April 15, 2009

Drone: Three Hearts

Anyone who's talked to me about music lately knows that I've been listening to tons of Animal Collective and field recordings (like Geir Jennsen's field recordings from Tibet). I listen to lots of music (can I call field recordings music?) in general, but just as AC and field recordings might seem strange to most people, after listening long enough, most of what "most people" listen to sounds strange to me.

Today, I discovered that WFMU publishes a podcast called "Airborne Event Dronecast with Dan Bodah," which they describe as "Your weekly ticket to droneland. Field recordings of waters, machines, subways, drums, frogs, ice, etc, and then those same recordings spindled, folded, or mutilated. Don't worry, that ticket will still get you through the phantom tollbooth."

Oh. My. Goodness.

I've had a few friends recommend checking out WFMU before, and like most occasions when friends make recommendations, I haven't followed through (even though they're usually right about my tastes, I insist on being a precious snowflake). And like most good things, WFMU is best discovered on one's own. But, man, it's good.

I'll admit it: Listening to 25 minutes of beating hearts might seem like a little much. And I understand that there are those who would question the necessity of this type of (re)mediation. In other words, why do I need a radio station podcast to give me the opportunity to just listen? Why don't I just put my ear on D.'s or Mojito's chest and enjoy? Or get a stethoscope, even?

Maybe, like my friend and fellow blogger David at ad vertiginem has recently suggested, this is further evidence of the "zombification" of the common "diePodder." In other words, maybe it's another example of the ways technology has further distanced us from each other and from the real world.

But I don't think so. I'm sure in Alexander Graham Bell's day, people were making similar arguments about the telephone: As in, "no one ever just sits down together for a good chat anymore." And, really, such sentiments are good at the level of intention, but at the level of practice, they just look like neo-Luddism to me.

But enough of that. Why not give a listen to those beating hearts yourself and see what you think? I'm not recommending it. I'm giving you the opportunity to discover it for yourself.

Dismembered

What do you get when Moby (yes, Moby) meets David Lynch?

"Shot in the back of the head."


April 10, 2009

ToW: A Hawk and a Hacksaw

On Tuesday, D. and I saw Andrew Bird give a stunning performance at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Music Hall (not to be confused...). Equally stunning and, to us, delightfully surprising were the opening act: A Hawk and a Hacksaw (who take their name from a line in Hamlet: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw" (Act II, scene ii).

Fronted by former Neutral Milk Hotel drummer Jeremy Barnes on accordion, bass drum, and tambourine; and backed by Heather Trost on violin and other strings as well as a couple folks (whose names I didn't catch) on sundry horns and woodwinds, these guys were amazing. Captivating.

I'll admit, some of it - including the this week's track - sounds like it could be the soundtrack for a fast-motion montage in a Guy Richie film (circa-1990's, Lock, Stock style), but not at all to its discredit. I've been listening to them all morning, and I can't get enough.

A Black and White Rainbow
.

And while I'm at it, one from Andrew Bird:

Nomenclature.

Enjoy!

April 5, 2009

Got Poetry?

Published: April 2, 2009

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone.

This may seem eccentric, not to say masochistic. If you are a baby boomer like me (or older), your high school English teacher probably forced you to learn some poetry by heart for class recitation. How we howled in protest! What was the point of memorizing Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” sonnet or — in Middle English, no less! — the first 18 lines of “The Canterbury Tales”? Our teacher could never answer this question to our satisfaction; the best she could do was some drivel about our feeling “culturally confident.” But memorize them we did, in big painful chunks, by rote repetition. (There is torture lurking in the very word “rote,” which is conjectured to come from the Latin rota, meaning “wheel.”)

A few lucky types seem to memorize great swaths of poetry without even trying. George Orwell said that when a verse passage “has really rung the bell” — as the early T. S. Eliot invariably did for him — he could remember 20 or 30 lines after a single reading. Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell, had a similar mnemonic gift. Christopher Hitchens — who carries around in his head a small anthology of verse, all of which, as his friend Ian McEwan says, is “instantly neurologically available” — also seems to absorb poems by osmosis. (Or maybe he swots them up late at night after his dinner-party guests have all passed out.) Richard Howard once told me that he eased into the memorization habit as a child, when his parents rewarded him with a dime for each poem he learned.

For the rest of us, the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I’ve already got. At the moment, I’m 22 lines into Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.

The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.

