selfdivider

As I mentioned, my daughter and I were sick with stomach flu. But I went to the health clinic to get injected with some Promethazine, an anti-nausea sauce, which not only curbed my vomiting but made me sleep virtually non-stop for almost thirty hours. (I was told I’d be drowsy for about seven hours, but apparently, my body likes Promethazine too much.) When I woke up in the early afternoon on Wednesday, I felt like Philip Marlowe just escaped from the drug-torture sanatorium in Farewell, My Lovely, but keeping in tune with the holiday season, I gathered my wife and daughter and hurrahed over to our friend Vicky’s apartment, near 150th and Fred Douglas Blvd., where she and her mother, Maggie, were hosting a pre-Thanksgiving dinner for her close family members, 100% Puerto Rican style. It was just awesome, a lot of love in that house. Although I couldn’t eat much, I just enjoyed being in a place where all the family members loved each other so demonstrably, so genuinely.

Probably the highlight of the night was in meeting Maggie’s brother, Carlos, who looks like any other unassuming, low-key dude on the street. It turns out that he’s Carlos Bess, who was the engineer producer of all of Wu-Tang’s albums until 2005. Slap me crane-style and call me grasshopper! He sound engineered Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Ghostface’s Supreme Clientele (my favorite Wu-Tang solo album and Carlos’s last project with the Wu), and - get this - Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. What the fuck: those three albums alone should be on any head’s top twenty list. My ultimate aim is to have The Blue Notebooks interview Carlos and RZA for the next semester. It’s only natural, since we just talked to Alex Ross last month. Duh.

Just one more thing before I sign off: after I came home, I turned on the TV and saw that Karl Rove was on Charlie Rose (I’m sure the show is a re-run, though.) Poor Charlie was clearly agitated, trying to pin something on the guy. It was really too amusing to watch him hyperventilate. But the weirdest comment came during a moment when Rove was musing about his childhood days in Colorado. He admitted to being a nerd, and said that the fourth grade paper he wrote for his civics class was called “The Theory of Dialectical Materialism.” I thought perhaps the Promethazine shot I took for nausea was finally getting to my head. Or maybe it’s just another proof that the Hegel-Marx trajectory almost never ends up where you hope it would.

My daughter adores Radiohead’s In Rainbows, has to listen through it at least once a day. What does it mean when a toddler has dystopian sensibilities, craves for Thom Yorke’s doomsday falsetto Do you counter those tendencies with, what, like more fiber in her diet

A lot of people are talking about this album. I love it, too; in my personal rank of preference, it’s right behind Kid A, just ahead of The Bends. Many of my friends like the song “Bodysnatchers,” because - holy crap - Jonny Greenwood is actually back shredding on what sounds like a guitar. Some like the pretty, pretty “Reckoner,” or the Beatles-esque “Faust Arp” (the chord progressions in “FA” reminds me of Nick Drake, too.) I really like “Reckoner” and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” too. But my very favorite is the last track, “Videotape.”

In “Videotape,” piano loops its simple descent, steadily in common time, through A, C# minor and E. Thom Yorke sounds more like he’s channeling some dead, ancient chanter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead than any musician, especially when he starts humming in the b/g, reminiscent of the opening from “The Pyramid Song.” The opening lines, “When I’m at the pearly gates/this will be on my videotape,” are less affecting and chilling than the first time around, when I heard the words in a live version. But the song remains devastatingly effective, its spare lyrics matching up perfectly with the simple, insistent beats.

In the song, Thom Yorke sings that he can’t say goodbye face-to-face, but it’s all okay because he’s caught all the good, perfect moments and days “in red blue green.” For me, the sadness of the song comes through in that “red blue green” line. The perfect moments captured, and the consequent “everything’s-okay-now” contentedness disintegrate in the knowledge that, soon, in the “red blue green” simulacrum of happiness, the experience lived and captured will lose substance and meaning. The videotape will loop, ad infinitum, and the real memory will fade and erode until there’s just surface. The pathos of the present moment - “The most perfect day I’ll ever see” - will cease to last with the erosion of memory, too, and lose significance. Even at the cost of sounding like a jackass, I’d have to mention that the self-negating surface world captured in “Videotape” reminded me of the “englobed life” captured in Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait, seen through the distortion of a convex mirror, as described by John Ashbery as -

[a] gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything.

(From John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”)

Sasha Frere-Jones has a thought-provoking article in The New Yorker on how the American indie music lost its soul, mainly, its African roots. The symptoms are obvious, if you have been listening to the indie music lately: no syncopation or any “swing” in the beats, the thinness of playing in the lower registers. Sasha Frere-Jones is well aware that making such a claim stands at the risk of being accused of reductionism and essentialism, so he is careful to make his critique from a personal perspective; he was a member of a funk band, which must, of course, consider musical miscegenation as an important reference for music-making.

But you don’t have to be in a funk band to recognize that there is a strange enervation of rhythm and vitality in much of the indie music today. To play an emotionally honest, bluesy guitar solo in a song must be a cardinal sin, too. Personally speaking, I can’t get into that freak-folk shit at all. Devendra Banheart, Coco Rosie, et al. I also think that the indie wunderkind, Beirut, is annoyingly overrated; aside from some inspired stylistic “borrowings,” the music itself is pretty middling. I might get pilloried for this in Broooklyn, but as good as the Animal Collective and Panda Bear are, their music really doesn’t burrow into me to the core. Sasha Frere-Jones calls the indie scene today “precious,” and I think that word is just about right on how a lot of the indie bands sound these days.

