Calling all Chinese freebooters.
Y’know, I’ve been wondering why The American Shore, Delany’s book-length study of Disch’s “Angouleme,” is so hard to come by. Now I know.
What if my gold be wrapped in ore?
None throws away the apple for the core.
But if thou shalt cast all away as vain,
I know not but ’twill make me dream again.
“He would be as happy as anyone to be rid of these men. They frighten him as much as they frighten everyone else.”
I was going to say something, anything about Orson Scott Card’s latest exercise in one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state (here, but also here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). But then I remembered I’d already quoted what somebody else had to say:
Unsuccessful in war and unable to adjust to a troubled peace, Weimar’s visionaries dismissed what was for them an overly complex, difficult, and demoralizing reality and indulged in elaborating fantasies of a vicious war of revenge that cast them in the role of conquerors. In their literature these angry men gave vent to primitive wishes for the annihilation of France, England, the United States, or whomever else they pictured as Germany’s enemy. But the war visions of the 1920s were not merely the self-serving fabrications of isolated malcontents. Instead of being left to dissipate in the realm of dreams, daydreams, and semireligious entrancement, the visions of revenge and renewal were converted into a literature of mass consumption. The published fantasy—often a quirky mixture of adventure story, fairy tale, millenarian vision, and political program—was intended to act as a catalyst inflaming the same type of emotions among the readers that originally elicited the fantasies in the minds of their creators. In this manner, what originated as compensation for the frustrated individual was transformed into a psychological tool, a propagandistic call for militant nationalism and engagement in antirepublican politics. Some of these writers, in fact, were also active as political speakers and agitators.
“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it does rhyme.” —Except, of course, he didn’t, and anyway, rhyme’s gone all out of fashion. Though I wouldn’t trust fidelity or fashion to keep us safe, not from this crew. Remember, “If This Goes On—”
“...until the white thread of dawn appear to you distinct from its black thread...”
I see that David Cunningham, the crypto-Christianist hack who brought us The Path to 9/11, is on his way to Romania, where he’ll be directing The Dark is Rising. —Walden Media hopes to launch another kid-flick franchise to follow the success of its Narnia adaptations.
Sigh.
If he doesn’t mangle the book(s) beyond all recognition, he will at the very least be forced to acknowledge Cooper’s bracingly grim morality: the Light, in the end, is in its purity and extremity as inhumane as the Dark, dragons and nemeses locked in an abyssal conflict largely invisible to us of the track. We can no more directly identify with the Light than we can wholly condemn those who succumb to the Dark. It’s one of those Important Lessons a kid really ought to learn. (Even if I did stay up late on my eleventh birthday. Just in case.) —Heck, maybe Cunningham himself will learn something, wrestling with the material. One can hope.
And even if he doesn’t, and even if he does mangle the book(s) beyond all recognition, at least those books will get into more kids’ hands. So there’s that, I suppose. —Whichever; I’ve got a sex scene to rewrite and a long-overdue boar hunt to choreograph, and a comics convention to attend. Bygones.
“It’s a terrific view,” Jane said. “Worth the climb. But the wind’s made my eyes water.”
“It must blow like anything up here,” said Simon. “Look at the way those trees are all bent inland.”
Bran was gazing puzzled at a small blue-green stone in the palm of his hand. “Found this in my pocket,” he said to Jane. “You want it, Jenny-oh?”
Barney said, gazing up over the hill, “I heard music! Listen—no, it’s gone. Must have been the wind in the trees.”
“I think it’s time we were starting out,” Will said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
Appositional.
This isn’t a picture of Wormwood.
