November 16, 2006
Trap Muzik Criticism
Even Joe’s dancing makes The Game kind of paranoid
Let me tell you about Texas.
It has the new Decemberists album and a cat.
Music criticism is getting excited about complimentary tickets to My Morning Jacket, whatever that is.
Music criticism is not dying. Don’t be a fucking dummy. It just gets smaller. It’s like this: the bigger bigger bigger (take sociology and see what I mean), the smaller smaller smaller (turn off your computer and see what I mean). I listen to less music than ever and value a good opinion more. It always happens like this. Watch Blade Runner and see what I mean. Once everything gets cut to ribbons again you’ll be all Ribbons, I remember those.
So what’s Texas? Poet Josh, who has no internet presence whatsoever, tells me he still remembers a mix I made for him about four years ago. “I bought the album for almost every song on that CD.” Five people mashing a panic button and straining some elegiac/Linda Blair shit about how critics are spouting missives into the void doesn’t mean anything.
The power to steal every record in the known universe has nothing to do with the mechanics of time or our ability to listen. It makes me sweat to have someone across the table screaming Why are you swallowing without chewing when I’m just like Shut up I’m trying to chew. And when someone burps and discourse comes out, all the brilliant minds—in search of fun, no doubt—will rush to point out how efficiently a few stiff-legged, crappy ideas trip up the frivol of “discovery” or having a remix beamed into your colon or something.
Words aren’t wasted unless they’re empty to begin with. Ideas and opinions aren’t, either. The prevailing charge that music writing doesn’t matter shouldn’t drive anyone into either hermetism or laziness, but it’s kinda happening all the time. Let people have a breath. They’ll re-engage.
And I promise that within a couple days, I’m just gonna toss good talk about records in the interest of coagulating agents and ass-plugging and whatnot.
***
me: wow it stopped raining
and yet i blog on!
Caleb: blog on man!
me: hit dem letters like it’s bloggle
Caleb: it is bloggle!
neeed italicss
me: sorry I was auditioning for the next the game album
(that IM was for the game)
Caleb: huzzah!
the ad at the top of gmail sez: “bloggers: who are they? New report reveals who bloggers are and what they are blogging about”
November 8, 2006
Mailbag: Soft Rock Against Phantasy
Pænuƒ Butter WordƒDear Jane Dark,
I am upset because your fairytale about Scritti Politti gave me the heart-tickles but you are not allowed to write fairytales about him because he said no more fairytales in “Robin Hood”!
Your fan,
PBW
***
Dear Joanna Newsom,
Why is it not okay for your PR friends to say “fairy tale or childhood or innocent“ about you? Easy for you because you took the thesauruses and made them groan. Think about their feelings and thumbs! Also it is okay because we all know you only make fairytales because you are in pain. Make it work for you!
Listening,
PBW
November 7, 2006
Humanity: Fuck You, Seriously
Dear Adrienne Shelly,
I was just in the middle of writing more humorous, irrelevant blogletters when I found out you were senselessly and brutally murdered. I can’t really explain–well, not without smothering my feelings–how much your performances in Trust and The Unbelievable Truth meant to me. You grew up and it seemed real. You were beautiful. Maria Coughlin was my hero. And because of the weird way films work, you’re going to just have to be okay with being Maria even though you weren’t really Maria in real life. I’m sorry.
GETTING WARMER at 7:05 pm, Comments Off.
November 6, 2006
Friend Shickwell writes of dreams with Joanna Newsom: Last night I had a dream that I was on a boat with J.N., in the below decks pub. Large wood beams and medieval dark. It was a celebration and I bought something called a “half-gallon” to be spread around in a toast to her. I missed the toast and was dismayed, so I caught up with her after and tried to talk. It turned out then, that she had a child, and not just a baby, but a fat, large, female child aged 6 or so. For some reason talking to her really depressed me. She said that she and Andy had the baby, though she wasn’t really with him. I assume this was Andy Cabic of Vetiver. I was surprised to find out he was there, and asked where he was, and she kept saying, he’s right there, but I missed him constantly because he was so enormously fat and distorted. I found myself longing mightily for Ms. Newsom.
Me on Ys.
Last week I had a dream that I was in a video store with Jenny Lewis. I was grilling tomatoes on a portable grill and she was leaning over my shoulder and we were picking out a video to watch. I woke up very happy.
November 3, 2006
Missing thunder already
THA GAVEL:
For all my wincing, it turns out that Joanna’s Ys is one of the strangest, saddest albums I’ve heard in a long time. Stay tuned for about 900 words on Monday, at least three of them expletives.
LIVING ON CENTRAL TIME, OR, WHEN I MISS NEW YORK, AM I NOSTALGIC FOR THE FUTURE?
I’m absolutely powerless to resist discourse on the level of Simon’s, re: “nostalgia” for the future. This has been an ongoing knot for me, from, well, lots of tawdry college papers, to an essay I wrote on Electric Light Orchestra about a year ago and am still quietly proud of in spite of its minor ugliness, to last week’s writing on the Boredoms, to my Yank love for Ghost Box.
