Sticky Fingers
In 1984, a year masquerading as a didactic yet prophetic novel, the real person of my father was kicked out of his home by the real person of my mother; I make such differentiation because real life, containing such real people, has no front and back cover, only addendums and epilogues under constant revision, not to mention a disorganized index of horror. My father, whose emotional abuse was verging on physical, recently kicked out after a bad night involving a six-pack of import beer and a kitchen knife, just past 40, rented a room four blocks away in a house he proudly referred to as of “bachelors,” showing me the cool Mazda RX-7 parked in the driveway, whose owner greeted this narrator with a swift “hey” in the manner of a dude out to party who wanted nothing to do with his new 41-year-old roommate and his 8-year-old son engaged in their ongoing “Sunday visits,” whose unnatural allocation was incurred by the former’s domestic transgression.
Democratized Moments of Egoism in “Nothing Else Matters”
1. “The Solo,” James Hetfield
Video still (5:12), Youtube
© 1992 Warner Bros.
James Hetfield is the singer, chief songwriter, and front man of Metallica. He wrote “Nothing Else Matters” and is the predominant figure of not just this video, but all their songs, and their entire ethos. This is fine. It’s consistent with the logic of most bands: a guy drapes chords around a diary entry and finds three other guys to fill in the low and high ends. Traditionally, the guitar solo — appearing at approximately 2/3rds into it, whose melodic evocations serve as a tight stringy emotive refrain — is reserved for the lead guitarist, in our case Kirk Hammett; though, here, James had to not just perform the lead solo, but dedicate its duration to filming the nuances of the various facial expressions which all worked together to corroborate this personal rapture towards his own notes. Kirk Hammett is a very competent guitarist and could have easily done the solo. True, one could argue that James wrote the solo, but that is not the point. The point is James has overstepped the guitar solo boundaries. Every time I watch this part of the video I feel repulsed.
The Morning After I Died
“It’s the morning after I died / it’s the morning after I died” is the refrain from the opening track of a Bones cassette tape my friend Matthew P sent me. It fits the realization I had today—that I must write a simple book that strives for nothing. Tonight the 2am radio plays low as I sit in the backseat of a van I have no right to be riding in. I don’t want to convey anything except a sense of peace with what has happened. I don’t want to amplify it. I would like to state it without judgment, without qualifying it to death despite the fact that it knocked the wind out of me. I would like to let it be small, to protect the quietude from the crowding out effect of inflated emotion. Writer-consciousness is hell but I don’t have to tell you that. It’s like the internet, the way it mediates everything.
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The Mystery of the Mysterious Elephant Bird Xmas Post-Punk Song (Now Solved)
Many years ago (like, way back in the mid-to-late-90s), a friend of mine gave me a tape of a radio program, which included a song I fell head-over-heels in love with. But no one I played it for had heard it before, or knew who the band was, or where it had come from.
For years I’d play it for self-professed music connoisseurs; no one was able to identify it. (I tried contacting the DJ without any luck.) Here’s a digitized copy of my ultra-degraded cassette copy, including a few seconds I accidentally taped over one day:
unknown artist – elephant bird song
Meanwhile, I transcribed the lyrics as best I could, Google-searching occasionally for them, to no avail.
I started writing this post to see if you could help me ID the piece—but now there’s no need. Let 2012 be remembered as the year that Jeremy M. Davies solved the Mystery of the Mysterious Elephant Bird Xmas Post-Punk Song!
WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT BEING DEPRESSED IS REALLY BORING
I just emptied my checking account to pay my taxes and was considering drowning myself in the ocean, but then my friend sent me a link to this video and life seemed worth living again
Maryanne Amacher and Thurston Moore
That’s nice.
B*tches in Bookshops
-Performed by La Shea Delaney (@lashea_delaney) & Annabelle Quezada (@annabelleqv)
-Director/Producer/Songwriter – Annabelle Quezada
Looking for Brassneck, Looking for Significance
The Wedding Present
Little by little I’m trying to get at a deep concern I have, some means of responding to what I consider to be a common and pressing situation …
A few years back, I stumbled across the music video for the Wedding Present’s song “Brassneck.” This was that band’s first US hit (well, the version that Steve Albini rerecorded was), and a song I’d always liked well enough, whenever I happened to hear it. (It’s from their second studio album, Bizarro [1989].)
