jane dark's sugarhigh!

It's Just A Kiss Away

If we can teach it when to cry, we can teach it when to kill.

"Headphone cento"

...that's what Jordan called this project, and that works for me.

Some preliminary notes: a couple folks pointed out that this seems to repeat the most tawdry aspects of identification, that minimum value of art. My goal was, in part, to restructure identification; that's what I meant about looking for resonances beyond the character in the song acting out a scene that you too have acted out, or would like to act out.

What's dullest about identification is that it ends up mandating a kind of demographic segregation; if we're stuck with seeing our own particularities of event replicated in songs, then we tend to prefer folks likely to have had similar experiences, which means -- in the case of the readers of sugarhigh!, to generalize viciously -- people who've been to college, and are middle-class, white, and probably male. Now look, nothing against Elliott Smith and John Darnielle, of whom I am fond; I just remain curious as to whether, and how, people imagine their affective relations to, say, hip-hop's ghetto fabulisms, or the generic romanticisms of Top 40, or the pointed populisms of Nashville.

Looking at the results so far, it may well be that people don't have such relations at all; that most sugarhigh! readers do indeed prefer songs sung by people demographically similar to themselves. But I'm not really in this for serious empiricism; curiosity regarding how folks talk about their music-listening lives is the main appeal for me.

I'm going to post a collection of passages from responses sometime in the next couple of days; in the meantime, here's Ange Mlinko's headphone cento, which according to her (!) resonates with her life "not at all." The wider you make your window, the closer you'll get to the right line breaks; it's in couplets.

Here, pick up, dig, dig out those weeds out of your happy go lucky fields of such predictive thinking
How come there's peacocks in the front yard?

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday night, but I am so lazy, don’t want to wander, I stay at home at night
Apartment in New York, London and Paris, where will we rest, we're all living on top of it

And now all day the radio’s been playing the same song, can’t shake that tune but it’s ok, maybe the world isn’t so small
The men were here to get your Belgian things

“I do not go to his country”

I know who watched for us, myself herself. He carried stories, he was a story teller, fabulous fairy tales for news agencies, crossing this world the next world and all the other worlds of this and outside universes. Yes. He sought stories, sought so that I might advise him. What did he want from myself was not mysterious. He might turn tables on me what of “campaign formations”, so he thought what he did think I do not care and did not, also that he thought I was a fool. He called me friend, he followed us, spoke also to my companion in quiet places, a fool, thinking quite places were secret, calling friends, friends, thinking we are so foolish. You are unlike these others, he said.

What language could he know. There is a language shared, man to man, with woman, why he did not leave, and watches us, myself, what did he think, why he was there watching us. He knows, man knows. He was there. Thinking I am so foolish we are so foolish. Why? I do not go to his country.

-- James Kelman, from Translated Accounts

Assignat Clarification

Hey! First of all, my gratitude to the so-far respondents. Sadly, I must have mis-expressed myself. I did not request the collocation of lyrics that now do or don't look like a poem, though it is very kind of you to have send said item along, you plural.

What I'm curious about is: when you read over that document, and think about it in ways that may well exceed the simplicities of "that character in that song still loves Bill, and so do I!"...do you recognize your life, your interests and desires and anxieties and so forth, in what you read there? How so, or how not? I am asking for your analysis, not your anthology; hit me back. Thank you plural.

Assignat #3

It's no big deal, really.

I wondered if you thought, given your willingness to think abstractly, structurally, allegorically, allusively, ambiently, and very late at night...if you thought that this little poem you have made tells about your life. I won't specify my curiosity further.

If you're willing to write up your thoughts on this, I'd love to read them; please email them to the button address above and to the right. Again, I have no need to know what songs you chose, or what lyrics; that's entirely at your discretion.

If you're willing to have part or all of your response posted, let me know; if you'd like to have a look-see at what I might select to post before I do it, that's fine; just say so.

