The Wank Zone

There was a movie that I just couldn’t get out of my head. Not because it was good, but because it had come so highly recommended at the time and was such a big letdown. The time was the mid-eighties; sometimes disappointment really hangs in there. At first I thought it was Blow Out (a ridiculously lame riff on Blow Up and The Conversation) but it wasn’t that turkey. It turned out that the scene that I couldn’t forget was from the sonic extravaganza To Live and Die in LA.

The spotting brush (usually these things are about four or five hairs round) hit the Kodalith with a scratching sound and I was gone in a rage. When a spotting brush makes that kind of racket, I know I have entered into some sort of alternate universe where a pin dropping can shatter an eardrum. The rest of the clip is pretty indicative; it’s foley gone mad with a relentless Wang Chung score.

I was reminded of this stuff this morning when I read The Death of High Fidelity. I don’t think it was MP3s that were responsible for the death of natural sound—I think it happened long before that, in the mid-eighties. No, I’m not just talking about the advent of digital sound in general, either. I think the movies helped kill high fidelity sound.

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Posted by Jeff at January 8, 2008 12:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Sentence of the year

Dion is the Antichrist of the indie sensibility, an overemoting schmaltz-bot who has somehow managed to convert the ethos of Wal-Mart into sine waves and broadcast them, at kidney-rupturingly high volume, directly into our internal soulPods.

Sam Anderson

This is one of the finest sentences I've read this year. But embracing the bile, there are some fine theoretical points to be made:

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Posted by Jeff at December 23, 2007 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Corrosion Research Center

I thought it was great that the University of Minnesota had such a thing. Rust never sleeps, you know.

Another review of the show I don't agree with. Ended tepidly? I'll agree with the searching for universal truths thing, but when you're performing harmonic experiments (somewhat like Coltrane) "resolution" isn't what you're really looking for. It seems interesting to me that the writer calls Pegi Young's set "amiable" when the most memorable tune to me was something about blood, a reflection on Neil's near death a couple of years ago from a brain aneurysm. Amiable is not an adjective I would use to describe that song.

Posted by Jeff at November 18, 2007 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Opting Out

"You can get things taken down, the legal tools are there to do it," said Caroline Kean, a partner at the law firm Wiggin. "The reason people don't is partly practical, because there are so many images, but also due to the bad publicity you get from going after your biggest fans. Most people soon realised it was counter-productive."

A spokeswoman for the fans' campaign said the sites had always tried to work with Prince's management. But it appeared that Prince wanted to edit his past and there was "no sign" of his lawyers backing down, she said. "He's trying to control the internet 100% and you can't do that without infringing people's freedom of speech," she added.

Guardian

According to the pragmatist interpretation, the "copying" of reality is replaced by a problem-solving "coping" with the challenges of an overcomplex world. In other words, we acquire our knowledge of facts in the course of a constructive approach to a surprising environment. Nature only provides indirect answers as all its answers refer to the grammar of our questions. What we call the "world" therefore does not consist of the totality of facts. For us, it is the sum total of the cognitively relevant constraints imposed on our attempts to learn from and achieve control over contingent natural processes through reliable predictions.

Habermas

Posted by Jeff at November 12, 2007 1:04 PM

The play's the thing

When you take away everything plays think they're about, what's left is what all plays—all stories—are really about, and what they're really about is time. Events, things happening—Ophelia drowns! Camille coughs! Somebody has bought the cherry orchard!—are different manifestations of what governs the narratives we make up, just as it governs the narrative we live in: the unceasing ticktock of the universe. There is no stasis, not even in death, which turns into memory.

Barrett died, 60 years old, a month after my play opened, 5 years after that photograph of him cycling home with his shopping from the supermarket. When I first saw the photo—in Willis's book—I found myself staring at it for minutes, at the thickset body supporting the heavy, shaven potato head, comparing it with images of Barrett in his "dark angel" days, like the shot on this story's opening page. "He was beautiful," Esme says. "He was like the guarantee of beauty," and, high-flown though it might be to apply Virgil's untranslatable chord "there are tears of things," sunt lacrimae rerum, to a snatched photo of a burly bloke with Colgate and Super Soft toilet paper in his bicycle basket, that's what came into my mind in the long moment when I understood that it was this play, the one about Communism, consciousness, Sappho, and, God help us, Czechoslovakia, into which Syd Barrett fitted. The tears of things are in mutability and the governance of time.

Tom Stoppard

Posted by Jeff at November 11, 2007 8:58 PM

Tommorow and the Day Before Yesterday

I can’t stop thinking about the tongue-in-cheek comment Neil Young made about “there was always more.” I took it as a backhanded slap at nostalgia, a bit uncharacteristic of a “greenie.” Going through some old links, I stopped to have a look at this Tom Snyder montage. I really can’t remember whether I liked him or not—I don’t think I did. His sideburns always seemed like they were on the attack, and he never seemed to have much of a grasp of the issues. But the clip near the end of John Lennon saying that the reason people become performers is to “get a little extra” made me smile. I don’t think Snyder got the joke any better than the Star Tribune reporter did. Today, I noticed that most fans are reporting a different experience.

