 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Today was a good day, all the better since it came on the heels of an extremely challenging month. Something has shifted in the weight on my mind, making me feel more light on my existential feet. The arrival of the Monsoon has certainly helped to improve my mood, but there are other factors in this change. Seeing the excellent Public Enemies this afternoon was a great pleasure, for example. Also, I had a great time bowling earlier this week, when I notched my second-highest score ever. It's not a very good score, I realize, but personally significant since my other scores in that range all came when I had been bowling regularly for months. Tags: autobiography, everyday, health
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote an essay for Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life focusing on a reference to leftist icon Antonio Gramsci in Rush Limbaugh's second book, See, I Told You So. That piece received more play than most of my work has, getting republished in a newsletter devoted to all things Gramsci and, later on, being cited by Eric Alterman in his column for The Nation. It was therefore with heightened interest -- and self-interest, which is probably the same thing -- that I noted Fox News personality Glenn Beck's long commentary on the latest cause célèbre in the realm of radical publishing, the anonymously authored -- and French, naturally, as Beck wryly notes -- book The Coming Insurrection, whose English edition will be out shortly: The fact that Beck goes on so long here makes it clear how badly the Right needs to find new leftist provocateurs to rile up its base and then link, by a chain of associations, to the centrists currently in power in the United States and most European countries. Just as it was no accident that Limbaugh's book brought up the Left's affection for Gramsci at a time when conservatives were eager to make Clinton look far more radical than he ever was or would be, it's pretty transparent why Beck is invoking a dense remix of 1960s-style polemicizing at the precise moment when Barack Obama is making it clear that he is not a revolutionary leader a la Mao or Che, but a politician whose strengths and weaknesses -- minus the tendency to overeat barbecue and [EXPLETIVE DELTED] -- are eerily similar to the last Democratic President's. Tags: clips, history, media, politics
Current Location: 85704
Muse: ". . . I don't need a minister to call me a groom . . ."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I had good thoughts earlier today, sparked by reading cultural theory about taste and Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. But they didn't stick in my mind, cluttered as it is with the details of dosages and dependency. I'm hoping that I can retrieve them with the help of the tape flags I use, obsessively, to mark passages of interest. The problem, as always, is that I'm interested in too much. Still, it's better than living one's life waiting for the next round of pills. As William S. Burroughs might have said, addiction is the antithesis of taste because it pushes the body to reduce all stimulus into simple maintenance. You can only build something new if you allow yourself room for improvement. Tags: everyday, health, reading, theory
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I've started reading the English-language collection of Jorge Luis Borges' non-fiction work that came out a number of years ago. I'd given it a cursory perusal when I bought it, as a companion to the fiction and poetry collections, but hadn't taken the time to give it much thought. Because it's one of the books that Thing Two marked during his excessively territorial phase, I decided that now would be a good time to pull it off the shelf. Noticing the slightly pockmarked cover and cleaning solution-curled edges of some pages may seem like a strange way of paying tribute to the cat's memory, but I've spent enough time musing on the ways in which mass-produced goods can develop the aura of one-of-a-kindness for this gesture to make sense for me psychologically. Because I've been reading and loving Borges since high school, I've had the occasion to reflect in some detail on the havoc his work plays with traditional notions of genre. It's no accident that the English-language collection devoted to his poetry has a good deal of what looks like prose inside. This genre-bending also holds true for this non-fiction collection, which periodically turns up a piece that reads exactly like one of his ficciones that purports to present real history. But there are plenty of reviews of a more straightforward nature that do not feel like that sort of deception. I have been repeatedly delighted to find that Borges offers learned but unstuffy opinions that avoid what we now call snark while still managing to see through the Emperor's new clothes. His take on Finnegan's Wake, for example, boldly targets its easy punning as an indication of the author's shortcomings. I'll try to post a few quotes from other pieces in the collection later this week. Tags: everyday, literature, writing
