Border Radio

Skeletal Rhythms

2006-03-08T02:15:00.000-08:00

The above image is of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. It was one of the paintings on exhibit at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts during the Basquiat travelling show. I've had a long-time interest in Basquiat's work (since I saw the Julian Schnabel biopic in high school, at least) and I'm probably going to do some work on him for part of my dissertation, amongst several other, smaller projects I'm currently developing. Although I vaguely remembered it from art books, the painting above has become easily my favorite Basquiat image...maybe equaled by the later series of "Griot" pictures, but not by much.

Anyway, as some of you may or may not know, Basquiat also had an early sideline career as a musician in a band called Grey. For a brief period, Vincent Gallo (director of Buffalo '66 and The Brown Bunny) was also a member of this band. Very little of this music is available commercially, especially since the prices on both the Downtown 81 and Schnabelm film soundtracks have skyrocketed once they went out of print.

Though Basquiat can't be considered, strictly speaking, a "graffiti artist" in the same sense as Futura 2000, Dondi, or LEE, he was frequently close friends with the wildstyle train bombers from up in the Bronx. Rammellzee, who was both a graffiti artist and an early hip-hop MC (he's on the Wildstyle soundtrack) was particularly intimate w/ Basquiat, and although the painter's taste tended to run heavily towards Charlie Parker, he produced one hip-hop track w/ his friend, called "Beat Bop." Though the official version of the song is available on both Souljazz Records' compilation "New York Noise" and the "Bi-Conicals of Rammellzee" collection, I tracked this dub/test pressing instrumental of the song down. It's a little slower than the final, commercially released version--and certainly of a lower fidelity--but I still think it's kind of an interesting little tidbit from a continuously (for me, anyway) fascinating person.

J-M Basquiat & Rammellzee- Beat Bop (Test Pressing)

Primitive Transcendence

2006-03-08T01:46:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite John Fahey song. John Fahey is one of my favorite musicians ever. This track is from the "Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death" album. If you like this song, I would love to give you copies of his albums. Just ask. I might get into how much I love this guy, but I won't here because I think this song's too good to spoil.

John Fahey- On the Sunny Side of the Ocean

Do You Know This Man?

2006-03-08T01:29:00.000-08:00

I made a crack in my rundown of "The Rock Snob's Dictionary" that unless I wanted to get into Italian film score composers, this book wasn't really telling me anything new. Well, the man in the picture above may one of the closest things that the United States has to an Ennio Morricone or Dario Argento's Goblins. And yes, apologies to Danny Elfman, Bernard Herrman, several members of the Newman clan...and whoever else I might be forgetting. But fuck you, John Williams.

Anyway, that's Mike Post. You know, the guy who has scored like every fucking cop show on network tv since 1975? He wrote that indescrible bit of sound (cell door slamming? gavel banging?) that happens every five minutes in "Law and Order." Yeah, that guy.

So, I assume this one will please the nostalgist in all of us:

Mike Post-A-Team Theme Song

I Heart Poly Styrene

2006-03-07T16:40:00.000-08:00

Though I tend to like girl punk groups across the board at a higher perecentage rate than their male brethren (a weird law of averages, I guess...fewer bands=better bands) I hadn't heard the above album until quite recently. I have the first Raincoats album, but somehow "Odyshape" managed to elude my awareness of its very existence. But, being a fan of their first album, the Slits, Kleenex/Lilliput, the Delta 5, and X-Ray Spex/Lora Logic--okay, so female, UK punk/post-punk generally--I figured I couldn't go wrong with Limewiring the thing. It's also out of print, if anybody's worried about my ethics. What's so weird about this album, though, is how different it is even from its UK post-punk contemporaries, male or female. Where most of the aforementioned groups stuck within a punk/dub framework with the occasional forays into the noisier end of jazz (Lora Logic) or funk or "roots" stuff like rockabilly, the touchstones for this album are--to my ears, at least--odd ones for the time. I hear Sandy Denny-era Fairport Convention and Vashti Bunyan...the latter of whom is an improbable influence, but given the revisionist impulse in pop music I can't help myself. Basically weirdo folk music I guess. I also hear the proto-"world music" from stuff like Don Cherry's "Mu" albums and 70s Ornette Coleman in "Odyshape." There's a couple of other things I can think of to compare the album to as well, but mostly what strikes me is how essentially contemporary it sounds. As the preacher says, "There's nothing new under the sun," I suppose. I highly recommend tracking the rest of the album down if you can.

As for now, here's my current favorite track:

The Raincoats-Only Loved at Night

PS: thanks to John O. for telling me about this thing.

Use What You Got To Get What You Want

2006-02-12T23:14:00.000-08:00

Since I mentioned this lady in the previous post, I figured I'd link to the track here:

Marva Whitney- Unwind Yourself

Marva, along with Lyn Collins and Vicki Anderson and a coupla others, were singers with James Brown's band/revue in the 1960s and 1970s. The track's pretty good, as far as J.B.'s (the Godfather's backing band) songs go...but of course the most attractive part of this track to us kids is that horn bit in the beginning...I really hope those guys got some sample credit/cash somewhere along the line.

some ideas for future postings a/o projects

2006-02-12T22:03:00.000-08:00

1. An essay about the high school band in For Worth, TX in 1947-8 or so that spawned King Curtis, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, Charlie Moffett, Prince Lasha, and John Carter. Also seeing this in the larger context of the Southwest with Don Cherry in Oklahoma et al. Session musicians in Los Angeles. The distinction between free jazz and r & b at root (or whether there is one)

2. Post-Billie H. and Ella F. female jazz singers: Abbey Lincoln (Max Roach), Linda Sharrock, Fontella Bass (Lester Bowie, AEOC), June Tyson (Sun Ra), Nina Simone...their relationship to popular r & b, their relationship to their husbands (often avant-jazz performers), why they don't get recognition, Betty Mabry and Miles Davis, the resurgence of interest in lesser-known female r & b singers of the 1960s: Candi Staton, Bettye Swann, Marva Whitney-Lyn Collins-Vicki Anderson et al (James Brown). Need to find out who is singing on Archie Shepp's "Attica Blues" and "Cry of My People" albums. Nina Simone and Betty Mabry/Davis make interesting case-in-points.

"Whose '60's Anyway?" I

2005-08-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

"I think that music is an instrument. It can create the initial thought patterns that can change the thinking of the people"
--John Coltrane

Many people (and I'd guess I'm one of 'em) like to divide the world up into two camps based upon a preference for one thing or another. Tarantino does this in Pulp Fiction exquisitely when he has Uma Thurman barrage John Travolta with a lot of "Beatles or Elvis" rigmarole. You could just as easily ask, "Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra," or any other type of question to suit your taste and needs. I for one, in the oh-so-important debate, would inevitably choose Coltrane in a "Miles or Trane" match. I don't think that the choice is mutually exclusive, but it is telling. Though Davis' Kind of Blue album has been sapped of much vitality by the "Starbucks/Barnes & Noble Syndrome," one has to admit that--with or without Coltrane--Davis is pretty fucking important to the history of "jazz" per se. But something important happened right after that session that set the two on pretty divergent paths through the sixties. Miles Davis went on making more or less "good" albums throughout the decade, and Coltrane...well, he went off into the lonely terrra infirma of avant-garde-land. Is it any coincidence that a fairly casual jazz listener can tell recognize right off Kind of Blue but then draw a blank until In a Silent Wayand Bitches Brew? Ten whole years?! Anyway, even without the Muzak-y appropriations of Davis' seminal album, he still never produced anything as moving as A Love Supreme to my ears, nor do his "fusion" works have the kind of spiritually and sonically terrifying and uplifting power of Coltrane's post-A Love Supreme work. Hey, you either love coked-out Miles with the crazy sunglasses or Coltrane besuited and seated Ascension look.

Coltrane is certainly not the only avant-garde "jazz" (he disliked the term, and I'm coming to agree with him) musician of the sixties, but he certainly ranks up there with Ornette Coleman (arguably the progenitor of the decade's "experimental" or "progressive" impulses, though I understand--I can't find many of his early albums--Cecil Taylor is another contender, as well as the last three sides on Lennie Tristano's Intuition album) for sheer breadth and range. It has taken me a long while to wrap my head around this kind of stuff...I remember downloading Ornette's The Shape of Jazz to Come album in the Napster-heady days of 2000, but other than "Lonely Woman" I have to say that the stuff escaped me. Plus, I mean, what was all the fuss about? It didn't seem that particularly noisy or "free," but then again I had just nibbled at the beginning. But thanks to the helpful additions of several albums onto my computer via Mr. John Olson and the invaluable (though unaware) aid of both Limewire and several university and public library systems, as well the not-infrequent purchase (but try finding Sonny Sharrock or the Art Ensemble of Chicago in Best Buy or Sam Goody's) from a record store, I feel like I've got a good journeyman's understanding of the behemoth of the '60s avant-garde.

But something else occurs to me right now, inspired strangely or appropriately enough by Fredric Jameson, that I may be missing in the Miles Davis albums leading up to and including those of of the early 1970s. With Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain and even up into (maybe this is the last one, and probably the reason that people who don't like Bitches Brew can tolerate it) In a Silent Way Davis manages to--with any of his band's incarnations--deeply emotionally resonating, even when it's obvious that his technical reach and theoretical/philosophical approach is nowhere near as "out there" as Coltrane or Coleman's. But the emotional resonancy of the work also tends to be more or less one-sided: is there really a better 3 a.m. by-yourself record than In a Silent Way? All of Davis' work seems to be infused with such incredible sadness that it is truly shameful the way that it is so often used as pleasant background noise. But that's not the whole story.

Bitches Brew, it seems from my vantage point, is divisive for several reasons. There is of course the issue of "going electric," and increasingly Afro-centric imagery that I understand upset a good number of critics at the time. (Even if they wouldn't admit to the Afro-centricism part--but, as Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones points out in his...well, contentious essay, "Jazz and the White Critic," most critics have been white (me included, I suppose) while most "important" jazz musicians have not...which leads me to something else: if the word "jazz" is not particularly liked by Coltrane et al, is it perhaps because the word itself (like "rock and roll") was simply a slang term connotating something else, and say, the "Original Dixieland Jazz Band" and their ilk simply cemented its usage by white patrons/disparagers? Something to think about...) Another point of divergence that I can see is that whereas earlier Davis records are infused with somber melancholy, post-1969 albums are becoming darker and darker, to the point where bitterness and anger are really dominant by the point of On the Corner. That album for me is particulary confusing, at least in part because its seeming atonality and randomness (as opposed to the r &b grooves of the 3-4 years preceding) on the surface it would appear to be similar to Coltrane and Coleman's "free jazz" avant-garde styling of the previous decade. But it isn't. In some ways, it seems like a good idea to chalking up at least part of this to the increasingly heavy intake of cocaine that Davis is reported to have indulge in in the '70s...and although I find ascribing any artist's output primarily to particular drugs, I can see some validity to this. Angry, bitter, metallic...the question I suppose would be, "Do the drugs fuel the music or do the choices in drugs reflect the personal, artistic, and social direction already inherent?" I would tend to follow the latter dictum, though a synthetic conclusion might not be out of the realm of possibility.

John Coltrane, unlike Miles Davis, died before the end of the 1960s. Due to complications from liver disease, he expired in 1967...just months away from the climactic year of the decade. What Jameson suggests in his section on "Space" in Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, written nearly twenty five years after that worldwide focal point year, is that it is imperative that we (I assume he means at least left-leaning people, or maybe specifically Marxists...whatever that now entails) not abandon the "utopian" project of the 1960s. And in the end, I suppose that is what separates Coltrane from Davis: despite or because of the cacauphonous "sheets of sound" that dominate everything after My Favorite Things, all of Coltrane's music is essentially a positive statement. This is not to say that I think that Coltrane is the ONLY musician to make positive statements through his work; the best "jazz," "free" or not, often does so...from Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker to more obscure musicians like Rahsaan Roland Kirk. But there is a definite lack of this quality in Davis' music, and I don't just think that it's me conjuring up that interpretation.

Since I've moved into my new apartment and because I haven't started school yet and am without employment, I have a lot of free time to peruse my books as I put them on their new shelves. Occasionally I sit down and read some of one that I just never quite finished, or one that I hadn't thought of in a while. I vaguely remembered reading a few Lester Bangs' pieces on "jazz" a while back, and being as both that's not Bangs' usual forte and the fact that I have gone through at least three or four different relationships with his work, I went back through them and found two really interesting pieces on 1970s era Miles Davis penned by one of the greatest lovers of "noise" ever. And strangely, Lester Bangs hated On the Corner. He even continued to hate it ten years later, when he decided (in one of those passages that manages to keep him interesting) that On the Corner was in fact the first "jazz" album of the '80s. He even makes explicit reference to James Chance/White...the man behind the Contortions and the Blacks, and who as much as anybody at the time attempted to meld "free jazz's" skronk and noise onto punk. I don't really have much more to go on at this point, but this brings me around to the impetus for this, my first new, long blog entry: All of my ideas seem to eventually converge from different directions, and this is one of those points. In my daunting amount of free time lately, I've been working on two projects. The first is an attempt to reconfigure the Sex Pistols against the interpretations offered by Jon Savage in England's Dreaming and, perhaps more specifically, against Greil Marcus' take on the band and the larger social milieu in Lipstick Traces. I guess the primary point in this is that I don't really buy Marcus' use of Nietzschean "affirmation through negation" anymore as an adequate interpretation of either the Sex Pistols or punk generally. I think it both de-emphasizes the very real economic issues at stake and affords a high-theoretical get-out-of-jail-free card for a movement that, though at times liberating, also was brutal, misogynistic and wilfully ignorant. I think this also applies to James Chance's work, and even more explicitly to the reigning "king" of 80s-90s punk/jazz fusion, John Zorn. It just seems pointlessly nihilistic (which doesn't mean "the courage to live without principle or order," no matter how much Jon Savage might want it to) and manipulatively slick in its cultural appropriations, whether from Weegee's 1940s crime scene photos or its knowing (and painfully soul-less) nods to Ornette Coleman. From the other end of the spectrum, I've been trying to figure out what happened to the "avant-garde" impulse that seem(ed) so important to African-American music after the mid-1970s...I have some ideas about micro- and macro- deconstructions that seem relevant to both the music and the 1960s, but I'm really searching for the bridge (or why there isn't one) between the music of that heralded decade and hip-hop. HIp-hop would on the surface seem to be an extension of the cut-up and collaging principles carried out by "jazz" musicians in the aforementioned era, but it seems to me that the choices in source material are so limited (James Brown and Parlaiment/Funkadelic et al) that it falls short of its (musical) possibilities...and of course there are all sorts of socio-economic history to parse out. But then again, maybe I'm just missing something. Anyway, I congratulate you on slogging through this preliminary stab at organizing some ideas, and as usual would greatly appreciate any feedback you might be able to give.

a link for you...

2005-08-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick link to my MA thesis:

American Myth Today

let me know if this doesn't work. I promise many more posts after wednesday, when the fine people at Time-Warner Cable give me the sweet digital satisfaction that I have been craving.

Later.

Uh huh....

2005-07-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

Cat and Girl: Feeling Hard or Hardly Feeling

obrother1

2005-07-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

The southern portion of the United States has long existed as a set of parallel, though not necessarily congruent, planes. On one level, the South possesses a concrete, distinctive contingent of historical fact. On the other level, the South exists as an entity created in large part by its own representations in mediated form. These two modes have at times meander into the other, and the (perhaps arbitrarily) separate planes have a tendency to contradict themselves. Even what constitutes the “South” is often up for argument, and a casual perusal of the ongoing historiographical debates regarding the region—during any era—reveal an ever-increasing complex of evidence that threatens to break down any stable idea of the South completely. Perhaps thankfully then this project is not concerned with the “real” South. Instead, filtering discussion through the 2000 film O Brother Where Art Thou?, I hope to explicate the role of the South as an imaginary plane in American culture. This plane, though it owes its raw source material to physical and historical reality, operates as a space of representation. In other words, this project begins with the concept of the “South,” which plays itself out on a plane of representation. This is not altogether a different idea than the one that has been commonly applied to the American West. From dime novels to films, the West has also occupied the dual role of a real place and an imaginary one. Monument Valley may have a minimal role in the history of American westward expansion, but it has left its indelible mark on the idea of the West through John Ford’s films. So too the South in films, books, and songs that were created by this imagined space, and created it in turn.
What distinguishes this project from a properly historical one is that fact is not the driving principle. Historians are obligated work with evidence as part of direct causal connection. A “history” of representation is far too ethereal for that approach. Substituting an historical approach for a “genealogical” one—i.e. one that allows for examples picked to show continuous development over a long period—affords the opportunity to deal with the South as a conceptual (rather than factual) entity. O Brother Where Art Thou? is a film set in the 1930s in the American South. Its existence is contingent on the popular ideas about that period, but it is also contingent about the revision of those ideas in the 1960s—marking it as inevitably part of its own time (2000).
The peculiar logic of time and space in O Brother Where Art Thou? that I will be discussing in the first section of this project is framed by a theoretical concept first proposed by the Russian thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, the “chronotope” was an analysis of the interdependent categories of temporal and spatial in a given text. In the case of this project, the primary “text” happens to be a film. The chronotope also suggests that the space-time logic of a text is culturally determined; in O Brother Where Art Thou? a number of tactics are used to construct a plane of representation that is possesses recognizable characteristics for the “viewer” familiar with American cultural archetypes, narrative structures, and value-systems. I will be analasing the techniques that establish the particular chronotope of the film in (another section). However, in keeping with the norms of theoretical discourse, “reader” would be more accurate for an encounter with any given “text.” Throughout the body of this project, “reader” will be used to denote active viewing, since it suggests a process of deciphering the film text that the more passive form lacks. There is some difficulty in arguing this point, however. While I believe that cultural knowledge plays a significant role in O Brother Where Art Thou?, conscientious acknowledgement is not absolutely contingent upon understanding. Nor is there any Freudian “unconscious” or post-Jungian “social unconscious” necessary for this argument. Rather, I would state outright that those provisions of knowledge (cultural archetypes, narratives structures, and value-systems) are understood at least at a base level because of that same cultural determinacy in the chronotope; they are familiar simply because they are an embedded presence. Supplementing that point, however, I hope to add a very rough list of annotations to the specific allusions that form such an important part of the film insofar as they enrich the discussion.
When I began, I noted that this project concerns itself with the South as it is represented in popular culture. That remains true, but in a larger sense this project is how concerned with how the South as a plane of representation operates as a site where and which (given the conditions of particular types of chronotopes) representation gives way to what Roland Barthes calls “mythic language.” For Barthes, “mythic language” is a meta-linguistic category. Following the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure on “structural linguistics”, “language” in Barthes’ work is fundamentally constituted by the relationship between three categories: signified, signifier, and sign. The signified is the as yet unnamed object; for instance the physical “tree.” The signifier, then, could be the word “tree” itself. Two important points here are made by Barthes. The first is that the signifier “tree” does not simply express the physical entity “tree.” The second is that, in an extension of Saussure’s work, language is not simply the verbal or printed word. In this, Barthes argues that language can be composed of images (like photographs or film), non-verbal sounds (like music), verbal or printed words, or any combination thereof. This is of the utmost importance to what Barthes calls “semiology” or the study of “signs,” the third term in this equation. The sign then is the relationship between the signifier and the signified, which can manifest itself in a myriad of ways. Barthes extends this triangulation to the study of “mythic language,” but the crucial difference is that “mythic language” is established after everyday language. This is why it falls under a “meta” category. Under particular circumstances that are culturally determinate and not (as some mythologist insist) eternal, the “sign” or relationship between signifier and signified in the first part becomes the signifier in a whole new linguistic equation. In his essay, “Myth Today,” Barthes uses examples drawn from Aesop’s Fables. In Aesop’s work, the “fox” bears little direct relationship to the physical “fox.” Instead, the concept of “fox” that constitutes the sign in the lower level equation becomes the basis for a meta-language concept that uses the signifier “fox” and the signified “cunning” or “sly” in order to establish a whole new concept of “fox.” This new concept, though contingent up the first, operates separately from idea of the physical “fox.”
This theoretical approach to mythology is very important to my understanding of O Brother Where Art Thou?. Aside from the film’s setting being an idealized representation of the “South,” those same cultural archetypes, narrative structures, and value-systems in the film noted above are, I would argue, operating within the same meta-language of myth that Barthes establishes in his essay. Some of the specific cultural allusions that fall under this rubric are analyzed in detail in (another section). In this introductory section, however, I would like to posit why I believe a synthesis of the two dominant theories in this project are useful to my discussion of O Brother Where Art Thou?. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s work (which honestly defies quotation) he was primarily concerned with literary form of the novel. For Bakhtin, the novel was not limited to book length prose a la Don Quixote. A novel, in this understanding, is dependant upon the idea of the “novel” or the new. The novel is a form that can consistently regenerate itself in a variety of ways. Bakhtin contrasts this with “dead” forms like the lyric poem or, more importantly, the “epic.” The epic in Bakhtin’s work is a form that is limited because it already has a preexisting basic structure that cannot be altered. Significantly, Bakhtin also posits that the “epic” possesses a particular chronotope—a space-time logic—that establishes it as both existing in the past, but also at a disjunctive rupture from any linear history. The prime example of this would be Homer’s Odyssey, which can be perceived as both “ancient Greece” and at the same time have no historical bearing on the events of that era. It is interesting, then, that the most lauded example of the novel in the twentieth-century, James Joyce’s Ulysses, uses the Odyssey as its structural model. Just as interesting though is the chronotope peculiar to Joyce’s Ulysses that creates an “epic” within the course of a single day in mundane, turn of the century Dublin. O Brother Where Art Thou?, though arguably not as significant an artistic achievement as Joyce’s novel, does something similar as it draws both on the narrative structure of the Odyssey and very pointedly alerts the reader of the film to its epic allusions at the beginning of the film with the words, “Based Upon the Homer’s Odyssey” and its use of a quotation from the first line of the poem. While the film does roughly follow the narrative pattern established in Homer’s epic poem, I think that it is less useful to annotate (as others have done with Joyce’s book) the adherence or deviation from its “source” than an alert to readers of the film that this film is speaking, according to Barthes, a “mythic language.” By establishing this mode of discourse immediately as the dominant one (and there are other, more subtle ways that I analyze HERE), the film is immediately relieved of any dutiful regard for fact. In its stead, a reading of the film yields the complex relationship between signs and signifiers of not just a Southern but a quintessentially American mythology. This project aims to analyze how those myths work today.

