I'm not sure what happened, but I've hit a real dry spell in my writing. Wait, I take that back. I do think I know the biggest source of my woes. When Zeek went on temporary hiatus while switching to a new host, my regular deadline - I wrote a lot over the past year - temporarily went away. And then the transition turned out to be much more complicated than originally anticipated -- the new site still has a ways to go before going live -- meaning that I've gone weeks without being forced to complete a piece. Some might welcome such freedom, the opportunity to work on longer-term projects. I believe I said that I would be looking forward to the break. But the simple fact is that I always get more done when I'm under the pressure of a hard deadline. Unfortunately, my efforts to simulate that sort of due date usually fall flat. If the injunction to perform comes from within, I find it too easy to ignore its call.

Tags: analysis, autobiography, everyday, writing
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

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

Today I wrote 2755 words in four-and-a-half hours. That's good for me, a rate of 612 words per hour. Understandably, I want to imagine that I could sustain that level of performance over the course of an eight hour day. The truth, though, as I've discovered again and again, is that I usually pass the point of diminishing returns after half that many. But even if my performance were to diminish by 2/3, I'd still manage some 3500 words a day. The problem, of course, is that I rarely get more than four hours per day in which I am sufficiently rested and focused to write effectively. Still, I think it would be realistic to establish a rate of 3000 words per day as my long-term goal. Even if I were to allow two days off each week, I could make enormous headway in a month. The challenge is to find a way to avoid the sort of interactions that drain me of the self-confidence and sense of purpose I need in order to make most days as efficient as today.

Tags: everyday, writing
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Poison Arrow - Sonic Youth - The Eternal

My longtime pal Chris Pratt and his Antipodean friend Julian Coldrey have a wine blog, Full Pour, that I read with great pleasure, even though I know very little about wine and get to drink it with others even less. I'm sure someone has written eloquently about how the art of describing what something tastes like, especially something as complex and mutable as wine, involves a good deal of accidental surrealism. The difference in the case of entries like this one, one of my favorite examples of Chris's style, is that the surrealism is deliberate and therefore all the more awesome, making the prose seem to transcend its topic entirely, if you aren't reading to sate your oenophilia:

Anyhow, if such a thing as strawberry floor wax exists, then surely it smells like this. Scratch that, it smells like Soviet bloc "strawberry" ice cream dreamed up in an East German cooperative, manufactured from apples and Bulgarian grapes. It is, however, enchanting in its oddness, dredging up memories I'm absolutely sure aren't mine of Russian tea rooms with small cakes that appear more painted than frosted.

It's hard to imagine anyone other than the inimitable Mr. Pratt writing those sentences, which makes them even more delightful to those who know and love him. For my part, I'm also intrigued by the notion that this description could be transposed, unaltered, to the realm of music criticism, where the use of metaphors from far afield is also prevalent. The harder it is to capture something in words, the more important it is to select words that simulate that something with the power of association.

Tags: friends, prose, taste, writing
Current Location: 85704

After attending this year's Pop Conference in Seattle, I sat down to write about the experience. But what began as a review soon metamorphosed into a feature in which I tried to put that experience in historical perspective, comparing it to what happened in the first few years of the conference. 12,000 words later, I had 10,000 words to cut. So I pleaded for an extra 1,000. And then I ended up wrangling almost 2,000 more, leaving me with a piece that was, as I told a friend, both too long and too short. Awkwardly sized though it is, however, I am reasonably satisfied with it. At the very least, I made progress towards realizing the vision I have of a work that will tackle the crisis of contemporary cultural criticism head on:

Music remains popular, one of the most important means of making sustainable interpersonal connections. But that social function no longer requires the purchasing of many records. This is not to imply that music culture has transcended consumerism. Money still changes hands, obviously. The difference is that its destination has changed. Whereas music lovers’ primary expense used to be “software,” such as LPs, tapes, CDs and the magazines that cover the field, they are now likely to spend more on the technology needed to manage their collection.

