Pulled pork sandwiches at Blue Ridge Pig are delicious and well-worth the drive out route 250 to get. Several trips ago I swore quietly under the sun that I’ll never eat pulled pork anywhere else but Blue Ridge Pig I’ll never I won’t. It was a dumb promise and one that probably kept me from eating delicious pulled pork sandwiches elsewhere. But I was out to dinner with my friend Annie a month or so ago, feeling good (having not seen Annie in two years, realizing she was still a wonderful person, her telling me she thought I’d look good in suspenders), so I ordered a pulled pork sandwich. And it was pretty good. Later I went back to the same place and ordered something different. It, too, was pretty good though maybe not as good as the pulled pork. But, you know, pretty good.

So while I respect Simon’s opinion on the eating/listening analogy, the suggestion that “going to the same restaurant and ordering the same entrée you know you like almost guarantees 100 percent satisfaction; going to different restaurants with different cuisines each time and trying the most unfamiliar dish on each menu is going to produce much more mixed results” seems to completely bypass the point.

Yes, it’s true: I have experienced 100% satisfaction from only ordering Orange Flavor Chicken at a wide variety of Asian-American takeout establishments over the past 13 years of my life. But if we’re trailing what the value of open-mindedness in the critic is (or being open-minded at all), it seems like you’ve got to go the extra mile and then imagine what a wreck I’d be as a food critic. I drink black coffee by the bucket. I used to smoke. In college, I carried around Tuong Ot everywhere I went; I’m sure it absolutely ruined my mouth (public apology for those kissed), but it made dormitory food acceptable (more accurately, it annihilated it). The first time I met my friend Hannah, she said “Mike, you know, you seem like a real white rice kind of guy.”

I never developed an ability to judge food. I’ll eat it. Sometimes I explore and sometimes I don’t. The important thing is that when I do explore, I might not always enjoy it, but the sheer confidence of my exploration is sometimes enough to make me feel like I’m just getting more out of my experience as a sentient being with reasonable reflexes, proper bowel control, and all my limbs. Disorientation can reinforce my boundaries, it can strengthen my resolve; every time I eat steak I remember how much I love good fried chicken. Can’t force that feeling the other way. So after eating steak, which might not be the most pleasurable eating experience for me, I can return to fried chicken; after a coke I can return to egg cream. Sometimes I want to have a coke though. I try not to think about that too much, like when I just want to hear “Crimson and Clover” (over and over) to the exclusion of anything else.

But would I ever proclaim that fried chicken was better than steak? No. That’d be dumb, and while I have little taste for steak, I have less taste for being dumb.

____

So, something about judgment:

Robert Christgau invokes David Hume in his take on Sonic Youth in the Voice this week:

“ When Murray Street came out in 2002, non-old Amy Phillips notoriously asserted in this very newspaper that since Sonic Youth hadn’t made a good album since (1995’s) Washing Machine, they should break up already. Who’s to say her opinion isn’t worth as much as mine? Me? Well, yeah. One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It’s fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That’s taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn’t mean it can’t be approximated in art.”

And I invoked him, albeit kinda unfairly and obtusely and in the wild – albeit rich – heat of passion a couple weeks ago here. The essay that I and Christgau and any Aesthetics course are referring to is 1757’s On The Standard of Taste. Because it’s very fucking good. And while the impetus (and how Christgau employs it) is to differentiate between having a taste for something and having the ability to judge it, it’s not the only trick it turns. Sorry to do this, but:

“But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty. When objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused; and the mind is, in a great measure, incapable of pronouncing concerning their merits or defects. The taste cannot perceive the several excellences of the performance; much less distinguish the particular character of each excellency, and ascertain its quality and degree. If it pronounce the whole in general to be beautiful or deformed, it is the utmost that can be expected; and even this judgment, a person, so unpracticed, will be apt to deliver with great hesitation and reserve. But allow him to acquire experience in those objects, his feeling becomes more exact and nice: He not only perceives the beauties and defects of each part, but marks the distinguishing species of each quality, and assigns it suitable praise or blame. A clear and distinct sentiment attends him through the whole survey of the objects; and he discerns that very degree and kind of approbation or displeasure, which each part is naturally fitted to produce. The mist dissipates, which seemed formerly to hang over the object: the organ acquires greater perfection in its operations; and can pronounce, without danger of mistake, concerning the merits of every performance. In a word, the same address and dexterity, which practice gives to the execution of any work, is also acquired by the same means in the judging of it.”