Folk Folk Folk Folk Folk...

2005-07-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

I'm having some trouble right now with a serious issue in my master's thesis at UVA. Sorry about the no updates for a while, but I've been travelling, dealing with university bureaucracy, and writing and building this goddamn webpage.

The trouble begins with Greil Marcus. Doesn't it always? One of the things that I find appealing about Marcus is his unswerving optimism about American culture and his faith in a kind of democratic spirit. This optimism flies in the face of fact, but I wouldn't necessarily call it naive. What bothers me most about Greil Marcus (and this is mostly about "The Old, Weird America" but it applies generally) is that, like a lot of American Studies scholars of the "old school," emphasizes that the "truth" of America can be found in some secret, apocryphal history or document. Marcus is writing in his book specifically about Bob Dylan, the Basement Tapes, and Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. But like Perry Miller's Puritans in "Errand into the Wilderness" and the frontier in, oh say, Frederick Jackson Turner, Henry Nash Smith, and Richard Slotkin, we are supposed to find (as their readers) the real marrow of America through whatever forgotten tidbit they pick up. F.O. Matthiessen, who coined the phrase "American Studies," thought it was the lives of the American Renaissance school of writers in 1850. Marcus happens to think it's folk music.

Right after I read his book, I tend to believe him. And then I think about it and I see some serious holes. For one thing, a "democratic spirit" whose nature is to be found in apocryphal texts seems a little suspect. Then there's the problem of the "folk" and their music itself.

A lot of people I've talked to assume that I like this "free folk" or "freak folk" stuff that's been coming out lately. And while I admittedly liked the last Animal Collective record quite a bit, I have to say that Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom just don't do it for me. For one thing, whatever their own influences are, I am now in a position (thank you MA thesis!) to say, well, any audience that they have was primarily created through the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Plus, even performers of that ilk that I sorta like (Will Oldham is the primary example)seem to be intent on ponderous, lethargic playing...Sam Beam of Iron and Wine, you are suspect #2. Their voices, cause of Bob Dylan or Joanna Newsom's having heard Hattie Stoneman or Sarah Carter once or twice, are idiosyncratic (in this case a generous word for "bad") without being stubbornly so. Dylan's voice was never good, but once he got to records like Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, it was so full of inflection and nuance and hate and irony and sad love that it implied a lot, no matter what it meant. These neo-neo-folkies are by and large the equivalent of what I think of when I think of contemporary fiction: trying to be profound in the banal and pretending to find insight in the callous and shallow. Goddamnit and fuck No Depression magazine as well.

But then again, I think that there are some musicians that qualify as a kind of "folk" by simple virtue of their being unable to fall into anything else, really. John Fahey, whom I've started to listen to in earnest (thank you, Mr. Olson)has an interesting argument on his hands when he says that Dock Boggs, Ornette Coleman, and Captain Beefheart are (and I'd include Fahey himself here, as well as 60s Dylan and maybe some others...) what really constitutes the heart of American "folk" music. They're all so resistantly odd, so completely in and of themselves and at the same time everything else around them that to listen to Fahey's guitar playing you have to laugh at the idea that an British guy named Clapton, Page, Beck, or Richards could ever have considered themselves a "blues guitarist" at all. The current crop of folkies and alt.country-ers are similar to this problem in a simple way: though in and of themselves they can produce quality, interesting music (sometimes), in the end Devendra Banhart is a collection of records that most other people didn't happen to remember at the time. This is one of the reasons why I will always love the Yardbirds more than just about anything that their three above guitarists ever did afterward--they were too young and stupid to even manage a pseudo-authentic performance (a la Clapton) or too incompetent to complete the cycle of bastardization that is Led Zeppelin III, IV, and so on. These people are always more or less mimetic, and if I can't tell you just why Fahey and Beefheart manage to escape this trap it's because I think its ineffable and I'm just as guilty as Greil Marcus.

This is exactly what I'm talking about

2005-06-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Over Ian McKaye's Dead Body

Complaints About a Movie That I Will Never Actually See

2005-06-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

After a lengthy hiatus from writing anything, I come back to you with this, the two above movie posters. The first image is obviously from the current Lindsay Lohan Disney remake. I will admit that I don't have any love for Lindsay Lohan. It's not even that I think her movies are bad. I heard good things about "Mean Girls," though most of them came from people who believe that anyone from Saturday Night Live (I dont' care if you do like Tina Fey, Shawn) can possibly write something interesting or funny. No, and I don't really begrudge her the fact that nearly all of her films have been slight updates of movies that Walt and Co. made in the 1960s. The honest to god truth is that, despite her ever-presence on television in celebrity profiles and the constant "Wow that girl grew breasts!" slightly pedophilic sex appeal, she reminds me of that girl who everybody thought was easy in junior high, whose over-developed sexuality made you think just for a second in your twelve year-old brain that maybe YOU could have sex with her, and whose wrong-side-of-the-tracks background ensured that she would get pregnant before either of your eighteenth birthdays, but never mind that since you'd have taken to thinking she was a "skank" a two or three years earlier anyway...in other words, she just seems sad and vulgar.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the similarities between the posters for "Herbie Fully Loaded" and the 1970s B-flick, "Grand Theft Auto." The latter film was produced by Roger Corman, B-movie mogul, and it has the distinction of both starring Ron Howard and being his directorial debut. Yes, Opie and Richie was making films as far back as 1974. Aside from some gratuitous (but glorious) car chase/wreck sequences, it's a cheapo drive-in movie that plays for laughs and gets them cause it's too cheap and silly and fantastically entertaining, on its own terms anyway, not to. Watching a Rolls Royce in a demolition derby will always make me smile. The poster for the film is pretty typical stuff for a movie of this type. The comparison between it and "Herbie: Another Fucking Disney Remake" should be obvious, but there's something deeper that bothers me about this.

When Quentin Tarantino cops stuff from from the junk pile of pop culture past, he gets applauded for it. If you're of a particular mindset, you may even appreciate it as "postmodern pastiche." But look at those two posters. I'm willing to bet that some Disney employee decided, "Hey, I may work for Disney but that doesn't mean I can't put my art school hipster education to work for me, I'll rip off some Roger Corman poster designs." This stuff happens all the time, particularly with television ad campaigns. Ad designers, since the success of the use of Nick Drake and the Buzzcocks in Volkswagen commercials, have taken to using hipness-certified songs in their ads. Witness the Sonics' "Have Love Will Travel" in that one SUV commercial. Or the "Lust For Life" drum bit (of course they cut the lyrics) in the ad for a cruise line. Now I don't hold it against the guys from the Sonics', who are probably dads with mortgages, or Iggy Pop, who deserves to be finally financially rewarding if just for still being alive, the money that they garnered from licensing their stuff. What I can't figure out is who the hell this is supposed to be appealing to.

Equation:

Recognize Song with Hip Cachet+Car Commercial+Disdain for "Selling Out"+Twenty-Something Record Collectors Limited Income (original Sun Ra lp's take up a lot of disposable $)=What The Fuck Are These People Thinking?

I mean, unless I'm totally wrong and a lot more people pick up on the cool quotient of the Sonics than I can fathom, and these people have money to buy SUVs, it seems like ad designers are just wasting these non-renewable pop culture resources for their own nationally televised "My Record Collection Can Beat Up Your Record Collection" sunken-chest beating. On the other hand, that this bothers me speaks ill of my concerns...THERE ARE STARVING CHILDREN IN INDIA, YOU KNOW! ?!?!

Small Note

2005-06-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Shawn, I realized that this particular blog doesn't have any access for comments by anyone who doesn't already have a blogspot account. That has since been remedied. Thank you, Shawn. I look forward to you being back in the States in a week or so. Sorry I haven't talked to you in a while...but we'll be kicking it Flashes style on the Fourth of July, won't we?

At Last...

2005-06-16T16:32:00.000-07:00

Here is my mostly done project on Dick Tracy for American Studies. There are still a few bugs that I'm trying to work out, but on the whole I think everyone should be able to view it. Anybody who reads this blog is (again) strongly encouraged to comment up this project, under any topic you may think is worth bringing to my attention, from layout to argument to...well, whatever. I'd really appreciate it.

Dick Tracy: The Ethics of Violence and the Legacy of an American Comic Strip

If for some reason the link doesn't work, let me know about that as well. In fact, call me on the damn phone if the link doesn't work. Later.

Man-Child in the Promised Land

2005-06-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

In honor of a phone call from Mr. Andrew Lytle in which he recorded this gem of a song onto my voicemail--which I hadn't heard in at least four years--and in deference to my brother Nick (sorry buddy) here is Jonathan Richman's incomparable song from the "I, Jonathan" album..."I Was Dancing in a Lesbian Bar."

Jonathan Richman-I Was Dancing in a Lesbian Bar

Luther: If you bitch about the quality of the recording, I refuse to speak to you again.

Nihilism is Fun!

2005-06-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

Puppy love this ain't. Some guy posted like thirty different versions of the Stooges' classic song at, I Wanna Be Your Dog.

Good stuff.

sugar free jazz

2005-06-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

I don't like haveing conversations about music all that often. There are particular people with whom I will go all out in a finish-each-other's-sentences kind of way, but especially here in Charlottesville, my record-talk people are few. So it was odd that I ran into some guy (who, it turns out, was my friend Andrew's friend...Andrew who has a poster of Donald Byrd in his living room and throw parties with a "Shag" theme) who mentioned a couple of albums that I had never even heard of. And, I met this guy on the same night that I got Jerry Harrison's autograph.

But I can't remember his name.

In fact the only thing that I can remember specifically from the conversation is the title from the album above, "Money Jungle." Granted, I was in a bar the whole evening. But I don't usually forget so much stuff...I guess you just go on information overload and start filtering quicker and quicker. But I remembered this album's title, and thanks to Amazon.com's useful track listing and other helpful services, I managed to download the whole album and piece it back together pretty easily.

First off, a complaint. I don't care whether or not an album has some sort of conceptual or logical sequence, I fucking hate it when they reissue something (this is particularly relevant to jazz records) and put the bonus tracks IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMN CD. Whatever it was, it was released with a particular order to the songs, which never included alternate versions of the same song right after each other.

"Money Jungle" is guilty of this...but other than that it's a fantastic album. A weird album too. I don't know much about the circumstances that could have brought Duke Ellington together with Max Roach and Charles Mingus. But the album is from 1962 or '63, which puts it in a weird place in the history of jazz.

I'm going to admit something that I'm not totally proud of. I don't really care for Duke Ellington. I don't actively dislike him, but he's someone whose influence is so wide, and whose own work seems confined to big band era swing (an era that I am highly ambivalent about) and the fact that he worked so much with Billy Strayhorn and others, it just seems like Ellington as a figure doesn't hold the same kind of appeal that smaller-scale (but idiosyncratic) personalities in jazz do...like Charlie Mingus and Max Roach, for instance.

But even they are odd figures in this trio. Roach had made a name for himself during the 1940's as the preeminent bop drummer. Charles Mingus, though also associated with the bop era, certainly stands out from his contemporaries in the fact that he made music for big bands too, and not just small combos.

So what are the three of them doing together on an album in early 1960s? That I cannot answer...I don't have the liner notes. But Roach's drumming is nearly as good as the stuff on (in my opinion) his best solo album, the contemporaneous "Percussion Bitter Sweet." Mingus and Ellington seem to combat each other, with heavy bass lines pulling in contrast to the often sunnier piano parts. Like many albums from this period (particularly the stuff released on Blue Note) there is something--sometimes ineffable--that marks this music as being distinctively a part of (though not necessarily dated by) the time and place from which it came. It seems like an album that could have only come from the Civil Rights period...with the burgeoning black nationalism of Mingus and the acquired respectability of Ellington opening up into new territory and mixing together in a way that was unthinkable only a few years before. Ellington's piano is both easy, familiar blues (without a lot of the polish of the big band work) that avoids becoming a kind of adult-contemporary pop by adopting some of the technique of younger musicians--at times his playing wavers between hard bop and free jazz--and by simply being earthier in tone, no doubt aided by the addition of a rhythm section like Roach and Mingus. Highly recommended.

This is the second track from the albums, and shows off Mr. Roach's drumming abilities. But get the whole thing, if you can.

Duke Ellington-A Little Max

Groundnut Stew

2005-06-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I turn a little bit objective, and I realize how absurd the things that I do and think and say are. And sometimes, I definitely get the feeling that if my former self could see the current incarnation, the younger John would kick my ass.

As anyone who reads this blog a/o has eaten food prepared by me knows, I tend to favor extremely heavy and unhealthy middle American cuisine...baked ham, homemade macaroni and cheese, chicken casserole, lasagnas that weigh upwards of ten pounds, etc etc etc. Well, after travelling back to Illinois last week and frying up a whole bunch of chicken and homemade potato chips (among other things not fried...but I'll spare you the whole menu rundown) and eating way way too much, I decided two things: One, I don't want to eat a fast-food hamburger for a long time. I'm not against hamburgers generally (I'll post something about Five Guys later maybe) I just realized that I have eaten very poorly all semester. So, decision number two: I must eat somewhat healthier than I am now. I have never been a small person, and this does not bother me particularly, but alcohol and Burger King are a shitty way to live. And because I am ridiculous, I decided that the centerpiece of this food transition would be a diet based off of what I have taken to referring to as "diasporic food."

The "diaspora" is a word-concept that in recent times has been co-opted by African American scholars (Paul Gilroy and his book "The Black Atlantic" being the prime example) from its original incarnation as a way of describing the dispersion of the Jews after their exile from Israel. Except of course, this refers to Africans and African-Americans and Afro-Carribean...well, you get the picture. Now, I've already had a strong interest in the music of this trans-Atlantic area, particularly this past semester.* But as always I have some apprehensions about the attendant ideologies that are part and parcel of enjoying another culture and its material products. In other words, I feel guilty and hopelessly fucking bourgeois. But at least with the Caribbean and the African, I can sorta maybe avoid being one of those people that's into Indian or Asian food and culture...you know who I'm talking about, you tai chi practicing douchebags.

But like the music, the food seems like it would be really good. I mean, I've only ever eaten stuff like jerk chicken and whatnot...but it seems very simple (beans, rice, tubers) but with interesting spices and an abundance of vegetables and other items that my fast-food diet has caused me to avoid.

So, with a recently aquired Barnes and Noble gift card, and unlimited access to the internet, I went off in search of something different to eat. At the book store, I managed to pick up two books, one on Cuban cooking, they other on Jamaican barbecue (or Jerk). The first thing that I managed to make, however, is from a recipe that I found off the internet. It's a recipe for Groundnut Stew, a West African dish.

Groundnut stew intrigued me for several reasons, as I was perusing the various data bases of recipes available on the internet. For one thing, it contained okra as a primary ingredient...which, after Siddhartha Mitter's piece in the Oxford American (see earlier post) I was eager to try in its non-fried forms. The stew is also made with chicken and peanut butter and tomotoes, which, as you can see from the picture at top, makes a nice color combination that may be appetizing to me only because it resembles a good red curry. In fact, though the name of the dish is a "stew" after making the it, I would have to say that it does resemble a curry more than anything else...especially since I served it over rice and its thin gravy/sauce seeped through the rice rather like its more prominent Asian cousin. Of course, the spices for curry are quite different...just consistency and form tie them together. The recipe for this dish can be found at Cooking.com. I served the stew with pan-fried sweet potatoes that were cooked in butter and a little salt. I would have preferred actual yams (there is a difference, and sometimes the produce buyers in the marker will argue with you about this) but the sweet potatoes carmelized nicely in the butter, which added a nice touch of sugar to the otherwise earthy stew.

Anyway, I need to go to Food of All Nations today to pick up a few things for another one of my pre-planned dishes. I need roasted pumkin seeds, currants, crushed coriander, cardomon, and turmeric...all items which were suprisingly absent from the regular grocery store. Last night I made a bowl of tuna salad, which was especially good since I added fresh lemon juice and chopped parsley to the mix. I also put in sweet pickle relish. This mixture eventually became the basis for tuna melts on rye with deli sharp cheddar. They were quite good. If any of this sounds mundane (you know, tunafish and pickle relish) realize this: I have not eaten tunafish from a can in 10-15 years. Tuna steaks, a couple of times. But they were cooked by a a guy in front of me where I worked on and off. And pickle relish? Are you kidding? I don't like anything that is remotely associated with the pickling process. But I'm trying. I decided to like these things, and it's not as hard as I thought. If I get my ass in gear, tonight it's going to be North African beef kebabs with a a cous cous salad. Seriously, I am a bourgeois pig.

*Aside from the obvious soul-jazz-blues of the American South, this also includes any number of interesting genres and styles from the Caribbean (Jamaica and its multitude of forms is easily the most prominent) as well as the traditional and popular music of West Africa. In particular, I am a huge fan of Fela Kuti. Although I have been trying to listen to other African pop musics, Fela is easily the most available and famous...aside from stuff like South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo, I guess. But I did manage to dig up this track from Tony Allen...who was, in fact, Fela's drummer. Fela is, to my knowledge, actually playing saxophone on this track as well. Although the aura of stardom only descends on Fela, Tony Allen was the de facto leader of the incarnations of Fela's group, the Africa 70 and the Egypt 80. This is sort of similar to the role that Fred Wesley played in the JB's. Although clearly they were James Brown's group, Wesley was the band leader in essence. Tony Allen's song below is very similar to a lot of Fela tracks, though I think it does tend accentuate the drumming...of which Allen was a supple, polyrhythmic expert. Good stuff.

Tony AllenAfro Disco Beat

The Chicken Man

2005-06-02T21:20:00.000-07:00

Since I posted one rockabilly mp3 yesterday, I figured that I'd follow it up with something along similar lines. The guy in the picture above is named Hasil Adkins, and he started playing rock & roll just about the time that the ubiquitous Mr. Presley arrived on the scene. Hasil (who is from West Virginia) apparently didn't realize that it wasn't just one person playing all those instruments on the records he was buying as a kid, and therefore--even though the picture is misleading--endeavored to become a one-man band. I can't decide of Adkins was actually mentally unstable (his lyrics sometimes wander into Glenn Danzig territory, but more convincing cause they're not copped from an old horror movie) or not, but I do think that the more interesting question is whether or not to consider this "outsider art." Granted, the guy wrote enough songs about chicken and chickens to collect into an album called "Poultry in Motion," but aside from the seeming novelty of his one-man band schtick and somewhat odd lyrics, Hasil basically sounds like something that could have been recorded by Sun Records...at least in the days before Sam Philips single-mindedly pursued the "next Elvis." The "seeming" novelty of the fact that Hasil plays all the instruments on his songs can (as with many things) be blamed on the Beatles. More than anyone else, the Beatles defined what a band should LOOK like on stage...one or two guitars, bass (electric), and drums. Even a cursory look at the people who were traipsing around the South in the 1950s in "medicine shows," at county fairs, and anywhere else they might pick up some coin provides a better context for understanding that a one-man band just wasn't that weird.

But back to the question about "outsider art." Nobody thinks of Screamin' Jay Hawkins as an "outsider" in the music-making world. Nor are the Cramps or the Gun Club or Jon Spencer Blues Explosion deemed worthy of inclusion in any of the guides to "Incredibly Strange Music." But the Shaggs and Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnston are inevitably included. They all sort of make sense as "outsider art," at least in some ways. All of them produced songs according to peculiarly individual ideas of how pop structures work...the result of self-instruction, partially, but also due to an inability to actually recreate the structures produced by more "competent" (I'm wary of making value judgments here) musicians and songwriters. Adkins clearly follows the conventions of the rockabilly genre, and yet is often considered an "outsider" nonetheless. Of course, Hasil was doing this stuff continuously, and was never a part of any "revival" which I suppose in some ways makes him anomalous, and he is certainly an idiosyncratic performer. But "outsider"? I don't know...judge for yourself:

Hasil Adkins-Chicken Walk

Rockabilly Chanteuse

2005-06-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a little book called "Unsung Heroes of Rock & Roll" by a Mr. Nick Tosches, the lady to the left in the picture (I assume you recognize the man on the right) is not nearly as obscure as she once was. Though her fellow rockabilly Janis Martin was actually deemed the "female Elvis" by her record company (in addition to singing a song entitled "My Boy Elvis") Miss Wanda Jackson is doubtlessly the real equivalent of the boy from Tupelo. Born in Oklahoma City, she got her first real professional boost from Hank Thompson, whose Brazos Valley Boys she occasionally sang with. It was on a tour with Hank--masterminded by his then-manager, Col. Tom Parker--that Miss Jackson met Elvis Presley. This was the months before Elvis became well-known, nationally or regionally. Elvis encouraged her to switch from country to rock & roll...a move that she tentatively made for the next six or seven years...much in the same way that Elvis Presley's first releases had one country song and one blues or r & b number on them. Though not as famous as her song, "Let's Have a Party," or even the Japanese favorite (ever seen "Mystery Train"?) "Fujiyama Mama," the song below is my personal favorite of what I know of her recorded output during that period. Enjoy...

