1/1/10 - The benefits of reaching for the stars

New Drive-By Truckers album came out, and, just like previous Truckers albums (basically all since Decoration Day), it's got some good songs, some OK songs, and some filler. It got me to thinking about why I anticipate each new DBT album the way that I do, and I realized that it all goes back to Southern Rock Opera.

It can be cruel the way that a work of art that results from total balls-out going for it can come to serve as an albatross around the artist's neck, but so it goes. As seen by the fact that the Who complained people thinking the band was called Tommy and the album The Who, it's not a new phenomenon.

The thing is, though, that there's a reason that people thought the band was Tommy. Tommy is an unbelievable accomplishment. As in, more unbelievably good as a thematic whole greater than the sum of its parts (and its parts are really good) than anything the Who had done before, or would since. And it's kind of crazy to expect them to do something that good again. Because a rock opera has to be the work of someone pretty anal and organized, what with the whole theme and variations and motifs requirements, and a band is a collaborative enterprise, and an album is really a collection of individual song units. It's like trying to write a musical in a completely different idiom - a musical, by its form, is rigid in its requirements, whereas a rock song is more ragged and free-form.

For that reason, Southern Rock Opera doesn't really hang together as a rock opera proper. There aren't any repeated musical motifs, unless you count three loud guitars operating all at once as a musical motif, but there are a lot of shout-outs to Lynyrd Skynyrd and a whole lot of lyrics about the experience of being Southern, which for Patterson Hood includes a lot of reconciling with Skynyrd. It's kind of a mess, but it's by far the Truckers crowning achievement, and I think they realized that which is why they distanced themselves from it immediately by cranking out another album (Decoration Day) and not allowing it to turn into Tommy. Which it is.

But just like the Who had plenty more bullets in the chamber ("Baba O'Reilly", for one large-caliber example), the Truckers had plenty of good songs left, and Southern Rock Opera doesn't even have the best lineup of the band, which right now is looking like the one with Jason Isbell on guitar. It's to their great credit that they just accepted that lightning in a bottle had hit them once and then kept on keeping on.

Still, I'm a greedy music listener, so I want another swing for the fences. Enough of this workmanlike rock, DBT. Go for the sequel. If it's good enough for Meat Loaf, it's good enough for y'all.

2/16/10 - Contra, Vampire Weekend

Contra - more Vampire Weekend. Pretty much the same as the old Vampire Weekend, which prompts the question: how much should a band change? I remember this coming up a lot when the Strokes exploded out of the gate. Once it was time for a follow-up, the band had already been through the cycle of hype/backlash/backlash to the backlash that ten years prior would have taken a couple of years. For the Strokes it happened in about six months.

They got compared a lot to the White Stripes - twin pillars of the rock revival and all that - but what got lost in that lumping together was the fact that White Blood Cells, the White Stripes "breakout" album, was actually their third album. Jack and Meg had been in the trenches for years, so when success came they had some anchorage - they kept evolving and moving forward in the way that they had already been doing. The Stokes found success right out of the gate. So where Elephant showed a pretty obvious next musical step (hello, guitar solos!), Room On Fire pretty much sounded like a copy of Is This It. Similarly, Contra sounds a whole lot like Vampire Weekend, to the point that one could plausibly argue that each band is not pushing their sound forward.

To which the question has to be asked: so what? Isn't the whole point of Vampire Weekend that people liked their music? And isn't that the kind of music that they want to play? So what's the problem? It's not as though the songs are different, they just sound pretty much the same. "Horchata" could have slotted in right past "Oxford Comma" on the debut album and no one would blink an eye. But somehow there's a sense that musical artists have to move forward or else they are somehow lesser.

I'd hypothesize that this has roots in the Beatles and Dylan, who both exert an outsize influence on the modern cultural perception of how a top-tier musical act should evolve. Both Dylan and the Beatles always moved forward, such that an early-period Beatles song like "Love Me Do" is almost unrecognizable as the work of the same band as something like "Happiness Is A Warm Gun". Similarly, Dylan was too restless to keep writing songs like "The Times They Are A Changing" for multiple decades, so even though his voice had a two-note range he still changed his songwriting style and overall sound around. "Like A Rolling Stone" would be the equivalent of Lil Wayne actually pulling off that hard-rock album he keeps hallucinating about.