Thanks so much for participating,

Jenny From The Rock

La Commune/La Commune

April 12
When I wake up this morning I see that the Issy fortress, which I thought had been taken, still has a red flag. The Versailles forces must have been pushed back.

Why this zeal? Because in this war the people themselves make the war, lead it themselves, and are not under the yoke of militarism. This amuses and interests these men, and so nothing tires or discourages them, nothing disheartens them. You can get anything from them, even heroism.

-- Edmond Goncourt, 1871

Assignat on hold

For the moment, the "assignat project" is on hold, while we wait for j-hova to catch up. Why? Because we love her. Last stage tomorrow, barring further unicorns.

Stop the Presses! David Brooks On Fire!

Statesmanship was for him a minuet to which specks of dust danced in the sunlight. That is how he justified to himself a politics which even the bourgeoisie at its zenith could not master without seeing through it as an illusion.
-- Walter Benjamin (from Selected Writings III, p.214) on Metternich

It's utterly predictable that David Brooks, perhaps for the first time in his adult life, should notice something substantial and important in the midst of an utterly disingenuous editorial, one which pretends to have achieved a fondness for Kerry while diligently serving his retard master by painting the challenger as boring, vague, and inconstant -- a rhetorical stance on Brooks' part one might describe as "strategic ambiguity."

And lo, as if the ways of consciousness were magical, or perhaps as if every letter's rightful recipient is always the author, that's exactly what Brooks has discovered: that Kerry has, over the years, filled the public sphere with so much incoherent-yet-excessive discourse that "he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity."

Faithful readers may recall that this issue arose earlier in sugarhigh!'s season, though regarding not the obsequies of campaign speech so much as the bloodiness of military maneuver and attendant stylized informatic morass. Let's then suspect that we are on to something: that the definitive condition of symbol management has ceased to be the persuasion towward a particular view, belief, ideology, but is rather the production -- so in keeping wiith the age -- of an excess of signification which at once denies the posssibility that one might ever be called to account for any particular action, and occupies the public sphere so profligately there isn't room for anyone else, nor does there seem to be any possibility for intervention. A post-modernism, but not a particularly salutary one.

The certainty that anyone committed to a particular course aside from the strategic ambiguities of politics as such is lost before beginning makes such commitment not-thinkable; all there is is that which appears, which has already appeared, which will continue to appear in its magisterial, dizzying dull dazzle, never quite in focus.

Assignat #2

Solid. Cash solid.

After the first part, the second part is a little, uh, vague? My hope is that, without specifiying too much on this end, I can ask you to select your favorite lyrical passage in each song. Don't get all fancy on me: I only mean, you know, the part you would most like to sing along with if you were in the front row at the concert, or walking unobserved down a night-time lane, or in the shower. The passage you choose for each song doesn't need to be discrete -- a verse, line, couplet -- and it doesn't have to be sensible or defensible. It just has to be the part you really like. This may require just a tiny bit of owning up. When you've done that for each song and typed the phrases into a single document, let me know. Again, no need to send anything but the fact that you're ready, that you're sitting on go.

Assignat

Reader, you are so money. And so, because of your economised excellence, I would like your help with a little project. It's pretty simple, and comes in three easy but sequential parts.

Here's the first: choose something like seven to 12 songs that you really like right now. They don't have to be new songs. In fact, the only limiting factor is that they should be the kind of songs with words.

When you've done this, ring my bell by posting a comment or sending an email (can be done by clicking in the appropriate place off to the right). I'd like to have at least ten participants before continuing to the second phase. You don't need to list the songs; just as long as you know them yourself.

Thanks!

Why are you reading this?

You should be reading this. Then get back to me.

Twizzler/The Heart of the Matter

Something mysterious hovers at the edge of the perverse, recursive debate which has re-appeared this time regarding the grotesque political provocations of one Linda Ronstadt (I mean, aside from the fact that the casino spokesperson is named Sarah Gorgon).

