The Red and the Black, Stendhal

I've just finished reading Stendhal's The Red and the Black. I enjoyed it. I don't pretend to have any deep insights into the book, but here are some general thoughts.

Sometime last year, I'd found a used hardcover of the recent Burton Raffel translation, published by the Modern Library. (Inexplicably, the book's jacket cover features a bizarre photograph of a naked torso, with a hand on the right side of it, which may or may not belong to the same body, and to the top, what may be the under-side of a breast. Anyone have any idea what that's about?) I'm happy to read Stendhal, one way or another, but the typical questions about translations again come to mind. How accurate is it? How well does it capture the spirit of the original? What kind of liberties have been taken? Unfortunately, my French is woeful, so I'm in no position to judge for myself directly. When trying to decide among translations, then, I must weigh assessments made by others. With a translator like Raffel, it's interesting that his detractors and supporters cite the same evidence: he renders Stendhal's French in a highly "readable", Americanized, colloquial style. And readable it certainly is. The novel in his translation is incredibly easy to read, and there are more than a few expressions that feel overly modern. I could give some examples, but it's hard for me to be certain whether a given expression was in currency at that time (for example, characters said to be yelling "at the top of [their] lungs"), but in the main, aside from the setting, the book did not feel terribly, well, foreign. I know it's been hailed as a "modern" novel, but I didn't expect it to this extent. Published in 1830, as rendered in English by Raffel it could almost have been written at any time since then.

In fact, I notice that similar criticisms are made of his translations generally. Back when I was deciding among the many translations of Don Quixote, I was leaning toward Raffel's translation--in part because it's published as a Norton critical edition, but also because I found the first few pages more, uh, readable than those of the other versions. (In the event, soon thereafter Edith Grossman's much-lauded translation appeared, and I ended up buying hers. Naturally, I have yet to read it.) Anyway, Raffel's version of the Quixote received the same kinds of criticism: often brilliant, but excessive instances of modern usages (Sancho Panza's references to his "kids", for one), etc. Since then I've started to wonder about "readability" as a value when assessing a translation.

To the novel, then. I said I enjoyed it, and I did, though the closing 40 pages or so are rather excitedly melodramatic. I'm not going to bother recounting in any detail the events of the story, or discuss its theme--other than to say that it follows the life of Julien Sorel, a provincial son of a carpenter who finds himself amidst aristocratic society (of which he is largely contemptuous) and at the center of two romantic scandals. He is "ambitious", we're repeatedly told, though it's not entirely clear what exactly his ambition is. He daydreams about what it might have been like 20 years earlier, when he could have served under Napoleon (who he secretly admires--an unpopular opinion among the "well-born"), and achieved some sense of nobility, despite his low origins. He and the other characters are forever worried about concealing their true thoughts on a matter, often because of societal expectations or political or class reasons. Julien is obsessed with hypocrisy--his own, as well as that of the aristocracy and the clergy, especially. The story is told by a third-person narrator, who seems at times amused, at times dismayed, at times bored, by the proceedings. The narrator appears to be nearly omniscient, while also shifting among the perceptions of the many characters, usually Julien and whoever he may be most engaged with at any given moment in the novel. As such, the novel is an early refinement of the psychological novel, or "psychological realism". Indeed, this is another reason why the novel did not seem especially alien: it's quite compatible with current-day fiction, perhaps underscoring the extent to which the so-called psychological realist approach has become the expected, default mode of fiction-writing.

The Scandal of Democracy

Jodi Dean has an interesting post about a book called Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Rancière. She refers to there being "something appealing in his discussion of the scandal of democracy". This is the second time I've seen this phrase used, "the scandal of democracy". What does it mean? Does it mean that, from the standpoint of those used to possessing power, the idea that power is not naturally held by anybody, that no one is "entitled to govern", that this is scandalous?

Jodi expresses some confusion with Rancière's idea that, as she puts it, "justification and legitimacy [of power] presuppose an underlying equality". Rancière seems to suggest that democracy, in a sense, rests on chance, since it is only chance that has one group ruling over another. This "chance" implies an underlying equality. I recall that Chomsky has said on numerous occasions that any kind of authority must be justified. It must be justified because there is no natural reason why, for example, you should have authority over me. This requirement that authority (or politics) be justified points to equality. She quotes Rancière:

[there is] no force that is imposed without having to justify itself, and hence without having to recognize the irreducibility of equality needed for inequality to function. From the moment obedience has to refer to a principle of legitimacy, from the moment it is necessary for there to be laws that are enforced qua laws and institutions embodying the common of the community, commanding must presuppose the equality of the one who commands and the one who is commanded. ... Inegalitarian society can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations.

This makes some sense to me (that at base we are equal, and that, therefore, authority must be legitimized). I would add that even the most authoritarian rule relies on the consent of the governed. Jodi observes that this "equality" is "trivial" since it can serve to merely "cement" more "fundamental inequalities"--i.e., those inequalities that actually obtain in real life.

I'm getting ready to set out what I believe are some first principles about democracy, and some implications thereof. This kind of discussion helps. I may need to seek out some of Rancière's work, who I'm only now learning of for the first time. (Add him to the list!)

In the comments to Jodi's post, Amish Lovelock refers to a New Left Review article from last year by Peter Hallward, which examines Rancière's "radical egalitarian politics"; the piece apparently compares Rancière to Chomsky in this regard. Of course, the article is subscription-only, but this is from the end of the freely available snippet:

Against those who argue that only the appropriately educated or privileged are authorized to think and speak, Rancière’s most fundamental assumption is that everyone thinks. Everyone shares equal powers of speech and thought, and this ‘equality is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances.’

I like this, and I think I may need to either subscribe to the NLR, or at least buy this article. In any event, this idea is one of central importance to my own conceptions of politics in general, and democracy in particular. I will be returning to this.

Democracy: Not Just a Legal Framework

I don't know much about China--its history, culture, how the Communist Revolution happened, why, etc. When I started subscribing to Monthly Review, the first issue I received was entirely devoted to the question of "What happened to China's Socialism?"--how its neoliberal reforms had transformed the country and so on. And here I knew very little about why and how China went Communist in the first place! So it was necessarily way over my head. (I'd love to read a book-length history of this, by the way, as well as on the Cultural Revolution. Anyone have any recommendations that are neither fawningly Mao-ist, or dismissively and/or comprehensively anti-Communist? One that treats it seriously?) There was, of course, some interesting material in David Harvey's book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (which, again, I whole-heartedly recommend), but that's about it for me. I do recall fairly vividly many of the images of Tiananmen Square, though I can't say I understood what was going on, or why.

Ok, the point. Apparently there was some thread controversy over at Crooked Timber. I don't care about that (I haven't read it, so I won't link to it specifically), but in response to it, CR at Long Sunday (cross-posted at his own ads without products blog) posted an excerpt from an interview with Wang Hui in 2003. I want to reproduce it here, because it feeds into my ongoing democracy discussion:

In 1989, why did the citizens of Beijing respond so strongly and actively to the student demonstrations? It was largely because of the adventurist reforms to the price system that Zhao Ziyang had twice imposed, without any benefit to ordinary people. Their earnings suffered from the agreements they were forced to sign by factories, and their jobs were at risk. People felt the inequality created by the reforms: there was real popular anger in the air. That is why the citizenry poured onto the streets in support of the students. The social movement was never simply a demand for political reform, it also sprang from a need for economic justice and social equality. The democracy that people wanted was not just a legal framework, it was a compreshensive social value.

The Military Thinks It's Crazy

Back to Iran. Given the insanity of the Bush Administration and the various idiotic comments about Iran made by Democrats (like John Edwards or Hillary Clinton), an attack on Iran looks all too likely from where we sit. However, it is worth noting that, as Noam Chomsky pointed out in an interview I've already linked to and quoted from twice, "the military in the United States thinks it's [the idea of an attack on Iran] crazy. And from whatever leaks we have from intelligence, the intelligence community thinks it's outlandish, but not impossible." And later in the interview:

Shank: In the 2008 presidential election, how will the candidates approach Iran? Do you think Iran will be a deciding factor in the elections?

Chomsky: What they're saying so far is not encouraging. I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe; nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that. But if the Democratic candidates are on the verge of winning the election, the administration is going to be desperate. It still has the problem of Iraq: can't stay in, and can't get out.

So how desperate will the Bush Administration be? Is it possible that the military and the ruling class, generally, "won't let" Bush attack Iran? It is, certainly. Bush has surely become a liability for the empire--just as Nixon was before he was forced to resign. And there have been reports that certain high-ranking military officers "will resign" were Bush to order an attack on Iran, that "[t]here is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible."

