Deerhunter / Atlas Sound / Lotus Plaza

I know I often write about the band Deerhunter in this here blog but for some reason the past years I've been coming back to them over and over. They're a 4-piece band originally from Atlanta, Ga., more or less "led" by a guy named Bradford Cox who play a mix of 60s pop, shoegaze, punk, whatever. They write great pop songs, always well arranged and played. I came to them late (as I usually do with music), around the end of 2008 when I was living in Boston (actually Cambridge). I was there for a fellowship or something that I only dimly remember now.

Either way, the walk from my apartment to campus was nice, especially on the cold snowy mornings. And Deerhunter would frequently pop up on my headphones. At that time I still had a habit of making mixes to sample new music. I started this habit about 10 years ago when I still made mix CDs (CDs!) but at some point, they just became iPod playlists and on Mix 27, there were two songs by Deerhunter, one called "Nothing Ever Happened," originally from the album Microcastle. The studio version is a rocking rush of a song. As Bradford Cox sings, he evokes late 1960s psychedelia in the melody, but by the end of the song, it moves slowly into early 1990s shoegaze: a hypnotic metronomic beat with rushes of glide guitar envelops you. Those two styles pretty much sum up many of their songs: 60s perfect pop and 90s fuzzy guitar. On "Nothing Ever Happened," the two styles clash and race ahead with urgency leaving you almost breathless. I always got to campus faster when that song came on.

Since Microcastle (my top album of 2008), Deerhunter has released another album, Halcyon Digest (my top album of 2010), also filled with an amazing number of pop goodies, like songs made of candy. My favorite song from the recent album was "Desire Lines," written actually by the lead guitarist of the band (and all around shy dude) with the unlikely name Lockett Pundt. Like many good Deerhunter songs, it begins as a perfect pop song, and then moves into being a mood piece of guitar and chimes. Pundt's modus operandi seems to be bliss-through-repetition and that ethic is clearly on display in the last few minutes of "Desire Lines." Here is the song performed live in the studio. Pundt is the guy singing on the right.



Both Pundt and especially Cox have had pretty prolific "solo" careers outside of Deerhunter. Cox is a man driven by some ineffable need to constantly write and record music. At one point, be posted four volumes of demos of songs on his blog entitled "Bedroom Databank." I think a lot of other contemporary songwriters would kill to be possessed of that kind of prolific creativity. The fact that he has a genetic disorder known as Marfan syndrome (and also probably the fact that he's gay) would seem to suggest a certain outsider status that informs his songwriting. He seems to have a vast knowledge about the history and mythology of rock'n'roll and you can argue that that kind of thing can make your music too calculated and contrived, but his undeniable musical talent makes up for that. Cox calls his solo act Atlas Sound; as Atlas Sound he's released a bunch of albums, all of them worth hearing. They're a bit more experimental than Deerhunter, less unified, more bedroom-ish electropop. Here are two songs. The first is from Logos (2009) and is a song called "Quick Canal." On lead vocals is Laetitia Sadier, one of the main forces behind the French band Stereolab. The song recalls some of Sadier's best Stereolab work and is (nearly) 9 minutes of electrobliss:



And here is Bradford Cox playing the song "Te Amo" live during a radio broadcast. The song is from the most recent Atlas Sound called Parallax, released last year.



Which brings me back to the aforementioned Lockett Pundt, who has just released a new album under the his solo career moniker Lotus Plaza. The new album is called Spooky Action at a Distance is getting some good reviews. I just got it myself and have only heard it a couple of times, and what I hear I am loving. Here is the song "Strangers" from it, evocative of 1980s jangle pop and shoegaze. Takes me back to 1989 and... um that adolescent state of pining for pretty hipster girls:



And finally, finally, let us return to Deerhunter's "Nothing Ever Happened," the first song by the band I ever heard on those walks to campus in Cambridge in late 2008. Deerhunter is good on record but they kick some major ass on stage. Here is the live version of the song, transformed into a frenetic and mesmerizing epic. You can see the band playing like a well-oiled machine that seems to teeter on the edge of total collapse. As the song rises into hallucinogenic psychedelia in the latter part, Cox begins to sing/talk the lyrics to Patti Smith's classic "Land" from Horses.

