close listenings

Songs I've Been Blasting in 2010

2010-05-02T13:12:00.001-07:00

What? So I'm lazy.

"Love Cry," Four Tet
Cut-up drugged-out soul.

"Free Energy," Free Energy
Cock rock + intelligence.

"Paradise Circus," Massive Attack
For Massive Attack, it's never not 1992.

"Relief," Sam Amidon
Usually Amidon reinvents folk standards; this time, R. Kelly.

"King of Spain," The Tallest Man on Earth
No one else is allowed to ape Freewheelin'-era Dylan.

"Sideswiper," Fang Island
A four-minute argument against verse-chorus structure.

"Collector," Here We Go Magic
Will you have some Sea with that Cake?

"Excuses," The Morning Benders
Sometimes songwriting excuses a complete lack of aesthetic adventurousness.

"Who Knows Who Cares," Local Natives
At first I thought Gorilla Manor was overrated. Then I heard this track.

"On Melancholy Hill," Gorillaz
We've been here before. Now we return. We will be back.

Word on the street is that two indie-consecrated acts, The National and LCD Soundsystem, have new albums coming out soon. Not that I've downloaded them illegally.

If, however, I had downloaded them illegally, and if you were considering doing so yourself, I would point you to The National's "England" and LCD's "Home." Something tells me those songs are all kinds of awesome.

The Uncool Sources of Cool

2010-04-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

In the early nineties, Primal Scream was nothing if not hip. The band emerged from a well-respected Glaswegian punk scene and absorbed influences from an emergent rave culture. They were skinny and long-haired, and they always looked stoned. It helped, of course, that in October 1991 they dropped a classic record, the still-amazing Screamadelica.

Some critics compare the impact of Screamadelica in Britain to that of Nirvana's Nevermind in the States. Both albums bumrushed the mainstream, bringing an underground aesthetic suddenly, incongruously, thrillingly above-ground.

One of the most successful singles from Screamadelica - and the first Primal Scream song I loved - was the bluesy-danceable "Movin' on Up." It features a stomping piano-and-acoustic-guitar rhythm track, some Stonesy fretwork, a gospel choir, and generous helpings of bongos. It's a feel-good jam.

"Movin' on Up" moved on up Billboard's "Modern Rock Tracks" chart (now called "Alternative Songs"), peaking at #2, just behind - you guessed it - Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." A simple hipsters-make-good story, right?

Maybe.

Rewind 11 months. In December 1990, George Michael's "Freedom," a.k.a "Freedom! '90," cracked the top 10 of Billboard's "Hot 100," alongside the likes of Madonna ("Justify My Love"), Whitney Houston ("I'm Your Baby Tonight"), and Bette Midler ("From a Distance").

George Michael was an unhip singer in an unhip (pre-Nevermind, pre-grungesplosion) era. Despite his petulant anti-label pose, Michael never managed to acquire any capital as a "legit" artist. He would always be the peppy/creepy dude in that atrocious Wham! video.

But sweet Jesus could the man write a pop tune. James Murphy wishes he wrote the rhythm track to "I Want Your Sex." "Father Figure" is ripe for an unironic soul-rock cover.

And evidently Primal Scream was hip to all this unhipness.

First listen to the rhythm guitar in "Faith" (skip to 0:55). Got it?

Now take in Michael's greatest song, "Freedom":

That piano? That gospel choir? Those bongos? Slap 'em on top of the "Faith" guitar line, and you pretty much have "Movin' on Up."

Tsk tsk, Primal Scream. Tsk tsk.

All Our Words Are Written Down in Chalk

2010-04-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Are there any great melodies left?

Whenever I hear a catchy song, I suspect plagiarism. The old wheels start turning: Did Weezer already use that guitar lick? Is this a Ronettes chorus? A goddamn Beatles chorus? Suddenly I'm no longer enjoying myself. Perhaps this is a side effect of listening to too much music.

Occasionally, however, a song like Buddy and Julie Miller's "Chalk" comes along and cleans me out. It consists of two melodies, one for the verses and another for the chorus. Both are so simple, so achingly lovely, that surely they have always existed. They've been waiting, and the Millers are the first to find them.

On the album version, the great Patty Griffin sings backups. It's almost unfair. If you're at all susceptible to weeping, you will weep.

Hookology 101

2010-04-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

The greatest hooks are stupid in their simplicity. See: "You Really Got Me," "Satisfaction," "Back in Black," "Bastards of the Young,""Seven Nation Army."

Now I'm not ready to place this year's "On Melancholy Hill" in that pantheon, but this Gorillaz song has one big thing going for it: a simple-as-hell, catchy-as-hell hook.

Listen closely at 0:20. Three notes is all.

And, for gravy purposes, a second hook - this one consisting of two notes - saunters into the mix at 1:20.

Early front-runner for song of the year.

And no, I don't know why the YouTube poster chose that image.

Ramones-itis

2010-03-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

When Franz Nicolay resigned his post as mustachioed keyboardist for The Hold Steady a couple of months ago, he explained his rationale to Paste:

[The Hold Steady] have their one big idea - making literate, wordy lyrics over big anthemic rock...

Ouch.

Especially because he's right. The Hold Steady have put out two pantheon-level albums - Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls in America - and established a reputation as a firecracker live act, a kind of E-Street Band for the under-35 set.

But their latest record, Stay Positive, sounded almost like a track-by-track retread of Boys and Girls. Big hooks, well-told stories, no shock of novelty.

The Hold Steady will release yet another album on May 5, and somehow, even though this band is responsible for two amazing records, I'm not super excited.

When all is said and done, we'll look back on The Hold Steady as a 2K version of The Ramones. See, we all love The Ramones, but how many of their records do we need? Probably two: the self-titled debut (invention of the pop-punk formula) and Rocket to Russia (perfection of the pop-punk formula).

The other 12 albums? All solid, all similar sounding, all unnecessary.

Here's hoping The Hold Steady focus on solo projects after the upcoming tour. If Craig Finn were to team with William Shatner for a spoken-word piece, I'd be the first to offer my $9.99.

Radio Silence

2010-03-07T14:26:00.000-08:00

I regret to say that from now until Sunday, March 21, I must disappear into my non-cyber life. Three papers, two weeks: Yes we can.

In the meantime, check out this creepy new video from These New Puritans:

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #1

2010-02-28T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the rest of the list.

#1: "Digital Love," Daft Punk

"How to Disappear Completely," my second favorite song of the decade, came out in 2000; "Digital Love" dropped in 2001. The former is one of the most wounded songs I've ever heard, the latter one of the most joyous.

I thought I loved them equally, just as I love Brief Encounter and The Shop Around the Corner equally. They complete different tasks with equal mastery. So I considered having a #1a and a #1b, but that would have been a cop-out.

I checked my iTunes playcount. "How to Disappear Completely" I had played 32 times. "Digital Love"? 127.

The disparity is easy enough to explain. "How to Disappear Completely" demands a ruminative, receptive type of attention; you don't have to be sad, but you do have to sit still and let the song inhabit you. "Digital Love," on the other hand, is for dancing. For singing into your hairbrush.

"Digital Love" is a song you play over and over - when you're writing emails, lifting weights, making breakfast. You play it when you feel like feeling good.

Released on August 21, 2001, the "Digital Love" single never made a huge impact in the States, but it did crack the Billboard Dance/Club list once - on the week of September 22, 2001.

People felt like feeling good.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: Your Questions

2010-02-25T15:39:00.000-08:00

Well, not "your" questions. I don't know who "you" are. I do, however, know Jeremy - my college roomie, a talented filmmaker, and, oh yeah, the dude I recently squabbled with about a certain ringletted songwriter - and Jeremy has two excellent questions about my favorite-songs-of-the-00s list. Aside from why Taylor Swift is on it.

Jeremy: What is your scoring system in determining the ranking? ITunes playcount? Is it more theoretical than quantitative?

Garrett: My "system" for choosing and ranking songs was primarily affective. I went with my gut, maverick-style. To wit: I made a playlist of about 70 songs I associated with happy thoughts, and listened to them all. Many of these I hadn't heard in several years. The ones that got my blood jumping made the list.

That might seem like a fairly straightforward process, but it's undergirded by a particular (and perhaps questionable) way of assessing of artistic value. Basically I'm adhering to the pleasure principle: Whatever gives me immediate gratification makes the list. Since I've listened to these songs many times, I know the gratification I derive from them is repeatable. But why emphasize pleasure at all? Don't I end up privileging melody and - God forbid - prettiness over lyrics and productive tension?

Um, yes. The pretty keeps me plugged in.

Jeremy: Is that Notwist song really better than "All the Wine"?

Garrett: Not necessarily. A lot of people might consider the Notwist and Sam Amidon songs the weak links in my top 13. "All My Friends," "Hey Ya!" and "1901" might generate more consensus. So goes the pleasure principle.

But the big question: Why that Notwist song? Well, it has a soft-loud structure, a cheap songwriting trick Kurt Cobain conditioned me to love in the early 90s. The melody aches. The big guitars and the reticent vox play off each other agreeably.

Okay, if I'm really honest with you, I'll tell you that I listened to "One with the Freaks" on repeat in the summer of 2004. I was in my half-deserted college town, renting a room in a frat house for 300 a month, sleeping on a mattress I found in the basement, working for an oral history project that loaned me a mini-CD recorder and sent me into the suburbs to interview old people.

None of my friends were around. I had been pink-slipped by a girl a few months earlier. Never in my life had I been so radically on my own. You might expect that I'd be depressed, and sometimes I was. But other times I found myself inexplicably joyful. Like everything-is-beautiful joyful, joyful in my freedom, Walt Whitman joyful.

I didn't like shopping or cooking, so most evenings I ate black bean soup and a salad at a cafe-cum-bookshop down the street. After dinner, I loafed around the neighborhood, making mixes on my iPod. Every single mix featured "One with the Freaks" by The Notwist.

That's all there is to it.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: The Next 13

2010-02-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for #'s 2-13.

I will reveal my #1 a week from today. In the meantime, feast your ears on these runners-up:

"Rebellion (Lies)," Arcade Fire
"Emily Kane," Art Brut
"Far Away," Cut Copy
"Hounds of Love," The Futureheads
"Young Hearts Spark Fire," Japandroids
"Stuck Between Stations," The Hold Steady
"This Year," The Mountain Goats
"All the Wine," The National
"Machine Gun," Portishead
"Saint Simon," The Shins
"Sandcastle Disco," Solange
"Ageless Beauty," Stars
"You Belong with Me," Taylor Swift

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #2

2010-02-18T20:03:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#2: "How to Disappear Completely," Radiohead

With Radiohead, it has always been about dynamics and chord changes. "High and Dry"? Chord changes. "Paranoid Android"? Dynamics. "Creep"? Both.

Normally at this point I would begin talking about the dynamics and chord changes in "How to Disappear Completely." But I'm drawing a blank. It's impossible for any description of this song to be satisfying.

5:05-5:30 = Eargasm.

Except spiritual-like.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #3

2010-02-14T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#3: "All My Friends," LCD Soundsystem

A clinking single-chord piano riff. That's how it starts.

The additions seem minor when they happen: a bass-and-high-hat rhythm (0:41); snare hits on the second downbeat of every other measure (1:08); deadpan vocals (1:22); a guitar lick (2:16); a synth line (3:22). But somehow, after three and a half minutes, "All My Friends" becomes an anthem. And I don't use that word lightly.

The last four minutes? Sustained anthem-ness.

"All My Friends" also yielded one of the best live TV performances in the history of ever:

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #4

2010-02-11T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#4: "Hey Ya!" Outkast

In general I don't enjoy dancing. I associate it with everything that sucked about junior high: bad music, awkwardness (physical, social), mean girls, sniggering boys. At wedding receptions, however, I become a dancing maniac. People compliment me on my moves. Or maybe they're just being nice to the crazy guy.

Last year at a friend's wedding reception I had an outstanding time dancing. There were plenty of young people and an open bar, but the music held us back a bit. It was from an iPod playlist, tasteful enough (Motown, 50s pop ballads) but hardly galvanizing.

The older folks left, the happy couple sneaked back to their hotel room, and the rest of us kept dancing in circles of four or five, clowning halfheartedly. One song ended, a pause, and then... "ONE, TWO, THREE, UH!"

The portable dancefloor went batshit. No more circles; everybody was dancing with everybody else, nobody was dancing with anybody; people crashed into each and laughed; I attempted to breakdance.

Four and a half minutes later it was over. So was the playlist. We were on our backs covered in sweat.

The song was Outkast's "Hey Ya!" Say what you will about too much radio play: I stand behind any song that can obliterate a wedding reception.

(You will note that the following is not the official video. It appears to be a school project, and a pretty awesome one. Outkast's official video, per its Beatles-on-Sullivan theme, adds a screaming crowd to the mix. Which is annoying.)

For double-bonus purposes, here's one of the best covers on YouTube.

(He flubs a lyric and 0:50 and starts over.)

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #5

2010-02-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#5: "Ignition (Remix)," R. Kelly

Sometimes a silly song - okay, a really silly song - creeps up on you and ends up acquiring something like emotional richness. Don't ask me how this happens.

And don't call it a "guilty pleasure"; ain't nothing to feel guilty about. (Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce.)

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #6

2010-02-04T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#6: "The Funeral," Band of Horses

Has this guitar line always existed? If not, why not?

The official music video cuts the song short, which is a sin. So here's the best alternative YouTube has to offer:

I'm a sucker for the soft-loud dynamic. It's not my fault; I'm a white guy.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #7

2010-01-31T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#7: "Saro," Sam Amidon

I can't exactly... complain about the critical reception of Sam Amidon's 2008 album All Is Well. The reviews ranged from respectful to breathless, and the blogosphere promoted the heck out of standout track "Saro."

But it wasn't enough! If All Is Well isn't the best folk album of the decade, then my ears don't work.

And it's not like the 00s haven't given us plenty of excellent indie folk. See: Iron & Wine, Bon Iver, Horse Feathers. But on All Is Well, and especially on the triumphant "Saro," the babyfaced Amidon makes all those bearded dudes sound like posers.

(Song starts at 0:29.)

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #8

2010-01-28T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#8: "One with the Freaks," The Notwist

This song explodes at 1:32. Which is the perfect time for a song to explode.

Poor jellyfish.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #9

2010-01-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#9: "Modern Kicks," The Exploding Hearts

Don't let the crackle and snarl fool you. The Exploding Hearts did not play punk rock; they played power pop:

It was happy music. It was.

On April Fool's Day, 2003, The Exploding Hearts released the Guitar Romantic, one of the greatest albums I've ever heard. Two months and twenty days later, on the I5 near Eugene, Oregon, their van flipped, and three of the four band members died.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #10

2010-01-21T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#10: "Bros," Panda Bear

It's been a few years since I smoked weed. I think that's why I never jumped on the Animal Collective bandwagon. But Panda Bear, the side project of AnCo member Noah Lennox, won my sober ass over with 2007's Person Pitch. Third song and centerpiece "Bros" is utterly immersive.

If you're reading this while listening to the song, stop. You can't multitask to "Bros." I know the video is 10 minutes long. (The album cut is 12 and a half.) If you have better things to do, g'head. But if you're curious about this music, put your best headphones on, recline in your desk chair...

... and smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #11

2010-01-17T07:30:00.001-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#11: "Gentle Moon," Sun Kil Moon

A delicate string arrangement, a chorus in falsetto, and layers of gorgeous ache. Sometimes I wish my tastes were edgier, but when I hear a song this pretty I forget all my usual wishes. To love "Gentle Moon" is to eat the lotus.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #12

2010-01-14T07:30:00.000-08:00

Click and scroll for the list thus far.

#12: "1901," Phoenix

The bottom-falls-out moment at 1:20 kills me every time.

Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s: #13

2010-01-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

"13" because I like that number. "Favorite" because I don't know what "best" means. "Songs" because there aren't embeddable videos for albums. "The 00s" because all the hand-wringing over what to "call" this past decade is silly. Call it "the 00s"! As in "the oh-ohs," or the "double-ohs." Duh!

So this is the part 1 of a series entitled "Garrett's 13 Favorite Songs of the 00s."

#13: "Naked as We Came," Iron & Wine

Not even my favorite Iron & Wine song (see: "Upward Over the Mountain," "Each Coming Night," "The Trapeze Swinger") but holy crap, this video:

Oh, the Variety

2010-01-07T07:30:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, when I posted my take on the "expanding norms" of indie taste, the New York Times published an article by Ben Sisario called "When Indie-Rock Genres Seem to Outnumber the Bands":

Ten or 20 years ago it was relatively easy to define the term “indie-rock” as a handful of related styles and a collective audience slightly on the fringe of the mainstream. But by the end of the decade it has become an ever-expanding, incomprehensibly cluttered taxonomy of subgenres.

Hm. Similar to the story I tell. Except that Sisario seems totally happy about these developments.

Despite this flurry of hyphenation, indie-rock’s gradual atomization has actually been good for the music. The reason there are so many names is that there is more variety in the music than ever.

The keyword there is "variety." In the dictionary, "variety" has a neutral meaning; in pop music journalism, it almost always carries a positive connotation.

And hey, I dig variety as much as the next blogger. Track-to-track variety is one reason I consider The Clash's London Calling my favorite album.

But I'm not into variety for variety's sake. On London Calling, The Clash nail every costume change - from rockabilly to Springsteen-core to dub - but not all artists are as nimble. Witness Chris Cornell's recent attempt at dance-pop.

Cornell's album is bad because it feels over-calculated. "Caterwauling rocker goes electro." The same problem afflicts much of the best-praised indie music of the past few years. Take Vampire Weekend. "Ivy Leaguers do afro-pop." Or Girls. "San Fran dudes play 60s AM radio pop." Or even a band I really like, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. "Brooklyn hipsters make a C86 racket."

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and to an extent Vampire Weekend, save themselves by penning hummable, relistenable tunes, but only a handful of bands can do that. Reviewing indie records sometimes feels like grading music-school genre exercises.

So I can't share Sisario's sanguine attitude about the state of indie rock. Sure, today's angry young (wo)men have more diverse record collections than yesterday's angry young (wo)men, but who cares? Passion and melody always sound new.

Cover Trumps Original

2010-01-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

The original by Beyonce:

And the cover by YouTube "VideoSong"-makers Pomplamoose. Check the piano chords:

The swing is the key.

By the by, what happened to swing in contemporary R&B? How do kids dance these days?

Indie Consecration

2009-12-31T07:30:00.000-08:00

(This post pairs well with last Thursday's.)

Consumers of American independent music - whether calling themselves punks, grungers, or hipsters - insist on their own imperviousness to tastemaking authorities. "Screw the filters," they say. "We like what we damn well please."

But indie fans need filters too. They need some figure to consecrate certain styles and taboo others. In the early 80s zine culture consecrated hardcore and tabooed nearly everything else. Since then the historical narrative of punk/college radio/alternative/indie has been one of expanding norms.

Consider the case of Pitchfork.com, which for most of the 00s has been top dog among indie tastemakers. In 2000 Pitchfork's list of the top 20 albums of the year featured mainly indie-rock traditionalists like Sleater-Kinney, Les Savy Fav, Yo La Tengo, and Modest Mouse. Not a syncopated beat to be found.

Now we have this year's list, a top 50 featuring four hip-hop albums (Raekwon, DJ Quik & Kurupt, Mos Def, DOOM) and a heavy dose of electronica. What's more, the singles list dips its toes unrepentantly in the mainstream (Lily Allen, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga).

Half-ironic appreciation for the poppiest of pop is cool these days. Observe the absurd resuscitation of Journey by the hipster intelligentsia in 2007. Observe how hating on "Since U Been Gone" is as much of a fart in the elevator as calling "High and Dry" your favorite Radiohead song.

Indie is no longer for the purists.

But every scene must have its taboos. For the indie community, mainstream country remains beyond the pale. Some flavors of alt-country are acceptable (see: Wilco, Drive-By Truckers, Neko Case), but usually even a soupcon of twang is suspect.

Brad Paisley and Miranda Lambert released well-regarded albums in 2009 and Pitchfork didn't review them. The site slapped The Avett Brothers' plainly brilliant I and Love and You with a 5.8 out of 10 rating and a review that used "professional" and "studio nuance" as pejoratives. According to Pitchfork's "Top 200 Albums of the Decade," Nashville failed to produce a single great album in the past ten years.

So you're saying, "That's just one website!" You're right. This ain't a scholarly study. But Pitchfork is a serviceable barometer, especially since alt-leaning critics tend to follow its lead. If Pitchfork jumps country, bloggers will ask, "How country?"

But that won't happen anytime soon. Indie needs an antagonist, and Nashville country plays the role well. It's corporate. Songwriting is done by committee. Production values hew conservative, as do the political views of the musicians and the fans. It will be a long while before American hipsters shake their sense of blue-state superiority.

And maybe that's not entirely a bad thing. The underground thrives on antipathy. Hardcore punk sure as hell did. But as long as everyone is making end-of-the-decade lists, here are five big-business country albums that moved me in the 00s:

Home by The Dixie Chicks
Love on the Inside by Sugarland
That Lonesome Song by Jamey Johnson
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend by Miranda Lambert
There's More Where That Came From by Lee Ann Womack

Rob Bacon Plays Guitar Better Than You Do

2009-12-27T07:30:00.000-08:00

Watch the dude in the sunglasses.

The Underground (Is) History

2009-12-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

In the early 80s hardcore punk ruled the American underground. Hardcore fans were purists. Any band that didn't play fast and dirty ran the risk of getting chased out of the converted lunch hall. And then urinated on.

Still, the scene had its outliers. The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Husker Du, and The Replacements sounded nothing like your typical punk bands, yet they often shared bills with hardcore partisans like Black Flag and Minor Threat and Bad Brains. There wasn't much funding for alternative music back then, so the weirdos had to stick together, no matter how different their particular brands of weirdness were.

... the avant-garde positions, which are defined mainly negatively, by their opposition to the dominant positions, bring together for a certain time [artists] from very different origins, whose interests will sooner or later diverge. These dominated groups, whose unity is essentially oppositional, tend to fly apart when they achieve recognition, the symbolic profits of which often go to a small number, or even to only one of them, and when the external cohesive forces weaken.

Pierre Bourdieu's subject here is nineteenth-century French literature, but his observations apply to any artistic field.

In 1984 the bands of the hardcore "field" began to branch out. Husker Du dropped Zen Arcade; The Replacements, Let It Be. These records, both of which belong in the GOAT conversation, saw heavy play on college radio. By the late 80s Husker Du and The Replacements had signed major label deals, Black Flag had gone off the black metal deep end, and the well-adjusted lads in Minor Threat had moved on to better projects.

Of course non-mainstream music persisted. Some of this music even sounded a great deal like hardcore punk, but influences from other genres were creeping in. Berkeley-based Operation Ivy pioneered ska-punk and then split up. One of OpIvy's opening bands, Green Day, stayed together - and we all know how that turned out. Meanwhile up in Seattle a tight-knit crew of longhairs went about melding hardcore and metal. We know how that turned out too. By 1990 the Grammys featured an "Alternative Music" category.

