;
Cecil Taylor - Air Above Mountains (track 2);
Atlas Sound - Logos;
Neil Young - Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (disc 3: Live at the Riverboat (Toronto 1969); and disc 7: Live at Massey Hall (Toronto 1971));
David S Ware - Go See the World (tracks 5-7);
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Spiral/Wach/Japan/Pole (disc 1, tracks 1 and 3; and disc 2);
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kurzwellen (disc 2).
Looking at Old Yearbooks, Part 1
Originally published at Sweet Pea in October, 2005, this article will now be held here, awaiting its Part 2, what will undoubtedly be the final entry of the Blog /Blob.
---
Looking at Old Yearbooks, Part 1: Lillian Roxon, Trouser Press, Spin
Four books: the 1978, updated, and revised version of Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia; Columbia House's The Year in Music: 1978; the fourth edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide: The Ultimate Guide to Alternative Music [1991]; and the Spin Alternative Record Guide [1995]... the first two I came across recently, at random, the other two I've read off and on for about ten years. Except for the Columbia House book, glimpses of how writers from differing perspectives conceptualized large swaths of the history of popular music. These impressions we get piecemeal, discovering clues here and there in what are after all supposed to be mere reference books. What is more intriguing about them is that they were written and published at significant turning points in the history of Rock, inviting us to try to discern how commentators reacted to changes as they were happening, what they foresaw would be the long-term consequences. By the time we get to the last of these four, critics are self-referential (academic) enough to take stock of their own culture and provide a unifying thesis behind their writings - in this case, Eric Weisbard's compelling and maddening introductory essay, "What Is Alternative Rock?" Maddening, because he is probably right: in short, Weisbard's interpretation is a variant of the typical U S A view of Punk, giving The Ramones precedence over The Sex Pistols in the contest over who serves as the proverbial Big Bang; it may be right only with regard to Americans - all the more unfortunate for us!
Roxon's book appeared when Rock was truly hegemonic in U S A popular culture, yet still was independent enough as a cultural entity to seem like it belonged to certain audience, who in turn were not as wracked with internal divisions, debilitating debates, or pestered by grown-up kids with new tastes and ideas, as they would be by the early 1980's, post-Disco, post-Punk, post-Electro - in other words, still eager to keep mellowing-out to The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac as the nation crumbled around them. The book is almost endearing in how limited its scope is and, moreover, the entries for each artist are terse, often witty, comments, usually about the band's commercial success, or lack thereof, rarely attempting to describe how the music actually sounds. Signs of Rock's mansion-on-sand status appear, especially the tendency to branch out only to include M O R pop like ABBA, Paul Anka, Cher, etc., suggesting the implicit connection already made between Rock and the music industry itself, instead of seeing it as an independent craft, a style fashioned by the inter-play of musicians themselves. This unspoken link would eventually prove fatal, leading to the temporary mis-appropriation of electronic sound by Rock as well as the gross wresting of M T V away from British Electro music by "hair Metal," surely more than any other phenomenon the turning point after which popular music in the U S A became too strange and nauseating for those of us with sensitive ears and weak stomachs. Indeed, while the common perspective which holds that Rock has declined relative to Rap and Country is, broadly speaking, correct, one needs to keep in mind that Country and Rap only went through the same kind of commodification process that Rock pioneered, allowing them to compete with Rock as money-making endeavors. By the early 1990's both at least looked, and in Country's case certainly sounded too, a lot more like Rock at its commercialized worse than vice versa.
Looking back at the Columbia House book, obviously distinct from the other three in being geared only toward contemporary readers, again a charming, non-clever, and non-cynical interest in the subject matter comes through. The book attempts to maintain the distinction among Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Country and Western, Jazz, Classical, Easy Listening, and Disco, yet notes in its introduction that "the year's top performers sought to create sounds that were not limited by [such] categories [...] The top records of the year, with their heavy use of synthesizers, echoes, and layers of smoothly intertwined overdubs, all pulsing with a swingy, danceable beat, could not be categorized as anything put pop." Nonetheless, we find a clue to Roxon's hidebound focus in the book's comments on Rock: though it was "now a comfortable grandfather" which had "sired disco, punk, new wave," and was dealing with signs of stifling nostalgia, the book also peculiarly suggests that only with Elvis Presley's death did "rock finally become totally acceptable." Perhaps only to appeal to the broadest audience, the book is more positive toward Punk than Roxon (or, rather, "compiler" Ed Naha, who presumably had some role in writing the newer entries, as Roxon had died in 1973) who gives it scant dismissive attention. Suggesting how strong the memories of Rock's early controversy were, the book says "punk, for all its hype and subsequent disappointment, was very real, a continuation of the rebellious energy that radiated from the early Elvis Presley, the revolutionary fervor that has always been part of rock and roll."
The Trouser Press guide appeared in 1991, just before Nirvana's mammoth success, and as such is cruelly reduced to being a memento of a culture which, for those of us too young to have experienced it directly, is foggy-distant, given a roseate hue it does not necessarily deserve. By 1995, writing directly in response to the resulting milieu of the early 1990's, the Spin guide is more exclusive with regards to contemporary music - fewer artists make the "alternative" cut than in the dense Trouser Press book - even as it attempts to lay claim to a diverse selection of pre-Punk artists, unjustly ignored in darker times, now given proper due by a small and self-conscious Indie audience made cynical, but determined, by the petrifying conservatism overtaking America.
Spin's relatively-exclusive selection of artists on one hand suggests a Punk-like rewriting of the past, a refining of the "alternative" canon, even as it also suggests the pressures of the marketplace, an attempt by the magazine to maintain its cool even as it keeps the number of artists in its book limited, its pages thick and glossy, its type-font large - all the more appealing for the novice. One can only bemoan the great artists included in the Trouser Press guide that are ignored in Spin's. Despite these misgivings, the serious reader cannot discount how much better the Spin guide's writing is compared to the Trouser Press. Precisely because the artists covered and the writer designated to each was chosen with greater care, the book is more insightful and inspired, except in the case of a few entries (R E M and Galaxie 500, for example) when they falter badly.
I discovered a few years ago that Spin's book probably subconsciously guided me in my listening endeavors. When I purchased the book upon its release, my sixteen-year-old self did not know of many of the avant-garde artists discussed therein - for example, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Borbetomagus, Fela Kuti, Sun City Girls - let alone understand why they deserved a place alongside more-accssible artists; except, perhaps I had the common dumb notion that they were put there only because of how "extreme" or "obscure" or "influential" they were. Re-reading the book sometime in the early years of this century, having not picked it up for years, I was pleasantly surprised that now I knew every artist covered. I felt the same kind of gratitude I also have for those friends and acquaintances who had, in traditional bohemian fashion, encouraged and goaded me - even sometimes in a condescending, unpleasant manner - to question received wisdom and to search out forgotten paths.
How sad it is: pondering how much less-compelling Spin, or the similar Alternative Press, are today compared to ten years ago. Sure, Alternative Press put the likes of Marilyn Manson on its cover, but it also ran a serial on the history of Punk, and featured well-written, positive reviews of some of the best experimental Rock of the day: I fondly recally deciding to buy Gastr del Sol's Upgrade and Afterlife after reading Alternative Press's glowing five-finger review. No mainstream Rock magazine at the moment could play the same role in their young reader's lives. Then again, perhaps the historical-minded Mojo could, but that only shows that Rock is behind us; and perhaps took with it the very notion of mass culture being something other than a business, a con game wherein those who have the means and the will to create refuse transparency, concocting product so that listeners and spectators can live vicariously through them.
