nervous unto thirst

reading and releases

2011-12-05T09:49:00.008-05:00

I've usually been updating my activities and quasi-commercial endeavors here, but I wanted those who haven't stumbled over there to know about the following. (Apologies for especially awkward html - no time to fiddle today.)

Tuesday 12/4, I'm reading at a launch for the 2011 edition of Da Capo's Best Music Writing, edited by Alex Ross, who was kind enough to include the piece I wrote on Felice and Boudleaux Bryant for the Oxford American. Excellent bench, including Kalefa Sanneh, Nancy Griffin, Nitsuh Abebe, and Wendy Lesser. At powerHouse Arena in Dumbo, 37 Main St., 7 p.m. (free). Directions and lineup at the link.

A new Human Hearts 7" (w/ download code) is now available from Fayettenam Records for $6 postpaid. One side rocks, one side creeps; neither one is on our forthcoming album. You can buy it right here: you can also stream both songs here, but you also like to possess music in a durable form, right? Right?

Fayettenam has also just released Grow Up/Move Out, a download-only compilation. In addition to The Human Hearts, contributors include Bill Goffrier (Big Dipper/the Embarrasment), Ron House (Great Plains), Kleenex Girl Wonder, and my homies Refrigerator and Peter Peter Hughes. This is the label's final release, and the proceeds benefit City Harvest. Download it for $7 here.

Lastly, I play guitar on several tracks on Drew Gardner's Flarf Orchestra, featuring readings by K. Silem Mohammed, Sharon Mesmer, Nada Gordon, Rod Smith and others, accompanied by a host of excellent NYC and D.C. out-jazz players.

agitourism

2011-10-11T14:54:00.004-04:00

[I mean me, not the occupants/iers. Also, I've always been a crap photographer.]

[Note Koch's Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?]

[The poetry section at the People's Library. It's a start. Word to Cathy Wagner!]

[I had been wondering about this statistic for the last few days. The first million is cut off; my camera doesn't count that high.]

lever

2011-09-13T23:00:00.003-04:00

A number of interesting exchanges in this (crowd-sourced) Q&A with Rae Armantrout, but I felt a shock of recognition at this passage -- I think I've resisted narrative for similar reasons for a long time, without ever having thought of this metaphor:

Remember how Archimedes, when speaking of the power of leverage, said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the earth.” I imagine the fiction writer using such a lever. The problem, of course, is finding a place to stand in outer space (or outside time) from which to wield such a device. I guess I’m saying that, since I can’t find a place outside time to stand, I don’t feel comfortable writing narrative. But that’s just me.

my city was gone: chocolate martini edition

2011-09-08T06:56:00.007-04:00

I saw this ad, not for the Rock Hall of Fame specifically, but for Cleveland tourism in general, out of an in-flight magazine this summer; today, I remembered to google the tagline "Unexpectedly 'You Go Girl' ":

The text is a little small:

Weirdest thing? I didn't realize that yesterday was Chrissie Hynde's birthday when I titled this post.

Jack Viertel on Jerry Lieber

2011-09-04T14:52:00.002-04:00

New York Times:

Jerry saw himself very much as a product of the vaudeville tradition: a Jewish comedian, though not a performer himself....Jerry and Mike turned the recording studio into a mini-theater that owed as much to radio drama (and comedy) as to more traditional songwriting.

(picture: Richard Kollmar on the air as "Boston Blackie"; cf. "Searchin'")

Bree's latest adventure (edit: POSTPONED!)

2011-08-24T15:09:00.004-04:00

POSTPONED in deference to Hurricane Irene. We will announce a new date (probably Sept. 18 or 25) as soon as we've made the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, keep safe and dry.

new site

2011-08-13T08:43:00.004-04:00

After a good deal of dithering (10-15 years, in some sense) and self-taught coding, I've put up a little personal/promotional site, which I invite you to visit. I had to code it myself (though with recourse to a simple/free css template), because I can't figure out how to make Bandcamp or anything like that not make me look like a motivational speaker.

There are about 10 free songs up for download, a discography, and a bibliography w/ links to various writing. Some other bells and whistles may be added as I have time (mainly, I hope to digitize some rare/unreleased stuff, and put up a gallery of old show flyers). Thanks to Mark Givens for all sorts of advice; he is not to blame for any remaining half-assedness.

Shows and appearances will generally be announced at there, but, since I'm typing: The Human Hearts (me, Matt, and guest bassist Dmitry Ishenko) are playing at The Rock Shop in Park Slope on Fri., Aug. 19. We should be on at 10, preceded by Daniel Klag and followed by Hospitality, a fine Brooklyn pop band of whom you're quite certain to hear more soon.

That site is not intended to house extended discourse, so I expect I'll still use this space on occasion. If I haven't mentioned it here, I'm tweeting as @humanfranklin, as gamely as my doubts about our lemminglike need to jump on every possible platform for garnering even the slightest bit of attention as though we were Berkeleyan idealists with respect to our value as human beings will allow.

I'll be playing piano for Bree on various occasions in summer/fall; you can hear more about all that at her site.

This single will be out someday:

notes on lyric 10 and last for now

2011-04-23T13:11:00.003-04:00

My two un-comprehensive and provisional cents:

What’s characteristic of lyric isn’t “musicality” per se, but a relationship between the musicality of the text and its having been produced by a “subject.” That relationship can be posited explicitly or implicitly, textually or contextually, and can take various forms. In the most traditional case, the poem is conceived of and treated as (somewhat metaphorically) “sung” by the poet; that relationship, and the conceptual framework that underlies it, brings along with it strong though defeasible connotations of self-expression.

One way that modernist and subsequent poetries tend to complicate this picture (which may be a caricature) is by raising doubts about the autonomy or coherence of the language-producing subject. (These doubts can lie in the theoretical background, but the poetic text can also display that they are on the table by various techniques, including grammatical fragmentation, collage/montage effects, suppression of the word “I,” and the creation of texts that are difficult to interpret as emanating from a unified subject position.) To write out of a nuanced or troubled account of the subject (or self) and how it is constituted is not necessarily to deny its function, or even its ontological status; hence the persistence of “lyric subjectivity.” But if the singer isn’t quite what we once thought she was, in what sense do we are we still privy to her “song”? I don’t mean to suggest any specific answer, or close off any possible answers, but it does seem like this is a productive question: How, given a more complex view of subjectivity or self-expression, are we now to understand the musicality of the lyric text? (This is a question for poetic practice as well as interpretation.)

I must admit that I would like to see more care and less handwaving in accounts of exactly what it is to speak of a decentered, fragmented, or somehow "fictional" self than one sometimes encounters -- I think that would help make these questions less inchoate. Also, I don't mean to ignore the question of what "political possibility" or related categories have to do with all this; it might well be the most important issue, but by the same token, one that's too complicated to admit of a facile comment.

notes on lyric 9

2011-04-22T12:53:00.001-04:00

The contemporary English-language innovative lyric captures some of this – text and sound to be received on a mnemonic level, but also need to be processed and thought about. Reading and listening should be work as well as reception.

Poorly copyedited; the two clauses after the dash aren’t parallel. What worries me here is that the slippery slope with respect to what counts as “meta-textual” now looks like a mudslide; putting the focus back on “sound” makes the set of techniques pointed at in this formulation look meta-linguistic, which is not the same thing.

The notion that mnemoticity (a word I found in Scott’s book) is wholly non-cognitive (doesn’t require processing) is odd. Similarly, the second sentence is less tendentious if “reception” implicitly means “passive reception” – but who ever thought this? Not Modernists, or modernists, and not (if JK’s “poetry was never so easy” is to be taken seriously) pre-modern poets/”intellects.”

Might as well register that questions about the status of a written text as the presumed record of a “sounded” one have been under the surface throughout the text. JK doesn’t try to bring them forward except by occasional gestures like “reading and listening.” I haven’t done any better – can’t talk about everything at once, though it may look like that’s what I’ve been asking JK to do.

Each of the poets in this anthology challenges us to think about how the lyric works, and whether it is a relevant literary concept in whatever environment/spatiality we experience it in.

New paragraph. “Environment” is just a metaphor for “context” (here, context of reception, though we’ve also been told that a concern with context of production [“intentionality”] is a feature with which audiences should be concerned with.) Fine, but adding “spatiality” (no more or less pretentious a word choice than “mnemoticity,” I’ll allow) gives the metaphor an air of (Jamesonian?) materialism, as though JK’s given the notion of environment content of a more concrete kind. Which he hasn’t. Do I receive the poem differently in a room, or “in the street”? (Cf. Dan Thomas-Glass.)

The power of the word itself, of the line, of the packaging and distribution of those lines, is in play.

This, again, is something one might claim about any poetry (any lineated poetry – is this a minimum requirement of the lyric.

Cf. second paragraph: “It’s a question of where the packages of word, or words, disseminate…” The occasional recourse to the image of “packaging” seems intended to remind us periodically of a kinship between the stages of linguistic/literary “exchange” and the commercial kind. It’s a potentially interesting way of thinking about lineation (the rhythm of units coming off the production line is rather different than the measure of song), but I suspect it’s more relevant to some poets than others, and, like “spatiality,” it’s here no more than a gesture.

The lyric has never been the prisoner of convention that some would have us think – metrical consistency in English, or the conventions of the French syllabics (for example, with the alexandrine, placement of caesura, alternating rhymes, and so on) have always been displaced or eroded without the loss of lyrical effect.

True in the very general sense that all texts possess musicality (prosody, etc.) if one chooses to attend to it; the contextualization of a text as poetry invites us to attend to it; lineation is perhaps the most common signal of that contextualization. Also true in the somewhat more specific sense that musicality can be foregrounded by means other than adherence to tightly regulated prosodic convention. Quite likely false, however, if “lyrical effect” is closely tied to mnemoiticty, as it has at times seemed to be in the last paragraph or two. (Translation – it usually takes more effort to memorize free verse than metrical verse.)

The metrically variable lyrics of Sidney through to the resonant para-tac-tics of Prynne, have in no way impaired the singing of the language.

[The dash between “para” and “tac” is part of the prose lineatation; the one between “tac” and “tics” is not, but may just be a typo.] Seems to just support the previous sentence, though a bit elliptically. I guess “have in no way impaired the singing of the language” just means “have in no way impaired these poets capacity to sing the language.” “Sing the language” is an interesting phrase and I’m unsure how precisely to take it. It’s not quite Heidiggerian (the language would sing us), but it connotes something more grandiose than the production of a specific song. It could be this: in the course of the poetic act, the poet takes the entire linguistic system (langue) as his or her instrument -- plays “upon” it, like (of course) a lyre, or in the way that a conductor “plays” the orchestra. I don’t think a reading of this sort is inconsistent with anything JK has said, but it’s a new note. Or, I may be making too much of rhetorical nicety.

Rather, they have developed sophisticated layerings of political possibility.

This is what Sidney and Prynne have done instead of impairing the singing of the language. Ok, how? We might take it that the poets stretching or breaking of prosodic convention is related to questioning of the status quo in other respects. (Sidney, here, would be grandfathered in as a modernist avant le lettre; again, despite the gestures toward a “historian’s modernism” at several points, JK ultimately thinks that these possibilities are always already there for a property self-conscious poet/intellect.) I have no reason to doubt that this relationship could be made out interestingly on an actual reading of these poets, or others, but I have to admit I dislike the manipulative way this move is made here, and not for the first time: JK not infrequently shifts suddenly from talking about musicality to talking about “opposition” or “political possibility” or vice versa, as though aware that, these days, a theoretical or quasi-theoretical statement on lyric had better keep both music and politics on the table (not to mention decentering of the self), but too easily satisfied that the connections can be established by “para-tac-tics.” [If taken this text on its own terms as much as possible, but it’s also an instance of a genre: the sophisticated but necessarily compressed contemporary anthology introduction. It might be interesting to attempt a similar commentary on some others – Charles Bernstein’s preface to the mini-Language anthology in Paris Review, which was my own introduction to those writers, is a candidate.]

Much more charitably, JK is alerting us to look for the relevant relationships when we read the poetry.

This is not a “school” of poets, but a grouping of unique voices. Some speak more directly to us than others, but the sheer power of the lyrical template must bring our certainties into question.

Last paragraph. The “certainties,” I assume, are those related to “death of the lyric”; JK is allying his position, and the anthologies, with “post-lyric,” and pointing us back, more explicitly than the previous sentence, toward the poetry. This is welcome, though it’s also standard rhetoric for the anthology-preface genre.

The details are odd, though. “Template” brings back a sense of reliance on pattern that has been denied throughout; it’s unclear, given the range of formal possibilities, what a general template for the lyric is supposed to be. We’re not told (and never were, beyond references to mnemoticity) what lyric has the “power” to do -- and the “sheer” makes this power sound irresistible, sublime, beyond questioning. Some poets, apparently, do speak to us fairly “directly”; this might register that some of the poets included will be less difficult at the level of determinate semantic content, but you’d think directness would be out the window with all of the questioning of the world/word link that’s gone before. (Not that JK says that the more “direct” poets are better.

Going back to the penultimate sentence: Denying that the poets included form a school or movement is de rigueur in contemporary anthologies (except those that are explicitly about movement-formation or –codification, such as In the American Tree. And it’s certainly true in this case, given the book’s explicitly international (U.S./U.K./Australia) and less aggressively but noticeably intergenerational perspective. Still, it’s funny that at this last moment we’re promised an array of “unique voices” beholden to no principles but their own, given that the denial of the privacy and autonomy of the ego (supposed to be part to the ideology of traditional, pre-Modernist lyric, except when it wasn’t) is supposed to be central to the M/modernist critique, as well as a starting point for (oppositional) “political possibility.”

[End of JK's intro. Some reflections tomorrow, perhaps.]

notes on lyric 8

2011-04-21T14:02:00.000-04:00

In recent years, there’s been talk of new lyricism, post-lyricism, and the gamut of groupings that comes with a need to reconcile past with present poeticizing.

True. Cf. Lee Ann Brown, “My Uncruel April, My Totally Equal Unforetold April Unfolded” (in the anthology): “As with all good (real) poetry movements we splice the past.” My sense is that, as much as anything, the programmatic rejection of lyric modes in heroic language poetry (or its theory – the practice was always more complex) was seen by emergent (hate the word) poets coming after as too constraining – to that extent, recuperating or reincorporating the lyrics is no more or less than finding a way out, a way to write. One could also be more cynical and point out that, in some of its guises, this is also an academic recuperation – or, perhaps, a way for some poets to do what they really want to do to anyway with some degree of theoretical cover. This impression is very strong in the Swensen/St. John American Hybrid anthology (2009), where the editors make what might be called a neo-liberal argument that some conflicts between mainstream and counter-traditions in American poetry have been transcended. (Silliman and other have pointed this out.) This anthology and the way it’s framed, isn’t nearly as objectionable in this respect (however difficult it is to draw a bead on its actual stance on a number of points.)

There has been a sense of the meta-textual, but this is not necessarily a new thing. Thomas Stanley, “Lesser Caroline” poet, was a great translator. Most of his own compositions still show traces of those poets he translated. He brought Italian, French, and Greek conventions to play within his strictly formal English verse. He replayed popular conceits in new frameworks. He was an intellect: he was a meta-textual poet.

I don’t know anything about Thomas Stanley, and the argument made doesn’t require that I search beyond this gloss; I’m more interested in what JK means by “meta-textual” The term is primarily used in translation studies: translations are said to be “meta-textual” in that they cannot be understood comprehensively without reference to a “source text” – that is, the object of translation. This is a truism, as far as a contemporary thinking about poetry in translation goes; this is one reason bilingual editions are far more common for poetry than prose fiction and non-fiction. Beyond this, how translators and readers should conceive of relationship between source text and “target text” is a matter of contention. (I’m also reading a book by Clive Scott, Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations [2006] that is essentially an extended defense of the author’s “experimentalist” translation practice – he produces various concrete, graphic, etc. versions of R’s prose poems that pursue various kinds responsiveness to the source texts rather than the will-o’-the-wisp of semantic or lexical equivalence.)

JK doesn’t have to take a stand on those debates, but he wants to extend “meta-texual” to cover not only translations, but poems that are informed by poetry outside of one’s own narrow linguistic tradition. Fine, and I assume that one could also extend the notion quite a bit more, to cover various kinds intra-linguistic dependency on other poems and elements of other poetic traditions (forms, measures) – from parody on down. I think the danger here is that one can easily slide into calling any poem that can be profitably read as read as responsive to other poetry – which is to say, any poem -- “meta-textual.” As he says, this is “nothing new”; this is a bit of refrain in the piece, as JK has said more or less the same thing about modernist dubiety about the autonomy of the self and the transparency of language. As in these other cases, the issue raised is what makes meta-texuality more common or more urgently foregrounded at this poetic juncture than others.

Other than the fact that JK is saying something about broad trends in contemporary poetry, I don’t see what the tighter connection of this point, or the example of Stanley is, with the concern with “lyric” and “post-lyric.” Not saying there isn’t one – it’s just that no argument presents itself without a great deal of guesswork.

He [Stanley] replayed popular conceits in new frameworks. He was an intellect: he was a meta-textual poet.

I wish we had a more concrete description of these “popular conceits.” Devices from “popular” non-English poetry? Genre conventions within English poetry? Can’t do much with this (someone more handy with the references might).

Thanks to the colon, there is no way to discern the intended relationship between being an “intellect” and a “meta-textual poet.” Are only intellects (intellectuals?) meta-textual poets? Given the breadth of practices that might be labeled meta-textual, this could only be true on an equally broad conception of who counts as an intellect. Are only meta-textual poets intellects? Seems doubtful – at least, we’d have to find some non meta-texual poetry, and make some judgments (on what grounds?) about the attainments of the poets who write it.

I don’t see what it gains JK to invoke the category of “intellect” at all, at this late point in the essay. As already noted, the connection between meta-texuality and a return to or renewal of the lyric has been suggested only by the fact that he’s mentioned both issues in the same paragraph, but perhaps the thought is that contemporary poets driven (for whatever theoretical, historical, or political reasons) to a “post-lyric” mode are necessarily reflective about preceding complications of lyric categories (without rejecting them out of hand.) This could be seen as contrasting with the anti-intellectualism implicit in JK’s earlier formulation of (M?)odernism as proceeding from perception (remember “seeing”?) rather than cognition, but since I think that conception of what modernist poets were up to is largely an unintended consequence of his words, I’d be very surprised if this were the distinction JK means to draw.

notes on lyric 7

2011-04-20T11:34:00.001-04:00

This anthology is an example of how diverse not only conceptualizations of the lyric are, but how malleable its co-ordinates have become.

Stock anthologist’s claim of diversity, inclusiveness, which isn’t to say it’s false.

Each poet here is conscious of the implications of a text that might imprint itself on memory, the effects of the mnemonic, and the lyric’s power of subliminal expression.

Musicality isn’t explicitly mentioned here, but I presume that it (or patterned-ness more generally) the property that makes texts at least potentially “memorable” in that way. It’s not just the ideas/content but the words in which they’re expressed that can be recalled, and this is one of the things that makes lyric poetry an “effective…vehicle” for content, including oppositional content. This is a further specification of the argument for an instrumental account of the value of lyric technique.

[Worth registering briefly that, given this argument, it’s odd that the anthology (organized alphabetically) begins with John Ashbery, a poet who does not often pursue a “mnemonic” kind of musicality. The poems included were recent and uncollected as of the book’s 2004 publication; I think most ended up in Where Shall I Wander?. “Interesting People of Newfoundland” is a particularly prosey, even chatty poem in the “apparently linear” mode that Ashbery experiments with one or twice per book, though it contains a brief, rather ironized “lyrical” passage 2/3 in: “…It is in the place/in the world in complete beauty, as non can gainsay/I declare, and strong frontiers to collide with.”]

Musicality also lends lyric a “subliminal power of expression.” It’s not the “music” (prosody and so on) that is subliminal -- it’s a perceptible property of the text – but its contribution to making “expression” more focused, vivid, memorable. As I suggested several days ago, the contributions of prosody and pattern to expression are non-semantic and not wholly conventionalized; hence, one might go on to argue, more difficult to articulate (paraphrase, translate) into other terms. This is not quite the same thing as being “subliminal,” but I think that’s what’s behind the use of that term.

Rather than see aggressive intentionality, one might equally see a responsibility and concern about the effect the lyric has once it leaves the space of composition.

Confidence or assurance (figured as aggression) that the poet knows what he or she means to be doing, and how to do it, is the negative term here. Implicitly, what is to be preferred is a degree of doubt about how one’s poem will perceived, received, or understood. I don’t think, however, that a poet who takes the “assured” (and perhaps naïve) stance that he or she has a good deal of control over the effect the poem has on its audience is necessarily abdicating “responsibility” or “concern” for that effect. The charitable reading is that JK doesn’t mean to deny that, but to claim that such concern and responsibility are possible without (naïve?) confidence or “aggression.”

That words “change”, that meaning alters according to context, are variable factors that ironically liberate rather than the poem.

That realization sounds pretty straightforwardly “liberating” to me – I don’t see the irony. I take it that the particular change in context adumbrated is that from “the space of composition” to that of being read by an audience. So the alteration of meaning here is ascribed to the instability (radical or not) of the communicative channel. I can see how a poet who take this view on board would be prone to lose a certain kind of (naïve) “confidence), but I have to admit that I find the sudden, casual, asked-and-answered quality of JK’s appeal to this idea unearned (or, at least, of limited use in clarifying his overall argument).

Overall, I think that JK doesn’t do enough to distinguish claims about the (in)adequacy of language to (a) self-expression and (b) communication. I’m not saying the two issues aren’t linked, but the blurring leads to “crisis of language” boilerplate.

In the 1980s it was not unusual within European-language poetry communities to talk of the death of the lyric – especially within linguistically innovative circles of English-language poets.

The circumlocution is meant to indicate that these questions were not raised solely by Language poets.

Maybe what was observed, or intended, was a rejection of the exclusiveness of the self, that the poem could exist in a bubble, “ignorant” of political responsibility.

If this was what was intended (JK’s not sure), this would be an error, if JK is also correct that the lyric evolved as (or into) an especially effective vehicle for oppositional content (which, conventional understanding of the political aside, can hardly be voiced convincingly from the point of view of atomistic individualism.)

The characterization of the rejected view blurs the “isolated” character of the (Cartesian, as one says) self as conventionally posited and that of the poem, but that doesn’t bother me here, as the rejected view (if anyone ever held it) is in fact pretty confused: My poem is autonomous because I am autonomous.

Of course, poetry was never so easy, whatever form it took, but the need to express these concerns – and to test these concerns within the structure of the poem itself – was strongly felt.

JK wants to insist, roughly, that the rejected view of the last sentence is a bit of a strawman, and that a good deal of pre-“death of lyric” (and probably, pre-Modernist) poetry was, at least implicitly, more nuanced in its theoretical underpinning. At some point, a need arose to treat these concerns more explicitly, and self-consciously. This might have happened for theoretical, political, or literary-historical reasons, or for some combination of the three. How these kinds of causal factors were related (mutually supportive?) “in the 1980s” isn’t something JK offers a position on.

notes on lyric 6

2011-04-19T12:58:00.000-04:00

Be it the Dadaists after the First World War, or the play-ploys of Gertrude Stein, or the post-Vietnam War and Watergate eruption of Language poetry, or the smouldering rejectionism of the “Cambridge School,” or the guerilla de-hybridizations of Murri poet Lionel Fogarty. There is iconoclastic intent in each expression, and language is the weapon.

[The first sentence is (unintentionally, I think) a fragment, but it doesn’t interfere with the sense. The second restates a the one I ended with yesterday (“This paradox informs the desire…”)]

Of the poetries on this list, two are textbook cases of “historian’s modernism”: on the standard critical line, Dada and langpo are responses to specific moments of disillusion about the representational adequacy of language. (I waved my hand at just these moments in the same terms somewhere above.) In both of these cases, official public language (the lies of politicians, war reports, compromised news organizations) and traditionally literary language are both objects of critique. I’m not certain that the fact the language can be and very often is used falsely or deceptively (ideology) is proof that language is “in its nature” deceptive or ideological, but it’s surely the case that noticing and being exercised by these abuses in a given context motivates that broader theoretical claim.

Fogarty, a contemporary aboriginal poet writing in a porous English (and included in the anthology at hand) is also of this stripe, if the “crisis event” is the displacement and dispossession of his people by white Australians. As his biographical note states, “[H]e objects to having his language (Murri) drawn into English, so draws English into his own aboriginal time-space continuum.” This kind of work attacks dominant representations from a somewhat different angle, and aligns itself with a specific marginal community the way most of the other examples do not, but JK’s not at all wrong to suggest that the language is weaponized: one of the pieces included, “Memo to Us,” is basically a fantasia on the retaking of Australia by aboriginals, narrativized almost transparently but with enough syntactic and lexical distortion to register difference strongly.

