The Music Was Dying

My piece about William Basinski and “Hauntology” in music is online and in print in June’s Brooklyn Rail. 

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.

Where Dreams Come True

Baudrillard:

“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, [and] all of the “real” America is Disneyland (just a prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral).  Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but…[in] simulation.  It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, thus saving the reality principle.”

     Such an ostensibly ‘imaginary’ endeavor as Disneyland also is screen for the display of desires too real for other social expression (see also:  ”role playing” games).  Applying this principle to the “It’s a Small World After All” ride reveals the full-bore projection neo-liberal multiculturalist desire.  Here we have all the “peoples” of the world cordonend off and presented via their difference, presented as the signifiers of cultural difference.  But one travels from group to group effortlessly, reclined in a gondola.  All are under the roof of the same ride, all the world’s difference displayed under a rubric of sameness, displaced by the constant substitution of its own sign.  This is what Badiou calls the “pluralism of the shopping mall food court.”  

     And what kind of dream is this?  Does it matter that Walt Disney himself was a virulent anti-communist who collaborated with McCarthy and possibly a Nazi sympathizer?  How often does “cultural diversity” instantiate as the fastidious arrangement of difference?  We are naive to think that there is anything inherently emancipatory in a cultural logic that demands this sort of parade.  

     One departs the peaceful ride refreshed and relaxed.  A gift shop and a cotton candy vendor are immediately in sight.  Already a child is tugging on your sleeve.  

The New Thinking

…but unlike her Israeli counterpart, the Palestinian woman must renounce nothing, least of all her headscarf, which marks her as authentic, imbued with real cultural identity (that is, an identity that is not a choice, an identity admired for its very reality though we would wince at adopting it for ourselves), a believer, sitting squarely on the vectors of history, lines of force, subject to these vectors in a way we no longer believe possible for ourselves but fetishize, need.  She is a bastion of belief which we outgrown ourselves, though we have not outgrown the need to know that it exists.  Faith held in our stead.  Last gasp nostalgia for what we believe to be the infinitely receding tides of history, tides which have left us for good.   Hammas is accepted as an inevitability, and therefore blameless, the determinant output of factors which can only be added to the equation by Israel and the West, who have the only agency in this model.  (It takes a suit to do business after all.) The logic here is something like ‘how can we expect them to do otherwise?’, which is also ‘how much can we really expect from them?’.  We are left as either benefactors, or the voice of the voiceless, keeping a vigil of conscience for those whose conscience we will not recognize.  And are the larger features of the Palestinian woman proportional relative to any ethnic variation that might be insisted upon?  Indeed one can imagine a more truly incisive rendering of the image in which two identical women are backdropped by the flags of opposing nationalities.  But the existing model requires this difference, requires this difference to be ethnic in addition to national/political.  This is a gaze that requires difference in general, and engenders difference in doing so.  We are meant to identify with the one (in her guilt — which, remember, requires conscience — and who, like us, must renounce her nation) and but sympathize with the other, which is to say sympathize with her otherness.

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. 

 

 

 

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

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.  

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.

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.

2008 Top Ten

I probably didn’t listen to enough records to do this legit, but since it was requested these are the ten records I submitted to the Village Voice critics poll.

 James Blackshaw – Litany of Echoes (Tompkins Square)

Blackshaw distances himself from the folk tradition that has sustained him thus far by taking an unexpected classical turn and somehow comes into his own in doing so.  This is John Fahey playing Philip Glass.  This is the most beautiful record of 2008.  

Deerhunter — Mircocastle / Weird Era Cont. (Kranky)

Though not a wholly even 2-disk affair, Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. repeatedly offer something that seemed surprisingly rare in a year in which countless bands sought to bathe flimsy songs in either Spector-aping reverb or skeuomorphic recording hiss:  sturdy and shimmering rock songs that sounded better with each listen.  

Birchville Cat Motel — Gunpowder Temple of Heaven (Pica Disk)

A single 40-minute slab of droning organs and feedback.  Both somber and blaring.  A gorgeous exercise in polyphonic stacking.  Thick, translucent, glowing like a thousand flickering neon halos about to burn out.  

Hercules and Love Affair — S/T (DFA)

In 2007 Hercules maestro Andy Butler told me that I was the first writer to interview him.  He told me he loved Yaz and the “theatrical” instrumental ornamentation absent in dance music post-1982.  In 2008 Hercules and Love Affair seemed to be in more magazines than anyone else. Offering up 4 or so tracks that immediately occupy the apex of disco revival in the 00’s will do that.  It’s more than enough to forgive the record’s underwhelming second half. Finally new disco music too gay for the gym’s sound system.

Sam Amidon — All is Well (Bedroom Community)

Old-sounding new takes on very old folk songs.  Simply put, no man and guitar combo struck those archetypal folks notes in as true a fashion as Sam Amidon this year.  

Grouper — Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill (Type)

Though some baristas were visibly shaken, Liz Harris’s decision to plug in her pedal board at the open-mic night took her Grouper project to new levels.   And no matter how much espresso you drink, it’s damn near impossible to stay lucid listening to this eerie reverb-laden beaut. 

Emeralds — Solar Bridge (Hanson)

Wow, people who make dark, textured, droning ambiance have friends — who knew?  Three buds from Ohio come together to make their most realized recording to date, in which all the promising noise experiments in their limited edition CDRs and cassette tapes are focused in a beautiful proper album.

Philip Jeck — Sand (Touch)

This is the music we have when deconstruction has run its course, endlessly splintered and recombined into nothingness.  This is the haunt of desires which both predate and will outlive the style games that occupy music now.  This is music as the memory of music, as memories just beyond reach.  

Silver Jews — Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City)

Oh David Berman we love you, write another book.  

Arthur Russell — Love is Overtaking Me (Audika)

Russell’s best?  Hardly.  But 2008 was the year that many caught on to the fact that every Russell release is essential.  [Captions for Grouper and Emeralds by Tony S]