Sorry for missing Friday's random 10 - I've been playing that game on facebook lately, which has advantages, being more interactive... it's purposes here are to force me to post something - to give me a framework for fairly arbitrary links posts - and to say something about music. But today - in compensation for not posting anything all week, I am going for something more substantial....
Tomorrow night, the Feelies are coming to town - I will be there. They're opening for Sonic Youth, but, much as I like Sonic Youth (and despite the fact that I have never seen Sonic Youth - one of the significant underground bands of the 80s I didn't see at the time), they are an afterthought. The Feelies are back, playing live, and the world is a better place for it.
I don't follow the music world very closely these days - I might never have known about this show if I hadn't found their web site a month or so ago. I was looking for them on the web because I was feeling nostalgic. I was feeling nostalgic because I went to see a concert a month or so ago - my niece was in town visiting colleges, and wanted to see The Airborne Toxic Event - I tagged along with her and her mother out of curiosity, and just generally enjoying live music, even though I don't see it much anymore.... There were three bands on the bill, the other two called Red Cortez and the Henry Clay People - bunch of LA bands on tour together, I guess it is... I went in innocent - I had never heard of any of these bands, and the only exposure I'd had was to look a couple of them up on YouTube, though I never finished any of the videos. I went in innocent, and came out - I guess disappointed isn't the word, but - they weren't awful - just drab, by the numbers, indie rock. They all felt like cover bands - though I admit that may be a function of me being 1000 years old, and of pretty much every rock band in the last 30 years sounding like a cover band. I don't hold that against them. They just weren't, any of them, very good cover bands. A really great cover band can make the originals sound like the copy.
You could say I'm building to something here, though it's another paragraph away.... Back to that show - none of the three were good enough to get me past guessing who they were channeling. Red Cortez? Franz Ferdinand trying to recreate Rattle and Hum era U2 - I include fashion sense and the singer's fondness for slinging his guitar across his back.... Henry Clay People? Mott the Hoople by way of Kings of Leon? They were the most interesting, by the way - Mott the Hoople? They didn't cover All the Way to Memphis, but they didn't have to - all their originals sounded like All the Way to Memphis. I think we could do with more bands trying to sound like Mott the Hoople.... And the headliners? I hate to cite Pitchfork, but - you know... Seriously? they usually sounded like New Order fronted by Chris Martin - the first half of that will keep your toes tapping at least. They too betrayed a fondness for Rattle and Hum, quoting it, and the lyrics I could catch certainly seemed up to the standards of mid-80s U2 - which is to say, godawful. And - I don't know if this is the most damning thing or not - they looked like they came straight from central casting. Lots of onstage speeches about not being from the glammy side of LA, but they still look like a Disney band. Acted it often enough too....
Okay. Enough bitchery. I was not, after all, the intended demographic (the niece is - at the bottom of the demographic, maybe, but 17-22 seems about right.) And complaints aside, it was a reasonably pleasant evening. Derivative, bland, but likeable enough. Not every band is going to knock you on your ass the first time you see or hear them. Ah - but - you gotta hope.... It does happen. Not often - but I have seen bands I'd never heard before that won me over on the spot. The Butthole Surfers, say - though I'd read about them, and I admit, that was the show, the surgery films, the stripper, the bullhorn (I missed the fire and the riot, as my ride was bored... still...) And when you get that feeling a couple times, you want more of it - and when a band you have never heard takes the stage, there's that moment or two when they still can do it - they can do absolutely anything - they can surprise you - they can blow you away - they can be perfect.... Which I suppose brings me back to the beginning.
I saw REM in 1986 - at that time, they were my favorite band, by a long shot. I went to the concert (and they were in fine form) and came out humming - the opening act's music. (Mixed in with Little America, for some reason...) "Slipping (Into Something)" to be precise.... The Feelies, of course. I had heard of the Feelies - I knew Peter Buck produced their record - that's all I knew. They opened and completely stole the show. I saw them a few months later - they opened for Husker Du - they stole the show; they were faster, more intense - it wasn't close. And after that, I saw them every time they came to town - usually playing once or twice a year at the Paradise. They never disappointed, it never got old. I see video of their recent performances, back together after all those years - they still seem sharp and tight and as thrilling as ever. So there you go.
