jane dark's sugarhigh!

It's All Fun & Games Until Somebody Gets Hurt

This morning I took a break from composing my epic poem in heroic couplets regarding the history of Modernism, just before rhyming Jaap Blonk and policy wonk. It was time, after all, to play my other favorite game: Googling the name of the most recently appointed US ambassador to, oh, anywhere really, along with the search term "death squad."

Good times.

The hottest place for a honeymoon

Jaap Blonk and Kenny Goldsmith perform a Man Ray poem while Whoopi Goldberg's menagerie bustles in the hedgerow, during a break from the Beyond Text Festival in Los Angeles, 6/19/04.

"...past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs"

There can be little doubt that science tends toward appearing as magic, nor that mystical conceptions are later realized, strangeways, in a fashion technological. So I trust no one will take it amiss when sugarhigh! suggests that iPod wearers ("iPod therefore I am...the middle class")...

...are starting to resemble the tefillin-enwraptured Chosen People, in a severe All That Is Old Testament Is New Again manner.

Which, I suppose, makes the mp3 the new phylactery. Bow down, bow down.

Plus ça change/Prep School Girls On Fire

The new dancing? Why, it's little more than simulated sex, I tell you! Of course, "a strapless red dress she had picked up in Brazil" doesn't hurt.

Blunderjahr/metablogging

As sugarhigh! prepares to go wandering for the summer, we have added a couple new links: Jordan's equanimity blog, and Kasey's lime tree.

It may be that the most compelling things about Third Factory are the proprietor's intelligence and reach. On the other hand, from a social perspective the notable characteristic is how elegantly the proprietor, sitting on a powderkeg of cultural capital and a high-tension network that reaches into nodes and apartments of some very tightly-wound poets et al, has conceived of ways not to make value claims: the listing of works received, the reviewing of movies (and sometimes books) by citing other reviews, the enumeration of activities on other blogs. Equanimity indeed.

Shake your love, adjust and shake your love

Listening to Kylie sent me back to Cathy Dennis (download the acoustic version of Too Many Walls immediately!) which sent me back to the eternal race between Debbie Gibson's "Only In My Dreams" and Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now."

Still too close to call.

Woke up it was a Chelsea morning

Reading the letters page in the current Village Voice, one thing becomes clear: the good people of the world have no intention of abandoning the practice of naming their children after popular songs.

And she moved through the phair

The Alanis and Avril albums are adjacent in my CD changer, and I don't always notice when one disc slps into the other. I care less than a little about either of them, which surprises me somewhat. But I have become faintly obsessed with trying to distinguish which one I like less, because of how eloquently the two records beg some eternal questions about records.

There's not a single good song on Under My Skin (there's a chance I might eventually like "Freak Out," buried down at #11, but not a particularly good chance). The songs are relatively unvariegated, have almost-impressively unmemorable lyrics (I had thought I might count how many songs depend on the word "yeah" for their communicative grace, but really, I had to separate out my recycling), and that annoying Rockman chorus w/ lite distortion on half the vocals just screams "come with me, yeah, under the shadow of this vague morass. Yeah."

So-Called Chaos has at least one fine song, "Eight Easy Steps." The lyrics are her usual overburdened Other Help Manual, but the melody and the grind, the rhythmic shifts, why, it might as well be 1995 again, yeah, yeah. On the other hand, the bad songs -- and this is sort of an achievement -- make Avril's bad songs seem utterly forgivable. They are intolerable.

I feel this, truly proclaimed, will help the curbing of this tendency
I know this sharing of shame will ensure that I won't forget myself so easily

The question isn't, exactly, "How hideous are the lyrics?" In more generous form, the inquiry might be phrased "How good would the music have to be to save those lyrics?" To which the answer must be, well, it would have to be Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones 1982 good, maybe it would probably have to be Joni Mitchell 1972 good, or at least Lennon-McCartney 1966 good. As it happens, the music is about Liz Phair-The Matrix 2003 good, which is to say, the words would then have to be Alice Notley 1988 good, and I think we have reason to suspect from the sample above that they are not.

