New Flags

Interview #3: Keepaway

2010-02-06T20:38:00.034-05:00

The amateur psychologist in all of us knows how lasting an impact our childhoods have on who we become. But, whereas we might timidly plumb the past to unearth the traumas and terrors that created our enduring anxieties, the men(/boys) of Keepaway (Mike Burakoff, Frank Lyon, and Nick Nauman) are eagerly swimming around the goo of their memories for material for their next song. So far, they’ve done pretty good. With the release of their debut EP Baby Style, the band’s already gotten major props from Pitchfork, Fader, and a widening circle of sonically-adventurous listeners. Keepaway coalesce a bevy of tricked-out samples with live instruments into a seriously textured stew. A couple of months ago, NewFlags met up with Keepaway after a rehearsal to talk about the sonic pallete of the 2000’s, the band’s pseudo-synesthesia, and the unexpected profundity in Contra (the videogame, not the Vampire Weekend record, though Frank did do some choreography for a Contra promo).

~ Ashraf

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NewFlags: What was the jam you guys were just working on at practice?

Frank Lyon: It’s called “New Food.”

Nick Nauman: It’s coming together, tonight it finally started gelling.

FL: It’s part of the new style. Now that we compare the old songs, the way that they live in our memory at the moment are as fleshed out recordings that are quite dense. And now what we’re playing feels a lot more spare and spacious because we haven’t recorded them in a very professional way yet, so they seem like skeletons, even though in truth they’re probably going to sound as dense as some of the material that we wrote before this. But I do think there are certain parts of the songs that are demonstrating a kind of haunted space that’s sort of dub-step-y to me, and that’s been a very positive development.

NN: Yea, I think compositionally we’re getting less dense.

FL: Yea.

NN: Less crowded. Our ideas are more crystalline. Less goopy.

NF: But still with the intention of as much layering as was done during recording?

FL: I think that, yeah, if I were to guess right now, I would imagine the next recording would be as layered but would somehow have more space, too.

NN: Yea, I mean, the recordings we did don’t actually have that many overdubs. It’s more or less our live sound.

FL: Sort of like, imagine I’m inviting all the same people to the party, but we’re gonna make them say twice as much in half the words.

NN: Very good, Frank.

Mike Burakoff: It’s gonna be more like Moving Pictures.

NF: The Rush album?

FL: We’re adjusting the tracking of our Moving Pictures.

NN: It’s like watching the fuzzy channel on porno.

FL: I would say that’s our old sound.

NF: So you’re soundtracking that experience?

FL: Totally.

NN: We are, but soundtracking that experience in a much more beautiful place than my mom’s basement. Or Mike’s mom’s basement.

MB: I was excited because Frank brought his MPC in today. We’re gonna have two MPC’s running soon, I think Frank’s gonna have some samples coming from his direction.

NN: Which actually I think is still in the spareness direction. When all the sampled material comes from one source, there’s less ability to have it be a bunch of isolated elements coming in and out.

MB: Yea, kind of unglue it a little bit. One of the criticisms we’ve been given is that the live elements don’t always mesh with the sampled elements. I think it’s not so much a timbre problem or a sound problem; it’s the rhythm or the compositions. You know, pre-composed stuff playing off the live vibe.

NN: I think the new stuff solves that problem a lot better than the old stuff.

MB: Eventually, I’d love to do everything live. It’s just a matter of learning the equipment and learning our hands.

NN: But soundwise, I think, regardless of how much stuff is still sequenced, I think the new stuff is a lot better.

MB: Yeah. I think a lot of bands are based on a hypothesis that electronic music and rock and roll, or folk music, can’t exist together and become something greater than the sum of the parts. And so a lot of the stuff we’re doing is working out the equation, slowly, and, like, just letting the equation balance itself out.

NF: When you guys got started, did you have a discussion? Or did you just start playing?

FL: What was happened was: Nick and Mike had a long-standing relationship from their youth. You guys met in 4^th grade. Whereas Nick and I only barely knew each other in college, and only really became friends when he moved out to San Francisco, and we always talked about playing, but I was already semi-ensconced in a few other projects. So we only got to play the very last night Nick was in town, and when we did, I was like, “Nick, we have to play!” and so we did this one show where I played drums over some songs. Mike and Nick ended up doing more with that stuff that summer as Longbow. This was the spring of 2008. There was this double-convergence around Nick, and then because we had both played with Nick, without really hemming and hawing too much, we all just jumped into the ring and started figuring it out sonically, not conceptually. The concepts came from sonic practice, if that makes sense.

NF: Mike and Nick: were you guys playing music together from when you first knew each other?

NN: We’d always kinda jammed out. I would always be in bands. I was in punk bands, and a reggae band, and a psych band. And Mike was always exploring his electronic music on his own. But we would jam out in his bedroom a lot, never too seriously until we all moved to New York around the same time and more or less started playing together right away.

NF: When you two were playing back in high school, were you synthesizing the electronic music that Mike was exploring?

NN: Yeah. Mike and I actually won our senior year battle of the bands, and I was more or less playing folk songs with an acoustic guitar and he was playing a drum machine and a synthesizer. I don’t usually think of that in the same lineage as what we’re doing now, but it definitely was.

MB: Making music together is just another way of being friends, Nick and I have been friends for a while now, so it’s about transposing the notes. And Frank is my friend too now.

NF: So that was a dynamic you were comfortable with – you guys playing these live instruments with electronic elements. Were you guys playing with that set-up from the first time you jammed together? Was Mike already playing on the MPC?

NN: More or less.

FL: Well, Mike, you’d been playing with the MPC for a while, right?

MB: Just over the summer.

FL: I didn’t realize that. I was pretty comfortable with it. The whole context with me joining this band was – especially when you move, you have a very happy-go-lucky, new-lease-on-life if you’re excited on your move. So I viewed it at its core as an opportunity to get better at drumming, I really wasn’t taking it super-seriously artistically. That might sound bad, but what I meant was that I wasn’t putting too much pressure on it to be artistically important. I wanted to give it as much freedom as possible by approaching it as practice. But now it’s becoming more something that has an aesthetic lineage and we’re honing in on a pocket of style, I guess. So now, things like relationships are important, that we understand each other. But at first, there wasn’t any pressure other than trying to get better at drums.

NF: Playing with the MPC, you guys are playing with an instrument that is sort of limitless in the sounds it can produce, or reproduce.

MB: Yeah. It does have limits, you know? There’s only so much you can do with your two hands at a time, it’s only got 16 buttons. It does have limits, but sonically, yeah, not much. If I played a piano, I’d be able to hash out melodic ideas much faster, but the for the kind of music that I make and have been making for a while, MPC is really conducive to experimenting with sound itself.

FL: MPC’s are amazing. Samplers in general are – I’m not sure we’ve found a more contemporary instrument, unless it’s Abelton Live, or something like that.

MB: Yeah, but, it’s all about reliability too. That’s why people love MPC’s because it acts like an instrument, it doesn’t fuck up. My Ableton Live setup is the only thing that ever causes problems, it always glitches out.

NF: I’m curious about the collaborative element of the MPC. Is it more or less Mike’s domain? Or was it until Frank brought in his?

MB: I’d love for it to be everyone’s domain. I think the more we play each other’s instruments, the more cohesive the sound’s gonna be, or the more we’ll understand what the other is doing.

NN: Yeah. But the answer is yes, it is Mike’s domain. But we sit down and listen to sounds together and talk about them.

MB: There definitely is a lot of back and forth, which, you know, is the real challenge of electronic music – it’s not always realtime. If you’re looping a guitar part four or five times, you can really hone in on the kind of sound you want, or if you have effects pedals. But a lot of what I do is precomposed – longer samples. I think the real challenge is going to be how to compose my parts around a jam session, because I feel like that’s where a lot of good stuff comes out of, just jamming with the material and letting everything fall into its own pocket.

NN: We sort of ran into that problem earlier tonight at practice when we were jamming on this new song. Most of the elements are there as far as we have drums going, guitars, vocals, a lot of sample-based percussion. But we were talking about some bass parts, and I had had some ideas I wanted to communicate to Mike, since most of our bass parts are from the MPC, but his hands were already used up. And to get the proper bass sound to fit into the EQ, it would take some time. So there’s a certain lag time or delay between having an idea that needs to come out of the MPC and actually executing it. Which can be frustrating sometimes, and it gives us a little difficulty communicating between instruments.

MB: Something we never talked about but I think is true - a large part of our music is about recreating studio tracks live, like recreating rides and effects and dynamics on a studio album. Frank just got these great mics for his drumset, you know, it’s less DIY-sounding, a lot of Brooklyn electronic hybrids fall into that trashy sound and not putting a high premium on sound quality. I think a big part of our setup is trying to recreate this balance you can get in a studio.

FL: I think we want the sumptuousness of the kinds of sonic events you get on a record, but I think there’s also a balance between that and wanting things to sound live and not just pre-recorded. Personally, I think it’s important that there are meaningful differences between recordings and live performances because those are different mediums, and to try to collapse them too completely is sacrificing the opportunity to experience the details of each event, you know what I mean? But we’re certainly going for the level of sound quality you get in the studio context live, and we’re putting a lot of energy into getting our live sound into the sort of the pocket of satisfaction which happens to be probably a little higher than what is common, but that also has to do with the fact that we’re now getting older as a band.

MB: I think it’s also the only solution to handling all the elements we’re trying to edit. The only way we can make it sound like music is by really paying attention to where things are pocketed. I’m really jealous of people who have classic four-part bands, everything has just kind of evolved to work together over the years. Bass amps were designed to fulfill a certain frequency range, and guitar amps have a certain range, and they all form around the drums.

FL: Samplers really fuck everything up! With great power comes great responsibility….

MB: I mean, we just got thrown a whole bunch of line of slack. We basically have a lot of freedom, and it’s kind of debilitating sometimes, we can get sloppy.

NF: So how did that translate when you were in the studio? What was it like to now be discussing songs with someone outside of the band?

NN: Well, we went into the studio with the five tracks that ended up on our EP, which we’d been playing live for a while. We knew we weren’t going to have a lot of time in the studio proper because our resources were limited, so we essentially went in and said “We want to do them like we do live, only better.” There weren’t many overdubs, only a few, and we were working with a guy who’d seen us live. We didn’t even discuss what we were going to do that much, just trying to put all our parts together. He came to us with some ideas – like maybe beefing up the bass or making some of the samples pop a little better. But when we were actually recording, it was pretty much the way we’d been doing them live, just one at a time.

MB: The next time around, as far as my part goes, I’d love to see my samples as evolving entities, like, things I can just swap out. Instead of using the same sample all the way throughout, from the first inception to having to lay it down on a record. Like, let’s say I sample an Indian flute from an mp3 because that’s all I can get my hands on, later down the line I might want to track down the vinyl and sample that directly to improve the fidelity. Or I could just swap out the sample. Next time we do an album, since we’re much more comfortable with the process, I think there’ll be a lot more leeway to microproduce.

NN: Hopefully we’ll have a lot more time and money, too.

NF: So who was the guy you recorded with?

FL: Kyle Boyd. A very nice man.

NF: And he’s the protégé of Biggie’s masterer?

NN: No, that was Eric, the guy we mixed with.

NF: So you had an engineer/producer?

FL: Yeah. The sound engineer was Kyle Boyd.

NN: He comes from Nashville and came up doing a lot of country records, then moved to Brooklyn.

FL: Studied under the auto-tune guru.

NN: The guy who invented auto-tune taught him. We recorded at Headgear Studios, which is where TV On the Radio and Yeah Yeah Yeahs recorded, and he worked on the last TV On the Radio. He’s a nice guy.

FL: He kind of plucked us. He saw us play and was like “Oh, I should give you guys a decent deal right now.” You know, studios are a lot cheaper these days because there’s less money in America and there’s more deals to be had because less people have time to be in bands because everyone is working hard. We went into the studio probably way earlier than any of us expected with this project. Although we were ready.

NN: Yeah, it wasn’t premature.

FL: It was just an opportunity that kind of snuck up on us.

MB: In the same vein, if our final goal is to be playing music live, we should be playing shows as soon as possible. And it’s the same thing: if we want to be recording and have people hear our recordings, we should be recording as early as possible. And I think we learned a whole lot.

NF: When you wrote that essay on the Jezebel music blog –

FL: The Pizza Jams one?

NF: Yeah, you were talking about the specificity of the actual sounds. It got me listening to your music in a different way. Lyrically, you talk a lot about childhood, and in the essay, you talk about the sounds of your childhood. What do you feel like you’re trying to reconcile?

FL: There’s a lot to be said about that. Obviously, there’s a lot to be nostalgic for, or even envious of the immediacy and unself-consciousness in kids being creative. Especially thinking about how challenging your 20s can be in a lot of ways, in terms of how you learn to prioritize your time and balance living in the culture that you live in. There’s a lot of dis-incentives to being in a band, and you need to lean on very core inspirations that you use to believe that what you’re doing is meaningful. And I think that a lot of that comes from very childlike insights that you hopefully hold on to when you’re older. It’s very innocent.

NN: I think what we were getting at in that article was just that in an aesthetic sense or an art sense, we grew up in a culture that’s increasingly recorded, so our entire childhoods are on record – visually, sonically, literarily. Our entire lives are somehow represented in a slew of media. And I think a lot of our contemporaries are addressing this in a whole lot of different ways, and a whole lot of musicians are addressing this in different ways. I mean, that’s what the sampler is: we’re taking little snippets out of the libraries of our lives and refashioning and reimagining them. And we’re just trying to do it in a way that makes sense for us because I think we’re sort of at odds with the ways a lot of other people are doing it. I mean, we have our whole lives, and our parents’ lives, in front of us, and it’s hard to process that in a way that’s meaningful and new and our own and a part of a lineage that’ll have relevance in the future. I think a lot of people are being regurgative about it all and just taking what has come and just spewing it out in a trashy, psychedelic penis-beat, and we’re trying to be a little more tasteful about it. I mean, these ideas could go in a million directions, we could talk about it forever.

MB: What if you could pick what you wanted to throw up?! Just throw up the bagel!

FL: But back to the childhood thing.

NN: Our childhoods are, like, a matter of material for us, you know? Musically, we have all these ways of reaching into our past and repositioning ourselves as curators of our childhoods, and it would be cool if we did a good job of it.

FL: We all come at this from different angles, but I think probably that all of the art history courses that I took in college has me very interested in the 80s as – to me – an irresolved moment in aesthetic history. So I think about using the palette of the 80s as an effort to just reinvestigate, actually. It’s not like there’s an answer in particular that I’m looking for or even one that I believe exists. But I think that there’s some sort of diffuse mystery to me about it still. The 60s and the 70s aren’t mysterious to me, just something about the way they’re being dealt with in the history-producing machine isn’t that problematic to me. But at some point around 1981, the shit hit the fan completely. It basically has to do with the post-modern, and I think there’s something I’m trying to figure out that I can’t even articulate yet, but it feels appropriate to take the palette and use it plastically to make my own forms.

NN: Respect.

FL: So that’s why the 80s and my childhood are important, because they are somehow the place where my material comes from.

NN: It also has to do – very, very simply – with the state of our lives. Being in our mid-20s, we’re adults for the first time, and yet we have our childhoods behind us in a very palpable way. And we’re dealing with that.

FL: Totally.

MB: I feel like I had ten years taken away from me by going to school.

NN: You only went to school for ten years?!

MB: Let’s face it: Kindergarten through 3rd Grade are great. You don’t really have to get down to brass tacks until 5^th Grade. I think this is maybe the first time since 3^rd Grade where felt like I can really do anything. Right now, I’m really feeling that. And the possibility in the air is really palpable. The only thing I can really relate it to is how I used to act, almost. And I used to play a lot of video games back then.

FL: Video games are a really big part of how Mike and I relate to music. Nick did not play video games. I know that when I’m playing drums, I’m using the same part of my brain that I developed as being, like, a wicked Mario Bros player.

MB: Getting through a song is like trying to get through a Contra level.

FL: Exactly.

MB: And when you’re doing really well, you know none of those bullets will touch you. And if one did, you’d be dead. That’s how I feel about electronics – if one bullet touches you, the whole level’s over. If you press the wrong button once, as far as the sequencing goes, everyone knows you fucked up. So it’s about being a good Contra player.

FL: That kind of leaps back into a bit of what we were talking about in terms of the palette. Everything that Mike is saying is to, but we’re not actually in Contra, and we know that. What’s incredible is to try to take the actual aesthetic ingredients of that experience, which is basically the sonic palette of the 80s and 8-bit videogames, and reorganize it to express more adult themes.

MB: But what’s our adult themes?

FL: Sex. Sex is an adult theme. And loneliness. Confusion.

NN: The caprices of identity in a world of identities…but I didn’t play video games.

FL: Right, so Nick doesn’t get a voice in this!

NF: About childhood, I tried to read heavily into your lyrics, and if I read too hard, tell me to back off. But there’s the line in “Yellow Wings” I want to be two places at once, it feels like the kind of thing when you’re an infant when you have to learn that there are spaces that exist without your presence.

MB: Yeah, you do have to learn that. But I think now, I’m trying to maybe find out if that’s really true. I don’t know, I think it is possible to be two places at once. And I think it’s possible to fly, too! That song, I wrote those lyrics. I was feeling depressed because I don’t think I had any income or job at the time. I think I was maybe just trying to escape a little bit, and I think there’s an admission in that song that you can’t really be two places at once or change shapes or do what you want to do all the time. But maybe you should try.

FL: Yeah, it’s an honest wish.

NF: Yeah, and in some sense, the way you guys are repurposing the sounds of your childhoods, you are at once there and also here.

FL: Yeah, I think that is a cool point to make.

NF: I also wanted to ask you about the fact that the three of you are also visual artists. Nick and Frank, you guys worked for an artist, and Mike, you do animation. It’s definitely in the lyrics, too, they’re really vivid, visually, especially in “I Think About You All the Time.” There’s the colors, the shoes, the constellation.

FL: Yeah, I spent a long time with those lyrics – and I’m always in a constant battle between being really loquacious vs. being more reserved because I can really run my mouth sometimes. And I’m trying to figure out if the most righteous way to express myself aesthetically is to let it flow or whether it’s a matter of doing more severe editing, and that song is an example of trying to let it flow, and that’s why there are so many words in it that may be vivid.

NF: So do you guys put much stock in the visual components of musical performances?

FL: Yeah. For me it’s central.

MB: For me, when I’m making a melody, I’m always seeing it visually. I’m always thinking about how that would play out theatrically, how the motions of individual parts interact with each other, and if they were actors, how they would work together.

NN: I think I see our music, too. It’s extremely visual – colors and shapes.

MB: For me, at least, I’ve been composing music on the computer for ten years, and it’s all very visual. Like, when you wanna draw in a filter envelope, you see it. And when you see the waves go by, you hear the click, but you see the click, too. You could almost feel the click with your finger when you see that threshold pass. And so when you have a whole bunch of these things going on at the same time, a really helpful way for me to organize it is to visualize where everything is spatially and how everything is hitting. It’s an organizational tool for music, usually.

NF: That’s something the three of you have or haven’t discussed before?

MB: Often when we’re talking about different parts of a song, we do use adjectives that are visual.

NN: We’re pretty visual in our vocabulary, but I don’t know that we really ever talk about the fact that we all see it that way.

MB: Well, one of the things about music that I really believe is that it has the power to transport you or to recreate reality around you. There has to be some visual component in it, and I think we try really hard to create realities.

NF: So you guys have a pretty conscious desire to be kind of evocative, visually, with your music?

FL: Yeah, I would say so.

NN: For me, it’s not even a conscious desire, it’s just a given. When I listen to music, it’s very visual, when I listen or compose or hear it in my head, it’s very visual.

MB: I don’t think any of us really nerd out on music that tries to sound like music alone. I think there’s a lot of types of music that’s all about making music that sounds like other music they’ve heard and trying to take it further.

NN: I just think that our music, and the music that we like, relates to an experience.

FL: Yeah. “Soundtracks,” is a really, really key theme. I don’t really ever think of sounds outside of the context of “soundtrack.” You know, my eyes are always doing something, even when they’re closed. Like, every sound I hear is the accompaniment to something I’m seeing, it’s all turned on all the time. So when I make music, it’s an attempt to create something that’s harmonious with the entire experience. So that maybe gets at why the three of us don’t really talk about that so much as it’s assumed. If the music feels true, it’s because it’s an effective soundtrack to our lives. So, the basic visual component is just what we’re doing as seeing creatures, and a big part of what I’m doing as a seeing creature is to sort out my art game. You know, trying to figure out how I feel about visual art, so it kind of follows that the sorts of images that I bathe myself in, because it’s a natural interest, have a lot to do with the types of sounds that are reasonable soundtracks to those.

NN: Trying to use our imaginations!

NF: So then, do you guys have a vision for the visuals of the band? Not necessarily in the sense of what the sounds are evoking, but the actual visual components of the group? Album covers? Videos?

FL: We’re actually just starting to tackle it.

NN: We talk about clothes sometimes.

FL: Yeah, we talk about palettes of clothing. There’s a shade of reddish-purple that we seem to gravitate toward.

NN: Yeah, we all have the same color pants. We actually planned on all wearing them, once, but Frank forgot.

NF: Are there musical performers whose visual presentation and style you guys dig?

FL: You mean fashion style?

NF: Yeah, since we’re talking about clothes now.

NN: We haven’t really talked about that.

NF: It can be personal, it doesn’t have to be a band thing.

FL: I’m pretty inspired by style all over the place.

NN: I can’t think of any musicians off the top of my head whose style inspires me. But I guess I dig grunge style. I also dig a lot of really contemporary hip-hop style. And actually hip-hop style from the 80s is really inspiring. And I also really like certain Mod-ish style from the 60s. I like the style of little kids a lot.

