Music = fun or boring?

Earlier this week at his Status Ain't Hood blog, Tom Breihan wrote about his visit to the Music is a Better Noise exhibition at the PS 1 Art Center in Long Island. I have no quarrel with most of the content of the post (not least because I didn't see the exhibition), but he opens the post with this:

I'm generally pretty suspicious whenever any institution tries to make explicit connections between pop music and art, whatever that term means, mainly because musicians' dumbshit ideas about art have resulted in some of the most boring and joyless forms of music ever invented: abstract jazz, prog, glitch, all that shit. Once musicians starts taking themselves uber-seriously and looking for new, more direct forms of self-expression, they usually lose all connection with the idea that music should be fun to listen to, that you can find plenty of ways to play around with ideas and preconceptions without sacrificing any notion of rhythm or melody.

I think there's a whole lot of bullshit in these few sentences. First, let me say again that I am happy over the last couple of years to have allowed myself to be exposed to chart pop and its potential delights, rather than ignorantly dismissing it as by definition garbage. But one of the problems I've had with some of the pop-ist rhetoric I've read has been an excessive emphasis on "fun", as if "fun" is a useful term for judging all music, and if music is not "fun" then it must then be "boring". I strongly object to this. I enjoy Tom's writing, while often disagreeing with him on matters of taste (though I've also learned about a lot of music from him). But occasionally he rubs me the wrong way, and it usually has to do with his over-use of these very words and, frankly, his general critical stance. Music is not easily defined in just these limited terms. His contention that "music should be fun to listen to" is frankly incomprehensible to me. I enjoy a lot of music that I would have a hard time describing as "fun". Some music should be fun to listen to, sure. A lot of dance music, for example. But it's hardly fruitful to use the expectations we have for dance music or other immediate, hook-heavy pop music, for assessing the value of all other kinds of music, for even all other kinds of pop. I could get on his case and drag in classical and ask if he really believes that all music should be "fun to listen to", but he's probably only talking about pop, generally (and not just chart pop, specifically). But even here, I doubt he really believes it. To take just one example, he's noted several times that his favorite album from last year was the Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree. Is an autobiographical song-cycle about an abusive step-father all that "fun" to listen to? Is "fun" even relevant here? I submit that it is not. I submit that this means that even Tom likes plenty of music for reasons having nothing to do with "fun" and that, even for his purposes, the word isn't terribly helpful.

And then there's "boring", which seems to be flip-side of "fun". If it's not fun, then it's boring, right? While there is plenty of music that ultimately is little more than boring, there is a lot of other music that might seem "boring" on first listen, but which reveals a lot of pleasure over the course of subsequent listens. If music is difficult, or hard to get at first, I can imagine the listener would be bored by it. We're often bored by what we have a hard time appreciating. I think the problem here is impatience. Some of my favorite albums have required many listens before I even grew to like them, let alone consider them among my favorites. Sometimes pleasure requires work. And if that word bothers you, then substitute "effort". Sometimes you have to meet the music halfway, enjoy it on its own terms, whatever those may be.

He's not wrong that often musicians take themselves too seriously, and that the music suffers as a result, but this is a pretty sweeping statement: "musicians' dumbshit ideas about art have resulted in some of the most boring and joyless forms of music ever invented: abstract jazz, prog, glitch, all that shit". Dismissing such a wide variety of music as "all that shit" is strange and off-putting. What exactly do they have in common? Does Tom have a definition for what "abstract jazz" even is? I'm not sure I know what he means. Is it free jazz? There is without question a ton of highly indulgent, painful free jazz, but a ton of it is incredibly life-affirming. I'm thinking William Parker or David S. Ware or Cecil Taylor: "joyless" or "boring" are the last words I would use to describe this music. Prog? Is there a lot of painful prog? Oh god yes. Did Emerson, Lake, & Palmer suck? Yes, and they were boring, too, and pretentious in the worst ways. But they weren't boring by definition, and they are hardly all that prog is. (I suppose I could provide lists of examples and counter-examples, but I just don't have that kind of time. Maybe for a later post.)

In part this fun/boring approach rankles because it does little more than reinforce our short attention-span, media-dominated, consumerist muddle we find ourselves in. We flit from item to item, in search of cheap calories, of fun, bored out of our minds by anything requiring effort. I'd like things to be just a little slower, a little more contemplative, even in pop music.

Junior Boys

The Junior Boys' So This Is Goodbye has quickly become one of my favorite albums of the year. I had not heard a single note of their music before the middle of September, when I bought both Last Exit and the new album. (I had somehow managed to not notice that the also excellent Last Exit was one of the most widely acclaimed records of 2004.)

It was probably this effusive k-punk post that focused my attention on them. I read it again after listening to the cd obsessively for a couple of weeks. Apparently in some quarters the Junior Boys have been labeled "retro", accused of merely hearkening back to the synth-pop of the early 1980s. k-punk takes issue with this, saying that

...it's an absurd irony that many casual listeners would cast the Junior Boys, not the [Arctic Monkeys], as retro. That's because rock has been eternalized, removed from any responsibility to renew itself, whereas electronic pop is cursed to be forever associated with a brief period in the 70s and 80s.

This is an excellent point. I haven't heard the Arctic Monkeys, but I have read a lot of the chatter about them, and the point is clear. How often do we hear about the latest guitar band being touted as the future, when they rarely offer anything stylistically that hasn't been heard before? Then he says:

But the synthpop revivalist tag has always been misleading and reductive in the case of the Junior Boys. Some of the Junior Boys' textures may be borrowed from synthpop but, formally, their songs would be impossible without twenty years of the rave discontinuum.

Which of course I can only take his word for, since I have no history with rave, and I doubt that it's possible at this point to fill in the blanks much. He links to this Dissensus thread where there is an interesting discussion about this question of revivalism, retro, etc, in pop. At one point, Tim F (Finney?) brings up Booka Shade and Villalobos and their influences (disco/house/rave, etc. for Booka Shade; Jon Hassell & IDM, for Villalobos), and whether they are combining these influences in a novel way or merely biting. And the thing is, I like Booka Shade (haven't heard Villalobos yet), but I have no frame of reference for them, other than "generally danceable, cool-sounding, electronic-ish music". But no history: I am unable, right now, to listen to them as part of a continuum, unable to identify their possible antecedents (with minor exceptions). I do wonder, what do you do when you have no real frame of reference for a record? I mean, obviously, I can enjoy it and anything else for whatever reasons I like. That's not the point. I like knowing and understanding the reference points for the music I listen to, but far too often, the music is just out there on its own.

Anyway, I think I'll return to this idea in the future, but for now all I'll say is that the Junior Boys are great, and So This is Goodbye is easily one of my favorite albums of the year.

Before I go, I want to quote another sentence from k-punk's post that I thought was interesting and worthy of more exploration:

So This is Goodbye's songs bear much the same relation to high-energy as the late Sinatra's bore to big band jazz: what was once a communal, dance-oriented music has been hollowed out into a cavernous, contemplative space for the most solitary of musings.

I'm interested in this idea, too: the movement of music (and culture generally) away from the communal toward the solitary, and how much my own musical preferences have been heavily geared towards the solitary even while I increasingly value the communal elsewhere...

Powers, etc

Recently I've only found time to blog on weekends, and I missed even that this past weekend. I have a bunch of things awaiting my attention that I hope to post sooner rather than later (including long-gestating posts on Despair and The Sleepwalkers, both of which are well past their sell-by dates).

In the meantime, I finished reading Richard Powers' new novel, The Echo Maker, yesterday. It's a very fine book and definitely of a piece with Powers' ongoing themes and concerns. Here he returns to an essential set of questions running through almost all of his fiction: who are we? how do we narrate ourselves to ourselves? how can we possibly recognize other people, and relate to them, when we can barely maintain ourselves (our "selves") from moment to moment? I may have more to say about it later, time permitting.

For more on The Echo Maker, be sure to take a look at the excellent five-day roundtable discussion over at Return of the Reluctant (parts one, two, three, four, and five, the last of which features Powers' own comments responding to points made by the roundtable participants). Also, at Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito responds to the William Deresiewicz lame attack-review in The Nation, which I talked about here (and Ed here).

On a somewhat related note, at The Pinocchio Theory Steven Shaviro reviews a science fiction novel by Peter Watts, called Blindsight, which is "a space opera, and a First Contact novel, and a vampire novel — and also a philosophical novel about the nature of consciousness." Shaviro then discusses at length the novel's exploration of consciousness. The novel sounds fascinating, and Shaviro's post is very interesting. Waggish responds with a thought-provoking post of his own.

Remainder, Tom McCarthy

Sometimes I find myself in a strange intersection of events, and a clutch of books, read more or less in random sequence, will touch on the same theme or mention the same detail. I bought Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder in France and read it in its entirety on the flight home. It was the second of three recent novels I've read in which the main narrator and principle character opens the book telling us about a mysterious accident or physical trauma and its aftermath, including the character's recuperation, re-entry into life, etc. The other two were Jennifer Egan's Look at Me and Rupert Thomson's The Insult, both of which I enjoyed. But the comparisons end there. And they are dwarfed in my memory by Remainder. Praise from certain people had my expectations high; too high, I feared. In the event, the novel far exceeded these expectations, and I feel that my experience of reading it will stay with me for a long time.

