jane dark's sugarhigh!

The Song Remains Different (+ Ann Powers)

Bruce Robison is a nice guy, albeit married to Kelly Willis, which makes it hard to like him. He wrote the best song ever about ambivalent sibling relations, "My Brother and Me." His brother is Charlie Robison, whose music I don't like quite as much, and who is the husband of Emily from Dixie Chicks.

All of which probably explains how the song "Travelin' Soldier," written by Bruce Robison last milllennium, came to appear on the Dixie Chicks' August 2002 release.

It was a good song on Long Way Home From Anywhere, and it's a great song on Home, the three voices moving in and out of unison in a song stuctured by the invention of absolute loneliness. The song has has only gotten better as times have gotten worse; yesterday morning, it was heartbreaking.

Are there fewer good songs about Vietnam, or poems? The latter, I suspect, since I can never summon any of the former other than "Witchita Vortex Sutra." As for the latter, there are at least two, and perhaps a dozen -- the argument about whether one addresses immediate social reality through form or content comes to a head not in Barrett Watten's serial introjections on the matter, but in Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner" (scroll down to find an audio file here) which may indeed be the most ironic cover ever performed.

Click on the link below to read Ann Powers' Critical Karaoke-ation of "Alfie," by Johnny Mathis.

When I was two, Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote “Alfie” as the title theme for a quite nasty Michael Caine comedy about a Lothario who lays waste to the women of Swinging London. I discovered it later, at ten or so, around the same time I learned the word “existentialism” from a blurb on a paperback copy of Camus’ The Stranger. I tried to digest that story of killing an Arab, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t need to: “Alfie” taught everything about life’s beautiful meaninglessness.

It’s a standard, you must admit -- recorded by hundreds of varying talents, a hit for Cher, Cilla Black AND Dionne Warwick, most recently revived in a Brie-rich interpretation by Ronald Isley. Bacharach says it’s his favorite, and why not. He broke all the pop rules here, or rather, he rewrote them in the style of his first love, the art songs of composers like Darius Milhaud. “Alfie” has no chorus, no refrain really, just an elegantly arcing melody made to be swathed in gossamer strings, a structure as natural as the heart’s pumping, its swells always tempered by an inward pull.

And then there are the words. Hal David has said he wrote them in the voice of one of Alfie’s conquests, the docile romantic played in the film by Paul McCartney’s cast-off girlfriend Jane Asher. But to me “Alfie” is a man’s song, a philosophical statement about the futililty and irresistible purposefulness of romance, the sad refrain of another Camus character, Sisyphus, as he ascends hope’s hill and tumbles down, the eternal believer feeling the rock of human limitation against his shoulder. “His fate belongs to him,” wrote Camus of his tragic hero, and “Alfie” makes the same statement for any lover, revealing passion not as the teen-age outburst of so much pop but as an adult choice, a weary willingness to buy the dream.

The version of “Alfie” I heard as a child was this one by Johnny Mathis, and that was my luck -- the reason I sensed that this was a song into which I could grow. Mathis captures the weltschmerz of “Alfie” better than anyone – his entire career has been a study of restraint, as a tease, a mask and a promise, and here, working within the exquisite constraints of Jack Gold’s production, he turns inward to confront the costs of such self-posession. Holding the song’s climactic note, Mathis enters that space when Sisyphus walks down the mountain and becomes genuinely alive. “Without true love we just exist,” the lyrics shout, but Mathis finally tempers his ardor, “convinced,” as Camus writes, “of the wholly human origin of all that is human.” “What’s it all about?” Such unanswerables carry us through life, like “Alfie’s” melody, which ends like question, unresolved and longing to be asked, to be heard, again and again.

Hed Spin (+ Elizabeth Mendez Berry)

On the same day that the RIAA sues 477 more of their customers, CNN's online edition features an article titled Study: Legal fears changing landscape for music downloaders. It says this in really big letters.

There are literally thousands of very small letters underneath the hed. And honestly, I felt I had every right to expect those letters (which I took time out of my very busy day in order to read) would say something like, oh, people are downloading less because they are afraid of being sued.

The data which inspired the headline was that, of the people who had stopped downloading over that period, a bunch of them said it was legal fears that made them stop. That's an interesting, if not exactly shocking, pseudofact. I guess. The article attempts to frame this info to justify the headline: "The change in usage patterns comes against the backdrop of the recording industry's campaign against unauthorized swapping of music files. Many of the resulting lawsuits have led to settlements of thousands of dollars each. Legally, recording labels can demand $150,000 per song for copyright infringement."

Italics mine, unpaid advertisement for RIAA's power and authority theirs.

"Changing landscape"? "Change in usage"? You bet. If you take time out of your busy day to read all these minuscule letters, you will discover that the poll CNN has used indicates that folks are downloading more: "the number of users who say they do download music jumped to 23 million, compared with 18 million in a similar survey that Pew did in November-December 2002." That's about a 28% increase in downloading over less than a year and a half. The hed, and as much of the article's lnaguage as could be warped, would like you to believe something else entirely, despite an absence of supporting facts.

In far more human and cheering matters, click on the link immediately below to see a photo (courtesy Ann Powers) from Elizabeth Mendez Berry's breathtaking Critical Karaoke performance of "Yo Me Llamo Cumbia," by Leonor Gonzales Mina -- a performance which involved cultural history, personal attachment, and fearless salsa stylings.

Revisiting a theory of irony, or "Less Rock More Talk" (+ Joshua Clover)

I'm going to assume that modernism changed enough that it became useful to have a whole different word for the art-cultural moment, albeit different in each particular circumstance and place, yadda yadda yadda. This assumption is pretty much like calling espresso with steamed milk a "latte" even though it's still mostly coffee -- except, what the hell, I'm fitna use the word postmodernism. If this raises your henna hackles, halt.