The crisis of music criticism is the direct result of this transformation. It used to be that record reviews served primarily as a form of financial planning. When you only have enough cash to buy one album a week, being sure that you’re making the best choice is crucial. Things are different now. Although music criticism is still an important resource for those who seek guidance in building their collections, the need for it is less pressing. A sizable percentage of contemporary music lovers know how to “test drive” music without having to pay for it. And they also have a wealth of internet resources with which to gauge the opinions of other consumers.

The advice this demographic requires is more diffuse in nature. In an era when the term “content” has come to stand in for specific media, what they seek in music criticism, often without realizing it, is the means of sorting the culture potentially available to them so that is serves a purpose beyond mechanically filling out their collection.. In a sense, time is the new money. Most music lovers have less of it to spend on culture than their predecessors did. For them, the value of music criticism is proportional to the time it prevents them from wasting.

That's a task for which the participants in the Pop Conference are perfectly suited. And it's what coming to the conference teaches them how to do even better. Maybe that's why the tensions manifested during its first year have melted into an easygoing, but engaged solidarity. Even for those possessed of the anti-intellectual bias typified by Jennifer Maerz's piece, the time to complain that studying popular music robs us of its pleasures is over. "It's easy to jab at EMP for being nerdy," wrote Eric Grandy in a favorable review of this year's event, also for The Stranger, but at least during the Pop Conference it is world-class nerdy."

The expertise that confers that aura of nerdiness can serve as a superb personal organizer, helping to sort through the vast amount of music at our disposal more efficiently than all the algorithms that purport to mirror our taste preferences back to us. Because you can only move to the beat when you've found the beat to move you, a task that scrolling through playlists can make extraordinarily tedious. In other words, what once may have seemed beside the point, a detour weakening the force of the pop narcotic's fix, now looks like the best way to reconnect the body with the power of music.

I love the conference and the people who attend it. Even though I acknowledge their nerdiness -- not to mention my own -- I recognize that it is the product of a passion too strong to discipline. The move to intellectualize bodily pleasures, whether music or otherwise, is typically regarded as an attempt to secure mastery over them. I think that's why some have taken such strong issue with events like the Pop Conference in the past, presuming that they derive from a ressentiment captured in the slogan, "Those who can, fuck; those who can't, teach others about fucking." Yet while this attitude has held undeniable appeal, even for those who feel negatively interpellated by it, its proponents overlooked a crucial fact: the mind need not be the body's antagonist. Although the expression "mind fuck" often has negative connotations, some folks feel otherwise. The fucking they seek refuses to distinguish between mind and body.

Those are the sort of people who come to the Pop Conference. As Chuck Klosterman writes in his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, discussing a panel from the conference's first year in which indie musicians from the Pacific Northwest showed disdain for the conference -- I discuss the experience at length in my own piece -- "Who needs to hear that your life's work is irrelevant? I prefer to imagine all of America's rock geeks breaking bread together, talking about Silkworm songs and Clinic B-sides and forgotten Guided By Voices shows and -- maybe for the first time in their lives -- feeling completely and utterly normal."

Tags: autobiography, clips, music, travel, writing
Current Location: 85704

I don't know whether I qualify as ADHD or OCD or any of the other acronyms bandied about these days when people's self-sabotaging faults are discussed. But I am definitely the sort of person who is highly sensitive to my physical environment when I'm trying to concentrate. There's a reason I used to align the objects on my living room floor as a teenager so that they would be at right angles to the television screen.

Since my bike injury last year, I've had a devil of a time sitting at my desk to type. Something about the angle at which I have to bend my knee makes my ankle and foot swell uncomfortably. As a result, I took to using the laptop on a long, thin folding table. At first I did this in the front room. But that seemed too much like the colonization of leisure space for work. So I reconfigured my home office, cramped as it, to accommodate the table. Now I work primarily on the laptop, but access the desktop, which I use for my iTunes library, photo archive and scanning-related tasks, by swiveling and rolling my chair forward two feet.

