when you assume...

I've written before that one problem (we) progressives/leftists/whatever-you-want-to-call-us have is a failure to imagine the way our messages might read to others outside our sometimes too-cozy orbit. I'm probably sensitive to this notion because my day job is teaching writing - and one thing writers must be aware of is their audience, and the ways they need to shape writing to reach (or, often, form) that audience.

If you think about it, you'll realize that there are three basic ways you can position yourself relative to any bit of language (spoken or written). You can stand outside it, utterly neutral, with the language being regarded merely as conveying information: for example, a scoreboard at a stadium listing the results of a game between two teams you don't care about. You can place yourself alongside the statement's speaker, including yourself in its "I" - whether that's literally true ("We're leaving as soon as I finish") or implicit. Or, you can find yourself addressed as the "you" of the statement - again, explicitly or implicitly ("Jeff, come over here for a second").

So, we ended up driving into our food co-op's parking lot the other day behind a Subaru wagon with a bumper sticker that said DON'T ASSUME I SHARE YOUR PREJUDICES. On the one hand, I certainly get (and appreciate) the overt message here. I've been in such situations - like the bunch of guys bellowing stupid and sexist assumptions about women, assuming I'll concur; or the racist assuming I'll agree with him because I'm white. But as a bumper sticker, this becomes a bit more problematic. It works reasonably well if you're including yourself in the phrase's "I": yeah, I don't share those prejudices either. But the moment you put yourself in the "you" position, it becomes...well, obnoxious.

First, there's the matter of the phrase being an imperative: the bumper sticker (which is to imply, the car's driver) is telling you what to do. Most people don't like being told what to do, or think. Even worse, the phrase is making a claim about you: that you have "prejudices" - and that word does not connote anything nice.

As an attempt at anything other than pat-on-the-back-seeking, that is, this bumper sticker fails miserably. If we're going to try to persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with us that our ideas are good ones, we'll have to do a lot better than calling them names and telling them how to live their lives. In other words, don't assume your audience has prejudices they need to be shamed for.

animation derby

Naturally, various popular cartoons have inspired websites which allow folks to generate images of themselves rendered in the style of the cartoon. Here are three examples:

Unlike the two Simpsons images below, the site I used to generate this (can't remember where it was, sorry!) has no connection with South Park, as far as I can tell.

This is from the "Simpsonize Me!" website (courtesy yellojkt), which is pretty obviously sponsored by Burger King. It is also slower than Hans Moleman - and it requires you to upload a large-ish image (480x640). It's pretty dumb at recognizing faces as well: of the two images I tried to use, both of which were closely cropped to remove extraneous details like beer bottles and papier-mache aliens, it could find a face in only one of them. (To be fair, that might be my fault. I'm not sure, though, why it thinks I'm Ringo Starr.)

This one's from the site for the Simpsons movie (warning: intrusive sound effects). This site requires no image to begin with (and I should note that the "Simpsonize Me!" site modifies the image so much, it bears almost no resemblance to the source anyway), so it's a bit quicker. As a Bearded-American, however, I'd say its selection of facial hair leaves a bit to be desired...rather amusing since, in fact, I've been told more than once that I sorta look like Matt Groening.

My verdict? The South Park site looks way more like me than either of the Simpsons sites. (Incidentally, I used this photo by Moxiemoo as source for the Simpsonizer site.)

"if she weighs the same as a duck..."

What's a good way to get people to testify in court when they're scared to do so, fearing reprisals from gang members and the like? Why, threaten them with jail time, too - that way, after the gang burns their house down, they'll have a place to live after they testify. I'm sure their new neighbors - who, you know, might be members of that very same gang - will be more than glad to help them out.

kitty vs. bear

Score: Cat 1, Bear 0.

Three Annoying Things, Arranged from Least to Most Significant

All this warm weather and sunshine is bound to put a person in a good mood - so it's important to balance things out with a few grumpy rants.

So, three things that I find annoying:

1. Urban Dictionary. This is essentially the internet equivalent of bathroom graffiti - except the wit and effervescent verbal interplay on display in bathrooms is generally of a higher caliber. As far as I can tell, the site exists solely to provide a forum for people with the sort of adolescent mindset for which sex is a spooky arena full of scary, alien body fluids, fodder for gross-out contests among their similarly repressed and fearful pals. Thus the number of highly fictitious sexual absurdities, all given stupid nicknames, most of which make a pointed conflation of bedroom and bathroom.