But there's plenty of virtue in doing one thing and doing it well. The day AC/DC writes an acoustic ballad will be its last, and for that focus they've turned out a lot more classic songs than the scattershot Aerosmith. Bands that change and evolve can often evolve themselves right out of being any good. Just as Axl Rose. Or Rivers Cuomo. Or even Radiohead and Wilco, who evolved themselves right out of the sound of their best work (Being There/Summer Teeth, OK Computer).

Do I want Vampire Weekend trying to take a stab at their own Kid A? Not yet. Not until their twitchy preppy pop songs start to wear down, not until they hit their own particular songwriting wall. Premature evolution can kill a band just as surely as running in place can.

11/10/09 - Yup

http://www.sputnikmusic.com/album.php?albumid=42899

Couldn't have put it better myself. Count me in as one of thousand. Better to burn out or fade away? Well here's your fading away. Although about 30% the album is really mindlessly catchy fun ("The Girl Got Hot", "Put Me Back Together"), it's really sad that "mindlessly catchy fun" is the absolute ceiling for Weezer these days.

At one point these guys, unknown to the mainstream rock press, were positioned to be the Pixies of the 90s/00s. Weezer mark II is like the portrait in Dorian Gray's attic.

10/16/09 - Adventures in Headline Ridiculosity IV

http://www.slate.com/id/2233082/

"Creed is Good".

No. No, Creed is not good. Creed is terrible.

Look, I know that Slate.com's thing is to publish the contrarian position, but sometimes the site can be like that annoying friend you have that always wants to argue and thus winds up taking some kind of ridiculous stance like "The Washinton Monument is a liquid" or some other such nonsense (or, if you will, poppycock).

One can only imagine the essays that Slate turns away to argue "Creed is Good."

"Mortal Kombat: The Great Lost Auteur-Driven Visionary Film of the 1990s."
"Being Impaled is Fun"
"Sand Is A Great Ingredient For A Pie"
"Purple Is Black"
"Saving Money Is For Morons"
"Hummer Brand Finally Turning It Around"
"The Dark Does Not Scare Small Children"
"Vampires Are Cuddly"
"Baby Ducks Are Not Cute"
"Santa Is Real And Hangs Out In The Tropics"
"Jimmy Buffett Does Not Coast On His Lifestyle And Persona"

10/13/09 - Music Recommendation: The Jayhawks - Rainy Day Music

The Jayhawks are one of those bands that got a lot of critical praise back in the day but never sold much of their music; stuck in the alt-country gutter they pretty much honed in on a jangly Beatles/Byrds/Parsons groove and rode it through audience indifference and internal dissent. Like a lot of critically praised and audience ignored bands, it's not too hard to figure out why a lot of their material didn't connect; a decent amount of it is so tastefully played and sung as to be indistinct. I gave Tomorrow The Green Grass a good listen back in the day and just couldn't find a way to get in past the surface sheen.

But somehow I got inspired to give a re-listen to Rainy Day Music, one of their latter-day albums with Gary Louris at the creative helm (somehow nothing, I remember listening to "All The Right Reasons" in someone's car and being blown away by how good it was), and I found to my pleasure and surprise that it is a bit of a lost masterpiece. Each song has hooks for days, and the sweet vulnerability running through the songwriting provides the entry point that I couldn't quite find with the Mark Olson Jayhawks. If you like Tom Petty, the Byrds, three-part harmonies, or Beatles-y melodies with Americana arrangements, I can't recommend the album enough.

And here's the song that I still remembered years and years later:

9/29/09 - Infinite Jest, page 700 - fin

Wow. Am I glad to be done with Infinite Jest. Not because it's a bad read or because I did not love it unabashedly (because it is not and and I did), but because I can finally put a normal size book in my bag again. No longer carrying a biblio-cinderblock around every day should do wonders for my shoulder muscles and overall posture. I can't imagine getting that thing out of the library and reading it in two weeks - I feel like I read it pretty quickly and yet it took me a good couple of months to get through. Nonetheless it's well worth reading and I'd recommended it wholeheartedly. Flaws and all, the thing is a work of titanic ambition and talent, and it's always worth it to grapple with art from an artist that aims high. So if you've got a desire to bulk up while entering the world of Enfield Mass. and everything connected with it, pick up a copy and carry it around and, you know, read it. The book's awesome.