This was my first time seeing the video. I spent a great deal of the late ’80s / early ’90s watching MTV, and YouTube has helped me catch up on what I missed. And what struck me about this one is its dance choreography, which reminded me a great deal of Michael Clark’s work. You’ll recall that I’m a tremendous fan of his, in particular his work in Prospero’s Books and Hail the New Puritan. The more that I watched it, the more I became convinced that Clark had somehow been behind it. And so I emailed the Michael Clark Company, asking them whether I was right.
A Company representative graciously wrote me back:
Music x 3: Xiu Xiu, Pissed Jeans, Beach House, The Magnetic Fields
1. Xiu Xiu has a new album out (Always); the video for the lead single, “Hi,” is pretty great:
2. It is not, however, as great as the video for Pissed Jeans’s “False Jesii Part 2,” which I only recently discovered:
3. The new Beach House single, “Myth,” is a secret cover of “Eyes Without a Face.”
4. Stephin Merritt, may I suggest the formal constraint for your next album?
NO END RHYMES.
Let’s over-analyze to death…Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know”
I love watching music videos, and I love analyzing art. So this is the first in an irregular, ongoing series where I analyze music videos, and eventually maybe other things. First up is Gotye. Somehow I didn’t know about this song until a few days ago:
Below are my semi-casual analytic thoughts.
the superbowl uses roman numerals to identify each game
2. OK, you don’t want to read any fucking super “Can creative writing be taught?” posts on here so don’t, just skip this link and start pounding avocado into paste (for the guac dip later), but this one has some interesting points and some decent links. So.
Creative writing is about doing the work of writing, and the experimental innovator benefits from time, support, and guidance.
11. Super exchange between John D’Agata and a fact checker, Jim.
Really, Jim, respectfully, you’re worrying about very stupid shit.
7. Jim Ruland over at Hobart is REALLY cheering for the Giants tonight.
2. What’s your AWP book fair budget? I like to take a big bundle of cash and leave my card behind. I bring the card, and it’s butter my biscuits crazy.
3. How to handicap this Superbowl? Brady plays it cool but you can see in his eyes the wake up daily, the “WTF? I own $8,000 flower pots and can do things with my hair. This kicks ass!” Eli looks like he cuts Brady’s yard, and not well. He walks through life in a daze. Brady gets nightly cunninglingus advice from his Brazilian goddess wife (who could buy him out X 20). “Clockwise, fucker!” “Sorry,” he mumbles again as he rubs the back of his neck and walks out back and throws a football through his walnut fence (lands in neighbor’s spleen-shaped pool). Eli likes Applebees but thinks the Wonton Tacos Chicken are “Too dern spicy.” Brady sometimes eats sushi fried, OK? Eli once wrote a complaint letter to Wal-mart (about some frozen waffles that split in half upon toaster entry) but didn’t send the letter because, in his heart, he loves Wal-mart. Brady did attend the opera in Italy last summer, but he also took two Lorcet and a V&T before settling in his seat. Eli is scared of horses (their heads are way too big!). Brady likes to smell the tips of his own fingers. Who knows?
Old Future
One year ago on February 16, 2011, as Odd Future made their television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, maniacally performing “Sandwiches” in their nerd/hipster-thug stage presence, a girl dressed as Sadako from Ring (1998) and/or its remake The Ring (2002) listlessly stood around in clear view on stage with them, as if recently excised from hikikomori, a “midbrow” pop-conscious nod which I’ve always found interesting, if not brilliant. Where Warhol and Koons seem to didactically curate their references, attached to their affected semiotic detachedness, it is rap’s erratic and somewhat manic collision/collation of culture which is our “true,” or at least more effective commentary. At one point, near the loud climax of the song, cymbals crashing, bros screaming, Sadako cowers with hands over her ears — as if suddenly transported into the NBC studio on 49th street. Though it may be her fault, one imagines, her voluntary entry into our real world as she climbs out of the television, scaring the shit out of everyone in front of their own televisions at home. The artifice’s protective medium of the screen was now broken, its very transgression part of the narrative. And when Tyler the Creator jumped on Fallon’s back as the latter bid his audience adieu, the former made odd (somewhat unfortunate, immune to irony) Blackface expressions with almost apelike movements. It’s hard to know how subtle, if any, his sarcasm was. Was it the self-critique of concession to corporate complicity (a la Cobain’s “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” t-shirt for their Rolling Stone cover), or Tyler simply now had a friend in Fallon, a fellow conspirator in the conspiracy of success. One year later, they are not news anymore, the future turns old; another group of young highly intelligent men in an alt-rock or rap band will be heralded as the real deal. Every generation wants to believe what they see before them on a screen somehow transcends the shallow vapidity from which it cometh, even a cute girl on your floor, actually smiling behind all that hair.