Here is first page of this remarkable novel:

About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That's it really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know.

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that - well, for one, I don't even remember the event. it's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been - or, more precisely, being about to be - hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap - the crater - that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.

And then there's the Requirement. The Clause. The terms of the Settlement drawn up between my lawyer and the parties, institutions, organizations - let's call them the bodies - responsible for what happened to me prohibit me from discussing, in any public or recordable format (I know this bit by heart), the nature and/or details of the incident, on pain of forfeiting all financial reparations made to me, plus any surplus these might have accrued (a good word that, "accrued") while in my custody - and forfeiting quite possibly, my lawyer told me in a solemn voice, a whole lot more besides, Closing the loop, so to speak.

Immediately the narrator (who is never named), is interested in the meanings of words and in the vagaries of memory. Very soon he learns that his Settlement was for "eight and a half million pounds" and he gets snagged on the "half", the amount leftover. And because of brain damage he has to re-learn how to perform basic functions. He gets fixated on the minute elements of actions and words. He becomes obsessed with forensic science. He keeps noticing the smell of cordite.

He interrogates the commonplace and finds that his actions seem unreal to him. He is taken by the perfection of Robert De Niro in Mean Streets: "De Niro was just being; I can never do that now." After moving more or less aimlessly for a while, hanging out with friends, investing his settlement money, he has a strange vision, an elaborate déjà vu in which he "remembers" a certain moment in a certain room in a certain building with certain neighbors. He has no actual memory corresponding to it, but in the moment of his vision, he feels alive. He knows what he must do, with the perfect logic only someone with a lot of money can think: He sets out to recreate the conditions so that he can re-enact this feeling of being alive. Before long he's hired staff to follow his every whim, bought a building in Brixton, and hired people to re-enact the other people who appeared in his déjà vu.

And there are further re-enactments, which get more and more elaborate. In his effort to isolate the moments in which he feels most alive, he has elements of the re-enactments slowed down. He enters into these moments: here, this is where life happens, in the moment, at the atomic level. He finds authenticity in the most literally unreal situations (more and more artificial re-enactments of real or supposedly real events). He goes into trances from which he doesn't awake for hours, even days. He appears to be further and further removed from reality around him.

Repetition plays a major role in this novel. The re-enactments are repeated over and over again. The narrator's singlemindedness creates restlessness in the reader (or, well, this reader): what, I wonder, is the purpose of these re-enactments? Or, where is this going? Indeed, expectations of "story" are continually raised and then thwarted. But the re-enactments are the point: he is trying to have a real experience, to enter into the experience, and his experience is such that we enter into it ourselves, almost achieve a trance state in our reading... In the re-enactments, as the narrator seeks to enter into the moment, to recreate these fleeting sensations when he felt most real, most alive, as he slows down the process, the prose slows, and we enter into the moment as readers, achieve an almost trance-like state, as he does.

Throughout, McCarthy's prose is appropriate to the material: precise, controlled, deliberate, restrained. One of the blurbs on my copy of the novel talks about how, in the novel, the event, is "lived and relived in... Beckettian vibrations...", which I immediately scoffed at as typical blurby hyperbole. But now I know what it means. I've only read Beckett's Murphy, which I know is not "mature" Beckett, but while reading Remainder, especially the slowed down, repeated re-enactments, I seemed to feel, yes, "vibrations" of what Beckett is about. Here he describes in minute detail the slowed down re-enactment at the building in Brixton:

We stayed there for a very long time, facing one another. The pianist's chords stretched out, elastic, like elastic when you stretch it and it opens up its flesh to you, shows you its cracks, its pores. The chords stretched and became softer, richer, wider; then they kinked back, reinstating themselves as he hit the keys again.

...and I am reminded of Morton Feldman... actually, scratch that: I'm not merely reminded of Feldman, the passage makes me feel that I know what it would be like to be inside Feldman's music; and then I remember that Feldman composed a piece "for" Beckett, and the reference seems entirely appropriate.

The temptation to write about this novel in excessive detail is strong. As is the temptation to quote from it at considerable length. But I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I think the novel is to be finally published in the US next year. If you can get it earlier, please do. I can't recommend this novel highly enough.

Honeymoon in France - Impressions and Travelogue

It's been more than a month since we returned from our honeymoon in France, and I am the slowest writer in the world. I know, it's ok: the everydayness of things quickly takes over and trips recede into the distance. There just isn't time. Besides, we were married in April and had to delay our honeymoon, so this is nothing out of the ordinary.

It’s often said that we all carry with us an idea of Paris. Maybe. For my part, while I definitely have various images of Paris in my head cobbled together from movies and novels, I have tried to resist certain romantic notions. It does not, for instance, matter to me in the least that many famous writers went to Paris and stayed there and became part of serious artistic communities. To the extent that I am interested in some of these writers, I am interested only in their writing. And I knew that the famous Bohemian underworld of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was long gone well before I ever thought of going. Places made famous for one reason (art, say) were already to my mind surely at best tourists’ theme park shadows of their former glories. In the event, for example, Montmartre is a dump.

But I was recently taken with the idea of Paris that emerges from what little I’ve read by Walter Benjamin, particularly his use of Baudelaire’s idea of the flâneur, or the urban stroller who is a detached observer. When we travel, there is no escaping the fact that we are tourists; the best we can do is observe and enjoy without running ourselves ragged. Aimée and I at least try to have a more casual trip--a relaxing vacation--rather than run from site to site. We mostly walk around. But even avoiding most of the obvious “things you have to see when you go to Paris”, we inevitably confront the fact of being tourists.

Museums are of course major tourist areas, especially the famous ones. And while part of me wants to experience the art that is on display in the great museums, the truth is that I am not well-suited to the practice of looking at paintings. I get impatient, I quickly feel as if I must move along to the next painting, into the next room, skim over the pretentious informational plaques. I was reading Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters on the trip, and in it the character Reger says,

Real intellect does not know admiration: it acknowledges, it respects, it esteems, that is all…. […] I have never yet seen a person enter a church or a museum entirely normally … because the journeys these people take are nothing but admiration journeys… Admiration makes a person blind.

“Admiration journeys”. I like that. This pressure I feel to move on is partly motivated by an awareness that I am usually unsure of what I am looking at, but somehow certain that I ought to look at it, and to look at as many pieces as I can. This is contrasted with the feeling that, to really see a great painting, I should stay in front of it at some length, devote my full attention to it, truly experience it. But then I get antsy: there are other paintings that might be more worth the extended effort; I will try to find them. And people are in the way (people are always in the way; museums, famous museums, are thronged with people, people on their own admiration journeys, checking one more thing off of their list of things to see), blocking my view, crowding in on the art, bustling, murmuring, making it difficult for me to concentrate, just as I no doubt make it more difficult for someone else to concentrate. In this way, traveling as a tourist can easily be little more than an admiration journey. You select a place and then pack in as many of the buildings, neighborhoods, artworks as you can. This is what we try to avoid, where possible.

Aimée has been to Paris before, and her mother has lived here, so she feels that she should be ok speaking French, even if hers is rusty. And rusty doesn’t begin to describe the problems with my French. Aimée jumps right into it, impressing me with her attempts to make herself understood. Yet we are chagrined when numerous attempts to engage in French are cut short by the other person, wishing to switch to English. Actually we think this is funny. As much as we are trying, and as patient as people are being, there is no escaping the fact that, at best, we speak French as if we were exceedingly dim second graders. For me, my uncertainty with speaking French makes me nervous, reviving largely eradicated speech impediments. For years I got around my (actually quite mild, but bad enough for me) speech impediment by softening sounds and quickly moving on to alternative words when I had a problem. With French, I just barely decide on one word or phrase I can use; if I fail to get that word or phrase out, I have no other options.

Our first day includes a nice walk through Île de la Cité and Île St. Louis, the heart of the old city, in and around various buildings, toward Notre Dame. We are unable to go inside because the area is blocked off for a lively AIDS march. The day ends well, with the obligatory boat ride on the Seine. The ride is enjoyable and makes Aimée happy. Neither of us had expressed interest in going to see the Eiffel Tower, but we must admit that it looks pretty cool from the Seine, all lit up, glowing gold against the night sky.

After the first couple of days, we learn that we are much better off when we have determined ahead of time where we will be eating. Otherwise, it winds up being 9 pm and we’re hungry and settle on something nearby. We end up eating some mediocre food because of this. But when we do well, we do very well. We go to le Marais, on the Right Bank, our second day, and we love it, not least because of all the great food we eat in its Jewish/Middle Eastern quarter. That night we eat at the justly popular Chez Marianne, filling up on cheese and wine, meat and falafel, tahini and humus. Highlights of our walk in le Marais include the winding streets and pre-Revolutionary buildings, as well as the Place des Vosges, intended by Henry IV as an exclusive aristocratic retreat, which it was, though it was later also heavily working class. We sit in its splendid park at length. We spend a lot of time sitting in parks and reading.