They are (and were) also the band that - more than anyone - signaled - something different about rock music. That crack about everyone in the last 30 years sounding like a cover band - I'm not kidding. And the Feelies were probably the first band that drove that idea home to me. Granted - this is the 1986 (and on) Feelies - Crazy Rhythms doesn't fit the theory so well... but the rest of their career feels almost like the Borges of rock. Not just for the actual covers (which very often do make the originals sound like Feelies covers) - for their way their originals sound like covers of songs someone should have written. Everything sounds like that lost forgotten unreleased Velvet Underground record, or maybe something by Iggy Pop or the Beatles you’ve never heard before. There are records that exist in dreams that seem as though they should be real, just as there are books you dream about that should exist. The Feelies are like the caretakers of these dreams, just as Borges is the caretaker of the libraries of dream books. Their songs sound familiar, half-remembered - though better than the originals must have been...
But these days, this is the rule, not the exception. Rock music is an odd genre - once upon a time it was a generational marker, a big old break with the past.... When I was growing up, no one I knew had parents who liked rock - that extends to most of the people I know within 5-10 years of me. But now - my peers are all getting old, and have kids of our own, and those kids listen to the same stuff we did. And the new music they listen to is the same as the stuff I listened to 20, 30 years ago. My niece is coming down to see this Feelies/Sonic Youth show - bands 12-15 years older than she is. Bands obviously a lot more adventurous than Airborne Toxic Event and their ilk. Though in fact - both of them feel like very "late" bands - or like - how to put this? like bands that have accepted that there isn't much more new to do in rock, so you stop worrying about that and start exploring the sounds you can make.... a new translation of Thomas Browne's Urn Burial - a new tuning, a new trick you can play with a screwdriver...
Because as far as I can tell, rock has stopped. There has been nothing new since - well - there's Rap, which is a new movement somewhere next to rock (though it's pretty much in the same boat, only since 1990 or so, not 1980)... Seriously? I'd say the Minutemen were the last band that didn't sound like what came before them. Since the Minutemen, there have been no bands that would not have fit easily into the music scene before they existed. If this sounds like criticism, it is not - I think this is true of some of my favorite bands ever - The Feelies, REM, the Meat Puppets - I like an awful lot of music from the last 20 years, from Pavement to Sleater Kinney to Mercury Rev to Six Organs of Admittance to TV on the Radio to the Liars to the White Stripes, and on and on... But they could have existed 10 years before they did. Could Pere Ubu or the Minutemen have existed in 1968? (They at least needed the Stooges and Captain Beefheart to inspire them, right?)
I have a theory about why this is, actually: I think somewhere in the 1950s and 60s, we became a completely media saturated world (or, big chunks of the world did.) Media saturation meant, among other things, that nothing ever went away. Everyone my age and younger has heard all of the history of rock and roll all their lives - we have the records, we live in and with pop music in ways my parents absolutely did not, and most of my friends' parents never did. Music, pop music, rock, rap, etc. is a completely pervasive presence in our lives: it's a given in our lives. I think, for all the insistence on the ephemeral nature of pop music, that its pervasiveness has made it almost eternal. Nothing ever goes away - at least the good stuff never goes away. I think it makes rock, and other pop forms, more like folk music - old songs passed along, new songs built on the structure of old... A nice idea, actually. I like having 12 year olds marvel that I don't have enough Elvis on the iPod, or 9 year olds play me Johnny Cash as the greatest thing they've ever heard. I mean, it is!
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Nomenclature
I've mostly given up politics here, but once in a while - sort of - at an angle... for instance, there is this exchange going on n the blogs: Mark Krikorian at the Corner comments on how to pronounce "Sotomayor" - response is predictable, and he comments again. The first time he's bland - "So, are we supposed to use the Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er, like Niedermeyer? " - the next time, he's a bit more pointed:
Response has not been favorable, at least not from the lefty blogs (and since I certainly don't read The Corner, without lefty blogs, I'd never have heard of this "controversy". I notice as of today, they are yukking it up about this, as if every word they say about it didn't make them look a little more ignorant...). Is it a "controversy"? Right wing responses to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the court have not edified - a good chunk of the commentariat is going straight to the race and gender stuff, though I suppose a few are trying to gin up controversy about her record or comments made through the years... I don't know. If the pronunciation thing is anything more than bloggers pissing on each other over a snide remark someone made - that's very sad.