Final thoughts:

1. The final 100 pages are a tour-de-force as Gately sees the first glimpse of his bottom with the death of Fackleman. That scene is another of Wallace's absolutely nightmare-scapes. I read (on Infinite Summer I think) a comparison of Wallace's descriptions of horrible violence and terrible occurences with Cormac McCarthy's with a particular eye toward McCarthy's elision of detail vs. Wallace's hyperdetail. In sequences like the whole Fackleman disaster, I'm reminded of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho in the depth of imagining Wallace is able to deploy to depict scenes of depravity. Wallace is much more elegant than Ellis, but it's a similar feeling as a reader: like pushing off at the top of some dark and terrifying rollercoaster-styled slide into the abyss. Once you're off you're hurtling forward and down with momentum. The only sequence I couldn't take in the whole book was the final film description with the depraved old man and the young hustler. Just couldn't take it.

2. The book really doesn't build to a climax, per se. The emotional levels and stakes seem about the same as they were early on - again, something I've noted before but classical plot is not Wallace's bag. However, I did find a really convincing description of a possible ending online, which was pretty amazingly well-argued and I thought picked up a lot of the threads that Wallace weaves throughout.

HUGE SPOILER HERE:http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

Somehow, the thought that Orin is responsible for the dissemation of the master copy of IJ makes his final appearance in the book easier to take - ending up in the position of Winston from 1984 is a pretty brutal way to go out.

3. Similarly, the way that Pemulis is ushered out of the book is pretty brutal. It's no secret that many court jesters carry a lot of malice behind the smiles, but Pemulis is such a grounding, earthy counterweight to all of the high drama going on with a lot of the other characters and storylines that his worst nightmare being realized (and taking place completely in footnotes, no less - being quasi-written out of the text itself!) seems a pretty dire fate. The Eschaton really marks a turning point in the events of the book, and of all of the Big Buddies Pemulis was definitely the one who saw trouble coming. He didn't exactly try to stop it but he did scream his head off. He does strike me as the kind of character that's a lot easier to like in fictional form, however - having interacted with a few Michael Pemulis's in my younger days, they can be no fun. Still, a pretty brutal end for M.P.

4. I loved the appearance of Himself as a ghost. His observations of Hal have a sad depth to them and really illuminate the ways that Hal is in the process of disappearing throughout the book. Plus it pretty definitively answers the question of what he was trying to accomplish with the Entertainment. For all the narrative threads left dangling, there's a lot of answers Wallace provides through JOI's shade. It also literalizes the way that Himself hangs over the emotional landscape of the entire book. The Incandenza family is deeply screwed-up, and James is the centerpiece of the hurricane that seems to be blowing through the entire family for the duration of the book.

5. I loved Gately's experience in the hospital bed. The psychological depths that Wallace plumbs in his description of Gately's recovery are really impressive. His imagination/hallucination of the Pakistani doctor trying to persuade him to take Demerol are as terrifying as Hal's glimpse of The Darkness's true features in the forehead-sticking incident. Amazing how as I read it I moved from a real anger at Gately and compassion for his victim at the outset to such a compassionate outlook on Gately. He counterpoints Hal in so many ways, and yet it's ultimately heartening to see both he and Hal take the direct actions of courage in the final pages of the book. Hal talking to Mario, and Gately bearing phenomenal pain.

9/28/09 - Check my brain

Ok, by all rights this should be terrible. '90s band with dead lead singer gets a replacement singer and attempts a comeback? We've seen this movie 1000x before. So why is this song rocking my face off? Well, in the Curious Case of Alice In Chains, there's a couple of factors at work.

1. Prime Alice in Chains is really, really repetitive. Granted, I'm developing somewhat of a retrospective appreciation of AiC, and as a balance to all the Grateful Dead I've been listening to they're a fine palate cleanser. But they are absolutely, unrelentingly dark. Dark harmonies, sludgy drone, and lyrics about dying and addiction from start to finish. Plus, you know the ending is not a happy one for Staley, so it can be a grim listen. It's not like the early oeuvre is untouchably perfect - there's a lot of draggy material.

So, the lightness of a "California's all right -somebody check my brain" lyric nicely balances the punishing heaviness of the AiC sound. A little yin to go with all that yang.

