8/16/09 - Infinite Jest, pages 300-500

1. There seemed to be a point around page 300 where the book really seemed to click for me. I was loving it for the first 50 pages, and then the pace seemed to slow and slow and slow for the next 150 or so, but then sometime around 300 all of the setup that Wallace does up front really started drawing me in. I think I also finally got used to the rhythm of the book, which doesn't move at all like a classically structured novel. The interwebs have clued me in on the face that Wallace designed the book structure to be a "Sierpinski Gasket", a kind of triangle-based fractal, and parsing the structure of this thing definitely feels about like the kind of brain-heavy-lifting that the term suggests. One thing that felt crucial to locking in on the drive of the book was realizing that the plotlines aren't really set up to echo or converge - the themes are. So, for example, I spent a good chunk of the first couple hundred pages wondering how Wallace was going to link Ennet House and ETA, but now that I'm at page 500 or so it seems that the link is not one of plot (i.e. Hal is probably not going to be thrown into his whatever-it-is at the beginning of the book because of some run-in with Lenz or something) but rather of theme; ETA and Ennet House both being a repository of characters that use drugs to medicate their lives. Steeply and Maranthe's discussions on the clifftop regarding the conscious pursuit of deadly pleasure and choice reflect the daily choices that we see the ETA and Ennet House residents making. Choosing to watch the deadly Entertainment is much like the choice Joelle makes to suicidally overdose regardless of whether the plot strand following Joelle and the plot strand with Steeply and Maranthe converge or not.

2. One aspect of the book that just doesn't work for me is the constant humor regarding Steeply's cross-dressing getup and its various grotesqueries. What bothers me about it is that usually Wallace is sly about his jokes and doesn't belabor them; he's much more likely to get a laugh by spearing some absurdity or another quickly and out of the blue. For example: Pemulis ending his dictated footnote with "P.S. Allston rules". But in the case of Steeply he plays it broad and is needlessly repetitive. Every single description of any of Steeply's movements or looks reference some grotesque way that his costume or disguise appears - it seems to be going for observational humor but by this point in the book it's just tiresome; like the 3rd stand-up in a comedy club that comes out and notices the funny-looking dude in the front and makes the same jokes about him that the two preceding him did. For a book containing such varied descriptions and moments of humor and sadness, poking fun at Steeply's appearance seems unworthy of being returned to again and again, unless there's some kind of thematic point that I'm not aware of.

3. The Eschaton section is real tour-de-force. Again, it's a section in the book that could serve as its own taut, penetrating short story, and the fact that it's a small part of a larger whole is another reason to be in awe of Wallace's accomplishment in writing this behemoth. What's really impressive to me about this section is how well Wallace is able to work on multiple levels. On one hand, the sheer physical comedy of a mannered nuclear wargame being played by academically precocious 12-year olds descending into a physical fight is so well-delineated and true to the way that most activities of 12-years olds carry a real risk of just getting chaotic provides the kind of grounding drive that Wallace often achieves in his shorter set pieces, if not in the book as a whole. On the other hand, the postmodern contrasting of maps and territories and the way that Pemulis freaks out at the mixing of the two is a really clever way of unpacking the signs and signifiers conundrum that Saussure talks about. And the math is just ridiculous. To be honest, I skimmed it and didn't try to understand the calculus, because I started getting confused around pre-cal in high school. I do love the way that Pemulis's personality comes ringing through loud and clear with the naming of his diagram "HALSADICK" and with his final PS: Allston rules. The flight of Lord into the computer monitor is such a transcendentally hilarious and tragic climax of this section and really hits the tone that Wallace is going for a lot in the book - sadness with a lot of dark comedic overlay.

4. Lamont Chu's anxiety about reaching the pinnacle of success and getting caught up in Hype is a really trenchant section that plays on celebrity culture in America. One thing that I think it really illustrates is the way that for Chu the fallacy is that the accolades that come from success are connected on a 1:1 level with that success. What Lyle's attempting to get across to him in decoupling the Hype/accolades from the Success is the way that any sort of success in entertainment (and, as we are reminded multiple times, the Show is the name for making it in competitive tennis, the athletes are entertainers, and the biggest threat floating out there in the universe of the book is the Entertainment) is just an entry point into a very complex matrix of public approval/denunciation. I've mused on it a lot, but it reminds me of the Britney Spears experience, where a culture just all of a sudden elevated an individual up way past any sort of actual achievement into a heightened level of worship/lust objectification/etc., and then tore her limb from limb by labeling her stupid, crazy, slutty, and all of the 1000x pejoratives that greeted her long slide from grace. But all of that unconnected with the actual quality of music that she produced, which was, on balance, a handful of catchy and pretty great pop songs. But the tornado bore her away, and if her goal was to be an artist it got subsumed in her commodification. That's the nameless fear that grips Chu, and why Lyle is trying to help him decouple what he actually wants (happiness) from what he thinks he wants (success).

5. One thing that I really like about the book is the absence of James Incandenza. The impact of his suicide on Avril, Hal, Orin, and Mario, is obviously profound, but it's arrived at obliquely. The small slivers of the man that we do get are more powerful for their rarity, like a supernatural creature in a monster movie that's glimpsed rarely and mostly in shadow. So Wallace will throw out in description of the past that Himself was not in the position to meet people on some day, letting us fill in the blanks of the senior Incandenza on some ferocious bender, or senseless, or some combination of the two. It also echoes for the reader Hal's experience, since he has never really grieved for his father but rather put on the appearance of grieving and convinced everyone that he has grieved. It's pretty clear that Hal's self-medication and gradual cracks in his mental well-being can be directly traced back to the the suicide of his father, and the way that he pushes it out of his mind is similar to the way Wallace pushed the senior Incandenza off the main stage. Which of course, parodoxically, makes him loom larger over the entire narrative. It's his movie, after all, that everybody's after. It's his tennis academy. It's his sons that we follow around for a most of the narrative. And as we see with Gately, and many others, the sins of the fathers are absolutely and always visited upon the sons (and daughters).

8/3/09 - Infinite Jest, pages 150 - 300

Falling behind pace in Infinite Summer, so I'll throw up some of my thoughts on the section from 150 - 300. Coming on strong for the next section - I will catch up.

1. Michael Pemulis is emerging as my one of my favorite character in the book, for his unbridled aggression and unpretentious teenager-ness. A lot of the characters seem to veer in and out of being actual characters and being mouthpieces or symbols for the complicated ideas that Wallace is trying to explore (I hated this about DeLillo's White Noise, and found that it ruined the book for me - "characters" just delivering didactic monologues to each other for pages, ugh - no thanks), but Pemulis is fully within the realm of fictional creation with his own personality and drive. Plus, he's the lowbrow comic relief of the E.T.A sections, and he reminds me of every student that I had in middle school whose sole aim was to get one over on any authority figure in range.
2. Having started with DFW from the non-fiction end of things, I remember reading some of the stories in Oblivion and being surprised by just how dark Wallace is in his fiction. He goes to some really terrifying and dark places in the human psyche, and there seems to be a way in which the themes that he likes to tackle artistically (alienation, how to live/communicate with others, authenticity of thought/feeling vs. "faking it") are a lot easier to take when he's tied down to real-world subjects. He lets the subject of his essays serve as his anchor or tether, whereas his imagination is only constrained by its own limits in his fiction. Some of the stories in Oblivion parsed as horror stories, almost, although horror of the internal rather than external variety. The central character of "Mister Squishy", for example, is numbed by working in market research, but the suggestion that his attempts to deal with that involve manufacturing ricin to poison market research groups is way more terrifying and dark than Wallace's treatment of the soul-sickness of marketing in his cruise-ship essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". All of which is to say that the section in which Hal describes finding his father dead with his head in the microwave is straight-up terrifying, especially Hal's climactic confession to his brother that his first thought on entering the house was that something smelled delicious. that's the kind of grotesque detail redolent of something like Dahl's "Leg of Lamb" short story. Wallace can be extremely funny, and he can definitely get conceptual and intellectual and all of that, but there's a real core of anger/terror/sadness running through the heart of this book that can make it tough to digest, length/postmodernism notwithstanding.
   