It’s interesting that one doesn’t usually think of Prynne and his (loosely speaking) followers, or Stein, as arriving at their practice in direct response to a particular historical or political crisis – I’m sure they can be read this way, but it’s not the first thing we say, as with Dada and langpo. JK doesn’t require or assume that we do, it’s just worth noting that this list isn’t homogenous. (The centrality of sexuality to Stein’s writing, and way of writing, also give both politics and iconoclasm a different valence; Prynne’s interest in the “long view,” especially where economics is concerned, has implications for his own time and may have even started from contemporary considerations [I really don’t know], but makes a historically “nailed down” reading dangerously reductive. The “rejectionism” is in part the refusal to concede anything to accessibility.]

[Stein is oddly placed with respect to another of JK’s concerned. I have a hard time thinking of her as much affected by a “crisis of the self.” Is there another experimental writer so confident of the adequacy of her idiolect to her (expressive?) aims?]

By the way: in this paragraph, JK never did get back to the point about complicity and “different intentionalities.”

It could be argued, however, that the lyric has always been the vehicle for such expression, and the “form” itself – in its paradoxical combination of the universal and the centring [sic] of self – evolved as the most effective linguistic-musical vehicle for such expression of opposition.

New paragraph. This is supposed to be a challenge, one that JK doesn’t want to dismiss summarily, to something previously claimed (not necessarily JK’s own view, but something claimed for the sake of argument). What claim? I actually thought he was already assimilating the various modernisms just mentioned to “lyric” in some way, and that the recourse to the category of “expression” marked this. But now it seems as though he takes himself as having presented some the anti- or non-lyrical claims of modernism, which are now going to be re-examined.

I’m not sure I understand one of the poles of the latest so-called paradox. “Centring,” of course, means being written from a unified subject position, but “the universal”? Does this have to do with the presumption of communicability?

The material outside of the dashes wouldn’t be tendentious if JK had left it at “most effective linguistic vehicle” rather than linguistic-musical. Why does musicality (whether in a particular register, or just the unavoidable prosodic qualities of language, somehow foregrounded) make this a more effective vehicle. (More effective than…?) “Effective” is about a certain kind of instrumentality: perhaps musicality just makes the poem more rhetorically vivid. (Or more pleasurable to attend to, though I’ve noted above that pleasure is not on JK’s radar in this piece.) Ok, but few poets of any stripe would be sanguine about such a overt instrumentalism. Another hypothesis is that musicality is what constructs not the subject as such (this can be done in prose), but the effect of the subject singing, which is in turn an indicator that a certain kind of self-expression is occurring. This is just a hypothesis – JK hasn’t said anything that determinate on the subject. But it may be a useful formulation: it also suggests why there would be something problematic about continuing to use musical techniques in any traditional way for poets who find selfhood and self-expression problematic (and wish to have their poetry convey this).

notes on lyric 5

2011-04-18T13:36:00.000-04:00

Context does matter. Someone writing a poem in a luxury apartment in a great city at the center of a military empire does create a different intentionality from the singer composing with community members, expressing the group’s marginality, loss, and defiance.

New paragraph. The emphatic “does”es suggest that JK thinks someone would deny all this, though he doesn’t say who or why. What does context matter for? Seemingly, for an evaluation of the ethics of the poetic act. The puzzling hypostasis of “intentionality” recurs. One could gloss this flatfootedly as “Someone writing….has different intentions,” but this suggests a stronger view of the autonomous or “inner” character of intentions than I think JK wants to convey. He has in mind, perhaps, a view (related to Anscombe’s and Wittgenstein’s) on which intentions, like “meanings” (Burge and esp. Putnam) “ain’t in the head” are partly constituted by the social and linguistic background against which they occur.

So there are two possible readings: (1) The intentions with which a poem is written are important (for whatever project), and the social position from which the poem is written is a guide to these intentions. This is a kind of “common-sense” picture. It does make one want to ask whether context is an infallible guide to intention. (2) The intentions with which a poem is written are important, and the social position from which the poem is written is partly or wholly constitutive of that intention. I think JK wants something more like this. Note that the harder one leans toward the “wholly,” the more the fallibility issue will fall away.

The two cases given occupy extremes; they do not exhaust the field. We are told the expressive intention of the “marginal singer” but not that of the imperial apartment dweller (read: New Yorker), but the implication is that the latter, by contrast, expresses privilege and complicity rather than loss and resistance; also, one would think, obliviousness and guilt or shame, as they case may be. (Reading (2) aside, this can’t be the whole story: what if the apartment dweller is a temporarily fortunate housesitter, on a student visa from a poorer country?) This contrast is rhetorically strengthened by the fact that the marginal figure gets to be a “singer,” while the other is merely writing a poem. Curiously, the wording “the singer composing with community members” (compare “the song collectively composed by community members”) suggests that JK can’t get away so easily from a view on which poetic meaning is tied to the text’s production (or stewardship?) by an individual.

Even though these sentences can be picked at, the stance if not the exact account is clear enough – looking ahead, though, it doesn’t seem that JK does much to tie this stance to what’s said in the rest of the paragraph (which jumps around a lot).

The expression “avant-garde” is military in origin, be it from Napoleon’s shock troops or dredged out of Mallory.

Usually “Malory.” Apparently (I had to look this up and don’t have a quote), Morte d’Arthur used the French term in its customary English sense in the late 1400s. Other than that, this is a commonplace. Progression from previous sentence not immediately obvious. Let’s go on.

The modernist avant-garde, and the avant-gardes that have emerged out of modernities, have worked to challenge a status quo, or assert their differences in perception.

Modernism challenges the status quo (literary, social); beyond its specific techniques, it does this (if we can tie in the previous sentence) in part by occupying an “advanced” position. This much is, again, commonplace. (One could muse further on the relationship between an avant-garde and the “regular” troops – an occupying force? – for which it clears the ground.) “Avant-gardes that have emerged out of modernities” is reasonably precise, and consistent with previous discussion; JK is, again, not unduly troubled by a distinction between modernism and post-modernism. There’s no good reason, though, for the capital to have fallen off the first “modernism,” which is supposed to refer to the historically specific, “heroic” avant-garde.

One can state the means by which this challenge is made in terms of “differences in perception”; however, if JK thinks that one of the things that brings about modernism is the “pressure” placed on “the certainty of observation” why would differences in perception be of special interest as something to insist on. I’m exaggerating the position, but if perception were merely subjective, one could draw few if any further implications from such differences.

A more just way of expressing, or expression comes into play.

“Way…of expression?” Very odd. Perhaps: “…way of expressing, or mode of expression…” I prefer “expression” in this formulation: “expressing” wants an object. Expressing one’s perceptions, presumably? The modernist/avant-garde mode of expression is not just distinct from that of the status quo, but more just! The choice of word links representational accuracy (again, what can this amount to for JK?) with ethical probity. If this claim were made on behalf of the marginal/community singer, it would have a straightforward political content. The same claim on behalf of modernist avant-gardes is not unusual, but does make one hope for some detail about what makes its mode of expression (its way of representing experience in language) more just than some other.

It’s to do with “seeing”, and conveying the politics of that seeing.

(I sort of like the donnish offhandedness of “It’s do to with”) “Seeing,” as elsewehere, is just a metonym for perceiving. One would think that what would be most salient about (M)odernist lyric would be how what is observed is represented in language, but for JK, a difference in perception itself is prior, and seemingly primary. Note that it isn’t that the modernist thinks differently about what is perceived; JK would like the difference to be less intellectual, more fundamental. That said, there are certainly issues here about the extent to which perception, as opposed to mere sensation, is underwritten by learned or innate cognitive processes [Kant; Dretske on “simple seeing”; Gregory’s Eye and Brain; my associations date me]. JK doesn’t expand on these, and I’m not well-equipped to tease them out.

The idea of different “politics of…seeing” is a fascinating, even seductive one. But: how does it come about that modernists not only write and think but “see” so differently? If this is just a compressed way of describing that one might make different (more or less “just”) ethical judgments about what one sees, it becomes rather less interesting.

The relationship between the poet and the tools of expression, and the tensions between experience and expression, are highlighted.

The suggestion here is simply that the difference lies in the modernist’s greater self-consciousness about the various relata and relationships in the I/world/word nexus. Fine: one can argue that this kind of caution or problematization is more conducive to making “just” judgments distinct from those associated with the “status quo” than a view which takes these relationships as transparent or otherwise untroubled. Great, except that sounds more intellectual than perceptual. Perhaps this modernist eventually internalizes a new, less stable conception of those relationships, such that the appropriate kinds of perceptual/cognitive/linguistic acts become “second nature.” (I don’t mean to make fun of this idea; it’s the flip side of the contention that the “status quo” mode is also only apparently “natural” in a strict sense. I think that some claim like this is almost certainly what a poet like Leslie Scalapino would have made about her own writing. I once heard her say: “I want it to be oppositional all the way down.”)

Language is of the user, but the user is also a product of language.

I’m perfectly happy with the notion that the relation between language-user and the production of meaning is dynamic. The second clause is a casual allusion to a Heideggerian strain, though the thought is also present in various forms of externalist and causal semantics. (Polemical note: the idea that linguistic meaning is not produced autonomously by language-users is a point of consensus between continental and contemporary analytic philosophy, though few on either side recognize the points of contact – beyond invocations of late Wittgenstein.) It’s not obvious, though, why this point is made at this particular point in the paragraph: I take it that it’s an example of something that is to be “kept in mind” (and eventually internalized) by the modernist.

This paradox informs the desire to make of poetry a weapon to challenge a “false” or “deceptive” status quo.

I think of what JK calls a paradox as a dynamic; it’s only an insoluble problem if one insists one a certain kind of origin story for linguistic meaning (i.e. Adamic, individualist)

“False” and “deceptive” are the worst scare quotes yet. At least, they confuse me about JK’s actual position. Does he think that alternative representations are more just, or more “just”? Perhaps he’s meaning to distance himself from these modernist commonplaces more than I’ve been able to recognize.

On the face of it, I would think that “the paradox” – and more generally, the view of the relations among self/world/word as opaque or troubled – would be just as likely to lead to doubt or despair as to the capacity for the language to represent alternative judgments as to produce the “desire” JK describes. Now, I think the historical record shows that it does produce this desire, sometimes but not always accompanied by an undercurrent of doubt about the expressive adequacy (not to mention instrumental efficacy) of both modernist and “transparent” poetic techniques – but it’s still puzzling why this should be the case.

Finally: A good deal of Modernist and modernist poetry (written out of the concerns, difficulties, and explicit and implicit politics JK has in mind) been written in luxury apartments, or at least infrastructurally functional ones, by first-world standards. JK’s first two sentences, especially on the strong (anti-individualist) reading of “intentionality” would lead us to doubt that this work can do much to avoid complicity with the context in which it is generated. Something else for the well-to-do imperial modernist to “keep in mind.”

day of rest

2011-04-17T11:59:00.002-04:00

1) This long interview with Bernadette Mayer by Adam Fitzgerald is one of the best I've ever read, with anybody.

AF: So the correlation between suffering and art, that’s a myth?

BM: [Laugh] I laugh at those ideas. It seems trivial to make that comparison. It trivializes both the art and the suffering. I mean, really, you have to suffer to make art? Give me a break.

2) I'm quite taken with this poem (among others) from Ron Padgett's newish How Long:

I'll Get Back to You

What was I thinking about
a few minutes ago when
another through
swept me away?
Can't I have (pepper)
several thoughts at the same time
(carnival midway) or go back and forth
between (hyphen) them?
I guess so!
But since people (ooga) don't
like that kind of thinking (factory)
we don't do it (doghouse) much.
I never wanted to live (tree)
in a doghouse.
Now to get back (folking
map) to that earlier thought.
(President is guarding it.)
(No sense in asking him for it.)
It had something to do
with numbers (flying up
all over the place) and how
(smoke) sequence has properties
that (gleaming faucets) induce
certain thoughts and feelings,
such as reassurance.
I guess that's a good argument
for linearity. Don't you prefer
linearity in the long run
(Low clouds over the winter field.)

2011-04-16T12:51:00.001-04:00

[We left off at “Modernism maps this frustration of self-expression.”]

The ownership of certainty of observation – that what the poet sees and conveys to those other than him or herself is a constant – has been placed under pressure and found wanting.

The fallibility of perception has been too long recognized to be a plausible source of the modernist crisis. (Cf. the undergraduate mistake of reading Mediation 1 as though the Argument from Illusion succeeded in grounding methodological skepticism. And the more sophisticated one, arguably an inheritance of the Cartesian tradition, of taking certainty or infallibility to be necessary for knowledge. [Austin.]) I’m not inclined to saddle pre-modernist poets with the wholly uncritical conception of the self/word/world relation JK sometimes, but to the extent that some such view has been held, it surely survived the realization that, e.g., the surface curve even though it “looks flat” locally.

Is the primacy of place on the modality of vision significant, or casual? Also, I don’t understand what “The ownership of” adds to “the certainty of observation,” unless it’s a (probably unneeded emphasis on the subjective character of the experience out of which one builds (with cognitive help, on most accounts) one’s picture of the world.

Social and cultural upheaval on an unprecedented scale, the destruction of natural “resources” (the world itself is a large part of the problem), and death by mechanization have lead to obvious shifts in notions of what constitutes the “I,” or rather, what the “I” can validly express outside its own constructed empiricisms.

Now JK invokes, broadly, the kind of “historian’s Modernism” I thought absent from his earlier, “philosophical” formulations. So either I’m a very bad reader or there was something misleading about the “all along” tone of the previous paragraph. It would be too much to complain that JK doesn’t rehearse at length how the events and processes (let’s just call them “social processes”) named produce these shifts, but still: go in fear of the “obvious.” There is some sleight of hand at work in “notions of what constitutes the “I”,’; it’s surely correct that reflection on these social processes has led to new notions (theories, accounts) of self-consitution, but this leaves whether selves and their constitution themselves have changed entirely open.

I don’t want to go too far around the following road, but: What’s a fairly clear case in which social upheaval might lead someone to question whether his/her “I” was quite what he/she thought? A “displaced person” – a political refugee or exile in the most usual sense, or an immigrant motivated to follow the global flow of capital for the sake of individual economic opportunity – might have the requisite experiences. If, that is, this subject once believed that his or her native “place” (geographical and societal) and language (membership in a linguistic community) were essential attributes of his or identity. All this and more may be destabilized, quite radically. But to the extent that the exile integrates novel experience (even if painfully, with a sense of loss and injustice), wouldn’t this lead one away from the view that one’s sense of having a unified self was dependent on connection to the originating social context and toward the view that one’s remaining “who one is” depends on being a locus of experience and memory, so long as they can be “unified” (again, not necessarily happily) along Kantian lines. (Which the subject doesn’t have to conceive of in those terms.) If not, why not? In a phrase: Is a displaced person still a person?

[Does this have anything to do with why successful American immigrants, such as my grandfathers (especially on my father’s side), become “rugged individualists.”]

[I realize doing all of this as a metaphysical thought experiment borders on the offensive, especially in abstraction from accounts of such experiences. I’d be very happy to find an opposing account, on which disjoint experience leads to a sense of disassociation and fragmentation, is spelled out in some detail.]

[Strange, trival analogy: Lately, I’ve been feeling unhappy that technological and economic changes have made it more difficult for me to be one of the things I am or have been – an inveterate browser for used books and records, especially in small shops where “anything” might turn up. {“Record Store Day” is a rockist rear-guard action.} Does the loss of this “way of life” make me someone else, or just someone experiencing melancholy?]

If anything, it’s even less evident how environmental depredation leads to a crisis in the conception of “self.” The train of thought, perhaps, is this: An view of the person as an autonomous individual tends to lead one toward an “I-It” (Buber) relationship with nature, on which the latter is something to be used/used up (Heidegger) by me. Reflecting on the sum effects of relating to the nature in this way might lead us to reconsider whether the underlying conception of the self is any longer a practicable one to have. (But if this is for the sake of human survival, it’s still an instrumental relation: “sustainability” is ultimately for our (and “my”) sake.)

Whether “the mechanization of death” refers primarily to the technologization of war or the slow death of industrial work, I’ll leave it be.

To return: notions of what constistitutes the “I,” or rather, what the “I” can validly express outside its own constructed empiricisms.

Why this “rather”? The two formulations do seem quite different, so why even include the one that has to be taken back? What the self is (and how it comes to be) and what it can “validly” do are related but distinct questions; running them together clouds everything. I have to admit that my brain runs aground on “constructed empiricisms” (as on JK’s idiolectical use of “intentionalities”); there’s a very slight whisper of some kind of phenomenalist view of how experience is made to cohere. The thought, maybe, is that, given the “pressure” that has been placed on “certainty of observation” (according to the previous sentence), the subject (poet) can no longer be assured that, in reporting on experience, one is saying or communicating anything but one’s self-enclosed subjectivity. But isn’t it true that, in many of its guises, lyric subjectivity has never claimed to do anything more than that? "Self-expression" is not frustrated here, but something else.

It’s hard for me not to read JK’s account of the crisis as being brought about by selves seeming more, not less, self-constituted and autonomous, which is not, I think, what he takes himself to be saying, inasmuch as he’s attempting to describe Modernism.

This is, of course, a “culturo-centric” observation.

Of course; obviously. (I’m being snarky; I’ve used “of course” twice myself in these posts, though “obviously” not at all.) I guess this means that the Modernist crisis is not universal; it may not effect those in social contexts that have not been affected by the relevant upheavals. Tempting to read a mild romanticizing of the primitive into this; I’m not sure where one actually find these social contexts at present.

notes on lyric 3

2011-04-15T13:03:00.002-04:00

Typically, a poem gives the reader or listener something to take away from the text – an emotional gravitas, whimsical joy, intellectual connection or awakening.

Is this typical of all poems, or only of those that are lyrical in one or both respects so far discussed (musical, subjective)? Most of the other readerly effects that I can think of offhand probably do fall under one of the categories given: persuading the reader to share rage or dissatisfaction (or shame or complicity) would come under “emotional gravitas,” imparting information, under “intellectual connection.” “Whimsical joy” strikes me as a moderately patronizing way to letting pleasure into the equation. We can be almost certain that the notion that poems should have a “takeaway” or “upshot,” or that this should be why poems are valued, will soon come in for some hard knocks.

These expectations have been challenged and undermined overtly through the stages of Modernism, but such challenges are the proto-typical concern of the poet regardless of age or context: that is, the relationship between the originating words or strings, and their intended audience.

First reference to “Modernism” in this text. (The subtitle of the book is “New Modernist Poems”; the preface’s emphasis on the category of “the lyric” is not announced there.) The capitalization is a choice. One immediately reads it as associating the overt challenge alluded to with a specific historical moment or formation, but “stages of” takes this back a bit, suggesting that some (not necessarily) later developments and “post-“s are further moments within M/modernism.

[In the context of an anthology like this one, this by-now familiar question – “Is post-modernism just more modernism?” – becomes, roughly, “Is language poetry modernist poetry?” To their credit, I don’t think the editors’ answers can be read straight off the table of contents. The only canonical language writers in the book are Susan Howe (always an odd fit) and Lyn Hejinian (represented by the relatively discursive “The Beginner,” 2003), whose presence points up obvious omissions; on the other hand, it would difficult to read selections by (at a glance) Tony Lopez, Drew Milne, and Marjorie Lopez competently without taking into account their reliance on lang-po devices and procedures.]

Back to the sentence. The upshot is: Modernism explicitly questioned some assumptions about the communicative potential(s) of poetry, but all poetry, Modernist or not, has had to deal with these questions in some way. I don’t find this contentious, though I’d add (and I’d bet that JK would agree) that a good deal of poetry just assumes an answer and goes about its business. I’d paraphrase the last bit as: “the relationship between the words constituting the poem and their effect on an intended audience.”

“Strings” is a bit annoying – if it’s short for “strings of words,” we don’t need it; otherwise, the informational-theoretical connotations are unmotivated. I don’t know that we gain anything, given the kinds of work JK is discussing, in conceiving of the words constituting poems as uninterpreted character strings. There are better ways to invoke “the materiality of language,” if that’s what’s being bruited.

The ceremonial chant, the private utterance scribbled on a prison wall, the paternalisms of a society’s laureate; it’s a question of where the packages of word, or words, disseminate, take on lives of their own though the context of each individual or group encounter with the moment of utterance.

Very dense, and the false precision (“word, or words”) and comma splices don’t make it easier. I take it this is meant to support the previous assertion that the “challenges” foregrounded by Modernism have been there along, but how, exactly? The “question” seems to be primarily one for audiences or interpreters, not producers, since the chanter, etc. need not frame it self-consciously in order to perform his or her linguistic act. I agree, though, that an audience, especially one different from the immediately intended one (if any – note the prisoner case), has to negotiate this gap in some way – precisely because what they encounter is not “the moment of utterance.” “Lives of their own” is a dead metaphor meaning that the effect on these unintended audience may not correspond to the author’s intentions; this is also true, and a commonplace.

The choice of examples is puzzling, given the previous emphasis on lyric. The laureate’s poem is as likely epic or honorific as lyric; the chant has an entirely distinct set of instrumental purposes (some related to the deity it assumes as primary audience, others for other participants in the ceremony); the prison scribble has, by hypothesis, no intended audience beyond its producer. (The case of a “practically” private utterance in a presumably public language has nothing much to do w/ Wittgensteinian private-language issues; not that JK suggests it does, but the confusion is common enough to forestall.) Poems might also be written that purport to be ritual utterances or prison writings – but this has more to do with a motivating theatrical or dramatic conceit that the operations of lyric as such. I suppose we can just say that the poet who intentionally produces a lyric poem faces the questions of audience and re-interpretation as much as any other language-user – though note also that a poet who writes “for posterity” or even for a contemporaneous audience of unknown dimensions faces the relevant “challenge” or “question” in a distinctive way.

“Packages” – glancing relationship to “strings,” in pushing the “materialist” line, now with an extra connotation of commercial exchange. I’m not always sure how useful these kinds of suggestions are when they’re not central or consistently followed up on. Why? Because the descriptive ontology that governs our practices regarding poems (not to mention words) isn’t the same as the one we apply to material objects. (Nominalists like Goodman want to reduce one to the other, but recognize that our ordinary practice of treating poems and other multiple artworks as abstract need to be explained or explained away. Won’t expand on this here.)

In a sense, the lyric is lost in the moment of realization: it is that engagement with “self” and articulation, the many possible engagements of the lyrical “I” with signifier and signified.

This is a new paragraph. I assume the air of paradox in the part before the colon is intentional. “Lost” seems multiply ambiguous. My guess is that he’s saying something about the relationship between the two “faces” of lyric: The musical, asemantic qualities of lyric utterances are “lost” (submerged, effaced) in the act of communicative engagement. Just a guess.

The rest starts looking like a definition: “the lyric…is that engagement with…” “That” engagement – which engagement? One feels as though one has missed an antecedent; the reference to a whole other set of additional “engagements” (which, no doubt, are also in play) complicates things further. Now, though, it sounds more like the lyric finds itself in these necessary engagements.

Why is “self” scare-quoted here when it wasn’t in the opening paragraph (“a declaration between self and text.”)? A contemporary tic. We haven’t been offered any view of self or subject so far that would require that the term itself be treated provisionally. That said, I know perfectly well what JK means by “the lyrical ‘I’,” and wouldn’t object to something everyone has figured out by now: a poem can have a “subject” in a more or less traditional sense whether or not the word “I” appears. (So much for strings.)

Can’t say I’ve had much luck getting to the bottom of this sentence.

Modernism in poetry maps this frustration of self-expression.

Another difficult antecedent. But, actually, this helps a bit: the situation described in the previous sentence (esp. around “lost”) is a the site of a tension or frustration. The lyric subject attempts to use the language to represent experience for some communicative purpose (perhaps in an uncritical way), but is frustrated in the attempt by the complexity and contingency of the relevant relations. (And perhaps also by false ideas about the relata, especially the self.) Pre- or non-Modernist poetry shrugs this off (so it is claimed); Modernist poetry worries it, faces it, makes these concerns part of its project. I still think his description of the troubled character of the relations has not, so far, been perspicacious, but I get the stance.

Note that reference to the “musical” face of lyric has fallen out of all this; at least, it doesn’t seem germane to the position JK is developing. I was probably wrong to attempt to horn it back in while glossing the previous sentence. (But I’ll leave it, as this isn’t attempt to be right, but to read.) We’ll see how and when it comes back.