That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure. Between the covers of any decent anthology you have an entire sea to swim in. If you don’t have one left over from your college days, any good bookstore, new or used, will offer an embarrassment of choices for a few bucks — Oxford, Penguin, Norton, etc. Or you might try ESSENTIAL PLEASURES: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (Norton, $29.95), edited by the former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

But which poems to memorize? I started with Auden’s “This Lunar Beauty” — a little lyric that Stephen Spender once said was the most beautiful thing in all of Auden. Next I tried Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” — a Nabokov novel compressed into 56 lines. Browning, although not quite a first-rate poet, proved to be especially fun to memorize because of his exotic vocabulary and jaw-breaking diction. For sheer length, the most ambitious poem I’ve tackled is Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (a favorite, as it happens, of Stephen King). At 204 lines, it takes 10 minutes to get through — just the time it takes me to walk from my apartment to the Chinese laundry.

By now, my mental treasury of verse pretty much spans everything from Chaucer up to the present. (Tennyson was the last major gap, which I’m just now plugging.) There’s a heavy concentration of Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats (whose symbolic hocus-pocus finally makes some sense to me), plenty of delightful warhorses like “To His Coy Mistress” and “Kubla Khan” and a good bit of light verse (like a long poem about a duck-billed platypus that becomes a brilliant diplomat only to resign in disgrace after laying an egg). Although I’m a little thin on contemporary verse, one of the best poems I’ve learned by heart is Richard Wilbur’s “Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” Its delicate rhythms at first proved rebarbative to my memory, but when I finally got it down I was so delighted with it that I wrote Wilbur a fan letter. He wrote back, saying that he always advised his students to memorize poems: “If one is delayed in a bus terminal, or sitting in a foxhole, it’s wonderful to have an inner anthology to say over, yet again, in one’s mind.”

One should be skeptical, though, of some of the alleged advantages cited by champions of poetry memorization. “I wonder if anyone who has memorized a lot of poetry . . . can fail to write coherent sentences and paragraphs,” Robert Pinsky once said. Well, responded David Bromwich, just take a look at the autobiography of Marlon Brando, who memorized heaps of Shakespeare.

Are there cognitive benefits? I sometimes feel that my mnemonic horsepower is increasing, but that’s probably an illusion. “Memorizing poetry does seem to make people a bit better at memorizing poetry,” Geoffrey Nunberg has observed, “but there’s no evidence that the skill carries over to other tasks.”

Nor, as I have found, will memorizing poetry make you more popular. Rather the reverse. No one wants to hear you declaim it. Almost no one, anyway. I do have one friend, a Wall Street bond-trader, who can’t get enough of my recitations. He takes me to the Grand Havana Cigar Club, high above Midtown Manhattan, and sits rapt as I intone, “The unpurged images of day recede. . . .” He calls to one of the stunningly pretty waitresses. “Come over here and listen to my friend recite this Yeats poem.” Oh dear.

The grandest claim for memorizing poetry is made by Clive James, himself a formidable repository of memorized verse. In his book “Cultural Amnesia,” James declares that “the future of the humanities as a common possession depends on the restoration of a simple, single ideal: getting poetry by heart.” A noble sentiment. I just wish that James had given us some reason for thinking it was true.

I don’t have one myself, but I hope that I have at least dispelled three myths.

Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize. It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.

Myth No. 2: There isn’t enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry. Bad analogy. Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar.

Myth No. 3: Everyone needs an iPod. You do not need an iPod. Memorize poetry instead.

- - -

The good folks at Norton have, in conjunction with the Essential Pleasures collection, created the Poems Out Loud site. Well worth checking it out.

March 27, 2009

A Yak Caravan is Coming

Geir Jennsen. Field recordings from Tibet. Listen.

A Yak Caravan is Coming

Neighbors on Oxygen

March 20, 2009

Track of the Week: "If I Had a Heart" by Fever Ray

Jeez oh pete! '09's shaping up to be a great year for new music from some of my old favorites.

Yep, Bob Dylan.

But also, Wilco's got a new one slated for June.

Andrew Bird just released a fine album Noble Beast.

In addition to the remastered reissues of Paul's Boutique and Check Your Head, word on the street is that the Beastie Boys have a new one in the works (my prediction: a "punk" album).

Animal Collective are relentlessly assaulting us with good stuff: beyond the truly excellent Merriweather Post Pavilion, they're re-releasing nearly everything they've recorded on Direct Metal Mastering vinyl (see, for example, the reissue of Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished) as well as a long-awaited vinyl-only, live box set from Catsup Plate Records.

And that says nothing of the newer bands busting out on the scene.

Dreijer Andersson may not be new to the scene, but her solo project Fever Ray is. I'll admit it, I picked this one up thanks to Pitchfork's "Best New Music" section: So sue me (and, haters, just have a look at their 10 most recent best new albums and disagree with them. I dare ya).

"If I Had a Heart" is the haunting opener from Fever Ray's self-titled album.

Enjoy!

March 17, 2009

Thru You: The YouTube Mash-Up, ReMix, Megajam

Do yourself a favor while you're slacking off at work or procrastinating on that essay, book, project, Spring cleaning, yoga practice, feeding the kids, etc., and check this out.