The glaring absurdity is the race to the bottom of the abstraction pool: the presumption on both sides that this somehow is an opportunity to discuss free speech, and the place of political opinion in art, as general topics. Is is not in fact a good opportunity to stage such debates, because what happened in Vegas wasn't about these matters. It wasn't general or abstract. It was particularly about George W. Bush and Michael Moore and the Presidential race. The audience members who tore down posters, and the casino that pandered to them, have no problem at all with "art" or "politics" or their intersection. They just don't want to deal with the fact that the children of the cities whose suburbs they inhabit are prancing around some country, murdering other children and sometimes being murdered in return, and that this might be a problem. There was no effort to "censor" Linda Ronstadt for offering up political rhetoric; there was an attempt to punish her for a specific opinion, and the fact that she said it in a speaking voice.

That last is the actual mystery. I suspect that had she sung "Masters of War" or "Stand Down Margaret," vocalizing notes in the Western scale as she pronounced the words, while the band manipulated their musical apparatus as bands tend to do, no one would have said boo. Which is to say, the vast majority of audiences -- the ones that go to concerts in Vegas, dinner theater in London, emo at Warped, and movies at the Carlyle -- recognize that art is, sigh, not actually much of a political risk. That, simply by agreeing to appear as "art," political speech becomes for the most part agreeable.

This is not to say that "art" has never caused any political problems, in the long or short term. This is to suggest that the general understanding of art and politics is already settled, and that to debate it is to miss the point of immediate social reality. And meanwhile, artists who want to kick up a fuss better spend a real hard time figuring out how to escape the trap, or it's just emo.

Junkspacejunk

Is this not a security issue, Rem? What part of "Love and Theft" don't you understand?

"Mystery and Melancholy of a Street" #2

Moroder She Wrote

I think Simon mentioned "filter disco" about half a decade ago, roundabout his astute analysis of Stardust's unfuckwithable "Music Sounds Better With You" and house's completion of its circular return through techno to the magical zero point of that Seventies Moroder-than-thou shit.

Well plus ça change, pal. Except it's worth noting the latest in perfect blends from the tip-top sounds of these last five(ish) years. Christina Milian's "I Can Be That Woman" (sadly, a song that doesn't appear on the domestic version of her new album; no wonder CDs cost the equivalent of 22 bucks in Europe) is a distillation of the five elements: Stockholm melody, Daft Punk's Parisian back-in-the-haute-vie-again champagne synth leads, r'n'b vocals in that New York uptown diva style, Virgina Beach syncopated minimalism, and filter sweeps + handclaps directly from on the floor at the Boutique on Brighton beach.

Which is why I am saying to you, in honor of the North Romantic, that this is what sugarhigh! means when we say "NATO disco." As in, NATO disco rules, okay?

"Mystery and Melancholy of a Street" #1

Here We Come/There We Go

The American keeps referring to Bastille Day, only to get blank French looks (which is like an exponential thing). Around here they just call it Independence Dat, basically. Remember, when when you drop 4 pieces of blotter for the new wave show, they're just the Furs.

Anyway I am happy to report that, though the nation favors no particular color coding of late, they have not forgotten: Plan Vigipirate remains in effect. It pre-existed 9/1, natch, since terrorism wasn't invented by Bin Laden, Hussein, Bush, nor Mike Moore (who turns out to be the most boring of the bunch -- that's propaganda these days? Seven percent of America is owned by Arabs Arabs ARABS! And mothers of dead soldiers are very sad and feel betrayed. C'mon, time to kick it up a notch like Ben Wallace in crunch time). I dislike Plan Vigipirate for several reasons, one of which is the replacement of the lovely civic waste containers by green plastic sacks hanging everywere with a flaccid bent (rhymes with accident, okay?). What I do like is the name. Say it with me now: Plan Vigipirate. Now doesn't that make you feel a whole lot better?

Click on'em to grow. They real big.