Finally, to repeat a bit, there’s an implicit “always already” hovering in front of much of this, from the copula in "The lyric...is that engagement" onward. The “self” was never unproblematic; the relations have never been as transparent as they’ve seemed. Modernism noticed this. Contrast this with another kind of view, on which specific historical, economic, and/or cultural changes induce changes in the very nature of the subject, and/or of language, which require poetry to change as well in order to remain authentic, serious, or legitimate. (I.e., language was transparent and could be used for communication once, now it’s been damaged and its relation to the world has been sundered, whether one traces the shift [fall] decisive for one's poetics to WWI [Dada] or Vietnam [Andrews, Watten] or the 1973 oil crisis [Clover via Harvey] or the rise of dessicated Internet language [flarf] – many variants are possible.) As so far formulation, JK’s is a philosopher’s Modernism, not a historian’s or a historical materialist’s. (Which stance is taken is something I always ask myself about philosophical accounts of the fragmentation or fictiveness of self/subject/person – I don’t always find a clear answer.)

notes on lyric 2

2011-04-14T13:52:00.001-04:00

But the lyric is more than that. It’s a political registration as well, a declaration of relationship between self and text, self and the empirical “outside.”

Futile to attempt to unpack this fully before we’ve heard more, but this is where things get interesting. Now we’re talking about the second strand in current appeals to the “lyric.” Lyric poetry is that which is to be understood as issuing from a speaking (singing?) subject, especially, on this formulation, in response to experience. To say “subjective experience” here would be to emphasize something rather than add anything – though it perhaps suggests that a poem consisting mostly of information might be harder to assimilate to the lyric. Despite the sentence structure, I don’t think JK means us to take “text” and “empirical ‘outside’” to be different terms for the same thing (he’s not Derrida); what he’s really proposing is a three-term relation among work, text, and (let’s say) world.

The lyric “declares” this – states that a certain relation among these items holds? Perhaps, but not necessarily explicitly – in poems of some kinds, the picture on which I use language to express my response to the world is simply a grounding assumption.

Two uncashed checks here: (1) Why is “outside” scare-quoted? Simply b/c it’s a quick, vague formulation, or because there’s something troubled about distinguishing subject and object? (Self as “inside”: a metaphor fundamental to modern philosophy.) (2) What is it to describe the three-term relationship induced here as “political”? [I think this is exactly the kind of claim that contemporary poetics is too inclined to nod “of course!” at.] One could mean that communicating one’s subjective response to the world through the public medium of language implies a relation to others (actual or potential communicants), and that any thing that brings one into a relation with others has a political element. Fine, if broad, but is that to say that other (poetic) uses of that same medium are any less political, or only that they “register” the political differently? Or one could mean that a particular politics is implicit in writing that conforms to the relationship described. [Probably it will turn out that part of the freight of “political” is that the lyric relation constructs an individualist subject – but this is reading in.] If this is the claim, I’ll admit that it seems a little dubious, as I don’t think it can be denied that lyric poems have been written in the service of vastly divergent politics. But, in response to this, a certain modernist or vanguardist claim might be that all such expressions are of a piece, and that certain political possibilities cannot be made manifest in poetry from within the lyric relation, or an uncritical version of same.

Two aspects of the lyric are now on the table. The musical, and the subjective, with the latter also tied in some way to the political. We have not yet seen any comment on the relationship between these aspects. Why should a given manifestation of a certain presumed relationship among self/word/world also foreground the prosodic/phonetic aspects of language? This is an intriguing question in part because “the musical” aspect of language is orthogonal to “the semantic” – the aspect that does the [potentially political] work of communication through engaging a systematized set of conventions. (This is not to say that other features of language do not signify, just that they do not do so through that system of conventions.) There is a tension here.

It declares an intentionality in appearance, in its desire for continuation.

Beyond registering the interesting thought that a song or a singer might “desire” to go on, that a voice once engaged might tend to perpetuate itself, this is opaque, and its connection to what’s gone before is not obvious. “Declares an intentionality” is just pretentious.

notes on lyric (1 of ?)

2011-04-13T10:18:00.003-04:00

(Commentary on John Kinsella's "Preface" to Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems ed. Kinsella and Rod Mengham [Salt, 2004].)

It could be argued that the lyric in poetry is a fait accompli, that it is generic across languages and cultures.

A hypothetical claim. By “generic,” JK means something like “universal.” Not, explicitly, “natural” or “essential” though the cross-culture reference suggests that. At a minimum, the claim is that poetry is generically marked by a relationship to the lyric (as yet, a completely undefined term). Is poetry a genre?

If musicality and the register of song inform the line of poetry, or are worked against, then the lyric becomes a truism.

This is presented less hypothetically – JK seems to hold that this is correct. (The whole if/then statement, that is, not necessarily the antecedent.) “The lyric becomes a truism” is poorly phrased, a bit of a category error. A truism, by definition, has propositional content. What is meant is something like “The assertion that poetry is always lyric is a truism.” or “The assertion that all poetry has lyric elements is a truism.” Anyway, given the rest of the sentence, “tautology” might be better than “truism.” This is obvious, but the sloppiness bothers me.

The logic of the sentence suggests some of the intended freight of “lyric”: that which displays “musicality” [cf. Guest’s poem of that name] and/or is written in “the register of song.” What, in turn, is the content of these phrases? Which properties of a text do we point to when we discuss its musicality? Prosodic and phonetic features/relations/patterns, one assumes; the properties that can be sounded. But any text has a prosody and (if spoken) a phonetics (so the “truism” is even emptier than it appears). Are particular kinds of prosody or sound patterning inherently “musical,” or is music [like beauty] where you find it? The “register of song.” meant to evoke Zukofsky’s “upper limit,” implies the former.

But what, again, is that “register”? It’s most obvious that we’re “in” it when the poem (strongly or subtly) resembles previous song or (to be recursive) earlier lyric poetry. Interesting to think of “song” as a historical or conventional category – and this isn’t to say that it would be an unchanging one, or that it wouldn’t operate differently in different poetic cultures. But this historicized conception is probably not what unexamined appeals to musicality and lyricism wish to foreground.

[Can other qualities of a poem also make it “musical”? Relations between ideas/represented content? Pound’s “dance of the intellect” – why not also its music?]

Finally, the “or are worked against” is the most interesting move here. Are we to say that poetry that is too (a) fragmentary to allow a consistent music to develop (some Bruce Andrews, perhaps, though long exposure certainly makes one recognize his rhythms) or (b) aggressively prosaic while still claiming “generically” to be poetry (Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies, because Lin is very concerned with what kind of work something is, and because I just heard him read from it) is also “lyric” to the extent that it positions itself against (a conventional conception of) “the register of song.” (How is this positioning achieved? Within the text, or through contextualization?) If so, the truism/tautology becomes emptier yet. Perhaps the only “poetries” that would not count as lyric would be (a) “purely” visual or plastic poetries (cf. Jessica Smith), esp. those that are so graphic (even non-linguistic) that they can’t be sounded or (b) other attempts to do an end run around the phonetic/prosodic elements of language. All texts, as already noted, have these; but one can claim more or less explicity that those elements are not to be attended to – that they are not relevant to the work.

The analogy I have in mind here: One claim some early conceptual artists made for their work was that, even though the presentation of the work inevitably took a material form, even if the “object” was nothing but words typed on a page, any aesthetic properties of what could actually be seen in the gallery (or wherever) were – by declaration – beside the artistic point. (Surely this is at work in Kosuth, Barry, etc. etc. – it’s also a strong element in work with photographic elements that attempts not to be art photography.) Of course, this has hardly prevented critics from treating these elements as legitimate parts of the work, or from recognizing that conceptual art had a “house style” (preferred formats and typefaces; a “clean,” undecorative look). Whether all that is a critical error depends on one’s views about artistic intention. Does the artist get to control what is and is not active in the work? If not, what does? (And of course, Felix Gonzales-Torres and similarly sophisticated post-conceptualists re-aestheticize many elements of their formal models.)

This is a digression (one that could be much longer), but the point is: Given that writing (almost?) can’t help but be “musical” in the very broadest sense, are conceptual poets who distance themselves from lyric values, and the critics who accept their claims, involved in a similar set of problems? (I haven’t read enough of Perloff’s new book to know if she handles this, or how.) None of which is a major concern of JK’s text, but “…or are worked against” raises this set of issues.

Who will be (or is) the F G-T of conceptual poetry? Or did Bernadette Mayer, among others, beat everyone there decades ago?

But the lyric is more than that.

To be continued.

2011-04-05T14:19:00.000-04:00

2010-09-18T11:56:00.002-04:00

I'm as disappointed as anyone that little or nothing that could pass for "content" appears here these days -- maybe I'll rectify that soon, but, honestly, it's mostly been about recording, rehearsing and performing around these parts. Full details when Blogger sees fit to let me update the sidebar, but, for what it's worth, here are 2 more recent pieces for Thought Catalog:

on John Cotner and Andy Fitch, Ten Walks/Two Talks

on Sparklehorse and Dangermouse, Dark Night of the Soul

And I'll be weighing in on tonight's Janelle Monae/Of Montreal show within a couple of days. Also, I had a chunk (block? pile?) of poems in The Brooklyn Rail last -- oh, was that May already? They are here. More poems from the same series are in this year's West Wind Review, but aren't online.

Back w/ more sooner than later, as I said. In the meantime, here are the dates for a short Extra Lens/John Vanderslice tour in Oct. -- and, in the meantime, our album Undercard is available as rich, streaming "content."

just the facts

2010-08-28T08:40:00.002-04:00

New shows (one tomorrow!), readings, etc. to your right. Please attend specially to the coming October run of Poor Baby Bree in I Am Going to Run Away at La MaMa E.T.C., the first two weekends of October; we'll be reprising the piano/viola/trombone arrangement of our Dixon Place performances in January. In the meantime, you can hear Bree's new recording of "The Bowery" (from A Trip to Chinatown, 1891) through the auspices of The Bowery Alliance of Neighbors.

A few more recent short pieces at Thought Catalog:

Wavves

Kelis and Robyn live

Gene/Eugene McDaniels

Ida Lupino (for the current MoMa retrospective)

Extra Lens album drops in mid-Oct.; new Human Hearts 7" a little before or after that. Konichiwa.

writing elsewhere

2010-07-13T12:09:00.003-04:00

I've been amiss in not mentioning that I have a few pieces up at the cultural webmag Thought Catalog. The most recent:

On James Schuyler's Other Flowers.

On No Great Lost, a reissue of '80s recordings by Atlanta art-rocker Kevin Dunn.

An overview of long- or one-take music videos (OK Go, Erykah Badu, etc.), with reference to their roots in avant-garde film and performance video.

More of these, short and long, appearing in the coming weeks.

2010-04-21T09:30:00.003-04:00

"Free" space devolves into promotional space. It's sad. Nonetheless:

Tuesday April 27
Union Hall, 702 Union St., Park Slope

8 p.m. Pete Galub & The Annuals
9 p.m. Jay Sherman-Godfrey (World Famous Blue Jays, Laura Cantrell, more)
10. p.m.: The Human Hearts (me + Matt, w/ Pete, above, sitting in for a couple)

We have new songs, which, by my lights, bite Big Flame, ABC, Code Blue's "Whisper Touch," and The Clean. At least one song by a bald post-punk will be covered.

(image: Jamie Lee Byars)

French kiss, Italian ice, Spanish moss

2010-01-05T15:18:00.002-05:00

Three notes on the pithy neo-liberal apologia that is Brad Paisley's "American Saturday Night"

1) "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the internationalism of the US city was largely restricted on the one hand to recognizing the connections of capital and the market and on the other to the recognition of nostalgic if palpably real Little Italies, Little Taiwans, Little Jamaicas or Little San Juans that dotted the urban landscape, as if to allow a tokenist internationalism at the neighborhood (working class) scale while insisting on the Americanism of the city as a whole." (53)

-- Neil Smith, "The Revanchist City," New Metropolitan Forms (Polygraph 8/9), 1996

2) Knowingly or not, the lyric's (very well-executed) conceit resembles Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz's (even more well-executed) "Rhode Island Is Famous For You", from the 1948 revue Inside U.S.A.. (The linked version is Blossom Dearlie's, the swingingest I know; the verse, very similar to Paisley's bridge, can be heard at the top of Nancy LaMott's more staid rendition.)

3) Paisley's souped-up chicken-pickin' guitar breaks are off the hook.

money (literally) quote

2009-12-02T01:22:00.003-05:00

...from T.J. Clark's eloquent address to protesting members of the UC Berkeley community, which you should read in full:

"A university [...] feels the despair of those for whom community college or the Cal State system seemed to offer a way forward, and who now see their courses cancelled and buildings shuttered. And all this – this is what is unforgivable – in a state whose concentrations of private and corporate wealth remain immense, but which a failed political system has put off limits even when the very life or death of our society is at stake."

This resonates for me not only as an alum and former graduate employee of UCLA, but also as the son of my father, who has taught in the community college system for three decades (and continues to do so, and who reports that the social science division offerings at his school (San Bernardino Valley Collage) are about to be slashed by a third, with many already fully-enrolled sections being unceremoniously dropped.

2009-10-15T20:13:00.003-04:00

I don't have strong feelings about either Mark Mulcahy or his old band Miracle Legion, other than recalling the guitarist's reliance on his Roland Jazz Chorus the one time I saw them, but I can't let the following sentence from a snotty review of a tribute album honoring his wife's recent death pass without comment: "But the majority of the record is given over to singer-songwriters covering a singer-songwriter, and adding all the creative touches you'd expect from somebody who performs under their own name." I'll forgo comment on what appear to be two errors of agreement, and merely note that this observation - and, really, the whole piece of writing - shows all the depth and insight that you would expect from somebody who thinks that the distinction bruited is a reasonable basis on which to judge artists' work, and who is proud enough of the principle to state it.

Nothing against those who do, but I think that I have not cared to use a bandonym for much the same reason that, as a show-goer and -performer in L.A., I dressed in a staid manner that I'd call "neutral" except that it of course revealed some sort of affiliation to my class-fragment. To spell it out: If you disdain me before you know anything about me because I'm not bearing the mark of cool, it is as well that I don't know you, and that you don't know my music. If you can't figure out that an individual who records pseudonymously may be implicated in all manner of objectionable (or not) Romantic self-expression, and that one who does not may not admit of any direct equivalence between the "I" of songs and the person who happens to be performing them, then, again, it is well that, etc. Also, good luck with fiction and poetry.

Should one at this point exclaim "but the self is fragmented/decentered/illusory," I reply: Perhaps, but if so, then this is the case whether or not I fuck about with self-presentation. "Franklin Bruno" may well be held together with spittle and memories, but this is so, and is reflected (or not) in the work, quite independently of whether or not he goes to the trouble of rebranding himself Ziggy McPersona.

All this is by the way of announcing the release pictured above, a collection of aesthetically hidebound and notably uninventive four-track recordings released under my own name, which first appeared on various vinyl 7"s and compilations, most of which are either collectibly scarce or overstocked in my closet. It can be ordered from Fayettenam Records, link screen left; all copies include a download code for a digital EP of songs of mine (none from this release, oddly enough) covered by Lou Barlow, Mac MacCaughan, Laura Cantrell and Jennifer O'Connor. The first 150 or so also come with a 7"s of three unreleased songs of similar vintage, discovered while I was assembling the master tapes.

The release show is next Wednesday at Union Hall, some details screen right. Old and new songs will be sung and played, alone and with confederates, two of whom have more attractive voices than myself. Also appearing - L.A. songwriter El May, a full band version of Kleenex Girl Wonder, and Diskothi-Q/Nothing Painted Blue bassist Peter Hughes doing a rare electropop end-run around pseudonymity in his incarnation as Peter "Peter" Hughes. I'm often diffident about whether people should come to my shows; I can enthusiastically recommend that you attend this one.

Sincerely,
Ziggy McPersona

2009-10-03T12:52:00.004-04:00

Upcoming dates, including the one flyered below, added. I understand that Matt and I will be on at about 10:30. (Italics problems solved. Thanks to Andrew Leland and Douglas Wolk for locating my dropped tag.)

2009-09-20T17:36:00.001-04:00

Just a phenomenological report: When you're kinda down and empty, rereading Charles Bernstein's Islets/Irritations is not especially helpful.

last minute promo

2009-09-14T13:13:00.001-04:00

Bree, despite being the least likely interpreter of Velvets songs this side of Steve Allen, is performing in the benefit below, tomorrow evening; I'm backing her up. Ticketing here.

2009-09-13T11:17:00.002-04:00

Political philosophy is the theory of how to balance competing interests; in practice, politics always involves the support of some interests at the expense of others. Given this, the most appropriate response to "I want my country back" may be, "You can't have it."

coming soon (rough mix)

2009-06-16T12:04:00.002-04:00

song is a strong thing

2009-06-11T08:38:00.002-04:00

Some writing on Langston Hughes is live.

So are myself and Matt, dba as The Human Hearts, tomorrow at Pete's Candy Store, Bklyn. 9 p.m.

a vampire who faints at the sight of blood

2009-06-08T09:25:00.001-04:00

Quick TONY review of Jarvis Cocker, Further Complications.

pinchbeck copse

2009-05-24T21:12:00.006-04:00

Two notes from NYT Magazine, 5/17:

1) From an interview w/ Nobel economist Myron Scholes (arguably the father of the credit default swap), recently retired from Stanford:

Q: What are you doing these days?

A: I split my time between giving talks around the world and running a hedge fund, Platinum Grove Asset Management.

Q: Does a place or city called Platinum Grove exist on any map?

A: No. One of my partners is Chinese, and he said we needed a name that had one metal in it and one wood.

[This also works for freak-folk.]

2) In the top 1 percent of previous purchases indicating a high risk of consumer credit-card default: chrome-skull accessories.

routine disruption

2009-04-29T10:31:00.002-04:00

OK, so Monday was actually Kenward Elmslie's 80th birthday. But tonight is his big birthday tribute reading/performance with longtime friends Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Ann Lauterbach and Ned Rorem (whom I've certainly never seen in the flesh). In honor of the occasion, here's a hastily digitized mp3 of his first published song, "Love-Wise" (music by Marvin Fisher). This was apparently written, circa 1959, for a show that never got off the ground, but it was taken up by Nat King Cole, for who it was a jukebox "hitlet" (Elmslie's term). The recording below, by cabaret legend Mabel Mercer backed by the Jimmy Lyon, is even less well-known (at least, I'd never heard of it until Bree brought the record home, and I dote on both the singer and the writer); it's from the Atlantic album Merely Marvelous. Happy Birthday!

not obvious

2009-03-21T07:54:00.004-04:00

My acquaintance David Lester, one-half of the redoubtable Mecca Normal, has kindly offered to post one of his paintings here: I'm quite honored, because what David and Jean have done over the years, and how they've done it, have been massively important for me. MN is celebrating their 25th year of music- and politics-making, and David's revisiting some moments in their history. More installments will be popping up here and elsewhere; they'll also be touring the U.S. for most of April. I've you have not seen Mecca Normal, you should. If you have seen Mecca Normal, you should see them again.

David's note: “The politics are not obvious” is a painting I did that a banjo player bought after seeing it displayed when Mecca Normal played a barber shop in Olympia and a bookshop in Seattle during a west coast tour in 2004. The man later sent me a cassette of his banjo playing. He recorded just this one copy to send to me. This was art. This was political.

with a whimper

2008-12-31T23:15:00.002-05:00

Well, 'round our way, 365 dreamt-of review posts turned into 100 hoped-for posts (not that I mentioned it), turned in to a scant 86, for a variety of reasons, including the add'l chaos introduced into what I laughingly call my workflow by the long delays in getting our (Bree's and my) co-op in Jackson Heights completely squared away, my inability to bring along to So. Cal. some things I wanted to write about over the holidays, a symptomatic relapse of my Dragnet (radio version) addiction when I discovered that nearly every episode is available at archive.org, and, I think most decisively, my inability to say - at least in this venue - one think about a given piece of work without it leading to several other observations, comments, etc. -- and ramifying onward from there.

Oh, sure, I could try to stick to the pith, could write, say:

[8x] Slajov Zizek, Violence (2008, Profile). Anti-foundationalist potboiler.

without going on and on about (i) what's wrong with that Adam Kirsch review, (ii) Kirsch's rightness, whatever his motivation, in pointing out the odiousness of Z.'s structuralist-inflected treatment of homosexuality as "inversion," (iii) the hit-and-missness of Z.'s pop instancing this time out, (iv) the tension between Z.'s strategy of make explicit the unappealing logical consequences of certain seemingly inoffensive starting points, a strategy in which I do, actually, recognize what I think of as philosophy being done, and his seeming lack of interest in avoiding self-contradiction at any level other than the most local, or (iv) how puzzling the discussion of not-voting is, read against a recent TLS piece which invokes Kant (or maybe even Rawls), in suggesting that, upon the election of Obama, "Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity." (Would he have said this whatever the outcome of the election?)

I had some other last thoughts for the year, mostly about the president-elect and Bon Iver, but it's now seven minutes to midnight, and there are other ways I'd rather spend them. I don't know what, if much of anything at all, will appear here in 2009 -- except possibly to a top-ten for Dragnet beginners. Health to you all.

2008-12-23T14:16:00.002-05:00

[79] Synedoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman). As attempts to plumb the human condition by Hollywood/indie straddlers go, this is preferable to I Heart Huckabees: faint praise. Though one can admire the relative economy by which Kaufman gets through his narrative, his fabulism (here derived from Albee’s Tiny Alice, among other things) is not strictly necessary as a device through which to explore the perils of attempting to represent “everything,” as the onscreen appearance of the first page of Swann’s Way should remind anyone who recognizes it. To state the obvious, it’s all too-telling that the central characters attempts to “understand” his life focus entirely on the private (sexual intimacy and physical ailment), while the social is apparently neither here nor there; there’s even a thumb on the scale in the demonization of other ways of living one’s life via the daughter’s lesbianism and sex-work. (Note also that money is essentially “no object” for anyone involved, though this is at least wittly foregrounded by the patently irreal suggestion that a single “genius” grant would fund a seventeen-year theater project.) Why must Representative Man be a schlubby white guy in his 40s? Though I take it that has someone who is supposed to be a sophisticated working artist who has presumably been exposed to all sorts of ideas need his entire life to come to the epiphany that other people are not “extras”? Why the hell is Emily Watson so willing to strip for him, as if we were stuck in the mid-century novel of male existential crisis and self-discovery through hotties. Philip Seymour Hoffman goes through his paces reliably, though I think he has the clearer and ultimately less interesting set of acting tasks than does Michelle Williams, whose considerable charm in particularizing her character is what this movie really deserves to be remembered for. (I also liked the burning house trope, which isn’t hammered to death.)

BTW, Stephen Colbert is at his sharpest in this interview w/ Charlie Kaufman; though Colbert’s position is ostensibly that of his anti-intellectual neo-con character, what’s really at issue are the merits of Cartesian representationalism (esp. as an account of perception) vs. some form of “direct realism.” “This is what living in your mind gets you”; i.e., homuncularism.)

BTBTW, [80]A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All, which I just caught as a rerun, is maybe a solid B+, given what the principals were attempting. The replication of bad TV direction (bluescreens, awkward cuts) is funny, as are the basic ideas behind the match-up of original songs (by Adam Schlessinger and David Javerbaum, who also did the Broadway Crybaby) with guests: Toby Keith giving voice to Bill O’Reilly’s “War on Christmas” canard, Willie Nelson as a pothead fourth Wise Man, but their execution is not as economical as one might hope. It’s pretty odd for me to see Elvis Costello aging into “a good sport” (though he’s always tended to treat himself unseriously in videos); he’s better here, anyway, than on his chat-show Spectacle, the interview segments of which are just fidget-inducing.

[81] In the City of Sylvia (2007, José Luis Guerin). Nadja meets Laura Mulvey meets Cortazar’s “The Pursuer” (in A Change of Light, I think). Gossamer-thin but for its spatial rigor; the narrative element is to a large degree an excuse for “pure cinema,” inc. some gorgeous passages of the changing reflections on passing train windows. Saved from erotic solipsism by the moment when the woman our protagonist has been stalking around Strasbourg manages to confront him, emphatically and convincingly, with just how unpleasant the experience has been for her. A studied film, but good nonetheless.

[82] Into the Net (1924, George B. Seitz): Feature apparently cut together from several NY-shot episodes of what was originally a serial, essaying a racist plot about the kidnapping of various Manhattan heiresses, inc. a very young Constance Bennett, who makes no special impression, by a generically orientalized “Emperor.” The great George Arliss arguably transcends, or at least displays some self-consciousness in, a similar role as an Oxford-educated Sikh in the film version of his stage triumph [83] The Green Goddess [1923, Sidney Olcott], from whence S.F.’s Palace Hotel’s signature salad dressing.) One moment bears mention: during a police raid on a private gambling den, a tuxedo’d worthy asks a cop (I’m paraphrasing the title cards) “Don’t you know who I am?” His respond: “Don’t tell me – you’re the Governor of Alaska.” Seen about 2 weeks before the election in a packed theater at MOMA, this nearly caused a riot.