And what, in the name of Samuel H. Invisible, is "urban" about any of this? Oh sure: the popularity of hip-hop-derived terms means that a lot that lingo gets "defined" at the site, and certainly hip-hop is urban in its origins...but I'd be willing to bet most contributors to Urban Dictionary are actually suburban. "Urban" is evoked as a synonym for cool, for black, in the classic sort of half-envious, half-distancing attitude made infamous by Norman Mailer in his influential essay "The White Negro."

2. The blues. Okay, okay: I'll admit that, first, a lot of music I do like would be impossible without the blues. And I'll also acknowledge that I do like a fair amount of blues...but almost all of it's at least fifty years old. The real problem is that blues refused to evolve - or more accurately, it continued to evolve, but what got called "the blues" remained stuck. Sorry, folks, but what you can do with the same three chords, the same 12-bar phrasing, the same stock melodic phrases, and the same small set of instrumental variations - even the same small set of lyrical concerns (write a blues about a non-traditional blues subject, and half your audience will take it as parody) - is pretty well played out by now. Transcribe any ten blues songs within the same genre (electric, Chicago-style's the worst offender here), mix them up, put them in the same key, and I challenge anyone to tell me which part came from which song. There's a reason Lou Reed is said to have levied a fine upon anyone in the Velvet Underground who played a blues lick (and yes, he would have had to have fined himself a couple-three times).

Perhaps far worse than the blues themselves are amateur blues musicians on the one hand, and blues fans on the other. Thing is, it's really easy to play the blues incredibly badly, and it seems that the attraction of doing so is nearly as compelling as the need for beginning guitarists to fumble out the opening chords to "Stairway to Heaven" or play the riff for "Smoke on the Water." (Note: there is a particularly painful place in my own personal version of hell for amateur harmonica players - particularly the kind who stroll around college campuses playing their abysmal wheezing impersonations of outmoded locomotives they've never seen.) And blues fans? A bunch of fifty-year-olds in gray ponytails who manage the neat trick of simultaneously imagining they're more sophisticated than you plebeian indie-rock fans (substitute nearly any other genre of music) and that they're earthier, more in touch with reality, by being blues fans. Insufferable.

3. The Olympics. Where to begin? An orgy of jingoistic glitz, a parade of hypocrisies, while behind the scenes huge towers of money bully everything in sight while cloaked in the luminous raiment of "amateurism." The TV coverage makes this so much worse: all-US, all the time, with only the barest gesture at the notion that a contest not involving the US (or in which the US is just not very good) might be interesting. Cities beg and plead for the opportunity to host the Olympics...and if they get it, they steamroller existing parts of town, while rents and property values blast out of reach - leaving a bunch of facilities of only limited use once the Olympics have moved on. I knew someone who lived in Atlanta before the 1996 Olympics, and his description of the way the city prepared for the event was not at all pretty. And despite the blather about peaceful competition, the set-up instead encourages nationalism of the worst sort: somehow our nation is better than their nation because we can cough up a better bunch of hockey players? Instead of competing nation against nation, all the blather about international fellowship would be better served if (for team sports, at least), teams were drawn up with members randomly chosen from various nations.

But what about the power and beauty of the athleticism on display? Can't you set aside all the politics and maneuvering and just glory in the athletes' incredible skills? Well, maybe...except that for a lot of sports, the need for training is so intensive that entire childhoods are sacrificed to the need to create a gold-medal winning gymnast (say). Sports like gymnastics, whose athletes seem to peak in their teens, are particularly egregious in this regard. Describing a character who'd ruthlessly trained his daughter to compete at the Olympic level, Kurt Vonnegut had another character comment, "What kind of man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?" (I think this was in Breakfast of Champions - yellojkt will probably know.) Oh sure, these young athletes will say they want to compete...but I will note that, in other arenas, characterizing what is legitimately "consent" recognizes that adults can create in children a compulsion that makes true consent impossible. The same is true concerning whether a ten-year-old really wants to do gymnastics half the waking hours of her day. It's borderline child abuse is what it is.

Sigh... I'll be back to my usual charming self next time, I'm sure.