The follow up comments at the Corner are particularly sad. They do tend to get to their point - that Sotomayor is a weird foreigner (born in the Bronx! or whatever) trying to ruin our beautiful mother tongue... they might be taking the piss, of course. The simple answer to the initial question is - try to pronounce a person's name the way they do, or your best guess, if you haven't heard it. Along with a corollary - don't get too worked up when people mispronounce your name, unless you've corrected them recently and they're being stubborn - or taking the piss. I suppose it's equally true - when you are in a country where people speak a different language, do your best to make pronouncing your name easy for them.
What's sad, though, is that under it all, this is a pretty fascinating subject: the political, social, linguistic implications of names - of words and pronunciations, as words flow between languages. It's a window on the ways languages functions - how they evolve and interact; questions about names are themselves fascinating to look at. The ways questions like this are handled change between cultures - I've had Chinese friends, and Vietnamese friends, for example - immigrants, as children, now naturalized citizens - the Chinese friends, more than one of them, adapt English names. The Vietnamese friends do not. Does that mean anything, other than the different communities take slightly different approaches to how they relate to English in America? You see it in other areas too, more public - sticking with Asian names, for a long time, in film books, and film writing (to name one example), Japanese names were given in western order - Akira Kurosawa; but Chinese names are usually given in Asian order: Wong Kar-wei. There are bound to be interesting historical reasons for that...
As for pronunciation - the obvious problem the Corner people have is that they are underestimating the English language. It is, after all, a notoriously greedy language - it takes in anything, accommodates other languages - there is no standard way to pronounce words in English, partly because English from the first was made up of French and Latin and Anglo-Saxon and big chunks of half digested Celtic languages, all of them maintaining their collection of sounds, while redistributing them around the letters used to represent this mess... and it continues apace. Never mind arguing how to pronounce Sotomayor in English - try to get people outside New England to pronounce "Quincy" correctly. (For that matter imagine a Kennedy pronouncing Sotomayor.) The idea of defending proper English pronunciation from the incursion of Spanish derived pronunciations is defending something that doesn't exist from something that made English what it is...
This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.
Response has not been favorable, at least not from the lefty blogs (and since I certainly don't read The Corner, without lefty blogs, I'd never have heard of this "controversy". I notice as of today, they are yukking it up about this, as if every word they say about it didn't make them look a little more ignorant...). Is it a "controversy"? Right wing responses to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the court have not edified - a good chunk of the commentariat is going straight to the race and gender stuff, though I suppose a few are trying to gin up controversy about her record or comments made through the years... I don't know. If the pronunciation thing is anything more than bloggers pissing on each other over a snide remark someone made - that's very sad.
The follow up comments at the Corner are particularly sad. They do tend to get to their point - that Sotomayor is a weird foreigner (born in the Bronx! or whatever) trying to ruin our beautiful mother tongue... they might be taking the piss, of course. The simple answer to the initial question is - try to pronounce a person's name the way they do, or your best guess, if you haven't heard it. Along with a corollary - don't get too worked up when people mispronounce your name, unless you've corrected them recently and they're being stubborn - or taking the piss. I suppose it's equally true - when you are in a country where people speak a different language, do your best to make pronouncing your name easy for them.
What's sad, though, is that under it all, this is a pretty fascinating subject: the political, social, linguistic implications of names - of words and pronunciations, as words flow between languages. It's a window on the ways languages functions - how they evolve and interact; questions about names are themselves fascinating to look at. The ways questions like this are handled change between cultures - I've had Chinese friends, and Vietnamese friends, for example - immigrants, as children, now naturalized citizens - the Chinese friends, more than one of them, adapt English names. The Vietnamese friends do not. Does that mean anything, other than the different communities take slightly different approaches to how they relate to English in America? You see it in other areas too, more public - sticking with Asian names, for a long time, in film books, and film writing (to name one example), Japanese names were given in western order - Akira Kurosawa; but Chinese names are usually given in Asian order: Wong Kar-wei. There are bound to be interesting historical reasons for that...