Wanda Jackson-Funnel of Love

Also, I still think Elvis stopped making good records in 1956.

Yeah, That Guy

2005-05-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

So by some odd coincidence, I met Jerry Harrison this weekend in a bar in Charlottesville. I also managed to get his autograph, which was really exciting for me.

To let you in on how much of a dork I am, Jerry Harrison is former keyboard player from both the Modern Lovers and the Talking Heads. He's also done a pretty significant amount of production work in the last twenty years since the Talking Heads broke up...some of which is for bands that I don't have much of anything good to say about (Crash Test Dummies, Kenny Wayne Sheperd). Nonetheless, the keyboard line from "Roadrunner" alone would endear me to Mr. Harrison forever, even if it was lifted directly from the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray." Anyway, he walked into the bar, and I recognized him immediately, though I waited and tried to get confirmation from the people around me...people who I had to explain who I thought it was to begin with. But I finally went over and talked to him for a bit, and he seemed like a pretty nice guy. Since I expect that most people who would be reading this blog are familiar with the Talking Heads and (probably) the Modern Lovers, I thought I would post something a little different.

This mp3 (that's right, I can post whatever I want now!) is taken from Harrison's second solo lp, 1987's Casual Gods. Although he released a solo project (The Red and the Black) in 1981, Harrison's solo work has never gotten the interest that the other Talking Heads' projects did...i.e. David Byrne and Brian Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and Byrne's "The Catherine Wheel" amongst a whole bunch of "world music" releases and solo records, and Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz's Tom Tom Club. So, here's the track:

Jerry Harrison-Rev It Up

Enjoy.

A Song of One's Own

2005-05-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

This is my first actually-actually-hosted-by-me mp3...that's opposed to the other ones I've just scrounged up from other places. Anyway, this track is from the album "Heart of the Congos" by the Congos, and it was produced by Lee Perry in 1977. It follows some parts of Jamaican popular music (i.e. male vocal trio singing, as opposed to American r & b's more prominent quartet) much in the same way everyone from the early Wailers on down had...which is usually attributed to the influence of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, by the way. But, with the music that Perry is constructing behind them, this record moves into a far more "African" vibe in that it doesn't maintain simple r & b or pop structure like so much Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff. An excellent track from an excellent album.

Congos-Fisherman

Another Installment of the Ghosts of John Past

2005-05-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

I wanna be a cult-figure when I grow up. Or, I should say, when I die. Cause you gotta be dead to have a cult following. Dead, or at least crazy. Dead or crazy, Die young or get sent to an insane asylum, get name checked in an R.E.M. song. But I guess there’s a couple of other criteria that you need to meet before you can assume the hipster halo:
You can’t be enormously popular when you’re alive. Not irredeemably obscure, but just subterranean enough to retain some of the mystery. Enough to give the reissuers and anthologists something to work with. By this rational Jim Morrison is not a cult figure. An icon maybe, like in one of them Byzantine churches. Poster art . The same thing with Jimi and Janis. But Syd Barret, Roky Erikson, Arthur Lee and Skip Spence are.

Have friends that are more than willing to divulge the “other” side of you. Set up a dichotomy. Sure you may know the legendary anecdotes, but do you know about the sensitive/tortured/generous/kind soul lurking in the background. Biographers love to dig this stuff up. They’ll talk to your 7th grade teacher if they think they can get away with it.

Do not, under any circumstances, risk your chances at posthumous cult stardom by being too artsy, intellectual or M.O.R. (middle of the road, in an outdated parlance). In the case of the latter, you will go on to a long lasting (at lest semi long lasting) successful career. In the former two you will at best be regulated to sub-cult status. For our purposes, let’s just say that this is why neither of the rock critics Dave Marsh and Richard Meltzer are really cult figures. Meltzer’s too damn smart. He reads Heidegger. And he wants you to know it, too. And Marsh, well, Dave Marsh has written at least two ENTIRE BOOKS about Bruce Springsteen—and not just Nebraska either.

Maybe I’m giving myself away. REM songs, rock critics, obscure Sixties music…Whatsoever could this be leading up to? Lester Bangs, of course. Cult figure par excellence. Why Lester Bangs? Because after months of waiting, I finally have my copy of the new Lester Bangs anthology, Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste. And it’s about fucking time. I’ve been retrieving my copy of Psychotic Reactions from people for the last year and a half. . . people to whom I have been preaching the gospel according to Lester. No, not the Lester so cuddly portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, but the real Lester. And you know what? I’m disappointed.

Not, of course, because it’s bad. It’s great. I’ve read most of the rock criticism canon and I still contend that Bangs is the best. Better’n Marcus, Meltzer, Marsh, Toshes, Landau, Guralnick, Paul Williams, and Christgrau. Others too, if you want me to name them. What, you don’t recognize any of these names? That’s too bad BECAUSE THEY WROTE RECORD REVIEWS TOO! Why why why, then, is Lester Bangs so fucking great? Literary bombasticity, acute social perception, and a highly developed personal critical aesthetic. He’s funny too. And a good enough writer to make you forget that you don’t give two shits that he’s writing a record review of the Comedian Harmonists or the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Yet it’s odd reading a book marketed as a companion piece to the Greil Marcus edited Psycotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung because it already assumes that you know a little about him. It’s a companion piece, after all. Even people who don’t read a lot of music criticism know who he is. Drank cough syrup for kicks. Wore a tee-shirt that said “Last of the White Niggers.” Cameron Crowe’s mentor. Was really a good-hearted slob, underneath it all. Blah blah blah. But about the book. I guess it’s kinda interesting because it fleshes out the parts of Lester’s oeuvre that Marcus left out: mainstream artist reviews (Lester liked the Rolling Stones? Who knew?), Lester’s personal canon (Beefheart, MC5, etc.) as well as early pieces that show Lester developing his style. Unless you’re still enamored with “spontaneous prose” a lot of this is hard to swallow. Strings of phrases dependent on a contradictory images, lines copped directly from other writers (Burroughs in particular) and a LOT of drug references. But hell, even Joyce scholars will read Stephen Hero eventually.

None of this is why I was disappointed with the book. I was disappointed with the book in much the same way as (I imagine) Lester himself was with the Lou Reed. It’s not an accident that Marcus titled the Reed section of Psychotic Reactions “Killing the Father.” As a reader, I’d changed. I couldn’t wholeheartedly tear into it the way I had the first time I’d read any of his stuff. The cloak of myth had worn through. Maybe it’s a good thing. You can judge things with a bit more clarity. The exuberance is reigned in, and all that’s left is the writing. Which is great, like I said. I guess I feel the same way about The Velvet Underground. They’re still one of my favorites, but the special status (I thought) it had afforded me as a listener is gone. Kinda like being a kid reading with a flashlight under the covers. It’s part of the cult -making process breaking down. First you wanna run out and tell everybody about this great writer that has been massively overlooked by the stodgy deans of literature. You’re in the know. He’s a genius, you’ll tell them. But I didn’t have that reaction this time. I’ll leave it to the next kid to recapture, because inevitably, they will. I’ll stick this book on my shelf, and if anybody asks, I’ll tell them that he’s the greatest rock critic who ever lived.

Non-Musical Blogging

2005-05-18T22:18:00.000-07:00

A pretty good blog that I got turned on to is Michael Berube's. Michael is (as his blog will tell you) as professor of literature and cultural studies at Penn State University. I haven't read that far back into his archive, but there's some more than decent stuff going on as far as I've managed to look. And apparently, he has a sizable following...probably among liberal arts grad students like myself.

Incidentally, I've asked this before, but I was wondering if someone (anyone?) would post a comment once and awhile on things that I have put up here on Border Radio. I know it's self-serving...I just want to know if anybody is actually reading the stuff that I post (I know you do, Shawn, but that's at least partially because you are currently without a pop culture IV). Anyway, I'd just like to get an idea of who is reading, whether they liked a link, or whatever. I've spent the night drinking the Miller High Life (the clear bottle is "truth in advertising") and I need to go to bed so I can be fresh for another day of...well, whatever it is that I do.

The Deal with Charlottesville

2005-05-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

A few posts back, I asked if anybody had any info or access to mp3s by a band called The Deal. Well, here's a link to their website. I can also say now that I have actually heard the band, thanks to the efforts of the fine staff at the local record store, Plan 9 here in Charlottesville. Well, thanks for nothing readers of Border Radio. I found out all the info that I needed on my own.

As you might know, I'm leaving Charlottesville at the end of July for the musically far more interesting pastures of Austin, TX. (a reminder to myself to compile some kind of list of Austin-centric music) Nonetheless, I have a recurrent interest in local, regional, and micro-scenes, especially if they happen to be historically distant a/o obscure. Well, I tried to give Charlottesville a fair shake when I got here. I went to a couple of shows and I found...well, I found pretty much exactly what I was expecting. Frat-boy reggae, Dylan-derivative "Americana," and sub-par (even by my skewed perspective) jam bands.

This is after all the town that spawned Dave Matthews, and whatever your affinity to him and his music circa 1998, I feel pretty comfortable at this point saying that I have nothing good to say about the legacy of DMB in Charlottesville. Limited apologies to fans of Carter Beauford. Anyway, I know that there has been (and continues to be) a pretty vibrant scene up the road in D.C. (see also: Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses...jesus, mostly a bunch of bands on Dischord) and I did manage to locate earlier in the fall a compilation cd called "Ol' Virginia Soul" which purported to be a collection of sould music performed and recored by Virginia r & b bands back in the day. And even though I'll probably pick up the second volume of that collection before I leave, it was a disappointment. One or two good tracks, and a lot of Motown and Stax knock-offs. So I was excited to hear that there had been an honest-to-goodness rock band in Charlottesville in the late seventies and early eighties that didn't essentially...suck.

So, after having talked to my fellow American Study-er Jim Baker, who happens to be a lifelong denizen of Charlottesville as well as a listener to The Clash and Devo circa 1980--he claims a strong affinity for "Freaks and Geeks"--I found out that he had in fact seen them on his very first day of college at UVA. As you can learn from the link to the website, The Deal were basically the first real rock band out of Charlottesville, and they definitely share some traits with fellow Southern East Coasters like Winston Salem's dB's (see earlier post) and the early R.E.M. I've listened to the album at least three times so far, and I can see that while there is nothing particular revolutionary about them, there's something nicely familiar in their catchy vocal melodies and jangly power-pop schtick. Some of the best stuff reminds me of a Guided By Voices song that Robert Pollard actually managed to finish. Other stuff reminds me of a song used in a John Hughes film whose performer no one actually remembers. Nonetheless, a welcome addition to an otherwise barren musical landscape.

My Alma Mater...And In Case You're Wondering, It's Shadow McNeely

2005-05-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

Oh, I definitely graduated too soon. At the University of Iowa, there will be a class taught on pornography this fall. Although, come to think of it, I'm not sure whether I would like to actually take the class so much as do the research for it. Take that, conservative critics of "liberal" academia!

Who's Your Graphic Designer?

2005-05-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

OR,

Many words have been said about the impact of the Sex Pistols' album cover for "Never Mind the Bollocks," but I want to be the first to comment upon the usage of self-adhesive lettering in Gretchen Wilson's album "Here For the Party" and its potential impact on font usage and layout in the future.

I've got something brewin' at the moment about "white trash couture" that will be forthcoming.

Somthing New, Something Old, Something Dated

2005-05-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

The three posts below are actually articles that I wrote while living in Iowa City for a zine called Sympathetic Ink. I haven't acutally re-read any of them as yet, though I seem to recall that they were published as is. The three posts comprise exactly 3/4 of my published output in Sympathetic Ink...if anybody has a copy of the "review" of Lester Bangs' second collection, please find a way to get a copy to me...that probably means you, Luther. Anyway, these were written for a particular forum, and their explicit subjects may seem a little bit dated. But, I still adhere to a good number of the judgments made herein, and in fact I've been working on some things that are revising or expanding on the themes that I lay out below.

I hope to get something new up soon, but I thought I'd post these up now since I can't seem to complete a thought or a sentence at the moment.

And yes, I clearly was reading a lot of Lester Bangs/rock criticism at the time...so it probably shows through in the writing.

Later.

The Upper Echelon of Hipsterdom, or Why I Like Captain Beefheart

2005-05-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

I was out record shopping the other day and, upon the reccomendation of the clerk, purchased an album entitled “Microminiature Love” by the Michael Younkers Band. The clerk (whom I know personally) told me that I’d like this particular album because I’m into “all that ‘60’s psychedelic garage-rock.” So I laid down the seven or eight bucks (it was used) and drove home.

My usual practice when buying a cd is that I put it in the cd player, slip the liner notes out of the jewel-case, then go lie on the couch while giving the disc a cursory listen. And I read the aforementioned liner notes. I get disappointed if there aren’t liner notes...especially since I buy a lot of reissues. Anyway, this particular album (by the Michael Younkers Band) begins its liner notes with, “Welcome to the everchanging landscape of early 21st century musical excavation.” If you’re realizing you’re unfamiliar with this particular tidbit of popular culture, be not alarmed. This albumed was released in 1968 in a pressing of a (very) few thousand copies, and has only been reissued in the last couple of years on an independent label (Sub Pop, if you’re interested).

Musical excavation, indeed. Did I like this album? Yeah, sure. I’m into all that ‘60’s psychedelic garage-rock. This is right up my alley. Arty-noise. But this brings up an important point...a point that I am wont to admit. Alright, here’s how it is: I’ve been accused more than once of liking things just for the sake of obscurity. This has been a major point of contention with more than one girlfriend since high school. Is it true? Do I just like things because they’re obscure?

Yeah, sure. But what really bothers me about this whole thing is the why of it. Why do I enjoy albums (and books and movies and all sorts of other disposable crap) that no one outside of an incredibly small group of people--mostly white and mostly male, incidentally--cares two shits about? The answer: Identity, Identity, Identity.

The more sensitive and less cynical you are, the more you’re likely to take offense at what I’m about to say: Our identities are in great part an aggregate of pop culture influences. Yeah, it’s fucking shallow. And it’s not like I didn’t think one or two of those girlfriends had “beautiful souls” or something else that sounds similarly ridiculous when I write it down. But in the banal, mundane everyday sense of identity, it’s pop culture man. From the conversations about that television show at the water cooler to the incessant name-dropping of every conversation I’ve ever had with a record store clerk in any store that didn’t say “Sam Goody” or “Best Buy” above the door. Not that I would ever be caught dead in any of those places.

Though the landscape of 21st century musical excavation may be an ever-shifting terrain, there still remains a fairly stable canon by which a person can be judged on the slide rule of hipsterdom. The Stooges, the Velvet Underground, the Clash, the Talking Heads, and Tom Waits are all irrefutable must-haves in any record collection. It is from these starting points that the intrepid adolescent begins the descent into the plunging depths of obscurity.

There is, of course, one major problem with the above listing. Almost everybody has albums by these artists. Pop music revisionist history has deigned that the Velvet Undergound be shelved alongside the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The Stooges are a commercial for Nike. Whereas hipster kids in the eighties could share in the secret greatness of these (and other) woefully neglected artists. That they are all recognizable in the mainstream is the real triumph of NIrvana.

Somewhere back in the mythic land of 80’s college rock radio, a blue print was made which thereby defined most of the “indie” rock that has been ceaselessly recycled and sold back to the record-buying public as an antidote to the looming, ill-defined “mainstream” that everyone so desperately tries to distance themselves from. Guess what? The fucking Pixies are having a reunion tour and Surfer Rosa is still in print. And all the unkempt hair and thrift-store clothes in the world aren’t going to change that.

A year or two ago, James Murphy from DFA Records in New York released a dance track called “Losing My Edge” under the moniker LCD Soundsystem. The track is basically a hipster’s anthem...albeit one that plays with a kind of ironic hindsight. A significant portion of the track (aside from the synthesized beats) is taken up by name-dropping. Oh but what name dropping it is: CAN, Suicide, Larry Levan, Pere Ubu, The Bar-Kays, Lou Reed, Soul Sonic Force, David Axelrod, The Slits, The Sonics, The Modern Lovers, Niagara, Gil Scott-Heron, The Germs, Joy Division, The Monks, Erik B and Rakim, Faust, Soft Cell, Mantronix, The Swans....

It kinda reminds me of that joke...
“How many indie rockers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
“How many?”
“Huh. You don’t know?”

There is something more than just the faintly ridiculous about this, of course. But if we grant that hipsterism is a kind of subcultural expression (which it no doubt is) and follow that subculture sets itself up in dialectical opposition to the Culture Industry (which is a fancy German phrase for “mainstream”), then the accumulation of signs and signifiers (via your record collection) can be seen as a desperate attempt to carve out an identity apart from the stultifying homogeneity of mass culture. Which is still fucking ridiculous, but at least it has the cloak of academic legitimacy.

The most significant part about the hipster of today (as opposed to those of yesteryear) is that there is a greater element of self-awareness. It’s all hindsight. When James Murphy says, “I was there,” there is no question as to whether or not he is aware that the icons of hipsterdom are in constant danger of being appropriated by mainstream culture and wants to (if ironically) assert the position that he was there first. No matter that the Velvet Undergound has become a band that even my mom knows...I was listening to them in third grade when the rest of you schmucks were swooning over New Kids On the Block.

Because of this awareness that the tiny building blocks that separate your identity from the people who watch TRL can be removed at any time, a number of defensive tactics have been developed by the contemporary hipster. There are, of course, the archivists and historians. These are the type of people who anxiously await the reissue of albums that only saw a handful of sales upon initial release (often enough for very good reasons) and meticulously catalogue a specific genre, style, or era if only to laud the “undiscovered” gems that no one else is familiar with.

Then there’s the type for whom irony is what separates man from beast (or earnest classic rock fan). Pac-Man Fever, Journey’s Greatest Hits, and The Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World all fall into this category to varying degrees. Kitsch, camp, cheese...whatever you want to call it, ironic championing of “low art” is de riguer for this method of insulating oneself from the mainstream. Even Journey (a band that is still disturbingingly popular) is allowed if you can appreciate them “for the right reasons.” And by the way, fuck Frank Zappa.

But by far my favorite of all tactics to avoid appropriation of your favorite bands by the heathens is to latch onto the most obscure, unlistenable, arty piece of noise that can possibly be located within the annals of pop culture. Do you own Trout Mask Replica? Then you, my friend, are guiltiest of all. There are no derivatives of the Captain. Not really, anyway. Beck may be a master of collaging vernacular music styles, but you can still dance to Midnite Vultures. Unless you are on a lot better drugs than I can currently locate in the Iowa City area, you cannot dance to Trout Mask Replica. It would be like trying to swing to Ornette Coleman. It’s grating, irritating noise that drives the neighbor’s dog insane. And it’s the greatest album of the twentieth century.

The Wages of Sin

2005-05-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

I have been trying for some time now to write a piece about the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” One of the fundamental topics that I want to deal with (whenever I actually get around to writing it) is the film’s usage of American archetypes--in particular that of the blues singer who sells his soul to the devil. This is, of course, an oft-repeated tale. One does not have to be familiar with the recording legacy of Robert Johnson (or for that matter, his “cousin” Tommy Johnson, whom some claim to be the originator of the story) to recognize the figure who “went down to the crossroads.”

It is tempting to allow this story to take on an exotic flavor that detracts from what I believe is the nuts and bolts reality of the fable. For the benefit of those who aren’t inclined to obsessing about pre-war blues and country records, here’s a little (more contemporary) example: “Footloose.” Although I’m sure that almost everyone has seen this movie, I’ll give a quick plot summary just for the sake of brevity. A young rebel (played by the inestimable Kevin Bacon) moves to a small town whose chief patriarch (John Lithgow) has enacted a ban on dancing. Dancing, yes, but especially dancing to the “devil’s music,” i.e. rock and roll. Never mind that this movie takes place in the eighties. John Lithgow’s character has determined that dancing leads to the decimation of the morals of the town’s young people. Kevin Bacon gives an impassioned speech about how dancing is a form of expressing joy, etc. etc. Needless to say, the intrepid teenagers put on their little dance and everything is just wonderful. Except that Kevin Bacon and Lithgow’s daughter exemplify the very behaviour that the good reverend is trying to keep them away from: drinking and sex.