Okay, well, I’d first say that what makes Ghost Box compelling is that its version of the future died a long time ago. Rather than “nostalgia for the future,” it’s “nostalgia for a backdated version of the future”; the disorientation comes, I think, with trying to reconcile those two worlds and not being able to. Like science fiction, it’s a win-win situation for the uncanny: if the past was right about the present (the then-future), then we’re spooked by its prescience; if it was wrong, then we have to re-experience a bygone ideal knowing that it flamed out. On the PBW currency exchange: it’s like looking at someone and thinking I used to love them and now I don’t; how did I ever? “Nostalgia” is itself a term that implies a rosying up of the cheeks, an inability to remember the pocks and pimples of something buried under memories. Ghost Box music feels quaint because we know that those myths never really came to fruition; Ghost Box music seems strange because there was a time that we went ahead with full faith as if they would.
Sez Simon of “futurism”: “what we’re really talking about is a future-now feeling, something that feels utterly of-the-moment and in that sense seems to be tilted to the future… but of course that futurity is very rapidly (sometimes almost instantly) turned into datedness, affixed as a period signifier … nothing dates faster than yesterday’s idea of the future….”
Now, when it comes to the future—pun breath—the things worth thinking about aren’t “what will this particular new version of the future look like,” but “in what ways does this future feel like older versions of the future.” Because in all versions of the future—in the Boredoms, in ELO, whatever—we deal with cumulative ideals about what the future could be; by being cumulative, we’re constantly invoking the greatest hits of the past. So Simon’s half-right, I think—nothing dates faster that yesterday’s idea of the future, but as time goes on, few ideas seem more bulletproof than the “vintage” futures. Think about it: the happiest science-fictions always involve a kind of prehistoric lack of clutter and restoration of airy humanism (the Boredoms). The aliens are always peaceful. The ideas of “connectedness” provided to us by economics or technology or whatever always have that ad-ready, vaguely neo-tribal undercurrent of “bringing people together.” ELO cobbled together a recent past (the 50s) with a distant one (classicism/romanticism) and tried to imagine a future that would end up echoing both.
Anyway, completely inconclusive, but now I’ve got to run and catch a plane to Charlottesville, Virginia, for my Very First Wedding. Glancing over the karaoke list, which the groom kindly sent me in advance, I’m preparing for my own therapeutic, retro-futurist moment: hoarsely shouting Ace of Base’s “The Sign” through a curtain of whiskey and, for once, trying to believe the words.
October 23, 2006
The Drip
It’s like a map, sweetheart, and the blood is my landlocked heart and the carpet is the unkind taiga of society and oh yeah bail is way high this time.The little free time I’ve had in the past couple of days (weeks) has been devoted to watching an ok film about the Arkansas blood scandal in the 90s (1/2 true-true crime, 1/4 Unsolved Mysteries whole-tones, 1/4 asinine conspiracy theories), screwing around in my kitchen (chicken covered in cayenne pepper and then fried in bananas: yes), and obtaining a framed picture of several hieroglyphs. My bachelor pad is creepsville USA. The Brown Bunny is 1. much more enjoyable 2. much more emotionally resonant and 3. much less concerned with Vincent Gallo’s cock than most responses led me to believe.
It is Boredoms week on Stylus. That’s one of the aforementioned Asian-related surprises. We have spent time. Long and hard. I interviewed Eye. Say that and confuse your friends. (realization: could’ve called it I Against Eye. Missed puns, though regrettable, are forgiveable.) I also got my treatise on the band. Enjoy. In other MP-not-PBW-related hustles, here’s me on the Knife. I basically stopped caring about Silent Shout just before I had to write the piece, and despite a track record that shows I play best with a hot iron, it turned out pretty well.
We will be back on regular flow soon. Recommended listening: We Shall All Be Healed by the Mountain Goats, registering in your consciousness as a new wound, every morning on your work commute as Arkansas turns cold. Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly” every night for the past month since leaving New York, imagining the tone of light Pete Cosey’s guitar gives off in the dark (Miles’s organ is dull, street-lamp orange); wake up from nightmares covered in a film of sweat with it playing in the corner of your room. Think about how you used to be obsessed with catacombs and how a good eulogy can really hit the spot, like a bowl of fluffed and candied yams.
Joanna Newsom’s Ys continues to perplex, disappoint, and thrill, in that repeating cycle.
