chasing a bee through a garden of eyes

I've been thinking about the curious parallelism of the careers of Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips (not to mention the personnel and production intersections). Both began by maniacally piling shards of sheet metal, broken glass, and as many guitars as possible into hugely precarious towers, then setting the whole thing on fire - and miraculously, interesting major labels in the process. Both then moved to a rather different approach, making castles using clouds and pillows as building materials, then wrapping the whole thing in gauze and whimsy. (Plus, both Jonathan Donahue and Wayne Coyne could get jobs as Neil Young impersonators...) In Mercury Rev's case, David Baker's departure no doubt had something to do with the change: his "dig all my cool musician friends" pseudo-solo album World, under the name Shady, seemed to take most of the more aggressive strangeness out of the band. (That's a fine, if hard to find, record, by the way.) And I like both bands' new approaches, although the Lips in particular (on Yoshimi) tend to wear thin a bit sooner than I'd like.

I'm hoping they occasionally want to set things on fire again.

shuffleupagus

Meme Fad! (Sounds like a song by The Fall...). On the suggestion of the lovely Editrixie :

Rules:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the "shuffle" command.
4. List the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurrences. You don't have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you'd like.

Sounds fun - here's what came up in my random iTunes shuffle:

1. Ya Ho Wa 13 "Making a Dollar"
2. Kepler "The National Epithet"
3. The Soft Boys "Rock'n'Roll Toilet" live in Detroit 2001
4. Sonny Criss "Ballad for Samuel"
5. Hood "They Removed All the Trace That Anything Had Ever Happened Here"
6. The Sugarplastic "Here Comes Mr. Right"
7. Stephen Malkmus "Malediction" live
8. LMP "Hits of '69"
9. The Bonzo Dog Band "Look at Me, I'm Wonderful" BBC version
10. Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3 "Shake Some Action" live

This is fairly representative of what's in my iTunes library, although not of my larger collection, because: (1) I've only had this computer for a little more than a month, and (2) what's on here is primarily temp. storage of mp3s downloaded from various blogs, for audition purposes, as well as an entire CD-R full of mp3s a friend made me compiling almost every show on the Soft Boys' 2001 reunion tour (still haven't had a chance to go through all those and edit...but if I hadn't eliminated repeats, about half this list would be Soft Boys tracks). It's actually nice to have an iTunes collection rather different in character from my main collection; it means that when I listen at the computer, I'm mostly likely going to hear different stuff than I'd choose browsing through physical CDs.

(Oh: per Amy's comment, a Wrens track showed up at #20 or so: I did rip Secaucus here...couldn't be too long without it...)

Addendum 1/27: For fun, I did this on my work iTunes, which is drawn from a broader range of my collection as a whole. The results: Marbles "Play/Fair," Migala "Isabella Afterhours," Dif Juz "No Motion," Butthole Surfers "Human Cannonball," Tim Buckley "Lorca," Robert Pollard "Captain Black," Vandalias "Red Cantina," Tori Amos "Thank You," Elvis Costello & the Attractions "Inch by Inch," The High Llamas "Easy Rod."

The House That Jack Bauer Built

Apparently, some writer involved with 24 is a Go-Betweens fan: the name of the defense contractor mentioned in tonight's episode was "McLennen-Forster." They changed the spelling - but hey, you had to rewind and slomo to catch that. As spoken, it certainly caught my ear!

It would have been even better if Jack had been humming the tune to "Someone Else's Wife"...

Now It Can Be Revealed!

As obsessive obituary readers know (I'm not one - but I know a few...), Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon's infamous secretary, died yesterday. As she lay dying, it seems, she revealed that it was just eighteen and a half minutes of Nixon babbling about some sled he had as a kid.

my head hurts, pt. 5,372

Check this headline. As Josh Marshall implies, it's hard to believe this isn't from The Onion...

Speaking of The Onion, here's a headline I've always wanted to see them use:

Satirical "News" Weekly Publishes Self-Referential Yet Sadly Unfunny Headline

I guess I should keep my day job.

ho-made

Many of my friends are still putting together lists and mix CDs of their favorite music from 2004, and one thing that's striking is the way many people's focuses have shifted from albums to single tracks (to an extent, that's true of me as well). I've always been fascinated by the way format or medium can influence the way things are received; in fact, my aborted dissertation at one point was going to address technology and its interaction with popular music. (Sounds vague? One reason I never took it much further...) Here's an intriguing article on the influence of the iPod and shuffle-mode generally on the way people listen to music.