It's a remarkably productive set-up. I only wish I'd thought of it sooner. The most interesting thing about the arrangement is that the practical value of being able to access both computers I use is supplemented by an unanticipated advantage. Before, when I would look up from the screen to rest my eyes and ponder, I'd see either a wall or a window. Now, though, when I life my eyes from the laptop I see this view:

Apparently, I respond as powerfully to positive distractions as negative ones. Scanning the books on these shelves sharpens my reflections, prodding me to conceive of what I'm writing in relation to these weighty tomes. And the sight of these shelves in proximity to each other also improves my thinking about the relationship between the categories they delimit. Mentally making the passage between French post-structuralism, on the left, and psychoanalysis, on the right, via the "bridge" of my stuffed Nietzsche's eyebows -- thank you again, Steven and Robin! -- or remarking the visual symmetry demonstrated by Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, on the left, and Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, on the right, adds a body to my musings that would be lacking if I didn't have the spatial aid of this spectacle confronting me all day.

Tags: analysis, autobiography, body, theory, writing
Current Location: 85704

In his latest set of responses to reader questions, ESPN.com's Bill Simmons, my favorite sports columnist, takes a complaint about boring status updates on Facebook as the occasion to make points that I've been fumbling towards in my head, even as I participate in the very forms of social networking that inspired them:

The more interesting angle for me is how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, "Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?" (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter.

As for Facebook, I don't mind getting status updates and snapshots of what my friends' lives are like -- even if "Bob the Builder" is prominently involved -- as long as they aren't posting 10 times a day or writing something uncomfortable about their spouse/boyfriend like "(Girl's name) is … trying to remember the last time she looked at her husband without wanting to punch him in the face" or "(Girl's name) is … just going to keep eating, it's not like I have sex anymore." Keep me out of your personal business, please. Other than that, the comedy of status updates can be off the charts. Like my college classmate who sends out status updates so overwhelmingly mundane and weird that my buddies and I forward them to each other, then add fake responses like, "(Guy's name) … snapped and killed a drifter tonight" and "(Guy's name) … would hang myself if the ceilings in my apartment weren't too short." It kills us. We can't get enough of it. We have been doing it for four solid months. And really, that's what Facebook is all about -- looking at photos of your friend's kids or any reunion or party, making fun of people you never liked and searching for old hook-ups and deciding whether you regret the hook-up or not. That's really it. All in all, I like Facebook.

I agree with him about Facebook, where most of the thoughtful content is imported from elsewhere on the internet, but which is fine for the cyberspace version of hanging out with friends at a café or pub. I also like Twitter. Again, though, most of the good stuff I get from my network is pointing me towards more substantive material elsewhere. Unless I have the time to follow the links, it feels like being in a room full of people talking animatedly about what excites them while everyone else does the same and no one can really catch the specifics of what's being talked about. That sort of social networking is always already on the verge of turning into pointing in which participants are more interested in sticking their own index finger out than they are in using their eyes to track anyone else's. Does pointing have no point if the thing being pointed to isn't registered?

Tags: blogging, theory, writing
Current Location: 85704

I've been experimenting, fitfully, with other "delivery systems" for my words over the past month. Getting a new phone and an unlimited data plan to match has radically changed the way I relate to the internet. I'm not sure I'm happy about that, though. Or, rather, I'm not sure that I like what this reorientation of my approach has done to my reading. My sense is that phone-based communication, which puts word count at a premium, is doing the same thing to social networking that tighter word counts at newspapers and magazines did for journalism. It often feels to me like reducing missives below a certain threshold evacuates them of substance to such a degree that the world would be better off without them. Mind you, I have rationalized the virtues of economy. I can see the appeal of OULIPO-style constraints on my own writing and those of people who share my conviction that prose should strive for effects, like poetry, that can't be wholly retranslated into factual data. But I struggle to live up to that standard in my own micro-communications and get the sense, further, that a lot of the people who favor that mode of exchange aren't even trying to write creatively within those constraints. And that saddens me, both because I miss the sort of extended Live Journal entries from which I could extract nuance even in the absence of good writing and because I fret that I'm becoming the sort of elitist I have historically submitted to withering critique. Still, I wonder whether the latest round of "democratization" in the domain of new media, in which word counts make it hard for all but the most adept stylists to publish consistently captivating material, isn't propelling us into a future where aesthetic judgments become harder and harder to sustain.