"it just doesn't meta!"

An old standby, but still capable of providing a moderate level of amusement, this is another "what's in your referrer log?" entries.

Curiously, one of the most popular searches that lead people here comes from people looking for the joke about the penguin, whose set-up line is "looks like you blew a seal." I'm sorry to say the entire joke is nowhere on this site - but if you're curious as to why my site pops up in connection with that joke, read this entry (and its comments).

Curiously, though, the most common search that gets people here is the word "oops." I'm not sure what this might signify. Perhaps I need a new tagline: "The Architectural Dance Society: Not What You Were Looking For, Since 2003."

For almost all of these, I'm rather puzzled as to why Google led people to my site. (Of course, now, they'll all legitimately lead here. Bwah-hah-hah-hah!)

* Anal dance
* "dan whitney" yearbook photo (who?)
* "font joke" (I'm happy to be one of the main providers of font jokes on the Internets.)
* "painting on naked women" (pretty sure I never wrote about that - if anyone would like me to do so, I'll need to practice first: send photos)
* "pure texture" concrete crap
* 1930's press cards in fedoras
* adult humor - grinning apes
* background all fuzzy (just the background? I think it's all fuzzy all the way down)
* beat dance typing (if anyone can contact Andy Partridge, do so and tell him to write a song with this title, immediately!)
* chart on wingdings popularity
* dale earnhardt domestic abuse
* drank curdled milk (HAVE NOT DONE!)
* funny manly construction worker names
* george bush keyboard sounds
* lyrical dresses at dance kracy shop in plymouth (I must write about this weekly!)
* oddball dotted sixteenth note
* static electric bite marks (if anyone can contact Captain Beefheart, do so and tell him to write a song with this title, immediately!)
* the one song you should never whistle at a urinal ("Pees Pees Me"?)

we never thought it would come to this

There's always been an interesting tension in rock between sheerly energetic amateurism, and technique (whether physical, musical, or recording). Even some very punk guitarists, scornful of others' need to endlessly practice scales at 700 mph, will enthusiastically talk up their gear.

Without rehearsing the whole argument here (because you probably know it), I'll just state that sometimes, the "let it be" attitude can undermine a perfectly good song, when musicians release shoddy performances not because they're particularly spirited or interesting but merely because, like Mt. Everest, they're there.

Here's an example. I like a lot of things about this song, "Mudflat" by Jake Mann - the alternation between spoken and sung vocals, the melodies in the chorus, its overall feel and sound - except would it have killed them to do another vocal take to get those high harmonies in tune? (The second chorus is particularly flat.) It's not as if what we hear is some amazingly soulful live performance whose intensity more than makes up for its iffy intonation - no, this isn't that kind of overtly emotive music anyway. There's no attempt to create a "live" feel, and I'm left to conclude this is a case of "close enough for rock and roll." Was there limited studio time? If so, that would be ironic: home recording equipment is good enough and cheap enough now that, unless you want your music polished to gleaming chrome Steely Dan finish, you can overdub the vocals at home at almost no cost. (The irony being, of course, that because of the more casual sound and feel of the song, a less-finished vocal sound isn't a problem for any listener who's sympathetic to this approach and style.)

Maybe it's just me: unless it's clearly intentional, being out of tune is something I'm pretty sensitive to. I suppose some people can't stand all this Garage Band laptop stuff and wish everything were recorded by professional engineers in real studios, and they hear those differences as annoying.

(More samples and downloadable tracks at Jake Mann's website.)

Jake Mann "Mudflat" (Daytime Ghost, 2007)

you don't look like no goddamned singer-songwriter to me

Welcome to this edition of Music Geek Corner. This week, we compare a single song as it evolved through three different versions over three years or so. The song in question originally appeared on Mouse on Mars' 2004 CD Radical Connector, where it was called "Wipe That Sound" and featured their percussionist, Dodo Nkishi, on vocals. This version brings some heavily clomping funk but remains a bit leaden, if not plodding, although the synth sounds are brilliant.