---
Looking at Old Yearbooks, Part 1: Lillian Roxon, Trouser Press, Spin
Four books: the 1978, updated, and revised version of Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia; Columbia House's The Year in Music: 1978; the fourth edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide: The Ultimate Guide to Alternative Music [1991]; and the Spin Alternative Record Guide [1995]... the first two I came across recently, at random, the other two I've read off and on for about ten years. Except for the Columbia House book, glimpses of how writers from differing perspectives conceptualized large swaths of the history of popular music. These impressions we get piecemeal, discovering clues here and there in what are after all supposed to be mere reference books. What is more intriguing about them is that they were written and published at significant turning points in the history of Rock, inviting us to try to discern how commentators reacted to changes as they were happening, what they foresaw would be the long-term consequences. By the time we get to the last of these four, critics are self-referential (academic) enough to take stock of their own culture and provide a unifying thesis behind their writings - in this case, Eric Weisbard's compelling and maddening introductory essay, "What Is Alternative Rock?" Maddening, because he is probably right: in short, Weisbard's interpretation is a variant of the typical U S A view of Punk, giving The Ramones precedence over The Sex Pistols in the contest over who serves as the proverbial Big Bang; it may be right only with regard to Americans - all the more unfortunate for us!
Roxon's book appeared when Rock was truly hegemonic in U S A popular culture, yet still was independent enough as a cultural entity to seem like it belonged to certain audience, who in turn were not as wracked with internal divisions, debilitating debates, or pestered by grown-up kids with new tastes and ideas, as they would be by the early 1980's, post-Disco, post-Punk, post-Electro - in other words, still eager to keep mellowing-out to The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac as the nation crumbled around them. The book is almost endearing in how limited its scope is and, moreover, the entries for each artist are terse, often witty, comments, usually about the band's commercial success, or lack thereof, rarely attempting to describe how the music actually sounds. Signs of Rock's mansion-on-sand status appear, especially the tendency to branch out only to include M O R pop like ABBA, Paul Anka, Cher, etc., suggesting the implicit connection already made between Rock and the music industry itself, instead of seeing it as an independent craft, a style fashioned by the inter-play of musicians themselves. This unspoken link would eventually prove fatal, leading to the temporary mis-appropriation of electronic sound by Rock as well as the gross wresting of M T V away from British Electro music by "hair Metal," surely more than any other phenomenon the turning point after which popular music in the U S A became too strange and nauseating for those of us with sensitive ears and weak stomachs. Indeed, while the common perspective which holds that Rock has declined relative to Rap and Country is, broadly speaking, correct, one needs to keep in mind that Country and Rap only went through the same kind of commodification process that Rock pioneered, allowing them to compete with Rock as money-making endeavors. By the early 1990's both at least looked, and in Country's case certainly sounded too, a lot more like Rock at its commercialized worse than vice versa.
Looking back at the Columbia House book, obviously distinct from the other three in being geared only toward contemporary readers, again a charming, non-clever, and non-cynical interest in the subject matter comes through. The book attempts to maintain the distinction among Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Country and Western, Jazz, Classical, Easy Listening, and Disco, yet notes in its introduction that "the year's top performers sought to create sounds that were not limited by [such] categories [...] The top records of the year, with their heavy use of synthesizers, echoes, and layers of smoothly intertwined overdubs, all pulsing with a swingy, danceable beat, could not be categorized as anything put pop." Nonetheless, we find a clue to Roxon's hidebound focus in the book's comments on Rock: though it was "now a comfortable grandfather" which had "sired disco, punk, new wave," and was dealing with signs of stifling nostalgia, the book also peculiarly suggests that only with Elvis Presley's death did "rock finally become totally acceptable." Perhaps only to appeal to the broadest audience, the book is more positive toward Punk than Roxon (or, rather, "compiler" Ed Naha, who presumably had some role in writing the newer entries, as Roxon had died in 1973) who gives it scant dismissive attention. Suggesting how strong the memories of Rock's early controversy were, the book says "punk, for all its hype and subsequent disappointment, was very real, a continuation of the rebellious energy that radiated from the early Elvis Presley, the revolutionary fervor that has always been part of rock and roll."
The Trouser Press guide appeared in 1991, just before Nirvana's mammoth success, and as such is cruelly reduced to being a memento of a culture which, for those of us too young to have experienced it directly, is foggy-distant, given a roseate hue it does not necessarily deserve. By 1995, writing directly in response to the resulting milieu of the early 1990's, the Spin guide is more exclusive with regards to contemporary music - fewer artists make the "alternative" cut than in the dense Trouser Press book - even as it attempts to lay claim to a diverse selection of pre-Punk artists, unjustly ignored in darker times, now given proper due by a small and self-conscious Indie audience made cynical, but determined, by the petrifying conservatism overtaking America.
Spin's relatively-exclusive selection of artists on one hand suggests a Punk-like rewriting of the past, a refining of the "alternative" canon, even as it also suggests the pressures of the marketplace, an attempt by the magazine to maintain its cool even as it keeps the number of artists in its book limited, its pages thick and glossy, its type-font large - all the more appealing for the novice. One can only bemoan the great artists included in the Trouser Press guide that are ignored in Spin's. Despite these misgivings, the serious reader cannot discount how much better the Spin guide's writing is compared to the Trouser Press. Precisely because the artists covered and the writer designated to each was chosen with greater care, the book is more insightful and inspired, except in the case of a few entries (R E M and Galaxie 500, for example) when they falter badly.
I discovered a few years ago that Spin's book probably subconsciously guided me in my listening endeavors. When I purchased the book upon its release, my sixteen-year-old self did not know of many of the avant-garde artists discussed therein - for example, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Borbetomagus, Fela Kuti, Sun City Girls - let alone understand why they deserved a place alongside more-accssible artists; except, perhaps I had the common dumb notion that they were put there only because of how "extreme" or "obscure" or "influential" they were. Re-reading the book sometime in the early years of this century, having not picked it up for years, I was pleasantly surprised that now I knew every artist covered. I felt the same kind of gratitude I also have for those friends and acquaintances who had, in traditional bohemian fashion, encouraged and goaded me - even sometimes in a condescending, unpleasant manner - to question received wisdom and to search out forgotten paths.
How sad it is: pondering how much less-compelling Spin, or the similar Alternative Press, are today compared to ten years ago. Sure, Alternative Press put the likes of Marilyn Manson on its cover, but it also ran a serial on the history of Punk, and featured well-written, positive reviews of some of the best experimental Rock of the day: I fondly recally deciding to buy Gastr del Sol's Upgrade and Afterlife after reading Alternative Press's glowing five-finger review. No mainstream Rock magazine at the moment could play the same role in their young reader's lives. Then again, perhaps the historical-minded Mojo could, but that only shows that Rock is behind us; and perhaps took with it the very notion of mass culture being something other than a business, a con game wherein those who have the means and the will to create refuse transparency, concocting product so that listeners and spectators can live vicariously through them.
Long Days, Long Months [6]
10 August:
And now for some old writings, from the blog I had at My Space; I'm afraid that the erstwhile social-networking favorite will up and disappear any day now, so I want to preserve these here at Google, which at least has the staying power of, say, C B S News, or your local public library.
First, a travelogue: New York (city), September 2006:
1/
I'll begin by telling you about "harbor country," Michigan, which is across the lake from Chicago. My brother's wedding took place there, Labor Day weekend, in Union Pier. The area - "harbor country" (I think the locals would like me to say the phrase a lot... you know - branding) - had a pleasant tacky feel to it. Very Mid-West, like the Wisconsin Dells. Cute bed-and-breakfast's, fruit markets filled to the brim (It must be nice living in a part of the country where there's still a lot of farming) remarkably sandy beaches - and a state park to the north of "harbor country" which features sand dunes, mountain-like masses of sand with trees sticking out... from where?
2/
Monday, Sept. 11, I avoided the city (and any sort of anniversary-memorial stuff going on, except for the two beams of light projecting upward from the W T C site, which I saw later in the evening) and took the Metro-North train to Beacon, New York, a beautiful scene most of the way, as the train travels along the Hudson River for much of the trip. Beacon is home to Dia: Beacon, part of the Dia Foundation of the Arts that also includes Dia: Chelsea and various site-specific works. The Beacon museum was once a factory, now a space specifically for large Minimalist and conceptual works that would have trouble finding a home otherwise.
Walking into the museum, one is immediately greeted by a long rectangular room housing a work by Walter De Maria, consisting of sets of one metal bar and one metal circle each [the circle is open], placed one after the other the length of the room. They are silver, and apparently each set gets slightly larger as you progress forward in the room, in order to counter the tendency of one's eyes to perceive things farther away as being smaller. Then again, the differences in size are minute enough that, when walking up the room, I could not note the difference.