Tags: blogging, new media, writing
Current Location: 85704

Joe Tangari, who is probably my favorite Pitchfork writer -- and I like most of them -- has a new review of the record Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted - Baghdad 1925-1929 up today. As you may recall, my own review of it was recently posted to Zeek. He didn't write as many words as I did, but the length and seriousness of his take on the album confirms my sense that it's an especially thought-provoking cultural artifact.

It also gives me the selfish pleasure of being able to compare my own approach with that of someone I respect enormously. Here's one of my favorite passages from Tangari's review:

The Gramophone Company and its subsidiary His Master's Voice-- HMV today-- were the first major companies to make recordings in 1925. (In the pursuit of record buyers' money the world over, Gramophone unwittingly provided one of the greatest cultural services of the 20th century by sending its recording engineers across the globe to document local musics-- I'd give a lot to be allowed several weeks in a hypothetical Gramophone vault.) Others quickly followed, including Polyphone, Baidaphon, Odeon, and Columbia, but all the recordings included here are drawn from HMV's nearly 900 78 rpm sides, all made from 1925 to 1929.

When approaching this compilation, it's important to remember something that's true of records from all eras: the recording medium is a part of the music. In today's studio, you might have 64 tracks, 20 different kinds of microphones, and an infinite amount of extra gear your can pile onto a record. Then, they had a mechanical recording device with a horn that the musicians had to be carefully arranged around to get the right mix of sounds. The dawn of electrical recording was right around 1925; by 1926, it was the norm in most of the world. But the liners here state pretty plainly that most of these records were made without microphones, and I frankly don't know enough of the difference to argue the point. What I can tell you is that this disc is nearly devoid of the surface crackle of 78s, and the sound is very clear. But one shouldn't expect a modern range of frequency response, as the low-end of performances rarely registered well on 1920s recordings.

When I was working on my own review of the record, a tortuous endeavor, I gradually came to to see it as a multi-media project that, for all the beauty and sadness of the music it collects, was as much a meditation on the state of mechanical reproduction in both the 1920s and today as it was a means of communicating obscure songs to a new generation. Tangari discusses the music more than I did. But the words I quote above suggest that he also perceived a self-reflexive character to Give Me Love, as if it were in part a commentary on old media when they were new. Here's what I had to say about the way the record presents the problem of reproduction:

Give Me Love wants to give listeners enough detail to destabilize their assumptions without taking measures to reorient them. At least, that’s what the record’s approach towards geography implies. Things get more complicated when we consider the way that Give Me Love inspires us to reflect on media. The CD booklet features more images like the one on the record’s cover, presenting photographs in a way that foregrounds their imperfection. Regardless of how poor the source material may have been, these pictures could at least have been restored to the point where the half-tone grid’s effect was diminished and where some of the details lost within it were made visible again. Instead of going this route, however, Will Bankhead’s design concept accentuates the distance between the “then” these photographs capture and the “now” in which faces of the dead stare out at us. Whereas the blue background of the cover image gives it a curiously modern aspect, like a photocopied handbill, the yellowish tint of these images in the booklet gives them an antique appearance. It’s a strategy that echoes the work of artists who have sought to represent the “unrepresentable” tragedy of the Holocaust by rendering loss visible. Unfortunately, it’s also a strategy consistently deployed by purveyors of exoticism intent on summoning nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” of colonialism.

This move would not be noteworthy if Give Me Love as a whole indulged in this form of distancing. Yet that is not the case. Because both Kojaman’s story and the notes on the music are written simply, without the adjective-laden passages that typically characterize invitations to nostalgia, a tension permeates the booklet. More importantly, the songs on the record are presented as cleanly as possible. Indeed, because they feature a small number of musicians and derive from idioms in which bass sounds were unusual, they sound much younger than they are. Part of the reason why the songs seem so easy to place is that they do not sound displaced. Even though they come from phonographic records that were bound to contain flaws, it’s easy to forget, listening to the record, that these songs were captured long before the era of high-fidelity reproduction. Indeed, someone listening to the music without knowing its source would be sorely pressed to identify it as dating from the 1920s.