Morevoer, I'm going to accept as a contingent axiom that the various qualities of postmodernism often have to with effacements and distortions of the singular power of the individual maker-of-stuff to impose from above meaning and order which travels down unto a host of receivers-of-stuff below. So I graciously include Angry Penguins, immanent critique, "the Death of the Author," deconstruction, sampling, Orlan, "the fragment," Barbie Liberation Front, and mislabeled mp3s in GnutellaLand, without suggesting that any of this is good or bad, or offers a scope for the category, or that any of these things cast down the primacy of consumer capitalism in the western world. And...onward.

"Irony" is generally adduced to postmodernism, and it makes sense within the terms just presented, it being a kind of undercutting of the author's claim on coherent assertion, and/or a presentation of language as always-already quoted, as being in prime reference to other language rather than the intentions of the speaker.

But what of ironic covers? You know, the rockin' mettallic dirtying of some piece of sentimental hygiene, the lounge'd version of Disturbed, Dynamite Hack's sweetly harmonized remake of Boys In the Hood? Each of these does a different kind of reframing of the original song and everything requires special delicate shadings and niceties so please don't send me an email explaining this (but do send me an email about what flowers are in bloom near you as April ends!)

Now I'm not one of those nitwits who thinks that covers, because they involve doing something someone else already did and yet have existed for centuries, somehow prove that there's no such thng as postmodernism. What I want to suggest is that the particular form of irony we'll call "cover irony" is indeed deeply relevant to the postmodern, but often as a counter-strategy. That is to say, by producing a form which refuses the literal meanings of the original lyrics and/or/via a shift in the understood emtoional tenor of the original sounds (Frente's "Bizarre Love Triangle" would one example), it's a strong assertion of, rather than an effacement of, authorial power. Irony is a way of controlling meaning in a circumstance where meaning is already rich. It needn't displace the previous meaning to function this way; it simply needs to show a new meaning there. (Even respectful or simpy usurious covers have the function of celebrating and thus securing the singular meaning of the original and thus are, differently, counter-strategies to postmodernism)

This explains why there are so many fewer covers of Nirvana than one would expect (I don't, in the end, find Tori Amos's "Teen Spirit" ironic in the slightest, unlike her Eminem et al). The meanings of those songs retain their crawling ambuguity, their facbric whipping around like flags in a gale with sigils that cannot be made out; they have yet to still into fixed screens on which a new meaning can be projected. Nirvana remains, for the moment, not so much unduplicable as undisplaceable (they can be, however, colluded with -- but this is the exact opposite of a counter-strategy; it's postmodernism in the purest form of its impurity).

This leads to another contingent axiom: the postmodern era supposes the production of communication will occur on a surface already coated in prior communication, abandoning the model of creation into a void.

Click the link below for Joshua Clover's analogic EMP celebration of Freelance Helllraiser's "Smells Like Booty."

When I was younger and more of a supergenius I used to try to have sex on ecstasy. Two pleasures at once! Which is sort of the modern dream: none of that rustic purity, but instead, dealing with the new world of excess: excess pleasure, excess commodities, excess stuff.

But I couldn’t come and this got frustrating. It got frustrating and abstract and my mind would slip away into really ferocious geometrical hallucinations.

They were something like Venn diagrams where the two areas overlapped almost entirely, or maybe like looking at something cross-eyed so the image splits. But even more separate: like there would be one shape over here, and the other over here. These shapes, I understood vaguely, were the two pleasures, like two signals you are trying to tune in at once, and as long as the two signals don’t quite match up, there’s a fuzziness, and there’s a frustration.

So there I am, fucking on ecstasy and having these RISD hallucinations and periodically wondering what’s going on for my partner and then flipping back into the visuals, and if it’s all...working, then the two shapes start moving. Actually, only one moves -- because the ecstasy pleasure is pretty steady, and pretty bright, I am pretty high -- so this one is moving, they are starting to grow congruent, and I am aware, somewhere in the near distance, that if the shapes match up exactly then I’m going to come and even though I am very distracted by the shapes and the ecstasy and the weird things the lights are doing, well, I really want to come.

This is not thinking. Every time I try to think it gets lost. This is just trying to match up two shapes. If they match up I am going to have this harmonious excellent experience.

It mostly eluded me. But it turned out to be a powerful analogy for a lot of my experience, living where I live, at this time. It’s easy to joke about 500 channels and nothing on, but it’s exciting and it’s the world. It can be overwhelmiing and threatening -- the postmodern sublime. A lot of it’s stupid and a lot of it’s pleasure and sometimes these overlap. There is too much going on, not just in terms of stimulation but signal, there is excess, and the labor of consciousness is not to screen stuff out, but to make the compelling and intense signals all be audible at once, exactly so that you don’t have to exclude this for that, rob the signals of Peter to pay for the signals of Paul.

It’s a dream I find myself having all the time. When I am miserable, the world narrows down to a few points. When I am ecstatic, it’s not about purity or simplicity, but excess possibility. The air is howling with signal. In the slightest case, I think it’s the ecstasy of the shopper, consuming more, and more efficiently. In the most philosophical case, I think it’s the escape from seriality, from the clock’s grim rule that first you do this -- and then you do that -- and then....finally you can tune in two, three, a dozen stations at once. Most immediately it’s living in the world, this world, with the static and the excess briefly clarified, the signs falling into an intense and surprising relation, though inevitably it’s a new order.

Less Talk More Rock (+ Franklin Bruno)

I have friends who see psychics, I have friends with life coaches, and me, I take advice from AM radio.

You pay them money, and eventually they say the very thing that gives you permission to do what you wanted to do all along, at a more or less conscious level. And you never have to admit that you were never not going to do that, that you never had autonomy.

Policy change: the new meaning of the word "discourse" will be any thing that allows social choices to appear as something other than ideological.

In this, it resembles the old meaning of discourse rather closely.

Click below to read Franklin Bruno's breathless excursus on the Urinals' 60-second chant "Ack Ack Ack Ack," the most stuttering ode to an avant-European cinematic auteur ever.