The Bourdieuan pattern of unity-through-opposition, success for a few, and subsequent splintering repeated itself a number of times in non-mainstream musical fields of the 80s and 90s. But as I look back on the 00s, and especially the past five years, I can't find any instances of that pattern, perhaps because I can't think of a single example of a unified "scene," big or small. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but it seems to me that cyber-formations have subsumed localities, that tastemakers have come to value heteroglossia more than stylistic purity, that laptops have morphed into laboratories for impossibly vast soundscapes.

I came of age as a listener during this time of change. I learned to love music with headphones on, and I only know about the American underground of the 80s because I read Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life. Music was never a social experience for me.

If I feel sad about that, am I guilty of bogus nostalgia?

Probably. I can't help myself. I hold out hope that somewhere, on some Thursday night in a boring town, kids will converge on a youth center where someone has set up a PA, and some shitty band, not long for this world, will play a loud, frenzied set that won't end until the cops show up.

Reader Stereotypes

2009-12-20T07:30:00.000-08:00

A blogger named Lauren Leto has assembled a fine list of reader stereotypes. How does she describe people who call Ayn Rand their favorite author? "Workaholics seeking validation."

Shakespeare? "People who like bondage."

Bull's-eye.

Allow me to propose some additions. (If you're easily offended, go away.)

Phillip K. Dick
Bifocaled employees of independent bookshops in the Bay Area.

Nora Roberts
College-educated mothers whose kids mock her for watching The American President every third Friday.

John Milton
Agnostic college professors with beards. Not the facial kind of beards.

Barbara Kingsolver
English teachers who spend the first two weeks of every summer beginning and abandoning novels about plucky, brainy, insecure young women attempting to escape stultifying domestic situations.

Anton Chekhov
Unremarkable MFA students.

William Faulkner
Posers.

Marcel Proust
Girls I hit on. Guys who hit on me.

Errata

2009-12-17T07:30:00.000-08:00

Ben Franklin doesn't dwell on regret. (Most of the time.)

... were it offered to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some faults of the first...

The rub: We don't get to relive our lives. But we do, time willing, get to write autobiographies.

... the Thing most like living one's Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life; and to make that Recollection as durable as possible, the putting it down in Writing...

Autobiography can be a do-over, a fair copy.

How heavily does Ben Franklin "edit" his life? Well, he doesn't seem to lie. (Often.) He admits to a few mistakes. (Surely not all. How about that mistress in France, Ben?) He calls these "Errata," a term for printing errors.

Printing errors are correctable.

Labeling his mistakes "Errata" has the effect of bracketing them. These don't go with the rest.

It's a public confession in which the sinner is pre-forgiven, because we know, as eighteenth-century readers knew, that Ben Franklin is speaking. Honest Ben. Industrious Ben.

The Ben we know only as the protagonist of the Autobiography.

Approaching Anew

2009-12-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

Lyrics from "The House That Guilt Built," a mini-song by The Wrens:

It's been so long
Since you've heard from me
Got a wife and kids
That I never see
I'm nowhere near
Where I dreamed I'd be
I can't believe
What life's done to me

Some parts of the above apply to my recent life. Others don't.

Here's the deal: new material on Sunday and Thursday mornings, fewer conventional music reviews, more randomness. The posts will be shorter and probably more oblique.

To quote Ronald Jenkees, "It might be cool, I don't know. And if it's not, I don't care."

Listen Closely: Micachu and the Shapes

2009-06-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

Things sure have changed here on Morrison's Mountain.

My girlfriend and I moved out of our San Francisco apartment on Saturday. UHaul is great, by the way. Great if you like half-broken graffiti-spattered trucks, surly employees, and loose interpretations of "guaranteed reservation."

Now I'm lazing about in my girlfriend's parents' backyard in Santa Rosa. Four days from now I finish my career as a tutor and begin my stint as an unemployed grad-student-to-be.

I just wrote a sarcastic letter to UHaul and now I'm embarking on a new project, a reflection on fifteen albums that shaped me as a listener. I do this kind of thing in the interstices of my life. Thinking about the past comforts me, secures my position in time.

That post will be up by the end of the week.

In the meantime, enjoy a silly little video for a silly little song called "Golden Phone" by Micachu and the Shapes, whose recent album Jewellery contains some of the weirdest, catchiest indie pop of the year:

How perfect is that Game Boy hook at 0:37? And the breakdown at 1:36?

Like all of the best songs on Jewellery ("Lips," "Calculator"), "Golden Phone" sounds like it was put together with scraps from the kiddie music junk heap. And somehow everything fits.

Listen Closely: Grizzly Bear

2009-05-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

Grizzly Bear already gets too much hype, but the Brooklyn band's new album Veckatimest is too good, and the following video for the single "Two Weeks" too creepy, to ignore:

Kinda yucky, right?

Other potential singles on Veckatimest include "Southern Point," "Cheerleader," "Ready, Able," and "While You Wait for the Others." Even filler tracks like "About Face" and "Hold Still" sound exquisite through (non-iPod) headphones.

If you listen to one indie rock album in 2009, this should be it.

Enlightened Paranoia

2009-05-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

I have here in my hand a list of two-hundred and five... a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.
~ Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950

I have, my brethren, an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, etc., of the officers and members of a Society of Illuminati (or as they are now more generally and properly styled Illuminees) consisting of one hundred members, instituted in Virginia, by the Grand Orient of France.
~ Reverend Jedediah Morse, 1799

In History class, high schoolers learn that Joseph McCarthy was a bad man and that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were great men. They are encouraged to pluck McCarthy out of the river of history and say, "This one doesn't belong."

But the truth is he does belong. McCarthy's style of thinking, writing, and speaking has ample precedent in American history. The first historian to show this was Richard Hofstadter, whose essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was a multidisciplinary blockbuster in 1964.

Hofstadter puts a name to McCarthy's rhetorical mode - "the paranoid style" - and traces its history from anti-Illuminists like Jedediah Morse to anti-Communists like McCarthy. The "central preconception of the paranoid style," says Hofstadter, is "the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character."

In a paragraph not unsuited to an essay about eighteenth-century novels of seduction, Hofstadter describes the "enemy":

... he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

The implication is that such a man does not exist. Paranoiacs and novelists, perhaps in cahoots, invent different versions of him every couple of decades. He was an Illuminist in the 1790s. In the mid-1800s, a Freemason. And a Muslim now.

Hofstadter's essay typifies a kind of historical discourse that surfaced in the post-war academy, one that engages in present-day issues without a pretense of neutrality. Hofstadter makes no bones about his liberal sympathies. Early in the essay he cites the contemporary "Goldwater movement" as an example of "how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."

The very term "paranoid style" reflects a bias. The so-called paranoiacs, who at certain times in history made up entire political parties, wouldn't call their discourse paranoid. They'd call it reason.

So would we, if they had been right. But Hofstadter's paranoiacs flamed out one by one, exposed as delusionals, exaggerators, or outright liars. Jedediah Morse's list of Virginian Illuminati was never authenticated, and McCarthy's fear of a Communist takeover never had a chance at coming true.

What Hofstadter misses is how often the paranoid style appears in "legitimate" political discourse, especially during the all-important second half of the 1700s. Take, for instance, this juicy passage from George Washington's Farewell Address:

... as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth [that the unity of government is of the utmost importance]; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness...

Here we have the hallmarks of the paranoid style: an evocation of a widespread, masterfully executed conspiracy; an enemy who operates "constantly and actively," "covertly and insidiously." And yet Washington's Farewell Address rarely comes up in discussions of the paranoid style. Hofstadter doesn't even mention it.

Which is weird. The Farewell Address is one of the most ubiquitous American speeches. Every year on the observance of Washington's birthday a different senator reads the speech in legislative session; last year Mike Johanns, the Republican senator from Nebraska, did the honors.

Perhaps familiarity conceals the vehemence of the speech's rhetoric.

Or maybe since Washington declines to specify an enemy, his tone doesn't seem truly paranoid. Say he had singled out the Illuminati, or the Jacobins: he would have seemed like more of a conspiracy-monger.

But his formulation of the enemy is vague enough to apply to any "anti-American" group. Hence the durability of the Farewell Address. In 1954, Joseph McCarthy would have seen red in the passage about covert and insidious "external enemies." And imagine the effect of the same words on the congressional audience in February 2002, when suspicion of Islamic terrorists - and, shamefully, Muslims in general - had reached its height.

If Washington's Farewell Address annually revives the paranoid style in our government, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence inscribed it on the birth of our nation.

U.S. history buffs might balk at this characterization of the Declaration. After all, the most vocal paranoiacs of late eighteenth century, from Jedediah Morse to Harvard theologian David Tappan, were Jefferson's political rivals. In a much-reprinted letter, Jefferson characterizes the writings of Augustin Barruel, an anti-Illuminist who influenced Morse, as "the ravings of a Bedlamite."

But the paranoid style was a common mode of expression at the time, and it slips into the flabby midsection of the Declaration. For eighteen paragraphs, which teachers often tell students to skip, Jefferson enumerates the wrongs perpetrated by King George III. "He" attempted to turn our military against us. "He" razed our towns and destroyed our lives. "He" incited the Indians to rebellion.

This singling out of one identifiable evildoer is a convention of the paranoid style. As Hofstadter puts it:

The paranoid's interpretation of history is... distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will.

The final draft of the Declaration is extreme enough in this respect, but Jefferson's first draft goes even further. He blames the king not only for the "piratical warfare" of the slave trade, but for the slave insurrections that rocked plantations in the late 1700s. Perhaps sensing the extravagance of these claims, Jefferson wraps up with a "strange-but-true!" appeal, standard in paranoid discourse:

Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay a foundation so broad and so undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom.

All of this was edited out. It's possible that the editors, members of the Second Continental Congress, doubted the accuracy of Jefferson's accusations. More likely, however, they refused to sign a document that condemned the slave trade. They sort of dug the slave trade.

You might be surprised that Washington's Farewell Address and Jefferson's Declaration of Independence employ the paranoid style. The word "paranoia" connotes at best intellectual laziness, at worst psychological abnormality. In the eighteenth century, however, paranoid thinking was considered up-to-date, even enlightened.

The historian Gordon Wood gives the clearest explanation of this surprising idea. He locates the philosophical foundation of the paranoid style in the Enlightenment, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural movement:

The work of John Locke and other philosophers opened reflective minds to the startling supposition that society, though no doubt ordained in principle by God, was man's own creation - formed and sustained, and thus alterable, by human beings acting autonomously and purposefully.

It follows that men could, with the proper use of reason, dissect and understand their world, their own handiwork. A new "science" of history thus emerged, with cause-and-effect as its central mechanism. In Wood's words:

Cause was something that produced an effect; every effect had a cause; the cause and its effect were integrally related. Such thinking created a new world of laws, measurements, predictions, and constancies or regularities of behavior...

In this type of historical analysis every event ("effect") can be traced to a human action ("cause"). This slips easily into what Wood calls "conspiratorial interpretation" and what Hofstadter terms "the paranoid style": a tendency to attribute events "to the concerted designs of willful individuals."

If something bad happens, someone must be responsible. And if something bad happens on a massive scale (the Reign of Terror in France, 9/11), the culprits must be numerous and well-organized.

As Wood sums it up:

Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man's long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions.

So when Jefferson blamed King George for every evil under the sun, when Washington imagined enemies in "from different causes and from different quarters," when McCarthy ranted about undercover communists in the State Department, when Hillary Clinton spoke of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, they all relied on a rational, "enlightened" framework.

The same framework, used for a very different purpose, underlies these more recent words:

It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

The effect: Barack Obama's victory. The cause: freely acting individuals banding together and acting purposefully.

A conspiracy, one might say.

Listen Closely: Passion Pit

2009-05-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

Passion Pit should annoy me. The squealing synths and kiddie choirs should annoy me. Lead singer Michael Angelakos's voice, well-described by Pitchfork as a "singing-in-your-hairbrush falsetto," should annoy me.

But none of it does. Passion Pit's new album Manners, released to big hype on Tuesday, is full of catchy, exquisitely produced, re-listenable electropop - better in every way than Pit's inconsistent debut EP Chunk of Change.

Check out the vid for the album's first single, "The Reeling":

Second single "Moth's Wings" is flowing through the tubes at the moment, but just wait till "Little Secrets" bum rushes the blogosphere. Explosion potential.

And trend-mongers beware: if these dudes hit top 40 radio, brace for a Vampire Weekend-style backlash.

Not that Chekhov Needs a Defense

2009-05-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

Few professional scribblers would dare to profane Anton Chekhov's short stories, so you have to admire the guts of Justin St. Germain, who in this post calls the Russian doctor a "middling writer." St. Germain himself is an author, and a better one than his taste in fiction suggests.

Here's his well-written, witty, and dead wrong critique of the Chekhov's much-anthologized story "The Lady with the Little Dog":

Let's examine what I seem to recall is the passage the aforementioned colleague mentioned as proof of the story's greatness. It comes toward the end of the second section. The central characters, two lovers having an affair, sit on a bench looking at the sea. (I'm using the Litvinov translation, if anybody cares -- full text here.)

When they got out of the carriage at Oreanda they sat down on a bench not far from the church, and looked down at the sea, without talking. Yalta could be dimly discerned through the morning mist, and white clouds rested motionless on the summits of the mountains. Not a leaf stirred, the grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow roar of the sea came up to them, speaking of peace, of the eternal sleep lying in wait for us all. The sea had roared like this long before there was any Yalta or Oreanda, it was roaring now, and it would go on roaring, just as indifferently and hollowly, when we had passed away. And it may be that in this continuity, this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, of the continuous movement of life on earth, of the continuous movement toward perfection.

Side by side with a young woman, who looked so exquisite in the early light, soothed and enchanted by the sight of all this magical beauty--sea, mountains, clouds and the vast expanse of the sky--Gurov told himself that, when you came to think of it, everything in the world is beautiful really, everything but our own thoughts and actions, when we lose sight of the higher aims of life, and of our dignity as human beings.

It appalls me that this passage might be offered as evidence of greatness. A man looking at the sea and pondering his own mortality? The sea will go on roaring after we have all passed away? The actual phrases "the eternal sleep lying in wait for us all" and "when you came to think of it, everything in the world is beautiful really," the latter coming in the same sentence as that bathetic bit about losing sight of our dignity as human beings? Do I really need to go on? If any of these same Chekhovophiles read that second paragraph in an undergraduate story, they'd likely run a big red X right through it and write "cliche!" in the margins. But because a Russian doctor wrote it a hundred years ago, it's supposed to be profound? Sweet holy me on a bicycle!

This is typical of Chekhov's attempts at pathos, which generally take the form of middle-class characters staring at something, the ocean or a landscape or a looking-glass, and thinking about the tragedy of their own lives. What his adorers offer up as evidence of his profound human insight strikes me as a bunch of bullshit bourgeois ennui about infidelity and mortality, a sort of prototype and justification for reams of subsequent pap about scions of suburban gentry moving to Manhattan, getting divorced, and meditating on their own meaninglessness. No wonder an entire generation of tenured professors worshiped at his feet.

And here's a revised version of the reply I posted on St. Germain's blog:

Hi Justin,

I like your blog and what I've seen of your fiction. When I worked at ZYZZYVA, I helped publish your wonderful short story "Tortolita."

My friend Michael Berger told me about this post because he figured it would piss me off. It didn't, mostly because you make your argument in the spirit of fun.

But since I'm a member of what you call the Chekhov fan club, I feel obligated to defend him. Apparently I've been seduced by his romanticization of bourgeois slackers and his condescension to dumb muzhiks. And I was introduced to his work by a creative writing professor. In other words, I fit the profile. Fifteen years from now I'll probably move to a Manhattan loft with my 21 year-old mistress, my scotch collection, and my self-pity.

Incidentally, does Saul Bellow rub you the wrong way?

Let me start with "The Lady with the Little Dog," a wise and delicate story you've dismissed (seemingly) for a single reason: the perceived shallowness of Gurov's "epiphany," which occurs halfway through the story. The trouble is you've oversimplified how Chekhov uses this epiphany. It's a tool for characterization, not an opportunity for the author to make his own profound observations. Gurov's insights in his moment of exultation aren't meant to be deep or even accurate.

So with that in mind, let's go back to the paragraphs you quoted. As the lone modifier ("Gurov reflected") indicates, we're close to Gurov's point of view. Very close, in fact: Chekhov was one of the pioneers of free-indirect discourse, a mode of third-person narration that "quotes" characters' thoughts without quotation marks.

So those treacly phrases - "eternal sleep lying in wait," "everything was beautiful" - belong not to Chekhov but to Gurov. Gurov perceives "eternity" in the sea. Gurov suddenly thinks everything is beautiful in the world. Chekhov isn't trying to blow our minds. He's just showing what Gurov, a well-educated but somewhat shallow man, thinks about as he sits with his new mistress staring at the ocean.

The forced extravagance of Gurov's thoughts makes more sense when you consider how mundane he finds his affair, how much he wants to experience loftier feelings. Toward the beginning of the story he fantasizes about "stories of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains," and indulges "the tempting thought of a quick, fleeting liaison, a romance with an unknown woman, of whose very name you are ignorant."

But quickly he learns her name: Anna Sergeevna. He finds her naïve and awkward. After they have sex for the first time, he behaves coldly:

There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

When Anna's post-coital guilt sets in, she tries to talk about it, but Gurov is unreceptive.

Gurov was bored listening, he was annoyed by the naïve tone, by this repentance, so unexpected and out of place; had it not been for the tears in her eyes, one might have thought she was joking or playing a role.

Nothing about this affair is mysterious or majestic. So as Gurov looks down on the sea with Anna, he tries to lend some poetry to his situation, some beauty. He wants to see himself as a romantic hero, not a middle-aged creeper who takes advantage of a naïve married woman.

Gurov and Anna continue to seek out spectacular natural vistas, because "their impressions each time were beautiful, majestic." Without these vistas, without the flattering light nature casts on their time together, they'd be a pair of dirty bodies in a hotel room.

When the first phase of their relationship ends, Gurov feels he has deceived Anna and perhaps himself:

... he had been affectionate with her, and sincere, but all the same, in his treatment of her, in his tone and caresses, there had been a slight shade of mockery, the somewhat coarse arrogance of a happy man, who was, moreover, almost twice her age. She had all the while called him kind, extraordinary, lofty; obviously, he had appeared to her not as he was in reality, and therefore he had involuntarily deceived her...

In an affair full of various kinds of deception, Gurov's "epiphany" is a clever, subtle self-deception.

But the story isn't close to done. In the most unexpected development of all, Gurov ends up legitimately falling in love with Anna - or more accurately he falls in love with his memory of her, a memory that probably glosses over the boredom, the tawdriness, the deception.

Though I find all of this wonderful, I'd never demand that you feel the same way. But since you're a literary writer, a professional in the field, shouldn't you dig a bit deeper into the text before you dismiss it?

By the way, the Litvinov translation you use doesn't do any favors to Chekhov's prose. Pevear and Volokhonsky's version, which I quoted from, goes down way smoother.

As for your comments about Chekhov's place in the canon, your "tenuous theory" that he came into favor because he represented a "safe kind of different" is more tenuous than you think. Chekhov appears on syllabi because lots of fairly bright people (William Maxwell, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and all those damn professors) study his stories over and over, and find them to be exceptionally well crafted.

Chekhov doesn't have the commitment to philosophical discourse of Dostoevsky or the panoramic ambition of Tolstoy, but with the short story, novella, and (let's not forget) dramatic forms, he did a number of new and remarkable things. I already mentioned his use of free-indirect discourse. His plots, especially toward the end of his career, take on shapes that have no precedents in the canon. The characters in his stories and novellas have the kind of self-contradictory yet self-consistent psychologies that previously existed only in novels. He's incredibly efficient.

And most importantly, he's unselfish enough to let his characters be themselves. Let me explain what I mean by this. Chekhov never makes his characters think more nobly or intelligently than they should. If a character is stupid, Chekhov's narration absorbs that stupidity and makes no excuses for it. Chekhov doesn't step in and say, "Okay, reader, I totally know this character is a dumbass." Tolstoy might do that, because Tolstoy, in addition to being one of the best writers ever, had a hell of an ego. But Chekhov simply gives us the character.

And in "The Lady with the Little Dog," he's unselfish enough to step aside and let Gurov make his meretricious observations about nature and mortality.

Such are the virtues taught in creative writing classes, and with Chekhov these virtues come conveniently packaged in short stories. I don't know about your writing professors, but none of mine ever assigned a novel.

And that does bother me. I agree that Chekhov and his descendants - Mansfield, Cheever, Munro - are too dominant in creative writing programs. I'd like to see some pre-19th-century literature on the reading list. And some Charles W. Chestnutt, an underrated writer you mention. And some speculative fiction. And some mainstream pap. And some avant garde bullshit. Writers-in-training need variety, and one or two Chekhov stories will do. Reading in school is all about the quick sample.

But if you want to prove that Chekhov is a "middling writer," you'd better write a longer post.

*UPDATE*
Justin took up that challenge here with wit and grace. He's still wrong.

Listen Closely: St. Vincent

2009-05-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

The noun "grower" has a few colloquial meanings that might surprise you.

If you Google "grower," the third result will be "The Marijuana Grower's Handbook."

Enter it into Urban Dictionary, the linguistic Wild West of the Internet, and you'll find this definition: "A penis that gets a lot bigger during an erection."

But I'm more interested in the musical meaning of "grower": that is, "an album that gets better with time," especially one that strikes the listener as odd and unsuccessful on the first listen.

Radiohead's Kid A is a recent example of a grower. Nobody expected a rock album, much less a Radiohead album, to embrace mellow electronic textures and avant garde knob-twiddling. Many early reviews had a tone of baffled disappointment.

Nowadays Kid A is widely considered the best album of the new millennium.

St. Vincent ain't no Thom Yorke, but her album Actor, released last week, is a big-time grower. My first listen left me cold. The jagged songs, with their awkward rhythms and sudden blasts of noise, seemed unmemorable to me.

A few days later, I listened to the album again. I was intrigued. I didn't know why.

On my third listen, the thing came together. The off-kilter hooks revealed their catchiness, the lyrics began to make emotional sense, the separate tracks cohered.

It's wrong to excerpt from it, but I have to give you a sample:

There's something viscerally unsettling about that video. And about St. Vincent herself, with her Bambi eyes and her eye-of-the-hurricane voice. She should be wildly famous.

Wavves Suxx

2009-05-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

The most divisive new figure in indie rock is a 22 year-old San Diegan named Nathan Williams. Under the nom du GarageBand of Wavves, he records lo-fi noise pop that will never, ever go mainstream.

And that's part of his appeal. The connoisseur need not worry about the dingy neighborhood coffeehouse of Williams's music being overrun by strollers.