The fact that the CD comes in a separate sleeve decorated with the labels from two His Master’s Voice recordings, with track listings in Arabic and English, confirms that the record’s packaging is meant to provoke listeners to relate to the music in a specific way. The idea, clearly, is to remind them that the music they are about to hear is from a long time ago, even if it does not sound that way. It seems like an effective approach, too, for those listeners who still listen to CDs. Unfortunately, though, even dedicated music lovers are likely to leave their discs on the shelf these days. We live at a time when much of the culture we consume either comes without a cover or with one that we are invited to customize. The resulting confusion affects everything from people who get their internet content through a news reader to Bit Torrent users who get their movies without having to pay for packaging.

Tangari operates under editorial and space constraints that don't affect my writing for Zeek -- he also gets paid, presumably -- so comparing his writing to mine might seem like the proverbial diptych of apples and oranges. In this case, though, they blend quite nicely, like the stuffing inside a critical goose. How's that for a terrible metaphor?

Tags: clips, music, writing
Current Location: 85721

The more I write about music, the harder it is for me to feel good about what I write. I suppose it's a good thing that I'm not a full-time music critic, then, although I have been told by those who fit that description that my self-critical impulse represents a stage that can and must be transcended. I've heard the same from those who write about books for a living, too, whether as scholars or journalists. Apparently, that's where I need to devote my energies, because the stage I am in right now has gone on way too long.

This is all preamble to my drawing attention to the first piece of music writing I've done in a good while. The last four months were a time of tumult around here. I spent most of the summer dealing with the unexpectedly severe consequences of two bicycle injuries, which made sitting at a computer typing particularly difficulty. I stopped writing for All Voices, for which I had expressed so much hope, because it became clear that it wasn't going to be the sort of long-term gig I was looking for. And I devoted my critical exertions to longer projects. But now I'm making efforts to get back in a groove, resuming my work for Zeek.

The review they just published, of the Israeli band Monotonix's first EP Body Language, marks a significant departure for me in style. Or at least the first paragraph does. Bear in mind that this is a music review:

There’s this guy you keep seeing around. He favors muscle shirts and cut-offs, even when it’s chilly out. When he walks, he has a way of putting his weight on the balls of his feet, like he’s looking for something to pounce on. Sometimes, when’s passing a shop window, he makes a sidelong glance at himself and flexes his triceps until he can see them ripple. And he talks up attractive women at every opportunity. One day, though, he sits down next to you on the bus and starts up a conversation without any obvious agenda. You’re surprised at how articulate he is and notice that his whole appearance changes the longer you talk. The bravado you used to silently indict from afar now seems like a layer of clothing he wears to cope with emotional weather. So when he asks for your phone number, you give it and make sure to get his in return. A week later you go by his place for the first time. He shows you to a seat on the couch and returns to what he’d been doing. “ My grandmother taught me to knit. It’s a great way to relax. Plus, I can make my friends gifts instead of buying them something in the store.” You sit back, a little dumbfounded. The television is tuned to an old movie. He senses your question. “Fellini, before he went surreal.”

I come back to recognizable music review territory in the opening of the next paragraph, "Monotonix’s Body Language is that guy," but I still shudder at hour far out on a limb I went with this introduction. It's not a bad shuddering, though, so much as a response to the thrill of not going through the motions.

I don't imagine that I will write many reviews that start this way. It's nice, though, to be reminded that I have the capacity to write something different than what I'm expected to write. I'm reminded of a few of the reviews I wrote for Bad Subjects, when I was really feeling it, and took risks that I was later too timid to take. Of course, it's different when you're writing for an editor and perhaps even getting paid for the privilege. Or when you're presenting examples of your work in the hopes of professional advancement. There's a reason I left my review of Andexelt's Circle out of the portfolio of clips I used to that end:

I'll be honest with you. I didn't even try to listen to this record objectively. You know how some people have a thing for girls with naturally curly red hair or boys who wax their body with wood glue? I feel the same way about Finland. As a teenager, I spent hour after hour memorizing a map of that small, cold land. I fondled Finnish glassware at Bloomingdale's. I even developed a secondary fixation on the Hungarian diaspora, because Hungarian and Finnish are distantly related tongues. Once, while travelling in Germany, I had the good fortune of spending several hours next to a beautiful Finnish maid. I was sure I would derive some sexual pay-off from the coincidence. But instead of melting in my arms, she decided I was a freak. And to think I believed that reciting the names of 50 Finnish municipalities would make her wetter than a tumbler full of Finlandia!