FL: That’s actually worth mentioning. We’re naming our record Baby Style. And that was, anecdotally, that was because I was wearing a really big oversized shirt when Mike and I were living together, and he saw me wearing it and said, “Cool, I like that baby style.” I mean, I won’t mince words for a minute: I find clothes to be an amazingly enriching field of, like, aesthetic information.

NN: Mike just got a new sweater!

MB: Yup!

FL: I’m fairly into Gucci Mane’s style. I mean, it’s pretty silly. It’s definitely baby style. I just think his chains are pretty amazing, and I’ve been sorting those out in my art practice lately, just with some chain imagery and stuff like that. Other than that, I don’t know, I definitely like Scandinavian style, Finland has some amazing things. I’ve been chilling with a Marimekko book and loving that.

NF: Don’t know who that is.

FL: Marimekko is like the Finnish national brand with beautiful patterns.

NF: “National” like “nationalized?”

FL: Sort of. You know things are pretty social there. So I’ve been enjoying this pattern book of 40s, 50s, and 60s Finnish patterns. That’s some stuff I like.

NF: You guys have played with some acts recently who have been getting some press – Class Actress, Boy Crisis – have folks been coming to you too in major ways?

FL: Pretty medium.

NN: It was happening a lot in the summer, but then it took a lot longer to master our record than we anticipated, so it kind of died down for a while. But we have people looking at us, you know. The biggest setback, the biggest obstacle has been our band name.

FL: Yeah, we kind of don’t have a band name. Though just today we decided to be called Keepaway.

NN: In was a good name in a lot of ways, but because of the nature of its brevity and ubiquity, and especially because it’s a preposition, it’s hard for people to remember and impossible for people to find on the internet.

NF: Well, beyond guys coming to you after a show and wanting to make a record with you – we have friends in high places – Victor from Boy Crisis mentioned you guys in an interview with Time Out.

FL: We didn’t actually know that. I mean, I think all of our feelings about this kind of thing is that we’re working hard on making music because we’re interested in being successful and figuring out a way to have a really stable relationship and ability to do this. It’s kind of a luxury, naturally. I think also all of us have to be kind of hustlers, but at the same time, we also have to keep our eye on the product ahead of any one particular outcome, you know? None of us want to get ahead of ourselves. It’s super cliché, but I’d be doing this out of this context. If I was in the middle of nowhere, I would still have a really engaged musical life. I have confidence that we’re gonna go places with this.

NN: Yeah. For me, the music is an important part of what I see as my life practice as a human being trying to become a more fully realized and intentional and just harmoniously-oriented version of myself. And I’d want anything I do to be part and parcel of that, music especially. But in order to be engaged with music in that kind of sustainable way, I feel like, at this point in my life, I need to be sort of doggedly determined and, you know, mildly opportunistic, and extremely dedicated to be able to achieve some sort of stable plateau in the arts.

NF: You guys have been around a lot of young musical acts that have sort of blown up really quickly. Do you feel like because of this, like, rapid sort of cultural grabbing that’s happened with these bands can maybe almost erode their dedication?

NN: Yeah, I mean, I feel like some of these people who have been sort of swooped up don’t actually exhibit the kind of really true, ardent commitment to creating good art that I want to engage in. I’m not talking about people we know, but just thinking about the people who have been swept up by the internet’s rapid fame machine, I mean, maybe some of them will use it to launch the kind of career I think is desirable.

MB: There’s something to be said for working up to big waves rather than just being swept up by them. You gotta learn how to surf. Some of these people who have been swept up quickly and have actually managed to stay afloat have always been surfers, that’s what they do, they do a good job of staying up. I’ve never been in a band before this one, and I like that we’re taking the time we need to feel things out and also not missing opportunities.

FL: Yeah, check the current and respond to it.

NF: Alright. Well, at this point, having played together a bunch and spent time together, would you say you’re pretty close dudes?

FL: Yeah, yeah.

NN: Yeah, we’ve spent a lot of time together.

MB: I see these guys more than I see my mom.

NN: I love them both very much.

FL: Yeah, totally. There’s a lot of love in this band.

NF: I wanted to ask about that and singing, because the three of you sing together, and it sounds great. But I don’t know if I saw you guys when you first started playing out, were you always all singing?

NN: As much as possible, yeah.

FL: Well, you know, drums is an unusual instrument to sing from. There’s a lot of drummers who drum and sing backing vocals, and even some who do lead vocals. It usually takes me the longest to figure out my parts, so we’re definitely in the habit of playing material live that I haven’t been able to get comfortable enough with yet that I won’t be singing, even though we know that when we record it, I will be singing. It takes a while to pair those two – drumming and singing – as oppose to singing and playing guitar.

NN: It’s definitely a goal and one we try to achieve as much as is appropriate and good. I think that’s one of the things we can say is one of the band’s strengths, when we’re all singing together.

NF: I mean, to me, that was kind of the most interesting element of the kind of dialectic with the MPC and the analog elements, it was, like the voice. Frank, you’ve said that you feel like your voice is your strongest instrument.

FL: Totally, totally.

NF: And then Mike, you said this is actually the first time you’ve really sung in a band.

MB: Yeah. It’s always been a goal of mine, to sing over an MPC – not rap over it, but sing. But there’s gonna be some more rapping soon.

FL: Yeah. Things are gonna get rap-ier. We’d love to do some collabo’s with some rappers.

MB: I mean, really believe this, though, that the only people who are really pulling off the electronic-vocal hybrid are rap artists. I think it’s why we touch upon it a lot, because there’s not really many other people to look to.

FL: There’s some other people.

MB: But I think rap artists are doing it so well in a lot of new, inspiring ways.

FL: Animal Collective does a pretty incredible job of it.

MB: Yeah. Well, that’s another reason that we get often get compared to them is because we use those kinds of rhythms and sing harmonies over electronic bass. There’s not many other people doing that well.

FL: I don’t know, really.

NN: Gang Gang Dance is another one.

FL: I think Crystal Castles, actually, are kind of an amazing electro band.

NN: Yeah, tons of bands are experimenting with electronics, but I think you’re right.

MB: Well it depends what happens with the voice. With Crystal Castles, the electronics get the voice, for sure, the vocals are more like a keyboard part. Rap puts the vocals up front.

FL: Well, it depends on the rap.

MB: As a genre, though, if you’re gonna generalize, the mix is focused around the voice and the 808 kick.Whereas a lot of electronic stuff, it’s more dance production – you have the electronic elements and then you have the voice that’s almost mixed like a sample.

NF: Was this something that came up while you guys were recording? Was it in the mastering process more than the recording?

NN: Yeah. The guy we worked with comes from a hip-hop background, so he’s very centered on the vocals. He kept telling us “This is a vocal-hot record! This is gonna be a vocal-hot record!” He brought out the vocals and the kick drum a lot. It was interesting to work with him because a lot of my inclinations for production are not to bring out the vocals. As far as the, like, masterworks of recordings that I listen to over and over, a lot of them are very textural and are more about the entire tableau than the vocals being up-front. I’d say, musically, in my whole life, I’ve been influenced more by Loveless than by Biggie. But our record maybe only takes some cues from Loveless. I don’t know, I’m just trying to say it was an interesting process.

MB: When we were mixing, we were going back and forth between having it be more textural and ambient vs. being more of a thump-and-pop song. I think what we learned is that you can’t just average those things together and hope you come up with something good in between. You can’t just hope to take the best parts of a pop song and the best parts of a shoegaze, put them together, and expect them to sound good. In order for a pop song to be a pop song and a shoegaze song a shoegaze song, they have to have certain elements in them that directly conflict with each other. So we had to make certain choices – “the vocals are going to be like this, but the kick drum can stay like this;” the “guitar needs to be like this, and maybe we can pick up slack for that by making the drums sound like this.” Kind of moving things around so it takes up both of those worlds, but at the same time, it can be both of them, it doesn’t neglect the other one. It’s a big challenge. You can’t just average them.

NF: Cool. Is there anything else you guys want to talk about?

MB: Not right now.

NN: I have something. Nobody listening to this interview could know this, but just wanted to tell you that, throughout the interview, Mike’s been manipulating his fork, and it finally just broke!

Keepaway - "Yellow Wings".mp3

Keepaway - "I Think About You All The Time".mp3

Autoscopy: I, Too, Decay

2009-03-30T11:41:00.012-04:00

I, person that I am, like you, people that you are, was born a toothless baby. It’s been nearly 24 years since then; 24 years plus 39 weeks (born one week early) of development and growth. I’ve grown arms and legs and an assortment of organs, which developed pre-natally, deciduous teeth, which developed between the ages of 6 and 33 months (post-natal), then those gave way to permanent teeth, which developed between the ages of 6 and 12 years (also, post-natal). My wisdom teeth (aka third molars), the final dental development and perhaps capstone to general development of my mature self, came in (and were taken out) just a few years ago (2004-2005). Now, just weeks from my 24^th anniversary of post-natal living, I have suddenly become all too aware of my impending decline.^[1] Because I have awoken awareness to the fact: I, too, decay.

On March 9, 2009, during what in the profession is called a “closer look” scheduled two weeks following a routine checkup, I was informed by my dentist that I had a cavity on my left maxillary second molar (way in the back, top-left). Actually, he told me that I technically had two cavities back there. This was my first cavity (or technically first and second), and after 23 and 11/12 years of un-caried life, a source of personal pride, you can imagine it came as quite a surprise. ^[2] Because, simply put, I don’t get cavities, and yet, there I was on March 9, sitting in a plastic covered chair, bibbed, with a bright light shining into my face and a set of hands/instruments in my mouth, getting a tooth drilled and filled because it had begun to decay as a result of bacterial by-products.

It wasn’t just the discovery of imperfection, or more precisely the discovery of an imperfection that I was confident would not exist, but rather it was the sudden crumbling of the entire mythology I had already constructed around the premise of mine being a non-cavus disposition. When I was young enough to be considered young, but old enough for my nonpropensity towards tooth decay to prove apparent,^[3] I was told by my pediatric dentist^[4] that such nonpropensities could be the result of a low pH level in my mouth. He said that people with higher pH levels were especially prone to tooth decay, while people lower pH levels were especially not.^[5], ^[6] I liked this distinction, a simple binary: us Basics versus them Acids. I liked it so much that I folded it into my identity list. I, Josh. I, Jew. I, New Yorker. I, brown-haired. I, myopic. I, college educated. I, Basic. Right there, just like that. I talked about being a Basic to people, seeking camaraderie with others of my kind,^[7] and sympathized with those less fortunate to be on the side of the spectrum. I believed that one day I would find a woman just Acid enough that we—a pair of star cross’d lovers—would find the perfect pH balance with each and every kiss. And this would be the woman for me. I wasn’t looking for the rapid and violent oxidation chemically required for sparks to fly; I was looking for our chemical union to result in the perfect balance that only she and I could bring one another. Of course part of that mythology was that being with this dream girl and her counterbalancing acid-mouth would somehow sustain the health of my all-too-base–encountering gums, much the same as my base-mouth would sustain the health of her too-close-to-acid-for-comforted teeth, thereby perfecting the symbiotic Aristotelian ideal of Friendship (here, an ideal Friendship not only with benefits, but dependent upon them). The myth had burrowed deep into my psyche; I its hero, my Acid counterpoint my fate. In some form or another, this whole Base/Acid discussion has come up with pretty much any woman I’ve dated since before I was 16. This is not to say that I’ve screened any girlfriends or checked cavity counts or performed alkaline tests while they slept. If I determined any said girlfriend to be an Acid, it was great: I could make some sly joke about chemical balance, move in for a kiss, and then move back, look into her eyes and think about the great balanced future we could have together, dentally and otherwise. If I determined any said girlfriend to be a Base, well that was fine too, I guess, as it was like living on the edge, fighting heroically against Fate in some epic trial.^[8]

While my dental record had always been pretty clean, my father has had just about every dental problem you can imagine (and a bunch that you may have never heard of, or perhaps you’ve heard of them but have no correlating definitions), which, as long as I can remember, have been continually treated one procedure after another. If there is one association I have for “dental issues” in my free associating brain it would have to be “dad.” And I have to say I feel a bit the Luke Skywalker here to his Darth Vader (with all due respect to my dad, who I would not like to suggest in any way is an all-powerful enforcer of a cosmic empire bent on submission or destruction to all opposition parties therein). In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke loses his hand as the paternal link to DV is revealed and the very last part of the movie shows Luke’s hand being replaced by a machine-prosthetic hand, symbolic of the step Luke has taken toward following his father’s path (DV being a heartless cyborg of a man) to the Dark Side.^[9] What step have I taken? And in what direction? The maxillary second molar that had once been all me, all organic, all pure to its core, has been partially replaced by some composite resin (plastic!) that was wholly foreign and now fused to me. I, Skywalkeresque. I, part-artificial. At least when DV’s lightsaber cut into Skywalker’s wrist, it was a sterile event (some presumptions of the nature of lightsabers here made) as opposed to the bacterial decay that cut into my tooth. It was not my first step: at age 16, I started raiding his closets for his old clothes (innocent enough); at age 20, I was diagnosed with colitis after a pretty violent flare up (the same age my dad was diagnosed with colitis);^[10] at age 22, I started to work for him in order to learn the family business (the only one in my generation in my family to even begin going down that track). And now this? I believe there is an instinctual fear of turning into one’s parents, perhaps having to do with genetic diversification, or the necessity of evolution or progress as survival of the species, or some other scientific reason. This dental decay, and its subsequent composite false restoration, only stokes this fear, enflaming it (fear-of-becoming-your-dad-itis): I, son. I, apple fallen not far from the tree.

Perhaps part of the reason this whole cavity business has been so rattling is that I can’t help but feel like my I-Basic, I-no-tooth-decayed, identity has been stolen from me unjustly. None of the digital x-rays taken by my dentist showed any signs of tooth caries. My dentist, with his little tooth pick and magnifying eyeglasses didn’t see any tooth decay. As far as any of these things were concerned I was tooth-decayless. But at the very end of my routine exam,^[11] the dentist pulled a new tool, resembling something between a thermometer and electric screwdriver, which he explained was a new toy. The tool was able to compare tooth densities of teeth. As a control, he pushed the tool up against an unquestionably healthy tooth (of course at that point, I thought all my teeth were unquestionably healthy teeth). This measurement was then compared to some of the more slightly questionably healthy teeth. If the questionable tooth proved to have a softer density than the control tooth, my dentist suggested there may be something beyond what can be observed by the naked eye. Well, his tool found what it was looking for: a tooth with a density reading of 20 somethings less than my dense control tooth. It had only been 2 or 3 months since my dentist had gotten his new toy. Had I scheduled my appointment just 2 or 3 months earlier, none of this would’ve happened. Instead this rat of a machine dragged me out of bed at night to some HUAC-like trial accusing me of possessing, fostering some kind of blight, disease, decay on the morals of dental hygiene. The jury would be out for a week, but, when I came in for my follow up it was condemnation from the get-go. I was robbed by technology. But at the same time, it leaves me to wonder: if it’s true that this new tech-toy can detect dental decay far beyond the limitations of physical exams, isn’t it possible that this tooth was decaying for a long time already, that really I hadn’t been non-cavity-prone for months years even. Also: if my dentist really had a ball with this thermometer-screwdriver-like tool, what else would he find? He only took reading on 2 or 3 teeth. What else lies/lays in there, just beneath the veneer of this once Basic mouth?

The procedure of routing and filling a dental carie is simple enough. First comes the anesthetic: a swab of numbing gel, followed by a little taste of some locally injected thing, followed by the real dosage. Then the dentist, with the help of his water-squirting-tool-wielding assistant, uses his tooth drill to drill out the decayed parts of the tooth, like cutting out the bruised parts of an apple. Then the filling process: a blue gel used to prime the surface (read: the inside of the newly drilled holes), which my dentist described as akin to priming a canvas to ready it to best receive paint, then a first coating of the composite resin, which needs some time to dry, and then the rest of the composite filling, which needs even more time to dry. Lastly is the fitting stage: any excess resin that overflowed from the cavity will interfere with one’s bite, resulting in discomfort, and will need to be buffered down to fit.

It was only on the drilling section of the procedure that I really formed any real opinion on a procedural level (it was a negative opinion), but not because of the drilling per se. It was more of the by-product. Drilling a tooth is not just cutting out a chunk. The process is more akin to a high-powered sander—a tiny little sander that slowly (well the drill probably moves pretty quickly) sands away the affected areas. And despite the best efforts put forth by the water-squirting-tool-wielding assistant that stood over me and opposite my dentist and the little suction tube that rested in my mouth, hanging from my lip, I could feel the shavings, the dental dust, coming off the tooth, spraying all parts of the mouth like a heavy ossified mist. The dentist and water-squirting-tool-wielding assistant both wore surgical masks, or perhaps the masks used for asbestos abatement or exhuming decayed corpses, but I was breathing in my own diseased tooth, the idea of which, more so than the sensation, was distressing to say the least. I could smell it: the same scent I remember from childhood demonstrations of how to make a shofar, a Jewish ceremonial horn made from non-cattle animals belonging to the bovidae family (i.e. rams, goats, greater kudus, etc.) by boiling the horn (softening and cleaning it), removing the cartilage (hollowing it), and drilling a mouthpiece (completing the air circuit), the scent of drilled animals, dead bones,^[12] a childhood association. I, product of my experiences. I, animal. And so I imagined my tooth as a ceremonial horn, blown through the then-drilled holes made by my dentist with different drills, which sounded different tones, each pitched according to the varying drill sizes, which in a circuitous way only emphasized the shofar-tooth image. I, instrument.

I’ve dreamt about tooth decay: dreams in which my teeth fall out en masse or crumble to dust at my touch, where said falling and/or crumbling is never painful (though usually at very least somewhat distressing) and sometimes turns out to be more of a side note than anything else. Apparently it’s not an especially rare dream amongst my fellow dreamers. Artemidorus, a soothsayer from the third century, reports on tooth dreams in his Interpretation of Dreams 1800 years ago. Artemidorus interprets tooth dreams to be about the family (the mouth being like a house) or possessions (who knows why). For people-tooth interpretations, upper teeth refer to important people in the family and lower teeth less important family members; right teeth refer to men and left teeth women; and incisor teeth refer to the young, canines middle-agers, and molars the old. For possession-tooth interpretations, incisors refer to household objects, canines objects of little value, and molars treasures. Artemidorus interprets people-tooth dreams to foretell the death of the family member to whom the tooth which is lost in the people-tooth dream corresponds, while he interprets possession-tooth dreams to foretell the loss of property to which lost tooth in dream corresponds. Many centuries (not to mention tooth dreams) later, Freud also writes about dreams of teeth falling out in his Interpretation of Dreams and categorizes such dreams as a “typical dream” along with dreams “of falling from a height,” “of flying,” and “of embarrassment at being naked or insufficiently clad.”^[13] Freud interprets the typical loss-of-teeth-dream to be about castration and/or guilt about masturbation. But I can’t say I buy the interpretations of either of these prominent dream readers: I can’t take Artemidorus’ argument too seriously because he understands dreams as divinations which is coming at dreams from a whole different level from the level from which I am coming; and I can’t take Freud’s analysis too seriously because Freud thinks everything is about castration/masturbation, so I can’t help but think he just took the easy way out here.

A more common interpretation I’ve heard (from peers and an assortment of dream-interpreting websites) contends that these dreams reflect anxiety about not having control;^[14] teeth will fall out in these dreams like Chiclets out of a 25-cent candy dispenser no matter what you do in the dream to stop said deluge of dentin. Of course, loss of teeth in the non-dream context pretty much represents the same thing in the larger scheme of things (which is why the dream interpretation resonates so soundly). That is, when your teeth are falling out (seemingly) by themselves (as opposed to falling out as direct result of blunt force trauma), we feel helpless and in the process of ruination. Dental decay is just that: decay. I decay. That’s what this means. I, one who does not care for decay.

I, one who does not care for decay? But I consider myself to be an (unrecognized) colleague in the small field of ruin studies. I, ruin enthusiast. I, who has done much research in books with titles like Fascination of Decay, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, Pleasure of Ruins, The Way of the Flesh. I, who has written extensively of the changing underpinnings of aestheticization of the ruin and decay over the past 300 years. I, ruin aesthete. So what happened?Well, maybe nothing. I have suggested that over centuries (particularly from the 18^th century onward) ruins have been aestheticized in a number of ways: emblematic, picturesque, monumental, nostalgic, nationalistic, etc. Each aesthetic category has its own historical, philosophical, and cultural basis. But the one category which I have always enjoyed the most was the sublime ruin. This category emerged in the 1750s or 1760s following Edmund Burke’s philosophical enquiry into the sublime, which laid out the definition of its modern usage.^[15] The sublime ruin provokes this terror (as this was the single most important aesthetic reaction when encountering the sublime) as one realizes the vastness of eternity as well as the inevitable decay of all material objects—including man—before it. All things decay, the ruin says, nothing lasts. And while this emotion may seem emotionally tiring (it is!), the sublime was sought by the Romantics of the period. The sublime was (for many, is) considered the height of aesthetic experiences. Romantics sought out ruins precisely for this emotional exchange with them, to feel dominated by them.

I, dominated. I, sublime seeker. The anxiety I feel as a result of this news of not only susceptibility but actual dental decay, the anxiety which shows my lack of control, the recognition of my impending decline (this existential angst) may be a true aesthetic encounter with the sublime. I am horrified by it. And yet perhaps I am drawn to it. It is exciting to me as I cower before its ramifications. Precisely. I can feel it.^[16]

The question itself crumbles. There is no I that was or I that will be, but only I that I am. In 24 years my identity has not changed, but grown, expanded, matured—a process that does not end post-peak, but is part of that process of decay as well. I, Josh. I, history. I, tooth decayed.