3. Similarly to point #2, Joelle's OD in the bathroom is straight up terrifying as well. Wallace gets so minutely detailed in everything that he writes about in Infinite Jest that when the subject really is horrible and/or scary, like a suicide by drug overdose or self-microwaved head, the details really make it loom large. He goes into as much detail with Joelle's OD as he does to the structure and layout of the Enfield Tennis Academy - not employing any allusive distance to scale back from her attempt to annihilate her own map, so to speak. Obviously, his own suicide looms large over a scene like this, not least because it can get really easy to project the the level of detail of thought and physical description of Joelle's attempt onto his own real-life map erasure. And suicide is all over this book - from the central one of James to Joelle's attempt to the Valium-addicted unnamed driver that destroys the Separatist terrorist mirrors in upstate NY.
4. Wallace is great at capturing irritating personalities. Pemulis is one of these, but of equal delight is Day, the jc professor that shows up and uses academic jargon to attack the cliches that Gately believes in so desparately. Wallace is good at having his cake and eating it too in moments like these. It's an interesting rhetorical maneuver: AA is based on cliches, but Gately et. al draw real power from the cliches, and Wallace is most interested in the way that people live their lives, which for the members of Enfield House is dependent on believing in the central truth of cliche. Because the source of a cliche, really, is a very powerful statement. It's only the repetition that robs it of the power - it's not inherently false. But having Day around lets Wallace let the reader know that he's thinking actively about the contradictory nature of attempting to live by cliches. By making him such a buffoon, DFW shows he's on the side of the believers.
5. I'm curious as to how non-tennis players react to the tennis sections. I find it all really facscinating, having played on my high school's tennis team (I wasn't that good), but some of the Separatist stuff, for example, is tough slogging for me at times. Thoughts?
   

7/6/09 - Infinite Jest, pages 81-150

Whoa boy. Things are heating up around IJ way. I'm going to break this down bullet-point style, not as any sort of DFW homage, but because the sprawl of the book is starting to get downright unruly, as Wallace hits page 150 still in setup mode; that is, he's still laying down new track as the book heads toward the second century mark. So, here goes:

1. Expanding on something that I wrote about the first 80 pages ("What also stands out is Wallace's Jules Verne-like take on entertainment in the future"), I found the brief digression on the history of the video-phone in the imagined future of Infinite Jest to be an example of Wallace at his best, writing the way that very, very few people are capable of. In a few short pages, he melds a very prosaic sci-fi conceit, the invention of the videophone, with an exploration of the ways that people adjust to new technologies in terms of the presentation of their public selves, complete with a rigorous examination of the cause-and-effect nature of social pressures on individuals. In addition, it's got very funny moments, like Wallace's tossed-off asides regarding certain investors in videophone technology losing their shirts, and some absolutely terrifying images (the description of the masks hanging on hooks next to the phone and getting mixed up by family members rushing to the phone). Really, it's almost like a self-containted short story, so to find it as background coloring the setting just points up the genius to spare that Wallace possessed. It's also an exaggerated version of the dilemmas of Facebook, wherein a new medium demands the new presentation of one's public self. Just as the videophones evolved to a static presentation of an attractive celebrity, so has Facebook evolved to present people's semi-public selves. Also, as someone who uses videoconferencing technology at work, I can vouch for Wallace's observation that observing oneself having a conversation, and observing the conversation partner, is terribly awkward. Videoconferencing is here, and it is just as alienating from a connection perspective as Wallace predicts in this short sketch.

2. When critics get on Wallace for being concerned mostly with his own cleverness (Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review: "Indeed, the whole novel often seems like an excuse for Wallace to simply show off his remarkable skills as a writer and empty the contents of his restless mind."), I feel like they're referring to material such as the sequence between Maranthe and Steeply in which Wallace breaks down the levels of betrayal/loyalty going on with Maranthe. Not going to lie - I'm pretty sure that Maranthe is ultimately compromised and loyal to Steeply's bosses, but I lost track of all of the ping-ponging descriptions of his loyalties. I am positive Wallace had worked out exactly what was was going on, and who thinks Marathe is betraying whom, but I got lost. And I'm not quite convinced that it's necessary to have all of the back and forth to get at the idea that loyalty and compromise quickly become very blurry things. Thoughts on Wallace's intentions at all the double-blind explications of Maranthe dilemma?

3. Also, the 2 footnotes that really take up some serious space: the filmography of James Incandenza and the explanation of the Wheelchair Assassin's origins (the latter being footnote 304, and the background exposition coming through Struck's plagiarized paper on the organization). One of my favorite books of the last couple of years is Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and she uses footnotes even more extensively than Wallace, usually in the style of these two expansive footnotes. I really enjoyed these, because, as with any sci-fi or fantasy endeavor - though this isn't straight-up sci-fi as much as sort of "contains sci-fi elements" in movie rating parlance - world-building is crucial. It doesn't make sense narratively to come to a full stop and inform the reader exactly what the contours of this fictional society are when those contours are presumed understood by the reader; how then to get the exposition across? I would say that these two footnotes are great examples of Wallace's intelligent solution to the problem - setting off the main narrative with deliberately place-less exposition that nonetheless more fully builds out the world Infinite Jest inhabits. I blew through both of these footnotes, especially the filmography, but from what I'm reading elsewhere there's plenty of narrative grist in there as well.

4. Steeply's grotesque appearance - I'm not sure what to make of it, but it resonates with the grotesque image of the steadily evolving videophone masks referenced above.

5. I loved the section in which Wallace pivots from mentor to mentor in the Enfield Tennis Academy, capturing vividly the cross-section of different kinds of advice and worldviews that can be possessed by various people, even when those people are bound by common cause and parts of their identities. The contrast of Hal's brilliant observations about the way that ETA positions the boys to bond against the administration as a way to develop their mental games with Struck's more prosaic advice regarding in-match flatulence provides both a sweeping continuum of Wallace's engagement with the issue of enacting one's place in modern society, and also some prime juxtaposition based humor.

6/30/09 - Michael Jackson RIP - a double helix of genius and strangeness

It's a question that comes up again and again when it comes to any art form: how does one reconcile phenomenal work with disreputable living? The death of Michael Jackson has produced a lot of commentary about the man, his music, and his life, which opens up a whole Pandora's box of queasiness.

MJ is one of the more extreme cases; he's got one of the widest divides between artistic accomplisment/reception and personal freakiness in recent memory. As high as the artistic peaks are; equally taboo-violating and strange are the personal freakiness episodes. And unlike some artists whose work seems to resonate with their own negative personal tendencies, Jackson's life and the way that it produced sadness and revulsion in the observer was directly opposed to the aims of his work, which aimed for univeral pop inclusiveness (not in any sort of altruistic sense - the man wanted to sell his music to the maximum amount of people, he was a pop artist in every sense of the term). So while it's easy to square, say, Hank Williams the man as a nasty alcoholic with the content of his songs (all that cheating, drinking, and sadness), it's a lot harder to square the ecstatic dance floor rushes and sparkling love ballads aimed at max pop penetration with a man whose life seemed to involve a whole lot of family abuse, possible child molestation, self-mutilation, and racial angst. If I were to guess at what Jackson's music sounded like based solely on the biographical details of his life, I'd guess something on the order of early, urgent Nine Inch Nails, or Nick Cave - machine-tooled and rage-filled, or dark and Gothic.

Jackson's life is a full-on tragedy - one of the cases of a celebrity whose life no sane person would wish upon him/herself, and by virtue of how many taboos he violated, it's no wonder that the urge is to remember him up until about Thriller, when he still seemed to be in full command of his vast array of gifts. For giving so many people so much pleasure, he sure seemed to have a sad and lonely life; which has always made listening to his music feel a little vampiric to me. It's not on the same level of a Fleetwood Mac, where one can dip into the drama-laden Rumors and know that everything eventually worked itself out from the long cocaine/infidelity bender. Jackson never recovered his equilibrium, and really, it seemd like he never quite had it to begin with. The artist that he reminds me of in this sense is Phil Spector; a murderer responsible for some of the most gorgeous music of the '60s. The accomplishments don't pale, exactly, when the life is factored in, but the coloration and connotations of every note and lyric change in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. "Human Nature"? I mean, what the hell did that even mean to Jackson?

Still, though, the artistic peaks are towering. "Billie Jean" may be the best song of the '80s. "PYT" is the hands-down best song of most singer's careers, and it's not even the best song on Jackson's top-selling album. Just a list of the radio hits is staggering. There's a reason the man was a superduperstar - he was exceptional talented as a singer, songwriter, dancer, and businessman in the music industry. Michael Jackson was no f'in joke, until, by the end, he had become one.