October 10, 2006
Just… the… twoooooo of usIf only all my fetishes were timed so well. Actually, I have two Asian-Related Surprises coming up in the near future, but… and that’s how I write a teaser. Here are a couple hints:
IRRESPONSIBLE AESTHETICIZATION OF SERIOUS POLITICAL SITUATIONS coupled with A CRIPPLING TENDENCY TO ONLY SEE THE FOREST AND BASICALLY FORGET ABOUT THE TREES
and
THUNDER
Also, the new Califone album is more or less as good as people have lead me to believe, though the “I Zimbra”-cribbed funk of “Pink & Sour” is, as far as Opening Tracks on Avant-Folk Records go, an inexcuseable tease. Somebody please get some ass in those britches amen. Right now, the grooviest folk record this year is still Ali Farka Toure’s Savane.
Also, Bob Dorough has big teeth and you should listen to his records. They screw me gigglepuss.
October 4, 2006
Can’t Stop Won’t StopAn article about an NYU professor creating “time-lapse phonography” of Billboard chart hits. So you grew up reading Allmusic guides. So you want to learn about pop history. All of 1978 sounds like a few jet engines spliced together. While it’s a canny move from that perspective—all abridged all classic favorites pill form swallow!—it also plays on another time-obsessed project, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. In Basinski, though, the tapes bled until they crumbled; they’re like the Malone Dies of head music. Or take Alan Licht’s Plays Well, where Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights” is cut up into hundreds of frames that loop over and over again, stretching two minutes out to nearly twenty, because, in the memory-wrecked rhetoric of my friend Brandon, “The guitar on that song is so fucking awesome and he wants to make sure you know how fucking awesome it is so he will let you soak in how fucking awesome it is bit by bit.”
DuBois’s music is immortal. Time gets compressed to the point of unintelligibility. I used to play this weird game with my brother where I’d make him say the second syllable of a two-syllable word and I’d say the first at the same time; neither of us could understand anything. Imagine fifty. Imagine it’s the pledge of allegiance. Splitting the verbal atom. I could dork out for pages, but in the spirit of the project: O//X! bip—
(The results of my own time-lapse phonography studies:
Joanna Newsom’s catalog: A footfall in the snow and then the sound of, I think, a fox’s tear splashing against an ebony nightstand.
Om, Conference of the Birds: A bong rip and then a mountain quietly exploding into gold dust.
Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music”: A fire alarm going off in what sounds like your brain.)
September 28, 2006
From: Rutherford X. Spindlemaker
Subject: PBW POSTS GAINS MINERAL STOCKS PHARMA!
“LIST MONITORS ARRIVE WITH PETITION:”
A critical cliché is the review that cribs limp rhetoric from one-sheets. Why? Why do you do that? I’ve been saving my spam for months. Spam is a treasure trove. Spam is a haven for New Language poetry. Spam is a place where ideas explode. V1agra. Your health, Pagoda sleeve. Long passages from Charles Dickens novels. happily orbiting sun nearly One morning billion. ??????ó??????(???. Play exquisite corpse with stamped out praise from presskits. Make them eat their words. Gnom gnom gnom.
Dear J. from XXXXX Promotions,
Yes! I like the Joanna Newsom album just fine. Some early thoughts:
got one Less harp whimsy. R O L full 18k Albiniphone. St1ff meds. Even now w1th younger control size. Wonder, new blog yap. Economize **OLDER, surreal Joni Denny Perhacs number one source. Get your we sell premium old values ALBUM scratch and match any 1deals. Hard inches longer in Main Stream Media. Moon-born, pansy-growing, your health extends. Key words you satisfy girlfriend with mixtape song cycle last longer but soft always.
XO!
mp
September 26, 2006
The Glamorest Life (Sidebars)
Little Cartoons: BossFrom a recent, unpublished interview with me in Creative Spaces: A Psychogeographical Digest for the Working Artist (recently condemned by the University of Central Arkansas Press):
CS: So, where do you do most of your blogging these days? I guess you can sort of do it anywhere, right? So wild.
PBW: I recently developed this new game called PRIVATE HEAT. I use the wireless signal in the parking lot of the Community Bakery on North 7th and Main in Little Rock after hours. I try to see if I can get all my stuff done before my laptop battery runs out. The kicker is that I also drink a liter of seltzer and have a quart of homemade vegetable soup before leaving. Plus, I’m still sorta obsessed with my ex-girlfriend and my old boss always said I run a fuckload too many browser tabs–personal handicaps I’m trying to overcome.
CS: So it’s sort of like a battle between your mind, your body, and technology.
PBW: At least. I mean, those three things at least.
CS: How often do you win?
PBW (pretending he can’t hear): Sorry, what was the question?
***
From an interview conducted this morning between me and a guy in some band that was sleeping on our living room floor:
Mutton chops, too many band pins: What time is it?
PBW, white boxer shorts and a pink collared shirt: A little before 8.
MC, TMBP: Cool.
A minute later.
MC, TMBP (nervously): Hey, is there any toilet paper here?
PBW, WBSPCS: It’s always a problem here. I mean, your best bet is–do you want a cup of coffee?–go out and get a cup of coffee and use the bathroom. Sorry. There’s never any toilet paper here.
MC, TMBP: Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah, I guess that would be a good idea… yes (slowly closing the door)