2. Jerry Cantrell wrote a whole lot of AiC material, and he's still around. Vocally, too, he's the architect behind those flat harmonies, so those are still around too.

3. That main riff. Good Lord, it's the sound of someone taking a club made out of concrete and just smashing it into a 500 year old oak tree over and over (and I mean that in the best possible way).

9/24/09 - Steve Nash continues to sport awesomeness as his chief accessory

The no-look passes are things of beauty, the full-speed 3 pointers are deadly weapons, and the competitive edge is intense and furious, but to me Steve Nash's sense of humor and regular guy-ness are what truly sets him apart in terms of his standing on the continuum of my own NBA fandom. It's like if you squint hard enough you could almost see him hanging out, swinging by for a few games of pickup, and then going out for drinks and making jokes and then maybe after enjoying a few libations gettin' a little crazy on the dance floor:


Steve Nash = my favorite professional athlete. I can respect the Ego-Laden Warrior persona currently sported by Kobe and Lebron (perfected by Michael Jordan), but give me the Steve Nashes and Dwight Howards and Chad Ochocincos any day of the week. Sports should be fun; they may be war in proxy but they're games, and even when a game is turned into a grueling profession the kernel of kids on a blacktop (or empty field, or [insert playing area of choice] remains at the heart.

9/23/09 - All Taste is Subjective vs. the Netflix Recommendation Contest

http://www.slate.com/id/2229225/

Read this interesting article on Slate.com by Farhad Manjoo on the phenomenal success of Netflix's contest to improve their movie recommendation algorithm. Manjoo approaches the success of the contest from a business/tech perspective, which is interesting in and of itself, but to me is secondary to the fact that contest winners did in fact improve the algorithm by the goal of 10 percent, which is an amazing achievement when the nature of the problem is contemplated.

It reminded me of the initial article I read on the subject in the NY Times, which can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?_r=1

The Napoleon Dynamite problem laid out in the article is a fascinating one to me, since it speaks to something that I (and, I think, most people) experience in a visceral and day-to-day way. That is, most of the time one can be confident that in recommending a book/movie/album/work of art to someone if one enjoyed it, assuming that the recommendee will also enjoy it, but there are a subset of cultural artifacts that personally connect to one person that repel other people for seemingly no predictive reason. And often, these books/movies/albums/songs/what have you are the ones that the person doing the recommending feel a particular protectiveness/affinity for.

For example, I have spent the last two years recommending Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell to various friends of mine that are avid readers, only to be met with one of two reactions: 1) a refusal to read the book because it's too big and impossible to carry around OR 2) complaints that the book starts slow and is too long and only gets good toward the end.

I am sympathetic to both of these reactions. The book is really long, and it's heavy to carry around. And, I can see the criticism that it starts slow. But, here's the thing. I don't agree at all. My experience of the book was basically 800 pages of solid rapture. But I have no idea how to set expectations for people when I'm recommending the book. I know that I love it, and if there's a chance that someone else who likes to read will have anything close to my reaction, I want to facilitate that experience. But at the same time I haven't talked to anyone that I've recommended it to that has reacted the way that I have.

The thing is, though, is that the book is hardly some obscure, difficult work. It won awards, it was on the bestseller list, it got great reviews - I'm not the only person by a long shot that enjoys the book. But at the same time, I love Jane Austen and I love dark fantasy, so it's possible I'm just uniquely in the sweet spot for Susanna Clarke's artistic aims.

Point being is that it's kind of exciting and kind of shiveringly terrifying that these sorts of questions are being algorithmized (if that's a word) with increasing success. I'd like to think that there's an unquantifiable part of art that accounts for the way that some works divide people.

The polarizing movies listed in the Times article above are described by the writer as "culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify". It made me wonder what other works across genre falls into this classification. My reactions to the listed movies w/the Napoleon Dynamite problem below:

I Heart Huckabees - loved it.
Lost in Translation - loved it (know many people who hate it)
Fahrenheit 9/11 - loved it
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou - have not seen
Kill Bill: Volume 1 - loved much like a child loves his/her blanket
Sideways - loved it, had extended argument with a good friend who thought it was total pap.