Some takes on Jackson's death that I found interesting:

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2009/06/26/michael_jackson_crossover/index.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-01/news/michael-jackson-the-man-in-our-mirror/
http://www.newsweek.com/id/204296

A great write-up of the child molestation trial:

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/03/26/jacko/index.html

6/23/09 - Infinite Jest, pages 1-80

All right, so what makes a better summer beach book than David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest? Nothing! You can learn new words while you listen to the surf crash on the shore, and if anyone attempts to take your shiny new beach chairs you can beat them off with a book that weighs about as much as a small dog. That's right, this is one intimidating mutha of a book; and, truth be told, I'm thankful that Wallace was able to crank out his magnum opus before his disease got the better of him - he's too good a writer to have not attempted a batshit crazy epic, so God bless him for getting this thing written. It's a doorstop, but it ensures that all readers of Wallace have a north star to guide them by, and it's this attempt of Wallace's to write the epic of modern living, or so it would appear from the reviews, hype, and snippets gleaned from various Wallace interviews.

So, then, how did I come to this book? Like many, primarily through Wallace's non-fiction, which as I've written about previously is simply stunning in its brilliance. Moored to everyday reality, with the events of real life (somewhat) providing a natural grounding force for a towering, towering intellect, Wallace just owns the essay form. The best essayist I've read since James Baldwin, and that means not a lot since I don't read many essayists, but his short-form journalism is simply amazing. Plus, it's accessible. I've only read Oblivion, of his fiction, and while also brilliant, it's a harder read, because Wallace can really get bleak in his fiction in way that he rarely does in his non-fiction. His non-fiction voice quizzical, ironic, questioning. His fictional narratives in Oblivion plunge full-bore into depression, anxiety, confusion, and despair, with a lot less of the humor that characterizes his non-fiction. Granted, he was struggling with some pretty heavy stuff by the time that story collection came out, but it still gave me pause at opening up Infinite Jest.

Well, imagine my surprise then to find that Wallace the raconteur is in full effect in Infinite Jest. He doesn't write comic setpieces in the Confederacy of Dunces sense, but already in the first 80 pages of the book he sets up very vivid scenes of anxiety that are shot through with the kind of ironic good humor that he uses so effectively in his non-fiction. Thus, the scene of Erdedy waiting for a delivery of marijuana is a humor and dread tour de force as Wallace burrows deep in the man's mind, tracing his every attempt at reformation, which always involves throwing out all of his bongs, weed, and smoking paraphenalia, only to have to buy it all again when he is fiending anew.

What's also stands out is Wallace's Jules Verne-like take on entertainment in the future. Published in 1996, which if I remember right is about the time of AOL demo discs spreading the gospel of pay-by-the-hour dialup throughout the land, it's incredible the way that Wallace's imagined Teleputer anticipates the whole laptop/iPhone/Hulu/streaming video axis of constantly available entertainment. Roku came out this year, and Wallace is writing with his usual easy facility about purchasing entertainment online and watching it instantaneously. It makes the whole near future in which Infinite Jest is set seem both more contemporary and more prescient.

The novel also has genuine narrative drive, which is more than I expected from both the stories in Oblivion (which are structured like more-or-less detailed sketches - few of them really hit any sort of climax or rising/falling action) and the usual critical writeups of the book. But Hal Incandenza, Don Gately, the nameless marijuana addict, and a whole host of other supporting characters are all well-drawn - the footnotes are a lot less intrusive than they are in, say "Host" (the essay about talk radio in which the footnotes were visually designated and quite distracting), and all told, reading the book is a lot more straightforward than I expected, even with the requisite alternate future and chronological shifting.

6/18/09 - The Cars, Band Out Of Time

The Cars exist, still, decades later, as a band out of time. Their sound is definitely '80s, but in a sui generis way, such that to hear a Cars song on the radio is not to feel that it could only have been a hit in 1982, but that it could have been a hit today with the sound of '82. One wouldn't necessarily react that way to, say, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", which has much more of a time capsule feel.

The Cars, though, have a sonic influence that has proven remarkably widespread. Despite criticism of the time that tried to fix the band into the New Wave movement (where they undoubtably belonged), the Cars sound has wormed it way into some unexpected places. From the Rolling Stone review of Candy-O, the second album:

"I don't dislike Candy-O—after all, it sounds better than practically anything else on the radio—and I still like the Cars. They're a good band. Their virtue is they're never anything less than that. Their limitation is they've yet to prove they're anything more."

This fixes them purely into the times while missing the Cars true legacy - a sound that has made them one of the few bands serve as a sonic touchstone whenever any band straddles that classicism/futurism divide by busting out the synths. Potter Stewart-style, any pop music listener can instantly identify the "Cars" sound - there's only a handful of ingredients, after all. Mid-tempo; crucial because you don't want to shade into punk on the fast end or sludge on the slow end, brightly wheedling synth sounds; needed for the the bright melodicism combined with the sleazy undercurrent of a suggestion that All Is Not Right Here; and hooks redolent of '50s proto-rock and British Invasion rock of the '60s.

Bands have taken and stretched these sounds to fit their own ends, but in doing so the Cars sonic legacy never fails to shine through. Take a song like 12:51, by the Strokes. It's not just that the synth-sounding guitar is a nod to the Cars the points up their bizarre and particular influence, it's the way that that instrumentation combined with the hook-laden vocals make the song sound not like a Cars-influenced Strokes song, but like a long-lost Cars song wearing some kind of surface Strokes mask. The sound endures eternal.



The destabilizing sonic element of the Cars, the synths on top of power chords, account for why they're such an influence on a lot of the noisy '90s bands, the ones that were all supposedly about bringing rock and roll back from the cheesy neon lights of the '80s. So you get Poison rejected, but the Cars embraced, as in the Smashing Pumpkins, of all bands, covering "You're All I've Got Tonight". There's even a Nirvana cover of "My Best Friend's Girl" floating around out there, and why not? Trojan horse pop destabilization was Cobain's game. Just as Kafka's name as adjective lives on more vividly even than his most trenchant stories, the most resonant aspect of the Cars might well be their blueprints, not their buildings.

6/16/09 - Kobe Kobe Kobe (sigh)

So, the LA Lakers get another title, Kobe gets another title, the Magic go home empty-handed, and Turkey Glue, D12, and the rest of the Magic get a summer to console themselves with the soothing purchasing of Lamborghinis and the launching of vanity rap careers and watching Transformers 2 and whatever else a millionaire NBA star does to console himself in an offseason not washed in the glow of a championship. I'm pretty sure they'll be just fine.

But from the sports narrative perspective, I'm disappointed that Kobe got another title, because of the way that it validates this whole athlete-as-steely-warrior meme that holds that to have a killer instinct a pro (or amateur) athlete has to be kind of a jerk. Or a lot of a jerk, depending. The goofballs (Dwight Howard), the dry wits (Steve Nash), the happy-go-lucky spotlight-eschewing beach-loving space cases (Lamar Odom) don't get much slack in the perceived mental toughness department, maybe because of the way that athletic competition serves as proxy war, and war tends to the serious. Although this breaks down as a straight 1:1 - what of the dark, cynical gallows humor? That takes place, if at all, definitively offscreen, away from the viewing audience. And, additionally, there is a viewing audience. It's entertainment, after all.

Nontheless, it's disappointing the way that the warrior/grinder is celebrated. Kobe is validated because winning is so important to him, when clearly what's most important to him is winning while being awesome, and as an occasional pickup basketball player (go-to move, the airball), there's no type of player I'd least rather play with.

Here's the subtitle for the article SI did on Dwight Howard toward the beginning of the playoffs:

Link:http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1154461/index.htm

"Great centers don't come any more easygoing than Orlando's Dwight Howard. But can he take the Magic to the Finals—and get one big, bad dude off his back—while keeping his smile intact?"