I’m not sure why I keep coming back to the decadent espionage thrillers of the ’70s for popcorn reading, these days. Maybe because we were much more sophisticated then? We handled it all—oil crises, Mideast flareups, terrorist hijackings, the existential struggle of the individual against an inevitable subsumption within this bureaucratic matrix, or that—we handled it all with so much more aplomb then than now, it seems. (This is as false as any other comparison of one decade to another. Allow me a minor pecadillo.) —I’m not sure why I keep coming back to Trevanian and MacBeth, in particular. The one so appallingly heartsick beneath its po-faced satire; the other so inadvertently ridiculous beneath its literary pretensions. (That one still managing to naught itself in the belly of the whale Annihilation, but I’m inexcusably referencing an inside joke hermetically sealed. —The first, of course, seeks to return to God by moving shibumily with God, knowing all the while it never can, but like I said, inexcusable, and dragging God into this will not help.)
It?
He? His? (She, hers?) (Penn’s?) —Both of them, of course, united in their queerly doomed battles, taking up the master’s tools against that 20th century grotesque, Bond. James Bond—
The explosions going off today world wide have been smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse. The terrorist has been the subliminal idol of an androcentric cultural heritage from prebiblical times to the present. His mystique is the latest version of the Demon Lover. He evokes pity because he lives in death. He emanates sexual power because he represents obliteration. He excites with the thrill of fear. He is the essential challenge to tenderness. He is at once a hero of risk and an antihero of mortality.
He glares out from reviewing stands, where the passing troops salute him. He strides in skintight black leather across the stage, then sets his guitar on fire. He straps a hundred pounds of weaponry to his body, larger than life on the film screen. He peers down from huge glorious-leader posters, and confers with himself at summit meetings. He drives the fastest cars and wears the most opaque sunglasses. He lunges into the prize-fight ring to the sound of cheers. Whatever he dons becomes a uniform. He is a living weapon. Whatever he does at first appalls, then becomes faddish. We are told that women lust to have him. We are told that men lust to be him.
We have, all of us, invoked him for centuries. Now he has become Everyman. This is the democratization of violence.
That isn’t a picture of Wormwood, either. (It may or may not be a picture of Jerry Cornelius, but then most things are. I can’t decide, though, if it’s a picture of Mister Six, or King Mob. It must be one or the other, right?)
But this isn’t about that; not yet, anyway. It’s mostly about Wormwood. Or at least the last few paragraphs of his life. —I was 11 or 12, and looking for something to read, and picked up The Eiger Sanction, because, hey, more spies. And was introduced in the opening bit to the hapless Wormwood, whose foolishness, while contemptible, still seemed to draw an undeserved measure of scorn from the ostensibly neutral third-person omniscient. What a prick, I said to myself, taking Wormwood’s side against a narrator he would never know. (And thereby learning a lesson it would take years to recognize.)
But, as I said, his last few paragraphs in this vale of tears:
As he climbed the dimly lit staircase with its damp, scrofulous carpet, he reminded himself that “winners win.” His spirits sank, however, when he heard the sound of coughing from the room next to his. It was a racking, gagging, disease-laden cough that went on in spasms through the night. He had never seen the old man next door, but he hated the cough that kept him awake.
Standing outside his door, he took the bubble gum from his pocket and examined it. “Probably microfilm. And it’s probably between the gum and the paper. Where the funnies usually are.”
His key turned in the slack lock. As he closed the door behind himself, he breathed with relief. “There’s no getting around it,” he admitted. “Winners—”
But the thought choked in mid-conception. He was not alone in the room.
With a reaction the Training Center would have applauded, he popped the bubble gum, wrapper and all, into his mouth and swallowed it just as the back of his skull was crushed in. The pain was very sharp indeed, but the sound was more terrible. It was akin to biting into crisp celery with your hands over your ears—but more intimate.
Damn.
Okay, “but more intimate” is arguably overkill, but still: Jesus. I shuddered (then and now) and dropped the book and haunted for years by that onomatopoeic image, I didn’t pick up Trevanian again until high school, when I read Shibumi, and kept saying, damn, this is like The Ninja, only better.
As you know, Bob.