9/22/09 - Adventures in Headline Ridiculosity II

Ok, Newsweek. This is getting out of hand. 2 for 2 on nuanced articles regarding a complicated issue, and 2 for 2 on headlines that would put the New York Post to shame. The infuriating thing in all this is the way that Newsweek has tried to consciously rebrand themselves to be closer in tone and style to the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly - longer, in-depth feature articles, less page-long news summaries, and aimed clearly at the less people w/more money target due to all of the various troubles facing the entire print industry that have been hashed over ad naseum.

But there's a such a thing as having a cake, and there's such a thing as eating that cake. Newsweek please report to the cake and make up your damn mind kthx.

And please consider leaving headline ridiculosity to the Michelangelos of the art:

9/21/09 - Into The Wild

Watched Into The Wild over the weekend. I haven't read the book but now I'm basically a ravenous slavering book-craving monster after watching the movie. I thought that the movie had its flaws but the central tragedy is really present throughout.

I immediately put the book on hold at the library, but in the meantime sought out the Outside magazine article that Jon Krakauer originally wrote. In the year after I finished teaching, when I started really getting into non-fiction after a lifetime of exclusively reading fiction, Krakauer was one of the authors that gave me the entryway. He's justly famous for the harrowing Everest disaster account Into Thin Air, but it was his also-heralded followup to that book, the true-crime and Mormons tour de force Under The Banner of Heaven, that really sunk the claws in me. Both books I thought were exceptional, but what Krakauer accomplishes in Under The Banner of Heaven is a riveting mix of social history and individual tragedy.

So it's somewhat surprising I didn't pursue him back to Into The Wild then. I think it's because, having dabbled benignly in outdoor pursuits, the tragedy of McCandless's short life was too painful to look at directly. Even through the fictional prism of the movie I find it a tough pill to swallow. I can only imagine the loved ones in my life had I disappeared only to die inglourious and alone - but then, that's a sharper realization now that I'm older.

As Krakauer observes about his own younger self, regarding a similarly foolhardy Alaskan expedition that he took when he was McCandless's age:

"At the time, death was a concept I understood only in the abstract. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts."

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_1.html

9/15/09 - Slate.com on Dan Brown's superawesome protagonists

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2009/09/14/dan-brown-s-awesomely-attractive-smart-affable-and-athletic-protagonists.aspx

When people asked me if I liked The Da Vinci Code and I told them that the terrible writing was hard to get past, I'm talking about passages like this from Mr. Dan Brown:

"The youngest full professor at Georgetown University and a brilliant foreign-language specialist, he was practically a celebrity in the world of academia. Born with an eidetic memory and a love of languages, he'd mastered six Asian dialects as well as Spanish, French, and Italian. His university lectures on etymology and linguistics were standing-room-only, and he invariably stayed late to answer a barrage of questions. He spoke with authority and enthusiasm, apparently oblivious to the adoring gazes of his star-struck coeds."
--from Angels and Demons

I remember at one point in The Da Vinci Code where Brown describes Langdon as Indiana Jones-like, which struck me as a pretty bold simile, considering that a) Langdon basically is Brown's attempt at writing an Indiana Jones type character, and b) Langdon seems to have none of the flaws that make Indy interesting. The failed/strained relationship with his father, the complications in his romantic life. No, Langdon is like Brown's dream version of Indiana Jones - the version that I used to pretend I was as a 10-year old, all superintelligence and rugged good looks.

All of which is to say that although I read the whole book I decided Brown isn't my cup of tea. I've got nothing against popular works of art, and I've got nothing against genre fiction, and I don't even have anything against workmanlike prose, but I don't have a lot of interest in following patently unrealistically awesome protagonists. The guys that grow up to be symbologists (which is no one, since the scholarly field as far as I can tell does not exist) are not the ones that are dominating swim meets in between World of Warcraft bouts.

And geez, if they guy is Indiana Jones, who cast Tom Hanks to play him? Ball: dropped.

9/14/09 - Roger Federer owns you

From David Foster Wallace's "Roger Federer As Religious Experience" essay:

"Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K."

That was 3 years ago, and he's still doing it.

The fact that Roger Federer can hit that shot running back to the baseline with more accuracy, pace, and angle than I can hit a forehand served right to my sweet spot is both inspiring and, frankly, terrifying. It's always a little bit amazing to know that right now, RIGHT NOW as I write this there is someone out there that could quite possibly be the best there has ever been at something. At anything.