Eple

It was an innocent time, 2005. I saw Royksopp in concert. (My review here). The soundtrack to happiness. I just figured out that "eple" means "apple"in Norwegian.

Tennis as Text

Back when Roger Federer was at the peak of his abilities as a tennis player and was speedily breaking through every tennis record known to humankind, David Foster Wallace wrote a piece on Federer for the New York Times. This was in 2006, when Wallace was.... well, he was alive for a start. He was 44 years old and it had been ten years since the publication of his greatest novel Infinite Jest. An incredibly ambitious work that operates on several meta-levels between fiction and non-fiction, this book, footnoted to death, was considered by some in the list of top 100 works of "fiction" written in the English language in the previous 75 years or so. Wikipedia describes it thus:

[a] lengthy and complex work [that] takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America and touches on tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism... The novel includes 388 numbered endnotes (some of which have footnotes of their own) that explain or expound on points in the story. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace characterized their use as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion.

Wallace went on to much fame. He even received the MacArthur Foundation grant, the so-called genius award, but he never finished another novel. He did, however, write quite a bit of short non-fiction, including about Federer and tennis, more broadly. In 2006, I wasn't paying that much attention to tennis. I think I may have heard of Federer at the time but I'm not sure I had any sense of his capabilities or where he fit into the pantheon. I used to be a tennis freak, as in, I obsessively watched tennis on TV as a young kid (couldn't play worth a damn) but sometime during the reign of Pete Sampras, I basically lost all interest. Something about his game (or perhaps his personality) dampened my enthusiasm for the game, and if there was a sport I followed at all in the early 2000s, it was basketball, inspired to some degree by a stint living in Philadelphia and watching the 76ers. Remember Allen Iverson?

Sports writing as a genre is largely a dull breed of writing. But something about Wallace's writing was intriguing. His peculiar choice of diction, his language, his circuitous description of Federer mimicked Federer's play itself. It's supremely elegant and effective but you don't know how he did it. The essay, recently republished in an anthology was described by its editors as one that "still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sports at its highest level." In time, Wallace's essay itself has assumed a strange iconic significance, with other people writing essays about his essay, especially after Wallace committed suicide in September 2008.

For some reason, I'm really not sure why, sometime around early 2008, I began to watch a lot of tennis. I saw the Australian Open which I think was in January and noticed this guy Roger Federer. He didn't win it, nor did he with the subsequent French Open a few months later. But soon after, there was the epic battle between Federer and his then arch rival Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon. It was July 2008, and I was visiting a friend in San Francisco. It was a spectacular final that Sunday, some claiming the greatest tennis match ever played. Somebody's even written a book--an entire book!--about that match. Watching Federer that year, a year when he was ostensibly in decline, I found myself drawn to tennis again.

All sports have knowledge systems that undergird them. For the laypublic, especially men, sports operates at the level of minutae: scores, averages, statistics, and so on. There's a lot of that in tennis too, of course, but there's also an ineffably individualistic quality about tennis that sets it apart from other popular sports of today. When you are on the court, there is no one but you. There is no coach, no helmet, no protective padding, no fellow players, no special costume: it is just you and a tennis racket. There's something both humanistic and animalistic in that ritual. What I think Federer did for the game was to infuse the loneliness of the tennis player with an inextricable naturalness. People talk about his grace, and yes, he is graceful, but he also seems to operate at a level where the science of angles and velocities disappear into mystery. His playing is both mysterious but utterly within reach. He makes it look easy enough that you, yes you, could do it if you just swung the racket in the right direction.

Wallace's writing about Federer captured that quality more precisely than anything I've ever read, indeed anything I've read about any sports. There's a lovely part where Wallace notes:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body. 

Of course, in men's sports no one talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their "love" of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalistic fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's. You too may find them so, in which case Spain's mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man's man for you---he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations.

Oddly enough, since 2008, when I found myself interested in Federer, he has been in a slow decline. After winning five Wimbledon championships in a row, he lost to Nadal in the finals in July 2008. Coincidentally, few months later, David Foster Wallace killed himself. In the last years of his life, Wallace had struggled to finish his second novel. In a lengthy post-mortem on Wallace published in the New Yorker a year after his death, the author, D. T. Max, recalled the outpouring of sadness from the literary world at Wallace's death:

He was only forty-six when he killed himself, which helped explain the sense of loss readers and critics felt. There was also Wallace's outsized passion for the printed word at at time when it looked like it needed champions. His novels were overstuffed with facts, humor, digressions, silence, and sadness. He conjured the world in two-hundred word sentences that mixed formal diction and street slang, technicalese and plain speech; his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed through itself.