One might think that the Laws of Probability would mandate that, without any intelligent input, 50% of the time the events in our world would lead to benefits for mankind. In a strictly mechanical way, life in our world ought to have manifested a sort of “equilibrium.” Factoring in intelligent decisions to do good might bring this average up to about 70%. That would mean that humanity would have advanced over the millennia to a state of existence where good and positive things happen in our lives more often than “negative” or “bad” things. In this way, many of the problems of humanity would have been effectively solved. War and conflict would be a rarity, perhaps 70% of the earth’s population would have decent medical care, a comfortable roof over their heads, and sufficient nutritious food so that death by disease and starvation would be almost unheard of. In other words, human society would have “evolved” in some way, on all levels.
The facts are, however, quite different.
—Laura Knight-Jadczyk, The Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive
No, wait, I’m sorry. It’s pretty much exactly the size of a walnut.
Back in March, I committed one of Roy Edroso’s cardinal sins: I snarked off on Harvey C. Mansfield’s Manliness, having only read a couple of the lit world’s equivalents of the trailer. Sorry, Roy. —Well, I still haven’t read it (see life, shortness thereof), but Martha C. Nussbaum has, and oh my dear sweet Lord. (Via; via.)
The grammar of ornament.
Actually, the poster in the window of the Meier & Frank is worse, much worse: she’s lying on her back on that zig-zag couch thing, coy-defenseless, chewing on her come-hither pencil.
It’s part of a Macy’s (née Meier & Frank, and that’s a whole other kettle of fish) promotion, complete with a crappy Flash-based website and tie-ins to crappy bands you’ve never heard of with albums you’ll never hear to flog. Aspiring poet. Aspiring celebrity chef. Aspiring indie filmmaker. Aspiring editor-in-chief. All of them aspiring to do little more than dress and accessorize the part (what else could they do to convince you of their worth, since all you’ll see is a single still image in a store window?): callow images of callow youths aspiring to little more in truth than flattering snark from a Nick Denton website. (The aspiring poet is spot-on, an unholy cross between Jonathan Safran Foer and Leotard Fantastic.) —And ordinarily, I’d be laughing at this joke that can’t figure out who the punchline is; ordinarily, I’m well-enough inured.
But aspiring therapist?
(That’s what it says, there in the white box. “Aspiring therapist.”)
The other callow youths all have the accessories of their aspirations: a sleek little digital camera, a sleek kitchen set, a not-at-all sleek library of serious-looking tomes bought by the yard from the Strand, mockups of sleek magazine covers to be marked up. All our aspiring therapist has is her couch and her pencil and her fun, short-sleeved tee: Let’s Play Doctor. And her patient, of course. Who else you think she’s looking at, bub? All coy-defenseless and come-hither pencil like that? —It’s a sexy nurse joke gone off, therapy and sex and nurture and desire and love all snarled and confused, projection and projector, subject and object inextricably mixed up: who’s aspiring to what, here? This pose isn’t Dr. Melfi, it’s Tony Soprano’s fantasy of Dr. Melfi, and I shudder and turn away and stalk off with a scowl on my face. The other callow images make me snicker; even the aspiring celebrity chefs are Bobby Flay’s fantasy of what it’s like to want to be who he is. But this one makes me angry.
(Is it just me? I dunno. Think about what the image is telling you you should want, or want to be. Just ignore it? Maybe, perhaps it’s best, King Canute and all that, but first slip Mary Daly’s lens in place for a moment: ASPIRING THE/RAPIST. —Whose idea was this, anyway?)
Adam and Eve on a raft.
