Nearly-Were Records of 2008

There are three records I thought a lot about including in my best of list this year but didn’t make it. Fun, but will these be on the curriculum of music I force my children to memorize?

These are:

“Images of Sigrid” (Poni Hoax)

Dark, polished, sleazy French New Wave married to dark, polished, sleazy French Disco. In English.

“We Started Nothing” (The Ting Tings)

Bright, optimistic, catchy English electro dance pop. The chanteuse sings with a thick, quite hot British accent. This record really, really K.O.’d my expectations.

“Chemistry Of Common Life” (Fucked Up)

Extremely hard, extremely epic.

Top Records of 2008

By way of introduction, I present my most carefully considered and powerfully received records of 2008. In years past I have lamented the lack of a unifying artistic theme or musical style linking the exponentially multiplying number of artists the onset of distributed information and cheap personal computer recording has brought to the marketplace of ideas. In years past I have scolded (to very little, er, no effect) the masses, creative or otherwise, for settling into repetitions of pop forms of eras gone by, for shirking the creative and political responsibilities of the day by engaging in playful and harmless anachronistic feats of costume rock.

There is very little unifying my picks this year other than my taste, but the range of amazing recordings that emerged this year differs from years past. In the ever-accelerating slurry of mediocrity abetted by the availability of affordable recording equipment and distribution channels, those just-as-few as ever Shakespeares pushing along the whole project of civilization behind the confused, echolaliac hordes seem to have gotten a lot easier to hear.

Continue reading “Top Records of 2008” →

Aphasic Workshop: John Berryman & Things so Ghastly You Cannot Respond to Them Directly

“The More Sin Has Increast, the More Grace Has Been Caused to Abound”
John Berryman, the mysterious death of whose father haunted his fitful eruptions through faith, its loss, and the development of his poetic audacity preceded his ’72 suicide leap from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis with his birth in Oklahoma in 1914, a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and a National Book Award. He graduated from Columbia in ’36, garnered his graduate credentials from Cambridge and Princeton, and taught at Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton, Iowa, the University of Washington, and Cincinnatti before he settled into his long, wracked tenure in belles lettres in the employ of the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis in 1954.

His 77 Dream Songs, published in ’64, was the volume that fetched the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and the follow-up volume of poems in his dream song cycle, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (’68) won for him the National Book Award.

Berryman’s Dream Songs were worked in a multiply lonely idiom of changing faces and voices whose true identities were at times fluid and difficult to pinpoint. Confounding in the face of the assumption of time’s linear passage, John Berryman’s poetry describes an open circuit of life as one endless dream. It is a dream wherein time is perforated by warrens of back-tracing corridors. Protagonist Huffy Henry House’s sullen solitude is suffused with somnolent feel as, committed to transforms and assumed roles, he cycles through many of the poems and new accidents of trouble having already died. Throughout his game of shapeshifting and suffering, taking leisure and forcing it (or mocking it), he is engaged in a conversation with an unnamed interlocutor referring to him as Mr. Bones, a conversation partner who may very well just be another figment of his own personality.

There is a thread running through the Dream Songs of learnéd criticism bound to be ignored. The poems are infused with the voice of a Lost Generation poet defeated before he makes his own glory, defeated by the legacy of poetic giants the likes of Eliot and Pound, and by the accelerating disingenuousness and misdirecting insanity of his century- his century that moved from one atrocity to the next in a blind panic to dispose of all unifying narratives, as though in the hope it could rid itself once and for all of the one narrative that fuels the gaining, encroaching accusing blame and recompense the 20th century will demand in unrelenting perpetuity.

Above it all, the Dream Songs are infused with the voice of a poet steeped in scholarship and technical capability bolstering a spectacularly daring talent.

Continue reading “Aphasic Workshop: John Berryman & Things so Ghastly You Cannot Respond to Them Directly” →

Last Night I Dreamed of Hurricanes

The house didn’t belong to my grandmother, is how I imagined I would start to tell someone as I stood staring at the old, discolored wallpaper, at cracks in old plaster walls in this composite house in my dream, but that was the reason I was there. That it had belonged to my grandmother, whose house has long been sold and which, to my clinging, nostalgic sorrow, I won’t ever find myself in again. It was on an island, and we were, both the family who had been there and who was expected in a few days, going over it to make sure we had saved all those artifacts whose sense memory would link us to our pasts.