Titled Thru You: Kutiman mixes YouTube this fascinating project seamlessly mixes together strange little, digital odds and ends into some decent music. Even more, it highlights what's best about collaborative digital environments: together, we can make some cool shit.

As explained by the man himself:

March 16, 2009

Together for Life

From Pitchfork:

If I were Bob Dylan, I would spend my days in sweatpants watching "The Price Is Right", eating fresh strawberries and cream, and maybe getting up to sign off on a few official bootlegs every few months.

It's a good thing I'm not Bob Dylan. After revising what it means to be a rock star, bringing the idea of rock'n'roll to something close to high art, and becoming the legend among legends, Dylan is still going at age 67. As previously reported, he's coming out with a new studio album-- his 46th-- called Together Through Life. The LP comes out April 28 via Columbia. That picture of an old-school couple making out in the backseat of a giant car is the sure-to-be-scrutinized cover.

The self-produced affair (under Dylan's Jack Frost alias) follows 2006's Modern Times and was inspired in part by French director Olivier Dahan's upcoming film My Own Love Song with Renée Zellweger, Forest Whitaker, and Nick Nolte. Dylan wrote the new song "Life Is Hard" for the road trip flick and then Together Through Life "sort of took its own direction," according to an interview with the songwriter now up on his site.

In the chat with longtime rock journo Bill Flanagan, Dylan talks about the heavy influence of Chess Records on the new album and how his recent artistic resurgence has changed his creative viewpoint: "If there's an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it's not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up."

Dylan invented and then figured out how to break almost every rock stereotype there is, so it's only right that he continues to age with striking grace.

Dylan's never-ending tour continues this spring with a six week trek through Europe.



I'm giddy.

March 2, 2009

Mojito Weekend


Happy Weekend!

February 27, 2009

Track of the Week: "Trouble Weighs a Ton" by Dan Auerbach

The first track from the Black Keys's frontman Dan Auerbach. This guy can do no wrong, in my opinion.

"Trouble Weighs a Ton"

Enjoy!

February 24, 2009

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses

In December, I posted my "Thirteen Theses for the Writer," which were, in part, a response to Walter Benjamin's "Post No Bills" (Selected Writings, Volume I). In "Post No Bills," Benjamin includes "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses" along with "The Critic's Technique in Thirteen Theses." Consider this Part One:

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses:

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude of a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea – but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea – style – writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

I often get stuck at number 1. Good thing this isn't a 12-step program.

February 23, 2009

Chiming in on Best Actor. Also, Aging.

First, my apologies for the hiatus. Between the last post and this one, I've scrambled to put together a paper for presentation at The Louisville Conference [truncated version of the cumbersomely long conference title], and I've had little time and energy left over for the blog. The paper - "Autopoietic Meta-Et-Cetera" or "Too Much Information is Never Enough: How to Create and Erase Yourself Using Common Household Tools" - went over very well, thank you.

Second, I wasn't going to throw in my two cents on the Mickey Rourke debate, but I've been thinking about using the film as the focus of a future conference presentation, and so I thought I'd throw this out there and see what comes back.

What I found interesting was that the Best Actor category also pitted against each other two films that portrayed anxieties regarding aging: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Wrestler. Where the former, a film based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, presented a hopeful protagonist aging in reverse; the latter, written by The Onion's Robert D. Siegel, gave us a pathetic protagonist facing age, death, nostalgia, and loss. And where Benjamin Button offered a fantastical portrayal whose cinematic effects were matched in superficial beauty only by the good looks of lead man Brad Pitt, The Wrestler offered the stark realism of a washed-up wrestler whose life dovetails both wonderfully and tragically with lead actor Mickey Rourke’s. Ask a movie buff who should have won lead actor, and chances are they will concede that Sean Penn was very good in Milk and that the film deserves all the attention it can get for its sympathetic portrayal of the film's namesake, Harvey Milk; but between Pitt (who, in my opinion, is really a superb supporting actor trapped in a lead actor’s body) and Rourke, I think most of us will agree that Rourke’s “comeback” deserved the Oscar.

Rourke’s acting was certainly deserving of the award, and I think there are many who suspect that he deserves it as much for the way he allegorically acts out the narrative arc of his life prior to The Wrestler as he does for his acting; but I think this reaction also speaks to the poignancy of the film/Rourke’s life as a cautionary tale. In short, the moral of both: Don’t fuck up, and if you start fucking up, stop. We find Randy "The Ram" Robinson and Rourke both looking back over a life of fucking up and the ensuing loss that goes along with it. Robinson’s rampant path of self-destruction takes only the briefest pause in the face of a life-threatening heart attack, shortly after which, having failed to patch things up with his daughter (wonderfully played by Evan Rachel Wood), he recklessly abandons himself to complete self-annihilation.