An Andy Warhol work filled one room. I'm not sure what material the boards which ran along the entire length of the room's walls (except the entrance-ways) are made of, but on them were printed one of either two images. There did not seem to be a pattern to the arrangement of the images, especially as what were originally shadow-y black-and-white prints had been colored various gaudy shades of pink, yellow, green, etc. As with the De Maria, the experience of being able to sit down and appreciate a work from a distance, yet (considering the scale of the works) not so far as to preclude studying them closely, was refreshing.
3/
On what was my second night in the city, I went to see To Live and Shave in LA at a sort of "unofficial" (that is, I presume, "illegal") venue in Bushwick, which is east of Williamsburg. Indeed, the venue was a space in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park - perhaps the name is a relic from a time when "Bushwick" did not exist, or those who named it preferred the more-recognizable name. Either way, I suppose Bushwick, especially when as far out as this industrial park, is at the farthest edge of gentrification - the "avant-garde," if you will.
The place was pleasant enough - reminded me of the basement of the original Eyedrum in Atlanta, where Rock shows took place, or perhaps the Backdrop gallery, also in Atlanta, which at least for a while (or perhaps just the night I saw Silver Apples there) hosted Rock gigs in its basement. There was a Rock band whose name I forget (I'll try to look it up) that was good, largely low-key instrumental. Then, To Live and Shave in LA played. Good set, I'll say. Noise Rock with vocals - which almost automatically makes it better than regular Noise Rock. Apparently, Andrew W K was playing with the band that night, as Tom Smith, the main guy (the singer), always has a revolving cast of musicians backing him up.
Going there, I had exited the subway station, and found myself not sure where to go -the all-too-typical N Y-subway experience. I ran into another person, Emily Easterley - a singer-songwriter who had recorded a record years ago with Rat Bastard, a member of To Live and Shave in LA. Together, we managed to find the place. Going back, the subway line was not running anymore, so we shared a cab home. This part of Bushwick is obviously not dangerous, since there seems to be so few residents at all, let alone criminally-minded ones; it's just empty. I'm glad the taxi driver showed up. Would've been a long walk home.
4/
For my last night in New York, my friend Nathan (with whom I was staying) and his friend Steve and I, joined later by Nathan's girlfriend Grace, went to several bars across Manhattan, all of which at least date back to the early twentieth century. I had read an article in Village Voice about such historic bars and decided to be a pathetic tourist for once and plan this fun, yet uninspired, outing.
We started with Chumley's, in Greenchwich Village, which started as a speakeasy in the 1920's and which had great bar food - or, in some cases, "bar food"; after all, I had free-range chicken, not exactly dive-bar fare. We went to the Whitehorse Tavern next, where Dylan Thomas often went to drink, a lot. But it was filled with yuppies and big TV's and was very crowded. Of course, Chumley's had been crowded, but we didn't have to wait long for a table... and, besides, they had book covers all over the walls - books by writers who'd come there over the years.
I'm sorry, but I don't remember the names of the other two bars. One of them dated back well into the Nineteenth Century, but like Whitehorse was boring. Another was much nicer, well-lit with large mirrors behind the bar. I'll try to look up their names sometime.
I couldn't help but end the night with a visit to Marz Bar, which has only been around since the 1980's but which I enjoyed the several times I went there during my '05 trip to the city, when I was staying in Chinatown, not too far away. Marz Bar is a grimy "punk" bar in that East Village/Lower East Side in-between area. I suppose it's a throw-back to the pre-gentrification days, but of course the very fact of me saying such suggests it too has a "theme." In the end, it's all about the alcohol (and whatever other substances you may take) and the people, so you could just as well go to Applebee's. But the food won't be as good as it was at Chumley's.
5/
Saturday, Sept. 9, there was a mini-festival, I'll call it, held in Bushwick (same industrial park as the To Live and Shave in LA show); apparently it was supposed to take place in a parking lot, but was moved to a rented-out floor of a building - very run-down and gritty, which I'm sure all the Brooklyn Indie Rockers just love.
The highlights of the evening were Growing, Comets on Fire, and of course Excepter, who I hadn't seen since my trip last year, in the meanwhile doing the correspondences with their main man J F Ryan for Sweet Pea. There was another decent group, Ex Models; a dismally bad group called Matt and Kim, who as it turned out turned up in Athens a couple weeks or so later, playing at Secret Squirrel; and some other stuff I missed or don't recall the names of.
Excepter's performance was an especially dissonant affair by their standards, while Comets on Fire's fit what I've read regarding their new record - very Rock, which was mildly disappointing, as Will Hart had told me when he saw them at Arthur Fest in LA in '05 they were quite good, with lots of electronics and sound-manipulation going on. Growing ended the night beautifully, with a space-y set that did a good job of drone-ing out the spastic flights of all the earlier acts.
Unlike the night of the To Live and Shave in LA gig, the subway back to Williamsburg was running. Still, it was long; it's not often you're in NYC and there's ample parking and you wish you had a car.
6/
Walked through what is supposedly Long Island City, but which seemed more like Astoria, from the subway to the Socrates Sculpture Park, on the East River. Besides a couple men at work, I notice a woman, the only other person there. Listen to one sculpture which is also a sound-art work, the winds leading metal balls to strike a surface. Very pleasant.
Go to the Noguchi Museum; the woman it turns out is the museum guide. The Noguchi Museum is amazing, absolutely one of the best places to go in the city. I could have spent hours in the outdoor sculpture park, with the basalt rocks that Noguchi had only altered slightly, keeping the artist's role minimal, yet still in the choosing and placements of objects the center of attention. Noguchi set up the museum himself, in the later years of his life; indeed, focusing on one artist at a time, I prefer. This same trip, I went to the Jackson Pollack exhibit at the Guggenheim, devoted to his paintings on paper, and found the experience of getting to view works across his career, seeing the gradual developments, to be revealing - an academic tendency, I guess.
After Noguchi, I head south, cross a pink bridge that is perhaps a draw-bridge to Roosevelt Island, which is mostly ugly apartment buildings from the '60s/'70s, and then take the tramway back to Manhattan. The tramway ride costs the same as a subway ride, and while the view is not especially great is still worth the surreal experience of riding a tram in NYC. The only other time I think I've ridden a tram is at Stone Mountain.
7/
To sum up, during my trip, I also saw the Finnish electronic duo Pan Sonic at the Brooklyn venue Northsix; went to the Pollack exhibit at Guggenheim I already mentioned; went with Nathan and Grace to Jackson Heights in Queens to eat Indian food; given that I was staying in Williamsburg this year, explored areas of Brooklyn I had always ignored, such as downtown, Fort Greene, Prospect Park, et al.; walked from 49th st. to Chinatown in the rain my last day there; and of course bought some books at the Strand and some C D's at Other Music.
Williamsburg I found to be rather drab. There's an interesting used-record and -book shop that also shows 16mm films in the back next-door to where Nathan lives on Grand St. I don't recall ever seeing the name of the place. I hope it survives, as it seems that, despite one good bookstore and some music shops, Williamsburg is mostly bars and bad coffee shops. To be frank, I'd rather go to a diner in the Upper East Side and talk with blue-haired ladies about Mayor Bloomberg...
8/
I nearly forgot about the Howling Hex gig at Mercury Lounge, which you must believe was a highlight despite my having forgotten about it temporarily. I assume that at least a few of the musicians playing with Neil Hagerty that particular evening regularly play with him over in his current home of somewhere, New Mexico. Either way, Hagerty and the dude playing saxophone got in a lot of free-improvising on top of the great back-up provided by a bass player and a drummer. Hagerty is finally putting into practice all that talk over the years of applying Ornette Coleman's harmolodics. Now, of course, Coleman's "theory" of harmolodics has ultimately amounted to gibberish, which is not to discount in any way the extraordinary music he has made. It's just that, at least Harry Partch or Anthony Braxton were able to put their thoughts down on paper... Coleman, on the other hand...