Even more amazing to me about Federer is that, like Superman, he has his tragic weakness: the Kryptonite of Nadal, ever lurking. From Wikipedia: "Federer's overall match record was 315–24 from '04-'08, but this included a mere 6–8 against Nadal, who was the only man to have a winning record against him."

Nadal, whose knees might just cruelly curtail his career, who is out of the U.S. Open, the Nemesis that Federer didn't have to to vanquish at the French after all (if it had been a movie, Federer-Nadal at the French would have been the climactic scene, and Nadal would wear black and be evil and hate dogs and old people like Don Johnson's golfer in Tin Cup instead of being friendly and unpretentious and kind of a surfer dude with a hankering for capri pants).

You watch a shot like the one above can only imagine - who is Rafa Nadal and what is the secret that he's not telling?

P.S. If you haven't read the Wallace essay on Federer, drop everything and read it now. You'll be glad you did:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all

9/11/09 - Adventures in headline ridiculosity

I remember being pretty blown away when I found out that the writers of stories in magazines did not craft their own headlines. It was one of those things that made the world make just a little bit more sense, because I had the vague sense that frequently the tonality of a story's headline didn't match its content. On the ridiculous end of the spectrum, Newsweek's headline for a very interesting, nuanced, and intelligently written examination of childrens' grappling with questions of race and otherness is none other than this gem:

IS YOUR BABY RACIST?

Really? Because even if someone sees that cover and thinks to himself/herself: "Gee, I'd never thought about it before, but maybe my baby is **gulp**...racist?" or even "Huh, my baby seems to cry and babble in a manner that seems disturbingly unfriendly to Latinos...perhaps the lil guy is a future attendee of Bob Jones U.?", they're not getting the answer from the article. The "is your baby racist" question is really only answerable by your baby, and chances are he/she ain't talking.

The article in question:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/214989

9/10/09 - Patton Oswalt on '80s metal videos

If, as I do, you enjoy both rock music as music and as a hilarious concept, chances are you'll enjoy Patton Oswalt's take on things. I also wish that I could make a piece of toast with melty cheese on it solely through the power of rocking. Glad I feel like I'm spoken for.

Clip:
http://comedians.comedycentral.com/patton-oswalt/videos/patton-oswalt---metal-mania

For an updated version of the kind of music video that Patton's talking about in that clip, The Darkness took a crack and did not disappoint. Without "guitah!" that squid thing would have devoured the whole band.

9/9/09 - Reading material: Spike Jonze

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06jonze-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Spike Jonze has made some of the most incredible music videos of all time, and his two movies are both awesome. In fact, if Charlie Kaufman only collaborated with Spike and Michel Gondry for the rest of his career, I'd be more than OK with it. Reading this article makes me wonder about the difficulty of identifying people with genuine vision/genius - I mean, by all accounts Jonze doesn't necessarily present the picture of the most together auteur in a professional sense, but his work is pretty amazingly singular and much more expressive in ways than the man itself. It must be hard to suss out though because a lot of what makes him distinctive is a very, very deadpan sense of humor underneath all the grungy skater cool.

The video for Wax's "California" that he made is a case in point. Sure, it's really cool to have a man on fire running down the street, but the best part is the utterly banal reason that he's running - dude's trying to catch a bus! Get out the way!

9/3/09 - Random Awesomeness

Hey, what song would make an ideal cover for G3, the ridiculous guitar-wankery-based supergroup featuring Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani?

Correct, sir, you in the back. "My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama", by Frank Zappa.

9/3/09 Infinite - Jest, pages 500-700

1. Randy Lenz. Good Lord. Wallace may not uncork a lot of narrative thrill-rides, but as I've written about before some pieces of this book could be made into some pretty intense short stories. Along with the horror of Hal's discovery in the microwave, James Incandenza's father shearing his knees off, and Joelle's overdose, add Randy Lenz and the Curious Incidences of the Animals in the Nighttime. Brrr. For a book without much overarching narrative drive, the shorter contained narratives can get pretty white-knuckled at times, as they do with Lenz's noctural adventures. Reading sections like this is kind of like seeing those early Picasso paintings where one realizes that he can paint realism that he wants to. It puts the cubism into context - makes the aesthetic choices seem more deliberate. Or listening to Jack White shred the guitar and then going back and listening to White Blood Cells. For a book whose overall plot is either static or vaguely non-existent, the micro-plots and character arcs can get pretty gripping.