Reviews of Wavves read like either ecstatic whispers ("Psst! Listen to this!") or world-weary takedowns ("I knew Lou Barlow, Lou Barlow was a friend of mine, and you, Nathan Williams, are no Lou Barlow"). Just look at the Metacritic page for Wavves' almost-eponymous LP Wavvves: the ratings range from 100 to 40.

In a recent Washington Post interview, the lead singer of another noisy lo-fi band called Psychedelic Horseshit worked himself into rage about Williams's success: "Wavves is getting $30,000 to [expletive] crank out this [expletive] generic [expletive]." The poor guy even made a t-shirt that said, "WAVVES SUXX."

When Stereogum, the influential indie rock blog, posted excerpts of this interview, the message boards lit up.

... if any of you have seen Wavves live you would understand only a monster could hate them, and specifically Nathan Williams. he's fucking adorable. he dresses like a middle school skater, he has the face of a 14 year old AND he's tiny. totally 'put-in-pocket' adorable. also he makes fun music.
~ Mandy

wavves is easily one of the least deserving bands to ever receive any degree of attention. I've seen them live, and if you're not drunk, stoned, or an asshole, it's impossible to ignore the fact that they sound like your little brothers punk band
~ chris

For those who don't keep up with indie rock culture, all of this jealousy and anger and defensiveness probably seems baffling. It's only a matter of taste, right?

Well, not exactly. It's also about identity, self-perceived intelligence, and community. Say you love Wavves. You have a passion for scuzzy pop-punk (identity) and you've earned that passion through open-mindedness and close listening (intelligence). You "discovered" Wavves on some random blog page and emailed the link to your buddies (community).

Then some critic comes along and trashes Wavves. Points out that Nathan Williams steals from better bands. Claims that underneath the distortion there isn't much going on. Declares that Wavves fans are just fad-mongers.

You're pissed. This dude has undermined your identity, questioned your intelligence, attacked your community.

All popular bands create tension between listeners, but something in the nature of Wavves' music provokes unusually violent fandom and haterdom. I might as well admit that I'm a hater, though not an especially passionate one. So instead of lashing out troll-style, I'll attempt a reasoned critique.

First, give a quick listen (and try to ignore the happy Chinese dancers):

My basic claim is that this music does not reward repeat listens.

Some people don't think re-listenability is important; they argue that music, like other pop ephemera, can be enjoyed, quickly forgotten, and still considered "great." I'm not sure I understand this perspective. To my mind, the loveliness of living with music, growing with it, is the whole point of buying it in the first place.

My litmus test: a song cannot be great unless the fifth listen is better than the first, and the tenth better than the fifth.

There are a number of ways for music to achieve re-listenability. It can have exceptional detail: with each listen, you uncover new tidbits - a perfect drum fill, a well-chosen word, a change-up in the melody, a correspondence of language and sound.

Or a band can borrow from such a variety of different styles that your favorite songs change according to your mood.

In rare cases, musicianship can maintain your interest, but that's mostly a jazz thing.

Usually re-listenability results from great melodies. Great melodies are durable. I have memorized every note of Daft Punk's "Digital Love"; the song can no longer surprise me; but I will never tire of its melody.

Nathan Williams writes good melodies, not great ones, and that's what does him in. Because there's not much else to recommend his music. No sonic detail, little variety, dumb lyrics, clumsy musicianship.

Amateurism, Wavves fans might argue, is part of the lo-fi aesthetic. Fair enough. But if you're going to cop the Jesus & Mary Chain and Guided by Voices style, you'd better bring some JMC or GBV-grade songwriting.

Also, great lo-fi bands know how to vary their sound, even with a limited pallette. Wavvves - the album, that is - maintains a midtempo, fuzzed-out consistency from the first track to the last. A few dull instrumentals and the slowish, stripped-down "Weed Demon" provide the only changes in pace.

But certain uber-clever music critics think Nathan Williams is a boy genius, as do mobs of indie scenesters. I suspect that many of these people won't have Wavves on their iPods two years from now, but, at the risk of sounding too sure of myself, I should acknowledge that Williams has some talent.

He's good at burying pop melodies under off-putting noise. If you're sharp enough to identify those melodies, you can't help feeling satisfied with yourself. You might say things like, "Ultimately, Nathan Williams is a songwriter in the mold of Brian Wilson," and others might say, "How do you hear the Beach Boys in that? It's just noise." They can't hear properly, but you can. You have taste.

So there's a self-gratifying thrill in finding any semblance of structure in the screeching noise of Wavves.

What's more, the process of discovery takes time and a little work. At first the feedback and megaphone vocals unsettle you. You ask youself, "Is this music?" But then you discover patterns, melodies.

With this discovery, you've been ushered you into an exclusive club, past the graffitied streetfront and the screaming bouncer, but now you ask, What's inside?

Not much, in Wavves' case. The strongest songs on Wavvves are "So Bored," "No Hope Kids," "To the Dregs," and "Beach Demon," and these weaken on post-discovery listens. Other artists write better songs. Williams even subtly ackowledges this in an L.A. Times interview:

If I had recorded "So Bored" in a studio, it would sound like an almost guilty-sounding pop song. You could put it next to some Matchbox 20 and feel real embarrassed about it.

Why "embarrassed"? Because the Matchbox 20 tune would probably hold up on repeat listens. And the Wavves song, stripped of noisy distractions from its mediocrity, might not survive the first.

Listen Closely: The Horrors

2009-05-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

Fan of post-punk and shoegaze? Have fun playing name-that-influence:

Sure, The Horrors sound like every 80s underground band ever. And if you judge them by their lyrics, haircuts, and videos, you'll probably conclude that they're a bunch of d-bags.

But how sweet does that two-note guitar riff sound?

Primary Colours, their second album, dropped on Monday.

Tolstoy, Workshop God

2009-05-03T08:01:00.000-07:00

For giggles, and because I've been brainstorming a YA novel lately, I flipped through Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French's Writing Fiction, a staple in almost every college fiction workshop. Somehow I missed it during my stint as an English major. Maybe my professors were uncomfortable with the concept of a trade manual for writing. You can't teach students to make fiction like you teach cobbler's apprentices to make shoes.

All the same, I wish someone had forced me to read Burroway and Stuckey-French's manual. I would have loudly resisted every one of its gentle prescriptions, spat adjectives like "bourgeois" and "stultifying." I would have generally made an ass of myself, and in the meantime I would have learned how to patch up many of the holes in the rooftops of my first short stories.

Writing Fiction is full of sound advice. One of my favorite tidbits is that interesting characters, characters we feel we "know," tend to be in conflict not only with others but with themselves. They are inconsistent, and consistently so. Some trait of theirs - whether manifested by appearance, thought, speech, or action - contradicts another, and this contradiction becomes integral to their personality, their psychology, their life on the page.

Say, for example, we invent a character, a thirty-five year-old man, let's call him Ralph. Ralph is an accountant. He goes to work in what we imagine to be typical accountant's attire: gray slacks, striped tie, button-down shirt. He keeps a few pens in his chest pocket. His affect is shy, meek. He speaks quietly and nervously, and he's always apologizing.

So far, our friend Ralph isn't very interesting. Sympathetic, perhaps, as shy and awkward characters often are, but not interesting: he acts and looks exactly as we'd anticipate.

But what if I told you that under Ralph's business casual uniform he has granite-cut abs and artery-laced biceps? What if I told you he moonlights as a cage fighter, notorious for red-faced aggression?

You might say I'm laying it on too thick, and you'd be right. But admit it: you're definitely more interested in Ralph now.

For more a more subtle use of this technique, let's look at the first chapters of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Prince Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky (Stiva) has been caught cheating on his wife with their French governess. The wife, as one might expect, freaks out; Stiva, as one might expect, is none too happy with the situation.

And in his imagination he again pictured all the details of the quarrel with his wife, all the hopelessness of his position and, most painful of all, his own guilt.

'No, she won't forgive me and can't forgive me! And the most terrible thing is that I'm the guilty one in it all...'

So far, so predictable. Man cheats, assigns guilt to himself.

But Stiva's train of thought doesn't stop there: "[I'm] guilty, and yet not guilty," Stiva goes on to think. "That's the whole drama." Indeed, he doesn't act like a guilt-ridden man. He continues to savor the sensual pleasures of his princely life. If we backtrack a few paragraphs, we find him rehashing a pleasant dream:

'Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, yes - and the tables were singing Il mio tesoro, only it wasn't Il mio tesoro but something better, and there were some little carafes, which were also women.'

So Stiva admits his guilt, agonizes over it in his waking thoughts, and yet his subconscious self remains sanguine. Consistent inconsistency.

In the next chapter, Tolstoy both clarifies and complicates matters, with what the critic James Wood calls "his massive straightforwardness":

[Stiva] could not deceive himself into believing he repented of his behavior... He repented only that he had not managed to conceal things better from [his wife]. But he felt all the gravity of his situation, and pitied his wife, his children and himself.

Stiva admits that he is guilty, but does not feel guilty. To him, guilt is an external fact rather than an internal state. That's why he has carefree dreams. His sense of responsibility has not penetrated to "the depths of his soul" (to lift one of Tolstoy's pet phrases), has not morphed into an recognition of moral wrongdoing.

At the same time, Tolstoy tells us that Stiva is a "truthful man concerning his own self," truthful insofar as he doesn't pretend to repent. But he's untruthful with himself about the cause of his wife's present unhappiness. He tells himself that the cause wasn't his infidelity but rather the "stupid smile" he gave her when she found him out.

We can see not only that Stiva is wrong about this, but that he should know better. Something, perhaps an instinct to avoid a difficult reckoning with himself, has led him into self-deception.

So Stiva both admits and rejects his guilt, evinces both self-knowledge and self-ignorance. That's the first three pages of the novel. And we haven't even gotten to the disconnect between Stiva's disgruntled political liberalism and his happy-go-lucky personal aristocratism, or his wife's awareness that she loves him more than ever, even as she's packing her suitcases and threatening to skip town.

Tolstoy specializes in internal oppositions, typically between a character's rational conclusions and primal impulses. Stiva knows rationally that he is guilty, but primally does not feel so. His wife's reason tells her to split, but her soul forces her to stay.

In Tolstoy's world, impulse exerts a stronger influence than reason. But as soon as a character acts on an impulse, reason stages a comeback, sometimes bringing shame, sometimes a creative justification.

If Tolstoy's focus on consistent inconsistencies conforms to Burroway and Stuckey-French's advice, it's only because manuals like Writing Fiction derive their tenets from novels like Anna Karenina. Tolstoy is a guest at every writing workshop, often invisible, even uninvited, but always palpably present.

When we write realism, we write in Tolstoy's shadow. When we put scare quotes around "realism," reject it, and rebelliously devote ourselves to surrealism, fabulism, or (God help us) metafiction, we are even more aware of that shadow, because we're tiptoeing around it.

The Thermals Chill Out

2009-04-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Thermals' new record, Now We Can See, is full of major-key melodies and bouncy hooks.

If you have no sense for why this is surprising, listen to the last Thermals release, 2006's The Body, the Blood, the Machine. A big, angry Statement Record, TBTBTM was packed with vicious riffs, rebel yells, and lines like, "They'll pound you with the love of Jesus!"

What a great record. A resuscitation of the old Black Flag spirit. One of the only condemnations of the Bush era in millennial indie rock.

But I never spun TBTBTM more than twice. Certain songs became mixtape stalwarts - the poppy "Returning to the Fold" and "A Pillar of Salt" - but the rest languished in some obscure corner of my iTunes attic.

Recently I sat through the whole album, and it kind of stressed me out. Hutch Harris's vocals consistently scrape the top of his range; the pace is frenetic; cymbals splash over everything. You can admire this music, but you can't make it part of your life.

On Now We Can See, the Thermals scale back their sound, settling into a comfy pocket of a pair of power pop jeans. They make do with two members: Harris pounds out bar chords, and bassist Kathy Foster handles percussion with Meg White-like austerity.

And it sounds like something a couple of (extravagantly talented) kids cooked up in a garage. Overdubs are kept to a minimum, snares crack and echo like real snares.

So the focus shifts to the songs, some of the best in the Thermals canon. The simple chord progressions remind me of the classic hooks on Green Day's Dookie. (Yep, Dookie's a classic. Unbias yourself and listen to the thing.)

Harris has always been one of the smartest lyricists around, and on Now We Can See he rants about past trauma, sudden death, and the clarity of afterlife. Read into this whatever political meanings you wish.

In the meantime, try not to sing along. Just try:

Now We Can See is fated to garner less buzz than its predecessor. There's no behemoth "Pillar"-style single, no scent of Importance, no newsworthiness. Critics are reluctant to rend their sweater vests over the sound of a band settling down. Settling down is bourgeois. Hence the noncommittal 7.8/10 review from Pitchfork. (The Body, the Blood, the Machine earned an 8.5 and a "Best New Music" nod.) Hence the so-so 79/100 rating on Metacritic.com. (TBTBTM got an 84 and a "Universal Acclaim" sticker.)

But I like songs. Now We Can See contains eleven excellent songs. Now We Can See is an excellent album.

Am I missing something?

Left High and Dry

2009-04-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

It's hip to say that "High and Dry," the first single off Radiohead's 1995 album The Bends, can't hold a candle to "Fake Plastic Trees," "Street Spirit (Fade Out)," "No Surprises," or any other ballad the band recorded in the mid and late 90s.

In today's Pitchfork review of Capitol's re-releases of Radiohead's first three albums - the underrated Pablo Honey, the stunning Bends, and the heart-stopping OK Computer - critic Scott Plagenhoef goes as far as to say that "even B-sides such as 'Bishop's Robes' and 'Talk Show Host' come close to matching 'High.'" Perhaps he's thinking about his own interview with lead singer Thom Yorke, in which Yorke claims he "had [his] arm twisted" to include "High and Dry" on The Bends. "It's not bad, you know," Yorke says, "it's very bad."

Not surprisingly, he hasn't sung "High and Dry" in over a decade. The song is the red-headed, rehabbing stepchild Radiohead wants everyone to forget.

Why? It's a bit generic: acoustic-based, gently lovelorn, conventionally structured. On the studio version, guitarist-savant Jonny Greenwood does surprisingly little with his solo. "High and Dry" is no "My Iron Lung" and certainly no "Paranoid Android"; it's simple.

And completely beautiful. The opening strums will transport you back to the first time you heard them - for me, the bitch seat of my older brother's Toyota truck. I was 12, on the way to swim practice. The second verse ended, the electric guitar started chugging, and suddenly, rapturously, the singer swooped up to a falsetto. I almost fainted. That chorus is the loveliest thing to come out of Thom Yorke's throat.

Yet Yorke and critics alike have disowned "High and Dry." In the wake of the capital-A Art of OK Computer and Kid A, no one wants to call Yorke a pop songwriter, or Greenwood a rock guitarist. But Yorke is a fine pop songwriter, and Greenwood is an amazing rock guitarist. And no, they aren't sonic revolutionaries. They steal from R.E.M., steal from Pixies, steal from Portishead, steal from Britpop and shoegaze, steal from Aphex Twin and Autechre. They synthesize influences brilliantly, better than anyone else, but mostly they distinguish themselves with rhythm, melody, and passion. Just like the Beatles did.

Sometime in 1995, Radiohead unfurled "High and Dry" on the BBC's Later with Jools Holland. Listen to how Greenwood, the skinny dude with the black Sam the Sheepdog hair, single-handedly gives the song an edge. At 3:06 he will melt your face with, like, four notes.

In what way, exactly, is that song not awesome?

John Donne and All the Ladies

2009-04-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

Before discussing the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne, I'd like to offer something for the ladies. The band: Flight of the Conchords. The song: "Ladies of the World."

You may not believe folk parody has anything to do with Renaissance poetry, but that's okay: John Donne and his fellow metaphysical loons were all about dubious comparisons. God is a tear-filled bottle. A flea is a marriage temple. One's soul, a drop of dew.

So indulge me when I say that "Ladies of the World" is quite similar to the Donne poem "The Indifferent," excerpted below. Both belong to what I call the "all the ladies" genre, which the Beach Boys' "California Girls" exemplifies and the Beatles' "Back in the USSR" parodies.

The Indifferent

I can love both fair and brown,
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,
Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,
Her who believes, and her who tries,
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork, and never cries;
I can love her, and her, and you, and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.

In other words, the speaker doesn't discriminate. He likes 'em fat ("whom adundance melts") and thin ("whom want betrays"), shy ("who loves loneness best") and brassy ("who masks and plays"). He'll do blonds as well as brunettes, farm girls as well as city girls. If she has a vagina and knows how to use it ("so [long as] she be not true [i.e., faithful]"), he'll go for her.

There's more than a little chest-pounding in this. As Professor Avery pointed out on Tuesday, it's as if the speaker is bragging to a group of courtiers, carefully portraying himself as an indifferent cavalier, daring and sexually potent, a man's man. He's performing a type of masculinity.

But then the mask slips, or is replaced by another:

Will no other vice content you?
Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?
Or have you all old vices spent, and now would find out others?
Or doth a fear that men are true torment you?

The group has dispersed, and now he addresses one woman. His tone becomes intimate. Instead of making broad, bold statements, he asks pointed questions. Ostensibly he wants information - why do you spurn my advances? - but his interrogation seems better designed to unsettle her, to make her wonder what's real and what's gamesmanship. The reader wonders the same.

His last question gets to the heart of the matter: "... doth a fear that men are true torment you?" Are you afraid that men are all talk? That if you make yourself available to me, I'll back up and say, "Whoa, I'm married"? That courtly life and poetry are just games with no reference points in reality?

The central theme of Renaissance art was the relationship of artifice and actuality. Courtiers and courtier poets constructed elaborate surfaces of clothes, manners, and words. They knowingly fashioned their public selves, and the performance itself was supposed to be pleasing, sufficient; the reality beneath the pomp remained demurely unknown.

"The Indifferent" enacts this kind of self-fashioning/self-concealment in its "all the ladies" stanza, but then turns itself inside-out. The question of whether "men are true" is aimed not only at the woman, but at the entire project of courtly culture, the obsession with artifice.

At the same time, "The Indifferent" remains a smooth, cohesive performance. Despite his subtle self-critique, the speaker adheres to his purpose: to seduce the woman. He assures her that men are not faithful, so please, "be not you so," and "bind me not." He claims that Venus, the Roman goddess of love, punishes those "[p]oor heretics in love... / Which think to 'stablish dangerous constancy."

But he also says, "I... came to travail [i.e., grief] thorough you." Really? The "indifferent" courtier grieving over a woman?

Thus the speaker keeps the woman, as Donne keeps the reader, off balance. He puts on a performance, hints at reality, and suggets that those hints of "reality" are just part of the performance. We still wonder whether "men are true."

Yes, Donne "can love" any lady, all the ladies. But he may want to love only one.

Hanson, Snobbery, and Growing Up

2009-04-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

The popularity of Hanson, the trio of flaxen-haired Midwestern brothers who foisted "MMMBop" on the world in 1997, turned me into a snob.

I was thirteen. I had just signed up with one of those CD clubs that rewarded you for joining by sending you twelve CDs for the price of one. In my first package, I got R.E.M.'s Murmur and Weezer's Pinkerton, staples for indie snobs in training. The less hip Ace of Base and TLC also arrived in that package, but hey, I was a beginner at connoisseurship. One thing I knew for sure, though, was that Hanson sucked.

(Digression: BMG Music Service, the last of the great CD clubs, stopped accepting new members last year. There should be some kind of massive public observance, like the one for the Notorious B.I.G. in Brooklyn, except instead of bouncing to "Hypnotize," mourners should throng the sidewalks of Park Slope and Noe Valley pushing their strollers and pumping their fists to Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping.")

I knew Hanson sucked because girls my age loved the band. They decorated their view binders with heavily airbrushed pictures of Taylor, Isaac, and Zac. During class they passed around tattered copies of Tiger Beat and discreetly giggled. They wrote "HANSON" in glittery ink on their JanSport backpacks. At lunch they took turns with a portable CD player, each girl getting approximately 15 seconds of headphone bliss. They were spinning Hanson's album Middle of Nowhere, specifically "MMMBop."

Ah, "MMMBop." The best of pop songs, the worst of pop songs. Here I will attempt to transcribe the chorus:

Mmm-bop, dop bah doo-bop,
Dooby-wah dah doo-bop,
Dop bah doo, yeah-ee yeah-ah.
Oom-bop, dop bah doo-bop,
Dooby-wah dah doo-bop,
Dop bah doo, yeah-ee yeah-ah.

Possibly the stupidest thing ever sung, but also brilliant. This gobbledigook, set to the purest of major-key melodies, is one of the most potent earworms in music history.

An earworm is a musical phrase - a riff, a snatch of melody, a drumbeat - that wriggles into your head and won't wriggle out. Everyone is susceptible to earworms, but some people are acutely, pathologically so. Leo Rangell, featured in this fascinating RadioLab podcast, claims that his "phonological loops" are frighteningly precise, almost exact replicas of the remembered sound.

"MMMBop" makes Leo Rangells of us all. The song is twelve years old, as familiar to me as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, yet every time I listen to it I spend the rest of the day helplessly bopping to my mind's reproduction of the chorus. As I type this, I'm blasting Camera Obscura, a band with earworm powers of its own, but I'm hearing, in the echo chamber of my brain, "Dooby-wah dah doo-bop." Over and over.

Whether sheer catchiness makes a song good or merely annoying, I don't know. In 1997, I would have screamed, "Annoying!" But I never troubled myself to listen to "MMMBop" all the way through. Now that I have, I know it's more than a jingle. In its LP version, the song stretches a whole four-and-a-half minutes. The radio version snips off thirty seconds, but still, in the land of teen pop, four minutes = eternity.

The Hansons make use of their time. In the verse after the first chorus ("Plant a seed, plant a flower, plant a rose..."), they change up the melody, with lead heartthrob Taylor jumping an octave and older bro Isaac filling in the lower end with a harmony. These kids know how to push a pop song, how to build intensity through variation. They don't just rinse and repeat.

A recent acoustic performance by the all-grow'd-up brothers, shown in the video below, casts "MMMBop" in its best light. The slower tempo brings to light some intricacies that the studio recording buries under overdriven guitars and clumsy scratching. Listen for the sweet little interlude that starts at 4:44 and extends to 5:22. The harmonies, always the best aspect of Hanson's sound, have the feel of improvisation, of spontaneous fun. Taylor overcooks his vocals a bit, but that's part of his and his brothers' charm: they're really, really earnest.

(After a maudlin speech, the song begins at the two-minute mark.)

Maybe it's an act, but after a dozen years and countless repetitions, the Hanson boys still seem to enjoy their most famous song.

And that's what sets Hanson apart from other boy bands: an evident love of music. Unlike, say, the execrable Backstreet Boys, Hanson is a band, not a lip-syncing dance crew. Taylor plays piano and bongos, Isaac lead guitar, Zac drums. Put them in a garage with some instruments, and they'd stand a chance of entertaining you. Add a skeezy older bassist, and they can nearly drown out a mob of squealing girls.

