Newsworthy

It's been a long break, but well worth it to recharge the batteries. Thanks to the dozen or so readers of this blog for putting up with the wait.

Actually, I hadn't planned on starting it up again today. I had said that I would write again when I had something I wanted to publish in this space. Since I haven't (yet) seen it anywhere else, I thought that this certainly qualified.

In case you're wondering what I just linked to, I'll give you the teaser of teasers:

After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.

(From Spiegel Online.)

Doors Are Closing

I'm putting Short Schrift on temporary hiatus. But don't worry. I'll write again when I have something that I want to publish here.

Hoaxing Literature

Gavin at Wordwright was all over the James Frey disaster from the first, but I thought I would chime in with some recent updates.

Of course, most people know by now that one of the things that fueled the fire was Oprah Winfrey's initial defense of the book -- that if it wasn't true, it was at least truthful, and if not entirely truthful, it was at least "true" in some, I don't know, nonfactual sense.

Well, yesterday, Oprah turned around and bitch-slapped Frey -- live on her own television show! (The NYT's TV critic went with the headline "Ms. Winfrey Takes a Guest to the Televised Woodshed.") She did an about-face on the book's truth content (or lack thereof), forcing Frey to admit to her viewers that he fabricated information -- including, apparently, legal documents testifying to the veracity of said information -- not that Frey forged them, he just made them up as well.

Even people who want to defend the distinction between memoir as recalled and autobiography as recorded fact have to acknowledge that Frey (and quite likely his publisher) went to extreme and probably fraudulent lengths to vouch for the factuality of his memoir, and that its presumed factuality greatly augmented its value as literature. A Million Little Pieces isn't even inaccurate -- it's dishonest, from cover to cover. Once a memoirist gives up even on honesty, there's no way to redeem it, except as a cleverly (or not-so-cleverly) executed hoax. And I think Oprah realized that, or was made to realize that.

Literary hoaxes can have their own fictonal or metafictional value -- Borges's Ficciones is an excellent example at the formal level, the poetry of Ossian (a fictional Celtic contemporary of Homer, invented by James McPherson in the late 18th century) might be another. But this one just stinks.

Actually, though, I was prompted to write this summary less by Oprah than by two excellent and complimentary pieces that appeared on literary hoaxes recently in LA Weekly. The first, "Free James Frey!" by Permanent Midnight author Jerry Stahl, is a smart and witty summary/analysis of the whole Frey affair, and linking JF to George W. -- kinda like the Frank Rich "Truthiness" column on crystal meth.

The second is a whole new hoax, titled "Navahoax," by Matthew Fleischer, about a memoirist named Nasdijj, who, in addition to fabricating his memoirs, is probably lying about being a Navajo Indian AND plagiarized other Indian authors to come up with his stories. It's not as ripping as Stahl on Jim Frey, but has some great lines from everyone's all-time favorite Indian author Sherman Alexie, who spotted the hoax early on, including this one:

“My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian. For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I’m so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow.”

I don't know what to say after that, other than this little paradox: more than the skill or deceipt of the authors, it's their readers' credulity, and their longing for some kind of authentic experience, that lets these fictions thrive. It's because we live in the world of "truthiness" that anything that seems to offer The Truth about life, any life different from ours, appeals to us. And appeals to us so much that we'll swallow garbage to get it. And anyone can sell it to us.

Why Duchamp is a Genius

I've long been a partisan of the works of Marcel Duchamp. His use of "ready-mades" was one of the touchstones that grounded my academic (and personal) interest in the role of objects in modernist art and literature. So this story in the NYT (via Boing Boing) caught my attention:

PARIS, Jan. 6 - The Dada movement made its name in the early 20th century by trying to destroy the conventional notion of art. Taking literal inspiration from their exploits this week, a latter-day neo-Dadaist took a small hammer to Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," the factory-made urinal that is considered the cornerstone of Conceptual Art.

The assailant, a French performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli, was immediately arrested after his act of vandalism, which took place on Wednesday, during the final days of the "Dada" exhibition at the Pompidou Center. The porcelain urinal was slightly chipped in the attack and was withdrawn to be restored. (The exhibition runs through Monday.)

