November 8, 2009
Karaoke Marfa Now Online
September 23, 2009
Karaoke Marfa
My essay “Karaoke Marfa” is out now in print in the new issue of Proximity (issue 5). It’s a sort of hybrid of art criticism and narrative, with photos. It’s not online, but it can be bought from one of these places (scroll to bottom), or online. Table of contents (pdf).
September 6, 2009
Value Added: Thoughts on Supplementary Tactics in New Music
June 4, 2009
The Music Was Dying
March 31, 2009
Poem
A poem of mine, “The Varieties of Knives“, is now up on Proyekto, which is refashioning itself into an outlet for new writing. The content promises to be anything but same ol’ same ol’. Check it out.
February 7, 2009
Daddy Knows Best: The Oedipal Right
Last year, as if to pass a now obligatory Republican litmus test, John McCain made the fatuous claim what while a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he drew strength from catching wind of a inspiring new Governor of California named Ronald Reagan (who was at the time spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get Herbert Marcuse fired from UCSD). The Republican primary debates and the recent election for RNC Chairman turned into slobbery grovel-fests before the memory of Reagan. Daddy knows best and I love Daddy most.
Recently published excerpts from former VP daughter Elizibeth Cheney’s 1988 college senior thesis (Colorado College) offer another point of triangulation in understanding this oedipal Right. In the thesis, Cheney seems to examine every major war in US history and side with the actions of the then President against any and all Congressional opposition, not so much because the President is right (indeed she becomes an apologist for a dizzying array of Presidential policy from various political orientations), but because he’s President.
This condition of being so desperately ill-suited for fatherlessness perhaps explains the distinctive mid-election reorientation toward Mommy.
January 21, 2009
Appearance
Ding Dong Reading Series
Nell Boeschenstein
Daniel Letchworth
Brandon Kreitler
Eric Burg + David Kutz-Marks
Sam Lipsyte
Wednesday, Jan 21
Ding Dong Lounge (106 and Columbus)
8:30-10:30
New York
January 12, 2009
Signal
You are driving and there is a song on the radio. You’ve heard it before. You haven’t heard it before. You may as well have heard it before. But static hums gently and then overtakes the signal, nearly. The song is hard to hear, buried in there somewhere. Is it the power lines that do this? The space between cities? And then something else. A faint operatic voice bleeds into the mix from another station. Or is it a Theremin? But you can’t really make it out, can’t pull it from the oscillations of the static and that incessant pop song which you now find obnoxious but do not adjust the tuner because it might mean losing that voice. This other voice haunts the pop song, which is oddly distant now and not fun at all. This other voice others the pop song. The melody is chopped up. You may not even like it. It’s all you want to hear.
January 5, 2009
Ghosts in the Wax (2)
In his 1928 essay “The Curves of the Needle” Adorno claims that it is exactly the imperfections of a recording, the sounds that point to the material instantiation rather than song, which paradoxically make a record sound human. The opposite also holds: the more clear the recording is the more distant, even “alien”, its sound (“as if the singer were being distanced more and more from the apparatus”(49)). Most striking about this revelation is how relatively early it comes in the history of recorded sound (especially the mass availability of popular music recordings). And what is this humanity which is amplified in the distortion of the human? Invoking Freud, the English critic Mark Fisher coined the term “the technological uncanny” to describe the surplus effects that the material inscription of music gives birth to. This surplus is a haunt born in the space between content and context, between the fantasy of song and the material inscription of sound. It is a haunt that was always already there.
January 3, 2009
Ghosts in the Wax
In his long article in Harper’s last year, “Unknown Bards”, John Jeremiah Sullivan makes the case that the mediation of records, and indeed their fetishization, was not only present very near the beginnings of the post-reconstruction era blues music that became the object of the feverish reification of authenticity, but indeed enabled this music from the very start. The myth of the “lost” blues greats requires that the recordings were secondary, even haphazard afterthoughts that, to our good fortune, ended up preserving essential music – but essential music the very essence of which lies outside of (predates) the recording.
Sullivan points out that records were already the very connective fiber of many of these early bluesman, who much like the rabid collectors who would “rediscover” the recordings later, came to the music not by chance encounter with other musicians on some Southern porch, but by seeking out their records. The myth was built into the story, mediated by wax.