By coincidence, around the same time I read Dan Hill's essay, Tris McCall was crankily complaining (in his January 13 entry: scroll down) that his whatever-it-is-website keeps getting called a "blog," even though he (correctly) points out that his site does not use many common blog features. "Blog," though, is one of those words that's come to mean something other than it began as meaning - hell, a local print publication features a column called the "Editor's Blog" - but what's more important is that the substance of McCall's complaint is against the standardization he sees blogging software as producing. (While I'm at it: I hate the word "blog." It's ugly, and ill-formed - no one really runs the "b" in "weblog" that closely into the "l." But saying "online journal" - what most blogs are - not only takes more time to type, it seems needlessly precious and, given the common usage of the word "blog," prone to misunderstanding or confusion.) And he's right to an extent: I made some minor tweaks to the prefab format this site appears in, so it looks slightly different from other sites using the same format - but it's still a bit jarring when I stumble across another site with the same format. It's like, hey, you're wearing my shirt...oh yeah, I bought it off the rack anyway...

That comparison, though, is suggestive. I mean, I'm glad Tris does all his own HTML coding, etc. - and I have little use for some of the more annoying eager-to-please features he mentions - but cutting and pasting every post, archiving old posts, and manually managing everything seems a time-waster on par with insisting on making one's own clothing. Yes, the occasional homemade shirt is nice - but really, I'm far too modern to want to spend all that time building an entire wardrobe.

In part, this is a pseudo-intellectual defense of laziness...but I wonder if the difference between a site like Tris's and a site that uses blog software is all that significant, or legible to those who don't know it. It's not as if Tris's site looks different with every entry; he sticks with a recognizable template (which, thankfully, has become a bit less eye-strainy over time: thank you, serif fonts). And since I hand-coded my site for about seven years (it's still up: the "old ADS" links), I can at least speak from both sides of that experience.

It's also true that if I took the trouble to update my circa-1994 knowledge of coding, I might be able to design something that looks good - at least as good as the template I'm using, which I actually rather like. But I'm not building my own car either...

cranky today, apparently...

One thing I teach my students is to improve their writing by having a clear sense of what they're doing and making sure that anything they include contributes to that task. In other words, unless what you're trying to do is distract and confuse your reader, don't distract and confuse your reader - for example, by making statements that lead to irrelevant or mistaken notions.

One of those mistaken notions is the idea that, generically, most agents are male. In other words, you shouldn't use "he" and its derivatives when you're referring to an unknown or generic agent. Since this isn't an academic paper, I'm not going to dig up sources, but studies demonstrate that contrary to some arguments, masculine pronouns in a generic context do tend to carry along ideas of maleness. That is, generic "he" causes readers to imagine male figures more frequently than neutral references do (such as, most usefully, rephrasing into the plural - far more felicitous than the awkward "he or she").

However, it's equally distracting to throw in anti-sexist points when that's not the goal of your argument - particularly if you think you'll be able to do so effectively merely by playing with pronouns. I read an article recently that quoted the following sentence from another source:

Imagine a baseball team manager choosing to send just two of her three dozen players through the rigors of spring training, regular practices and coaching.

Now, the article has nothing to do with gender discrimination in MLB managerial hiring practices, but the writer decided to derail his readers' train of thought with that "her." I mean, eliminating gender assumptions is a worthy goal, but so are lots of other things - yet writers aren't compelled to mention them parenthetically in the midst of a discussion of something else (floss daily for good dental hygiene). And there's something sneakily self-congratulatory about slipping in arguments by way of something as weakly effectual as pronoun usage - as if the writer is taking the opportunity to congratulate himself for his gender sensitivity, or hector readers for assuming (despite the fact that, uh, every MLB manager has been male) that his hypothetical manager is a man. (I'm imagining an Onion headline, similar to one in the latest issue: Gender Inequality Solved by Unexpected Usage of Feminine Pronoun.)Probably it's a better idea, if it's important to you, to write an article about iniquitous gender assumptions rather than toss references like grit into the wheels of an otherwise unrelated sentence.