In 1987, an early version of Nothing Painted Blue was the only band at the Claremont Colleges not covering "Cocaine,” "Sweet Home Alabama,” and half a dozen Eagles songs.

On the rare occasions we were hired for frat parties, we had a standing policy of playing this song, The Urinals two-chord, one-minute readymade "Ack Ack Ack Ack," whenever anyone yelled for "Freebird." On some nights, this meant we played it five or six times in a set, before everyone got the idea -- which was just fine with us.

In fact, sometimes we'd practice at night in a hallway near some dormitory bathrooms.We’d wait for students to wander in, especially drunk ones, and hold our fire for a while. The moment we saw the bathroom door open, we’d count off the song, and watch 'em scatter like roaches.

This was also the period when I would stand on stage and grate cheese over the crowd, and into their flat beers, while the rhythm section vamped, in place of a guitar solo.

I no longer advocate these particular ways of alienating neighbors, audiences, and potential friends. I’ve found other coping mechanisms, sonic and otherwise. But the rules only said you had to think it was the best song ever, not that you had to be the best person when you did.

Praise Chorus (+ Ange Mlinko)

The keynote talk at the EMP conference was pleasing and educational.

Sarah Vowell is working on presidential assassinations; it's an interesting pursuit, and she is always incisive and witty. She had along with her one Jon Langford, allowing for some musical divagations that ranged from the charming (Jon and Sarah duetting on a forgotten Johnny Cash assassinationist's lament; sheesh, Cash is sure fixated on the scene of the condemned man waking on gallows day) to the sublime (Jon singing the schoolyard classic "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school").

Therein lies what Shakespeare calls the rub. Sarah’s sort-of-musicological but mostly historical-cultural and mostly fascinating narration of the evolution of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" began with her evocation of the song’s use on a national and international stage immediately after September 11, 2001. Very New Yorker house style, starting with the contemporary tableau vivant before racing back to the beginning of the tale, when the machine that will get us to that tableau is first set in motion.

I remember the days after 9/11 as filled with fear, media exhaustion, and anger. But also a kind of discomfiting excitement; meanings seemed once again up for grabs. For a period, the republic was a land of opportunity. It was a land of opportunity for a President and his cadre to take up the terrible swift sword of righteousness for their own ends, for a New American Century.

At the end of her presentation, Sarah asked everyone assembled in the EMP's "Sky Church" to stand and sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That's what the song is for, after all, at least per Sarah's hypothesis: singing as democracy, the body politic constituting itself as body through collective voice. But given the song’s story, and the story Sarah herself told with such uncritical economy and grace, she couldn’t help but be asking us to stand for the transcendental collapse of the Lord, the military, and the bottom line into a single point.

Some people do not wish to stand for that America (though some have no choice). Moreover, some people do not stand for the phrase "glory glory hallelujah," under any circumstances.

Kids changed it to "...the burning of the school" because they have already learned to resent institutional domination, and they are not interested in the coming of the Lord. They and we have better things to do with our collective rage and despair. And peace to everyone who stayed down for this moment; I didn't note each person, but certainly Raquel Cepeda and Jon Caramanica. It is out of respect for Greil Marcus, whom I was sitting next to, that I didn’t spit, as any of the figures whom I most admire (many of whom I learned about from Greil) would have done without hesitation; I apologize for my failure.

Click on the link below to read Ange Mlinko's deep-as-the-Marianas Trench descent into the song "Walltz #2" by Elliott Smith.

When Elizabeth Peyton paints the young men that come into her ken—both through her social circles and magazine photos—and turns them even more red-lipped and dreamy-eyed and lithe, the question critics ask (in strict denial of the obvious) is “Elizabeth, why do you paint these attractive guys?” And in response, she says something along the lines of, “Because they live a Beautiful Life that inspires me.” That sounds either very Third-Century C.E., if you’re a Neo-Platonist scholar, or very 1960s trust fund Bohemia. But I think she is talking about Autonomy, that which Beauty underwrites for itself. Money is one of the least interesting ways of guaranteeing it. Take her early portraits of Napoleon: autonomy for him meant no less than conquering Europe and crowning himself king. But as Belle and Sebastian sing, “If my family tree goes back to Napoleon / Then I will change my name to Smith.”

“Now I’m a crushed credit card registered to Smith / Not the name that you call me with,” replies Elliott Smith. Supposedly, I’m here to explain why “Waltz #2 (XO)” once occurred to me as the Greatest Song Ever, and avoid either reliance on the ineffable (e.g., it’s just a transcendent melody!) or the literary (e.g., I’m doing critical karaoke on a song about karaoke, in which Smith deftly imbeds song titles to tell the backstory for him. Clever!). So one of the reasons is how I experienced it the first time I heard it: Live, 8 months before the record came out, in a tiny packed bar with a handmade ticket for an almost secret show. And the last time I had seen him there had been only 40 people or so in the audience—he was practically an unknown. This, to me, was privilege. I was in grad school, hiding out from the world, eking out my meager stipend in the presumptuous, not to mention anachronistic, role of Poet. I was living a Beautiful Life.

It’s the chorus, of course. [In sync with song:] “I’m never gonna know you now, but I’m gonna love you anyhow.” For an audience who imagined the very insiderness of this show to be a privilege, the outsiderness of the lyrics heightened the glow. (The moebius strip logic of indie scenesterism is obvious that way.) But the chorus speaks to the fan at large. Smith is reverse karaoke-ing my desire. He designed the song to be sung back to him. Not because he’s the beautiful boy as depicted in an Elizabeth Peyton painting of his photograph. But because he gave us a little present, just a little song, out of some otherworldly luck and an understanding that in the long run, in the big picture, it means almost nothing.