Filtered through the lens of post-baby boom sensibities, the film attempts to paint the reverend as a quaint figure who “just doesn’t get it.” Which is all fine and good, except that it misses out on just how correct his assumptions are in the first place. Let’s jump back to Robert Johnson again. When Johnson was a living, breathing performer (and not just fodder for Eric Clapton’s patronizing grist-mill) the circumstances of performing were not particularly upstanding. PBS documentaries to the contrary, one has only to look at the origin of the word “juke” (as in “juke-joint” and “jukebox”) in its West African root to know that these establishments were bad places where bad things happened. Not literally black masses with Beezlebub maybe, but their metaphorical equivalent. Adulterous affairs, extreme drunkeness, and brawling were all de rigeur for any self-respecting joint. And, if the blues gave birth to rock and roll, it’s easy to see why the morally inclined decried its participants and the establishments that they inhabited. These were truly the dens of vice and sin. So when Robert Johnson sang about hell hounds on his trail and selling his soul to the devil, I tend to take it more as a comment on the lot with which he cast his fortunes than on his particular metaphysical affiliations.

Another case in point: Jerry Lee Lewis. Sure, Elvis is the King of Rock and Roll. But Elvis revealed himself to be pretty much an All-American mama’s boy after he went into the Army. Nobody could have had any misconceptions about Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee had cast his lot with the devil and then laughed with glee at his own damnation. But Jerry Lee was also the first cousin to Jimmy Lee Swaggart, noted televangelist. Jerry himself had considered heeding the call to the lord before heeding to the call of temptation. And while his story is not unique (Little Richard and Al Green are two performers notorious for their inability to put themselves completely with one side or the other) it is these twin poles of God and sin, the Devil and redemption, that are the cornerstone of my concern here.

Georges Bataille, in his book “Eroticism: Death and Sensuality,” argues that the main function of religion (by way of taboos and social customs) is to quell the destructive impulses present in society. The way that a society deals with sexuality in particular is indicative of the methods by which destructive impulses are kept in check. There are no laws against pre-marital sex (at least not in this country...anymore) but there is a rather complex set of taboos that govern the way that any expression of sexuality take place. But just why is unconstrained sexuality destructive? Because, obviously, if we were all fucking in the streets then nothing would get done. The very fabric of society--which is industry--would be disrupted because everyone would be too busy getting it on. Or getting drunk. Which we all know leads to sex. Hell, that’s half the reason most of us drink anyway.

Which is where fundamentalism comes into the picture. Fundamentalism--insofar as its modern, American incarnation is concerned--first took hold in the same rural, isolated Southern communities that produced the aforementioned blues and country music. Fundamentalist religious beliefs (as eschewed by Pentecostal and Baptist sects, among others) espouse a very rigorous code of ethics on their practictioners. No drinking, no smoking, and no pre-marital sex. As the Louvin Brothers said, “Satan is real,” and these are the means by which his works come to fruition. Some Pentecostal groups even went so far as to ban the usage of musical instruments during worship--particularly those instruments so closely tied to the devil: banjo, guitar, and fiddle.

If this seems to be an extreme reaction to the world at large, it’s because it is. The proximity of impending violent death lend a fervor to religious devotion that Easter-and-Christmas christianity cannot account for. This is what Bataille is talking about when he refers to the “preservational impulse” of religion. When presented with a crisis (i.e. the possibility of destruction of life a/o community) the natural response is to take arms against the threatening forces with a vigilance befitting the particular threat. Since the effect of alcohol and pre-marital sex (and their various results) was immediate in the communities were religious fundamentalism first arose, these activities were demonized accordingly.

I realize that if you’ve continued reading this far, you are probably wondering where in the hell all this is going. I suppose that my purpose with this essay is two-fold: on the one hand, I would like to offer an alternative to the out-of-hand dismissal of religious fundamentalism too often perpetrated by liberal-minded people--people most likely like you, dear reader. And on the other, I would like to examine briefly why I think that some of those same assumptions are essentially correct, at least with regards to contemporary fundamentalism. But I want to at least try and get to the core of my (and maybe your) problems with jesus-freaks and the religious right.

Alright. Well, I’m pretty sure that every alienated teenager with a black t-shirt can probably quote this line from Nietzsche, but cause it serves my purpose I’m gonna say it anyway: God is dead. Of course “god” isn’t literally dead...sorry to tell all you johnny-atheist-come-latelies. You gotta have a little history. When Nietzsche penned those infamous lines, he was writing from the perspective of a Western European after the first wave of the Industrial Revolution. Most of the people in Germany (good ol’ Friedrich’s place of birth), Great Britain, the United States, and a whole host of other European countries were no longer farmers or peasants. They were socialized urban-dwellers. And as modern men and women, they had internalized the rules and regulations of society to a degree that the harsh dictums and threats coming from the church pulpit (supposedly via God) were no longer necessary to keep them in line. Hence, “God is dead.” The metaphorical qualities of a divine overseer were obsolete, at least in Nietzsche’s observation. Now if we jump back to the culture that I was referring to previously (the rural, Southern half of the United States) and think about all those carpetbaggers from sixth grade social studies, it might be helpful to recall that this particular part of the world was not fully industrialized until well into the twentieth century. So they have an excuse.

But why in the hell do people like John Ashcroft and George W. Bush remain relevant (don’t laugh) forces today with their thinly veiled rhetoric of fire and brimstone? Let’s think about who these people REALLY are. Yes, yes. George Bush is a christian. He has prayer meetings. He tells us that, “God is on our side.” But come on. These guys are CEOs. They’re major stockholders. They’re fucking rich. They are not country preachers travelling from revival meeting to revival meeting.

I mentioned earlier that fundamentalism takes hold primarily during times of crisis. This crisis results in a vigilant moral and ethical code that damns anything that does not adhere to the letter of the word as it is writ. There is no protestation and there is no debate as to the authority of the message: there is GOOD and there is EVIL. Now I don’t think that many people today walk around believing that god actually speaks to them and condemns or praises them according to what they do. I don’t even want to deal with that mentality. But what I think has happened vis-a-vis the marriage of the Republican party and the religious right is the creation of a kind of secular fundamentalism.

Think about it. Most of the push-button topics of political discussion boil down to the same stuff that makes up a good blues song: drugs and sex. Except instead of talking about tomcatting around with someone else’s woman and the battle with the bottle we have abortion and the war on drugs. These are surely significant topics, but hardly worth the consideration that most politicians warrant them. We have a moral crisis. The minds of America’s youth are being corrupted by narcotics. Our morality is degenerating when we allow women to choose whether or not to carry a child to term. Etc. etc. etc. Or on a larger scale we have the battle between good (the United States...meaning everyone in line with the Word according to the West Wing) and evil (mostly people of Islamic descent, but anyone will suffice so long as they don’t agree with the Word).

It’s all rhetioric that would make your freshman TA blush. But it works pretty fucking well. I started out thinking that this was a ploy to make people in this country more industrious, kinda like all the propaganda against the Germans and Japanese during World War II. Scare tactics to keep the time clocks punched. But that doesn’t really matter anymore. Nah, Dick Cheney and George Bush don’t need you to work harder. They just need to keep you frightened enough about world destruction and moral decay so that you’re not too concerned with the real implications the actions that they initiate. And if the Christian Coalition happens to be a convenient ally, so be it. You don’t have to go to church to worry about the Apocalypse.

That, in a nutshell, is secular fundamentalism. It is not snake handlers and holy rollers. It’s a sense of crisis and a feeling of endangerment that leads to moral absolutes. But unlike the Pentecostal on the pulpit, these preachers are not waging a war against the sins and excesses that truly affect our day to day lives and safeties. This is an ecclesiastical sleight-of-hand that would make even the crookedest televangelist jealous.

I'm a Working Class Hero!

2005-05-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

I drink a lot. Mostly, I drink beer. Pabst Blue Ribbon. At the Foxhead. They’ve got a great. jukebox down there. The Stones, the Sex Pistols, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash...

Well anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Johnny Cash lately, being as I consider myself a fan and mourned his passing a few weeks ago. But it’s funny, ya’ know? Just what is that keeps the Man in Black such a hero to so many different people? When I sit in the Foxhead and somebody plays “Folsom Prison Blues” on a crowded Friday or Saturday night, inevitably a number of people (but mostly guys) will sing along--particularly that line about shooting somebody in Reno “just to watch him die.” And outlaw. That’s the persona, at least.

I suspect that a lot of people who are reading this will have at least heard of the albums that Johnny Cash recorded with Rick Rubin over the last decade. Rick Rubin, the guy who got his start producing the Beastie Boys. If you haven’t heard of them, it’s a shame. Don’t you watch MTV? The Man was up for a VMA this year. Plus, they’re really good...especially in light of all the unremarkable albums from the ‘70s and ‘80s. But why in the hell would a guy from the hip-hop world wanna revive the career of a goddamned COUNTRY singer?

First of all, Johnny Cash ain’t exactly a country singer. Least he wasn’t way back when he was recording under that big ‘ol yeller rooster at Sun Records. Rockabilly maybe Something different. I’ve never but never seen a picture of him in a cowboy hat--accessory de rigeur for country and western singers the world over. What’s important, though, is that he’s got authenticity. Johnny Cash is the Real Deal...but for whom?

My grandfather likes Johnny Cash. But I suspect that he doesn’t like him for the same reasons that people who know who Rick Rubin is do. I’m willing to betcha that he doesn’t stress the “just to watch him die” bit when he sings to his glass of beer. They would be almost the same age, my grandfather and Johnny Cash, if Cash was still alive. Pretty similar upbringings, too. Country boys. My grandfather was born in Kentucky; Johnny Cash was born in Arkansas.

The point that I’m trying to get with all this is that Johnny Cash was married to June Carter, heiress to the Carter Family legacy. The Carter Family, preservers and purveyors of very traditional Southern (American) values...values about family, god, love, and work. Grand Ole Opry treasures. Let’s put just two songs performed by Johnny Cash together to provide some illumination on the apparent incongruency between the pill-popping, bird-flipping bad boy and the son-in-law to the first family of country music: “Delia’s Gone,” from the American Recordings album, and the single “One Piece at a Time>”

“Delia’s Gone” is in the same vein as “Folsom Prison Blues.” It’s a murder ballad. guy kills his lover. Real cold-blooded. It leads off the first album with Rick Rubin. It’s got a little Edgar Allen Poe/ “Tell-Tale Heart” thing going on as well. Though Johnny Cash deliver it pretty well, it’s not that estranged from a whole tradition of Appalachian ballads...the most famous of which are probably “Pretty Polly” and “Frankie and Johnny.” The Carter Family used to sing some of these. They form an intrinsic but not exclusive part of the canon of balladry. The question that haunts this lead-off song choice is whether it is truly part of this recurrent theme or if it is, in Chris Dickinson’s 19994 review, “marketing to the hip crowd that believes that ‘real’ country must hew to the Appalachian dead-baby school of song writing.” this is the troubling aspect to Cash’s American Recordings; while lauded for its “stripped-down” aesthetic, it ultimately paints a very different portrait of his style than even a cursory listening to the entire oeuvre will yield. But hell, even Jimmie Rodgers had Louis Armstrong play trumpet on one of his records, and we’re talking about the Godfather of Country Music. What people really mean is that it sounds like the Tennessee Two stuff on Sun Records...and not the Countrypolitan-style that plagued some of the records from the Seventies.

“One Piece at a Time” is a completely different story. It constitutes the one major blip that Johnny Cash made on the Billboard charts between 1971 and 1994. Released in 1976, it roughly coincides with the “Urban Cowboy” chic in terms of cultural history, but really belongs to a whole separate faction of Cash’s fans.

This fan base is, of course, what kept Cash out of the poorhouse during the long lull in record sales. Relentlessly touring with the remaining Carter Family, Carl Perkins, and the Statler Brothers, Cash’s live performances could count on this demographic to fill theaters. They’re the Grand Ole Opry set.

As for the song, well, it’s kinda interesting. If I were more of a Marxist, I’d be inclined to describe it as indicative of the plight of the working class. Which it is. It’s just that that kind of political reading doesn’t jive with its subject. Ostensibly about an automobile factory worker who steals a single part everyday, the narrator eventually acquires all of the parts necessary to build his car. Except it don’t look quite right. It’s got on tail fin and three headlights. But he’s proud as hell of his ‘56, ‘57,’58...well, I don’t recall that Cash ever mentions the particular make of the car, but one suspects that it’s a high-end job: Lincoln, Oldsmobile...but more’n likely it’s a Cadillac. So here’s a guy who wants a car--supreme symbol of Americans’ ideas about freedom--and finds that by the time its actually his, it’s hopelessly out of fashion.

Cash’s politics have always been problematic. He wrote an album highlighting the plight of the modern Native American several years before AIM held the Department of the Interior building under siege. He was embraced by the folk/civil rights crowd, most significantly in his friendship with Bob Dylan. He played numerous free concerts at prisons...not just Folsom and San Quentin, either. And yet he went on record as saying that it was an American citizen’s duty to support the government and the President during the Vietnam war.

What compounds this problem, however, is the song “Man in Black,” which contains a few lines about wearing black as a symbol of mourning--mourning for dead soldiers of any war. I think that herein lies the rift between Johnny Cash, the hero to “alternative” and “counterculture” crowds and Johnny Cash, the hero the the working class and the downtrodden...not that there’s much of a difference.

If you listen closely to the Live at Folsom Prison album, you can hear the prisoners cheer at the line “just to watch him die.” Cheer really goddamn loud. Louder than anybody at the Foxhead. Some of those guys in Folsom prison were really bad motherfuckers. Maybe they hadn’t shot anybody just to watch them die, but more than a few of them had certainly shot someone. It’s sorta like the song “Johnny 99” on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album. Even if you haven’t actually killed anyone, there are circumstances that can drive you into such desperation that you could kill someone...because what does it matter anyway and what’s the goddamn point? I highly doubt that many of the patrons of the Foxhead have ever been under such duress. Hey, we’re all privileged middle-class folk down here.

What then is the appeal here? It ain’t exactly like you or I (as middle-class people who have never been to prison) can precisely feel any real empathy with murderers and drunken Indians...but the working class and ethnic minorities have always had a kind of appeal for people whose lives were anything but similar because of exactly that. The coarseness of language, the violence, and the close proximity of death are all romanticized and repackaged for consumption by people who desperately (although maybe not as desperately as somebody holding up a liquor store) want their lives to be anything but the safe, complacent existences that they already are. In this way it is possible to identify with the killer in a song...the killer is always more “real” than you are. He can claim an authenticity that as listeners you can only imagine. This attempt at emulation has informed most of American popular culture since its conceptions. Minstrelsy, white jazz fans, wiggers, you name it. Everybody who consumes these images always--on some level--wants to be something else, whether that something else is black or white working-class. Take a look at the fashion trends: snap-button shirts, trucker or seed corn hats...all things that signifiy a kind of working-class masculinity, and not your dad’s polo shirt and loafers. These are the new Johnny Cash fans. They drink beer. Pabst Blue Ribbon, in fact. Let’s hope that none of us ever actually have to face the reality of Mr. Cash’s songs.

Uhhh...

2005-05-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

So, I mentioned a few music blogs in an earlier post...it turns out that there's a pretty sizable number of them that have been organized and listed a this guy's blog "The Tofu Hut" where they're broken down into categories of (extremely broad) genre, and with more added as he comes across them. I haven't gotten through that many, but some of them are bound to be interesting, depending on your personal taste.

Also, in the interest of combining two recurrent topics on Border Radio--comics and music--here's a link to Chris Ware's site for the the "Rag Time Ephemeralist", which consists of written entries and a few mp3s to download. Though I am not given to listening to much music in the ragtime idiom, Chris Ware (you know, the guy who did "Jimmy Corrigan" and "Quimby") is a thoughtful and engaging writer, and the graphics are guaranteed to be worth a visit themselves. Plus, you don't have to worry about copyright infringement, since these songs are well past even that whole "Disney Clause" and reside comfortably in the public domain--I think, anyway.

Also: Has anyone else noticed that comic book writers (at least of the "serious, adult" variety) all seem to have some sort of attachment to a bygone cultural era or musical style? I don't know, it seems like Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes, and Chris Ware must have all sat down at some point and said, "Hey, why don't we each pick a decade to emulate in our work and daily lives, and then that can become part of our whole cartoonist persona." Crumb loves the 1920s. Clowes grabbed up the late 50s and early 60s, and Ware is into the turn of the century. Weird.

I Am Curious: Dead

2005-05-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

This is a film still from a movie that I watched recently called "Thriller: A Cruel Picture." Although the box advertises that, "If this film were rated, it would be rated X," and the video store that I rented it from made note of the fact that the main character ("One Eye") is the basis for Daryl Hannah's character in the Kill Bill movies, neither of those two bits of info really give an accurate idea of how disturbing this movie is.

"Thriller" was made in Sweden in 1974, and the lack of rating on the film is an reminder of the fact that Sweden had some rather lax censorship laws by the late sixties and early 1970s. Indeed, in 1969 "Midnight Cowboy" was sufficiently lurid for the American ratings board to certify it "X"...and it went on to win an Oscar, for chrissake. Anyway, this movie is sort of a weird cross between a European pornographic movie and an action flick.

The pornographic parts are extremely uncomfortable, mostly because the protagonist ("One Eye") was molested as a child, then turned mute, only to be picked up hitchhiking years later on her way to a doctor's appointment by an exceedingly evil slick character. He drugs her at dinner, gets her strung out on heroin, and forces her into prostitution. She eventually loses her eye to him, but it's only after her bereaved parents die and her fellow prostitute is murdered that she decides that it is now time to kill not only her pimp, but every one of her customers.

There's a lot of build up while she trains for this, and by the time she gets around to actually killing anyone she's a pretty terrifying sight with her double barrel 12 gauge and black leather trenchcoat. There's some pretty great shots of slow-mo violence. I can see why Tarantino liked it so much. Tentatively recommended.

Stands for Decibels

2005-05-12T00:26:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite power pop bands are the dB's (i.e. the Decibels) from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Since, like so many other marginally popular bands from the 1980s, they've decided to get back together, here's a live mp3 from a 1984 show at the Metro in Chicago. The song ("Black and White") is one of their best, and the recording--which is from their official site--isn't that bad. If I could find the studio version, I'd have posted it instead. Until then...

The dB's--"Black and White"(live)

Also:

If anyone knows anything about the power pop group "The Deal" from the late 1970s/early 1980s, I'd greatly appreciate any info you could give--especially with regards to mp3s and whatnot. Thanks.

Rock & Roll...It's a Good Thing

2005-05-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

Here's another cachet of mp3s from a website devoted to "Mod Pop Punk" in an archive devoted to...well, devoted to that. Since I've been in such a power pop mood lately I thought you might enjoy this great big old bunch of songs as you waste your own time instead of doing whatever it is that you do.

The Mod Pop Punk Archive

Enjoy.

An mp3 to Make Your Day Better...

2005-05-10T15:41:00.000-07:00

So, as I attempt to host my own mp3s on Border Radio, here's a link to my favorite song from the aforementioned "Yellow Pills: Prefill" comp from Numero Group. This song sounds like the long-lost cousin to Wilco's "Heavy Metal Drummer," another song that has a lot to do with summertime nostalgia. Anyway, enjoy the first audio link on this particular blog.

Toms-"Sun"

According to the liner notes, although this song is credited to the band "Toms," it is in fact the work of one guy, Tom Marolda. Prior to the "Yellow Pills: Prefill" release, this was an "impossibly" obscure track. This is why I buy these kinds of albums.

Dick Tracy

2005-05-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

This is an image of a book I got awhile ago which is a collection of Dick Tracy comics. For everyone who enjoyed the wonderful discussion of comics in the earlier posts, you can look forward to a whole lot more junk about comics (this time specifically Dick Tracy) in the coming weeks as I put together my project for this semester on Dick Tracy in the 1930s.

I'm just testing my ability to put pictures up on this blog, so bear with me. But I'm serious about the comics thing. You may wanna avoid this site for a while.

Blogs Blogs and More Blogs

2005-05-09T17:51:00.000-07:00

I mentioned that I've been reading a couple of music blogs lately...other than the one that Will Bowers publishes at Puritan Blister that I mentioned in an earlier post, I've become a regular reader of these three blogs:

Soul Sides

Diddy Wah

Big Rock Candy Mountain

The first two are primarily soul, r & b, and jazz mp3s sites with some interesting analysis and whatnot on the tracks that are posted...some of which are taken directly from the lp or 45. The best posting thus far that I've seen is from Soul Sides, in which the guy who runs the thing posted up a piece from Michaelangelo Matos about the song "Apache." Soul Sides supplements the essay (which was delivered at the Experience Music Project's Pop Music Conference...and no, I'm not bitter about them turning down my submission) with a collection of mp3s that represent most of the versions of "Apache" that are mentioned in Matos's paper. If you don't know "Apache" offhand, it's the basis (at least in its Incredible Bongo Band's version) for one of the most famous breaks in hip hop. Anyway, Soul Sides is a good site. Diddy Wah is also excellent.

Big Rock Candy Mountain is (rather obviously if you recognize the title) more along the lines of a roots-rock (see also: rockabilly, honky tonk, and early country) site, and it doesn't seem to have nearly as many mp3s posted up, but it's still pretty good writing, as far as it goes. Anyway, I happen to read these three regularly, and I frequently link out from these blogs to other mp3-heavy sites from their sidebars. You'll have to check out those for yourself.