Mr. Pinoncelli, 77, who urinated into the same urinal and struck it with a hammer in a show in Nîmes in 1993, has a long record of organizing bizarre happenings. Police officials said he again called his action a work of art, a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists.

Forget the conceptual gamesmanship, everything that you could say about chance or the role of the audience in constructing, constituting, or attempting to destroy the artwork, all of the rehashed crap about the modernist avant-garde closing the distance between art and everyday life, or the role of gesture (on behalf of the artist) and institutional valuation (on behalf of the artwork).

The reason why Duchamp is a genius is this: what other masterpieces in the history of art since the Renaissance could be both pissed on and taken a hammer to and come away "only slightly chipped"? Duchamp has really created a work of art that genuinely endures the ravages of time.

Then again, Pierre Pinoncelli is 77 years old. So he couldn't have been swinging the hammer too hard.

Outsourcing the Welfare State

Americans have Wal-Mart; Europeans have Ikea. The differences are instructive.

Here's one. The story's been kicking around for years now that Wal-Mart employees' low wages mean they rack up a kajillion dollars (or something) in government welfare, amounting to a kajillion dollar government subsidy to Wal-Mart. Another example of American capitalism at its most contradictory and perverse.

Then, I saw this post on Boing Boing linking to this article from Der Spiegel: "The Swedish Feeding Trough." Man, oh man.

If you've ever been to an Ikea, you know that two of its features which make it stand out from American stores are its free-of-charge child play area and its cheap-as-free in-store cafeteria. Now, this hasn't caught on in the states, but apparently in Germany, the following have happened:

1) Pensioners and poor people are turning to Ikea's restaurants instead of soup kitchens. Some are drawn by the low prices, others by the opportunity to "scrounge" for free stuff in the kitchen and bathrooms -- used cups, toilet paper, baby food, diapers, etc.

2) Parents are using the Ikea play center as a free babysitting service: dropping their kids off while they go to work, run errands, etc. In at least one case, parents dropped their daughter off and forgot to pick her up again until an hour after closing time.

In other words, instead of the government subsidizing Ikea, Ikea is subsidizing the government, and people are treating the store's loss leaders as free social services. In other words, European socialism at its most contradictory and perverse.

There Is Nothing Left to Fear

After I'd come across an unconscious Hurricane Katrina theme in my best of 2005 mix CD, I looked at the rest of the songs I'd been lining up to include on the album. After discarding some that didn't thematically fit at all, I noticed that while several of them couldn't be shoehorned into the Katrina mythology I'd cooked up, except tangentially at best, they did have a different and complimentary coherence.

The Mountain Goats' "This Year" is a salutary example. Like all of the songs from the excellent The Sunset Tree album, it tells a story about a heartbreaking and an almost jubilant urge to self-destruction punctuated with fights with an abusive stepfather. I liked how the narrator's "We played video games in a drunken haze / I was seventeen years young" dovetailed into The Hold Steady's "Lord to be seventeen forever" on "Stevie Nix." But mostly it was the attitude of defiance in the face of catastrophe that appealed to me and seemed to fit into the schema I was putting together. I loved the shifting narrative reference of the choral refrain: "I am gonna make it through this year / If it kills me." "This year" could be any year -- the year the narrator was seventeen or now, at the moment of the utterance. The lesson seemed to be that recognition of destruction in the past steeled you to face it in the present, even if ultimate destruction was inevitable.

I've written briefly before about Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History -- ironically enough, in the context of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea -- but it's worth mentioning some quotes again:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
--- Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History"

It's strange -- for a nonbeliever, I have a strange affinity for religious visions of the apocalypse. Benjamin's concept of history as a single, unending catastrophe -- which, for him, culminated but did not conclude in the rise of fascism and his own suicide -- almost coincides with a Gnostic vision of our universe as trash, a kind of cosmic accident. I say almost, because the key difference for Benjamin, and what makes his concept of history a Jewish-Marxist one rather than a fully Christianized one, is that redemption is not spiritual or for the soul alone, and that there is and can be no other world but this one -- flawed and failed though it might be.