This is my bid for the ineffable beauty of the song, where ineffable beauty is the embodiment of Autonomy—[In sync with song:] “the place where I make no mistakes” being as good a description of ineffable beauty or autonomy as any I could come up with. Opting out of the top 40 contest and a historical narrative of technical innovation, refusing to make millions of dollars or reach millions of people, it strives for the opposite, in fact—reaching just a few, almost no one, really. To have faith in that is quixotically the Beautiful Life, devotion on the scale of [In sync with song:] “I’m never gonna know you now, but I’m gonna love you anyhow” epitomizing the poet in love with poetry (in its twilight, in its afterhour), and maintaining an eternal eligibility on its behalf

Wigger Parking Lot (+ Greil Marcus)

Having found Neuma's closed down, we found our way to Re-Bar, where Scream Club had already screamed. But somehow -- I believe it was Julianne's imprecations -- they agreed to recapitulate their show. Having driven down from Olympia, they had a car stereo handy, which provided the backing tracks, appropriately booming and distorted. We all smuggled our drinks out to the parking lot. Ange arrived with suitcase; always have the airport taxi drop you off at a seedy bar after midnight. Oliver got photos; sadly, no notational nor notional device can capture the splendid absurdity and pleasure of the event, the sense that the You Had To Be There meter had just blossomed red. Or in the case of the wigs, pink.

Click the link immediately below to read a revelatory four-minute feature on "More Than This," as performed by Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music and Bill Murray, as performed by Greil Marcus.

Byran Ferry is a god, and Roxy Music was his court. As a stylist—and that’s what he is, not an icon, not a performer, not Lesley Gore, not Bob Dylan, people he would love to be—or to have been—no one touches him, just as no one touches Neil Young. They have their own styles. Their styles are narrow, so much so that they can seem merely self-referential.

Maybe so. “More Than This,” from Roxy Music’s “Avalon,” from 1982, twenty-two years ago that can feel like last night, summed up everything the band’s style ever implied, everything it ever wanted. “More Than This” is the essence of the story the band told, and at least half of the story Ferry always meant to tell—no, you can’t fit his version of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” into “More Than This.”

It begins with Phil Manzanera’s high-stepping guitar, and then Bryan Ferry on a swing, pumping slowly, going just a foot higher with each pass—all you can do is sigh. All you can do is shake your head, that anything could be so perfect.

Now, this is my karaoke number because I love it. When asked to pick a song this popped into my head without a thought. But after I chose it, I realized that behind that choice really was karaoke—Bill Murray in a Tokyo karaoke bar singing “More Than This” in “Lost and Translation.” For this moment, anyway, the title of the movie is strange: in this moment, every word is enunciated, singled out as a thing in itself, made plain: every word is exposed. You realize that the man Bill Murray is playing, in his attempt to seduce the woman played by Scarlett Johanssen, in his attempt to seduce himself, to convince himself that he is still sexually alive, cannot afford to miss, even to elide, a single word. The song is the truth; in this moment, the only way Muray’s character can imagine telling the truth is literally. But the truth of “More Than This” is anything but literal; the truth of the song is that to remake the song as fact is to show how afraid of the song you really are.

For me anyway, after twenty-two dissolving years of listening to the tune, Bill Murray’s halting, heartfelt version was a shock: the shock of discovering that “More Than This” has words. Lyrics.

Absolutely terrible lyrics, on the order of “Castles in the sky/ Castles made of sand/ You and I will last forever/ My ring upon your hand.” You hear not a word of this when Bryan Ferry sings the words that he himself wrote.

More than this—nothing. Those are the words to “More Than This.” As far as I’m willing to go, that is the complete lyric.

Roxy Music’s “More Than This” is a drift, a float. The sounds coming out of Ferry’s mouth, except for the chorus, when the whirlpool is stopped, when it’s centered, when he steps out as if to make a speech, are a golden smear.

Four minutes and fifteen seconds long, the song begins to fade after two minutes and thirty-two seconds. You hear “More than this—nothing”—and then Phil Manzanera, who has simply been counting off the rhythm behind Ferry, play his solo. It’s maybe eleven bent blues notes—there and gone in under three seconds. It is the most elegant and ephemeral distillation of the guitar solo, any guitar solo, imaginable, and it brings up a question. What is a guitar solo? What happens when the singer steps back and gives the song—its themes, its argument, its imagery, its story—to a musician?

What happens is the admission that certain things can’t be said in words, but they can be said. Almost always, when this happens in a song, there’s a sudden thrill, a catch in the heart—even if what follows is bland, blank, time and no more than time.

That summer

If I know you (and I believe we have at least a passing familiarity, having seen each other around town that summer the cicadas seemed to have forgotten everything they are accused of knowing), you are wondering whether you can consolidate your six or seven Carly CDs into the new Reflections: Carly Simon's Greatest Hits.

Almost. Carly is arguably the finest of the Phoni Mitchells, and the top nine here, from "That's The Way I've Always Heard It should Be" through "You Belong To Me" make a slow, languourous offer that's pretty hard to refuse.

After that, the disc promises nothing and delivers, which is itself informative about how thin the Joniesque movement was; I should run the numbers, but suspect the Next Bob Dylans included five artists with at least ten fine songs, especially if you include Bruce Springsteen and Ani DiFranco.

This collection is wise enough to include "Nobody Does It Better" on the front end; it is, indeed, one of the three best Bond sndtrk songs ever (with -- I'm sorry Ms. Bassey -- "For Your Eyes Only" and "Live And Let Die"). What breaks the disc's heart is the absence of "Boys In The Trees," a failure about which one can only throw up one's hands (and it's not a label issue; songs from that record appear here). So, in short, after you've downloaded a quality mp3 of "Boys," you can trot down to the store and trade in your Carly Simon discs to your heart's content.

While you're acquiring said file online (not against the law: sharing is controlled, downloading is free, man, in Paris), pick yourself up Tori Amos's live version, which ranks among her very best soft rock covers, matched only by "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her."

Best Smokey Robinson song of last 30 years

"I Wanna Get Next To You"
Rose Royce (Whitfield)

Habitude (+ Oliver Wang)

One of the loveliest moments at the EMP Pop Music Conference was something someone muttered.