So there are some encouraging signs.

It was One Year Ago, um, Monday...

I note that I am approaching my one year anniversary of beginning this blog. March 5th of last year, I finally decided to take the plunge (my reasons for doing so here, the blog name explained here). It's been an interesting, and fun, experience.

My last post, in which I wrote about the potential war on Iran and the need to prevent it, highlights a problem I've had here--a problem I perceive of tone. It does often seem frivolous to follow up a serious post about war and human suffering with a post telling the world what I've listened to on my iPod. And yet I want to do both, as well as all kinds of other things. So I have. But I am not unaware of the oddness of it. Life is like that.

Of course, aside from music and politics, the other area I've written substantially on has been literature. On this, contra Scott Esposito, I agree with Sam Tanenhaus on one point (mind you, this is pretty much the only thing I agree with him on, as far as I can tell):

It is easier to get a good piece of analysis and writing, a better essay, a better report, whatever you think a book review of being, on non-fiction than fiction. Novels and short stories are very hard to write about.

Scott says in response to this: "If you are concerned about literary aesthetics and culture, then they are in fact very easy to write about." Really? Isn't this a strange thing to say? I find literary aesthetics very difficult to write about (of course, "literary culture" is a distinctly different thing, so maybe that's what's so easy). And I don't find all that much discussion anywhere about the actual aesthetics of a work of fiction, even online (I'm not saying there aren't blogs that do this; obviously there are, and those that do have become much more valuable to me than are the bulk of the litblogs). Even where blogs are better than mainstream book reviewing (and the best of them unquestionably often are), I see mostly writing that is concerned primarily with content and theme, comparatively very little with how the things work. And I think this is because it's difficult. It certainly is for me. If you've been paying attention, and care, you may have noticed a relative lack of literary posts lately, and an increase in the number of posts on politics and music. This is why (that, and an overall increase in sleepiness, but that's another matter entirely). But I haven't given up on it; I promise. Perhaps it is for this difficulty that some of the posts I've been happiest with have been those in which I've tried to do some of this, and succeeded, at least on some of my own somewhat nebulous terms. (Specifically, I'm thinking of my posts about Peter Handke's Across, Tom McCarthy's Remainder, and Nabokov's Despair, as well as my defense of David Foster Wallace and my post about Stephen Dixon.)

As I started out, it was interesting to see who responded. It was enormously gratifying to be blogrolled and linked to by some of the literary-minded bloggers I respect the most, such as Dan Green at The Reading Experience (and thanks to Dan, also, for early encouragement, for example in a comment to this post on "Politics and Literature", as well as alerting his own readership to the Nabokov, Wallace, and Dixon posts mentioned above), Steve Mitchelmore at This Space, and Ellis Sharp at The Sharp Side. Early posts about music and music culture caught the attention of Carl "Zoilus" Wilson and Simon Reynolds, two of my favorite music writers, both of whom sent many readers to me--after which I naturally promptly stopped writing about music for weeks! Thanks to everyone who has sent readers my way, whether via blogroll, or a link to a specific post. Thanks to everyone who has commented, particularly those who've commented regularly, thereby helping to form a sort of Existence Machine community--I'm thinking of long-time readers like Scraps (of Parlando) and newer readers like Brandon (of No Trivia).

This incremental awareness of a readership, however small (and mine is certainly that), does pose its own set of pressures and expectations, beyond those I already put on myself when I write. But I try not to worry to much about that. Anyway, it's been a good year. Thanks for reading.

Prevent an Attack on Iran

The most important question of the last couple of days is, of course: What the fuck is the matter with the Democrats? They're asking for more war funds than Bush? It's true:

U.S. House of Representatives Democrats will more than fully fund President George W. Bush's request for money to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, but are still debating conditions that could be attached, senior lawmakers said on Thursday.

I know I shouldn't be surprised by this, and unfortunately I'm really not. And yet it is still astonishing. The Democrats won Congressional majorities in November on the strength of widespread dissatisfaction about the War on Iraq, but it was immediately clear from the public statements of such moral vacuums as Nancy "Impeachment is off the table" Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, among countless others, that no substantive changes were forthcoming. Again, the sheer contempt for democracy is breathtaking. We should always remember that Democrats are imperialists, too. They only oppose Bush insofar as they think he has bumbled things badly (and insofar as they hate like hell that they're not in power). That the United States has invaded and occupied Iraq, a country that was no threat to anyone: this is an ongoing War Crime, of the most basic type. But the Democrats don't care. They don't care because they share the basic belief that the US should be able to do what it wants in the world. More to the point, they "don't care" because they operate within a worldview that doesn't accept that War Crimes can be committed by Americans. To them, the concept is unthinkable. What Americans do is right, by definition.
I look on this state of affairs in despair. It seems increasingly likely that the US will attack Iran some time soon. An attack on Iran would be an appalling atrocity, and the ramifications of such an attack, while unpredictable, are likely to be devastating. How can we stop it? I don't know that we can, really, but we owe it to ourselves to try, to make some noise. In a couple of recent posts, I've linked to the blog Once Upon a Time..., written by Arthur Silber. He's been posting at a tireless rate about the mendacity of our political culture, in general, and the continuous bombardment of lies about Iran, in particular. I recommend you add his blog to your daily reading, if you haven't already. Last week, in part three of a series ominously titled "Dispatches From Germany, Summer 1939", he lists some things we can do to help "Build an Effective Resistance" to the run-up to yet another war. They involve doing a lot of things that often seem pointless--like writing our Representatives and Senators, newspapers, other public figures. I know they've seemed pointless to me, anyway, and I very seldom do it. But I plan to do it now. As a not-widely read blogger, I will probably ramp up my posts about this, but if you have a wider readership and happen to read this, please take the opportunity to speak out against an attack on Iran as often as you can. If you've already been doing it, I applaud you. If we're wrong about the likelihood of an attack on Iran--well, I hope we are. If we're not, then we need to do all we can to stop it from actually occurring. Waiting until an attack finally happens will be too late.

Incidentally, Silber helpfully provides a link to the Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950. It's always worth taking a look at these, in case you've forgotten their content, and then re-familiarizing yourself with American actions abroad since then (William Blum is always useful on this score, as in this article, or if you have more time, try his book Killing Hope). Compare. It's a depressingly sobering exercise.

Consent of the Governed

Chalmers Johnson, in an excellent interview with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! (link via American Leftist):

Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn't ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we're talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation.

And then, in response to a question about popular resistance to the ongoing American presence throughout the world:

We see the resistance in the form of Prime Minister Zapatero in Spain, that he promised the people that after he came to power, he would get out of Iraq, and he was one of the few who did deliver, who does remember that if democracy means anything, it means that public opinion matters, though in an awful lot of countries, it doesn't actually seem to be the case. But he has reduced radically the American military presence in Spain.

I quote these passages because they tie in with my intention to write about democracy (which I began here), but the whole thing is interesting, particularly when he describes his conversion from Cold Warrior to anti-imperialist through his observations of the reality of American military bases.

iPod rundown - 03/01/07

1. Paul Bley - "Ida Lupino": I've talked about Bley before. This track is gorgeous, one of my favorite jazz recordings of all time, from the classic Open, To Love. I have two other Bley cds that also feature versions of this Carla Bley composition: Closer, released on ESP, and Ramblin', on BYG Actuel. Both of those versions are shorter and faster than this one. Here, you can almost hear Bley thinking as he improvises.

2. Pere Ubu - "A Day Such as This": Song of the Bailing Man was Pere Ubu's fifth album, the last of the original run (the "historical" era, as David Thomas puts it). Gone are the Chuck Berry riffs of guitarist Tom Herman, replaced by the more angular work of the Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson. And for this album only, Anton Fier appears on drums and other percussion. At more than 7 minutes, this song is unusually long for Ubu. It's a mid-tempo track, with a repeating percussion cycle for most of the song, and marimba. Halfway through, it speeds up, almost rocks, but not quite, before returning to the pattern set by the beginning.

3. Matmos - "Rag for William Burroughs": The longest track (13+ minutes) from my favorite album of last year and Matmos' best. It opens with some pleasant, melodic piano (backed by interesting electronics), interrupted at 1:55 by the sound of a gunshot, followed by keys opening a door, and the sound of a typewriter (backed by an insistent buzzing), then two typewriters. The typewriters devolve into a clicking rhythm. Then at the 4:15 (or so) mark begins 7 minutes of a very entertaining electronic rag. Very cool.