The next day it’s very hot, and I’m not feeling well. We see the Louvre, and it is impressive, but we have already decided that we are not going inside. We walk along the Champs Elysées and go to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. We love the view, and take many photos, but today has not been our favorite. The Champs Elysées is, of course, highly commercial and very crowded. We go to Montmartre, where Aimée remembers going with her mom many years earlier. It is very crowded, tacky, covered in trash. And at the bottom of the hill, on the main drag that includes the Moulin Rouge, it is replete with sex shops. Aimée is disappointed. We return to le Marais for dinner. We give up on waiting outside another popular place, opting instead for a lovely, intimate restaurant half a block away, where I have duck, with a nice fig sauce. Another thing we learn on the trip: it turns out we like fig.

The next day, we leave Paris, taking the train to Avignon, where we rent a car and for the next week drive around Provence, listening to jazz.

The historical city of Avignon, site of the Papacy in the 14th century, is enclosed by a wall. We only spend two evenings inside the walled city, happily avoiding the daytime crowds. Something about Avignon makes it seem like a toy-city to me, ghostly, with its old buildings, imposing palaces and churches carved out of stone, inside the wall, now seemingly geared almost completely towards tourists of one stripe or another. And yet people certainly live here. Walking the back alleys at night confirms this, but it seems odd. Maybe it’s because we are Americans and everything is relatively young in the US, but I always find myself wondering what it’s like to live in these old buildings. We talk about the fact of being a tourist, how we are necessarily separated from people’s actual lives. We want to experience France, but our experience can only be that of a visitor. Even if we succeed in avoiding the heavily crowded areas, our experience with the place is mediated through interactions that inevitably tell us little about everyday French life, and we are alienated by our ineptness with the language, mine in particular. Our awareness of this alienation does not mean that we are not enjoying ourselves. Quite the contrary: we are interested in the question. We discuss further our own ambivalence about it; we want to visit places, but there’s no accessing the idea of a visited place. Unless we live and work there, we cannot truly know it. We understand that there is only so much we can do with a two-week trip, and we make the best of it.

One of these nights in Avignon, we have a great dinner at a hole-in-the-wall French pasta restaurant we happen upon while looking for another place. Our waiter is a charming Frenchman who speaks broken English and who gets progressively drunker throughout the evening. He has had some good news and is celebrating. We sit outside, toasting ourselves. We decide that, so far, the honeymoon has been excellent. We are optimistic about our future and review the events that brought us together. As we talk, we laugh, and I am reminded once again why I love her. Aimée is funny and smart and witty, and tonight she is in fine spirits. She is lovely. We have a wide-ranging discussion, at one point deciding that we should write a book about history’s missed opportunities: the Paris Commune, the German Revolution just after World War I, the Spanish Civil War. And in the United States: Reconstruction, the so-called Progressive Era, the Civil Rights movement… We think it would be a pretty big book. Our waiter recommends a fantastic fig tart for dessert. When he discovers we are Americans, his reaction is so strong that our instinct is to apologize, but he is excited. He lived in Washington, DC, for a year back in the late 1980s, and he loves America. When he learns further that we are on our honeymoon, he gives us some champagne on the house, and kisses us both. When we have to go, he hugs us, and as we leave, he calls out, “Be good to each other!”

Surrounding Avignon, especially to the immediate east and southeast, in the direction of our chambre d’hôte, is suburban sprawl, that vision familiar to any American--ugly commercial box stores and malls, heavy traffic, dispersed residential development. It’s interesting to note that, yes, France is a commercial place, and the French do live with some of the same kind of blight that we do. But we did not travel to France to find ourselves back in Towson. We take steps to remedy this and head further east, away from the chambre d’hote, toward the Luberon region, where we have a delightful day wandering through many of its picturesque hill towns. We enjoy the pleasant drive, which takes us through fields and past farms, till we arrive in Fontaine de Vaucluse. This village is located at the source of a river, which is supposed to be a spectacular sight when it’s flowing, which it’s not. The village is still quite lovely, even without the benefit of this attraction. We have a fine lunch of baguette and goat cheese and juicy plums. From here we drive to Bonnieux and then on to the tiny village of Buoux, where we go for a hike on one of the marked trails. We learn that following the walks in the reverse order than is described in our book is a lot easier on the streets of Paris than it is in these hill areas, with its nebulous, hard to identify landmarks. We never do find the supposed end of our walk. We return tired, but happy to have spent the day walking in a natural setting. With only one day available, we inevitably miss a lot of the Luberon (and resolve to come back on a future trip), but it's a much-needed corrective to the congestion and sprawl.

Leaving Avignon, we drive south, on the way to Cassis, stopping for an hour for lunch at a random kebab place in Marseilles, eating the best pommes frites of the trip. Aimée is enchanted by Marseilles, its bustling, multiethnic city life. We’ll be coming back here, too.

We get to Cassis, a coast town, with the calanques and boats and many fabulous people who have clearly spent way too much time in the sun, all leather-skinned and shriveled; we swim in the translucent, turquoise water of the Mediterranean, with the nearby cliff red against the sky, looking unreal, shimmery, as if it will disappear if you stopped looking. We notice that the only people anyone can hear on the beach are the Americans sitting ten feet from us. They are from Connecticut and they are loud.

At night we take a walk to the other side of the port, near the smaller beach, and sit on a rock jutting out into the water. I am mesmerized by the movement of the water around the rock, as it hugs the stone, slapping back and forth, in and out, as if alive. (Soon after returning home, I read a passage describing this effect perfectly, in Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Housekeeping: "…among all these pilings and girders the waves slipped and slapped and trickled, insistent, intimate, insinuating, proprietary as rodents in a dark house." I am jealous and want to steal it.)

From Cassis we drive northeast, en route to the Gorges du Verdon. It’s a long drive and we arrive after dark--the road winding through the mountains, the vast expanse hidden in the black night. The next day, we go for a hike. We stop to rest off the side of a mountain path, and eat lunch: a fantastic assortment of bread, cheese, and chocolate, and perhaps the finest apples either of us have ever tasted. I struggle to write in my journal. What can I write about the Gorges? It's beautiful, of course; spectacular. The view is indescribable. Returning to Old Masters, the narrator describes nature as "uncanny"; I’ve always found uses of this word mysterious, but here I think I have an idea what he means. Nature renders insufficient our attempts to process it or describe it. Nature is beautiful, but the word seems wrong. "Beautiful" seems to belong to artificial things, to art. Nature just is. And there’s something overwhelming and fearful about that fact. Here, the views in the mountains are breathtaking and words elude me. Where we are, it seems at times untouched, relatively pure, the illusion of wilderness, but then there are the remote villages, the connecting electricity and telephone cables, the roads, signs--footprints of humanity, footprints of organized humanity, of institutional France. But, even with this evidence of human interaction, nature remains, and where there is evidence of older, abandoned settlements, nature has taken over, as it will. Nature is beyond my ability to understand. It's huge, relentless.

I stare out at the expanse beneath us, across from us, and the mountain there, against the sky, in all its different shapes and striations, and I can say nothing other than variations on "wow". So I stare. I stare while sitting at lunch (beneath telephone towers, it turns out), and I enjoy following the flight of a bird as it glides in the wind; as it soars for a distance before rising above the visible peak on the horizon, it encounters another bird, they tangle, appearing to play. Do birds enjoy flight? Is enjoyment too anthropomorphic a concept? No doubt it is. Nevertheless, this is the impression I get: this bird, these birds, are enjoying themselves.

Earlier, during our walk that brings us to our lunch spot (through a plateau, where each step comes alive with the scattering of millions of jumping insects that seem to behave like crickets, but look like butterflies or colorful moths), we talk about birds and how they, en masse, suddenly all rise, all do the same action at the same time. There never seems to be a signal when they do this. Aimée has been reading Jung and is reminded of his idea of the collective unconscious. We talk about this, and about the limits of human understanding.

I return to the idea that nature is uncanny. I would include ancient structures in this concept. Ancient buildings, whether ruins or not, are uncanny, at least to someone coming from a place where, by definition, no structure is older than two or three hundred years. When we were staying around Avignon, one day we went west to the town of Nîmes to see the Roman buildings there--the large amphitheatre and the Maison Carrée. The latter is a temple (which, says our guide, “rivals Rome’s Pantheon as the most complete and beautiful building that survives from the Roman Empire”) that sits squat in a square, amidst other buildings from throughout the intervening centuries, including a huge, very modern, all glass office building. In this context, the Roman building seems like a mirage. I get the strong impression that the building is not really there, so strange does it seem to me to see it among all these other buildings.

Our chambre d’hôte near the Gorge is a former school located in a tiny village in the mountains called Chasteuil, operated by Pascal and his American wife, Nancy. Pascal packs our lunches and presides over two fantastic dinners with all of the guests. We are the only Americans staying there. Among the others are two British couples, a Danish couple, a trio of Germans, and two Welsh couples. These dinners are multi-course affairs and give us the opportunity to talk with people, something we realize we miss, which reinforces our feelings of ambivalence about what it means to be tourists. Everyone has their own ideas about the United States, and, while they are unlikely to come across two Americans more critical than we are of America and its actions, we still feel the need to correct some misapprehensions and even, on occasion, defend it. The dinner conversations range from American television (uniformly bad, it appears) to Bush (ditto, but fair enough), and touching on healthcare, travels, and the EU. This time in the mountains is our favorite part of the trip: for the scenic walks, the peaceful mountain air, the leisurely pace, and the welcome opportunity to engage in non-commerical conversation with other people.