To learn anything worth knowing requires that you learn as well how pathetic you were when you were ignorant of it. The knowledge of what you have lost irrevocably because you were in ignorance of it is the knowledge of the worth of what you have learned. A reason knowledge/learning in general is so unpopular with so many people is because very early we all learn there is a phenomenologically unpleasant side to it: to learn anything entails the fact that there is no way to escape learning that you were formerly ignorant, to learn that you were a fool, that you have already lost irretrievable opportunities, that you have made wrong choices, that you were silly and limited. These lessons are not pleasant. The acquisition of knowledge—especially when we are young—again and again includes this experience. Older children tease us for what we don’t know. Teachers condescend to us as they instruct us. (Long ago, they beat us for forgetting.) In the school yard we overhear the third graders talking about how dumb the first graders are. When we reach the third grade, we ourselves contribute to such discussions. Thus most people soon actively desire to stay clear of the whole process, because by the time we are seven or eight we know exactly what the repercussions and reactions will be. One moves toward knowledge through a gauntlet of inescapable insults—the most painful among them often self-tendered. The Enlightenment notion (that, indeed, knowledge also bring “enlightenment”—that there is an “upside” to learning as well: that knowledge itself is both happiness and power) tries to suppress that downside. But few people are fooled. Reminders of the downside of the process in stories such as that of Adam and Eve can make us—some of us, some of the time, because we are children of the Enlightenment who have inevitably, successfully, necessarily, been taken in—weep.
We say we are weeping for lost innocence. More truthfully, we are weeping for the lost pleasure of unchallenged ignorance.
—Samuel Delany, “Emblems of Talent”
Words are mere sound and smoke, dimming the heavenly light.
I left Methernitha that day with many questions buzzing through my mind. What if I asked to become a member? Would I be accepted? Would they let me see it then? Would I find out how the machine functioned, and whether trickery was involved? How long would it take to gain their trust? Stefan Marinov, a Bulgarian physicist and free-energy inventor, joined Methernitha and for many years attempted to understand how the machine worked. He claimed to be privy to the secret of the device, but he could not convince the group to share their knowledge with outsiders. In the summer of 1997, he leapt to his death from a library window at Graz University; his suicide note ended with: “feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes” (“I did what I could, let those who can do better”).
Soon after making my pilgrimage to the Methernitha, I heard about a conference devoted to free energy to be held in Berlin. Looking down the schedule, I was excited to see that there would be a presentation of a Testatika. I immediately booked a place and bought a plane ticket. When the time came, a somewhat half-heartedly constructed machine was described as a demonstration device, created to rule out certain hypotheses of the Testatika’s design—to show how it didn’t work. When I spoke to him after his talk and explained my ambitious quest to build my own working version of the Testatika, he earnestly recommended that a thorough reading of Gœthe’s Faust might be the best way forward.
—Nick Læssing, “Something for Nothing”
Cabinet issue 21—Electricity
This machine bugs liberals.
Say, Fred, I heard Lyndon is forming a new Federal agency.
Yeah? What’s that?
It’s going to be called the Poverty Relief Agency.
Oh, that’s nothing new, Bobby Baker’s headed that department for years.
Zing?
Down in Havana, 90 miles from our shore
Lies an army of Commies and Fidel Castro
We were going to remove them, the plans were all made
We’d help with the airplanes on invasion day
But you know the Liberals and the CIA
They agreed with Adlai, take the airplanes away
So the brave freedom fighters were destined to fall
’Cause we didn’t answer when we heard their call
—the Goldwaters, “Down in Havana”
Rick Perlstein’s always worth reading; the Design Observer’s running an essay of his that the New Republic couldn’t be bothered to put online, so go, read “What is Conservative Culture?”
Conservative culture was shaped in another era, one in which conservatives felt marginal and beleaguered. It enunciated a heady sense of defiance. In a world in which patriotic Americans were hemmed in on every side by an all-encroaching liberal hegemony, raw sex in the classrooms, and totalitarian enemies of the United States beating down our very borders, finally conservatives could get together and (as track twelve of the Goldwaters’ Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals avowed) “Row Our Own Boat.”
