Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Go, and do thou likewise.

According to Susan Tully of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), many Roman Catholics are unhappy with their church leaders who, like Mahony, advocate for illegal aliens. “I am a Catholic, and there’s a whole bunch of us who are calling for a boycott of the Catholic Church,” she says.

“In other words,” Tully explains, “we’re telling other Catholics, ‘If you want to go to church to receive communion and a service or whatever, that would be fine, but do not financially support [the church].” And as for Cardinal Mahony, she contends, it is important for church members to remember what is truly motivating him.

—“Activist Urges Boycott of Catholic Leaders Who Support Illegal Aliens,” Agape Press

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

—The Gospel According to Saint Luke,
chapter 10, verses 25 – 29

—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugs

—Filed 7092 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment [2].

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.

—Filed 7093 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [1].

34°4'48" N, 49°42'0" E.

Arak is not an old city, though it is the capital of the Markazi Province, one of the oldest settled areas on the Iranian plateau.

That white patch in the upper-right is a sometime lake and salt-flat, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s the Kavir-e Mighan (or Miqan, or Miyqan, or MeiQan, depending), except this page says it’s the Shur Gel. I don’t remember; I do remember seeing plumes of dust rising hundreds of feet into a hard blue-white sky, the only sign of a convoy of trucks driving across it, lost somewhere in the shimmering heat-haze.

There’s a university in Arak, now: the Islamic Azad University of Arak, founded in 1985, some 23,000 students, degrees in drama, agricultural science, Islamic theology, English literature. —Actually, there’s several universities: the Arak University of Medical Sciences, the University of Arak, the Tarbiat Moallem University of Arak, a campus of the Iran University of Science and Technology. I don’t know how old any of those are. I don’t remember any of them; I remember a small town and dust and open sewers and the incongruities of an American-style suburb thrown up away from all that, platted blocks of yellow grass and red-brick houses and the high-rise apartment towers off over that way.

If I’m remembering correctly, the suburbs were at the southern end of Arak; we looked out on the mountains to the south and west. We’d drive up there and go tromping about. I spelled my name in flat rocks with letters taller than myself in the snow, but when we got back in the car and drove back down to our house and I got out and looked back, I couldn’t see them. When we went out into the country for the last day of Nawruz, I remember it looked a lot like this:

And I remember we could look out the window of our car and see farmers threshing wheat the way they had for centuries:

But if nothing changed for centuries, a lot can happen in thirty years.

Thirty miles to the northwest these days there’s a brand-new heavy water production plant. Heavy water is water made with deuterium atoms, rather than simple, light-water hydrogen; it’s used to moderate neutrons in nuclear reactors that run off natural uranium, rather than enriched uranium. Just the ticket if you’re trying to get a nuclear program off the ground.

I haven’t seen the list of 400 possible sites the president plans to attack in Iran, but I can tell you the Arak heavy water facility is on it. I don’t know if it’s hardened enough to require a nuclear bomb. If so, it’ll (probably) be a B61-11, which could generate between 25,000 and 1.5 million tons of radioactive debris—depending on the yield “dialed in”—some thirty miles northwest of a house I lived in, thirty years ago.

If not, it’ll just take a lot of conventional ordnance. —And I know, I know: who cares? The Russians loved their children, too. So did the Iraqis.

I just can’t help but take this personally. I’m only human.

—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugs

—Filed 7096 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment [6].

Mutually assured destruction.

Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an hour listening to us argue about “circular errors probable” and “MIRV decoys” and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day, turned to me and said, “I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I’ve ever seen up here.” At that point, I agreed with her.

What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho. Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over.

As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as a speeding Mexican bus…

And I wish to God I could believe it was nothing more than this; nothing more than a projection of implacable, irrational lethality, a bit of cakewalk brinksmanship, steely-eyed diplomats pounding tables to distract from the inevitable blink.

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.

Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:

I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.

—Seymor Hersh, “The Iran Plans”

But we cannot trust the people we’ve put in charge of our country. Whether they’re thinking of Iran’s nascent nuclear program as John Perry Barlow’s speeding Mexican bus or not, the fact is they will not blink and they will not falter and they will not turn away.

Can I be crystal fucking clear for a moment? The destruction I mean is not some tit-for-tat exchange of container nukes for bunker-busters. (It’s not like the people we’ve put in charge of our country will miss New York and LA all that much anyway.) —What I mean is if we do this thing, the audiences of tomorrow will cheer as their pulp heroes bravely square off toe-to-toe with implacable American stormtroopers. What I mean is, there is no difference in this world or the next between dropping enough conventional and nuclear ordnance to take out 400 suspected sites and flying a couple of passenger jets into office buildings on a cloudless autumn day. Either is so monstrous as to be beyond any possible, rational measurement or comparison.

Look! See! How good we have gotten, at fighting dragons!

—Filed 7097 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

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

—Filed 7100 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

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