I've already identified the apocalyptic vision animating Andrew Bird's beautiful "Tables and Chairs" -- one which reconciles the catastrophe with a kind of foolish hope. But I found a better statement of purpose in the verses of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood":

Now that everybody's here
Can we please have your attention
There is nothing left to fear
No, now that Bigfoot is captured
And the children are all right...
There is danger in the night
There are things we can't control but
Will we give ourselves a fright
When we become less than human?...
We are men who stay alive
Who send your children away now
We are calling from a tower
Expressing what must be everyone's opinion
They are going out to bars
And they are getting into cars
I've seen them with my own eyes
America, please help them!...

The line "There Is Nothing Left to Fear" immediately reminded me of Neutral Milk Hotel's "Ghost":

And there she goes
And now she knows
She'll never be afraid
To watch the morning paper blow
Into a hole
Where no one can escape

The most debilitating part of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has been the cynical attempt to manipulate Americans into being afraid -- not by the terrorists, but by actors within our own government. Hurricane Katrina both exposed the extent to which we were not (and quite possibly could not) protected from disaster and offered up new images to play on our fears.

The lesson Benjamin offers, and which I've embraced, is this: catastrophe is the rule rather than the exception of history. Furthermore, once this is admitted, there is not only nothing one can do to insulate oneself from the storm of history, but there is nothing to fear even from disaster itself. We are absolved from our sense of our own importance -- after all, we are all, and have always been, already dead.

This was when I decided to title my mix CD "There Is Nothing Left to Fear."

My Mix CDs for 2005

Last year, I got a Best of 2004 mix CD exchange going with some of my music loving friends (and friends of friends). This was hot on the heels of a period when I was making mix CDs all of the time. I had a regular monthly exchange going with one friend (now sadly defunct) and was randomly making CDs for friends and family, for holidays, moving, whatever. I had made an early and imperfect Best of 2003 mix CD -- which, I think, was actually burned only once, and only one person besides my girlfriend has ever heard -- and I figured having a kind of CD exchange with friends would be a good way to ensure quality and share lots of new songs, albums, and bands. And it was.

But a funny thing happened in 2005. Apart from a few aborted attempts, I stopped making mix CDs. This was especially strange, since I finally had a car, where CD-length mixes really do come in handy. But I'd stopped exchanging with friends, and I had less and less success coming up with new ideas for mixes. Most of my 2004 mix CDs were concept- or genre-driven: a two-disc post-rock primer, or an album loosely structured around a theme taken from a song lyric or title. Besides a good tweak of my 2004 freak-folk mix ("The Hard-to-Find Stations on the AM Band," after a lyric in The Mountain Goats's "Jaipur"), I was coming up dry.

Instead, and not long into the year, I was listening to lots of new music and filing away songs for my 2005 mix. I had no theme or musical style in mind -- limiting an album to songs released in a calendar year is usually enough of a constraint to get started. But in September -- about two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast -- I had it.

Entirely by accident, or with the benefit of hindsight -- take your pick -- I had been putting together an album of songs from 2005, all released before Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath -- that seemed to be about the hurricane. Lines in songs I'd listened to a dozen times and ignored now had new relevance.

"I've lost my house. You've lost your house.
I don't suppose it matters which way we go.
This great society is going smash."
(The Books, "Be Good to Them Always")

"It's so cold in this house
The open mouth swallowing us.
The children sent home from school --
One won't stop crying.
And I know that you're busy too,
But do I know that you care?
You got your finger on the pulse,
You got your eyes everywhere,
And it hurts all the time when you don't return my calls
And you haven't got the time to remember how it was."
(Bloc Party, "Like Eating Glass")

"Sit down, honey, let's hang around.
We'll wreck their precious, their perfect town."
(Sleater-Kinney, "What's Mine Is Yours")

"She got screwed up by her vision,
It was scary when she saw him;
She didn't tell a single person
About the camps on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Lord, to be seventeen forever."
(The Hold Steady, "Stevie Nix")