And the article proceeds to follow that, with the main thesis being that Dwight Howard, with his goofy nature, imitations of his coach, ADD photo shoot style, and all the rest, just isn't and serious and focused enough to win the NBA title. Which is infuriating. Because last I checked, basketball is a game. And sure, to make a living at it, and to play at the highest level, it's a lot of work, but it's still a game. There's still a lot of it based on fun, and on artistry, and on improvisation (within a defined context), so I don't get the binary that states that one must be a basketball Terminator in attitute to win it all. It's like the asinine dress code on ESPN, whereby grown men and women dress in power suits to talk about football. It would be a lot less disenguous, and a lot more reflective of the kernal of truth at the center of sports, if ESPN anchors would just sport sweatpants and the jersey of whoever their favorite player is. Because it comes off as dressing up something fundamentally non-serious as something important, when any spectator can see that despite the passions they inspire, sports have their foundation in play; ergo, playfulness should not be so shunned.

So, great, Kobe wins, the grinder wins, the warrior wins. Now can he please retire the bizarre underbite-as-intimidation facial expression. Because it makes me want to reach through the screen and tell the man to grow up, already.

6/11/09 - Southeast Engine, a recommendation

I'm not usually the first on any below-the-radar bands, since my music discovery tends to follow the stampede of the written word, but I'm going to have to give a plug to Southeast Engine, I band that I came to by following a fairly convoluted route: In reading the Onion's AV club "Popless" project, I believe, the writer mentioned that Southeast Engine was a band that he was getting into after his vacuum chamber away from music.

Curious, I found my way to their website, where they've got a generous slice of songs on display (link below)

http://www.southeastengine.com/audio.html

I was (and remain) impressed, which is partially because I think the band is way tighter and polished than their level of exposure. Back when I was first getting into music seriously, I had a kind of rage against the machine mentality, when I thought that there was a whole universe of music outside of the mainstream push that just didn't get exposed for some reason. I was excited about going to shows and seeing the opener, and about all the random bands I'd never heard of. I quickly learned that most (MOST, not all), bands that aren't head of are obscure for a reason - rarely do I go see openers at concerts anymore, just because the vast majority of them are mediocre-to-poor. Still, I'm not ignorant to the fact that good music is bound to slip between the cracks, and I think that this band is a good example of that.

I'm not going to make any grand pronouncements about why - the band is playing straight-up Band-style Americana, but pulling that off without being insufferably boring and turgid is a tough trick. Now that Wilco decided they wanted to be the American Radiohead, instead of the 2000s version of the Band, the slot is open for a roots-rock band with ambition, that's not just obsessed with pedal-steel formalism, but rather in the way that the intersection of folk, country, and rock can speak uniquely to the open space and frontier mentality that's such a part of American culture, for better and worse.

For further reading up on the Popless project, proceed to:
http://www.avclub.com/features/popless/

5/29/09 - On the evolution of Green Day

From the Pitchfork review of 21st Century Breakdown, the new Green Day, re:American Idiot:

"Have you tried to parse the lyrics to "Holiday" or "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" lately? This wasn't anti-imperialist dissent set to kick-ass. It was gaudy, way-too-impressionistic, self-congratulatory garbage warbled over lumbering AOR dressed in strings and conceptual malarkey."

Now, when it comes to reviewing music, Pitchfork is a straw man constructed out of the world's largest hay bale, but still, I thought that toward the end of the '00s we were past equating commercial success with lack of quality. Like it or no, describing the Green Day of American Idiot as "lumbering AOR dressed in strings" betrays a gross laziness of musical descriptive powers. You want lumbering AOR dressed in strings? Try picking up a Kansas album, buddy. Green Day's still playing 3-4 pop-punk last time I checked, even if they've taken to adding some stylistic grace notes here and there. OK, a 9 minute conceptual song suite isn't very Ramones-ish on the surface, but if you dig into "Jesus of Suburbia" it's easy to hear the the underlying architecture is still recognizably Green Day - it's just that there's a few more shifts in tempo and instrumentation.

It's something that anyone in the punk idiom has to wrestle with - music based on the anyone-can-play dictum that has, as its primary audience, teenagers, invariably has to either mutate or die, but it comes out of a subculture with pretty rigorous formal codes. Ambition is frowned upon. The two touchstones of the punk revolution, musically, the Clash and the Ramones, serve as very different templates; interestingly, the biggest East Bay punk bands, Green Day and Rancid, both have followed the Clash template, incorporating different influences as they've transitioned from snotty upstarts to established vets. For this, Green Day, especially, gets pilloried?

There's a catch-22 at work here that all bands that last for longer than 2-3 albums have to contend with, but punk bands more than most - do you keep doing what you're doing, or do you change and evolve? There's merit to both, but it's a lot easier to work these things out as a band in a commercial vacuum, because nobody gives a damn. It's also easier to do as a Big Rock Band, because the template was set by the Beatles. So when Radiohead decides to follow up a masterpiece with a half-assed set of song sketches (ahem, Kid A), they get lauded for breaking new ground. When Green Day starts trying to ape the Who, they get the insulting 'AOR mess' tag, as though they're toddlers trying to fly a plane.

Thing is, their only musical problem is how to reconcile the sound of pogo-ing 16 year olds that forms their core (like the way old blues informs the core of the Stones), with the ambition that comes from being honest-to-God grownups, with kids and everything. The tension may show at times, but ambition shouldn't be slapped down reflexively, even if it results in multiplatinum sales and arena shows. Sometimes the lucre comes along with the singalong chorus, and sometimes it doesn't.

5/20/09 - Lost, Season 5, Final 2 Episodes

1. OK, Miles finally voiced what I've been saying all season, which is that the Incident is being created by the time-travelers at the heart of this season. I would be very surprised if S6 opens with anything other than the time travelers awaking on the beach back in the present, everything unchanged. I appreciate that the writers have stayed true to their own rules of time travel, namely that you can't change the past. What was so interesting this season was seeing the ways that the castaways created their own past. What it makes me wonder is why Daniel got the idea that he could actually change things, when he for so long had been the consistent voice arguing that the past could not be changed. His change of heart was unclear, and naturally, to maintain the mystery, he was gunned down before he could do much explaining other than speaking cryptically about people being the variable and how the hydrogen bomb would need to be detonated to ground the energy pocket.

2. There are way too many guns on Lost. One thing that was great about the first season was how scarce weaponry was. Now everybody seems to belong to the SWAT. There's no reason Jack should be in a gunfight with members of the Dharma Initiative - on a show that strains credibility on the best of days, there's no need to employ the dreaded 80s action movie cliche of the villains being unable to hit the broad side of a barn.

3. Jack is such a tool. For him to say that he wants to detonate the bomb to erase the misery of him screwing up his relationship with Kate is such tiresome BS. He remains purely reactive and hasn't changed a bit.

4. Fascinating when dead Locke tumbled out of the box. Really plays up Terry O'Quinn's spookiness as Locke, which is something that the show does an excellent job with. In contrast to Jack, who has hardened into a very 2D character, Locke remains an intriguing enigma. Sometimes pathetic, sometimes irrational, and sometimes creepy as hell and twice as threatening. And now that he's imbued with the spirit of the nameless Man In Black from the beginning of the episode (or is that man, or is the smoke monster, or is one or both of those and Locke), the intrigue surrounding him deepens. I'm reminded of the moment in the pilot when he puts the orange peel in his mouth and appears absolutely terrifying. Sometimes he's got the scary nutso intensity of a true believer, and sometimes he's the most lost character on a show full of them, and both are eminently believable.

5. All that racing around LA was just time filler, as suspected. It really wasn't necessary to get the O6 off the island - just false obstacles to stretch the story out. Nothing really crucial happened while they were off the island.

6. Juliet dying feels like a cop-out. It's bizarre because she and Sawyer have so much more history accorded to them than we have spent time with them. As viewers we're seen them in a relationship for a total of about 4-5 hours. They've spent 3 years together. I think that the 3 year mark is too long - it's just so much time and killing Juliet off so soon after we learn about the relationship throws the audience's perception of the depth of that relationship off. Sawyer knew Kate for about 100 days- what, he's really still hung up on her? The length of time he spent happy with Juliet makes the whole Kate love triangle seem even dumber (and it's already excruciating).

7. I've never seen a show that foregrounds its weakest elements so often. The difference between a Ben/Locke/Faraday centered episode and a Jack/Kate one is profound, and the the quality of the latter has been on a steady downward trajectory.