All this is another way of saying that Hagerty was getting unbelievable sounds out of his guitar, the songs went on and on - inspiring, fun, surprising - and that's all.
11 August:
Another set of My Space blog postings from 2006:
1/
Two places stand out in my memories of southwestern Wisconsin, from the most-of-three-years I lived there: the House on the Rock and the farm where the Pasture Music Festival was held.
First, a word about Wisconsin - no, the Mid-West, as we still quaintly call a region whose borders we don't exactly know: it's flat... until you get to near the Mississippi River, where it gets hilly and greenery-y and pretty. And there, there's no sprawl. You're in the country, then you're in a town, then you're not. It's like you're in Europe. This is our setting!
2/
One day, I ran into an old friend from college while walking along one of the two lakes Madison sits between (not the one Otis Redding died in [Lake Monona], the other one [Lake Mendota]). Turns out, she's going to grad school too. We hadn't kept in touch. As Madison seemed eons away from Atlanta, this coincidence was a little eery, surreal-like.
Another day, we went with some of her friends to the House on the Rock. Apparently, the man who built the house, and collected the massive collections of stuff contained in it, was some sort of sex freak. Or, perhaps, allegations of such arose simply because of the peculiar lay-out of the original house - it's all low-ceiling rooms, with beds and large love seats built into the walls, the decor of stone and wood evoking a sense of private affairs, locked away in an intimate setting sometime in the swinging '70's. Sounds fine to me. I don't see why we have to go digging into the man's past. Just keep wishing you had his house.
After all, there's the mechanical orchestras. Yes, orchestras of robots playing the standard instruments of the European orchestra. The rigidity and regularity of their movements gives the music the sharp, dissonant quality of electronic music, heightened surely by the fact that supposedly one only hears recordings of the orchestras now. Nonetheless, I bought a CD of the music. That's what I call "americana," not some drunkard townie pretending he's a southern good ole boy.
Most of the other parts of the collection pale in my memory next to the mechanical orchestras. There were lots of dolls though. And knick-knacks. Yes, that sounds right.
To top it all off, there's the Infinity Room. Protruding over a valley (remember, the house is on a rock, except this part, which sticks out from the rock) and consisting entirely of window panes, the Infinity Room is diamond-shaped: the ceilings form an angle above you, the bottom a sharper angle, though of course there's a flat floor above it for you to walk on. The room gets smaller as you go along. Eventually you have to stop; after this point, the floor moves upward, and somehow or another - through the use of mirrors, I guess - the room is made to look like goes on forever, though in fact it reaches a point.
3/
In 2003, Madison started showing signs of the new directions manifesting themselves in indie/experimental music, with a surprising number of local artists engaging in the surprising resurgence of electronic "noise" music, a university residential co-op hosting one concert featuring Jackie-O Motherfucker and The No-Neck Blues Band and another featuring Nmperign, a duo of Greg Kelley and Bhob Rhainey, from Boston - two rare American improvisers who play in the "quiet," flightly yet drone-tastic, extended-technique-heavy sound that at the time was becoming very hip in European and Japanese improvised music.
Some of the folks involved in putting on these concerts, who worked under the moniker 23 Productions, in the summer of 2004 organized the Pasture Music Festival, to take place on a communal farm about 90 miles (if I remember right) west of Madison.
4/
Driving to the Pasture Music Festival was uneventful, though I did almost get a speeding ticket. Those Wisconsin policemen: they're probably too nice to give anyone a ticket; they just warn you, and nicely send you on your way. While I was pulled over, the promo car sent to the festival by Red Bull passed me. It was a car with a big Red Bull can in the back, instead of what would usually be the backseats of the car... probably - I can't recall exactly. Apparently, it didn't stay long. The driver dropped off some free Red Bull, as he was supposed to do, apparently because the organizers had convinced the company that the people who'd be attending the festival would be turned on to the beverage. I think the free cans were all gone by the time I got there.
The day's performers were split into two groups: those that performed during the day, outdoors, on a modest stage facing a sloping hill providing seating/laying-down space for the audience, and those that performed in a dilapadated barn at night and early in the morning. Of those that played outside, I only recall Plastic Crimewave Sound; they were good. I bought a CD by Dredd Foole and the Din (featuring Pelt, Chris Corsano, and Thurston Moore) called 'The Whys of Fire' which, as it turns out, sucks ass. No shit... I've not heard too many records which have received such wide-reaching acclaim but have been just-plain awful. Thankfully, Pelt's records are blissful drone fests.
Christina Carter of Charalambides played solo, and didn't seem into it - didn't play long. Loren Chasse, part of the Jewelled Antler collective from San Francisco, did a conceptual/ performance-music piece under the moniker 'Of.' He has a long history of doing works that rest somewhere between field recordings and electro-acoustic music. He laid out a roll of white paper the length of the barn, and put leaves, twigs, etc., on top. He walked up to each member of the audience and rubbed some leaves, twigs, etc., near their ears, so you could hear them up close. Matt Valentine and Erika Elder played, as did Wooden Hand and the Vanishing Voice (or is it Wooden Wand... I don't care); the former did some nice stuff, but like the latter are too much of a fake-folk "let's pretend we're hicks" act. [M V and E E, as they tend to call themselves, have gotten a lot better since then]. Born Heller played too - a couple, Josphine Foster and some dude. Since then, both have turned up in Athens - Foster playing solo an especially mellow week-day night at Tasty World, and before that the dude playing with a jazz group called Dragons 1976. They're from Chicago.
By the time the second-to-last and last groups - Pelt and Son of Earth-Flesh on Bone Trio, respectively - performed, several people were asleep on the floor of the barn, wrapped up in sleeping bags to guard themselves against the surprising cold. Yes, though it was July (or was it August? I don't remember...) it was really fucking cold. Luckily, as I was in the process of moving, I had my huge winter jacket in the car. I put it on over my t-shirt.
Both Pelt's and Son of Earth-Flesh on Bone's sets were the epitome of great "ambient" music; they fit the occasion wonderfully. I distinctly remember walking into the barn when Pelt had already started. The sounds floated off into the ether, inviting you in, to hear them close-up. Son of Earth were playing mostly electronic instruments, which was especially intriguing given the acoustic-ness of most of the artists performing that day.
Alas, I had not planned on the day's festivities lasting so long into the early morning. I had a drive ahead of me, through a fog so thick I usually could only see a few foot in front of me. I was alone on the roads, and yet I was still going under the speed limit, because I simply could not see. The sun was rising by the time I got back to Madison. The site of the fog looming over farm fields in the dawn (everything was blue, I swear) was beautiful.
12 August:
Reminiscences... (more old My Space-ings).
1/
During our visits to La Push, part of a native reservation occupying a narrow strip of land on the Pacific coast of Washington, we'd sometimes visit other beaches in the area. Most of them had far less visitors than the La Push beach, which was always populated because of the very lodges and hotel we were staying in; though some town folk hung out there too. One of these other beaches was a favorite. The sea cliffs were especially large, and a large rock stood in the middle, a sort of mini-sea cliff that had gotten lost. One year, the beach was covered with fog thick enough that one had difficulty seeing more than a few feet in front. Another year, a starfish sat by itself on the beach, presumably left behind with the passing of high tide; our dad threw it back in the water. Often, one would pass campers and feel guilty about spoiling the relative isolation they usually enjoyed. One had to walk a trail through the rain forest to get there. On this occasion, our mom was not with us, but our aunt and a cousin were. Going back up, our dad and aunt lagged behind, catching up, as they live on opposite sides of the country and rarely talk either way. Arriving back at the road, my brother and I and our cousin decide to begin walking back. Actually, our cousin, who was considerably older than us - and a girl - decided; we followed. Eventually, our aunt and dad came along in the car and picked us up, surprisingly not too upset.
2/
Customarily, students of Clarke Central did not to return to school the days they took A P exams; since they checked in with the teacher of the A P class at the exam site (the Navy Supply Corps school soon to close) they thus by some strange logic were excused for the entire day. Sophomore year, a friend and I got a ride with his mother to Guthrie's to get lunch, but then returned to school. Next year, I was determined to avoid that fate. So I went downtown, as did several others. I ate lunch at The Grill with three kids, two of which were part of the Punk/Industrial crowd that would loiter in College Square. Afterward, we went to Peppino's to play pool and video games.