2008-12-21T13:57:00.002-05:00

[73] Jonathan Monk, Continuous Project Altered Daily (ICA, 2006). Catalogue of an overview exhibition by Young(ish; 35)-British-Artist Monk, with its conceit of removing and adding a few works each day of the show inspired by the title, which comes from an early Castelli show of Robert Morris’s. Which fits: Monk’s work is part of that peculiar vein of neo-Conceptualism that involves adapting or slightly varying strategies and specific works from the ‘60s and‘70s, often toward witty or more ‘personal’ ends, while retaining the ethos of ‘idea first’ and minimal facture. Martin Creed would be a kissing cousin; Christopher Williams (more systematic and less funny) a distant one. Examples: postcards mailed to places that On Kawara sent “I got up…” postcards from; a photo piece of side streets off of Sunset Blvd. in L.A. (cf. Ruscha); text ‘paintings’ reading, say, “This painting should ideally be hung near to a Sol Lewitt (cf. Baldessari, among others); and so forth. One of the cleverer and more appealing pieces doesn’t have such a specific provenance: a slide projector that displays commercial postcards of Big Ben at the times depicted on the postcards (inc. when the gallery is closed), and remains off at all other times of day. (“A stopped clock…”and all that.) I suppose I’m drawn to at least check out this sort of thing because it’s likely what I’d be doing (because it’s all I’d be capable of) if I were an “artist.” One can discern a similar impetus behind some post-Language writing, though at the moment the sense of a love/hate tussle with forbearers’ innovations is arguably stronger in literature than in visual art; take, for example, the perfectly-titled and –executed “Whole Hog,” a sort of rural de-electrification of Watten’s “Complete Thought” that occupies the center of [74] Lisa Jarnot’s Night Songs (Flood 2008). By comparison, Monk and Creed’s work seems fairly affectionate. I don’t have any off-the-cuff speculations on the reasons for this difference.

[75] Joseph Thomas, Strong Measures (Make Now, 2007). Highly focused Noulipean work that uses the neoformalist anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American in Traditional Forms as sole source for various recombinations. One section reassembles single lines from various individual poems in that text to produce ‘new’ sonnets, villanelles, etc., retaining rhyme scheme (though not meter). I take it that the point is to display the constraints on content and imagery operative on a group of ostensibly distinct writers. Other sections employ selection strategies too elaborate to reproduce here; the methodological “Notes” have a MacLow-with-OCD quality. The most corrosive section is a mesostic on the title that turns the anthology’s “editorial apparatus” to so much schrapnel. The justification of the caps won’t reproduce here, but:

educaTed at san jose
Responsible
chArles
eDucated at
new york aquarIum
drawn Through
meInke
cOllege, the
paNtoum
A
worLd war

Fearing
cOllege
a Renewal
i aM willing to bear
w. S. merwin

Interesting project, though the return on investment is not quite as high for me as in:

[76] Raphael Rubenstein, The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now, 2007). The first half of the book consists of poems comprising n stanzas of n lines of n n-letter words, for n=1 to 8. The first, “After the Divorce: Crossing Paths by Chance in a Park,” reads, in its entirety:

X.

The second, “Crisis”:

To be
me is

to be
an “if.”

The tours de force really start around n=5; here’s the second stanza from n=8, the pan-musical “Active Octaves”:

Eardrums register brimming airwaves carrying assorted auditory messages,
miswired receiver confuses adjacent stations: highland Scottish bagpipes
encroach Jamaican melodica virtuoso, Hendrixy feedback explodes delicate
madrigal, Liberace disrupts Tristano, yodeling mountain peasants bulldoze
Idomeneo. Antennas remotely transmit baffling episodes: Mulligan embraces
Gesualdo, bleating electric bassoons practice Ultravox classics, Veracruz
mariachi ensemble enlivens famously pathetic Nocturne, Bayreuth audience
whistles Zepplin melodies, Morrissey conducts flawless Sibelius symphony.

Degree of difficulty slightly below Bökian levels, perhaps, but still quite the feat. If the individual poems in the back half of the book are procedural or constraint-driven, it’s not as evident; they have their own pleasures, especially “Illusion is a Gangstergirl,” each stanza beginning with the titular phrase and moving out in various directions from there, one even tweaking the Oulipean (“Illusion is a gangstergirl/an anagram for ‘langourous green misprints” (just kidding). [I myself briefly thought “profiteroles” might be an anagram of “proliferates” the other day.] Good book.

[77] Dream Babes Vol. 2; Reflections (RPM, 2001). There are many, many series of reissue comps out there for those who want to delve deeper into girl-group and/or gal-sung ‘60s pop minutae than the Rhino box allows; this particular series, of which this is the only volume I’ve heard, focuses on U.K. major-label singles, largely on Columbia and Paralphone, from 62-71; like most, it’s hit-or-miss. (That said, the five mostly-French, copyright-flouting Ultra Chicks comps, if you can locate them, are invaluable for yé-yé-heads.) Stylisticall, this is all over the map, from erzats rock-and-roll (Linda Laine’s “Low Grades & High Fever,” which isn’t much beyond its title and Coasters-styled hook) to budget Bacharach (Three Bells’ “Over and Over” again). Two curiosities attempt to capitalize on then-current movies: Gullivers People’s “Splendour in the Grass” and Caroline Munro’s “This Sporting Life.” (Cf. also Don Everly’s “The Collector,” found on the Bros.’ odd Hollies-produced -----). All told, there are about four tracks here that I’d at least consider if I were compiling a personal best-of-genre playlist: Cilia Black’s precisely-sung “Work Is a Four Letter Word,”well-known from its Smiths’ cover; Jill and the Boulevards’ “And Now I Cry,” with a Duane-Eddy-meets-Yma-Sumac texture that anticipates Tarnation’s brief career; Linda Laine and the Sinners’ “Don’t Do It Baby,” which obviously but effectively repurposes the hook of “Don’t Worry Baby” in a pleasant 12-string arrangement, and (best-of-show), Patsy Ann Noble’s “I Did Nothing Wrong,” a minor-key, Hammond-rich it’s-not-what-you-think number sung and played with enough gusto to rival “You Don’t Own Me” for overheated teen drama.

[78] Gwigwi Mrwebi, Mbaqanga Songs (Honest Jon’s, 2008). Reissue of 1967 LP (originally titled Kwela) on a specialist label run out of a London record shop, by an oddly configured (2 altos, 1 sax, piano, bass, drums) group of Cape Town/Port Elizabeth expats (expect for drummer Laurie Allan, later of Gong). The credit to Mrwebi as leader is a bit misleading, as both the tunes and most of the solos are by either the other altoist, Dudu Pukwana, who first came to London with a group that also included Louis Moholo, or pianist Chris MacGregor. The tunes are riff-based (and often catchy), not much given to dramatic harmonic shifts even when they have B or C sections, and the overall approach to form and rhythm is more in line with what one associates with continental Africa than “island music.” But it’s not wildly expansive; nearly every track would fit on a 78 side with room to spare, the unsion sax lines are almost telepathically tight, and the solos are succinct. McGregor, despite occasionally sloppy execution, comes off as the most thoughtful soloist, sometimes sounding like a pianistic translator of the African guitar styles where arpeggiation is a key melodic motivator, other times veerying off into spikily linear bop territory. Not surprised at all to read (in venerable out-pianist Steve Bereford’s informed notes) that at least one player hear, bassist Coleridge Goode, later worked with Joe Harriot, who went much further-out from a related starting point – this disc is pretty surefire for any fan of Harriot, the Ethopiques series, or even the jazzier portions of the label’s London Is the Place for Me calypso comps. Would love to hear the recordings Beresford mentions of this band backing a South African R&B singer.

2008-12-02T23:59:00.001-05:00

[72] The Captive City (1952, Robert Wise). Will John Forsythe make it out of Kensington (unsure of state), where some harmless bookmaking has metastasized into total mob control, in time to...show up at the first meeting of the Kefauver Committee on Organized Crime on Interstate Commerce. Faintly ridiculous and 99% humorless one-honest-journalist-against-whole-town true-crimer, complete with PSA-type appearance by Sen. Estes Kefauver himself at the end: "There's no such thing as a little local vice." Narrative frame right out of Double Indemnity (story told on tape turns to flashback); one standout performance by Marjorie Crossland as a local businessman-turned-crook's ex-wife; Forsythe, at this age, strongly resembles Glenn Ford.

[73] Down Three Dark Streets (1954, Arnold Laven). Most entertaining of the several "semi-doc"s I've seen recently, perhaps because the "doc" element is fairly minimal, and despite an unwieldy plot involving Broderick Crawford's attempts to which of three open cases is connected to a fellow FBI agent's murder. Crawford, against type as a white hat, is almost as strong a centering presence (visually as well as dramatically, his bulk and slouch hat anchoring many of the shots) as Barry Fitzgerald in The Naked City, the gold standard for this subgenre. Three main female characters, one per narrative thread, are caricatures in themselves, but the strong contrasts among them are key to clarifying and articulating the structure: Ruth Roman (less interesting than in Invitation) as an "anxious career woman" and Marisa Pavan (the plainer fraternal [sororal?] twin of the better known Pier Angeli) as a "sweet young Italian wife" (sentimentally blind, to boot), do their jobs, but Martha Hyer (a little-known name with a varied career in supporting roles), the "kept mob chippie," steals the film w/ cheesecake and tart delivery of lines like: "You mind if I put something on? I don't like being stared at before lunch." One online review notes that the much better-known (but to my mind a bit drab and white-elephantine, except for Wendell Corey) Experiment in Terror is arguably a remake of the plotline involving Roman.

Pre-code Carole Lombard triple feature at Filmforum:

[74] White Woman (1933, Stuart Walker): Imagine Charles Laughton playing Mistah Kurtz, and you've got the essence of this film; his alternately mincing and enraged performance is pretty much the point. Lombard, as a nightclub singer who can't leave Malaysia b/c of some obscurely referred-to scandal involving her previous husband's suicide, is fairly peripheral, even though the movie starts off with her sultry performances of two Mack Gordon/Harry Revel obscurities (the moderately salacious "A Gentleman and a Scholar," to which I wouldn't mind finding a lead sheet to, and the more generic "Yes, My Dear"). I'd be curious to know whether the songwriters were also responsible for the pentatonic "native chants" that show up after the action moves up-river. Some dismaying sequences with a dead monkey.

[75] Sinners in the Sun (1932, Alexander Hall): Poor girl (Lombard as a department store dress model, a vanished profession on which numerous films of the period depend) decides between poor guy (mechanic Chester Morris, long before the Boston Blackie cycle, acting with his chin) and rich guy (the forgotten Walter Byron, a Zachary Scott type). Has a certain frankness about 'modern' relationships (Morris is a chauffeur/gigolo for much of the movie; Lombard is to be 'passed on' to a pre-stardom Cary Grant once Byron goes back to his wife), but, eventually judges these, and their attendant glamorous trappings, unsatisfactory. One minor character suicides; if this film had been made after '34, though, just about the entire cast would have to die for their transgressions. Despite the somewhat overdetermined quality, a higher-than-usual proportion of scenes land, esp. Morris's party dialogue with a more experienced fellow kept man, played campily by (I think) Russ Clarke. Interestingly indecisive between silent/talkie modes of story telling: one the one hand, there's an unusual emphasis on overheard dialogue ("And they have the best pretzels there...": "There he sat, just spearing his peas."); on the other, much material is covered by proto-Vorkapechian whirl-of-the-demimonde montages.

[76] Virtue (1932, Edward Buzzell). Deservedly better-known than either of the other two, evoking much genuine sympathy on both sides of the central relationship between Pat O'Brien's cynical hack and Lombard's redeemed-by-love ex-pro. Great repartee: "Hey, my face is all right." "Yeah, it's all right for you -- you're behind it." I'd be surprised if silent star Myra Methot (Bogart's first wife), by this point an aging kewpie, was ever better used in a talkie; even ever-doltish Ward Bond is tolerable here. Not as visually distinctive as Me and My Gal, the early Wellman I raved about a few posts back, but similar in its resolute attention to the small-bore concerns of its characters. (Side note: throughout all of these, one can't help but be a bit distracted by the harsh make-up treatment, esp. at the eyes and eyebrows, given Lombard; she doesn't really become iconic until such styling went softer later in the decade, which also helps her play innocents (Godfrey, Nothing Sacred) more winningly. This isn't usually the case, but I'm mildly interested in reading a biography -- my impression is that she was a good egg.)

(Seen a few days later): [77] Made For Each Other (1939, John Cromwell). Melodrama w/ rom-com pacing. Some early sections anticipate the better-written [78] The Marrying Kind (1952, George Cukor), the kind of movie that could make you resolve to treat your sig. other better. (Saw that for the first time this yr., so it counts in the count.) But by the last third, you're better off attending to the increasingly expressionistic cinematography and prod. design (Wm. Cameron Menzies) than the story. Lombard and James Stewart give it their best shot, but when a prayer to Jesus saves their dying baby, it just about kills the movie (and my appetite to stick around for another soaper, In Name Only w/ Kay Francis).

[79] Richard F. Snow, The Funny Place (J. Philip O'Hara, 1975). Oddball volume of mostly narrative verse employing Coney Island, the "funny place" of the title, as the site and occasion for a sort of American mythopoesis. George C. Tilyou and other sub-Barnum enterpreneneurs figure as characters; the central sequence is an impressively handled chronicle of a major 1932 fire. What pulls the book forward is largely the tension between the ennobling pathos of Snow's technique (moderately high diction, rhythms based in blank verse) and the points scored about modernity and the Old World v. the New. On Tilyou:

He met McKane one swelling afternoon:
"You could have had a European Spa."
"But this is not a European place."

(Another key line: "The American century came first in toys.") Impulse-bought b/c it was edited (i.e. selected) for something called the "J. Philip O'Hara Poetry Series" (no relation, apparently, to Frank) by John Ashbery, who contributes a one-paragraph introduction (he calls the poet's music "light classical," and does not mean it as a slight). I presume the mild perversity of the project was an attraction; one certainly can see JA being drawn to a book including a section that opens "Some postcards:"; there may also be a link with the loose handling of pentameter in "Self-Portrait."

2008-11-24T10:52:00.002-05:00

[66] Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed (1982, Hasan Shah and Dom Shaw). U.K. doc covering late punk and associated musics (oi, mod, two-tone) in and around London. Valuable as a reminder of just how everyday subcultural gig violence was at the time, and for sharp interviews w/ John Peel, Tony Wilson, and the NME’s Charles Shaar Murray, who is hilariously smart and self-regarding. Of the musicians interviewed, Stiff Little Fingers’s Jake Burns comes off as the most reflective, and the performance clips of “Suspect Device” and “Alternative Ulster” are strong. The Purple Hearts and The Cockney Rejects, by contrast, are just shite; Sham 69’s in-studio lip-sync of the Transformer-ish “Poor Cow” is a pisstake; The Selecter are represented, unfortunately, by one of their weaker songs (“Missing Words”); A Certain Ratio, whom I’ve never really gotten, would be nothing w/o (black) drummer Donald Johnson; Patrick Fitzgerald should be getting royalty checks from Jeff Lewis (not that I expect that Jeff Lewis is rolling in it); an unknown-to-me figure named Johnny G has the last word with “You Can’t Catch Every Train,” a solo-electric-plus-kick-drum ditty that anticipates, hmm, early Everything But the Girl. This is on DVD, but I don’t know whether that release includes the 25th anniversary coda the film shown here (in BAM’s “Punk ‘n’ Pie” series), with many of the original, now much fleshier interviewees. The guys from the Purple Hearts appear to have gotten smarter, Jake Burns more pretentious, and the Cockney Rejects look curiously Americanized, collectively working a pukka-shell/Warp Tour roadie look. Tony Wilson, who makes some latter-day claims for current black U.K. R&B (“of course, I always love my own artists,” not sure who he meant) not long before his death, ages the least. The recent footage also includes an acoustic performance by Burns, Bruce Foxton, another guitarist who doesn’t seem to have been identified, and The Selecter’s Pauline Black (a bit guant and far less joyful than in the early performance clip) of a fucking horrible new song called “She Grew Up” (“…but she never grew old.”).

Makes me a little nervous about the upcoming Magazine reunion. Devoto is about the last person I want to see tarnish his legacy. (That Buzzkunst album wasn’t good, but hardly anyone noticed it.)

[67] Brian David Mogck, Writing to Reason: A Companion for Philosophy Students and Instructors (2008, Blackwell). What the subtitle says; meant as a sidecar to whatever texts constitute the first-order content of an intro course in philosophy. Much of the advice (section title: “The Only Outline You Need is a Sketch of the Argument You Plan to Make”) seems unremarkable to me of course, but I doubt that the book’s often sclerotic tone (“The Cardinal Virtues: Logical Rigo and Clarity of Expression”) would do much buy confirm the prejudices of the students with whom one struggles the most – bright but resistant, either tempermentally or because of early exposure to other methodologies in the humanities – against a certain kind of careful dialectical work on sharply-articulated questions. (That said, the identificatory footnotes on Continental figures are admirably non-snarky.)

Two somewhat philosophical points that bug me. A glossary early on states:

“The truth conditions of a sentence are the states of affairs that must hold in the world for a sentence to be true. The truth conditions of the sentence “Snow is white” are simply that crystals of frozen H2) must reflect all wavelengths of light equally.”

The first sentence is, of course, an accurate description of the way the notion of “truth conditions” is used, whether or not one cares for the metaphysical picture broadly implied. As to the second: well, Tarski and Davidson, among others, would disagree mightily; more to the point for the student reader, there’s an uncashed rhetorical check in the implication that the “wordly” conditions that make an ordinary sentence true (or false) are canonically expressed by a scientistic-sounding quasi-precisification in the object language. The claim made assumes too much about the semantics of “snow” and “white”; if these assumptions of made, too much epistiemology is imported into the semantic and merely formal notion of “truth” at issue. Unfortuately, the safer disquotational account that could be given – “The truth conditions of ‘snow is white’ are that snow is white” – will look empty to most students (I can assure you) without a grasp of the object/meta-language distinction.

The discussion of thought experiments and conceptual analysis (98-99) seems to go silent on just how the philosopher is to judge whether theoretical reconstructions comport with concepts as we actually use them; that judgment, it appears, requires some intituive appeal to our own facility with the concepts. Maybe that’s troubling, maybe not, but for the author’s purposes, the issue needs to be made far more explicit.

Overall, there seems to be a bit of mission creep here from methodology and writing advice to philosophical substance; Martinich’s similarly intended Philosophical Writing is more pragmatic.

[68] Jennifer Bartlett, Derivative of the Moving Image (2007, University of New Mexico). Lyric occasioned by trauma (primarily, the death of a sister) and sustained more by intensity of observation than by ‘music.’ The poet’s cerebral palsy is frankly present (“If my spine were not a question mark”), but neither the body nor others’ misunderstandings of it is made the central fact of the book; the obvious ways one might write mimetically of “disability” are avoided. Not as much cinema as the title might indicate: one poem on a specific film by Assayas, a few set more generally in theaters and one in a “Camera Obscura” (“When I was a child/my parents brought me here/but kept me here/but kept me outside,/Excluded from this dark chamber,/the projected landscape.”) Not a cheerful book, but by any measure an honestly made one.

[69] P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season (1949, Herbert Jenkins Ltd.). I’ve never read a Jeeves book; now I have, and probably won’t read another (though I could believe that radio or TV adaptations might be enjoyable enough). I like encountering the U jargon and all, but, really, isn’t the central joke that the butler is a hundred times smarter, more competent, and decent than anyone he serves a bit of a sad, not to mention repetitive, one? The mannered quality, and much else, would seem more forgivable if the book were twenty years older, and the extent to which the humor of Wooster’s narration depends on hyperbole (“…her son Thomas, one of our most prominent fiends in human shape…”) also wears thin, almost immediately. Even in a mood for “trivial” fiction, I think I’d be more apt to reread Firbank, Harry Matthews , or Van Vechten (esp. Firecrackers and Spider-Boy).

[70] Kevin Killian, Action Kylie (2008, I.G.I.N.e.C.I.) I’m down with Kylie and all, in a non-obsessed generalist kind of way (I’m now inclined to look up Towa Tei’s “G.B.I.”), but Kevin is probably the only poet who can make me swallow references to her or anyone else’s appearance in Luhmann’s Moulin Rouge, probably because I feel secure in assuming that he’s not ignorant of Huston’s. Love that there’s a poem here that consists entirely of the release information and tracklisting (including, crucially, writers and producers) of KM’s City Games (cf. Jane’s “French Narratives”). I think the main risk of the book – more so, if memory serves, than the more overtly form-intensive Argento Series -- is its casualness at the level of the line, but it almost always pays off by the end of the poem: “Good Like That” and “Is It All Over My Face?” are beautiful poems, tricking us into fear, even sublimity, and making it look easy. And, of course, the poems for Gwen Aurajo clarify, if there was any doubt, how high the stakes here actually are.

[71] Colette Inez, Spinoza Doesn’t Come Here Anymore (2008, Melville House). One of those books you briefly flip through a full-price copy of somewhere (the bookstore in Penn Station, I think), and are sufficiently intrigued by to pick it off a dollar rack at The Strand. Strong, funny start w/ the localisms of the title poem (“We seek him out at Leroy’s Pharmacy”) and a pantoum on Perry Como, but soon looses focus in a round-robin of adolescent memory poems, magic realism, jotty observational lyrics (I think one needs to title a poem something other than “On a Day of Elliptical Musings,” even – especially – if that’s accurate), and higher-register myth-and-history stuff. The arrangement of the book as a whole appears unstrategized, and weakens some good individual pieces (“Pegeen, Real Lace”). Afraid this one didn’t make it over for me.

2008-11-23T10:32:00.003-05:00

This doesn't reproduce online that well, but I'm playing the Sun. after Thanksgiving in Arlington VA; club link @ screen right:

And while I'm in promotional mode, I should mention that this chapbook:

is now available ($8 via check or PayPal) from the so-not-lame Lame House Press. Please attend to their other offerings as well.

2008-11-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

To be a hair more specific: George Sanders is my favorite person to watch being bored onscreen. Also, to be fairer to Rossellini’s heavy metaphors, the plaster casting of the holes left around Pompeii by bodies turned to ash is a neat figure for the movie’s desiccated lovers – it’s a conceit out of a Mountain Goats song, or that one Bill Knott sonnet. Negative space, indeed, speaking of which

[63] Negative Space (1999, Chris Pettit). Half-hour or so British essay/doc that moves among the videographer’s road-trip footage (29 Palms, Leucadia, Vegas), appropriated fragments of (mostly) Out of the Past and The Big Sleep, and interviews with Manny Farber and Dave Hickey. In sum, an attempt to understand the American landscape, and how it affects our character and movies, through Farber’s criticism. I don’t know that I particularly agree with some of Pettit’s generalizations, as when he suggests that we don’t have much use for irony because actual physical distance (wide-open spaces) makes it redundant, but there are many pleasing way-stations along the road thereto: Farber comparing the car trip at the opening of Breathless unfavorably to that in Voyage to Italy and claiming that half the reason he came up with “termite” and “white elephant” is that they looked good in type; Hickey commenting that Farber is “so amazed when anything is good – I mean, this is a really negative guy”; and an anecdote about Shirley MacLaine making a point of asking Robert Mitchum the time when they worked together, “just so she could get a straight answer.” (Isn’t Mitchum, though, both an ironist and utterly American?) Excellent soundtrack choice: Dylan/Shepherd’s “Brownsville Girl,” an aimless narrative that doubles as film criticism (“All I remember about it was Gregory Peck and the way people moved.”) Shown with [64] New Blue (1995, Paul Schrader), a five-minute film (which can be seen here, though it doesn’t really work at this size) about a painting of Farber’s owned by Schrader, a web of notes, fruits, onion blossoms, and rebar (“to cut the sweetness”). Heartening to be reminded that Farber was painting at full force at 76 years of age – as marked by his inclusion of an orange 76 service station antenna ball, also a pop/Californian/Ruscha-esque play on still-life tradition.

[65] Me and My Gal (1932, Raoul Walsh). Highly structured and spatially controlled early Walsh, eminently watchable both on the level of the relations between settings (docks/chowder house; rooms of an apartment), the almost sculptural use of hats, the observation of Irish immigrant faces and folkways, and the push-pull of sweetness and toughness in the performances of Joan Bennett (seemingly a very different actress before she went brunette) and Spencer Tracy. Many of the selections in the current Farber tribute series are films he didn’t get around to writing about at length but (according to Kent Jones’s worthwhile little essay, which I wish were online, in the Lincoln Center Film Society’s monthly schedule) taught repeatedly in San Diego, and you can see why this one might have repaid study – almost nothing in this film, including dialogue and minor physical business, happens just once, with the net effect of strong organization of potentially chaotic material. Despite the “street-level”/”little folk” concerns, Walsh isn’t programmatic about his choice of techniques: Bennett’s farther directly addresses the camera twice (to ask us if we want a drink!), and a sequence in which Spencer Tracy mentions that he’s just seen “Strange Inner Tube” (that is, the 1932 Norma Shearer/Clark Gable adaptation of Strange Interlude), upon which the principals play a love scene with audible internal dialogue, per the play/film – it’s funny, but not ultimately played strictly for laughs. (The O’Neill was a not infrequent object of satire at the time: cf. Groucho. I think there’s a routine along similar lines in one of Wheeler and Woolsey’s films.) Best thing I’ve seen in ages.