But now conservatism has grown into a vast and diverse chunk of the electorate. Its culture has become so dominant that one can live entirely within it. Shortly after the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, a Washington activist could, if he so chose, attend nothing but conservative parties, panels, and barbecues; a recent Pew Research Center study suggested that partisan divisions are increasing at the community level. And yet, far inside these enclaves, conservatives still rely on the cultural tropes of that earlier period: At one living room “Party for the President” in 2004, a woman told me, “We’re losing our rights as Christians. ... and being persecuted again.” The culture of conservatives still insists that it is being hemmed in on every side. In Tom DeLay’s valedictory address, as classic an expression of high conservative culture as ever was uttered, he attributed to liberalism “a voracious appetite for growth. In any place or any time on any issue, what does liberalism ever seek, Mr. Speaker? More. ... If conservatives don’t stand up to liberalism, no one will.”
How to explain these strange continuities? And what does it say about the politics of our own time? Kirk offers no answers, because what holds the movement together isn’t its intellectual history but its cultural one. Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals is this mystery’s Rosetta Stone.
Bugging liberals, you see, being bugged by liberals, is not incidental to conservative culture, but rather is constitutive of it—more so than any identifiable positive content. Seeing Republicans appropriate liberal-sounding rhetoric on immigrants and education and getting credit for it—even while their policies corrode public education and also stoke an anti-immigrant backlash—bugs the hell out of the liberals. Which is, for Karl Rove no doubt, part of the calculation. Rove knows that the pleasure of watching liberals’ heads explode is the best way to keep his team rowing in the same direction.
Two things struck me, reading this: first, of course, appropriation isn’t only done to fuck with our the other side’s heads. When you start to believe your own bullshit, that you really are beset on all sides by an implacable foe, when you’re out there fighting dragons every day, you start to ask yourself what it is they’ve got that you don’t; you start to wonder if maybe you shouldn’t become a little draconic yourself. You say things like, “They have Joan Baez, who do we have?”
It was Dr. Fred C. Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade (CACC) who acted as [Janet] Greene’s “Col. Parker” and molded her into his very own Anti-Baez. As reported in The Los Angeles Times, on October 13, 1964, Schwarz unveiled his new musical weapon against Communism at a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel in LA. With Greene at his side, Schwarz stated to the assembled press that he had “taken a leaf out of the Communist book” by adding a conservative folk singer to his organization. “We have decided to take advantage of this technique for our own purposes.” He then added, “You’d be amazed at how much doctrine can be taught in one song.”
The second thing was how old the conservative schtick is. They were hating on the Clenis back in 1964.
Say I saw a new a great new play on Broadway last night, it’s called The Doll House.
Is that the Rodgers-Hammerstein show?
No, it’s a Profumo-Baker production.
Must have been quite a comedy!
Might call it a farce!
Rimshot, motherfuckers. Rimshot.
Oh, right.
I was—“procrastinating” is such an ugly word—I was organizing some notes, looking over the list of proposed titles for upcoming fits and remembering which ones I’d found epigrams for and which ones I hadn’t, when I tripped over “Frail,” there between an as-yet unnamed bit at no. 14 and “Plenty” at no. 16.
“Frail.” Hadn’t that been the one with the O’Brian quote? Aubrey to Maturin, or Maturin to Aubrey, one of ’em anyway laughing at what little it is that separates quickness from death? Which the hell book was that from? And why isn’t the quote in the neat little text file I’ve got of all my other epigrammic candidates?
So I opened up the various other text files I’ve accumulated over the years where notes have been stashed and squirreled away, and searched them with the various search tools at my disposal, looking for “frail.” Bupkes.
Did I forget maybe to put it somewhere? Noted it en passant, said to myself, oh, hey, keen, let’s remember to come back and get this later, okay? And then forgot? As it wouldn’t be the first time.
Okay. Okay. We could go look for it. Except I ran across it the last time I was bingeing through the first seven or so of the Aubrey-Maturin books, and I have no earthly idea which one it was in. And I don’t remember enough of the context to make skimming at all viable. Not through seven books. (Maybe I should start bingeing again? Put down The Orientalist and Evasion and Civilizations Before Greece and Rome and The Demon Lover and pick up Master and Commander for another go-round, grimly determined to pounce this time?)