Peppino's was quite the local institution in its original location. Using up the entire space of the bottom floor of what was once a department store, a large counter greeted the customer to the left, while immediately in front and to the right was the cavernous seating area. One game room was in the back, while the smaller of the two was to one's left if you kept walking straight after entering the restaurant, after the bathrooms.
The son of the owner of Peppino's went to St. Joseph's; now, he owns Little Italy. Before one of the dances, we all met at Peppino's to eat dinner. The original plan was to walk from there to St. Joseph's... not a long walk, but eventually someone's parents gave us a ride in their van. Before that though, an awkward moment: I ran into the pastor of the Lutheran church which my mom forced my brother and I to attend. The pastor was there with a group of church kids, part of some sort of "lock-in" churches have to encourage like-minded kids to mingle, sharing their piety or lack thereof. The pastor said hello, then whispered in my ears something to the effect that he hoped he knew what kind of crowd I was hanging out with. I suppose he saw that some of the girls wore dresses - the kind of dresses teenagers and adults would wear; I still remember the black dress one of them wore. I suppose also he might have thought weren't acting appropriately enough for eighth-graders.
3/
We're sitting by a radiator heather. I'm wearing a green button-up shirt with a thickness to it and a pattern I remember somewhat fondly. Jeff says, "I don't like to eat my animal friends." A human friend walks in, greets us. Overall, the house is dark, but enough lights are on to forever give the scene an aura of Christmas time, which it was. A year prior, I had first heard Jeff's music, again around Christmas time. It snowed that year in December. I told Cary while at Low Yo Yo Stuff the day the snow and ice coated the ground that such weather made me nostalgic. He thought it was a little overwrought for such a young person to be nostalgic.
4/
At the V 96 Festival in Chelmsford, England, August 1996, Pulp headlined. It was their last gig promoting Different Class, and they premiered a new song, "Help the Aged," which would end up on their next record, This Is Hardcore, released nearly two years later. As I stood among thousands of Englishmen and -women, a large video-screen told us Elastica were playing on the second stage. They were the last act there, but if one wanted a good spot to see Pulp, you had to be here, waiting. The bounty was too much for me: Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci both played on the second stage, but the one time I made it over there, I'm not sure who was playing. I had the impression that I would have greater difficulty getting near the front there than at the main stage - who knows why! I was correct though.
I was eager to see Stereolab, who played the main stage earlier in the day. They were followed by Jonathan Richman, who asked for the volume to be turned down. Gary Numan was there too, but he and his band played heavy Rock far removed from the sound that made him famous. Supergrass and Cast were the two big acts leading up to Pulp. Cast were forgettable, and have been forgotten. Supergrass were good, and still are today. The masses started singing along a lot during Cast's and Supergrass's sets. And when Pulp was on stage, the hundreds of people who were within ear- and eye-shot were singing along to every single line of their hits like "Common People" and "Disco 2000." They were great, and sadly I would never get a chance to see them play again. They toured the U S rarely, and when they did came nowhere near Atlanta/Athens. More important, I've never been to another British pop festival; are they as fun now, that the Brit-Pop moment has passed?
Indeed, when I had arrived in London, the weeklies New Musical Express and Melody Maker featured reports on the massive mini-festivals Oasis had just put on. They had purposefully tried to beat the attendance record for a music concert held by Led Zeppelin and their 1979 Knebworth shows. And they did. But the weeklies, despite their effusive praise for all sorts of awful groups, were already turning against Oasis and their excessive desire to the biggest band ever, and did not have many nice things to say about the just-past concerts.
Anyway... I bought a Pulp t-shirt; and the Blur t-shirt I had on turned out not to be an especially inspired choice: another kid had the same shirt on. I still have the program I purchased, and my ticket.
5/
Nikki the dog spent most of his days on the basement steps. When Ervin was home, he would occasionally go to rest on Ervin's lap, especially when called; in such cases, Ervin was usually watching professional wrestling. Upstairs, Elsie sat talking with her younger friend Virginia, who always seemed to know what was best for Elsie, and brought copies of The National Enquirer and similar newspapers when she was done reading them. Elsie didn't read them, and kept them in a stack in the closet that was immediately to one's left when entering the house. Immediately in front of you was the upstairs staircase, the carpet over them so thin that the hardwood floors under it defined how they felt: one always felt a little surprised by how hard a carpeted floor could be; it was uncomfortable to walk on. I always feared the prospect of falling on them.
13 August:
A final old posting from My Space. This time a biography of sorts:
And now for some old writings, from the blog I had at My Space; I'm afraid that the erstwhile social-networking favorite will up and disappear any day now, so I want to preserve these here at Google, which at least has the staying power of, say, C B S News, or your local public library.
First, a travelogue: New York (city), September 2006:
1/
I'll begin by telling you about "harbor country," Michigan, which is across the lake from Chicago. My brother's wedding took place there, Labor Day weekend, in Union Pier. The area - "harbor country" (I think the locals would like me to say the phrase a lot... you know - branding) - had a pleasant tacky feel to it. Very Mid-West, like the Wisconsin Dells. Cute bed-and-breakfast's, fruit markets filled to the brim (It must be nice living in a part of the country where there's still a lot of farming) remarkably sandy beaches - and a state park to the north of "harbor country" which features sand dunes, mountain-like masses of sand with trees sticking out... from where?
2/
Monday, Sept. 11, I avoided the city (and any sort of anniversary-memorial stuff going on, except for the two beams of light projecting upward from the W T C site, which I saw later in the evening) and took the Metro-North train to Beacon, New York, a beautiful scene most of the way, as the train travels along the Hudson River for much of the trip. Beacon is home to Dia: Beacon, part of the Dia Foundation of the Arts that also includes Dia: Chelsea and various site-specific works. The Beacon museum was once a factory, now a space specifically for large Minimalist and conceptual works that would have trouble finding a home otherwise.
Walking into the museum, one is immediately greeted by a long rectangular room housing a work by Walter De Maria, consisting of sets of one metal bar and one metal circle each [the circle is open], placed one after the other the length of the room. They are silver, and apparently each set gets slightly larger as you progress forward in the room, in order to counter the tendency of one's eyes to perceive things farther away as being smaller. Then again, the differences in size are minute enough that, when walking up the room, I could not note the difference.
An Andy Warhol work filled one room. I'm not sure what material the boards which ran along the entire length of the room's walls (except the entrance-ways) are made of, but on them were printed one of either two images. There did not seem to be a pattern to the arrangement of the images, especially as what were originally shadow-y black-and-white prints had been colored various gaudy shades of pink, yellow, green, etc. As with the De Maria, the experience of being able to sit down and appreciate a work from a distance, yet (considering the scale of the works) not so far as to preclude studying them closely, was refreshing.
3/
On what was my second night in the city, I went to see To Live and Shave in LA at a sort of "unofficial" (that is, I presume, "illegal") venue in Bushwick, which is east of Williamsburg. Indeed, the venue was a space in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park - perhaps the name is a relic from a time when "Bushwick" did not exist, or those who named it preferred the more-recognizable name. Either way, I suppose Bushwick, especially when as far out as this industrial park, is at the farthest edge of gentrification - the "avant-garde," if you will.
The place was pleasant enough - reminded me of the basement of the original Eyedrum in Atlanta, where Rock shows took place, or perhaps the Backdrop gallery, also in Atlanta, which at least for a while (or perhaps just the night I saw Silver Apples there) hosted Rock gigs in its basement. There was a Rock band whose name I forget (I'll try to look it up) that was good, largely low-key instrumental. Then, To Live and Shave in LA played. Good set, I'll say. Noise Rock with vocals - which almost automatically makes it better than regular Noise Rock. Apparently, Andrew W K was playing with the band that night, as Tom Smith, the main guy (the singer), always has a revolving cast of musicians backing him up.