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I'm realizing now what an important part of my daily life Thing Two had become over the past year. After making the move he'd long desired from indoor-only cat to one allowed to roam freely for much of the day and evening, I took on the role of his designated caretaker. But he also served as mine, in a way. When I was alone at night in the front room, feeling down, I could always go visit him in the garage or bring him into my office for belly rubs. Frequently, I wrote with him by my side or sprawled across the edges of my laptop. I don't want to sound too New Age here, but I think he did serve as a sort of muse.  Animal companionship is especially helpful when one is engaged in a solitary pursuit like writing. I imagine that the traditional link between witches and their feline familiars has its origins in the realization that creativity comes easier with cats. Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that I'm feeling pretty upset. The Michael Jackson coverage has heightened my fixation on loss, but I was having a terrible time staying asleep all week. I just realized that I'm writing this entry on the one-week anniversary of my vigil, when I lay in the sofa hoping he'd come home and kept getting up to call him every fifteen minutes or so. The song "I Want You Back" is on auto-repeat in my head right now. But though I understand Jackson's cultural significance and want to show the proper respect for the dead, it's Two that I'm thinking about when they come to the chorus. And you, too, I confess. Tags: autobiography, everyday, music, pets
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
While it may seem redundant to add to the massive tide of remembrance at this point, there was something in this particular clip, which won't get seen as much because of its length and comedy format, that struck me as especially poignant: The moment when Michael first sings, his voice caught between the fluid highs of his pre-teenage years and the confident falsetto that compensated for their loss in his adult career, is one that captures not only his personal dilemma, about which so much has been said, but also that of mainstream American culture more generally, with its promotion of an "adamant immaturity," as my friend Ron Alcalay so aptly put it, that would deny even grown-ups the feeling of being grown up. I don't think it's any accident that the liminal state that Michael Jackson sought to occupy in the temporal register had its corollary in his fixation on the color line. I have to give another shout out to Ron, here, who did a wonderful job of pondering the deeper implications of Jackson's famous video on the subject in an essay he wrote for Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. Tags: bad subjects, history, music, race, theory
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
When Skylar got home from her martial arts class today, we talked about Michael Jackson. She barely knew who he was, which I attribute more to the sort of culture to which her parents have exposed her than to his declining fame. I told her that she'd want to remember the moment, regardless of her ambivalence, because it would be one of those historical events that would get brought up over and over in future years. Still, she seemed nonplussed. So I came up with an analogy. "It's like when Marilyn Monroe died," I told her. Finally, she seemed to understand that this wasn't just a case of a minor personage passing away. It was interesting, though, that I had to use Marilyn as a point of reference, considering that she died six years before I was born. The harder I think about what Skylar's perception of history will be as she grows up, the more difficult it becomes to imagine it resembling my own. Tags: daughter, everyday, history, media, music
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The loss of my archive of features and reviews for Tikkun has prodded me to do a better job of pointing people to my work while it's still available online. My long association with Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life and its superlative "technical director" Geoff Sauer spoiled me to such an extent that the prospect of suddenly broken links didn't generate the alarm it should have. Anyway, I am going to be showcasing some of my recent pieces for Zeek here, in rapid succession, so that those of you are interested in them can go have a peek before the passage of time makes them inaccessible, a circumstance that might lie in the distant future or much closer to hand. Where was I? Right. So I'm going to share more than I typically do, overcoming the unproductive modesty, mingled with unproductive anxiety, that leads me to think that people who want to read my musings can find them if they want. My most recent article began as an attempt to write a wide-ranging review of the new Sonic Youth record The Eternal. Several paragraphs in, however, it became apparent to me that I was ranging so widely that I had yet to come close to discussing anything specifically relevant to the record, even though the connection to it would have been clear to someone as invested in the band as I am. So I started over, setting aside those paragraphs for later use. As it happens, that later use came quite soon, since my next self-assigned assignment was