~Josh

^[1] I see this as essentially different from feeling old, which is not a feeling I am currently feeling. In fact, I feel too young to think about feeling old. Oldness refers to age (temporal) and perhaps psychology (mental). I, however, am feeling imminent decline, which is completely physical and corporeal in nature.

^[2] My dental records, up until March 9, consisted of the following: (a) slight staining which was cleaned or cleaned as best said stains could be cleaned at periodic (read: semi-annual) checkups; (b) tender gums, due to somewhat delinquent care (see note 5, below); (c) slight over-bite and some spacing issues which were corrected by a few years of orthodontic care (read: 3 years of braces, which were cared for by a very sweet orthodontist who wore braces himself as if in a show of solidarity, and which were put on my teeth just after my bar-mitzvah and pretty much demarcated, if not defined, those awkward years boys aged 13 to 16 go through); and (d) after years of x-rays showing that my wisdom teeth were coming in straight, they decided to take a wrong turn and all four were removed during my summer vacation ’06 in a single sitting, which took no more than ten minutes (once the local anesthesia set in, the teeth just popped right out seemingly as easily as a Pez dispenser dispenses Pez) and together with the application and removal of braces were the only things that I would consider to be “dental procedures” at all comparable to the procedure of having this maxillary molar procedured. In case it wasn’t clear, I’ll just mention that while the whole wisdom teeth ordeal was upsetting, it was not upsetting in the same way this cavity is upsetting. No contest.

^[3] I should mention by reiteration that I never had a cavity in any of my so-called baby teeth either, despite my childhood distaste towards cavity prevention techniques (yes, I did lie to my baby sitters about whether I had brushed or not, but it proved innocent enough). My baby teeth fell out one by one perfectly intact, like James Bond villains killed by taking hundreds of bloodless and woundless machine gun shots to the chest, like sacrificial virgins left for the fairied gods.

^[4] I think.

^[5] This is not to say that my pediatric dentist told me that me and my low pH(at)-ed mouth were not susceptible to other problems. He said that people with low pH levels were especially prone to gum disease, which may be even more terrifying than tooth decay, but always seemed distant enough. By this (il)logic of distance from repercussion (i.e. gum disease always seemed like an older person’s issue), I felt pretty confident about my dental hygiene, if not prideful. Actually it has only been in the past year that I’ve gotten more serious (read: serious at all) about flossing to combat said propensity toward gum disease after my current (i.e. not pediatric) dentist said I had mild gingivitis (a gum disease). I’m more than happy to report the apparent successes of my flossing efforts in both thwarting the mild gum disease and gaining some approving nods from my dentist.

^[6] I should mention in full disclosure that I told my current dentist what my pediatric dentist told me and got a pretty sideward glance in return. It occurs to me now that the whole pH-level thing may have just been a tactical maneuver to keep a kid who thought he was dentally invincible interested in his own dental hygiene. Sort of like telling a kid who thinks he can fly about the amazingly strong suction force of commercial plane engine intake to keep him from jumping out the window. Tactically sound, I guess. It is also my current dentist’s glance that caused me to question whether it actually was my pediatric dentist who told me this (see note 4, above), even though I am pretty sure that I specifically do remember it being him who had done so. Still, despite my current dentist’s accusations, I refuse to let go of this general assertion of pH-based proclivities. It makes too much sense to me and unless someone can show me scientific proof otherwise, which my dentist has not done, I’m sticking with it. That being said, if you have such scientific proof and try to show it to me, I may run away or just close my eyes and start yelling, depending on my initial estimation of your speed versus my own speed and the physical, emotional, social, or other effects of my running.

^[7] I would warn them of their impending gum disease (see note 5, above) out of a sense of duty.

^[8] I’m going to have to be real careful here. I honestly can’t remember my current girlfriend’s cavity count at the moment. Although I do know we have had this conversation. I do want to clarify one thing: while the myth does have to do with finding an Acid for love, in no way am I particularly physically attracted to the sight of cavities in a woman’s mouth. I find them to be pretty gross to look at, as are most other things in other people’s mouths that lay beyond the most superficial veneer of a smile. The point being that I was more than happy to take a girlfriend’s word on her cavity count and infer from it her Basic/Acid identity. I needed no proof.

^[9] Of course in one of the Star Wars prequels (does it matter which one?) it’s revealed the first part of the not-yet-DV-DV to become mechanized in the not-yet-DV-DV’s descent into becoming the cyborg DV is losing a hand, as if to retroactively place even more resonance in young Luke’s amputatory transformation (a little forced).

^[10] I haven’t heard anywhere that colitis is a genetic disease. And yet, as if by some genetic, father-son, mental/spiritual, connection/intuition, I knew the moment my symptoms started to become evident (no need to go into the gross specifics) that it was colitis. Without a doubt. In fact, I called my dad on the phone and the first thing I asked him was how old he was when he was diagnosed with colitis. Of course he wanted to know why I was asking before he told me that he was around 20, but finally he did admit it. I don’t think he really believed me over the phone that I had colitis, but I knew I did. And when the doctors confirmed it a week later (it was a really long week for me), I definitely gave him a look.

^[11] I have my teeth cleaned and examined semi-annually, which I realize is probably significantly more often than many other people of my demographic. I can only suggest that this is the result of a Jewish mother, whose own father was a dentist and was seemingly raised to have severe fears of tooth decay (nonetheless, my mom does have a few cavities), who schedules my dental exams whenever she has her own. Another result of having such mother was a distinct lack of sugary foods in my childhood diet: no sugared cereals, no candy, and only sugar-free gums. I once tried to explain to her that these sugared things won’t effect my dental health (I being a Basic and all), but I didn’t win the case. Maybe she didn’t understand. Or, maybe she was just trying to be fair: my brother, cavitied as he was, was definitely not Basic so maybe it was just a matter of being dietarilly hitched to his Acid ride.

^[12] Actually a shofar, by Jewish law, cannot be made out of bones (antlers), as they must be made of horns (which is pretty much all keratin).

^[13] It strikes me as peculiar that the typical dreams of falling and of flying are counterpositioned while typical dreams of being naked and of teeth falling out don’t have any similar oppositional typical dreams. It also strikes me that 3 out of 4 of these typical dreams are angst-inducing if not terrifying, while dreams of flying, I’m assuming, are usually pretty pleasant, if not exhilarating. I should mention that while I do have recurring dreams about teeth falling out, I do not recall dreaming any of these other typical dreams Freud lists (although I have tried quite expressly to have a dream of flying, concentrating on birds, superheroes, clouds, and such images while trying to fall asleep, and have on a number of occasions lamented my failure to have accomplished such goal of dreamt flight). I have had atypical dreams, which need not be discussed. Also, I should mention that I have another recurring dream of driving with an unresponsive brake pedal. By a simple survey of a few friends, I understand that this cut-brake dream is fairly typical, too. I imagine that Freud would have no objections to my inclusion of this dream in his classification of typical dreams and humbly suggest that he, too, would have classified it as such had he lived long enough to see modern vehicular brake systems invented. Actually, I imagine this would have been extremely interesting to Freud as he had a difficult time understanding the notion of a typical dream (a dream that many people have independently of one another) and it would have been fascinating to study the rise of a new typical dream that arose according to technological cultures of the time. Personally, I find these broken-brake-pedal dreams frightfully awful and dream a derivative of this dream at least as often as I dream derivatives of tooth-falling-out dreams. On rare occasions, I have had dreams that incorporate both tooth-crumbling and brakeless-driving (which usually involve brake failure and car crashes), which have proven damned near paralyzing upon my awakening.

^[14] Of course this is what I would think my car dreams are about as well, which of course suggests that I have a lot of angst about that sort of thing—enough angst to manifest itself in two completely different ways. Although they certainly do seem like different angst-sources: car angst suggests man’s loss of control with regard to technology (i.e. it’s is not me who controls the actual car braking in the car because really I have left that job to a complex system of technological tools on which I rely heavily), while the tooth angst suggests man’s loss of control with regard to nature (i.e. man does not control his body, ultimately, nor does man control all surroundings). So my sense of control seems to be burning from both ends of the candle.

^[15] Or at least one version of the modern usage. Immanuel Kant wrote his own philosophy of the sublime, which certainly built on Burke’s, but made some small but significant changes.

^[16] An interesting thought: as a true ruin-enthusiast, I may have already made a mistake. I was treated for my cavity. My tooth was restored. Restoration, however, is a true abomination to a ruinist (this debate first surfaced in the 19^th century when French restorationists and preservationists duked it out as to how to treat various ruin sites the world over). At very least I could have pursued the preservationist’s route of freezing my tooth in its current state of decay. But of course a devout ruinist would have called out to my dentist: Let it all crumble!

November 5, 2008

2008-10-27T11:48:00.002-04:00

In just over one week, the election will be over. And I'm terrified.

No, not so much about whether my guy will win or not—although the possibilities of voter caging, false accusations of voter fraud, and all the other sorts of voter suppression tactics of the Right do make me anxious, the prospects of a McCain/Palin administration are the makings of a truly frightful haunted house this Halloween, not to mention that the fact that so many people in this country voted for George W. Bush twice just freaks me out. All that stuff is certainly scary, but that's not why I'm terrified.

I'm terrified of November 5. I'm terrified of living without this election. November 4 may be one hell of a final bender—ecstatic, climactic, or otherwise—but to suddenly kick this election cold turkey. I'm not sure if I can do it.

It’s hard to imagine what it will be like on November 5—what the world will be like—what I’ll be like—what you’ll be like. And that’s what is so terrifying. What will we talk about? What will we do? Will you still like me? We've been talking about this election for almost two years now. I was still in college when Barack Obama announced his candidacy. This election cycle has been one of few constants in my life. It has allowed me to keep anchor, while casting my first lines into the world beyond the campus, into the world at large.

It has allowed me to feel relevant. Sociability has been as easy as being informed. Any awkward silences can be filled easily with a “Did you hear about?” or “Can you believe that?” Just this week, a woman made the news by tapping into the undercurrent of racial fears when she made up a story about a black man assaulting and mutilating her in a fit of pro-Obama rage. Did you hear about that? Can you believe that? Let’s talk about that. Isn’t that interesting? Aren’t I interesting? This is too easy.

After November 4, we won’t even have any of those congressional races to talk about. No more Michele Bachman’s craziness. No more Nikki Tinker’s race-baiting her Jewish Democratic primary opponent. I’m already feeling emptier.

I suppose it's sort of a Saturday Night Live complex. The election catapulted SNL's 34th season into a realm of cultural significance it had long lost. It made SNL relevant again. Even producer Lorne Michaels has admitted that the whole Sarah Palin thing was a bit of a gift. But can it keep on giving? How does the show retain its refound audience once the election cycle is over? How does it keep from slipping back to that cultural backburner until the next election cycle (and that's hoping the next cycle will be as crazy as this one)? It’ll try to stay current, talk about other important things, current things, but it probably won’t work. After all, jokes about the economy are about as funny as—well—the economy.

To ease my terror, I suppose I would do well to remember that friendships are deeper than politics. And that they rely on more than just the current news cycle. On November 5, many of us will have to start looking for new hobbies, so to speak. Let us remember that while we put away this crutch of an election and stretch our legs once more, we still have our friends to lean on should we fall. We may not have as much current affairs stuff to talk about, but we have our memories of this election, the importance and nostalgia of which will probably last longer than the next president’s term(s). We’ve been through a lot together over the past two years and I know we move forward in whatever directions together. So perhaps, instead of fearing the end of this election, I should spend some of my time this week thinking of some new group activities. I’m open to suggestions.

~Josh

Soon finding a place in these lost verses

2008-10-07T02:43:00.012-04:00

Friends,

The leaves have been turning slowly here in San Francisco. The edges of all the seasons are a little dull in California. Beautiful, here, but homogeneous. Well, last week, I traveled to the far and spare southwest coast of the city to celebrate the Jewish new year and to cast my sins into the Pacific Ocean. I stood in the icy water while small crabs burrowed in and out of the sand around my toes, some dudes wiped out on the waves in front of me and a few birds scattered across the wet shore, eyeing the old bread by my backpack in an erratic dance. I lingered there for a while thinking truly of nothing, something I'm usually not very good at. And then I splashed my way out of the tide's reach, back to the warm sand, feeling calmed and emptied.

I'm told that these days - autumn - are ripe with renewal, maturity, growth or, at least, pause. This blog has been sparse, but its slow pace has proven an asset. Each of the posts here has been an occasion, an event, and, because of their welcome surprise, I read my friends' words with added attention and joy.

Speaking for no one but myself here, the beginnings of New Flags emerged from the hope to create an artifact of our community, to merge disparate desires, experiences and ideas under our own banner of creative conviviality, flapping high and triumphantly in a strong breeze. And I think these are the same ambitions that have been the foundations of so many of the projects each of us has undertaken or collaborated on in the past few years. New Flags has surfaced as a modest venture, but its roots cling to deeper truths.

In this spirit of renewal and reflection, come celebrate one year of our sparse blogging at what used to be one of my favorite rock venues and then turned into one of my favorite bars.

New Flags- One Year Anniversary
Hi-Fi (Ave A btwn 10th and 11th)
Saturday, October 11 - 9PM.

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kindred local thoughts
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Asher

Autoscopy #3: Long Live Eulogies

2008-10-06T15:16:00.019-04:00

We're approaching our first birthday here at NewFlags, and though not all our kin have made posts since our inception (seriously, dudes: it's been a year), it's cause for celebration. For the first time in a while, we'll all be in the same city this weekend, and when kin get together to have a joyous time, you get excited. You also get to thinking, and I'm not trying to be morbid: the flow of seconds into hours and months and years leads to a mortal inevitability that I'm not all that excited about. I have to work some things out....

So I was thinking that everyone should get to hear their own eulogy before they die, no? What if we added fifty-two days to our calendars – tacking one on at the end of every week – to host pseudo-memorials for the living? Close-ones would take the occasion to get closer, meeting at houses of worship – temple sanctuaries, living room shrines, IKEA showrooms – to belabor why one sacred head has owned their hearts for so many moons. It seems only fair to me. If memorials really are the celebrations they purport to be, what, then, would be so morbid about a memorial service for the standing and breathing? Death is not charming, and if that’s true, then there’s no reason we have to wait until then to finally get all vocal and sentimental about our peoples. There're things that you and I still do that over and over trigger the endorphin rushes in our friends’ skull-holes and keep them coming back for more. There’s the “I love you” toast at a party, and then there’s the expository speech with multiple paragraphs in front of 60 folks about “why I love you,” during which everyone gushes like an exploding piñata of compliments about your loyalty in times of crisis and your care and concern in times of despair. To quote a group of resident 21st Century geniuses: "Love is the province of the brave - ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh...."

This I’ve believed for a long time. But why? Seems like a strange thing to have been thinking about since you were 13, but every so often I’m sitting on the Houston St. steps thinking about my eulogy. I wonder if it comes from a place of profound vanity, that really I just want to hear all about me: about my endless generosity, what with all the change I’ve given to the homeless over the years, and about my dedication to social justice that has seen me time and again confronting with an awkward pugnacity those who refer to “Africa” when really they just mean Kenya….

I think it’s more likely, though, that it stems from a deep, if not pathological, sentimentality, one that’s made me sometimes severely empathetic and once led me to write the lyrics to what I imagined would be a spare, unironic piano ballad that I’d use to close a musical set I would play at an intimate, wintry holiday-season show after a fat dinner in the low-light living room of one of my friends’ many cozy abodes. Here they come:

All my friends
I love them so much
They are almost all here
And that is so much more
Than I could ever ask for
I think I’ll just listen
To all of them breathing
Sometimes it gets so that is all I want to hear
Sometimes it gets so that is all I want to hear
So I’ll just listen

My crafty plan was to put the words in a song so I could tickle all my friends’ hearts without feeling all bashful and blushy about it. But that also defeats the purpose, no? It’d be something more if I had something to lose – like if there were strangers in the audience – because, (unfortunately) the way I see it is there aren’t rewards for the kind of niceness that’s in a eulogy. Or in a piano ballad. Or in a lot of things. There’s got to be some effort to match however much it takes to remain a good person in the face of utter shit. But then I start thinking about the people who don’t deserve a good word. What do you do with a dead body that never brought you any joy in the first place? I guess you just don’t go to their memorial. But also, what about people who aren’t necessarily “bad,” but who you aren’t exactly close to and you know won’t have many people at their memorial? You take pity and show up and look like a fool at how effusive you are?

Aarrrgh...this is where my theory starts to unravel….

Recently I tried to revise this whole idea. It’s simpler to say that everyone should get at least one glossy black-and-white photo taken of themselves in their lifetime. It memorializes in an instantaneous, wordless way, and its inherent aesthetic beauty lends itself to your image so severely that the implicit caption of almost any black-and-white photograph should read “Damn! Doesn't this person deserve to be looked at?!” (SEE BELOW) Seems simple enough. This came to me one morning after I saw a delicate photo of a man in a magazine that someone on the subway was reading. The man in the photo was looking down, contemplative, and his head was wrapped in a bandana. Who’s to say he didn’t live a good life? At least at that moment, he seemed to be doing no wrong. I had all this sympathy for him from this one photograph. Suddenly this seemed like the way to go...who needs eulogies?

Incidentally, when I got to work 20 minutes later, the same photo of the man was sitting on my co-worker’s desk staring out at me. I read the caption, realizing that it was David Foster Wallace. I went on to read the flattering article underneath, and I learned that this man was in fact dead. I’d never actually read Wallace before. I knew his Kenyon commencement speech, and I remembered a line that always stuck: “There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.” I looked up again at the photo and wondered how someone who seemed so aware and in control of the banalities of day-to-day living could have reached a despair so deep.

Later, I did some trolling on the internet for more about Wallace and ended up reading some of his interviews. I kept reading a snippet of one long one in which he was trying to ascertain "why we're so desperate for an anesthetic against loneliness,” which to me read as “why haven’t we found an anesthetic yet?!” My impression of the man in the photograph was mutating into something far less romantic now. The delicacy and nuance of the greys in the photo suddenly started to look horribly foreboding.

When I subsequently watched an interview with Wallace on the Charlie Rose Show, his suddenly ruddy moving image disturbed me. On the one hand, he was alive, in the flesh. But on the other hand, and maybe this is hindsight speaking, he seemed terribly, terribly unhappy. He rarely looked at Charlie. What might’ve been a moment of reflection in the photo turned out to be a reality of posture, his back hunched and his gaze fixed on the nothing of the table and the emptiness of the black set. Each of his painstaking responses to Charlie’s probes carried with them a sense that Wallace was annoyed. Though Charlie is an aggravating interviewer, I got the sense that Wallace was more undone by how severely he believed in what he said. And every passing second brought with it another thought that was tragic enough on its own, but each held even more gravity when he realized, or at least believed, that no one else but himself might understand.

In that magazine photograph, at least, Wallace is frozen and unthinking, and it’s easier to try to remember him at a moment when he wasn’t straining under the weight of thought. When I think about it more, though, the photograph idea doesn’t totally work either because no one is actually connecting with Wallace: he has no idea how people around him feel about him, and why would he be flattered if one person he didn’t know came to his house for an hour one day to stand behind a camera and every once in a while ask him to move to the left a little and to “act natural?”

Moreover, what the hell could David Foster Wallace have wanted people to say at his funeral? If he got to hear his eulogy, would the adulations of his loved ones have kept him buoyant enough to live another day? Sadly, my guess is no. I can’t say what circumstances were compounding on Wallace, but I get the sense a gushing and early eulogy was not what he needed....

Eulogies as we know them are starting to sound futile to me. Why do we do it? They seem to have more to do with the people delivering them than they do with the dead. Are we just trying to absolve ourselves of any lingering guilt we feel toward the departed? Maybe our paeans to the lost are nothing more than good PR for our imperfect relationships. And now there’s no one around to prove us wrong...I don't want to believe we're so ego-oriented, but I wonder....

My experience of death has always been a solipsistic one, as in “whoa, this means I’m mortal,” and “I hope I do a good job consoling everyone.” Paradoxically, the lesson death has imparted me is that life goes on, and so my reaction to death has always involved me in some way. In that sense, when I say everyone should get to hear their eulogy before they die, I am speaking out of self-interest.

But it’s not out of vanity. I think it goes deeper than that. I think we’ve always wanted to feel that we’ve touched someone, someone who’d want to be in front of an audience, surmounting their phobia of public speaking, to make sure others understand the deep and far-reaching impact of your life, one so profound that it's managed to bring people together even when your physical faculties are kaput. So maybe my system of year-round eulogies for the living is imperfect, but couldn’t we devise something like it? Imagine what it feels like to know before you die that when you die, you didn't live an empty life. Imagine what it feels like to know that the life you are living is not in vain and has already meant something. Is it enough for you to keep going? I really hope so.

Love (a lot),

~ Ashraf

TV On the Radio - Province (Live at Amoeba Records).mp3

David Foster Wallace Interview w/Charlie Rose

Autoscopy #2: If Only for a Little While

2008-08-26T13:21:00.006-04:00

Growing up, I sometimes fantasized about being really fat. But it wasn’t an escapist fantasy of wanting to be an astronaut or wanting to fly or wanting to ride ponies all day or wanting to be anywhere else but here. I was perfectly content being who I was and where I was, as long as that meant I could be really fat—if only for a little while.

Actually, as opposed to those escapist fantasies, I would consider this one—about being really fat—to be more of a practical fantasy.