Circus Peanuts and Coca-Cola

2005-05-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

When I was about fifteen years old, some how or another I managed to become friends with these two girls who were about eighteen at the time...seniors in high school. So the summer before my sixteenth birthday, I hung out with them a lot. They would come and pick me up at my parent's house and we would ride around in a jeep with the top down. I can't remember what the specific songs were on FM radio in the summer of 1997, but I can still call up the kind of sickly-sweet feeling that comes with August and July. It's a kind of pleasant nausea.

So, as promised here's another music recommendation.

Numero Group is a reissue label out of Chicago. Their first three releases were two retrospectives of small Midwestern r & b labels (Bandit and Capsoul). Their other release was a reissue of the Belgian/French band Antena's album "Camino Del Sol" from the early 80s that has some vague association with Factory Records (Joy Division, A Certain Ratio).

Their fourth release came out about a month ago. It's called "Yellow Pills: Prefill," and it sounds like being a sixteen year old in and open top car in August. The "Yellow Pills" imprint was originally a part of a early 90s zine published by Jordan Oakes. Oakes later went on to compile four volumes of exquisite power-pop under that rubric as well. ("Yellow Pills" is also the name of a song on the band 20/20's debut album) This particular double-disc set is full of some of the most obscure power-pop that I can imagine that still manages to cause you to wonder why you haven't heard of this stuff already. The Numero Group's website can be linked below:

Numero Group

I'm not exactly sure how good their distribution deal is, and as I remember the excellent special order service that Record Collector in Iowa City provided, I'm not sure I wouldn't just order this thing (if you wanna) directly from the website. I'm pretty sure that Pitchfork gave it a favorable review, but that may or may not be a positive attribute, depending on your point of view.

All I can say is, after listening to "Rubber Soul," "Revolver," the three Big Star albums, the Cars, and the dozen or so other bands that make up a standard power-pop list, these two discs are a delight because the songs fall within that context and (like the best 60s garage tracks) because they do something novel enough with the melody or the hook or the instrumentation that sticks with you...at least for the rest of the summer.

Snow Tires and Crampons

2005-05-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

I've been in a bit of a rut lately with my listening habits. I haven't found anything that really piqued my interest for a while...but in the last few days, I've gotten ahold of some things that brought me back to my senses. The first one of these is the third volume of World Psychedelic Classics from Luaka Bop, David Byrne's record label. Although I generally tend to like afrobeat stuff, this comp is unique in that the musicians here fall into "psychedelic" territory in ways that are surprising if you think that Sgt. Pepper and Are You Experienced? are the pinnacle of that vague stylistic movement. Anyway, the cd is great...I'll have more to say about the other stuff I've been listening to later.

Which reminds me...Does anybody know how to post mp3s on blogspot.com? I'd like to post up a track now and again, and I'd be interested in hearing how it's done, since I don't know anybody else personally who posts mp3s, though I read quite a few of them out there...I have a couple of recommendations in a future post.

Anyway, here's a link to Luaka Bop's website, were you can find a Quicktime movie featuring the leadoff track from World Psychedelic Classics: Love is a Real Thing. The movie is a music video done w/ puppets (sorta like the old British tv show "Thunderbirds") for the song "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome" by the Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou Dahomey.

Puppets! Puppets! Puppets!

Later.

Another Request

2005-04-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

As you might have noticed in the long post belong entitled "Combat Fatigue" I am re-treading a lot of ground that I have covered in two previous posts on this blog. Sorry about that. And the typos. But seriously, I am having some difficulty writing this paper. I feel like I have a few too many threads to keep track of in the course of the thing, but I don't think that it would be a responsible argument if I didn't include all of them in some fashion. This paper is also running counter to the way I usually compose something, so I feel like I'm out in uncharted territory here. And since I have a tendency to lose sight of what actually is accessible and understandable to people who don't share a great deal of the reference points I have, I would really really appreciate some feedback before monday...that is, assuming the conceit that people actually read this thing often enough to come to it by then. Anyway, thanks in advance...but there's all sorts of great stuff to piddle around in the links I've posted below in case none of the paper writing stuff strikes you at all.

MTV Ain't Got Nuthin'

2005-04-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

If you enjoyed any of the political ads of presidential races past posted below, I strongly encourage you to check out another site dedicated entirely to free short films that aren't burdened by any of that copyright bullshit. Whether it's dancing Lucky Strike cigarettes you're looking for, or if early 1950s sex ed. films are more your thing, this stuff is interesting a/o hilarious, sometimes at the same time. Although it was originally the solitary project of Rick Prelinger, it has since gone on to being incorporated into the Smithsonian orbit.

The Prelinger Archive

(For anybody who hasn't checked out the politico stuff below, I strongly reccomend it. The Stevenson is kitsch, but the Nixon ads are fucking scarily close to the stuff we still hear today from the GOP and our fine pundits. Ronald Reagan, who endorses Nixon in one ad as the governor of California, even sounds a lot like GW with his inflection and rhythm and tone...yeah.)

Hey, Remember Adlai Stevenson?

2005-04-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

I don't. You probably don't either, but you can check out some old-school political ads on this site from the University of Michigan.

Follow the link in the middle, choose a candidate from the sidebar (I recommend the gentleman from Illinois) and enjoy.

Sometimes I Hate the South, But Sometimes...

2005-04-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

So the new issue of the Oxford American is out. Although I missed the first issue after it came back from the murky depths of defunctory, I was really anticipating this one.

The topic of the issue is "Southern Food." Since I myself have a small interest in this (I'm frying up enough chicken for 20 people at the end of this month for my grandmother's 83rd birthday) I have to say that, aside from the music (which OA devotes an annual issue to) the food of the American South is one of the things that manages to hold in check some of my more rampant (and, to be honest, at times irrational) dislikes of this entire region. If I think about fried catfish and jalapeno hush puppies or really good pulled pork, it helps to offset the fact that this is the place of slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings, politically motivated evangelical Christianity, and some of the most odious politicians the U.S. has ever had the grace to serve in its public offices.

But back to the OA and food.

The Oxford American--if you're not a regular reader--is a magazine that was started by John Grisham (they can be forgiven for that) and was originally housed in Oxford, Mississippi. Since the most recent reformation, the magazine is now operating out of Little Rock. The writing is consistently of the highest quality.

What makes the food issue so great is that it blends the digestible with the personal, political, and cultural. A case in point: in this issue there is a piece by Siddhartha Mitter on the subject of okra. As you might have guessed from the name, the author is Indian by ethnicity. What the piece does is weave in the author's own love of okra (a vegetable as common to India as to the South) with a discussion of its texture, which is then related to how okra--because of its "slimy-ness" has been systematically marginalized due to white people's disdain for that same texture. Not all white people, mind you, but aside from the REALLY poor ones, okra in its non-fried form is roundly shunned.

I have to admit that I find okra to be slimy and none too appetizing...except when it's fried. But the argument goes that its foreigness of texture is related to its being African or Middle Eastern (like Tigris and Euphrates Middle Eastern) and therefore "beneath" white colonials' palate. Mitter explains how the French-African word for okra is "gombo," and that it was much more common in the "gumbo" of the Gulf Coast before that dish was appropriated by whites.

Mitter also manages to talk about in a reasonably accessible way the work of Frantz Fanon, Du Bois, and a number of other academic or theoretic writers whose own work is often only disseminated amongst the specialized. Mitter's understanding of okra, or more generally the foods primarily allocated to black Southerners, is more than simply interesting; it provides a model of introducing complex topics through the everyday objects of our lives.

Paranoia From the Ether

2005-04-29T00:37:00.000-07:00

If any of you have listened to the band Wilco's album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," then you have inadvertantly listened to the stuff on this page:

The Conet Project

Although they give a better explanation in the site, the Conet Project is a collection of shortwave radio broadcasts from what are called "numbers stations," where someone reads long strings of numerals or letters (like th "Y," "H," and "F" denoted by "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). These stations broadcast these strings of code, which are understood to be linked to espionage, to this day. There's a collection of Quicktime MP3's on the page free for download.

So all around you every day there are shortwave broadcasts transmitting intelligence reports and directives to agents of all stripes around the world.

Have fun thinking about that.

Combat Fatigue

2005-04-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

This is a really, really long post that is made up of a not-so-rough draft of a paper that I am turning in next tuesday. I need to cut it down to a 5 page version to deliver as a conference talk on that day as well. Any suggestions or comments that you have are very much desired. On this, I am serious. I've asked for comments on stuff in the past, but I'd go so far as to ask you to call me or something (assuming you know my number) to discuss. If not, just leave something in the comments section or via e-mail. Anyway, I'd really appreciate feedback.

Olive Drab. Woodland Camo. BDU. In the years since my own early adolescence, I have bought more than one piece of clothing from a military surplus store. I have bought boots, field jackets, t-shirts, hats, and other sundry items at one point or another. I even used to keep a P-38 can opener on the ring that holds my keys. And yet, there is always a distinctive anxiety that plagues me whenever I make a trip to a surplus store. The omnipresent John Wayne Posters, the proprietor’s inevitable protestations against what “Uncle Sam” is adding to the price of his wares in sales tax, the quasi-legal display of heavy ordinance, and the sign that reads “We Don’t Dial 911” are not a part of most shopping experiences. And despite what I perceive to be the ideological/political differences between the owner and myself, I know that I will come back again. He is (and it is always a “he”) the only game in town. But, I am careful never to wear more than one or two items of military apparel at any one time, lest I appear to be like one of those militia-types or--worse still--an ex-soldier.

In her article, “Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’,” Lynda Boose points out that after a steady decline of sales in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hasbro refashioned its “G.I. Joe” line of toys into one of the most poerful toy brands of the 1980s. (Boose 581) I was one of those kids that went whole-hog for the second coming of “G.I. Joe.” I In addition to the action figures, I pieced together a collection of costumes for my own escapades into the “jungle.” The “jungle” consisted of a series of lilac bushes, hedges, and cornfields around my parents’ house, where I could indulge in any and all of my military fantasies. They were rarely bloody. Most often, they consisted of little more than crawling around in the dirt in a plastic helmet and one of my uncle’s hand-me-down shirts from a stint in Vietnam.
Vietnam was not a well-understood event for me as a child. Perhaps it remains just as confusing and mysterious today. My mother informed me that I should refrain from asking those same older male relatives about their ware experiences, as it was not a topic that they would enjoy discussing. Most of the information I gleaned came from the illicit watching of the Rambo movies on video (my mother hated them), and--some years later--from supposedly “anti-war” movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon. I suspect that this is not an altogether different story than many other American males of a similar age.
Since taking it upon myself to examine and critically analyze such topics, it has become apparent to me that my formative subjective experiences with the imagery of war, and Vietnam particularly, was predicated upon a whole host of historical contingencies and diverse forms of representation that no child could ever be expected to understand even partially. In his book, The End of Victory Culture, Tom Engelhardt suggests that we are all living in the “afterlife” of that conflict, since the traditional white male ideology of American triumphalism was battered during the decade of conflict in Southeast Asian. Battered, of course, but not wholly beaten. Indeed, as I played with “G.I. Joe” action figures as a child, I had only the slightest knowledge that the toy had existed in a previous incarnation, released on the year of Lyndon Johnson’s election to President. Nor did I know that “G.I. Joe” had originally been without an “enemy” or foil for playtime activities. In my world, there had always been Cobra Commander.
Englehardt discusses at some length the role of George Lucas’s Star Wars film in initiating a renaissance in the action figure market. He also points out the relationship of laser guns and bloodless battles in space to the reconfiguration of “G.I. Joe” in the 1980s. But I know from firsthand experience a few things about the “enemy” in Joe’s universe: he had no fixed national or ethnic identity, and he always wore a mask, which made him impregnable and inhuman.

By the time that I got around to actually buying military surplus clothing, what I thought were my reasons for doing it had changed. And I wasn’t just buying U.S. military-issue stuff, either. I bought a leftover Soviet winter hat and a West German army t-shirt emblazoned with Che Guevara’s face. I listened to the Clash. I’d seen the pictures from My Lai. I had missed out on protesting Vietnam by a long shot and the first Gulf War by a couple of years, but I was in the know. We (the United States) were an imperial power, and we had done some awful stuff to all those Latin American and Asian countries. I sympathized with guerillas, whether they were from Belfast, Hanoi, or Chiapas. Living or martyred. I thought about refusing to register for Selective Service when the military recruiters visited my high school. Even though I didn’t (they won’t give you financial aid for college unless you get yourself qualified as a “conscientious objector” and since I wasn’t Quaker, that would have been rather difficult) I knew that “rebels” were my real heroes. In this, I was aided in no small part by the inheritance of my father’s collection of left-wing books from the 1970s (when he was a university student). My access to novels like Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun” was predicated on the educational history of my own father, which in turn is at least partially dependant upon a level of socio-economic status or initiative mobility that provided access to the material in the first place.

As eye-opening as the books, albums, and films were to me as an adolescent, the romanticization of rebels and guerillas (or historical and political counter-narratives, more generally rife with conficting effects, however. On the one hand, it establishes a series of counter-narratives that are attractive to disaffected adolescents. In the best case scenario, this leads to a heretofore absent left-leaning political consciousness and activism. Of course, this transformation includes its own kind of growing pains; anyone who has been fortunate enough to listen to someone who has recently read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” will be familiar enough with what I am talking about. But for all the righteous indignation and proselytizing, there is something to be said for reading a biography of Che Guevara in the face of state-sanctioned opinion on the history and legacy of the Cuban Revolution. Unfortunately, this emphasis on particular icons, social and political groups, and cultural roles (like the disillusioned American G.I. in Trumbo’s book) also manages to maintain a sufficiently high level of masculine cultural dominance (aside from the inclusion in this narratives of figures like Emma Goldman) as to call into question the effects and consequences of the reframing of the narrative in the first place.

That being said, I would like to turn to someone whose work I believe constitutes an important foil and benchmark for what I am interested in discussing here. I did not choose Michael Herr’s quote as an epigraph for this paper lightly. His book Dispatches remains one of my favorites. And while there are numerous reasons for that fact, the most significant are just two. The first is contained in the lines quoted above, the last lines of the book: Vietnam is the singular metaphor and reference point by which we--as Americans--live and interact today. Vietnam had the effect of globalizing and technologically mediating the world in ways that were all but impossible less than half a generation previous, even with regards to events not directly related to the war itself, especially for Americans who came of age during the conflict or were born in its aftermath. I find it hard to argue with this, and Engelhardt’s thesis about “The End of Victory Culture” reassures me that there reasons for more than a few people to concur. The second reason is probably the genesis of this paper. Instead of fantasizing about being a soldier (even a left-wing) guerilla) this book opened up for me the idea of being a “correspondent.” What is important to me about the differences between a “correspondent” and a soldier a matters of autonomy, voice, and non-combatant status. The correspondent or journalist is not beholden to military rules, and is thus more autonomous than the soldier. The journalist gives voice and opinions to their experience in war (at least journalists like Herr do), whereas soldiers are explicitly discoureaged of this by the chain of command. And most importantly, journalists do not have to kill anyone. Of course, a lot of these reasons rest on some pretty unstable mental gymnastics. Journalists are agents of imperialism, no matter how you slice it. If you are a journalist or a “correspondent” you are required to report to your respective media and your material is filtered to ensure that its remains acceptable in format and content. That eleminates a lot of autonomy and opinion. Plus, in all likelihood that media that you work for uses advertising to budget your journalistic enterprise abroad. That advertising is probably for products whose production and marketing led (indirectly or directly) to the war that you are covering right now. Furthermore, the idea of the “war correspondent,” even a highly conflicted one, is (as hinted at earlier) bound up in a very masculine ideology.
The position and role of the war correspondent brings to the forefront what I think are some of the central questions that I am carrying with me when I try to understand any text depicting war, particularly those which take place outside the United States. How can you be both enthralled and repulsed by depictions of combat at the same time? How can you look at it and criticize it, when your own looking is predicated on being a part of the imperialist culture you purport to disdain? Can any media really succeed at being “anti-war”?

Ostensibly, this paper is about the work of Joe Sacco a comics (or “comix,” or “sequential art,” or “graphic novel,” or whatever) artist and writer whose work for the most part falls into the shady territory somewhere between that medium and journalism. Basically, he creates works that employ both words and pictures that focus on war and war-torn areas. What I want to do with the pages at hand is look at the way in which Sacco uses his medium to address the questions I posed for myself in the above paragraph. Other than some strictly formal discussion of how the medium he uses operates, I am going to try to avoid the “Comics are a form that should be taken seriously” party line that colors most of the critical material that I have read about them. Suffice it to say that I feel it is a legitimate medium--on that can be easily reproduced and distributed en mass--and that I find Sacco’s work within that medium to be worthy of serious consideration. Within that characterization of the form, however, there are some problems of access and availability that I hope to address. Furthermore, because of Sacco’s usage of journalistic elements is quite particular, I have found that it was difficult (and maybe dishonest) not to write my own subjective experience into the paper itself. This is another reason for using the Michael Herr quote as an epigraph; Joe Sacco, like Herr, inserts himself into the events that he is depicting. This is more or less a “New Journalism” approach, and something that I will discuss later. Additionally, I would like to analyze the ways in which Sacco draws on and employs other formal devices and cultural and historical references within the material.

Regardless, I am of course coming at this project with my own set of ideological baggage, and responses to particular elements in both the subjects in Sacco’s work and the methods by which he depicts them are irrevocably bound up in those personal ideologies. So, rather that construct a hypothetical audience for these comics that gets the references to both T. Rex and Wilfred Owen’s poetry (a hypothetical that would probably be more autobiographical than sociological, anyway) I will try and negotiate my own way through the material at hand in something like the way that I began this paper, though--I assure you--in much briefer passages, and with greater discussion of the texts under focus. The reason for this rhetorical move is two-fold: I feel that it both mirrors the way in which Sacco employs first-person subjective in his work, and, more importantly it is indicative of what I take to be the central thesis of my paper--namely, that both writers and readers make use of the cultural materials that they have at hand in order to make sense of events and circumstances whose sum is beyond any total comprehension. Joe Sacco happens to use comics as his primary vehicle; I am trying to see how well his usage of that mode works.

Begining in 1990, Joe Sacco crafted a series of what I would call “experiments” in comics that have recently been collected in a book entitled, “Notes From a Defeatist.” This collection encompasses a great deal of Sacco’s early work, and only part of pieces included deal explicitly deal with the themes and subjects that dominate his three later book-length pieces (Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and The Fixer). Since so little has been said about Sacco's work before the heralded "Palestine" book (the first long-form piece, though it was serialized initially) I think that it would be useful to discuss at some length what I believe to be the three seminal pieces that cement together the themes and methodology of Joe Sacco's later work.

Of the information about Sacco and his work, pre- "Palestine," what is mentioned is that he is a 1981 graduate of the University of Oregon, with a degree in journalism. One BBC interview does discuss this fact briefly, and Sacco makes note that he initially wished to pursue a more traditional career as a foreign correspondent in the printed press. Failing this, through starts and stutters he found himself using his long-time hobby (cartooning) as a way of making a living. The book "Notes From a Defeatist" is partially a selection of work that he produced for a comic Sacco produced from 1988-1992 called "Yahoo" that was published by Fantagraphics books. The three pieces that I will examine are culled from this comic. The last of these, “How I Loved the War,” was drawn during the first Gulf War in early 1991. In late 1991, however, Sacco travelled to the occupied territories of Israel and began the preliminary work for what was to become “Palestine.”

The first of these three pieces is called, “When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People.” Rather than being a series of images that constitute any kind of narrative, this piece consists of single images drawn next to blocks of quotations pertaining to three separate military campaigns. Each campaign get two or three pages and consequently two or three pictures. The focus of these pages is on the British bombing of Germany (1940-45), the U.S. bombing of Japan (1944-45), and the U.S. bombing of Libya (April 14, 1986). The premise of these pages is in showing the official sanctioning of massive aerial bombings against vilified nations and cultural groups, regardless of the incurring civilian deaths--hence the title. The words are obviously chosen to reinforce the callousness of military and political commanders, and the pictures are a mixture of highly stylized portraiture and news-photo realism. The two defining images of this piece are the image that Sacco draws of bombs being dropped out of a plane over Japan (which is immediately recognizable from the stock footage of WW II documentaries) and a picture of Ronald Reagan reading a statement concerning the bombing of Libya from his desk. The picture of a president facing forward during an address is a generic one since the advent of television. However, Sacco portrays the President with a face that is strongly reminiscent of the illustration work of the Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada. Posada’s work drew heavily from the “Day of the Dead” imagery prevalent in his country, and he used the skulls and skeletons of that tradition to illuminate and lambast the political, social, and moral ills afflicting Mexico around the turn of the century. His work has been seen as a direct influence on the “Muralists” of the 1930s (Rivera, Orozco, et al) whose own works were motivated by socialist concern. Reagan’s skeletal features are especially terrifying as he calmly reads aloud a report on the bombings.
The second “experiment” in Notes From a Defeatist is entitled “More Women, More Children, More Quickly.” In the subtitle, it is noted that the piece is based upon the recollection of Carmen M. Sacco--the author’s mother--in Malta from 1935-43. Since Malta was the site of a British Royal Air Force base, it was a prime target for Mussolini’s government in the years leading up to and during WW II. Mrs. Sacco’s retelling of the events from her own life accentuates the populace’s fear of gas (the civilian defense organization handed out masks and advised to put strips of treated cloth around windows and doors), the desperate search for shelter during an air raid, and the terrifying arbitrariness of where a bomb may fall. Carmen Sacco barely escapes an attack unharmed several times. The personal story also dwells on the effects that the constant threat of utter destruction (besides the bombing, there was also a shortage of food) has upon familial and communal relationships. Of particular interest is the shame that Carmen’s mother induces in her when Carmen is reluctant to share part of the family’s meager bread portion with an elderly woman.