Was there some weird inexplicable parallel between the talents of Wallace and Federer? Probably not. But the fact that one provided a window into the beauty of the other, brought into relief for me the very primal link between words and bodies. When we watch the theater of sports, we are at once celebrating the physicality of the human body and at the same time reading the body.

Since 2008, Roger Federer has had a reasonably successful career as a tennis player. While he has never managed to (re)attain the halcyon heights of his peak level between 2004 to 2007, he remains very much in the mix as one of the best tennis players. If he has been eclipsed at the top by Nadal and Novak Djokovic, he still retains his odd capacity to create movement--kinetic beauty--on the tennis court bar none. As a 'real' person, he remains oddly sterile, someone who is probably rather well-intentioned and polite, but not terribly interesting, but more than a bit self-involved. He reminds me a little bit of people like Kanye West: incredibly talented, unduly self-absorbed, and and possessed of some questionable aesthetic choices.

In the past few months suddenly, Federer has been on the rise again. He has won six of the eight tournaments he has entered, the last won being a major tournament played at Indian Wells in California. The above picture is from the final match played last Sunday when he beat John Isner, an American player, in straight sets. Something about that picture, for a brief moment, reminded me of David Foster Wallace. If you could disassemble that picture and abstract those pieces into words, you might get something akin to Wallace's essay. Mysterious, confounding, elegant, humanistic, animalistic, contradictory, beautiful.

Read it here.

25 Most Original Films of All Time

PaperStreetCinema posted the top 25 most original movies of all time. The list (below) suggests that there's some overlap between "original" and "influential." I think it's easier to measure the latter but more difficult to measure the former. "Influential" basically means that the movie in question incorportaed stylistic features that later repeatedly showed up in later films. You could also measure "influential" by reading interviews with directors and getting a rough estimate of how many times directors tend to invoke particular movies. "Original" is a different matter. It's really about creating new idioms, new languages of film.

Here is PaperStreetCinema's list. My comments are in red.

1. Citizen Kane (Welles)
1. Birth of a Nation (Griffith) --Tied with Citizen Kane. Every movie made since Griffith and Welles has been inextricably influenced by both in equal measure. No film since has added much more to the medium than what's in these two. They are cinema's most basic building blocks.
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
This would have been my number 1.
4. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
5. Pulp Fiction (Tarentino) --The most groundbreaking screenplay/dialogue of all time.
6. Star Wars (Lucas)
Influential or original? I tend to think more influential. Star Wars inaugurated the era of big budget special effects sci-fi/fantasy popcorn blockbusters. But was it original? Star Wars took bits and pieces of everything from Greek tragedies Hindu mythology, cowboys-and-Indians movies, the Bible, Flash Gordon, and Freud, added some operatic overtones, and put the whole thing in space. Maybe Lucas' genius was to mix all of this stuff into a greater whole?
7. Fantasia (Disney)
8. Rashomon (Kurosawa)
Yes, for sure.
9. Jaws (Spielberg) --one of my favorite films but I would argue that Spielberg ruined Hollywood by creating the "event movie" phenomenon (Lucas shares the blame too).
This is definitely original. I think the modern special effects thriller was born here.
10. Toy Story (Lassiter)
Good call.
11. Die Hard (McTiernan) --yes, really.
What?
12. The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (Wiene)
13. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
14. The Last Laugh (Murnau)
15. Blade Runner (Scott)
Yes, most definitely.
16. Cleopatra (Mankiewicz) --Groundbreaking in the sense that it single-handedly ended the classic Hollywood generation.
Again, are we talking landmark or original?
17. Night of the Living Dead (Romero) The first significant independent film.
Probably my number 2.
18. Batman (Burton)
19. A Trip to the Moon (Méliès)
Yes, absolutely.
20. Psycho (Hitchcock)
21. Stagecoach (Ford)
22. Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Dali)
23. Metropolis (Lang)
Again, essential in the "original" category.
24. Halloween (Carpenter)
25. The Blair Witch Project (Myrick/Sanchez)
I'm not a fan of this movie but I can see this.