2. Tonally, the mixture of menace and comedy of the A.F.R. is a pretty complicated cocktail. Wallace does a really masterful job of building them up as a threat, even though as a concept they're pretty ridiculous as a terrorist group. In some ways, Wallace's strengths as a humorist come from his ability to wield a certain deadpan tone of narrative voice when approaching patently absurd situations. In his fiction, he's able to lay out absurdities as he sees fit, and the A.F.R.'s danger/menace cooexists uneasily but effectively with their comedy. I particularly like the oft-repeated assertions that really, the only thing they fear is hillsides. It's a Monty Python touch for an organization that proves, in its murder of the Antitoi brothers, to be completely serious and brutal. It's a delicate shifting point, that murder of the brothers, because for so long Steeply and Marathe have been all talk, no action. We get the suggestion that the A.F.R. should be feared - the sound of the squeak, and all that, but it's played mostly for comedy. But when the broomstick comes out, it's like Wallace is pulling back the curtain on the comedy and saying hey, you know how it's really funny to have a terrorist organization with mostly legless members? They're still a terrorist organization - i.e. terror and fear are indeed their weapons.

3. The Crooner Johnny Gentle section (which we see through Mario's history film) ascending to the presidency is another place where the tone of the book shifts pretty abruptly. Despite all of the literary pyrotechnics, for the most part Infinite Jest seems to try to capture real people and real personality types - there aren't many flat, cartoony characters despite its occasional trips into satire. Gentle, though, really is more of a cartoon; more a collection of tics than anything resembling a real person. The picture that's painted is a kind of funhouse Reagan, I guess; with his history of artifice as a singer and the kind of intimidations-beneath-charm that seem vaguely Reaganesque, Gentle comes off as as Reagan moved to logical extreme. I think what Wallace is trying to do here is to draw out the American tendency to deify celebrity. The daily doings of Ben, Jennifer, Brad, Robert Pattinson, etc. etc. etc. are the subject of much ink (electronic and otherwise) and care, and for some reason celebrities exert an enormous gravitational pull on American culture and its members. I'm hardly immune - why should I know about Matthew McConaughey playing the bongos naked on his front lawn and get arrested? I have no idea, but I do. Gentle then is the logical extreme of this tendency to value celebrity as currency - he is put in a position of power by virtue of his celebrity, and allowed to run amok. I'm not sure what Wallace is suggesting by the fact that Gentle seems to be such a shrewd and ruthless negotiator, though. The whole execution of the Concavity/Convexity plan is like the way the CIA sees itself operating - coldly, efficiently, and for the National Interest (as opposed ot the way they seem to actually operate: blindly, confused, and with the lurching contradictions of any large organization).

4. The book seems unfair to Avril. It's clear that her family has issues with her which results in a fair amount of hostility (Orin demonizes her pretty unmercifully, but Hal also doesn't seem to have the most positive of feelings towards her), but the narration seems to suggest that there is something terrible and off in Avril's treatment of her family. The thing is that her openness to her sons seems genuine, and even though she may take pains to ensure that they know they are loved, it doesn't seem fair from a narrative standpoint to continually insert these suggestions that her love is smothering or somehow solipsistic. As an outsider, it seems to me that Avril is doing the best she can to hold together a pretty screwed-up situation - there are suggestions of infidelity and a certain locking-away-of-skeletons, but these seem like understandable human responses to the kinds of things that have befallen the Incandenzas. Not to mention whatever sadness she has around her life with Jim and his death; that remains unexplored so far. We have a scene from Jim's history; why is Avril's pain obscured and why is she painted as having some kind of sinister life-sucking presence hovering underneath her declarations of maternal love?

5. I love Gately and the Crocodiles. Wallace really dignifies these men that have survived despite everything, and captures something authentic about the way that confused people like Gately can accurately see that beacons of hope and wisdom are often contained within foul-mouthed individuals of seemingly foul countenance. Their sheer cussed tenacity and emphasis on confronting real shit head-on is such a contrast to Hal's fakery when it comes to dealing with real emotions/sadness.

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?