Compared to today's Tiger Beat cover boys, the Disney-engineered Jonas Brothers, the Hanson guys seem scrappy, homegrown, almost pop purists. Now that their fame has faded, they release albums on an independent label and play small venues. It's hard, even a little funny, to imagine the Jonas Brothers doing the same.

One of these days Hanson just might put out an excellent power-pop record. If matched with a producer wise enough to minimize overdubs, they could end up with something like Matthew Sweet's wonderful, under-remembered Girlfriend.

Maybe then I'll write "HANSON" in silver ink on my Samsonite backpack.

And totally creep everyone out.

Listen Closely: "Take My Life" by Deleted Scenes

2009-03-27T18:07:00.000-07:00

Deleted Scenes have a lovely way of extending, or rather milking, their songs. Instead of relying on traditional verse-chorus structures, they split their songs into sections - soft and loud, slow and uptempo, spare and ornate.

Unlike most bands that attempt this style (see: prog rock), Deleted Scenes don't just slap together several half-baked ideas and call it "epic." Each track on Deleted Scenes' debut LP Birdseed Shirt makes internal sense: melodies are introduced, abandoned, and brought back in altered form; licks are passed from instrument to instrument; songs build, fade, and build again to a climax.

"Take My Life," the clear standout on Birdseed Shirt, begins unassumingly, with a lone guitar line, a ride cymbal softly marking the downbeats, and one of those barely-can-sing indie dudes cooing about suicide. The guitar chords get fuller, the percussion louder. A whine of feedback can be heard in the background. After the first bridge and chorus, the drummer starts to work his bass pedal and the keyboardist joins with an echo of the original guitar line. The band's swinging now.

In the second chorus, they break out into call and response:

Lead singer: "Take my life"
Backing singers: "My life, my life, my life"
Lead singer: "Day to day"
Backing singers: "Today, today, today"
Lead singer: "Drop me off..."
Lead singer with backing singers: "... in a better place!"

It sounds better than it reads.

The chorus repeats, and then, at the 2:30 mark, something amazing happens. The guitarist flips a distortion switch, the drummer attacks the center of his snare, and the singer belts a new melody.

Sixteen bars later, the band wisely pulls back. With just guitar behind him, the singer chirps, "ba-dum ba, ba-dum, da-dum." But the peace doesn't last long: harmonies accumulate, the rhythm section reenters, and suddenly everybody's shouting "ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum" in the original chorus melody. The lyrics ("Take my life / Day to day...") return, and, right at the summit, the song ends.

No other song on Birdseed Shirt plays in that league, but there are some charming moments: a shape-shifting Menomena-like opener ("Turn to Sand"), a drunken country singalong ("Got God"), and a nimble driving tune ("Ithaca," which you can watch Deleted Scenes play live at the end of this post). The last five songs on the album aren't as well fleshed out as the first six, but all in all Birdseed Shirt is a solid effort from a promising, under-hyped band.

AON Sessions: Deleted Scenes, "Ithaca" from All Our Noise on Vimeo.

Sympathy for the Devil: Rowlandson and Franklin: Part 2

2009-03-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

Click here for part one of this two-part post, in which I wrote about Mary Rowlandson's late seventeenth-century captivity narrative and remarked on her portrayal of her Indian captors. In order to maintain her typically Puritan view of Indians as Satan's minions, she blames them for their unkind acts and credits God for their kind ones.

Rowlandson got the salvation she prayed for. Of course she did. We wouldn't have her story otherwise. And that's the funny thing about captivity narratives: they all have happy endings. The ones with sad endings never became narratives.

The captivity genre remained popular throughout the eighteenth century, but nearly everything else about the New World changed.

In 1670, six years before the Indians kidnapped Mary Rowlandson, the population of the colonies stood somewhere around 111,000. By the turn of the century, that number had more than doubled; by 1760, it had reached 1,600,000.

With the hoards came greater diversity. The original settlements in Massachusetts were overwhelmingly Puritan, but as boatloads upon boatloads of Irishmen, Germans, Dutchmen, and Swedes alighted on American docks, the Puritans gradually became what they had been in mother England: a minority.

The clash between settlers old and new is well represented by an anecdote in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, published at the dawn of the eighteenth century. Mather tells of a young minister who travels to Maine and preaches to a crew of roughneck fishermen. The minister reminds the fishermen to keep sight of the "main end" of their work: the service of God's will. An attendee interrupts him and says, "Sir, you are mistaken, you think you are Preaching to the People at the Bay; our main end was to catch Fish."

Many eighteenth-century immigrants to the colonies were pragmatists first, churchgoers second - or not at all. They had absorbed the ideals of the Enlightenment, a massive cultural movement that posited a rational universe, a benevolent clockmaker God, and an emphasis on the here and now rather than the hereafter.

Religion was by no means abandoned, but a subtle split appeared between the church and "the world." In day-to-day affairs, most people no longer thought of themselves as actors in a divine drama of good and evil (God, stage manager; me, hero; them, villains; goal, heaven). Whereas Rowlandson looked at an Indian and saw Satan, the Enlightenment-era American looked at an Indian and saw an Indian.

If the latter way of thinking seems smarter, more "enlightened" to you, that's only because you, my friend, are a product of the Enlightenment. We all are. Even those of us who stand on street corners shaking Bibles at speeding cars.

The trouble with the Enlightenment ethic is that it asks the individual to make sense of the world without the help of scripture. That's a tough assignment. So much easier to categorize people as either good or evil, to see a mountain and say, "God did that," instead of studying plate tectonics.

But if you're anything like Benjamin Franklin, you prefer difficulty. Franklin is the prototypical Enlightenment-era American. He believed in God (he would've been run out of Philly on a rail if he didn't), but refused to subscribe to any sect but his own, and rarely attended Sunday services. He was deeply pragmatic, and when he wasn't accruing wealth, he was reading, experimenting, seeking to understand earth and life as physical, literal entities. He also liked prostitutes, but that's another story - the unauthorized biography, if you will.

The world of Benjamin Franklin, as represented by his not-always-factual Autobiography, is full of lessons, maxims, and other certainties, but if you put a magnifying glass between the zebra stripes, you'll see some gray areas. Here you will find the DNA of Enlightenment thought.

Take, for instance, his portrayal of William Keith, governor of Pennsylvania from 1717 to 1726. When Franklin arrives in Philadelphia as an ambitious young printer, Keith befriends and encourages him. In a fit of generosity, he offers to help Franklin purchase equipment to set up his own press. Long story short, the governor fails to follow through on various promises, and the eighteen year-old Franklin winds up in England with no money and no prospects.

Had young Ben been a Puritan, he would have viewed this event as a God-authored trial in which Keith represented Satan. But Franklin doesn't think that way. He sums up the governor's character with almost absurd equanimity:

But what shall we think of a Governor's playing such pitiful Tricks, and imposing so grossly on a poor ignorant Boy! It was a Habit he had acquired. He wish'd to please everybody; and having little to give, he gave Expectations. He was otherwise an ingenious sensible Man, a pretty good Writer, and a good Governor for the People, tho' not for his Consituents the Proprietaries, whose Instructions he sometimes disregarded. Several of our best Laws were of his Planning, and pass'd during his Administration.

So let's get this straight. A rich, full-grown man can be both a rogue who strands a teenager in England and "an ingenious sensible Man" who makes good laws. The mind reels.

But that's the Englightenment way. If you assess people on their own terms, you'll find all kinds of distressing contradictions. Every single person is, after all, the hero of his own drama, and heroes are allowed to be complex.

Franklin knew this, and that's why he opened his essay "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America" with the then-stunning insight that, hey, Indians are people.

Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.

These words were published in 1784, a century and two years after the first edition of Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative came out. Times done changed.

Sympathy for the Devil: Rowlandson and Franklin: Part 1

2009-03-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

On a winter day in 1676, a tribe of Indians ransacked the Puritan settlement of Lancaster, Massachusetts, a woodsy hamlet 40 miles west of Boston. They set fire to the minister's house and attacked the fleeing servants and children with clubs, spears, and British guns. The minister himself escaped, but the minister's wife, Mary Rowlandson, was wounded by a bullet and taken captive.

Spring came and went, and in May the Indians sold Rowlandson back to her husband. Six years later, she published an account of her ordeal, which went through several reprints, sold like hotcakes in both New and "old" England, and eventually came to define the genre of the American captivity narrative.

Rowlandson is a lucid, effective writer. Her narrative begins with a graphic description of the attack and proceeds through twenty "removes" into the wilderness. A thoroughly domestic woman, she pays particular attention to her new diet, which consists of ultra-savory items like pancakes "made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease."

But now that was savory to me that one would think was enough to turn the stomach of a brute creature.

Perhaps scared of falling into "brutishness" herself, she thinks constantly of God. In her trusty Bible, she turns to Deuteronomy:

"That then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return thee from all the nations."

She comforts herself with the idea that her captivity is a God-approved trial, a test of her faith. Just as God put Job in the clutches of Satan, He has put Mary Rowlandson in the clutches of the Indians, the Devil's minions. So she must endure like Job. Keep living, and all will be restored.

But there's a problem: in order to keep living, she must coexist for a time with her captors. Out of necessity, she integrates herself into their barter economy, sewing hats and shirts in exchange for food.

Inevitably, she perceives the milk of human kindness in the Indians.

How does she get her hands on a Bible, for instance?

One of the Indians that came from Medfield fight, had brought some plunder, came to me, and asked me, if I would have a Bible, he had got one in his basket. I was glad of it, and asked him, whether he thought the Indians would let me read? He answered, yes.

Doesn't sound like a Satanic savage to me.

Over and over Rowlandson describes Indians treating her with respect and generosity. She also records their atrocities with a certain relish, but to the modern reader, their acts of goodness stand out; those acts undermine Rowlandson's God-versus-Satan, good-versus-evil, Mary-versus-Indian framework.

In the Hollywood version of Rowlandson's narrative, she would come to see her captors as human beings and perhaps begin to question the Puritan take on Christianity. Hollywood loves crises of faith.

But this doesn't happen in Rowlandson's text. She never budges from her belief that Indians are evil incarnate. If one of them gives her food, she attributes the act to God's will. For example, before narrating the scene in which she receives the Bible, she spins off this clever little disclaimer:

I cannot but take notice of the wonderful mercy of God to me in those afflictions, in sending me a Bible.

The Indian did not give her the Bible. That would be impossible. God gave her the Bible through the Indian. Left to his own devices, the Indian would have boiled the book and eaten it.

With the consistency of a woman driven by a single overmastering idea, she blames the Indians for their crimes (mostly petty theft, a common "affliction" of those brought up in economies not based on personal property), and credits God for their kindnesses.

In this way, she keeps her Puritan worldview intact. She can go on thinking that God has placed her in the hands of the Devil's savages in order to test her. She can go on thinking that if she prays and prays, she will be delivered.

To be continued...

If You Dig Nightmares...

2009-03-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

... you should totally watch this Fever Ray video.

From the slow and tense tempos, to the devil-processed vocals, to the clean and cold synths, to the Charles Burns-ish cover art, Fever Ray will creep you out. The new self-titled album tests just how much slithery darkness you can handle. I can handle plenty, apparently.

Why We Like Shakespeare Better Than Spenser

2009-03-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

A college professor of mine once declared Edmund Spenser, the towering 16th-century English poet, the greatest versifier in the English canon. Right, I thought. Better than Shakespeare. Whatevs.

Undergraduates detest Spenser, especially when they read him in a survey course. He comes off as stuffy, ostentatiously "learned," and outdated. Even in his own time he was old-fashioned; he intentionally spelled words in an antique 14th-century manner, and modern editions preserve this infuriating little pretension. He seems the deadest of dead white men.

But my old college professor was pointedly specific in his praise: he called Spenser the greatest English versifier (i.e., manipulator of meter, rhyme, and other poetic forms), not the greatest English poet.

In fact, as a way of showing poor old Edmund's (relative) limitations as a poet, my professor compared two sonnets, one by Spenser and the other by his near contemporary Shakespeare. These poems are similar in their use of a love-as-theater conceit, but worlds apart in terms of complexity, compassion, and, for lack of a better word, wisdom. Observe:

Sonnet 37 (from Spenser's Amoretti)

Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay
My love like the Spectator yldly sits
Beholding me that all the pageants play,
Disguysing diversly my troubled wits.
Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits
And mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy:
Soone after when my joy to sorry flits,
I waile and make my woes a Tragedy.
Yet she beholding me with constant eye,
Delights not in my merth nor rues my smart;
But when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry
She laughes and hardens evermore her hart.
What then can move her? if not merth nor mone,
She is no woman, but a senceless stone.

Sonnet 23 (from Shakespeare's Sonnets)

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart,
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite.
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'er-charged with burden of mine own love's might.
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ;
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

Spenser's sonnet ends on a conventionally misogynistic note: "What then can move her? if nor merth nor mone / She is no woman, but a sencelesse stone." A sonorous couplet, but not exactly thought-provoking. It hems in meaning rather than expanding the realm of possible interpretation. She's a bitch, Spenser says. Period.

The attitude of the speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnet 23 is harder to pin down. Instead of lashing out at his audience/woman for not responding satisfactorily to his on-stage gyrations, he criticizes his own "performance," referring to himself as "an unperfect actor... [w]ho with his fear is put besides [forgets] his part." The very strength of his love saps his strength to communicate that love. Most poets would be happy to let the meaning settle there, in the leafy bower of that pleasant paradox, but Shakespeare pushes on.

In the third quatrain (lines 9-12) he offers his "books" as a superior alternative to the talkative "tongue." Finally, in the all-important concluding couplet, he alters his plea slightly, asking his woman to "hear with eyes." Does he mean to "hear" his written lines? Or to "read what silent love hath writ" in the lines of his face, so that even though he's dumb with stage fright, she'll understand what he means?

Shakespeare uses his final couplet to expand and complicate; Spenser uses his to sum up and solidify.

Okay, fine: that's an oversimplification. Spenser is dizzyingly complex, but usually in ways that only academics can appreciate. He builds levels of meaning through allusions, quibbles with convention, puns, and manipulations of poetic forms. Shakespeare does so by giving us humans who seem real. For that, history has garlanded him from head to toe, and these days we see the greenery of praise more clearly than the proper poet.

So it's hard to admit that in certain respects Spenser lords it over the Bard. Shakespeare is, as far as we can tell from the unreliable manuscripts we have, an occasionally lazy versifier. Even his sonnets, more polished than his play scripts, abound with busted meters and imperfect rhymes. Sometimes one can argue that these inconsistencies contribute to the meaning of the poems; usually one must acknowledge that they are the unfortunate byproducts of hasty composition.

Spenser, on the other hand, is nothing if not meticulous. His rhymes are precise and surprising. His meters trip off the tongue. In his sonnets, every quatrain forms a sentence, every couplet has a pause in the middle, and every enjambment is used advisedly.

Spenser's mastery of versification is most evident in The Faerie Queene, his self-proclaimed masterpiece. Throughout the six long books of this epic poem, he employs a nine-line stanza that contains eight lines of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, alternating stresses) and a concluding alexandrine (twelve syllables, same pattern of stresses). The beautiful, beautiful rhyme scheme goes ababbcbcc. Note how Spenser moves us haltingly forward, from "a" to "b" and back to "a," and then to "b" again, where we linger for two lines. Then we shift to "c," fall back to "b," and push on to the climactic couplet. The feel of this rhyme scheme - two steps forward, one step back - matches the progress-setback-progress structure of Spenser's quest plots.

It's called the Spenserian stanza because, well, you figure it out.

In its inventor's hands, the Spenserian stanza gets manipulated in surprising ways. As Professor Avery mentioned in his lecture on Tuesday, the poet often uses that final line, the alexandrine, to contradict what comes before it. For instance, in the first stanza of the poem's opening canto, Spenser describes a "Gentle Knight... pricking on the plaine" who has little experience in battle ("armes till that time did he never wield") and rides his horse like a man who has spent more time sitting in the gilded chairs of court.

However, in the alexandrine, the poet describes the knight as "fitt" for "knightly giusts [jousts] and fierce encounters." Huh?

At first it's tough to figure out what Spenser's doing, but as you read on, you'll find that he consistently treats the alexandrine as a sort advertisement (to steal Professor Avery's term). The "official company line" is that the Redcrosse Knight, the chivalrous hero of Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, is courageous and skilled in battle. The conventions of the courtly romance demand this. But in the initial eight lines of the stanza Spenser shows that Redcrosse doesn't quite live up to his archetype. More generally, the poet suggests that traditional courtly roles chafe against the way people actually are.

So Spenser, like Shakespeare, had an interest in describing people "as they actually are." Of course, Shakespeare did a much better job of this, and for that reason we call him the greatest English poet. No doubt he deserves the title. One could say he was the most talented poet of his time, but it's more accurate to say he possessed a particular talent in abundance, a talent we happen to value in our own time. He could write people. He could find the best words and put them in the right mouths.

Spenser had his own distinctive talent, a certain mastery of forms. Perhaps because he was so interested in forms like the sonnet and the courtly romance, he couldn't break entirely free of them. He was the consummate courtly poet, a member of the ruling class, a conservative. It took Shakespeare, a Stratford-born playwright who didn't set foot in court except to perform, to say, "Forms? Where we're going, we don't need forms."

"Getting" Old Poetry

2009-03-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

In this post I will lay out my approach to reading an Elizabethan poem. I hope I won't come off too schoolmarmish. It's just that approximately 16 souls in the entire world read 16th-century verse for pleasure, and they're all going to die soon. I'm concerned.

I understand why many people stay away from early modern poetry. It can be intricate and arcane. Some attractive elements of prose fiction - character, suspense, realistic speech - go missing in lyric forms like the sonnet and the ode. Sometimes after finishing a poem by Shakespeare or Spenser or Sidney you'll say, "So what?" Or just, "What?"

If it helps, not even professors "get" Elizabethan poems on the first try. Their trick? Going through poems more than once. Approaching them as puzzles. Reading them how they were meant to be read. Spenser didn't write "Happy ye leaves when as those lily hands" in a single draft, and he would be outraged if you gave it a single reading. He might even suggest that you be repressed and forced to speak a different language.

Admittedly, Shakespeare might have written "That time of year thou mayst in me behold" in one sitting. But that's only because he was a bastard. A really talented one.

So let's dig into some text. Take a gander at the following sonnet, part of Astrophil and Stella, a mind-blowing sequence of 108 interrelated poems by the late 16th-century Englishman Sir ("Don't Call Me Philip") Philip Sidney.

Sonnet 34

Come, let me write. "And to what end?" To ease
A burdened heart. "How can words ease, which are
The glasses of thy daily vexing care?"
Oft cruel fights well pictured forth do please.
"Art not ashamed to publish thy disease?"
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.
"But will not wise men think thy words fond ware?"
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
"What idler thing, than speak and not be hard?"
What harder thing than smart, and not to speak?
Peace, foolish wit; with wit my wit is marred.
Thus while I write I doubt to write, and wreak
My harms on Ink's poor loss; perhaps some find
Stella's great powers, that so confuse my mind.

On your first reading, pay more attention to punctuation - commas, periods, question marks - than line breaks. Of course, Sidney uses line breaks in interesting ways to create additional levels of meaning, but right now you're striving for basic understanding. Imagine the poem this way:

Come, let me write. "And to what end?" To ease a burdened heart. "How can words ease, which are the glasses of thy daily vexing care?" Oft cruel fights well pictured forth do please. "Art not ashamed to publish thy disease?" Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare. "But will not wise men think thy words fond ware?" Then be they close, and so none shall displease. "What idler thing, than speak and not be hard?" What harder thing than smart, and not to speak? Peace, foolish wit; with wit my wit is marred. Thus while I write I doubt to write, and wreak my harms on Ink's poor loss; perhaps some find Stella's great powers, that so confuse my mind.

If, after reading through the poem once, you grok that some kind of debate between a poet and a skeptic has occurred, you've done a fine job. Now it's time to refine your understanding of the poem's main idea. Eventually you should be able to articulate this main idea in a single colloquial sentence.

During your second read-through, look at the annotations, which any respectable edition of Sidney will have. The Norton anthology offers these clarifications:

Line 3: glasses = mirrors
5: Art = are you
7: fond ware = foolish trinkets
8: be they close = let them (my words) be kept private
9: hard = heard
10: smart = feel pain
11: wit = reason, intellect
12: doubt = hesitate; fear
12: wreak = avenge

Makes matters clearer, huh? Words are the mirrors ("glasses") of Sidney's pain; wise men might find those words foolish trinkets ("fond ware"); Sidney considers keeping them private ("close"); he might speak and not be heard ("hard"); the mini-epiphanies go on. Footnotes rule.

The key is recognizing that Sidney uses "wit" in the Elizabethan sense, to suggest deep-seated reason or intellectual acumen, not facile cleverness. When he orders "foolish wit" to hold its peace, he is seeking to quiet his own inner rational voice. The poem, to put it simpl(isticall)y, stages a debate between the poet's logical and emotional impulses.

If you feel comfortable with the poem now, skim it once more for flow's sake, and jot down the main idea. The note I made in my text reads, "My reason raises all kinds of objections to writing poems, but I continue to write, confused about the whole enterprise, and I hold out hope that some of my poems will make sense of why Stella so confuses me."

Not pretty. Functional. Writing down the main idea is a first step: if you're reading for a class, move on to the next poem; if you're preparing a paper, proceed with further excavations. Much of value could be said about the tension between self-concealment and self-display in Sonnet 34.

Or if you have a jones for history, hit the stacks to find out more about the development of the publishing industry in the late 16th century. Poets like Sidney were just becoming aware that widespread publication of 14-line love poems was a possibility. Earlier in the 1500s, sonnets were kept more private. Courtly poets (Wyatt, Surrey), fearful of ruffling kingly feathers, discreetly distributed their handwritten manuscripts among friends.

But back to my "basic understanding" theme. Sometimes after three readings you'll still be stumped. Move on, if you wish. But if you want to be an English major (I'm talking to you, 460), fire up Word and start translating. Use casual language, even obscenities. Render Sidney in your vernacular. Have zero respect.

Come on, reason, you motherfucker, let me write. "Why should I?" Because I'm sad, dude. My heart is, like, burdened and stuff. "What good can words do? They're mirrors; they just reflect your problems back to you." But sometimes super good poems about super bad shit actually make me feel better. "Won't you be kind of embarrassed when everybody finds out how messed up your are?" No, actually. My messed-up-ness is my most unique quality, and these super good poems are gonna make me famous. "You can't fool the smart kids. They'll see right through your little angsty love poems." Fine, I'll keep them locked in my diary. "But then you'll be wasting your effort. You've got homework to do." But I have to let my feelings out! I'm in pain here! Shut up, reason, you asshole. Your smarty-pants-ness is making me stupid. Because of you I'm all insecure about writing, but I can't stop, and I'm taking it all out on my poor pens (wait, is that phallic?), which are totally running out of ink (yeah, that's phallic). But hell, who knows? Maybe by writing poems I'll find out why this chick Stella is making me crazy. Because that would be fucking useful information.