But the bit at the end of the clip where Howard Cosell accuses Snyder of being a shill for the network bosses is the best part. It brings out another cliché stated well by Bob Dylan: “You gotta serve somebody.” I suspect it is scariest when the biases (and masters) are hidden. A few commentators have suggested that the centerpiece of the current Neil Young tour is the song “No Hidden Path.” Everyone talks about the groove, but no one talks about the substance. For some, it’s an instant classic—for others, a recycled dirge.

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Posted by Jeff at November 10, 2007 12:05 PM

Times Change

As I alluded to a month or so ago, I did go see Neil Young at the Northrup Auditorium last night. I have been doing a lot of thinking about the life unnarrated— as I’ve been busy not narrating mine—but I felt alright about breaking the silence for a moment to compare and contrast this experience with the last time I saw Neil at the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

Fifteen years ago, Rex and I stood most of the night behind a cute Japanese couple in the middle of the sidelines, looking sideways at Neil and Crazy Horse on a fairly distant stage. The crowd was mixed, and as I recall pretty well behaved with grey long-hairs and young kids who looked like they might have been conceived while their parents listened to Neil. The couple in front of us offered their binoculars, which Rex rapidly took advantage of to scope out all the details (down to the knob settings) on the amplifiers. The sound was huge. I remember thinking to myself that it was tailor made for such a large space because it loomed and rumbled and needed some distance to really pick up momentum.

Last night seemed like it might have been sort of a “night at church,” but with some key differences. Behind Krista and I, there was a Russian or Slavic couple who just couldn’t shut-up during Pegi Young’s set. Though we were all packed in our pews, moderately sized little red seats, people just kept filing in and out chattering loudly for the first half hour. It just seemed rude, somehow—at $100 a ticket, I really didn’t want to listen to them. But I became more intrigued by the couple in front of us, who just couldn’t stop playing with their iPhone. They were surfing the net during every break, and it looked as if they might doze off at any moment during the show. After Neil started the acoustic set, you could have heard a pin drop for a little while (other than the usual caterwauling from the people who love to hear themselves shout erupting once or twice per song).

When Neil made a mistake, starting “Love is a Rose” in completely the wrong key, —he said “Guess I better go home now.” There was some moaning and booing, and then he said—“Wait a minute—I am home. I grew up just north of here. You all make mistakes at home, don’t you? That should be all right.” There were very few mistakes that I noticed in the performance, but a few have popped up in the “reports” of the event. Neil commented that there were a lot of ducks around here; then said that there once were more—there was always more— “Grandpa says that the geese used to blot out the sky.” Somehow, the local reporter thought that the comment was cryptic. I don’t get it. I also don’t get the evaluation of a show based on the number of “hits” played.

But more than anything, I was offended by the heckler shouting at the painter onstage (part of the vaudeville set shtick): “Get off the stage, this isn’t a movie!” Minnesota nice my ass. I was really embarrassed by the crowd, who sat politely except when they were being idiots. Comparing this show to the LA show I witnessed before (which became part of the Weld movie), the most significant difference was the increase in the number of bald spots—and idiots. Maybe I’m just more intolerant now, or just sober.

Posted by Jeff at November 9, 2007 1:06 PM | Comments (1)

Inventing Pasts

Krista pointed me at the news of a new release from Karen Dalton, wondering if I’d heard of her. I hadn’t. I clicked through to the video, and was saddened by the fact that she died homeless in NYC in 1993. Further clicking about lead to videos from Peter LaFarge. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was related to Oliver LaFarge, author of Laughing Boy and, more important to my research, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow whose illustrations were designed by Edward Rosskam—a long time research interest of mine.

It turns out Peter LaFarge was his son. Small world and all that. I didn’t know that he was the one who wrote the Ballad of Ira Hayes, which is also a favorite song of mine. I thought about that song a lot, especially in 2002 when I was working on my “heroes” research. Strange to stumble into all this when I’ve been teaching Let Us Now Praise Famous Men this semester. I’d really like to see the documentary, which has uncovered the convenient fiction of LaFarge’s Native American heritage.

Is he diminished if his past is a lie? I’m not sure what I think about this.

Peter was a genuine intellectual, but he was also very earthy, very proud of his ... heritage, and very aware of the wrongs done to his people and other Native Americans. The history he knew so well wasn’t known at all by most white Americans in the early 1960s - though that would certainly change in the coming years - so to some extent, his was a voice crying in the wilderness. I felt lucky to be hearing it. Peter was great. He wasn’t careful with the Thorazine though.”

-Johnny Cash, Cash

Posted by Jeff at October 19, 2007 1:47 PM | Comments (2)

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