4. Charalambides - "I Don't Know What To Sing": This track is just over a minute long, and there's not much I can say about it. Some fuzzy guitar, voice. In general, I like Charalambides' brand of Texas psychedelic music, but this song wouldn't tell you much about what they do. It's more of sketch, really. From the reissue of Our Bed Is Green.

5. Pere Ubu - "Big Ed's Used Farms": Oddly, this is also from Song of the Bailing Man. It's a faster song, and half as long. David Thomas' frenetic vocals are more in evidence here.

6. Van Der Graaf Generator - "My Room (Waiting for Wonderland)": It was Simon Reynolds' book, Rip It Up and Start Again, that led me to Van Der Graaf Generator (John Lydon was apparently a big fan), a group that had previously only been on the periphery of my awareness. I have so far picked up one album, Still Life. Peter Hammill's dramatic vocals take a little getting used to, and I'm still getting used to them (sort of like Scott Walker, for me, in this respect). This particular song is lovely and mellow (and also more than 7 minutes long). Mostly keyboards, with a beautiful sax throughout.

7. Bob Dylan - "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite Dylan albums (we're always going out on a limb here at The Existence Machine), but for years I took little notice of this song. Lately I've come to like it, too, even if I couldn't say with confidence what it's about. Some nice local images though.

8. The Go-Betweens - "The House That Jack Kerouac Built": Years ago I bought two Go-Betweens albums (Spring Hill Fair and Tallulah) after reading about them in one of those music guide books, but I didn't give them fair listens until recently, partly inspired by this Parlando post. I'm still absorbing the albums, but I like them. Catchy, literate, guitar pop.

9. Uncle Dave Macon - "Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train": Perhaps like a lot of people, I bought the cd reissue of the famous Anthology of American Folk Music, assembled by Harry Smith, expecting it to be interesting more for historical purposes than for listening pleasure. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I like a lot of the music for its own sake. The original set contained three volumes, but Smith had apparently intended for there to be a fourth, and even had a songlist ready for one. John Fahey's Revenant label finally released it a few years ago as Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4. It includes this Uncle Dave Macon song. Macon is one of my favorite artists on these anthologies (along with the Carter Family and Dock Boggs, among others). A lot of the songs featured touched on topics of the day (the Titanic, the Mississippi flood of 1927, definitely life in the Great Depression, etc.) but some, such as Macon's, are more explicitly political. A sample lyric: "some lay it all on parties, some lay it on others you see, but now that you can plainly see what happened to Tennessee/for the engineer pulled the throttle, conductor rang the bell, the brakeman hollered 'all aboard' and the banks all went to hell". I wouldn't mind finding a collection of Macon's music.

10. Fiona Apple - "Please Please Please": A fine song from Extraordinary Machine, an excellent pop album.

11. June of 44 - "Take it with a Grain of Salt": June of 44 was already more or less dead by the time I found them (one day I'll write about how I ended up sifting through the wreckage of various kinds of already-happened music), and I guess the indie kids have moved on from this kind of thing, but I like it. Ascetically recorded post-Slint math-rock (wheeee!), complete with dramatic yet barely decipherable spoken vocals. I described them earlier as a "music of possibility". I think I meant that they seemed transitional, like they and their ilk were on their way to some future kind of rock, but which never quite happened. Which sounds semi-dismissive, like I don't get actual pleasure from listening to them. But I do. This song is on their first album, Engine Takes to Water.

12. Pavement - "Summer Babe (Winter Version)": Now that I've finally listened to the Fall, I can hear why Pavement got compared to them, especially circa Slanted & Enchanted. This is the first song from that album, an album that continues to get better every time I hear it. Malkmus has always reminded me of Lou Reed on this song.

13. Radiohead - "Motion Picture Soundtrack": This is the quiet closing track on Kid A. By now, after some of the dust has settled, it seems clear to me that Kid A and especially Amnesiac are far and away the best of Radiohead's albums. OK Computer, which I played constantly for years, and loved, now sounds quaint to my ears, and I never got into The Bends. The debut Pablo Honey was always sort of crap, "Creep" aside, and I've had the hardest time giving a fig about their more recent Hail to the Thief.

14. Fleetwood Mac - "Not That Funny": A Lindsey Buckingham song from Tusk. Tusk was famously underrated at the time, but it has since become more recognized for what it is, an excellent and diverse collection of pop songs. Fleetwood Mac's White Album. Inspired, I guess, by the energy of punk, Lindsey's songs are all short and seemingly more minimal than his contributions to either Fleetwood Mac or Rumours.

15. Einsturzende Neubauten - "Schwindel": Haus der Lüge is the only Neubauten record I have; I like it, but haven't made the effort to track down any of their other numerous albums. This track is fairly typical of the album: lots of clanging metal, occasional German vocals.

Contempt for Democracy

At American Leftist, Richard Estes quotes a passage from this Tariq Ali article about the ongoing disaster in Afghanistan:

The lesson here, as in Iraq, is a basic one. It is much better for regime-change to come from below even if this means a long wait as in South Africa, Indonesia or Chile. Occupations disrupt the possibilities of organic change and create a much bigger mess than existed before. Afghanistan is but one example.

Then Richard says: "Is there anything that alarms the US more than organic change within a country or region?" I would say that the answer is "no". He goes on:

Organic change can be roughly translated as indigenous change, even as we admit that there is no pure form of it. Such change presents the prospect of people governing themselves according to social and economic systems independent of ones imposed by the US, and, potentially, even resistant to the US, as we now observe in Venezuela. Few people respond enthusiastically to being subjected to the ruthlessness of neoliberal primitive accumulation, the remorseless exploitation of their labor and resources, for the benefit of transnationals and the far away elites that control them.

Is it possible that the urgency for the invasion of Iraq was the fear that the Iraqis themselves would soon depose Saddam and the Baathists without US assistance? Was it necessary to invade Iraq to depose Saddam and destroy the country's infrastructure so that Iraqis could not chart their own course? Is there an even greater fear that the Iranians may likewise liberate themselves from the stifling constraints of the Islamic Revolution

This is one of the things that so many people refuse to recognize about the United States. Far from promoting democracy around the world, the US is the primary enemy of democracy in the world. It's often enough pointed out that this or that dictatorship is "paradoxically" closely allied with the United States, but it's only paradoxical if you attend to all of the cant about democracy. By now, the contempt American elites have for democracy should be clear. This is, of course, a point commonly made by Noam Chomsky, as in this recent interview where he says:

There was a free election in Palestine, but it came out the wrong way. So instantly, the United States and Israel with Europe tagging along, moved to punish the Palestinian people, and punish them harshly, because they voted the wrong way in a free election. That's accepted here in the West as perfectly normal. That illustrates the deep hatred and contempt for democracy among western elites, so deep-seated they can't even perceive it when it's in front of their eyes. You punish people severely if they vote the wrong way in a free election.

The last thing the United States wants is for countries to go their own way. Because if they go their own way, there's a chance the US won't get its way. This was what the Vietnam War was all about. This is what our policies in Latin America have been about for well over a century. A country that acts independently, that doesn't open its doors for American-led neo-liberal looting--this cannot be tolerated. This is why Cuba must continue to be punished. Claims that we are "spreading democracy" are appeals to our better natures, and they succeed all too often.

Movie Notes

I watched Miami Vice on Friday night. I admit that when this movie came out, I had no interest in seeing it. I tend to avoid movies based on tv shows, and I have some mysterious aversion to Jamie Foxx. It was reviews like this one by Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door, its presence on certain critics' year-end top ten list, and then this fascinating discussion between Uhlich and Matt Zoller Seitz (also at The House Next Door) that persuaded me that I wanted to see it. The Uhlich/Seitz discussion is about the so-called "death of film". At one point they're talking about how filmmakers who don't work in the classical narrative style get ignored by the canon-makers and marginalized. In this context, Seitz says:

And we're implicitly excluding filmmakers who do radical things within the context of formats that are quite well-established. Circling back to where we were a minute ago, I think that to have been made within the commercial exhibition system, Miami Vice and INLAND EMPIRE are, hands down, the two most radical works of popular culture to have appeared on American screens in 2006. Nothing else comes close.

I admit that I'm not well-versed in the visual-language of movies, and it often doesn't occur to me to think about why a certain visual appears instead of another. But damn, when a critic I respect says something like this, I'm going to want to see that movie. They talk about Vice some more in the discussion, but the whole thing is worth reading, if you're interested in film.