As for pronunciation - the obvious problem the Corner people have is that they are underestimating the English language. It is, after all, a notoriously greedy language - it takes in anything, accommodates other languages - there is no standard way to pronounce words in English, partly because English from the first was made up of French and Latin and Anglo-Saxon and big chunks of half digested Celtic languages, all of them maintaining their collection of sounds, while redistributing them around the letters used to represent this mess... and it continues apace. Never mind arguing how to pronounce Sotomayor in English - try to get people outside New England to pronounce "Quincy" correctly. (For that matter imagine a Kennedy pronouncing Sotomayor.) The idea of defending proper English pronunciation from the incursion of Spanish derived pronunciations is defending something that doesn't exist from something that made English what it is...
Monday, June 18, 2007
Monday Roundup
Let's try this again - that last outpouring of musical opinion rather overwhelmed the rest of this post: but some of it I want to get said...
Mainly - I wanted to commemorate the passing of three giant figures of arts and culture: Richard Rorty, Ousmane Sembene and Rudolf Arnheim.
It was rather startling to learn that Arnheim was still alive - I know of him mostly as one of the very early generation of film theorists: that was a long time ago. He was 102 years old, that helps. Anyway, I have read about him, but not read him, but the Bordwell tribute linked to above makes me very interested in doing so.
I have read Rorty - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, even - I don't know how much I understood, but I was impressed. I mean, by the time I finished I'd probably learned enough to understand it if I reread it. It was inspiring - I have no doubt I will return to his work in the future - I am partial to many of his ideas. Argument as re-description; the value of constantly expanding what we know; the dangers of final vocabularies. AS far as I grasp it, it makes sense to me.
And Sembene - I've only seen three of his films, though I have seen Ceddo several times, and I heard him speak. He made superb use of his resources - his films seem simple, even crude - but he makes optimum use of what he has. Ritual, symbolism, allegory, political themes, words and images - he uses what he can control like a master.
And - beyond that? I'll point, without (much) comment for the moment: Moviezzz comments on EW's 25 best action films - a discussion with overtones of the philosophy of vagueness - when does a film with violence turn into an "action movie"? ZZZ's also got footage from the new PT Anderson film.
And oh - another Blogathon! July 15-21, at the Projection Booth: "Movies I've Borrowed for an Unreasonably Long Time" Blog-a-Thon. The way my viewing habits run hot and cold - very hot: right now I am in the midst of watching Deadwood start to finish (that Journey post previous I wrote hearing it read in the voice of E. B. Farnum), A Deadwood disk a day, more or less... at other times... I do have one film I've had for three months. Child's play. Somewhere in the house I have a Chaplin disk I lost back in 2001. Anyway - another blogathon to look forward to.
And speaking of which - later this week, Film Music blogathon at Windmills of my Mind.
Who reminds us, by the way, that today is Roger Ebert's birthday - the great man is back in action, here reviewing La Vie En Rose, a pretty fine use of film music itself. And that - or rather, this - Piaf doing what she did - is where I shall leave you. Bon soir!
Mainly - I wanted to commemorate the passing of three giant figures of arts and culture: Richard Rorty, Ousmane Sembene and Rudolf Arnheim.
It was rather startling to learn that Arnheim was still alive - I know of him mostly as one of the very early generation of film theorists: that was a long time ago. He was 102 years old, that helps. Anyway, I have read about him, but not read him, but the Bordwell tribute linked to above makes me very interested in doing so.
I have read Rorty - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, even - I don't know how much I understood, but I was impressed. I mean, by the time I finished I'd probably learned enough to understand it if I reread it. It was inspiring - I have no doubt I will return to his work in the future - I am partial to many of his ideas. Argument as re-description; the value of constantly expanding what we know; the dangers of final vocabularies. AS far as I grasp it, it makes sense to me.