Going there, I had exited the subway station, and found myself not sure where to go -the all-too-typical N Y-subway experience. I ran into another person, Emily Easterley - a singer-songwriter who had recorded a record years ago with Rat Bastard, a member of To Live and Shave in LA. Together, we managed to find the place. Going back, the subway line was not running anymore, so we shared a cab home. This part of Bushwick is obviously not dangerous, since there seems to be so few residents at all, let alone criminally-minded ones; it's just empty. I'm glad the taxi driver showed up. Would've been a long walk home.
4/
For my last night in New York, my friend Nathan (with whom I was staying) and his friend Steve and I, joined later by Nathan's girlfriend Grace, went to several bars across Manhattan, all of which at least date back to the early twentieth century. I had read an article in Village Voice about such historic bars and decided to be a pathetic tourist for once and plan this fun, yet uninspired, outing.
We started with Chumley's, in Greenchwich Village, which started as a speakeasy in the 1920's and which had great bar food - or, in some cases, "bar food"; after all, I had free-range chicken, not exactly dive-bar fare. We went to the Whitehorse Tavern next, where Dylan Thomas often went to drink, a lot. But it was filled with yuppies and big TV's and was very crowded. Of course, Chumley's had been crowded, but we didn't have to wait long for a table... and, besides, they had book covers all over the walls - books by writers who'd come there over the years.
I'm sorry, but I don't remember the names of the other two bars. One of them dated back well into the Nineteenth Century, but like Whitehorse was boring. Another was much nicer, well-lit with large mirrors behind the bar. I'll try to look up their names sometime.
I couldn't help but end the night with a visit to Marz Bar, which has only been around since the 1980's but which I enjoyed the several times I went there during my '05 trip to the city, when I was staying in Chinatown, not too far away. Marz Bar is a grimy "punk" bar in that East Village/Lower East Side in-between area. I suppose it's a throw-back to the pre-gentrification days, but of course the very fact of me saying such suggests it too has a "theme." In the end, it's all about the alcohol (and whatever other substances you may take) and the people, so you could just as well go to Applebee's. But the food won't be as good as it was at Chumley's.
5/
Saturday, Sept. 9, there was a mini-festival, I'll call it, held in Bushwick (same industrial park as the To Live and Shave in LA show); apparently it was supposed to take place in a parking lot, but was moved to a rented-out floor of a building - very run-down and gritty, which I'm sure all the Brooklyn Indie Rockers just love.
The highlights of the evening were Growing, Comets on Fire, and of course Excepter, who I hadn't seen since my trip last year, in the meanwhile doing the correspondences with their main man J F Ryan for Sweet Pea. There was another decent group, Ex Models; a dismally bad group called Matt and Kim, who as it turned out turned up in Athens a couple weeks or so later, playing at Secret Squirrel; and some other stuff I missed or don't recall the names of.
Excepter's performance was an especially dissonant affair by their standards, while Comets on Fire's fit what I've read regarding their new record - very Rock, which was mildly disappointing, as Will Hart had told me when he saw them at Arthur Fest in LA in '05 they were quite good, with lots of electronics and sound-manipulation going on. Growing ended the night beautifully, with a space-y set that did a good job of drone-ing out the spastic flights of all the earlier acts.
Unlike the night of the To Live and Shave in LA gig, the subway back to Williamsburg was running. Still, it was long; it's not often you're in NYC and there's ample parking and you wish you had a car.
6/
Walked through what is supposedly Long Island City, but which seemed more like Astoria, from the subway to the Socrates Sculpture Park, on the East River. Besides a couple men at work, I notice a woman, the only other person there. Listen to one sculpture which is also a sound-art work, the winds leading metal balls to strike a surface. Very pleasant.
Go to the Noguchi Museum; the woman it turns out is the museum guide. The Noguchi Museum is amazing, absolutely one of the best places to go in the city. I could have spent hours in the outdoor sculpture park, with the basalt rocks that Noguchi had only altered slightly, keeping the artist's role minimal, yet still in the choosing and placements of objects the center of attention. Noguchi set up the museum himself, in the later years of his life; indeed, focusing on one artist at a time, I prefer. This same trip, I went to the Jackson Pollack exhibit at the Guggenheim, devoted to his paintings on paper, and found the experience of getting to view works across his career, seeing the gradual developments, to be revealing - an academic tendency, I guess.
After Noguchi, I head south, cross a pink bridge that is perhaps a draw-bridge to Roosevelt Island, which is mostly ugly apartment buildings from the '60s/'70s, and then take the tramway back to Manhattan. The tramway ride costs the same as a subway ride, and while the view is not especially great is still worth the surreal experience of riding a tram in NYC. The only other time I think I've ridden a tram is at Stone Mountain.
7/
To sum up, during my trip, I also saw the Finnish electronic duo Pan Sonic at the Brooklyn venue Northsix; went to the Pollack exhibit at Guggenheim I already mentioned; went with Nathan and Grace to Jackson Heights in Queens to eat Indian food; given that I was staying in Williamsburg this year, explored areas of Brooklyn I had always ignored, such as downtown, Fort Greene, Prospect Park, et al.; walked from 49th st. to Chinatown in the rain my last day there; and of course bought some books at the Strand and some C D's at Other Music.
Williamsburg I found to be rather drab. There's an interesting used-record and -book shop that also shows 16mm films in the back next-door to where Nathan lives on Grand St. I don't recall ever seeing the name of the place. I hope it survives, as it seems that, despite one good bookstore and some music shops, Williamsburg is mostly bars and bad coffee shops. To be frank, I'd rather go to a diner in the Upper East Side and talk with blue-haired ladies about Mayor Bloomberg...
8/
I nearly forgot about the Howling Hex gig at Mercury Lounge, which you must believe was a highlight despite my having forgotten about it temporarily. I assume that at least a few of the musicians playing with Neil Hagerty that particular evening regularly play with him over in his current home of somewhere, New Mexico. Either way, Hagerty and the dude playing saxophone got in a lot of free-improvising on top of the great back-up provided by a bass player and a drummer. Hagerty is finally putting into practice all that talk over the years of applying Ornette Coleman's harmolodics. Now, of course, Coleman's "theory" of harmolodics has ultimately amounted to gibberish, which is not to discount in any way the extraordinary music he has made. It's just that, at least Harry Partch or Anthony Braxton were able to put their thoughts down on paper... Coleman, on the other hand...
All this is another way of saying that Hagerty was getting unbelievable sounds out of his guitar, the songs went on and on - inspiring, fun, surprising - and that's all.
11 August:
Another set of My Space blog postings from 2006:
1/
Two places stand out in my memories of southwestern Wisconsin, from the most-of-three-years I lived there: the House on the Rock and the farm where the Pasture Music Festival was held.
First, a word about Wisconsin - no, the Mid-West, as we still quaintly call a region whose borders we don't exactly know: it's flat... until you get to near the Mississippi River, where it gets hilly and greenery-y and pretty. And there, there's no sprawl. You're in the country, then you're in a town, then you're not. It's like you're in Europe. This is our setting!
2/
One day, I ran into an old friend from college while walking along one of the two lakes Madison sits between (not the one Otis Redding died in [Lake Monona], the other one [Lake Mendota]). Turns out, she's going to grad school too. We hadn't kept in touch. As Madison seemed eons away from Atlanta, this coincidence was a little eery, surreal-like.
Another day, we went with some of her friends to the House on the Rock. Apparently, the man who built the house, and collected the massive collections of stuff contained in it, was some sort of sex freak. Or, perhaps, allegations of such arose simply because of the peculiar lay-out of the original house - it's all low-ceiling rooms, with beds and large love seats built into the walls, the decor of stone and wood evoking a sense of private affairs, locked away in an intimate setting sometime in the swinging '70's. Sounds fine to me. I don't see why we have to go digging into the man's past. Just keep wishing you had his house.
After all, there's the mechanical orchestras. Yes, orchestras of robots playing the standard instruments of the European orchestra. The rigidity and regularity of their movements gives the music the sharp, dissonant quality of electronic music, heightened surely by the fact that supposedly one only hears recordings of the orchestras now. Nonetheless, I bought a CD of the music. That's what I call "americana," not some drunkard townie pretending he's a southern good ole boy.