Mouse on Mars then re-worked the track with vocals from The Fall's Mark E. Smith. It's a major re-thinking: the track begins with a new drum part whose offbeat hi-hat accents work well to diffuse the original's clompiness. Smith's vocal, of course, adds a completely new texture to the track - but what's often overlooked about Smith is his skill as melodic minimalist. Smith essentially adds a two-note chorus to the song (the recurring bit about the garden), and it provides an effective hook to the track. The string synth part also makes this version more song-like (and commercial, in fact - although the multiple tracks of crosstalking MES are unlikely to contribute to that direction).

Earlier this year, Mouse on Mars and Smith released a full-length collaboration under the billing Von Südenfed. "Wipe That Sound" was remade, under the title "That Sound Wiped." The first thing you'll notice if you listen to this version directly after the earlier version is that both the drums and Smith's vocal seem a bit brighter. It's disguised by the arrangement, which withholds pitched instruments for nearly a minute, but this track is nearly a half-step higher in pitch than the earlier version. The arrangement also foregrounds Smith's vocals, gradually adding instruments to build the track up.

Incidentally, by Law of Your Granny on Bongos, this track is legitimately billed to "The Fall." (Smith once facetiously told an interviewer that "if it's me and your granny on bongos, it's The Fall.") I like the Von Südenfed album better than the most recent album by The Fall proper, in fact. I doubt Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner of Mouse on Mars will quit their day jobs to become The Fall when Smith fires the current version (of course that's a "when" rather than an "if"...), but Smith sounds more committed here than he does on Reformation Post T.L.C.

As long as we're noting the evolution of a song, here's a bonus trio of three versions of "Theme from Sparta F.C.": the first is from a leaked copy of the withdrawn promo edition, the second is from the UK version of The Real New Fall LP formerly Country on the Click, and the third is from the US version. Which one do you like best?

If I were truly insane, I'd compare the three versions of every track on each edition of this CD (not all tracks appear on all three), but thankfully, I haven't gone quite that mad. Yet.

Mouse on Mars "Wipe That Sound" (Radical Connector, 2004)
Mouse on Mars ft. Mark E. Smith "Wipe That Sound" (12", 2004)
Von Südenfed "That Sound Wiped" (Tromatic Reflexxions, 2007)
plus...tubular bells:
The Fall "Theme from Sparta F.C." (Country on the Click, promo version later withdrawn, 2003)
The Fall "Theme from Sparta F.C." (The Real New Fall Album formerly Country on the Click [UK version], 2003)
The Fall "Sparta 2XX" (The Real New Fall Album formerly Country on the Click [US version], 2004)

being young and stupid isn't just for the young any more

A few days ago, our local paper printed an article noting the increase in deaths and serious injuries from motorcycle accidents, noting as well that the victims of such accidents have been, more and more frequently, older and not wearing helmets. One would have thought that as you grow older, you realize that you are not, in fact, immortal (as you thought in your teens and early twenties), and that if you're going to do something inherently risky like propel yourself on top of two wheels, an engine, and a gas tank at sixty miles an hour down a freeway amidst multi-ton behemoths, wearing a helmet might be a useful thing to do, providing at least some insurance that in the event of an accident, your brains will not end up a red and black smear on the roadway.

A curious aspect of this article: even though it focuses on motorcycle helmets as a factor in deaths and brain injuries (and even though helmets have been shown to reduce the incidence of death and injury in accidents), it never once mentioned that Wisconsin had several times tried to pass mandatory helmet laws. I e-mailed the author of the article, who said that she had limited space and that material had been edited out (fair enough) - but it still seems a curious omission.

Perhaps it has something to do with the same bunch of people - regular people as well as lobbyists - who ensure that a Google search for "motorcycle helmet law" yields, first, a slew of pages ranting about the jackbooted thugs' attempt to limit bikers' freedom to crush their skulls on America's highways. And probably the same bunch of people sending abusive letters to the author for even mentioning the concept that helmets might save lives (as she also noted in her reply to me).

When I get in my car (which at least provides some sort of protection), I am legally required to strap on a seatbelt. Yet motorcyclists are legally allowed on the roadways wearing pretty much nothing more than what they might wear to the beach. Such freedom: freedom to subject other motorists to your grisly death, freedom to cast your parents, lovers, or children into mourning. I wonder what Angeline Schreiber, the young woman quoted in the article whose parents were killed in a (helmetless) motorcycle accident, thinks of their exercising such "freedom."

smear the mouth

Here's the other item I wrote for my friend's aborted book project, some years ago. This one's on Scott Walker's Tilt. I wish I could remember which famous or acclaimed album these things were to have been paired with...maybe (for this one) Big Star's Sister Lovers?