8. I'm happy that we have finally been introduced (presumably) to the top of the pyramid, conflict-wise. Jacob vs. the Man In Black would seem to be the ultimate conflict of the show, with Ben and Widmore serving as pawns and the castaways serving as the pawns of pawns. I liked how Ben snapped - carrying the burden of being Oz the powerful left him with a pretty intense chip on his shoulder, indeed.

9. Bring on Season 6!

3/31/09 - March Madness and the NBA race for #8

I love college basketball, I love March Madness, and, even it seems like a sort of too-easy sporting event to love (since the team I am loyal to, the Tar Heels of North Carolina, are perennial Goliaths/contenders), nonetheless, I do love it even when there aren't really a great deal of opening round upsets to speak of. The reason being is that when upsets are expected, they're not really upsets at all. To know that the higher seeds are capable of steamrolling the entire tournament may make this year's (and last year's) tournament seem dull, but it lays the seeds for future tournaments, when we don't expect a George Mason or W. Kentucky to do anything but roll over and die an then lo! We are shocked again anew. I've heard a lot about how this might be a really boring tournament, but I don't find a lot boring about close games and desperation basketball, even if Goliath winds up eating David alive. And again, to reiterate, I'm biased, because UNC is one of the 800-pound gorillas here, and I would love to see them win every game by 20 and cruise to the title.



But it brings me to one of my favorite subjects, which is the bad rap that the NBA suffers in comparison to the college game. Having come to the NBA late, and not having a team to swear blind loyalty to gives me a little bit of the freedom to freelance, fandom wise, and I once again find myself following the plight of that NBA Sisyphus of franchises, the Phoenix Suns. They played the Jazz last week to fight for the right to enter the playoffs, and the atmosphere of the game was absolutely electric - far more so than any of the opening round games of the NCAAs. I don't know where the idea comes from that pro athletes don't care, or don't try, but it seems particular to the NBA. Nobody ascribes sloth and non-motivation to the NFL as a league, so why the NBA? Especially since the Suns-Jazz game I saw featured neck and neck lead changes, dives for loose balls, and all players going all-out 110 percent while playing some of the best basketball in the world. I love the NCAA tournament, but if basketball gives you pleasure it's sheer madness to write off the entire NBA just because of received wisdom that the games don't matter and the players don't care. When a 35 year old point guard is sacrificing his body by stepping in front of Carlos Boozer on the way to the rim, hitting the deck to ensure postseason games, well; the dichomoty falls apart.

Best of luck to the Suns in their quest, even if it looks like post-Sacramento all hopes are dead in the water until next year.

3/20/09 - Lost: Season 5, Episode 8 - 9

Thoughts on Lost, Season 5, Episode 8:

- WTF. So Sayid is part of Ben's origin story? That both makes a lot of sense, and no sense at all. The writers of Lost have been playing with fire all season with the time travel paradoxes, and they just ratcheted up the stakes with Sayid's action at the end of this episode. That said, I think that it's not really as much of a game-changer as it seems. Doubtful that Ben will die; much more likely that he will be resurrected by the island and conclude that he should be the leader of its people and maniupulate a man named Sayid into attempting to murder his own self in the past, since he has always known it has happened. Even writing that sentence made my brain hurt.

- I like the suggestion that Sayid had a hand in creating the Monster (The Monster That Is Ben, that is). Over the course of the show we've seen time and again that Sayid's judgments and decisions are the correct ones. He was the one that believed that Ben was not "Henry Gale", and in conflicts among the castaways he historically has had his judgment borne out by the events of the show. I wonder if his decision to shoot will also be borne out by the events of the show.

- Although in the following episode, it looks like the writers are positioning Ben as a flawed but redeemable character ultimately. At some point they have to get off the fence with Ben and with the ghost of Alex giving him his new marching orders it looks like he may yet work his way toward some sort of salvation. Seeing him forced to use his manipulations to serve Locke instead of torment him will make for some interesting new wrinkle's in Ben's method of operations.

- It's easy to forget now, but Lost's whole first season had no Ben at all. It's amazing how primary and elemental he now seems to the central narrative. Although narratively I see no way for him to make it out of the show alive, I have to admit that if they do wind up killing him off I'll be sad to see him go.

- Locke & Ben are a cut above, acting-wise. The contrast between the poorly written and decently acted Kate scenes previously in the season and Locke and Ben's charged tete-a-tete's really bring it home. I don't think the writers do Evangeline Lilly any favors, but it's kind of unavoidably noticable how far above the bar Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn consistently reach.

- I love the temple scenes. Straight out of the Indiana Jones school of kinda-hokey-but-actually-really awesome. There's a real sense of place and power in that temple - it's a strength of Lost that it slowly reveals the layers beneath its most narratively important locations. Similar to the way that we first saw the hatch exterior, and then gradually saw what was underneath (ultimately leading to the 'charged electromagnetic deposit' or whatever it is), we've been slowly led to see the temple fence, the exterior, and now the underground layer where the smoke emerges.

- Watching things fall apart around Sawyer is amazing. LaFleur as wielder of authority is great, LaFleur as cover-up artists really tests Sawyer's ability to think on his feet in an amazing way.

3/13/09 - Lost: Season 5, Episodes 5-7

Thoughts on Episodes 5-6

1. 2 episodes without Jack and Kate. Glory glory hallelujah! Watching two episodes back to back without those two just reinforced my opinion that they have become the least compelling characters on the show. Especially in contrast with Locke, whose adventures and struggles are much more dramatic (as opposed to melodramatic) and whose character arc resonates much more strongly with the overriding themes of the show. I really wish that they would just leave Jack and Kate off-island with a happy ending so that I don't have to witness high-strung Jack making asinine arguments and moony Kate biting her lip in confusion over which man to string along. Blech.

2. One of the things I like most about Locke is that he is very different in demeanor depending on which other character he is dealing with. Like in real life, where one's persona/personality comes through differently depending on who you are with (subtly in some cases, dramatically in others), Locke's persona shifts depending on who is he is with. So, when he's talking to Jack, who has such a poorly defined sense of self/comfort in his beliefs, Locke comes off as calm, certain, and at peace with himself and his choices, because compared to Jack, he is. But when he's talking to Ben, Locke comes across as fearful and uncertain, because Ben's strategy of manipulating people is predicated on a kind of titanic certainty in whatever Ben is saying at any given moment. In the face of that kind of certainty, Locke's self-doubt flowers. So you have two dramatically different scenes: a calm Locke attempting to talk Jack into returning, and a frantic Locke flailing suicidally and questioning everything in his dealings with Ben. Both scenes make sense based on the way Locke is written and portrayed, which speaks to the breadth of scenes Lost is capable of bringing off.

3. Why did Ben have to kill Locke? Why not let him kill himself. My 2 theories: 1) he didn't know about Eloise Hawking before Locke told him, and once he found that out Locke became redundant for Ben's purposes; or 2) Somehow Ben thought that if he killed Locke, if Locke did not die of his own free will, that the island wouldn't bring him back. Ben wants the leadership position that the island wants Locke for, that much is clear.

4. I'm really glad that all the off-island nonsense is over. Who wants to hang around LA when you can be on the Freak Island?

5. Similarly, although the time jumping was fun, I'm glad that we've stabilized in the '70s Dharma era. The building time paradoxes were starting to make my brain hurt, and now things are stabilized I'm looking forward to the writers using the deposit of our heroes in the Dharma era to flesh out a lot of the exposition/mysteries of all of the leftover Dharma relics that have provided so many questions over the first 4 seasons.

6. So happy to see Juliet and Sawyer as a pair. They work together quite well. Although it was annoying to see the suggestion that Sawyer hasn't gotten over Kate. Really? They were only sporadically together over the course of a couple of months, and now Sawyer and Juliet have a 3-year (!) relationship. I would think that would be plenty of time to get over a not-worth-it Kate.

7. It seems clear that Ben is revealed to be more unequivocally evil. Amazing how many predicaments he's been able to talk his way out of so far, but how is he going to talk his way out of killing Locke to Locke's face?