But this introduction actually comes closer to approximating the sort of music writing I aspired to and, what is more, have advocated pursuing than a more conventional approach would have. It's overtly autobiographical and perversely risqué. I'm not sure whether the opening paragraph of my review of Body Language meets that standard. It has an autobiographical component, though less overtly. And it at least constructs a scenario in which the gender of the second person singular is not specified, which might lead a creative soul to draw conclusions not specified outright. The important thing, though, is that I allowed myself to take risks I would normally avoid. My challenge, going forward, is to figure out how to sustain that momentum.

Tags: autobiography, clips, music, writing
Current Location: 85704

The notes I take in books have become increasingly minimal over the past two decades. I blame technological change. Because I stopped writing directly in books around 1990 or so, whatever I inscribe must fit onto something I affix to the page. Originally, I used the classic yellow Post-It notes, often to great excess. I have one copy of Moby Dick that I notated so overzealously that the pages are almost impossible to separate. Then I discovered tape flags, another fine 3M product. I liked the fact that they didn't tear or detach easily. And I welcomed the discipline of compressing my commentary onto the transparent portion of the notes, which has the added virtue of assuring that the referent is clear, since my text refers to the portion of text it adjoins. Now, however, those large tape flags have become an endangered species and I have been forced to switch to the narrower sort, which cost a lot less but only provide enough room to write two or three words.

Sometimes I will pick up one of my older books, the sort festooned with Post-Its, and, in the effort to read it with fresh eyes, remove my commentary. I'm doing that with my first copy of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction right now, which is filled with examples of what I was thinking about in 1993. Because I don't want to lose the labor that went into those Post-Its, I am transcribing them for posterity. It's an exhausting undertaking, but one that I would feel terrible to forsake. And at least there's the promise of a document at the end, however cryptic without the text it refers to, that can be used to transport myself back in time. Here are some Post-It notes I logged back in 2002, which date from around the same time as the ones I made on Distinction:

From Brian Wallis, editor, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Boston: David Godine, 1984)

[ALL NOTES ON POST-ITS UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED]

1) Robert Hughes, “The Rise of Andy Warhol” (45-57)

[NOTES COME FROM PREPARATIONS FOR BAD SUBJECTS “WIRED?” PIECE FROM ISSUE #10, FALL 1993]

• 49m: Note equation of Warhol and a TV, mention of his “mysterious circuitry”
• 52t: “Roughly silkscreened, full of slips” like “sleazy color of TV”
• 53t: I’m offended by the dis of (German) Marxists, but actually I’d have to agree in a way (since that’s the substance of my critique)
• 55t "Bleeding out a good deal of information from the image by reducing it to monochrome , and then printing it over a fudgy background of decorative color, applied with a wide, loaded brush to give the impression of verve” -- no relation to background

2 Frederic Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia; or Can We Imagine the Future” (239-252)

[NOTE MUST COME FROM BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY PAPER PREPARATION, CIRCA FALL 1992 OR SPRING 1993]

• 240t (Two adjoining tape flags w/o comment, perhaps added later than 1993): The paragraph in question concerns the equivalent to the “master fantasy” of progress
• 245t: Key to Benjamin on Moscow = Visiting new city, land makes us see things, ‘slip’ on the suddenly impermeable materiality of ‘daily’ existence (water into ice). Sci-Fi (244) and Raymond Chandler (245) similarly make present (in manner of all good art? -- Russian Formalists) ‘strange’, make it, therefore, ‘appear’

3) Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” (417-432)

[NOTES COME FROM PREPARATIONS FOR BAD SUBJECTS “WIRED?” PIECE FROM ISSUE #10, FALL 1993]