Many albums get called "one of a kind," but very few actually deserve that designation as richly as Tilt. Similar to Alex Chilton, Scott Walker began his career at its commercial peak, singing several hit singles with the Walker Brothers. And like Chilton's, Walker's career since has been a lengthy odyssey away from commerciality, sometimes with stunning results, sometimes disappointingly. With Tilt, Walker's fierce refusal to compromise with expectations yields an intimidating, bleak album of arctic grandeur and isolation. Its emotional effect is comparable to that of the much better known Plastic Ono Band, but Lennon and Walker achieve similar ends through divergent but complementary means. Whereas Lennon strips his music down to basics - simple, sparse instrumentation and direct, straightforward lyrics - Walker strips away the basics, leaving a music seemingly devoid of any of the usual musical touchstones, with lyrics often so abstract as to be nearly impenetrable.

Walker sets his rich, creamy, dramatic baritone in a series of spare, minatory surroundings that seem to bear only the most gestural relation to rock songs in structure or sound. While instrumentation ranges broadly, augmenting a typical rock ensemble with strings, church organ, flutes, concertina, whistles, trumpets, along with industrial electronics (and in one song a recording of locusts that sounds like electronics), these sounds are deployed sparingly, jarringly, and discordantly against one another. Walker is as distinctive a lyricist as he is an arranger. Seemingly influenced by William S. Burroughs' cut-up technique, the songs speak in fragments, odd and haunting phrases alluding to everything from Italian films to Nuremberg trial excerpts. A certain peak of Walker's achievement is Tilt's closing track, "Rosary," in which Walker matches the desolate strangeness of the other tracks' diverse arrangements on one self-played electric guitar. Halting, irregular notes chatter like the teeth of a dying man, as the lyrics suggest the desperation of the addict.

One of the most unexpected aspects of this expectation-refusing album is that, after several listens, most tracks reveal something that could, in more conventional settings, pass muster as a catchy chorus. And the songs' melodic contours turn out to be not that far removed from the rock vernacular, although the surpassing strangeness of their surroundings makes this difficult to hear. As a result, the album thaws a bit as one lives with it for a while – which only increases its emotional intensity.

Truly chilling, forbidding, but ultimately rewarding, Tilt comprises a genre of one.

Scott Walker "Rosary" (Tilt, 1995)
Scott Walker "Face on Breast" (Tilt, 1995)

Vice President Cheney fumes as a reporter questions him. See why the White House does not want you to see this!

Sunday trivia

So, the new movie by French director Luc Besson features a character named "Angela." She's an angel. And - the movie's title is...Angel-A.

It's the ability to weave such gossamer latticework of subtle interrelationships that makes European films so superior to our American product.

Also, I received a spam from someone named "Jesus Price." By this point, I should have started about twenty bands just to use all the excellent band names those clever spammers have created for me.

machines are living too

Introduction: Several years ago, a friend of mine had an idea for a book in which he'd set up well-known or critically well-regarded albums against more obscure albums that were lesser known (at the time, anyway). He'd solicited several submissions, but the project never really took off. In going through some old files, I found the two reviews I'd written for him - which, I'm assuming, are no longer of any use to him. The first one addresses Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark's Dazzle Ships. I've left the review largely as it was, even though I'm less dismissive now of the band's shinier moments.

Early eighties synth-based pop has a misleading, if not downright bad, reputation. The collective memory has come to designate it as a repository of fluffy pop songs and fluffier bizarre hairstyles. But not all acts discovering the relatively inexpensive new synthesizers of the era were interested solely in fluffy pop songs – even if, like OMD, they did record a few. Sometimes, though, the most interesting music can result when singles bands get ambitious – as Dazzle Ships proves.