Let's hope none of my English professors see that.

Listen Closely: "1901" by Phoenix

2009-03-09T18:28:00.000-07:00

The French knob-twiddlers of Phoenix know their way around a three-minute pop song. You can find at least two earworm choruses on each of their albums: United has "Too Young" and "If I Ever Feel Better," Alphabetical "Everything Is Everything" and "Run Run Run," and It's Never Been Like That... tracks one through ten.

The basic Phoenix formula involves layering clean staccato guitar lines over smooth synth chords. It continues to work on "1901," the first single off Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, due in May. Stream and download for free here.

Run on the treadmill to it. Play it through computer speakers while you study. Drive to it. I dare you not to sing along in a goofy French accent.

And if you have $9.99 (or torrent software), add It's Never Been Like That to your iTunes library. I'll never understand why that album didn't dominate college radio in 2006. Not one bad track, at least three great ones.

Locus and Platea

2009-02-24T08:07:00.000-08:00

Locus and platea. Don't those words sound sweet together? Lo-kiss and pla-tay-ah. I'm tempted to rename my blog. Or learn to play the drums so I can start a one-man band and call it Locus and Platea.

To my purpose. The words are most commonly used in criticism on medieval and Renaissance theater, with which you're deeply familiar, of course. "Locus" refers to (approximately) the heart of the stage. There, at a proper distance from the audience, the fictional world of the play roils into being. The "platea" comprises the front part of the stage, where actors occasionally venture to speak to the audience.

So the audience has to strike a tacit agreement with the actors: "When you're back there, you're a king, as your wooden simulacrum of a crown indicates. But when you're up front, you're just speaking to me, probably saying something meaningful and important."

The modern viewer isn't likely to buy into this agreement. If an actor breaks character, all bets are off. Effect, ruined! Disbelief, unsuspended! As Professor Avery said in his lecture last Thursday, we millennials want our representations (i.e., fictional characters) to pretend to be presentations (i.e., real people). So most conventional contemporary plays simply dissolve the platea. All becomes locus.

But back in late medieval England, when craftsmen performed mystery cycles on wagon platforms in town squares, the platea was alive and well. In a 15th-century morality play like Everyman, some lines are meant to be delivered in the locus, others in the platea.

The passage below, in which Everyman gears himself up to meet his maker, has a few of both.

Methink, alas, that I must be gone
To make my reckoning and my debts pay,
For I see my time is nigh spent away.
Take example, all ye that this do hear or see,
How they that I best loved do forsake me,
Except my Good Deeds that bideth truly.

The big shift occurs with the phrase, "Take example." At that moment, one can imagine the actor facing the audience, approaching the front of the stage, and spelling out the message of the play.

Who exactly speaks in the platea? Not Everyman, really; the actor left that dude behind in the locus. Not the actor, because he's just a conduit. The author? Maybe, but 15th-century plays were usually written anonymously and by committee. You might say the voice of the community speaks in the platea. Or the voice of power, or the majority, or the church, or the rich.

A paper could be written, no doubt.

A Lit Geek Live-Blogs the Oscars

2009-02-22T21:03:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to survive an entire Academy Awards telecast, I will record my minute-by-minute observations in this post. Since you are most likely reading this the day after Slumdog Millionaire took Best Picture (ed. note: yes, I wrote this before the ceremony began), take the opportunity to relive all the pomp and circumstance. And the ass-kissing and self-righteousness. And the botox.

I don't cover movies, and for good reason: I hate going to the cineplex. It costs too much, and I haven't been blown away by an American live-action film since You Can Count on Me made me weep in an empty stadium theater near Irvine, California.

But since I occasionally venture into the real world, I still find myself popping Sour Patch Kids in a big dark sloping room several times a year.

In 2008, I saw The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, and Man on Wire, all major players in this year's Oscar sweepstakes.

My quick thoughts:

I found The Dark Knight thrilling but pretentious and affectedly doomy-gloomy. The director, Christopher Nolan, has many talents, but not a light touch. By the by, Heath Ledger probably deserves to win, and he will.
WALL-E, the best movie I saw last year, proves that no studio comes close to Pixar. Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and WALL-E: these are among the most memorable films of the past fifteen years, and not one has been nominated for Best Picture. Anybody else want the Best Animated Second-Class Citizen category to die?
During the reenactment of the Market Street candlelight march at the end of Milk, my throat knotted up. Harvey Milk was a mensch. But the film itself struck me as scattershot.
The last fifteen minutes of Slumdog Millionaire retroactively stink up the rest of the movie. Evidently, the mostly British creators of Slumdog want me, a white English speaker (their target demographic), to leave the theater feeling nice and comfy about Mumbai. How lovely those ghettos look in the evening light! [SPOILER ALERT] Isn't it wonderful how that, er, slumdog gets the girl and the money? Guess we don't have to worry about those poor Indians anymore. They're plugging along just fine.
I have nothing mean and tactless to say about Man on Wire. Excellent documentary.

Here goes.

5:31 PM (PST) Hugh Jackman speechifies, smooches Kate Winslet's hiney. I miss Jon Stewart, who gleefully took the piss out of Hollywood glitterati. Perhaps Jackman will prove more palatable (boring).

5:33 Jackman sings. Whither art thou, Jon Stewart?

5:42 Five presenters for Best Supporting Actress. How will they all get lines?

5:43 By slathering superlatives all over every single actress, apparently. Doesn't the Academy try to shorten the show every year? I don't think I can last five hours.

5:46 Goldie Hawn should totally be on The Real Housewives of Orange County.

5:47 The panegyric for Marisa Tomei contains the line of the night so far: "... a stripper need never take off her dignity with her clothes." Let's hope that, you know, like, inspires strippers everywhere.

5:56 Milk gets Best Original Screenplay, probably for reasons far removed from the quality of the writing.

5:58 You know why I watch the Oscars? To have some random screenwriter tell me that gay people are beautiful. Because that's not something I can or should learn when I'm not watching the Academy Awards.

6:02 A white English dude accepts an award for the gritty, super authentic Slumdog Millionaire, which tells white people everything they need to know about India. He thanks all the real Indians who taught him about the real India.

6:03 Jennifer Aniston, all botoxed up, stumbles over her lines while presenting for the Pixar category. Seconds later, producers cut to Angelina Jolie faking a laugh in her front-row seat. Oh, producers.

6:06 WALL-E takes Best Picture! Or Best Animated Feature Film. Whatever.

6:09 Hey, I saw "Oktapodi" and "Presto," both up for Best Animated Short Film. They were awesome. Not relying on big money does wonders for art.

6:10 The very Japanese winner for Best Animated Short Film, who bravely attempts a few English phrases, makes a "Mr. Roboto" reference. I love this category. The Academy should move it to the end of the show.

6:17 If anyone outside of the art director's support group cares about the art direction category, I'd be shocked.

6:19 If anyone outside of the fashion industry cares about the costume design category, I'd be shocked.

6:20 My girlfriend on Sarah Jessica Parker: "She's really just forehead and boobs tonight, isn't she?"

6:32 Ben Stiller presents Best Cinematography as post-meltdown Joaquin Phoenix. The funniest moment, which no one in the audience seems to notice: a minute after sticking his gum to the podium, he pops the half-chewed wad back into his mouth.

6:35 But then Stiller breaks character, turning back-pattingly gracious when the victorious DP arrives on stage. No one commits to performance art like Andy Kaufman used to. Except Joaquin Phoenix.

6:42 As James Franco and Seth Rogen reprise their Cheech and Chong routine from Pineapple Express, I reflect on the strange rise of Judd Apatow's comedy stable. Franco and Rogen. Jason Segel. Jonah Hill. How did these people become famous? Which reminds me, if you haven't seen every episode of Freaks and Geeks, you're not fully human.

6:47 Seth Rogen randomly busts up at James Franco's befuddled pronunciation of "Speilzeugland," winner of Best Short Film.

6:53 After declaring that the musical "is back," Hugh Jackman sings again, and proceeds to get upstaged by Beyonce. For the last time, where is Jon Stewart? Stewart!

6:57 At the end of an awkward, interminable song-and-dance medley, Hugh Jackman reiterates, "The musical is back!" My girlfriend slurps soup and mutters, "That was awful."

7:06 Christopher Walken says not a single funny word in his Best Supporting Actor presentation. He unsettles me.

7:08 Heath Ledger posthumously wins Best Supporting Actor. If his mom, dad, and sister go on too long in their speeches, will the band cut them off?

7:10 Nope. They give concise, moving tributes.

7:14 Bill "I'm going to promote my film by joking self-deprecatingly about promoting my film" Maher presents a well-earned Best Documentary prize to Man on Wire. Philippe the French wire-walker balances the statuette on his chin. An inveterate entertainer, that guy. And he speaks English more eloquently than most Americans.

7:27 Is anything more pathetic than special effects nerds who stand silently on stage with their statuettes while another member of their team prattles on about his beautiful children?

7:30 The sound editor of The Dark Knight ums and hems through an improvised speech. So, a hypothetical for you. Say you're the sound editor of The Dark Knight. Say it's the night of the Oscars. Do you prepare a brief, meaningful acceptance speech? No, no. You just wing it.

7:32 One of the three sound mixers of Slumdog Millionaire has an Indian accent. I take it all back. Slumdog is totally authentic. Just listen to how the sound is mixed: you can hear the heat and stink of Bombay! I mean Mumbai!

7:40 Jerry Lewis receives an award for charitable service. Do I foresee a critical reassessment of his career? The French would approve.

7:50 Jackman quotes a letter in which Audrey Hepburn employs an extended metaphor, comparing film music to airplane fuel. Which current A-list actress can successfully use figurative speech? Or write a letter? Babylon has fallen ever so far.

7:54 Another real-life Indian takes Best Original Score for Slumdog, then immediately, hilariously reppears to sing "O Saya," tapped for Best Original Song.

7:58 ... And he's back again to perform "Jai Ho," the other Slumdog song. His name is A.R. Rahman. You're famous now, A.R. Rahman.

8:01 ... And he wins for "Jai Ho." He stalls, plum out of words, then mumbles something about "the power of hope" and jogs offstage. How swiftly and unexpectedly fame strikes!

8:07 Sputters the Japanese winner for Best Foreign Film, "I am very, very happy!" Japanese filmmakers complete me.

8:15 During the dearly-departed montage, the applause for Charlton Heston sounds less than enthusiastic. (Seriously, click on that Heston link.)

8:18 My girlfriend passionately despises Reese Witherspoon's pointy chin. "See? Right now it's like 'point, point.' And there's a little beam of light coming from it."

8:22 Slumdog director Danny Boyle declares that the people of Mumbai dwarf "even" his Oscar statuette.

8:27 The Best Actress presenters take the stage and deliver long, maudlin, self-serving paeans to the nominees. Please, shoot whichever producer came up with this idea. In the brain.

8:34 I thought Kate Winslet should have nabbed the award in 2004 for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She's the Ingrid Bergman of our era, and I'm happy to see her happy.

8:38 It sounds like Winslet, five times an Oscar bridesmaid, says, "To the Academy, fuck you very much!" I guess that's probably, "Thank you very much."

8:44 Best Actor Sean Penn's hand trembles as he clutches his scribbled-on piece of memo paper. Charming.

8:46 Penn uses several seconds of time under the lights to spew polemics. Not charming. Sure, California should have voted down Prop 8. That's a serious reality. But the Oscars are silly. Sean Penn is silly, and all the sillier for trying to be serious.

8:48 As the Best Picture presentation nears, I am reminded of Citizen Kane, Goodfellas, and L.A. Confidential. Amazing movies, right? The Academy nommed all three for Best Picture. And all three lost. Because, as everyone knows, How Green Was My Valley, Dances With Wolves, and Titanic make a far better triumvirate.

8:53 Slumdog prevails. I smell the start of a trend. How about this pitch, Hollywood moguls: ten year-old Sudanese child soldier stumbles on a blank check in the jungle. He's rich! If only he can escape his brutal Uzi-toting masters. And beat his addiction to cocaine. And find a pen.

Feel-good hit of the holiday season, baby.

What We Teach When We Teach Huck Finn

2009-02-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

Last month, an English teacher opined in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should be dropped from high school curricula.

The teacher, John Foley, considers those books outdated. The attitudes of the characters toward race, in Huck Finn especially, strike a dissonant chord in the era of Obama.

Besides, Foley says, kids hate Huck Finn. (Really?) The phonetically-spelled frontier dialect confounds them, the sluggish pace of the narrative gives them the fidgets, and the 213 invocations of the n-word piss them off.

Foley has some replacements in mind. Instead of To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men, how about the more modern and palatable Snow Falling on Cedars and Going After Cacciato? And rather than stupidly plunge into Twain's quagmire, why not opt for the flat, dry, egalitarian plains of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove?

Before I set about dismantling Foley's argument, I need to admit the guy has a point. The standard high school curriculum is somewhat bland, and I see no reason why teachers shouldn't freshen up their syllabi with sprigs of contemporary literature.

It's not that Foley dislikes Huck Finn; in fact, he considers it a favorite. He's not dumb enough to believe that a racist character makes a racist book. He just thinks his students would react more positively to au courant representations of of race relations.

We all want kids to like what they read in school. When I taught English as a 22 year-old idealist, my dearest wish was that my 11th and 12th graders would learn to enjoy reading. The Chicken Soup for the Soul story in my imagination went something like this: teenager goes nuts for book, perceives the Importance of Literature, and vows to become a lifelong reader. Violins.

Reality is messier. But hey, sometimes the Chicken Soup thing actually happens. Most English teachers can tell you about the books that rearranged their synapses in high school. I know I can. My first was, well, Huck Finn.

My second was Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a rarely assigned novel my AP English teacher, Ms. Mason, spent two months on. A gutsy move. The AP standards permit little goofing around, and pity the poor teacher whose students underperform on the year-end test. The Mother's Mafia takes no prisoners.

Fortunately for Ms. Mason, her risk paid dividends: her students, including this one, loved Marquez's book.

But Ms. Mason, unlike John Foley, never shied away from difficult antiquarian literature. She forced Kate Chopin's The Awakening down our constricting throats. She made us analyze, *gasp*, criticism. In other words, she alternately appealed to our sensibilities and challenged our intellects. If we bitched about a tough poem, she rerouted that bitchery toward insight.

To study literature is to push through textual thickets. No worthwhile poem or story or novel will lay its riches before you without a fight. I'm not saying that all great literature is incomprehensible at first. But if there's a poem you consider both great and easy, read it again. It will seem either not as great or not as easy.

Skillful English teachers persuade students to embrace difficulty. Thorny language is alluring rather than intimidating; ambiguity is exciting, not frustrating.

A can-do attitude becomes essential when students confront old texts. The modern reader has no cultural reference points in a fictional world like that of, say, Beowulf. And the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales can seem so opaque that many young readers miss Chaucer's warmth, his psychological hawk eye, and most importantly his sex jokes.

Sometimes these young readers get frustrated. Sometimes they garb their complaints in the rhetoric of political correctness: "Chaucer was classist!" "Shakespeare was anti-Semitic!" "Twain was racist!"

They might be right. But they can't afford to tune out Twain simply because Jim talks funny and Huck uses the n-word. Students need to strike up a conversation with Twain, listen to him, argue with him.

When I taught Huck Finn in my 11th-grade American literature class, I brought up the race issue early and often. It sounds like Foley tried something similar.

I explain that Jim, a black man, is the hero of the book. I tell them Huck eventually sees the error of his ways, apologizes to Jim and commits himself to helping him escape slavery. Yes, I tell them, he does all this while continuing to refer to Jim by the demeaning word, but Twain was merely being realistic.

I was not and am not a maestro, but I know this much: "explaining" and "telling" are ineffective pedagogical methods. Let kids reflect and discuss. They'll surprise you.

Many of my students pointed out that Twain satirizes Huck's flaws, including his racist tendencies. On the other hand, Huck occasionally observes the world with sophistication and empathy, a tendency that becomes more pronounced as the raft floats south. He's a three-dimensional kid.

Other students cited the condescending portrayal of Jim and the inconsistency of Huck's so-called "moral development" as evidence that Twain could not rise above his culture. I encouraged these students to say more about that culture and to contrast it with our own.

Some students got angry at the novel. Many found it challenging, and a few gave it an overall thumbs-down. But nearly all of them engaged with the text passionately and successfully. They grappled with issues of racism, political correctness, history, and cultural relativity. No other book created such a wonderful furor in my classroom.

Sure, I might have achieved similar results with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In fact, I won't kick and scream (too much) if Huck Finn gets booted from the reading list. But another 19th-century work should take its place.

An education in the humanities should encourage kids step outside of themselves. If you're an American, speak with a Chinese person from time to time. If you're a Democrat, find a few Republican friends. If you live in the 21st century, read books from the 19th, or the 14th, or the minus-8th.

But John Foley puts little stock in ye olde times. Of the 25 "favorite" books he lists on his website, two were written before 1920: Huck Finn and Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

Perhaps, in his limited way, Foley is an effective teacher. But if he refuses to require any books written before the Vietnam War, he'll fail to convey the importance of battling through textual obstacles and conversing with voices from the past.

And those are components of the literary discipline. Essential ones.

At one point in his editorial, Foley refers to Shakespeare's language as "Old English." Actually, Shakespeare wrote in an early version of Modern English. Old English is an entirely different language.

It's surprising that Foley would whiff on these basic terms. But here's the big question: if he discovered his mistake, would he care? I suspect he would shrug and say, "So what?" His priorities lie elsewhere. Perhaps he focuses on helping his students read and write, and finds literary history beside the point.

So he's not evil. He seems young-ish and progressive, exudes passion for his subject, and probably runs a fun classroom. He has his blind spots, but so do I. In the end, public education could use (a couple of) anomalies like him.

But if Foley represents the wave of the future, and especially if his curricular ideas gain any traction, you won't see much of me for a while. I'll be busy digging trenches around my discipline.

When Singers Sing Well

2009-02-16T16:31:00.000-08:00

How many singers in indie rock can actually sing? How many can perform in concert with precision and panache?

I count Neko Case, Antony Hegarty, Thom Yorke, Mark Lanegan, Beth Gibbons, and maybe Jim Jones on a good hair day.

No doubt I'm blanking on a few names. And I don't want to imply that the six on my list are the only entertaining or moving singers in indie rock. Take Matt Berninger of The National, who kills on stage. But let's face it: if he wanders out of his low register, things get pitchy.

In general, indie rock fans have to live without rip-roaring vocals.

Which is why I watch American Idol, that gussied-up karaoke competition. Yes, the contestants hardly ever choose songs that don't suck. Yes, the arrangements are the soul of tack. But every so often, a singer busts through all the fake string sections and delivers an on-point, powerful vocal.

Kelly Clarkson did that with regularity in the first season of AI. Even though she ran through every crappy MariahCelineWhitneyAretha tune in the karaoke machine, she had the charm, the chops, and the creativity to infuse each performance with something like grace.

In the clip below, lifted from a 2007 American Idol charity show, she and guitarist emeritus Jeff Beck utterly demolish Patty Griffin's "Up to the Mountain." Griffin, not coincidentally, is a heckuva crooner herself. This is a singer's song.

Check the blues notes at 1:05 and 1:18. And the tightly controlled dynamics at 2:32 and 2:57.

Now if only an indie label could wrest her away from 19 Recordings, surround her with a group of crack Memphis musicians, and convince her to sing a set of jazz and soul standards...

Finding the Human in the Wulf: Part 2

2009-02-12T15:01:00.000-08:00

This is the second post in a three-part series on Beowulf. Click here for part one.

To appreciate the nuances of Beowulf's behavior, one must know a few things about his time and place in history. Medieval tribes in Denmark and Sweden didn't organize themselves around written laws, secular or religious. They had their own institutions, which fostered a bellicose morality similar to that of Homer's warrior-heroes.

Medieval society in Europe - especially in the wintry northern lands, where the tentacles of the Roman Catholic church did not reach - was broken into a variety of self-sustaining tribes, each headed by a king. This king kept a retinue of thanes, or knights. Any treasure won by the thanes in battle would devolve to the king, who would, in his capacity as "ring-giver," distribute the riches among the most worthy of his servants. A killer party in the mead-hall would ensue.

Given the constant bloodshed in this kind of society, inter-tribal relations could get hairy. Say one thane, let's call him Thor, slays another, Sven. There are no police, no formal charges. No robed man bursts onto the scene, points a crucifix, and screams, "Sin!" Instead, the fall-out is managed by the tribes themselves. Either Thor's king FedExes some treasure to Sven's king (a blood-price, or wergild) or one of Sven's buddies impales Thor on a righteous sword (a vendetta).

No third option is entertained. Everlasting dishonor descends upon the tribe that fails to collect a blood-price or carry out a vendetta.

What happens if vendettas pile up? Tribal warfare, that’s what. The whirligig of violence can sometimes be stopped by inter-tribal marriage, but usually kings aim for complete conquest. Nothing says, “It was a bad idea to kill Sven,” like a good ol’ pillaging.

Of course, there’s another, fluffier side to this eye-for-an-eye ethic. Say Thor, instead of bashing Sven’s head open, gives him a ruby-studded sword. Well then, Sven must do something nice for Thor!

Hence the central concept of Beowulf's culture: reciprocity. You do A to me, I'll do A right back. Yes, reciprocity is very much a part of any society, including our own. But the demand for equal give-and-take in medieval warrior culture was so rigid, so pervasive, that it permeates every line of Beowulf.

Beowulf (the character) lives by the code of reciprocity, but he is more than a head hidden under chain mail. He becomes a character, independent and unruly, when he subtly subverts that code while appearing to abide by it.

To be continued...

Twee Politics

2009-02-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

There's this new band called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. If you cringe at that name, you might also cringe at the music: cuddly indie pop with layers of acoustic guitars, vintage keyboards, boy-girl harmonies, and the pillowiest distortion imaginable. The lead singer sounds like he grew up in Westchester. He probably has a good relationship with his parents; he may even still live with them.

This is music for wussy guys and the girls who like them as friends but prefer to date punk rockers.

(Two free downloads available here. Scroll down and find the links for "Come Saturday" and "Everything With You.")

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are very twee. The word "twee" originated as British slang for "affectedly dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint," which is a fairly accurate, if overly pejorative, description of a 25 year-old pop genre that combines the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) punk ethic with a weakness for pretty melodies.

To paint a picture, sometime in the 1980s a bunch of sensitive university dudes with no connections in the music industry were like, "Hey, we wanna be in a band, but we're way too nice to imitate the Sex Pistols. And we kinda dig The Byrds."

Fey, jangly bands like The Field Mice, Felt, and Black Tambourine resulted. Haters called them "twee." True believers repossessed the term. Twee, you say? That's right. We're twee as fuck.