So what is it about his recklessness and self-destruction that resonates so well with aging and failure (not that aging and failure are intrinsically linked)? Is the real moral of the film that, if you're a man, and you're alone (i.e. sans family), you're pretty much screwed? I'd like to think director Aronofsky is a little deeper than that. And I think he's deeper than to just be overtly setting Robinson up as the "sacrificial ram" and making our protagonist into someone who suffers so we don't have to. But, still, what IS going on here?

February 13, 2009

Track of the Week: "Legal Tender" by Handsome Furs

This one comes from the duo comprised of Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner and his wife Alexei Perry: Handsome Furs.

The other bands involved in the collective that gives us Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs - Frog Eyes, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, et. al. - seem to get more attention than the Handsome Furs, but, in my opinion, the Furs are the best of the bunch.

Here's a new one from their forthcoming album Face Control.

Legal Tender.

Enjoy!

February 9, 2009

Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

From Priya Ganapati's recent Wired Blog Network post:
In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain's abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.
As you might have guessed from the title, the team of neuroscientists et. al are going to come up with this architecture by "reverse-engineering" the brain.

Whoa. Like, remember when I was ranting about The Singularity?

I think it's time to start thinking about what kind of robot body you'd like.

I'm going for the Adrienne Barbeau-bot.

February 8, 2009

Mojito Weekend

Mozilla.

Happy Weekend!

February 7, 2009

Track of the Week: "Let's Talk About It" by White Denim

This one comes from White Denim's recent Exposion, available here in multiple formats ranging from FLAC files to a "one-year subscription" that comes with the album on both wax and in a million digital bits as well as a 7" single of this week's track.

"Let's Talk About It"

Enjoy!

February 5, 2009

One Art

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

~ ~ ~

Bishop rewrote this superb villanelle seventeen times before getting it right.

For more on the revisions, see Brett Candlish Millier's "The Drafts of 'One Art'."

February 2, 2009

GeekDad, the SuperBowl, and the new Dylan?


Even just thinking about Wired's blogging collective of sci-fi loving, mustachioed, game-playing, tech-freaky fathers puts a smile on my face. I love those guys at GeekDad so much. From reviewing Star Wars themed lego creations to raving about the "10 Science Fiction TV Series [They] Can't Wait to Watch with Their Kids," these guys make it clear that they unapologetically love being good fathers while completely embracing their geekdom.

God Bless 'Em.

Most recently, one of them - Ken Denmead - commented on his picks for the worst Super Bowl ads. Unsurprisingly, the GoDaddy.com ads were blasted. I'm not a parent (I'm certainly a geek), but even I was a bit put off by the excessive and entirely unnecessary sex appeal of the ads. Moreover, my intelligence was a bit insulted: rather than tell anything about the GoDaddy service, the ads just flashed some flesh under the assumption that sex sells, even when the product may have been a bit ambigiously pitched.

Don't get me wrong: I don't need my ads to be blatent endorsements of their represented goods and services. Often, the crew working on an advertisement consists of talented filmmakers, writers, directors, etc. who are trying to break into the film industry, and so they build a resume and forge an artistic identity through branding themselves while helping to endorse brands.

Such must be the case for the Dylan/Will.I.Am Pepsi ad (embedded below).

I don't typically comment on Dylan's endorsements. They haven't bothered me much, and my sense is that it's far easier to criticize (and to make the obligatory, sarcastic "I guess the times are a-changin'" comment) than to understand or accept. In the 60s, Dylan reportedly said that he'd let his music be used for the endorsement of ladies underwear: at the time, it was almost preposterous to imagine an underwear ad. But, sure enough, in the early aughts, there was Dylan, strumming and singing in a Victoria's Secret ad. Didn't bother me. With the release of his most recent album (Modern Times), Dylan did an iTunes promo in which he sang one of my favorite tracks from the album ("Someday Baby"). I like the song, the commercial is well done, I dig Apple, I have an iPod...so...whatever.

But one thing bothers me about the SuperBowl ad. Wait for it. Let me describe.

The commercial - visually beautiful, artfully done, thematically significant - essentially compares popular cultures of previous generations with the pop culture of today's youth, reminding us that "every generation refreshes the world." Overtly, it suggests that Shrek is the new Gumby, that Jack Black is the new John Belushi, that the cell phone slowjam tribute is the new Bic lighter...And that Will.I.Am...I say again, Will . I . Am ... is the new Dylan. Look, I even like the mash-up. It's a decent mix, and Dylan notoriously approves of interpretations of his songs (see the Dylan-approved soundtracks for Masked and Anonymous as well as I'm Not There).

But, really? The new Dylan?