We return to Paris, but not before driving to Nice to drop off our rental car and catch a train. We had talked about trying to fit Nice into this trip, but there just wasn't enough time. We know instantly that we will have to make a point of coming back here; the water is a stunning sight, with a wide strip of azure running along the coast (almost as if it were called the Côte d'Azur for a reason).

Back in Paris, we stay in the Latin Quarter and enjoy walks through Luxembourg Garden and Jardins des Plantes... We view the Impressionist paintings at the Musée d'Orsay and the Roman and Medieval artifacts at the Musée National de Moyen Age. We feel the trip winding down and wish we had more time. This doesn't stop us from enjoying our last couple of days. We discuss the trip, the things we have learned, things we'd like to do again. We continue to eat interesting food. One night, I order steak tartare, which, it turns out, is basically raw beef. I rather like it. Our last night, we return to Île de la Cité and Île St. Louis for a final romantic, night-time stroll. We stop for some of Berthillon's rightly famous ice cream and some wine, and we sit, watching people go by.

Though we struggle with our roles as tourists, we have a wonderful trip. We discover some things about ourselves (for example, it turns out we don’t know French), what we want out of traveling, what kind of planning is necessary, what places we will want to return to, what places we won’t. And we do get some glimpses of French life. Though we don’t want to leave France, by the end of the trip we are ready to. As enjoyable as traveling is, not knowing the language well is limiting and alienating, and living at length out of suitcases is tiring. Returning home, it is a relief to again hear English. And after being away for two weeks, even Baltimore seems new, freshly scrubbed. We are happy to be back.

Hauntology

I am not well acquainted with the concept of "hauntology". But after reading the many posts on the topic by Mark at k-punk, I feel I have glimpse into the nature of the idea. Mark's brilliant most recent post opens it up even further for me:

It is this sense of temporal disjuncture that is crucial to hauntology. Hauntology isn't about the return of the past, but about the fact that the origin was already spectral. We live in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past. Hauntology emerges as a crucial - cultural and political - alternative both to linear history and to postmodernism's permanent revival.

Ten years ago, we would have looked to SF and cyberpunk for this alternative. But hauntology and cyberpunk can now emerge as twins; travelling back in time in Butler's Kindred is the complement of the violent irruption of the past in Morrison's Beloved. It's no accident that hauntology begins in the Black Atlantic, with dub and hip-hop. Time being out of joint is the defining feature of the black Atlantean experience. As Mark Sinker wrote, the 'central fact in Black Science Fiction - self-consciously so named or not - is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in [Public Enemy's] phrase) Armageddon been in effect.' In this disjunctive time, it makes perfect sense for Terminator X to juxtapose samples of helicopters with discussions about the slave trade, as he does on Apocalypse...91. There is no way in which a trauma on the scale of slavery - 'the holocaust that's still going on' as Chuck D had it - can be incorporated into history, American or otherwise. * It must remain a series of gaps, lost names, screen memories, a hauntology. X marks the spot... The deep, unbearable ache in Kindred arises from the horrible realisation that, for contemporary black America, to wish for the erasure of slavery is to call for the erasure of itself. What to do if the precondition for your being is the abduction, murder and rape of your ancestors?

This last specifically reminds me of a professor of Russian history I had back in college. One day, while railing that Russians, in the approaching dissolution of the Soviet Union, had nothing to learn from "Jeffersonian nonsense about natural law", he said something to the effect that, as horrible as what happened to the Native Americans was, he was nevertheless happy it had happened. To wish otherwise was to wish away his own existence.

Before getting to the end of Mark's post, I was also immediately reminded of Greil Marcus and his thesis of the "Old Weird America"--a much derided idea now, I suppose, but one which made some sort of sense to me. When I read Invisible Republic, I was bored by the chapters specifically about Dylan and the Band and the recording of the The Basement Tapes--I love Dylan, but I'm no Dylanologist, I was then discovering. But the stuff on the old folk songs, on Dock Boggs, on "The Coo-Coo Bird"--this stuff fascinated me. It seemed to speak to a history of America beneath the surface, away from the standard narrative we've had forced down our throats, to acknowledge the strange religious practices, the violent upheavals, the anxiety about technological change... At the time I also listened to an interview with Marcus in support of his book. When he wasn't droning on about who played what on The Basement Tapes, but was talking about Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Clarence Ashley, and Dylan's songs that seemed repond to other currents in pop culture (like Dylan's take on the teenage murder song), I felt that I was on the cusp of understanding something, something that tied in with Faulkner's imagined South, and Cormac McCarthy's highly stylized violence of the Old West in Blood Meridian, and this something was just beyond my reach, something I could not articulate intelligibly.

Mark does mention Marcus, in a footnote. He notes that Marcus invariably avoids talking about production techniques and that, indeed, in his discussion of the Sex Pistols, for example, Marcus talks about their live performance... Mark admits: "I haven't read any of Marcus' Old Weird America material, so correct me if I'm wrong - isn't it about Dylan? - but couldn't all this return to field recordings be fitted, all-too-comfortably, into a quest for presence?" Yes, yes it could. Also, it strikes me that, in his recent work, Marcus appears to be positing something essential about America, locating some kind of authenticity in the musicians and writers he chooses to focus on, in the particular narrative strain he choses to highlight. His focus on David Thomas, for instance, is interesting in this regard, given how inauthentic Thomas' musical persona is. In his music, in and out of Pere Ubu, Thomas is saying something about America, too. As if there is something authentic in the very inauthenticity of the projected persona, in the music, and as if this reveals something essential about America.

One of the important things to remember about the Anthology of American Folk Music, emphasized by Harry Smith but often overlooked, is that these were intended to be commercial recordings. The musicians may have been playing songs that had been around seemingly forever, but these were not field recordings, these were performances recorded for release by record labels. That it's been well over 50 years since the Anthology first appeared, and another 20-30 years since the recordings first appeared, means it's easy to listen to these songs as if they are ancient, but the recordings have locked in place a certain time, and the technological artifice of the records--their scratchiness equals for us "old-time"--allows us to continue to believe in the illusion of folk tradition transmitted via the recordings. Not that there is no folk tradition, but that the tradition we think we know about is necessarily altered by the technological artifact.

I'm just sort of riffing here, but I'm interested in pursuing this line of thought further. I look forward to reading Simon Reynolds' piece (referenced by k-punk) in the new issue of The Wire, which I haven't received yet, among other things....

Phantoms of the Imagination

From Italo Calvino's "Levels of Reality in Literature", collected in The Uses of Literature:

The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work. That a person puts his whole self into the work he is writing is something we often hear said, but it is never true. It is always only a projection of himself that an author calls into play while he is writing; it may be a projection of a real part of himself or the projection of a fictitious "I"--a mask, in short. Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological attitude, a rapport with the world, a tone of voice, a homogeneous set of linguistic tools, the data of experience and the phantoms of the imagination--in a word, a style. The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing.

Stories That Don't Make Regular Sense

From Laird Hunt's excellent novel, Indiana, Indiana:

You didn't tell me about your finger yet.

Didn't I? said the saw player.

Noah shook his head.

The saw player took another drink then asked Noah what he'd heard about the Finger Lady and whether or not he had an opinion on her.

The what? said Noah.

Now don't you go on and tell me you never heard about the Finger Lady.

I never did, said Noah.

Well, now, that's a shame, that is indeed, and I reckon we'd better rectify it directly. You bring me on over one of your daddy's fine tomatoes and I'll see if I can't tell you the long of it good and short.

Noah brought over a tomato. The saw player lifted it up to his mouth and bit into it like it was an apple.

Then he told Noah about the Finger Lady.

My daddy would like that story, Noah said.

Is that a fact?

He likes stories that don't make regular sense.

Well then I reckon he likes most stories.

Noah thought about this then nodded.

Experimental and Weird

Related to earlier posts of mine (here and here), this is from Phil Freeman's interview with David Thomas, in this month's issue of The Wire:

...sometimes it seems like David Thomas keeps his back catalogue in print because he thinks (or hopes) that maybe that way, understanding will eventually sink in. He's probably wrong of course, but it's easy to understand why he'd find it futile to endlessly re-debate the 1970s. The battle's been lost; Pere Ubu's been enshrined as a pioneering proto-punk act, the better to allow critics to trace lineages and build imaginary hierarchies the most obsessive football fans would envy. "First we were pre-industrial, then we were industrial, then we were post-industrial," he scoffs. "First we were this, then we were the other thing. It's all baloney, and the reason there's so much confusion about it is, we're mainstream rock. It's not my fault that the rest of the world has gone off into a bizarre parallel universe where they find comfort in experimental music."

If that statement seems counterintuitive, it's because of the dominant, and obfuscatory, role marketing jargon has achieved in artistic discourse. Thomas, having been a professional musician for more than 30 years, sees things clearly and simply--a group playing three-chord songs with guitar, bass, drums and occasional synth is a rock group, not some avant garde art project. It's those who make their music with computers, in the least organic manner possible, who are the strange ones, to him. "In the early 70s," he says, "the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn't one thing. It was stuido techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was supposed to be, to make use of this powefull, relatively new narrative voice. That's why I've always said that we are in the mainstream. It's people like Eminem or Britney Spears who are the weird experimentalists. They are avant garde. They are dealing with weird alternative worlds. If you put our view of the human condition alongside Britney Spears's, one of them is extremely experimental and weird, and it's Ms Spears'."

