Atrios has an A&R suggestion for Rick Rubin.
Here's little Tommy F.'s oft-linked audition tape, for those of you who do not follow the progressive blogosphere:
Also -- "This bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us"? Matt Taibbi wasn't kidding -- "It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up."
I haven't blogged on the conviction Thursday in Jose Padilla show-trial, because the whole thing is just too depressing. Almost 60 years after Project MKULTRA was launched, the US government is still inflicting Manchurian Candidate-style psychological violence on US citizens. The "enhanced interrogation techniques" they used are not designed to extract useful information from you. Instead, they are absolutely guaranteed to destroy your mind, just as surely as if they had lobotomized you.
There's a word for this -- it's called "menticide."
Keith Jarrett addresses the audience at the Umbria Jazz Festival with his usual sensitivity and good humor:
[Via.]
This has occasioned an open letter from Daniel Biro. And Jarrett has been officially banned from the Umbria Festival.
I've never quite understood the bullish US market for Canadian wingnuts. It's not like there's no homegrown crop. But you've got Mark Steyn, David Frum, Rachel Marsden, Adam Yoshida, and a man I'm sure would be proud to count himself amongst such august company, the frickin' deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and all-around wanker Michael Ignatieff, who's got some nonsense up in the NY Times Magazine about how he only supported the Iraq war because he's much smarter, more serious, and more intellectually rigorous than you are. So even though he was wrong, he was wrong in all the right ways.
No, really:
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, transparently self-serving bullshit. In fact, as Matt Yglesias points out, "People with relevant academic expertise -- notably people who weren't really on the left politically -- were massively opposed to the war."
Despite seeming to promise a mea culpa, Ignatieff shows absolutely no self-awareness of how he came to make such a massive blunder. David Rees (of Get Your War On) gives the pretentious twit (and Prime Ministerial hopeful) an immensely satisfying pantsing:
Ignatieff's latest essay is what Latin people call a "mea culpa," which is Greek for "Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made." I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing-- a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It's about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard's Kennedy School; now he's Prime Chancellor of Canada's Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they've got up there.)
In a way, it's a story much like Cormac McCarthy's recent best-selling "The Road." Both follow a hero's long march through thankless environments-- in Ignatieff's case, from the theory-throttled, dusty tower of academia to the burned-out hell-hole of representative politics. Danger lurks. Grime abounds. The narrative tension is: Can the hero be wrong about everything, survive, and still convince people he's smarter than everyone in Moveon.org?
I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: "Please, for the love of God, don't ever listen to me again."
HOWEVER. . .
The first nine-tenths of Ignatieff's essay, far from being an honest self-examination, is a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans. It hums with the comforting murmur of lobotomy. I refuse to believe this section was actually written by a member of the Canadian government, because that would mean Canada is even more "fuxxor3d" than America. (A little hacker-speak, that. There will be more; I finally bought the B3rlitz tapes.)
While I still think it's unlikely that anyone in authority "ordered a hit on Pat Tillman", this whole situation is just incredibly disturbing. Good on his family for keeping the pressure for these past these years, demanding real answers under what I can only imagine are extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Trust Kyle Gann to perceive a link between two seemingly unrelated groups of self-described "Very Serious People" -- insufferable Beltway wankers like Time's Joe Klein (AKA "Joke Line" -- oh, I'm sorry, was that insufficiently serious?) and insufferable serialist fundamentalists:
The thing I love about it is, of course, that "serious" has also long been the word that High Modernist composers use to distinguish themselves from composers who try to appeal to the audience, who think about accessibility, who are influenced by pop music, who don't build up dramatic climaxes, who appreciate Erik Satie and Virgil Thomson, who don't try to impress each other with the sophistication of their techniques. "Serious" is a condescending but tolerant-seeming word that connotes, well, yes, these postminimalists are composers too, and amateurs may find in them a certain entertainment value, but we must not forget, of course, who the really serious composers are.
Someday someone will appear who has analyzed more minimalist-influenced music from the 1980s and '90s than I have, and if that person feels that I have divided my era into categories inappropriately, I will be glad to listen to her argument. So far, I've gotten plenty of argument, but only from people who don't come anywhere close to fitting that description.[...]
Now, don't write in and tell me you don't like these pieces. Who cares if you like these pieces? Do I care if you like these pieces? Do I, Kyle Gann, personally give a shit whether you like these pieces? No. No, my friend. I do not give a shit whether you like these pieces.
