Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Vulgar Toothpick

Slate reports that the mysterious object of Henry James's novel The Ambassadors has been found out.

"It's a little thing they make—make better, it appears, than other people can, or than other people, at any rate, do," says Strether. When prompted to explain further, he again equivocates, describing the business as "a manufacture that, if it's only properly looked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly." Impatient with Strether's "postponements," Gostrey asks him whether the article in question is something improper—perhaps even unmentionable?..

In the 1880s, Forster patented a revolutionary new machine that polished, rounded, compressed, and sharpened toothpicks. This new toothpick was a marvel, according to Petroski, "ahead of its time as a designed object." Now consider Strether's first impression of Chad Newsome, whom he hasn't seen in five years when he finally tracks him down:

Chad was brown and thick and strong; and of old Chad had been rough. Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth? Possibly; for that he was smooth was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand. ... It was as if in short he had really, copious perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned successfully out.
James had a habit of associating his characters with a specific piece of scenery or work of art, or, in The Ambassadors, manufactured object—recall Sarah Newsome Pocock's safety-match smile. Of Chad Newsome, it might be said that he was as compressed and polished as one of Forster's toothpicks.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Poverty of Print

From Anthony Grafton, in a New Yorker article about the digitization of libraries:

If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.

He also includes a 5000-year history of how librarians have tried to organize and circulate an excess of material. It includes a whole paragraph of the early Christian bishop/librarian Eusebius. If that doesn't turn you on, I don't know what will.

Monday, October 29, 2007

No Better Man To Strategize Your Online Products

The New York Times calls this article "An Advocate for TV That Viewers Create," but I totally prefer the International Herald-Tribune's "Al Gore's other cause: Current TV." Check out this quote, by our boy wonder blogger:

"If you build it, they will not necessarily come," Robin Sloan, an online product strategist for Current, wrote in a blog entry. "We have, a number of times, assumed that if we built the Web architecture for citizen journalists to send in their reports, they just would."
They didn't just quote Robin -- they quoted his blog, which is infinitely cooler.

Man, I've totally got to find a way to get my name into the paper of record.

Sasha Frere-Jones Advocates (Musical) Rape

You can't make this stuff up. From his blog:

I am also aware of, and comfortable with, the non-musical meanings of the word “miscegenation.” There are long American traditions of both advocating miscegenation (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the “smelting pot” is one of the better known tropes) and trying to prevent it, either by outlawing mixed-race marriage or banning representations of miscegenation in film. Also, I wanted the word to emphasize the rough nature of pop, a genre rooted in theft, jury-rigged machines, and barely legal alliances. The birth of rock and roll itself was not a happy event for everyone involved. Miscegenation involves sex (which, as I point out at the end of my piece, is the original meaning of “rock and roll”) but it doesn’t always involve consent. Miscegenation felt like the right word, warts and all.
I wrote before how I thought Sasha Frere-Jones's piece played off of racialized and heteronormative tropes about sex, but this is ridiculous.

I can't even sort this out. Is it a primitive black male sexuality that Frere-Jones wants to celebrate with a rape fantasy, or a kind of white slavemaster's prerogative over black music/women? Then again, there aren't any women in SFJ's account of rock and roll, up to and including its indie rock and hip-hop present -- so the whole thing could be a kind of butch, homosexual rape that somehow doesn't make either participant gay (since SFJ definitely wants to avoid that). So is Mick Jagger sodomizing Little Richard, or is it the other way around? One way or the other, as Snoop Doggy Dogg says on SFJ's favorite album of the 1990s, The Chronic, "I'm hollering 1-8-7 with my dick in your mouth, bitch!"

I'm suddenly reminded of a moment in SFJ's podcast when he complains that James Mercer from The Shins whines too much about lost love. SFJ's advice boils down to, "Grow some stones, stop singing like Morrissey, and show that girl what a man you are, R. Kelly style."

I really think that The New Yorker needs a new pop music critic. One who actually listens to pop music, and writes to the standards set by Alex Ross, Joan Acocella, David Denby, Louis Menand, Calvin Trillin, James Surowiecki, Seymour Hersh, George Packer, Malcolm Gladwell, David Remnick, and Peter Schjeldahl. Think about what those writers write, and then think about Sasha Frere-Jones. I know we don't have a country full of Lester Bangses right now, but I bet that if you made an offer to Greil Marcus, he'd say yes. It's enough to make you sad.

The Rural Midwest Is A Real Sleeper

Andrew Bird and the band Dianogah have a free set of mp3s available from their Daytrotter session. (Be sure to also visit this link to download "The Giant of Illinois.")

Armchair Apocrypha's "Fiery Crash" gets a much-improved full-voiced treatment from Bird, along with a richer, fuller acoustic texture, even if it loses some of the propulsiveness of the original studio release. "Lull," from Weather Systems, still my all-time favorite of Bird's recordings, gets similarly drawn out, becoming "a little too laid-back," as Sylvia noted, but still astonishingly beautiful. Let's hope the promised re-take on the next album is more "Skin (Is My)" than "I"/"Imitosis."

The instrumental "A Breaks B" adds some much-needed energy, with Bird's frenetic violin helping tilt the sonic resonance from mid-period Tortoise to a less-electric Books. The sound recording on "Plasticities" is a little buzzy, but it still highlights that song's lovely, inspired introduction and verses, which gobble up the once-electric chorus. I wish Bird had rethought this section altogether rather than dropping the musical change outright. The guitar line in Armchair Apocrypha might be the dumbest riff ever, but this version, at over seven minutes long, is too samey and shapeless, even with Bird's fine multitracked solo at the end.

The song that will attract the most attention, though, is the delicate, slightly melancholy "The Giant of Illinois," a strong companion to Bird's "Don't Be Scared," penned by the same band. Go check it out.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Musical Analogy of the Day

If, as I believe, Animal Collective's Feels is a polymorphously perverse Pet Sounds, then AC's Avey Tare is a fusion of Mike Love with those two most eclectically perverse of frontmen: Damo Suzuki from Can, and The Pixies' Black Francis.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

The Love and the Theft Never End

First of all, I am not Tim Mohr.

However, judging by this post he wrote for the Playboy Blog on Sasha Frere Jones's "A Paler Shade of White," either he read my post on the same subject (in which case I should be upset) or we (Mohr, Slate's Carl Wilson, and myself) are all on to something.

And that something is (and here I'll borrow Tim Mohr's words): Sasha Frere-Jones is a jackass. And a sloppy one, at that.

(Via Stereogum.)

Give Me Your Poor

You know, since I read Carl Wilson's "The Trouble With Indie Rock," I've been thinking a lot about his thesis that the real change in indie rock, perhaps more in this decade than the last, has been in the class background and identity of the artists and audiences, rather than their ethno-musical pedigree. This argument picks up on page 2 of Wilson's essay, where his analysis of Frere-Jones's essay diverges from mine. Here is a good summary section:

Ultimately, though, the "trouble with indie rock" may have far more to do with another post-Reagan social shift, one with even less upside than the black-white story, and that's the widening gap between rich and poor. There is no question on which side most indie rock falls. It's a cliche to picture indie musicians and fans as well-off "hipsters" busily gentrifying neighborhoods, but compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it.