Most of the other parts of the collection pale in my memory next to the mechanical orchestras. There were lots of dolls though. And knick-knacks. Yes, that sounds right.
To top it all off, there's the Infinity Room. Protruding over a valley (remember, the house is on a rock, except this part, which sticks out from the rock) and consisting entirely of window panes, the Infinity Room is diamond-shaped: the ceilings form an angle above you, the bottom a sharper angle, though of course there's a flat floor above it for you to walk on. The room gets smaller as you go along. Eventually you have to stop; after this point, the floor moves upward, and somehow or another - through the use of mirrors, I guess - the room is made to look like goes on forever, though in fact it reaches a point.
3/
In 2003, Madison started showing signs of the new directions manifesting themselves in indie/experimental music, with a surprising number of local artists engaging in the surprising resurgence of electronic "noise" music, a university residential co-op hosting one concert featuring Jackie-O Motherfucker and The No-Neck Blues Band and another featuring Nmperign, a duo of Greg Kelley and Bhob Rhainey, from Boston - two rare American improvisers who play in the "quiet," flightly yet drone-tastic, extended-technique-heavy sound that at the time was becoming very hip in European and Japanese improvised music.
Some of the folks involved in putting on these concerts, who worked under the moniker 23 Productions, in the summer of 2004 organized the Pasture Music Festival, to take place on a communal farm about 90 miles (if I remember right) west of Madison.
4/
Driving to the Pasture Music Festival was uneventful, though I did almost get a speeding ticket. Those Wisconsin policemen: they're probably too nice to give anyone a ticket; they just warn you, and nicely send you on your way. While I was pulled over, the promo car sent to the festival by Red Bull passed me. It was a car with a big Red Bull can in the back, instead of what would usually be the backseats of the car... probably - I can't recall exactly. Apparently, it didn't stay long. The driver dropped off some free Red Bull, as he was supposed to do, apparently because the organizers had convinced the company that the people who'd be attending the festival would be turned on to the beverage. I think the free cans were all gone by the time I got there.
The day's performers were split into two groups: those that performed during the day, outdoors, on a modest stage facing a sloping hill providing seating/laying-down space for the audience, and those that performed in a dilapadated barn at night and early in the morning. Of those that played outside, I only recall Plastic Crimewave Sound; they were good. I bought a CD by Dredd Foole and the Din (featuring Pelt, Chris Corsano, and Thurston Moore) called 'The Whys of Fire' which, as it turns out, sucks ass. No shit... I've not heard too many records which have received such wide-reaching acclaim but have been just-plain awful. Thankfully, Pelt's records are blissful drone fests.
Christina Carter of Charalambides played solo, and didn't seem into it - didn't play long. Loren Chasse, part of the Jewelled Antler collective from San Francisco, did a conceptual/ performance-music piece under the moniker 'Of.' He has a long history of doing works that rest somewhere between field recordings and electro-acoustic music. He laid out a roll of white paper the length of the barn, and put leaves, twigs, etc., on top. He walked up to each member of the audience and rubbed some leaves, twigs, etc., near their ears, so you could hear them up close. Matt Valentine and Erika Elder played, as did Wooden Hand and the Vanishing Voice (or is it Wooden Wand... I don't care); the former did some nice stuff, but like the latter are too much of a fake-folk "let's pretend we're hicks" act. [M V and E E, as they tend to call themselves, have gotten a lot better since then]. Born Heller played too - a couple, Josphine Foster and some dude. Since then, both have turned up in Athens - Foster playing solo an especially mellow week-day night at Tasty World, and before that the dude playing with a jazz group called Dragons 1976. They're from Chicago.
By the time the second-to-last and last groups - Pelt and Son of Earth-Flesh on Bone Trio, respectively - performed, several people were asleep on the floor of the barn, wrapped up in sleeping bags to guard themselves against the surprising cold. Yes, though it was July (or was it August? I don't remember...) it was really fucking cold. Luckily, as I was in the process of moving, I had my huge winter jacket in the car. I put it on over my t-shirt.
Both Pelt's and Son of Earth-Flesh on Bone's sets were the epitome of great "ambient" music; they fit the occasion wonderfully. I distinctly remember walking into the barn when Pelt had already started. The sounds floated off into the ether, inviting you in, to hear them close-up. Son of Earth were playing mostly electronic instruments, which was especially intriguing given the acoustic-ness of most of the artists performing that day.
Alas, I had not planned on the day's festivities lasting so long into the early morning. I had a drive ahead of me, through a fog so thick I usually could only see a few foot in front of me. I was alone on the roads, and yet I was still going under the speed limit, because I simply could not see. The sun was rising by the time I got back to Madison. The site of the fog looming over farm fields in the dawn (everything was blue, I swear) was beautiful.
12 August:
Reminiscences... (more old My Space-ings).
1/
During our visits to La Push, part of a native reservation occupying a narrow strip of land on the Pacific coast of Washington, we'd sometimes visit other beaches in the area. Most of them had far less visitors than the La Push beach, which was always populated because of the very lodges and hotel we were staying in; though some town folk hung out there too. One of these other beaches was a favorite. The sea cliffs were especially large, and a large rock stood in the middle, a sort of mini-sea cliff that had gotten lost. One year, the beach was covered with fog thick enough that one had difficulty seeing more than a few feet in front. Another year, a starfish sat by itself on the beach, presumably left behind with the passing of high tide; our dad threw it back in the water. Often, one would pass campers and feel guilty about spoiling the relative isolation they usually enjoyed. One had to walk a trail through the rain forest to get there. On this occasion, our mom was not with us, but our aunt and a cousin were. Going back up, our dad and aunt lagged behind, catching up, as they live on opposite sides of the country and rarely talk either way. Arriving back at the road, my brother and I and our cousin decide to begin walking back. Actually, our cousin, who was considerably older than us - and a girl - decided; we followed. Eventually, our aunt and dad came along in the car and picked us up, surprisingly not too upset.
2/
Customarily, students of Clarke Central did not to return to school the days they took A P exams; since they checked in with the teacher of the A P class at the exam site (the Navy Supply Corps school soon to close) they thus by some strange logic were excused for the entire day. Sophomore year, a friend and I got a ride with his mother to Guthrie's to get lunch, but then returned to school. Next year, I was determined to avoid that fate. So I went downtown, as did several others. I ate lunch at The Grill with three kids, two of which were part of the Punk/Industrial crowd that would loiter in College Square. Afterward, we went to Peppino's to play pool and video games.
Peppino's was quite the local institution in its original location. Using up the entire space of the bottom floor of what was once a department store, a large counter greeted the customer to the left, while immediately in front and to the right was the cavernous seating area. One game room was in the back, while the smaller of the two was to one's left if you kept walking straight after entering the restaurant, after the bathrooms.
The son of the owner of Peppino's went to St. Joseph's; now, he owns Little Italy. Before one of the dances, we all met at Peppino's to eat dinner. The original plan was to walk from there to St. Joseph's... not a long walk, but eventually someone's parents gave us a ride in their van. Before that though, an awkward moment: I ran into the pastor of the Lutheran church which my mom forced my brother and I to attend. The pastor was there with a group of church kids, part of some sort of "lock-in" churches have to encourage like-minded kids to mingle, sharing their piety or lack thereof. The pastor said hello, then whispered in my ears something to the effect that he hoped he knew what kind of crowd I was hanging out with. I suppose he saw that some of the girls wore dresses - the kind of dresses teenagers and adults would wear; I still remember the black dress one of them wore. I suppose also he might have thought weren't acting appropriately enough for eighth-graders.
3/
We're sitting by a radiator heather. I'm wearing a green button-up shirt with a thickness to it and a pattern I remember somewhat fondly. Jeff says, "I don't like to eat my animal friends." A human friend walks in, greets us. Overall, the house is dark, but enough lights are on to forever give the scene an aura of Christmas time, which it was. A year prior, I had first heard Jeff's music, again around Christmas time. It snowed that year in December. I told Cary while at Low Yo Yo Stuff the day the snow and ice coated the ground that such weather made me nostalgic. He thought it was a little overwrought for such a young person to be nostalgic.