Like most catchy terms, twee has dulled through overuse. Is Belle & Sebastian twee? How about The Shins? Jack Johnson?

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's vibe can be better described as C86. That's short for "Cassette 1986," an influential mixtape put out by the Brit mag New Musical Express in, um, 1986. This tape either documented or spawned a mini-movement - nobody's sure which.

By the mid-90s, the C86 sound persisted in various evolved forms (shoegaze, jangle pop, dream pop, lo-fi), but most of the founding noisemakers had faded into even greater obscurity. Now, in 2009, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart has turned back the musico-evolutionary clock. This band is completely, precisely C86.

I'm not sure TPoBPaH's debut album brings anything new to the genre. Except for 10 really, really beautiful songs.

There I go. I have a hard time feigning objectivity when I write about C86. This sound just works for me. When I was in high school and I Napster-searched my way to Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and The Pastels, I felt as though I had discovered an abandoned, rotted, awesome treehouse.

It was headphone music. The layers of distortion didn't alienate you, but instead enveloped you warmly. The minor-key melodies weren't afraid to yearn. Some guy usually took the lead vocals, but he didn't have an ego about it. He sang underneath the instruments, sweet and soft.

My affection for this genre was consistent with my teenage rebellion against machismo. I played sports, but I made fun of chest-beaters. Sometime in ninth grade I began self-identifying as a "raging liberal." I got a kick out of telling other guys that I considered myself a feminist. The arguments were fun, and I also considered myself an excellent debater.

Perhaps most importantly, I listened to an effete, extinct genre of indie pop that nobody else cared about.

Eventually I figured out that I took too much pride in playing the anti-man. I was macho about being un-macho. So I weaned myself off sexual politics, and all that remained was the C86 sound, the aural incarnation of my teenage self-image. I still listen to The Pastels and Ride regularly, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart deserves a place in that rotation.

Chalk this up to "one of those funny things pop music does." You can cast off a social identity, but you'll never be able to shake the songs that went with it.

Finding the Human in the Wulf: Part 1

2009-02-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

The cover of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf depicts a medieval warrior from the shoulders up, completely enshrouded in chain mail. No features of the face are discernible: no bump for a nose, no hollows for eye sockets. Only his outline makes him recognizably human, and clearly he is a warrior. You could say his warrior-ness obscures everything else about him.

The same could be said - has been said many times - about Beowulf himself. He is a warrior in the purest, almost mineral, sense of the word. He boasts, fights, earns honor and treasure. He repeats this process three times, and finally he dies from a dragon bite.

It is unclear in that last fight whether he actually, properly achieves glory (both he and the dragon perish), or whether the treasure he earns will do his people any good. Such is the ambivalent attitude of the English/Christian poet toward his Scandinavian/pagan "hero." The poet seems to feel a mixture of awe and pity for Beowulf, and this tension gives the poem a powerful undertow, not always perceptible to the first-time reader.

In fact, many first-time readers find little to like about this 1,000-plus year-old epic dirge. These readers are typically in their teens, either high school upperclassmen or college underclassmen, muddling through the first weeks of a Brit lit survey class. Boredom via Beowulf is a time-honored tradition in the academy. As one critical history has it, "By the opening years of the twentieth century, Beowulf was a synonym for undergraduate literary boredom." Then, as now, the poem is presented to students as an historical relic that just happened to survive a millennium of wars and library fires.

For the past half century, however, a growing academic contingent has been calling for a greater focus on the particulars of the text of Beowulf. These critics think the poem has enough internal merit to withstand close reading after close reading, never mind claims of "historical importance." One of the first professors to articulate this stance was, of all people, J.R.R. Tolkien, known to most as the Lord of the Rings guy.

While I'm never one to de-emphasize historical context, I agree with Tolkien and his acolytes. Introducing Beowulf to students as an historically representative text tends to divert attention from the surprising details of the poetry.

For instance, readers usually see Beowulf as an empty suit of armor. No personality, no psychological complexity, and certainly no sense of humor. He is the textual incarnation of the aforementioned cover portrait.

Fair enough. Beowulf does not live on the page like Hamlet and the Wife of Bath and even Odysseus do. Beowulf exists as a field of force, exerting pressure in a single direction. If Hamlet is a super-maneuverable hovercraft, Beowulf is a monorail. He wants glory and gold. He fights for glory and gold. He gets glory and gold. (Most of the time.)

However, within this structure of desire, action, and reward, the Beowulf poet finds some subtle tensions. Beowulf's wants may be simple and predictable, but his ways of fulfilling them are anything but.

To be continued...

One Glum Beach Party

2009-02-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

Using the words "sunny" or "beachy" or "tropical" to describe the synth-pop of Air France (the band, not the airline) is boring. Way too obvious. I mean, the band habitually layers congos over steel drums.

So at first the new video for "No Excuses," off the purty EP No Way Down, may strike you as a bit tell-me-something-I-don't-know. It's basically a slow-paced surf vid, like a strip from Jack Johnson's old cutting room floor. Exactly what you might expect from Air France. But around the 30-second mark, it'll sink its teeth into you.

Talk about devotion to a mood. The light doesn't brighten, the film doesn't speed up. No additional surfers join the solitary wet-suited dude. You get the impression he's surfing somewhere cold and remote, like Sweden.

That's what good music videos do: take their cues from the overtones of the music (beach, water) but skew things to bring certain undertones into relief (dark beach, dark water, loneliness).

Air France is a beach band, but only when it's a cold cloudy day at the beach.

Canon(s)

2009-01-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

This week I started my stint as a TA at San Francisco State University. I'm helping out Professor Bruce Avery in his lecture course, Literature in English I, which consists of a red-eye trip through the first millennium of the English language.

It all begins with Beowulf, a good ol' medieval gore-fest, and wraps up at the end of the seventeenth century. In the intervening years, English transforms from Germanic gobbledigook (Beowulf), to a Frenchified and readable-with-annotations patois (The Canterbury Tales), to a form of the modern language (Paradise Lost) that would go down smooth if it weren't for Milton's completely messed up syntax.

Seriously, though, there's an amazing fund of amazingness on this syllabus.

Yesterday in his second lecture Professor Avery surveyed the hotly contested ground of canon formation. A canon, in the modern literary sense of the word, is a list of "great" books. The very mention of such a list gets certain progressive professors all in a tizzy. Starting a conversation about the canon at an English Department cocktail party is kind of like bringing up politics at Thanksgiving dinner.

Nobody agrees on what belongs and what doesn't. Nobody knows the criteria for admission. Some feel the need to bracket "the canon" in scare quotes; these are the same people who also put scare quotes around "plot" and "character," and use verbs like "problematize."

Within this global academic brawl, there are a few loosely organized gangs. Professor Avery identified them as the formalists, the moralists, and the culturalists.

The formalists focus on the quality of the language itself to the exclusion of historical and political concerns; the moralists believe that exceptional works survive for a reason, and that we read these works to become better people; the culturalists view canon formation as an intellectual power play by the white male upper crust.

This is an extreme simplification, but a useful one.

Professor Avery asked us to jot down our own "canons" and perhaps declare a (critical) gang affiliation. A few brave souls shared their lists, and most of these students sounded as though they were simply rattling off their favorite books. Don't get me wrong: I like the "favorites" approach. It's probably the most honest way to create a canon. But why not ratchet up this exercise a few turns?

I find myself sympathetic to all three schools of canon formation, so I'll make lists from both the formalist and moralist perspectives. Since the culturalists don't play in this sandbox, I'll replace them with an imaginary group: the hedonists. These are the "favorites" people.

Lest I make the culturalists really angry, I should say these lists only draw from literature written originally in English.

My "Formalist" Canon
(Most amenable to a language-only framework)

Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
The Temple, George Herbert

"Lycidas," John Milton

Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
"To Autumn," John Keats
Middlemarch, George Eliot
What Maisie Knew, Henry James
Ulysses, James Joyce
Spring and All, William Carlos Williams

My "Moralist" Canon
(Most culturally persistent and most likely to "improve" the reader)

Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

My "Hedonist" Canon
(Most dog-eared in my collection)

The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Henry IV, William Shakespeare
"Tintern Abbey," William Wordsworth
Emma, Jane Austen
The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The Man of the Crowd," Edgar Allan Poe
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Dubliners, James Joyce
The "Chance," "Soon," "Silence" cycle from Runaway; Alice Munro
Herzog, Saul Bellow

Whew. Lots of white dudes.

And how boring is that "moralist" canon? Wonderful literature, but so high-school-reading-list.

That was fun. Over and out.

Music by the Numbers

2009-01-27T11:03:00.000-08:00

"Do you think there are some things that should just stay unquantified?" Ira Glass asks in an old episode of This American Life.

Most people would say yes, absolutely. Love, for one. And art.

Certainly at this point in history we can't calculate, say, the intensity of grief. But that doesn't mean we'll never get there. Perhaps we need to improve our methods.

I'm serious, mostly. My liberal arts education cursed me with a mechanistic view of human nature (and a suspicion of phrases like "human nature"). We're sophisticated animals, but animals nonetheless. We try to survive, reproduce, and have fun.

So isn't it conceivable that numbers could someday map our responses to stimuli such as love and art?

Maybe. I won't say either way, because my liberal arts education also taught me never to decide on anything. Ever.

What I do know is that current survey methods cannot predict people's taste in music. Market research and pop songs hate each other, and for the past twenty years the music industry has cruelly forced them to stay married. As a result, top 40 radio is what top 40 radio is.

The scary thing is that the listening public gets used to it. T-Pain becomes popular because he's on the radio, and he sounds kinda sorta all right.

In that old episode of This American Life, Ira Glass interviews a couple of math dudes who pushed numbers and music even closer together. They quizzed a bunch of people on the details of musical taste. Preferred tempo? Favorite instruments? Lyrical subject matter?

Then, enlisting the help of some songwriters and musicians, they created two tracks: "The Most Wanted Music" and "The Most Unwanted Music." (Those links will take you to sites where you can stream the songs.)

The former clocks in at five minutes but feels much longer. It's a duet between a chanteuse and a Michael Bolton knockoff with the typical soft-rock backdrop: elevator-music keyboards, noodling sax, electronic drum fills. A Van Halen-lite guitar solo kicks in at the two-thirds mark.

"The Most Unwanted Music," on the other hand, makes for a fascinating 20 minutes. Suffice it to say that the song features an opera singer. Who raps.

The fallacy of this project isn't that music cannot and never will be accurately quantified. That strikes me as the knee-jerk generalization of someone (Ira Glass) who has too much invested in the "mystery" of art.

Rather, I would argue that survey-makers - not to mention survey-takers - have a poor idea of how music operates on the mind. The mere presence of a tuba or a liquid bass is mostly beside the point. People dig Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby" not because of the electronic drum fills, but because of a still-mysterious but conceivably quantifiable confluence of elements. The mid-tempo R&B rhythms. The lift of the melody. The verse-to-chorus flow. Mariah's feathery phrasing.

"The Most Wanted Music" sucks because the notes on the page suck. The same poverty of invention afflicts "The Most Unwanted Music," but at least the glissandos and boy choirs and Wal-Mart references keep our attention.

The big question here is whether some wonderful machine of the future could produce full songs - replete with melody, rhythm, structure, and instrumentation - that would not fail to please. I say it's possible. But not until the Cylons are able to look like us.

Seriously, Edgar Allan Poe Was a Funny Guy

2009-01-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, Edgar Allan Poe turned 200. Several newspapers and magazines took this arbitrary milestone as an opportunity to run a quickie article about his "legacy" - or, in the case of the New York Times, a slide show.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Anytime Poe's name returns to the cultural conversation, no matter how stubbornly that conversation avoids insight, I'm happy. His stories, poems, and essays deserve to be considered and reconsidered.

The problem is that, more than any American author, Poe seems stuck with a single narrative about his life and work.

His life: he was perhaps overly affectionate of the bottle; he married a 13 year-old cousin who died of tuberculosis at 15; he himself died, either of grief or alcohol poisoning, in Baltimore in 1849.

His work: creepy, Gothic, an eerie mirror of his purported personality. Take that poem about the raven. Or that story about the murderer who buries his victim under his own floorboards.

A couple of subsidiary facts sometimes get thrown into the usual rehashing of Poe's life and work. One, he wrote book reviews and helped shape the nascent field of literary criticism; his thoughts on the short story have proven particularly durable. Two, he basically invented the detective story.

While these facts suggest a more shaded picture of Poe's oeuvre, they do nothing to challenge the widespread conviction that he was one dour dude. Well, he was. But dourness isn't necessarily incompatible with a sense of humor, and Poe could be hellaciously funny.

Believe it or not, he penned several comic tales. These slapdash pieces hardly show up on syllabi anymore, probably because they present the starkest possible contrast with accepted Poe cannon. If taught in an undergraduate survey course, they would only confuse the students.

"The Spectacles," for instance, is a full-fledged romantic comedy. (If you plan on reading it, click here and skip the rest of this paragraph.) The story is narrated by a foppish Frenchman, Napoleon Buonaparte Simpson, who begins by presenting his 19th-century-chic theories concerning the electrical substance of love. He mentions in passing that he refuses to wear his spectacles, despite his severe nearsightedness. At the opera, sans spectacles, he vaguely perceives a beautiful woman in a luxury box and falls instantly, electrically in love with her. He pursues her, proposes, and on the wedding day, seeing his beloved clearly for the first time, finds her to be somewhat older than he thought. She is in fact 82 years old and, moreover, his great-great-grandmother. The story ends happily, as romantic romps must, with a marriage between Simpson and his great-great-grandmother's young and lovely charge, and with the reader checking the byline, just to be sure.

Poe the jester also crops up in various newspaper hoaxes. His balloon hoax, published in the New York Sun in 1844, offers a superlative-laced account of an amazingly swift transatlantic hot-air balloon voyage. "This is unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking ever accomplished or even attempted by man." And it was, of course, fiction. For a short strange time, however, many people were convinced that a man named Monck Mason had crossed the great Atlantic in a mere three days. "I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper," Poe giggled afterward.

This playful side of the man often gets drowned out by the bombast of his poetry, crushed under the Gothic weight of his fiction. But since Poe is one of those authors whose birthday we'll celebrate every five years or so (205th, here we come!), we might as well remember him differently each time.

Today, let's remember that Poe was disturbed, solemn, brilliant, and fracking hilarious. Let's remember that even his serious stuff - "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym - comes seasoned with a hint of parody. And let's remember that reports of his last words, "Lord help my poor soul," are apocryphal. Others maintain that, in his final seconds, Poe responded to the question, "Would you like to see your friends?" with what could be read as a blacker than black, perfectly timed joke: "Nevermore."

Properly Observing MLK Day

2009-01-19T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how I, a leisurely white kid, should spend this holiday, but something tells me that being leisurely isn't proper.

How about listening to a great black leader speak? I can do that tomorrow morning, I guess.

For now, I'll reread this: "Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's a shame that most high schoolers - and indeed most people - know King only by a catchphrase. The "I have a dream" speech is certainly powerful, especially considering when and where it was delivered, but comes nowhere near a full representation of King's philosophical system.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail" is longer, darker, and angrier; it's the single most persuasive piece of writing I've clapped eyes on. King defends the kind of nonviolent civil disobedience that landed him in jail and challenges "liberals" who believe that better days for minorities will come naturally, eventually.

I use the present tense advisedly. He's speaking to us.

Oh, and I shouldn't leave out this tidbit: in his Alabama jail cell, King had a pen but no paper. He drafted "Letter" on scraps of toilet paper.

Sheesh.

The Sheer Likability of Taylor Swift

2009-01-17T13:07:00.000-08:00

I have no indie cred. Here's proof.

My favorite song of the moment is "Hey Stephen," the fourth track on Taylor Swift's Fearless, the third best-selling album of 2008 and Billboard's current top dog. Only Coldplay and Lil Wayne sold more discs last year.

Taylor Swift (born, depressingly enough, in 1989) plays teen pop. If iTunes tells you she's a country singer, don't believe it. Only the occasional banjo and Martina McBridism will clue you into the location of Swift's label: Nashville, Tennessee. Fittingly, that label is called Big Machine.

Yes, the sound of Fearless has been processed by some kind of big machine. Guitars glisten. Swift's flattish, quavery, not-fully-mature voice stays miraculously in tune. Not one of the studio musicians would get caught dead playing behind the beat.

In other words, tension hardly exists in this music, and for that reason I can't love it. But I really, really like it.

Back to "Hey Stephen." This is a mid-tempo acoustic number, one of more countrified moments on Fearless. Its success depends on the magic of melody and pop structure. Give the song a listen and you'll hear what I mean.

Note how, ahem, complex that melody is. The verse sashays about in Swift's low register, then takes a four-bar excursion into higher territory. After a return to the initial melodic phrase, the chorus arrives and Swift shifts back into the middle-high end of her (limited) range.

A verse-chorus repetition ensues, and then... a BRIDGE! I love bridges!

That makes four - count 'em, four - hooks in "Hey Stephen." Verse 1, verse 2, chorus, bridge. Four good hooks. In indie rock, those hooks would become four different songs. College radio hits.

Did I mention that Taylor Swift wrote "Hey Stephen" without help? And that she graduated from high school last July?

I can't help it, I'm impressed. Like a creepy uncle or something.

Too bad she has zero stage presence. I suppose her label throws her up there because, well, she's a pretty blonde waif. But her natural element seems to be the studio, where a little auto-tuning goes a long way. Through headphones, her plain-Jane vocals sound properly young.

And a youthful voice is what her lyrics need. A 17 year-old LeAnn Rimes, preternaturally mature at that age, would have made a fool of herself singing, "Of all the girls tossing rocks at your window / I'll be the one waiting there even when it's cold." Delivered by the impish Swift, the couplet kills. She sounds just young enough to imagine tossing rocks at windows.

But she also sounds just old enough to interrogate romantic cliches. "I'm not a princess, this ain't a fairy tale," she sings in "White Horse." "I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet / Lead her up the stairwell." Fearless is the story of a teenager discovering that movie love ain't real love. No duh, right? But come on: I know you're still a bit disappointed that Sleepless in Seattle never happened to you.

Don't expect Taylor Swift to sweep you off your feet. If the best of pop music, as Robert Christgau defines it, is a re-articulation of "a democratic vitality that shakes us free of our staler habits without destroying the fabric of our daily life," Fearless does not represent the best of pop music.

But hey, Christgau likes Taylor Swift. Why? Because she's so goshdarn likable.

The Right Vibe

2009-01-14T07:47:00.000-08:00

An indie band playing on a sunny Manhattan rooftop: this concept has been waiting for the Department of Eagles to come along. Pitchfork TV's live concert series, "Don't Look Down," has filmed The Hold Steady, The Thermals, and Okkervil River on the same rooftop, but those dudes were just a tad too uptight.

Great sound, huh? Old-timey, amenable to dynamics (a rarity in pop music). I just wish the Department had taken a scalpel to its debut album, In Ear Park. Three less tracks, one more uptempo number, and that baby would have been top ten material.

This New Year, I Resolve...

2009-01-13T20:45:00.000-08:00

To punch a hole in my indie rock bubble and stick one ear out. Translation: listen to and write about more captial-P Pop.
To submit at least one short story to a litmag, and to get some work done on a YA novel. My other blog, Asides, will serve as a warehouse for ideas and drafts. Feel free to offer feedback; I like it when smart people tear into my stuff.
To reach out to other bloggers and blog readers.

Whaleship vs. Harvard: Emerson and Melville: Part 3

2009-01-12T09:03:00.000-08:00

This is the third of a trio of posts on Emerson and Melville. Read the first here and the second here.

So perhaps we should take Ishmael's warning to "ye Pantheists" as Melville probably wrote it: simultaneously in jest and in all seriousness, and thoroughly in the context of nineteenth-century ideas about nature, pantheism, and the sublime.

In fact, Melville was ahead of his time. According to Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, the experience of fighting in the Civil War, of internalizing a soldier's sense of duty, of seeing the most graphic imaginable consequences of daydreaming on the job, caused the influential jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes to adopt a mildly anti-Emersonian "jobbism": that is, a belief that devotion to one's specific duties led to the truest philosophy. Goodbye transcendental generalism, goodbye leaning and loafing and taking one's ease. Jobbism became an article of faith among the followers of Holmes and, as Menand shows, thinkers of the twentieth century.

Was Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick a decade before Holmes joined the Union army, our nation's first jobbist author? Most major American writers before him - Brockden Brown, Poe, Hawthorne - hardly ever portrayed professional life in their fiction, as if a character's job had little to do with his essence. All of Melville's finest work, on the other had, defines characters in and by their workplace. Think about Typee, Omoo, Billy Budd, "Benito Cereno" - seafaring tales, all. The one important exception, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," takes places in a law office.

These days, workplace novels (Then We Came to an End), plays (Glengarry Glen Ross), and sitcoms (NewsRadio) are so common that we don't bat an eye at Melville's obsession with jobs. We take for granted that professional life can be full of drama, but in the mid-1800s Melville stood almost alone in thinking so. That's one reason why he strikes us as so modern.

Whaleship vs. Harvard: Emerson and Melville: Part 2

2009-01-11T14:50:00.000-08:00

This is the second of a trio of posts on Emerson and Melville. Read the first here.

Melville's Moby-Dick doesn't exactly beg comparison with Emerson's essays. The novel strikes some readers as literally and figuratively out to sea, as indifferent to contemporary discourses as the white whale is to Ahab's Shakespearean bombast. But in fact the big book subtly, playfully, and consistently engages with nineteenth-century ideas. The narrator, Ishmael, never mentions Emerson by name, but the Emersonian conception of man's relationship to nature informs many of Ishmael's philosophical digressions. Take the following gem, which relocates the transparent eyeball, in the form of a book-softened shipman, to the watchbox at the top of a whaleship's mast.

... perhaps there might have been shoals of [whales] in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernable form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting thought it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

The famous and oft-overstated difficulty of Moby-Dick has something to do with the elusiveness of Ishmael's tone. One can rarely tell whether he's being dead serious or mock serious, or whether Melville is mocking his dead seriousness. In the paragraphs above, Ishmael drapes his semi-colons and archaisms ("thee," "ye") over a darkly funny situation: a laggardly watchman mistaking whales for "thoughts" and finally tumbling off his perch. Bathos, exemplified.

And yet Ishmael makes a serious point about the limitations of Emersonian thought. The funhouse is for lovers, and reveries are for the rich. It's all well and good for Emerson, a man of wealth and leisure, to stroll about the woods forgetting his identity, his friends, his job. But for Ishmael, communing with nature comes with professional consequences. He must either sleep or work, and there's no time for daydreaming. Ishmael's hypothetical lazy watchman daydreams; he sees a reflection of his own soul in the water; he sees what Emerson calls the "over-soul"; and, like Narcissus, if he sees nothing else, he drowns.

Such is the pragmatism imparted by an education at sea. Emerson attended Harvard, but for both Ishmael and Melville, "a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard."

To be continued...