I wanted to be fat because I was curious. And I wanted to be fat because I was bored. And I wanted to be fat because I was jealous of—well—fat kids. I saw them in class playing with themselves—and not in an autoerotic way. They could tug at their big cheeks. They could poke their double chins. They could jiggle their arms and thighs. And I thought that was completely unfair. If I was bored in class and pulled out some silly putty from my desk and began playing with it, squishing it between my fingers, the teacher would have taken it away. It would have been confiscated as contraband. But the teachers couldn’t take away their silly putty. I mean, after all, it was attached to them!

While I was at it, I also wanted to run a 100-meter dash really fat. Some people, I suppose, dream of having long thick hair for wind to blow through because they think the sensation would be liberating. I dreamt of running fat for similar reasons. I wanted to run as fast as I could and feel all that fat bounce with each stride. I wanted to feel that resistance and delayed response that must be like watching your hand move while really stoned. Rather than an equal and opposite reaction, I wanted every action to have a delayed and maybe even amplified reaction. I wanted every movement to have more weight.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about this kind of stuff. And I thought I had it all pretty much figured out. I fully understood the health issues involved in being fat and I knew that really fat people couldn’t really run. That’s why I only wanted to be fat for an hour or maybe a day at most. And I didn’t want to get fat as much as be fat. I wanted to be instantly fat. Like Cinderella, but fat. A fairy could come visit me at night or even right there in the middle of class and wave its magic wand. And instead of a pumpkin turning into a sleek carriage, I could turn into something more like a pumpkin. By midnight I would turn back into the skinny kid again. I figured that by making it a wax-on wax-off deal, I would still be able to do all the things I normally do, just that I would be doing it with a whole lot of fat. I just wanted to try it out. A test drive, if you will.

It was around this time that I was preparing for my bar-mitzvah (which is when a fairy, on you thirteenth birthday, waves its magic wand and turns you for all Jewish intents and purposes into a man, albeit a young man). Part of that preparing was planning my bar-mitzvah party, a black tie affair at a hotel catering hall in midtown Manhattan. My parents handled most of the planning, like picking out the venue, the menu, and anything else that dealt with the adults invited to the party (family, family friends, etc.). But they let me do some of the planning when it came to entertaining the kids. There were something like sixty kids coming to the party; school policy was that you had to invite everyone in the grade.

I was given a catalogue of party game options. There were some standards like a basketball shootout, arcade games, and less active activities like sand art, and other souvenir-making things, but there were also larger activities, the main attractions if you will, of which I was allowed to choose one. It was important to me that I got something that none of the previous bar- or bat-mitzvah parties in the grade had (there were many previous bar- and bat-mitzvahs). And there it was in the brochure: sumo wrestling.

Now, I don’t remember exactly how the sumo wrestling was described in that particular catalogue, but a comparable party planner, on their website, describes it as follows:

Probably the most widely known 'interactive' game around, sumo wrestling suits have long been a favorite for company meetings, grad parties and a host of other special events. With sumo wrestling suits, two contestants put on oversized vinyl suits and are instantly transformed into gigantic Sumo wrestlers, complete with wig and miwashi [sic] belt. The referee starts the match and the giant sumo wrestlers try to push, pull and 'blubber' their opponent to the floor. The hilarious appearance of the overweight sumo wrestlers might just bring the spectators to the floor, so watch out! This one is a real crowd pleaser!

Racist undertones aside, I was pretty excited by the prospect. Just look at those verbs: push, pull, blubber. That’s what I was looking for. And then when I was done, I could take off the fat suit and show off my skills in the limbo contest. It seemed perfect.

Of course the parental veto nixed my fat suit plans. Something about kids in suits and dresses putting on big hot vinyl outfits and then wrestling seemed less than ideal. There was also something about liabilities. We ended up settling on laser tag, which was not as cool as it sounds (it turned out be laser tag inside a six foot by six foot space enclosed by a black sheet, where you weren’t allowed to run around and basically just hid behind a plaster “crater” until your time was up).

Looking back on that however I know that no fat suit would’ve ever satisfied my true desires to be really fat. Fat suits are too stiff. They are too fake. They’re not designed right.

Moreover, as the party planners say, they are “crowd pleasers;” putting on a fat suit wouldn’t be for me, but for others. I had no interest in the “hilarious appearance” (again, as described by the party planners) of a skinny person made fat, or the easy jokes of fat-face comedies that have become norms in the comedy industry since The Nutty Professor won an Oscar for Best Makeup in 1997 (films like Austin Powers, Shallow Hal, the end of Dodgeball, Big Mama’s House, Medea’s Family Reunion, Jiminy Glick, Just Friends, Norbit, etc.). I wanted to be fat for purely selfish reasons and purely sensational benefit. Not for the amusement of others, but the purely physical amusement of myself.

Today, I’ve maxed out at just under 6’ tall and I’ve never broken through the glass wall of 140 lbs, regardless of my eating habits and exercise routines (or lack thereof). By all accounts, I could be described as somewhere between slim, thin, and skinny. And I always have been. I can’t say that my fantasizing of being fat has completely stopped, but it has certainly become increasingly infrequent, especially ever since I grew enough facial hair to play with and tug at whenever I find myself in those unbearably boring situations. Simple pleasures. Fantasizing about being fat today, is more a fantasy for nostalgia’s sake than anything else for me.

Recently, I’ve talked about my old fat fantasies with a number of friends that have always been skinny themselves. (I thought it best not to bring it up with some of my less skinny friends. Respectfully.) Anyway, I asked them if they ever had similar fantasies about being really fat when they were young. The answer was a pretty solid No. And everyone seemed shocked by the idea. Not to say that any of them are especially weight conscious. They just thought the whole idea of such a fantasy was strange. As if I was the only person who thought about those things.

Maybe. Although I have a hard time believing that I’m that original.

When I was fifteen years old, I went on a three-day trip to Pennsylvania with my camp. We went to Philadelphia, Amish country, and on the last day we went to Hershey Park. Besides all my friends that were on the trip, there was Becky. I knew that she liked me and that she thought I was cute. Her friends had told me so. Moreover, I knew that she knew that I knew she liked me and thought I was cute. Her friends had told me so. And I liked her too. We had gotten to the point where we would talk to one another in passing, which was really a big deal considering we had never spoken a word to one another the previous few years we had been in camp together. When it came time to get on the bus for the four-hour bus ride back to camp, she was standing right behind me on line. And when I kept walking down the bus aisle, she followed me. And when I finally sat down in a seat, she sat down next to me. I didn’t even have to ask her if she wanted to. The bus started to drive and we were together, sitting right next to each other.

We talked for a little while. I thought it was going really well. I thought that maybe this was the night; we’d kiss and start dating, making it possibly the best summer ever. After about an hour, she put her head on my shoulder either to go to sleep or to pretend to go to sleep. I’m not quite sure which, but it didn’t matter. It was very exciting. I thought about maybe even putting my hand on hers. But just then, the bus hit a small bump and we bounced in our seat. Her head hit me on the shoulder, right where she had been resting it. She sat up straight almost immediately. She said that I wasn’t very comfortable, that my shoulder was too bony for her to rest on. I wasn’t sure what to say. And I wasn’t sure what I could do about it. I mean, it was my shoulder after all. I had another one, but I didn’t think that it would be any better or any more comfortable. I guess I could’ve pulled out some of the Hershey’s chocolate I had bought and start to eat it—I could’ve stuffed my face with it right there even—but I knew it would not have helped. It probably would’ve just made me car sick. We sat there for a few minutes quietly until she got up and moved to a different seat. And that was the end of that. We never dated and she pretty much lost interest in me after that. After all, what’s the point of dating someone if you can’t lean on them once in a while. I still remember the rest of that bus ride being long and the scent of urine had begun to leak out of the bathroom. I remember that scent very vividly. I still associate it with failure.

It was the first of many similar accounts: I’ve been reminded repeatedly that I’m just not very comfortable. Sometimes it’s sitting on some other bus. Sometimes it’s sitting on a park bench. Sometimes it’s someone I’ve been dating and sometimes it’s someone I’m just getting to know. I never know what to say to it. And they usually don’t have anything to follow up with either. It’s because they’re disappointed. They wanted something, something from me, something of me, that I couldn’t give them. In that silence, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what they are thinking about.

So maybe I’m not all that original at all. Because maybe I’m not the only person who has fantasized about me being really fat. If only for a little while. Just long enough for you to rest your weary head.

~josh

Beach Ball Martyrs

2008-08-06T11:41:00.013-04:00

Our appreciation of music is more than an aural experience. While music has become increasingly accessible through the technology of downloadable and portable mp3s, we, the listeners (or consumers) constantly desire the most basic form of the music-experience: live concerts. (Similarly, given the technology of mp3s, record labels and musicians see concerts as one of the few ways to make a buck on music.) If we just cared about the audio, we could just stay at home (or go out) and listen to those same notes, rhythms, and melodies at our leisure. But we want more out of our music, to be informed of and by our favorite songs in ways that only a live show can offer. That’s why we spend money or (when free) time on these oh-so-ephemeral events. It’s the context, stupid. There are those dimly-lit and smoke-filled jazz clubs, where your senses all fall into some dizzy haze or another. There are those arenas where you think the whole world is cosmically unified in singing its heart out with the screeching chorus about hope, redemption, or triumph. There are those basements, where energy is oozing from everywhere at once and the dancing is so intense that the only things sweating more than you are the walls. There are those dusk concerts outside where the music kisses the day goodnight, evoking mood and emotion of poets, painters, and prophets.

This past weekend, I went to another kind of concert, the day-long summertime concert that epitomizes the greatness and party-readiness of summer days. It was sunny (too sunny even) and it was hot (too hot even) and it was great (too great even, considering how tired I still am). These are the experiences that nostalgia is made of, the things that I can look back at as both unique and familiar, specific and general. Things that I’ll one day compile into a single memory of youth, summer, and awesome. And it’s only possible because these sorts of festivals are so consistent and therefore so strong in my mind. Really, if nothing else, you can be sure of seeing the following things at these shows: (1) at least five people from school you didn’t plan on meeting up with, but are happy to talk to (or at least say hello to), (2) a whole lot of women wearing American Apparel bathing suits, and (3) at least two beach balls of varying size.

Item (1) is always great, because even if you don’t really like the person you run into, you may very much like their friend who will be back in just one minute. Alternatively, these small bumping-intos seem to have the power to make the world go round.

Item (2) is sometimes great, depending if you are (a) a man who is attracted to women in American Apparel bathing suits, (b) a woman attracted to women in American Apparel bathing suits, (c) really love American Apparel and the scene that wears it, or (d) don’t deduct points for unoriginality. Regardless, it’s a harmless phenomenon.

Item (3) is usually not great at all. Or actually never great after about, say, five minutes. Sometimes these are beach balls with company logos on them passed out as advertising by the concert’s sponsors. Sometimes these beach balls are just plain beach balls brought from home by someone. I’m not sure which is more alarming. Regardless, they are always present at these types of shows and as far as I can tell they are never tolerated for long.

The course of the crowd’s relationship to beach balls is fairly standard: at first the crowd is happy to see beach balls surfing over the crowd—people even compete to get to hit the ball themselves, as if the entire crowd was participating in one large communal game in which everyone is a winner and recipient of good cheer awards; the crowd’s attention however soon shifts, either a band comes on stage or people just get bored, but most of the crowd generally loses interest in any beach ball that may or may not be coming their way; this, of course, leads to a beach ball hitting you or a loved one in the head, which may not hurt (although some of these beach balls are pretty big), but is generally annoying; reacting to this nuisance people begin to hit the ball harder, trying to get it further away from their section of the crowd; of course the receiving section of the crowd doesn’t want the ball either so they just hit it back equally hard; a passive-aggressive situation, leaning more on the aggressive side ensues and the entire crowd gives each other looks of annoyance and castigation until someone finally stabs the ball with something. The fact that they stab the beach ball as opposed to just letting the air out of course makes them complete garbage to be picked up by event staff at the end of the day.

Without leaning too heavily on the-world-is-a-beach-ball analogies (which by the way could have been reinforced by the invocation of globe beach balls, but wasn’t, due to my own restraint, sort of), there is an important social phenomena on display. Namely, that no one actually deals with the issue at hand (i.e. the beach ball). Instead, everyone is pushing their problem (read: the problem) on someone else, which only gets pushed on someone else, a chain reaction resulting in a whole lot of annoyed people.

In the past, I’ve used these balls as inflatable beach chairs between acts. This past weekend, my friend earned extra points of respect and admiration for collecting beach balls at his feet, simply catching them and putting them down. In both situations, the idea was to take a pro-active and non-violent stance towards a care- and beach ball free concert. And yet, the people around us shot us both dirty looks. But we were doing it for everyone! We spared everyone all kinds of future pains! Here is the solution! You’re welcome!

But they wanted none of it. The beach ball and the ups and downs therewith are part of the experience. It’s part of that summertime nostalgia that we are already, at a young age, creating for our future reference. We may not want to deal with the beach ball at the moment, but we want it there in our memories to draw threads of continuity between familiarities. It’s a powerful image, suggestive of warmth, youth, softness—all good things. Too colorful to pass up on. The type of detail that makes memories seem all the more authentic, despite their soft focus.

Our suffering will be rewarded one day, not in our next life, but later in this one. We are all beach ball martyrs. Hallelujah.

~josh

Fiction: Scratch That

2008-07-18T13:55:00.003-04:00

It seems like it’s always right as your favorite song is about to break open into the full chorus, during that little pre-chorus that really gets your mouth watering or ears tingling that the CD starts to skip. The anthemic lyrics never come. Instead, you’re stuck with that one word you really don’t care about. Maybe that word on repeat is the or dream. Maybe it’s even love. You just don’t care. Anyway, you take out the CD and look at its surface, hoping that you’ll just find a little piece of schmutz that you can wipe away. But no, it’s a scratch. Maybe you then remember you accidentally dropped the disc a week ago. Maybe you don’t know where the scratch came from at all. Honestly, I’ve had to buy London Calling three times already, and I just refuse to buy it again. Out of principle. Then again, that principle isn’t going to help in this situation, because at the moment you have a big scratch scarring the reflective surface of the CD you really want to listen to, and it isn’t going anywhere (the scratch or the song).

That’s sort of how it was with Felix Landers. Felix was a real nice kid, really sincere. And he got along with everyone. We all liked him a lot, but he was one of those kids that would be categorized as “scarred.” We all knew Felix’s story even though it wasn’t Felix who told us about it (we never brought it up with Felix either). It was an unfortunate fact about an unfortunate kid. I can’t even say how we first heard about it for sure, because no one really felt comfortable talking about it (I still don’t). It was just out there.

Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that some very bad men did a very bad thing around a very young Felix. These bad men then proceeded to make sure (convince) Felix hadn’t seen that very bad thing, when in fact Felix had. It should go without saying that it’s not especially easy to convince someone that they didn’t see something that they had. And I don’t think I need to appeal to cultural references such as the Who’s Tommy to convince you that successfully convincing someone of something like that could be quite traumatic for a child. It would leave lasting psychological effects. And it did.

But like I said, we all really liked Felix. We just had to be careful around him with certain things. Felix didn’t like being asked certain types of questions. Actually, it’s not that it was a matter of liking or not liking, more like Felix couldn’t handle being asked certain types of questions.

One weekend, Larry Perkes met up with a bunch of us to play basketball in the park and either he was just a little too excited and careless or he didn’t realize Felix was around (Felix did have a way of shrinking to the back of large groups), when he said “I saw Terminator last night. It was awesome. Did you guys see it?” We all answered at once, each of us stating how we had seen it a week ago or hadn’t gotten around to it yet but planned on it. As the chorus died down, however, we heard Felix from the back:

I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it.

And he wasn’t stopping. He was stuck in this loop. It was something that happened when he was asked about seeing something. It was one of those things he couldn’t handle. Literally. We all knew why. And it was problematic for us because (a) nobody wants to see someone, especially a friend, go into that sort of state, (b) it reminded us all about Felix’s past, which was emotionally disturbing for us other kids, and (c) we didn’t really know if Felix had seen the movie, so those of who had not seen it yet (like me and Ray Rohr) didn’t know whether we should invite him or not when we did go.

For the time being, the only thing I can do about my London Calling problem is smack my CD player. This gets the laser inside to start reading the information after the scratched part. Even though I may miss a part of the chorus (maybe even the really good part), the alternative is to be stuck listening to that pre-chorus lead-in forever.

And it was the same with Felix. It was clear that he wasn’t going to snap out of it by himself. So in situations like this one, where Larry Perkes asked if Felix had seen Terminator, we had to give Felix a little nudge to get him going again, to break his cycle. Actually it was more of a punch. And it worked. Felix snapped out of it and we broke down into two teams of four like nothing happened. My team ended up winning that day though not by my own merit (I did try hard).

Still it was times like that that we all sort of silently reaffirmed our friendship commitment to be more careful around Felix. We had no problem playfully punching each other during sports and Felix never complained about us hitting him too hard or at all (I think he knew we were just trying to help, that is, if he knew we had hit him at all), but we always felt bad when we had to punch Felix like that. I mean, honestly, the kid had been through enough. Don’t you think?

~josh

Autoscopy #1: It's the Coffee Talking

2008-07-01T18:57:00.006-04:00

I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker. Not that I have any particular problems with the drink, other than it sometimes giving me a mild case of sour stomach (or what I understand to be sour stomach) and diarrhea. And it’s not an issue with taste either, because I’ve always liked coffee flavored sucking candies and coffee ice cream. Sometimes I think that I may even like coffee more than those people that drink it regularly. I know plenty of people that discuss different roasts, the advantages of cone filters over flat filters, and the best places to grab a cup of coffee in just about every major city in the USA, but I’m always surprised by just how much sugar they dump into their cups. That’s right: I may be only a casual coffee drinker, if that, but I take it with no sugar and just a splash of milk.

The point is that coffee is just fine, but I’ve never depended on it to get me—or keep me—moving. In the morning, to wake up, I take a shower. Or I don’t. Either way I get up. And while it’s not the fear of becoming a caffeine junky that has kept me from a regular coffee routine, there are a number of things that I’m happy that I don’t have to deal with: (a) I can only assume that on Yom Kippur when all those Jews in synagogue are fasting and haven’t had their morning fix, the resulting trembling and shaking makes them a little nervous about their pending atonement; (b) when I’m in a bad mood, I can blame other people, rather than blaming myself for forgetting to set my alarm and running out of the house without time for a coffee; (c) I don’t feel compelled to talk about coffee all the time; (d) similarly, I don’t assume other people want to hear me talk about coffee all the time (but hopefully enough to read this essay).

Even in college, I didn’t really rely on coffee to get through those long nights in the library. And that usually made me the odd man out, considering everyone else was either on caffeine, taurine, adderall, or some combination thereof. When I would start to lose focus, I’d stretch my legs under the table to get my blood going. If that didn’t work I would take a walk to the water fountain. If that didn’t work I would go to the other water fountain, the one that was plugged in and dispensed cold water, cold water being all the more effective. And if that didn’t work, I would skip a couple pages and try again. After all, if David Hume had anything important to say in those fifty pages, he probably would have said it already.

While I would categorize my relationship to coffee as one of admiration at a distance, energy drinks like Red Bull, Amp, Rockstar, Sparks, Crunkjuice, etc. are a whole other story. I think they are scary. They not only have a whole lot of caffeine, but all kinds of other chemicals. While taurine, one of the active ingredients, may not actually be a synthetic version of bull testosterone as some rumors indicate, the notion is just a little too juicy to ignore completely. And the thought of needing a dose of testosterone just to be able to read my Foucault always seemed to say something strange about my masculinity: man up, don’t be a pussy, concentrate on those fucking power structures, bitch-ass.

Not to say that I haven’t ever had an energy drink. I have. In college I played on my school’s competitive ultimate Frisbee club team. Besides daily practice sessions, we would play in weekend-long tournaments throughout the northeast. For reasons that I never understood, even in the Spring when daylight hours were long, tournament organizers always insisted on starting these games at what seemed to be the crack of dawn, which meant we had to wake up before dawn to make the sometimes two-hour commute.

Tournament days were without exception exhausting, even when I didn’t get much game time. It was certainly exhausting when I did get a lot of game time and had to run around chasing a plastic disc and people for four games each lasting around an hour and a half. And if you made it to the tournament finals, you got to play in a fifth game (great).

So it shouldn’t be surprising that most players rely on energy drinks to give them just what the drinks advertise: energy. It also shouldn’t be surprising that at some point, the upperclassmen looked at me nearly passed out on the side line and took pity on me by passing me one of their cans. It wasn’t peer pressure or anything like that, and it’s not like in Major League Baseball where teammates make you take steroids for the good of the team. To me, this seemed like some sage advice from my captains. So, without much thought I opened the can and downed the thing.

It didn’t take very long to kick in. I’ve described the feeling as suddenly having this deep urge to dance, bumping and grinding with some female, while simultaneously punching some dude in the face, repeatedly. And that’s how they sent me onto the field. That was game mentality.

We were playing Brandeis University. They were an okay team, nothing particularly special. We had played them before and I even knew some of the kids on their team from summer camp.

Within the first few possessions, I jumped over a Brandeis player to knock down a deep pass. On my way up I had made a little contact with the Brandeis player, just enough for him to know I was there. When he called a foul, I started yelling at him:
—You should be ashamed of that call. Really ashamed.
The Brandeis player, short, pimpled, and wearing athletic goggles, tried to explain how I fouled him. I replied very simply:
—That was some pussy shit!
When he told me to calm down, I didn’t:
—Go fuck yourself!
He asked me not to curse. The conversation ended with me saying the following:
—At least I’m better looking than you!
That’s sort of the way the remainder of the game went. When I caught a goal, I took a little extra time to stand over the Brandeis player guarding me. When I guarded someone, I would whisper to them that they had no chance. I tried to stare down their entire sideline. I barked. I stuck my chest out. And I laughed at them. When they dropped a disc. When they threw a bad pass. When their cleats didn’t hold in the mud. When they spoke or looked at me. I just started laughing.