"I Mean It Man"

I am of the opionion that certain capabilities of iTunes have started to have an effect (somewhat like SoundScan's onset on the Billboard Charts all those years ago) on the year-end singles polls -- at least for those critics who suppose that their Top 10 lists should reflect the ten singles they chose to listen to most often over the last year, rather than trying to chart out the particular and contingent affect-matrix about a year's singles residing in their brains on that one January morning that they type the thing up.

But If I'm going to represent my listening habits (those indulged in more for pleasure than obligation), in good conscience i can't vote for any albums this year. I'm not saying there aren't any good ones; according to Keith and Sasha and Bob and Kim and Kim and Kim and Kim, there are slightly more than three kajillion. I just don't listen to them as such. I listen to songs from my computer when I'm travelling or in my office or on the train to and from my office (which is a lot), songs on my pink iPod when i'm walking around or biking (also a decent amount), and the radio when I drive.

So for reals, barring a boomshot from Missy or Buckcherry in the near future, there will no album ballot from sugarhigh! this year. Promise.

Simple Men, Simple Analysis

The thing about John Edwards is that he is an open invitation for the Republicans to shimmy about shrieking "he has no foreign policy experience, no domestic security chops, he has never killed a man with his bare hands and ripped out his thymus gland with his teeth!" or whatever it takes to subtly imply that America will not be a safer place if those dudes are elected. And this claim will be true even if the implication is false, and it will be particularly true in the nice parts of Ohio. And so John Kerry will have no choice but to point out that he himself is a big bad fella, a real fucking security hero, that he has, in fact, chewed uponst the thymus gland of a Laotian teenager to make this world a safer place. The more he runs with John Edwards, the more he will have to say these things. And should he be elected, he will have to back all those speeches up, so as to be a man of his word, so as to be eligible for re-election.

John Edwards is very cute by the standards of the legal profession; he is also the Vice Presidential candidate who gets the U.S. out of Iraq the slowest and the least.

If You Build It, They Will Commune

Look, say what you will about Mao's Communists: history will judge them harshly, Cultural Revolution allegedly very bad, desultory access to coffee, etc. But they built a basketball court or two in the courtyard of the Forbidden City (unlike CoCoPa, the Commision for Conciliation and Peace, which built its negotiating bunker for 1995 talks with the Zaps directly on the only court in San Andres Larrainzar. That sucked.)

In-flight magazine, Eastern China Air

From: On Love (1): Kant Loves You
by Sun Mo (translator unknown)

"A German philosopher named Kant hasn't married in his life, and it has almost been a historical enigma.

"In fact, Kant once says that when he needs a woman, he could not support her, but when he has the ability to support her, I could feel the need for her [....]

"Believing that men should bear all responsibilities, Kant mentions no marriage before he has such ability. The stubborn Kant is so lovely!

"If present men are so stubborn, it shows that they are unsophisticated, and they respect marriage.

"It turns out that your Kant loves you and treasures you."

Janie Hebdo

15) T-shirt on young woman shopping on Rue du Jour: Mrs. Ryan Seacrest.

14) “Girls Lie Too,” Terri Clark & Jacques Lacan. Clark has always been a faux Patty Loveless, with an emphasis on the latter: less style, less aggression, less twang, not quite as much sweet remorse or resolve, just slightly less of the curious crypto-feminism that Nashville allows. But this song, as easily as it settles into its conceit of listing classic chick lies, still gathers up more of everything, and it’s especially pleasing the way she growls “size don’t matter anyway.” Bonus: it sort of sounds like she’s saying “signs don’t matter anyway.” What’s that you say? There might be some relation between the signifier/signified chain’s security and castration anxiety? Did someone mention the Teeny, Tiny Other?