The most uncanny of all was Archer Prewitt's "Way of the Sun." Prewitt's album Wilderness came out in January, and I had been listening to it semi-regularly for most of the year. I thought that "Way of the Sun," the first track, was the most beautiful on the album, a soft and shimmering gem with haunting but (I thought) fairly abstract imagery. Here are the lyrics:

Hello, my sweetheart
Hold still until they pass by
No, don't let them see you
They'll take what's left of our lives

Too late for the cameras
Everything's right
All the people are hiding,
Burn through the night
Please, what's the reason?
Say goodbye
All our lives are all on burning paper

We can get by on the candles
We can survive if we ration it right
It's the last of the candles
Let me take one more look at your eyes

We awoke in the morning
Caught by surprise
A helicopter was hovering
Up in the sky
Please, please believe me
I'd give my life

(Ave Maria)

I feel that it's over
We can go by the way of the sun
We can go by the way of the sun
I feel that it's over
We can go by the way of the sun

In the weeks after Katrina, it seemed less like a song than a first-person account. And other songs that didn't seem to reference Katrina at all had a new resonance. The Decemberists' "On the Bus Mall" was about two hustler/prostitutes... from New Orleans. Feist's "Mushaboom," with its idyllic wintry vision of children, suddenly seemed more poignant and insecure: its "rented house" and wait for "dreams to match up with my pay" came from a family relocated to Utah. What was really bizarre was that the music was changing the way I thought about Katrina -- I cared less about the storm itself, how the media covered it, or which awful politicians to deserved the most blame. Music written before the hurricane ever happened was giving me a better appreciation of the full human drama of thousands of people who'd lost their homes, who were angry, tired, but still hopeful to rebuild.

Once I had the theme, then it was easy to decide which songs to keep and which to let go. But the hurricane wasn't the only story I had found in the music. I'll tell the next story... in my next post.

Best Albums of 2005

Not long after Pitchfork came out with their Top 50 Albums of 2005, I started working on my own list. Well, actually, I just put it together in the last ten minutes. So I don't know if I will wind up absolutely standing by the particular rankings I've made. But mostly, I can't entirely believe that I bought, borrowed, streamed and/or downloaded this many albums this year.

In case long-term readers of Short Schrift are wondering, I'm sticking with my premature claim that Andrew Bird's The Mysterious Production of Eggs is the album of the year. Bird got ignored by Pitchfork and lots of other critics' list this year, and if nothing else, that convinced me to come down heavy in his favor. It really is a phenomenal album, and I lived with it this year like nothing else I heard.

In general, I think albums released early in the year -- particularly albums released to some fanfare (although on this count, I don't think Bird qualifies) -- tend to slide farther down the lists than they'd appear if they were released later in the year. For example, if Bloc Party's Silent Alarm had been released in October instead of January, I think it would have been in more top tens instead of 25s, and would definitely have beaten less potent releases by Franz Ferdinand and Maximo Park. Franz Ferdinand actually had the same problem in 2004.

Not only is there a problem with eventual critical backlash, but I think critics tend to get tired of listening to some albums, and musical trends that seemed vital at one moment begin to wear thin later. If anything, my list has the opposite prejudice. Albums released in the last four months of the year had a harder time breaking into my rotation of favorites, both because earlier albums had already secured their places and because I just had less time to concentrate (and money to spend) on music, at least until the very end of the year. (Plus, I made my first best-of-2005 mix CD way early, which locked out albums released later.) So albums like Animal Collective's Feels and even Kanye West's Late Registration (which I heard in entirety on release but didn't pick up until much later) are probably lower on this list than they deserve to be, or at least as they would if I listened to them on repeat four or five more times.

But I don't pretend that this list is anything but subjective. Its quirks and vagaries are mine, too.