Others for consideration: Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick) for its ground-breaking combination of satire, apocalypse, realism, and alternate reality. Also: Alien (Scott) for its original contribution of the alien archetype, the class warfare on the ship, and grunt protagonists, etc.. Can any other sci-fi movie ever claim such originality? Other possible candidates: Manhattan and/or Annie Hall (for its combination of comedy and meta dialogue with the audience). Also The Player (Altman)? Russian Ark (Sokurov)? Rope (Hitchcock)?

Besides

For some reason, as long as I have owned music, I've fetishized the rare. Here, "rare"is a relative term, for the quality of being "rare" (let's call it "rarity") is a slippery term, often carefully constructed by corporations and faceless musical conglomerates. But conceding that the whole edifice of the music industry is built around interventions designed to create consumer demand for useless things, I'll argue that there was something oddly attractive about rare musical artifacts: b-sides, alternate versions released specially for the Belgian market, extra tracks on Japanese releases, EPs that had been deleted and never included on a proper album, singles released on 45s that never made it onto CDs, etc.

In the late 1980s, as I grew to be a collector (or maybe a Collector), these sorts of stray songs, the ones left behind, assumed a sort of mystical quality in my imagination. I had to track them all down, even if I had to make friends in Belgium. I'm thinking of bands like the Smiths who not only released albums but also numerous singles which had songs that were never included (at least originally) on the proper albums. How did bands make these choices, what to keep on the album and what to leave off? I was recently listening to one of my favorite Smiths songs "William, It Was Really Nothing" which was originally released as a single in August 1984. The song was not originally featured on any album, i.e., the only way to get it and listen to it was to buy the 45 rpm single. And if you bought the 12" version of the single, you got a special treat, two songs on the b-side: "How Soon Is Now?" and "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want." What kind of a band would relegate such fantastic songs as forgotten b-sides?

Soon enough, of course, all three of these songs appeared on various Smiths compilations (and believe me, there are far too many to recount), but every band, however famous, always had a few tracks, lost to the world, lost to the general public. You had to be a bit industrious to track these songs down. If you lived in Texas, you might go to Sound Exchange or that big store in Austin. Because these "rare" purchases were rather expensive, you felt that you had to invest some time and attention to the songs you bought, even if they were mediocre (which they were, half the time). I remember buying Love and Rockets' "So Alive" as a 45 in 1989, and listening excitedly to the b-side, "Dreamtime" an absurdly bizarre (and let's face it, bad song). If you paid a lot of money for it, you forced yourself to appreciate the b-side.

But some bands in the 1980s took a lot of care and effort into these stray tracks. The Smiths of course, whose "Jeane" (the b-side of "This Charming Man") has been lost forever but was undoubtedly one of the best songs they ever recorded. And there was a certain kind of fetishistic joy I got simply from listening to these experiments in sound from bands like the Smiths, U2, the Cure, Flaming Lips, My Bloody Valentine, and so on.

Today I present five randomly chosen b-sides from the 1980s. The first is from a classic middlebrow easy listening band (and now firmly in the playing-in-the-doctors-office-waiting-room category), Tears for Fears. In March 1985, the band released "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (which I still love); but if you bought the 45 and flipped it over and played the b-side, what you got was a strange sound collage called "Pharoahs," a truly mesmerizing piece of 1980s-period experimental pop. If you listen to it carefully (at about 2:20), the band plays the exact guitar solo (one of my all time favorite guitar solos, actually) that is featured on the a-side. Play it. You'll recognize it. Simply fantastic:



The next one is from U2's single "When Love Comes to Town" (a frankly terrible song) released in April 1989. The b-side, however, is a song called "Dancing Barefoot," originally written and performed by Patti Smith on her album Wave from 1979. I had never heard the Patti Smith version when I heard U2 do it, and it's an understatement to say that it blew my mind. It's rare that U2 performs as a rock band--they're usually so overproduced (which I think, is the point of latter day U2)--but here they sound raw and just a band jamming, trying to find new spaces out of old chords.