And Sembene - I've only seen three of his films, though I have seen Ceddo several times, and I heard him speak. He made superb use of his resources - his films seem simple, even crude - but he makes optimum use of what he has. Ritual, symbolism, allegory, political themes, words and images - he uses what he can control like a master.
And - beyond that? I'll point, without (much) comment for the moment: Moviezzz comments on EW's 25 best action films - a discussion with overtones of the philosophy of vagueness - when does a film with violence turn into an "action movie"? ZZZ's also got footage from the new PT Anderson film.
And oh - another Blogathon! July 15-21, at the Projection Booth: "Movies I've Borrowed for an Unreasonably Long Time" Blog-a-Thon. The way my viewing habits run hot and cold - very hot: right now I am in the midst of watching Deadwood start to finish (that Journey post previous I wrote hearing it read in the voice of E. B. Farnum), A Deadwood disk a day, more or less... at other times... I do have one film I've had for three months. Child's play. Somewhere in the house I have a Chaplin disk I lost back in 2001. Anyway - another blogathon to look forward to.
And speaking of which - later this week, Film Music blogathon at Windmills of my Mind.
Who reminds us, by the way, that today is Roger Ebert's birthday - the great man is back in action, here reviewing La Vie En Rose, a pretty fine use of film music itself. And that - or rather, this - Piaf doing what she did - is where I shall leave you. Bon soir!
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Sygns of the Family?
I have started reading Samuel Delany. Started for a class - Triton was on the syllabus (actually, Trouble on Triton, but I had an old Bantam paperback on hand, and figured I'd save a couple bucks. I don't know what that lost me - a Kathy Acker introduction, which may or may not be worth the expense - and possibly something at the back? I compared them - they both had the appendices, and they looked alike - but are they? I have heard rumors of something by Leslie K. Steiner - a Delany alter ego - in the new version - but is it so? I am haunted...)
I've lost the plot. This is the point. I started reading Triton for a class - read it - liked it, very much (did I love it? in a way. But Delany is an odd case - I have tried reading his science fiction in the past, and not been able to keep at it; something about the self-consciousness of it, makes it, somehow, seem smug - he's too good - and somehow too smug about what he's doing... But that's not fair,a nd part of the point of this post is to note how I lost that feeling.) (So did I love it? in a sense - yes - but Delany's books tend to split, a bit - on one side, a text - sentences running together, creating a story and a world and people - all of this utterly engaging; on the other side something of a treatise on Science Fiction, or The Paraliterary, or, The Novel, or... not that that bothers me as such - I like metafiction as much as the next man, but...)
I can't get this started. And the irony is, originally, I wrote this not to discuss Samuel R. Delany, and still less, my (emotional? or critical?) reaction to him - but because I was reading Delany, and some criticism of Delany, and - coincidentally - via Pandagon - found this: Gender News - a conservative site about gender issues. A week or so ago (getting on to 2 weeks now, I think - I started this note almost a week ago), they had an article up called Deliberate Childlessness: Moral Rebellion With a New Face - which basically says it all. Reading within, one finds:
I've lost the plot. This is the point. I started reading Triton for a class - read it - liked it, very much (did I love it? in a way. But Delany is an odd case - I have tried reading his science fiction in the past, and not been able to keep at it; something about the self-consciousness of it, makes it, somehow, seem smug - he's too good - and somehow too smug about what he's doing... But that's not fair,a nd part of the point of this post is to note how I lost that feeling.) (So did I love it? in a sense - yes - but Delany's books tend to split, a bit - on one side, a text - sentences running together, creating a story and a world and people - all of this utterly engaging; on the other side something of a treatise on Science Fiction, or The Paraliterary, or, The Novel, or... not that that bothers me as such - I like metafiction as much as the next man, but...)