During a lively conversation excavating the 1973 Bronx gang truce as a pre-history of hip-hop, former Ghetto Brothers boss Benjy Melendez mentioned he had briefly attended PS 133. "Westside up," Jeff Chang rejoined, unhesitatingly, as he started to formulate a gently leading question about the history in question.

In that lack of hesitation is a world. Upping your partner's turf is a longstanding tradition (one thinks of Viking toasts -- and the Greeks too, while we're at it) that's been with hip-hop since the beginning, but isn't necessarily naturalized these days -- even a little old school. But Jeff, who represents the West Coast (up!) and Hawai'i, not only felt the tradition, but knew exactly where 133 fell on the New York map.

In this moment, scholarship and social commitment fell together perfectly. The idea that studies somehow separate one out from lived culture, so quietly prevalent, became an insupportable hater's fantasy right then. And respect to Jeff Chang, who is so deep in the game, he doesn't even play.

A few minutes later, Benjy blew Bob Christgau back in his chair by explaining he was a Marrano Jew, always had been. I think Daphne Brooks and I high-fived.

Over the next few days, I'll be posting (in the raw form sent to me) a few of the short talks panelists wrote for Critical Karaoke, starting with Oliver Wang's elegant brief on Betty Davis's "Anti-Love Song": click the link below.

I first heard Betty Davis when I found her album “Nasty Gal.” On it, she’s decked out in black fishnet stockings, her legs kicked out in an aggressive dare and within moments of listening to her, she owned me. Partly, it was her voice, swinging from a seductive lilt to a jagged dagger in the blink of a bar. It was also her music, this tidal force of funk, rock and blues that could spin you dizzy or drag you in deep. Mostly though, it was her attitude – as brash and proud as her Afro, lit by the spark of youth but powered by the proverbial fury of a woman scorned. Betty Davis didn’t sing love songs, she sung anti-love songs, but even her whispered warnings about her cruelty and cattiness couldn’t stop you from falling for her. In the space of a song, Betty could make you crawl, make you sweat and before you knew it, she held the deed to your soul.
Most of what I initially found about Betty was just mere footnote – she was known more by her married surname than as an artist in her own right. Born Betty Mabry, she’s the Mademoiselle Mabry that Miles Davis composed about and her face adorns Miles’ Filles De Kiliminjaro album. The two, separated in age by 25 years, were only married for a year but in that time, she’s credited with introducing Miles to Jimi Hendrix, who was Betty’s friend and rumored lover. Considering Miles’ famed fusions between rock and jazz, one has to think of Betty as the bewitching inspiration behind his Bitches Brew but more than just a former First Lady of Jazz, she was also a Queen Mother of funk. Betty Davis was the missing link between Marva Whitney and Parlet, Nina Simone and the Brides of Funkenstein, not to mention the inspiration behind more recent funk fatales like Macy Gray, and Kelis. However, unlike female mouthpieces for male producers and songwriters like James Brown and George Clinton, Betty wrote and arranged every song on all three of her albums and produced two herself. As she says on the title of her second album, They Say I’m Different.
Miles once said of his ex-wife that with more support and better luck, she could have been as big as Madonna and in retrospect, she had all the markings to be a huge star. Her photogenic image and flamboyant personality preceded Diana Ross’ disco diva conversion while predicting Tina Turner’s 1980s comeback. But far more than a pretty face and big hair, I was drawn to Betty for her striking songwriting, musical breadth and most of all, her blend of sass and seduction. I long adored the sentimental soul stylings of Aretha Franklin and Etta James but where they emoted, Betty inflicted. In her, I hear the wrenching misery of the gut bucket blues but Betty pours it out through funk’s cathartic energy. She tackles love and lust by shaking out frustrations and fantasies in a tremble of slapping bass lines, serrated guitar riffs, jabbing drum breaks and her own scratchy voice.
Her song titles alone - “If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up”, “Nasty Gal”, and “Game Is My Middle Name” made it clear that she wasn’t penning Burt Bacharach tunes. Unlike ‘60s soul’s preoccupations with romance and heartbreak, Davis trumpeted funk’s indulgence with raw sexuality. She sang – singed really – about obsession and rapture, bragging about roughing you up, dragging you down and leaving you begging for more.
Yet, Davis was no raunchy tease – she understood that love and sex formed a blurred line that anyone was in danger of slipping into – including herself. On “Anti-Love Song,” she’s irresistibly seductive when she purrs, “No, I don’t want to love you/’cause I know how you are…/I know you could posses my body/I know you could make me crawl.” But with a wink of an eye, she turns the tables and you realize, who’s really in control: “Cause you know I could possess your body too/(don’t cha)/you know I could make you crawl/and just as hard as I’d fall for you/(boy)/well, you’d know you’d fall for me harder.” Truer words were never spoken.

The aside that makes it "worth reading"

"Lil' Flip often sounds as if he could go for hours — and one presumes he'll never be interrupted by a coughing fit."

It's not that good

The coffee in Seattle, I mean. They are very proud of themselves, and I guess it is very important to have a sense of what you are good at. Seattle is good at being aromatic. And, really, the coffee's okay.

It is in France that the coffee truly sucks. They are proud of their coffee as they are proud of everything, and in many regards they are right to have that glow; the Institut du Monde Arabe, for example, and the Supreme NTM. And in a lot of cafes, they will give you a little piece of chocolate -- French chocolate! -- and generally one receives a little glass of water, which is nice. Still.

I will be back at my home, neither Paris nor Seattle, on Tuesday, at which point I hope to offer a report on the Experience Music Project pop conference, which is all but over. What isn't?