In the event, I enjoyed the movie. There were some striking visuals, to be sure, though what they necessarily meant I'm not sure I could say. As for the plot, I'd kept hearing that it was impossible to follow, but this complaint is strange, since the plot seemed pretty basic to me. (For another interesting--positive--take on the movie, see Brandon Soderberg's at No Trivia.) (By the way, the film's music included two or three Audioslave songs and somehow they didn't suck and may even have been good. I'm not sure what to do with this unexpected information. On the bad side, there was also a truly terrible cover of "In the Air Tonight".)

And last night, we watched The Departed, which was a second viewing for me. I liked it again, perhaps even more than I did the first time; still think Leonardo DiCaprio was better than I'd ever seen him before; still enjoyed Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg immensely; and still think Jack Nicholson's performance was all too often annoyingly cartoonish.

People Need the Magical Side

Last week in The Washington Post, there was an interesting article about an Army chaplain named Don Larsen who'd applied to become the first Wiccan chaplain in the U.S. Military. He'd been doing his duty as a Pentecostal chaplain, but "inwardly . . . was torn between Christianity's exclusive claims about salvation and a 'universalist streak' in his thinking". Later in the article, Larsen is quoted thus:

"You can't intellectually talk about witchcraft. You gotta show up," he says. "What Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a lot of us universalists think is, people need the magical side, the mythological side, of religion.

"We don't need more Calvinist rationalizing. We need mystery. We need horizons. We need journeys."

This is not a new suggestion, obviously, but I am increasingly convinced of the basic truth of the idea. In a recent post, I tentatively embarked on a discussion of these kinds of issues. I claimed that liberal atheists' excessive focus on religion qua religion obscures the reality of what are really political problems (while tending to miss how religious belief and practice actually operate in people's lives). Of course, it is the very exclusivity of, for example, Christianity's claims of salvation that rankles.

And the invocation of "mystery" does not sit well. There is a tendency to associate the word with obscurantism and to think that people simply want to be told what to do and how to behave and would rather not know the facts. I used to maintain that any suggestion of spirituality was anathema; I didn't want to have anything to do with it. But I no longer think it's as simple as that.

A few years ago I read Karen Armstrong's A History of God and noticed with interest that, as she told it, throughout history when the more mystical aspects of religion have come to the fore, groups of people have been more tolerant of each other. It seemed to me that problems have arisen when religious groups have attempted to define and explain their belief in rationalist terms. We tend to, I think, pass over those periods of tolerance and instead define religious activity in black and white terms as defined by the most intolerant, fundamentalist, rationalist believers. (Further, I think that the idea of "intellectual" activity has been overly associated with rationality in this way--note Larsen's comment that "you can't intellectually talk about witchcraft".)

It may seem as if I'm denigrating rational (or scientific) inquiry in this line of thought, but I assure you I am not. Elsewhere, it will be seen that I often criticize political figures for making policy decisions irrationally, and followers for ignoring available evidence and facts irrationally. I see no contradiction, but I know that I will need to flesh out the difference.

Ok, I'm still in the very early stages of my thinking about this, and there is much to read and to write. More to come.

Turns out Rubber Soul and Revolver are pretty good after all...

Speaking of the Beatles, last year I finally heard Rubber Soul and Revolver for the first time. I know that sounds unlikely, but it's true. I went through a period in high school when I was listening to the Beatles constantly, from a tape I'd made from my step-brother's LP of their #1 hits. As a result, I am incredibly familiar with their early super-hits, like "She Loves You" and "Love Me Do" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Later, I became obsessed with Sgt. Pepper and The White Album and Abbey Road (I even had these on vinyl!). These are the records that form the core of their "classic rock" body of songs, along with "Hey Jude" and "Let it Be" and so forth. So I shifted to agreeing with the conventional line that had the later, "more mature", music as being better than the earlier "pop" hits. But Rubber Soul and Revolver are in the middle, don't have too many songs that got played on classic rock radio, don't have the super-massive hits, and do have a couple of songs that I professed to hate (such as "Michelle", which I'm still not sure about).

By the time I'd heard the two both referenced many times as the best Beatles albums (when it wasn't still Sgt. Pepper), I wasn't listening to them much at all anymore. In fact, I'd taken the Beatles for granted for ages. They're always there, aren't they? It was Woebot's appreciation of "1o Unfamiliar Beatles Tracks" from last year that inspired me to listen to my own Beatles records (cds in my case). I dragged out my Beatles for Sale and A Hard Day's Night cds, and we listened to them a lot during the rest of the year. It's really hard to deny this music.

I find, now, that I listen to the Beatles more closely. The thing about them always being there is that we (or, well, I) tend to not really notice what's going on. And the Beatles were so good at making pop music, made it seem so effortless, and have been so absorbed into the pop landscape (plus the deliriously wonderful vocals are so upfront in the mix) that it's been easy to miss the sheer inventiveness in so much of their music. I like Woebot's line at the end of that post from last year, where he says: "I think if we’re ever going to stop the rot that’s eating away at music, we need to go back and have another look at The Beatles."

Anyway, back to these records. In his comment about "I'm Looking Through You", Woebot says: "Probably the most well known of all of these selections by merit of the fact that literally everyone in the world has heard "Rubber Soul"." Of course, this made me laugh. Not only had I never heard the album or the song, but for years I'd only ever heard Steve Earle's cover of it on Train a Comin' (in the liner notes Earles says of the song: "This is the stuff I cut my teeth on - Middle Class White Boy Roots Music." Compare with David Thomas' increasingly ridiculous-seeming assertion (quoted by me here) that not only do the Beatles not play "rock music", but they "will be a footnote in 50 years and forgotten totally in 100". Sure.) Then when Pitchfork did their 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s thing last year, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was the second-highest placing Beatles song--and I couldn't even say I knew what it sounded like!

So, yeah, I bought the albums, happily found them both used. And of course I was already somewhat familiar with a lot of the music on them, though not all of it. But listening to the albums as albums, straight through, this was new for me. As the subject line suggests, it turns out they're pretty good after all.

"Classic" Rock

It so happened that the next three songs to play after those listed in yesterday's iPod rundown were "Why don't we do it in the road?" by the Beatles, "Wild Horses" by the Rolling Stones, and "Wicked Annabella" by the Kinks. I thought, banally, "hey, a classic rock mix". But then I realized that it's no classic rock mix at all, if "classic rock" is basically a radio format. While certainly the Beatles and the Stones, and to a lesser extent the Kinks, are classic rock radio staples, this sequence illustrates one of the many things wrong with it as a format (and with commercial radio in general, by extension). That is, these radio stations always claimed to play "deep cuts", but in reality always played the same songs over and over. The only time you'd every hear "Why don't we do it in the road?" (which, admittedly, is not one of the Beatles hundred or so best songs) would be if a station was playing all of side two of The White Album (if we're being casually pedantic, do we italicize aliases of titles?? better play it safe. . . ). "Wild Horses" was pretty common, of course, but a song like "Wicked Annabella" would never get played. But pulling back even further, yeah, the Kinks were basically reduced to "Lola" and "Celluloid Heroes" and their arena rock hits from the late seventies, like "Come Dancing" or "Do It Again". "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" and others were generally relegated to "oldies" stations, if I recall. (Classic rock was more likely to play Van Halen's version of the former.) But albums like The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (which includes "Wicked Annabella") and Muswell Hillbillies were never played. In fact, even for the Beatles and Stones, in general their earlier music was played on oldies stations, while the later, more rockist ("mature") music (and only certain songs) was "classic rock".

I'm sort of rambling here, but the thing is, I have always wanted to like the radio. But even within a given radio format's narrow range, the narrowness is astounding. It doesn't bother me that there is something like a "classic rock" format--where music from a particular era or genre is played. But if they didn't have time for anything but "Tumbling Dice" from Exile on Main Street, or for central classic rock artist Neil Young's "Ambulance Blues", I guess it's no surprise they didn't play Fairport Convention or Richard & Linda Thompson or Captain Beefheart or the Velvet Underground or the Stooges. All of these artists seem like obvious choices for any decent "classic rock" playlist. And yet you'd rarely, if ever, hear them. Perhaps because I listened almost exclusively to classic rock when I first got into music in high school, one of my impulses since then has been to fill in the gaps, to build a massive playlist of what I think classic rock should have been. All of the above artists, plus Blue Cheer, Silver Apples, Skip Spence, Funkadelic, Robert Wyatt, Roy Harper, Love, Syd Barrett (and Barrett-era Floyd, never played on the radio); German bands like Can and Amon Düül II (Faust strikes me as a little trickier, though even they had some actual songs that would have sounded great alongside this stuff); stuff like Pentangle and the Incredible String Band . . . all that music that gets suddenly "re-discovered" by a new wave of indie kids.