2/13/09 - Lost: Season 5, Episodes 4-5

Thoughts on Episodes 4 and 5:

1. Usually Lost does a really good job of integrating its new characters (Nikki & Paulo excepted), but I feel like Charlotte was never really a compelling part of the ensemble, which makes her death feel a little weightless. Which is a shame, because the other three members of the science team definitely feel like they've made their place in the ensemble. Faraday stands at the middle of this season's time travel madness and, as portrayed by Jeremy Davies, is a fantastic portrait of the twitchy meddler in Things That Maybe We Shouldn't Be Meddling With. Miles is solid comic relief, and really having him and Sawyer in the same crew is a treat. Like Hurley, he's an audience stand-in, reacting to things with the same nonplussed slacker disdain that he might react with if he were watching the events of the show instead of participating in them. Charlotte's dominant trait, though, was possessing scary-intense blue eyes. We never really got a sense of her as a character, so her death doesn't hit very hard, except for the fact that it clearly unnerves Faraday; especially in the suggestion that he tried to prevent it.
2. The time travel paradoxes are opening some Pandora's boxes that are straining the narrative logic - namely, there don't seem to a set of rules as to whether or not you can a)change the past b)interact with past events/your past self without causing problems or b) have people from the past remember you. As awesome as it was to see Jin witness the dark days of Rousseau's crew's arrival, is raises the logical question of: why the hell didn't Rousseau say something about it when she met the castaways?? Surely she would remember that having happened since, after all, Jin was the one that stopped her from going into the scary cave where the smoke monster lives. That strains the suspension of disbelief that's so necessary for Lost, which already operates on a thin margin of error on that front due to all of the mystic occurences flying around.
3. It's unclear as to why the O6 have to return to the island, aside from taking Ben and Eloise Hawking's word for it. This makes the action in LA seem really arbitrary. Of course they are going to make their way back to the island - the obstacles are just ways to extend the show, it seems. The LA stuff is not very compelling, except for the ways that it shows Ben operating improvisationally instead of with advance planning (the strain shows - he's never lost his cool in front of Jack before).
4. In contrast, the action on the sland is extremely compelling. One thing that Lost has done very well is to make the island a major character on the show - the queasiness and sense of everpresent danger is very much alive and well on the island, from the monster's terrifying arm rip near the temple to the way that Rousseau's man seems to lose his mind. Not to mention all of the rainstorms and time flashes - the island remains the most interesting character on the show.
5. Jack and Kate have worn out their welcome several times over. Kate as a mother is much less interesting than Kate as a tomboy criminal. Jack is infuriating - for all the time we've spent with him, he's grown very little - he never considers things rationally and is a ridiculous control freak. Kate spends way too much time biting her lip. Jin and Sun, Desmond and Penny, and at this point Sawyer and Juliet are all much interesting romantic (or potentially romantic) pairings. I wouldn't mind if Jack and Kate just got written off the show into some happy domestic life in LA so that we could spend more time with the more interesting characters.
6. Terry O'Quinn is fantastic as Locke. One thing the writers do really well with Locke is show that depending on who his interactions are with, he can seem serene and self-confident or scared and uncertain. With the other Oceanic survivors he is an expert manipulator - with Richard, Ben, and now Jacob, he is consumed with fear and indecision. His self-possession is a mix of genuine confidence and bravado. O'Quinn does a great job of showing Locke dropping the mask of bravado once he falls down the well and encounters Jacob and reveals he doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
   
7. I think it was a mistake to kill off Rousseau and Alex. Rousseau's story is fascinating, and her time on the island had the potentail to open up a lot of context. And Alex was such a major part of the Others/Castaways conflict that having her gunned down just seemed short-sighted on the part of the writers.
8. Jin and Sawyer's reunion was fantastic - the core ensemble is really strongly drawn and has such a history together.
   

1/30/09 - Lost: Season 5, episodes 1-3

I'm a huge Lost fan, and I have to say that for all of its easily identified flaws (an overreliance on surprise reveals, a certain stinginess with revealing secrets, a really weird balance between its invisible redshirts and prominently displayed prime time players, and some large logic/plot holes), the show is attempting to pull off something that is insanely ambitious for a network TV series with over 10 million veiwers: namely, to tell a narratively complex sci-fi story with consistent, 3-dimensional characters while narrating in a a variety of nested flashbacks. That's a damned hard task to accomplish in a novel, let alone a series running for multiple years.

One interesting thing to me that I've noticed from discussions with friends of mind that watch the show is that they're not into the time travel angle, they're tired of Lost introducing mystery after mystery with no solution in sight. Which just illuminates the problem that faces the creators and writers of the show - the mystery is always, always more interesting than the resolution. So in a season that sees Lost actually driving towards answering some of the overarching questions that its been posing since day 1, people are losing interest because the resolution is coming into view, or erroneously asserting that the show is only piling on more mysteries.

My counter to that is to say look, watch, and see how many things that the writers are actually pivoting to address now that there's only 2 seasons left:

1. A huge question about the island in the first couple of seasons was succinctly summarized by Charlie as "Where are we?" and could be extrapolated to a greater question of "Why do fucked-up things happen on this island?". Without doing the big speech of exposition (yet), the writers have started filling out the outlines of an answer to this question - the island is a place where time is unstable, and where time has been messed with.

Also, an aside: for people asserting that the time travel is too arbitrary, I would second Alan Sepinwall's excellent recommendation to rent 12 Monkeys. That movie and Back to The Future capture the two competing theories of time travel, as far as I understand it. The Back to the Future model is the butterfly effect theory of time travel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

This is seen in the Ray Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder that holds that making small changes in the past have a huge effect on the future. Thus, if Marty's parents don't fall in love with each other, Marty will be wiped out of existence.

12 Monkeys, on the other hand, ascribes to the linearity theory of time travel that basically states that the past cannot be changed because it has already happened. Thus, if you went back in time and tried to kill Hitler, for example, you would be unable to do so - maybe the gun would jam, maybe you would be killed en route, but because Hitler survived to start WWII that could not be stopped.

Lost is operating on somewhat of a hybrid model - Desmond has a limited ability to move in time and change things from happening (limited because Charlie eventually had to die), as, it is suggested, does Faraday as a result of his experiments, but the rest of the characters can't change the existing timeline.

2. Why do the Others know so much about the castaways? This question was posed in S1 and deepened throughout S1-S3, and now it seems clear that it has something to do with the time shifts on the island. We are now seeing that Locke has made contact with Richard in the past, which explains all those mysterious assertions in the first couple of seasons that the Others were waiting for Locke to show up.

3. The polar bear? Clearly, related to the Dharma Initiatives experiments with the big wheel. If Ben can be transported to Tunisia and back, so too could a polar bear.

4. Why does Widmore care so much about the island? We don't know yet, but we have now been shown how he first got there by way of the U.S. military.

5. What is the Dharma Initiative doing? We don't know the full details, but the big time wheel is clearly something that has prompted their scientific interest.

6. Who is the con man that caused Sawyer so much pain? Anthony Cooper, Locke's dad, and he's toast.

There are more, but that's just a representative sample to rebut the idea that Lost never answers the questions that its raising. Since they pinned an end date to the show I'm a lot more confident that they are moving toward resolution, which parodoxically seems to make people less interested.

Thoughts on Eps. 1-3:

• Faraday is a great character. A strength of Lost is that for the most part they have been able to effectively introduce new characters and fold them into the existing ensemble if they take the time and care to do so. We're starting to get hints that Faraday has some dark secrets in his past related to the whole knowledge over morality dilemma portrayed in so many stories of the tragic scientist. In addition he's shown as being present at the discovery of the time wheel by the Dharma initiative - looks like Dan's actually the man with the answers. Just don't expect him to give any since he's terminally twitchy and stressed.
• Charlotte is not a great character. A weakness of Lost is that with such a large ensemble sometimes they can't get a character defined before they have to be a part of the action, the way that the first 2 seasons had the luxury of fleshing out the main players through all the flashbacks. Charlotte has a perpetually pissed-off look on her face, and Faraday cares about her, but that seems like all we know about her. So who cares if she gets the time travel disease?
• Jack and Kate have moved from compellingly tortured to really, really uninteresting. Ep. 3 was the best episode of the season so far partially due to the fact that Desmond was the protagonist of the main story, Sawyer and Faraday took the lead in the secondary story, and Jack and Kate off-island were nowhere to be found.
• Sun slipping into the morally ambiguous realm is a great move. We've seen the pain that could underpin any destructive course of action she might choose to pursue.
• They're going to milk Ben's good/evil ambiguity for all that its worth. Although I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wind up the Wizard of Oz figure, the small man behind the curtain. Now that we're seeing that Richard is really the power behind the Others, it gives more perspective on the leadership conflicts between he and Ben once Ben came on the scene.
• Are the whispers we always used to hear in the woods related to the unstuck in time nature of the island?