January 30, 2009

Track of the Week: 6 Ghosts by Nine Inch Nails

I'm not gonna lie: I have tremendous respect for Trent Reznor. At about the same time Radiohead were shattering traditional methods of music distribution, Reznor was also digitally releasing some amazing material sans record label (and without asking his fans to qualify their appreciation by coming up with their own price).

The guy is intelligent and talented. Don't believe me? Check out NPR's World Cafe interview.

This week's track comes from a massive, 36-song instrumental collection called Ghosts. Reznor made the first of four parts of this collection available for free download. And it's good.

6 Ghosts.

Enjoy (and don't be afraid).

January 27, 2009

"What Life Asks of Us": In Defense of a Liberal Education

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, David Brooks laments what he sees as the degradation of traditional, vocational codes for behavior (and in Brooks's perspective, identity).

In his words:

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.
In short, according to Brooks, the results of a liberal education - thinking for yourself, questioning social and behavioral scripts, "breaking free" from "the way you were raised," examining life, discovering your own values - are bad. Very bad. "The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations," he says. "They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them." Question these rules and, apparently, your identity will crumble.

Brooks concedes that "institutional thinking is eroding" and that "Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined." Furthermore, he notes that the popular perception is that "Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity."

Brooks, however, apparently eschews personal exploration and embraces institutional conformity. As he puts it, institutionalized rules for behavior, scripts for identity, "often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life."

I'm speechless. How can there still be room in the Twenty-First Century, in the post-Bush era, in Urban America for the fear of a liberal education?

January 26, 2009

Mash-Up!

Tonight, I was going to continue something I started earlier today in debate with a close friend: a rant I started regarding the "institutionalization" of the arts through the creation of a Secretary of the Arts (or Culture Czar) position in Washington. For those who don't know, Quincy Jones has suggested he'll ask ("beg" even) for a Secretary of the Arts position during his next talk with Obama. In support of Jones, Jaime Austria, a bass player with the New York City Opera, started an online petition (which, at the time of this post, has received well over 207,000 signatures).

Rather than rant, I'll just ask this question:

If the U.S. government appointed a Secretary of the Arts (and let's hope Obama would be as wise in making this appointment as he was in the appointment of, for example, a Nobel Physicist as Energy Secretary), would, at the end of Obama's presidency, the "mash-up" still be the most popular go-to form for artistic expression?

January 25, 2009

Mojito Weekend

w/Helio

Happy Weekend!

January 23, 2009

January 21, 2009

Spoiler Culture

I'll admit it: I'm a Lost addict. I'll not try to justify, qualify, or explain my raging fandom. It just is.

As it has for other television series with cult followings (ranging from Battlestar Galactica to Survivor), the surrounding spoiler culture is thriving as a new season begins. As Wired's Hugh Hart puts it: "To the true believer, spoilers are the sincerest form of flattery."

Books, blogs, websites, and even a Lostpedia provide venue for believers to obsess and flatter. I'll not take a stab at spoiling anything here (I struggle with both the obsessive urge to know and a romanticized sentiment for enjoying the surprise), other than to say this:

I may be taking Wednesdays off for a while...

oooh...commercial's over!

January 20, 2009

Inauguration Day

From Richard Monasterky's article "America Elects a Professor in Chief" published in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The 2008 presidential election has broken so many political barriers that historians may overlook one unusual fact: When Barack Obama takes the oath of office in January alongside his running mate, Joe Biden, it will be the first time that the president, the vice president, and both of their spouses have worked in higher education.

Taken together, the Obamas and the Bidens have amassed decades of experience at colleges and universities. Mr. Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 until 2004. His wife, Michelle, has worked in the administration at the same university. For the past 17 years, Mr. Biden has taught constitutional law at Widener University School of Law. His wife, Jill, teaches English at Delaware Technical and Community College's Stanton-Wilmington campus.

The world of academia and Obama's presidency further intersect at Post_Moot: Two Miami University of Ohio English professors have put together a blog they describe as "A Radically Inclusive Online Anthology of Responses to the Inauguration of the President-Elect Barack Obama." The blog invites anyone to post responses, pictures, comments, etc. on the inauguration of our 44th president. Check it out here.

And Happy Inauguration Day!

January 19, 2009

Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

McSweeney's, the publishing company founded by Dave Eggers (the author of the excellent, an actually appropriately named A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), and 826 National, a national, non-profit organization that promotes and teaches literacy skills to youth, have teamed up to publish a collection of letters, words of wisdom, and advice for President-elect Obama.

From the McSweeney's store:
A few days after the election of Barack Obama, kids around the country were asked to provide advice and guidance to their new president. In this collection, arriving at inauguration time, there's loads of advice for the president, often hilarious, sometimes heartfelt and occasionally downright practical. Students from all over the country reach out to the 44th president, speaking to the issues closest to their hearts, relating their life stories, and asking for help. Topics include the economy, education, war, global warming, race relations in America and immigration. The book also includes letters about snow cones, puppies, microwavable burritos, dinosaur projects, multiplication and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, reportedly haunting a White House bedroom.

Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country includes such advice as:
"If I were president, I would help all nations, even Hawaii."
— Chad Timsing, age 9, Los Angeles

"I really hope you put America back together. No pressure though."
— Sheenie Shannon Yip, age 13, Seattle

"1. Fly to the White House in a helicopter. 2. Walk in. 3. Wipe feet. 4. Walk to the Oval Office. 5. Sit down in a chair. 6. Put hand sanitizer on hands. 7. Enjoy moment. 8. Get up. 9. Get in car. 10. Go to the dog pound."
— Chandler Browne, age 12, Chicago

And, while it wasn't advice, exactly, we thought this was worth sharing:
"You are just like a big me." — Avante Price, age 7, Seattle

Cute, huh?

For more hilarious and touching excerpts from McSweeney's, click here.

To purchase Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids' Letters to President Obama (ed. Jory John) directly from 826 National, click here.

January 17, 2009

Mojito Weekend


Happy Weekend!

January 16, 2009

Track of the Week: "You Remind Me of Something" by Bonnie "Prince" Billy

When I lived in Louisville, I was often told I should check out local act Will Oldham aka Palace Brothers aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billie. As usual, when I'm told I should check out any cultural product (be it film, television show, album, artist, etc.), I'm resistant. Oppositional, even. I mean, c'mon, I'm a unique, precious snowflake: irreducible to your simplified assumptions regarding my artistic preferences, tastes, etc. You don't know me, man.

So, I never got around to checking out old Will.

Thanks to a recent New Yorker article, I decided to give him a shot. That's right, my friends don't know me, The New Yorker does.

Everyone who said I'd like Oldham was right.

"You Remind Me of Something"

Enjoy!

January 15, 2009

Unwavering bands of light: What's post- the post?

I'm fond of talking, theorizing, about what comes after Postmodernism. Some see the whole PoMo thing as a paradigmatic example of exaggerated, pretentious intellectualism. I don't.

As a literary and cultural movement, it has given us useful language and a situational discourse to understand the underpinnings - the psyche - of our contemporary culture. More importantly, it's given voice to a multiplicity of perspectives that have traditionally fallen outside of academic discourse. It has sought to liberate marginalized groups by not only giving them a voice, but also by seeking to understand what it means to "be" ~someone~.

It essentially asks my favorite question: Why are you you? Its responses to this question have been various, and they typically suggest that the Postmodern identity is ideologically interpellated, socially constructed, subject to contextualized performative imperatives, unstable, under continual construction, without a core essence, open to continual possibility, and so on. I don't find this scary, or even existentially overwhelming, as some do. I actually find it hopeful. And important.

But what comes next? Historically, at least in America, cultural shifts - in literature, art, film, etc. - have coincided with wars. As many theorists have observed, cultural production is intrinsically linked to both economics and the widespread concerns of the masses. These things show up in the art. During periods of war, economics are affected as are our cultural concerns. The time is beyond ripe.

Appropriately the tone and focus of various academic discourses has been shifting: I've noticed a greater attention being paid to aesthetics. Postmodernism essentially did away with aesthetic concerns, noting that aesthetic taste is, on one hand, subjective (and thus socially constructed) and, on the other, without essence (like the PoMo subject). If anything, PoMo gave us the aesthetic of the abject: piss, shit, blood, vomit, that which is within me and I violently expel (read Kristeva, if you dare). I think we've gotten what we need from the abject and are ready for a new sense of aesthetics.

I think this also points towards the development of a new understanding of ontology, of being. I think that we'll see something that seems like a return to considerations of essentialized identity, but I think these considerations will be unfettered from religious associations, and, by and large, will be free from considerations of the permanence or infinite status of the soul. Rather, I think these considerations will, in some ways be extensions of pre-existing understandings of subjectivity - and will thus have an existential component. In other words, I think we may see considerations of the subject reconsider the possibility of a vestige of selfhood that isn't explained by the complex interrelationships of genetic preconditions, environmental factors, social constructions, and so on. I think we'll see a Post-Postmodern formation of subjectivity that considers both the complex interaction, and the process of putting together fragments of selfhood, as resulting in a ~something else~ that isn't necessarily reducible to the focus of previous considerations of subjectivity.

I'm seeing evidence of this shift a lot these days (but perhaps it is only the reflection of my own perspective). Consider the lyrics from the new Animal Collective album I recently mentioned:
Am I really all the things that are outside of me?
Would I complete myself without the things I like around?
Does the music that I make play on my awkward face?
Do you appreciate the subtleties of taste buds?
Or maybe Vonnegut - being, as always, ahead of his time - wrote it best when, after writing himself into Breakfast of Champions as both author and character, changed his perspective from this:
I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.
to this (in the voice of the book's artist Rabo Karabekian):
"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."
I'm still working this out, but I'm curious: What do you think, you unwavering band of light, you.