2008-11-17T07:48:00.002-05:00

[53] Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl (1962, Atlantic Books ed.). Middling Highsmith, repeating the play of literal innocence and psychological guilt taken up in the slightly earlier and more energetic The Blunderer and This Sweet Sickness; everyone whom the protagonist by rights should want dead ends up dead, including an ex-wife whose shrewishness strains credibility, but one somehow doesn’t feel as implicated as in the other books mentioned, simply because said protagonist is a bit of a cipher. Even not counting Ripley, I’d put several of her later novels ahead of this, particularly The Tremor of Forgery.

[54] Simon Blackburn, Truth (2005, Oxford). Meant as a popularization of contemporary debates over the titular concept, this didn’t seem to me to hit quite the right pitch to serve its intended audience as advertised: Blackburn shuns the kind of boredom-courting technicality that might make matters really perspicacious, but at the same time casually assumes too much background at points – an occupational hazard. Decent on deflationism about the theoretical interest of ‘truth’ in the abstract; that is, the view that it is true that p adds no semantic content to p; and his taxonomic discussion of elminitavism, realism, constructivism, and quietism is useful (even though every time someone tries to explain to me what “constructivism” actually is, I feel as though I must have glanced away at just the key moment). Less convincing on questions about why we might want to be realists in one area (commonplace claims about objects and events, say) and (I guess) constructivists or what have you when it comes to aesthetic or ethical claims. By the final pages, Blackburn writes, “I hope we have become confident in using our well-tried and tested vocabulary of explanation and assessment. We can take the postmodernist inverted commas off things that out to matter to us: truth reason, objectivity and confidence.” I think I missed where this was accomplished – the threat of regress implicit in the notion of confidence of confidence being, perhaps, one reason why.

[55] A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes, ed. Steven C. Tracy (Oxford, 2004). Collection of commissioned essays giving an overviews of how Hughes’s work (which, just about all contributors note, is too voluminous over five decades of activity to be reduced to a single position) stands with respect to some overarching concerns: place, music, “genderracial” issues, and black politics. The latter piece, by James Smethurst, is the most useful by some distance, arguing that Hughes wasn’t merely representative of Popular Front aesthetics but lays some claim to being one of its architects, and tracking the extent to which a critical perspective was still present in coded but not exactly opaque form in his Chicago Defender stories and columns, even in the wake of his humiliating appearance before HUAC. The music chapter, by the editor, is disappointingly short on critical distance and not notably successful in its vernacular moments: “May the Lord be praised, Hughes was aiming not always for the dignified, select, austere poetry that Cullen sought but for the sensuous, visceral throb that bursts forth into human life.” The point that Hughes was drawn more to urban female “blues” singers of the sort that drew whites to Harlem than to what I suppose rock critics would think of as ‘folk’ or ‘country’ blues, however, deserves further consideration.

[56] Joyelle McSweeney, The Commandrine, (2004, Fence). Well, the rococo vocabulary certain makes one feel that one’s getting one’s money’s worth: The end-words of the first few lines of “Application Ballad” run: chorizo/cabeza/djinn/Florida/Barcelonic/embarcadero. Sometimes, though, the insistence on verbalizing it slant seems excessive: for some reason, the phrase “a world that wouldn’t math up” (“Youth Idiom”) sticks in my craw the way that Gary Lutz or Ben Marcus can. Faves: “Lives,” prose blocks containing widely separated but vivid aural relations (“cosseted”/”Cassette!”); and the closer, “The Born Fetus,” a success (like sections of Jean Day’s The Literal World) in the hard-to-bring-off epistemology-of-the-neonate mode, which is also less strenuously stylized than most of the book.

[57] The Romance of Happy Workers (2008, Coffee House). A very carefully wrought book, even in apparently casual moments, that I’m not going to pretend to be able to do justice to here. Just wanted to this register that this poet needs flarfiness like a squid needs a bodystocking. The title sequence, with its boho-lover figure named “Woody,” is perfect.

[58] The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971, dir. Dario Argento). What’s Hitchockian about Argento’s second feature (I didn’t make it to MOMA in time for its predecessor, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) is the extreme MacGuffinosity of the plot mechanism, some nonsense about chromosomal research that one could, I imagine, plumb for thematic resonance – that and the near-comic absurdity of the suspense-for-suspense’s-sake set-pieces, including a sequence involving the Italian equivalent of Floyd the Barber, a will-they-drink-the-milk-we-know-is-poisoned bit, complete with showy allusion to Suspicion, and a graverobbing scene. Oddly unbalanced for the American viewer by the presence of Karl Malden as a blind crossword compiler – in a way, the film peaked for me early on with the detailed attention paid to his laborious working method. The kidnapping of Malden’s character’s pre-teen niece is a harbinger of the career to come.

[59] Voyage to Italy (1954, Roberto Rossellini). Shown as part of the Walter Reade’s welcome tribute to Manny Farber, curated by Kent Jones. An emotionally unsubtle film, subtly acted by Ingrid Berman (caught, almost cruelly, at the precise age necessary for her character, a great beauty to whom time is just beginning to happen) and George Sanders, one of my favorite human beings to watch on a screen. The film survives, and was admired by Farmer, for the composition, blocking, and photographic attention to the landscape surrounding Naples, rather than the hefty metaphorical freight which Rossellini makes it bear – not to mention the seeming suggestion that the couple’s marriage is finally “saved” by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin, in the form of a village procession. (This sequence, complete with canopy carried by local worthies, looks remarkably similar to one the Cordasco clan -- my mother’s extended family -- still participates in every March around St. Peter’s near Chinatown in L.A., as the ceremonial component of the feast the Madonna della Stella.)

[60] Invitation (1952, Gottfried Reinhardt) Tightly controlled melodrama – it is no great surprise to find that expat director, who did not have the U.S. career of many of his fellows, is the son of no less than the great Max Reinhardt. In a nutshell, sickly and ‘plain’ (you just have to take this on faith in ‘50s studio pics, which contain even fewer unattractive persons than our own) Dorothy McGuire has a year to live, doesn’t know it, and also doesn’t know that doting dad Louis Calhern has more or less hired Van Johnson to marry her so she can be happy in the time she’s got. Then she finds out. Of course, in the meantime, Johnson has actually fallen in love with her, plus there’s a new operation, so it all works out, but the uneasy middle of the picture has some real intensity – it’s really an edge-of-the-construct deal, minus any alien/supernatural element. McGuire’s slenderness and elegant wardrobe do a lot of her work for her, but not all of it, and there’s also good support: Ruth Roman, the weak link in Strangers on a Train (speaking of Highsmith and Farber, come to think of it), is above-par here as the justifiably catty spurnee whom Johnson would have married had he not been bought off, and – if the Reinhardt pedigree wasn’t enough – the film includes one of the few recorded performances by the important acting teacher Michael Chekov, nephew of Anton. A genuine oddity that I’m glad I caught, especially because the presence of Johnson as an ineffectual husband and Calhern as a father who deceives out of love make it a dramatic companion piece to the fascinating Confidentially Connie, possibly one of the great lost ‘50s comedies, and of which more, sometime.

[61] Big House U.S.A. (1955, Howard W. Koch). Decent-to-good “semi-doc” crime drama. [That is, a member of the late-noir subgenre marked by strong police-procedural elements, location shooting, and “object lesson” voiceovers: see The Naked City, He Walked By Night, T-Men, and the radio series This Is Your FBI.] The completeness with which lawful order is restored allows the movie to get away with much cruelty on the way, with a kidnapped kid (a asthmatic afraid of the nurse’s needle with whom I immediately identified) thrown into Grand Canyon – mystifyingly renamed “Royal Gorge” throughout, as if there were a copyright involved – within the first 20 minutes, and criminal-mastermind-type Broderick Crawford ordering William Talman (so good as a heavy, here and in Ida Lupino’s The Hitchhicker, and so familiar as the prosecutor in Perry Mason that it’s a shock to realize that that role was the one that was “against type”) to burn a dead buddy’s face off with a blowtorch. Come to think of it, the structure here (and the use of an imperiled kid) has a good deal in common with the Argento, above. Thrills is thrills.

[62] Joan Miro, Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 (MOMA, through 1/12/09). Not an artist for whom I have a lot of context, but here go my strictly amateur-hour observations: Miro could be kitschy, even garishly so – I particularly dislike the black-light poster coloring of Still Life with Old Shoe -- but also spare and bracing, as in the object trouvés of the “Spanish Dancer” series. Over the decade covered here, the most interesting series are those that attempt to combine these extremes especially two bodies of work from 1933. One group somehow makes the referentiality of sentimental and/or cheesecakey postcards that even Cornell might have rejected disappear into large-scale compositions on paper. (Some related pieces on reflective foil backgrounds, however, have a crummy, prom-décor look.) The other, paintings full of his familiar biomorphic forms, turn out to be abstractions from collages of mechanical ones, para-works that are displayed alongside the finished ones, presumably not in accordance with Miro’s intention but to the advantage of both components. The thinking here is intriguingly Duchampian, though the peculiarities of the transformation seems Miro’s own. Finally, some smaller, later works on Masonite wouldn’t look bad on the front of a book of poems, particularly Two Personages in the Presence of a Metamorphosis. (Just about the entire exhibition is online.

fall-back position

2008-10-31T14:50:00.004-04:00

I've been remiss in updating here, but NYers are hereby reminded that I'll be reading from Armed Forces, and performing a few songs not from Armed Forces, at Barbès this Sunday at 7 p.m., w/ guests Matt Houser (drums) and Drew Gardner (vibes). A bit more detail here.

I won't screw up the daylight savings time thing if you don't.

[51-52] we like the boom

2008-10-14T10:00:00.003-04:00

If you haven't already seen it, here's Bocephus at a Palin rally a couple of days ago. Not as snappy as "I Like Ike," is it? 2nd verse repeats, more or less. the Clinton/CRA-caused-the-crisis canard, already debunked. Signs that Hank isn't trying real hard include terrible syllable-stuffing in line 2: "The left-wing liberal media/have always been a real close-knit family." (Why not just "are a close-knit family"? The sense that this is a long-standing situation is lost, I guess, but the short version is more, um, impactful" and the weak-ass chorus: "John and Sarah tell you just what they think/They're not gonna blink/And they don't have radical friends to whom their careers are linked." "With whom their careers are linked?" C'mon. Song also invokes Hank I, who, as we speak, is probably trying to digitally erase himself from this.

Equal time: Lady Tigra, all grown up from L'Trimm days, performing "First Black, First Lady," which is not, as the vid might lead you to suspect, a comment on her own presence at Spaceland.

2008-10-13T10:27:00.002-04:00

I'm disappointed that a television production company in Abu Dhabi has beat me to the show I was going to pitch to Bravo: Top Poet. I suppose there's still room for a U.S. adaptation (hey, worked for Steptoe and Son); I'm thinking Kevin Killian would make a good host.

2008-10-12T23:20:00.004-04:00

Read [41] Umberto Pasti (trans. Alstair McEwen), The Age of Flowers (2003, Pushkin Modern). Somewhat overwrought Italian novel set in contemporary Tangiers, in an atmosphere of Islamic reaction to the ways and influence of European nazrani (here, a general term for foreigners, though I gather that the word has narrower meanings). The political/cultural shift is mere background for the protagonist’s descent into near-madness (and night gardening) in the face of his wife’s breast cancer and infidelity, and the attempts of various locals and expats to capitalize on his instability. A great deal of botanical detail and hallucinatory sex, inc. memories of incest; much effort seems to have been expended in describing the physical world as unpleasantly as possible. An influence I thought I detected on some decadent party scenes seemed unlikely until passing dialogue gave the game away: “…straight out of Firbank.” More structure to all this than I’m indicating, but, honestly, a slog.

Read [42] L.P. Hartley, The Shrimp and the Anenome (1944; I’m reading the NYRB edition). First third of Hartley’s reputation-making trilogy, centering on the roots of what we would now call the co-dependent relationship between too-obedient-for-his-own-good Eustace and his older sister Hilda, whom both consider his moral compass. Technically indebted to What Maisie Knew, with the machinations of class and income constantly refracted through the limited but growing comprehension of the viewpoint characters. Also excellent on the obscure significance of private games to the young, as when Eustace names the chips in the bathtub after various world capitals, which meet their destructions as the water rises. Some tonier children’s reaction to the news that Eustace has suddenly been left a fortune sufficient for both his education and a private income thereafter is a bit too blatant to be entirely believable; otherwise, pitch-perfect. Bourgeois fiction doesn’t get much better than this.

Heard [43] Oliver Lake and Reggie Nicholson, 10/10, at The Community Church of New York, in what I gather is the New York chapter of the AACM’s monthly concert series. Lake (technically an AACM fellow-traveler, having come up through St. Louis’s similarly minded Black Artists Group) played one interrupted trio piece (“Spring-Ing”), switching between alto and tenor several times. Guitarist Michael Gregory picked out a spot somewhere in the Sharrock/Ulmer continuum and stayed there; very little of what he played sounded like “jazz guitar,” but I tended to prefer him in interplay w/ Lake than in his solo turns; drummer Pheeroan Aklaff kinda stole the set with a couple of busy, well-sustained grooves that Lake often responded to by playing as if to a slower on that the rest of us couldn’t hear. Most striking ensemble section was a kind of chunky, stuttering funk, with a lot of staccato reed-popping and Aklaff shouting (I think) “Jack,” and then “Jack…find yourself” every eighth beat or so. Nicholson, who’s drummed at some point with most of the better-known AACM leaders, played five fairly modest originals as a duo with pianist Sharp Radway (huge guy), a name previously unknown to me. Interesting player: for all the liberty that the drum/piano format allows, Sharp was disciplined and fairly “inside” harmonically; between the frequent use of octaves and his way of accenting single-note lines, he could as well have been playing salsa much of the time. Nicholson himself was a touch subdued; not at all an indulgent drum-fest.

Church acoustics for both sets a bit of a drag; also unsure sure why the woman on emcee duty called out the personnel of both groups as though she were calling out the card for a middleweight bout.

If the above concert leaned toward the jazz-identified end of the AACM spectrum, at least half of what went down at the Kitchen [44] the next night was way over toward the new music/contemporary classical pole that gets this bunch in trouble with everyone from Baraka to Crouch. This and a Thurs. program I couldn’t attend were both curated by (the great) George Lewis in connection with A Power Greater Than Itself, his weighty new history of the organization (extended review forthcoming). First half, all performed by members of Brooklyn collective Wet Ink: an flute/cello/percussion trio by Nicole Mitchell, not as compelling as her own playing later in the evening; an extremely abstract quartet (I could see the graphic notation on the piano from my seat) by Leo Wadada Smith), and, the highlight by some distance, Lewis’s own Hello Mary Lou, for a nonet w/ no repeated instruments, plus percussion (vibes and a few pitched drums, mostly) and the composer’s live electronic treatments. The piece went along in a wooshy, sliding-panels-of-sound manner for a while, de-emphasizing individual instrumental voices, before suddenly waking up into a much more articulated section that tended to pit the three string players against the backline of horns and reeds; very insistent, even Rite of Spring-esque in parts, with what I’m guessing would be some very clustery chords on paper distributed over a very broad timbral range. It wouldn’t be sonically inaccurate to compare Lewis’s treatments of the live sound to dub, but it’s probably misleading nonetheless. Beyond the title, no discernible reference to Ricky Nelson: the piece was apparently inspired by Mary Lou an accompanying 1989 video by the late Kate Craig, which didn’t do anything for me at all.

After intermission, back to jazz-inflected territory with Ritual and Rebellion, a new suite-like piece co-composed/fronted by Mitchell, on various flutes, and “saxophonist, composer, and conceptualist” (according to the program note) Matana Roberts, previously only a name to me, on alto. Though this was presented as an uninterrupted suite, you could pretty easily hear how it would be broken into tracks, some fairly “out,” some quite evidently notated, moreso toward the end. I don’t really know how to talk about improv flute, though I was impressed by Mitchell’s use of extended techniques one doesn’t really associate with the instrument. I was quite taken with Roberts’s playing, which seemed representative of a turn of mind: she has a biting, non-lyrical tone, and, although she certainly gets around the instrument, doesn’t seem overly concerned with impressive technical embellishment. The two other players were less well-integrated (though necessary to the more “written” sections): drummer Chad Taylor, familiar to post-rockers via Thrill Jockey releases with Chicago Underground Duo/Trio was fine but underused, and pianist Craig Taborn was idiomatically “out” without giving the impression of actual exploration.

Especially disappointed to have missed a panel on Lewis’s book earlier in the day, but I was selling my car in Hackensack.

Watched [45] The Amazing Mr. X (1948, Bernard Vorhaus). Narratively cheesy but visually atmospheric* thriller with horror elements involving a con-man/medium, a bilkable widow, her even more credulous sister, and a dead husband who isn’t, actually. Somewhere in the vicinity of The Seventh Victim, or, oh, a Whistler episode adapted by Maya Deren, whom lead Lynn Bari somewhat resembles. The transparency of the double-exposure effects in the séance sequence fails to blunt their effectiveness; also, some enjoyable business with an ex-magician detective who idly executes a continuous cigar production. At once highly generic and uncanny, partly on account of that parallel-universe feeling that adheres to movies with less-than-familiar casts (Bari, who rarely broke through the B-barrier in a decades long career; Cathy O’Donnell in a step down from They Live By Night; career “exotic” Turhan Bey, who showed up on Babylon 5 in the ‘90s; erstwhile Dragnet regular Virgina Gregg). I guess this showed up on a local PBS affiliate because it’s out of copyright; the whole film is free for download.

*Wrote that before learning that it was shot by John Alton, which explains a lot.

2008-10-08T08:17:00.003-04:00

Read [38] Joy Williams, The Changeling (Fairy Tale Press, 2008; orig. pub’d 1978). Don’t remember what I thought of this when I read it in high school; probably that it was heavy going compared to Breaking and Entering, her then-current novel, or my favorites among the stories in Taking Care. (Pick up a copy and read at least "The Yard Boy" sometime.) Now, I’d but the difference between this and later work a bit differently: somewhere along the line, Williams stopped needing the kind of fabulism she depends on here in order to get across her sense that the world is stranger than we know. Sentence by sentence, though – or, often, in tilts from plumb of just a few degrees between one sentence and its neighbor – she’s already Williams: “In the hospital nursery the baby lay, covered with ointment and lying on greased paper, prepared much like fish en papillote.” (She’s also already found her knack for constructing a point of view that is almost that of the protagonist, while still being able to include vocabulary and imagery unlikely to be available to her; the effect is “off,” but never uncontrolled. Something similar happens w/ dialogue.) The final chapter is six unpunctuated pages; the technique is Molly Bloomish, but instead of one consciousness representation, here we get the overlap of about a dozen feral child-animals as they gnaw away at what’s left of the integrity of the main character’s personality. I also note that the men in this book are just awful; the women, unknowing at worst.

Read [39] Ed Park, Personal Days (Picador, 2008). 1/3 Office Space (I particularly enjoyed the quotes from fictional management/motivational books; there’s even a stapler episode), 1/3 Martin Amis’s Dead Babies (equivalently weighted cast of characters, one of whom turns out to be something other, and far more destructive, than he initially appears); 1/3 Joyce made digestible, with modernist technique given a rationale internal to the narrative by way of technological mediation (final chapter, also a bit Molly-ish in its urgency, is one long email, written while trapped in an elevator; some clever word play gets worked into the plot, cleverly though not exactly believably, via malfunctioning voice recognition software.) I’m not sure some family-background digressions in the last third added much, but as for the rest: well-played.

Watched [40] Afjin (ICP/Data Images DVD; no director credited; 2007-8?). Recent Dutch TV doc on the pianist/composer/improvisor Misha Mengelberg. Not a great film as such – it jumps around temporally a lot, in way that suggests intentional fragmentation less than it does indecision about what story the filmmakers were trying to tell – but I don’t know where else, outside of the BIMhaus, you’re going to get to spend this long hanging out w/ Han Bennink, Ab Baars, and the like, not to mention that subject himself, a little desultory in the manner of many artists wary of being pinned down as to their intent, but often happy to jump up and illustrate a point at the piano. Some archival footage (the earliest from ’60, I think) reveals that he (cf. Basie) used to play a lot more busily than he does on most of the stuff I know; it also appears that some of his compositions for others are based on ideas he’s too lazy to execute in his own performances. Much of the music excerpted is given in full on the DVD extras, inc. Met welbeelfde groet van de kameel, in which the concluding improvised section ends when an onstage carpenter has finished reassembling an ordinary wooden chair, tangram-style, into a camel, according to instructions given in the score, and a charming arrangement of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Baltimore Oriole,” which happens to be available here.

2008-10-05T23:20:00.001-04:00

Saw [37] Murder in Harlem (1935, Oscar Micheaux). This is the only one of Micheaux’s over 35 films for the black audience untapped by Hollywood that I’ve seen, and a late one and that, but most of what I’ve read about his at-best pedestrian technique as a writer and director is confirmed – though not the claim that, in his films, light-skinned African-Americans are typically “the good guys”; nor did the film seem to have the unmotivated eroticism often said to make his work “exploitative,” save for one singer/dancer’s dress that indicated that someone hadn’t gotten the memo about the Production Code. One vivid performance (Alec Lovejoy) in a vast sea of woodenness, with the booby-prize going to lead Clarence Brooks as Henry Glory, who goes to door selling a new novel by “one of our best colored authors,” which is to say Henry Glory – this being, apparently, just what Micheaux did as a young man before he got into filmmaking. Despite the expository flat-footedness of much of the dialogue, interesting to hear some culturally specific slang (”peckerwood”) passing by without much emphasis. The murder of the title, it turns out, is committed not by the white chemical plant owner (who actually thinks he did it, a common Perry Mason device), but a psychopathic kid, also white, who is finally killed (we learn from an on-screen newspaper item) in a quixotic attempt to free Leopold and Loeb from Joliet.

While its historical importance is undeniable, it’s difficult to actually experience this film as one assumes its intended audience did; that is, as dramatically compelling or consistently entertaining. It’s not just me: the print shown included a b&w wraparound featuring Ossie Davis engaging in some special pleading for this and the other films in the ”Tyler Black Film Collection”. Glad I saw it, but how often do I say otherwise?

Related: [38] Paradise in Harlem (1939, William Seiden), another film w/ an all-black cast, though this one was the first feature by a director whose work was otherwise almost entirely for a different “parallel market,” the Yiddish-language one. Mainly concerns a vaude/nightclub comic (we see him first in cork, ala Bert Williams) who dreams of doing Othello. (Robeson’s Broadway Othello, I believe the first with an African-American in the title role, was ’42.) This eventually happens: the film’s final sequence is a version of the handkerchief scene in which audience heckling gradually turns into a gospel obbligato, to which the actors respond by singing their lines in blues cadence, all this eventually leading – not particularly sensibly, given the onstage happenings, but somewhat cathartically – to general lindying in the aisles. This set piece is very well orchestrated, visually and musically. Otherwise, the film exhibits the same mixture of vernacular élan and self-consciously respectable stiffness as the Micheaux, with the generous time given over to minimally motivated “numbers” making it more engaging overall: it’s fascinating to see significant ‘30s-‘40s bandleader Lucky Millinder in action, for instance. The story heads South at one point: there’s an interesting representation of a juke joint, with a performance of a song with some striking lines about missing the work from the WPA more than one’s woman.

(Both of these are from the terrific MOMA series ”Hollywood on the Hudson,” inspired by Richard Kozsarski’s eponymous book on studio and independent filmmaking in NYC. I’ll be at a lot of these in the coming weeks; especially excited to get another crack at the 1933 tuner Moonlight and Pretzels.)

Saw [39] Fully Awake: Black Mountain College Experience (2007, Cathryn Zommer, Neeley House), a straightforwardly informative but not especially probing video doc. Probably better to read about the place: most of the surviving students/graduates (out of 1200 of the former, there were only 60 of the latter) hammer home the same points about self-determination in a generally self-congratulatory manner (one exception is the guy who says, roughly, “Freedom can be as difficult to deal with as oppression”), and, as there doesn’t seem be much archival footage available, most of the piece is made up of stills and talking heads. Not enough specifics on Albers’s departure; nor, really, anything that would tell you why Charles Olson is an interesting figure, beyond being extremely tall. I probably found this film annoying partly because of my previous experience with an institution with some pretenses toward a diluted version of Black Mountain values, though minus the work program or noticeable emphasis on actual responsibility. Nice to see Jonathan Williams, though. The credits mentioned support from Ray Johnson (not his estate or anything like that), which can only mean that the project was underway before his death in 1995. [There are a couple of small, concentrated Johnson assemblages, by the way, in “Looking at Music,” [40] a not especially tightly-focused exhibition up concurrently in the museum.]