Ah, utopian dreams. Stay tuned as I continue to bang the drum for important issues like this.

Science Fiction

I haven't read much science fiction or fantasy. During the years when I might otherwise have been reading a lot of science fiction, I was instead reading superhero comics. In fact, I can fairly easily list all such books (relatively loosely defined) I have read:

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - Perhaps you've heard of it? I've read this twice, once when I was 12-13, and then again when I was 24. I enjoyed it both times. Given how often my father and especially my brother have re-read it, and with the recent movies, I've leafed through it a few times to see whether I might want to give it another go, but the prose just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke - I've also read this twice, once for a ninth grade book report, again in my early 20s. I thought it was damn good.

Dune by Frank Herbert - I read this around the same time I re-read The Lord of the Rings, and I remember loving it. My dad keeps getting on me to read the other books in the series, but I don't see it happening.

Several novels by Kurt Vonnegut, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Slapstick, and Timequake, which seem to be the most "science fictiony". I don't have Vonnegut in the highly rigorous "science fiction" column in my mind, but I know that he is talked about a lot as such, so I include him here. The first two of these novels are my favorite of his overall. Timequake had an interesting premise that he did nothing with.

Something Wicked This Way Comes & Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - These were ok, not terribly exciting.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov - I borrowed the original Foundation trilogy--along with the Bradbury, as well as the Card and Finney novels mentioned below--from my dad in an effort to read some of the classics of the genre, but I was unable to get past the first one; I found it virtually unreadable.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein - probably the worst novel I have ever read.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman - this book is hilarious, and I wish I knew what happened to my copy; I keep meaning to read some Pratchett proper and, in fact, just gave a couple of his books to my brother for Christmas, to some acclaim, so I think I'll need to snag them from him.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - I loved Gaiman's Sandman comics, so I was at least interested in his novels. This one, I just learned from Wikipedia, is apparently adapted from a BBC series he wrote. Anyway, the book was ok.

Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers & Red Dwarf: Better Than Life by Grant Naylor - Ha! These are very entertaining and very silly, though I didn't realize until later that the novels came after the even sillier BBC series, which I didn't see until recently anyway (I liked the books better). "Grant Naylor" is, of course, the name under which Rob Grant and Doug Naylor collaborated.

Icehenge, Antarctica, & Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson - I was quite impressed by Robinson's novels (I thought his evocation of the cold in Antarctica, for example, was very effective), even though they did occasionally get bogged down in the science, and I fully expected to read more of his stuff, but, alas, have not as yet. Icehenge was the first science fiction I'd read that had a kind of literary uncertainty, if that makes any sense (and it might if I troubled myself to elaborate).

Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, & Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card - The first Ender series. Ender's Game is enjoyable, if problematic. Speaker for the Dead was excellent. Midway through Xenocide he kind of lost me, and Children of the Mind didn't leave much of an impact on me at all.

Time and Again & From Time to Time by Jack Finney - I admit that I'm something of a sucker for time travel stories (though I've not actually read many), including shit like Back to the Future. Time and Again is an interesting twist on the idea: characters think themselves into the past (so long as they are in a certain location, if I recall correctly). Pretty good. The sequel is inevitably not quite as good, but still it held my interest.

Light by M. John Harrison - I first heard about Light via The Complete Review; I was duly impressed and have turned others onto it, who've also enjoyed it. I look forward to reading more of his fiction--for example, this Matthew Cheney post has interested me in The Course of the Heart.

Stranger Things Happen & Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link - various bloggers have been gushing about Link and her short stories for the last few years, so I was intrigued. I read Magic for Beginners first, and I understood why. Readers seem to think that her earlier collection was even better, but I disagree. I was not nearly as enchanted by the stories in Stranger Things Happen.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - see my review here

Little, Big by John Crowley - A great book. My first Crowley. I look forward with great interest and anticipation to reading his Ægypt tetralogy, once the fourth is finally published (scheduled for later this year) and the first three come back into print.

Ok, I think that's about it. No Philip K. Dick (interested, in theory, but wary of what is, by most accounts, often dreadful prose). No Samuel Delaney (who I definitely do plan to read). No Ursula Le Guin. No Handmaid's Tale (though I have read other Margaret Atwood novels). Not included: novels by Pynchon, Delillo, or Powers, etc, that might appear to have some elements of what could be called science fiction; so-called "magical realists" like Garcia Marquez or Rushdie; fabulists like Borges or Calvino. And so on.

All of this is to clear away the decks and get to the point, which is that very recently I did read a great science fiction/fantasy series: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, and its sequel, The Urth of the New Sun. I plan to write a little bit about it soon.

Historically Contingent Features

Mark Kaplan points to this Valve discussion of Terry Eagleton's recent review of a book about stereotyping in the London Review of Books (subscribers only, which I am not, so I haven't read it). Eagleton apparently offers a strange defense of stereotyping (strange, I guess, because it's coming from him and is so common, and easily punctured). I like Mark's comment:

. . .what makes it a stereotype is [. . .] that it essentialises what are historically contingent features. The English stereotype of the lawless Irish (under colonial rule) overlooked that it was this foreign and imposed law that was being resisted or disavowed, not ‘Law itself’. (Indeed, ‘Irish’ itself might be seen as proto-stereotypical, since a diverse population, having in common the fact being of under colonial rule, is then turned into a positive entity, ‘The Irish’.) Likewise, with stereotypes of ‘lazy’ colonised peoples etc - they don’t want to work for you etc. Stereotyping is de-historicising, edits out context/ relations of power and so on.

This is always an important point, but especially so now, as we continue to find ourselves doing battle with people pushing for war by appealing to and relying on some essentialized picture of how a whole people are, or how all adherents to a given religion necessarily believe and will act.

More locally, I note that it is similarly unhelpful when people think they have some special ability to identify more refined stereotypes--their resultant models are no more accurate in predicting what people will do, or how or why they will do it.

No Military Purpose

From a useful interview with Noam Chomsky, conducted by Michael Shank and appearing in yesterday's CounterPunch:

Shank: How is the political deadlock in Lebanon impacting the U.S. government's decision to potentially go to war with Iran? Is there a relationship at all?

Chomsky:There's a relationship. I presume part of the reason for the U.S.-Israel invasion of Lebanon in July-and it is US-Israeli, the Lebanese are correct in calling it that-part of the reason I suppose was that Hezbollah is considered a deterrent to a potential U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. It had a deterrent capacity, i.e. rockets. And the goal I presume was to wipe out the deterrent so as to free up the United States and Israel for an eventual attack on Iran. That's at least part of the reason. The official reason given for the invasion can't be taken seriously for a moment. That's the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of a couple others. For decades Israel has been capturing, and kidnapping Lebanese and Palestinian refugees on the high seas, from Cyprus to Lebanon, killing them in Lebanon, bringing them to Israel, holding them as hostages. It's been going on for decades, has anybody called for an invasion of Israel?

Of course Israel doesn't want any competition in the region. But there's no principled basis for the massive attack on Lebanon, which was horrendous. In fact, one of the last acts of the U.S.-Israeli invasion, right after the ceasefire was announced before it was implemented, was to saturate much of the south with cluster bombs. There's no military purpose for that, the war was over, the ceasefire was coming.

UN de-mining groups that are working there say that the scale is unprecedented. It's much worse than any other place they've worked: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, anywhere. There are supposed to be about one million bomblets left there. A large percentage of them don't explode until you pick them up, a child picks them up, or a farmer hits it with a hoe or something. So what it does basically is make the south uninhabitable until the mining teams, for which the United States and Israel don't contribute, clean it up. This is arable land. It means that farmers can't go back; it means that it may undermine a potential Hezbollah deterrent. They apparently have pretty much withdrawn from the south, according to the UN.

You can't mention Hezbollah in the U.S. media without putting in the context of "Iranian-supported Hezbollah." That's its name. Its name is Iranian-supported Hezbollah. It gets Iranian support. But you can mention Israel without saying US-supported Israel. So this is more tacit propaganda. The idea that Hezbollah is acting as an agent of Iran is very dubious. It's not accepted by specialists on Iran or specialists on Hezbollah. But it's the party line. Or sometimes you can put in Syria, i.e. "Syrian-supported Hezbollah," but since Syria is of less interest now you have to emphasize Iranian support.

iPod rundown - 02/22/07

1. Ghost - "God Took a Picture of His Illness on This Ground": I have two cds from the Japanese band Ghost. This is a gorgeous song from the excellent Hypnotic Underworld. Thirteen minutes of abstractness, with a lonely bass plucked throughout, a lovely, plaintive reed of some kind (recorder?) cutting through the din, occasional crashing of cymbals, somewhat tribal-sounding percussion off in the distance…

2. Kool & the Gang - "Jungle Jazz": And a nice transition into this enjoyable funk, from Kool & the Gang, before they went supernova with songs like the cheesy wedding staple "Celebration". I have this on the Funky Stuff various artists collection. I like the flute solo in the last minute.

