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July 30, 2003
Saw Joao Gilberto last night. His music is some of the most emotionally complex stuff imaginable: songs that are simultaneously soaringly utopic and paralyzingly sad, passionate yet subdued, quiet but force you to listen in the way that a lowered voice can sometimes sound much more dire and desperate than a screaming one.
Just had an idea for a rap lyric: “Neighbor,* you have no web presence whatsoever / your only Google hit is for a company that makes fake rubber vaginas.” [* 'Neighbor' = my substitute for 'nigga']
July 29, 2003
Just utterly geeking out on the genius of the Metric record, the crafty conservatism of their songwriting/arranging choices which sounds radical in context, the backdrop of thousands of CDs falling into plastic bins in college radio station offices, tch-klack -- and thought, damn, the way to appreciate rock is to be radical towards everything BUT rock. Rock doesn’t need an upheaval; it’s doing just fine on its own, has done fine, aesthetically speaking, on its own, an implacable “market” where craft balances insurgence to a degree that makes The Dismal Science look truly dismal by comparison. I ache to say it's a model for something, some ideal, another place where sweet equilibrium can be inhaled like oxygen masks on airplanes, but the very nature of it is that it's beyond modeling. Just thought I’d share, and then get back to listening, which is always more important that anything else you might think you're up to.
July 23, 2003
July 18, 2003
CANNED MULLET
whoopass shelflife Zizek’s article on canned laughter mentions the arcane phenomenon of “weepers,” proxies hired by people to mourn in their place at funerals that they couldn’t be bothered to attend. But joy seems to be the only emotion that’s “canned,” with a few notable exceptions in the rock realm (the weeping mother in the background of the Smiths’ “Suffer Little Children,” or the wailing DCFS waifs in Lou Reed’s “The Kids” - pretty effective and creepy in both cases). Then of course there's Elton John's "Benny and the Jets," with its reconstructed "live" applause, a figment of appreciation for Elton's fictive band. I’d love to hear a nu-metal band that uses canned emotions; the song can enjoy itself while we go do something else. A smoking 10-finger guitar solo replete with OOOH!s and AAAH!s in the right places. Whoops – there ARE no guitar solos in Alternative music anymore. Then how about the parts where the band stops on a dime to feature some graceless, extremely well-recorded guitar clunkery, and then the band kicks in, surprise surprise, with all the musical intelligence of a box of pallets hitting a loading dock? A well-timed WOOOHH!, like you hear in Latin American soccer games, would help remind you that you just got your fucking ass kicked. A whole album where after every song ends, there’s a pause, and out of the silence, a lone dude barking out a fist-retracting YESSS!!! I can see a white room filled with Laff Boxes. We think about Nietsche’s trip, about each laugh representing another emotion that’s died, and the field is wide open. You enter the laff-filled room and are bombarded with emotional defoliant. You get lost in the mists in a reverie of ambivalence that you don’t care too much about one way or the other. Is it torture or psychotherapy, Engram-negation style? Sitcom television is revealed as a vast waste of canned laughter that’s gone bad from sitting on the shelf so long. The story ends when TV is designated a Psych Superfund site and deemed uninhabitable for 10,000 years; a lifeless, laffless plane.