January 14, 2009

Surveillance, Property, and the Body

I just came across David Kravets's recently posted comments on a University of California study of the effectiveness of public surveillance as a method of reducing violent crime rates. He points out that, although property crime rates decrease in the presence of visible surveillance cameras, violent crimes don't.
"Violent incidents do not decline in areas near the cameras relative to areas further away," added the study, which noted the cameras helped police bring charges against six people accused of felony property crimes. "We observe no decline in violent crimes occurring in public places."
Of course, I find this study fascinating. For the record, I'm far more interested in the ways the widespread distribution of surveillance cameras can be liberating, or at the very least, I'm interested in how a proliferation of visual information affects postmodern subjectivity and narrative structures. It's interesting, though, that the mechanism meant to create the illusion of safety does little to actually secure it.

Image from aforementioned Threat Level blog post.

Church Mouse

How can he know and not be crazy?

January 12, 2009

"On Not Winning the Nobel Prize"

From Doris Lessing's 2007 Nobel Lecture, given in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year she wrote The Cleft (click here for the New York Times review):
Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

Read the full lecture here, or get it as a .pdf courtesy Nobelprize.org.

BTW: Orhan Pamuk's 2006 lecture - "My Father's Suitcase" - is also wonderful.

January 10, 2009

Mojito Weekend!



















Happy Weekend!

January 9, 2009

Track of the Week: "My Girls" by Animal Collective

I love this band so freakin' much. Their new one... Merriweather Post Pavilion...geez oh man, it's good.

Pitchfork Review.

Buy it from Domino
.

Listen to "My Girls".

Enjoy!

January 8, 2009

Susan Sontag's Journals

I haven't read Reborn yet, but I want to.

As Daryll Pickney describes it in his New Yorker review:

Sontag’s “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice. The volume takes us from her last days at North Hollywood High School to the year that, now living in New York, she published her first novel, “The Benefactor.”

NPR's John Freeman points out that:

Reborn is full of earnest exhortations to read books (Moll Flanders, another tale of self-creation) and smile less ("Think of Blake. He didn't smile for others"), as well as descriptions of lectures attended and films inhaled, sometimes at the rate of three a day.

I'll admit that posthumously publishing someone's journals is worse than hanging their dirty undies out to dry (and for everyone to see), and the fact that it was her own son who published them is a bit...bothersome. But, according to Richard Eder of The New York Times, Rieff published the journals knowing that "Sontag had left her papers without restrictions to the University of California, Los Angeles. If he did not do the job, thus at least keeping some control, someone else would."

I guess Junior didn't think he could have destroyed the journals himself (which is what he says his mother would have done were she alive). And I'm glad he didn't. Here's the thing about seeing someone's dirty undies blowing in the breeze: it's hard not to look.

Besides, I love reading journals written during a period of intense creativity. Take Kafka's journal entries produced during the writing of The Trial. They're wonderful insights into not only the writer's mind, but also into the process of writing.

For example:
August 29. The end of one chapter a failure; another chapter, which began beautifully, I shall hardly--or rather certainly not--be able to continue as beautifully, while at the time, during the night, I should certainly have succeeded with it. But I must not forsake myself, I am entirely alone.

September 1. In complete helplessness barely wrote two pages.

October 15. Two weeks of good work; full insight into my situation occasionally.

November 1. Yesterday, after a long time, made a great deal of progress; today again virtually nothing; the two weeks since my vacation have been almost a complete loss.

December 19. Yesterday wrote "The Village Schoolmaster" ["The Giant Mole"] almost without knowing it...

January 20. The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

Excerpts from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Vol. II, 1914-1923

You see? Even Kafka struggled. And you see? Pretty interesting, huh? I bet Sontag's journals are even better.

January 7, 2009

Stanley Fish's 10 Best American Movies

Stanley Fish - most famous in my world for the concept of "interpretive communities," or the idea that readers interpret a text subjectively but in the context of the specific linguistic system to which readers belong - recently posted his list for "The 10 Best American Movies" on his New York Times blog.

His introduction and rationale:

It’s Top Ten time again, and like everyone else I have a list, in my case a list of the 10 best American movies ever. Here it is, with brief descriptions and no justifications. Only the first two films are in order. The others are all tied for third.


His List:

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
2. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
3. Double Indemnity (1944)
4. Shane (1953)
5. Red River (1948)
6. Raging Bull (1980)
7. Vertigo (1958)
8. Groundhog Day (1993)
9. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
10. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)


Has Fish only seen two films since 1953? And did he decide he should put them on the list for good measure?