More and more prominently over the course of its first four albums, of which Dazzle Ships is the fourth, OMD grew increasingly ambitious and experimental, seemingly feeling a bit limited by the bouncy, ready-made pep of early singles like "Electricity" and "Enola Gay." (Of course, that the lyrics of the latter are about the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb might have provided some hints...) By the time of Dazzle Ships, OMD was matchless in mixing synthetic pop songs with sonic ideas both classical and avant-garde into a cold, marble beauty. Several tracks here use tape-manipulated sounds (in a technique borrowed from musique concrète), generally in conjunction with OMD’s already distinctive mix of synthesizers and acoustic instrumentation (drums and bass guitar), while here, for the first time on one of their albums, a handful of tracks are nothing but sheer sound sculpture.

What sets OMD apart from many electronic bands of this era, and indeed of later eras, is the skill with which the perceived inherent coldness of synths and tapes is played against the warmth associated with the tools of conventional music-making, such as the voice and the other acoustic instruments OMD blend into their songs. While some bands exploit the inorganic nature of synthesized sounds and record them dry and direct into the board, OMD typically bathes its electronics in a haze of reverberation, giving its songs a strong sense of acoustic space. In the liner notes to the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, songwriter and OMD fan Stephin Merritt comments that on one track, he was trying to sing, like OMD, in the very uppermost register of his voice. The strain this puts on the vocals gives them a yearning quality that, again, plays off against the sometimes sealed and hermetic quality of the band’s near-classical sense of harmonic motion, as on the last verse of "International."

That track also displays another example of OMD's musical fearlessness: a flute-like synthesizer part is noticeably, obviously out of tune with the rest of the track. This is clearly intentional: the opening of "The Romance of the Telescope" is, if anything, even more out of tune, and the guitars in the unrelenting backdrop to "Of All the Things We've Made" are treated to broaden their pitch as well. Used sparingly, notes that are out of pitch can provide a texture quite distinct from that produced by any kind of correctly tuned instrument, and the sometimes jarring musical landscape OMD evokes here would be unobtainable within standard intonation.

At their peak, as they were here, OMD successfully blends the seemingly incompatible worlds of pop tunefulness and experimental sound sculpture, while avoiding both condescension and obsequious fawning to the proponents of either musical approach. Sadly, most of the band's quirks and idiosyncrasies were ironed out over the next few albums, so that by the time of their hit single "If You Leave," featured in John Hughes’ film Pretty in Pink, they seemed nearly indistinguishable from the sort of fluff from which albums like Dazzle Ships and its equally skilled predecessor Architecture & Morality save the reputation of eighties synth-pop.

Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark "International" (Dazzle Ships, 1983)
Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark "The Romance of the Telescope" (Dazzle Ships, 1983)
Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark "Of All the Things We've Made" (Dazzle Ships, 1983)

g33x'(?) d3l19h+

Over at his Flickr site, a friend of mine (hi D.!) referred to "the Red Sox' closer" in the caption of one of his pictures.

My inner proofreader nearly had a coronary. No, "x-apostrophe" is not a legitimate formation, I commented. He disagreed, saying he'd found style guides to support his view. Anyway, rather than continue the back-and-forth in his Flickr site's comments area, I decided to let it go.

But my geeky brain wouldn't let it go, it seems, since the notion popped into my head again today. So I had to resolve it.

First, some logic. As I pointed out, if a bare apostrophe tacked onto an irregular plural noun (a plural noun not ending in -s) is sufficient to convey possession, then why not alumni'? Pronunciation is no guide - because while some people might pronounce the (singular) possessive of Jones as "joanz," others might render it "joan-ziz."

Anyway, enough speculation (and we'll leave for another time whether team names like "Utah Jazz" and "Miami Heat" take singular or plural verbs: both teams' official sites, FWIW, use plural verbs). What do the style guides say?

Chicago: sec. 7.17: "The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s, and the possessive of plural nouns (except for a few irregular plurals that do not end in s [my emphasis]) by adding an apostrophe only."
7.18: "The general rule covers most proper nouns, including names ending in s, x, or z, in both their singular and plural forms, as well as letters and numbers." (ex. "Marx's theories")

MLA: MLA Handbook sec. 2.2.7c (1999 ed. - but the MLA's website, listing changes in the Handbook's most recent (2003) edition, says nothing about this section): "To form the possessive of an irregular plural noun not ending in s, add an apostrophe and an s."*

APA (quoted online here): "add 's to the plural forms that do not end in –s."

Moving on from the academy: from the AP Stylebook's "Ask the Editor" (curiously, using the exact word D. used): "AP style is to use the apostrophe in the possessive Red Sox's."