• 419t, Paragraph #3: Props to Frankfurt School
• 419t Paragraph #4: How Foucault is different: local analysis of different fields, i.e. where Frankfurt School totalized /was general, he’ll not be
• 420t, Paragraph #3: A privileging of ‘immediate’ struggles seems to be at work here -- i.e. not looking for the ‘chief enemy’ (like ‘capitalism’) but immediate enemies… though there are problems w/this for me, obviously, I do see benefits to learning what ‘immediate enemies’ are
• 420t, Paragraph #3: No ‘final’ liberation, ‘revolution’ -- ‘anarchistic struggles’ (Foucault seems to be privileging them, aiding my point about him and anarchism)
• 420m, Paragraph #4: Don’t see things being so utopian -- see our Bad Subjects critique of a certain kind of multiculturalism
• 421m: Foucault invokes Renaissance -- chatting with Greenblatt???
• 421b: State’s power is “both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power”
• 424t, Paragraph #2: Task might now be to refuse ‘who we are’ -- refusing totalization/individualization double-bind
• 424m, Paragraph #4: ‘Prefer not’ = shades of Bartleby in this refusal (paragraph #2)?! (‘Tho it’s a different article!)
• 424m, Paragraph #4: Not questioning nature of power -- I agree, but does Foucault question his own -- electrical -- metaphorics of power?
• 425t: ‘Power’ relations can’t be reduced merely to “relationships of communication” [SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE, 2002: Habermas is the target here, as indicated by the footnote] -- “power relations have a specific nature”
• 426b, Last Two Paragraphs: A Marxist kind of move -- instead of reifying Power “itself”, he states that power is always relational AND “not simply a relationship between partners (i.e. not equal)
• 427t, Paragraph #2: Civilized power hides itself (ME: like beauty in a white noise-drenched post-punk song?) -- power in ‘DRAG’ (Anno’s contribution) -- distinction between power and violence… Power is a set of “actions upon other actions”
• 427b: Re: electrical -- ‘conduct’
• 428t, Paragraph #2: “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” -- “In this game freedom may well appear as the condition of the exercise of power” -- At “heart” of power relations are “the relationships of the will and the intransigence of freedom”
• 428-9 [A stand-alone Pooh note stuck in these pages]: P.429 and earlier, A.A.M. -- Could Foucault’s ‘intransigence’/’intransitivity’ of freedom be linked to that which alters, distorts the flow of power through itself?? -- Freedom in ‘failure’
• 429b, Last Paragraph: Re: ‘differentiations’ -- “Every relationship of power puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and results -- vgl. making of ‘distinctions’ a la Bourdieu (I’m thinking of alternative music here)
• 431b: “It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape”
• 432: Power relations vs. adversarial relations -- citizens vs. enemies, sort of… Last paragraph is weak

The "Wired?" piece I mentioned in my transcription -- here offered in the Courier version included in a Nettime collection -- was one of my most successful pieces for Bad Subjects, though it has not aged as well as others. I was reading Michel Foucault as a theorist of networked existence, even though he wasn't overtly addressing the concerns of cybernetics. That stuff was in the air for much of the post-World War II era, though, as famous passages in the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida attest. I suppose my implicit argument was that Foucault was mindful of the discourse they invoke, even though he shied away from its terminology. After all, he had a tendency to shy away from most of the dominant intellectual language of his day, as his relation to Marxism indicates. Oh, and I should mention, in light of that "Wired?" piece, that it's funny to remember when a "wireless" experience implied a vacation from computer technology, rather than its deeper penetration of everyday life. These days, "wireless" means you owe them something, to paraphrase a poem that has been running through my head lately.

Tags: archive, bad subjects, fragment, writing
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Tags: autobiography, everyday, tucson, writing
Current Location: 85704

A few years ago I started writing in a journal on a consistent basis. It helped me through a difficult time, when I was struggling with questions of both style and substance. Starting last August, though, I started to do more of my non-directed writing on Google documents, figuring that it would be easier to repurpose my words if they were already in electronic form. What I've discovered, though, is that, although Google documents is a great place for storing back-ups and the perfect location for the notes I keep on my longer projects, the interface channels my prose down different pathways than writing by hand. As I gradually ceased to use my Moleskin journals, I could feel a door shutting inside me. But it took me a few months to perceive the causal relationship. Now I'm trying to get back in the flow by doing more by hand. And it's helping me, not only to think more clearly, but to write more fluidly on the computer. Although I belong to the first post-typewriter generation -- even my first papers in high school were composed on a word processor -- I apparently need to alternate between the screen and the page in order to be the writer I need to be.