Soleil cou coupe

The phenomenology of film-seeing in Blowup is finally not so compelling, but the film taught me more at 16 than any of the critical theory I had yet to encounter, in the scene where the mod crowd stands impassively through a Yardbirds concert but goes into a frenzy (in fact, they go Maenadic; that's a sparagmos where I come from) at a chance to take home a bit of Jeff Beck's guitar. Not the art but the fetish, not the experience but the commodity. Maybe the film's surrounding philosophical yar-yar...maybe all of that's necessary to set the terms for the lyric episode/club riot in which David Hemmings finds himself, for it to make sense; certainly the guitar-rending episode is necessary to open Hemmings' personal puzzlements (image/truth, visual trace/memory) out into the social, where it dies for lack of oxygen.

Any show booker, from Britney's management to the indie-boy driving the van, knows that the show is what gets kids into the room where they buy the t-shirts; that's how the rent gets paid, whether yr living in yr practice space or the Hollywood Hills. Recently I've been wondering about horse racing. I bike past the track almost every day, perched on a little hill at the edge of the Bay between Richmond and Berkeley marinas. It rises bold and stark like a Springsteen song, and it takes the length of a song on my pink iPod to ride from one end of its grounds to the other. We've all seen a million stories about loser gamblers with their shined but brokedown jalopies, and they all let us know like it's some tremendous wisdom that the odds are always stacked in favor of the house. Are they? Does it matter? It's starting to seem a matter of misdirection, as I climb past one green attendant's booth and descend past its brother at the other side. The horse racing's the show, right? Bet the ponies or don't; isn't the house winning on parking fees alone, before you ever ponder your first superfecta?

A different sense of time (corrected)

It's hard to decipher whether Kill Bill More is slow because we're supposed to be employing our sustained visual attention (which sort of worked in Jackie Brown, where there was never anything to do but look at Robert Forster's amazing face), or because -- in the style of the worst American films for as long as there's been a European high cinema -- slow is an ongoing signal to the audience that this is art. That's a device that more or less works in early Hal Hartley movies, where every possible lack of vivacity is a symptom of the bleak affectlessness of late suburbia.

But in Kill Bill And Then Some, neither rationale justifies the miserable boredom. When, near the end, David Carradine's Bill asks Uma the hero why she ran away, you can't help but suspect it's to escape the pacing problems. She never gets far. It's not a visually interesting movie, unless relentlessly pointed but irrelevant shot-quotes get you open. Neither are we to be persuaded this is art, with a big or a little a. It's a quippy, mildly wry, violent cartoon with a monologue about comic-books...that is, it's another damn Tarantino flick. The quips, the mild wryness, the violence are exactly the things that come off in the swift passage from one to the next -- in what ought to be their evanescent glory as instances from what once threatened to be an infinite supply of throwaway brilliance -- but seem like leaden stoner sado-maso in this tantivy-laden incarnation, where each slight device asks to be taken as a set piece. Thud...thud...it's like listening to a fat guy climb a long set of stairs late at night, but less narratively compelling.

That's a really nice sculpture

Total computer failure; must be replaced.

This may indeed slow the pace around here for a few days, but I'll try to throw some sugar on the world if I'm able.

In the meanwhile, you may wish to read this Frank O'Hara poem.

I'll get back to you soon!

Compared to what real?

Three notes from the world of words:

In a development sure to delight Louis-Georges, Todd Shaw, who has once again fallen short in his heroic efforts to retire the Too Short brand, mentions -- for the first time in his 19-year career -- everyone's favorite meta-representational fetish, in the context of an analogy to a sex industry professional, no less:
Wearing all pink just like Hello Kitty
Bringin back all c-notes and no fifties

In an unrelated development, here's Jim Behrle, seen live in action at Stephanie Young's, 4/10/04 (during an evening in which "posting to my blog" was proffered as yet another jerk-off euphemism):
I’m like save me and you say
Maybe you need to be destroyed

Lastly, the always-lovely Andre Benjamin, guesting on Sleepy Brown's "I Can't Wait":
You’re playin with me darlin I’m not a toy
As if Anita Baker brings the joy
You’re kinder
The Tyner
Meaning the real McCoy

Scary Children, Pt. III

"When you've decided - Meet me at the airport"

The problem with rock is that it is premised on being a problem. Mostly it’s little more than problem-as-passion-play; rare is the musical moment which has stakes such that you could actually, say, alienate friends and colleagues by taking certain positions offered by rock music. There’s a reason the dinner-chat prohibition exiles politics and religion, but not Rage Against The Machine.

Greil Marcus has been, among other things, the chronicler of such moments, when the stakes of rock music seemed so high they threatened the social order. There have been a few...but not so many. Mostly just simulations thereto. It’s unclear if there are at this late date any rock guys at all with, for example, Stockhausen’s chutzpah.

This is why rock, the edifice and institution, has failed so dramatically to deal with the new age of terrorism. Country music can do it exactly because Nashville never promised to be radical, not even fake radical. So they can make “Have You Forgotten” and “The Angry American” and so on and so forth and no one feels like country failed the test. Boring liberal humanists, boring vigilantes: kill’em all, let Johnny Cash sort’em out.

Rock, however, is bound to fail its test...

The gravity of sentimentality is massive in times of anxiety, and rock knows its business is not to yield to that temptation (though the steady rise of fundamentalist Christian “rock” might one day be seen, rather dismally, as what rock had to say about 9/11). But the risk that bad-boy provocations might be taken the wrong way, what with everyone so on edge, is a keen one; we all know about ClearChannel’s blitzkrieg blacklist of September 2001. As of now, the middle ground where rock thrives, between banality and actual bad voodoo, is as thin and convoluted as a spiral jetty. No one even wants to try to dance on the borderline. The only viable choices right now are to be utterly unproblematic or an actual problem; the phase of mediating between the two, also known as the rock era, is in deep abeyance.