Whaleship vs. Harvard: Emerson and Melville: Part 1

2009-01-10T21:24:00.000-08:00

This piece will be rather long, so, as has been the trend on Close Listenings lately, I will reveal it in three parts. Here's the first.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and disturbance.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

If you learned Emerson in high school or college, you probably remember that passage. The image of the "transparent eyeball" is unforgettable, and I'm not sure whether it's brilliant or daft. One envisions an R. Crumb-like cartoon eyeball, bloody retina and all, standing on stick legs at the edge of a cliff, happily observing a New England panorama.

Emerson dreamed up this (intentionally?) macabre image in the mid-1830s, when he was a confident and hopeful young man. This version of Emerson remains the best known Emerson. His early writings, exemplified by "Nature" and "The American Scholar," pigeonholed him as some mixture of mystic Pantheist, Cantab, reformer, and wild-eyed optimist.

The reality is that darker themes crept into his writings as he aged and watched his country slide inexorably into civil war. One of his mid-1840s essays is aptly entitled "Experience."

Still, his contemporaries persisted in defining him primarily as the author of "Nature." It was a convenient handle. In the contests between Copperheads and Free Soilers, Transcendentalists and Dark Romantics, Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans (not a typo), Emerson's ideas, often dissociated from his name, were bandied about like so many cultural tennis balls.

To be continued...

Hey, You Gotta Read This

2009-01-08T07:47:00.000-08:00

I like when a book is passed to me like it's a secret. "Hey," someone whispers, "you gotta read this."

Was this how youngsters in the 50s got their paws on The Catcher in the Rye?

Or how their counterparts in the 30s - maybe their parents - discovered Lady Chatterly's Lover?

That must have been fun. Doesn't really happen anymore. For one, books don't get banned too often, and if they do it's easy to find a perfectly legal copy. Kids know how to use Amazon - and their parents' credit cards.

Besides, books don't have the force in youth culture they once did. Hard for someone like me to admit, but true. Adults are usually so thrilled to see a kid reading that they don't ask questions. And parental approval is the antidote to youthful enthusiasm.

Anyway, I'm too old now to take much pleasure in my secrets. I console myself with the thrill I get when a friend passionately recommends a book I had never heard of. For Christmas my college roommate sent me The Other Side of the River, a beautifully written work of true crime by Alex Kotlowitz. It won some awards, but the author's name didn't ring a bell with me.

That's a legitimately exciting event, you see. Due to years of obsessive web research - and possibly due to my own incorrigible arrogance - I tend to assume I've heard about most books worth reading. When I'm proven wrong, I'm delighted. The world seems mysterious and wonderful again.

Yesterday, a 13 year-old student of mine introduced me to a new book. This student, I should mention, is on the cusp of full-out rebellion. His parents are high-powered Ivy League types, but he prefers to watch stoner flicks and do tricks on the trapeze.

I'm teaching him how to take the SSAT. Before I started working with him, his scores hovered somewhere in the lower percentiles. Purely by forcing himself not to screw around during the test, he has jumped 30 percentage points in the past two months. He's a smart, good kid.

And an excellent writer. He showed me a short story he wrote for an English class yesterday. Plenty of mechanical errors, but tons of wit and literary acumen in chrysalis. His teacher had the good sense to give him an "A," and I encouraged him to write more stories and let me read them. I hope he does, because he has real potential, and success in fiction-writing could change his whole attitude about school.

After I finished reading his story, he asked me, "Have you read King Dork?"

"King... Dork?"

"Yeah, it's amazing."

He handed me a dog-eared paperback. The cover imitated Catcher's famous red minimalism, and the title and J.D. Salinger's name were whited out. In their place: "King Dork" and "Frank Portman." Clever idea.

I read a few pages while my student practiced some math problems. The prose was colloquial yet refined and vivid. Like a punk-rock Catcher: that is, with "fuck" instead of "goddam," explicit sex talk instead of hints. The narrator's voice captured me because it didn't try to sound authentic. It just was.

When my student got done with his math problems, we - well, we talked about math. Still had a job to do. But as I was leaving I told him I would pick up a copy of King Dork.

"You won't be sorry," he said.

"You know," I said, "it reminds of this book called Be More Chill."

"What's that about?"

"This kid, he's kind of a loser, and he gets this computer chip implanted in his head. The chip tells him how to make friends, how to get girls, all that stuff. And chaos ensues."

"That sounds amazing. What's it called again?"

"Be More Chill," I said as he took notes on a Stickie, "by Ned Vizzini."

"I'm gonna go to Border's. Like, tonight."

He was earnest. 13 year-olds are typically earnest around every adult except their parents and their least favorite teachers. The world is still mysterious and wonderful to them.

As if to keep a tacit promise, I stopped by a bookstore on my way home. I hunted down King Dork in the YA section. Back in my car, I started reading. I had fifteen more miles to drive, but I couldn't wait.

This is it. This is why I liked books in the first place.

Listening Closely to 2008: Part 4: Top 25 Albums

2009-01-06T07:31:00.000-08:00

Rule: in order to participate in the critical discourse in any medium, one must make a top-ten list in December. Well, it's January, and I have my top 25 albums of 2008.

But first, allow me a digression on list-making.

I have always made best-of lists for my own amusement. And I have always been suspicious of them. "Too simple!" bleats my nebbishy skeptical self, which holds at least 70-percent ownership over my total self. But here's the thing: lists are fun, and railing against them is bitchy.

Take Annie Proulx, responsible for some of the most overwrought and overrated fiction in the past two decades. (See: The Shipping News, "Brokeback Mountain.") As befits a crotchety "genius," she seethes at the idea of a top-ten-novels list. Nevertheless, she contributed one to an entertaining toilet-side book called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. Her disclaimer:

I find this list of ten books project to be difficult, pointless, and wrong-headed. Just so you'll give it a rest, here is a list. One could, of course, quickly go on to put together list after list. Moreover, the lists would change from week to week as one's tastes change and as one reads more widely. It has not escaped me that nearly every newspaper, book review publication, and magazine are currently gripped by list fever. Lists, unless grocery shopping lists, are truly reductio ad absurdum.

Well, then.

As long as Ms. Proulx has appointed herself to the sophistication task force, I'll play the equally annoying role of grammar policeman. "Every" is a singular noun. Therefore, one should say, "Every newspaper, book review publication, and magazine is currently gripped by list fever."

More importantly, how is it, exactly, that anyone will "give it a rest" if Annie Proulx offers her top ten books? Will the list-makers of the world throw up their hands, despairing at ever competing with AP's cultural authority?

Of course she doesn't mean that. She's just tossing off words to project attitude, not meaning - kinda like she does in her fiction. The attitude is: "I am not comfortable with this modern list-making trend." The subtext is: "Please don't think I'm not a Great Writer just because I'm selling out to this modern list-making trend!"

I don't presume to know why Annie Proulx bothered to compile a top-ten list. But how about this hypothesis: she wanted to promote herself and her books. For there is only thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

(Not one contributor to The Top Ten gave a shout-out to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Has Wilde gone out of fashion?)

In any case, I henceforth pledge not to hate on lists, unless they be bad lists. In fact, good lists can serve the honorable purpose of turning non-readers onto challenging literature, non-cinephiles onto neglected movies, non-musicheads onto weird music.

So if you live a normal life and didn't spend $5,600 on music this year, the following list - Garrett's 25 favorite albums of 2008 - might help you build another: an iTunes shopping list.

25 Where You Go I Go Too, Lindstrom

Reductive description: Slow-melting electro-disco
Track to sample: "Where You Go I Go Too"

24 Pershing, Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin

Garden (State)-variety pop with a hella strong rhythm section
"Glue Girls"

23 Car Alarm, The Sea and the Cake

Indie pop for early autumn
"On a Letter"

22 HLLYH, The Mae Shi

Spazz-outs for fans of Dan Deacon and early New Pornographers
"Lamb and the Lion"

21 The '59 Sound, The Gaslight Anthem

Guitar rock for the open road
"Old White Lincoln"

20 Little Joy, Little Joy

Old-timey fireside singalongs
"The Next Time Around"

19 House with No Home, Horse Feathers

Indie-folk that explores many levels of quiet
"Working Poor"

18 The Very Best, Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit

Malawian-inflected remixes that improve already good songs
"Kamphopo"

17 No Way Down (EP), Air France

Beachy electropop from Gothenburg
"June Evenings"

16 Visiter, Dodos

One dude strums a guitar, another has a seizure on the drum kit
"Winter"

15 Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend

Collegiate Afropop, coming to a barbecue near you in fifteen years
"Campus"

14 Uproot, DJ/rupture

A dubby mixtape of obscure gems
"Elders: Clouds"

13 Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes

Echo chamber full of hippies and organic... instruments
"Ragged Wood"

12 The Midnight Organ Fight, Frightened Rabbit

Ragged Counting Crows with haggis on the side
"Head Rolls Off"

11 Street Horsssing, Fuck Buttons

Distortion-drenched drones that actually go somewhere
"Sweet Love for Planet Earth"

10 Love on the Inside, Sugarland

The best of your mom's country music, summarized
"We Run"

9 All Is Well, Samamidon

Elongated folk standards with avant garde string arrangements
"Saro"

8 Hercules & Love Affair, Hercules & Love Affair

Disco done better
"Athene"

7 Meanderthal, Torche

Pop metal done better
"Across the Shields"

6 Rooks, Shearwater

Piano-driven chamber pop with dabs of noise
"The Snow Leopard"

5 Furr, Blitzen Trapper

70s radio rock, weirdness
"Not Your Lover"

4 Saturdays=Youth, M83

Synthesizers as big as My Bloody Valentine's guitars
"We Own the Sky"

3 Sun Giant (EP), Fleet Foxes

Prog-folk
"Mykonos"

2 Third, Portishead

Creepy sounds
"Machine Gun"

1 In Ghost Colours, Cut Copy

Makes you want to be a 12 year-old girl in 1983
"Far Away"

Still familiarizing myself with the following wonderful-sounding albums:

The Felice Brothers, The Felice Brothers
Los Angeles, Flying Lotus
Dragging a Dead Dear up a Hill, Grouper
Life... the Best Game in Town, Harvey Milk
The Way I See It, Raphael Saadiq

Listening Closely to 2008: Part 3: Overrated

2009-01-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

As this useful page on Metacritic.com shows, four albums received the lion's share of critical love in 2008: Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes; Third by Portishead; For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver; and Dear Science by TV on the Radio. The Bon Iver record made my list last year, since, you know, it was released last year. But not until February 2008, when For Emma was reissued by Jagjaguwar, did Justin Vernon and his soul-folk trio find the spotlight.

TV on the Radio crept onto center stage more gradually, over the course of three widely respected albums. This year's Dear Science marked a shift toward a niche long occupied by Radiohead: mainstream art-rock. Perhaps the record will grow on me, but right now I find it inconsistent, over-produced, and over-serious. A bit like OK Computer, actually - sans the genius. Deerhunter's Microcastle also reaches for greatness, but only two songs ("Agoraphobia," "Nothing Ever Happened") have the melodies to match the ambition. The album's middle stretch sags under water effects and directionless plink-plunking. Piquant the first time through, tedious the second. Vivian Girls are also arresting on the first listen, what with their cross-breeding of Sonic Youth sonics and Supremes harmonies. One song, "Where Do You Run To," proves fairly sturdy, but the rest are designer t-shirts that disintegrate in the drier. A similar flimsiness dooms You & Me by The Walkmen, a highly praised album that lacks not only good songs, but pace, variety, and charm. It feels like the aftermath of a tequila binge, which must be what The Walkmen are going for, so good for them. Just stick with those uber-authentic vintage instruments, boys. You'll be guaranteed all the critical huzzahs you need to keep making money by inducing headaches.

Listening Closely to 2008: Part 2: Too Pop to Be Hip

2009-01-02T12:08:00.000-08:00

Rock critics are easily bamboozled by a striking aesthetic. Feed 'em white noise, or electroclash, or world music-y percussion, and they'll forget all about melody. Witness the hubbub over Beach House, The Walkmen, and Crystal Stilts: what do these bands offer aside from trendy sounds? Where's the beef? The following albums bring the beef wrapped in commonplace aesthetics, which earns them a sniff and a cold shoulder at the indie kid picnic.

Little Joy got its share of blog play, but as far as I can see, only the boys at Gorilla vs. Bear put the group's self-titled debut on their year-end lists. Perhaps no one was able to forget that the drummer dated Drew Barrymore. Well, good for Fabrizio, I say. He has a fabulous name, and he writes one hell of a lazy singalong. He also knows how to choose a producer: the sound is warm, lived-in, vintage. Reminds me a little of The '59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem. The few critics who paid attention to this album insisted on comparing it to Bruce Springsteen's early stuff. Hm. Even if the lead singer did graduate summa cum laude from the E Street School of Manly Emoting, there ain't no horns, strings, and glockenspiels behind him. Just drums and bass in lockstep, jangly layers of rhythm guitar, and dudes going "whoa-oh" stage right. A better reference point might be Gin Blossoms. If you don't remember how awesome they were, pop in your old cassette of New Miserable Experience. For more mid-90s nostalgia, listen to Frightened Rabbit's The Midnight Organ Fight, which comes on like a dirty Scottish version of August and Everything After. Guitars chug, snares thunder, lyrics clunk, choruses soar. There's only one album I've listened to more this year, and that would be the utterly wussy Pershing by Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin. But maybe I'm a wuss, because I drive a turd-colored '94 Ford Escort and love blasting "Glue Girls," "Dead Right," and "Modern Mystery" through my cheap speakers. I also turn up the volume on Sugarland's Love on the Inside, which perhaps makes me, in addition to a wuss, a menopausal woman. No matter: I'll take the hot flashes as long as I'm permitted to have my spine tickled by Jennifer Nettles's plangent twang and her band's incandescent Nashville pop. It's hard to imagine a better collection of roadhouse ditties, torch songs, and karaoke bait - and harder to imagine better shredders, sludgers, and arena rockers than those on Meanderthal by Torche, a metal record only slightly darker than Siamese Dream. Too pop for fans of Cannibal Corpse and too heavy for Rolling Stone, Torche tends to get lost in the netherland between genre cliques. People will find the band eventually, and I'm pretty sure those people will be stoned.

Listening Closely to 2008: Part 1: The Favorites

2008-12-30T10:48:00.000-08:00

My favorite record of the year is In Ghost Colours by Cut Copy. This post on my old blog attempts to explain why. The opening seconds of "Far Away" drip magic, as does the acoustic-to-electric transition in "The Rip," from Portishead's Third. Forget James Bond guitars. Forget that bedroom soundtrack for melodramatic hipsters. The middle-aged edition of Portishead is ballsy enough to dispense with trip-hop and emulate the warm dark electronics of Kid A. The influences of Fleet Foxes are less avante garde, but the Foxes wear them with comfortable grace. Amid the well-deserved praise of their self-titled LP, the brilliance of their Sun Giant EP was forgotten. "White Winter Hymnal" and "Blue Ridge Mountains" notwithstanding, I say the middle three songs on the EP - "Drops in the River," "Mykonos," and "English House" - represent the best of Fleet Foxes, just as "Saturday Night," "Black River Killer," and "Not Your Lover" form the crux of Blitzen Trapper's Furr. The latter sounds like a kissing cousin of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" and "Borrowed Tune"; the middle, a Johnny Cash murder ballad with production help from Tom Petty and Dr. Dre; the former, a disco ditty played by a string band. Hercules & Love Affair plays disco like a disco band, and does it better than any late-70s outfit I'm aware of. Side one of H&LF's self-titled LP beats the bell-bottoms off anything released in 2008 ("Time Will," "Hercules Theme," "You Belong," "Athene," and "Blind"), but side two goes limp. Fortunately, the album remains concise at ten tracks, similar to Shearwater's Rook, which saves two fine tracks - "The Snow Leopard" (closely listened to here) and "The Hunter's Star" - for its climax and denoument, respectively. A more drawn out but equally effective ending can be heard on Saturdays=Youth by M83, in which an eleven-minute synth dirge consisting of two chords resolves into piano ballad that accrues one heavy electronic layer after another, only to throw everything off like so many sweaters in a lovely, sunlit final minute.

The Restoration

2008-12-28T18:41:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, applying to graduate school takes a lot of time.

No matter. I'm back, and Close Listenings will continue as though nothing happened.

Sort of. For one, I've started another blog, Asides. I envision it as an outlet for all the weird stuff I'm compelled to write but at a loss to categorize. My plan is to post here today, post there tomorrow, post here the day after, etc.

To be honest, Asides has no pretensions to usefulness, and it might be totally self-indulgent.

Close Listenings, on the other hand, will continue to curry your favor. I will make recommendations, provide a few links, and write about artists you probably care about. For my uncle John (and for my own kicks), I will resume my "close listening" of Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky.

But I have changed a bit since I last posted. I have reaffirmed my commitment to 19th-century American literature, which means that in graduate school and beyond I will spend much of my time (re)reading, analyzing, and teaching the texts and contexts of Irving, Emerson, and Melville.

I am aware that you may not share my passion for the so-called American Renaissance. You, like many others, may have had a traumatizing high school experience with Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter. Be not afraid. I will write under the assumption that you have not read the books - or even the Cliff Notes.

Close Listenings is neither a litblog nor an mp3 blog. I hardly keep up with contemporary fiction, and I get my music through the usual web filters. If a litblog is what you seek, check out Bookslut or Literary Saloon. The best sites for mp3's are Stereogum and Gorilla vs. Bear. Pitchfork generally touts what should be touted, and Largehearted Boy condenses indie culture into lists and soundbytes. If you follow these sites, you know as much as I do.

The important, questionable, egotistical, heroic business of "discovering" does not appeal to me. I assess what has already been discovered and, by keeping some distance, try not to get caught up in the whirligig of hype and backlash.

Is that possible? Doesn't the very form of the blog annihilate careful consideration?

Um.

Maybe.

Mesmerizing!

2008-08-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

The word "mesmerizing," now primarily used to describe Robert Downey Jr. performances, has its roots in the cognomen of Franz Mesmer, an 18th-century German "doctor" whose treatments were as dubious as they were influential.

Here, in very unscientific language, is what he contended:

An invisible physical fluid courses through the universe, connecting men with fellow men, nature, and the heavenly spheres.
In humans and animals, this fluid is called "animal magnetism," a name meant to differentiate it from non-human magnetisms: mineral, cosmic, planetary. "Animal" comes from the Latin animus, roughly translated as "life force" or "soul." These days, of course, "animal magnetism" has taken on bastardized connotations of feral sexuality. In this spirit, it became the title of an album by Scorpions. Ausgezeichnete!
Human disease is due to unequal distribution of animal magnetism; healing results from a resumption of natural magnetic flow.
Skilled healers can channel their own animal magnetism and convey it to patients.

Quackery, you say? Don't rush to judge.

Though Mesmer's "fluid" theory tiptoes out on a brittle limb, his basic medical approach - or therapeutic tactic - strikes me as sound. The man did cure mobs of sick people.

The secret to his success, which not even he understood, lay in his ability to establish a rapport with his patients, to convince them of his power. His charisma was the thing. Or his "animal magnetism," you might say - but in the modern sense of the phrase.

Mesmer believed he could heal his patients, and because he exuded this belief, his patients believed they could be healed by him. As one of his more level-headed disciples, the Marquis de Puysegur, put it:

The entire doctrine of animal magnetism is contained in two words: believe and want. I believe that I have the power to set into action the vital principle of my fellow men; I want to make use of it; this is all my science and all my means.

An attractive piece of rhetoric, to be sure. It also points toward an explanation of those "miracle cures" we read about in supermarket lines. Something kinetic and inexplicable happens when a confident healer meets a receptive patient.

I'd imagine that many doctors would scoff at this sort of talk. Physical illnesses are best treated through concrete means: rest, water, pills.

But what about mental illnesses? What are psychoanalysts if not latter-day mesmerists? They gain a patient's trust, enter his head, and clear out the pathways in there. Their treatment relies on their personality. Some psychoanalysts even use hypnosis, a technique planted in Mesmer's soil.

Animal magnetism, psychoanalysis, faux-authoritative opinions on medicine... "Where is Garrett's head?" you may be asking.

I'll tell you: My head's in research. I'm taking a graduate course on 19th-century American Gothic literature at San Francisco State, and I signed up to give a presentation on mesmerism, especially as it relates to Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.

Phew.

Lately I've been reading The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri Ellenberger, a 932-page history of dynamic psychiatry that's 933 times more fascinating than it ought to be. I've been plagiarizing it shamelessly.

Yup, Close Listenings is getting weird. Don't say I didn't warn you.

G's Philavery #1

2008-08-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

I like strange words. I like the profane, the aurally pleasing, the etymologically intricate. Useful? Bah.

This series, named in honor of Christopher Foyle's book, will feature the sorts of words you won't find on high school vocab tests.

Why I consider this "preparing for graduate school" I don't know. Maybe because, like spending one's life in academia, it's an exercise in the arcane.

philavery (n.) an idiosyncratic collection of uncommon and pleasing words; coined by Christopher Foyle's mother-in-law; loosely derived from the Greek phileein (to love) and the Latin verbum (word)

clapperclaw (v.) to claw with the nails; to scold or revile

caryatid (n.) a woman-shaped pillar; made indie-famous by Son Volt - the other band to emerge from the wreckage of Uncle Tupelo - in the song "Caryatid Easy"

plectrum (n.) a guitar pick; plural form is plectra, as in, "Yo, Slash, you steal my plectra?"

cachinnate (v.) to laugh loudly or immoderately

Temporary Blogomorphosis

2008-08-25T10:39:00.001-07:00

I'm back.

If you're a friend or a family member, you know that I plan to apply to graduate school this year. You have nodded your head gravely as I've explained my reasons for pursuing a difficult six-year degree that guarantees nothing except that I'll be a super-boring stiff for the rest of my life.

Applications are due in December, so for the next three months I will be forced to give up my dilettantish ways. Specifically I'll have to:

- Take two GRE's, a general test and a long-ass literature exam.
- Write a new critical essay, because my college papers reek of stress and haste.
- Try to maintain a po-face as I explain in a personal statement why a ph.D. in English is a stepping stone on my path through the garden of greatness.

Instead of abandoning Close Listenings while I disappear into this work, I will turn my blog into a sort of study center. I will post the useful new words I'm learning, such as malaxate. I will write brief, occasionally humorous synopses of Great English Literature. I will venture an observation or seventy on Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Dickinson, and Twain, and eventually I will post portions of my esoteric, tortuous, torturous critical prose.

And I will continue my Jackson Browne Restoration Project, because good music keeps me sane.

If this doesn't sound like your thang, check back in mid-January, when I will resume listening closely and reading rapturously.

In the meantime, welcome to Close Listenings, Grad School Edition.

It's gonna suck.