The island was very small, and the hurricane was sudden. The grey wall of the sea reared a mile high or more than a mile offshore, and I was sure we would be lost. The tide moved from the front to the back of the house that was not my grandmother’s house, as I have said, but was intended to be, even though it was a composite of many houses. Water rushed through the empty living room that the front door opened on, and out the back door of the empty kitchen. It was not my grandmother’s first story, it was my mother’s, but that’s not important. I finally thought to shutter the doors and went out back. The Japanese open air cafe under the house was in full swing. The weather was not good, the wall of water stood there as though built of bricks just offshore, but the Japanese were calm, taking their oddly flavored pizzas and drinks. I, too, became more comfortable with the impending doom that may or may not visit, and walked down to the line where the soil gave way to sandy beach to stand and watch the water standing up as though it thought it was a man.

Motorik

[singlepic=1,320,240,watermark,]

11.18.08 Music Hall of Williamsburg

The Secret Machines’ Josh Garza.

Simple Visions

Muscle memory kept Ilya the driver beautiful. He lifted a finger, set the cruise control, answered his cell phone, made the rare use of his turn signal, and his tissue reciprocated magically with new and fabulous striations, rich grains whose alluring strength was uncontained by the suit coat he wore. The eyes of passengers find health and strength like wizards will find water in desert countries where it sits below an inconsequential surface, and the chauffeur was iconic of health and well-being. He held his clientele in the hypnotic sway of either attraction or fearful respect.

for fifteen years, fifteen hours a day he shuttled humans to or back from the airports over the uneven pavement that could hardly be called a proper road, over the seemingly randomly channeled spread of concrete and asphalt divided by temporary concrete rails in new patterns daily, like frost on an airplane window, that crept outward from the unnatural, growing concrete and glass metropolitan crystal garden on the island whose new facets of poured stone and hung glass, that slowest of fluids, he kept framed either in his windshield or in his rear-view mirror. It was a quiet life free of unexpected disappointments he never had to call on his vast strengths to vanquish.

The day he picked up the old nun he was unable to fasten the cuffs on his sleeves. On the third try He gave up on pushing the cuff links through the holes, and when he opened the drawer to replace them on his dresser 3 spiders, each with three stripes on their bellies in the shape of a cross, or a sword, or a crosshairs, made for the corners. He picked up his keychain, holding 3 keys, and left the house.

He arrived three minutes early and, as he was waiting, denied three calls for a pickup in the area. The convent where he picked the nun up was situated on a triangle of land between ill-planned roads, and the front door was on a small porch the old woman had to descend three steps from as she was bade adieu by two other ascetics.

The nun gave him a strange and long look as he lifted her three traveling bags into the trunk of his car, the last of which was unusually heavy. The trunk took three attempts to close. He had three quarters of a tank of gas left.

“That last bag was a heavy one,” he remarked when they had gotten underway.

“It contains the Word.” She replied. Ilya’s mind told him it must just be some devotional fervor that made her response so strange, that it was just religious stuff, but he couldn’t shake the chill that ran down his spine. The rest of the journey was spent in an understandable silence.

She had asked him to take her to an airfield whose name he did not know, but he did not think it was strange until later, until he had been thinking on all the events of the day after the fact.

When he had left her at the funny little airport, alone somewhere far away on Long Island with nothing surrounding it, he stopped for lunch and found that she had left the heaviest bag in his trunk. Somehow he had forgotten to remove it.

He finished his lunch and pointed his car toward the convent to return the bag to his passenger’s cohort, but the windows were dark and, like so many specimens of bungalow architecture, in the building’s eerie vacancy had taken on the mien of eyes seeing for a strange and timeless mind. There was no answer when he arrived.

He brought the car with the bag in it back to his home, where he hefted it with great struggle up the stairs and into his apartment. He set it down beside his computer, which he turned on to check his email and Facebook messages. With dismay at the difficulties he was being forced to surmount, he let the bag fall open, and a large flash drive in the shape of a casket that said “Facebook” on it fell out onto the floor. It was fully large enough to fit a man of his size.