The third one is a song by Siouxsie & the Banshees, originally released on the b-side of the 12" of "This Wheel's On Fire" in January 1987. The a-side was a (Bob Dylan) cover but the b-side had two originals, both of which were stellar. Here is "Sleepwalking (On The High Wire)," a strangely evocative song about God knows what. The production is dated, of course, but the mood is still powerful, emotionally taut.



The fourth one is "Erotic City," the b-side to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" from July 1984. I couldn't find the 7" version on youtube so here is the extended version in all its seven-and-a-half minute glory. This may be the best dance song Prince ever released; it's certainly in my list of the top 10 best dance songs of all time. Unbelievable genius.



Finally, we have, as (implicitly) promised, "Jeane."

We tried and we failed
We tried and we failed
We tried and we failed
Jeane

Originally released in October 1983, somehow the song got lost in the shuffle, missing a spot on various compilations. The song is ostensibly a subtle but powerful comment on Thatcherite England and the ways in which money (or lack of money) can tear even the best relationships apart. But you know, even if you know nothing about Thatcher or early 1980s England, it doesn't matter. The song just summarizes a lost cause relationship with economic precision. Here is the original version:



Here is a cover by Sandie Shaw (from April 1984) backed by Morrissey and Marr, who were big fans of Shaw and who invited her to do a cover.

Friend Of The Night

Once again, another "holding-the-fort" type post instead of anything substantive. [I should add that I vomited out this massively long meditation on the 20th anniversary of Nevermind a few months ago but chickened out of publishing it on the blog at the last minute due to general embarrassment. But you know, whatever, I might still put that up.] I still have to do Parts 2 and 3 of my Joni Mitchell retrospective. For those interested, Part 1 is still here. And then I have another one coming up on "crappy/totally uncool bands that have one awesomely good song." [Yes, even the Eagles had a good song or two]. Anyway, in the meantime, here is one of the best Mogwai songs every made. The track is called "Friend of the Night" and highlights how incredibly dynamic Mogwai can be. This is some beautiful interplay of guitar and piano that creates an almost sinister vibe that, by the second half of the song becomes all too inevitably tragic. Mogwai have a reputation for being the loudest band on earth but this is all about subtlety and understanding space, minimalism, and melody.

Somehow I managed to see them live in 2009 in Brooklyn and... amazingly that very live show was released on CD as Special Moves and packaged as a special actual motion picture (and DVD) as Burning. I am uncertain if I'm featured in the film but I guess I should find out. The audio is incredible.

Chromatics - "Into the Black"

I'll have more detailed posts coming up soon. I've been so incredibly busy that I don't have had much time to devote to this. However, I did want to make sure people (well, whoever reads this blog) hear this "new" song from Chromatics, a band from Portland, Oregon who made a splash with albums a few years back. They recently contributed a song to the soundtrack to the movie Drive, one of my favorite movies from last year. They now have a new album coming out soon called Kill For Love, and among the songs they cover is Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" from Rust Never Sleeps. This is an AMAZING cover version which they call simply "Into the Black." I can't wait to hear the whole album. Check it out.



You can also download an mp3 of the song here.

The Winter of Our Discontent

From As You Like It:

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."

And from Richard III:

"The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch."

Talkin' About a Revolution

Life is good. In fact, life has been good. Overall, compared to my parents' lives, I'm having a good one. It's a bit boring, but that's expected. I'm a bit of a boring person. Me = bourgeois sensibilities wrapped in some aspiration for 'hipness' sprinkled with the occasional (feigned, I'm told) sympathy for socialist ideals. It's all very predictable. I was trying to figure out the other day whether I was in the 99% or the 1%. According to this at the Wall Street Journal, I am apparently part of the 99%. I am, however, above 77% of the U.S. population. That's a pretty significant statistic. That means that I make more money than approximately 240 million people in this country. (See here.)

Thinking about incomes. My initial income in graduate school (my first year) was $12,500 (before taxes). This was the 1998-1999 school year. I was able to live pretty decently in Pittsburgh with that income. I'm not sure how, actually. I think the income increased marginally and by my third year it was $15,000 per year. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the border between Oakland and Shadyside (in a very nice area, actually) and it was an area that might be termed 'gentrified.' I bought CDs (plastic things with music on them) frequently, spent money on alcohol and um other things, traveled a bit here and there. I went to England in 2000, which was a lovely visit.