What Novels are For

I haven't read Richard Powers' new novel, The Echo Maker, yet (it's on order), but I've noticed that the reviews have started coming in. This one in The Nation by William Deresiewicz is a pretty annoying James Wood-style takedown (link via The Written Nerd). Deresiewicz irritates immediately, attempting to take down Powers and his fixation on science:

Richard Powers has a lot of ideas: complex, articulate, deeply informed ideas about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, relativity, genetics, music and much more. But poems, as Mallarmé told Degas, are not made of ideas, and neither are novels. The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like. And that, crudely put, is what novels are for.

Nice of him to decide for the rest of us what novels are for. I can only say that I've never found Powers' introduction of scientific ideas or themes off-putting or, as Deresiewicz later puts it, "textbookery". It's never been difficult to understand their relation to the narrative--or, rather, it's always been clear that they have a relation to the narrative, and part of the enjoyment in reading Powers is figuring out what that is.

Anyway, some other offending remarks: About The Time of Our Singing, he writes "Powers constructs an enormous novel to tell us, in part, that white people will never be able to understand or accept black people (so black people should stick to their own culture and their own kind)." Though I disagree with him, I'm not especially bothered by many of Deresiewicz's criticisms of this novel (for example, that he finds Powers to be more sentimentalist than humanist), but this comment is just lunk-headed. About The Gold Bug Variations, Deresiewicz says that it's little more than Powers "treating the novel as a container for scientific ideas". And: "One can't help but feel that Powers is more in love with his ideas than with his story."

I know I shouldn't get too worked up; if he's unable to figure out what Powers' "elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like", then that's his loss.

Experience Only Words

Hugh Kenner, in his introduction to his A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett, providing some background to the idea that Beckett, in his prose fiction, "became our time's inheritor from Flaubert.":

The Flaubertian Revolution was, we know, a matter of style, of the nuanced cadence and le most juste. It was also a revolution of theme, for after Madame Bovary the theme of fiction after fiction proved to be illusion. Madame Bovary is about Emma Bovary's notion that successive men--Charles, Leon, Rodolphe--offer the vast emotional opportunities to which she feels entitled. She acquired her sense of entitlement from such sources as novels, so Flaubert's novel is like the novels she has read, from the marriage and the obligatory adulteries to the theatrical death; like them, but written as they are not; composed, sentence by sentence, with a double vision, a simultaneous awareness of her illusion and of the realities, barely perceived by her, out of which the illusion is spun. That is why the style is so important; each sentence must walk that tightrope, making Leon simultaneously the not unusual young clerk, in our vision, and the sensitive lover, in hers. Thereafter we encounter a whole fictional tradition of people who live inside stories. Joyce, in Dubliners, presents person after person enclosed in some received fiction, the men and women around them virtually transformed into figments. When Gretta Conroy, in the [sic] 'The Dead', says of the young man who died, 'I think he died for me', she is placing him inside a story that shall obliterate the commonplace fact that he died of having stood in the rain, and that ficiton of hers has more power over her passions than has the living husband from whom she turns away.

The novels of the Flaubertian tradition have tempted playwrights and film-makers, but have never made successful plays or films. The Great Gatsby for instance--how shall Jay Gatsby be impersonated by some actor? For he is incarnate illusion, the collective dream of all the other characters. Such a being abides in fiction, where he is created by figures of consummate rhetoric in a medium whose very condition must be that we shall see nothing, shall experience only words.

So fiction, since Flaubert created the fiction of solipsism, has turned away from the visible and the palpable: from the stage, from the film...

What if the World Were Already Lost?

I'm in the midst of re-reading Richard Powers' second novel, Prisoner's Dilemma, which was the first Powers book I ever read. In this book, Powers plays with history and time and family interactions and the question of how the individual can impact the world. The family in the novel is the Hobsons: Eddie Sr., his wife Ailene, and their four children, Artie, Lily, Rachel, and Eddie Jr. Eddie Sr. suffers from an ongoing illness that he refuses to have diagnosed and the rest of the family avoids talking about, has avoided talking about for years, finding elaborate ways of evading the issue. Powers' fiction is usually packed with puns and metaphor and allusion, and Prisoner's Dilemma is no different. Here, the engine of this language is Eddie Sr. and his battery of pedagogical tricks and referential tics. The children have all grown up under his dark, often tasteless humor and his constant barrage of movie quotes, literary allusions, bad puns, ad hoc mind games, science quizzes over breakfast--indeed, he speaks almost entirely in this language, leaving the children to figure out what he might be getting at with any given comment or joke or question. His way of teaching them how to make their way in the world. But the children, adept at playing the game, have each in his or her own way instead mastered the art of evasion: evasion of the topic and of having to admit their true feelings.

In the "present-day" narrative, as the book opens, it is November 1978 and the family is gathered for Eddie Jr.'s 18th birthday, and Eddie Sr. is increasingly, alarmingly ill. He is ill but somehow still able to bounce back from each seemingly awful collapse and maintain his cheerful, joking demeanor, and the rest of the family battles silently over how to confront him about it. The following passage is taken from the middle of the novel, towards the end of the visit, Rachel having finally coaxed the family into singing by providing the first line, "Lo, how a rose e’er blooming". The rest of the family joins in with four-part harmony:

All at once, the flash that each had tried so hard to evade was there, intact: a moment of tender visiting hovering over them as the tenors slid down that narrow half-step to the F sharp. They all felt it, momentarily. And each knew the others received a momentary hold on the instant, too. All six stood looking into a place before irony, before wit, before anxiety, before evasion. Surfaces dispersed, and in the still point underneath, they saw what was so terribly obvious to all of them, despite their long gainsaying: how hopelessly each cared what happened to the other. The care shouted out uninvited between them, like a candidate's criminal record. They had no choice but to tune their chord to it. They stood startled, flushed into that snare, aware for once of the connection between them that could reach down at leisure and destroy them. Caught in glorious chord, in facts gathered from each other's faces, they all felt the fissure--fragile, dangerous, and beautiful--close up and leave them in the incurable call back to tonic. The rose I have in mind.

That last sentence is too much of an apparent non sequitur to pass without notice. A short search came up with words to this Christmas carol:

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

Isaiah ’twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind;
With Mary we behold it, the virgin mother kind.
To show God’s love aright, she bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.

So, as expected, it's clearly not a non sequitur. "The rose I have in mind" is just another line in the song. Or is it? The placement of the line in this manner implies a lot more than mere quotation. Why is Powers using this carol? It appears at least one other time in the book. What is he trying to say? I don't know much about carols, nor am I well-versed in Christian literature or imagery. But, at risk of being obvious, I'll take a stab at it.

In the carol, the "Rose" is obviously Jesus Christ. Or, given the reference to Isaiah's messianic prophecy, the Messiah, or Saviour, more generally. In the passage, I think the line means that here, in this singing, where the family realizes with a shock how much they care about each other, they perhaps see that it might be a way out of their standard evasion, it might save them. They might just be able to drop the act and get to the point. But it is as elusive as understanding. Singing is where they see past all their jokey facades to their intimate connections, where they realize that they matter to each other more than they might have been able to say. But when the song ends and they part ways, they're back where they were.

But I think there's more to the allusion than that. Ed Hobson learned something about the world, something about America, that ruined his youthful idealism, left him adrift in the world, unable to find the purpose for a small individual like himself in the vast billions and in the huge historical currents that happen without most of us being aware of the changes. His illness has a dark source, connected to one of these hidden histories, and he knows it. In a world that may already be lost (a variant on one of his favorite phrases: in many ways this book is a meditation on loneliness, and its opposite), he resorts to trivia, silly movies, fantasy, in order to survive, or so it appears. Alternating with the present-day narrative is a counter-narrative, Eddie Sr.'s "Hobstown" project, involving Walt Disney and a fictional scheme to free some of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, in which Eddie imagines a world where history is redeemed. Where people realize that the way out of the elaborate Prisoner's Dilemma of the title is in fact not mutual mistrust, that self-interest is not in the self's interest, that they must hope against hope that the other party, the Other, will recognize this too. This might just save humanity. The rose he has in mind.

Liberation Theology

At Lenin's Tomb, Lenin is tired of people continuing to throw the word "liberation" around:

And if there is no excuse now for such deluded horseshit, there never was any excuse. To imagine, to fantasise that the people who calculatedly and maliciously imposed the genocidal sanctions regime on Iraq, a wilful and wicked assault on Iraq's civilian population - to dream that such people are likely to want to 'liberate' Iraqis, except from their mortal coils, is a profound and shocking abdication from the duty to analyse and think through a situation. To then on the basis of this preposterous illusion go on and publicly, clamorously, boisterously demand invasion and occupation is to advertise a kind of collective insanity. And the hide n seek game, so beloved of the 'humanitarian interventionists', won't do either - "we found some Kurdish leaders who agreed with us, so we must be right." Of course the Kurdish leaders agreed with you - they, as the single Iraqi group most imbricated with the US, had the least to lose from it and the most to gain (at least in the short term). What happened to thinking for oneself? What happened to thinking?