Without thinking, he let his curiousity get the better of him and he lifted the giant vessel to the USB port of his desktop computer. It slid in and mounted and, as it did, the casket opened.

Ilya climbed inside.

Kurt Wagner Gets Tiny

Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner did a tiny desk concert for NPR’s All Songs Considered last month October 8, I was this evening delighted to learn.

Yours On All Counts

Amid offhand pissing contests, stories about the more unbearable depression, there you were in the canopy, languid amid the apples of my eyes. When I saw you I told you,

“Seeing you is like hearing bells ringing.”

All you were willing to try was refilling my coffee, was trading a tale of unromantic origins.

You and I fell from the same mold, this is what I was thinking.

“You and I were shipped to the same big box retail giant, Saran-wrapped into the same forklifted pallet, returned in the same consumer recall, implicated in the same class action lawsuit,”

Is what I said.

You weren’t not unsure of how to respond, but you also just didn’t seem concerned while I remained conscious of my elephant gun clumsiness, my proletarian design features, my reaching for an acceptably unhaughty demonstration of the goodwill toward couture while still remaining able to stay in touch with my relatives.

No more coffee, no more small talk, all this caffeine and frustrated ambition makes me fart, and I want to control the airs I put on for you. You, who sit in disdain of all effort as you foil me.

“If this is really all there is, if that is the case,” you say with a tired heft of your eyelashes, “I wish you’d say something to me that doesn’t already contain its own end. I wish you’d stop chasing your tail and match the universe with your ambition. You’re not giving me anything to hold on to, and being cruel and being kind have in common that they can only go so far. I’m becoming irritated at embodying your clichés. I wish you’d tell me your own stories.”

Alright.

“I quit,” Is what I say as I stand up. “I’ll meet you when your shift is over and we’ll change our names so our last paychecks can never reach us.”

“I’ll never be able to serve you coffee again.” You pretend to be saddened to inform me.

“I’ll never have to build time for longing into my day again.”

“Yes,” you say, “You’re getting it. Now tell me again about bells ringing. Now I’ll know it’s true.”

2666

“2666: A Novel” (Roberto Bolano)

I followed them: I saw them go down Bucareli to Reforma with a spring in their step and then cross Reforma without waiting for the lights to change, their long hair blowing in the excess wind that funnels down Reforma at that hour of the night, turning it into a transparent tube or an elongated lung exhaling the city’s imaginary breath. Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren’t stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

-Auxilio Lacouture, speaking in Bolaño’s Amulet

Bolaño’s really big last hurrah began to regale the retinas of English-reading humans the world over on the 7th, when 2666 was unveiled to the tune of free booze, party crashing, and the kind of literary elbow-rubbing that hasn’t been available to the salon set since Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg. My 898-page copy of the volume sits ensconced in portent on my bookshelf as I try to get a few other in-progress volumes out of the way. The definitive article on this rare auteur who spent is life dancing in intimate proximity (close fighting) with the many faces of his only fellow combatant, life, remains here at The New York Review of Books.

However, for those who are in a hurry, the short version is thus: Bolaño was a Chilean who had moved to Mexico in his youth, returning to Chile right before Pinochet’s coup, where he was jailed for left-wing activities. He was recognized by a guard who had been boyhood schoolmate and released. Without that fortuitous intervention of fate, the writer would more than likely have met his end long before any of his books had been written.

2666 is a sprawling 5-volume work spanning the demarcations of geography, the echelons of culture, and the many-fathomed spaces composing the convoluted machinations of human cruelty. Bolaño, a sufferer from Hepatitis C, the result of a heroin addiction, and a poet who began writing fiction in earnest as a means to provide for his family, envisioned 2666 as a serial, the release of each volume spaced so as to afford his family the maximum benefit of the proceeds from sales in his definitively foretold absence. Following his death, his estate decided that the first printing of the book should be released in a single volume to preserve the coherence of the massive text.

I don’t want to commit more than a few words here to call attention to this writer who made a simply powerful entrance into my life in the last year or so. I haven’t read this newest book yet, but few authors have moved me like this one. A writer who was willing to admit that “literature is basically a dangerous calling” (check out the entirety of his Caracas Speech), he spoke straight and unflinching to the heart of human matters, be they boring, vile, obscenely beautiful, or entirely forgettable.

Roundup