I think I was actually typing “frail” in the Seach Inside the Book! feature over at Amazon when it hit me: maybe I’d written it down. You know, on paper. With a pen. In the main black notebook I’ve been using when I’m not, you know. Near a keyboard.
Found it in two: “Bless you, Jack, an inch of steel in the right place will do wonders. Man is a pitiably frail machine.” —Although I still don’t know which book. Or what context. Oh, well.
(At least I got a blog post out of it. Now. What in hell am I going to quote for “Surveilling”?)
Althæaphage.
I got an email here. Uh, “Rush,” uh, “now that two of our own have been tortured and murdered by the terrorists in Iraq, will the Left say that they deserved it? I’m so sick of our cut-and-run liberals. Keep up your great work.” Bob C. from Roanoke, Virginia. “PS, I love the way you do the program on the Ditto Cam.” [Laughter.] I read… no, I added that! He didn’t, he didn’t put that in there. [Laughter.] You know, it—it’s—I—uh… I gotta tell ya, I—I—I perused the liberal, kook blogs today, and they are happy that these two soldiers got tortured. They’re saying, “Good riddance. Hope Rumsfeld and whoever sleep well tonight.” I kid you not, folks.
Do I even need to tell you that not a single liberal kook said anything of the kind?
It’s not that they lie. It’s not even that they lie so brazenly, so completely, so shamelessly. It’s that people believe them. It’s not that if only we were speaking out against their lies with more volume and vigor and vim. The indisputable fact of us, being where we are and doing as we do, is enough to give them the lie direct. But the people who believe them don’t pay any attention, and if they do happen across us, they don’t listen. They don’t have to.
Go, Google Abu Zubaydah. Read up on how important he was: a top Bin Laden deputy, al-Qaeda’s top military strategist, their chief recruiter, the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s thirty-five. Two years younger than me. We caught him in 2002. He’d been keeping a diary for ten years, written by three separate personalities. His primary responsibility within the foundation was to make plane reservations for the families of other operatives.
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.
So we tortured him. We tortured him, and he told us all sorts of things about 9/11, and over a hundred people we’ve since indicted on the strength of his coerced word, and “plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target’.”
And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
At least the president didn’t lose face.
As above, so below: the self-similarity of the wingnut function; string theory for echthroi. Too much has been swallowed ever to turn around and come back up; it’s basic human nature to prefer being wrong to ever admitting one might not have been right. (The sort of human nature one is supposed to outgrow, yes, but.)
“Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.” Cliché? Hell, it’s a shibboleth: Welcome to the Reality-based Community. —Ignorance we can deal with, with the talking and the listening and the reasoning and the debating and the citing. Stupidity requires a different approach. Pathological liars so epically insecure they’ve made up their own network called “Excellence in Broadcasting” and call themselves “America’s Anchorman”? That shit writes itself, but our real fight’s altogether elsewhere.
Neither the first word nor the last on profanity, disputation, anger, and civility for bloggers.
The Dragonlord held the blade up, and said, “I was given this weapon of my father, you know.” He studied its length critically. “It is called Reason, because my father always believed in the power of reasoned argument. And yours?”
“From my mother. She found it in the armory when I was very young, and it is one of the last weapons made by Ruthkor and Daughters before their business failed. It is the style my father has always preferred: light and quick, to strike like a snake. I call it Wit’s End.”
“Wit’s End? Why?”
“Well, for much the same reason that yours is Reason.”
Piro turned it in his hand, observing the blade—slender but strong, and the elegant curve of the bell guard. Then he turned to Kytraan and said, “May Reason triumph.”
“It always does, at the end of the day,” said Kytraan, smiling. “And as for you, well, you will always have a resort when you are at your wit’s end.”
“Indeed,” said Piro with a smile, as they waited for the assault to commence.