to write a review of the new Tortoise record Beacons of Ancestorship. Because I didn't yet have the physical record in hand, however, and wasn't sure I'd heard all the tracks on it, I was reluctant to follow through on my intention of posting a review of it. What I came up with, as an alternative, is an essay that provides a context for understanding Tortoise's fifteen-year career in relation to the massive changes in the music industry that have accompanied it. So the piece is "about" Tortoise more in the sense of exploring what lies immediately beyond the circle delimiting the band's work than what falls within its scope. Still, I listened to a lot of Tortoise while writing it, suggesting that their music's influence on my ideas might be manifested indirectly even when I'm not talking about them. The same goes for our cat Thing Two, whose body I'd discovered before finishing the last two-thirds of the piece. I couldn't sleep, so I wrote. Here's to you, Little Guy, with three of the paragraphs I poured out in your honor: In the end, though, post-rock did not prove to have the impact that its supporters had hoped. Although it pointed the way towards a new cultural sensibility, its leading lights were too dim to transform the music industry to a meaningful extent. As it turned out, the crisis in self-understanding that post-rock had signalled proved to be a prophecy whose full meaning could not be immediately discerned. In his remarkable 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the French thinker Jacques Attali inverts traditional leftist thinking in arguing that changes in music often anticipate changes in the social order rather than merely reflecting them after the fact. While post-rock may not be the sort of music he had in mind, his suggestive comments about the revolutionary potential in free jazz – a major influence on some post-rock luminaries – make it possible, without distorting his ideas egregiously, to claim that the radical structural transformation that we have been witnessing in the music industry was prefigured, both in post-rock’s rejection of traditional notions of genre and in the reluctance to pursue stardom exhibited by most of its practitioners.
That being said, there’s no doubt that the major factor in this structural transformation was the technological progress that made music available on the internet. But it is worth nothing that, long before Napster, MySpace and YouTube came on the scene, astute critics had imagined the future that those services would later make flesh. In his comments on the future of composition, written a number of years before the development of the compact disc became a hot topic, Attali himself proves remarkably prescient. “The consumer, completing the mutation that began with the tape recorder and photography, will thus become a producer and will derive at least as much of his satsisfaction from the manufacturing process itself as from the object he produces.” Interestingly, though Noise is about music, Attali clearly includes the manipulation of images in his conception of composition, a sign that, together with future-oriented media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, he anticipated a world of what Henry Jenkins calls “media convergence.”
This vision of a world in which consumers want to feel like producers of their own content highlights the most profound change that popular music has undergone since being made available on the internet. More and more, even the most devoted music lovers struggle to identify what they are listenting to and, as a consequence, also frequently struggle to identify with it. Despite the fact that today's listeners can carry “their” music around on an iPod or access it from internet sites like LastFM or Blip.fm, they regularly forget what they have in their collection. It used to be that, once you put an LP on the turntable, you were pretty sure of what you were going to be hearing, even if it was your first time listenting to the record. Now it’s common to see people pause to look down at their iPod or up at their screen to remind themselves of the name of a band they’ve heard many times before. When I sat down at the laptop at 3am, I hadn't thought of Jacques Attali in many years. I'm not sure why my thoughts gravitated to Noise so intently as I tried to type my way out of paralytic sadness, but it felt good to reread portions of the book that night. I recommend it. And I recommend the new Tortoise album, out Tuesday, as well. It will always conjure memories of Thing Two for me, but it's better to remember than forget. Tags: clips, music, theory, writing