3. Smog - "Russian Winter" - Bill Callahan/Smog is one of my favorite musicians. "Russian Winter" is from his first album, 1990's Sewn to the Sky, which I haven't spent much time with as compared to his other music. It's much noisier than later Smog albums, with less emphasis on Callahan's distinctive songwriting, more on tape manipulations and guitar experiments. This particular track is an instrumental: guitar accompanied by a fluttery machine chug; yet not as abrasive as much of the rest of the cd.

4. Tommy Boy Megamix "Tommy Boy Megamix": Eh. I didn't hear much rap for several years, then I started to listen to more of it in the last two, realized I'd missed a lot of interesting music, decided I wanted to go back and check out a lot of it and do the historical survey thing. I'd read an interesting review of the label sampler, The Tommy Boy Story Vol. 1. Then I saw it used, listened to a couple of tracks, and bought it. I'm sort of wishing now that I hadn't. It's not terrible, but it wasn't quite what I'd had in mind. It has a couple of nice rap songs from the label's early days, but it's largely filled with dated, quaint dj mixes like this, not entirely without charm or interest, but not what I was hoping for.

5. Three 6 Mafia - "Got it 4 Sale": I enjoy Three 6 Mafia, even if most of their songs sound alike to me. This is from Most Known Unknown.

6. Bedhead - "To the Ground": Bedhead was already defunct by the time I'd ever heard of them. All three Bedhead albums are equally good; this song comes from their first one, WhatFunLifeWas. They seemed to take the Velvet Underground's third album as their basic template, which is fine by me. (What I said here about American Analog Set applies to Bedhead, too, except that Bedhead was much better, and I think they also potentially could have pointed me out of that particular dilemma, had it happened.)

7. Muhal Richard Abrams - "Duet for One World" - I'd never heard any Abrams before I downloaded this track from Destination: OUT! Pretty good! (This is the permalink, but the mp3s have been taken down.)

8. Modest Mouse - "A Different City": Modest Mouse is a great rock band. I've been able to catch them live on three occasions. The first was a few months before The Moon & Antarctica (from which comes this song) came out, at The Black Cat in DC. It was a solid show, not overwhelming; by the end my legs were killing me (I was already too old for this kind of thing), and possibly a bit cranky as a result, so perhaps more critical than I otherwise might have been. The second time was at an old fire hall in Dundalk, MD, and they were phenomenal. One song ("Tundra/Desert", I think) was so transcendently awesome that I'd swear that I nearly levitated. Third was at DAR Constitution Hall in DC, which I can tell you is a terrible place to see a rock show. I saw the Pixies there, too, and both shows should have been incredible--it was clear that both bands were on--but it was hard to get involved; they seemed so far away.

9. Nick Drake - "Harvest Breed": Short (1:40) track from Pink Moon, which I guess is pretty much all short tracks, isn't it? Anyway, it went by pretty quickly, and I don't have much to say about it or Nick Drake (who I like well enough, though not quite as much as I thought I did when I first got into him, by coincidence just around the same time "Pink Moon" was in that VW ad).

10. Pet Shop Boys - "West End Girls": This really is a great pop song. I'm always sort of astonished by how good it is. I don't like anything else by the Pet Shop Boys (who keep showing up on these rundowns, I can't help but notice) nearly as much.

11. Aretha Franklin - "The House That Jack Built": For years the only Aretha Franklin songs I knew were "Respect", "Think" (largely thanks to The Blues Brothers; is that wrong? I suspect that it is); and "(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman". A few years ago I finally did the right thing and bought The Very Best. Of course, it's pretty much all great (though I could do without her cover of "Eleanor Rigby").

12. Volcano the Bear - "Dawn and My Hips are Fuel": Wow. How can I describe Volcano the Bear? Improv rock, maybe? Except it doesn't really rock. If you like Henry Cow you might like them? Gastr del Sol? This track is from the wonderful album, The Idea of Wood. It's music like this that makes it worth scouring the bins and magazines for new music.

13. John Duncan - "Helix": This comes from another Wire-sampler, Atlantic Waves 2006 in this case. Three minutes of a barely changing wall of noise. Not sure I care, but I'll give it another shot.

14. Silver Jews - "Room Games & Diamond Rain": I always put off buying another Silver Jews album. The music is always fairly mellow, deceptively simple country-ish rock. And then there are poet David Berman's laconic vocals and interesting lyrics. This comes from Bright Flight.

15. Joanna Newsom - "Cosmia": I'm still absorbing Ys, but I do enjoy it so far. If occasionally Van Dyke Parks's strings threaten to overwhelm the songs, I still find much local pleasure in Newsom's harp playing and wordplay.

If you guessed from this list that I have a lot of music released by the Drag City label, you guessed right.

Juana Molina, etc.

I've bought three cds thus far this year: Christine Fellows' Paper Anniversary (quite good; thank you, John Darnielle); the new Deerhoof album, Friend Opportunity (I'm enjoying it, but so far not as much as Reveille, Apple O', or Milkman); and Juana Molina's Son (I believe I have Simon Reynolds to thank for alerting me to this). My previous encounters with Molina had been via two Wire-sampler cds that included one song each of hers. If I'd heard Son last year when it came out, it would easily have been one of my ten or fifteen favorite albums of the year. I've been able to listen to it a handful of times, and it's marvelous. To hear what she's all about, check out the latest excellent episode of Woebot.TV, which is devoted to Molina and her music, with a phone interview and live footage. If you're interested at all in new music, I encourage you to take a look. It'll save me from fumbling around trying to describe the music. (As far as I can tell, Woebot doesn't archive the shows, which is too bad, because I think I've missed at least one. I've subscribed now, so I won't miss any more.)

Elsewhere, in an interesting post at the new version of his Clap Clap blog, Mike Barthel discusses Devenda Banhart and Lindsay Lohan, and Lohan's interview of Banhart from last year and the kind of cultural transactions it might represent. (As a side note, can we please just retire the ridiculous "freak-folk" label?) A post from earlier this month on the deaths of James Brown and Gerald Ford, and what the ensuing funeral spectacles can tell us about American culture, was even more interesting.

Recent Political Reads

Edie at Annotated Life on the media. A sample:

While ostensibly wringing their hands at the sordid celebrity lifestyle, the article’s authors simultaneously capitalize upon it to sell the magazine on the lowest level possible, and completely omit the fact that the giant media empires—not Paris and Britney—are themselves most responsible for the quality of news coverage, Newsweek included. Instead, the authors insult and attack parents and their daughters for following popular fashion.

Lenin at Lenin's Tomb on Mike Davis' new book on the history of the "car bomb".

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon with a feminist response to Children of Men (my review here).

Joe at American Leftist on the "wishful thinking" of left-leaning bloggers, who keep expecting Democratic politicians to be more leftwing than they really are (this post is where I found the link to Marcotte's review of Children of Men).

Gabriel Kolko at Asia Times Online on how Israel "cannot survive allied with the United States" and so it is time to make peace, and concessions, with its neighbors.

Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report, on Barack Obama, who, like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice before him, as president would merely put a "black face on imperial aggression" (article first seen at CounterPunch).

Arthur Silber at Once Upon a Time. . . on the ongoing propaganda effort to prep us for an attack on Iran, in "Iran: All Propaganda, All the Time".

Chekhov

I've had my edition of The Portable Chekhov since I was a senior in college (1991). Along with Gogol's Dead Souls, it was among the assigned reading for a course covering Russian history up to 1915. I remember reading some of the stories at the time (and possibly even some of the Gogol; I wasn't the world's most diligent student), but not anywhere near all of them. In the intervening years, I've pulled the book out on occasion to read a story or two, but for the most part it's sat on my shelves, mocking me.