Oh, my Believer review of [41] The Nancy Book begins here; the rest may or may not still be on the stands. See also Jordan’s more extensive take.

Speaking as someone who would be gladdened to imagine that a viable political candidate actually found someone like William Ayers minimally comprehensible, and realizing that locating logical gaps in present-day political speech is akin to finding, I don't know, glass in a window: wouldn't a conventional term for someone who "doesn't see America as you and I see America" be "maverick"? (Andrew Sullivan's reminder of the precise origins of that term is also salutary.)

the obstaclizer

2008-08-31T09:12:00.002-04:00

A perfect storm of irresponsible marketing and z-grade production and acting: welcome to the world of Vioxx training videos.

3 quick book reviews

2008-08-02T12:35:00.002-04:00

Read [36] Jan Clausen, If You Like Difficulty (2007, Harbor Mountain). Assured, formally various collection from a poet I didn’t know previously; have to confess that the presence of a blurb from Rodney Koeneke was the sell, that and the fact that the work didn’t look immediately inane when I flipped through it. The opening, longish but short-lined “Voxology” is playful in ways distinct from much ecriture feminine.

Ms. Lack
got down
on all fours

kindled
keened
crept
while feeling sorta
language-y

After which one is less surprised to find an epigraph from Yvonne Ranier on one poem (extra points for the title “If You See Something, Say Something”) than a ghazal, a pantoum, aggressively sing-songy quatrains (“Page Turner”). I’m a bit more taken with less overtly formal but tighly-sounded poems, like the outaged, choked-off “Rout”:

See thugged out
Yankee Doodle don
the chador
of the brave.
draw on
the clotty goregarb
gouts and gouts.
Invest
The turbaned day.
Tart up the spoils.

Final section, “Ablation,” turns up this not to a volume I found a little self-righteous, with one sestina that mostly complains about the “whiteness” pervading the writer’s retreat at which the poem was written, and a second, more verbally playful, that connects the poet’s enlightened vegetarianism to other social concerns. (Endwords: people/pig/organic/transplants/advance/factory) Final two poems, one on an NYC blackout, are further evidence that the poet would rather that human civilization (e.g. not just capitalism) had never arisen. I confess that I find this a limiting view, and one that comports oddly with Clausen’s techniques.

Read [37] Pattie McCarthy Verso (2004, Apogee). I don’t think I understand the concerns driving the short though not wholly-discrete lyrics in the middle of the book – they’re too disjointed for unity and symmetry to be the point, but the relatively mild shifts in register in tone don’t seem to be an end in themselves either. The other two sections are constructed by similar means (a sort of round-robin attention distributed among roughly a dozen sources, arranged to produce both connections and “interference”) The first, “otherwise (an eke name),” loosely centered on naming and the decline of Irish as an independent language, seemed diffuse to me – I had difficulty sensing a motivation for the page-by-page alternation of prose blocks and field composition. The final section, “piseogs” (an archaic term for a spell or charm) compares favorably to its likely antecedents in Susan Howe. The work’s spine is the execution as a witch of one Bridget Cleary by her husband in 1895, when such practices were hardly common any longer; both this through-line and the interstitial material on folk cures and magick (if there’s a line to be drawn between these) is fascinatingly specific, and the poet’s investigative anger– which extends to the deftly chosen cover image of a 1960 FBI line-up of “presentable” women – is palpable. The book’s success in getting this content over only makes Ron Silliman’s infamously oafish blurb – “We can still count the number of women who attempt writing on such a scale on the fingers of our hands” – all the more inexplicable.

Read [38] Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (2007, Graywolf). The prose poems here are clearly after the “cracked internal logic” effect of, say, an Edson, but Harvey doesn’t trust the represented content enough to avoid sounding fussy “creative writing” notes. (Almost at random: “Her ladyship, who trails sheets of seaweed like floaty green skirts, is lovesick for the sailor who used to stain her lips with wine before each voyage.” The descriptive clause kills this for me.) The limitations seem most evident in “Strawberry on the Drawbridge,” where an appealing seedling of spooneristic wordplay (“drawberry”/”drawbridge”) is rationalized, rather leadenly, by an extensive narrative frame. The two lineated series “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” seem to me much better, as writing: as discussed near the end of this interview the loosely employed procedure (each poem hits alphabetical “marks” taken from the dictionary between the keywords’ of the title) gets Harvey out of some habits, and she’s quite adept at using the verbal material that comes to hand to evoke (roughly) an post-apocalpytic/Hobbesian/paranoid atmosphere. The effect is somewhere between Matthew Derby and Auden’s The Orators:

From the window, we shot
At what was left: gargoyles and garden gnomes.
I accidentally shot the generator
Which would have been hard to gloss over
In a report except we weren’t writing reports
Anymore. We ate our gruel and watched
The hail crush the hay we’d hoped to harvest.

The poems are better at expressing “our” present predicament and fears than at examining how we might have gotten this way – something, I’ll say in passing, I also felt about Laurie Anderson’s recent performance Homeland, seen [39] at Lincoln Center last week. (Musically, though, quite satisfying – not a surprise with Joey Baron, Eyvind Kang and Greg Cohen in the ensemble.) One might with some justice object that this is partly a matter of what art is good at -- but it’s problematic as a response to this complex of topics.

2008-07-29T18:27:00.002-04:00

Tangentially connected to The Gleaners and I: One of the wittier elements of the film are the sequences in which robed jurists are stand in fields or on the streets and are made to recite and explain relevant passages of the French penal code concerning “unowned property” (tomatoes, refrigerators), the upshot being that the law considers such stuff fair game. (Though on the agricultural side, the situation seems to vary a lot with location, crop, and the attitude of the growers.) Of course, one notes that the law cannot by its nature make these allowances except by treating such items as potential property that just happens to be judged not to stand in any property relation at the moment; hence it may be appropriated. Resonant with [34] Bernard Edelman’s The Ownership of the Image (1973; trans. Elizabeth Kingdom, 1979, RKP), which uses changing and inconsistent statutes on rights and copyrights on photography as the thin wedge for a deconstruction of the ideological principles behind French law. I’m not well-versed enough to understand just how Edelman’s account differs from other French Marxist legal theorists (Pashukanis and Renner, according to editor Paul Q Hirst’s introduction); it all seems heavily Althusserian to me. Immediate interest for me are some passages from Alphonse de Lamartine, who sounds exactly like Roger Scruton:

In the same way that a musician would not be an artist if with the aid of an orchestra he restricted himself to imitating the noise of a cauldron on the firedog or the noise of a hammer on the anil, so a painter would not be a creator if he restricted himself to tracing nature without choice, without feeling, without embellishment. It is because of the servility of photograph that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarises nature by means of optics. Is the reflection of a glass on paper an art? No, it is a sunbeam caught in an instant by a manoeuvre. But where is the conception of man? Where is the choice? In the crystal, perhaps. But, one thing for sure, it is not in Man. (45)

It emerges that as photography becomes an object of commerce and industry in the new century, the legal system falls all over itself revising this opinion, with the eye of finding someone to assign property rights in the results of this natural process: on some judgments, the owners of the film stock!

Also: [35]

“Cheap,” a red-vinyl no p/s 7” by Jennifer & The Qualifiers, circa '78-79. Musically, this is sub-Patti Smith Group rock-as-punk with an indulgent lead guitarist, but the grottiness fits well with frontwoman Jennifer Blowdryer’s glaneuserie (well, let’s pretend it’s a word): “You can spend a lot of money/on a shirt/or you can buy it for a dollar/on the street/you could love someone with all your heart or you could love who you happen to meet/I’ve tried it both ways now I do it for cheap/cheap cheap cheap.” The B-side is the kicker: Johnny Mercer/Matty Malneck’s 1936 “Goody Goody,” with corrupted chord changes. I would have pegged this for an LES artifact, but apparently they were Bay Area-based. Ms. Blowdryer, the internets reveal was later on the ground floor of the Annie Sprinkle/Slut Fest scene, and continues to write books and plays.

2008-07-28T13:41:00.000-04:00

Saw [32] Basic Sanitation: The Movie (2007, Jorge Furdato), again in the Premiere Brazil series. A small town do-gooder wants to build a new cesspool to clean up the local creek; there’s no money left for sanitation projects in the regional budget, but there is a small grant available for a video (which has to be “fiction”), which a helpful functionary in the local government is willing to divert, so long as the town produces a short, cheap 10-minute movie (about the “Swamp Monster”) as well. The characters’ naïve attempts to do this (at first, they’re not sure what counts as “fiction,” and are unclear on the notion of editing as well; there are also some funny jabs at product placement) are the source of much of the film’s humor – the territory, and the implicit valorization of non-professional artistic production, is similar to Be Kind Rewind. Of course, the covering project of representation ends up overtaking the “real” one, which never gets completed, and what’s disappointing about the film is just that this develops in somewhat predictable ways – the local beauty goes diva, a wedding-video editor from a nearby larger town sees the piece as an auteurist vehicle, the climactic showing to the townsfolk is a “small triumph.” There are a number of more than clever moments – as when the self-congratulatory construction-project sign the mayor puts up b the creek gets repurposed as a homely bridge – but my sense was that the filmmakers didn’t quite find a third act that would balance the (very winning) lightness of tone with the micropolitics and reflexivity. [“Self-reflexivity” is a redundancy.] Which is too bad, as I gather all these are long-standing concerns of Furtado’s, whose short “Ilha dos Flores” was apparently an anti-capitalist faux-documentary on garbage collection. Worth seeing if it comes around nonetheless.

Saw [33] Calamity Jane (1953, David Butler). Much better-crafted than I tend to expect from a non-MGM original musical (i.e., not a stage adaptation), esp. by the ‘50s, and esp. esp. given that it came about, I believe, largely out of Doris Day’s disappointment at not landing Annie Get Your Gun after Judy Garland had to drop out. But, against the odds, it’s more satisfying than the overstuffed, overloud Betty Hutton version of AGGG that eventually appeared, and in places rivals The Harvey Girls. One realizes only after the fact that, although it’s typically bright and colorful for its time, this isn’t an especially “spectacular” musical, as things go – there are no huge ensemble numbers, the action is divided among relatively few set-ups, and Day’s big ballad (the shimmering “Secret Love,” a megahit record) is staged as a simple wander through the brush. It’s strengths are Day’s performance, remarkably physically confident, and the songs, by journeymen Sammy Fain and Paul Frances Webster. “Deadwood Stage” (which, as the first single Robert Christgau ever owned, I’ve mentioned here before) and “Windy City” feel fresh and inventive despite being in standard, extremely narrow subgenres (the first is, at bottom, a train song; the second is clearly inspired by “Kansas City” from Oklahoma!), and two largely unsung performers (Dick Wesson, Allyn McLerie*) receive a convincing vaude-period numbers apiece (“Hive Full of Honey,” “Keep it Under Your Hat”) Only the Calamity Jane/Wild Bill Hicock duet “I Can Do Without You” is forced – too obviously designed to fill the same spot as “Anything You Can Do” in AGGG.

Oh, and there’s a good deal of drag, in both directions, on the way to the (incomplete) feminization of “Calam.”

*Bree is kind of incredible: She i.d.’d this actress as a dancer with one line in Words and Music, for which IMDB lists her as “uncredited.”

non-review notes

2008-07-26T12:06:00.002-04:00

Working over coffee a couple of days ago, I unavoidably heard a conversation between a guy in his mid-20s and, presumably, his mother. He was physically a Subway Jared type, somewhere between "before" and "after" -- not morbidly obese, but enough that he'd likely be constantly accompanied by an awareness of how it affected people's reaction to him. (I've known this firsthand for a long time, though it's been lessened by the fact that I dropped some weight about 3 years back, disgusted after a particularly indolent Chicago winter.) The conversation centered around his apparent plan to enroll in some college classes (community, maybe), I think for the sake of finding a better job. He was extremely agitated and defensive, insisting "I hate school, the only reason I'm doing this is [inaudible], I only want to take 101 classes," and then, flipping through a course catalog, "Look at this -- 'The Italian Response to the Holocaust," "Greek Myth in Song and Story" -- it's nonsense!" From there he went on to variants on "I know I'm not an intelligent," "I'm a miserable person," "I don't want to do anything important," concluding, "I like office work -- my little dream is just to have an office, and type things, and not do anything for anybody or to anybody." (I couldn't make out anything his mom said in response, and I made an effort to tune out after this, as I felt passively invasive.) I guess I'm just noting down how sad all this made me, and how recognizable it felt: No one protests this way unless s/he does have some intelligence and ambition s/he somehow believes some combination of perceived personal weakness and external obstacles will never allow them to realize. How does anyone fix that?

As for me I find myself in a strange position: I've decided semi-voluntarily not to pursue more teaching work immediately and, in essence, be a freelance writer/musician (I like the phrase "without portfolio," but it's not quite accurate) for the time being. (What does "semi-voluntarily" mean? Well, in the past I've turned down one tenure-track job, and last fall willingly allowed love, location, and unwillingness to take another good but explicitly temporary gig to constrain my job search. Frankly, the predictable result has been Plan A for a while; both locating and landing a genuinely suitable position would have been more surprising at present.) That's all fine: I expect I'll teach philosophy again, and I'm grateful to have the time to think though some aspects of what I've been doing since the Ph.D. that I won't go into here. But the fact is that the other way I've earned money over the last 12 years or so has been journalistic criticism, out of which the bottom has been dropping -- the slow shrinkage of word counts and available inches has been a constant since I've been publishing, but the wave of film critic firings and the closure of newspaper book sections is a new wrinkle. (Of course, it may be that some of these phenomena will have an upside for freelancers, just as current trends in academic labor make it feasible to land a class here and there, but harder than it once might have been to find security. And sure, maybe some of the action is going online, and that's fine, but as for monetizing a blog or being "entrepreneurial" in some way, well, I'm squeamish, for what I think are probably self-regarding reasons. Similar problems about making money from music, which is roulette anyway.) In any case, most of the writing projects I give a fig for (writing a musical-theater biography, say) strike me as more appropriate to a gentlemanly "independent scholar" than to someone who'd like to make a living. The point, by the way, is not complain: for various reasons (no debt, luckily modest baseline living expenses, some savings, no interest in yachting, have medical insurance), I don't expect to be chewing off my hands in the next 6 months or even, honestly, 2-3 years. It's just kind of interesting to realize that, even though, as I've said, my current situation is mostly of my own choosing, aspects of the present economic downturn/final crisis of capitalism are not without their practical implications for members of whatever class fragment I might be said to belong to.

One tires of always writing (and seeing others write) from a place of confidence. Or is this not the done thing? Back to our regularly scheduled judgments presently.

2008-07-23T11:01:00.004-04:00

Enjoyed this streaming 3-song "single" [28] by Baltimore's Gary B & The Notions. Their erstwhile leader released a good deal of solo material as Your Imaginary Friend a while back, but the band-band plays a deeply unfashionable gtr-pop-rock (RIYL Rage to Live and The Silos), with considerably more care lavished on chord progressions and arrangement subtleties than the norm -- the sort of thing indie audiences as currently constituted are unlikely to treat with much respect because of its strong resemblance to actual rock and roll. Lead gtrist Tim Sullivan is an excellent foil throughout, esp. on the contrasting pre-chorus of "Amy," but the pick of the litter is "I Get Up," which begins as a paean to "hot sex in the summertime" w/ a debt to #1 Record but moves into emotionally shiftier territory: "How I'm married to you...it's not black and white." More that likely that the HH's will play a show or two w/ these fellows down the road.

Saw [29] The Gleaners and I (2000, Agnes Varda), kinda the lisablog of cine-essays. I'm hardly bringing the news to anybody by recommending this, but I couldn't be more impressed with Varda's combination of seriousness of purpose with lightness of tone, or of apparently offhanded technique ("the dance of the lens cap") with pinpoint control of visual rhythm. Happen to be watching, in bursts, a DVR-D of Mr. Varda's [30] Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967, Jacques Demy), which is not sung-through like the better-known Les Parapluies de Chairbourg, but more Donen-besotted. I've never read up on the relationship between these two filmmakers; the only obvious connection between these two films is their concern w/ France beyond Paris. The Demy makes we want to get another crack at Model Shop (1969), a European-tries-to-figure-out-Southern California movie that is as outlandish and occasionally ugly as Zabriskie Point, perhaps in a less faded print than the one that showed up at LACMA several years ago. (Tangentially, I'm disappointed that I didn't manage to get to recent screenings of the latest French semi-musical oddity, La France (2007, Serge Bozon) apparently set in WWI w/ ye-ye "numbers."

Saw [31] The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan). I can only nod in agreement with those who say that Heath Ledger's performance is the damndest thing. The canny bit of the conception, as opposed to what he did with it, is the character's presentation of conflicting "origin stories"; this loon won't even observe that convention. Bale's mask and Eckhart's gore do most of their acting for them, Caine and Freeman seem to have pricetags attached, but the only performance that's actively bad is Maggie Gyllenhaal, trying too hard to do something with nothing. About other aspects, I could hardly care less -- I'm just not the audience for extensive blockbuster destructiveness and velocity, and the idea that this movie says anything about terrorism, except that its agents are incomprehensible, is insulting. I suppose some of the "moral dilemmas" in the movie might do for the trolley problem and its ilk what The Matrix did for brain-in-a-vat skepticism.

2008-07-18T08:41:00.002-04:00

Saw [26] Os Desafinados [Out of Tune] (2006, Walter Lima Jr.), which amounts, roughly, to the Brazilian That Thing You Do, following the tribulations of a fictional bossa group though '50s/'60s Brazil, and for at least 1/2 the movie, NYC, where they go to crash one of the famous Carnegie Hall concerts that brought the style to public notice in the U.S.. Nice thread early on where an American producer buys the rights to one of their originals for the seemingly princely sum of $1000, and then proceeds to register a crappy English version of the lyrics in his own name. Other than that, disappointingly inspecific about the particulars of how this kind of music came to be (for that you can read Ruy Castro, I guess), but not off the mark, in a generalized way, as to the joys and tensions of playing and writing together at a certain age. Not that there aren't elements of the fantastic, as when the group wanders into a recreated Village Vanguard and begins jamming, w/o invitation or prearrangement on "Take the A Train" (an unlikely choice in that sort of club in the mid-'50s) with the cats on the bandstand to general acclaim -- evidence, I guess, of how thin the line is between what people (and filmmakers) want from a "musical" and movie "about music." Once the film gets back to Rio, the '64 coup in comes in eventually, mostly so there can be some suspense around the band's filmmaker buddy's attempt to smuggle his film out of the country; later, the group's composer/pianist is kidnapped and killed in an Argentine prison, leading to protest concerts at which the bassist has suddenly turned into, essentially, Gilberto Gil. Far more of the movie is given over to romantic hocket among two of the band members, the stalwart wife of one, and an Anglo-Brazilian singer/flautist -- the film's Jeanne Moreau/muse figure -- they meet in America. (The latter is played by Cláudia Abreu, a lithe Siena Miller type with a distractingly Anistonian 'do.) Both the young guys in the band and their older counterparts in the contemporary framing sections are likeable; a final sequence, however, in which the muse-figure's son shows up and "brings the old gang back together despite it all" for a group sing of the title tune, is hard to take. A much slicker entertainment than I'd been expecting -- I hope that the other films I mean to see in MoMA's "Premiere Brazil" series (esp. Basic Sanitation: The Movie) have less of an air of transplanted Hollywood.

Saw [27] Lullaby of Broadway (1951, David Butler). Opening shot replicates Busby B's famous slow dolly up to a disembodied head (here, Day's) from Gold Diggers of 1935 (there, Wini Shaw's, I think), which has the effect of making one conscious of just how bizarre the scale of a face on a movie screen is. Has anyone noted the affinity between this and Wavelength? That's the only interesting thought I had during this barely-ok musical, in which: Day is amusing and fresh but not, despite a couple of classic reaction-pouts, the comic actress she'd become; "Cuddles" Sakall, on loan from Metro, receives, thankfully, much more screen time than the nominal male lead, a very boring Gene Nelson; Gladys George is quite touching as Day's alkie mother; the song choices are an unmotivated grab bag of catalog items; and all the choreography is at the level of what you'd expect to see from nightclub "terp" duos of the kind that used to be reviewed in Variety.

2008-07-06T06:07:00.007-04:00

The format I've been attempting here for the last few months has been overly constraining, guilt-inducing (setting myself up for failure if I don't keep up a self-imposed quota), and probably not that illuminating. I don't know exactly how things will develop, but, for a start, I think I'm going to stop differentiating between music and other cultural products. So, let's try something like this for a while.

Read [25] Julie Carr, Equivocal (Alice James, 2007) at gym. 'Worthy' but otherwise well-executed book which, in part, torques the contemporary motherhood post-lyric (a few poems appeared in Not For Mothers Only) with a step- or adopted child variant ("Like other mothers, I say no to desserts, noise and spitting, but I am not a mother and I am not like anyone else.") The series "Wrought" rubbed me the wrong way early, with "Beckett" isolated on its own line, floating out there in an inspecific musing relatedness, but later sections tighten up quite a bit, both in imagery ("When he gathered the mussel shells//they were studded with barnacles--//wedding cakes") and sound. The title series is often, from p. 58 on, insistently dactylic ("If that bird in my hand and that bear in the trees/were to read what I store in the crease of my eye"), which sets off the chatty "I'm not really into science right now" on the final page sharply. Though I like that line, the "limits of reason" material that pops up here and elsewhere ("Iliadic Familias") seem like pretty worn goods.

Listened to [26] The Kinks, Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (orig. Pye, 1969). Thirty-odd minutes on how the English working class busies itself, what it thinks of itself, and what it can't; sociology shading into ideology critique. "The little man who gets the train/Got a mortgage hanging over his head/But he's too scared too complain/'cos he's conditioned that way" ("Shangri-la") is a little undercooked, but much of the writing is sharper, e.g. "She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina," probably my favorite song on the album, though "Brainwashed" would make someone an excellent cover (as "Victoria" did The Fall). A few cuts ("Australia") are overlong, and sonically, I've never found most mid-period Kinks anything to write home about, but the writing does so much of the work here that it doesn't matter much. Haven't gotten to the CD bonuses.

Watched [27] Best Food Forward (1943, dir. Edward Buzzell [though the main stylistic stamp is producer Arthur Freed). MGM adaptation of a bit of prom-at-the-military-prep-school froth with, in its Broadway version, had been a surprise hit thanks to a young (like, the actual ages of the characters) and energetic cast. I should know the OCR and don't (there was also an early '60s reviival that was one of Liza Minelli's big roles), but I have to assume that these stage versions were livelier than this film, which is so stylized and art-directed that it might as well be animated. Lucille Ball -- playing "Lucille Ball," a sex symbol who accepts a fan's invitation to his prom as a publicity stunt -- works the Eve Arden side of her persona, but her hair color is more integral to the film's overall design than she is to the plot. Many of MGM's junior stable are caught at awkward stages: Virginia Weidler, so wonderful at 13 in The Philadelphia Story, is shrill and stagey three years later (this was her final film), and June Allyson wouldn't find (or be handed) her sweetheart persona until Two Girls and a Sailor the following year. Here, she just acts hyper. Nancy Walker is almost the only performer to come off well, though the sort of "homely" jokes she's given -- see also Girl Crazy, and Alice Pearce in New York, New York -- are the single most unpleasant aspect of the MGM musical cycle. Glad I checked this off my list, but it's not a patch (musically, either) on the superficially similar Good News.

24. Stars Like Fleas, The Ken Burns Effect

2008-07-05T06:51:00.004-04:00

(Hometapes, 2008)

Reviewed for Time Out New York

22-23. American Music Club, The Golden Age, Mark Eitzel, Candy Ass

2008-07-05T06:46:00.003-04:00

(Merge, 2008; Cooking Vinyl, 2005)

Reviewed for Village Voice

I don't know whether thesays something about my interest-level or Mark Eitzel's career, but I've followed the guy pretty closely, and I was completely unaware of the solo Candy Ass (echt-Eitzel title, no?) until I was assigned the new AMC. Coming between the two new-era-AMC discs, it's a collection of songwriting demos comparable to similarly-minded collections I've seen him sell on tour for years. (One tune, "The Sleeping Beauty" is reworked on The Golden Age.) Several tracks are electronic instrumentals, and not wispy oral surgery soundtracks either, but fairly 'dirty' and aggressive-sounding constructions. Eitzel is more adept with the relevant techniques than he was a few years back on The Invisible Man (the obligatory man-and-his-loops '90s solo album), but still, this is just not the thing for which he's ever going to be anyone's go-to guy. Of the song songs unique to this release, the standout is "Song of the Mole," concerning a character enraged by his positive test, with a terrific opening conceit: "He was so pissed off he was dying/he would only play Hall and Oates."