—Steven Brust, The Viscount of Adrilankha
The problem with Manicheanism.
In a world with Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel must necessarily represent the force of good, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Something to keep in mind (Jupiter drops).
It’s maybe, what, fifteen blocks from our house to Salon Bédé? We usually walk it. And if I am for whatever reason walking by myself, I take my iPod. I take my iPod whenever I’m walking anywhere. It’s nice to have on the bus—that and a book and you’ve got your isolation bubble firmly in place (you and maybe half of everybody else)—but when I’m walking, I can hear it better. When I’m walking, I’m not doing anything else.
Last night, around about 42nd, something, I don’t remember what, but let’s say it was “Cyberbird” for the sake of argument, it fluttered to a stop, and then that rising ghostly hum-chord began, and crawling up out of it that unearthly backwards guitar, and maybe it was because it was a chilly night and I’d only grabbed a light jacket, but you know how Robert Graves goes on about poetry and the shaving mirror and the hairs on your chin? It was like that, only all the way down to my toes, and I stood there hanging between one step and the next until he began to sing, and it’s not the first time that’s ever happened.
And yet it isn’t the song, is it? Just? I’d play it for you, and you’d say maybe that was nice, or huh, but you wouldn’t hang there, unstuck from the moment-to-moment. (Unless.) —It’s everything I’ve put into the song, everything that unfolds when I hear it begin to play, a key only I can use for a lock only I’d want to open. —It’s all so very, very big. Without the song, where would I put it?
Here’s an alternate take on “Ubiquity is the abyss”; a polished remix of the earlier rough demo track. “Songs are fascist immigrants,” says Momus, elsewhere; “conquistadors who’ve come, inevitably, to slay indigenous sound wherever they find it.” —Well, yes. But not just slay. And not just sound.
Jupiter drops (four).
Where were we?
Opening fanfare, check. The basic theme; motives, episodes; the countersubject—
I’m beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!
What a strange thing to say. —“I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to read as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just seeing a book once a month, how amazing it must have seemed!” Imagine a glass of wine just once a year—the taste! (The anticipation of the taste; the concentration brought to the tasting; the memory of the taste—a whole language constructed to better remember that taste—) Imagine: sex, but once in your lifetime. What an amazing experience!
What a terrible price to pay, for such fleeting evanescence.
It’s a strange thing to say, isn’t it, for an airport musician, a furniture musician, a knife-and-fork musician?
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces—familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
—Brian Eno, “The ambient music manifesto”
To say that an airport musician has said?
As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I’m aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory)—
Yadda yadda concert but once a month amazing. —So I went and poked around for an interview given by Eno around the time he moved to St. Petersburg, in which he expressed his dissatisfaction with CDs. I wanted to see his own words, not Momus’s memory of his words; I wanted to get closer to how Eno had squared this particular circle. And I did find the column he wrote around the time he moved to St. Petersburg, in which he said:
I was in a big art gallery in Los Angeles once. There was a Frank Stella painting about 60 feet long, and next to it a tiny, jewel-like eight inch square collage, and a little further along a Boltanski piece using framed black and white photos and table lamps and boxes of old clothing, and next to that a Nam June Paik sculpture made of working TV sets. I found myself envying visual artists the endless range of forms their productions could take—big, small, 2D, 3D, 4D, colourful, dull, glossy, rough, smooth, figurative, abstract—and I compared it in my mind with making a CD. Suddenly that seemed like a narrow bottleneck through which all music had to be squeezed. Imagine if you said to all the visual artists of the world: “Okay guys… from now on the only way that people are going to see your work is in magazines—on 11" x 8" colour pages.” What would happen to painting? Well, Frank Stella probably wouldn’t bother with making his things 60 feet long—he’d make something that looked adequate at the 11" x 8" scale. Similarly all the others…. because if the final format is only capable of certain things, that’s what you’ll end up regarding as your working palette.