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Back when I first started trying to get Skylar interested in the idea of sports, at age four or so, she invariable wanted to dribble the soccer ball and kick the basketball. For the most part, that attitude towards la régle du jeu persisted through last year, with the exception of her martial arts training, which seems to get processed in a different part of her mind. I was delighted, then, when she not only proved willing to give an after-school girls basketball class a whirl this past spring, but also stuck it out for the whole six weeks, despite perceiving that the "sporty" girls that dominated the proceedings were a poor psychological fit for her. I'm hoping that she'll take the next iteration of the class in the fall. And I would also very much like her to start playing softball, since she has demonstrated a real affinity for hitting projectiles in motion. Still, I know that her aversion to rules and regulations may make it hard for her to get and stay involved, since softball and baseball lack the one-on-none dimension that makes basketball a good sport for loners and free spirits. So I'm hoping to remind her how much she likes to hit without pushing the team concept too hard. The other night, when I was trying to figure out a new way for her to get her daily exercise, I devised a new "sport" with this approach in mind: whack-a-frisbee. Not only does this activity involve me throwing her a frisbee instead of a ball, it's also played with a long, unwieldy branch pruned from the mesquite tree in our front yard. The only rules are that A) she has to slide the frisbee back to me, hockey style, if she fails to make contact or whacks the frisbee foul; B) I have to retrieve the frisbee if she whacks it into fair territory (an amorphous but still sensible subdivision of space roughly equivalent to the shape of a baseball diamond); and C) I also have to retrieve the frisbee if it sails into the flood control retention basis next to our house, a task that involves clambering down a rather steep, rocky incline. Skylar enjoys this activity more than any of the other in-front-of-our-house games we've played over the years. It gives her good exercise, since the stick is considerably heavier than her baseball bat and she swings it almost like a martial arts-type staff. It confuses our neighbors, who aren't used to seeing such DIY games. And it solves the problem of dealing with the potential for a well-hit ball to break something important or roll away where we can't get it, since the frisbee doesn't go very far on even the best of whacks. I also like the idea that we've revived, in a strange way, stickball, the sport my father played growing up in New York City, with the added wrinkle that we "grew" our own stick! Tags: daughter, everyday, sports
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I have been spending less time in the car than I did in the spring and much less than I did in the fall, when I was commuting up to the Phoenix area twice a week. And I haven't been bicycling or jogging as regularly as I would like. On top of that, before my trip to the beach, the hard drive that contained my huge iTunes library -- 120 gigabytes of music that I had largely imported myself from CDs -- inexplicably gave up the ghost, with no hope for reasonably priced data recovery. Aside from what this trend says about my health, both of mind and body, it also means that I've been listening to a lot less music than I'd like. That's why I took special delight this weekend in spending many hours alone with my daughter in which I could play music out loud. On Thursday we listened to Sonic Youth -- at low volume, naturally -- after I picked her up at art camp. She rapidly picked out snatches of melodies and sang along, distractedly, which always impresses me. Friday morning we heard more Sonic Youth. Saturday, while we spent mellow hours at home -- I was cleaning while she played -- we heard a wide range of things, from two of Beethoven's last spring quartets, to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, to Vic Chesnutt. The musical highlight was Saturday evening, though, when I brought my iPod with us on the long drive to pick up her mom. We listened to her favorite songs off the latest Neko Cast album Middle Cyclone, which both of us have come to adore, and I also played her some of the New Pornographers songs that best showcase Neko's voice, from the two fine ballads off Challengers to the always-breathtaking "Letter From an Occupant." Music sounds better when you hear it with someone you love. Even though headphones deliver superior audio, there's something about their isolating qualities that has a negative psychological effect on one's listening. From my perspective, there's even a marked difference between listening to music alone without headphones, as I typically do in the car, and listening to music alone with them on. The reason I sat down at the keyboard to write this is that I wanted to share the experience I had driving home from Safeway earlier. Bob Seger's "Night Moves" came on the rock station. I've never been a fan of his oeuvre and have typically found that particular song, which dominated the airwaves in the years when i was discovering popular music, especially grating. Tonight, though, it held me rapt. I suddenly felt a personal connection to the song that brought me almost to the point of tears, despite the fact that I have little in common with its narrator. I'm pretty sure that all the listening I'd done over the previous few days was the main reason why. Something had opened up inside me, a portal so big that even Bob Seger's clunky sentimentality could squeeze through. Tags: autobiography, everyday, music
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
PREVIOUS 
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