Skimming the Hype 8-14-08

2008-08-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

Seven interesting mp3's rushing through the series of tubes right now:

"Lost Coastlines," Okkervil River

The first single off the upcoming album The Stand-Ins, which plows the same fertile sessions that yielded last year's The Stage Names, "Lost Coastlines" drapes a swooping Will Sheff melody over a girl-group backbeat.

"Where Do You Run To," Vivian Girls

Speaking of girl groups, indie rock has really fallen in love with Phil Spector lately. Pays off on "Where Do You Run To," a sort of nonchalant lo-fi tribute to The Ronettes.

"Crippled Croon," Crystal Stilts

Flat singing, jangly percussion, surf guitar: Crystal Stilts come on like Vivian Girls' lazy brothers. But no matter how I search I can't find a good hook here. Bewilderingly, Crystal Stilts have gotten crazy hype. If they had fuller songs, more polished production, and a name not including the word "Crystal," they would probably slip right under the blog radar, only to be picked up by NPR.

"Bruno's Torso," Death Vessel

Soft-loud pop never fails to push my happy buttons.

"A Crutch or a Cradle," Pony Up

What indie rock sounded like in the mid-90s. I miss it.

"A Field of Birds," The Tallest Man on Earth

Gotta admire how tenaciously this Swede clings to his early-60s Dylan influence.

"Id Engager," Of Montreal

Last year Of Montreal's esoterically-titled Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? got big ups throughout the blogosphere, but I found it grating. "Id Engager" comes from OM's new LP; apparently Kevin Barnes's id has a porn soundtrack. This critic is yawning. (Though OM's similarly smoove "Jimmy," an M.I.A. cover, still has my white toes tapping.)

It's Warm in New York

2008-08-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Garrett is vacationing in New York. Posts will be semi-frequent for the next week or so.

Stick a Fork in 'Em

2008-08-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

It's about time The Onion ran something like this.

If you've ever found yourself annoyed by pretentious, willfully arcane music criticism, you must click that link.

The conceit: Pitchfork has reviewed... music. In general. And given it a 6.8. Because 6.9 would have been sensationalist, 6.7 just plain mean.

How does Pitchfork come up with its incredibly specific ratings? Do the reviewers use a big secret chart?

Like, "7.8 = a fine effort from an artist that perhaps relies to heavily on influences but still shows potential to branch into a riskier aesthetic in the next three years."

An excerpt from The Onion's hilarity:

"Music used to be great, but let's be honest, it's a 6.8 now at best," said Los Angeles resident Lowell Radler, 23, who admitted that he just looked at the rating rather than reading the whole review. "I seriously might never listen to music again."

I laugh. It hurts.

Browne Meets Bickle

2008-08-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

Martin Scorsese, ever the recontextualizer.

In his 1976 crazy-fest Taxi Driver he used Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky" in a rather surprising way:

It makes sense when you think about it. In the early 70s Jackson Browne presented himself as a lonely romantic, and "Late for the Sky" is all about loneliness invading the last days of a romance.

Travis Bickle, the Robert DeNiro character, is also a lonely romantic, a modern knight out to redeem the homeland (NYC) and rescue the damsel in distress (Jodi Foster, too young).

But there is a crucial difference.

Browne's brand of lonely romanticism feels safe, appeals to the ladies.

Bickle's? Not so much.

The Case for Jackson Browne: "Late for the Sky" (Track 1)

2008-08-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

In each of my eight posts on Jackson Browne's album Late for the Sky I will focus on a different aspect of Browne's art.

Today's theme: poetic unity.

Oh, and buy Late for the Sky. $7.92 in the iTunes store. Go. Buy it.

"Late for the Sky"
(Track 1 on the album Late for the Sky)

The words had all been spoken
And somehow the feeling still wasn't right
And still we continued on through the night
Tracing our steps from the beginning
Until they vanished into the air
Trying to understand how our lives had led us there

Looking hard into your eyes
There was nobody I'd ever known
Such an empty surprise
To feel so alone

Now for me some words come easy
But I know that they don't mean that much
Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch
You never knew what I loved in you
I don't know what you loved in me
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be

Awake again I can't pretend
And I know I'm alone
And close to the end
Of the feeling we've known

How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been dreaming I could make it right
If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might
To be the one you need

Awake again I can't pretend
And I know I'm alone
And close to the end
Of the feeling we've known

How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been running for that morning flight
Through the whispered promises and the changing light
Of the bed where we both lie
Late for the sky

For the sake of clarity let's view this song as a portrait of two lovers in crisis. It's also a reckoning with the aftermath of the 1960s, but we'll explore that later.

The relationship between the two lovers is both particular and universal. Particular because we can see them lying in bed, exhausted with words yet continuing to use them. Universal because we've all been there.

We know exactly what the singer means when he sings, "You never knew what I loved in you / I don't know what you loved in me / Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be."

Defining the relationship in this way is step one for the singer. Step two is "trying to understand how [his and his lover's] lives had led [them] there," perhaps an impossibility. The singer himself doubts the power of words to make meaning: "Now for me some words come easy / But I know that they don't mean that much."

Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.

But the singer has to use words; they and the music are his only tools. If he wants to understand the connections between past events and present circumstances - "how our lives had led us there" - he must do so through his lyrics. He can't help trying, even if it's a losing game.

So why are the lovers in "Late for the Sky" at a loss?

The singer doesn't know exactly. His lyrics are full of skepticism and self-doubt. In the choruses - "How long... / How long..." - he asks question after question. But he seems to think his present situation may be the result of past deceptions: fooling his lover and fooling himself, both unintentionally.

At the end of the first chorus, in a major-key melody that builds to a climax, the singer wonders, "How long have I been dreaming I could make it right / If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might / To be the one you need."

Painfully sentimental. Accurate words often are.

The singer's use of "dreaming" could be translated as "thinking wishfully:" that is, deceiving himself. The phrase, "If I closed my eyes," suggests not only clenching exertion ("tried with all my might") but blindness, another image related to self-deception.

In deceiving himself, the singer has also deceived his lover, who apparently bought into the fantasy that he was the one she needed.

He becomes aware of these deceptions during the song; the lyrics chart the course of his epiphany. In the first bridge, as the music crescendos and he sings, "Awake again I can't pretend," he owns up for the first time to pretending, to playing a role that suits him poorly. Then at the chorus' apex the images of dreaming and blindness reiterate this new awareness.

His internal journey nearly complete, the singer repeats the bridge: the words "awake," "pretend," and "end" stand out this time. Then he repeats two lines of the first chorus, the ones about "sleeping" and "drifting alone through the night."

But he gives us a new apotheosis: "How long have I been running for that morning flight / Through the whispered promises and the changing light / Of the bed where we both lie / Late for the sky."

These replace the earlier climactic lines - "How long have I been dreaming..." - and must be read as an elaboration of them. He is "running" but still "dreaming:" to wit, dreaming of running for a morning flight, presumably because he has overslept.

Hey, I've had that dream.

The last three lines of the song are so finely wrought, so moving, that I hesitate to scour them for fear of scraping their patina. But here goes.

First the singer dreams about running through "whispered promises." What an image! We can see him pumping his arms, his hair trailing behind, the whispered promises swirling around him like wisps of smoke.

The phrase reminds us of the singer's distrust of words as well as his awareness of deceit. Clearly neither he nor his lover has made good on those "whispered promises."

In the same line we also have "changing light," another ambiguous and resonant image that could refer to the lightening of the sky in the singer's dream of "that morning flight," or the darkening of his waking-world relationship with his lover, or the overall changeability - lightening and darkening - of that relationship. Or it could simply be a description of the "bed" where he and his lover "lie."

And that word, "lie," at the very peak of the chorus, simultaneously denotes stasis and deception, lying still and lying bald-faced.

From that climax the singer settles into a four-word denouement, which, like any good denouement, takes us back to the beginning, to the title. Both the words and the chord - in C-major, the original key of the song - have been there all along.

The singer and his lover, having deceived themselves into love, now find themselves too "late" to reach the clarity, the freedom, the romantic ideal symbolized by the "sky." The words also complete the image of "running for that morning flight:" the singer misses his flight - too late, no sky.

In this final line the song achieves unity.

This unity can be approached from a number of angles. Try an exercise: Choose any substantive word from the lyrics sheet. In the first verse you might go with "words," "spoken," "still," "right," or "night." Now go through the song and find where the word is repeated, opposed, hinted at, played upon, altered slightly. Meanings will accrue.

No word dangles off the whole; all is unified.

The Case for Jackson Browne: Preface

2008-08-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

"Are you serious?"

The woman looked at me askance, beginning to smile; she was probably waiting for me to admit that I was joking. But I wasn't.

"Yeah," I said. "In the early seventies Jackson Browne was awesome."

The woman picked up a binder from the conference table and placed it on an end table by the door. Busying herself. Maybe she was embarrassed, thinking she had offended me.

"But it was a different story in the 80s," I reassured her. "He really went downhill."

"When I think Jackson Browne," she said, suddenly re-energized, "I think, 'She's got to be somebody's baby / She's so fi-ine.'" She mocked the lyrics in a bouncy, nasal voice. I laughed for her benefit.

I knew there was nothing I could do: She would always see Jackson Browne as a sleek-haired 80s pop star. A singer of bland AM radio hits. A purveyor of synth-rock.

Still, I tried to sway her.

"He used to write fantastic lyrics. You should check out Late for the Sky sometime. I think it might be the best-written album ever."

"Sounds great," she said, shuffling papers.

It was clear that she had pegged me as a fan of crap music.

I gave up on her, but I won't give up on you, my intrepid readers. I will force you to fall in love with Jackson Browne's early work. I will be relentless in my effort to canonize Late for the Sky, an album that doesn't get nearly enough love.

I will help you forget "Somebody's Baby."

Tomorrow I will post the first of eight close listenings to Late for the Sky's eight tracks. My focus will be the lyrics, but occasionally I will explore the connections between melody and verse, sound and text.

Think I'm overdoing it? Bear this in mind: When Late for the Sky came out in 1974, the reviewer at Rolling Stone just about pooped his pants: "I can't think of another writer" - i.e., not even Bob Dylan - "who merges with such natural grace and fluidity his private and public personas [sic] in a voice that is morally compelling yet noncoercive."

This was back when Rolling Stone had a modicum of cultural authority.

Things change. These days Rolling Stone rates Mick Jagger's corpse two stars higher than some of the most vital artists in indie rock. These days Dylan is the first and sometimes only name that comes to mind when we think "60s" and "good lyrics."

"These days I seem to think a lot / About the things that I forgot / To do."

We forgot to carve out a place for Browne on the Rushmore of Rock.

I've got my chisel.

Nostalgia, Pavement-Style

2008-08-06T07:20:00.000-07:00

If you are between the ages of 24 and 36, the following clip will probably fill your chest with a warm feeling, then make you weep a little for the golden old days.

1994. MTV. Pavement. "Cut Your Hair."

Look how much Stephen wants us to think he doesn't care! Listen to that intentionally messy rhythm section, that deliberately flat singing!

Ah, image.

In the end, however, "Cut Your Hair" is damn catchy, and I still listen to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain regularly.

Other things that happened in 1994: Friends premiered; so did My So-Called Life; Lorena Bobbit was declared insane; Nancy Kerrigan took silver; Schindler's List won best picture; Kurt Cobain shot himself; O.J. Simpson cruised in his Bronco; Green Day threw mud at Woodstock '94.

That covers everything, I think.

Coming Down on the Upbeat

2008-08-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

'Scuse the scarcity of text while I prep some longer posts.

I have been informed that I post an awful lot of sad music. Must be all those Quaaludes I'm popping. Well, I've switched to Ritalin for the day! This is what it sounds like in my head:

"Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes," Johnny Foreigner

"See/Saw," Jay Reatard

"Torture," King Khan & the Shrines

May your day be full of exclamation points!

!!!

(Mom, Dad: I was joking about the Quaaludes. But not the Ritalin. I steal it from my students!)

Everybody Loves Raymond (But I Don't)

2008-08-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

On the first day of a literature class I took this summer, the professor asked us to stand up and announce our favorite short stories. Several people couldn't think of one. (Had they never read one short story? Why not lie and say, "I really dug 'A Rose for Emily?'") A few MFA types muttered obscurities. I went for Anton Chekhov's "In the Ravine." The rest of the class picked something by either Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver.

Hemingway I understand. But Carver?

With the New Yorker's recent publication of a Carver rough draft (along with some delicious lit-nerd candy) terms like "minimalism" and "dirty realism" and "Kmart realism" have been revitalized in literary discourse. This development in itself doesn't bother me; it's the focus on Carver that gets my goat.

His contemporaries and genre-mates Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Amy Hempel, Mary Robison, and Jayne Anne Phillips were - and are - better writers.

The latter three get particularly short shrift, perhaps because they're women, and the extra X chromosome doesn't gibe with mainstream conceptions of dirty realism. "More macho self-pity!" readers cry. Also, Hempel, Robison, and Phillips's stories are tough to follow. Avant garde. Proof that minimalism doesn't mean monosyllabism.

Carver, on the other hand, is get-able. Short sentences. Fourth-grade vocabulary. Beer. A complete dunderhead can read "Where I'm Calling From," feel all tingly and literary, and not encounter a single intellectual challenge.

I don't mean to say that Carver's stories aren't occasionally great. I don't mean to say that any dunderhead will fully understand "Where I'm Calling From," a story with a powerful undertow. But I do mean that Carver's rudamentariness, his get-ability, accounts for his enduring popularity.

If more than a couple of his stories measured up to "Why Don't You Dance?" I wouldn't have a problem with Carver being crowned King of the Monosyllable. But his body of work is spotty. In each of his collections, two or three stories stick. The rest make a gray impression. Verbs like "got" and "went" and "did" blend in the memory.

Case in point: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981), which the New Yorker ran in rough form last December. Originally called "Beginners," the story records a conversation between two married couples. Tensions bubble, settle.

That's pretty much it.

In his first draft Carver imposed an epiphany on the ending. Gordon Lish, Carver's savvy and brutal editor, cut the epiphany, along with reams of dialogue and exposition. The resulting story should have been called a Carver-Lish collaboration - and it's dull. Dull in manuscript, dull in published form.

Fasinating literary history, sure. Carver the dependent alcoholic, Lish the firm father figure.

But the fiction itself? Eh.

Better Be Ready for Saturday Night

2008-08-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

When Samamidon's "Saro" sent me into raptures several months ago, I snapped up his album All is Well, a collection of beautifully re-imagined folk standards. I've been moseying 'round San Francisco to it ever since. Ideal for quiet foggy mornings.

"Wedding Dress," the second-best song on All is Well, has now been rendered in images:

Artsy but not pretentious. Kinda like Samamidon's horn-n-string arrangements.

Dinosaur Miscellanea #3

2008-08-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

In this occasionally recurring series, Garrett's special lady contributes a fun fact, observation, question, or rant about... DINOSAURS!

Colors were super weird back when dinos roamed the earth. Because the atmosphere was thicker, light reached the earth at a different frequency, so dinos might not have been green or brown. Why does everyone assume that dinos were green or brown? Yes, I'm talking to you, Mr. Speilberg!

I think they were pink. Pretty, pretty pink.

~ Garrett's special lady

Skimming the Hype 7-31-08

2008-07-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

This post contradicts the mission of my blog. Usually I try to maintain a high standard of critical rigor, and linking to batch of mp3's is, well, lazy. And all too common in the blogosphere.

But the reality is that people read blogs to keep pace with the zeitgeist. So this recurring feature, "Skimming the Hype," will link to recently released, Garrett-tested mp3's. Most of them will be good; some will suck; none will put you in danger of breaking the law or, worse, paying.

"Willow Tree," Chad VanGaalen

Instrumentation: banjo, accordian, double-tracked falsetto quaver. Tone: sad in a happy way. Of course I adore it. I was a fan of VanGaalen's eclectic Skelliconnection and Infinite Heart; the new album, Soft Airplane, becomes legally purchasable September 9. "Willow Tree" is the first track.

"In Ear Park," Department of Eagles

DoE's "No One Does It Like You" made my 2007 best-of list. The new single "In Ear Park" has some entrancing fretwork. Definitely looking forward to In Ear Park, the album, October 7.

"Swiss Ex-Lover," Fight Bite

A grower. The sound is wafer thin, but headphones and a volume boost make all the difference. Fight Bite's like a synth garage band, similar to fellow hype beneficiaries Au Revoir Simone (underrated) and Beach House (a bit overrated). Emerald Eyes, FB's debut LP, drops in late October.

"Mockingbird Diet," Karl Blau

Sloppy musicianship, check. Lo-fi, check. Circular riff, check. ("Sweet Jane," anyone?) Deadpan vocals, check. Bill Callahan's corner of the market just got more crowded. But Blau sings in a higher register, comes off sunnier. Stream his new album, Nature's Got Away, here.

"4:15," Young Rival [click on "415DEMO" in the media player]

Some blogs hear British Invasion in this guitar sound. Can't argue with that. But the breathy insouciant vocals remind me more of Elliott Smith in "Son of Sam" mode.

People Are Like That: Zachary Lazar's Sway

2008-07-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I met a student in the Comparative Literature department at Berkeley. His work, he told me, focuses on the pleasure of reading.

Pleasure, he said, often emerges from the reader's sense that the characters are thinking and acting in a psychologically realistic way. "That's right," the reader might say, "people are like that." Or better yet: "Oh! I never thought of it that way, but yes, people are like that."

Sudden illuminations. You're reading, reading - the characters are acting, acting - and then, without warning, a character thinks or says or does something so apt, so ineffably real, that you must stop, reread, reconsider. You try to connect the fictional moment to real memories of your own. If you succeed, you see both the story and your life in higher definition.

A tingling sensation results. Pleasure.

Intellectual pleasure, to be specific. The kind of pleasure concomitant with mind expansion.

And a heck of a narrative weapon too. Say you're an author with a knack for psychological insight. If you sprinkle those insights throughout a novel, you hardly need a plot; your readers will follow your every swerve, because one tingling sensation creates the desire for another. Plus, since you're so very observant about people, your readers will trust you. Your world will be real to them, and they will disable the questioning function of their minds. You will be able to manipulate them however you want.

Bwah-hah-hah-hah.

Anyway, my grad student friend's primary author of interest is Jane Austen. Why, he wonders, has Pride and Prejudice remained so hugely popular for nearly 200 years? Why Emma and not Tristram?

Because Austen, WEOS, is our most astute pre-Freudian psychologist, and her novels brim with those wonderful "people are like that" moments.

There are other reasons, of course. Austen's canny use of wish fulfillment has a lot to do with her tenacious popularity, as does the crackle of her dialogue. And the likability of her Lizzie Bennets and Emma Woodhouses curries favor among lady readers.

Still, I think my Berkeley friend is onto something.

Lately Zachary Lazar's Sway has been lighting up my pleasure nodes (does that sound dirty?) with passages like this:

"... Why don't you just cool off and relax?" Charlie nodded then, his mouth half-open, drifting into some sort of sarcastic daydream. He had a way of miming his emotions, acting them out so that they came across as artificial and sincere at the same time. It was the way he played his guitar, dipping and bucking his head, giving himself up to the song, but also making fun of the idea of giving himself up to the song, making fun of you for believing it.

Reading the second sentence, I say to myself, "Sure, I've seen that gesture before." It's a kind of parody of zoning out that stoners do.

Then, as Lazar describes the expression as simultaneously "artificial and sincere," I have my first "I never thought of it that way" moment.

The next sentence brings four more: 1) the connection of a sarcastic facial expression to a manner of performing; 2) the precise image of a guitar player "dipping and bucking his head;" 3) the idea that "dipping and bucking" in an exaggerated way is both performance and mock-performance; 4) the exposure of mock-performance as subtle antagonism.

Oh, by the way, the "Charlie" in the passage is Charles Manson.

Hooked?

Sway is fiction. It narrates the 60s through the POVs of Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoliel, Kenneth Anger and the Rolling Stones.

It packs more pleasure than a 4x4 from In-N-Out.

A Useful Acronym

2008-07-29T18:52:00.001-07:00

William Shakespeare is the exception to a ton of literary generalizations.

With the exception of Shakespeare, 16th-century English poets addressed their Petrarchan sonnets to women.

With the exception of Shakespeare, pre-19th-century playwrights designed characters in two dimensions.

With the exception of Shakespeare, fine writers in the 1590s were Oxbridge products.

With the exception of Shakespeare, 16th- and 17th-century drama is nigh unreadable.

It's tiring to type out "with the exception of Shakespeare" so often. Therefore, I propose the acronym, "WEOS."

WEOS, no writer pre-Joyce would inspire this kind of post.

Gettin' Bucolic

2008-07-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

Claymation gnomes in the forest. If you can think of a better visual accompaniment to Fleet Foxes' woodsy folk, you're a genius.

Ladies and gents, "White Winter Hymnal," the video:

Their EP Sun Giant and LP Fleet Foxes are both must-gets. While Portishead's Third is my #1 of the year, I'd recommend Fleet Foxes to a wider range of music lovers. My mom might even like them.

Never heard the Foxes before? Check the generous sampling of tunes on their MySpace, especially the stunning "Mykonos." If you like what you hear, get this: "Mykonos" is maybe their second or third best song. And "White Winter Hymnal" barely cracks the top ten.

Blacklash

2008-07-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed Black Kids' EP Wizard of Ahhhs, which dropped last year with tons of hype and a killer single. As soon as Pitchfork hung a Best New Music tag on it, bloggers did their duty and went crazy.

That was the buildup. Now apparently it's time for the blowup. Black Kids have released a full-length, Partie Traumatic, featuring slicker production and four refurbished songs from the EP. Last Tuesday Pitchfork hit the new album with a 3.3 out of 10. The rating was even lower - a double bagel - when the review went up first thing Tuesday morning.

The lowest blow was that Pitchfork didn't even run a review. Just a picture of two sad-eyed pugs and a caption: "Sorry :-/."

Perhaps the Fork wished to convey its guilt about tearing down a band it helped make. But you know, a better way to do that is to say it. Like, in a review.

Or maybe the fact that Black Kids now suck - as opposed to ten months ago, when they ruled - is already self-evident. To all hipsters.

I wish I could say I love Partie Traumatic, but the truth is I haven't listened to it. Wizard of Ahhhs, while catchy and semi-fresh, didn't floor me, and I doubt the new one would be worth my eight bucks. But the issue here is not the quality of the music; it's the flippancy of Pitchfork's non-review, the unwillingness to explain when there's a lotta 'splaining to do.

A proper review could have clarified how Black Kids have regressed. It could have discussed the culture of hype and backlash. It could have given a young, talented rock band its fair shake. It could have modeled responsible Internet journalism.

Instead, it goes for the gag. It gives ammunition to any bow-tied newspaper traditionalist who wants to argue that pixels are inherently inferior to paper and ink.

As the most powerful tastemaker in indie rock, Pitchfork stands at the vanguard of respectable Internet publishing. But would the New York Times ever run a goofy picture in place of a review?

I hope the editors of the Fork had a good giggle. Because the lash is going to whip back.