It might be the case, however, that the work is already done. There is a genius rock record about terrorism already; it just happens to have been made in 1996. Well, “antennae of the race” and all that.
On this record, the terrorists are the heroes, if not altogether pleasant ones, German kids who have traded in dropping acid for anti-state warfare, hanging out with the PLO, jail breaks, and killing. Episodes wander in and out of fragmented consciousnesses, as an incredibly odd arrangements of electric bass, violin, synthesizers and tabla dust off the seamiest kingdomns of the world. Characters like “Captain Martyr Mahmoud” and “the Holger Meins Commando” smoke cigarettes and hijack planes, loiter just beyond the floodlights at the edge of the army base hissing “you’re going home in a fucking ambulance.” Or moaning "Do you remember Petra Schelm?" as if a young Berlin hairdresser killed in a police gunfight was still pacing the stage of everyone's amphitheatrical imagination, an unfinished moment still awaiting its final soliloquy. These are the characters. You are not invited to judge them. You can walk a minute in their ears, in the bad conscience of a continent, or reach for another record.

No one really cared about this record at the moment. It was too idiosyncratic, or too much of a put-on, or just too creepy. In 1996, who actually wanted to talk about Baader Meinhof anyway? But then 9/11, and then the Richter retrospective featuring the series October 18, 1977; eerie paintings from Baader Meinhof photos, ending with corpse after ghostly corpse, gray blood running across the gray floor of Richter’s Stammheim, the strange and massive public funeral, the terrifyingly interior psychic apparatuses of the terrorists having completed their ineluctable course toward spectacular public images...

The Three Confusions

“If a man says to me, looking at the sky, ‘I think it will rain, therefore I exist,’ I do not understand him.”
L. Wittgenstein

“When I state that coats or boots stand in relation to linen because linen is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the proposition is manifest.”
K. Marx

“It is impossible...that zebras, quaggas, hemiones, and pygmy ponies, who know they are destined to serve as steeds for the children’s cavalry of the future, are sympathetic with the policy of our statesmen, who treat as merely utopian the equestrian institutions where these animals are to hold a position of honor.”
A. Toussenel

The horse and the needle and the damage done

Returned to Dawn of the Dead last night. I had forgotten (already) that the song under the opening credits is "The Man Comes Around," one of the three great songs on American IV, along with "Hurt" and "Hung My Head," in which the pale horse from "Man Comes Around" comes to killer Johnny on the gallows and bears him away, meaning he himself is now the pale rider, the one-man apocalypse. As he is; his whirlwind is in the thorn tree.

Sitting in the front row at the movie, dead-center, a pair, perhaps a couple. I wouldn't have noticed them except that, when they left at the end of the credits, it became apparent they were both blind.

Ain't Talking About No Aeron

But seriously, can I ask one little favor?

Go into a supermarket. D'Agostinos, Star Market, Whole Foods, Key Foods, Safeway. Look at the cashiers.

Why are they standing?

They are not standing up in any country that has ever had a substantial Labor Party, or Communist Party, or Socialist Party. As far as I know, they are not standing in any country with proportional representation elections.

What would we have to do so cashiers could sit on stools while at work?

"Nations go to war over women like you"

Update on the Greatest Song Ever project. A recap: The Experience Music Project, as part of its annual pop music conference, is hosting a panel called "Critical Karaoke," in which the most amazing people (Daphne Brooks, Julianne Shepherd, Greil Marcus, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Ange Mlinko, Oliver Wang, Ann Powers, and Carrie Brownstein) will be mic-rocking about one song each: a song they thought, if even for a second one afternoon long ago, was the greatest song of all time. The gimmick (because it's all about marketing) is that they'll have exactly the length of the song to make their case, with the song playing in the background.

We are now just a week away from the show. Predictably enough, every single participant picked "Strut" by Sheena Easton except for Elizabeth and Greil, who both went with "Naughty Naughty" by John Parr.

For archival purposes, here are some songs I didn't choose; the parenthetical number is the age I was when it occurred to me that this was the greatest song ever. List to be updated arbitrarily.

Paid In Full (29)
Wannabe (34)
Bombs Over Baghdad (37)
Roadrunner (17)
I Feel For You (Chaka Khan version) (22)
Uptown (19)
Shameless (28)
One Nation Under A Groove (16)
I Want It That Way (36)
Angel From Montgomery (23)
Rock&Roll Nigger (25)
Doowutchalike (album version) (27)
Working Class Hero (Marianne Faithfull version) (32)
Freedom '90 (27)
Bittersweet Symphony (35)
Got Til It's Gone (34)

Postcards after the hanging

Read the last three grafs. Paint your passport brown.

If I were selling 803 million books of poems a year...

...I would perhaps hire someone to be in charge of saying reasonable stuff so that I sounded...reasonable. A college graduate. A high school graduate? Caitrin from the Debate Club?

The record biz, in their response to the recent Harvard/UNC study on file-sharing, however, manages instead to offer the following insight:

"If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?"

To clarify, with the kind of logic that would have set Port-Royal ablaze, they have deployed their stacked-to-the-rafters PR budget to rebut the assertion File-sharing doesn't account for reduced record sales with a loudly stamped foot and: It must! because there are reduced record sales!

As a rhetorical stance, this ranks with Life's A Sport. Drink It Up.

Nothing new wave under the new metal sun

Killer visual

Shiite Militia Marches in Iraq To Back Cleric Critical of U.S.

Les Chausettes Rouge '04

Steve's proposal for a politics and baseball internet tendency:

MoVaughn.Org

ePublish or Perish

Amidst the links in the right column of this page is the opportunity to download all parts (text and audio) of the chapbook Their Ambiguity (Joshua Clover) which once cost ten bucks and now is free as Roger Daltry in McVicar. Sugarhigh! will feature poetry downloads on a regular basis, from many and various authors.

Remarks on form

The subtle reader will notice that the previous entry appears on this front page only in part; one must click the link at bottom to finish the rant. This "extended entry" device will show up every now and them, when I get a lil off the chain.

Down with the quickness

I had meant to stay home last night, studiously reading the exhaustive new evaluation of the economic impact file-sharing exercises on music sales in the US. It was researched and written by gentlemen who are very comfortable with the word "econometric," as well as the halls and verdant lounges of University of North Carolina and the Harvard Business School. It has cool charts and maps at the end.