1) Body Language, Kylie Minogue
2) Here For The Party, Gretchen Wilson
3) Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey
4) Under My Skin, Avril Lavigne
5) So-Called Chaos, Alanis Morissette

Can I Get A [nother] Soul Clap?

There's one compact disc on my shelf between Cornershop and Costello, and I would like there to be two very much please thank you.

News that stays news

The poetry reading I briefly attended last night was no worse than the dinner preceding it, during which the guest poet, a college teacher, indicated that she had never wanted to teach anything more advanced than "precomposition" because that way "I'll never get snobby." Around then, sugarhigh! was thinking about getting extremely drunk.

A good-hearted graduate student, seated next to the poet, mentioned that she was writing about abandoned houses in American poetry, and that one of her interests was Ashbery. "Are there houses in Ashbery?" inquired our guest, unsnobbiness faintly dripping from her inflections. "How could you tell?"

Said visitor opened her reading with a brief poem called "Tired Blood." It was about tired blood. After the poem, she explained the poem to the audience. She explained why it was good and why she liked it. Then she read it again. It was at this juncture that the tragically sober sugarhigh! quietly departed the building and returned home, determined to listen to a lot of NIN in a fit of juvenile rage.

This is what sugarhigh! misses today: rage that seroconverts to joy in the bloodstream. Though it is not totally lost from the world: this morning en route to the bakery, I saw spraypainted carelessly on some abandoned wall, REAGAN'S DEAD! Like she just had to tell somebody, even though everybody knew.

How we think what

One of the conveniences of an election year (now two years long!) is how easy it is to evaluate world events: by their impact on the presidential race. That chat with the Pope, that unemployment news, that guy in a hood standing on a box being threatened with fatal electrocution -- what're they going to do to the numbers?

In making this the issue of necessary remark, it allows, say, the New York Times to have the same relationship to ethics that Billboard has to aesthetics: it can only be considered using a sales model. It may indeed be appropriate to suggest that "the election" doesn't exist to elect a President but to safely quarantine social justice within the market's reasoning.

Developments in the listening test:

1) Body Language, Kylie Minogue
2) Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey
3) Here For The Party, Gretchen Wilson
4) So-Called Chaos, Alanis Morissette
5) Under My Skin, Avril Lavigne

notes: a day later, I like all five records less. Having to actually reckon with B-side balllads will do that. Kylie's A-side remains monumental.

ess doubleyou eff

Actually, I have no idea who is single, or straight, for that matter. However, I recently had occasion to acquire, by way of cash, trade, and US Mail, five compact discs by white females, all within a few hours of each other. So I loaded them all into my new old car's 6-cd changer (the last slot is for E-A-Ski, fool) and started the listening test. For the next week or so, sugarhigh! will list the 5 discs in order of preference, revising only when the order changes. So, after one full listen-through, here's how things stand:

1) Body Language, Kylie Minogue
2) Here For The Party, Gretchen Wilson
3) Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey
4) So-Called Chaos, Alanis Morissette
5) Under My Skin, Avril Lavigne

notes: Big drop-off after #3. As I think is to be expected, this first impression list is more or less a map of my "genre tastes" as they pre-exist the project (though I would have expected a reversal in the two lowest spots): dancepop, Nashpop, whatever Polly Jean is, therapy pop, pre-therapy pop.

One of these records contains the line "don't confuse emotions with the pleasure principle." Assuming you don't already know the answer, care to hazard a guess?

Field trip

I and my colleagues around the sugarhigh! headquarters have been maintaining for quite some time (going back to the very first issue of the zine) that, as regards aesthetic consumption, the idea of "guilty pleasure" was proper not to the psychology of individuals but to class war. Always about slumming with the tastes of masses, as a term -- as an available concept -- it's a way of showing one recognizes the inferiority of pop, while still allowing oneself the pleasures found there. Just like irony!