4/
At the V 96 Festival in Chelmsford, England, August 1996, Pulp headlined. It was their last gig promoting Different Class, and they premiered a new song, "Help the Aged," which would end up on their next record, This Is Hardcore, released nearly two years later. As I stood among thousands of Englishmen and -women, a large video-screen told us Elastica were playing on the second stage. They were the last act there, but if one wanted a good spot to see Pulp, you had to be here, waiting. The bounty was too much for me: Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci both played on the second stage, but the one time I made it over there, I'm not sure who was playing. I had the impression that I would have greater difficulty getting near the front there than at the main stage - who knows why! I was correct though.
I was eager to see Stereolab, who played the main stage earlier in the day. They were followed by Jonathan Richman, who asked for the volume to be turned down. Gary Numan was there too, but he and his band played heavy Rock far removed from the sound that made him famous. Supergrass and Cast were the two big acts leading up to Pulp. Cast were forgettable, and have been forgotten. Supergrass were good, and still are today. The masses started singing along a lot during Cast's and Supergrass's sets. And when Pulp was on stage, the hundreds of people who were within ear- and eye-shot were singing along to every single line of their hits like "Common People" and "Disco 2000." They were great, and sadly I would never get a chance to see them play again. They toured the U S rarely, and when they did came nowhere near Atlanta/Athens. More important, I've never been to another British pop festival; are they as fun now, that the Brit-Pop moment has passed?
Indeed, when I had arrived in London, the weeklies New Musical Express and Melody Maker featured reports on the massive mini-festivals Oasis had just put on. They had purposefully tried to beat the attendance record for a music concert held by Led Zeppelin and their 1979 Knebworth shows. And they did. But the weeklies, despite their effusive praise for all sorts of awful groups, were already turning against Oasis and their excessive desire to the biggest band ever, and did not have many nice things to say about the just-past concerts.
Anyway... I bought a Pulp t-shirt; and the Blur t-shirt I had on turned out not to be an especially inspired choice: another kid had the same shirt on. I still have the program I purchased, and my ticket.
5/
Nikki the dog spent most of his days on the basement steps. When Ervin was home, he would occasionally go to rest on Ervin's lap, especially when called; in such cases, Ervin was usually watching professional wrestling. Upstairs, Elsie sat talking with her younger friend Virginia, who always seemed to know what was best for Elsie, and brought copies of The National Enquirer and similar newspapers when she was done reading them. Elsie didn't read them, and kept them in a stack in the closet that was immediately to one's left when entering the house. Immediately in front of you was the upstairs staircase, the carpet over them so thin that the hardwood floors under it defined how they felt: one always felt a little surprised by how hard a carpeted floor could be; it was uncomfortable to walk on. I always feared the prospect of falling on them.
13 August:
A final old posting from My Space. This time a biography of sorts:
--
Born and raised in Athens, Georgia, though no-one ever thought to ask me about it, I went to Catholic school (no, I'm not Catholic) - St. Joseph's, right near downtown - from kindergarten through eighth grade, and Clarke Central High School afterwards. Except for a few brief moments here and there, and a few individuals here but not there, I did not enjoy high school, and escaped to downtown, starting in 1996 to go to Rock shows at the 40 Watt and Atomic, and meeting many lovely individuals in those distant days before the booming economy and "indie" hipster dorks started flooding the town with new building materials and clever ideas about how to make money. I also spent too much time talking to strangers on the Internet; and reminiscing about childhood friends who I had known outside school, who'd gone; and witnessing my family's home in a part of town between the suburbs and the city, near a large chunk of unused land - a stretch of the Middle Oconee River passing through - gradually deteriorate, by which I mean, "change"; because when your childhood home changes when you're not there to experience the changes or have a say in them, obviously it's a bad thing. My family had traveled a lot - to Alaska, France, all over Washington state, the southwest.... and watched Dr. Who Saturday nights on P B S... and went to Atlanta to buy bagels at a great Jewish bakery when the only ones you could get in Athens were frozen, at the supermarket... and I remember the day I bought my first Smiths record - no: not the day, the moment first listening to it, on the car stereo driving down Washington St.
I attended Emory University, '97-'01. What was fun and intriguing about being in Atlanta occurred far from the Emory campus (naturally... since the uni. is separated from the city by Druid Hills and its golf course), including parties at the Candler-Smith lofts; working at W R E K, 91.1 FM, the Georgia Tech radio station that plays more avant-garde/ experimental/ yadda-yadda music than any other station save perhaps W N U R in Chicago or W F M U in New York; eating Mexican and all sorts of Asian cuisines on the Buford Highway (which is actually quite close to Emory, being in the other direction); going to Free Jazz and other poorly-attended gigs at the original Eyedrum, the Existentialist "church," and elsewhere; and engaging in various late-'90's-style ironic behavior with similar-minded friends, such as eating at Cici's Pizza.
I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, '01-'04; and, relatively free from the cultural currents I'd been a part of in Athens and Atlanta, I achieved a remarkable sense of mental clarity... fleetingly. Put more concretely, I got a Master's degree in history; since we're talking here about a doctoral program, in other words, I quit. Though I'm still interested in what I studied: namely, progressive and radical dissenters of the first half of the twentieth century (U S) especially with regard to foreign-policy debates - e.g., the neutrality movement of the '30's, anti-imperialists, Socialists.
I like many, many things, but usually only when they are taken out of their context - or, rather, after they've been enjoyed by many, and are abandoned to be taken up by the likes of me, to be contextualized, and thus made to be specters of a different time - for example, Roseannne re-runs or Sam Fuller movies or Frank Sinatra or "science" fiction.
I returned to Athens, summer of '04, much to the bemusement of many; yet having already come back regularly for winter and summer breaks from school, Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, and other music performances, and so on.
I like to listen to music - I'm academic [obsessive-compulsive] about it, so it's rarely fun or inspirational anymore.
I've driven the same car since 1995. In the summer of 2003, driving through the Illinois corn fields, listening to Swans's Soundtracks for the Blind, the setting sun seemed like it was actually rising from beyond the horizon of the flat land that laid out before me. This scene led to a song, which has been rejected but was one of several that lead to...
Making my own music, though the process of recording is still too disparate from the random pleasure or catharsis I get from singing to myself. I've completed a C D R record, Winter's, released in November, 2006, under the moniker, The People Under the Sun. The track listing:
"The State of Things (Self-Portrait)"
"Hell and Earth"
"Hone the Earth"
"I, I... (Prelude)"
"Sing Song (Part 1)"
"I, I..." / "Sing Song (Part 2)"
"Love and Social Death"
"Love and Social Death (Coda)"
The record consists entirely of vocals.
I read books and write essays; for the sake of publishing the latter, and more, I've started an e-zine, Sweet Pea Review - no, rather, it's an imitation of an e-zine, really an anthology-in-progress, as it is not updated often or with any regularity, and the contributions will stay there as long as it exists; it is a collection of writings/ photos/ etc. of whomever is willing to contribute. With regard to its primary subject, music, Sweet Pea offers discussions directly related to the music itself, not the gossip and faux-ideological disputes that envelope it, with the aim of tying musical criticism into the themes developed by essayists, literary and visual-art critics, philosophers, and historians - say, George Steiner, Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, Terry Eagleton, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, Isaiah Berlin.
In these past few years, nearly always working on an essay or some other project for Sweet Pea, my listening has gone beyond any (mis)conception of the notion of eclecticism - that is, the point is moot. I actually do prefer those artists who cover a lot of ground, so to speak, whose work not only suggests several different methods and styles melding together but also compel thought about extra-musical concerns. Artists with massive bodies of work - not revolving around a center, temporal or conceptual, appeal to me: Anthony Braxton, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harry Partch, Pierre Henry, Olivier Messiaen, Sun City Girls, John Zorn, Neil Young, etc.
I've recorded enough material to make up a second People Under the Sun record. I don't know when I'll have the inspiration to do the necessary editing, over-dubbing, and manipulating required to finish it.