It is quite a long document (52 pp pdf), meticulous, measured, and of classical demeanor -- so it should come as no surprise that it was prepared (as Steve noted immediately) with "Aural support from Massive Attack, Sigur Ros and The Mountain Goats." If you'd like to save time, I recommend reading the abstract, and then Sections I, VI, and VII. For the truly clock-sensitive, read these two sentences: "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales" [Italics Lars Ulrich's].

However, I ended up succumbing to the incongruous lure of Sarah Polley ("the Canadian Winona Streep") in the sin duda feeble remake of Dawn of the Dead, a film recommended otherwise only for having inspired the Variety headline, after it office-boxed the fuck out of Mel Gibson Is Crazy last week, approximating "Zombies Knock Off Jesus." The raw facticity of this seemed in question when Steve and I discovered a total of four other customers in the theater.

We were in for a surprise...

At the conclusion of the end credits (not amazing for the Blair (t)witchy handicam breakdown, but for the way that the dark-blood-red-on-black credits themselves are almost entirely illegible, which requires more chutzpah in Hollywood than full frontal of ugly guys) exactly half the audience started applauding and yelling.
"That was the best zombie movie in all history!"
"That was retarded!"
"It totally redefined the zombie movie."

The opening itself will send me back to see the flick again this week, with its trifurcated array of placid suburbiana (shown first in a lovely schematic high-overhead of such orthogonal justice as to embarass American Beauty's similar but maundering effort), ripped and chaotic action, and intercut (mostly close-up) compositions of such oddity and brevity that the brain is just starting to shift from whoa to some traction when the next kinetic corpse hurtles angularly across the picture plane. The sequence has such intensity, asks so much of the mind, that, for the first time in years, I forgot we hadn't seen the credits yet -- when they started, I was stunned. I leaned over to Steve and said "this is the best movie I've ever seen."

The remainder can't match such density, but the entire film is an onslaught. It's premised on the same mechanism: not leaving enough time at the end of, the beginning of, or between sequences to recompose, either for characters or viewers. In that regard it's the triumph of montage over mise en scene, not in the MTV-indexed sense of methedrine editing as mimesis for the mind shuttling ecstatically over the aimless surfaces of data excess, but in the sense of exactly what it is that films can do that theater cannot. The assault on consciousness is in the cut.

The film does, as has been noted, lack the devotion to consumer critique of George Romero's original; indeed, it's a bit surprising that the director (who the hell is Zack Snyder? I'm gonna gay-marry that kid) maintains the mall setting. The mall is the locus classicus of the last-human-alive fantasy, which is irrevocably a commodity-fantasy: always about being the sole consciousness adrift in a world of pure things, a world in which thingfulness has overtaken all the other humans (in a less total way, this fantasy of entering commodityworld is rehearsed in the shopping montage at the heart of a thousand films, most brutally Pretty Woman. In such cases, we don't play witness to the dream of the last human -- of the lone being with agency in a world of things -- but the humbler dream of achieving agency regarding things in the first place: not the realization of sole consciousness but of bourgeois consciousness. This is the difference between the French Revolution and the apocalypse).

This version foregrounds its own refusal by limiting the inevitable festival of mall-pillaging by the heroes -- the apocalyptic shopping sequence -- to a few slight underlit seconds. The mall serves as a series of arenas, not as a social issue; with its insistent shots of slatted metal gates and holding areas, it's far more a gauntlet of jail cells than a vast doo-dad depot (as in the original, and the superb Quiet Earth). Watching the original's awkward, stumbling zombies traverse echoing commercial space was its own pleasure, the awful comedy at the heart of the matter. They had to be slow; they were things now, making their ineluctable orbit through the world of things.

In the new Dawn the zombies are fucking track stars.

This concerns, in part, nothing more than kinesis; with its sequential arenas and bordered visual fields into which creatures are perpetually about to race, the film does far better with video-game structure than dedicated flicks like Resident Evil, or aggressive wannabes like XXX. In the most crowded and overwhelming combat, the camera leaps to its schematic perch well above the action, summoning up the rounds of Robotron in which the bad guys flood the screen, and there's no choice but to shoot a path through them if one wants to move at all.

But, beyond gamer's bliss, the velocity of the zombies is about speed itself. If the world is composed of the quick and the dead, the zombies are awfully quick; in their way, they are more alive than the few human survivors. They have not been overtaken by thingfulness, but by creatureliness. They are feral, bloody, and stoked: revels without a cause, evil without a pause.

They are not blurs, you understand, not impossibly fast; they can't outrun cars. They are just...swifter than humans. They have no need, after all, to rest; zombies do not need to catch their breath, recover from muscle fatigue, stop for pain. Nor do they need to collect their thoughts, make emotional sense of loaded conversation, register their experiences. In short, they are to humans as movies are to the theatre -- and, as I intimated earlier, this is the film's entire strategy. It knows that the endtimes concern not rapture but speed (reading Virilio again?), and that cinema was born to run at this post-human speed.

By editing out the human pauses of theatre, of mise en scene, and cutting relentlessly from one creaturely burst to the next, the moments in which the human gathers itself, composes itself, are excised from the screen and disallowed for the audience. As a film, it is absolutely filmic; of its viewers, it requires total creatureliness. This may explain its multiple nods to Sam Peckinpah (particularly Pat Garrett), or why the only character allowed much characterization ("Steve Marcus") is pointedly the creep. Nothing, I fear, can explain the Richard Cheese lounge-against-the-machine version of "Down With The Sickness" mid-film (genius) or do justice to the apparition of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" (weepingly le choix juste) during the closing credits, before it dissolves into the original of "Down With The Sickness" and the last burst of speed overtakes the tale entirely.

At the movies, I have not felt more at the movies in quite some time.

How to get a job

Newsflash: Single sentence from advice columnist proves identicality of "things hideous persons think," "ideology of the State," and "things people will pay you to say"!

"Kids who can do as they please are never really happy about it."