Now it turns out that this analysis is simply a a commonly-held fact -- not the fact that rich people are the dominant market for gossip mags, but that this revelation is a story about class-based fantasies of taste. Phew. Now that the battle of understanding is over, could everybody please stop using the term, or at least recognize what it is you're participating in, every time you invoke it?

"E minor with a G in the bass"

"6 Underground," which I still find incomprehensibly great after eight years, is largely based around a modulation from a minor to major (F#, I suspect). The ways in which this allows for interesting deviations within a traditional western melodic structure are intractably interesting (and there is much to say about the progression of "SLTS": one way to understand F>Bb>G#>C# is as a song in the key of G#, where the F and Bb are actually modulations-to-major of the key's two convenient minors, Fm and Bbm. Side note: as a chord progression, it has zipnada to do with any songs by the lovely Boston rock band Boston).

Is this almost-modal device in "6 Underground" something that trip-hop does regularly? Will some reader who's spent more time with the compositional structures of the genre donate their know-how?

Smash List

Fresh figs: don't you wish you had them more often?

Free music: it's open round the clock! A few minutes ago I was reading an old email from Rob Sheffield, one of those notes so melancholy and sweet that you save it forever in your your special file, and noticed that he has passingly quoted "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." And I would have driven downtown in the rain to the late-night record shop, and blown some of my isn't-it-excellent-to-be-a-former-music-critic? store credit on a little Billy Joel, just to, you know, have the full experience of Rob's letter. But the record store is closed, so I just jacked it from someone I will never know, who doesn't think it was stealing. Thank you, IP 192.xxx.1.97.6346, for ripping your entire Pop Rock 1977 to disc; regarding "the internet," it's for people like you that keep it turned on. Please drop in and steal, mmn, "Ode to Bille Joe."

I would also drive downtown, though perhaps not in the rain, to satisfy my yearning for a guidebook to Beijing; I'm going in 20 days, and getting anxious. But the bookstore is also closed, and the guidebook as I understand it doesn't exist in particularly trustworthy format online, so I'll have to wait. Meanwhile, when is someone going to get on the ball and start making digital guidebooks, files that take the form of playlists downloadable to your iPod? So you would click browse, and get a menu from which you'd choose lodging, and then you'd choose, say, price and continue on by clicking yuan 500-999, and there your list would be, with addresses and phone numbers and so on. This is a very good idea but I am lazy, okay? Get on it!

[Look, I am sure that these byteguides exist for the PalmPilot, but I am willing to carry only a limited number of digital devices at any one time, and the PalmPilot is a poorly-implemented joke. The cargo pants craze, blatantly driven by the explosion in little devices we are expected to carry around as badges of membership in the forward-facing bourgeoisie, cannot last forever. Meanwhile, even the iPod is awkward and bulky, even my pink mini. Why does my music delivery system gave to be an item? The reasonable delay between digitized music and songs being beamed directly to my head by satellites at all times should have been 18 months, tops. What's the holdup?]

Louis, who is on a fact-finding roll today (consider this link he sent along), wonders about "Ode to Billie Joe," and it is the day to wonder, after all (though not a good day at all for the folks in the sleepy, dusty Sacramento River delta). His curiosity, as a Yankee, is piqued: is June 3rd late enough in the Delta season to be chopping cotton? Please advise. I realize that I have never wondered exactly because the song is so unconscionably great that I trust every little thing it says, implies, or even hints at. Which is pretty much its thing.

Boy I got it bad ("Is rock rockist?" remix)

Top 5 for the afternoon:

"Live For Loving You," Gloria Estefan
"Sweetheart," Penelope Houston
"Holding Out For A Hero," Frou Frou
"Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On," Mel McDaniel
"The Girl From Ipanema," Astrud Gilberto/Stan Getz

Girls are so much better than boys. I don't know what the deal is with that Mel McDaniel song. If you are feeling tired, sleep on Party Monster and Pieces of April. If you're dirty, go take a bath.