1 Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs - Andrew Bird
2 Illinois - Sufjan Stevens
3 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
4 Silent Alarm - Bloc Party
5 In Case We Die - Architecture in Helsinki
6 Gimme Fiction - Spoon
7 A River Ain't Too Much to Love - Smog
8 The Sunset Tree - The Mountain Goats
9 Apologies to the Queen Mary - Wolf Parade
10 Separation Sunday - The Hold Steady
11 Twin Cinema - The New Pornographers
12 Late Registration - Kanye West
13 Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
14 Feels - Animal Collective
15 Picaresque - The Decemberists
16 The Woods - Sleater-Kinney
17 Tender Buttons - Broadcast
18 Strange Geometry - The Clientele
19 I Am A Bird Now - Antony and the Johnsons
20 Alligator - The National
21 Bang Bang Rock n' Roll - Art Brut
22 Pixel Revolt - John Vanderslice
23 You Could Have It So Much Better - Franz Ferdinand
24 Arular - M.I.A.
25 Z - My Morning Jacket
26 LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem
27 Let It Die - Feist
28 Lost and Safe - The Books
29 Transistor Radio - M. Ward
30 Get Behind Me Satan - The White Stripes
31 Oh You're So Silent Jens - Jens Lekman
32 Cripple Crow - Devendra Banhart
33 Superwolf - Bonnie Prince Billy and Matt Sweeney
34 Chaos and Creation in the Backyard - Paul McCartney
35 Face the Truth - Stephen Malkmus
36 A Certain Trigger - Maximo Park
37 EP - The Fiery Furnaces
38 Thunder Lightning Strike - The Go! Team
39 The Best Party Ever - The Boy Least Likely To
40 Wilderness - Archer Prewitt
41 Nice and Nicely Done - The Spinto Band
42 Extraordinary Machine - Fiona Apple
43 Set Yourself on Fire - Stars
44 The Magic Numbers - The Magic Numbers
45 Plans - Death Cab for Cutie
46 Who's Your New Professor - Sam Prekop
47 The Runners Four - Deerhoof
48 Year of Meteors - Laura Veirs
49 The Alternative to Love - Brendan Benson
50 Guero - Beck

News and Genre

Newspapers have genres (e.g., student, entertainment, state fair, socialist) and journalism has genres (not just food, entertainment, and op-ed, but also things like reportage, analysis, and punditry). Soon, though cable news may be developing its own system of genre as codified, well-worn, and viewer-driven as anything in broadcast television drama.

The latest? Planes in trouble, says Reuters. They're the new high-speed car chase.

Northwestern University Professor of Journalism George Harmon writes: "My personal theory is that some stories on TV beget similar stories: Shark attacks, wildfires and missing blond girls ... the format has been established."

The twin keys to emerging news genres seems to be 1) similarity to other preexisting dramatic genres (soap operas, cop shows, movies about war/politics) and 2) the photo- or videogenic quality of the story. In other words, TV news likes stories that make good television.

One speculative point I'd like to raise, aside from just demonizing the degradation of television news, etc.: I wonder whether we're moving away from a culture of the media event (coronations, funerals, weddings, and other rituals; the Moon Landing; one-off scripted live events, like the Academy Awards; sports championships) and more deeply into a culture of unscripted but serial media (political scandals, murder investigation and trials, Terry Schiavo). This might say something not just about changes in the way we digest news and politics, but also in how we treat media as such, and the interaction between this and our changing lives and mediascape. But I'm not entirely sure.

Even SNL Brings the Funny

If you haven't seen it yet, the Chronicles of Narnia video-rap sketch (aka "Lazy Sunday") from this past week's Saturday Night Live is worth checking out. It's available at YouTube and on the SNL site above. Boing Boing also has a post with some background on Lonely Island, the comedy team that wrote and produced the sketch w/Chris Parnell (which also includes Andy Samberg, the other star of the sketch and now a featured player on SNL. Andy Samberg is apparently also sometimes called "Ardy" -- which is neither here nor there, but confused the hell out of me).

Before hooking up w/SNL, Lonely Island started out as a Creative Commons-licensed comedy group who wrote primarily web shorts. One of these was The 'Bu, an insane parody of The O.C. produced for Channel 101 -- later home to the beloved Yacht Rock. (Thanks again, LPS.)

I don't know what any of this says about the continued rise of decentered digital entertainment, and its inevitability or freak-occurence nature of its synthesis with traditional media and entertainment gatekeepers. It is, however, a curious triangulation of new, clever, and often very funny stuff.