So what I find exciting now is discovering music that hasn’t obediently designed itself to slot within the constraints of this arbitrary medium—recorded music—and which is somehow bigger than it, overflowing at its edges, extending beyond its horizons. Yes—I want to feel the music is too big to fit on a little old CD, that there is more to it than that, that it has a separate life from my hi-fi—a life I can imagine and add to my aural experience of the music.
Not a word about the ubiquity of music. Just the ubiquity of CDs. Not a word about the Middle Ages, or concerts once a month, but more, much more, and other and better and bigger and different. —And I don’t want to suggest that my search was in any way exhaustive. There could well be another interview or column somewhere about St. Petersburg that I missed, which starts with dissatisfaction and ends up with self-denial. There could be a remark somewhere else entirely, taken out of its other context, conflated. But I don’t want to suggest that Momus misspoke, or misremembered; he has as much Google as the rest of us. Nor do I wish to imply that he made up an authority to cite, the better to drive home his point. (The lurkers support him in email!) But I do want to remind you of his current gig: he’s the Unreliable Tour Guide for the Whitney Biennial.
And anyway, it isn’t the ubiquity of music that Momus is railing against, any more than it’s the fornication and the silk and the wine and the musical instruments that will lead Allah to let the mountain fall.
Jupiter drops (some further context).
Bunk has suffered through Gram Parson’s “Streets of Baltimore” on a hillbilly bar’s juke, just as Herc has been forced to police West Baltimore amid the throbbing bass lines of what passes for rap these days. Which is the point, perhaps.
“In real life you don’t get to punch the button on the song that you want to be playing when you get into the bar fight, when you’re in a car chase,” said Simon.
And so we have these buttons being punched on The Wire: 1972’s “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” by Looking Glass, played on a beat-up radio in the stevedore’s pierside shack when Frank Sobotka was worried about a can of contraband languishing on the docks; the Tokens singing that ridiculous, everything-that-Bob-Dylan-is-not folk song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as Jimmy McNulty and sons follow Stringer Bell through a city market; prosecutor Rhonda Pearlman, stuck at home doing paperwork, listening to the plaintive poetry of Lucinda Williams.
Yet one rule is strictly observed: All of the music has to be ambient, meaning it has to be justified by a source in the scene, either a boom box or a stereo or a car radio or a band belting it out in a bar that doesn’t even have a stage.
—George Pelecanos, “The Music of The Wire”
Might as well go with the flow of it. Jim puts on his “Supertragic Symphony,” a concoction of his own made up of the four saddest movements of symphonic music that he knows of. He’s recorded them in the sequence he thinks most effective. First comes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, grand and stirring in its resistance to fate, full of active grief as an opening movement should be. Second movement is the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the stately solemn tune that Bruno Walter discovered could be made into a dirge, if you ignored Beethoven’s instruction to play it allegretto and went to adagio. Heavy, solemn, moody, rhythmic.
The third movement is the third movement from Brahms’s Third Symphony, sweet and melancholy, the essence of October, all the sadness of all the autumns of all time wrapped up in a tuneful tristesse that owes its melodic structure to the previous movement from Beethoven’s Seventh. Jim likes this fact, which he discovered on his own; it makes it look like the “Supertragic Symphony” was meant to be.
Then the finale is the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, no fooling around here, all the stops pulled, time to just bawl your guts out! Despair, sorrow, grief, all of czarist Russia’s racking misery, Tchaikovsky’s personal troubles, all condensed into one final awful moan. The ultimate bummer.
What a symphony! Of course there’s a problem with the shifting key signatures, but Jim doesn’t give a damn about key signatures. Ignore them and he can gather up all of his downer feelings and sing them out, conduct them too, wandering around the ap trying feebly to clean up a bit, collapsing in chairs, crawling blackly over the floors as he waves an imaginary baton, getting lower and lower. Man, he’s low. He’s so low he’s getting high off it! And when it’s all over he feels drained. Catharsis has taken place. Everything’s a lot better.
—Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast