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded "creative" college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young "knowledge workers" in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire. (Many rap MCs juggle symbologies just as deftly, but it's seldom their main point.) This doesn't make coffeehouse-indie shallow, but it can result in something more akin to the 1960s folk revival, with fretful collegiate intellectuals in a Cuban Missile Crisis mood, seeking purity and depth in antiquarian music and escapist spirituality. Not exactly a recipe for a booty-shaking party. While this scene can embrace some fascinating hermetic weirdos such as Joanna Newsom or Panda Bear, it's also prone to producing fine-arts-grad poseurs such as the Decemberists and poor-little-rich-boy-or-girl singer songwriters who might as well be James Taylor. This year even saw several indie bands playing in "Pops" concerts at summer symphony programs; that's no sin (and good for the symphonies), but it's about as class-demarcated as it gets.

Right after I read this, I put my contrarian hat back on and rattled off three counterexamples to Wilson's thesis. But those counterexamples started to bother me. Wilco, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips -- these were all older indie bands, old and successful enough not to even be indie anymore (all three are on major labels). They were all a part of the early-to-mid-nineties wave of wide interest in punky, alternative, blue-collar rock inaugurated by bands like The Replacements, Husker Du, and above all, Aberdeen's own Nirvana. These weren't bands started by record-label scions, art-school composers, or post-graduate hipsters with nothing better to do. These were small-town losers with nothing to do at all but get stoned or drunk and make music. And almost all of your favorite indie and alternative acts were like that: Elliot Smith, Pulp, Guided By Voices, Neutral Milk Hotel, Slint, Built To Spill, The Jesus Lizard, The Breeders. Even the rest of the Pixies (besides Kim Deal, who never went to college) were college dropouts.

The question is, where are those small-town losers now? If you really think about it, the big indie bands that can claim or at least represent some kind of blue-collar background are all older, and they've all been around for about ten years or longer: Besides the bands above, there's Chan Marshall, Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, Jack White, and a few others. Has indie rock been ceded to the college kids in the metropolis? And if so, why is that?

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Philadelphia Comes Ugly, Minneapolis a Utopia

According to Travel and Leisure magazine, Philadelphia ranks dead last for attractive people in the city. Reuters has the story:

For unattractiveness, Philadelphia just beat out Washington DC and Dallas/Fort Worth for the bottom spot. Miami and San Diego are home to the most attractive people, the poll found.

But [senior editor Amy] Farley pointed out the results don't mean people in Philadelphia are ugly or the city is a bad place to visit.

"We were asking people to vote on attractiveness, not unattractiveness. Travel & Leisure editors believe there are a lot of attractive people in Philadelphia," she said.

"The relative attractiveness of its residents is only a minuscule factor in evaluating a city's merit."


Bear in mind, Philadelphia isn't the ugliest city in America -- just 25th out of the 25 cities they surveyed. (Minneapolis is 8th? I've gotta fly out of that airport more often.) But Reuters rubs it in:

Philadelphians' self-esteem has been undermined by national surveys showing they are among the fattest people in the United States. The American Obesity Association ranked the city in the top 10 for overweight people every year between 2000 and 2005.

And sporting pride in a city known for the fierce loyalty of its fans has been hurt by not having had a national champion in any of its four main sports since the 76ers won the National Basketball Association title in 1983.


That is just cold blooded.

Philadelphia also ranks 20th out 25 for friendliest cities, and 14th out of 25 for most intelligent. Minneapolis is 3rd and 2nd, respectively.

That's it -- let's spring for parkas and a minivan, and move.

* Hat Tip to PON for the link. Cross-posted at Young Philly Politics.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

He Recycles


I'm not always a fan of the New York Times's Vows section, but Deneta Howland and Bryan Sells' story is one of the better ones I've read in quite a while.

Bryan Sells knew he was attracted to Deneta Howland the moment they met in 1989. She was the first person he saw when he arrived as a freshman at Harvard for a community volunteer program. “My cab door opened, and Deneta was there to greet me,” said Mr. Sells, now 36, remembering the sunny day and the vibrant smile of his group leader.

They were both native Virginians and shared a passion for social justice, becoming friends while painting a mural at a homeless shelter in Boston.


My favorite part, though, is this: "Mr. Sells worked up the courage by the next summer to invite her to an Anita Baker concert. Dr. Howland assumed his interest was platonic. He assumed Anita Baker would put anyone in a romantic mood. They were both mistaken." And I can tell you -- in 1990, Anita Baker was the move any white guy would have made. It took Mr. Sells another decade of dogged persistence to seal the deal.

My wife spotted and read this article to me, and after we talked about it for a little while, I asked her to show me a picture of Dr. Howland and Mr. Sells. I said about Dr Howland, "She is six kinds of attractive." She said of Mr. Sells, "He needs a beard." All of this tells me that my wife and I are perfect for one another.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

By the Hammer of Thor!

Via Salon's Machinist: Every episode of The Daily Show ever is now online, for free, from Viacom.

Paper Under Glass

As a companion piece to what I wrote a week or so ago in The Book and The Browser, here's another link via if:book. Early hypertext innovator Ted Nelson gives a talk at Google on the deficiencies of the paper-based representation of documents on the computer. It's about an hour long, and hardly a polished presentation, but worth checking out. Nelson's prototype Xanadu Space application leaves a lot to be desired in its interface, but it is a real and radical attempt to comprehensively rethink the way we view documents, understood broadly as text, music, photos, video, etc.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Love and Theft, Pt. 3

These are the last thoughts I will pen for a while on Sasha Frere-Jones's "A Paler Shade of White" (see how it began here) but I wanted to strike while the iron was still hot.

First, a concession. When you listen to SFJ's podcast and read the notes on his blog, his argument sounds much more nuanced and conciliatory than it appears in his initial article. For one thing, the section on gangster-rap, which hangs like an old matzo ball in the magazine piece, seems to be much more important to his overall thinking about "musical miscegenation" than it first appears. SFJ appears to be saying that with indie rock on one side and hip-hop on the other, increasingly, these are two audiences, and two sets of musicians, who don't really understand one another, and that that misunderstanding hurts both genres and their audiences.

If hip-hop is really your secondary focus in all of this, then it makes a lot of sense to look at the early nineties, since that's when the audiences for rap and alternative rock briefly broke through and mingled, and then seemed to go their separate ways. But if you're thinking about the history of American music writ large, the early nineties seem completely arbitrary. You could make exactly the same argument about the early seventies and psychedelia, singer-songwriter folk, country-rock, heavy metal and prog -- all of which left the African-American imprint of mid-60s rock behind and diverged much more sharply from ballad-y soul, disco, and hard funk than nineties alt-rock ever did.

Likewise, I can't agree with this section at all:

The indie genre emerged in the early eighties, in the wake of British bands such as the Clash and Public Image Ltd., and originally incorporated black sources, using them to produce a new music, characterized by brevity and force, and released on independent labels. The Minutemen, a group of working-class white musicians from San Pedro, California, who were influential in the late eighties, wrote frantic political rants that were simultaneously jazz, punk, and funk, without sounding like any of these genres. But by the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term “indie rock” came implicitly to mean white rock.

First, while The Clash and PIL were punks interested in reggae and dub, this wasn't true of the larger post-punk scene. Arguably, the indie genre emerged when Motown was about to sign the British post-punk band The Fall, and fired up their new song "The Classical," only to be greeted by dissonant guitars and the sound of Mark E. Smith mumbling, "Where are the obligatory niggers? Hey there, fuck-face!" Again, there's a hard sheen of fuck-you irony here. But for the most part, alt-rock fans in the 1980s were listening to The Replacements and R.E.M. and Husker Du and The Smiths and Black Flag because they really didn't like disco or Michael Jackson or any of the much more racially mixed-up pop music they were hearing at the time. I love these bands, but there is a reason why skinheads love punk, and it's not because they just didn't get what "Guns of Brixton" was all about.

If anything, things got better in the early 90s, as Madchester made it cool for indie rockers to dance, Nirvana made it cool for hard rockers to like Leadbelly and The Pixies and David Bowie (and, you know, not hate gay people), Fugazi and Jawbox and the whole Dischord crowd (following Bad Brains) actually found a way to make hardcore punk and reggae work together, and labels like Merge and Thrill Jockey and Drag City and even Matador started making indie labels much more interesting, eclectic vendors of a wide range of music. I know that like a lot of fans, SFJ might weep over the loss of Gary Young, Pavement's original acid-fried drummer, but that's hardly a reason to take it out on everyone else.

In no small part, it's Frere-Jones's choice of examples that makes no sense to me. Really, the alternative band from the seventies and eighties that did the most to fuse punk and rock and country and soul and funk and pop and dance and sonic experimentalism and even hip-hop is Talking Heads -- my favorite band of the last thirty years. But Talking Heads is also probably the most influential act on the current wave of popular indie rock bands, including most of the ones SFJ takes to task. I'm not really sure how he would make sense of that contradiction, but I would love to listen to him try to sort it out.

In my earlier article, I took issue with what I thought was Frere-Jones's primitivism, his odd reduction of authentic black music with danger and sexuality. I also wonder whether there isn't a touch of musical homophobia in his critique. Look at the bands he praises: Zeppelin, The Stones, R. Kelly, James Brown, Snoop Dogg -- all represent a virile, masculine, aggressive, sometimes exploitative, and above all hetero sexuality. The indie bands he dislikes, above all Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, he dislikes for being fey, literary, obscure, asexual.

And even though he praises individual artists in other reviews, in this essay on rock music as a whole, Frere-Jones doesn't talk about music made by women. At all. He even goes out of his way to attribute Mick Jagger's dancing to an imitation of Little Richard when everyone knows Mick learned how to dance by watching Tina Turner. The Arcade Fire and The Fiery Furnaces have female co-vocalists, but you'd never know this just by reading SFJ's article.

One last gripe. I know Brian Wilson, with his high voice, weird lost albums, and simultaneous reputation for clean-cut pop and druggy experimentalism makes for an easy target. But to call him "a tremendously gifted musician who had at best a tenuous link to American black music," and framing him as the "indie rock muse" who led the current crop of artists astray is just way off-base. I do think that Wilson is a tremendously gifted musician, and that he is hugely influential on American and British alternative rock, from at least The Jesus and Mary Chain onwards. But anyone who spends any time listening to those Beach Boys records can clearly tell that the biggest influences on Brian Wilson have always been Chuck Berry and The Ronettes. He is as much a part of the story of the great, musically integrated mid-60s as anyone.

Postscript (to the Postscript): Do read Carl Wilson's "The Trouble With Indie Rock" in Slate. Wilson finds Frere-Jones's essay flawed in many of the same respects that I do -- and even uses many of the same arguments and examples -- but adds a smart take on the changing class dynamics in popular music that is genuinely illuminating:
Among at least a subset of (the younger) musicians and fans, this class separation has made indie more openly snobbish and narrow-minded. In the darkest interpretation, one could look at the split between a harmony-and-lyrics-oriented indie field and a rhythm-and-dance-specialized rap/R&B scene as mirroring the developing global split between an internationalist, educated comprador class (in which musically, one week Berlin is hot, the next Sweden, the next Canada, the next Brazil) and a far less mobile, menial-labor market (consider the more confining, though often musically exciting, regionalism that Frere-Jones outlines in hip-hop). The elite status and media sway that indie rock enjoys, disproportionate to its popularity, is one reason the cultural politics of indie musicians and fans require discussion in the first place, a point I wish Frere-Jones had clarified in The New Yorker; perhaps in that context it goes without saying.

Unlike Wilson, I don't think that Bruce Springsteen is the answer -- the current indie fascination with sailors and vagabonds isn't far off from Bruce's 70s ballads, and if anyone helped to popularize the sensitive, nerdy guy writing about, not from, blue-collar authenticity, it's the Boss, not Sufjan Stevens. And the guys in Wilco, The Flaming Lips, and Modest Mouse certainly didn't come from a "comprador class." But when you think about the audiences for these bands, Wilson is definitely on to something. It's the beginning of a conversation at once more comprehensive and more particular than the one that Frere-Jones tried to begin.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Love and Theft, Pt. 2

Sasha Frere-Jones has a podcast with Matt Dellinger on the New Yorker website. He also responds to some criticism (and praise) of his article on race and indie rock on his blog.

Listening To The Century

Speaking of music critics at the New Yorker... Jason Kottke has a really good interview with Alex Ross, discussing Ross's new book The Rest Is Noise, on instrumental music in the twentieth century.

I'm picking the phrase "instrumental music" out of thin air, because Ross argues that there is no single tradition of composition that we can call "classical music":

My big thing is that classical music doesn't really exist. When you have a repertory that goes from Hildegard von Bingen's medieval chant to Vivaldi's bustling Baroque concertos to Wagner's five-hour music dramas to John Cage's chance-produced electronic noise to Steve Reich's West African-influenced "Drumming," you're not talking about a single sound. Whatever variety of noise you desire, we've got it at the classical emporium. I'd suggest plunging it at various ends of the spectrum - some Vivaldi or Bach, the Beethoven "Eroica" or some other big-shouldered nineteenth-century classic, Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (which foreshadows so much pop music to come), and Reich or Philip Glass. The idea is to get a feeling for what composers were trying to express at any given time, and, of course, deciding whether you want to follow them. There's no correct path through the labyrinth.

As that quote suggests, Ross has some sage advice for people like Kottke (and me), who are music-savvy but don't know very much about this section of the music store. He also has more multimedia stuff on his book blog. Well worth checking out.

Love and Theft

In the new issue of The New Yorker, pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones doesn't mess around:

I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.


The article, "A Paler Shade of White," isn't about race and rock as such, but race and contemporary indie rock. It begins with Frere-Jones's account of an Arcade Fire show in NYC. "If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music." In addition to The Arcade Fire, Frere-Jones takes aim at Pavement, Sufjan Stevens, Panda Bear (both of which "evoke the sound of glee clubs and church choirs"), Wilco, The Fiery Furnaces, The Decemberists, The Shins, and (somewhat more hesitantly) Grizzly Bear and Devendra Banhart. He likes some of these bands more than others, but all of them are symptoms of a music scene that's lost its way, bled white.

Frere-Jones contrasts this current slice of indie rock with popular rock and roll in the late 1960s, when white and black blues, rock, pop, and soul artists freely borrowed from one another. This story is pretty well known, and his examples are familiar ones: The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. But this story is a good one, and much better handled than either his long account of race in American music or his slightly bizarre account of his experiences with his own band. (Frere-Jones apparently tried to rap over jazz-soaked interpretations of Zeppelin and Kraut-rock. Pass.)

And in the 1960s, too, I think, is the germ of a really good argument, that Frere-Jones doesn't quite make. The melting pot of early rock radio did provide for a more dynamic interaction between contemporaries of different races and musical traditions than is occurring today. (Right now, the cultural traffic seems to be going in the other direction, with Kanye West sampling Peter Bjorn and John, or Timbaland producing Stereolab beats for hip-hop artists.)

I think this is largely a consequence of the segmentation of FM radio formats, which arguably creates a de facto segregation of musical styles more pernicious than the days of white musical theft/homage that Frere-Jones is somewhat nostalgic for. But this isn't limited to indie rock, and isn't a new phenomenon, but has emerged over the last forty years. Frere-Jones's explanation rests on the success of political correctness (whites -- including, apparently, Frere-Jones himself -- are afraid to appropriate black music) plus the success of black artists and black music, especially hip-hop, on the pop charts. I don't think this has enough explanatory value to really describe what's happening, especially since it rests on a view that I think is mistaken: that indie rock has gotten significantly whiter over the past ten to twenty years than it was in the glory days of The Minutemen or The Clash.

Here I think we need some context. One indie rocker that Frere-Jones doesn't mention in the article is Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, but SFJ has described him and his music in much sharper language than is used here -- calling him a racist, a "cracker," and "Stephin 'Southern Strategy' Merritt." This stems from Merritt's comparison of contemporary hip-hop to minstrelsy, his dislike of melisma (where a singer stretches a syllable over a run of notes, a la Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera), and an incident where Merritt said that the Disney musical "Song of the South" had one great song, "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah." (He also called the notoriously racist musical unwatchable, saying "the rest of it is terrible, really.")

The Merritt throwdown might be chalked up to miscommunication and deep differences of musical opinion, but it's become part of Frere-Jones's critical DNA to hammer away at critically acclaimed alternative bands through the lens of race. It's also been an engine for some good music writing. Frere-Jones's best pieces for The New Yorker have championed pop and R&B artists like Mariah Carey or R. Kelly. They aren't obvious choices for The New Yorker's NPR/high-culture venue, but in SFJ's hands, they become pop auteurs. But in the pages of The New Yorker, Frere-Jones has conspicuously ignored, well, all of the artists he talks about here, even those he claims to like -- which means that one of the most influential magazines in representing popular culture for an elite audience gives a pretty distorted picture of what's happening in contemporary pop music.

My bigger worry, though, is that Sasha Frere-Jones just isn't listening, or rather, that he misunderstands what he's listening to. He writes, "It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted." This is absolutely true, and Frere-Jones is guilty. He's working with a really thin, primitivist notion of what constitutes African-American music. It's all about the blues, soul, reggae, and early rock and roll. (This requires some odd twisting of musical categories, such as when he refers to Michael Jackson as a "soul singer." Jackson, especially as a solo artist, was a pure pop act -- I can't think of a single song of his that remotely qualifies as "soul," like Otis Redding is "soul," which is the equation SFJ makes.)

But at some deeper level, black music for SFJ is about drums ("I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness") and sex ("Rock and roll was never a synonym for a polite handshake. If you’ve forgotten where the term came from, look it up. There’s a reason the lights were off"). Haven't we seen this before? Isn't this the picture of the happy, musical, sexual, dangerous Negro -- our pop-cultural version of the "noble savage"? The notion that African-American music has a brain, that it can be cerebral and precious and delicate and emotional, all of the adjectives that SFJ equates with asexual, immature, whiteness, is completely absent here. Jazz, Motown, bossa nova, girl-group pop, the sample-collage side of hip-hop, techno and electronica are all not part of this story. And not coincidentally, all of those musical genres have deeply inflected contemporary indie rock.

Let's consider Feist, who's probably the top indie solo artist right now. Musically, Feist is as safe, and NPR-friendly as it comes, but has a lilting, eccentric voice, and pumps out musically adept pop: the perfect artist for the New Yorker audience. And SFJ knows this full well, since he wrote a strong and positive review of her new album back in April. Now, in addition to indie rock and punk (most of which turns up in her other collaborative gig with Broken Social Scene), Feist's biggest musical influences are folk, jazz, bossa nova, standards, and disco-pop. She has a solid cover of Nina Simone's "See-Line Woman" (here called "Sea Lion Woman") that adds electronic flourishes and a ringing indie-rock guitar. This is a Canadian woman who's largely channeling black American music, or pop music itself largely influenced by black music. (Hell, if SFJ can count the German band Can as a group "indebted to black music," certainly Feist can count the Bee Gees.)

But in his review -- even though "visionary pop musician" Andre 3000 from OutKast gives Feist his approval (and by proxy, gives SFJ permission to like her), calling her music "amazing," Frere-Jones isn't so sure, either because those black influences aren't sufficiently or authentically black, or because they don't manifest themselves energetically, in sex and rhythm.
I’ve seen Feist live several times in New York in the past few years, and found myself wavering between admiration for her controlled performances and the quality of her songs—especially “Mushaboom,” a lilting track about a city woman who yearns for a house in the woods, aware that “it may be years until the day my dreams will match up with my pay”—and unease that the indie community, which had previously wanted little to do with commercial pop like the Bee Gees or Sade, was eager to embrace a woman who often seemed content with being merely a deft, twenty-first-century version of those artists.

In other words, even when an indie artist and indie fans go for the kind of R&B-inflected pop that Frere-Jones likes, they're still suspect for exactly that reason. Heads I win, tails you lose.

On the same day that SFJ's piece hit the web, Pitchfork ran this news story about Hot Chip, an indie electronic-pop outfit, who's been tapped to remix singles by both R&B/pop star Alicia Keys and the alternative/pop band Rilo Kiley. In the interview, Alexis Taylor name-drops R. Kelly and Randy Newman, Prince and Phil Collins, string quartets and Terry Riley, The Beatles and Marvin Gaye. About the upcoming remixes, he says "It's nice to do remixes of ladies" -- suggesting that the key adjustment for Alicia Keys and Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis is their gender, not race. Indie eclecticism is alive and well.

We could go on. M.I.A. is as aggressively synthetic as anyone in music today, fusing her tripartite core of hip-hop, Brazilian and South Asian music with a whole range of musical textures and worldwide influences. Amy Winehouse, who might not necessarily be an indie act, but is popular in the indie music crowd, sings (and acts) like Billie Holliday by way of Lauryn Hill. Even the less obvious artists show clear lines of influence: Swedish indie-pop artist Jens Lekman puts together his sample-based records in much the same way that De La Soul assembled Three Feet High and Rising. The White Stripes are still the last best bridge between punk and classic rock and the blues and country traditions that Frere-Jones assigns the main narrative of American music.

He's not interested in dance-punk, the mumble-soul of The Walkmen or Mazarin, the post-rock of Tortoise or The Sea and Cake that borrows as much from dub and jazz as it does from Frere-Jones's beloved Can. He's not interested in all of the indie-pop artists who try as hard to imitate the sound of The Ronettes or Dionne Warwick as the Rolling Stones tried to imitate Stax singles. He's not interested in David Byrne's Luaka Bop, or in Cat Power's own version of Dusty in Memphis on The Greatest, or in Bjork's use of beatboxing as the soul percussion on Medulla, or that Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock uses disc scratches and hip-hop shouts to offset his band's spacy guitars and his own Kurt Cobain-meets-Woody Guthrie-meets-Wayne Coyne-meets-Tom Waits yelp. He hasn't heard Andrew Bird's The Swimming Hour, where Bird manages to summon Lady Day, John Lee Hooker, Northern Soul, and whip-snapping country within just a few tracks of one another.

I don't even think he's listened to The Arcade Fire's "Antichrist Television Blues," with its call-and-response structure, twelve-bar blues chords, driving rock guitars, and Son-House-by-way-of-Springsteen deadpan delivery of lines like "You know that I'm a God-fearin' man," reminding us, despite the irony of the lyrics, that the biggest influence on The Arcade Fire isn't Roxy Music or Springsteen or The Clash, but probably church hymns and gospel music -- which is why everyone acts so reverent at their shows and towards their music, since that tradition is a part of all of our musical DNA too.

Nope. Instead, Sasha Frere-Jones is still mad that like a whole lot of indie rock fans, Stephin Merritt doesn't like R. Kelly or Mariah Carey. Frere-Jones doesn't see what the big deal is about Radiohead or Wilco or Pavement. He forgets that The Minutemen made fun of Michael Jackson and covered Creedence Clearwater Revival. He forgets that the briefest of infatuations with reggae and funk rhythms aside, alternative rock has been pretty white for a long time, and hasn't really gotten any whiter. And for a music fan, he makes The New Yorker a drag to read.


Postscript #1:

Sasha Frere-Jones has a podcast with Matt Dellinger on the New Yorker website. He also responds to some criticism (and praise) of his article on race and indie rock on his blog.


Postscript #2:

These are the last thoughts I will pen for a while on Sasha Frere-Jones's "A Paler Shade of White" but I wanted to strike while the iron was still hot.

First, a concession. When you listen to SFJ's podcast and read the notes on his blog, his argument sounds much more nuanced and conciliatory than it appears in his initial article. For one thing, the section on gangster-rap, which hangs like an old matzo ball in the magazine piece, seems to be much more important to his overall thinking about "musical miscegenation" than it first appears. SFJ appears to be saying that with indie rock on one side and hip-hop on the other, increasingly, these are two audiences, and two sets of musicians, who don't really understand one another, and that that misunderstanding hurts both genres and their audiences.

If hip-hop is really your secondary focus in all of this, then it makes a lot of sense to look at the early nineties, since that's when the audiences for rap and alternative rock briefly broke through and mingled, and then seemed to go their separate ways. But if you're thinking about the history of American music writ large, the early nineties seem completely arbitrary. You could make exactly the same argument about the early seventies and psychedelia, singer-songwriter folk, country-rock, heavy metal and prog -- all of which left the African-American imprint of mid-60s rock behind and diverged much more sharply from ballad-y soul, disco, and hard funk than nineties alt-rock ever did.

Likewise, I can't agree with this section at all:

The indie genre emerged in the early eighties, in the wake of British bands such as the Clash and Public Image Ltd., and originally incorporated black sources, using them to produce a new music, characterized by brevity and force, and released on independent labels. The Minutemen, a group of working-class white musicians from San Pedro, California, who were influential in the late eighties, wrote frantic political rants that were simultaneously jazz, punk, and funk, without sounding like any of these genres. But by the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term “indie rock” came implicitly to mean white rock.

First, while The Clash and PIL were punks interested in reggae and dub, this wasn't true of the larger post-punk scene. Arguably, the indie genre emerged when Motown was about to sign the British post-punk band The Fall, and fired up their new song "The Classical," only to be greeted by dissonant guitars and the sound of Mark E. Smith mumbling, "Where are the obligatory niggers? Hey there, fuck-face!" Again, there's a hard sheen of fuck-you irony here. But for the most part, alt-rock fans in the 1980s were listening to The Replacements and R.E.M. and Husker Du and The Smiths and Black Flag because they really didn't like disco or Michael Jackson or any of the much more racially mixed-up pop music they were hearing at the time. I love these bands, but there is a reason why skinheads love punk, and it's not because they just didn't get what "Guns of Brixton" was all about.

If anything, things got better in the early 90s, as Madchester made it cool for indie rockers to dance, Nirvana made it cool for hard rockers to like Leadbelly and The Pixies and David Bowie (and, you know, not hate gay people), Fugazi and Jawbox and the whole Dischord crowd (following Bad Brains) actually found a way to make hardcore punk and reggae work together, and labels like Merge and Thrill Jockey and Drag City and even Matador started making indie labels much more interesting, eclectic vendors of a wide range of music. I know that like a lot of fans, SFJ might weep over the loss of Gary Young, Pavement's original acid-fried drummer, but that's hardly a reason to take it out on everyone else.

In no small part, it's Frere-Jones's choice of examples that makes no sense to me. Really, the alternative band from the seventies and eighties that did the most to fuse punk and rock and country and soul and funk and pop and dance and sonic experimentalism and even hip-hop is Talking Heads -- my favorite band of the last thirty years. But Talking Heads is also probably the most influential act on the current wave of popular indie rock bands, including most of the ones SFJ takes to task. I'm not really sure how he would make sense of that contradiction, but I would love to listen to him try to sort it out.

In my earlier article, I took issue with what I thought was Frere-Jones's primitivism, his odd reduction of authentic black music with danger and sexuality. I also wonder whether there isn't a touch of musical homophobia in his critique. Look at the bands he praises: Zeppelin, The Stones, R. Kelly, James Brown, Snoop Dogg -- all represent a virile, masculine, aggressive, sometimes exploitative, and above all hetero sexuality. The indie bands he dislikes, above all Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, he dislikes for being fey, literary, obscure, asexual.

And even though he praises individual artists in other reviews, in this essay on rock music as a whole, Frere-Jones doesn't talk about music made by women. At all. He even goes out of his way to attribute Mick Jagger's dancing to an imitation of Little Richard when everyone knows Mick learned how to dance by watching Tina Turner. The Arcade Fire and The Fiery Furnaces have female co-vocalists, but you'd never know this just by reading SFJ's article.

One last gripe. I know Brian Wilson, with his high voice, weird lost albums, and simultaneous reputation for clean-cut pop and druggy experimentalism makes for an easy target. But to call him "a tremendously gifted musician who had at best a tenuous link to American black music," and framing him as the "indie rock muse" who led the current crop of artists astray is just way off-base. I do think that Wilson is a tremendously gifted musician, and that he is hugely influential on American and British alternative rock, from at least The Jesus and Mary Chain onwards. But anyone who spends any time listening to those Beach Boys records can clearly tell that the biggest influences on Brian Wilson have always been Chuck Berry and The Ronettes. He is as much a part of the story of the great, musically integrated mid-60s as anyone.


Postscript #3:

Do read Carl Wilson's "The Trouble With Indie Rock" in Slate. Wilson finds Frere-Jones's essay flawed in many of the same respects that I do -- and even uses many of the same arguments and examples -- but adds a smart take on the changing class dynamics in popular music that is genuinely illuminating:
Among at least a subset of (the younger) musicians and fans, this class separation has made indie more openly snobbish and narrow-minded. In the darkest interpretation, one could look at the split between a harmony-and-lyrics-oriented indie field and a rhythm-and-dance-specialized rap/R&B scene as mirroring the developing global split between an internationalist, educated comprador class (in which musically, one week Berlin is hot, the next Sweden, the next Canada, the next Brazil) and a far less mobile, menial-labor market (consider the more confining, though often musically exciting, regionalism that Frere-Jones outlines in hip-hop). The elite status and media sway that indie rock enjoys, disproportionate to its popularity, is one reason the cultural politics of indie musicians and fans require discussion in the first place, a point I wish Frere-Jones had clarified in The New Yorker; perhaps in that context it goes without saying.

Unlike Wilson, I don't think that Bruce Springsteen is the answer -- the current indie fascination with sailors and vagabonds isn't far off from Bruce's 70s ballads, and if anyone helped to popularize the sensitive, nerdy guy writing about, not from, blue-collar authenticity, it's the Boss, not Sufjan Stevens. And the guys in Wilco, The Flaming Lips, and Modest Mouse certainly didn't come from a "comprador class." But when you think about the audiences for these bands, Wilson is definitely on to something. It's the beginning of a conversation at once more comprehensive and more particular than the one that Frere-Jones tried to begin.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

The Birth of Lyric

It's so easy, after centuries of lyric poetry, after Shakespeare and the Romantics, to take the intimate mode of love poetry for granted. That's why I was happy to see Scott Horton -- the poet-inest lawyer/blogger around -- post this Sappho poem, which I hadn't thought about in a long time:



Some say cavalry and others claim infantry or a fleet of long oars is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is the one you love.
Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is

the one you love. And easily proved.
Didn’t Helen, who far surpassed all
mortals in beauty, desert the best
of men, her king,

and sail off to Troy and forget
her daughter and her dear parents? Merely
Aphrodite’s gaze made her readily bend
and led her far

from her path. These tales remind me now
of Anaktoria who isn’t here,
yet I
for one

would rather see her warm supple step
and the sparkle in her face than watch all
the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored
in glittering bronze.

–Sappho (Σαπφω), Supreme Sight on the Black Earth (ca. 590 BCE)(W. Barnstone transl.)


In his Poetics, Aristotle notes that tragedians invariably wind up mining the same material, because only a few noble families in history have the kind of high drama and moving scenes that the tragedian requires. So they return to the stories of Greek epic poetry, from the imagined history and theology of a people. In this context, Sappho is as radical as she can be.

A poetry not about heroes, and the travails of noble families, or (like Pindar) the champions of the Olympics, but about the woman you love -- and who is now fugitive. Sappho doesn't just invent a mode of and content for her poetry -- with that surplus of deictic moves (These tales remind me now / of Anaktoria who isn’t here), she invents an entirely different sense of the past: both irreducibly immediate and irretrievably lost. And with only a handful of surviving fragments, she is arguably still the best lyric poet -- herself both immediate and lost. At least, she is the best we know of.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Automation

I love the timing even more than the sentiment in this Wired News interview with snarky blogger Ted Dziuba, about his new startup.

WN: Tell me about Persai.

TD: The three of us are doing a company based around machine learning and artificial intelligence on an unreasonably large scale. We essentially want to automate the understanding of all the information in the world.

WN: (Pause.) What?

TD: We want to build machine programs that can learn things from information that's out there on the web. In the first application we'll come out with, you tell us things that you're interested in, and we'll continuously go out and find stuff on the internet that's related to that. There's a positive feedback loop where you tell us what you like and don't, so the machine gets progressively better in learning what you like.

WN: Is it going to be like, "I like unicorns; give me news about unicorns"? That sounds like a search engine.

TD: Search engine implies somebody's actively going out and looking for information. We're more passive than that. It's more like a newsreader. It's like you have some time to burn, so you go to Digg and see what the top headlines are. In that same style, except you take the community part completely out and leave all of it up to a machine.

WN: That's the opposite of what's trendy right now.

TD: Exactly. We're hoping that the tenet of "automation is key" still holds.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

It's Up To You

Ten years out from OK Computer, Radiohead's still got it. And they're giving digital copies of their new album In Rainbows as donationware. Good times.

Update: The site is jammed! Keep trying!

Monday, October 08, 2007

The Book and the Browser

Ben Vershbow and co. at the Institute for the Future of the Book (aka if:book) are soliciting comments for a project they're calling "The Really Modern Library." The idea seems to be to try to think about the new social/material networks that come (or maybe don't come) with digitization of analog texts. Or:

This project is animated by a strong belief that it is the network, more than the simple conversion of atoms to bits, that constitutes the real paradigm shift inherent in digital communication. Therefore, a central question of the Really Modern Library project and competition will be: how does the digital network change our relationship with analog objects? What does it mean for readers/researchers/learners to be in direct communication in and around pieces of media? What should be the *social* architecture of a really modern library?

Here is a thought I had. Most of the discussion of reading electronic documents has focused on either the process of digitization itself or the form factor: book readers, e-paper, or whatever.

But it seems to me that the real problem is that we've never had a killer client app to handle electronic documents on the scale of the book. Basically, we read text in four different kinds of apps: web browsers, PDF readers, text editors, and word processors. Maybe you use an image editor or viewer to read scanned documents. But that's it. None of those apps are primarily designed for viewing books, and most are downright bad at it. Adobe's Digital Editions reader is marginally better in terms of the interface, but it's still pretty limited. And none offer the kind of dynamic, peer-to-peer networking or the rich graphic experience that Miro or Joost or even iTunes offers for other media. Partly this has to do with technical limitations of that kind of software -- but the rest might be explained by the fact that all of those applications bring with them their own baggage in the way of the social/material networks that come with them.

So let's imagine what a really good book reading client might look like. It would have to have a browing interface more like Joost than a library card catalog. It would have to have at least as much interactivity in the way of comments, social interaction, and a recommendation engine as the Amazon store, Google Documents, and Wikipedia combined, with the resources of the existing search-engine and scholarly databases. It would have to plug into course management software, so this material could be used for study and scholarly collaboration in and out of the classroom in a local context. (You don't want to open up your students' writing or your paper-in-progress to the world, at least just yet.)

