ONCE I WANTED TO BE THE GREATEST (IN PRAISE OF FILLER)

Picked up the new Dan Deacon, Bromst, the name of which firmly places it in the awesome pantheon of Marvel-comics-sound-effects (I imagine...the sound of a giant rubbery foe bouncing our hero off of his elastic belly? BROMST!). As I listened to it for the first time, I connected it to an otherwise utterly unrelated album, Andrew Bird's latest offering. Both stand out to me as examples of a rare pop culture phenomenon: getting exactly what you want out of an artist and being, well, underwhelmed as a result.

Emphasis on: "first time." Both albums have grown on me and one of them is reaching a "My Girls" level of repetition on my iPod. But....but, but, but. I feel as if both were borne from the moments of their previous offerings where I thought, Yes. Yes, this is Why I Love This Artist, this moment, this signature sound, this absurd beauty, what have ye. For Mr Deacon, it's the oft-interwebs-loved track "Wham City." Not the chanted communal Baltimore collective scruffy lovefest (though that's fun, and as Nitsuh Abebe points out, good company). No, rather, the confident, complicated-yet-totally-simple swinging instrumental breakdown about halfway through, chimes and drumbeat and bass all in sync. We've earned it: the slow buildup, the aforementioned chant about sharks or something, the earlier tracks with annoying samples, et cetera. But here we have the Payoff.

Well, the new album is all payoff, all the time. It's odd--I'm glad there isn't a track of endless Woody-Woodpecker-squawks, because I'd probably skip it most of the time unless I was in a Let's Experience the Whole Album mood (there are some artists I can ONLY listen to in this mood, like the Fiery Furnaces or Kate Bush or El-P). So I don't actually want annoying Dan Deacon to show up. But I don't only want the stuff I craved on the first album. Huh? I mean, this new record delivers on so many levels; it's dense, melodic, fucked up, and eerie. And moving! I don't doubt for a second the sentiments of "On the Mountins," where he/they chant (again with the chanting!) "Been wrong so many times before, but never quite like this." Sweet, kinda prosaic in a way that works, absurdly rich music, yet....the first listen, it just sort of happened. the album slipped by. It was one of those gimmick cereals that have only the coveted treats, not the filler. The peoples have been given what they wants, but only what they wants.

The moral of that story is a largely self-defeating one; I've since totally fallen for the album and its grooves. The surprises are inward--buried within the familiar moves--not outward--discovering entirely new palettes.

The same, alas, can't be said for Mr Bird. Noble Beast just feels unedited. It's too much beauty, all the time--it's an album of "Scythian Empires" (the most moving track from his previous offering) and interspersed with some unambiguously great songs (like "Fitz and the Dizzspells"). But the mightiest track is the one that frustrates the most--the coy "Anonanimal." There's a break in this song, and if you've heard it you know what I'm talkin' about, where Bird sings in perfect unison with his violin in sudden, quick wordplay about, well, forgetting a melody, and just when you want it to last, you know, just one more stanza! as I process these lyrics!, it's over and back to swirling whatevers.

So, this post is dedicated to the filler out there, the slow-burners, the dutiful tunes, the failed experiments, that place the rest of the record on relief--the "Climbing up the Walls" of the world. Because the only other option would be consistently beautiful, hence boring--or, in the rarest of rare cases, somehow continuously both great and surprising.

SO, WHAT ARE YOU IN FOR?

It seems that everyone--every non-professional-critic, I guess--should finish their best-of lists well into the next year. After all, how many of these films/albums/whatevers did we actually get to see in the time of their release? I suppose this especially applies to film, since we seem always to be in the annoying penumbra between release and eventual rental. Or perhaps all this is to justify my mind's eventual lolling around to thinking of what cluster of audiovisual sensation happened to grab me this year.

In any case, people, music! Tunes and such! It was a really odd year for the musiks because I was generally indifferent to most of the lauded albums this go-around (Deerhunter still gives me the yawns, Fleet Foxes's coveted-yet-oddly-always-underwhelming Pitchfork no. 1 spot reeks of uber-compromise [again, boring!], Vivian Girls have one great great great awesome song and a middling to slight rest of album...etc); this could all be a function of my teetering on the utterly useless-lame-quasi-adulthood-demographic, a thinning hair away from humming along to discounted 90's nostalgia-porn compilations as I type out a christmas card while checking on my ebay bid on an original cartridge of Dragon Warrior 3; or it could totally be because most of the hyped stuff is exactly that and no more, empty retreadings that didn't strike any chords for me, and I'm actually shrewd and cunning and sincere and like a motherfucking modern-day Socrates wandering the earth just telling you what's up, people. Like, how it is like really.