What I think is primarily demonstrated in Sacco’s comic, “More Women, More Children, More Quickly,” is two-fold: first, it concentrates its story on the civilians lives affected by bombings and war. This runs counter to a “down with the grunts” style of reportage that gives short shrift to non-combatants. In terms of Sacco’s resources of technique, it also introduces an element of “oral history.” Oral history as a method and technique is not particulary new; it owes its origins to the gathering of ex-slave narratives that began in the 19th century and came to fruition in the 1920s and 1930s. By that point, various New Deal programs sent out writers to gather other groups oral histories as well. In practice, oral history is little more than interviewing a subject about their life experiences and recording their response for posterity. In function, however, it takes on a greater significance. In the work of one of its greatest practicioners, Studs Terkel, it elevates the individual and (at times) the mundane as being relevant to history, as opposed to the “politicians and generals” style of history-writing. It gives a forum for the voices whom history normally silences or ignores. In that, it often operates as left-wing counter-narrative to the dominant discourse of official history. This is particularly prescient for Sacco’s choice of subjects, both here and in his later books. By taking a microcosmic view, it is posssible to extrapolate a broader perspective while maintaining a personal (and subjective) bent to world events.

The third comic, “How I Loved the War,” is not a piece of reportage on the first Persian Gulf conflict. Sacco was living in Germany during the during the period, and the comic that bears the title is an odd mixture of story elements that add up to something far different than the sum of their parts. Lunging back and forth between reflections on the build up to (and eventual enaction of) assault on Iraq, the author’s disintegrating long-distance romantic relationship, his relationship with a couple of Palestinian students, and Sacco’s selling of a self-designed anti-war t-shirt, the bric-a-brac style of storytelling imbeds an underlying message (political, personal, social, etc.) that belies its final panel and which I would take to be cathartic in the production of his later work.

Whether he is picturing himself naked and frail amongst a sea of U.S. soldiers or in a state of catatonic despair on his couch, the dominating theme of “How I Loved the War” is powerlessness. Sacco makes much of how he knew the war in Iraq was coming long before any bombs were dropped or any troops were deployed--indeed, for Sacco those civilian dead had already been turned to “mush” in his mind again and again before CNN had the opportunity to ignore that fact. But against the horror and paralysis of impending war, Joe has his own problems. Several times throughout the piece, he comments upon the scale of context in our understanding of tragedy and personal pain. For Sacco, his own inability to cope with the “open relationship” concept that he and his long-distance girlfriend had agreed upon runs correllary to his obsessive watching of televised footage of the bombing.

In these depictions of himself relating to both other people (his absent girlfriend, for example) and the larger world events that bombard his imagination, Joe Sacco takes two distinctive tactics. On one side, he openly displays his own lack of normative masculine traits via nakedness and the size of himself in contrast to larger, more powerful men--the soldiers in one instance, and a German who hoists him from his seat next to an attractive girl in another. On the other side (though sometimes concurrently) he bolsters himself with finger-wagging indictments American foreign policy. That same normative masculinity, in my opinion, gives rise to the kind of world ventures that result in thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties. This is explicit in his interactions with the Palestinian student, and also plays an important (if subtle) part of his interaction with the t-shirt makers. None of these depictions of himself lend an attractive or romantic quality to Joe Sacco.

With regards to his depictions of his own masculinity and righteous pomposity, Sacco draws a sharp divide between how he understands his position in the world versus the way that Michael Herr’s self-depiction works in “Dispatches.” While Herr constantly doubles back against his himself as he examines the conflicts that arise from being a correspondent among the grunts, there is a decided lack of women and civilians (aside from the other correspondents) to give any kind of context as to a fuller measure of the scale of what is being affected in a war. Although Sacco is not technically covering the Gulf War as a correspondent in “How I Loved the War,” the elements point towards an awareness of the stakes of masculinity and foreign policy that are decidedly lacking in Herr.

Formally, the piece “How I Loved the War” is also quite different from the preceding two that I analyzed. Sacco employs a much wider variety of panel constructions, drawing styles, and perspectives to accomodate the various threads of his story. Particularly effective is the way in which a page can contain an overload of information, with no stable panel construction to direct the reader, which I see as corroborating the confusion and paranoia that Sacco as narrator feels as he wades through the complex of televised destruction, disintegrating personal relationships, and trying to empathize with other people’s suffering. Though the transitions are sometimes jarring and it seems at points to be a senseless mash, in the penultimate page of the comic is revealing in its summation of the underlying theme of the piece. Sacco jumps in three panels between a phone call with his girlfriend, his obsession with the televised war, and the Palestinian. Joe has regained his long-distance relationship and come to terms with the t.v. set, but the Palestinian throws a wrench into the mix. A few days after the Gulf conflict ends, Sacco asks him how he feels about this fact. Ali (the students name) replies, “You cannot imagine how I feel.” Sacco responds in the over-narration in agreement.

Though the final page hails back to some of the triteness of Sacco’s war-obsessed persona (he gets paid for his t-shirt) as a reader, “How I Loved the War” takes on a different meaning when it is placed in context with the other two pieces I looked at, as well as the fact that I know that shortly after completely this comic, Sacco in fact went to Palestine and produced a remarkable book that someone as esteemable in these things as Edward Said felt compelled to write the introduction. Though the three “experiments” examined above are self-contained, in the context of Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and The Fixer, it would seem that they are not fully realized. What Sacco does in these pieces is to synthesize the elements of “When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People,” “More Women, More Children, More Quickly,” and “How I Loved the War,” with other formal devices in the framework of on-the-scene reportage.

Sacco’s project, which I believe begins with the three comics that I examined, is not without its antecendents. Whether one chooses to begin a genealogy with the 1890s or the 1950s, there are certainly ways of historicizing and contextualizing how Palestine and the later books can be understood as cultural materials. In the 1890s, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer introduced comics into their newspapers as a means of garnering working-class readers. In point of fact, what is known as “yellow journalism” owes its origins to the first commercial comic in American newspapers, R.F. Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid.” Additionally, Hearst sent the famed illustrator of the American West, Frederick Remington, to cover the conflict in Cuba that was to become the Spanish-American War. Remington was asked to provide illustrations for stories on the conflict. In what is perhaps the most famous bit of journalistic ephemera, in an exchange between Remington and Hearst that began with Remington’s request to return home (he supposedly could not find anything worth reporting), only to be followed by Hearst’s infamous reply, “You supply the pictures, and I’ll supply the war.” The actual existence of that exchange becomes negligable (if highly metaphoric) when contrasted with the history of images of conflict that dominate the twentieth century. Although photography quickly replaced illustration as the dominant mode of newspaper imagery, it no doubt maintained its significance as a means of influencing public opinion. The apex of this is doubtlessly the Vietnam war, when the images of combat (particularly My Lai) proved instrumental in bringing about a shift away from supporting involvement in South East Asia

This genealogy is supplemented when one refers to a quote from Art Spiegelman (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Maus”) in which he says, “In a world where Photoshop has outed the photographer to be a liar, one can now allow artists to return to their original functions--as reporters.” Sacco seems to concur with the general thesis that the mainstream news media distorts images to suit their own ends (a sentiment theorized at length by Jean Baudrillard in his book, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”) when he depicts himself decrying the “file footage” being used again and again on television to denote entirely different events. What I think is important is to see Spiegelman’s quote as a complication--a rather ironic one, I think--when juxtaposed with the Hearst/Pulitzer scenario.

Outside of the realm of journalism, the history of comics themselves provides a fruitful counter-narrative into which Joe Sacco squarely falls. Beggining in the early 1950s, Harvey Kurtzman began crafting a series of comics (“Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat”) for E.C. Comics that depicted the effects of war on soldiers within a liberal-humanist morality frame. Kurtzman would later go on to found MAD magazine, and in turn inspire the entire generation of 1960s “underground” comic artists (R. Crumb and Bill Griffith of “Zippy the Pinhead” are those most recognizable) who in turn brought about the 1980s and 1990s renaissance of which Spiegelman and Joe Sacco are some of the most heralded propents.

The story of E.C. Comics is illuminating in itself for the place which non-superhero comics occupy in American culture today. Although the majority of their output was quite lurid (it inspired the infamous comics “Code” and Frederic Wertham book “The Seduction of the Innocent” which effectively put them out of business) in its horror, crime, and science-fiction stories, within the history of American comics, E.C. can be understood as a kind of late-adolescence which, though still quite juvenile in most cases, distanced itself from the post-Superman era, whose most sophisticated take on war can be reduced to Captain America punching Hitler in the nose. The end of E.C. Comics brought to an end the maturing of comics as form within American popular culture and effectively drove it to the margins outside the conventional history of the medium, though the counter-narrative that runs through examples like Crumb, Spiegelman, and Sacco provide a rich source of alternative discourses in a specific (though not popular) strain of American culture.

In a class discussion I recently heard someone describe history writing as, "Storytelling with evidence." If you follow the standard procedure of seeing journalism as the history writing of the present, then it seems prescient to understand that the storytelling aspect of that equation receive its due share of emphasis and recognition. This is one of the lessons of "New Journalism." In the embrace of the subjective experience of the author vis-a-vis the subject, the processes of narrative construction are raised to the forefront. In this rhetorical move, the reader is asked to reflect not just on position of the author, but on their own position within the framework of information dissemination. Comics seem to me particularly apt at drawing out this response, since they are able to break up the structural form visually and represent elements of the story that are unavailable to print, film, or photography; for instance, in Sacco's work the face someone being interviewed will dominate a frame with an exaggerated expression that relays and heightens the emotional content of the speech bubble. Although punctuation and portraiture can aspire to this kind of emphasis, the comic has the benefit over film in that it is an active medium requiring the reader to sort between text and subtext against the passivity of viewing. In its stead, Sacco’s work provides an example of how information and narrative can be relayed and which, even when evidenciary, calls upon the reader to understand the factual data as filtered through the subjective position.

Although I believe the comic as a form to possess enormous potential in relaying complex information to the reader, there are certain shortcomings that need to be acknowledged. Politically, my own urge is to understand this as a popular form that (with examples like Sacco) has the capability of reframing the reader's perceptions of complicated cultural and political relationships in a positive manner, I must admit that the reality of the position of comics in America renders this argument largely untrue. Stuart Hall addresses the problem of "popular culture" insightfully when he argues that much of what is understood as working-class or popular culture is in fact a synthesis between the cultural production of the bourgeois and working-class desires. (Hall, ) Comics historically have often fallen into this territory; indeed, the history of comic and "yellow journalism" would support this. Unfortunately, given the cost and availability of what is called (for lack of a better phrase) "serious, adult" comics, the purchasing public has fallen within the sphere of the educated middle-class, particularly those with a large disposable income and cultural cachet. Furthermore, I would characterize this demographic as being largely white and best summed up as kind of "hipster global tourist"; more succinctly, this group could be understood to be an idealized "Clash fan." Like the British punk band, this group can appropriate diverse cultural forms (often Third World, working-class, or generically "minority") which are purchaseable as commodities--records and other cultural material downgrade the need for actual, physical travel--and manipulate them into left-leaning cultural and political positions. The ethics and effects of such appropriations are too complicated to discuss at length here, and this characterization of American readers of "serious, adult" comics is not totalizing. What I want to emphasize, however, is that this discussion in no way pertains to Sacco's work as an "authentic, popular form." I have tried to avoid much of this by implicating myself as a reader within the discussion; this implication extends to the generalizing claims about the audience for Sacco's comics.

Nonetheless, the potential of the comics medium remains. The existence of powerful counter-narratives and alternative media within American culture, though limited, is heartening in that it beckons the consumer of such cultural material to disseminate the ideas and ideology of the counter-narrative and, perhaps, inspires the production and proliferation of more like them.

Radio, Hollow Be Thy Name

2005-04-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

I'm going to admit something.

Something to myself, and to anybody who happens to be reading this blog.

I am totally fascinated by John Tesh's radio show.

This is not a "Ha, Ha, isn't John Tesh a fucking joke" sort of fascination.

This is the kind of fascination that goes beyond irony or mockery.

Example: I was driving in my car last night and I switched to 95.1 FM on the radio dial. I realized after a few minutes that this in fact was the radio show (I think it starts at 8 o'clock or something) that John Tesh hosts. After a few very unremarkable songs, John comes on himself and takes a caller.

The caller identified himself as a fan of the show, and a truck driver.

He then proceeded to tell John that he was on the road six days a week and that he was having trouble finding someone to share his life with. Then he asked if maybe John Tesh had some advice for him to help out in this matter. Although he didn't say it directly, the tone of his voice suggested such sincere loneliness and faith in John Tesh's ability to aid this that I had to stop myself from turning the dial for shame.

John Tesh told the man that he would get together with his writers and researchers and that they would try and come up with something to help the man, and everyone else too who may be afflicted by similar problems.

What is so odd is that I actually believe him when he says this. John Tesh has some sort of thing that he says periodically, like "I want you all to be healthy and happy." That's not a direct quote or anything. But he has stuff about dealing with kids, about faith, about all sorts of stuff that I typically find incredible disdain for...and there is a weird Christian undertone to the whole thing. Not like "700 Club" Christian stuff, just...really, really earnest.

I think that's the word for the whole thing. John Tesh presents this positive, earnest radio show to (presumably) a lot of people who happen to be listening at night...probably in their cars or trucks, as the case may be.

The music. Oh man, I can't believe what a weird soundtrack this radio show provides. It's like if you've ever been to a real typical wedding (maybe just in the Midwest, but that's all I have to go on) and there's a DJ playing the reception. The first things that the DJ plays are completely off the radar; nobody is paying any attention while everbody shuffles into the rented hall and your uncles start getting down with the free beer. Then sometime during dinner and going on through cake cutting and then the dancing, the music takes a real sharp turn. Stuff like "Lady in Red" and other very sentimental synth-romance songs come on. It gets kind of heavy, like a lot of power ballades without the misogyny. Then comes the novelty songs and risque stuff (hey, all that beer-energy has to go somewhere) when they play "YMCA" and Marvin Sease's immortal "Strokin'". But that's all later. That stuff they play when the grandparents are still in the room, that is exactly the kind of music that John Tesh plays. It's "nice."

I don't want that quotation around the word to imply that I think that this is mock-worthy stuff. Maybe it is, but I just can't bring myself to do it. It's sort of like that sequence in the movie "Primary Colors" where Kathy Bates and the black campaign organizer go out to dig up dirt on their primary opponent. The guy had quit politics back in the 70s to (he claimed) spend more time with his family. The real story is that while he was governor of Florida, he had developed a bit of a problem with cocaine. The cocaine power-trip that he was on led to a couple of homosexual encounters with a guy who later went to prison and contracted HIV. Kathy Bates, having dug up the most destructive dirt possible on any political candidate (though other than the drug use, he was uncorrupted politically) decides that there is no possible way that they can use it...because it's just too human and awful.

That's how the John Tesh Radio Show makes me feel.

3-Color Pulp Glory

2005-04-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Harvey Kurtzman.

Although to my knowledge they have never been reprinted (other than a few individual stories here and there) Harvey Kurtzman was responsible for producing two titles for E.C. comics during the very end of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s. These books were called "Two-Fisted Tales" and "Frontline Combat." Although they were not the first comic books to deal directly with war (as opposed to just having a superhero battle Nazis) they took a decidely different tact than any of their predecessors or contemporaries.

Kurtzman's comics were a kind of humanist morality tale; the told the story of the real cost and suffering afforded to both the Americans and their opponents. Originally conceived in much the same vein as other comics of the period (the title "Two-Fisted Tales," which was a throw back to this original incarnation indicates this) Kurtman radically reconfigured his message in response to the Korean conflict. Needless to say, these comics were not among the bestsellers of the period.

They do, however, fall into an odd alternate history of the comics medium. Being produced as they were by E.C. Comics (originally standing for "Educational" and then "Entertaining" or "Entertainment" Comics) the books were part of a publishing empire that is perhaps the most legendary of the post-war boom. Aside from Kurtzman's work, the most famous titles among E.C.'s line were "Tales From the Crypt" and "The Vault of Horror." In addition to the horror stuff, E.C. published a great deal of science fiction, crime, and adventure-type of books. It was the crime and horror end of their catalogue that got them in trouble in the middle of the decade. Due in part to Frederic Wertham's book "The Seduction of the Innocent," the United States Congress held comittee meetings to discuss the negative impact of the lurid stuff upon the mind of impressionable youngsters. In response to these probes, most of the comic book publishers adhered to a self-policing "Code" that barred exactly the type of "heroin syringe in the eye" and cannibalism elements that were E.C.'s bread and butter.

E.C. found itself slipping in sales, since it did not accept the code, and because retailers refused to carry their titles. In the grand scheme of things, E.C. can probably be seen as the comic book company that tried to push the content out of early adolescence (see also Superman) and into a more mature arena. Granted, the stuff was pretty fucking juvenile. But it was yards more sophisticated than anything else anybody was doing. But the demise of E.C. would not be total.

Since Kurtzman's war titles were selling so poorly (and probably cause he needed the money) he was encouraged to start up a new comic that might supplement his income. It was to be a humor title. And, it was additionally to be manufactured as magazine-sized glossy, rather than a comic book. Although this didn't happen initially, it certainly worked to circumvent the restrictions of the Code.

This magazine was, of course, MAD.

MAD magazine has gotten a lot of press over the years for being a kind of "revolutionary" cultural document. I have to admit, I don't have the cash to shell out for reprints of all the early issues (Kurtzman abandoned the title after a few years, though his helmsmanship is said to have produced the greatest examples of the magazine) I have seen enough to coincide with my "growing" pangs theory about E.C. comics generally. This was not a magazine for children. Kurtzman, after creating MAD, would go on to other more "adult" projects before finally landing at Playboy where he and Will Elder created the long-running "Little Annie Fanny" series.

Kurtzman's brand of satire had an enormous influence. Most so-called "underground" comic artists of the 1960s cited him as a prime antecendet to their own work. This included both Robert Crumb (too many titles to list, really. And besides, you should already know who he is.) and Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead). These group of artists--much heralded today--had a profound impact on the second generation of "alternative" comic artists. These people include the aforementioned Art Spiegelman and Los Bros. Hernandez, as well as Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Eightball), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, Quimby the Mouse, Acme Comic Novelty Library) and Joe Sacco.

There is also another interesting figure who fits sort of between these two groups of comic artists. Harvey Pekar, who has written the comic "American Splendor" (though it is drawn by others, most recognizably R. Crumb) since the 1970s. He specializes in first person storytelling drawn from his own life. In some ways this is not antithetical to Crumb's work, but Pekar tends more towards the banal, everyday, and the realistic...as opposed to Crumb, whose first person or pseudonymous work is quite often about his outsized sexual neurosis.

This alternate history of comic books (starting with E.C.) is something that I think is relatively important in grounding how we can understand Joe Sacco's work in the context of his chosen medium. Anyway, all of the things that I've mentioned in this post are well worth checking out. If you're lucky, you'll have a decent public or university library nearby that has the werewithal to get ahold of some examples of this stuff. Sadly, UVA does not. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this aspect of comics (as well as some really exciting stuff about 30s era Dick Tracy) in future posts.

Sub-Continental

2005-04-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

Although I suspect that anyone who is reading this blog already knows this address, here's my friend Shawn's blog...I am going to put it up in the sidebar whenever I get the motivation to scroll through all that fucking code in the template. Shawn is living in India and working for the British government, oddly enough in this post colonial era. Anyway, he has pictures, musings, and an unhealthy dose of pop culture junk thrown in for good measure

All Blogs Go to Heaven

Another Link to Stuff about Music A/O Theorizing Post-Adolescent Males

2005-04-17T23:40:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot to include this one:

Puritan Blister

The above is a link to William Bowers's blog. In case you are not a regular reader of Pitchfork or somebody who pays attention to who writes articles in music mags, William Bowers is a regular contributer to Pitchfork. He has a column every month that I really like called "Puritan Blister," just like the blog. Apparently, he lives in Florida somewhere and teaches English Lit. at a community college, in addition to writing about music. He has a book coming out later this year called "All We Read Is Freaks." His blog has a lot of MP3s and random pictures thrown in for good measure. Anyway, I like his column.

Something Slightly Less Draining

2005-04-17T23:13:00.000-07:00

In light of the very recent long-ass post that isn't even really that close to being finished, here's a link to a site that I found that has a decent supply free MP3's of mid-sixties American garage bands...a genre a/o subject that I have an abiding love for.