I think this is settled.

I've also seen people use x' with singular nouns: "Fort Knox' security." This is, clearly, insane. If "sounds like an s or z" is an acceptable criterion for omitting the s, that would legitimate adze', chance', or even (rendered as a proper noun, say, the name of a bar) Deliquesce'.

Any copy-editors wish to weigh in?

* MLA actually complicates the issue, or at least it did in the '99 edition: 2.2.7f obtusely says only, "To form the possessive of a plural proper noun, add only an apostrophe." The examples it offers are "Vanderbilts' estate" and "Dickenses' economic woes." Uh...but what if that "plural proper noun" does not end in an -s? What if I were idiotic enough to name my bar-trivia team "the Phenomena": does this imply that the possessive of this now-properized plural noun is Phenomena'? Pretty clearly, someone was lazy at the editing desk, and the proviso "that ends in -s" should have been added after "plural proper noun," in order to prevent 2.2.7f from directly contradicting 2.2.7c...since "plural noun" as a category includes "plural proper noun" as a subset.

faux Emily (whenever I may find her)

No sense wasting perfectly insane parodies in the comments section of other people's websites: Francesco Marciuliano (I think I should get honorary Italian status just for spelling that correctly without looking it up) had a recent entry entitled "Table of Contents for 'The Complete Norton Anthology of Emily Dickinson, Post-Zoloft Prescription'," one of which was "Today I catalog spoons."

I was inspired...

Today I catalog spoons --
The round, ovoid, and flatly bent.
And then the forks shall tarry
To hear my cupboard's testament.

The knives - all dulled by busy
Friends with worried bonnet bees
-- will trouble me no longer --
Drone-layer queen apothec'ries!

why we will not tootle together

Stephin Merritt's Showtunes CD (released last year) provides an instructive test case for exactly why I tend to dislike showtunes. The CD is a compilation of songs from three musicals for which Merritt served as composer and librettist for Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng.

Do I enjoy the melodies of the songs on the CD? Yes. Are the arrangements unusual, intriguing, and successful? Yes - there aren't that many songs built on accordions, steel drums, Stroh violin, ukulele, autoharp, lute, plus pipa and other Chinese instruments. Are the lyrics witty, intelligent, impeccably constructed, and (so far as one can tell) useful to the plots of the musicals? C'mon, this is Stephin Merritt we're talking about. I suspect he orders pizza with more wit, intelligence, and verve than most folks write short stories.

Do I like the CD, then?

Uh, not really. Why? Because nearly all the singing is done by singer/actors whose tone, enunciation, and general vocal production are very, very...Broadway (there's no other word for it). There's something about this sort of hyperenthusiastic, consonant-sculpting sound that just cloys for me. Oh - and two tracks feature the most annoying falsetto I've ever heard - and that's even after I allow for the fact that it's supposed to be annoying.

This is too bad - because really, writing for musicals is a job designed for Merritt. He gets to write in character (which he does anyway), he's not held to any particular genre, and his primary musical virtues - melody, lyrical wit - are those of the best Broadway showtunes. The songs also demonstrate that Merritt, like most great songwriters, has an instantly recognizable melodic and harmonic profile. Take "The Top and the Ball": that chorus is utterly Stephin Merritt, such that even when the song is scored for accordion and pipa, you can almost hear Merritt's doleful bass* singing along (it isn't).

Incidentally, I suspect that fans of musicals who might like this album might be disappointed with the rest of Merritt's output (at least the songs he sings)...since that voice is, apparently, an acquired taste. (Or so everyone says: I've always loved it.) To me, its deadpan, resonant rumble is perfect counterpoint to Merritt's bruised romanticism: he's cynical, but by no means hopeless...and cynicism in romance arises from failed romanticism. You can't be cynical if you don't care, if you have no hopes to be dashed.

By contrast, these singers - even if they might be technically superior to Merritt as vocalists, at least by certain definitions of vocal technique - seem to inhabit their voices and, by extension, Merritt's lyrics, much as they inhabit the costumes they wear on stage. And while I'm by no means claiming that any sort of "authenticity" or autobiography characterizes Merritt's lyrics, there's a sense of persona dwelling in them: again, they're recognizably his, even if you don't know at first who wrote them.