13) R. Kelly and his judges. I love Ta-Nehisi Coates’ beat, and I love that he’s on it. Still, his R. Kelly piece torqued hard under the strain of trying to reconcile the object’s aesthetics and the ethics surrounding its production, a task which’ll get even the smartest and most humane critics twisted (see, for example, Bob Christgau’s various defenses of Eminem). Predictably enough, Coates’ essay engendered some sanctimonious bullshit in the form of “agreement.” I don’t mean anything like tinylucky’s furies regarding Mr. Kelly; it’s the unicorn’s absolute free choice to focus on the moral actor and set aside the art. But if you’re not going to ignore it, you better give up on explaining how “Ignition” must perforce be as bad a song as R. Kelly is a person. You’ve got to fucking deal with how good it is, because it’s real real good (though not quite Ginuwine’s “Same Ol’ G,” yet another reason to worship Tim Mosely). Listen: The desire for an unambiguous world is not going to work out for you. Awful people will make thrilling art, and vice versa. I checked my Infinity Calendar, and this is a “recurrent event.” It’s not hypocrisy; it’s exactly one of the things that makes art more than a victory garden on the chateau grounds of philosophies of right. It’s what makes it art. And then one has to figure out how to live with this; that’s what makes it life.

12) While we’re on the topic of art and moral ambiguity, when all the deeply evil and fucked-up multinational guns’n’oil’n’mercenaries companies are meeting in their secret chamber under the South Pole wearing smoking jackets sewn from baby’s blood, the Carlyle Group gets to treat the other Groups and Corps and so on like the bitches that, in comparison, they are. And now, a little birdie tells me, the Carlyle Group hath acquired the Loew’s Theater chain. This ‘pon this while deciding where to go see Spiderman 9/11.

11) “Freak Out,” Avril Lavigne. The closest to fine on her album, because, being a sort of jumpy power ballad, it’s the closest thing to metal. I know she’ll never do the Cookie Monster voice, but she should be making heavy metal like pigs make iron. Her career highlight is still the cover of “Fuel” during the MTV Metallica tribute.

10) “Midnight Blue,” Lou Gramm. “I remember what my father said. He said ‘Son, life is simple. It’s either cherry red, or midnight blue.’” I remain unclear how, as paternal advice goes, this is simple.

9) Bureaucracy. And so, after walking around in the rain to find a photobooth in the Montparnasse metro station, submitting said photo at the front bureau so as to add to my growing collection of cartes d’identité (along with passport, museum pass, and metro card), waiting an hour, getting redirected to a different bureau to receive a three-page contract to sign — in duplicate — I had a one month gym membership.

8) Josie and the Pussycats (movie and OST) & Noise From The Basement, Skye Sweetnam. You may recall that, in the opening of the 2001 film, the *NSync-tastic crew DuJour (including an uncredited Seth Green...sigh...dreamy) is bumped off by the record company, which has decided its commodities future lies no longer in boybands but in angry teen girls like Josie (sung by Kay Hanlon, the least-named and most excellent thing about soundtracks over the last decade). This before the appearance of Avril Lavigne, before Katie Rose, before Skye Sweetnam...who sounds exactly like Josie and the Pussycats. Did this movie make the future happen, or just see it with an inconceivable clarity?

7) Hey, how come Christian hard rock isn’t called “life metal”?

6) Lisa Lisa, Having a moment. Quoted in both Nina Sky and Kylie Minogue songs, not samples, just phrases floating loose, because Lisa Lisa is just completely of the atmosphere of dance-pop, the vernacular, has dissolved into a few of the billion signs that make a genre itself and not something else. This is not a diminishable achievement.

5) Models. Or, rather, the extreme communicability of narcissism. I don’t know about you, but I just cannot sit next to a model for more than about eight minutes without thinking I gotta go to the gym.

4) “That Hoobastank song,” Hoobastank. Just as big here. Bigger.