There are assumptions here: that beauty exists, that there’s beauty and non-beauty. That there’s good and there’s bad; that saying Art A is better than Art B would be as impossible as calling a “pond as extensive as the ocean.” And that to discern all these things, what we really need is practice. We need to think and we need to listen. Somewhere, I believe all that, because I bother to criticize at all. And I criticize because I want to understand music, not because I’m always looking for pleasure – though it’s great to find and share that feeling. There’s no way I can hold it against the “average listener” for not wanting to listen to twenty Soft Boys rarities, even though I have a hard time believing that you could possibly be truly alive if you’ve never heard the guitar break in “Hear My Brane.” And there’s no food critic that could make me stop eating Orange Flavor Chicken. Which is a little daring, I guess, because unlike listening to the Soft Boys, Orange Flavor Chicken will eventually make me fat. So will a $50 cut of steak. Music will not make you fat. It might make you dumber or smarter, but only if you even bother to really think about it. Which again, most people don’t.

___

So, something about taste:

The verb “policing” came into play in Simon’s post. What immediately registered in my mind was reading Eve Sedgwick – I think, can’t remember, sorry – talking about how we “police” our sexual desires to keep ourselves fitting into our social roles. What’s interesting about the open-mindedness issue is that it’s an inversion: you police yourself to keep your desires as free and open as possible. But it’s just another identity, when you get down to it. So we’re like kittens on ice or something, it’s horrible, how do we stop sliding? Or it’s like that great Weekly World News headline: DOGCATCHER IS A DOG! Recursive, self-destructive. Anyone that has had something put where they preferred it not to be will understand: after all that, some people like to fucking fuck in a boring, regular fashion. And that’s just fine. You can’t make a window or a libertarian out of everyone.

___

Simon: “There is no evidence that people who listen to lots of genres have more enjoyment of music.” And there’s no proof that they couldn’t be experiencing more pleasure by branching out more. And there’s no proof for or against the possibility that the mere experience of branching out might make them feel better and more attuned to what they love. There are lines. And maybe Carl’s Celine Dion project is too much. I’m not sure. But I’ll let him be the guinea pig, frankly.

I think the point here is to keep all these things in the back of our mind. We’ve all got our mouths open and think we’re talking. But yeah, we’re gnawing on ourselves a little here. As a critic, I absolutely think we have to test the limits of our tastes because it will likely help to improve our judgment in the end. Christgau’s piece—is it judgment or taste? Couldn’t say for sure, but there’s some part of me that just believes him. What do I know? I’m just a guy who likes Sonic Youth and pulled pork. Maybe I can entertain you with stories of how I like Sonic Youth and pulled pork for a few minutes. Maybe I’ll make you think. Get off my cloud.

Dear Mister Tom Russell,

I got to thinking the other day that I want you to kick my ass because sometimes I’m dumb and there’s not a body around smart enough to kick my ass.

Because once a year I get stuck like a fly on honey to some record all hot with honesty and simplicity and last year it was the Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday and this year it’s your Love and Fear. I got a broken heart and what’s worse is that all the pieces are ugly and I can’t find them where they went to the other time this happened. And I even sort of got to talk to Dr. Ali about you and I don’t even bother talking to Dr. Ali about her but Dr. Ali wouldn’t kick my ass even if I asked him to because he says he only gets paid to “make observations.”

So I listen to you and it’s the next best thing to you kicking my ass because every time you tell the truth (and you tell it an awful lot), it’s like someone’s got my pinky in a nutcracker. And you do it straight and old and a little country, but like Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen or some other White Guy. But I think you mean it more or maybe you mean it less because I think it’s easier to be smart about a feeling that’s gone than one you’re all tied up in right then, I think.

And so I like my cum-cum disco and dubstep and wild Brazilian music but I will give some of my feeling over and call to you because I only have got you and her to give my feeling to and only one of you’s likely to answer anymore.

With Respect

The Sensitive Side of PBW, Wearing Denim in the Shade

The NY Times gets “heady” about horror, or something. It’s the same impetus as the Sunn article from last week, really, just more apalling. Broken down: horror is fundamentally - necessarily? - irreputable, because it appeals to instinct over intellect (seriously?). Horror is “nonaspirational.” After that, it’s basically a book review.