Merritt's work for musicals also allows him to indulge in one of his favorite lyrical conceits: lyrics that refer to the song in progress. "Shall We Sing a Duet?" (presented here in its reprise) is an excellent example. The singing on both of these tracks, by the way, is less "Broadway" than on many other songs on the CD...so if sounds too musical-y to you, be forewarned.

Stephin Merritt "The Top and the Ball" (Showtunes 2006)
Stephin Merritt "Shall We Sing a Duet?" (reprise) (Showtunes 2006)

* Merritt's voice is definitely in the bass range - but it's typically referred to by music critics as "baritone" (as are those of most lower-voiced singers)...presumably because everyone knows the word "bass," and the word "baritone" sounds fancier, as if the critic knows a thing or two about music. Heh. Incidentally, Thom Jurek's review of the CD in the All-Music Guide doesn't commit this blunder and is generally an accurate assessment of the CD...but two-third of the way through, Jurek suddenly goes off the rails in a pre-emptive attack at what he guesses will be indie-rock critics' rejection of the CD (metacritic.com notes that its average critical score is 69: pretty good, in fact). That's odd enough - but then he specifically attacks...well, it's too bad-good not to quote in full: "You can hear the spoiled, wealthy, upper-crust indie rock wiseacres cynically snickering and smirking their bellicose, smarmy analyses of this album over the tops of books by Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek (which they also misunderstand), on blogs and hipper-than-thou websites." I gather Thom Jurek is a Man of the People, salt of the earth (much like Merritt himself who, of course, grew up a sharecropper's son in deepest Alabama). It's good to know that he, unlike the half-educated critics he imagines, does in fact understand Derrida and Zizek (whose name needs diacritics, but I'm too lazy to find them). I hope I'm not being too smarmy and bellicose in my cynical snickering here.

Update: If you check the comments for this post, you'll see that Thom Jurek has responded to this post - by apologizing for including irrelevant personal material in his review! This is extraordinary, I think - in fact, he plans to change the review in response. The key word, I'd say, is "irrelevant": while a reviewer for a site such as AMG should avoid personal details that are either not about the music or are unlikely to affect other listeners, reviews are unavoidably personal and subjective, in that they report one listener's response, even if that response is put in a larger, more objective context. A minor comment: it wasn't that I was "offended" by Jurek's reviews, only that they seemed presumptuous and off-target. As he implies, he wrote about a discussion he had with friends, presumably concerning some particular blogs or critics he found smarmy and pretentious. (I certainly didn't think he was talking about me: my readership is in the upper double-digits, and in all probability Jurek is among them for this post solely because I linked to his review. In any event, I'm all for smarmy cynicism in blogs, rather than in reviews - as long as it's entertaining and well-written!)

separated at birth?

(L) David Duchovny as Special Agent Denise Bryson in Twin Peaks
(R) Michael Steele, former bassist with the Bangles

the social whirl

After two consecutive months in which I posted more entries than in any prior month, it may appear as if I've disappeared entirely. Nope - just that we have friends visiting, and I'm busy with them rather than posting madly. For some evidence, click on my Flickr link (to the right).

signs of flickering amidst the embers

Stereogum has posted five YouTube videos from R.E.M.'s "live rehearsal" tour of Ireland, featuring new songs presumably to be featured on their forthcoming album.

I'm provisionally encouraged, particularly after the almost complete disaster that was Around the World Sun*. Peter Buck has remembered why his guitar has amplification, for one thing, and even if the first and last songs risk dropping into that midtempo area they've been purgated in for years, they're at least not all in A minor.

(via Fluxblog)

* Steve of Hot Rox Avec Lying Sweet Talk pointed out I'd gotten the title wrong. In my defense, and as I said to him, that album has barely enough energy to get Around the Block. Oh the humor.

What? No Duff?

In response to this idea, I'm waiting for local dives to proclaim themselves "Moe's"...

while I'm at it -

I don't remember where I found this one, either - but it needs to be seen!

store this in your list of potential band names...

Going through the archives, I discovered this image, scanned from who knows where:


Opening, perhaps, for the Dead Kennedys?

Anyway, after Robert Zimmerman is safely in his grave, I call dibs on naming my band "The Dead Bob Dylan."