2008-07-02T11:34:00.003-04:00

Cost of replacement aside: things I'm least happy to have lost along w/ my laptop, which was stolen out of an Upper West Side coffeeshop while I used the restroom on 6/30.

1) Longish (2/3 of a book, maybe) series of poems ("Ohm: An Incident Log") that I've worked on off and on for more than a couple of years now.
2) A couple of weeks of revision work on an aesthetics paper (photography material I was discussing a while back, just getting back to it.)
3) Stickie note where I kept isolated words or idioms that I'd like to find a place for (bollard...wallwart....sea lawyer....whitelist)
4) The back-channel emails (mine/others) I've kept, stemming from blog commentary etc.
5) Any photos I never posted anywhere.

Upsides, or so I tell myself:

1) Released from guilt over a lot of stuff I've loaded onto iTunes and never dealt with. (Somewhat similarly for a long list of books/authors to be explored; I imagine most of the ones really worth the effort will come to mind again before I die.)
2) A lot of "Ohm" wasn't that strong, as indicated by my resistance to sending parts of it out. (I am hoping that another longish piece/series, "Still," was kept by one of the few people to whom I've sent it.)
3) I've been kind of desultory in starting any major prose projects; I'm not halfway through a Latouche biography or anything.
4) DIdn't happen just before my EMP or Orono talks, of which there are hard copies and probably other documentation.
5) I haven't bought an M-Box yet, so haven't started doing any significant hard-drive recording.

21. The Paragons, My Best Girl Wears My Crown

2008-06-05T20:56:00.002-04:00

(Trojan, 1992 comp. of various recordings 1966-8.)

Without having read up on the relevant history, this is just guesswork, but the Kingston vocal group from whence issued both “The Tide Is High” (the sad violin is really what makes their version, I think) and lead singer/lover’s rock pioneer John Holt is most easily comprehended (to me) as early reggae’s equivalent to The Drifters -- The Paragons have that same capacity to sound simultaneously urbane and innocent. Some material (“On the Beach,” “Silver Bird”) is fairly predictable though thoroughly enjoyable, but two tracks in particular surprised me, in ways that may merely show my ignorance: “I Wanna Be With You” has chromatic harmonies and cut measures (both evoking Bacharach) that I’ve never heard in Jamaican music of this vintage, and “When The Lights Are Low” has a completely non-reggae rhythmic basis -- for the most part it could be the Stax house band pinch-hitting for Tommy McCook and the Supersonics, with some pseudo-Latin congas thrown on top. That tune and several others bear “unknown” writing credits, but most of the rest is either by Holt or the group -- the only credited piece of outside material is an unrecognizable cover of Don Covay’s “Mercy Mercy Mercy”. Much as I enjoy this, I can’t recommend this particular release: I’m quite sure these songs are not presented chronologically, but the liner notes are no help, and most or all of this is evidently mastered from the vinyl -- I could swear the pitch of “I Want to Go Back” wavers, as though it weren’t centered on the spindle. The 2CD On The Beach (2007) is probably the thing to buy, and if I ever see it for less than the listed $50, I likely will.

20. Bruce Springsteen, Magic

2008-06-05T19:58:00.003-04:00

"Radio Nowhere" appears to be one of those songs in which an artist takes the diminished size of their broadcast royalty checks as a sign of the irreversible unraveling of the social fabric. Sorry man, there's still a monoculture in whatever sense there ever was, which is to say a pretty contestable one, you're just no longer at its center. On the other hand, I enjoy the sound of the track, and much of this self-consciously meat-and-potatoes album, a great deal -- the best rockers ("Livin' In The Future," "Long Walk Home") have the relative concision and thoughful band dynamics I associate more with The Heartbeakers (Tom's) than with E Street's operatic bombast. I have almost as much trouble swallowing the vocal persona of "Devil's Arcade" as I do the average Bonnie Prince Billie record, and the alleged single "Magic" seems weak on several fronts -- the songs I'd want on that non-existent "good" AM station would be the Spector-scaled "Your Own Worst Enemy" (I'm not a sucker for orchestration, but actualorchestra bells usually get me) and "Girls In Their Summer Clothes," which has some damagingly awkward scansion in the bridge but scores extra points for with me for including a bank clock.

p. 123, you're it

2008-06-02T17:21:00.003-04:00

I'm not going to extend the meme by tagging 5 people, but, at the behest of Elisabeth:

"But the tonality remains one of single sounds and their most primitive sequences. The necessity of following cues, and of producing harmonic effects without regard for the requirements of harmonic development, obviously does not permit of really balanced modulation, broad, well-planned harmonic canvases; in brief, real tonality in the sense of the disposition of functional harmony over long stretches. And it is this, not hte atoms of the triads or seventh chords, which constitutes tonal organization."

- Adorno & Eisler, Composing for the Films (orig. pub'd 1947, quoted addition at 2007 reprint [Continuum] of a 1994 edition)

19. Big Dipper, Supercluster

2008-05-27T11:19:00.003-04:00

(Merge, 2008)

Reviewed for Village Voice.

[P.S.: Though this is a 3-CD set, I can really only count the disc of unreleased material into the tally here, as Boo Boo/Heavens/Craps have bulked large in my cosmology for 20 years or so. Curiously, a number of demos I've had a on a decaying tape (perhaps acquired through John Henderson?) for almost that long didn't make the cut: "She Skates" and "The Painting Game" merit official release. The Southpaw show, btw, was more satisfying than Maxwell's the previous night, though the scene was pretty time-warpy.]

18. Juno, Encores! at City Center, 3/30

2008-05-27T10:06:00.003-04:00

[N.B.: If this supposedly quick-and-dirty reviewing project is going to work up any steam, I have to establish some self-imposed limits. Not Twitter-length: though Paul Ford's SXSW tour de force makes a critical virtue of the crushing imperatives toward for Procrustean compression under present conditions, I'm not actually "on assignment" here. Except in special cases (and we'll see how many of those there are), I'll try instead to observe the five-sentence rule of thumb recently recommended by productivity/GTD types. (That whole world, by the way, awaits its Kulturkritik.)]

Marc Blitztein's adaption of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock was a Broadway bomb in 1959, partly because neither of its bankable leads (Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas, both charming in the right roles) were not up to realizing the rather difficult score, and partly because the play is a huge fucking downer that Blitztein was, to his credit, uninterested in softening. On the evidence of Cradle Will Rock and No For An Answer, it's seemed to me that Blitztein's equal commitment to (a) a modernism that disallowed easy show-tune solutions and (b) a very '30s left-populism left him very little room to move. This show is actually quite accessible by his standards: the Irish setting allows for folkier melodic material and dance forms (though the excellent orchestrations, restored for this revival, often complicate the picture), and one of the central events/images of the original play (the family's acquisition of their first phonograph, an effective enough figure of modernity) is a better excuse than most for some diegetic genre writing (a John MacCormack pastiche, "The Liffey Waltz"). But O'Casey's themes of intolerance and resignation (best encapsulated in the mother-daughter duet "Bird Upon the Tree," one of the few numbers I could imagine being detached from the show), not to mention their political context, do tend to make the lighter elements seem an uncomfortable compromise. (The cheery OCR cover above, based on the original Playbill design, gives a sense of how uneasy the show's producers must have been about marketing it: no dancing cat was in evidence on stage.) The final stage picture -- a line of young Republicans raising their guns to the audience -- is evidence, if there was any doubt, of Blitztein's Brechtian leadings, but since I couldn't see that the play as a whole had done much to implicate its audience (unlike Sondheim's Assassins, which has a similar moment), the device seemed tacked on. Oh, and there is an unplanned teen pregnancy involved, though I'd be more than a little surprised to learn that Diablo Cody was making an intentional allusion.

[Okay, that was seven, not bad for me.]

17. Alex Hassan, Phantom Fingers

2008-05-22T10:14:00.002-04:00

(1998, Stomp Off Records)

Instrumental solo disc by a ragtime/"novelty piano" specialist; I'm not sure where he's based (the main scene for this stuff seems to be the Bay Area), but I have to assume he's done a fair bit of silent film accompaniment. Tracked it down b/c I wanted to hear a recording of "The Angel Cake Lady and The Gingerbread Man," (Jasmyn Joan/M.K. Jerome) a song that Bree's been working on for her next show. (We learn the songs from sheet music.) Hassan plays it faster than I'd ever be able to, with much tricky chromatic embellishment that is pretty much the point of this specialized style -- anyway, no one would sing it that fast, so it doesn't matter, but it's good to get some idea about voicings and adding to the written harmony. The bulk of the CD is in the same vein -- it's hard to describe the precise rhythmic profile of this style, which you wouldn't exactly call "swinging," but which doesn't follow classical performance canons either. (See "Three Syncopated Romances." The brilliance of Hassan's pianism (and that of the overly bright recording) can be enervating in large doses, though there are a few more sensitive performances, as of this tune. What I really wish is that lyrics had been included for those songs that have them. I mean -- "Igloo Stomp (Will Thaw Icicles)"? "Mindin' the Baby"? "I Breathe on Windows"? Might have to write that last one myself.

15-16. V/A The Found Tapes, BIPPP

2008-04-23T10:20:00.002-04:00

Reviewed for Boston Phoenix

13-14. Dirty Projectors, Rise Above and Jeffrey Lewis, 12 Crass Songs

2008-03-22T22:57:00.002-04:00

Reviewed for Boston Phoenix.

P.S.: This covers whatever it was I had thought to say about Juno a while ago. I mean, I really don't care that much, and there are plenty of reasons to have a problem with the film, but possibly the least valid (most rockist) is that loud indie music is more genuinely rebellious than quiet indie music.

P.P.S.: I'm surprised that I likes the Lewis record so much more than Douglas. Could just be that the originals don't mean all that much to me.

12. Talking Heads, 71 Minutes In 76

2008-03-22T18:19:00.003-04:00

(cd boot; no label or release date, though per title, all the music is from 1976)

Picked up from a vendor who comes in from CT and sets up shop in the Bard student center a couple times a semester. This will be trainspotty, but for what other reason do quasi-releases like this exist? 15 live-in-the-studio or nearly so demos by the trio line-up, done for CBS, I gather, and then 4 live cuts w/ Jerry Harrison, a bit later, from Max's. Notable that, of the songs demo'd, one more is from Buildings and Food (6), than 77 (5). (Also essayed: "Sugar on My Tongue," and "I Wish You Wouldn't Say That," which have never really fit into the corpus for me, and "Love --> Building on Fire," which along w/ "Psycho Killer" itself, is the tune that sounds most underfed w/o 2nd gtr. There's also one title u/k cut, u/k to me as well, but very much of a piece w/ the pre-77 material. "Stay Hungry" seems to have been heavily rewritten over the next two years, w/ some rhythmically opaque transitions worthy of Send Me A Lullaby dropped. (Oh, yeah -- speaking of Robert Forster....) Neither "Don't Worry About the Government" or "The Big Country" appear -- had Byrne even thought to apply his brand of blank irony to social commentary as well as bubblegum at this point?

As to the arrangements and performances, pretty eh as far as sonics go, with a couple of very dated chorus effects (which sound weirdly flatulent applied to Weymouth's bass) as nearly the only adornment. Many ideas (inst. hooks, textures) in which one might have heard Eno's on B and F are, in fact, implicit in the trio parts. Frantz might as well be drumming to some future, more powerful performance the other parts of which exist only as possibilities, Weymouth is just a hair tentative in execution but the parts are great, and even though I don't think anyone's going to call Byrne, now or then, the clarity of his conception as a rhythm player belies the spazziness of the persona projected vocally. This isn't something you realize as a kid: at 14, I was obviously drawn to the misfit aspect of the band, and (though I wouldn't have put it this way) that whatever personal or political tensions were driving the music were not filtered though a threateningly working-class self-presentation. Now I mainly note that the structures are extremely sturdy, as they have to be to contain the vocal phrasing.

Pretty tuff, but y'know, it's no "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa."

2008-02-29T02:00:00.003-05:00

I was already aware of the Volvo jingles, but this Wrigley gum ad in which Stephin Merritt's voice emanates from a dentist weirds me out every time it comes on TV. Tune is nice enough, lyric shows signs of haste.

10. Curtis Mayfield, Get, Give, Take and Have

2008-02-27T23:33:00.003-05:00

(1976, Curtom -- I'm probably listening to mp3s of a Charly CD reissue)

I gather this is considered a relatively minor Mayfield album, recorded between soundtrack and production work for other artists (namely, Aretha and Mavis), and it does have some evident shortcomings -- most of the songs seem rambling rather than formally adventurous, and, very surprisingly, I hear some undisciplined playing. I'm assuming that the prominent acoustic guitar leads on much of the record are Mayfield's -- it's a pleasantly unusual texture for this kind of plush soul/funk, but it's responsible for some unforgivable microrhythmic traffic jams (mostly w/ the congas), especially on "In Your Arms Again." Remarkable mainly for its final track, "Mr. Welfare Man," which, thematic shift aside, is a more striking and ambitious piece of music than anything else here by some distance: "You might want to say I'm a lazy man/but you've got to understand/there's a thing about my pride/you can't make me move if there ain't no groove/'cos it eats me all inside." You can perhaps imagine the melodic grace with which this is delivered, and the several layers of dramatic string and horn writing that accompany it. The song isn't obscure -- there's also a Gladys Knight version, with somewhat different lyrics and a more uptempo feel -- but it's interesting to stumble upon in the bait-and-switch context of the album that I thought, for 7/8s of its length, was going to remain entirely in love-man mode. (Not to say that the title track doesn't have an economics of its own -- a libidinal one: "I need you so greedily."

9. Dominique Eade, The Long Way Home

2008-02-16T10:47:00.002-05:00

(BMG, 1999)

Decent enough vocal jazz by an Air Force brat/Berklee grad, currently on the New England Conservatory faculty, who, if nothing else, does something else with my 50 minutes than try to convince me that she grew up in the Black church. Backing group is grade-A, with bassist Dave Holland the best known name; one Bruce Barth builds an excellent piano solo in "Rounding the Bend," the strongest of four Eade originals. Still, the overall feel is neither fun enough nor out enough to really land with me, and, let's face it, scatting is hard to take under the best of circumstances. Most interesting song selection here is "Comrades," the only version of any of Hoagy Carmichael's late-'60s children's songs I know of besides the fabulously inappropriate fusion recordings by Stark Reality, and "I'm Hans Christian Andersen" (Frank Loesser) from the Danny Kaye film -- this is the only song, for me, where Eade's tendency to treat the lyrics fairly abstractly (she's not "expressive") really makes me hear the music itself differently. More intriguing/pretentious than most Diana Krall, much less to than Patricia Barber.

8. Down in Albion, Babyshambles

2008-02-16T10:11:00.003-05:00

(Rough Trade, 2006)

I didn't follow the Libertines, and my only reaction to Pete Doherty's ongoing personal drama is to think that he's a bit of a throwback, now that our taste for excess is fed largely by fallen Disney employees, while most "rockers" are more inventive at creating new business plans than destroying their lives. He's a throwback musically as well, which must be why Mick Jones (who produced) and older critics love him. There's no denying that he's internalized 40 years of formal moves to a remarkable degree, covering both a decent variety of harmonic language (the Smiths are now part of the assumed background of this sort of thing as much as the Kinks; see "Back From the Dead") and his casual vocal phrasing, which, if not "natural," does not read as self-conscious. I'm in fact surprised, given what I knew in advance, that there are as many completely formed tracks here, compositionally and sonically, as there are. I will admit that this mainly got played in the car, and I did not closely attend to lyrics -- the one moment that jumped out is in the good-n-negative "Fuck Forever": "I can't tell between death and glory/New Labour and Tory....it's not supposed to be the same." Aside from this and the surprising "Pentonville" which seems to just be Doherty acoustically backing a toast by "The General," who he apparently met in the named North London prison (its "separate system" floorplan for isolating inmates is pictured above.

Beyond the tracks named, what makes the album a bit suspect is that I pretty much "like" it all about equally; there may be other deep cuts that would stand out with more repetition, but many songs, and the disc as a whole, could be about 1/3 shorter with little harm. I've read that this album was received as underproduced, but I suspect that much of the credit for whatever makes this an enjoyable overall listen rests with whoever kept the guitars in tune and dialed in the amp settings. May have to check out last fall's Shotter's Nation, which is allegedly more "together."

Stray thought -- lead guitarist Patrick Warren reminds me a bit of the Only Ones' John Perry, and Doherty is a bit of a Peter Perrett figure. Has this comparison been made much, or are the Ones too forgotten? [Post-Googling update: Oh -- Doherty's been joined on stage by Perrett, and has been known to cover "Another Girl, Another Planet." Well, I may not be behind the curve, but at least my ears aren't bad.]

7. Vampire Weekend, s/t (Beggar's Banquet/XL)

2008-02-11T20:40:00.000-05:00

Reviewed for Time Out New York.

6. Applause, Encores! at City Center, 2/7

2008-02-09T13:06:00.000-05:00

So, I've decided that performances of entire shows count, since, for me, it's a lot like hearing a cast album with more dancing and talking between tunes. (Other sorts of live shows and movie musicals, not sure yet.) Applause is the 1970 musicalization of All About Eve, updated to a (then)-contemporary setting: a gay male hairdresser (here, comic and The View semi-regular Mario Cantone) delivers Thelma Ritter's wisecracks, there are a couple of 'Nam references, and the score (m. Charles Strouse/l. Lee Adams, a few years after Bye Bye Birdie and several more before Annie) attempts to find a way to integrate some rock touches in rhythm and orchestration (nice combo organ) with a (then)-mainstream musical-theater style in the actual writing. Ersatz but fun, in other words, like the songs in a beach party movie. (The dancing, which was very strong in this production, is similar [assuming it was something like the original choreography], with a good deal of frug among the Fosse.) The score falls down badly in attempting to spin a number out of the famous "It's going to be a bumpy night" scene, and overall doesn't seem remarkable enough to have earned its Tony, which I suspect is a symptom of how weak and directionless Broadway was in the period when actual rock was genuinely becoming mainstream (the counter-culture becoming, at least in surface respects, the culture, as many have noted about the '70s). The two standout songs would be "I'm Alive," which has elements that prefigure Sondheim's "Being Alive" and "I'm Still Here" from later in the decade, and "One of a Kind," more for its tricky modulations than anything it does lyrically or dramatically. The book, by Comden and Green, has some zingers, but they're mostly from the movie. Inexplicably, though, they chose to collapse the show's producer and critic into one bland figure; eliminating George Sanders' narrative function removes at least half of the cattiness that drives the piece.

The original ran for two-years-plus largely on the novelty of hearing Lauren Bacall (as Margo Channing, Bette Davis' great late-period creation) sing. The draw of this limited production (something like 5 performances, with production values closer to a staged reading), and certainly the reason I sprung for tickets, was the presence of Christine Ebersole, a far more adept singer, in the lead. If you don't care about this stuff at all, I'm not sure I convey to you the pleasure of seeing someone who really knows how to do this stuff, and who also has a distinct personality of her own as a performer. There was announcement before the show that Ebersole had been sick and missed some rehearsals, and, yeah, this showed in interactions with the rest of the cast, but her own songs, even those that I didn't think were much in themselves, were terrific. I can't say the same for the show's Eve, Erin Davie (like the star, recently off off Grey Gardens), who just didn't seem innocent enough at the start of the show to make the gradual revelation of the character's insincerity interesting (though to be fair, this could in part be a function of being extremely familiar with the film), and she left huge teeth marks on "One Hallowe'en," the song that's supposed to answer the question "What's her damage?" The supporting cast was just that, though the lead dancer, the show's representative of hard-working Broadway chorus personnel, was very hot.

Not fantastic, glad I saw it for Ebersole, but the failings won't keep me away from the next Encores! production, Mark Blitzstein's rarely-revived Juno, which does not involve what a quirky teen learns about life from a difficult decision. (I have more to say about that, but not now.)

4-5. His Name is Alive, Xmmer and Sweet Earth Flower

2008-02-07T10:47:00.001-05:00

(BMG/Silver Mountain, 2007: High Two, 2007)

Reviewed for Boston Phoenix

3. Monade, Monstre Cosmic

2008-02-07T10:32:00.000-05:00

(Too Pure, 2008)

I haven't made time for Stereolab in maybe a decade, so I don't know how Letitia Sadler's side-project (now less bedsit, more full-band, I gather) bears on what they've been doing lately. It's knee-jerk, obviously, to make her/their Frenchness the angle, but it find it hard not to say: Well, she seems to be going for Air, except when she's going for Bridgette Fontaine. Which is just to say that most of this promenades by in an eminently licensable manner, except when it doesn't, notably on "Lost Language" (one of three songs in English) and "Entre Chien et Loup," which have that harder attack and type-of-syncopation-that-doesn't-swing that is usually abbreviated by the term "angular," and which I've lapped up since I was about 13.

2. Jaki Byard, Blues for Smoke

2008-02-05T14:54:00.000-05:00

(Black Lion/Candid, 1960/1989?)

Have always meant to hear more Byard, an unpigeonholeable pianist/composer who was the victim of a still-unsolved murder in his home in 1999. This is an all-original solo date from 1960 (seemingly unissued until the '80s), on the cusp of his lengthy association with Mingus; the continual interplay between harmonies and textures marked as “European” and more vernacular (blacker) pianisms (e.g. stride-via-Monk) was, unless I'm mistaken, much more unusual at the time than it is now (Jarrett, Jason Moran, so forth). Technically impressive, though not preciously so, throughout, but most distinctive when something’s happening on both of the above fronts at once, as on a waltz (“Aluminum Baby”) where the right hand swings and the left doesn’t, or a long passage of the title track where he gets insistently Cowell-clustery over a hypnotic blues turnaround, like something you’d hear at an especially arty rent-party. I’d definitely seek out more, though this particular record is marred by indifferent recording of the instrument itself.

1. London Is the Place for Me 2; Calypso & Kwela, Highlife & Jazz from Young Black London

2008-02-05T08:16:00.000-05:00

(Honest Jon's, 2005)

Just found this, and have to lead with it: a fan's recent stopmotion animation of the epochal title track of the first installment of this compilation series.

I love this, ventriloquism of Lord Kitchener's just-off-the-Windrush voice through a "white" figure and all. (Creator "gamebundle" notes in the comments that "...the brown clay is harder to keep intact....If I could do it again, I would.")

As for v. 2 -- it's inevitably less of a revelation than the first, which was also pretty carefully cherry-picked, but still pretty great. Standouts are Kitch’s “My Wife’s Nightie,” in which a young lady with whom dallies while his wife is away steals said item, and Mona Baptiste’s “Calypso Blues” especially given that the previous volume included no female artists. Also intriguing are two calypsos that take stands pro (King Timothy) and con (Young Tiger) bebop, apparently a hotly debated topic in the black British musical community c. '53.

[Sidebar: These also extend “Kitch’s Bebop Calypso” from the first volume – which is itself performed by Lord Flea in the bizarre 1957 exploitation flick Bop Girl Goes Calypso (link is to the trailer, it's worth a glance), though the cast otherwise consists of the likes of Bobby Troup (wrote “Route 66,” married Julie London after Jack Webb) and Judy Tyler (Elvis’ costar in Jailhouse Rock, who died the same year both movies were released; she was actually a Rogers and Hammerstein discovery, and performs the styles relevant to this movie as unconvincingly and offensively as any musical-theater type I have ever seen.) Note to self: Read this Carribean studies paper that opens w/ a discussion of the movie.]

Disc is filled out by instrumental tracks, which are swinging and in some cases edifying (I, at least, know very little about kwela). Oh - great cover, too.

[And yes, this is very much on the long side of what I'm intending to do.]

(new series)...

2008-02-04T10:09:00.001-05:00

...as re-activated journals describe themselves.

So, I've decided that I'm going to try, between now and the end of the year, to write 365 brief notes on albums, old or new, that I haven't heard before. Mostly older, I suspect, both because I have a virtual and physical backlog of such items, and because, as Jane is only the most dogged in noting, there's increasingly little point in trying to grasp the year's music by making "the album" one's critical focus. (It would make as much or more sense, if I were at this point really attempting to be a well-versed professional, to drop notes on 1000 or so individual songs/tracks. Maybe next year.) I really do intend to keep these and other posts brief -- if I generate more than 250 words or so on a particular cultural artifact or performance, that's probably a good sign I should be trying to write something more substantial elsewhere. Music reviewed elsewhere will count in the total, and be will linked where possible. I'm sure that there will be peaks and valleys in activity, especially while I am teaching -- some catch-up will inevitably be played over summer.

We start tomorrow.

2008-01-05T11:24:00.000-05:00

Some new dates up, stage left. Couple of stray pieces of writing:

On Busdriver and Von Südenfed (the Mouse on Mars/Mark E. Smith collab that I decided to treat as an indie-rap record).