A few hours after the game, after I could once again feel the exhaustion in my body and all the muscles I had pulled over the course of the day finally made themselves known to me, I thought back on what had happened during the game. That was weird, I thought. While everything that happened during the game seemed appropriate at the time, I couldn’t help but think about how out of character it actually was for me. Normally, I’m much more the kind of guy that rolls my eyes or (silently) sneers at the guy talking, talking not whispering, on his cell phone in the library. The guy who would rather stew in my seat and wait it out, rather than confront the inconsiderate guy. But the outright aggression I showed in that game: that wasn’t me. That’s not how I see myself, and that’s not who I want to be or ever wanted to be for that matter. I remember the kids like that. I couldn’t stand them.

So who was it?

Red bulls may not be laced with testosterone, but it certainly made me act in this hyper-masculine way. But what does that say about my actual masculinity? I suppose no more than the fact that I’m writing this on a beach in San Francisco no less than 15 yards from many naked men. And no less than the fact that when that girl in the bikini walked past me, the best I could do was muster a sort-of smile.

Maybe if I were raised on caffeine, I’d be a totally different person. If I were a routine coffee drinker, I would have more interest in working out. Maybe there’s a whole would-be me out there in an alternate universe, with a cup of coffee in one hand and some one-night fling in the other. Maybe I would have played varsity basketball. If only I grew up with a little more caffeine in my system, slipped into my diet a little more steadily, I would have had a more pronounced jaw line.

For my 7th grade science fair project, I did one of those experiments your teacher recommends to you from a book. My partner and I took a bunch of mealworms and split them up into four groups. Keeping one as our control, we gave the other groups increasing amounts of “no doze” pills in their food. The group that received the most caffeine literally bounced off of the walls of their container. Not jumping. Bouncing. They were all dead within a day or so.

Come to think of it, I guess I should take that experiment as reassuring. Those mealworms didn’t become anymore masculine. They were just in a mosh pit for no reason. I should really rethink the whole thing. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity. How could caffeine do that anyway? Maybe over caffeination doesn’t make me “hyper-masculine” it just makes me a “hyper-asshole.”

~josh

The Undead: Your Favorite Records Live

2008-05-30T16:38:00.027-04:00

For so many musical acts, there's usually THE record, that one album where vision and execution lie together as the comfiest of bedfellows. To us listeners, these are the records that just make so much sense to us they are just a given. This specified kind of worship can sometimes be so extreme as to obscure artists' other achievements in their careers, where later works just doesn't seem as impressive as their masterful predecessor (like Nas after Illmatic), or in hindsight, earlier work is seen merely as a mis-step along the way to a perfect album (My Bloody Valentine?).

I'm sure there're artists who'd agree that their careers have either built up to one album, or that their creative juices were never more focused and potent than on their breakout record, but very often, it's us fans who are making the judgments. In most cases, it's only because of that one album that anyone might remain a fan (would anyone really be listening to any late Dylan if he wasn't DYLAN?). Really, there's nothing that compares to that first time, the momentous occasion when you actually "get it," when a melody or a voice opens the psychic floodgates to your central love organs. Years later, you wish you could relive that sacred moment when you and the music symbiosed to form a single, perfectly symmetrical SOUL.

Thank God for record labels.

Roused and ready, the labels are here for us, always poised to feed our need for reimmersion in the ecstasies of our younger years, pumping tons of cash into reformatting, remastering, repackaging, and reissuing our favorite records. Throughout the 70s, cassettes ran slightly behind records as the preferred music format for consumers. In the 80s, their popularity grew with the advent of portable cassette players. Starting in the late 80s, with the advent of CD's, labels encouraged music listeners to repurchase their music libraries with smaller, "higher quality" compact discs. And throughout the last two decades, labels have been releasing special edition reissues of classic albums.

Time and again, we consumers oblige in kind (witness a third reissue of Love's Forever Changes), and we shell out the duckets, hoping somehow to come at the record with virgin ears and have our minds blown again like they were however many years ago by our favorite artists. Or else we're looking to be the uber-completist. Often, in addition to reissuing (and often remastering) records, these repackaged albums come stocked with bonus tracks, if not bonus discs, of b-sides, alternate takes, and never-before-released songs. There's usually some extended liner notes, penned by a doting music journalist or by an artist fessing up to how much they've stolen from said band's sound. On so many of these re-releases, there's the prestigious "Original Recording Reissued and Remastered" sticker pasted on, which I guess means the recording deserved to be reissued and remastered – either because it was so poorly recorded the first time around, or because the material is so damn good, the technological limitations of the era precluded the album from being listened to in its most lucid, digitally-enhanced incarnation. Never mind the possibility that maybe we loved these great records for exactly what they were – the warm-as-womb, wah-wah-ed squalls of distortion punctuating the first track on Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me; the mysterious, funny, (and disturbing?) "You Fuckin' Die" interlude on the Pixies' Surfer Rosa (deleted off some re-pressings) – these are parts of a whole that gestalt their way into our souls and make us weak in the fecking knees. Maybe we want them there for eternity (even if we sometimes skip over them).

But businesses have the distinct power of creating demand, and the truth is this is a business. Selling us our youths over and over again is nothing new. The Woodstock generation has made much of its tie-dye-stained bills by relentlessly reliving the experience of the 60s, charging $150 a ticket for reunion shows and selling original posters for who-knows-how-much. Everyone's got to make a buck, so I'm not knocking our parents' ventures, especially if this is how they're paying for us to have a comfortable living. And besides, this nostalgia-fest has its perks, not just for the record labels, but in a less monetary sense, for the artists themselves. This expansive, full-disclosure business model allows creators to involve interested fans in their creative process, if they're brave enough to put some of their sketches and flubs on display.

Take, for example, The Stooges' The Complete Fun House Sessions – a box set that culls together every single piece of audio material recorded during the sessions that led to the great paean to sleaze that is Fun House. Fans get the chance to hear Iggy fuck up his words, laugh at the tight-as-all-get-up band go through a ton of false starts, and soak up a little recording studio atmosphere as band, producer, and engineers discuss the merits and blemishes of each take. You get to feel like a part of the band in a way you might not have when all you had was the finished record in all its glory and intrigue. It's an illuminating advantage to the excess it takes to be a completist.

You still have to think, though, that however thorough and enlightening the box set may be, it's an investment, one that pits music fans against their wallets, having to decide whether to purchase something they're already familiar with vs. something new that's potentially amazing/horrible (unless of course you're going the download-everything-for-free route, in which case: NEVERMIND).

But hark! There is hope!

A healthy and generous antidote to this muddled, mostly commercial practice can be found on the most glorious of homo sapiens' innovations – the internet. And perhaps the most healthy and generous proponent of this internet-based, direct "artist-to-audience" model is a most innovative homo sapiens named Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound notoriety).* On his sprawling blog, Cox walks us through the evolution of his songs, with demo mp3's, moment-by-moment accounts of his thought process (both technical and emotional) while recording, and even proofs of some of the album art that he and his bandmates went over before putting out their records. In the history of recorded music, this is the kind of complete access that is restricted to a holy few. Of course, Cox has complete control over what is put up on his blog, and so we're not privy to EVERYTHING that's going on in the studio, but it is still significant to discuss that not only is this a direct, money-less enterprise - it is also IMMEDIATE. Now, the mystery of an album's creation doesn't have to wait a decade until its reissue to be uncovered. For those especially devoted to watching the life of a song, the process can be reversed, where we can now hear the demos BEFORE THE COMPLETE VERSION. And there's something to be said for "democratizing" the creative process, even if I'm partial to the notion that boundaries and mystery belong in art.

Still, you've got to appreciate Cox's generosity (and prolific work habits!). And to his credit, he doesn't reveal ALL the demos of ALL his tracks, but he certainly shares enough of himself to make you wonder what exactly constitutes "private" to him. His good-natured posts are generally reciprocated in the comments sections, which makes the dynamic all the more interesting. Now, we not only have a deluge of information coming from the artist about the art during its creation, but we also have the artist getting almost immediate feedback from its listeners. Cox even welcomes assignments from his listeners, for example asking fans to request songs to cover and offer their impressions of the results. I haven't yet seen him heed any of these requests, but I don't hold it against him…I'm sure he's busy….

Even in this age of two-way communication between artist and listener, where the potential to engage with new art as it evolves is at its peak, it seems we're still suckers for the old days. In recent years there's been a spike in the number of artists performing their classic albums live, in their sequential entirety, often at the behest of the UK festival group Don't Look Back. The list of albums being performed is ever-growing, but to name just a few milestones being rehashed –

Spiderland – Slint
Daydream Nation – Sonic Youth
Only Built for Cuban Linx – Raekwon
If You're Feeling Sinister – Belle and Sebastian
Millions Now Living Will Never Die - Tortoise
Liquid Swords - GZA/Genius
Vs. - Mission of Burma
It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back - Public Enemy
Perfect From Now On - Built to Spill
Meat Puppets II - Meat Puppets

It's endearing, on the one hand, for so many of us so-called "adults" to have our souls still stirred by these organized noises that were put together when the other Bush was in the height of his reign of idiocracy. It's also a testament to the artists themselves, their ability to have crafted full-length recordings that are with every passing year accruing "timeless" status. These are albums that have touched us, amazed us, and influenced legions who came after.

But on the other hand, is it really all that necessary? I guess those of us who were too young to see these songs performed live finally have the chance to, and those of us who were actually there can do it all over again. But the obvious tragedy is that it just isn't the same. Does a live show need to adhere to the rigid confines of an album's sequencing anyway? Having these artists be paid to go up there and play their songs exactly the way they were on record feels a bit like asking Dave Chappelle to do his Rick James line – it's pretty awesome, but there's so much more we could be enjoying together.

And even though the act of revisiting these albums could be seen as a celebration of the work of an artist and the bond forged between us and them, it can also be seen as strangely selfish. In a weird way, we're demanding that the artists celebrate these records on our terms. I'm assuming, too, that these artists don't really want to spend time talking about what they did decades ago, especially when many of them are still making new music. But then I consider that some of these artists wouldn't be making new music now if, at some point in the last ten years, people didn't continue clamoring for them and attending their reunion shows....

In the end, I want the artists I love to make a living, and in all honesty, I really do love when an album is played in its entirety, so I can't be all upset. It's just that there are times I wonder if I can be okay with not having the world exactly as I want it to be. Will I ever get that same fuzzy feeling again I had when I was fourteen listening to the second Meat Puppets record? Will I ever accept that my later years will never compare to the ones previous? Will I ever, ever grow up?

~ Ashraf

Nas - It Ain't Hard To Tell.mp3

* I could talk about Radiohead here, but really who hasn't already?

Interview #2: Max Goldberg

2008-05-29T22:51:00.008-04:00

I've never been one to associate the idea of a cultural "critic" with the phenomenon of "laughter," but when I talked to San Francisco Bay Guardian film and music critic Max Goldberg a few months ago, I got a whole lot of the latter, a comforting balance to the overwhelming weight of his intelligence. For the past four years, Goldberg has worked his way up to writing thorough and thoroughly erudite features on some of the most enriching films and musical acts that have made their way through the City By the Bay. In addition to working at the Guardian, he wrote an extensive piece for the gallery opening of his close friends (and NewFlags comrades) Dave Wilson and Frank Lyon aka Ribbons, while also maintaining a part time position at event listing site Flavorpill.

Furthermore, Max’s band Stop Plate Tectonics blew the collective mind of all the NewFlags contributors back when we were in college together. In February, Max took a couple of hours out of his culturally fecund schedule to talk about the (dis)comforts of being a “Critic” with a capital C, the politics of being a tastemaker vs. a provoacteur, and how the hell you write about the art of friends who are so close, you call them brothers.

Thanks to Dave Wilson for taking the photo above, and many thanks again to Max for dropping some knowledge on us. Do check out Max’s excellent blog Text of Light (on the blogroll!), which compiles all his Guardian pieces along with other, equally learned musings on the world around him.

~ Ashraf
………………………………………………………………………………………………

NewFlags: So are you making a living writing?

Max Goldberg: More or less…”a living" is so relative, but it definitely feels good to have everything I'm doing somehow related to "the bigger picture." In addition to working at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, I write for Flavorpill in San Francisco, which is an event listing site. I do something every day for that job, which isn't the most substantive – I troll the internet for events to list and write little blurbs about them. And then I freelance write a little bit scattershot – it always seems to go in waves. I’ll have a few assignments in a week and then I’ll be really working a lot, and then there’ll be another week where it’s more about just coming up with ideas and seeing what’s coming up on the calendar to be pitching to the people at the Guardian.

NF: I guess you can’t really let your mind wander too much because you have to be writing about something that’s playing relatively soon, right?

MG: Totally. I obviously feel fortunate to be in San Francisco just because there’s a good selection of things that are happening. And I feel like the culture is generally at a level where there’s always something interesting to be interacting with. Although, the idea of doing it in New York or in LA is a crazy notion to me because it’s such an overload. But it definitely is a very broad challenge to be coming up with projects and ideas that I might wanna think about and write about and carry out on my own that don’t necessarily have to do with “the films opening in March” or “the bands playing this week.”

NF: When did you start writing in an expository sense on films and music? I know you studied film in college, but were you writing or thinking about writing about art before then?

MG: Not with any grand design, certainly, and not consciously. I feel like it was a pretty natural transition for me, but I also feel like a bunch of little things just sort of happened and I ended up going with it. I ended up being a film major in school and ended up really digging that, but that wasn’t at all what I was expecting to do when I went there. And I guess my job at the Guardian feels the same way to me. I can easily imagine that that just wouldn’t have happened and I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get around to doing this.

NF: Were you at least especially thorough in reading about music and movies?

MG: Yeah, they’ve always been an interest of mine. As far as reading about movies and music and “paying attention” to criticism – that’s something that really only started to happen for me after graduating from college. It was a sort of education after my education, because at school I did feel a kind of awakening, but at the same time, it was just reading what was handed to you. The Film department had a certain bent, and you’re very much watching and thinking and reading exactly what they give to you. And so I think that when I started to write in the fall of 2004, pretty much right after graduating in May, I just had a hunger to see what criticism was all about and read who the people are who do this really well. That first year for me was totally exciting, I was always thinking to myself “Whoa, this person is so big and I’m so persuaded by their view of things.”

NF: Are you finding that writing is deepening your enjoyment, or appreciation of the art? Or is it just another way to take it all in?

MG: Well, writing about film and music feel very different for me in the sense that the music stuff just feels like a natural growth – it’s a very local thing for me. I’m usually thinking and writing about the music that’s in front of me, or that my friends are really enthusiastic about. And I just write in a very expressive way about music and about taste.

Film criticism feels a bit more serious to me, I guess that’s more where I feel the “deepening” or the “broadening,” but I don’t know exactly how to put it into words. If I were to look back on the last few years, it’s a combination of first learning how to write by doing it, how to be writing in this format which is pretty narrow – I’m usually writing between 600 and 1500 words – and learning what you can do with that, and what the goals are with writing about films and the different ways you can write about and react to them.

The other part of it is constantly feeling like I’m just catching up – there’s all these directors and movements about which I might know a few things, but I’ve only been able to see one or two of their films. So much of this job is still about “Before I start shooting my mouth off about Jacques Rivette, I better actually try to see a few of his movies.” When you’re reading one of those great critics in Film Comment or something else, you realize these people are 55 years old and they’ve spent 30 years watching films really diligently. And you tell yourself that you have a lot of work to do to be able to develop that voice.

NF: Are there some specific writers you can think of you feel like you’re learning from?

MG: Yeah! At the Guardian, I feel so fortunate to have landed there and to have a relationship with Johnny Right Huston – he’s the Arts Editor and the Film Editor. With him, I feel like my taste has been shaped so much by where he’s steered me. It is getting increasingly rare for independent papers to have an actual staff, even if it’s really small – which it is at the Guardian – and to have these people steering the content. The other main paper in San Francisco is the SF Weekly, and it gets some of the syndicated reviews from the Village Voice, which then run everywhere else. So it’s just nice to feel this local vibe.

There are definitely a lot of different critics I respond to, critics who I’ve tried to go back to – I especially respond to Manny Farber, and to Andrew Sarris. Among working critics, especially in Film Comment, whenever Kent Jones or Amy Taubin write something, I feel like I’m always so easily wooed by what they have to say. And there are critics who I read whose erudition boggles my mind, if I’m reading Jonathan Rosenbaum or the really great Australian critic Adrian Martin, I feel like they’re doing a totally different thing than I am. I feel like I’m the hack saxophone player watching John Coltrane play. And, then there are other critics who I think are great for different reasons, like J Hoberman for the Voice or Manohla Dargis for the New York Times. Their stuff is more hopeful to me because I can more easily imagine myself writing what they're writing – I think part of it is that they’re writing for a more general audience than some of the more esoteric writers.

NF: I’ve always been curious about the experience of watching foreign films – to a certain extent, they feel like a critic’s domain and I’m curious if you see a sort of disconnect between the people doing very specific writing – like at Film Comment, where they’re maybe not catering to a specific audience, but they’re almost guiding it – as oppose to the New York Times, which can really appeal to a more general audience.

MG: There’s a couple of different parts to that. I think that both certainly have their place in terms of writing for the more general audience and writing for the coterie. And I think that part of my time doing this is sort of – and this is very much an ongoing process – is finding out what I’m good at or what it is I should be applying myself toward, and where my energies are best directed to. Not only is it ongoing, but I feel that thinking about it in that way is a very new thing to me because it’s taken a long time for me to even start thinking of myself as a critic, even though that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s such a tenuous lifestyle, it’s just taken a long time for me to be comfortable with what I do and the fact that I’ve been doing it for a while and I’ll continue doing it for a while and I can now think about how I want to be as a critic. So that’s definitely one thing.

And it’s interesting what you say about foreign films because I think there is implicitly in any film critic, and in a lot of more serious music criticism, there is this element of didacticism in a critic’s voice, or I guess in a more positive way, an instructive type of voice that is taking on this role. It’s like “Okay, here’s this thing, which is great, but because of various realities of distribution and capitalism, it’s not going to get pushed, so here it’s my role to really push this.” And I think that generally it is a service, although sometimes it can come off as being heavy-handed. The way any American critic is going to be writing about foreign films is going to be inherently problematic. The more and more you get into this stuff – especially if you’re getting into this more selective class of films or music or books – you’re necessarily crossing borders.

NF: You talk about the different ways to be a critic, but how do you see the role of the critic in our culture?

MG: Actually, one thing I did in preparation for your calling, I remembered this great quote I found some time last year. I’m paraphrasing it, it’s something that the French critic Serge Daney said: “A critic should either know something or love something. Or even better, know how to share this love with the general public.” I think that certainly appeals to me, especially because I naturally gravitate to what I guess you could call “affectionate criticism.” I’m usually drawn to writing about something because I’m interested in it and to some extent I like it, and that’s what drives me and that's what I want to express in my pieces. I never feel the urge to lay the smackdown on something that I’m writing about in feature-length. It could be fun to do in some little blurb on some schlocky movie, but not generally.

NF: That was definitely something that I appreciated when I was reading your pieces. Do you feel like you can account for why so many critics can be so negative?

MG: For one thing, I think some people are just good at it. Someone like Pauline Kael is an amazing stylist who can deliver this debilitating critique of a film. On the other side of her there’s someone like Susan Sontag who is so very, very intelligent, and her intelligence just towers over anything that she looks at. I think there are just certain critical voices that lend themselves to that kind of writing.

Accounting for my position, I think that part of it is certainly just a product of my greenness, my inexperience, and my nervousness to be too deliberate about something that I’m having a mixed reaction to. Also, I don’t have a weekly column or anything like that at the Guardian. If I did, I might see myself having more space to go after something.

So I think part of it is that I don’t get to step up to the plate every day, so when I do write, I want to spend time on something I’m drawn to. There’ve been certain things where I think I tried to register something’s being somewhat disappointing or in consideration of what came before it, its being problematic – but usually I try to integrate it into a pros and cons type picture, so it’s never a leveling critique. One day, I’d love to be able to lay the smackdown on something. I think of Susan Sontag’s essay on Diane Arbus, which I read not that long ago, and it’s so devastating and so overpowering. I just I can’t look at this woman’s photographs again, Sontag really delivers the death-knell.

NF: What’s your relationship with your editors? Do you feel you can articulate some of the things they’ve taught you?

MG: I think the things I’ve gotten the most from them haven’t been so much a product of intensive editing so much as direction in terms of “you should see this” or “you should read this” or “you should think about this.” Again, it speaks to my greenness and how much I have to catch up on. It’s a really good, broadening thing. When I’m Not There was coming out, I was talking to Johnny Ray about Todd Haynes. He has so much more of a direct plug-in with that because he was there writing about Haynes when he was first coming out and he was getting to know him. In that respect, there’s just a lot of knowledge to pass on.

But then, more generally, the encouragement that I’ve gotten from Johnny and Kimberly, the music editor, on specific pieces has been fortifying. There was one instance during last spring’s San Francisco Film Festival when Johnny asked me to write about this documentary called Forever by Heddy Honigmann about Père-Lachaise Cemetary in Paris. And again, it was one of these things that’s exciting when Johnny has seen something and he says “I think your sensibility would be great for this.” But I really struggled with that movie. I don’t know what it was, it’s a really beautiful film, but I just didn’t have some normal footholds, I didn’t have a good sense of reference for it, and she’s directed a ton of other documentaries, and I hadn’t seen any of them, so I felt really at a loss in a certain way. I was e-mailing with Johnny about that, and we had a nice correspondence about certain scenes in the film that we both really liked. And then I ended up writing a much more personal reaction to the film than some of my other aesthetic, or historical, pieces. This ended up being more of an emotional reaction. Johnny was so encouraging about that. It was a great feeling to know that I could respond to something with just me and read it in this way and the writing will still have value.