Then last year, a post by Bud Parr at Chekhov's Mistress about the story "The Kiss" prompted me to look at it again. I was pleased to see that my edition had that story; I read it, and I liked it. I decided to return to the beginning of the book and read it straight through, but I had a hard time of it. Some stories I liked, but a lot of them seemed, well, lesser than I was expecting. Again and again, I put the book aside in favor of something else. Also last year, at a fire sale for a local crap bookstore going out of business, I bought the NYRB edition of Peasants and Other Stories, a collection of late Chekhov stories originally selected and introduced by Edmund Wilson in 1956. There is very little overlap between the two books (only two stories).

Last week, I was struggling through a couple of the shorter pieces in the Portable collection, wondering again what all the fuss was about this Chekhov guy. Some of these stories were mildly amusing, others annoying. In the middle of one such story, I tossed the book aside and picked up the other one to read Wilson's introduction. In it, he explains that all too often editions of Chekhov's work have not been chronological in nature: "You get humorous sketches from his earliest phase, when he was writing for the comic papers, side by side with his most serious stories; and the various periods of this serious work are themselves all jumbled together. . . " This, he writes, "has always been a serious obstacle" for those trying to understand Chekhov via English translations. Here he offers the longer stories from Chekhov's late period, but omits "the more anecdotal ones with which they are interspersed" (in a footnote he offers the full list of works from this period and says parenthetically that "If anyone should set out to read these consecutively in Constance Garnett's edition, he would be put to considerable inconvenience").

I felt I knew what Wilson was talking about. Though The Portable Chekhov is presented in chronological order, it nevertheless packs in so many different kinds of his work that I found it hard to read from piece to piece. Some of the comic stories are so broad and, well, obvious, that it makes sense that they appeared in newspapers. They're often rather tedious, a fact only barely mitigated by their brevity.

All of which is a long preamble to my saying that I think I finally understand what's so special about Chekhov. After reading Wilson's introduction, I decided to try the stories in Peasants. I'm glad I did. So far I've read the first three stories in the collection--"A Woman's Kingdom", "Three Years", and "The Murder"--and they're excellent. In general, these stories are much longer than the earlier ones (at 106 pages, "Three Years" is really a short novel). I've often read that Chekhov is credited with "inventing the modern short story", and certainly the form of these stories still seems to be the basic template followed by so many writers today--slice of life stories, with no resolution or judgment. Each story presents the social life of a particular milieu, the narrator subtly moving from character to character, describing in precise detail the thoughts and impressions of each, and even minor characters are given their due, with stories and personalities sketched in, with a natural-seeming ease, making us feel as if we do indeed know them.

In "Three Years", my favorite of the three, the central characters are Laptev and his wife Yulia, who married him out of some strange sense of obligation, but not for love or money. Both characters are confused about their lives--why have they made the decisions they've made?--and they feel trapped. Laptev is rich, but has nothing but contempt for his wealth and resentment for the abuse he suffered as a child, though by the end, his father's and brother's health failing, he is moving closer to taking on the role of head of the company they own. Toward the end of the story, Laptev again considers his life and surroundings, and finds them both essentially unchanged since childhood; he wonders that he should be unable to alter it:

Laptev went into the garden and sat down on a seat near the fence, which divided them from the neighbor's yard, where there was a garden, too. The bird cherry was in bloom. Laptev remembered that the tree had been gnarled and just as big when he was a child, and had not changed at all since then. Every corner of the garden and of the yard recalled the faraway past. And in his childhood, too, just as now, the whole yard bathed in moonlight could be seen through the sparse trees, the shadows had been mysterious and forbidding, a black dog had lain in the middle of the yard, and the clerks' windows had stood wide open. And all these were cheerless memories.

[...]

Laptev was convinced that the millions and the business which was so distasteful to him were ruining his life and would make him a complete slave. He imagined how, little by little, he would grow accustomed to his position; would, little by little, enter into the part of the head of a great firm; would begin to grow dull and old, die in the end, as the average man usually does die, in a decrepit, soured old age, making everyone about him miserable and depressed. But what hindered him from giving up those millions and that business and leaving that yard and garden which had been hateful to him from his childhood?

He imagines leaving, changing his life:

His heart ached sweetly with the foretaste of freedom; he laughed joyously and pictured how exquisite, poetical, and even holy, life might be. . . .

But he still stood and did not go away, and kept asking himself: "What keeps me here?" And he felt angry with himself and with the black dog, which still lay stretched on the stone yard, instead of running off to the open country, to the woods, where it would have been free and happy. It was clear that that dog and he were prevented from leaving the yard by the same thing; the habit of bondage, or servitude. . . .

I think these passages are beautiful, finely controlled; and this story is one of the finer shorter pieces of fiction I've read. I can't wait to get to the rest of the stories in this collection.

iPod rundowns - 02/15/07 & 02/16/07

In an effort to write more about what I'm reading and listening to, I'm going to make the iPod shuffle rundown a semi-regular feature. I was going to do this yesterday but, other than noting the songs as they came up yesterday morning, didn't have time to. So today you get a bonus: I'm going to give you the first 15 songs I heard both yesterday and today. I'm sure you're all very excited.

Yesterday's first 15:
I have more than 10,000 songs on my iPod. With such a number, I always find it interesting where the shuffle appears to fixate on any given day. One day last week, eight of the first 50 songs I heard were by Sonic Youth. Yesterday, it started out heavy on the country.

1. Merle Haggard - "California Blues (Blue Yodel #4)": I have the great Down Every Road 4-cd box, though I find it hard to listen to any given disc straight through. Love it when one of the songs comes up on shuffle though. . .

2. Palace - "Give Me Children": Arise Therefore may be my favorite Will Oldham record, if it's not I See a Darkness.

3. Signal - "Index Area": 14 minutes of electronic music from the lone Mort aux Vaches comp I have. It would probably make for better reading if I could remember a thing about it right now. I'm sure it must have been repetitious.

4. Annie - "Chewing Gum": Appropriately titled sugary pop song; I like "Heartbeat" better.

5. Randy Newman - "Have You Seen My Baby?": I don't have nearly enough Randy Newman. This is a great one from 1970's 12 Songs. I also have the Flamin' Groovies version, which is pretty cool, too.

6. Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson - "Good Hearted Woman"
7. Dolly Parton - "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind":

Two albums that I got to know very well when I was like 13 or 14 were Waylon Jennings' and Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits. My Dad liked country. He had these on tape, and we listened to them constantly when we were with him (as well as, um, the Eagles). I've always liked Waylon Jennings' voice, and his duets with Willie Nelson were great. This one addresses the old problem of the "good hearted woman lovin' a good-timin' man". Of course, all of his songs seemed to be about being, or having been, an outlaw or roughneck or cowboy or some such trouble. Seems pretty silly these days, but, notwithstanding that period of time in which I pretended that I was too cool to admit I liked country music, I've always loved those songs. I liked when we listened to Dolly Parton, too, but it took me longer to come back to an appreciation of her. "Islands in the Stream" is hard to forgive. Aimée is the big Dolly fan in the house; I think the last song played at our wedding reception was, by her request, "9 to 5".

8. Beck - "The New Pollution": Don't really care about Beck anymore, but I still like Odelay.

9. Syd Barrett - "Long Gone": I mentioned liking post-Barrett Pink Floyd better, but I do like the earlier Barrett-led stuff. This is, of course, from the solo album, The Madcap Laughs, which I've had for a while, but haven't spent much time with. People swear by it.

10. The J. Geils Band - "Freeze Frame": Ha! I have this on here because I was making a mix-cd of 80s pop hits; it may be sort of terrible, but fuck it, I've always liked this song. Somehow, I can still remember the first time I ever heard it (I was eleven).

11. Herbert - "Harmonize": A lovely song from one of my favorite albums from last year.

12. Ghostface Killah - "Run": Yes! Evidence that I do indeed listen to rap! This song features Jadakiss, and is from The Pretty Toney Album.

13. Midnight Oil - "Forgotten Years": I don't care much for Midnight Oil. I have the 20,000 Watts R.S.L. greatest hits collection, which is actually more than I need. But it so happens that this is one of my favorite songs of theirs.

14. The Rapture - "Alabama Sunshine": I was looking the other direction when all the indie kids realized it was ok to dance again and went batshit crazy for the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" and Echoes. That said, it's a decent album. This song is from the second DFA compilation, and I like it just fine.

15. The Velvet Underground - "Sunday Morning": The first song on The Velvet Underground & Nico. Given all the noise and dissonance on this record, it's occasionally a surprise to notice the quieter moments of sheer beauty.