-----
It often has been remarked that only in politics and the "arts" does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard. In the realm of politics he knows that this right, in the form of a vote, is guaranteed by fiat. Comparably, in the realm of public music, the concertgoer is secure in the knowledge that the amenities of concert going protect his firmly stated "I didn't like it" from further scrutiny. Imagine, if you can, a layman chancing upon a lecture on "Pointwise Periodic Homeomorphisms." At the conclusion, he announces: "I didn't like it," Social conventions being what they are in such circles, someone might dare inquire: "Why not?" Under duress, our layman discloses precise reasons for his failure to enjoy himself; he found the hall chilly, the lecturer's voice unpleasant, and he was suffering the digestive aftermath of a poor dinner. His interlocutor understandably disqualifies these reasons as irrelevant to the content and value of the lecture, and the development of mathematics is left undisturbed. If the concertgoer is at all versed in the ways of musical lifesmanship, he also will offer reasons for his "I didn't like it" - in the form of assertions that the work in question is "inexpressive," "undramatic," "lacking in poetry," etc., etc., tapping that store of vacuous equivalents hallowed by time for: "I don't like it, and I cannot or will not state why." The concertgoer's critical authority is established beyond the possibility of further inquiry.
-----
Okay, I keed, I keed. Babbittian crankiness aside, Kyle's Postminimalism: Chapter One, Metaphorically Speaking is a first-rate piece of analysis, tracing some specific commonalities between composers whose music sounds very different indeed and making some incisive observations about postminimalism as a kind of do-over of serialism, but without all the Germanic angst. He also hosts audio of one of the pieces under discussion -- Belinda Reynolds's "Cover." While it breaks my heart to know that Kyle Gann does not, personally, give a shit whether I like this piece, I like this piece. A lot. It's pretty kickass, actually.
Anyway, never mind the occasional cantankerous outburst, just go read. It's worth it, I promise. Or if you just want to hear the MP3 of "Cover," scroll down to just before the string of asterisks. This is, BTW, the title track from Belinda's most recent CD, which you can get here.
(As an aside, am I the only one having nightmares about this picture of Unca Milt?)
Everyone and their dog has already linked to Conservapedia -- the wiki for the hydrocephalic and home-schooled -- but seriously, this is without question the best trainwreck I've ever seen on the internet. As one commenter pointed out, it's not just that they're crazy, they're crazy about crazy things -- like the use of "BCE" and "CE" instead of "B.C." and "A.D.", and how using the British spelling for certain words is evidence of anti-American bias. I'm not making this up.
Hilarious commentary abounds -- see Jon Swift, for starters. But why don't we take a quick survey of all of their music-related entries to date?
Beethoven: "Ludwig Van Beethoven was a German musician who lived from 1770-1827. He was a great pianist and composer, and his work is among the most famous music ever written. The most remarkable thing about Beethoven is that he completely lost his hearing, yet continued to compose music despite the fact that he could not even hear himself play. In fact, some of his greatest works were composed after he had fallen deaf, including the famous Ninth Symphony. He lived during the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic ages in music. Some of his most famous songs include Fur Elise and Moonlight Sonata."Stravinsky: "Igor Stravinsky was famous Russian composer. In his piece, The Rite of Spring, which he wrote in 1913, he broke away from traditional views of music by having the instruments play in different keys simultaneously."
Recorder: "A recorder is a musical instrument about a foot long. You play it by blowing through a whistle-like mouthpiece known as a fipple, and putting your fingers on holes to prevent air from coming out. Baroque and Renaissance music written 'for flute' would have been played on a recorder. The modern 'flute'—made of silver, held sideways, and played by blowing across it— was not developed until the 1800s."
Musical Harmony: "Musical harmony was invented in the late 800s A.D. Singers in monasteries like St. Gall in Switzerland improved the basic chant by adding a voice in parallel motion in order to sign in mostly perfect fourths or fifths along with the original tune. This was the beginning of musical harmony, and is known as the organum. It later became the counterpoint."
Jazz: "Jazz is an entirely American style of music that originated in New Orleans during the 1920s. It combines traditional European music with African American music."
The Beatles: "The Beatles were one of the most influential rock bands of the 20th century. They were the most successful band, selling over 1 billion records. The four Beatles were John Lennon (1940-1980), George Harrison (1943-2001), Paul McCartney (1942- ), and Ringo Starr (1940- ). Many of the Beatles songs were written by Lennon and McCartney, Lennon writing the lyrics and McCartney writing the music."
The Vans Warped Tour: "A punk, hardcore,ska, and emo music festival series sponsored by Vans Shoes that has occured every summer since 1994. Lasting all day and having over 50 stops in the US. It is best known for having large numbers of bands or artists playing throughout the day, sometimes over 100! There is also usually a skateboarding demo as well. Bands such as: The casualties, Senses Fail, Nofx, Less than jake, Atreyu, thursday, and even Joan Jett and the blackhearts have appeared at past warped tour dates."
Examples of bias in Wikipedia: "Wikipedia claims about 1.5 million articles, but what it does not say is that a large number of those articles have zero educational value. For example, Wikipedia has 1075 separate articles about "Moby" and "song". Many hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles -- perhaps over half its website -- are about music, Hollywood, and other topics beneath a regular encyclopedia."
Behearer.com, eat your heart out.
Recent Comments