NF: You were just talking about I’m Not There, and there’s something you wrote about it in your piece on biopics, you said “It is epigrammatic, rather than evocative, and made to be written about.” How do you feel about films that need to be sussed out verbally, as oppose to more visceral ones?

MG: I think that’s a really important distinction and certainly a hard thing to make categorical judgments about. We don’t have to decide whether we want the slow and lyrical movie where it almost feels like a betrayal to put into words because it’s so much about the experience of the film, versus the movie that feels like a dissertation, that’s just built out of reference and is there to be written about. I mean, those films challenge me as they’re meant to be challenging, and they put me a little off-guard, which again, they’re designed to. Just think about Godard’s movies and how you’re playing this game with it, you know, responding to it with all this interpretation but then the film is doubling back on you. With the I’m Not There piece, I gave Todd Haynes the benefit of the doubt just because I think his motivation for making that was totally sound and it was a really interesting project, although at a more personal level, I was somewhat disappointed by that movie because I didn’t feel like there was quite enough “soul” in it.

NF: Along those lines, has having to write about music and movies gotten at all difficult when, for example, you’re trying to engage with something that has, as you said, “soul?”

MG: Yeah, absolutely. I think there are situations in which I feel myself pushing up against and experiencing my limits as a writer. And again, I am relatively new to this kind of expository writing, you know. When there’s something that has this “soul,” sometimes all I can do is take a deep breath. It’s always tricky to be putting something into words in this way, especially with music, which is one of these things that can be so silly. Sometimes you’re reading something about My Bloody Valentine and you think “how many different ways can I say ‘ethereal’?” If I’m ever feeling a little adrift in my writing, I try to remind myself that I’m really trying to give a person a sense of this work. I don’t need to wrap it up or totally explicate it, or even solve it.

NF: Do you feel like the stuff that we’re saying needs to be written about is any more or less valid? Do you see anything wrong with making a movie like that?

MG: No, not inherently. The best kinds of movies, I suppose, are really plugging in to their moment in culture and in politics and in history, and they let loose with this charge of what all the different, often fractured, strands of thought are at that particular moment in time. Some of the movies of Godard’s that I like best do actually have this cathartic quality for me, so that it feels like something has been thought over and worked out in some way, so I think it can be a necessary thing.

NF: Incidentally, I was recently reading something Harold Bloom wrote where he basically said he felt like looking at art through any lens other than a purely aesthetic one cheapens that work.

MG: Well, I naturally tend towards the aesthetic myself, that’s kind of just my taste, but…I’m not ready to argue the point with Harold Bloom. I do think it’s kind of silly in a way to be contending that the aesthetic doesn’t have shadings of other, political components. I guess he writes mostly about literature and poetry, which, since there is such a definite author, it’s easier to essentialize the aesthetic and the voice. Whereas, working with something like film or often with popular music, it’s a much messier picture.

NF: What was your reaction to that whole Sascha Frere-Jones article about indie rock needing to be “blacker?”

MG: (Laughs) It was…interesting…. I mean, I don’t quite get him in general. It feels like he has this amazing post at the New Yorker, but it’s confusing why it’s him. To me, the New Yorker is such a strange thing. I get it, and I love it, but for film and music criticism, it’s a bit of a strange beast. It often feels patronizing to me. I thought that he was certainly addressing something that we’re all aware of and that is very much present and I think is good to be talked about in this way because this is such a white-dominated subculture he’s talking about. Being in California these few years, it’s been a treat for me to dig in to what’s often called “freak-folk,” which is something I really enjoy for the most part, but at the same time, quickly gets ridiculous. I think that when I look back on this time it’ll be something I see as a trend that I really engaged with. So I sort of sympathize with where he was coming from – although I don’t know if I agree with what he said in this particular sense.

Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but generally it seems like “indie rock” is becoming a less and less useful designator. I think there’s a more interesting argument to be made with someone like the Talking Heads where you’re dealing with artists who contradict Jones’s premise. I think there’s a richer argument to be thinking about – to what extent are David Byrne and Brian Eno appropriating this music? You can acknowledge why something is important and at the same time try to get your hands dirty with what’s going on with it. Something else that I’m thinking now that struck me about that article is that it doesn’t ring true with my experience – and that’s part of my problem with the laziness of the “indie rock” tag – it sort of presupposes that there’s this small group of bands that’s the be-all, end-all for a lot of listeners. In my maybe skewed reality, all of my friends had momentous experiences with Pavement and all the other “canons” of indie rock, while still having hugely eclectic tastes. I could look at their iPods, and it’ll have the bands that Sascha Frere-Jones is talking about – the Pavements and Modest Mouses – but it’ll also have the Anthology of American Folk Music and the Goodbye Babylon set, and a Sly Stone album. It doesn’t ring true to me that there’s this group of people that’s cutting itself off from other kinds of music.

NF: Well let’s talk about what you mentioned in your e-mail earlier, the experience of writing about friends and their art.

MG: That’s so…big! That’s a different thing for me.

Frank and Dave, who work together as Ribbons, had a gallery opening last week showcasing some of their work. My essay looked at their collaboration, specifically their collaboration as Ribbons for the last couple of years, and then it looked at the specifics of this show which involved a lot of their individual contributions, whereas before the whole Ribbons entity was their joint thing to put on their different concerts to gather designs and put on shows. But this was something different – they were having this show that wasn’t so much a retrospective of what they’ve done so much as a celebration of the spirit of it, something to which they were both contributing their individual art pieces.

This funny thing occurred to me while I was writing that piece – the other big writing project that I had going on at that moment was something about Jandek, who’s a famously obscure, recluse musician. So here’s this piece for the Guardian and the nature of it is that you really can’t know anything about the author. You can speculate and look for different ways to get into the work. Ribbons was the total opposite, something I’m so intimate with. I mean, I live with Dave! So for me the challenge of that was how to strike some balance between having some level of critical distance to try to express something more objective about what it is I think they’re doing, and it was also important for me to be taking them seriously as artists. I think that’s something that’s often the case when working with friends or people you’re close to is that you’re always keeping tabs on a person and you know what it is that they’re up to and you know their style and stuff like that, but it’s kind of bracing to them to take a whole day to really really talk about where you’re coming from right now and what is this you’re creating. It was definitely a necessary thing to get going on the essay. I was absolutely drawing on my special experience and knowledge with them and using that to give a more intimate portrait, but it was a challenge, for sure.

NF: I guess last question is do you have a shortlist of movies and/or albums that have been criminally underrated over the years?

MG: Do you know Entrance? I feel like my experience with music is so local. I’ve had the opportunity to see him over the past few months – I think his last album is so good. Everything I read about him – it seems like people aren’t taking him seriously, a lot of people write him off as being this retro thing. Right now I feel like he’s operating on a totally different level. He’s someone I’ve totally been pulling for. I’ve also been really smitten with this songwriter Michael Hurley for the last year or two – that’s been another thing where I’ve had the chance to see him a couple of times and he’s totally a West Coast dude. He’s one of these people who has a really small base of people who admire him, but it’s one of those things where to know is to love him. He just has so many great albums and so many great songs, you wonder why this dude is not recognized in a broader way. It’s always good to have your stock of undervalued treasures.

NF: Are you making music these days?

MG: I’m not (laughs). My relationship to making music is kind of strange, or I guess estranged, right now. I was still doing it the first year I came out here. I don’t’ know if it’s right that writing has supplanted my music…that’s sort of the corollary, but I’m not sure I buy it. There’s part of me that still feels like I’m on vacation from doing music. It’s a strange little ghost around me. Talking so much to Ribbons about their processes, it was really helpful for me to reflect and recognize that “oh, these are some of the same things that I am doing, just in a different form, even if it’s a kind of secondary creation, since I’m jumping off of someone else’s work.” But in terms of the process and the commitment to it, it does feel artistic to me.

NF: Does that mean that Stop Plate Tectonics was kind of the last project you worked on?

MG: Yeah. Actually, the first year I lived out in California was such a different year for me because it was before a lot of my friends lived out here. So that whole year, in terms of music, I was just messing around on my own, never getting too deep into something. When Dave moved out here, it was such a treat – we were excited to be around each other and we played music together for a lot of that second year. We played together as Brothers because we were getting a lot of people thinking we were brothers. It was just this really casual, informal thing. We just each had a few songs and were just playing guitar together. I think because it was so casual, we both started to naturally gravitate to other things – Dave to his artwork and me to my writing. It was a natural-feeling thing to me because it was at a moment when I felt like music was something I enjoyed doing, but it wasn’t something that was firing me up. But there’s still a part of me that has my fingers crossed for some reawakening.

Stop Plate Tectonics - Spring Forward Fall Back.mp3

Wipe Out

2008-05-26T02:34:00.007-04:00

I’ve had a tremendously difficult time writing lately. In any context. Creating. The closest thing to “art” (whatever that is) that I’ve produced in the past couple months are some DNA sequencing data that I’ve generated at work. Not creative, but pretty.

Well, I felt my frustration very tangibly when I wiped out on my bike last Saturday night. Pretty suddenly, I lost my footing and went down, digging my left side into the rocky pavement with a bit of force. Mostly confused and shaken, I lifted myself up and inspected my torn jeans, a bloodied knee, nothing too bad. But as I walked home to burn out my wounds with hydrogen peroxide, the pain set in. I spent an uncomfortable night and a generally frustrating week, canceling squash matches and recovering from this incredibly minor injury. Nonetheless, the feeling of being even slightly physically debilitated was humbling and gave me some perspective on my writer’s block.

Soothing the pain has been my recent infatuation with the Drive-By Truckers. There’s really no praise I can bestow upon them that hasn’t already been extensively outlined by plenty of glowing write-ups. But, simply put, this band can do no wrong by me. The three songwriters at the center of the band – at least until the most recent Brighter Than Creation’s Dark – are blessed with the ability to weave together sympathetic narratives to paint a picture of the South, ridden with pathos, that exudes as much character and dimension as Greg Dulli’s bedroom scenes or Matt Berninger’s collages of wanderings and murmurings. Needless to say, I’m smitten.

On the Truckers’ website, chief songwriter Patterson Hood posted a great background story to his song “Tornadoes,” about a sudden tornado (what else?) that ruined the triumphant homecoming show of his band at the time, leaving him in financial debt and deflating the band’s chance at major label dreams. Hood suggests he wrote the song in response to a cruel joke life played on him, trading hard times for humor, and spinning everything into an inspiring, swelling, cathartic jam. (I mean, dude, check out that foot-stomping at the climax.)

I’ve been thinking about my difficulty writing over the past few weeks. I realized that this month – this weekend, actually – marks the close of a major year in my life, one that has been incredibly tough and strange but also beautiful and productive in profound ways I really never expected.

Reading Hood’s essay and reflecting on the past twelve months, I’m reminded that nothing pretty comes easy. The quality of your art is proportional to the amount of blood you spill making it. So, as my knee scabs over and I start timidly riding my bike again, hopefully I can cull some redemption from my wounds.

- asher

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Links:
-Some Drive-By Truckers jams: Where the Devil Don't Stay, Heathens, Women Without Whiskey, Space City
-DNA Sequencing
-Art is Hard

Cobwebs In the Closet #3: Jacques Demy

2008-05-12T01:06:00.005-04:00

As it crests towards its fiftieth anniversary, the cinema of the French New Wave is crystallized in the historical memory in a pair of indelible scenes. 13-year old Antoine Doinel runs towards the sea at the end of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), the film’s bittersweet score haunting the boy’s uncertain gaze in a final freeze frame. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg make playful love in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), their 22-minute bedroom romp fragmented by the arresting jump cuts that announced Godard’s presence as one of the cinema’s great formal provocateurs. As Richard Brody elucidated in a recent piece in The New Yorker, the historical narrative of the French New Wave has traditionally rested on these twin, yet contrasting pillars: the tender realism and autobiographical impulses of Truffaut and the intellectual devotion and “manic invention” of Godard.

Now consider a treasure trove of scenes lurking in the wake of these cinematic juggernauts. A sailor and a smitten teenage girl spin around on an amusement park ride, their faces framed in slowed-down black and white images in a lyrical tribute to the onset of love. An iris widens just in time to capture the electrifying sight of an ash-blonde Jeanne Moreau as she runs along a windswept boardwalk, her figure receding into the distance as towering piano lines crash across the soundtrack like the waves battering the shoreline. A crane shot glides blissfully across a town square during the preparations for a summer festival, music wafting into the humid air as we move through an open window to reveal a young Catherine Deneuve at the piano.

From the short films he crafted in the 1950’s until his death in 1990, French director Jacques Demy was the creative force behind some twenty films. These scenes - from his films Lola, Bay of Angels, and The Young Girls of Rochefort respectively - are only a small sampling of this exceptional filmmaker’s rich contribution to the French Cinema of the 1960’s. Though Demy’s films were celebrated by his contemporaries in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, the influential bastion of French film criticism, they are often left out of the critical and popular discussion of the major works of the era.

“When writing about or teaching a particular film movement, you find yourself by necessity looking for commonalities that can help to define trends, and for filmmakers whose work seems to embody these trends,” says Lisa Dombrowski, professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University. “That's how Breathless and 400 Blows came to be the canonical French New Wave films. Though their sensibilities are quite different, they both vividly illustrate the key characteristics that have come to define the New Wave.”

Demy and his films don’t fit the New Wave designation quite as neatly. Demy was never a critic at Cahiers du Cinema, nor as influenced by film theorist Andre Bazin's thoughts on realism as the five filmmakers most closely associated with the New Wave: Godard, Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. In Dombrowski’s estimation, Demy is “a man on the margins, working contemporaneously with the New Wave, but deeply engrossed in his own unique set of formal concerns.”

Demy’s first feature Lola (1961) established the template for his cinema, exhibiting both the movie-mad aesthetic of his contemporaries in the New Wave and an utterly distinct worldview. Dedicated to German-French filmmaker Max Ophuls, whose opulent visual style Demy revered, the film follows an intersecting cast of characters around a sleepy seaside town: Roland, an aimless dreamer; Lola, a cabaret singer pining for the memory of a sailor who once abandoned her; and a teenage girl, Cecile, whose chance encounters with another sailor mirror Lola’s own youthful love affair.

As these characters intertwine in a mosaic of rekindled love and youthful yearning, the trip on the amusement park ride between the smitten Cecile and her sailor emerges as a potent visual metaphor for Demy’s circular storytelling. Every episode in the screenplay reflects on others; as destiny pushes Roland and Lola toward each other, their stories are replayed through other characters in a roundabout of bitter resignation and sweet fulfillment.

Performed with enticing energy by sixties screen icon Anouk Aimée, Lola is, as David Thomson notes in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, the archetypal Demy heroine, “trembling between tears and laughter”. Like its title character, the film is deeply romantic but embedded in a world where sadness and suffering, deceit and death are very real. As Demy states in the film’s opening epigraph, “Pleure qui peut…rit qui veut” (“Cry if you can, laugh if you want to”).

This arresting mixture of emotional timbres characterizes Demy’s entire body of work. In Bay of Angels (1963), Jeanne Moreau plays a compulsive gambler who seduces a young bank clerk and drags him from casino to casino across the glittering, black-and-white Cote D’Azur. From its opening iris at the boardwalk to the climactic reunion of its lovers in a hall of mirrors, the film never loses sight of the destructive contours of its protagonists’ love affair nor the liberating possibilities of their life at the roulette table. In one stunning moment, the camera rises above Moreau and her beau as they stroll down a cobblestoned street, leaving them dwarfed by the opulent shadow of a casino. Tying the characters to the symbol of their fluctuating fortunes in a single expressive camera movement, the moment, like the film itself, is both ominous and majestic.

A compelling combination of sadness and enchantment persists in the fairy tales Demy adapted from works by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm in the 1970’s (Donkey Skin, The Pied Piper of Hamelin) and in his seminal films in another fantastical storytelling mode: the musical.

“It is more plausible as legend than as film fact that someone made movies in which all the dialogue was sung,” David Thomson has written of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the film that epitomizes Demy’s distinctive synthesis of artifice and actuality. Buoyed by Michel LeGrand’s stirring score and the childlike wonder with which Demy choreographs his first ecstatic foray into color cinema, this bold formal conceit never obscures the harsh realities of everyday life. Filled with acute insights into family and class relations, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a rhapsody of romantic longing and loss, as well as one of the few films of its era to deal with the traumatic effects of the Algerian war on the French home front.

Where Umbrellas is often filled with dark irony, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is sweeping and buoyant. With graceful crane shots and a dazzling cameo from Gene Kelly, Demy achieves both a pitch-perfect homage to MGM musicals and a film alive to the textures of modern life, glorying in the ever-versatile LeGrand’s jazz-inflected soundtrack. As in Umbrellas, the film’s song-and-dance routines are delivered with casual, quotidian grace and the walls of Rochefort painted in hot pastels to match the characters’ colorful costumes. Bursting with melodic and visual poetry, Demy’s musicals are lyrical in every sense of the word.

“What will we do with so much joy?”, ask two lovers in Demy’s 1970 fairy tale Donkey Skin. This question haunts the baffled critical response that has greeted his films. At the start of Demy’s career, there was real enthusiasm for his potent merger of formal exuberance and Gallic sadness. Not much later, critics and the public alike derided him for these same qualities. As film programmer James Quandt concluded in his notes to a recent retrospective of Demy’s work at Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario, Demy has been “a major artist condescended to as a stylist”, his “light-hearted, exuberant tone mistaken for triviality”.

Since his death in 1990, Demy’s legacy has been preserved through documentary tributes by his wife Agnes Varda, another major filmmaker woefully absent from most critical discourse on the New Wave “boys club”. There are also a handful of contemporary directors who owe an unmistakable debt to Demy’s vibrant body of work. Lars von Trier was obviously inspired by Demy’s combination of musical fantasy and clear-eyed realism in his Dancer In The Dark (2000), even casting Demy stalwart Catherine Deneuve as a factory worker. French filmmaker Christophe Honoré, a darling of the international art house circuit, has also cited Demy as a primary influence on his acclaimed musical Love Songs (2007).

But Demy remains largely adrift in the wake of the New Wave. Though lackluster DVD transfers of his most well known films are available, The Criterion Collection has yet to canonize Demy’s films for digital posterity, perched as he is in the uneasy middle ground between the classic and the cult classic. By and large, young film-goers do not know his name.

According to Dombrowski, Demy’s idiosyncrasies “make him difficult to include in historical overviews, but he is ripe for cult acclaim.”

“Those who know Demy tend to love him: his films are beautiful yet heartbreaking, and they stir the soul. The challenge is to create a place for him in the conversation.”

The upcoming 50th anniversary of the New Wave is a fitting time for such a conversation.

“Twenty plus years after Demy’s astonishing productivity in the sixties and early seventies, he does not seem quite possible,” writes David Thomson. “Did he really live? Have those wistful, gentle, and melodic films been made? Or is he only an ideal director one has dreamed?”

As the films of Truffaut and Godard are justly celebrated in the coming year, there could be no better time to wake up to the rich, endlessly rewarding films of Jacques Demy.

~ Will

Correlations #1: Prayer & Masturbation

2008-04-14T13:20:00.003-04:00

Correlations is a new (recurring?) feature in which two disparate ideas, objects, or actions are juxtaposed in order to examine correlating ways to view them. It is a comparison not of the ideas, objects, or actions in and of themselves, but rather a comparison of attitudes or themes made by external observation. That which is examined is not equated, only correlated. Thus in the case of this entry, I am neither as cynical as to call prayer a form of masturbation nor as dedicated to embodied spiritualism to call masturbation a form of prayer.

I.
From pre-K to 12th Grade I attended Modern Orthodox Jewish schools. The idea behind those schools is to raise observant Jewish children, at least somewhat within a modern secular culture. Observing (and experiencing) the “growth” of myself and my classmates, was not only an observation of the “maturation” of children to adults, but also the “maturation” of Jews and their religious capacities. From first learning the Bible as simple (and censored) stories to relearning them with close examination of underlying themes, implications, and meanings, the ways we were led to relate to Judaism and spiritual practice evolved. The practice of prayer is a prime example.

Everyday of elementary and high school, before any learning, the entire class would conduct the Morning Prayer service. In elementary school, this was conducted in the classroom. Of course it is not easy to keep a class of 30 kids focused for 30-40 minutes and in these formative years of Jewish indoctrination the teachers thought it best to do what ensures any kid’s focus: make it a competition. Thus the Prayer Chart. Everyday, the teacher would select the “best” prayers of the day. Those students would be awarded a star next to their name, at the end of the semester, the student awarded the most stars was rewarded with something like a box of candy or something. Now the teachers probably determined the “prayer of the day” by whoever was the quietest, but we had our own way. If you finished the silent prayers quickly, it meant that you were able to read all that Hebrew (12 pages in the prayer books we used) fluently. If you could read that Hebrew that well and that quickly, you must have been a good prayer. It was a sign of status. Of course some of the kids finished in under three minutes, but everyone knew they were cheating (after all, they tended to be the poorer students who especially found Hebrew to be difficult for them). Some students prayed out of conviction others to be noticed by the teachers. I admit I was more of the latter than the former, but I was never a cheater. I was upset when they didn’t give me a star. Sometimes I figured the teachers were just rigging it to keep it close

As we grew, our Hebrew got better, and the daily reciting of the silent prayer made it familiar to us (we knew most of it by heart), so we were finishing faster and faster. I was praying faster and faster. But then one day, when I had prayed faster than ever before, I looked around the room and for some reason all my competition (the top prayers in the class) weren’t done, not even close. Apparently I hadn’t received the message. Suddenly good prayer was no longer fast prayer, but meaningful prayer. The longer you prayed, the more intensity and intent you put into each and every word, the better prayer you were. It was a complete reversal of the time-to-quality ratio. It seemed like the competition changed also; students seemed to push one another to see who could pray the longest.