Tags: autobiography, writing
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Muse: after-reverberations of The National's superb Boxer

Sometimes a review speaks to me with a force that makes my ears ring:

In essence, Liars is scorched-blacktop biker music played through the art-rock filter of a band that's spent the last few years steeped in the bleak sounds of German new wave and early industrial.

I've already heard enough of the new Liars record to appreciate the aptness of this description. But even if I hadn't, I'd know enough from this single Jess Harvell sentence to beat a path to the record store as soon as I am able.

Tags: music, writing
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If you are interested in the intersection of technology and gender or just want to hear out some of the people I respect most in the world, you should check out the reading that charliegrrrl, Annalee and two of their contributors to She's Such a Geek gave at Google headquarters:

I like this format. It makes YouTube useful for something other than nostalgic chills and cheap thrills. More personally, it's great to be able to hear voices I know so well in this context. You can get the book, which is full of great stuff, here.

Tags: friends, media, technology, writing
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Doug Wolk's review of the new Young Marble Giants reissue went up on Pitchfork today. I already knew I'd need to hunt the record down. The previous reissue has been on my I'll-buy-it-when-I-see-it-at-the-record store list -- I almost never buy things online, for complicated reasons -- for years. But now that I have Wolk's words in my head, I may have to break with precedent and go shopping at Insound.

One of the things that annoys me about much Pitchfork-style writing is the way it draws attention to itself at the expense of the music. I love a good turn of phrase, mind you. And the witty are preferable to the witless. It's just that I don't need to be constantly reminded that the reviewer commands more depth of field than the reader or, for that matter, the artist being reviewed. What sets Wolk's prose apart are his devotion to presenting the music he's reviewing in the best possible light and the fact, itself a distillate of that devotion, that he doesn't need to build himself up at the music's expense:

In a year when everyone was trying to make a big noise-- but isn't that every year?-- YMG switched tactics, forcing their audience to lean in to hear them. It's not simply that they were quiet, although substituting a drum machine that sounded like it had a thick quilt on top of it for a human drummer was a radical move at the time. They weren't even all that quiet-- they were just in love with negative space, and their lyrics were so much about things unsaid that the space was formally appropriate. Stuart Moxham flicks at his guitar like a card-sharp snapping out an ace, amplifying the impact of his pick on the strings as much as the notes themselves; his brother Philip Moxham bangs at his bass, then lets the sound decay. Alison Statton's not an affectless singer, exactly, but her chief weapon is understatement. She knows how angry Stuart's songs are, and just barely hints at that fury, in a voice that suggests someone finding the courage to say something she's needed to say for a while and has only one chance to get right.

What's sort of shocking about their sole album, actually, is how full of rage it is, and how many ways the band manages to translate that rage into something that's not the way the rock idiom usually expresses it. Colossal Youth ticks like a not-yet-exploded bomb. In theory, "Include Me Out" is a mighty garage-rocker, something the Stones or Count Five could've played with a sneer and a great big beat; the Giants strip it of virtually all its audible violence, reducing its rhythm to a muffled thump. "Credit in the Straight World" is a vicious little song about the relationship between subculture and mass culture, and it's all tension, no release, with a riff that keeps landing a half-step above where it should resolve. (The caterwauling Hole cover of it, from Live Through This, demonstrates that you could fill in all the space in Stuart Moxham's songs and still have something impressive.)

Wolk certainly doesn't hide his chops in the back of the refrigerator. He uses metaphors -- "not-yet-exploded bomb" -- when they compress the work of straight description into half the word count. And he references musical history -- from the Count Five to Hole -- where appropriate. The difference, I think, is that he never loses sight of the way that adjective risks turning into the noun "appropriation." The glory his words generate is angled to illuminate the artist he's writing about. If that light ends up returning to bathe him in a soft, steady glow, it's a reward he deserves all the more for not seeking it out.

Tags: music, writing
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