Of course, I've been known in this very forum to insert irrelevant negative remarks about our beloved Ass-Hat-in-Chief, so I suppose I'm a hypocrite. Oh wait - I did say that it might be a writer's goal to distract and confuse readers... Whew - off that hook!

Because the title "Cannibal! The Musical" was already taken...

I'd mentioned that I watched Silence of the Lambs last week. Surely it's no insult to the movie to suggest its mood might have been improved by a few catchy showtunes - and sure enough, someone else agrees with me; and so we have Silence! - a musical adaptation of Silence of the Lambs.

I'm not sure how I lived my life without the clever musical stylings of "It's Me!" - or what others might think as I cheerfully hum "Put the Fucking Lotion in the Basket" as I walk down the street. (Be sure to check out the lyrics link and the external link to the mp3s...)

2004 - again wit' da ducks!

A couple of updates on my 2004 year-end list. First, I made two mixes, one drawing from my top-rated albums and EPs, the other compiling some "singles" (basically, stuff I discovered on mp3 in 2004 - whether or not it was recorded last year) at artofthemix.org.

I'd say it's likely that given a few more listens, both Love Songs for Patriots by American Music Club and From a Basement on a Hill by Elliott Smith might have made my top ten. I liked the PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth albums as well (thank god: Kim Gordon actually tries to sing instead of squalling like a sexually aroused asthmatic suffering constipation), although the Tom Waits and Camper Van Beethoven releases haven't fully hit me yet (and has anyone else noted that CVB blatantly steal Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" in the opening track?).

Two albums deserve mention as being among the oddest 2004 releases that weren't particularly trying to be odd or waving any sort of avant-garde flag. The first one, Destroyer's Your Blues, at first struck me as compelling evidence that Dan Bejar had lost it. I mean, almost no accompaniment but an absurdly lush but MIDI-based fauxchestra? Then (as typically happens with Destroyer albums for me) the song's peculiar charms insinuated themselves with me - and then, the album's synthetic sound somehow seemed exactly right, paradoxically feeling both lush and freeze-dried, like an ice sculpture of a flame.

The other album was probably the second-most-written-about release of 2004; since I already wrote about The Arcade Fire CD, obviously I'm talking about the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat. This one came my way through the auspices of a friend who didn't know what to make of it; I confess I'm not so sure either, except that there's enough going on there that I don't feel I can simply dismiss it. If nothing else, the Furnaces deserve credit for ambition (almost always a positive with me); whether they pulled off what they intended, or whether it actually works for me, I can't quite say yet. But they're certainly an interesting band: that word's usually a bit dismissive, the adjective of last resort...but taken literally, a band whose music can compel attention even as it puzzles is at least worth watching.

"here is your throat back - thanks for the loan"

I just finished reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, and what most impressed me about it was how well the distinctive Dylan voice translated into writing. Curiously - and perhaps because this is his first actual book - early on that made me suspect a ghostwriter...yet the more I read, the less likely that seemed, since such a ghostwriter would've had to have been more Bob than Bob to do it. No, I'm pretty persuaded it's Dylan's book - surely (as with every published book) some editorial assistance, but Dylan all the same.

The decision to structure the book by beginning and ending with Dylan's early days in New York City - and then skipping over the years of his biggest songwriting success, instead focusing in turn on his years of lost songwriting faith, and on a resurrection of sorts - serves to highlight the way Dylan views songwriting as a vocation. I mean that word in its priestly sense: Dylan studied the songwriting that influenced him (Woody Guthrie, of course - but also Weill/Brecht and Robert Johnson, among others) and took seriously the notion that ti wasn't just a matter of hammering out tunes, that his songs had to be his own in a very deep, real sense.