I can't get this started. And the irony is, originally, I wrote this not to discuss Samuel R. Delany, and still less, my (emotional? or critical?) reaction to him - but because I was reading Delany, and some criticism of Delany, and - coincidentally - via Pandagon - found this: Gender News - a conservative site about gender issues. A week or so ago (getting on to 2 weeks now, I think - I started this note almost a week ago), they had an article up called Deliberate Childlessness: Moral Rebellion With a New Face - which basically says it all. Reading within, one finds:
The church must help this society regain its sanity on the gift of children. Willful barrenness and chosen childlessness must be named as moral rebellion. To demand that marriage means sex--but not children--is to defraud the creator of His joy and pleasure in seeing the saints raising His children. That is just the way it is. No kidding.
With that, I'd say, we are halfway, at least, to the line of thought presented in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (which I have started reading in the wake of Triton: (as described in this essay by Earl Jackson Jr..) "In such a circular patriarchal theology, nonreproductive sexuality becomes associated with blasphemous treason." That's not far from what our Gender News writer, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., said - not far at all. The blasphemy part is there. The treason is implied - but those guys (the religious right) are increasingly pushing for a union of blasphemy and treason.
And doing it all in terms that Delany parodied 20 years ago. They're a creepy lot.
(Jackson cite via Long Story, Short Pier - specifically, this post from almost 2 weeks past...)
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye
Jacques Derrida has died. Legal scholar Jack Balkin writes a nice appreciation....
I read Derrida in grad school, back in the 80s. Most decidedly tough sledding, but fascinating. The first piece of his I read (or tried to read) was his "Living On/Borderlines" essay in the Deconstruction and Criticism book, collecting the "Yale Mafia" inside one set of covers. Derrida's contribution ran an essay on Blanchot on top of a long footnote consisting of an essay on - long footnotes? It's been awhile. The way it looked on the page, though, was instantly addictive, and I kept reading Derrida in hopes that I could understand some of it. Eventually I did, though I had to read a lot of Nietzsche and a fair amount of Hegel first.
But understanding aside - the way he wrote suggested things, ways of writing, mixed registers. You don't see that sort of thing in academic writing all that often. You see it, instead, in works of genius like The Third Policeman . It is pleasant to imagine Derrida as a kind of gallic, "serious" Flann O'Brien. It's only slightly far-fetched - O'Brien's japes are very serious; Derrida in turn seems, if not precisely comical, certainly delighted in the sheer oddness of his writing. The puns and wordplay and elaborate typographical trickery he occasionally indulged in cannot be completely rationalized as high seriousness.
At any rate, it was that - the sense of excitement in the act of writing and thinking that his work gave off - that drew me to him first, and kept me at it, long enough to get some clue what was going on. And then - frankly, it made sense. A lot of what he said simply makes sense. Not that I can possibly justify that conclusion at this hour of the night. But as far as I am concerned, Derrida made the world a better place.
I read Derrida in grad school, back in the 80s. Most decidedly tough sledding, but fascinating. The first piece of his I read (or tried to read) was his "Living On/Borderlines" essay in the Deconstruction and Criticism book, collecting the "Yale Mafia" inside one set of covers. Derrida's contribution ran an essay on Blanchot on top of a long footnote consisting of an essay on - long footnotes? It's been awhile. The way it looked on the page, though, was instantly addictive, and I kept reading Derrida in hopes that I could understand some of it. Eventually I did, though I had to read a lot of Nietzsche and a fair amount of Hegel first.
But understanding aside - the way he wrote suggested things, ways of writing, mixed registers. You don't see that sort of thing in academic writing all that often. You see it, instead, in works of genius like The Third Policeman . It is pleasant to imagine Derrida as a kind of gallic, "serious" Flann O'Brien. It's only slightly far-fetched - O'Brien's japes are very serious; Derrida in turn seems, if not precisely comical, certainly delighted in the sheer oddness of his writing. The puns and wordplay and elaborate typographical trickery he occasionally indulged in cannot be completely rationalized as high seriousness.
At any rate, it was that - the sense of excitement in the act of writing and thinking that his work gave off - that drew me to him first, and kept me at it, long enough to get some clue what was going on. And then - frankly, it made sense. A lot of what he said simply makes sense. Not that I can possibly justify that conclusion at this hour of the night. But as far as I am concerned, Derrida made the world a better place.
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