Or maybe it's because I just really like these albums. In alphalabetical ordair, and counting compilations but not reissues (so...sorry Bon Iver):

• Asko Ensemble, Des canyons aux etoiles (from the Olivier Messiaen: 1908-1992 set). As I've mentioned before, I don't know classical and my maxim is basically to follow Alex Ross's lead. So far, so good, because Mr. Ross has sung the praise of Monsieur Messiaen--and this recording specifically--so much, usually with attendant adjectives: transcendent, spiritual, revelatory. So imagine my surprise not to have a layered harmonious echoey Catholic chorus but these spikes! Of! Instruments! all running together in weird ways! And dammit, I put this on so I could work, but I keep getting jolted...out...Ok, now it's more chill, there's a melody AH! Wait, have I heard that motif before? Oh my God it's ending and it's long and sustained finally and it's beautiful and I made it through.
• Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War): This album not only has its own musical logic, it has its own cosmology. It's a dance album you can't entirely dance to, or a manifesto that pokes fun at itself, or a paean interrupted by a brassy little girl, or a bootleg of a space musical, or...? I keep putting this album on and am totally surprised, as if new tracks snuck on there when I wasn't looking.
• Fennesz, Black Sea: Fennesz has left the skipping, splattering palette of Endless Summer for a long composition evoking its title to perfection: rippling and slightly terrifying, music that assures you it belongs in the background and then sends a shiver of atonality through its veins--or, as in the glorious "Perfum for Winter," a plucked melody that, well, surfaces from the murk to stagger on shore.
• R. Stevie Moore, Meet the R. Stevie Moore!: This (and Arthur Russell, below) is why I wanted to include compilations, because everything R. Stevie Moore puts out is some sort of compilation of scraps from his head, overstuffed one-offs of California pop with bawdy cliches and spacey licks all making a stew of home recording nonsense that evokes J. Mascis one moment and a deranged children's singalong the next. The blank cassette your strange neighbor leaves at your door before scurrying back into his basement. You're scared you'll like it.
• Mount Eerie, Julie Doiron, Fred Squire, Lost Wisdom: So slight it barely happens, and all the better for it. You wake up one morning and Phil and co. are just sitting in your living room. They're already tuning their instruments and you listen in as you read your paper. Unassuming and pretty and light. And then as you wave absently and tell them to help themselves to coffee, you realize on your porch that you are a small human being who will die and sit on your porch and look at insects.
• Nico Muhly, Mothertongue: I'm tempted to just say this is my favorite album of the year and that everything else is just runners-up. Well, fuck it, it is. This release from the prodigious young composer is: wholly original yet clearly playing on sterling influences, beyond any genre yet full of authenticity and familiarity, deconstructive and redeeming, and most importantly ridiculously beautiful and moving without sacrificing the abundant virtuosity on display. And he has a highly entertaining website to boot.
  
• Parts and Labor, Receivers: Rock, rock on. Parts & Labor seem to take the simplest point from indie rock A to noise rock B with droning and four/four and Bob-Mould-y melodies and some burst of feedback and dissonant keyboard intros, and they are no more or less than that: a completely solid crescendoing hardworking band hitting all the right notes.
  
• Arthur Russell, Love is Overtaking Me: Oh I love Arthur Russell. How can you not? The great critic Jessica Hopper recently described Nite Jewel favorably to AR because she evokes "sounds of isolation, bedroom tinker dream." Yes and yes, and yet why is there something so communal about his music? This is I guess his "country" album but it's really the same odd amazing-by-way-of-haphazard formula he seems to nail. The title song is basically an 80's-loop of plinking sounds with him saying the title in the most heartbreaking way. Is it a good thing, this overtaking? Is too much love melancholy? What kind of music is this?
• Tinariwen, Aman Iman: Water is Life: A Tuareg band that makes shuffley dancey music with call/response and really really great edgy desert-tinged guitar intros. I once had this in my headphones as I arrived in a class I was teaching and couldn't bear to take the headphones off because it was so good. I did a half-dance at the podium until class began, sighed, and was like "OK so Aeschylus..."
• Women, Women: An album and band with no real name that sounds like a relic from another time. Not that it sounds old but that at one point there was perhaps a whole people that made this type of music according to their own rules, and someone picked up a transmission and burned it from her hard drive and slapped the name women on it and when you hear it you hear a guitar doing guitar-y things but not quite, and the vocals are chanting but not ritualistic, and then there's a drone, so perfectly long the album just relaxes into itself but still, hmm, the vocals are still just off, just muffled, just something, that you play it again when its over.
  

MESMERISION

I'm looking for a noun version of "mesmerize." Mesmerization, I suppose, but it's too processual, too mesmerizing-factory-ish. In any case, yes, the state of being mesmerized. The word struck me doubly from the same source, the byzantine and delightful Haruki Murakami; one from the great blog Daily Routines in which he describes his daily ritual as--and alas, here's the word I'm looking for; oh, the perils of writing in real time--mesmerism.

There's something seductive about this, though I suppose the great irony of being a citizen of late capitalism is that I have to go to great lengths to make my time exceptional in order to attain some sort of mesmerism. Or at least, this is the fallacious narrative I create for myself. Case in point: today I was planning on rising at 5:00, driving off to the mighty Mount San Jacinto, trekking about and bringing some reading, working up a sweat, breathing non-L.A.-air, letting the mind go a bit. But no; when I checked last night, one of the three thunderstorms that hits each year decided to descend on the Southland and I find myself grumpily grading papers and listening to Wagner really loud instead.

The second push towards this blankness--?--that my mind fetishizes is from Murakami's book Kafka on the Shore. The book is fine; for better or for worse it contains the tropes he adores so much (and which, I believe, are most gloriously on display in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) except shuffled differently--now the deep woods are the bottom of the well; now the missing cats can talk; now the woman's voice on the phone is tender; etc.--but still there is this obsession with the rhythms he's after in his own life played out on a fantastic scale. Perhaps there's a lesson here--that one can get to the amnesis of the still center without shaking up one's habitual lifestyle; that, in fact, the habits themselves can supply it. Can one meditate on one's own quotidian existence? Is there a good nothing and a bad nothing?

The storms are descending as I type, so at least there will be entertainment of sorts. But my posts of late (forgive the meta-therapy that accompanies these sorts of things...) seem to be circling around some quality of flatness, of emptiness, that fascinates me as of late. Anyone else on board? Since my lovely readership is comprised in part by my friends, around my age, I wonder if anyone else's mind peers down at the edge of one's 20's and feels a similar pull. More anon.

CRIT FIC

Without hesitation, my reply to the question "what book do you want to read next?" is 2666. I love it because I know precisely what I will love about it, which is that I Have No Idea What Will Be Going On. In other words I'm finding a certain comfort in the total sprawling insane o'erweaning mess it promises to be (and indeed almost indulgently is sold as). I think the conversations around this book remind me of the conversations floating around other Big Messy Tomes like V. and Dhalgren and, yes, Infinite Jest (a note on the latter: a totally devastating and sobering piece by DT Max on the last days of DF Wallace is a must-read: his prose style is simple but the cumulative effect despite/because of this is surprisingly affecting).

In any case I'm nostalgic for bafflement, but of the non-academic, paranoidly putting-it-all-together type, of the clashing of expectation to experience. I think this love of byzantine literature was instilled at a young age by my father's impressive library of science fiction; I would grab various selections at random and fight pleasurably against the weirdness of the worlds I'd pore over. This ranged from the awesome pulpiness of Expanded Star Wars Universe Nonsense to the legitimately cultish and occulted worlds of Michael Moorcock and, of course, William f'n Gibson.

In any case, there's more to dwell on the effect of speculative fiction upon boys and girls of an age when reality is speculative enough, but I'd like to nudge you gentle readers all to the always-entertaining and enlightening Tournament of Books hosted by good ol' The Morning News. This is where my 2666-eyebrow-raising only became more heightened at reading the witty and sharp Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner dissect and challenge and boost each bracket of the contest--their most marrowful bone to pick thus far is with Bolano's Bloated Opus, but this only makes me more enraptured. And it makes me mentally dog-ear other wonderful sounding stuff like the We-Already-Knew-She-Was-Awesome Marilynne Robinson and the Whoa-That-Dude-Sounds-Like-He's-Awesome Keith Lee Morris, who wrote a book about dart leauges. Dart Leagues! That alone makes me want to plunk down some change.

It seems odd that on the cusp of generating a vast insane (though faaaaaar less entertaining!) work myself, standing as I am on the edge of Dissertationland, and given that I stare at words all day anyway, that I would want to read more. But I do, and sometimes it pays to not be too critical of one's impulses. In fact, a flight from theory might be just the thing I need. That and some serious nature, but that particular neurosis will be tossed about another time. More anon.

SALIENT VS. EDITOR

I'm loving the reactions to Michael Robbins--and they are many--more so than his actual, you know, poem that caused such a splash back in the NYorker a few months past. To push that cliche painfully further, the ripples are much prettier than the rock hitting the water [cuz your reflection gets warped? Stop me please). Yet I want not to sound like that inevitable student who points out that like Beckett is just having the last laugh because it's about nothing at all, man--and I do have many students like that and I actually kind of love them for it, But Still. Obvy Robbins is playing with sonic form and weird internal formal jokes and rhythms that I, no student of poetry, can ascertain, but perhaps in the spirit of my previous love for Warhol, I just love the generation of celebrity as its own performance (now we're back to the idiom I study!).

I feel like the flipside/flopside to this issue is a funny recent post on an anthropology site (via) about the Worst Postmodern Article or some such. I winced first at the term "postmodern," being as it is such a dated whipping-boy for all things Intellectual, but am still intrigued by the actual title which, so not to bury the lede any deeper, is:

an ILL/ELLip(op)tical po – ETIC/EMIC/Lemic/litic post® uv ed DUCAT ion recherché repres©entation.

Yikes, or something. The writer actually makes some stabs, apparently, at explaining a new "poetics of representation" (on the other hand, New? Hello, Aristotle?) and how s/he's going for a new critical voice etc etc and the comments are predictably filled with timid snark, albeit rusty (e.e. cummings? fer reelz?).

Anyway, I kind of dig it, the mere fact that someone is doing this, the same way I like that Mr. Robbins is out there listening to metal and Li'l Wayne and writing poetry for the New Yorker. Although now we're in the tricky zone of intellectual taste-borders and kitsch and slumming and pop and that takes me to a final Interest As Of Late, which is...

Mr Carl Wilson, of the non-deceased-Beach-Boy variety, who is an able and interesting and daring critic and whose blog features some rather nice discussions ranging from an honest and kind of gratifying account of being a guest on Colbert to...well, a discussion of Michael Robbins! And with that final Oroborous tail-head snacking, I leave you gentle readers, more anon.

P.S. OK how awesome was the address of "gentle reader?" I am officially curious now as to the history of this wonderful phrase.

THE WORST WORD THAT YOU CAN THINK OF

After a great session with my dissertation advisor in which I received a tacit nod of approval to go forth with my chosen topic, I hungrily asked what the next step was. I think I was (and am) still in the framework of defining my boundaries, goals, interests--the kind of quagmire of meta-self-analysis that gets so seductive (see previous entry on facebook) in that you can broadcast not necessarily your honest intrigues but the performance of them for others to see. Anyway, he said, rightly, that now I had to do the work.

The Work. Not the limning of the space for the work to happen, not the contours of the advertisements for the work, not the epithets to drop and glibly encapsulate the work, but the work itself, the tedious and repetitive work that rewards through slow realizations and occasional epiphanies, but is always hard-earned and weathered. The Work.

"The work," I repeated. He nodded and said, "Hey, have you ever heard the song 'Work,' by Lou Reed?" He proceeded to fish it out of his music library (somehow the fact that it was an "untitled track" added to the mystique). I shook my head.