That, in turn, relates to what is most Dylanly in Dylan: his use of language, its concreteness and rootedness in place and time. Even in what reads, on the page, as his high surrealist period (roughly from Highway 61 Revisited through Blonde on Blonde) draws from specific and particular objects, objects that typify both his upbringing in the Midwest of the 1940s and 1950s and his deep study of the folk-music tradition, with a strong coloration derived from his reading and the intellectual world of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. (I hadn't thought how important the Civil War was in Dylan's work, but this book makes that clear, for example.) For Dylan, objects are verbs: they are vehicles, transformative in nature. Lines like this one, from "Visions of Johanna," "harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain": at first it seems gratuitous imagery, incongruous objects stitched together in homage to the famous Lautreamont phrase "beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella," along with a harmless pun on keys musical and lock-opening - except that actual harmonicas, actual skeleton keys (and of course the actual rain) aren't random objects but very much a part of Dylan's world. You can be sure Dylan had in mind the look of a night watchman's or building super's ring of keys, worn, or perhaps even rusted; and the rest of the line takes off from the look and circumstance of that image: something lonely, maybe shady, or even sepulchral about the man and his keys, a something evoked by the wheezing, hollow sound of the harmonica. As to how those lines fit with the rest of the song: Dylan (and the book, too) seems to shy away from telling us too much too directly, mistrusting those who'd leave no white space for listeners to draw their own conclusions in - and so he drew specifics with great detail, but left the specifics, the what of the situation, more hazy and blank, trusting that following those verbs would eventually allow the appropriate nouns to be summoned forth.

That, too, may underlie Dylan's decision to talk around the peak of his career: maybe he needed to rethink its beginnings, and what fell out from the amazing string of records through 1966 or so, before he could get to that. Certainly, the "New Morning" chapter makes clear what his unwished-for anointment as "voice of a generation" cost him, psychically, personally, and (it's implied) musically. Perhaps future volumes will address those years - or perhaps they won't: it wouldn't really surprise me if Dylan felt there was nothing more left for him to say about them.

spot the setup

From the Department of Missed Opportunities:

In this week's "News of the Weird," the story concerning one "Mount Lee Lacy": it's truly a shame that doing so would have essentially given away the punchline, because if ever a story cried out for the headline MAN BITES DOG, this is it.

In desperately seeking a transition from the last paragraph to this one, the only thing that comes to mind is "biting" - rather unfortunate, but what can I say. Anyway: I watched Silence of the Lambs last night, for the first time in probably a decade...and I had forgotten how incredibly young Jodie Foster looks in that movie. This is most noticeable in the opening jogging sequence, and particularly in the "night vision" sequence in "Buffalo Bill"'s house. (Both times, I suspect, it was quite intentional.)

I'm also wondering if any other movie managed to place both a member of Wire (Colin Newman) and The Fall in its soundtrack...

Maybe his wife is named Carlene?

A few blocks from where we live, in a house I usually pass on my way home from work, there's a man that I've come to refer to as "Car-Leaning Guy." He is, presumably, a retiree; the name comes from the fact that in spring and summer, nearly every day at around two or three in the afternoon as I drove back from classes, he'd be in his garage with the door open, surveying the world while leaning against the hood of his car. He's rather distinctive-looking: he's got a big, reddish face that reminds me of what Mr. Potatohead would look like if it were called Mr. T-Bone Steak, with large, plastic-frame glasses in that sort of brownish-putty shade that only eyeglass frames come in. He's got a fine example of the Milwaukee Gut, our local and common storage facility for processed bratwurst, cheese, and beer.

He's got a corner house on a four-way stop intersection, so he's got a good vantage point not only for pedestrians but also for cars. It could be, too - because we live near enough the airport that some planes' flight paths bring them in fairly low to the ground near us - that he's an airplane fancier, and he enjoys watching the planes in their slow-motion descent. I don't know: I'm not the type to strike up conversations with strangers...particularly not since I usually see him from my car, and his driveway is set back far enough that I'd have to shout to make myself heard. True, if I were really curious and socially exuberant, I could walk the few blocks my house and say, hey, so what is it about leaning on your car that that's what you do seemingly every day of the week?

But not in winter. It occurs to me that I've become acclimated enough to this neighborhood, which we moved to six years ago, to recognize some of its characters and quirks - such as the likelihood that Car-Leaning Guy's reappearance will be a harbinger of spring, less prosaic than robins but more reliable than Punxsutawney Phil. I don't know; perhaps I should send him a card..."Here's Hoping You'll Have Years of Car-Leaning Joy"? I'm not sure there's any small division of Hallmark Cards dedicated to that sort of message yet.