More after episode 4 - I'm still all in.

1/16/09 - Party and Bullshit

Notorious coming to the movie theaters, and it looks like Biggie's getting the full-on hagiography treatment, which is almost a shame since the bulk of his recorded output is summed up by one of his earliest songs from '93:

Biggie: "Party and Bullshit"



Death has a way of whitewashing life; so too to any kind of lasting achievements. Phil Spector seems to be on a mission to balance the karmic scales by going full-blown crazy to reverse atone for all the girl-group singles he helped produce, but even with what looks an awful lot like blood on his hands, his epitaph is still going to be dominated by his musical work in the '60s. Abraham Lincoln put the Emancipation Proclamation in place, but they don't tell you in high school that he loved dirty jokes.

So it's a little disconcerting to see Biggie mythologized like this, blown up to a larger-than-life image, when he was especially gifted at creating himself as a larger-than-life image anyway. The tough part of it is that his version is a lot more complex and a lot more real feeling than the hagiographic treatment that seems to be advertised in the promotional materials for Notorioius. It's not an encouraging sign that Sean Combs help produce the movie; as the overblown explosion of "I'll Be Missing You" post-Las Vegas shooting showed, Puffy's trades in sentimentality and melodrama when it comes to his now 15 years dead friend. That's all well and good from a coping perspective, but it murders art.

The genius of Biggie was the way that he traded in operatic images and themes, but extracted real drama, not melodrama, from them. The blinged-out fantasy world that Puffy luxuriates in was, for sure, something that Biggie also cast as aspirational lifestyle shit in his rhymes. But Puffy's motto is to never let them see you sweat - Biggie let the contradictions hang out, and deepend the thrust of his lyrics by showing the fear, desparation, and hopelessness behind the gangsta mask.

Take the opener, "Things Have Changed", from Ready to Die - it comes replete with thug life imagery:

"Turn your pagers, to nineteen ninety three
Niggas is gettin smoked G, believe me
Talk slick, you get your neck slit quick
Cause real street niggas ain't havin that shit"

But what comes before that, what it opens with, is an invocation of what's been lost:

"Remember back in the days, when niggas had waves
Gazelle shades, and corn braids
Pitchin pennies, honies had the high top jellies
Shootin skelly, motherfuckers was all friendly
Loungin at the barbeques, drinkin brews
with the neighborhood crews, hangin on the avenues"

Biggie: "Things Done Changed"



In the opening verse of his debut album, Biggie sketches out the lament of the crack epidemic in the inner cities - the dissolution of neighborhood bonhomie in the name of the real. It's this "real" that Chris Rock so memorably skewered as a dead-end street, and the critique is right there in Biggie's verse - this is the way things are, he's saying, I'm a part of it, but the way things used to be worth lamenting.

It's the filling in of the context, of the margins, that make his verses so resonant, and that give even his straight-up gangster songs and verses their tragic weight. Without Michael Corleone in Italy, the depth of his fall doesn't quite tug on the heart so hard. Without the image of a Biggie waking up "fucked up/pockets broke as hell/another rock to sell", all the threats to grab his shotty and identify the body and smuggle crack and all that would just be the empty swagger that we've seen Xerox'ed into irrelevance by 50 Cent et. al. Similar to the way that one of 50s most compelling stories is that of wanted to sell drugs to buy a new hat (context is king), Biggie's gangster narratives are made so much richer by the details filling out the margins.

1/9/09 - Coming around on Vampire Weekend

I resisted Vampire Weekend for a long time, mainly because they went to Columbia and then proceeded to join a band and become stars, pretty much in that order; I did the first two things and then most emphatically did not hit step #3, which has, let's say, somewhat impacted my critical faculties when it comes to VW. Aware that their album was percolating upwards and outward, and hearing vague things about Afropop influences and a modern Graceland-type sound and how they were a "breakout band" and "up and comer" and all that, well, basically it made me want to chew my own arm off.

I'm coming down off the ledge now, though, having finally sighed and made my through their debut and finding, well, yeah, that it's pretty great. If I just pretend that they're all from Vermont or something and met while farming Christmas trees one winter I'm able to get enough cognitive distance from my jealously to take in the music.

So whatever, I've been listening to their debut obsessively for the last month, which makes me about 16 months behind the rest of the country, but so be it. What pleasantly surprised me about the album is not the afrobeat and baroque influences, but the way that the band effectively uses sonic space.

Contrast this with Axl Rose and his white whale, Chinese Democracy, where each song has, I'm estimating, about 8,000,000 separate tracks mixed in, all building songs that are decidedly less than the sum of their parts. Or, if you want to go the indie route, contrast it with something like The Walkmen, who delight in piling ragged loud instruments on top of each other.

Guns N Roses (well, sort of, really just Axl):


The Walkmen: "The Rat"


In contrast, take a song like "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa", and marvel at all the empty space within the song. The intro is an interchange between the guitar and drums, and then the bass comes in. Having established a simple riff, the vocals then float in on top, but the simple guitar pattern and bass are still clear and distinct while still harmonizing with the verse melody. The riffs themselves on bass and guitar feature pauses and stops where the other instrument and vocals step briefly forward into the spotlight.

Then in the chorus, the riffs change slightly, while still leaving a lot of space for the vocals to come in and out, and finally the "Do-ooh-ooh-ooh" vocal melody loops back in over the vocal melody until it sounds like an instrument itself. The bridge features a mellow keyboard hook over drums and bass, and then we're back to the chorus again.

All of the instruments have so much space that the vocal melody is able to establish itself, wear the hook in, and then cede space back to the main instruments. As a consequence, the entire song has a feeling of airiness that lends it a certain dynamism that indie bands especially often run roughshod over. Spoon is the closest band that comes to mind, but to be honest Spoon often errs on the side of too much minimalism, robbing their songs of dynamics. VW has managed to put together songs that remain dynamic while still leaving enough space in to let the listener (aurally) breathe.

1/5/09 - Slumdog Millionaire vs. City of God

So I think I can turn in any sort of cinephile card -the 3 movies I've seen in the last 6 months are:

Iron Man The Dark Knight Slumdog Millionaire

I'm leading a populist revolution, baby! I refuse to watch your movie until it has reached critical mass - this just wasn't the year of taking fliers. So there's your top 3 of the year, by virtue of elimination. I just saw Slumdog Millionaire, and, after I had successfully separated out the movie I had just seen from all of my flashbacks to watching City of God, sat down with a set of conflicting set of reactions.

One, I loved the movie. The visuals and the music especially came in such a vivid wash that the movie grabs hold from moment one. The tight shots, the chaotic speed of the story and the rush of images, and the beauty of even the most terrible images (the bathtub filling with money, people of fire, piles upon piles of refuse), all form a sort of vortex of visual storytelling. As some movies do, Slumdog Millionaire vividly reminds the viewer that movies can tell stories in ways that no other medium can; larger than life images in a rush can provoke vertiginous feelings and reactions that words on a page, or images on a smaller screen, just can't.

And Jamal is an appealing protagonist, the movie is ultimately an emotional rush (upward), and really, despite some crushing imagery of poverty and entrapment and violence, is ultimately a fell-good movie. Wedded to the delirious tension of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". So I've got no complaints with the movie per se; I highly recommend it.

And yet...

And yet it's hard to shake the feeling after watching it that the movie falls apart a little bit the further it goes on and the more one thinks about it. The chief flaw is that the central relationship is the least interesting one of the entire movie. Jamal and Latika are stand-ins for the Platonic idea of love, that of the two halves that are meant for each other, against any and all logic. Their ability to find each other in all of the madness throughout the movie is beyond preposterous, the fact that his phone call to her basically kills his brother is treated as some sort of karmic balancing of the scales when really it's just florid narratively and kind of dumb, and centrally, the idea that they love each other from age 5 until their first kiss outside the studio after Jamal's just won 20 million rupees...it sits uneasily with the purported social realism of the earlier parts of the movie. By the end of the movie we've shifted from hardscrabble reality brought brilliantly to live to a kind of fairy tale Never-Never Land, which rings false narratively and tonally. It's the way I felt at the conclusion of The Kite Runner: for such a messy social landscape, the central narrative sure features a lot of neat melodrama-style conclusions; the bad characters either repent or are killed or otherwise stymied, the good characters are rewarded. It's a feeling of aesthetic dishonesty in a way - a happy ending that doesn't quite jibe with the images of people on fire, the death of Jamal's mother, and the terrifying whirls of the abandoned child's life in Mumbai.