July 16, 2003
COOK-OUT
Had a cookout last night with Dead Man Beatbox and The Lonesome Pragmatist. Recently I did some consulting for the Visual and Material Properties of Objects-brand bratwursts, so we sat under the VMPO banner and ate free spicy meat... Dead Man Beatbox: What, we ask, is the social function of a rigorously leftist cultural criticism inspired by ftrain.com and focused on a thorough analysis of Sony Chiba flics? The Lonesome Pragmatist: These brats are tasty. I was thinking of opening a restaurant called Grindcore – you bring it, we grind it. Three different coarseness settings. There are three entrances to the restaurant for patrons of varied coarseness. Me: Does ftrain let you keyword search for entries about rigorously leftist meat criticism? DMB: I think you’re taking my words out of context. Me: How can that be when your words constantly change the context itself? TLP: Text is a foreground that implies a background. Your background is like the oil screen at a Jefferson Airplane concert ca. 1968. Shapeshifter! [throws container of Jello salad off balcony. Distant honking of cabs below.] Me: Are you hermeneuticizing or chewing? TLP: I’m just trying to be pragmatic about all this. It’s lonely. DMB: Speaking of yummy, they just added “yummy down” to the OED. Me: We’re not disaffected, Dead Man Beatbox. We’re fully integrated citizens of the culture of actuality, and we don’t so much as jaywalk there. We’re not pop culture junkies. We practice excessive moderation in our consumption of pop culture. In fact, we don’t really even consume it so much as sports-announce it. DMB: I don’t even own a TV. TLP: That depends on how you define “TV.” DMB: When I hear the word 'culture,' that's when I reach for Sprite. Sprite - euphemize your desire! Me: I hear your words, the sounds your words make in and near your mouth. I acknowledge this, the sounds, the words, the meanings, your mouth, all your mouths. We’re not ironic here. Irony implies a top-down lack of faith. We’re bottom-up kinds of people. We only do the things that can’t be done ironically, because there’s no other way. Why don’t we try shooting ourselves in the head ironically? With an ironic Glock 17? Why don’t you eat this bowl of gaspacho ironically? TLP: Alright, I will! [begins eating the gaspacho]
July 15, 2003
LIBRATTE SATIN
I was supposed to be moving the corpses today, but instead I just surfed the web. I allow myself this on Mondays. Most of the people who work here browse auction sites all day, sipping oily coffee, looking for t-shirts or art nouveau vases or vintage Vietnam Zippos with debased Semper Fi inscriptions engraved on them, crude drawings of Lucy pregnant with the caption “Goddamn you Charlie Brown,” rust in the letters from the humidity of the jungle. No one here was even alive during Vietnam, but beyond this, you wouldn’t think you’d need to spend what little money we make here on dead signifiers of death. Not when there’s so much of the real thing right here, for free. I think that a level of remove is what they’re buying, not a collectible trinket, but distance from the sour smell of bodies, the low-end of the Union pay scale and the atrophied faces staring out at you from inboxes, the morgue shelves of dead paperwork we spend the weeks emptying. There are lots of names for the act of prying things from dead hands. I call what I do triage, and if the metaphor is lost on others it isn’t lost on me. I’ve heard that the original translation for the name of my department was “Acquisitions,” though the etymology is so tattered it can’t be traced now. It’s a metaphor that I lose sometimes. I switch off the computer monitor in rare moments of spirituality and lean back in my chair, smoking, lighting cigarettes with a Vietnam-era Zippo (I was on that trip once) and thinking about what’s lost and gained in death, the quaint notion that death is some type of cosmic fulfillment, something given to you not in exchange for your body but as really the only thing you ever get. Our department is a perverse rejoinder to this idea, even in name alone – we acquired you, dead boy or girl, like the boy is fucking the girl and saying gimme that, it’s mine (her orgasm). Living death and voicemail. We deal in intangibles around here. The history of literature tells us that a room the color of death is the color of that which brings death, or where death happens, battleship gray or hospital eggshell cream. This area is actually death-colored, color-keyed to the corpses themselves, folks who never would have seen us in life, my desk, my computer, my three-hole puncher and singing greeting cards on my cubicle partition. Most surfaces here are painted in Libratte Satin, the color of a body from the time after death that it gets here until the time it’s “recorded,” at which time it’s taken away and we never see it again. The architectural details are in various florid hues that are meant as contrast. The delicate bruise of eye sockets is reflected in the violet switchplates, the breakroom lunchtables are blood-colored – dried blood, not wet. You can leave your work at work because you just don’t see these kinds of colors domestically. I personally don’t have any problem with Battleship Grey or Time Out Pink. It’s decoration that bothers me. The way these death colors are catching. The way they turn up in design magazines in the photos of the homes of the people who are so far removed from all this, the colors pop out at me while I flip through them in supermarkets. It makes me see death in paper towel prints and soupcan labels when I try to shop. It’s a sort of atrocity.
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