And it should be scalable. This brings us back to the problem of the form factor, i.e., what kinds of devices you're going to use to read these documents. At the All Things Digital conference earlier this year, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Mossberg, and Kara Swisher got into a discussion of the emerging form factors for personal computing. Gates (I think) broke it down this way: you have the four-foot experience in your living room, the portable computer (either a laptop or tablet), a pocket device (a phone or PDA), and some kind of desktop machine/hub like you would have at your work.

Reading books on a pocket device is problematic, at least on something as small as most phones are now. I can see some kind of paperback-sized portable that you could read text and do crosswords or sudoku on. And definitely you want people to be able to work on their desktops and laptops, which is where most of us digest our information and do digital work.

But I think you also want to have not only the larger living room experience, but the classroom/seminar experience, or the Library of Congress experience. That requires a much larger screen, or even a dedicated machine, and a client that's up to the task. I don't want to read the Book of Kells on my phone. I want to go to the library, get into the reading room, and dig into it on a thirty-inch podium screen, or blow it up on a sixty-inch projector, and juxtapose or swap between the original document and annotations or bibliographical material or critical texts or art images, photos, or video, or other primary sources as easily as I can switch between apps on my Mac. And then I want to be able to download everything I've seen and all the notes I've made onto my laptop or jump drive or whatever, so I can continue to work on it at home. Oh, and I also want to have the material texts right next to me whenever possible -- the illuminated manuscript, the boxes of Ezra Pound's letters, or the musty binding and palimpsest of marginalia of a pirated edition of a Renaissance play.

Most people are not going to be able to have the need or to afford that kind of equipment at home, and many would hardly ever use it primarily for books. This, I think, is the natural domain for the university, research library, and archive -- and maybe even the bookstore. In short, our existing repositories for books can continue to provide the best on-site access to the materials in their collection -- even as some of the walls of space and place and access start to come down.

What about you? What would your dream digital text-reading experience look like?

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Musée Fedora

Eileen Joy has a lovely and complex post over at In The Middle (everyone's favorite medievalist group blog) . The bulk of it is devoted to the problems of queer histories, especially in the medieval period -- if you're at all interested in things queer, historical, medieval, or theoretical, I suggest you read the whole thing in its glory.

But in the middle (ha!) there's a lyrical invocation of an image, of how Joy thinks about her scholarship.

In his lovely book Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes to the Kublai Khan all of the cities he has visited. In the center of the city of Fedora, there stands “a metal building with a crystal globe in every room.” This metal building is a kind of museum of all the possible futures once imagined for Fedora, and in each globe visitors can see “a blue city, the model of a different Fedora,” which represents “the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today.” For me, one of the chief tasks of any history would be the determination of how it is that Fedora could have only turned out one way, while it would also participate in the “taking stock” of all the missed turns and the subterranean rumblings [anxieties, desires, hopes, fears, unanswered needs] occasioned by those missed turns that continue to circulate “under the surface.”

When I was completing my dissertation [2000-01], I made a crude architectural drawing on an index card, which I placed above my desk, of my dream university. There would be two buildings: one, the Musee Fedora, and the other, the Musee Histoire, and in between there would be a kind of bridge, simply called Lycee. In the Musee Fedora, artists would be busily building the models for the globes, working from their imagination and what they know about what did not happen in history. In the other building would be the archives and the historians, who would be busy writing causal narratives of “events,” from which narratives the artists have learned to take note of the gaps and omissions, which they see as their job to fill in. And in between, everyone would travel back and forth between the two buildings, affectively-intellectually “joining” together in conversation in the middle [the university, in other words, as the site of a certain kind of cultural “traffic,” in which Bill Readings’ vision of the posthistorical university as “one site among others” where “thought takes place alongside thought” would be possible and the “question of being-together” could be raised again and again], and each artist, historian, and student would be a citizen of each domain, with the ultimate aim of cultivating a mindful forgetfulness of which place was which. I’ve kept this drawing [in a box under my desk with my unbound dissertation], and while it seems kind of silly in retrospect, I think it still gets at the kind of historical scholarship, and even a queer “humanities,” I hope is possible.

Isn't that just a beautiful Borgesian picture of counterhistory?

The Poetry Blogroll

I updated (i.e., recreated) the Short Schrift blogroll of friends, fellow-admirers, mutual admirers, etc. A lot of the usual suspects are there, but I want to draw attention to a handful of poetry/literature blogs, all of which happen to be both really good AND written by people I know.

In the poetry world, especially in experimental poetry, it doesn't get better than Silliman's Blog, written by poet/critic Ron Silliman. Unlike the majority of his peers, Silliman doesn't have a regular gig at a university, which apparently means that he has more time and energy to read voluminous amounts of poetry old and new, and write what seem like spontaneous but fully-formed essays than any of us. Despite having an honest-to-goodness day job. Some people make it look easy.

It's almost as though Silliman's blog is so good, that other poets with similar skills don't really try to compete. Tom Devaney's blog reads kinda like a MySpace page -- more links, photos, and advertisements of events than full-fledged posts -- but he always points to interesting things, not least of which his are own poems, reviews, and readings. Ditto Charles Bernstein -- who also happens to be as consistently interesting and innovative poet and critic as any I know of.

One poetry critic that I know, though, gives pretty good chase. Al Filreis has not one but two very good poetry blogs. The first, "Al Filreis," covers roughly the same ground as Silliman's, but with a heavier focus on the events Filreis runs at Penn's Kelly Writers House, and indexing Filreis's own critical work (past and present). There's a really thoughtful post-let about the relationship between writing, sound, and poetry. And Filreis has a real feel for both the history of poetry and everyday poetic experiments.

More interesting, at least to me, is Filreis's work-in-progress blog, 1960. Filreis mines newspaper articles, occasional speeches, and museum catalogs, which gives him a sort of immanent look into the culture at the moment, while still having the distance of a contemporary perspective. I've always been interested in radically synchronic (and radically diachronic) approaches to cultural history, so mapping out the literature, art, culture, and politics of a single year, rather than a single author or book or work or movement, is already appealing.

Consider this entry, part of which is on the reception/persistence/historicization of Surrealism -- a movement already nearly fifty years old in 1960, but still with very notable and active practitioners.

Surrealism in the U.S. seems to have had three big moments in 1960: (1) Wallace Fowlie's essay (quoted at the outset of this entry), "Surrealism in 1960: A Backward Glance," published in Poetry in March issue; (2) the publication of Anna Balakian's important book, Surrealism: The road to the Absolute (Noonday--reviewed variously in April); and (3) a show at D'Arcy Galleries featuring 58 surrealist painters and sculptors put together by Marcel Duchamp and Maurice Bonnefoy (owner of the gallery) at the end of November. (I'm focused on American happenings here, so I won't count a fourth big surrealist moment that year. Back in January, in Paris, crowds flocked to the Eighth International Exposition of Surrealism. The theme that year was eroticism. Apparently, though, gallery-goers were not sufficiently shocked. "For the truth is," one critic wrote, "surrealism's erotic symbols and visual jokes [e.g. the fur-lined teacup at New York's Museum of Modern Art show in 1936] have ceased to shock or enrage the bourgeois."***)

Later entries here will surely return to the three above-mentioned American surrealist moments, but let me add a word here about the Duchamp show. When reviewers showed up at the gallery to find out about the show in advance of the opening, they found Duchamp waiting for the delivery of three live chickens, standing outside 1091 Madison Avenue. The fowl were to participate in the show. (They were set off in a corner near a sign that read "Coin Sale.") A pair of half-burned logs were set neatly on andirons against a wall in which they was no fireplace.

Already, I think, you get a sense of what works in this kind of historical excavation. But I think that by putting out the work in short entries, as a blog, it takes on a different character -- it's almost like reading a literature and culture blog from 1960, moving through snapshots of the year's moments, taking digressions into minor figures, taking stock of the distant (and not-too-distant) past from the more recent past. It's one of the most interesting academic blogs I've started reading in a long time, not least because it has a great deal to offer for the nonacademic (and even nonpoetry-savvy) audience.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

State of Undress

From Michael Wolf, "The Real Toy Story." These photographs of industrial toy workers in Guangdong Province, China, are fabulous.



Friday, October 05, 2007

The Global Rentiers

Paul Krugman makes a nice observation in his new(ish) blog:

Back in the pre-industrial world, big cities were mainly “rentier” cities – that is, their economic base consisted primarily of rich people whose income came from the land, serfs, etc. they owned elsewhere. These people lived in the capital not because it was where they worked – only the little people worked for a living – but because it had the best parties, not to mention access to the king...

Today’s Wall Street Journal (sub. Req.) has a story about the sources of London’s current boom: an influx of very wealthy foreigners, whose income comes from elsewhere. Middle Eastern sheiks, Russian beeznessmen, Indian industrialists, have become the backbone of London’s economy. It’s all helped a lot by British tax law, which gives big breaks to people who live in Britain but are “domiciled” elsewhere (don’t ask.)

Krugman adds that "it continues to amaze me how the 21st century is starting to look like the 17th century with fancier technology: tax farmers, mercenaries, and now rentier cities."

Of course, the rentiers and the industrial world coexisted for a long time, well into the twentieth century, even as the overall shape of cities became proletarian. Pick your favorite French novelist: the chances are good that their income came from their families' landholdings, not their books. Today instead, in addition to the global capitalist class, we have the hipster-artist, the heiress-clubgoer, and the forty-year-old who live off of their parents' rent-controlled apartment. Plus ça change.

That Fine Line

Bush Vetoes Child Health Plan. Or, as Smithers said about Mr. Burns, Bush crosses the line between everyday villainy and cartoonish super-villainy.

Update: Jon Stewart seems to be thinking the same thing.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

Dan Keating, the last surviving veteran of the 1919-21 Irish war of Independence from Great Britain, has died. Keating lived in died in County Kerry, the precise contemporary of my great-grandfather, who also fought in the Republican Army for a free Ireland, and who was born, lived and died in Kerry.

A piece of history has come to a close, at least as much as history ever does. Suddenly I'm reminded of newsreel footage of the last Civil War veterans on V-E day, and the sense that historical moments that we think of as utterly separate, centuries apart, can be spanned by a single lifetime. Now, of course, it is the World War II veterans who are dying, but some will undoubtedly survive to see another generation, and if history gives any template, another war.

Keating's obituary, though, adds a sudden shock of recognition to the Faulknerian axiom that the past is not past:

He joined the I.R.A. faction that opposed the 1921 peace treaty with Britain, and fought against former colleagues in Ireland’s 1922-23 civil war... took part in an I.R.A. bombing campaign against London from 1939 to 1940... In 1970, he switched his allegiance from the “official” Irish Republican Army to a new, Northern Ireland-based faction called the Provisional I.R.A., which spent 27 years trying to overthrow British rule.

When the Provisional I.R.A. called a 1997 cease-fire and supported the Sinn Fein push for a negotiated deal, he switched support to a breakaway faction, Republican Sinn Fein, which opposed compromise and backed the I.R.A. dissidents’ continued bombings.

In 2002 he also refused a $3,500 award from President Mary McAleese that was offered to all Irish citizens who reach age 100; Mr. Keating argued that she was not the real president of Ireland...

Mr. Keating had no immediate survivors.


It's as though those Civil War veterans in the newsreels were still fighting in the forties and fifties. And maybe, when you look at the vociferousness with which Southerners fought against integration, the war was still being fought. History, it turns out, can take longer than centuries -- since, borrowing not from Faulkner or Joyce but Stein, all our contemporaries are not our contemporaries. Or it can happen in an instant. Just like that; a birth, a death, an event -- and you wake up.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

A Lot Like the AARP

My old professor John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, was on Stephen Colbert last night. It's a good interview, and shows off Colbert at his most willfully dense ("What I'm hearing is... Jews control our foreign policy") and supremely sharp ("How does the Israel Lobby turn the U.S. into the largest supplier of arms to Saudi Arabia? How does that help them?")

Most of you are probably aware of some of the buzz around this book, but there are two points that I think help put it (and the Colbert interview) in context. (Note: I've read excerpts of the book when they appeared earlier, but not the entire book itself.)

1) Mearsheimer is totally restrained in this interview, but in a graduate seminar, he acts exactly like Stephen Colbert. Loud, belligerent, funny, smart, willing to go anywhere and say anything as long as he can continue to argue. It's fantastic.

2) Mearsheimer is only a public intellectual north-northwest. When the wind is southerly he's a hard-bitten neorealist theorist and military historian. His point of view is that all states do and should pursue their own security interests, independent of ideology. His take is much more methodologically sophisticated, but it's not at all far off from the old game-theory toting, conventional deterrence cold war crowd.

From this point of view, the argument in The Israel Lobby is totally natural. Israel and its friends want to promote the safety, security, and stability of the state of Israel. But if this leads the United States or other states into conflict with their self-interest, that's a problem, and one that's difficult to resolve within the narrow confines of neorealist theory. So, it requires a different kind of explanation, and some clarifying analysis to show where the conflicts might be. And if it gets a lot of attention and makes people argue with him, so much the better for Mearsheimer.

That's all. I don't doubt Mearsheimer's intentions or goals in the slightest.

Monday, October 01, 2007

Secret Identity

Harpers has a list, compiled by Perry Moore, of gay superheros and their fates. In short, it isn't pretty. This entry on DC Comics' Obsidian is fairly representative:

OBSIDIAN: depowered, corrupted by his sexual strife, manipulated by dark forces, thwarted in an attempt to destroy the world, made a security guard for a team of heterosexual superheroes but not allowed to sit with them at the table


In short, it's a long list of torture, rapes, shunning, abuse, and secret villainy not infrequently at the hands of people closest to the gay superhero in question. Whether it's out of sadism, a scapegoat mechanism, or the inability to write (or for the audience to accept) any other kind of storyline is open to debate.