City of God came to mind while watching the movie, because what links the two is that both portray a life of poverty in a crowded city through inventive visual styling (and pointedly chaotic editing). Where they diverge is in tone and ultimate narrative goal - City of God is a social portrait, not a fairy tale, but it's a social portrait from frame one until the curtains drop. Rocket, the protagonist, falls in love when he is young and innocent too, but his lady love falls for Bene, the stylish bon vivant gangster who keeps Lil Ze in check for a lot of the movie. This is no fairy tale; it's life. I've got no complaints with the fairy tale of Slumdog Millionaire, but it makes the early scenes seem cheaper and more manipulative to find out that they are in service of a boy-meet-loses-gets-back girl story. City of God is messy in form and content; about nothing so much as the danger, excitement, and terror when poverty whittles away the basic rules of human nature.

1/5/09 - Some thoughts on music this year

Back in action after a month hiatus:

I love reading lists of top cultural moments/albums/music/singles/videos etc. of the year, and I'm not going to apologize for it. In some ways, it seems to be a somewhat moronic and arbitrary exercise, but in other ways, it makes perfect sense as a way to contextualize a discrete set of time. There's a certain rhythm that I've grown to love about the recurring lists.

Sadly, and this is a realization that pains me greatly, despite being a self-avowed devoted fan of music I simply don't have the stamina to keep up a comprehensive survey of new music released in a year. I think that very few people are able to do so. My personal way of taking in music over the course of a year usually winds its way through old music that I am catching up on, bands from previous years that I'm late to the party on, and the scattering of new bands that friends have recommended to me.

So in no way at all am I qualified to give any sort of best albums of 2008; search that topic on the internet and you'll be drowning in that particular list - chances are you'll be able to aggregate a pretty decent compilation of 10 albums or so that fit your particular aesthetic. What I can and will offer is a list of 20 songs that I've listened to more than any others this year, and a few tangential words about them. So, my own personal top 20 songs of the year, whether released this year or not:

(not ranked in order)

1. "Salute Your Solution" by The Raconteurs, from Consolers of the Lonely. Fuzz guitar, stairstep riff that reclaims the adjective "angular" for music that's actually catchy, and my favorite part, the 2nd verse, when Brendan Benson actually cuts loose and sings like Jack White instead of like the 18000th watered down Beatle imitator he usually patterns his vocals after. Also, a great half-time breakdown; what with all the indie rock, dance-rock, rap-rock, and Lil Wayne, it can get hard for a good old fashioned rock song to cut through the clutter; this one does.

2. "All Summer Long" by Kid Rock, from whatever Kid Rock's new album is. This song is indefensible: all my friends hate it, and with good reason. It basically steals two better songs to put together one that is much, much worse; so all I can say as to its merits is that by mashing up "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Werewolves of London" Kid Rock manages to rescue both from classic rock radio purgatory, where both of those songs have become mere aural wallpaper. Also, singing about singing "Sweet Home Alabama" and then busting out the guitar riff to same is the kind of ballsy move that has me still undecided if Kid Rock is a genius or a moron (leaning genius!)

3. "Pistol Grip Pump" by Rage Against the Machine, from Renegades. When de la Rocha is forced to rap about something other than politics, as in, covering someone else's song, Rage pretty much instantly transforms into the most badass gangsta rap rock band of all time. Too bad there aren't any others even in the arena. Every year needs a song to accompany moments of being righteously pissed - this is a great candidate.

4. "Chick Habit" by April March, from the Death Proof soundtrack. Basically accomplishes in 2:30 or so what Death Proof, the movie, took about 2 hours and change to do: unspool a tale of female vengeance that encompasses the yin/yang or modern femininity - the potential for seductive sweetness/vulnerability and the ability to unleash all manners of holy terror.

5. "Sequestered In Memphis" by the Hold Steady, from Stay Positive. One thing that Craig Finn understands about lyrics and storytelling is that the little details make all the difference, and the the more clear and particular one person's experience is delineated, paradoxically, the more universal it becomes. So the details of a one-night stand gone terrible awry in this song are highly specific - "we didn't go back to her place/we went to some place where she cat-sits", which crystallizes the univeral regret that all of us feel in the aftermath of bad choices made. Favorite lyric sequence of the year, personally: "In bar light/she looked all right/in daylight/she looked desparate/that's all right I was desperate too".

6. "Dondante" by My Morning Jacket, from Z. A perfect example of discovering a song way past the fact. I saw MMJ live and was blown away, and "Dondante" was the high-water mark of the show. And is, in fact, the high-water mark of Z. Rock music is light on accessible epics that really move between the delicate to thundering ends of the spectrum, but this song is a textbook example of it. Also reinforces the argument that to have a truly great band, you really need a great singer.

7. "Let The Beat Build" by Lil Wayne. I slept on Lil Wayne until my my significant other got obsessed, and so I'm a latecomer to this one. But man, when you get classic Kanye production married to someone that can actually rap...wow. Dwayne Carter says it best himself - this is how you let a beat build - laying back half the time, and half the time you just kill it; also, love the wave pool shout out.

8. "Volcano Girls" by Veruca Salt, from Eight Arms to Hold You. Veruca Salt got a ton of shit for being brass-ring grabbing sellouts in the '90s, but I think time has been kind to their singles. All it takes is to hear some lame faux-rebellious song like "I Kissed a Girl" to remind me that VS got a raw deal, seeing as how they're capable of the aggression/melody marriage that eludes so many other, more respected bands.

9. "Silver Springs" by Fleetwood Mac, from The Chain. Absolutely ridiculous that this song was left off of Rumours. It's an absolute classic. Having Buckingham and Nicks singing those last lines practically at each other is the extra gear that the Mac can slip into at any time.

10. "Baby and The Band" by Imperial Teen, from The Hair, The TV, The Baby and the Band. Still one of the most underrated bands I've ever heard. A fizzy pop song about getting middle-aged and not quite understanding how you got there.

11/6/08 - Election results & happy endings

I can't believe it. It still hasn't sunk in. As I told a friend, I feel like this is the first national historic event I've lived through, before correcting myself and saying that is the first POSITIVE one, and my brain is still attempting to process its meaning and feeling.

On the history of the event, all that I can say is that I am immensely proud to have been alive when the US voted in its first black president. Trite, but I don't know how to say it in any other way that would not be too flowery and ridiculous. It is momentous enough that its importance needs only statement, not overstatement.

From a narrative perspective, what is so inspiring to me about the victory relates to something I've written about before in terms of sports - namely, that the "happy" or "right" ending is never guaranteed in life, which makes it all the sweeter when it does. The election of Barack Obama is like the ending to some Hollywood miniseries, what with the enormous symbolic power on display of a man redeeming the social sordidness of an ugly past.

What it reminds me of is the (possibly not true) story of how in early Puritan America people would stage Shakespeare's tragedies and change the endings to happy ones. In terms of the narrative that America prefers, there is a time and place for the warning tragedy, but what it truly near and dear to the national heart is the crazy against-all-odds Rocky kind of ending. Although, it would be fair to point out, Rocky lost.

But the beautiful loser/beautiful rebel strain running through the national narrative is no match for the overwhelming vector of the American happy ending (sure, Rocky lost in Rocky, but last I checked that was not the final word on the pugilist). In-no-way-realistic happy endings are the currency in trade, even when they seem trite, or unrealistic, or unearned. Unless you're talking about straight tragedies, the US likes its winners, and it likes them overcoming incredible odds.

Because the thing about odds is that they got that way for a reason. Every time an underdog fails it builds more a weight of evidence for the failure of the next underdog, on and to the next. So not only do we statistically know that the underdog is unlikely to win, we are conditioned by our own life experience to watch him/her fail. Aesthetically, narratively, Americans want their underdogs to succeed, which makes for a fascinating disconnect between American aesthetics and lived experience.

Functionally, it allows for that rush of pleasure when those aesthetics are matched in real life. "It's like a movie!" one muses, wide-mouthed in wonder, and the wonder comes from the disconnect between what we want and desire to happen and what so infrequently comes to pass.