Guys Who Really Wanted Out of Palo Alto So They Pretended They Were British

Also, due to the fact that I am moving to Texas soon, I am compliling a list of two things:

1. Bands or performers from Texas, and more specifically, from Austin

2. Garage bands from the 1960s whose members were all or in part of Hispanic descent. There are actually a lot more of these than you'd think...including all the members of ? and the Mysterians, of timeless "96 Tears" fame.

Any suggestions for these lists would be appreciated.

And, not surprisingly, I bought the just-released "Rock Snob's Dictionary." Although I have read the first two installments of this ongoing series in the music issue of Vanity Fair, I was slightly disappointed by the book itself. On the one hand, I have to slap myself on the back for having a well-over 80% recognition for every entry in the book. On the other, I was kinda hoping for something that would usher in some new stuff that I hadn't heard of yet. Unless I want to listen to the guy who composed Federico Fellini's soundtracks, this book didn't do it for me. Anyway, you can check out the book's website here.

There's a section on the site called the "Nitpicker's Corner" where readers of the book are encouraged to present their gripes about the shortcomings of the slender volume. Greil Marcus, who can be single-handedly attributed with foisting a number of the entries upon the public, has already posted twice. I'm debating whether or not to enter into the fray over the origins of "country rock," which SOME people think belongs to Gram Parson's and the Byrd's album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo." I could argue that the Beau Brummel's album "Bradley's Barn" (named for famed Nashville producer Owen Bradley) which predated "Sweetheart" by almost a year, is a strong contender. But then again, I could also argue that the song "White Lightning" which was written for George Jones by J.P. Richardson (aka the Big Bopper) beats them both out by at least a decade. Or whatever. I'm just saying.

Some Stuff about Comic Books, Journalism and Other Crap You May or May Not Be Interested In...

2005-04-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

Aside from getting into Texas, I have been intensely procrastinating with regards to writing and researching a couple of things that will wind up my semester here at UVA. The first of these is a project that I am doing for Prof. Eric Lott. Eric’s class is called “Anti-American Studies,” and I have chosen to do a paper about (ostensibly) the comic “journalist” Joe Sacco. I use the word “ostensibly” since I rarely if ever actually write “about” the topic that I have chosen. And as for the “journalist” part, its doubly difficult to describe someone who draws and writes comic stories as a journalist, at least in the sense that most people use it, what with all the 24-hour news channels and real-time updates of newspaper’s online versions.

At any rate, I’m trying to write this paper about Joe Sacco. Sacco has produced three book-length comics in the last ten years, and has also published numerous shorter pieces--some of which are collected in another book entitled “Notes From a Defeatist.” The other three books are non-fiction comics about some aspect of a “war torn” area of the world; one of them was about the Palestinians, and the other two were about some aspect of the Bosnian conflicts of the 1990’s.

Although I strongly recommend any of these books (“Palestine,” “Safe Area Gorazde,” and “The Fixer”) the fact that they are not particularly well known presents the initial problem for my paper. While comics were initiated at the turn of the century as a very popular, working-class medium that sold papers for William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, in recent years--aside from mostly tired newspaper syndicates and fanboy superhero stuff--comics themselves have become increasingly the psychic property of a group of middle-class, well-educated white people. While I understand that there are still some outstanding newer examples of newspaper comics (Boondocks, Get Your War On, etc.), that lighter “humor” stuff and superheroes are always gonna be the bread and butter of the industry, and that there are some great non-white comic artists (Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” comes w/ strong recommendations, as does anything by the Hernandez Bros. (“Love and Rockets”)...and I’m still working myself up to buying “King,” Ho Che Anderson’s long comic biography of Dr. Martin Luther King) a whole lot of serious, “adult” fare is marketed to a very particular audience. This includes Joe Sacco’s work. Explicitly, I don’t think that this has to be true. The comic medium works well because it is capable of delivering things that simple print (because of language barriers, etc.) is sometimes inadequate to do. This is one of the reasons that I love Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. In their “Love and Rockets” work, they manage to tell stories that are explicitly about Latin American culture, whether in small town Central America or East L.A., that reach for the Gabriel Garcia Marquez territory without succumbing to the “Chicano Literature” trap that, for me, indicates that a book is being consumed primarily by English department faculties and students who wish to “diversify” or add a “multicultural” element to their course offerings. In theory, I’m not opposed to this move. But on the other hand, the actual relevance of the form (big L “literature”) to the group being represented seems pretty fucking suspect.

Sacco is pretty accessible, I think. Although his books contain references to the band T. Rex and the WW I “trench poetry” of Wilfred Owen--knowledge of which screams “hipster college student”--the impact of the stories do not themselves depend upon the sharing of these cultural references. Not that I mind that they’re there...cause clearly I’m myself in the demographic that I’m criticizing.

Sacco’s comics work well, I think, for a number of reasons. First, they take full advantage of the kind of formal and aesthetic tools that comics offer. This includes the page-by-page panel layouts, the “expressive” qualities of the drawings, and the blend in other “genres” and mediums not necessarily associate with comics. This kind of “hybrid” activity, as I mentioned in a previous post, is something that I think can be particularly fruitful. In Sacco’s case, he manages to do both “expressive” type drawings and nearly photo-journalistic realism. He also draws heavily from the interview style of “personal history” that sort of began in the 1930s in the United States and finds one of its best examples in the work of Studs Terkel. Sacco also employs a technique most often associated with the “New Journalism” of the 1960s (Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson being the most famous examples) whereby he inserts himself, first-person, into the proceeding action that he records. His reactions to the events is quite important to the way that he tells the story. Plus, he seems to have a pretty decent handle on some complex (and at times obscure) history associated with his subjects.

That comics would be a journalistic enterprise is not, in a sense, a very new proposition. Just prior to the Spanish American War (our name for it...I’m sure the Cubans and the Philipinos would disagree) William Randolph Hearst sent the famed artist Frederick Remington (“The Bronco Buster” and about a million other “western” images that contribute to our general picture of that period) to Cuba to cover the burgeoning war, along with a writer. Remington, in one of the most famous pieces of journalistic ephemera, is said to have cabled Hearst to tell him that there was no war to be covered; he didn’t see anything worth drawing a picture of. Hearst infamous reply, “You supply the pictures, and I’ll supply the war” is often used as an example of the overwhelming power of the press (especially the so-called “yellow” press--another reference to comics, i.e. R.F. Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid”) to shape and sway the opinion of the public at large. Regardless of the fact that the Cubans had been fighting the Spanish for the better part of a decade and the “Who blew up the U.S.S. Maine?” controversy, the quote illustrates an awareness that images--and not words--were quickly ascending to primacy in the world of journalism.

Although photography was by the time of the Spanish American war nearly fifty years old, its usage in journalism was still quite limited, mostly for practical reasoning. Matthew Brady’s famous images of the Civil War belong more in the category of “documentary” than journalism, though that categorization is probably rather arbitrary. Even Jacob Riis ("How the Other Half Lives") and the social reformers of roughly the same period used photography in conjunction with printed books, rather than cheaply reproductions on newsprint. Part of the problem during this period is due, of course, to the cost of printing photographic images in quantity. The other was the size of the cameras themselves, as well as the cost of the enormous glass plates needed for each negative. This obstacle led a great many of the “documentary” photographers to stage their shots in order to make the best use of resources. Brady and Riis were both guilty of this. It wasn’t really until the WW I era that cameras became smaller and the printing press adapted to the medium that photography became such a mainstay. The 1930s were when this really began to flower, not only in the newspapers, but in various other “documentary” outlets like Life magazine and a coterie of government-funded projects. By WWII there were active combat photographers and people like Weegee in New York were taking photos of crime scenes and other news-worthy events as fast as they happened, to be printed in tomorrow’s edition.

(anyone who is interested should consult the books “Reading American Photographs” by Alan Trachtenberg, “The Real Thing” by Miles Orvell, and “Documentary Expression” by William Stott...prof. emeritus at UT Austin)

But the real pinnacle of the power of photography in journalism (and no doubt, in swaying public opinion) has to be the Vietnam War. And if there is an apex to the photography of that conflict, it has to be the images captured during the My Lai massacre by the Army photographer assigned to the unit responsible for the atrocity. I won’t discuss this episode in detail here, but you can find most of the photos online. Further research will lead you to the revered Seymour Hersh’s book drawn from his reports on the massacre (he broke the story nationally) as well as a reflection written by Joe Eszterhas (yeah, the guy who wrote “Showgirls”) who was working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer during the period. The Army photographer (whose name I sadly forget) had Joe broker the sale of his photos to the highest bidder. I think that this aspect of My Lai puts an interesting perspective on the history of the news story, especially since Hersh’s work is (quite rightfully, I think) regarded as some of the finest achievements in investigative journalism. Hersh's stuff can be found in "My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath." Eszterhas apparently makes no mention of this aspect of his career history in "Hollywood Animal," his memoir, but the piece can be found in the second volume of the Evergreen Review Reader, a compilation of the 1960s literary and cultural journal of the same name published by Grove Press.

But back to the comics. I think that all of this emphasis on truth and the image that follows along with photography and journalism is rendered quite ironic when Art Spiegelman (the guy who won a Pulitzer for his comic “Maus”) says that, “In a world where Photoshop has outed the photographer to be a liar, one can now allow artists to return to their original functions--as reporters.” Not wrong, but ironic, since the history of journalistic reportage via illustrations (or “comics” I suppose) is summarized quite nicely by exactly the opposite of Spiegelman’s truth-value assignment: even if it’s just a myth, even in the 1890’s we can understand that Frederick Remington was--in a sense--lying with his images. Of course, you could argue about the reinstatement of the “subjective” that we hold immediately for a drawing as opposed to a photo--and I’m not talking about some sort of Philistine, “take it at face value” sort of thing either. How can we expect that Remington’s or anybody’s drawings in the age BEFORE photo-journalism weren’t taken to be anything by “true” lies?

Anyway, there’s also a pretty interesting history that runs concurrent with this journalisic bit that has to do with comic book treatments of war. The comic book has a slightly shorter history than the newspaper strip. In general, comic books began their life in 1930s. Although the first comic books were little more than extended reprints of newspaper strips, in 1938 the granddaddy of all comic books made its debut, Action Comics #1. Superman. And yeah, I think Superman is kind of stupid, generally. But with the advent of the superhero and the long format, all of the rules for the medium changed. For the most part (excepting Dick Tracy and his ilk...which I am actually working on this semester as well) comics had been a primarily humor-based medium. This changed a great deal with Superman's appearance. Superheroes aimed at adolescent boys' power fantasies reigned supreme through the years of WWII in the comic book, though there was certainly a market for this type of fair in the youngest set of consumers (Archie and the Disney comics being the prime examples). As you might expect, most of the comics that came out during this period concerned themselves (when they concerned themselves with anything) with the issues of the coming war, or the midst of the war itself. Although I make no claim to being intimately familiar with the exploits of Captain America during this period, having seen enough examples of the stuff as well has the secondary literature written about it leads one to a pretty broad, sweeping assessment: These comic books were jingoistic, racist, propaganda vehicles. That’s about it. They way that they manifest these traits is at times interesting, but the above generally holds true.

That is, until Harvey Kurtzman’s work for E.C. comics in the early 1950s.

(considering the beginning of this post, you might have realized at this point that I’m actually writing out part of what I want to say in the ACTUAL PAPER that I am avoiding at the moment. This is true. Sorry if it’s kinda boring or esoteric or obscure or whatever. Actually, I’m not sorry at all. HA HA HA...anyway, this post is already pretty long, so I’ll try and do it in more than one installment. Until later....)

Buckles, Boots, and Beer

2005-04-13T08:49:00.000-07:00

So, I'm moving to Texas.

I accepted the University of Texas at Austin's offer yesterday. By the middle of this August, I will be living in Austin and I will be beginning work on a Ph.D. in American Studies.

Bully for me!

I know I haven't posted in a while, since I've been travelling and trying to catch up w/ current school work that went slack while I was visiting other schools. Anyway, I hope to have something up here again soon.

Oral examinations...It's NOT what you think

2005-03-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in Eric Lott's class, we had a grad student come in who delivered a sort of pseudo-lecture on the oral examinations that are required of all graduate students. Oral examinations are determined by first the student, who gives a list of self-selected materials that they wish to be tested on, and then the examiners, who decide how well the student is capable of extemporaneously speaking upon the books chosen. There's also (apparently) this nasty part of the process where a student's list gets kicked back and forth, because certain texts are not seen as fitting the desired parameters of the deciding faculty member.

There's a lot more to this, but my basic problem is this: in a few years, when it comes time to do this sort of thing myself, I am going to have a hard time not putting stuff like albums and movies on the list, as well as other non-canonical (and basically non-print based) on my list. For my own sake, more than anyone else's, I'm gonna try and put up a mock list here in the near future.

Dub Version

2005-03-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

I finally picked up the damn "Studio One Dub" cd. If Soul Jazz records weren't so fucking expensive, I'd probably just go ahead and buy whatever they're releasing, regardless of what it was and sight-unseen.

And yes, it's good.

If you don't know any of the Soul Jazz stuff, check out their page here.

The Studio One series is the one I'm most familiar with, although their other releases (New York Noise: Underground Dance Music 1978-82, and the odd "Chicago Soul" cd, among others) are really great. Aside from the Trojan records 3-cd sets, this is by far the best place to get non-album length Jamaican music from the sixties to the eighties.

A Few Things...

2005-03-22T12:17:00.000-08:00

First off...

If anyone is curious, I named this blog "Border Radio" after the radio stations that flourished on the southern side of the U.S. border with Mexico during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Usually designated with call letters beginning w/ "X", these stations operated outside of the jurisdiction of the fledgling FCC. They generally played an odd mixture of music, advertisement, and spiritual/self-help guidance. Although a few of them lasted well into the 1950s and '60s (when they influenced people like SDQ's Doug Sahm and the members of Los Lobos...even ZZ Top has a song about the "X" stations), the majority of them were wiped out by an agreement between the Mexican and American governments regarding broadcasting rights.

The most notorious of all "X" stations was XERA, just south of Del Rio, Texas. Run by a "Dr." John Brinkley, at its peak it boasted a 500,000 watt signal that could easily be heard in Chicago and--if the weather was right--all the way up into Canada. By contrast, the Grand Ole Opry (one of the U.S. most powerful broadcasting signals) only put out about 50,000 watts.

John Brinkley, aside from putting a number of important country performers on-air (The Carter Family enjoyed a tenure at his station after their recording career had begun to lag)was also a snake-oil salesman of the highest degree. Except he wasn't selling snake-oil. Brinkley used the advertising power of his station to entice impotent men to have goat glands grafted onto their testicles. There's something in a Faulkner novel about this, I believe. Anyway, Brinkley had begun his medical practice (uhhhh...) slash broadcasting business in Kansas, where the authorities eventually got wise and tried to strip him of his medical license. Incensed, Brinkley initiated a call for a write-in for himself as governor in the upcoming election. Several sources I have read tend to agree that Brinkley probably won the popular vote, though his constituency's mispelling of his name disqualified enough ballots to uphold the balance of power. Apparently Brinkley even managed to carry a couple of counties in Oklahoma. Populist politics, quackery, mass media, country music...all with a little outlaw charm. Huey Long, eat your heart out.

(Brinkley's character type is going to be a part of my master's thesis on O Brother Where Art Thou?, since the character Pappy O'Daniel--and his opponent--ring as powerful types at play in the South during the 1930s. This includes Louisiana governor Huey Long, Texas governor--and real-life author of "You Are My Sunshine"--Pappy O'Daniel, and Brinkley himself.)

Adrian Tomine:

I find myself willing to accept certain storytelling conventions in comic form that I would gag on if they were in print. As quite a few people who might be reading this blog are aware, I have very little tolerance for most of what passes as fiction in the contemporary era. And truth be told, Tomine's "Summer Blonde" collection of stories is pretty much on par with a lot of what I hate about contemporary fiction. "Oh the alienation" plot structures, adolescents and parent-issues, profound epiphanies in the banal...all of this shit.

Tomine is a pretty excellent artist, as far as drawing goes. Really similar to Daniel Clowes in a lot of ways, but not at all surreal in the way Clowes very often can be. The stories are taut (some reviewer inevitably drew comparisons to Raymond Carver), not-quite-resolved character studies. So I guess the generic Carver references maybe weren't off base.

I read about Tomine (who has been publishing his one-man comic "Optic Nerve" since about 1990) through the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern volume that Chris Ware edited and I recognized his artwork from The New Yorker. Since, like Ware and Clowes, Tomine's work comes primarily from a not-readily available comic (Have you ever looked for this stuff in a comic book store? Good luck.) the way I usually encounter it is through a bound collection like "Summer Blonde." This makes it somewhat difficult to ascertain exactly when these stories were done in the artist's career...maybe they've altered the content of their overall work since initial publication, maybe not. I read this stuff primarily because it's something that doesn't fall as easily into my "hobbies and pastimes become work" ethos. Their kind of fluffy--if in a serious sort of way. I usually try to read them through a few times, since it takes adjusting not to just get the story and not skim the artwork. But I don't know whether I'll purchase another Tomine piece...the jury's still out on that one. But the Hornby quote on the back doesn't help its case.

Yes, I have conflicted opinions about the McSweeney's publishing empire. Who would have thought?

And, for future reference:

I read a bit of the book "Guerilla Radio" today. It's a really interesting take on cultural resistance and offers up what I assume to be a pretty good history of the Bosnian conflict concurrently with its subject matter. It did, however, have me begging the question: Is XXX (starring Vin Diesel) actually in some weird way an accurate take on post-Soviet Eastern Europe?

And, by proxy, are machismo-laden action flicks sources of alternate political and historical information? I'm thinking here about Rambo III, when the Colonel tells the Russian commander that "You'll never beat these people (the Afghanis) because they've been invaded by everyone since Alexander the Great and they're still here." Prophetic? Yeah, well, I'll have more to say about this.

And the working title for my piece about politics and country music is "Why the South is a Disease." It's already time to leave Charlottesville, I think. Not that the (possible) move to Texas is really all that much of an improvement, geography-wise. But at least it'll be Austin and not Houston.

Later.

A Cheeky Fellow

2005-03-21T19:15:00.000-08:00

In the earlier post on Gwen Stefani vs. M.I.A. (by way of Blondie) I mentioned an album that Malcolm McLaren put out in the early eighties called "Duck Rock." I feel that I should probably admit that before today, I had only listened to this album via digital files, and had not as yet actually possessed the album as a physical entity.

So I got "Duck Rock" in the mail today.

Granted, it is in cd format and not in lp as the original would have been. But having the cd with its accompanying artwork and liner notes complicates the whole damn thing in ways that I hadn't even expected.

For one thing, there's the artwork. Now I can't remember who did the radio boombox assemblage pictured on the cover (and I can't seem to be bothered to go look it up at the moment) but the rest of the artwork is done by Dondi and Keith Haring.

To top it off, the whole fucking thing is dedicated to Harry K. McClintock, and Malcolm notes that the album was--for him--a rediscovery of "the roots of rock and roll."

First off, Mr. McClintock. If you are unfamiliar w/ his name, perhaps he would be better known by his nickname, "Haywire Mac" McClintock. Still unfamiliar? Perhaps you have heard the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" on the O Brother Where Art Thou? sountrack. Or maybe you're just not as into early twentieth century radicals as I am . Anyway, Mr. McClintock was a songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World (the I.W.W. or the Wobblies) during the teens and twenties in the United States. Though perhaps not as celebrated as his contemporary Joe Hill (I refer anyone unfamiliar with the Wobblies or Joe Hill to my website project linked in a previous post) McClintock certainly holds a hallowed place in the tradition of radical songwriters. Malcolm McLaren decided to dedicate this fucking album to THAT guy.

And then the thing is illustrated by Dondi (super-important old school graffiti artist) and Keith Haring, the gay white b-boy artist.

This is on top of the fact that this album cops from all sorts of "world" music styles.

It's increasingly hard to tell how to make the ethical and aesthetic distinctions between the varieties of cultural appropriation. Especially with regards to something that sounds quite joyous. I highly recommend listening to this album if you can get ahold of a copy, both because it's an interesting document and because it's a pretty decent album to listen to.

Also:

I got in the mail today (this post was started yesterday and only finished today) this book from amazon.com called "Guerilla Radio: Rock and Roll and Serbia's Underground Resistance." It's about a pirate radio station that was on-air in Belgrade during Slobodan Milosevic's reign. (I realize I'm missing the requisite Slavic accent marks). I bought the book as part of my project on the comic-journalist Joe Sacco, who did two book-length pieces--among others--on the Bosnian conflict. After I read it, I may manage to post up some thoughts about it...since it's not dissimilar to origins of the title of this blog.

Later: Adrian Tomine's "Summer Blonde" graphic novel; why I called this blog "Border Radio." And maybe I'll get some stuff up about country music. Dammit, this is getting much more complicated.

Just some guy...

2005-03-21T11:05:00.000-08:00

I was sitting on the pedestrian mall yesterday here in Charlottesville, eating lunch, and there was this elderly black man who was marching up and down the mall with a sign in his hand. The first few times he passed, it was a little difficult to exact precisely what he was shouting about. He was trim and neatly dressed, so initially i assumed he was a preacher of some sort. Maybe a Nation of Islam member, though he was lacking the standard (I think, anyway) bow tie. He was wearing a suit, and he was carrying a sign that memorialized someone named "James Muhammed" who had (apparently) recently passed away. After paying a little closer attention to what he was saying, I began to gather that he was not in all likelihood affiliated with any specific chucrch or institution, since his references were to both Allah and God. When he passed by for maybe the third time, I heard him singing deeply and reverentially the "Ballad of Joe Hill." And I noticed that beneath his current sign (and only visible from bleed-through on the back) and older sign had read "Your Policy of Hegemony Stinks!"

When I walked down the mall later to go back to my car, he was standing at one of the "intersection" type things and proclaiming that "James Muhammed did all that he could, all that he could was all James Muhammed did."

I don't really wanna offer up any analysis on this event. I just thought that it was interesting...and that maybe it was something somebody else might be interested in as well.

When he sang "The Ballad of Joe Hill" I smiled all the way up from my chest.

I don't know whether...

2005-03-16T23:20:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to use this blog as a forum to post ideas and drafts of essays that I have rattling around in my head as I walk between classes and while I smoke cigarettes. This last part indicates that I devote a lot of time to this sort of thing. Anyway...two things:

I am working on a massive post about country music right now, and I promise it will be as circuitous as the previous post about Gwen Stefani and M.I.A.

I do not know whether anyone is reading this or not...if you are, I would really appreciate some kinda commentary, either in the comments sections, or if you know my e-mail address (and anybody whom I sent a link to inevitably does) send it to that. I realize that parts of things that I am posting are not well-explained and that there are sort of shorthand notes to myself in them. Nevertheless, I'd appreciate some feedback.

Also:

Does anyone read the magazine The Believer? Generally, I am very wary of McSweeney's type of stuff. On the other hand, the last two issues of this magazine have had some really interesting articles about the legacy of the Weathermen, Aquariums, urban renewal and class conflict, and some great treatments of films and genre-novels. Was I wrong about the whole thing? Nick Hornby's column is just the kind of bullshit in-joke and aggrandizement that I detest about McSweeney's and Dave Eggers generally, but the quality of writing and breadth of scope seem quite impressive in The Believer. I've decided to start reading magazines...don't ask me why I "decide" things like this. I've been reading The Wire regularly and I'm anticipating the next issue of The Oxford American (congratulations, Katherine). Any other suggestions? I used to kinda be into Flaunt and Black Book, and I occassionally will pick up Rolling Stone or Interview (yes, I know), but I'm unsure of investing in a $5-$10 disposable without it having some kind of pedigree or strong recommender.

I hope to have the piece up about country as soon as possible, though I may stick something else up in the meantime.

I Get Sentimental...

2005-03-14T14:10:00.000-08:00

If you're interested, you can check out a website that I did last semester for my American Studies program here at UVA. It's not really posted on the larger umbrella site yet, and I can't vouch for how well the Quicktime and Flash elements are gonna work (streaming server problems), but here it is:

xroads.virginia.edu/~ma05/cline/splashpage.htm

Let me know if the link doesn't work...that is, presuming that anyone is actually reading these posts.

Although I am not entirely dissatisfied with the project, I can see that there are some major design flaws in the whole thing, as well as content and presentation issues that haven't really been resolved. My professor here told me that I was, "Wrestling with something that I couldn't quite get a handle on." I think that was a pretty valid criticism. Granted, this was my first serious web design project (there's another one, but it's password protected since it uses so many copyrighted audio files...sorry) but I can't help trying to reimagine ways in which I could add to the effectiveness of the message of the project. Some of the methodology that I'm thinking about right now I've laid out in an earlier post, but I wouldn't mind some feedback if you'd like to take the time to look at it. Thanks.

Women of the World Take Over (Maybe)

2005-03-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

I was inspired this morning by the Pitchfork interview with M.I.A. to finally download some of her stuff. I'd first heard about M.I.A. in an Interview magazine profile from an issue that I picked up in the airport on my way home from Franklin back to Charlottesville. Although I was intrigued by the idea of a Sri Lankan woman rhyming over (basically) a hip hop/Jamaican music hybrid--and doubly intrigued by the fact that her father had been involved in a revolutionary group--I put off listening to any of her stuff until now. It doesn't hurt that she is quite attractive. Pitchfork lays all this out before the interview begins (except maybe that last bit)which seems like a good idea, since it downplays the novelty end of her appeal. Maybe the shoulda mentioned something about her being attractive, just to slap boys like me in the face with our own fetishizing.

Anyway, I also happened to download the two big Gwen Stefani singles ("Rich Girl" and "What You Waiting For?")at the same time. I'm not sure how coincidental this choice was. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been thinking a lot about "world music" and processes of international cultural appropriation. What is the difference between M.I.A. and Gwen Stefani?

I don't just want to say that the cultural appropriation that Stefani perpetrates is unacceptable simply because she's white. Granted, Stefani (who is, in fact, quite wealthy) does carry on about "If I was a rich girl" while copping riffs from a musical about JEWISH peasants (holy shit!). And she makes nods to Japanese culture (the Harajuku girls) in way that would make Colonel Walter Kurtz proud (look at the cover of her damn album). Well, if Kurtz was blond southern California female with a penchant for high fashion. Also, let's not forget that hip hop makes some serious inroads here with a reprise of her collaboration with Eve and Dr. Dre ("Let Me Blow Your Mind"). But at base, I think that perhaps the thing that bothers me the most about Stefani's "Rich Girl" is that it may be little more than a vehicle for her L.A.M.B. ("Love Angel Music Baby," also the title of her album) clothing line.

Stefani can hardly "sell out." She's never really been in a position where her "underground" cachet was worth something in comparison to the lure of branding and marketing in order to further her (or her band's) career. I'm not even sure that I'm adamantly opposed to branding and marketing the trappings of pop stardom per se. In the end, it's all commerce, I suppose.

And it's not like Stefani doesn't have a precedent for this sort of thing. She name drops Vivienne Westwood, who--along with her then-husband Malcolm McLaren--was the proprietor of the London fashion boutique Sex. This shop was the famous birthplace of the Sex Pistols, a band that has been notoriously difficult to distinguish between being either a radical critique and mere commercial opportunism. It doesn't help matters when you consider the bands and projects that McLaren was involved with after the Sex Pistols broke up...first there was the "Duck Rock" album that utilitized various "World Music" styles (before there was such a term) as well as The World Famous Supreme Team, a New York-based hip hop group. Then there was Bow Wow Wow. Aside from being a staple of VH1's systematic program of nostalgia for/shallow mockery of fairly recent cultural artifacts, they were a band that had a decidely underage (she was 14) Tahitian lead singer pictured in the nude on the cover of their first album. But hey, you know, it was an homage to Eduard Manet. Malcolm McLaren then managed to do a lot of musical work whose sole purpose seems to have been to serve as background music in haute couture shops.

I used to think that Gwen Stefani and No Doubt were basically a new version of Blondie. Stefani a/o Debbie Harry serve as the visual identity of the band, and a couple of goofy looking guys with slightly stronger ties to subcultural authenticity made up the band. The band, of course, functions primarily by appropriating various sub-genres of music (garage bands, girl groups, disco, and reggae, in the case of Blondie; dancehall, ska, 80's New Wave (including Blondie) in the case of No Doubt) and then mass-marketing them to an audience whom no actual participant in those respective genres could ever have hoped to reach, now or in the past. Stefani's work with Eve and Dr. Dre a few years ago just expanded the available material the blond pop princess had at her disposal to hip hop.

But then again, I'm not really sure if that's fair to Blondie. Or Debbie Harry, for that matter. Undoubtedly, Blondie succeeded in large part because their visual identity was far more palatable than that of the sources of their inspiration. Disco may have sucked for a lot of people, but it was probably a lot easier to stomach with Debbie Harry singing rather than Grace Jones. And the earlier incarnation of Blondie (the Stilettos) were conceived of as a feminist critique in the guise of a 60's style girl group. They were one of the first bands to play at CBGB's. Plus, Chris Stein (Blondie's guitarist, main songwriter, and one-time husband of Debbie Harry) contributed some significant parts to the Wildstyle soundtrack--a document inestimably important to the development of hip hop. They name-drop Fab 5 Freddie in "The Rapture" for christsake. What then, makes No Doubt/Gwen Stefani different than Blondie/Debbie Harry?

I recently watched the finally-released (how many people knew enough about it to "anxiously await" it for almost 25 years?) movie, Downtown 81. As a movie, it's not particularly good. As a document, it is perhaps more revealing than the filmmakers intended. But then again, maybe not. By following the painter and musician Jean Michel Basquiat around during the course of a single dramatized day, the viewers of the film are afforded a glimpse into the Lower East Side in New York in the late 70's/early 80's when (it would seem) it was a particularly rich breeding ground for cross-cultural pollination. As someone with an interest in Basquiat's work, graffiti, early hip hop, and No Wave-era music, this would be reason enough to watch the film. But, near the end of the movie, Basquiat encounters an old bum--a woman--who promises to give him a wish should he choose to kiss her. In a moment of hesitant benevolence, Basquiat aquiesces, and the hag turns into none other than Debbie Harry. She gives him a suitcase full of money, and he disappears into the night, full of the freedom that all that cash allows. At first I thought this was just and absurd flight of fantasy. Then I realized, as the fictional Tony Wilson says in "24 Hour Party People," that, "This actually happened." By 1981, Basquiat was well on his way to fame and fortune as a painter, aided in no small part by the the patronage of white people like the wealthy woman who agrees to buy one of his paintings in the film. And let's not forget Warhol's role in all of this. What the scene with Harry demonstrates is the elevation of these sorts of transactions to a symbolic level. On her own, Harry is powerless. But given the benevolence of her (very black and very poor) prince, she morphs into a beautiful woman with incredible power. And the residual effect of this is to make Basquiat quite rich.

Was Harry aware of this (possible) underlying message? In one of the bonus features on the dvd, the writer of the film (Glen O'Brien) mentions the success of Blondie's single "Heart of Glass" in the charts, on a cable access show (called "TV Party") that he hosted during the period. The featured guest of this particular program--which ran in 1979, two years earlier than the movie-- is none other than Jean Michel Basquiat, making one of his first public appearances while he was still doing his "SAMO" graffiti illegally around New York City.

While I think that this is particularly interesting as a coincidence, I am tempted to dismiss it as apocrypha. If Harry was aware of this symbolic (and eventually, quite real) transaction, then it makes her work with Blondie in some ways subversive. Certainly, O'Brien seems to be celebrating the success of Blondie, rather than deriding them for "selling out." Is Blondie authenticated and absolved by the subculture? Does their success invigorate rather than discourage their (former) Lower East Side peers, since effectively they now have a "man on the inside"?

My concern with this anecdotal bit of evidence being apocryphal is rooted in what I think is the major flaws of a book that deals almost entirely in that same kind of material, Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces." When I first read Marcus's book, I was stunned by the imaginative leaps and associative links that he made between Dada, Situationism, and the Sex Pistols...among others. While I still admire the method that he uses to present is ideas, I think that "Lipstick Traces" is a little overeager to see the Sex Pistols as a phenomena that constituted a radical critique. There is certainly that aspect at play in the Sex Pistols, but there is also the undeniable element of rank commercialism and exploitation. No, the Sex Pistols never got as big as the Rolling Stones. But what seems more important than the question of whether or not they were subversive or opportunistic (and Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon nee Rotten will argue both sides, accusing the other of the greater sin) but how they became such an excellent vehicle for carrying a whole complex set of ideas about cultural resistance. For many people and in many ways, they ARE PUNK. Lydon's post-Pistols band Public Image Limited may be more significant musically, but the Sex Pistols resonate as an idea in ways that no other contemporaneous band really challenges. Marcus uses the apocrypha ("Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?") that has sprung up since the band's demise to tell one side of this story. He does it pretty convincingly, but the Sex Pistols were a band that tried to make money, no matter how much Nietzchean "affirmation through negation" they happened to indulge in.

McLaren and Lydon are both guillty and laudable in this regard. They understand the stakes involved in the telling and re-telling of the Sex Pistols mythos, and they struggle to each come out on top.

But does Gwen Stefani actually know what she's doing?

It's tempting to writer her off (since she's pretty, blond, and female) as being unconscientious about her cultural appropriation. But it doesn't really work for me. Likewise, I don't know if the subcultural proximity that Stefani and No Doubt lack is made excusable in Blondie's very tangible ties to the subcultures present in New York during the 1970s-1980s. What is telling is how flippant Stefani's usage of her "exotic" source material is, as well as the essentially unapologetic demeanor she has regarding the clothing line/album connection. This makes her different from Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren, and the Sex Pistols, who vie for the morally superior position. This position doesn't seem to matter much to Gwen Stefani.

I started this long, long entry out about M.I.A., and then I ran into a question about the differences between her and Gwen Stefani and stopped there. Both performers employ subcultural styles that are (arguably) not their own. They make danceable music. They are both women, and rather attractive. Stefani is a blond Californian, and M.I.A. is Sri Lankan. M.I.A., who grew up as an immigrant in the East End of London with an absent, rebel father, certainly has stronger connections to subcultural authenticity. But rather than using Jamaican music and hip hop to promote a designer clothing line, M.I.A. makes dance music with an undeniable political bent. There are personal stakes involved, and as her video for "Sunshowers" demonstrated, is willing to court controversy if it is expedient to get her message across. This is not necessarily related to her being a minority. The politics of that position are always present, but that political struggle is couched in a beat. Gang of Four and the Clash were white British guys. They may have been working class (most of them weren't), but they were also a part of a culture that perpetrated an enormous empire. What they did was use a language that wasn't theirs by heritage and use it to say something about the conflicts that they perceived around them. Guilty of appropriation? Yes, of course. But it's almost unavoidable. By finding common cause with those people who don't share your cultural terrain, it's a positive step towards alleviating the exploitation that runs rampant in the world. Stefani may be managed by a firm that takes its name from a Clash song ("Rebel Waltz") but she doesn't seem to be intent on ever becoming "a", if not "the only band that matters," at least not if "mattering" entails more than turning culture into little more than a choice in consumption. M.I.A. sounds like she's trying to matter...and really, that's seems like the best anybody can do.

Authorship and Negotiation

2005-03-09T14:22:00.000-08:00

This is an in-progress essay that I'm working on where I'm trying to outline the best way to complete the work that I want to do:

Academic work is always-already personal. The choices inherent in which project or subject line is chosen as a pursuit of interest inevitably reveal individuated responses to a psychological situation related to exchanges and contradictions between what Lacan calls the “imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “real” forms of knowledge. The best academic work also is that which draws to the surface those “unknown knowns” that constitute the “unconscious,” in Freud’s terms, besides illuminating those things which are consciously known. This is applicable to materials which are not necessarily “academic” in nature, as well. When they are drawn into the sphere of academic discourse, by convention they assume the status of “primary text.” This convention, as well as the rhetorical and authoritative ones are what this essay is essentially concerned with; I am interested in the ways in which I understand those conventions to succeed or fail, and in possible alternative modes of presentation.
Whether a text assumed to be primary or critical (i.e. academic), the most important question to be asked of it is, “How well is this text doing the work that it is doing?” Implicit in this question, of course, is that a text does do work whenever it is “read.” The operational apparatuses needed to do this work (whether poorly or well) are the means by which a “reader” negotiates their way through the material. The process of reading a text then hinges on the text’s capability in revealing those “unknown knowns” and successfully reevaluating conscious knowledge, by whatever means are at the author’s disposal and the accessibility those operational apparatuses and individual elements to the reader’s own predispositions both conscious and unconscious.
Those predispositions are what ties together the author’s choice of subject and the preexisting knowledge of the reader. In some ways, I see the unconscious aspect of this knowledge as being akin to the post-Jungian idea of the “social unconscious,” which acknowledges a preexisting set of symbols shared among the members of a “culture” (a very loaded word, I know) that work in a different sphere than Jung’s more primal “collective unconscious.” Additionally, a text at its best does the work of revealing the space of negotiation between various kinds of conscious knowledge (again, perhaps best synthesized into Lacan’s triumvirate of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real), often by concretizing or illuminating the vagaries and organizing the fragments of that same “conscious” knowledge. This best succeeds when those particular methodologies and apparatuses are made explict, even if they remain subtle, lest the text become mere propaganda-i.e. an assumption of a level of authority undeserved or illusory. Which means containing as many contradictions and complexities as possible, while still managing to make the material meaningful to the reader. Understanding the eventual incomprehensibity of any topic under scrutiny (given the limitless complexities emanating from even the smallest kernel of an idea or real life situation) allows for a perspective shift to understanding each text as an “attempt” at parsing out meaning or knowledge. That attempt is the “work” that a text does. Again this works best when the methodologies are visible, since by proxy the whole of the text is denied absolute authority under these conditions. Pulling back the wizard’s curtain, I suppose.
The difficulty that I see is in the application of these ideal reader-writer conventions. Aside from economically predicated issues of distribution power and control, there are underlying assumptions in the idea of shared knowledge between author and reader that seem very tenuous in the current American cultural climate. Assumptions of culturally shared knowledge can easily morph into ideological hegemony and obscure some of the competing narratives to be found in larger cultural bodies. However, I think that there are ways to resist and negotiate between those authorial temptations and pitfalls, even if they are not entirely avoidable. Thus, even if the idea of a text being “anti-war” is utterly untenable, it is still worth attempting the create texts that do the work of opposing war by presenting material which employs widely accessible symbols and ideas, even if only to undermine the value of that shared knowledge in a way that is meaningful to the largest number of people possible.

These are some of the means by which I think that a text can maintain a “resistant” character:

Personal History/First-Person Subjective, especially when it contains a sufficient level of exposition about possible foreign or alien elements.

Eisensteinian “dialectical montage” or simple juxtaposition, especially when multiple dialectics are involved. This is not necessarily limited to visual presentations.

Heterogenous, “minoritized” presentation of multiple perspectives. Basically Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia” combined with Deleuze’s “minor literature.”

Qualities associated with the medium itself...expressive drawing in comics, montage in film, the “I” in writing, etc., as well as instances in which those qualities and modes of operation cross from one medium to another.

Employment of ideas, images, symbols, etc. (especially those which have a great deal of common currency) in such a way as to defamiliarize them, expose the nature of their construction or working value (what kind of work do they do?), and re-fashion the pieces in a usable manner. Sometimes this entails what the situationists would call “ detournement.” Other times, this could be something like Sleater-Kinney (an all-female rock group) performing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” in Washington, D.C. during George W. Bush’s first inaugaration. “Bricolage.” “Collage.” etc. etc. etc.

Usage and/or manipulation and subversion of genre norms.

Avoidance of strict adherence to single critical methods; alternately, in the adaption of critical methods and tools of analysis befitting the task of creating a particular text and/or attempting to analyze a event, subject, or text. Blending schools of thought.

If you made it this far without actually skipping ahead, congratulations. Let me know what you think about this stuff...

Field Recordings

2005-03-02T00:10:00.000-08:00

I am finding myself with little to do at work at the moment...and I figured that perhaps I would start a blog to take up some time. I'll try and skip all the "This is my first post!" whatnot. Anyway, I'm working in the Folklore Archive at the University of Virginia, transferring 5" reel-to-reel tapes onto a computer, then formatting them to be burned onto cd-r's. I am not paid very much to do this, but then again it really doesn't take a whole hell of a lot out of me, either. At any rate, I'm re-recording Bolivian music that I take to have been collected some time in the early 1970s. Some of it is pretty interesting, sorta like free jazz meets the Master Musicians of Jajouka for an Andean trance ceremony. With weird New Orleans-style funeral march elements. The rest of it...well, some of it is pretty hard to listen to, given the fact that the tapes are often deteriorated.

I have been trying to make a several mix tapes lately...both of them at the request of other people. This is starkly contrasted by the usual "mix-tapes-for-girls-who-probably-won't-appreciate-them" schtick that marks many of my past efforts. Also, I continue to use the word "tape" when in fact the compilation that I will be making will undoubtedly be produced on a cd. I just like the idea of analog. I like that I'm piddling around with old reel-to-reel tapes. They're obsolete, for the most part, but I like tapes. I won't go into any aesthetic details, but suffice it to say that I am a fan of archaic technology. I used to collect typewriters. There's just something more visceral about some of this stuff...which is ridiculous, since it's all technology and as such it is absurd to valorize one disembodied medium from another. But "analog" is undoubtedly a cool word.

Back to the mix tapes (cd's)

Shawn has asked me to produce for him a mix tape of music for his birthday. He didn't really make any qualifications other than hinting that liner notes might not be a bad idea. Since this comp is essentially unhindered by the strictures that govern mix-tapes-for-girls, I am confronted with an almost limitless possibility with regards to theme. Of course, I could just piece together songs that I "like" but that's boring as hell. I'm thinking of calling it "Situation No Win: Pop Music & Imperialism." I'm not gonna list the tracks I have in mind (since Shawn may read this before he gets his cd in India) but it will contain music that vaguely or directly relates to the processes of cultural appropriation on an international scale. "World Music" before there was such a thing, I guess.

That's all I really have to say at the moment on the topic of mix-tapes. I'm gonna post this thing that I wrote a couple of days ago that outlines some of my thoughts on how to do the work that I want to do...a rough draft of a "manifesto" I guess. Anyway, it'll be up in a little while. The theme of Shawn's cd I'll try and parse out later.