Today's first 15:
Contra Dial "M" for Musicology, I have a fair amount of music on my iPod that I can't quite say I like, at least not yet. My first instinct was to load it up with albums that had lain dormant in my collection. Plus, there are all of the cds that come with various issues of The Wire. I loaded them all, and have been grading the tracks and removing the ones that I can't stand. And then there are exploratory downloads. Etc.

1. Dizzee Rascal - "Vexed": I have both Dizzee cds and the first Run the Road comp, but I guess grime is dead, innit? That's ok; if so, it left some cool music behind. This is from Dizzee's Boy In Da Corner. At times Dizzee's distinctive (and attractive) flow is a distraction from the music, which seems to be made up of shards of electronic keyboards (whatever that means--I'd no doubt do better writing these while listening to the songs).

2. Voxtrot - "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives": Downloaded this song from some blog at the end of last year, I think. Not sure about it. Generic indie rock.

3. Scarface - "In Between Us": Scarface's The Fix is a monster of a rap album, one of my favorites ever, I think. Like much of the album, this song has a bluesy menace to it. I will not dig myself a hole with an attempt to define it any further. Nas guests.

4. David Thomas & the Pedestrians - "Semaphore": A delightfully odd song from the second David Thomas "solo" album, Variations on a Theme (featuring, among others, Richard Thompson, Lindsay Cooper, and Chris Cutler).

5. Billy Bragg - "Upfield": Blah. I love Bragg's collaborations with Wilco, the Mermaid Avenue albums of previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics, but I'd never listened to Bragg's solo stuff. Last year I borrowed his 2-cd Must I Paint You a Picture compilation from a friend. I didn't listen to it straight through, instead just dumping the whole lot onto the iPod, letting them come up randomly. I haven't been impressed. I'm usually annoyed when his songs come up. This one is no different.

6. The Constantines - "Goodbye Baby & Amen": This band got tagged with the odd "Fugazi meets Springsteen" label. Ignore that. They're just a damn solid rock band. This song is one of the quieter ones from the excellent Shine a Light.

7. Maria Castro - "Postglacial Rebound": Some of my favorite Wire-sampler cds are in the Exploratory Music from Portugal series. This particular track was on the 2004 sampler. All electronic blips and static, and somehow soothing.

8. BR5-49 - "Even if it's Wrong": Entertaining trad country; here and there sounding a little like Waylon Jennings, then a little like Hank Williams.

9. Bob Dylan - "Seven Curses": If you're a Dylan fan at all, the 3-cd first Bootleg Series release is absolutely essential. This is one of my favorite songs from the set; it tells the same basic story as Zep's "Gallows Pole". In this version, a woman comes to town to pay off the hanging judge in order to save her father; neither gold nor silver will do, and he demands her as payment; she pays the price, but he hangs her father anyway. Curses ensue.

10. US Maple - "Babe": Guttural, indecipherable vocals; two guitarists who sound like they've walked into different songs; the drummer laying down an off-kilter groove. . . U.S. Maple has a wonderful lurching quality that I find tremendously appealing. Their deconstruction of rock is different than, say, Deerhoof's. Deerhoof seem to play the basic hooks in their songs from every possible angle until they're done. U.S. Maple plays rock music like it's falling apart and they can't be bothered to make it right. If any of this sounds interesting, I recommend experiencing them live. "Babe" is from what I think is their best album, Acre Thrills.

11. Ghostface Killah - "Big Girl": From last year's excellent Fishscale. I don't know that I have anything intelligent to say about Ghostface, or rap in general. I don't listen to enough of it to know what I'm talking about. I'm not good at differentiating voices (Ghostface's is one of the few I think I could recognize right off). But I like plenty of it. And I like Ghostface. Most of what I've heard of his is musically based on old soul samples, and he seems to just barrel ahead, rapping at full-speed, in his own world, at times seeming oblivious to the music behind him.

12. Mission of Burma - "Man In Decline": Huge, punishing, awesome. Forever an argument in favor of rock-band reunions, in the face of the many more arguments against. Obliterati rocks.

13. Spontaneous Music Ensemble - "Karyobin, Pt. 1": I bought Karyobin at a Derek Bailey show (w/American Milo Fine) at Stoke Newington in 2003. Recordings of free improv seem counter-intuitive in some respects. I often have a hard time with them, because I can't help but to reflexively want them to resolve into jazz or some other kind of structure. I do much better when I allow the music to just happen. This stuff often sounds to me like it's music falling down a hill.

14. Low + the Dirty Three - "Cody": A lovely instrumental track from Low's collaboration with the Dirty Three, as part of the In the Fishtank series. The record also has a gorgeous cover of Neil Young's "Down By the River".

15. Fleetwood Mac - "Monday Morning": I love this song. My mom had very few albums that I had much interest in, but Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, the first Fleetwood Mac albums with Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, were two that I gave her credit for. Commercially huge, of course, and also critically praised at the time, they still seem sort of out of step with the whole punk-taking-over narrative. I'd rather listen to Rumours than Never Mind the Bollocks.

Music Bits

I'm a little giddy with excitement to learn, by way of Carl "Zoilus" Wilson, that Pere Ubu's four long-unavailable "Fontana Years" albums are finally coming back into print. This is great, not least because I know that David Thomas has been trying for years to get the rights to these records. They were already out of print by the time I started getting into Pere Ubu. I was finally able to track down beat up used cds of three of them--The Tenement Year, Worlds In Collision, and Story of My Life, but I've never heard Cloudland, which is often said to be the best of the bunch. There will be bonus tracks, so I will replace my three. But the main reason for replacing The Tenement Year is that, apparently, "[t]he original 1988 Fontana release does not seem to have been mastered". Well, it's been mastered now. I always thought that cd sounded terrible.

In my two posts on hauntology, and probably elsewhere, I mentioned that I know next to nothing about dub. I've wanted to redress this, but the discography is so vast and confused, and I have very little money available anymore for just randomly trying records out. So this lacuna in my musical education has remained unfilled. Then the other day, I clicked over to Border Music from the fine folks at Destination: OUT! Both blogs had posts on The Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet, which featured John Zorn and Wayne Horvitz (and which I'd long had on my list of jazz albums to try to find, but never seen anywhere). Once at Border Music, I noticed that they'd posted some Lee 'Scratch' Perry albums, along with a lot of other cool music. I downloaded them, and as I write this, I am listening to some dub. I'm digging it. (Incidentally, I notice today that Border Music has been pulled down by WordPress for violating its terms of service. It doesn't say which term, though I suppose it could be for copyright issues. I hope it isn't permanent. For the record, I buy music and I believe in supporting artists. The little free music I've downloaded has been exploratory. I want to know what I like! Update: Good news! As Lucky from Border Music commented here today, the blog is back up. Apparently it was indeed about copyright, but he explained to them that he largely posts only out-of-print records, so.)

At his excellent blog I Hear a New World, the Sad Billionaire has a wonderful post up about the Wu-Tang Clan. Here's an excerpt:

The record [Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)] opens up with a kung-fu movie sample-- a hyper-caucasian voiceover artist reading Shaw Brothers boilerplate doggerel-- that sounds like it was recorded with a handheld cassette player held up to a television: “Shaolin shadowboxing and a wu-tang sword style.” Soon it will become clear to me that martial arts cinema mythology, cosa nostra trivia, comic book superheroes, Staten Island drug trade lore, five percent nation holy writ are all elements of an occult and inscrutable language in which the Wu-Tang Clan encode their messages to the world. Like Lee “Scratch” Perry and Sun Ra, the Wu-Tang Clan speak in a language meant to confuse and mislead outsiders like me; nonetheless, it seems all the more pleasurable the more it leaves me scratching my head and feeling like an idiot. The young Dominican-American novelist Junot Diaz once said that the reason he leaves so much untranslated Spanish in his fiction is to give Anglo readers the sensation of what it’s like to be an outsider to a dominant culture. Unlike the bourgeois MCs of recent years, the Wu-Tang Clan do not speak the lingua franca of luxury goods and imported automobiles… there is no opportunity for the false solidarity of product loyalty… but rather an invitation to estrangement, the first step towards critical consciousness…

And, in the new edition of The High Hat, Nate Patrin has a nice appreciation of 1970s-era Pink Floyd, which he links to his love of the soul, funk, and disco of Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, P-Funk, and Chic. In my recent post listing my favorite rock albums from 1967, one album conspicuous by its absence was Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which I only really like about half of. I know it's somehow not cool these days, but I much prefer the 70s Roger Waters-led Pink Floyd over the Syd Barrett stuff. I listened to Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall constantly when I was in high school, and I even love the last album with Waters, The Final Cut (though the best known track, "Not Now John", is completely awful in every way).