The Top 20 Albums of 2011 According to David Fishkind
20. Go Tell Fire to the Mountain – WU LYF
I noticed a band with a ridiculous name appearing on music blogs and googled the name. Something like World Unite Lucifer Youth Federation came up and I navigated to their website. The page was cryptic and dark. I watched videos of what seemed like old stock footage under the impossible-to-decipher vocals and heavy drum beats. I downloaded the album, and the next day listened to it while picking strawberries in the rain. It was a Friday and I was cold and my fingers began to prune. Later I would drive to my girlfriend’s house 100 miles away.
19. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World – The Caretaker
After a fight with my girlfriend weeks earlier—I think, or later, or maybe just moments earlier (it’s hard to remember a summer anyway)—I found myself on Facebook deleting the majority of my friends. I needed something to listen to, as the process would end up taking two hours. I put on The Caretaker’s new album and thought I’d made a mistake. It was just sounds, old-seeming sounds, like the musical accompaniment to a 1930s black-and-white Looney Tunes, or Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary Blues.” Weeks later I listened to it again lying on the ground, and then with my girlfriend in bed, where we agreed we would purchase the record on vinyl the following summer once we got a lease and I moved my record player from my parents’ house to New York.
18. Leave Home – The Men
At some point in the summer I wanted to only listen to loud music. But this record came out before then. Recommended by a friend, it took me three tries to get through the first song, usually stopping the track on my iPod at work before even 90 seconds had passed. When I finally did break through that first song, I listened to the album a lot more, mostly driving, once in my girlfriend’s hometown, after we’d purchased Blizzards from Dairy Queen; I remember she asked who the band was and upon my reply, said, “I thought this was from the 80s.” We would lie in her basement and eat the ice cream until one of us, almost definitely me, started to fall asleep.
Top 50 Black Metal Albums of 2011
A lot of people—or, in truth, absolutely no people—have been asking me what my Top 50 Black Metal Albums of 2011 are.
So, here they are. I love all 50 equally, and do not have them numbered. If you can think of any that deserve honorable mention, anything I have forgotten, leave the name in the comments section and I will maybe tell you why I didn’t include them, or apologize because I should’ve included them.
Verg by Necrolocust
Vreg by Locustcorpse
Turgal by Trugla
Groluck by Stunefier READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
This is the only Christmas record allowed in my house: Agoraphobic Nosebleed “Make a Joyful Noise”. Eat.
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Five Albums For Saturday [2]
I did this sort of post last month. Thought I’d do it again.
It’s Saturday. I’m reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine issue #6, which opens with a special section devoted to three chunks from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Michael Davidson offers the first contribution in the issue, which he begins by making a distinction between the two ways that Stein scholars tended to categorize her work (granted this issue came out in 1978, but the categories still seem to be pretty paradigmatic examples of orthodox Stein interpretation): on the one hand, Davidson argues, her writing is seen as all play, deriving strictly out of her early research work with William James and automatic writing and later invigorated by Cubist formalism; on the other hand, her writing is seen as hermetically Symbolist, concerned with encoding sexual and biographical information in complex little verbal machines which contextualize their own environments. Both views, Davidson says, operate on either side of a referential paradigm: one wants her to mean nothing and the other wants her to mean intrinsically. But what makes Tender Buttons so vital, Davidson argues, is not the strategies by which meaning is avoided or encoded but how each piece points at possibilities for meaning.
I like this argument. It’s not about meaning vs. meaninglessness, it’s about exploring the possibilities engendered by the confounding nature of the text.
Anyway, here are five albums (plus two extra bonus albums!) I’ve recently been spinning, which I thought you might find interesting (hint: if you click on the artist and title it will take you to the magic place):