"Liberation" - the canard of every bullshitter and hypocrite in the world, and yet another example of a cynosure of radical discourse being enclosed on behalf of imperialist tyranny.

All kinds of otherwise intelligent people still resort to disingenuous "liberation" arguments or its variations. And this crap shows up in all kinds of unexpected places. For example, over the weekend I read this article about photography criticism in the Boston Review by Susie Linfield (link via The Reading Experience). It's a very interesting piece. Actually, in many ways it's quite excellent. Along the way she discusses the criticism and influence of Susan Sontag and John Berger and Walter Benjamin--people whom even I, knowing virtually nothing about the history of photography criticism, would expect to potentially come up in such an article. Anyway, Linfield argues that present-day Anglo-American photography critics do not love photography (whereas, for example, Pauline Kael obviously loved movies), that they are stuck in a view of photography that is mistrustful, taking their cues ultimately from Bertholt Brecht and his own mistrust of sentiment and emotion. She writes:

There is much that is bracing, and revelatory, and so wonderfully challenging about Brecht’s emotional astringency. [...] What is often forgotten, however, is that Brecht—like Moses—was a particular man who lived in a particular time and place and who observed particular things. Brecht’s time and place was Weimar Germany, and he saw—correctly—that his compatriots were drowning in a toxic bath of unexamined emotion: of rage over their defeat in World War I, of ressentiment against Jews and intellectuals and others, of self-pity, of bathos, of fear. Brecht saw—correctly—that this poisonous mix of increasingly hysterical feeling, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the perfect incubator for fascism. [...] Brecht’s relentless war on emotion was ethically, politically, and artistically necessary for him, but it has been taken up in an all too uncritical way by Anglo-American photography critics working in very different times and places and facing a very different set of challenges.

She suspects that these "postmoderns" (generally people identifying themselves with the Left), rather than worrying about people's "automatic" responses, instead don't trust viewers to come to the right conclusions about photographs. She may be right about this, and the quotations she supplies do appear to support her argument. But she presents examples, and her discussion of them is problematic. She discusses, by way of demonstrating the "strange, confounding ability of photographs to make us feel things that we do not think we should", a book of photojournalism about the Iraq War, Witness Iraq: A War Journal February–April 2003. Let me say that, in general, as she describes the various photographs and her responses to them and the questions they raised, her questions are usually interesting, provocative, well-taken. But she sneaks in a number of troubling assumptions. First, she describes a photo of relatives standing over the coffin of a man killed by a bomb. Linfield tells us:

Because the picture is dated “03/29/03,” we know that the bomb was probably an American one, and that it was dropped on the civilian marketplace almost certainly by accident—which is not the same as forgivably. (If the picture, and the bomb, were dated yesterday or today or tomorrow, we would know that it was planted by members of the Baathist or Islamist insurgency, and on purpose.)

As if there is no question about this whatsoever. As if the notion of "by accident" means anything when you have invaded a country and routinely bomb civilian areas. The clause "which is not the same as forgivably" does not get her off the hook. Linfield then discusses a couple more photos and her reaction to them, before offering us this gem:

These photos speak not just of the plight of children in wartime, though they depict that too. But perhaps more important, they suggest—though do not explain—the strange incongruities of the Iraq war, which cannot be summed up by phrases like “U.S. imperialism” or “war on terror.” It is a war in which an army of liberation quickly became an army of occupation, offering an unusual, catastrophic blend of negligence and oppression; in which the overthrow of a dictator led to the unleashing of tremendous violence against his already wounded people; in which a nation newly freed from decades of brutal rule turned, furiously, inward, its lessons in sadism learned all too well.

It is a war in which an army of liberation quickly became an army of occupation. I'm sorry, but no. This is indeed horseshit. At this point, the article is almost over, and Linfield finishes up by echoing the standard "decent Left" chorus, effectively accusing the "postmoderns" of missing the true enemy at the gates:

And though most photography critics—or at least those I have been discussing—identify themselves with the left, this detestation of the photograph is not a subversive or progressive or revolutionary stance, but in fact aligns them with the forces of the most deplorable backwardness: aligns them, for instance, with the frenzied crowds in Kabul and Karachi, Damascus and Tehran, who called for the execution of the Danish cartoonists and promised what they called a “real” holocaust. Here is where pre-modernism and postmodernism merge, for those demonstrators, too, view images as an exploitation, an insult, a blasphemy: as an “act of subjugation” indeed.

I don't know much of anything about Susie Linfield--a quick search reveals that she has written for The Washington Post, Dissent, Newsday, and The Nation--but here she emerges as just another Liberal buying into idiotic notions about a "Clash of Civilizations", unwilling to recognize the implications of American foreign policy and actions.

On Returning to Jazz

All of a sudden, I find myself listening to a lot of jazz again. I posted before about my exhaustion with jazz, which resulted in my not buying a lot of it anymore. This is still true, though I retain the habit, wherever I go, of looking for recordings by certain musicians (usually Anthony Braxton, Paul Bley, Joe McPhee, and William Parker); for the most part I can count on nothing being available, so I'm safe. But, as previously mentioned, I've been digging the stuff posted over at Destination: Out. Recent posts about Marion Brown, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Don Cherry, as well as Sunday's on Sam Rivers, have been illuminating and a lot of fun. And besides, I have a bunch of recordings that I've barely absorbed, so there's plenty to investigate in my own collection. The other night, I dragged out my copy of Ornette Coleman's Beauty Is a Rare Thing, one of the cooler box sets I own, and listened to that classic stuff for the first time in a few years. Always an enjoyable experience.

So, that's been part of it. As it happens, though, I did buy a few jazz cds when we were in France. I'd compiled a short list of record stores in Paris before we left, but it turned out that I didn't bother seeking any of them out. However, I did pop into the monstrously massive Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysees. I didn't really have a lot of time to kill there, and the pop/rock section was completely overwhelming, so I gave up and moved on to the jazz room. The selection was not as deep as I would have expected, and anyway price was an issue. Nevertheless, I walked out with four cds:

• Paul Bley, Homage to Carla
• Paul Bley/Evan Parker/Barre Phillips, Time Will Tell
• Joe Harriott, Genius
• Max Roach, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.

This was pretty much all the music we had to listen to as we drove around the country-side and up into the mountains in Provence. We listened to each cd five or six times or more. I recommend it: It was a great soundtrack to a great trip.

Anyway, the four cds. They're all good.

We Insist! is a classic, from 1960, with Abbey Lincoln on vocals and a band that includes, aside from Roach on drums and as bandleader, Coleman Hawkins, Booker Little, and Julian Priester. I'd read about it in Robert Cook and Brian Morton's Penguin Guide to Jazz, in which it was one of the few records to be awarded their coveted crown rating (is it wrong that I've tried to get as many of the crowned records as I could? I know they're supposed to be idiosyncratic choices, but I haven't really been steered wrong yet...), but I'd never been able to find it. The record is an explicitly political statement, with lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr.. It's certainly of its period, but it never feels dated. The band burns, and Abbey Lincoln is excellent. I've never listened to her before, but I like her voice and the power and emotion of her singing. I'll have to keep her in mind in the future.

I first heard of Joe Harriott when Ken Vandermark released his tribute album a few years ago, then I looked him up in Penguin, but I'd never seen his own records anywhere (admittedly, I did not look very hard), so I snapped this one up, even though I knew it wasn't one of "the ones to get", which I understand to be Free Form or Abstract. Genius is kind of a hodge-podge of stuff. Put out by the UK label Jazz Academy (which appears to have specifically educational goals), it gathers various performances from two different sets with Harriott and his 1961 quintet, as well as two other performances featuring Harriott as a sideman in bands led by Michael Garrick (about whom I know nothing). The Harriott groups play nice versions of "Moanin'", "Round About Midnight", "Love For Sale", and "Body and Soul", as well as some of Harriott's own compositions, which he introduces as "abstract". It's an enjoyable recording. (One weird thing about it: in the second grouping, comprising tracks 5-9, the bass was over-dubbed in 1999.)

Then there's Paul Bley. My interest in Bley came about entirely by way of reading the Penguin Guide. Bley has a huge discography, covering more than 50 years (!), and Cook and Morton are fans. I quickly compiled a sizable list of Bley albums to look out for. Probably the first Bley performance I actually heard was "Ramblin'", his lone song on the excellent Jazzactuel box, compiled by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. The first Bley cd I bought was a reissue of the fantastic ESP album, Closer, not covered in my edition of the Guide. Over time I have assembled a decent cross-section of albums from throughout his career (though this still amounts to only like eleven cds), including the absolutely essential solo piano recording, Open, To Love.

Of the two new ones, the solo Homage to Carla was the first one we listened to, and it's quite good. Right away we were treated to Bley's characteristic clustered notes and melodic structured-yet-free playing. As might have been guessed from the title, here he is playing songs written by his ex-wife, Carla Bley. I'm not familiar with much of her work (I have one LP), so I can't say anything about how the interpretations stack up against the originals or other versions.

Time Will Tell was the true gem, though. Of all of the cds, we listened to this one the most. I'd already had the later Sankt Gerold cd featuring the same grouping, and the setup is the same: several trio performances, with the members of the trio splitting off into duos for a handful of tracks, as appears to be common in recent ECM sessions. As with Sankt Gerold, the album is more mellow than a freely improvised record featuring Evan Parker might lead one to believe. There are a few instances of Parker going off on one of his circular-breathing exercises, by they don't last too long, and are anyway typically virtuosic. There will be moments where it sounds like the music is falling down a hill (perfect for driving in the mountains!), or Bley's piano sounds delicate, like wind chimes, which mixes with Parker's sax and Phillips' often-bowed bass to create some truly spooky atmospherics. At times the music will sound chaotic, with the musicians trying to find each other, then Bley will seem to erupt into a beautiful melodic figure--I'm always amazed by this with Bley, what I perceive to be his ability to produce spontaneous melodies, melodies that stay with me. Time Will Tell is a great, great modern jazz album.

Elsewhere, I came across this guest post by Destination: Out's Chilly Jay Chill over at Marathonpacks, an mp3 blog that is new to me. He is there to talk about the recent Kieran Hebden/Steve Reid collaborations, but along the way the takes the time to offer up a brief primer and needed corrective on people's expectations of "free jazz", including the idea that it's all just "cacophonous noise":

Well yeah, some of it is really noisy. That’s the strain of the music that’s influenced Sonic Youth, Black Dice, The Boredoms, Wolf Eyes, The Stooges, Lightning Bolt, MC5, and the like. Think of it as ecstatic freak-out music. The sort of thing that will peel back the lid of your skull and rearrange your atoms. BUT that’s only one small part of the music. Free Jazz spans 50 years and numerous countries and includes music that’s so delicate it’s practically ambient as well as tunes with a funk beat strong enough to shake the dance floor. Not to mention the pieces that showcase echoes of melodic folk music, Indian rhythms, minimalist repetitions, gutbucket blues, Hendrixian squalls, orchestral grandeur, big band exotica, electronic beats, proto-punk swagger, and much more. It’s an entire continent of sound represented by tens of thousands of albums and approaches. Once you start digging, you’ll be amazed by the sheer variety and vitality of the genre. There’s something for just about every taste – all you need is a slightly open mind.

An excellent read. I'd like to suggest that the music of Paul Bley, particularly as represented on these two cds with Evan Parker and Barre Phillips, is a great way to approach some of this music, especially if you're wary of saxophone skronk and marathon noise sessions.

In the course of writing this, I came across another blog that's new to me, Different Waters, which has had two recent posts on Bley, specifically on Open, To Love and Sankt Gerold (this one mostly quotes from a Pop Matters review). Also, moving away from Bley, I am grateful to Carl Wilson at Zoilus for linking to this wonderful interview with Joe McPhee from 2000.

The New Standard

Just popping in here to say if you're at all interested in alternatives to mainstream news sources and in supporting independent news media, please consider supporting The New Standard, if you don't already. In recent years, it has been an exemplary model for alternative media. They do great independent reporting on many issues not usually presented in the normal outlets. And they are in trouble. They have been trying to raise money in order to stay in business, and it's only just now occurred to me to post about it. This Friday is their deadline. Please go here to take a look at their archives of news articles and to see how to pledge a modest monthly amount.

Update: Apparently they have reached their goal and will be able to stay afloat for another year. Excellent news. But of course they are still operating on a very tight budget and could still use any available help.

Pathological Music Consumption

Another exemplary passage from Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, pp. 139-140:

The present generation, curiously enough, no longer makes the highest demands on music, those which were made on music a mere fifteen or twenty years ago. The reason is that listening to music has become a trivial everyday affair as a result of technical progress. Listening to music is nothing out of the ordinary any more, you can hear music wherever you go, you are practically forced to hear music, in every department store, in every doctor's surgery, on every street, indeed you cannot avoid music nowadays, you wish to escape from it but you cannot escape, this age is totally accompanied by background music, that is the catastrophe, Reger said. Our age has witnessed the eruption of total music, anywhere between the North Pole and the South Pole you are forced to hear music, in the city or out in the country, on the high seas or in the desert, Reger said. People have been stuffed full of music every day for so long that they have long lost all feeling for music. This monstrous situation of course has its effect on concerts you hear nowadays because all music all over the world is out of the ordinary, and where everything is out of the ordinary there, naturally, nothing out of the ordinary remains, indeed it is positively touching to see a few ridiculous virtuosi still taking pains to be out of the ordinary, but they are so no longer because they can be so no longer. The world is through and through pervaded by total music, Reger said, that is the misfortune, at every street corner you can hear extraordinary and perfect music on such a scale that you have probably blocked your ears long ago to stop yourself going out of your mind. People today, because they have nothing else left, suffer from a pathological music consumption, Reger said, this music consumption will be driven forward by the industry, which controls people today, to a point where everybody is destroyed; there is a lot of talk nowadays about waste and chemicals which have destroyed everything, but music destroys a lot more than waste and chemicals do, it is music that eventually will destroy everything totally, mark my words. The first thing to be destroyed by the music industry are people's auditory canals and next, as a logical consequence, the people themselves, that is the truth, Reger said. I can already see people totally destroyed by the music industry, Reger said, those masses of music-industry victims eventually populating the continents with their musical cadaverous stench, my dear Atzbacher, the music industry will one day have the population on its conscience, it will most probably ultimately have the whole of mankind on its conscience, not just chemicals and waste, believe me. The music industry is the murderer of human beings, the music industry is the real mass murderer of humanity which, if the music industry continues on its present lines, will have no hope whatever within a few decades, my dear Atzbacher, Reger said excitedly.

Old Masters, Thomas Bernhard

In his preface to Correction, George Steiner, while judging it to be Thomas Bernhard's masterpiece (a fairly common assessment, it seems; I haven't read it yet, but I can think of at least one person who disagrees), says that, "[t]oo often, notably in his later writings, Bernhard succumbed to a monotone of hate (hate for Austria, for modern man, for the soiled materiality of being)." Old Masters is late Bernhard (published in 1985 four years before his death), and readers could be forgiven for describing it as indeed often seeming little more than a "monotone of hate". As with Concrete, published a year earlier, we are subjected to a steady stream of negativity directed towards, yes, Austria, modern man, critics, artists, art. In this case, most of the opinions are held by Reger, a music critic who writes for The Times of London, who for more than thirty years has visited the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna every other day to sit across from the same painting, Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man. Reger's pronouncements come to us through Aztbacher, the apparent narrator, who has been invited by Reger to meet him at the museum. Aztbacher gets to the museum early, and takes the time to observe Reger and recount, it seems, nearly everything that Reger has ever told him.

We are drawn into the world of Reger's opinions, many of which seem perfectly reasonable, and had me either nodding my head or enjoying the ideas, for example in this early passage:

The perfect not only threatens us ceaselessly with our ruin, it also ruins everything that is hanging on these walls under the label masterpiece. I proceed from the assumption that there is no such thing as perfect or the whole, and each time I have made a fragment of one of the so-called perfect works of art hanging here on the walls by searching for a massive mistake in and about that work of art, for the crucial point of failure by the artist who made that work of art, searching for it until I found it, I have got one step further. In every one of these paintings, these so-called masterpieces, I have found and uncovered a massive mistake, the failure of its creator. For over thirty years this, as you might think, infamous calculation has come out right. Not one of these world-famous masterpieces, no matter by whom, is in fact whole or perfect. That reassures me. It makes me basically happy. Only when, time and again, we have discovered that there is no such thing as the whole or the perfect are we able to live on. We cannot endure the whole or the perfect. We have to travel to Rome to discover that Saint Peter's is a tasteless concoction, that Bernini's altar is an architectural nonsense. We have to see the Pope face to face and personally discover that all in all he is just as helpless and grotesque a person as anyone else in order to bear it. We have to listen to Bach and hear how he fails, listen to Beethoven and hear how he fails, even listen to Mozart and hear how he fails. And we have to deal in the same way with the so-called great philosophers, even if they are our favorite spiritual artists, he said. After all, we do not love Pascal because he is so perfect but because he is fundamentally so helpless, just as we love Montaigne for his helplessness in lifelong searching and failing to find, and Voltaire for his helplessness. We only love philosophy and the humanities generally because they are absolutely helpless. We truly love only those books which are not a whole, which are chaotic, which are helpless.

While Reger is finding fault here, it doesn't seem wholly negative, nor merely an attempt to knock artists or other famous people down to size. The notion of art as a record of failure is not ridiculous, and there are echoes, of course, of Beckett's "Fail Again. Fail better." dictum. But Reger goes further than that. It quickly starts to seem as if he despises nearly all art, all life, as much of what follows is a negation.

Old Masters is subtitled "A Comedy". Why? For one thing, there is Irrsigler, the guard at the Kunsthistoriches Museum who has enabled Reger to occupy the space in the museum for more than thirty years. We learn early on that Irrsigler had "wanted to join the police because the career of a policeman would...solve his clothing problem" and became a musuem guard for much the same reason, and even thought of joining a monastery "because there too a person's clothes were provided". Irrsigler is a comically stiff figure. But, in the manner of Bernhard's other work, most of the comedy comes about through Reger’s pronouncements themselves. They become so repetitive as to often be ridiculous, to be comical; are so often objectionable; so often so encompassing, so absolute, so far over the top, so apparently assured and negating of everything they come into contact with; at times Reger is so obnoxious as to be repellent, yet it’s funny; the re-statements from every conceivable, every tedious angle of the same proposition, which is then modified with an “except”, which is then re-stated itself from seemingly every possible grammatical angle. More than once I grew exasperated, tired of plowing through yet another permutation of yet another outlandishly absolute negative opinion, finding myself wondering why. Then there are those rants that are simply hilarious. He rants about Vienna's cleanliness and then intones solemnly: "The lavatory question and the tablecloth question are still unsolved in Vienna". Good point. Also:

...it has been scientifically established that a Viennese uses a piece of soap only once a week, just as it has been scientifically established that he changes his underpants only once a week, just as he changes his shirt at most twice a week, and most Viennese change their bedlinen once a month, Reger said. As for socks or stockings, a Viennese, on average, wears the same pair for twelve consecutive days, Reger said.

On average! Over time, through all of this, we learn about Reger. He is physically weak, elderly. His wife has recently died and he considers himself a coward for having stayed behind. He looks to art but it fails him in his time of need, and yet, finally, it appears to be all he has, and he clings to it. There ends up being something strangely affirming about this. And, in Bernhard's perverse way, the book has what I am going to call a happy ending. Aztbacher finally learns why he has been invited to meet Reger and it is wildly anti-climactic, in one sense, but thematically consistent. The final sentence of the book is hilarious and perfect.

I am unsure which I liked better, Old Masters or The Loser, my previous favorite Bernhard (and, oh yeah, source of this blog's name). Either way, Bernhard is uniquely Bernhard, even with the echoes of other writers (Beckett, I guess, and more than one place has compared the form to Notes from the Underground, which makes sense, given the rant or confession, though it escaped my notice I have to admit, and seems more specifically relevant to Concrete). His enormous paragraphs (again, there are no breaks here) and the interspersed "Reger said", "I considered", "said Reger, I thought", etc, and ranting and re-ranting through grammatical reconstructions, make for a reading experience that is by turns thought-provoking, infuriating, hypnotic, and often quite funny. If you already like Bernhard and haven't read Old Masters, of course you're going to want to, and if you haven't read him yet, I imagine this is as good a place to start as any. For myself, in France I was able to find Correction and Gathering Evidence, his childhood memoir, both of which I look forward to, as well as finding the rest of his fiction, Extinction in particular.

Something more human, more survivable

Jodi Dean on feminist elitism, in response to this article at Alternet, about Linda Hirshman's book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World:

The overall argument is against 'mom-ism' and the general backlash culture that puts elite women back in the home, seemingly by their own choices. It's a shame that the author was compelled to reassert and validate elitism in her argument against this current view, not least because it damages the feminism she claims to support by reifying rather than challenging the class distinction between women with Ph.D.s advancing ideas in the lofty heights of public debate while poorer women are arm deep in shit as they change the diapers of these women's children.

But why accept the opposition between ideas and diapers? Don't we encounter a lot of shit in each sphere? And, might not energy in one sphere cross into the other? For crying out loud, something like three hundred years of feminist thought has challenged the public/private distinction and here this philosopher is re-installing it, this time in terms of elite privilege, a privilege here linked to a kind of moral duty. In so doing, she limits the potential of feminism to challenge basic social structures, to try to transform these structures into something more human, more survivable.

Lesson in Charisma

In the wake of his unceremonious firing, a lot of people have linked to and discussed Robert Christgau's final major Villiage Voice feature, in which he relates his experience of taking in 32 shows in 30 days. I just read it the other day, and this passage jumped out at me, about Robert Plant's appearance at the Arthur Lee benefit concert, in part because it sort of surprised me, and because it gave me a weird unearned sense of pride, as a long-time Zep fan:

But the big-ticket house, which wasn't full, had come for Robert Plant. Plant owns any room he enters. He could have fobbed off three Loves, three Zeps, a solo promo, and "Danny Boy." Instead he spent two days with the pickup band, rehearsing a set that honored Lee personally and culturally. The Zeps were early, the Loves exquisite. "For What It's Worth" led to a Hunter-assisted Everlys tune (the Elderly Brothers, Weitzman called them) and "Can't Help Falling in Love." Highlighted was "Hey Joe"—a perfect Zep-Love link, misogyny and all. And into the middle of a psychedelic fantasia—based on his own 2002 revival, not Love's peppy single or Hendrix's psychodrama—Plant inserted "Nature Boy," an inspired evocation of Arthur Lee the L.A. eccentric even if you didn't know its composer was an L.A. longhair when there were no longhairs and its hit version a turning point for black pop pathfinder Nat Cole. At 57, Plant no longer had his high end. But because the music was new and the occasion felt, he was singing fresh. This wasn't the somewhat automatic mastery of great Springsteen or Stones. It was a lesson in charisma full of near misses and intricate meshes, the most life-affirming thing I witnessed all month. My daughter and I fought through the rain at 1:30 a.m. just as if we weren't exhausted.

The things you are prepared to apprehend

I've started reading William Empson's 7 Types of Ambiguity. This is from early in the first chapter (and is another item related to the issues raised in this post, in which I quoted from Ezra Pound):

...there is a sort of meaning, the sort that people are thinking of when they say 'this poet will mean more to you when you have had more experience of life,' which is hardly in reach of the analyst at all. They mean by this not so much that you will have more information (which could be given at once) as that the information will have been digested; that you will be more experienced in the apprehension of verbal subtleties or of the poet's social tone; that you will have become the sort of person that can feel at home in, or imagine, or extract experience from, what is described by the poetry; that you will have included it among the things you are prepared to apprehend. There is a distinction here of the implied meanings of a sentence into what is to be assimilated at the moment and what must already be part of your habits; in arriving at the second of these the educator (that mysterious figure) rather than the analyst would be helpful. In a sense it cannot be explained in language, because to a person who does not understand it any statement of it is as difficult as the original one, while to a person who does understand it a statement of it has no meaning because no purpose.

Pre-Honeymoon Music Round-Up

Ok, one final, brief post before closing up shop before we leave for France.

John Darnielle has a very nice, if quite short, piece on Souled American's Flubber album. I first heard of Souled American about seven or eight years ago. For the first time in years, I'd bought an issue of Spin magazine--I have to admit that it was the cover story "What the World Needs Now Is Axl Rose", or something, that had caught my attention. Oddly, the Axl story was not worth the time it took to read it, but in the back of the issue was a story set aside in a box about this strange, elusive, sort of country rock band called Souled American. I immediately felt that, somehow, this was a band I needed to hear. I happened upon their Frozen cd in a Borders, of all places, and snapped it up. A bizarre, lovely, low-key record. I set about finding their earlier stuff, ordering tUMULt's two double-cd reissues of their first four albums, the second one taking months to get to me. Completely worth it. I go through periods where I listen to Souled American obsessively. I've yet to hear anything else like them.

Louis Menand's article in The New Yorker on Bob Dylan is excellent. (I'll be buying Modern Times fairly soon after returning home.)

Speaking of The New Yorker, I also liked Sasha Frere-Jones' column about the Boredoms a few weeks back. We caught their show in Philadelphia at the end of June, and it was utterly fantastic. It was hypnotic and trance-inducing and also made us dance.

I've been enjoying Destination-Out, my favorite free jazz mp3 blog. If you have any interest in free jazz or out-jazz or whatever you might prefer to call it, and you haven't already been checking in on them, please do so now (the links don't last long). I've especially appreciated recent posts about Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Alice Coltrane. Their most recent subject is Muhal Richard Abrams. Good stuff.

And, from just this morning, John at uTopianTurtleTop on the Beach Boys, a group I've never been able to get. John's blog is usually a thoughtful read, and this post is no different. He makes me want to spend some quality time with the Beach Boys, which is quite a trick, and he almost makes me think I'll actually make the effort to do so. From the end of the post:

I don’t mean to say they’re better than the Beatles. There are no comparatives in music you love. When you’re in the music, nothing else matters. There’s nowhere else you’d rather be. I realize that the Beach Boys are the height of rock nerd-boy sensibility, but I can’t help myself. I love those melodies and countermelodies and blends. And, you’ll note, the words are often poignant, almost always humane, often witty and playful. Sometimes I think that Brian and his team of lyricists were Chuck Berry’s truest heirs in the ‘60s -- so many songs detailing social life in little vignettes and narratives. From a more youthful, simpler, less critical perspective -- not saying the lyrics are as deep as Chuck’s, but they’re often surprisingly excellent.

Ok, that's about it. So far, since compiling my year-to-date list, I have acquired only two more albums released this year: Herbert's Scales and that Burial cd. Both are excellent, and will place fairly highly at the end of the year. Scales is gorgeous, and I've been listening to it continually on the iPod. My response to Burial is not as enthusiastic as, say, k-punk's, but it's a grower. (One problem becomes more and more evident. I need to listen to more dub and its offshoots, but I am not sure where to go, who to listen to. My main frames of reference for this cd are Massive Attack and Tricky.) Other albums I anticipate getting include (some of which are already out), aside from Dylan's: the Mountain Goats, Yo La Tengo, Junior Boys, E-40, Masta Killa...

I'll be back in two weeks. Enjoy!