I moved to New York in September 2001 (actually physically moved into my place on 112th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam on October 25) and my rent was about $750. By that time, I think I made $20,000 (before taxes) but I don't remember feeling particularly poor. In fact, it was good times, as far as I can recall, in terms of money at least. Shit, I saw a ton of bands, including Tool, who were Goddamn expensive.

There was a big jump, obviously when I got a 'real' job, which was in the fall of 2005. But for New York standards it was relatively low--I've since discovered that academic starting salaries in the humanities are the lowest at my institution in New York.

Which brings me to the election. Occasionally, people will bring up the current 'race' between the Romney, Gingrich, Paul, etc. I have some basic knowledge of their policies. I don't follow things too closely but I am aware of their positions on a few important things. I am also somewhat cognizant about Obama and his policies the past three years. My basic position on all of this has been very accurately articulated by one Matt Taibbi, he of the ceaseless wit and genius brain. He notes:

... this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.
In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

He adds that "the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time" in the United States.

I understand that people care about elections. I also understand that Americans (especially young white middle class Americans) find it anathema to consider the option of not voting. But that is essentially my stance. I am tired of voting for the lesser of two evils as opposed to someone I want to be president. I voted for Obama in 2008 (with some hesitation). But I did. On election night, I was really excited, actually. I texted back-and-forth with a friend about the future. It was a hopeful moment. But that moment is gone. Perhaps it's lazy to say that Obama has disappointed. But I like to think that I have substantive reasons for thinking that none of the candidates, Republican or Democrat, represent truly egalitarian values. This is not a personal slight against Obama. I'm sure he is a very nice person (unlike, say, Gingrich). But what is one to do, if one believes in a set of things and none of the candidates subscribes to those values? Voting is where we get to exercise our democratic prerogative(s). But voting has been rendered an empty shell by the dollar signs in everyone's eyes.

Most of the musicians I like seem to be on the Democrat divide, which is not surprising. But few are for a truly revolutionary approach. I'm not talking about fringe figures but mainstream figures. It seems quaint to remember, but in the 1980s, there were 'mainstream' bands who espoused (almost) revolutionary impulses. There were punks (Dead Kennedys comes to mind) of course but also mainstream artists who were culturally and politically in the avant garde (even R.E.M., of course, and the Smiths who sang "The Queen is Dead," Bruce Springsteen, even John Mellencamp, and yes, even the uber-produced contribution of Bruce Hornsby). The 2000s and the 2010s have been periods of artistic orthodoxy. More or less, anyway. You see bands lining up to support Obama when he's basically been a shill for corporate leeches.


I guess I'm saying that music that is politically radical yet popular is a thing of the past. I'm open to be proven wrong -- that Obama is the one to vote for. But until, then:

Whale & Wasp

Calling a hotel in Moscow the "Volga Hotel" is like calling an Indian restaurant the "Prince of India" (or the "The Taj" or the "Taj of India"). It's a bit obvious. Here in the Volga Hotel, I am listening to the Jar of Flies EP from 1994, early 1994, I think. I have a vague memory of a shadow of a wisp from that time of being in my red pickup truck and listening to something off this on my radio. That truck actually belonged to my brother-in-law but he gave it to me for free. It was totally beat up and a piece of crap from 1985. It was a Toyota, though. It had nothing inside except what bore only the faintest resemblance to a radio. Radio in western Massachusetts at that time was an obvious blend of post-grunge lite mixed in with some heavier guitar fare. I didn't like much of it but I did listen to a lot of it because I had no other options. Remember those bands? Blind Melon, Hole, Local H, Stone Temple Pilots, the Offspring, and so on. Mostly horrible bland stuff. But there's something about hearing a song on the radio, that precise moment when the song comes on, and you are about to switch stations but then you don't, 'cause you know, it's too much trouble, and there's no one around to judge you anyway. So why not listen to that new song?

Alice in Chains, I think, was better than that. They had some good ideas. They seemed to have cornered that halcyon genre of navel-gazing nihilism wrapped in commercial-sounding metal. I liked them, even though (or especially because, perhaps) they were a bit of a downer. Shove my nose in shit, indeed.

I had an eventful day today. Big day in Moscow. But if you don't tell anybody about it, did the events actually happen?

I feel like this right now, though: