return of the peeve

Rose and I eat out far too often - but your typical restaurant gargantuan portion is far too much for us to eat in a single setting, so we most often take home leftovers - thereby decreasing even further the number of times we actually have to prepare food at home (because we're lazy, or busy, or both). But it's irritating as hell when what you expect in your leftover package is not there. The other night, we had Indian food: I ordered tandoori chicken (for the first time in a while - overfamiliar to me), and it came with some delicious roasted onions and peppers at the bottom of the plate. But when I opened up the leftover package for lunch today, no veggies. Dammit. If I want my food to go, why wouldn't I want all of my food to go? Do they think their own food is garbage? Grrr. I'd call the place and complain...but the management has very little English, and I fear I'd lose my patience and cool trying to get my point across.

Other annoyances: blatant lying. At a Chinese place the other day, Rose ordered the same dish she always orders (and we go to this place probably twice a month). This time, it arrived with a pile of fried tofu (and Rose can't do fried) and with a different sauce. While the owner came over and agreed to replace the plate with a tofu-free version, she was adamant that "this is always the way this dish is" and that the menu listed the tofu as an ingredient. (It isn't, and it didn't.) Rose says she thought from the tone of the owner's voice as she told the cook what to do with the remake (in Chinese) that it was indeed his error, not an unannounced change in the menu. I suppose loyalty to one's employees is a virtue...but not at the expense of making the customer out to be deluded or a liar.

Any of the above, though, is preferable to the jackass waiter at a Mexican place a couple of weeks ago, who was monumentally unconcerned with trying to accommodate Rose's dietary issues (even though she was, again, ordering a dish she'd ordered many times before without incident) and more concerned with, I don't know, anticipating bong hits after his shift was over. Or during it. Anyway, he was astonishingly arrogant - and in that even more annoying way of saying "I'm really sorry" while actually meaning "I couldn't give half a shit for your stupid problems." Worse: I wrote a (much more politely worded) letter to the manager about this...and have yet to receive a response. Thank you for ignoring your customers.

Damn. We should just cook more often.

coffee grounds and rinds

I've been a bit frustrated by the slow working pace forced upon my noisemaking attempts, so even though I have the ideas for one song complete and am working on tracks, and a lot of ideas for another one done (although not a thing recorded), I decided I would force myself to act quickly. So, yesterday evening, I came up with some lyrics and a few musical ideas, and this afternoon I recorded two acoustic guitar tracks, some cardboard-box percussion, and a vocal. There was one false guitar take and one bad vocal take; otherwise, everything you hear is first take...(clears throat) and very heavily edited. I still have a lame-ass sense of rhythm. It's certainly easier to work quickly when I don't worry about the lyrics making a damned bit of sense.

So here it is: "Lance Crocker, Almanac Cracker" by the renowned Monkey Typing Pool.

I can hear your...

Reading Momus' praise of quiet, I found myself thinking about the role of (relative) silence in my life. When I was younger, my need to hear music was nearly compulsive: my clock radio's alarm was set to play the radio when it went off, I'd carry a Walkman with headphones with me when walking or taking a bus, my car radio was always on - and when I got home, I'd turn on some music before nearly anything else.

It may have been a 1974 Opel (pumpkin-colored) with only AM radio that began to cure me. It would have been more cool to credit Brian Eno (also with German connections) but less true. Anyway: there was nothing I wanted to hear on AM radio, and it was a pain to bring along a tape player into the car (although I used to do it - even bringing a boombox along on camping trips, or for backyard picnics and the like), so I simply turned the radio off. And just listening to whatever sound happened to be in the world, even if that was noisy traffic, became a different kind of experience.

Now, I find increasingly often that I don't put on music, even when I can, just so I can have some time with quiet. This tendency is, unsurprisingly, more pronounced when I'm besieged with loud noises - but not only then. And interestingly, I think it's allowed me to become more skilled at maintaining a sort of inner quiet even when outside is noisy. Last weekend, one day I remember a carful of screaming children (okay: there was only one screaming child) insisting on the louder louder playing of disco music, and then we got to a bowling alley. (No surprise, one of us actually needed to retire outside temporarily to collect herself.) What was odd was that the noise of the bowling alley actually felt quiet to me. Perhaps that was by contrast, or because volume aside, there's something quiet-like about the distant and regular, resonant falling of pins, the gathering hum as the balls roll down the lanes, and so on.

For any number of reasons, though, we tend to favor loudness. Clubs and bars sometimes are designed expressly to maximize noise, as if volume is directly equivalent to "excitement" (which equates to desirability and popularity). There's a restaurant/bar in town with an excellent menu and a nice environment - except that its acoustics seem designed to amplify whatever noise is present, such that even a roomful of people conversing at normal volume echoes and reverberates upon itself, making conversation uncomfortable. And for me, if I can't hear well what people are saying, and if I have to nearly shout to make myself heard, I tend to withdraw and become a bit depressed. Shouting becomes physically uncomfortable, if only because I think I unthinkingly damage my throat in so doing. But I suspect it's also depressing because it's disappointing: generally, if I'm in a room with a lot of people I know, it's because I want to talk with them. This is one reason that, in a group, I'm unlikely to prefer going to see a band: you can't talk over the band (although it astonishes me how many people try, resorting to shouting directly in your ear if you can't otherwise hear them), and even the between-sets music must be pumped to maximum volume (see the "excitement" factor, above).

The sad part of all this is that I suspect a lot of these places use volume quite knowingly as a prophylactic against conversation - or rather, against anyone's realization that they have nothing to say to the people they're with, and nothing they particularly want to hear from those people. You can see this most clearly, perhaps, in bars catering to single college-aged people - who perhaps can be excused from being wildly interesting due to their youth. But I think it's a general cultural thing: the notion that noise is exciting, and desirable, and that quiet is boring. In my cynical moments I think that the fear of quiet is the fear of hearing the crickets chirping emptily away in the confines of one's own brain, or of the realization that one couldn't entertain oneself for a moment in the absence of external stimuli.

At the same time, I'm not quite ready to go entirely unplugged. I'm also not sure that I think volume, or discord (which often creates an impression of relatively greater loudness), is necessarily an expression of aggression (as discussed on another thread over at Click Opera. Related to this, you could chart different effects of loudness, discord, and distance along varying axes: sure, something that sounds loud, discordant, and close probably does convey aggressiveness...but what about something that sounds loud but very far away? Or something discordant, close, but very quiet? The latter, I'd argue, conveys a sense of delicacy all the finer for its discord. (Actually, we might need another axis, I'm not sure what to call it: I can distinguish, in my mind's ear, between a sound that seems both loud and faraway but plays loudly, and a sound that seems both loud and faraway but plays quietly. The first is clangorous, the second can have entirely different effect, including being rather haunting, depending whether other, closer (and/or quieter) sounds are presented at nearly the same volume.

Perhaps some of the above relates to the way humans, generally, hear loudness rather differently from the way equipment measures it. Pick out the loudest part of a recording by ear: it may well be not even close to the peak in volume as viewed in a wavefile editing program like Audacity. And audio engineers have known for a long time that we often hear the contrast between loud and soft more by other acoustical cues than by actual, measurable volume: music might be highly compressed (and, overall, sound louder than music with a similar peak level but lower overall average level) but those cues tell us that a solo acoustic guitar lightly plucked is quieter than a full rock band with distorted guitars...even when the actual levels of each section might in fact be equivalent.

As with many of our senses, we're easily fooled.

(You didn't really expect an mp3 with this post, did you?)

D'oh!

Things I Just Found Out Now

You know that Stereolab song "Jenny Ondioline"? It's not the name of the musical instrument (the Ondioline) put together with some girl's name. It's named after the inventor of the Ondioline, Georges Jenny.

Also: "Rosebud" was a sleigh!

ps: On vacation last week. News to follow...

Stereolab "Jenny Ondioline" (alt. version)

White Elephant!

This building, consisting of condos and retail space and located at the intersection of Bay and Kinnickinnic, has been on the market for nearly a year, and it's still mostly vacant. (Click on the image for a clearer version: Blogger's downsampling is for the birds.)
It's amazing to me that this was built: generally, a place needs to have a certain occupancy guaranteed to receive financing. I suppose if someone's putting their own money down, that requirement might be waived - but if I were the city, I'd be dubious, since an empty building degrades the neighborhood and costs money (in the form of taking up space a more useful and profitable building might otherwise have used).

There appears to be exactly one residential unit occupied in the building (and no retail spaces). Two other units seem to have furniture...but they're pretty clearly model units, not occupied by an owner. And that occupied unit is way at the back of the building...as if the residents didn't want anyone to know they live here. (Sneaky me, driving around back on the sidestreet...)

So, even with that property nearly empty, someone decided to put up another set of condos across the street. Note the prime location, directly adjacent to a railroad track, with some industrial building or other looming behind, and across from a gas station (where I was standing to take this photo) at a major intersection...

Just how close is the railroad track to this property? There you go...

Soundtrack:

The Volcano Suns "White Elephant" (yes, this is the second Volcano Suns track I've posted in the last month or so. So?)

Saturday Looks Good to Me "Empty Room"

two Madison stories

We lived in Madison from the time we met in the early eighties until 1988. Here are a couple of stories from those days.

1. We wandered into a sub shop on State Street one evening, I think around 8 p.m. A little while after we'd arrived, a very drunk guy probably in his late twenties. He stumbled around the store a bit - he might have tried to order something - but mostly he kept shouting "Semper Fi! Semper Fi!" Eventually, he let on that it was "the Marines' birthday, man." (I was unaware that organizations had "birthdays," or that the anniversary of their founding was celebrated - but hey, it's the Marines, so who knows what goofy unit-cohesion propaganda they come up with.) Apparently the other people in the restaurant weren't paying enough attention to him, or weren't joining him in his joyous revelry in re Marine Corps anniversary - because soon every other word was "fuckin'" and, to enhance his prominence in the place, he picked up a medium-sized metal garbage can in the corner (it was pretty much empty) and began smashing it against his forehead, while yelling "It's the Marines' fuckin' birthday, man! Semper fuckin' Fi!"

We left.

2. More stories about drunks and cussin'... Madison's Halloween celebrations have become notorious, and well out of hand, given that they attract idiot drunks from a multi-state area. But back then, they were still pretty much local affairs, and the drunkenness and property destruction remained within generally acceptable limits (like, say, restaurants' garbage cans being destroyed). It was actually possible to walk on State Street on Halloween and amuse oneself observing the clever costumes. Our all-time favorite costume set was worn by two guys. One guy, a tallish, very skinny guy, had a sort of bedraggled look to him, but his main prop was a crumpled, half-opened umbrella, which he kept jabbing skyward at random while yelling "Fuck you! Fuck you!" His buddy, rather more fleshy and saturnine a fellow, moped along beside him, dressed in large brown plastic garbage bags from shoulder to ankles, muttering grumpily "Shit. Shit. Shit." What were their costumes signifying? Why, the very spirit of "Shit" and "Fuck You," of course.

The soundtrack:

The Ray Bryant Combo "The Madison Time (Part 1)" - This song reads as a sort of surrealist version of a dance-catalog record, either by virtue of entirely obscure and outdated references or because it actually is a surrealistic version of a dance-catalog record.

The Blow Pops "Halloween" - Charm pop.

If Jim Morrison had read Friedberg and Wallerton's "Fundamentals of Tax Accounting" instead of Freud

The accountant awoke before dawn,
he turned his laptop on.
He took a deduction for some charitable contributions
and he walked on down the hall
He took a Section 179 depreciation on the room where his sister worked,
and...then he
Formed a limited liability partnership with his brother,
and then he...
He walked on down the hall, and...
and he made copies in triplicate of his previous year's returns.
"Father?"
"Yes, son?"
"Have you considered a Roth IRA?"
"Mother...
"I want to..." (incomprehensible whimpering)

Bruce McCullough "Doors"

sun rises in east, dog bites man...

...and "The Fall tour descends into chaos." (That Talk guy: quite the talented crafter of well-formed sentences...)

priorities

Intelligence ignored, towers destroyed, deceit propagated, thousands of lives lost, economy stalled, Constitution shredded, democracy contemned, international reputation trashed...but fish caught. Good boy, Georgie.

still in thrall to outdated obsessions

I just finished reading J. Niimi's short book on Murmur, part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series on rock albums - and I'd say it's definitely among the better instances of rock criticism I've read. Partly (to use the standard everyone actually uses, even if it's not cool to admit it) that's because Niimi snuck into my house secretly, used advanced scientific equipment to steal thoughts from my head, and then transcribed them and claimed them as his own. So much of the way that album works for me is discussed here; I'd grossly paraphrase by saying that Stipe's language is evocative...but whereas that descriptor usually points to something in particular ("evocative of a late spring evening"), what's curious is that the object of Stipean evocation is essentially that act of evocation itself. Much of the album's aesthetic - in everything from its cover art to its sound to, of course, its notoriously worried-over lyrics (by critics - not by Stipe) - is about suggestion but not definition, leaving the listener to fill in what gaps arise between whatever thoughts and images initially assemble in the wake of that aesthetic. (Here's what I wrote about lyrics, along those lines, a couple of years ago.)

Niimi places some heavy emphasis on an interview wherein Stipe mentioned Walker Percy's "Metaphor as Mistake," whose applicability here is more or less that we sometimes get closer to something by accident, by a metaphor, than by painstakingly setting out to limn reality pebble by pebble. (Percy's example is his own mishearing as a child of the name of a bird as a "blue dollar hawk" - the actual name is the rather more prosaic "blue darter hawk": the hawk's blue, and it darts.) Stipe has always honored the interesting accident - perhaps the best-known example is from "I Believe," whose lyric originally contained the phrase "between the hours of the day." Someone misread "horns" for "hours," and Stipe liked the resulting mistake better. This might also go some way toward the band's reticence to nail down any definitive reading of the lyrics - it allows listeners to make out what shapes they will through the haze of Stipe's foghorning voice.*

That haze, by the way, is partly the result of Mitch Easter's and Don Dixon's sound design work - and Niimi's book benefits greatly from his having interviewed Easter and Dixon for in-studio detail. Niimi, like both Easter and Dixon (who has a new album coming out soon), has worked as both a musician and a recording engineer, so he knows what he's talking about - but don't worry, this isn't an obsessive gearhead's enumeration of exactly which microphones, cables, and omnidamped flanged triangles were used in every second of every song. His experience as a musician allows him to render extraordinarily sensitive and insightful readings of the songs' structure and arrangements: if you never thought what difference it might make when a drummer uses a ride cymbal versus a hi-hat, you will now - and your listening experience will be richer for it.

Probably, not every reader will enjoy every part of this book. In different sections of the book Niimi is pensive autobiographer, music critic, cultural historian, sharp-eyed but unpretentious literary scholar, and philosophical poet; and I suspect not everyone will have all those hats in their millinery. At moments he seems to want to out-Stipe Stipe in weird allusiveness. But at the same time, that diversity means most R.E.M. fans will find at least part of the book interesting. Two of my favorite tidbits: the revelation that in all the lyrics to Murmur, the word "I" occurs in only three places (one of them so buried that most listeners will miss it); and Niimi's brief disquisition on the contrariness of the word "can't" as in "you can't take too many vitamins": Niimi points out that such a phrase can mean either that "it's inadvisable to take too many vitamins" or that "there's no such thing as taking too many vitamins."

* Which means I can stop being disappointed that some of my favorite lyrics end up being misreadings. In my world, for example, the chorus of "Perfect Circle" is "standing too soon, shoulders high in the wind," with the first line later substituting "heaven assumes." Taking off from the "eleven gallows" in the first verse, I interpreted the chorus to be about hanging, and the song itself to address martyrdom - and was quite impressed with Stipe for coming up with such a striking metaphor. Normally, one stands when one is awake, active; to stand is to defy gravity, to assert one's verticality against the will-toward-horizontality of gravity's pull. Of course, when a person is hanged, gravity stretches them into a straight vertical line: standing. And "high in the wind" evokes the Western-movie "hang 'em high" imagery. Given all that, "heaven assumes" then becomes obvious: "assume" in an etymological, religious sense (as in the Feast of the Assumption) but also an implication that "heaven" requires a kind of defiance ("shoulders high in the wind").

Unfortunately, none of that works if you assume Stipe is actually singing "room," not "wind." My mistake: I'll keep it.

Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens died last night. He was only 48 years old. Here are three of his songs.

"Cattle and Cane" has always been one of my favorite songs. While the rhythms are almost bizarre, there's also a very clever intricacy and variation going on, and the band make things work. The lyrics are, apparently, autobiographical.

"The Statue" is from what will now be, I suppose, the final album of new Go-Betweens material, last year's wonderful Oceans Apart, which I think is the first post-reunion album to sound like a band album rather than a collaboration among two songwriters and backing musicians.

And here is one of my favorite McLennan solo tracks, "Malibu 69" from In Your Bright Ray.

**

At nearly the same time, and at the opposite verge of life, my sister Jill gave birth to her and husband Scott's second son yesterday, at the numerically consonant time of 5:56 am 5/5/06. Here's a picture of the newly born Devin Norman Wooldridge with his mom and older brother Reid, taken by my other sister Julie. (I also like that the brothers' names share the same vowels and in the same order.)

my two favorite Eno covers

The Volcano Suns did "Needles in the Camel's Eye." A gang of exuberantly giddy superheroes is playing some sort of game that finds them roaring and crashing through the trees and whaling on each other with foam bats. A few bruises...but no one minds.

The Hope Blister did "Spider and I." We are becalmed at sea off the Antarctic coast. Gradually, cracks open in the ice ahead of and above us, on immense craggy heaped frozen cliffs. Suddenly and slow, huge sheaves of ice calve off the frozen shore and crash into the ocean, creating enormous clouds of froth and mist. Yet all is utterly silent, like a memory or a dream - and somehow it makes sense that it takes music to illustrate what the words say: "a world without sound." We sleep in the morning.

The Volcano Suns "Needles in the Camel's Eye"
The Hope Blister "Spider and I"

oaken tailor seeks viable impasse

An interesting, if frustrating, discussion recently on one of the music mailing lists I'm on. Someone mentioned having seen an old movie and was struck by what he referred to as "dated racism." A discussion ensued on what sorts of, or even whether, racism might be "dated." I noted that it struck me as vaguely irritating, and indicative of a sort of fossilized racism, that personal ads almost invariably note race, both for the seeker and the sought. Most people, I suspect, include race in a formulaic manner - just because that's the format. But it's exactly that sort of half-conscious persistence that constitutes a certain variety of racism.

Before going any further, I should probably use another word - like say "racialism" - because the word "racism" has become the verbal equivalent of flinging shit. Mostly, this is eminently justified...but one result is that it becomes very difficult to talk about the sort of unconscious racialism I describe above - because people immediately take offense. In fact, on that music list, first people argued that no, that wasn't racism (as if the notion that qualities are carried along with race other than those that define "race" wouldn't be nearly a definition of "racism," objectively, without the invective), and then tried to justify the use of racial categories. (This list, I should mention, is populated primarily by intelligent, humanistic, left-liberal folks - in other words, it wasn't the Skrewdriver list or anything.)

But that justification, however well-meaning, is a bit fishy. Granted, no one can be forced to be attracted to a person they're not attracted to (nor should they be) - but imagining that "race" - and any such designation includes people within an enormous range of appearance, skintones, and culture - would be a reliable predictor of attraction either misunderstands the nature of race and intraracial diversity or is, in fact, fetishism. As someone said in the conversation, "if you find blondes 10% cuter on average than brunettes," that seems a weak reason to rule out someone otherwise compatible with you. And as for that fetishism: while there's no denying a kink's reality for the kink-holder, that doesn't mean that, say, an Asian fetish isn't racialist. What else could it be? It might - so long as both parties are aware of what's going on, and don't have a problem with it - be a relatively nonproblematic sort of racializing, but to pretend it's simply not racist in any way strikes me as blinkered.

Or worse. If you're really attracted only to people displaying certain physical manifestations of race, how different are you from Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, demanding the object of your affections get a blonde dyejob? How many people want to be desired primarily as an instance of something, rather than for oneself? (Well, some: see the "kink" passage above.)

But if you're still not persuaded that the persistence of racial labeling isn't a bit insidious, consider this: as far as I can tell (as a happily married man, I run into them en route to Max Cannon, or P.S. Mueller, or the latest disappointing "Life in Hell" cartoon), most venues for personal ads categorize them under headings like Men Seeking Women, Women Seeking Women, etc. Given that most people include race, those publishing the ads could also choose to organize them White Men Seeking White Women, Black Women Seeking White Men, etc. What would most people's reactions be? Probably a snort of disgust at the racism of whoever put those pages together.

And not so long ago, and in a different social realm, ads for employment did list race. But people came to realize that, however strong an influence race might be culturally, the variation of suitability within any so-called race was far greater than any trend observable between races. I have to believe that where relationships are concerned, imagining race as a predictor of success is far likelier to eliminate many more potentially compatible people than filter out incompatible ones - except, of course, for blatant, conscious racists.

(Today's soundtrack: "Lovelines" by the Replacements, and "Want Ads" by the Honey Cone.)