3) “Shannon Stone,” Go Home Productions. Yes, since you asked, there is an original version of a song. It’s the one that establishes the distance to the referential remake. There is simply no way to think meaningfully about, for example, Dynamite Hack’s version of “Boyz N Tha Hood” without having Eazy-E’s original in mind -- not the notes for it, not the charts, but the famous recorded performance. Songs aren’t ontological objects without being social objects always-already. If it helps with the linguistic anxiety, you can always jettison the word “original” in favor of “originary” -- from whence spring future versions. Anyway, this question has been bandied about at least since the vogue a couple decades back for associarting the birth of pop culture with the immense sales of sheet music in the 19th century (a narrative which figures heavily in the film Under The Roofs of Paris). “Shannon Stone,” like your basic mashup, has two originary versions. It is both cherry red and midnight blue. It is what Jackson Browne cowered in fear of, when he wrote “Disco Apocalypse.” Sasha pointed me to this track, but it was Chris who said, “You have to wonder what they thought when they heard this. Shannon was probably all, like, ‘whoa.’ Mick Jagger was probably all, like, whoa!”

2) “Holidae Inn” (screwed version), Chingy. It turns out that, content aside, the only annoying thing about Chingy is his voice. And this in fact ceases to be a problem if you slow it down enough, plus you don’t really have to notice the usual all-about-my-dick blabber (um, Chingy? I have Terri Evans for you on line one). Mainly, you notice that they seem to do things like play the screwed version of “Holidae Inn” in the locker room at the Montparnasse gym in Paris France. Dude. Sweet.

1) “I’m Ready,” Cherie. Douglas brought this to our attention, though sugarhigh! prefers the unremixed version, where the sample still sounds like Foreigner’s original. Wouldn’t this all be better if she was named “Cherie Red”? Anyway, one perfect song. But still manages to remind me, as does almost every bit of female teenpop, of Robyn, who kicked off the whole contemporary teenpop-as-the-ultimate-Swedish-song-technology era. Robyn fucking ruled.

Some words are the same

Mortality is what assures our status as unique subjects, discontinuous with others. Economy is the dominant ideological force that guarantees our place in social relations, as parts of a distributed system determining our material conditions.

That is to say, "death and taxes" is not a description of the two inevitables, but of the two forces indexing the "grand theories" that made the 20th Century compelling: Freud and Marx. And, more generally, they're simply the code words for psychology and for political economy, for the self and the social.

Peking University, 26 June

...was utterly excruciating. I read from a paper, alternating paragraphs with my translator Michelle Yeh. At that pace and stagger, the tenebrous connections between idea and idea (the more fragile the connnections, the more "dense" the argument, as I have learned from respondents) shatter like frozen sugar-water, and each concept drops like an icicle into snow.

But then we all read poems; among my favorites were the comically mythographic musings of the phlegmatic Xi Chuan (click for large version):

Xi Chuan also asked some incisive questions about the poetics/urbanism paper, questions which gathered in the relation of the urban grid to democracy, and wondered about speed and the difference between passing through and inhabiting as appearing in possible formalisms. But the best question was asked by a woman who left before I could ask her name; she appears in the back of this image, to the left of Zang Di:

Her question concerned the relation of the modern grid to the orthogonality of cinematic apparatus, and the relationship between Soviet avant-garde cinema and experimental poetics. It is exactly the kind if question that one waits years for, and answers in two minutes out of embarassment, having spoken furiously about factory sounds, "Dziga Vertov," Malevich, poetry's learning of abstraction from a form that moves in time, Eisenstein's aspect ratio, and...all the things you would speak of all the time, if this were a perfect world.

It's a frickin' "water bar," which may be funny to French Buddhists because it would translate as "bar d'eau"

I am posting from Colette, where the water comes in fewer varieties than it used to (maybe only 50 now), the coffee is now Starbuck's (fuck that fronting), the clothing boutique upstairs is, you know, curated, and the wi-fi blazes like Big Baby Jesus's pipe just before five-oh puts their cherries on blast.

And I would like to toss up some Beijing pix, so I think I will. Here are three I took with Steve in mind: representative views of an apartment building near the Third Ring Road. Might as well call it Beijing Modernism; boxy glass-n-steel window settings, often wrapping around corners of buildings. It's a look that's rare and expensive in the US; here, it's profoundly everywhere, in a way that one owuld probably get used to after a couple weeks. I had four days, and thought it was magnificently strange.

Click on the thumbnails for a larger version.