Straight-up academic book review of Julian Dodd's Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (Oxford U.P.). Those uninterested in analytic phil. may not have the patience for this. In brief: admirable in its careful dismantling of untenable metaphysical views, but less than satisfying in its defense of a highly acontextualist aesthetic view. (You would be wrong to think that the latter is presently the rec'd view in the field.)

~~

If you're in 2007-in-review mode, you might pause over this report on the year's singles by Tris McCall, a Jersey rocker/critic about whom I don't know as much as I'd like. Tart, compressed, up on his hip-hop, and evenhanded in its puncturing of indie and popist pretensions alike (often both at once; the entry for Rilo Kiley is hilariously accurate). He sometimes reads like a meaner Christgau, though writing for his own site allows him to be more expansive when he chooses. You won't agree w/ everything (M.I.A. is "Buffy Saint-Marie with a boombox"!), and I actually now think it's false that once a song appears in a commercial it's "forever tethered to the production wagon" (see Of Montreal/Outback Steakhouse rant/open letter), but much of this is terrific: page down to his take on Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls," a song that I listened to a lot last year but never figured out how to discuss.

~~

Best movie seen recently: Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger), a calmly-paced, elaborately-lit, morally non-simplistic soaper that somehow makes the romantic relations normal to melodrama seem like strange, incomprehensible rituals. You'd call it a Joan Crawford vehicle, except she is a vehicle, a conduit for every manner of male incomprehension. Yes, it could be watched for its camp value (particularly a scene involving increasingly close shots of a ringing phone), but there's more to it than that. Also contains some remarkable (though perhaps too-noticeably so) music by David Raskin. Worst: Never A Dull Moment (1950, George Stevens), a later and lesser The Egg and I w/ a very similar performance Fred MacMurray, halfway down the long slide from Double Indemnity to The Absent-Minded Professor, and Irene Dunne (in her second-to-last film before one of the most judiciously timed retirements in Hollywood history) doing the Claudette Colbert job. Of mild interest as an adaptation of a memoir by songwriter Kay Swift, now mostly remembered for "Can't We Be Friends," and for divorcing her first husband on the expectation that George Gershwin was about to propose to her, which he didn't. The three Swift tunes in the film are just ok, certainly not better than Friedrich Hollaender's underscore.

As for I'm Not There; I don't know, seeing Joey Burns and John Convertino show up on screen took me out of the movie, and I never got back in. Couldn't Haynes have done something less expected in the Richard Gere sections than toss together a bunch of imagery derived from the cover of The Basement Tapes? And is Bobby Seale supposed to wrong about "Ballad of a Thin Man" just because Bob Dylan was thinking of some mere personal slight when he wrote it?

~~

Even my revenge fantasies end in compromise.

2007-12-12T16:33:00.000-05:00

Ange says kind things about Bree. If there is one thing we can safely say about her act, it's that any "making it new" that's going on is purely accidental, and likely the result of my hack pianism. I do not know what Lou (& Laurie) thought; I was not introduced. We have two more shows, Friday and Sunday; details here.

~~

Pleased and a bit suprised to find Deborah Meadows, a fine L.A. poet whom too many people I ask have never read, appearing in The Brooklyn Rail. These new paratactic sonnets look to be less "written through" other texts (Melville, Quine) than her other work; in any case, her ear remains sure. The first appears to being with a reference to David Frum.

~~

Revisions 1: I don't have it to hand, but I could swear that the version of "For the CGT" on Rod Smith's Fear the Sky CD has a second half that reverses the first: something like: "...we are too tired to overthrow the government. That is why we must fall in love." I'd be interested to know the thinking behind cutting this from the version in Deed.

~~

Revisions 2: Over three years ago, I twitted Bill Berkson for misdentifying Vernon Duke as the lyricist rather than composer of "I Can't Get Started With You" in a poem from Fugue State. The poem is reprinted in this year's Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, with the relevant lines corrected. I'm glad that our senses of the persnickety match. (To be clear, I do not take it that he read my post.)

~~

3 pull-quotes from Noah Eli Gordon's Novel Pictorial Noise: "Why should a thread understand a carpet?" "The globe may be the worst object ever invented." "No matter how often I click on this icon, the beetle refuses to come out of its box." Took me 2/3 of the book to notice that each of the prose blocks closes with a couplet. More my speed, overall, than A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of the Sparrow.

~~

Ted Greenwalt, interviewed by Arlo Quint in the Poetry Project Newsletter: "Poetry is the only thing which hasn't been called poetic."

Mutatis mutandis "philosophy" and "philosophical," I often feel.

if you're interested

2007-11-03T17:52:00.000-04:00

I posted a quick piece about the background to my 33 1/3 book at the
blog run by Powell's books, which is currently running posts by many of the authors in the series. To be honest, I had to write this quickly, and the typos and other infelicities are my fault; I plan to submit a lightly revised version in a couple of day, but it ain't going to get any more substantial, so you might as well read it now. (I don't know quite who thought to head the post with the title of the wrong EC album, but I hope to have that changed soon as well.)

The fact that I make reference to indie-rock's race problem is, locally, coincidental with what's been in the air, as I wrote this several weeks ago, before I knew SFJ's piece was coming out; globally, it is anything but, as it's primarily the fact of having come to know Sasha (and Joshua, among others) that has forced me to think about the issue over the past several years -- or, more precisely, to stop looking for a way not to think about it.

Additionally, this piece on Cass McCombs is the only piece of plain-old record reviewing I've been able to do for what seems like a long time. I would not, myself, have placed "indie-folk" in the subhead.

they only met once, but it changed their lives forever

2007-10-19T08:08:00.000-04:00

Anne Wiazemsky = Molly Ringwald
Jean-Pierre Léaud = Emilio Estevez
Juliet Berto = Ally Sheedy
Lex De Bruijn (not pictured) = Judd Nelson
Michel Semeniako (not pictured) = Anthony Michael Hall
Paul Gleason (Principal Vernon) = Prof. Frances Jeanson (himself)

Université Paris X - Nanterre = Shirmer High

"Mao, Mao" = "Don't You (Forget About Me)"

2007-10-15T21:47:00.000-04:00

Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding (1967, Peter Tewksbury)

As choice-of-suitors movies go, this weakish Sandra Dee vehicle is far worse than Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941, Garson Kanin at the top of his game), but slightly better than that film's musical remake, The Girl Most Likely (1957, Mitchell Leisen at the bottom of his). Dee, like Tuesday Weld, is more interesting to watch than her featherweight reputation suggests, and I'm never displeased to see Celeste Holm, but Brit director Tewksbury, on this evidence, soured into a cut-rate Richard Lester soon after the charming Emil & The Detectives.

The film mertis this note mainly because of the song used as the main number in Dee's character's nightclub act (kind of an Ann-Margaret spoof, don't ask how it bears on the story): "Walk Tall (Like A Man)" which recently resurfaced, in a version by the 2 of Clubs (no "the," apparently) as Disc One, Track One of Rhino's Girl Groups box. I have no idea how this Vance/Pockriss* tune jumped from a Fraternity Records 7" that just scratched the Hot 100 to a hack sex-comedy from the waning years of the studio system, but slightly more digging reveals that 2 of Clubs were themselves covering a flop single by one Verdelle Smith, a Capitol pop-soul singer I'm not sure I had ever heard of before. (I suppose this info is in the Rhino booklet, but that's long packed away.)

(*Their songs included "Itsy-Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini," "Johnny Angel," and "Fortune Teller"; also "My Little Corner of the World," recorded by Anita Bryant and Yo La Tengo.)

2007-09-08T01:45:00.000-04:00

Interesting development, not that I have anything to add, other than disappointment that "antipatina" isn't a palindrome.

2007-09-07T00:26:00.000-04:00

"I don't know what I want to say, but, to try to say something, I think I want to try to think. I want to try to see what I think. I think trying is a big part of it, I think thinking is a big part of it, and I think wanting is a big part of it, but saying it is difficult, and I find saying trying and nearly always wanting."

-- Martin Creed, BBC Interview, 2001

o-k

2007-08-17T19:55:00.000-04:00

"In the 'Conjectural Beginning of Human History' Kant describes the steps that take man from the first inklings of his status as an end in himself to out-and-out political life. Man first comes to the realization that he may make use of animals but not man for his own needs when he begins to keep herds. But the nomadic herdsman's existence eventually turns into an agricultural one, with a period of conflict between herdsman and farmer marking the transition. The intrusion of the herdsman's animals on the farmer's crops was probably the occasion of the first use of force to discourage encroachment. Farmers and herdsmen soon began to keep out of one another's way, however, and agriculture began to develop in earnest."

-- Tom Sorrell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science (Routledge, 1991)

Or, as Oscar Hammerstein II had it, "The farmer and the cowhand should be friends."

2007-08-06T11:05:00.000-04:00

"I had spent too long laboring on one article -- not lengthy, but dense, and entirely about canals, a subject I knew and cared little about, but chose it because the field was relatively untouched, and then having discovered that the subject bored me, I continued on with it anyway."

-- Shiela Heti, Ticknor

in circuitry, success

2007-07-14T19:04:00.000-04:00

"At first, he said, he'd thought he would mix Dickinson's poetry into a Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas environment. But in the end, he was inspired to create a kind of combination of Tamagotchi and Microsoft's universally hated paperclip helper, Clippy."

the spraycan wars

2007-07-01T05:41:00.000-04:00

More on the Venice Biennale in a week or so, but here's what was probably the weirdest moment for me: walking into Raymond Pettibon's fugly-even-for-him installation in the Storr-selected International Pavilion. I've gotten used to the oddity of seeing Mr. SST-Flyer-Guy taken up by the artworld, of course, but there's still something curious about traveling a few thousand miles to see lists of Black Flag and Germs members scrawled in ballpoint (you'll have to click for an enlargement to make them out; I'm rushed and not v. good w/ iPhoto), and (more visibly) a play on a Minutemen title to boot. I have to wonder what percentage of attendees get these references; possibly higher than I imagine.

tarascon, provence

2007-06-23T04:14:00.001-04:00

click to enlarge

2007-06-16T03:15:00.000-04:00

"This is not a social work slot: of course we want plays about contemporary social and domestic issues, but they need to be handled imaginatively and often with a light touch. Shameless takes people at the very bottom of the heap and makes them fun and life affirming."
-- from current writer's guidelines for comedy and drama on BBC Radio 4.

The bar for conversation in po-blog comment boxes is not high, but what developed out of Kasey's posts on competency is edifying; Jane D. and Kent J., both in non-vituperative moods, staking out opposing positions on what is alive/"discredited" in Marxist accounts of this 'n' that, and certain forms of revolutionary exhortation here represented by Badiou's Metapolitics and a recent Zizek interview. It does seem, though, that some (not all) of their differences boil down to the fact that Kent is inclined to read Zizek's statements quite literally, while Jane reads him rhetorically, not to say poetically. (On reading the interview just now, I guess I just hear him doing philosophy: If you take positions A, B, and C, you're being inconsistent about their normative consequences in being squeamish about D. I couldn't say whether Z's doing something else in other related writings. I do find myself agreeing more and more strongly ~~that the notion~~ that the commonly held notion that political violence, at present, is a disruption of some state of affairs that could with any credibility be described as non-violent is bankrupt. Whatever may be problematic about the practice, that ain't it.)

As to the ostensible framing subject: being a "member of community" is a luxury (not everyone with interesting aesthetic ambitions and the energy to do something about them finds a critical mass of like-minded peers, not even after actively searching for one) and a burden (my own experiences have involved the usual amount of self-policing); so too with adopting the ficiton that one or one's work is "autonomous." In any case, most artists occupy various points on the continuum defined by these two poles at different periods of their working lives. (Of course, to say this is to imply that the artist is the interesting unit of analysis; perhaps we should say instead that it's unfortunate for the fate of aesthetic positions that they cannot really manifest except as embodied by fickle individuals. Stay the course, flarfistas!)

A saddening footnote: I don't remember how I stumbled across it, but this blog seems to have begun as the group organ of Trainwreck Union, a self-created (as are they all) avant-garde made up of young Berkeley poets (recent grads, possibly, though I'm not sure) out to buck each other up, tell each other they're the greatest, etc. Terrific. But I get the impression that the formation set a land speed record shaking itself apart thanks to at least one member's naked ambition (which equals that of any speech-ballooned animal sticker seen in the last 3 years), leaving by the side of the road at least one embittered freedom rider. Only of note in that those involved seem, well, just so young. I don't think anyone who reads this would say that I'm one to make with advice, but since it's all hanging out there on the 'sphere: jeez, give youself a couple more years before turning careerist, or, for that matter, wheeling on your careerist ex-buds. You've got decades for that shit, trust me.

~~~

On more entertaining notes:

Pleasantly surprised to see the entirety of Hans Richter's film Dreams That Money Can Buy is online. Of particular interest to me, right now, is the segment "The Girl With the Pre-Fabricated Heart," based around a song by John Latouche. (Starts at 19:50.) I believe the singers are Libby Holman and Josh White, but I'm having trouble figuring out who the composer is (could be Paul Bowles), and am not geographically well-placed to do research. A little irked to learn that it's recently been screened at the Tate Modern w/ a new live score by fops The Real Tuesday Weld -- not that I dislike the group, but this isn't a silent film, and to my mind doesn't need the update.

For mersher Surrealism, see the 1956 Motorama promo film Design for Dreaming. Well-known, but I hadn't thought about it for years until Bob Massey alerted me to its home in the Prellinger Archives.

~~~

Best recent YouTube finds:

The epochal Leonard Cohen/Sonny Rollins "Who By Fire" from the so-good-you-couldn't-believe-it-was-network Night Music. [Related: I just learned that LC's first three albums were recently reissued; the only one with actual unheard songs is the first, which includes two tracks rec'd with original album producer John Hammond, before he withdrew for health reasons. I'm very curious to hear a track called "Store Room."

Brenda Lee sings "Dynamite" in 1957; she's 13, looks 10, sounds 30+. Also rockin', "Sweet Nothings", three years later.

Speaking of fops, this is the best of a handful of available Monochrome Set clips: their El single "Eine Symphonie des Grauens", live in '79 at Walker Art Center's New-No-Now Wave Festival. I suppose I'll be tracking down this at some point.

I'm not 100% sold on the single from the Cash-styled (and -penned) comeback record, but if you search "Porter Wagoner," you'll come up w/ a ton of clips from his '60s TV show, w/ some great Jerry Reed, and, jackpot, 8 or 9 early Dolly Parton appearances, w/ and w/o PW. All worth a look, but I love her early "Fuel To The Flame" (a hit for Skeeter Davis), outro'd by the host with, "That's a little pop, but awful good."

~~~

"We continue to broadcast several series about men and women coping with their early middle age. We are therefore discouraging all such offers this round."
-- BBC guidlines, ibid.

i can has bloggng?

2007-06-14T02:59:00.000-04:00

--undated sketch (w/ misspelled caption) of jazz trombonist Jimmy Archey by W.V.O. Quine, one of many notecard-sized sketches reproduced on the avocations section of an extensive archival website maintained by the late philosopher's descendants.

"That my life as a human animal is wrought with particularities is the law of things. That the categories of this particularity profess to be universal, thereby taking upon themselves the seriousness of the Subject, that’s when things regularly get disastrous."
-- Alain Badiou, "Behind the Scarfed Law, There is Fear" (March 2004)

"I never focus the camera - anyone can focus the camera - I focus you!"
-- Adolphe Menjou in Road Show (1941, dir. Hal Roach, wr. Arnold Belgard &c.)

--via Rod Smith, excellent out-jazz blog posting full sets (as RapidShare .rars) of Steve Lacy, Sam Rivers, David S. Ware and so forth, and some o.o.p. material from vinyl. I'm listening to a Lacy all-Monk set now; going to check out this rare Ellington/Mingus pairing (no, not Money Jungle) next.

"You've got to take your soup where the spoon is."
--Madge Evans in Beauty For Sale (1933, dir. Richard Boleslawski, wr. Faith Evans &c.)

"A fantasy of universal franchisement still obtains -- so long as she doesn't wear a veil."
-- Rod Halpern, Rumored Place (Krupskaaya, 2005)

--courtesy (via Douglas Wolk) the dorky, uneven, but sometimes on-point philolsophers; also see loltheorists for more information about how various figures from intellectual history (past and present) would text us, if they were cats.

be there

2007-05-28T13:51:00.000-04:00

Two opportunities to see my nearest and dearest perform: Tonight at the Million Poems Show season-finale, with Chris Toll, Sina Queyras, and the usual suspects; and tomorrow at Don't Tell Mama, per below. Please click to enlarge if you're interested in attending (full info is on the "card."), or just to get the impact of the picture.

Don't know what to tell you about the extended haitus here, other than that I seem to be in good company.

2007-05-06T11:45:00.000-04:00

Jeff Wall show, MoMa: Dude loves a diagonal. Disappointed that the selection doesn't include some of the irreal stuff (The Vampire's Picnic, The Giant), or the Odradek photo. Obvious but not-much-remarked feature of his turn from big-C conceptualism: very little written language in his pics. "PIZZA SLICE 93c" in the recent nightclub-scene is one of the few legible instances. (Though there is that early diptych Stereo, also not shown here -- fairly evident how different that piece is from just about everything else.) Interesting, the devices that he uses exactly once: the inset of a "detail" from a few minutes later in the b&w scene of a drug deal in progress; the date on the framing lightbox in the '40s children's party reconstruction (not shown as part of the work in reproduction). Also "glaringly" obvious, though I hadn't made the connection until skimming Galassi's catalog essay -- the "invisible" reference to Flavin in the flourescent tubes behind the transparency, forming part of the work's support (in what I think is a fairly technically precise sense). Again, this element of the work isn't really relevant when the pieces are reproduced as photographs. Galassi doesn't say so (though I'm sure someone has), but the bulbs in the Invisible Man "illustration" relate directly to this.

[Meanwhile, Wall's one-time bandmate (see above) Rodney Graham has released a songbook.]

***

Amused to learn (NYT, Sat.) that Stargate's managers are two black Britons who are often initially taken for the producers by clients and execs at meetings.

Most accurate name for a peepshow/video store: Mixed Emotions, near B'way at 51st.

Best trickle-down hype: the sax-busker who's always near Colony Records playing the "Spider-Man" theme.

Best name for an open wireless network: my roommate sleeps around.

the kind of sentence

2007-04-16T21:52:00.000-04:00

I thought they'd quit writing in the '80s:

"Shaw’s acute insight into the nature of language is especially surprising because he could not have read Derrida’s critique of logocentrism.” -- Jean Reynolds, Pygmalion’s Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw; University of Florida Press, 1999

***

Statcounter stopped responding to me a while back, so I have no idea if anyone's looking at this but: upcoming "dates" of one sort or another at left. Esp. looking forward to hearing Cathy Park Hong; Dance Dance Revolution, which I'm 2/3 through, is a helluva performance.

***

Sorry I never said more about the b-musicals: Harburg/Gorney's "Dusty Shoes," a "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"-sequel from Moonlight and Pretzels (1933, Karl Freund), ruled, as did Marge Champion's solo turn to Johnny Mercer/Johnny Green's "Derry Down Dilly" (I may not have that title exactly right) in Everything I Have is Yours (1952, Robert Z. Leonard). The Ann Miller vehicle Priorities On Parade (1942, Albert S. Rogell) included some nice Styne/Loesser obscurities and too much jingoism to let you forget for long what Ann Miller vehicles were for; and Slightly French (1949, Douglas Sirk) wasn't so much a musical as a romantic comedy w/ lush visuals, natch, and a couple of diegetic numbers for Dorothy Lamour, Arlen/Koehler's "Let's Fall in Love" among them. The week of break, in which I saw all these, plus a fine Kenward Elmslie reading ("What's happened to the poem as poem, Sneaky Pete?"), plus Braxton, plus the ICP with George Lewis, who slayed, was not a bad week -- though it's sad that the last event was part of Tonic's final week of operation.

***

And hey, entire state of New York -- it's called Spring, and it normally starts in March or April. Just think about it.

apparently-hard

2007-04-03T16:12:00.000-04:00

I think I'm only going to post about those B-musicals if something just demands to be registered; so far, all four I've seen have been diverting but not-earthshaking, and summarizing them is feeling like a chore. The best by some distance was the Paramount oddity Sweater Girl (1942, William Clements, which combines a college-show setting, early Jule Style/Frank Loesser numbers, and some murder-mystery elements that are oddly "heavy," given the tone of the whole. In particular, the hit of the movie, "I Don't Want to Walk Without You [Baby]," is introduced as having just been written by Johnny Johnston. When he broadcasts the song over some sort of intra-campus carrier station, we see and hear a full chorus, and then cut to the rest of the cast at a break in their rehearsal, who listen as he's strangled to death on the other end at about bar 15. Early Capitol signee Johnston, by the way, was a genuinely talented singer (he had one of the biggest hit versions of "Laura") and capable guitarist who was briefly married to MGM soprano Katherine Grayson. Otherwise, pleasant work by Eddie Bracken and the now-obscure June Preisser, a sort of proto-Debbie Reynolds who also happened to be an adept contortionist.

***

Curious Mountain Goat sighting: Peter Hughes interviewed by "personal productivity" dude Merlin Mann. Loving the bit where he contrasts the sense of "mission" experienced on tour with his day-to-day life. I'm with ya, Pete.

***

What I've been trying to tell you, via a Seed piece quoted on (and linked from) Language Log:

"In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones."

***

"One of the major functions of the avant-garde is to contribute to the imaginative erotic life of teenagers."

-- Mark Grief, in P.S. 1 Symposium: A Practical Avant-Garde, (n+1, 2006) [Buyer beware: your just read the most striking line in the whole transcribed discussion.]

"[T]o the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents [...] literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them."

-- George Bernard Shaw, Afterword to Pygmalion, 1916

rejecting the terms

2007-04-01T23:12:00.000-04:00

Since "killing" and "owning" are both activities that I engage in with trepidation, while still doing both constantly, if passively, I suppose I should feel no better or worse about playing other people's songs than any other instances of these acts, since I "must" do one or the other. Still, it's funny to learn that these are my only options, since I had for some time thought that playing music created by someone other than myself might be one of the relative few activities left to me that was not best described in terms of either the destruction or taking of property. My bad.

But then again, how about the possibility that distinct interpretations of the same material may relate to that material in different ways that do not vitiate or one-up one another, and that it isn't "one-two-three-four, I declare thumb war" against the "major"/"original" artist. How about "sharing"? (Or is that something one does only with the work of the "minor"? Or is it that if one does that, one doesn't win?) How about reimagining criticism in such a way that it could accomodate (encourage?) the notion of relations between any entities (even abstracta, which don't even have to eat) that are not relations of competition and domination? I know, not likely; call it an unreality check.

**

It's very tempting to say something like, "speaking of non-hierarchical relations, I just came back from seeing Anthony Braxton at Iridium, for the first time in 13 years of listening," but after all, he is the leader, and more than nominally so. I should probably read up on his whole Ghost Trance Music thing before posting stupid impressionist descriptions, but I get the basic idea that he has a series of compositions that consist of unison (rhythmically at least) heads that sort of expand and contract in terms of note-values, from which players eventually start splitting off; then that material may get continued by one subset of the group while another interrupts ("interpenetrates is probably closer") with another relatively composed-sounding "head," which may be fairly different in tempo and texture. And so on. Beyond instrumentation and technique, what makes this music "jazz" is that it's still, at some level, written in large part to let the players' play, by giving them something of interest (not, here, a harmonic structure) as "support" (the way an art critic would use that word).

Not that this, anymore, might mean "duo" or "trio" as well as "solo" space (though the uninterrupted set did include a drum solo 4/5 of the way in, like 82% of live hard bop records). Braxton, though clearly choosing most of the directions taken, and playing 5 or 6 different reeds wonderfully, doesn't go out of his way to feature himself; I gather that cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum has become a key sideman, almost a second leader, since the last time I made more than a cursory dip into Braxtonia. He (Bynum) is a monster, and despite the above note, I'm hardly not going to pretend that hotshot jazz soloing is not a practice in which a good deal of competition and domination resides. There were also some passages where the only musicians playing were 2 or 3 of his current Wesleyan students, including an intriguing guitarist named Mary Halverson, who helped me understand what might have led Braxton to take up with Wolf Eyes for at least long enough to record something (that I still haven't heard).

**

Totally unrelated: why have I been seeing "different to" instead of "different from" more and more often, especially in theoryish material? Is this a translation thing? What's the home language? Is some fine difference in connotation marked by the change in prepositions? (I find this immediately suspect, as the semantic contribution of prepositions to larger syntactic units is wildly unpredictable; it recently occurred to me that "argue with" and "argue against are nearly synonymous.) Is this the coming "always already" for the late '00s? (And anyway, what most everyone writing in English means by "always already" is no more and no less than what analytic philosophers mean by "necessarily" -- "essentially" having falling out of favor everywhere.)