Now I know that, while Fish's list is largely subjective, most film critics would probably agree that most of these are important, if not good, films. Moreover, I can accept that Fish himself is part of an interpretive community that brings a socially constructed value system to his "readings" of these films.

But, seriously...two Westerns? Not a single film from the last 18 years? And Groundhog Day? Really?

Don't get me wrong: I loves me some Shane. And Red River is a classy-classic John Wayne Western - if I'm channel surfing and hit this one on AMC, chances are I'll watch it (and for the upteenth time). The Best Years of Our Life - a bit depressing, but a good melodrama (and I can understand that, for a film made in 1946, it pushed the envelope on things like war, love, and...dismemberment). Scorsese, Hitchcock, and...okay...even Wilder deserve spots on a "10 Greatest Filmmakers of All Time" list. Sure...

And I totally dig Fish. I find his take on socially constructed interpretation compelling. He's a good writer - his blurbs about each film are great. I've even seen him talk and enjoyed it. But that's all beside the point. The point is:

Groundhog Day? One of the Best American Movies ever? Really?

January 6, 2009

Web 2.0 and the Expansion of the Filmic Event

In my talk at the recent MLA conference, I made the following case:
I believe that both the virtual community’s relationship to film and the advancing development of entertainment technology, in and out of the virtual world, suggest that the filmic experience is telescopically, if not exponentially, expanding to an inevitable point: an organic and integrated experience that straddles and blurs the boundaries between the real world and the virtual, between forms and genres of visual entertainment, and between the spatio-temporally isolated experience of the cinema and television and the ongoing experience of everyday life.
and that this "inevitable point" means that:
From here on out, and for those who have the technology and access, the filmic experience will become something less identifiable as traditional film and more recognizable as a hybrid between traditional film and something like a television show (if, in no other way, only by virtue of length and accompanied advertisements). The viewer will be able to choose what she wants to watch and when and where she wants to watch it. Moreover, the experience itself may well be accompanied by a social, “Web 2.0” component wherein the viewer may evaluate a film, asynchronously communicate with the filmmaker, synchronously interact with a virtual community of fellow viewers, or take part in an ARG or fantasy community collaboratively constructed around a particular film or around a series of films.

I used The YouTube Screening Room - a venue gushed about in December - as my paradigmatic example of this - but there are so many more examples of both digital venues and real-world technologies (like AppleTV and the TiVo).

What surprised me so much in the audience's reaction was the vast difference between those who felt like I was pointing out the obvious and those who couldn't accept that the cinematic experience can really happen to someone watching it on a computer screen (or iPhone or other such device) as opposed to the old movie house, big screen.

It seems to me that "Web 2.0" - particularly Web 2.0 as social space - has become a dividing line between those who can accept that social activity can happen without a physical bodily referent (these are the folks who have no problem with considering their facebook friends to be closer than their classmates, co-workers, etc.) and those who can't. Unfortunately, this line too easily looks like one determined by age - typically, the folks who haven't grown up with with the internet fall on one side; and those in the "Wired Generation" fall on the other.

Age aside, perhaps the key to my perspective - one that I'm still figuring out - is that I suggest that the cinematic experience will become (or already is) a hybrid one (and hybrid in a unique way for each individual): consider alternate reality games (ARG) that have surrounded films and television (from the marketing campaign called "The Beast" for the Kubrick cum Spielberg film A.I. to the more recent "Lost Experience"), the popularity of video games based on films (like ones that let you explore the Star Wars galaxy or roam Tolkein's MiddleEarth), or even just the popularity of rating film clips on YouTube... For those of us who want the filmic experience to go beyond the cinema screen, there is ample opportunity.

On the other side of this coin, so to speak, we might expect a cultural reaction comparable to the one regarding the digital distribution of music. Vinyl sales have been skyrocketing in the last few years, suggesting that the digitization of music has left us hungering for a physical artifact. What, then, might a similar reaction to digital film distribution be?

January 5, 2009

Long Story Short:

The Summary of Everything That's Happened Since My Last Post:

Orlando.
Winter Park, FL where we sampled wine at one of the more excellent places on earth.
Christmas on a plane (to Pittsburgh).
Fog in Atlanta -> delayed flight -> missed connection -> lost luggage.
3 a.m., $3 breakfast with Coronas at Terrible's near the Las Vegas strip (which was never on the itinerary to begin with).
San Francisco.
Disappointed by Haight-Ashbury.
A $5 tie from Walgreens.
The Nutcracker performed by the San Francisco Ballet at the historic War Memorial Opera House.
Fisherman's Wharf -> Irish Coffee at The Buena Vista.
My Talk: Web 2.0 and the Expansion of the Filmic Event.
Louisville.
NYE wedding.
Home again (thank god!).

My apologies for the brevity.