At the time, I was shocked, but really it makes a lot of sense. By this age, we were all able to read Hebrew more than proficiently, we were all familiar with the prayers, there was no competition there. Now it was only a matter of who could derive more meaning, be more intense, have better control.

II.
From the age of 8 to the age of 16, I attended a summer camp. The idea behind camp was to spend a summer outside of the city with kids my own age in an environment a little less rigid as school. Observing (and experiencing) the “growth” of myself and my campmates, was not only an observation of the “maturation” of children to adults, but also the “maturation” of sexualities and sexual identities. From first being able to orgasm to boasting to your bunk about exactly what that girl did to you (or what you did to her) behind the bunk, the ways we discussed and understood sexuality and sexual capacities evolved. The practice of (male) masturbation is a prime example.

There was a time when none of us knew about masturbation or about orgasms. There was a time when we heard rumors about it (at one point I remember thinking it was something like whipped cream from a pressurized can). But in these formative years of sexual indoctrination, after certain chemicals got flowing and certain body parts started changing, the truth about masturbation couldn’t be kept from our heads, discussions, or bunks. Thus the masturbation game. After lights out, the bunk counselors left the bunk before they were ready to go to bed themselves. For the most part it was a chance for our bunk to act its rowdiest with no adult supervision other than the occasional bunk checks. When we were 14 or so, two of my bunkmates, two of the “cooler” more athletic bunkmates, devised a new way to compete: they each started on their beds, with their hands in plain view. At the count of three, they could begin without any external aids or substances to masturbate. It was a timed competition and whoever was able to achieve ejaculation (and show proof thereof) was named winner. The rest of the bunk cheered their pick along and judged the competition—cheating would not be tolerated. It was a sign of status, displaying sexual abilities and pubescent progression. It really excited the rest of the bunk. I admit myself included. When the winner was announced, my losing bunkmate was upset and claimed that it wasn’t fair (he said had just masturbated a few hours prior).

As we grew from summer to summer, and became more sexually mature and more sexually experienced, the ability to cum within 13 seconds soon became somewhat less of a feat to boast about. At some point kids were starting rumors about premature ejaculation, a concept that no 13 year old boy had even imagined. And if you were the target of those rumors, you risked becoming a sexual pariah. Suddenly a sexually viable person didn’t depend on the speed with which he could get it done, but rather the length and intensity of the sexual experience. It was a complete reversal of the time-to-quality ratio. It seemed like the competition changed also; boys were pushed for fear of embarrassment to last longer and longer. We were told girls wanted whoever could last the longest.

I can’t say that I was especially shocked. It really made a lot of sense. At some point being able to masturbate wasn’t impressive; everyone was mature enough to do it. Now it was only a matter of convincing a partner to share in your sexuality, that you could offer something more intense with better control.

~Josh

Q & Aid: A Guide to Question and Answer Sessions

2008-04-09T18:21:00.007-04:00

Experience is a painful thing. Learning by experience is even worse. To cite experience as a qualification is to say that either (a) I personally have seen someone else make a mistake and have learned not to emulate or (b) I personally have made the mistake and have learned not to replicate.

Unfortunately, it has been experience (mostly of the a-type) that has led me to write this short guide to how to behave in a question and answer session (I’m sure there’s some b-type from my younger years in there somewhere, but they elude me now). Now, it may be that I’ve never actually been to a good Q & A session, but I definitely have been to some painful ones. Rather than castigate as unintelligent, I’ll assume it’s mere inexperience. Allow me to humbly share my experience and save you all the trouble.

Whether it follows a film screening or a philosophy lecture, the point of a question and answer session is to allow the speaker (lecturer, director, actor, artist, etc.) to speak (more). It’s an encore, really. That being said, the emphasis should be on the A, not the Q of the Q & A. So when you are forming your Q in your seat while you wait for someone else to ask the first question, here are five things to think about.

1. It’s not about you. Keep in mind you are part of an audience. If no one else in the audience is going to understand your all-too-specific question on how the film you just saw relates to that 1946 underappreciated classic by Ewan McGreggor’s third uncle, you should really think twice about asking the question. Even if you read in Film Comment’s more underground counterpart that the speaker happens to be an aficionado on McGreggor family lineage, there’s no reason to help the speaker disengage the audience.

2. Q-to-A ratio. Sometimes speakers are shy, especially when they aren’t lecturers by trade. It’s not always your fault, but one thing to think about is if your question can be answered in less than three words, try to reformulate. One way to do this is just to add the simple phrase “your thoughts?” to the end of any sentence. Let the speaker figure it out.

3. Your Q is but a means. Often enough, the most entertaining parts of a Q & A are the tangents within the A. Keep your questions broad. It may be that the speaker has a better sense of what’s interesting. Let the speaker navigate to those points.

4. Don’t pander. It’s not required to start your question with “I just want to say, I thought it was wonderful.” No one likes a speaker’s pet. No one in the audience cares. And the speaker probably only cares if you happen to represent the Nobel Committee. Be your own editor.

5. Taste is not a question. It’s okay if you don’t like what you saw or heard. Not every event is organized around a masterpiece. At the same time, what do you expect the speaker to say when you tell them that. Usually the A will be “okay” or “well screw you” and neither of those satisfies the Q-to-A ratio principle. This doesn’t mean that you can’t engage the speaker in a debate to clarify or press the speaker’s position. Implications are always interesting. Hold the speaker’s feet to the fire (whatever that means) if you want. Just make sure it’s not an us-versus-them scenario. If you go to hear Dave Eggers speak about Barthelme and you happen to think post-modern literature is nothing but self-aware (red) herring sandwiches, the odds are that lecture is not for you. As they say, Hegelians can’t debate Kantians because they aren’t philosophizing on the same playing field (i.e. Agora). Don’t talk through each other.

Addendum: Some things are best left unanswered. Some Qs to avoid in specific situations:
Following a film screening: What did the ending mean?
Following a history lecture: What about Hitler?
Following an ethics lecture: What about Hitler?
Following a reading of a piece of fiction: I know it’s fiction, but do you think that’s really possible?
Following a lecture that was over your head: Can you explain that again?
Following a John Kerry lecture: Apparently whatever that tasered kid said.

~Josh

No Pussyfooting

2008-03-20T17:19:00.006-04:00

Things have been quiet here at NewFlags, but that's only 1/6 my fault....

In any case, I have something very important to discuss with you:

I owe everyone ever an apology.

In our first Cobwebs In The Closet piece featuring the mighty Unwound, I attempted what some might say is impossible: to explain why-the-hey I love this band. I tried to balance that task with giving NewFlags' readers (all 9 of you) a sense of what the band actually sounds like. And during a momentary lapse of judgment, a psychic queef (sp?), as it were, I wrote an overused and underwhelming phrase that you've probably read in every review after 1982 about any record with keyboards on it:

"Eno-like soundscapes."

What-the-hoo-ha does that mean? What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. I don't have to say it again. Unwound does not sound like Brian Eno. No one sounds like Brian Eno, and suggesting anyone does is lazy and just a little bit douchey (of or pertaining to the [pejorative] qualities of a douchebag).

So I apologize to the English language for using its virtues to say nothing. I apologize to Brian Eno for belittling his extensive and variegated achievements in the aural arts. And I apologize to you for not respecting your always-discerning and paramount intelligence. All I can say is that I'm working on it.

~ Ashraf

Brian Eno - The Big Ship.mp3

Morality and the 2008 Western

2008-02-12T12:58:00.001-05:00

The Western certainly did make a comeback this year. As the Academy Awards approach, there are two “Westerns” contending for best picture, director, cinematographer, editing, sound editing, and adapted screenplay. Indeed the only differences in the honors for No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood are best lead actor versus best supporting actor, NCfOM’s nod for sound mixing and TWBB’s nod for art direction. Of course this year also served 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to fill out the Western bloc, but compared to the extraordinary NCfOM and TWBB, they become all but ancillary.

In No Country for Old Men by the brothers Coen and There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson, we have two films that expand on the conventional Western. They both have been praised for there superb directing and are shoe-ins for receiving Oscars for their respective acting categories. Either could win (and be deserving of) the award for Best Picture of the Year. Both films deal with notions of goodness and badness, morality or the lack thereof. And yet the two films couldn’t be more different.

In what has been described to me by Jeanine Basinger as an essentially “cinematic” maneuver, NCfOM offers the viewer no explanations, backgrounds, or contexts for any of its characters (in the case of Chigurh, Bardem employs such an utterly bizarre accent that we can’t even tell where he comes from). We have the good guys (played by Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin) and the bad guys (played by Woody Harrelson and Javier Bardem) displayed before us on the screen with unidentified, but unambiguous identities. The good, the bad, and the money are the only motors for the plot. And just like the bagful of money, the viewer has no idea where the good or the bad came from or why either has been plopped onto our screen.

NCfOM evaporates from our minds the most base question of Why. Indeed it is the inexplicably and categorically evilness of Javier Bardem’s character that has received the most support from critics and fans alike. Bardem’s character is so completely evil and even evinces rationality in acting so that he exhibits a mutilated banality of evil not in the central and moderate sector, but off the charts.

Unlike with the character of Chigurh, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character Daniel Plainview in TWBB is compelling because of the question Why. Indeed we are left with the strange and resounding aftertaste of the question following the enigmatic final monologue and final scene of the film. Plainview is capable of both good and evil, although both are underscored by ulterior motives (i.e. what were Plainview’s true intentions in adopting H.W.?), and we are aware of these motives. We are thrown into the depths of Plainview’s character, from his beginnings to his rise to his fall. We are saturated by his world—the context to which he is always responding. The movie is very much about the Why. Why does this happen? Why does he do this? It is this context that makes our understanding of Plainview’s morality all the more complex and ambiguous.

Of course the evangelical undertones of the film question the very idea of morality. The farce of Eli Sunday’s Church of the Third Revelation suggests the arbitrariness of moral judgment, the delegation of saint and sinner, altogether.

If Richard Slotkin argues that the Western has long been a consistent commentary on American culture and politics, what do these two movies with such different understanding of morality say about the state of our politic? After eight years of an administration soaked through with religious zealotry, secrets, wars, and mistakes, after eight years of consistent decline in our country’s supposed moral standing in the world, after eight years of a war where each side is convinced of the absolute evilness of the other, our relationship to morality has never been more ambiguous. Does the Bush administration really believe it has been justified in its actions or are they really employing some evil plot? Is there real evil out there or has it been created by unfortunate circumstances and a world context of inequality. And what are our personal responsibilities, stakes, and abilities in this ambiguous moral state? Post-modernity certainly has created problems for our simple and dictated notions of good and bad, and these two films certainly suggest the subsequent confusion over the subject. But, despite the statements on the objective and subjective evil, neither film offers us a peace of redemption. And what does that say about our American culture and politic?

~josh

Cobwebs In the Closet #2: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Shahen-Shah"

2008-02-02T15:46:00.000-05:00

There are hungers so deep they're sometimes unfathomable. Or else, we've learned early on that they're the hungers that can never be sated, those epic appetites that even history's holiest couldn't satisfy. But us laypersons who have inherited the unanswered questions of our ancestors, a lot of times we don't seem to stand a chance against the eternal. We have our lives leashed by our gravity and our weakening joints and our cravings for fried foods and our needs for sleep. Who has more than a few hours a week, at most, to devote to that endless pursuit of the universal? And really, how many of us are into that anyway?

At the risk of getting a tad too confessional (it is late, after all), this last year I've felt myself stepping away from a once-solid faith and resolving to nest my heavy hungers (quite uncomfortably) in the possibility of nothing more than a mortal life. It wasn't part of any expository, articulated turn to atheism/agnosticism - it just happened. And maybe it's easier this way, to have no dogma, to have no guilt for not being tied to dogma, to stop trying to feel so damn in touch with the unseeable (whatever that is). But mystery is mystery is mystery, whether or not you've named it or had it spelled out in scripture. As you might expect, my head still buzzes with questions, full of conflicts that linger for months, often finding no resolution.

I try to look at it all in the affirmative, which I think calms this sometimes severe separation anxiety. This distance has afforded me a certain luxury of perspective, the chance to put some words to otherwise wordless experiences. And the other night, over a hearty meal, I for some reason turned manic, thinking hard all of a sudden on what felt increasingly like a revelation: the straight-as-an-arrow parallels between song and spirit, my ever-growing iTunes library suddenly doubling as an ever-growing vessel for enlightenment, and as much as I'd thought about the notion before, I'd never felt so overwhelmingly good about it. I was starting to feel like I suddenly believed again in the possibility of believing....

Too wordy? Here's a better story:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Pakistan in 1948 to a family a Qawwali singers (the traditional devotional music of Sufis). Nusrat's father wanted his son to pursue a profession more respectable than what he saw as a lowly singer, but early on Nusrat showed an aptitude for the music, and so he went into years of training with his father until he died suddenly, when Nusrat was only eighteen. Ten days after his father's death, Nusrat dreamed his father came to him and told him he would be a singer, at which point he touched his son's throat, and Nusrat suddenly awoke from the dream...singing....

And what a voice: unfathomably loud, imbued with the raspy pathos of centuries of singers reaching for something beyond the stratosphere. You've heard it before, wafting in the background of the film scores to Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and Tim Robbins's Dead Man Walking. It's been remixed by Massive Attack, it's been featured in Peter Gabriel performances, but really, truly: it belongs way up front, leading Ali Khan's group (or "party") in the most ecstatic songs you'll ever hear. And that's exactly the point of Qawwali, always pursing that state of complete, devotional (non-booze-induced) intoxication. Circular melodies are half-sung, half-shouted in glorious call-and-response patterns by anywhere from one to twenty very sincere men. And these swirling vocal lines are propelled by hand-claps and pulsing tabla workouts that leave just enough room for one or two harmoniums to just sit back and ooze deliciously sweet major chords.

And back to that voice: holy cow. It's always moving, running up and down scales, sometimes very fast, other times especially slowly, but always moving. I guess we're a searching type of species, from our hunter-gatherer forebears to the archaeologists who dug up their bones, and it's all there in Ali Khan's voice, always pursuant of what binds past, present, and future. Legend has it he would listen to commercial jingles in whatever country he was performing in to learn the predominant scales of the region and incorporate them into his performances, hoping somehow to translate his Urdu/Punjabi/Persian/Brajbhasha lyrics into a wordless vernacular. I'd venture to say he succeeded.

Shahen-Shah (meaning "emperor") is Nusrat's most potent collection of songs, six ten-minute-plus pieces that capture the party at their most cohesive. Tracks open with single harmonium lines that are quickly joined by a hum of rising voices. There are moments you think the song is over, the hand-claps slowing their tempo and the voices quieting, but then suddenly, they all erupt at once, as though privy to some secret revelation. And gradually, as you move forward through the album, you can sense the moments coming: you settle into the hushed respites and wait to be shook out of your daze by Nusrat's ululating incantations. By the final track "Kehna Ghalat Ghalat to Chhupana Sahi Sahi," you're exhausted, but the song is perfectly slow, the rhythms perfectly lulling, the melody perfectly celebratory. You need this last statement to feel complete. It's a song for endtimes, the sound of realizing that you'll never find that unified field theory, that perhaps we are nothing more than hungry, curious beings whose capacities for comprehension are at times severely limited, and that maybe, just maybe, it's best left that way.

Amen.

"Kehna Ghalat Ghalat to Chhupana Sahi Sahi".mp3

~ Ashraf

What we talk about when we talk about love.

2008-01-29T05:40:00.000-05:00

In an earlier life, when I was younger but mostly like the person I am today, I sent this poem to a girlfriend:

Prayer to Shadows on My Wall (source)
Mark McMorris

Soon the rush-lights will go out in the flesh
of sympathetic bodies once close to my own hand
and I will go to my hammock, thinking of little
except the numbness that alone makes bearable
the wind's twisting. I want atoms to separate
like hairs or dust onto the heads of my daughters.
I want to violate the edict that traps my hunger
in cages and away from her rough shoulder
and once to be enough for this and all the loves
that flicker through my bedroom before sleep.
They keep me awake, and tonight they are fierce
as whips or as needles to make the skin crawl.
I want to drift like the poui in a southerly wind
and settle where I need to before the faces erode,
my appetite of iron caulking the egg-shell heart.

A couple days later she sent me this poem in response:

Some Days in the City (source)
Mark McMorris

Some days, the sky descends to the level of mid-thigh water
the clock-hands come loose, and language is a skiff
over land through the rhythm of your breathing, girl
then I can hear the pink oriole, the body is a metronome
of blood and syllables beating placentas of speech
and news tingles like a caress of words still to be spoken:

umbrellas, bracelets, sleepers in doorways, police and victim--

I wind these objects to strike my human self dead
so as to taste the massy hive, the bloom and sounds
following my spending to gather up the pennies, kisses
meant for you, lost in transit, I follow my own kisses
to rooms in European cities, to the bottom of a shot glass

like a piece of economy flung about the streets
I spit pronouns, you fall from my lips, bewildered
I fall to the tracks, a suicide, a trembling drunk at
Du Pont and this day is a book left ajar, next to the rain.

This exchange only recently occurred to me. My impulse is of course to put these poems in dialogue: as if they are some kind of prophecy, that this girlfriend and I were speaking through someone else’s words, more eloquent than our own.

I revisit McMorris’s poems a lot, the same ones usually. I’m floored by the rhythm of his images, his words as vehicles for a tremendously calculated stream of consciousness that can be at once calamitous and desolate. Each image is interrupted by the next, each thought is amplified just as it’s articulated. Lost in these pulses, I return to these poems like they are songs stuck in my head but I can’t make out the lyrics. Like the final line in Prayer, a weak heart mended by the heaviest desire, my infatuation with McMorris’s poems comes from consistently feeling puzzled by them, a satisfaction in absence.

In Some Days, McMorris reminds us that language fails us not just in poetry but also in the real world, like the “clock-hands” unable to point to the time. “Some days,” words lose their power of distinction, of classification: broken barometers leaving us with that watery biblical mess: nothing is imbued with meaning because nothing is (yet) distinguished. In a romantic way, that is. McMorris finds himself only able to talk around things, not about them: “umbrellas, bracelets,” only “a caress of words,” scratching the surface.

Which brings me back to this girlfriend. I sent her a poem about severe wanting, the articulation and the drive of that longing. And she sent me back one about the pain of attainment and the inability to classify and to process. And maybe there’s no common ground between these two scenarios. Maybe these were just two ideas exchanged because they shared an author and some pretty words. Or maybe they refer to a similar sentiment, a same motive of desire.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we express love. From emails in a young relationship to how I write a birthday card to my mom. How can I say what I want to say without saying it? Or because I’m not saying it?

Uncertain how to tie up these thoughts, here’s one more, much simpler poem that I exchanged with this girlfriend, this one from a much more well-known poet.

Love (source)
Billy Collins

The boy at the far end of the train car
kept looking behind him
as if her were afraid or expecting someone

and then she appeared in the glass door
of the forward car and he rose
and opened the door and let her in

and she entered the car carrying
a large black case
in the unmistakable shape of a cello.

She looked like an angel with a high forehead
and somber eyes and her hair
was tied up behind her neck with a black bow.

And because of all that,
he seemed a little awkward
in his happiness to see her,

whereas she was simply there,
perfectly existing as a creature
with a soft face who played the cello.

And the reason I am writing this
on the back of a manila envelope
now that they have left the train together

is to tell you that when she turned
to lift the large, delicate cello
onto the overhead rack,

I saw him looking up at her
and what she was doing
the way the eyes of saints are painted

when they are looking up at God
when he is doing something remarkable,
something that identifies him as God.

-----------------

Links:
Audio of McMorris Readings
BUY the super-dope The Blaze of the Poui
Springsteen plays 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), in Passaic, NJ, 1978.

-asher.

Cobwebs In the Closet #1: Unwound

2008-01-27T23:02:00.000-05:00

Unwound is quite possibly the greatest BAND I've ever listened to, a mercurial aural juggernaut whose remarkable ten-year career saw each record deftly navigating between extremes of volume, rhythm, melody, and texture. I came to the group off a vague recommendation from a friend and a half-remembered review from Tower Records' free in-store magazine (remember Pulse!? Adorable!). This was 2001, the year Unwound put out their masterful swansong Leaves Turn Inside You and subsequently announced that their next tour would be their last. I had the mixed blessing of never getting to see the band live, the tradeoff being I had their glorious, full catalogue sitting before me, just waiting to be swallowed whole by my still-soft teenage brain. And I was totally blown away.

But it was that confused state of wonder where you're in love with something a little dangerous, a little esoteric, a little intimidating, and thoroughly sexy. I really didn't think I'd ever heard music like this before. Naturally, one could say their affinity for prolonged, feedback-laden, "what the fuck?"-eliciting dirges had its antecedents in Sonic Youth, and sure, their devastatingly beautiful, arpeggiated interludes could also be traced to Sonic Youth. But really, Unwound was speaking its own kind of Esperanto. I'd never listened to a band whose sound, with each record, grew...a lot. Earlier tracks like "Hexenzsene," and the 14-minute gem "Valentine Card/Kantina/Were, Are And Was Or Is" experimented with explosive, anthemic choruses and oh-so-quiet passages bathed in cymbal wash and gentle guitar patterns. And then, unpredictably, their middle period found the band exploiting insistent grooves as a newfound counterpoint to their tense repetition, as in the 1996 track "Corpse Pose." Finally, in 2001, after disappearing into the Washington state backwoods for two years to build a studio and record an album, they put out their final, most dense, and unrecognizable record Leaves Turn Inside You, a double album comprised of Eno-like soundscapes, William Faulkner references, and an 11-minute Led Zeppelin knock-off.

For about three years, before I began my still-hopeless cathexis with TV On the Radio, I was convinced that this was the greatest rock record ever made. It was so utterly singular and so totally remarkable listening to their first records, and then finally ending up with this. It seemed they'd even written a pop song, just as a sort of "bet you didn't think we could do this either" (the lovably hummable and slightly funky "Demons Sing Love Songs"). Now I'm older and a little less attracted to hyperbole, so I wouldn't say it's the greatest rock record ever, but I don't shirk away from saying it's still a mind-blowing album that (thankfully) rewards with time.

The past few years I took a break from Unwound, becoming more attracted by the idea of loving a lot of bands rather than championing one. And as I became slightly more politicized than my 15 year-old self, I'd pay special attention artists who were manufacturing mind-bending sounds while at the same time weaving thoughtful, "socially conscious" narratives in their lyrics (like Parts & Labor, have you listened to "The Gold We're Digging"?!). However vague the words may have been, I for some reason appreciated their intent. And when I decided to write about Unwound, I thought about how their words weren't as like-mindedly convicted as Parts & Labor, or TVOTR, or Fugazi. In the definitive Unwound interview, guitarist/singer/lyricist Justin Trosper openly talks about his lyrics being more "wordplay" than anything else. And I remember being offended by that. For so long I'd been totally invested in Unwound's strange, cynical yet strangely profound lyrics (ex: "The drawback/To living/Is finding yourself"). And to hear them dismissed as "wordplay" negated everything that felt legitimate to me at the time. But now I'm realizing that Trosper never said his words didn't have meaning or significance, because if nothing else, they were huge for me. And in my book, that's a giant check-plus written in fat black sharpie.

These days I don't hear much about Unwound apart from a few gigs producing bands at their Mag Rec One studio. Drummer Sara Lund was recently one of the awesome 77 drummers at the Boredoms' 77 Drum performance. Bassist/singer Vern Rumsey has had a couple of projects of his own (Long Hind Legs, Red Rumsey) that have put out a few records. And rumor has it that Justin Trosper stopped making music, unsure of whether or not he believes in music anymore as an expressive medium for him. Bummer, right?

Way back in 2001, when I finally "got" Leaves Turn Inside You, I kind of felt similarly, that this was the most supreme product of musical creation, that this was the end of music as we knew it and that there was no way anyone could cook up anything more substantial than this. Now I don't quite feel that way, but I recognize that for a long time the music was something otherworldly and illuminating to me, redefining what seemed possible to my young mind. And I'd hope that maybe that'd be reason enough for Justin Trosper to keep doing something he did so well for so long.

Even if it is just wordplay.

~ Ashraf

Unwound - Hexenzsene (CLICK TO DOWNLOAD)

Unwound - Corpse Pose (CLICK TO DOWNLOAD)

Unwound - Demons Sing Love Songs (CLICK TO DOWNLOAD)

Change (Sort of)

2008-01-11T11:34:00.000-05:00

Change is the word. “Change You Can Believe In.” “Change is necessary.” “History of Change.” “Candidate of Change.” Change is in. The hot new fashion brought to you by political advisers and media pundits. Change is hip. It’s like wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Yes, revolution is at hand.

My, how we’ve changed. Just think of the semantic weight of change today compared to that of four years ago. In Bush v. Kerry, change was the dirtiest of words. Bush argued against changing horses mid-stream, and he labeled Kerry a flip-flopper (i.e. one who changes). Change lost Kerry the election. And now it’s supposed to win one? Who’s flip-flopping now? But that’s fashion. It’s like switching from bellbottoms to tapered leg. It’s like moving to Brooklyn after decades of moving out of it. It’s like liking 80s pop music again.

And yet, America hasn’t quite come to fall into the fashion of change completely. According to the candidates, we can change healthcare, taxes, social security, the economy, parties, politics, moral standing. We can change anything and everything except for one thing: our minds. The looming danger of falling into the pit of flips and flops hangs over the head of every candidate (and ultimately over every politician who ever votes or makes a statement on anything). We want change, but not from someone who has changed. We want a one-track change, but the idea of change on any track is absurd. We are our own examples: in 2004, America voted to stay the course and in 2008 America wants something new (whether Democrat or Republican). We’ve changed our minds for “positive” progression (positive of course being a subjective term) to follow a new fashion, a better fashion, a more current fashion.

We are fashionable people. We demand specific cuts, colors, and brands every season. We are easily impressed with the new. We want to stay ahead of the curve of mediocrity. We progress. We learn. We should want the same from our representative. Talk about problems with our education system.

~josh

Interview #1: Laura Goldhamer

2008-01-08T22:52:00.001-05:00

First of all: yes, that is her real name. And if it makes you conjure up images of an indefatigable ax-slinger of mighty import, you'd be right, because Laura Goldhamer is a creative powerhouse. In May 2006, as part of her final college senior recital, she put on a sprawling performance of original work that thematically wove a full live band playing original songs with animations (a skill she taught herself in the preceding months), fully choreographed dances (on skis!), and a fierce, fierce audience coloring competition. Titled Ye Old Leave Behind, Goldhamer later culled her original material together into a unique CD-DVD package that can't quite be called an album, nor can it quite be called a musical, but it certainly is a thorough, conceptualized work that uses its multiple media to meditate on the ever-fascinating and perpetually perplexing politics of getting older.

For the past year, Laura's been writing, animating, and performing in her hometown of Denver, Colorado. She is also now the founder, head curator, and sole tenant of Brooks Center Arts Underground Teahouse, a DIY venue situated in the basement of the Brooks Center For Spirituality, a non-denominational church and spirituality center in central Denver. Last week, Laura took some time out before playing a show to talk to us about how she conceptualized Ye Old Leave Behind, her increasing interest in creating multi-media, space-specific work, and her plans for the future of Denver's DIY music and arts scene.

Thanks to Brian Carney for allowing us to use his photographs, and of course, thanks again to Laura for her generosity. She has plenty more work to check out HERE.

~Ashraf
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NewFlags: Do you wanna talk about how Ye Old Leave Behind started in your head?

Laura Goldhamer: I guess the whole album and animation work that I had done up until the point of graduating from college was geared toward my senior recital performance. I'd been playing with a blues band for a while, and I wanted to somehow connect that with what I was doing more "contemporarily," with cello and more experimental, quirkier instrumentation and meters and other things. All these songs were written within two years of that senior recital performance, so I was trying to cohere them. Then I wrote that song "Ye Old Leave Behind." It was initially a classical string quartet assignment. I started playing its riff and writing that instrumental stuff for the assignment, and I actually thought of the title for that senior show before finishing the song. I needed a title, and I was thinking "Where am I gonna do it?" and "What do I want the title to be?" the show was to be in the old cinema at school that had kinda been left behind by the construction of the new, high-tech university cinema.

I was just kind of, I think, feeling for that space, in terms of both being a little bit obsolete and also a little bit forgotten about and still totally functional, utilizable…except for the fucking leak in the roof! It was raining the night of the recital, and it was like waterfalls from the light fixtures! But, anyway, here's the cinema, this kind of a neglected thing, and me wanting to make a concert that really took into account the setting in which it was to take place, a space-specific performance. I think that acts are put together in order to be toured across the country and across the world, and to be able to be transplanted wherever, sometimes insensitively to the setting in which a touring musician is going, where you just roll into town before a show, go to the venue, put on the show, and leave the next morning. It's not connected to the place. So I guess I was thinking about that and trying to be space-specific with the title of the show, with the last words of the show (and song), "ye old leave behind."

NF: Well, I was listening again to Ye Old Leave Behind, and I was feeling like it was a very apt album for someone who was about to graduate.

LG: Yeah. If I can remember that far back (laughs), I remember the title resonated with kind of moving on, or time periods, and that change and progression. I pretty much put the songs in the chronological order in which I wrote them – not entirely, but pretty much. And I was thinking a lot at the time, in terms of the title and in terms of arranging it, about time periods and moving on from them, and change over time. Especially starting with the blues band stuff, because that's something that I was into for a while, and, I mean, I still love that shit, it's powerful! But I started wanting to move on from that blues rock band format – drums, guitar, keys, and bass. I just wanted to, you know, explore from there and change. So then it kind of gets more kind of strange and out there as the album goes on (laughs). So yeah I love thinking about Ye Old Leave Behind in terms of time periods and moving on from college, as a large transitional step.

I think also, though, it's been a funny tension for me because I am very conscious of that title and moving on and changing the emphasis and stuff, but I still perform to those animations! You know, it's very much a part of my repertoire now, in different configurations. I think it's funny being a year-and-a-half out of college and still being very much invested in that repertoire and that work I did really methodically. It's an interesting tension. I'm making new stuff, I'm writing new songs, I'm gonna be doing a new animation to this Humpty-Dumpty song that I wrote recently (laughs), but I'm still using all that old, not-so-left-behind stuff.

NF: One thing that seems to be a constant in your lyrics is that you're always more or less acknowledging that things are really complex. There's always at least two kinds of meanings, in your words. So, for example, in your song "No Ability", you're kind of talking about how everyone is intertwined in being both a victim and a victimizer, not necessarily in those terms, but participants in a complicated dynamic.

LG: Yeah, I've been having trouble sometimes articulating what "No Ability" is about, because I think I was more engrossed in each of the specific references and knew what I was trying to say. And actually, tonight I'm playing my friend Carolina’s graduation party. She's graduating with an art degree, and she's done a lot of cool works in terms of addressing political and social inequity in her sculptures, and anyway, blah blah blah, moral of the story is I'm playing at her graduation party tonight and she asked me to play "No Ability." She called me the other night and wanted to talk in depth and analyze those lyrics and so I looked back at them and explained to her what I could but I also couldn't really expose every reference or each density.

NF: That's why you wrote the song.

LG: Yeah, that's kind of why I wrote the song. And it seems like it would be kinda bomb if the song either spoke for itself consciously or spoke for itself unconsciously, like, the melody and the lyrics and the intonations, the inflections of my voice, if all those things combined to access someone's both conscious mind and unconscious mind. You know, they can't consciously explain what every line is about, but maybe through the music, which I think music has a tendency to do, it can access the subconscious mind and you can't explain every little bit about it and why, but it touches you and you understand what it's saying even though you can't explain it.

NF: What did you have in mind when you started animating your songs?

LG: Sometimes my mom would say "great songs, but I can't understand what you're saying." I wondered if even enunciating better would get my words across. That's when I started thinking towards not just communicating my lyrics vocally, because you know people learn in different ways: some people are kinesthetic learners, some people are visual learners, some people are aural learners. So I started getting into the idea of conveying my lyrics with very specific images that I have in my mind when singing them and actually conveying them visually through animations, so, that's what I think I was doing, or trying to do, with that.

NF: So how did that play out in, for example, the "Lion" song and animation? I was thinking specifically about this stanza and what was going on in the animation:

in church I would be embarrassed
like foreigners in Paris
everything is heresy
cause I've got faith in modern science
an error not to've tried it
find proof it's miraculous
one cell soon to be divided
replica's been sighted
must have been enlightenment

LG: I guess there's a lot of double-entendres in the way I like to write, like, having multiple meanings or interpretations simultaneously. Like that enlightenment line just being one example: I'm talking about science vs. religion for a while and I'm holding those tensions in that song, and so "the enlightenment" is talking about both spiritual enlightenment within religion and the Enlightenment Period in history as a scientific sort of revolution. In my animation, at that specific point, the camera goes into a Petri dish and then the cell division stuff and then when it says "must have been enlightenment" I popped a little Buddha statue in the bottom of that Petri dish having a little apple fall and hit the Buddha's head. So that's a little reference to both the religious elements of the song and then also to Sir Isaac Newton. That's just talking about that example.

I think that doing animation and video is really cool and accessible and marketable as a product because it's two-dimensional. I think it's important to balance that marketability thing (laughs), the business side of things as I move forward into trying to make a living as a musician.

NF: Tell me more of what you're doing at the Brooks Center For Spirituality as the curator of the Brooks Center Arts.

LG: Well, I created this DIY venue of sorts – the Underground Teahouse – it's All-Ages and we ask for 3 to 5 dollars donation at the door. It's really low-key and comfortable. We've had some really great acts come through, both local ones and touring acts, we just had, two weeks ago – Adrian Orange & Her Band and the Watery Graves of Portland also. And Karl Blau came a couple months before. I'm trying slowly and organically to expand with the concerts and start putting on bigger shows in the Sanctuary Space upstairs – where there’s 600 seats, a balcony, a pipe organ, a grand piano – and bring in some big national acts.

NF: Like who?

LG: Hopefully in March, we'll initiate these big shows with Beirut. And you know Nick Zamudo of the Books was in town and was wanting to play in that space next time they tour. I think it's very conducive to national acts and I think the big space would eventually be on par with the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. That's one direction the Brooks Center wants me to go with my job in addition to doing outreach to let folks know what sort of rad classes and meditation groups the Spirituality Center has to offer.

So there's this complicated business side of running a venue, too. I'm just kind of scratching the surface with that – both appalled with the music business and intrigued by the music business. And to balance that with my own artistic sensibilities or trajectory and trying to build the community here, it's strange. It' s interesting, and it's really vibrant in Denver right now: you kind of gotta be savvy and wary and trusting and loving of it all at the same time, you know?

Laura Goldhamer - "No Ability" (CLICK TO DOWNLOAD)

"Lion" Original Video

Open Letter #1: Year-End Best-Of Lists

2007-12-21T14:24:00.000-05:00

Note: Please feel free to insert your own Dylan-lyric pun anywhere you want. Personally, however, I’m refraining.

2007-12-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

In the wake of the success of movies such as Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005), you can tell that the studios are clamoring for another American musician bio-pic to put out there. They don’t necessarily require big budgets, they have a built-in audience, they seem to be shoe-ins for Oscar nods (warranted or not), and the basic story is already there. Not to mention the fact that these musicians’ lives conveniently follow a simple time-tested narrative arc of rags to love to riches to drugs to family disenfranchisement to reconciliation to comeback. They are straight-forward, heart-warming, celebratory movies dedicated to the legends of modern music icons. Unfortunately it creates a fine line between legend and cliché.

Yes, it is in the wake of these movies that Todd Haynes offers us I’m Not There, a movie with no less then seven glimpses of “Dylan” and also seven glimpses of the kinds of traditional bio-pics Haynes could have made. Dylan is certainly an icon with a status worthy of a bio-pic (to supplement all of the documentary films covering his career) and his life seems to fit nicely with the musician bio-pic template: his struggles to become famous, his struggles with fame once achieved, his struggles with drugs, his struggles with religion, his struggles with identity, his struggles with love, etc. With every nod towards the bio-pic template, however, there is a direct refusal of it. Not unlike Dylan himself, who has turned on his base a number of times (i.e. going electric, going country, going Christian, etc.).

Dylan is an anomaly. I can’t think of any other artist with such difficult if not incomprehensible works that has been so unilaterally embraced across the board, by intellectuals and jocks, poets and pot heads. It’s seemingly impossible to try to interpret Dylan songs without seeming an asshole. Then again, that doesn’t really stop anyone, either. Even Dylan thinks his interpreters are full of it (something nicely carried through in the movie’s humor as well). Haynes seeks a similar aura: he gives allusions of things we can relate to, emotions and scenes that we can understand, but they are only allusions, fragmented and indifferent to time, location, style, and form. To Haynes’ credit, he doesn’t try to discover the real Dylan; to his credit, the interpretation’s not there.

I remember one night when I was probably fourteen or so, my older brother had an argument with my mother. It was the climax of teenage rebellion and parental restriction, one of the few harder times in our family. I remember sitting in my room. I could hear them arguing through the wall and I was scared or annoyed at the noise, or possibly some amalgamation of the two. I remember brushing my teeth as a self-distraction (actually, I wrote a poem about it at the time, a haiku). The next day, when I walked into my brother’s room, I saw that he had taped the lyrics to It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) on his wall. While I didn’t totally understand, I got that it was his way of dealing. They actually are still up on the wall. I’ve never asked him about it.

My freshman roommate in college and I didn’t get along. Luckily we each had our own rooms, but one of the points of contention was the fact that he played three CDs on repeat all day. One album was Bob Marley, the second was Neil Young, and the third Bob Dylan. Yes, I bore Bob, Bob, and Neil blasting through the all-too-thin-but-supposedly-fireproof wall for two full semesters. And as much I like Dylan and Young (not so much Marley), it was absolutely awful. And yet, that’s part of Dylan too.

Why these two anecdotes from my brother and my roommate? Well, for me, Dylan has never quite been there in front of me (even when I saw him play at MSG when I was 16). He has always been heard from behind a wall, behind a veil, behind the wizard’s curtain. A quasi-presence that doesn’t allow for actual questioning or engagement, but fascinating all the same. You can keep coming back to it.

In the case of I’m Not There, Haynes presents cinematic beauty, just enough lyric-references to amuse that guy in the audience, and a confused vision. And that’s great. Before any value judgments on the movie, the one thing I’ve been hearing from my friends has been: “I’d like to see it again.” That seals the deal right there. It won’t necessarily make anything clearer, but there it is.

~Josh

Addendum: If you haven't heard, check out Dylan laying down a rhyme on this Kurtis Blow track.

The Image and the Picture, or: One Small Part of One Much Larger Project

2007-11-19T14:23:00.000-05:00

Images have a history of influence on the socio-politico-cultural consciousness: photographic images of breaker boys in 1910 caused an urgent call for child labor reform, FDR released images of war-ravaged Europe and fallen GIs to rally support on the home front, in the 1950s and 60s the broadcasted images of lynchings and brutality in Birmingham brought civil rights into the home of white Americans, in 1989, the smuggled images of the Unknown Rebel in Tiananmen Square outraged the world, video images of the 1991 beating of Rodney King eventually led to the LA riots. Images such as these, whether real or not, contrived or not, or misinterpreted or not, were experienced by viewers as the real deal: they brought foreign “realities” into the domestic environment to the homes and heads of mainstreamers, educating and disturbing at the same time. The shock and resulting outrage from seeing these images led to some of the most progressive social changes of the past century. It made what was happening somewhere else a priority here. It promised correlating social advances with those of technology. One would assume that today, in a digital age where images have become ever more accessible and distributable, where the plights of the underprivileged, hungry, and murdered world-wide are made visible daily, that we would be living in the most socially conscious, politically active, and culturally progressive society ever, and yet, the question “why is there no student/anti-war/counter-culture movement today like there was in the 1960s” itself has become so cliché that it is stagnant.

The real question however should be: what about our current culture has kept us from responding actively to injustices? The answer has to do with how injustice, if not reality itself, is experienced by the contemporary person. Much of the anti-war movement’s strength in the 60s had to do with Vietnam being the first televised war. It was the first war that mainstreamers could see exactly what was happening from their homes, and they were outraged with what they saw: the images of the war were seared onto the consciousnesses of television viewers across America. I question the possibility of this happening today.

A convenient example can be made out of the blogger’s favorite “Don’t Tase Me Bro” Kid. On September 18, 2007, video began circulating online and then on Big-News of a twenty-one year old student being forced out of a John Kerry Q & A session after confronting the senator on a number of issues (intelligently or not), culminating in the university police forcing him to the ground, immobilizing him, and then tasering him despite his having been completely disabled. And it wasn’t just one video being circulated: it seemed as though a quarter of the audience at the Q & A were videotaping the altercation on digital cameras, digital phones, or amalgamations of the two. These videos, however, do not merely show the absurd encroachment of Andrew Meyer’s rights, both in censorship and excessive force, but something even more disturbing as well: a complacent crowd content with videotaping the event rather than protesting, acting, voicing disgust, or doing anything else.

How does this answer the question of cultural complacency?

On the Colbert Report that aired the following day, Stephen Colbert made a similar observation on the inaction of the crowd and commented very astutely on the matter: something to the effect of “Everyone was so used to seeing people getting tasered on youtube, that all they were thinking was ‘I can’t wait to go home and watch this on youtube.’” This suggests that the crowd related to the injustice at hand only through a picturesque mentality: they could only experience the injustice in reference to experiencing via a picture on their computer screens.

Yes, the internet has proven to be an enormous progression in society, but it has led to an oversaturation of images. We’ve seen so many footballs to groins, at-home water boardings, bombs over Baghdad, nuclear blasts on our screens that have lost meaning to us. We view them only as pictures like other pictures we’ve seen before. They become mere pictures. Where once our mothers spoke of radiation from television screens today we see only the borders of the screen and computer monitors. When an image becomes a picture it becomes distant: a picture is framed, put behind glass, and hung on a wall. A picture does not penetrate our consciousness like an image. A picture can be viewed and then forgotten. A picture is disposable.

Three years ago, the outrageous photographs from Abu-Ghraib became public knowledge and while they may have damaged the popularity of the war in Iraq, there was little to no political or social recourse. If Americans have not forgotten those photographs, they have parodied them (parody only being possible once a certain level of exposure is reached and relation to the images themselves is put at a distance). Abu-Ghraib had all the makings of becoming important images for the times, and yet our experience of them was somehow sublimated as mere pictures.

In a world of pictures, we live in a cultural daze, distanced from that which should seem so real to us. The proliferation of pictures has made us emotionally infertile. And until we face, or rather quiver from, an image-experience that will awaken us to the essentiality of socio-political historicity, we will remain so. Until then, no one really cares.

~ Josh