I’ve spent a lot of mental energy thinking about horror, but just because I have the propensity to think about and spew those thoughts doesn’t mean that I go through a different emotional experience than the “teenagers, slackers and fatalists” that don’t think about it. I’m just more concerned with acknowledging those emotions, trying to parse out where they’re coming from and trying to figure out what they mean. The article comes about a half-step short of “love the band, hate the fans.”

Other things I am looking forward to hearing the NY Times’ definitively and logico-philosophically relegate to the chambers of the Dirty, Classless, Undereducated Betwetters and Halfwits that I identify with by way of my Psychically Retarded and Unrealistic Concerns:

Lower Tier:

- psychedelic drugs
- pornography
- dancing

Upper Tier:

- sex without procreation
- subculture, generally speaking

‘Scuse; I am flying by the assseat of my facepants etc. this morning.

In case you missed the “Huge Friggin’ Sunno))) Piece in NYT Magazine“, go give a read, because it’s important, and I say that without a smirk. I spent a good part of the weekend listening to drone/minimal/stuffed animal enthusiast Charlemagne Palestine and his sometime Kirana vocal teacher, Pandit Pran Nath (who I’ll post more about within the next few days). In between, I was giving Sunn’s Black One some more listens, but to no great gains.

Okay, so it’s great that Sunn0))) are getting more coverage. It would be dumb to act like a guard dog at the gates (of what? Purity? Integrity? Not sure, but someone’s barking).

Of course, it’s the kind of coverage they’re getting that is making people prickly: the art references; the “metal for smart people” tack (are metal fans supposed to rejoice? Feel the growing pains of their collective IQ surging, what with the addition of cosmopolitan and well-educated NYT mag readers? Offensive!). It’s definitely the whiff of what Frank Kogan talks about with the PBS-ization of rock music; how placing Sunno))) in a certain light/context–contemporary art, in this case–makes it “important,” “relevant” or worse, “worthy” (of time and dollars, I guess).

Well, I’m divided on the PBS debate really; I mean, I think that the primary design of anyone that cares enough to write about music is to, roughly speaking, get other people to recognize its value in the world–by listening, supporting, learning about, etc. So in the process, maybe Sunno))) gets vaulted into the more rarified world of minimalist sculpture, but maybe minimalist sculpture gets brought down from its pedestal, just a little bit. A great equalization.

____

I’ve actually always loved the art/music division and comparison, and though it’s way too big of a topic to tackle here, I think it’s important to take note of and flesh out. (I did it a couple times, once with Gang Gang Dance, more recently–and a little sarcastically–with Scott Walker, and I’ve got the same things in my head for The Pipettes (more to come on that).)

Actually, my biggest problem with the Sunno))) article is the comparisons they make. The sculptor Banks Violette says:

For me, what Steve and Greg are doing bears comparison to Donald Judd’s work, particularly his boxes of the 60’s and 70’s. Their sound is serial, repetitive, plays off of mass and is as much a physiological phenomenon as an acoustic one. It stops being an aesthetic experience and becomes a body experience. There are exact, direct parallels there.

Here’s my issue with the Judd (or Robert Smithson) comparison(s) [take a look at the links]: In their work, the viewer/participant is essentially the active part of the experience; your space is disrupted, but only when you’re moving through it. This experience doesn’t seem to square at all with the idea of Sunn’s physical/oppressive/endurance approach, which is constantly not only referenced, but upheld as something distinctive, impressive and crucial to their sound. Sure, it’s “monolithic” but it’s a monolith that moves, or at least expands, squeezing air out of the room, challenging the listener’s physical presence by just BEING there (again, different from the Judd, which is more passive–you can occupy the same room with it and not necessarily feel its power until you approach it).

Sunno))) does remind me a little of something like Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor because to experience it at all, you have to walk through it (which is physically demanding). The “squeeze” aspect is crucial, I think; it makes the experience aggressive and present rather than just passive/contemplative (which is basically how I feel about Judd, at least up until the point that you decide to, you know, walk around the sculpture).

Anyway, this is only the tip of these ideas; the article also, and seemingly accidentally, ties together ideas of minimalism/minimalist sculpture/obstruction to the durational/hypnotic/drone aesthetic when, of course, they’re different. Or at least seperable. Think about the article: it’s not just the fact that Sunno))) are so goddamn loud, it’s that they happen for an hour. And while I could take the canny formal approach of making this post another 2000 words long, I’ll save some for the next few days.