Now, I adore Lou Reed more and more as time goes by: the flat banality and winkless indulgence of rock 'n' roll cliches used to put me off; but now I realize he's not necessarily a postmodernist but is simply affectless, and from that affectlessness can come a strange power. "Berlin" capitalizes on this in extremis, beginning with lounge-night silliness and slowly fading into the stark plea of "Oh Jim" and the unlistenable (but brilliant) "The Kids." I remember hearing that this was the quote-Saddest-Album-Ever-unquote, and after the first few tracks I initially thought, really? But later the pastiche seems even sadder, a blurry desperate drink at a desolate dive-bar. It's really amazing while still tasteless (and each more because of the other).

Anyway, so I was excited, and he played the song, and it was fantastic, the last few lines particularly, just the right song at the right moment. Here are the lyrics below and here is a link to a really great performance of Reed and Cale playing the song, replete with French subtitles:


WORK

Andy was a Catholic
the ethic ran through his bones
He lived alone with his mother
collecting gossip and toys
Every Sunday when he went to Church
He'd kneel in his pew and say
"It's work, all that matters is work."

He was a lot of things
what I remember most he'd say
"I've got to bring home the bacon
someone's got to bring home the roast."
He'd get to the factory early
If you'd ask him he'd tell you straight out
It's work.

No matter what I did it never seemed enough
he said I was lazy, I said I was young
He said, "How many songs did you write ?"
I'd written zero, I'd lied and said, "Ten."
"You won't be young forever
You should have written fifteen"
It's work.

"You ought to make things big
people like it that way
And the songs with the dirty words
make sure your record them that way"
Andy liked to stir up trouble
he was funny that way
He said, "It's just work."

Andy sat down to talk one day
he said decide what you want
Do you want to expand your parameters
or play museums like some dilettante
I fired him on the spot
he got red and called me a rat
It was the worst word that he could think of
And I've never seen him like that
It's work, I thought he said it's just work

Andy said a lot of things
I stored them all away in my head
Sometimes when I can't decide what I should do
I think what would Andy have said
He'd probably say you think too much
That's 'cause there's work that
you don't want to do
It's work, the most important thing is work
It's work, the most important thing is work

image: Roman de la Rose, illuminated manuscript, mid 14c.

THE NOTION OF ANTICS

History has never been so easy.
That line and the title are lifted from a New Pornographers song with no ties whatsoever to the theme of this post, except insofar as it is essentially themeless (thus far). They are simply in the air, I'm listening and typing and trying to free up the blogging voice that has been stifled, strangled in the throat like Macbeth's cry of "amen."
Step one to getting back in the blog game ("were you ever in?" asks Cynical Man on my shoulder_ is this: get out of Facebook. I did and it feels great. It's odd to describe, but it's actually tangible, the fringes of time that have freed up in your day, the borders around other activities; my body is used to doing something after or amidst my work, so I'll look up from a paper I've finished grading and my fingers start to drift to Facebook, and then I think: wait, I'm not on anymore. And in this pause, my brain catches up, and says, just do something else then, bro. Go back to the paper, or go give your rabbit some food, or browse around but go to some other site, where you won't have to face the box that says simply and lazily WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF, as if every other thing isn't about yourself and I'd rather be straightforward in my solipsism and share with a few friends rather than have to share it with Bryan Manter from high school who I played speedball with but largely do not remember but am uncomfortable dealing with in the present tense, even though it's NOT in the present tense, and this conundrum is ably written about by Peggy Orenstein here in case you were wondering.

I would rather be the five millionth blogger to write about Animal Collective (not that I will, but you know) than write twenty-five things about myself.

My, Mr. S, your first post in months and months is taking on a rather zealous tone, and you don't have the charm of a Jon Stewart to make media messianism sexy, so let's settle, yes?

Let's settle for this: in the interim since I last talked with myself and the blog and the cursor, I've run a marathon, Barack has found himself tap-dancing on the edge of a volcano, a pair of sea lions were set back into the wild together because they had bonded in captivity, Judd Apatow has faded from cultural relevancy, I have seen fewer hummingbirds than I had hoped to when I moved to the West Coast, I have let losse several sentences like the former that lead people in cold climates to unthinkingly grit their teeth, I've made a batch of beef stock, and Dustin Pedroia has claimed his injury is no big deal. I think that covers it.

More anon(ymous). If someone writes a post and no one reads it because they have logically left for pastures greener and prolificker, what space do those words go to? I think I like the anonymity of this because no one is reading, it's meditative, selfish by way of selfless with a left turn somewhere around oblivion.