Sasha Frere-Jones believes that the lack of musical miscegenation stems from the general social progress and the democratization of music (myspace, etc.) which renders the notion of “genre” a moot point. I believe that to a certain degree, but I think his assessment is near-sighted in that he claims that the intense musical criss-cross of borrowing, referencing and imitating, cannot happen today in this risk-averse world. I don’t think his prophesy will play out. I think the indie bands sound the way they do now, mainly because they’re not referencing James Brown or Muddy Waters anymore. Instead: Brian Wilson, and the folk artists from the 60’s, etc. (as S/FJ himself mentions.) It’s inevitable that these formative musical templates will change, and so, too, will the soundscape.

I think the focus in S/FJ’s article should be that the current absence of African influence in indie music is caused by the stylistic appropriation by today’s bands of different artists with a different set of aesthetic sensibilities. The mere fact that certain kinds of sound and influence are not present in music does not mean that the musical miscegenation has stopped in effect. More troubling, I think, is S/FJ’s view of this trend as a “segregation.” Although I agree with his diagnosis of what is sorely lacking in indie music today, I think S/FJ is overstating his case here. It turns his assessment, indeed, into a reductionist and essentialist claim. What is black music What is white music There is only one kind of music - the one that you appropriate and ultimately make your own, regardless of how “white” or “black” it sounds. Perhaps the best kind of model that I can think of for musical miscegenation was conjured by W. E. B. DuBois, who had imagined that the black people in America, with their sorrow songs, would rise up like Wagner’s Meistersingers and overtake the old vanguard. I mean, isn’t that what rock & roll is about, let alone miscegenation? No boundaries.

(Image by Anthony Goicolea)

Oh, the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk! Has it vanished by the way of extinct animals and New Coke Of course people would think of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Maybe Mahler’s symphonies for still others. In literature Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine or Proust or Tolstoy. What about the Gesamtkunstwerk of our own heroic century, you ask? Does it still exist? Yes. The R&B crooner-cum-sex criminal R Kelly’s multi-part Trapped in the Closet music videos represent a work of art so total and complex, that it merits a map according to the New York Times:

Readers keen on serendipities and coincidences might note that the name of the girl who cheats on the R Kelly narrator in Chapter 9 of Trapped In the Closet is Bridget; Bridget was Charles Lamb’s guise for his real sister Mary, as noted in my previous post. Not that this convergence means anything. It seems that the only reason R Kelly chose the name Bridget is that it rhymes with the man who’s hiding in the closet, who is a midget… midget… midget… midget. Anyhow, it seems that Andrew Kuo, who mapped out R Kelly’s saga, is a blogger who loves to chart and graph all kinds of trivial pop phenomena in eye-popping, cute colors. Thank you, Andrew, thanks a lot.

This Sunday’s NY Times looks really good. It has a profile of Ang Lee’s upcoming Lust, Caution, based on Eileen Chang’s short story with interesting observations from James Schamus, who adapted the story into film script. James Schamus will most likely appear in our Blue Notebooks interviews in the upcoming year, discussing Lust, Caution and other works he collaborated on with Ang Lee. It should be a great interview, considering Schamus is equally at home talking about Kant’s late philosophy in Critique of Judgement or John Ashbery’s poetry as he is in talking about the more pragmatic craft of filmmaking. Anyways, in the NY Times article, it almost sounds as if Ang Lee and James Schamus are pining for the NC-17 rating for their steamy picture. I’ll keep you posted.

Also, Mary Gordon, the subject of our interview a few months ago, has written a memoir of her mother called Circling My Mother, which receives a reverential review here. Oh, and the long profile of Saramago in the Sunday Mag. And Michael Lewis on New Orleans and the odds of calculating disasters.

I thought that occasional free lunches I got at some Columbia University functions were great. Better still were those sadly infrequent events which featured open bars (meaning cheap reds and whites, a few Miller Lites… Heinekens or Coronas when the stars are aligned). But hey, mama said knock you out: The Miller Theater is hosting a series of 18 concerts, FREE, held at the Philosophy Hall, through which the youthful Pacifica Quartet will be performing all of Beethoven’s quartets. Best of all, each concert is an hour-long affair held during lunchtime (12:30-1:30). Which means a Grosse Fuge before your Microecon exam! I will be going to all of them, and probably will be writing up each performance, despite my earlier pledge not to do any more concert reviews (because I am a liar). So see you there (bring a bottle).

The Pacifica will be performing one quartet per concert, from September to October, and from February to March. I like the concept, even the leisurely span of it. And one can’t really expect to squeeze more than one quartet into a lunch hour in an echo-y lounge of the Philosophy Hall which is sure to reek of greasy pizza and coffee, right It’s perfect. My only gripe is that the performances of the late quartets will be spread out over those long months. I don’t know about you, but I like to experience the last quartets as a suite. But did I mention the concerts were free

The rest of the Miller Theater Season looks really solid, too, even if they are not free. They are highlighting Esa Pekka Salonen (October 5) in their frequently great “Composer Portraits” series, although I don’t see that Salonen is making an appearance. But the exceptional Peter Lieberson will be present for an on-stage discussion following the February program; let’s just hope that Columbia won’t find a way to involve Robert Thurman into the discussion. (Those of you who are unfamiliar with Lieberson’s music, you can read a brief profile of him written by the always excellent Alex Ross here, and of his wife, the phenomenal - and much missed - Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs which were dedicated to her, here.) I’m sure I’ll also be going to the 10/27 Matthew Shipp concert and the 12/1 Christian McBride show.

Kudos to the Miller Theater staff for putting this season together.

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