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Springtime music notes

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  • Tipped off by a positive NY Times review by Kelefa Sanneh, I got “The Body, the Blood, the Machine,” the new album by the Thermals, a Portland band, and it has been steadily knocking me out. Musically it’s relatively simple — flawlessly executed classic pop-punk in the Buzzcocks-to-Green Day tradition. Lyrically it appears to be a narrative song cycle. At first I thought its Biblically infused verses (full of Noah’s ark references and titles like “Pillar of Salt”) might be about a Heaven’s Gate-style cult, but I read on the band’s Web site that “the album tells the story of a young couple who must flee a United States governed by fascist faux-Christians,” which makes things a little clearer. It’s as if someone took American Idiot, subtracted the teen anomie and the Tommy-style riffs on celebrity, and injected it with a little bit of the acid from the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” I’m finding it irresistible.
  • I’m also enjoying the new Mother Hips release, Kiss the Crystal Flake. This Northern California band’s sound — straying over the years from jam-band to country rock to folk and now neo-psychedelia — has always hovered on the edge of derivative cliche only to be rescued by great vocal harmonies, smart lyrics and a devotion to the sheer sonic pleasure of a well-played guitar well recorded.
  • We got a piano for my sons to learn on a while back, which means I can pursue my half-baked musical noodling on multiple instruments now. The other day I started playing the old Eno chestnut “St. Elmo’s Fire” — the kids love it! — and realized, in a flash, that its chord progression is almost identical to that of Elvis’s “Burning Love.” This is the sort of realization you are in an especially good position to experience if your piano-playing, like mine, consists of sounding out simple triads, because you are stripping the music down to its chordal essence (a nice way of saying that you make most of what you play sound the same).

[tags]thermals, mother hips[/tags]

“Lord of Light” in Tehran

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Wired has a remarkable story this month — a cloak-and-dagger saga about the rescue of a handful of Americans from Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80. This group had slipped out of the U.S. embassy as it was overrun and taken refuge underground; a CIA operative rescued them by masquerading as a film producer and manufacturing new identities for the Americans as his crew.

The story is a great yarn in itself. But one little tidbit really stood out for me: the movie the producer was pretending to make was a film adaptation of a science fiction novel that was one of my absolute youthful favorites — Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light.

The original book is set among human exiles from a lost earth — a spaceship crew stranded on a new home planet, where they have used technology to set themselves up as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Ironically, given its use by the CIA during the chaos following Iran’s overthrow of the Shah, it’s a tale of revolution: the “gods” maintain a monopoly on the body-swapping technology that makes them immortal, keeping the masses in a backward state; the hero, Sam, is a populist who sparks a war against the oligarchy. (In the novel’s parallel world, Christianity is represented by the original ship’s chaplain, who has become the menacing leader of a zombie army. It was the ’60s, remember?)

Here you can see all sorts of information about the CIA/Lord of Light connection, including the screenplay, designs by comic-book-art legend Jack Kirby, and an article by the CIA agent who led the rescue mission.

I don’t know that Lord of Light would ever have made a great movie; then again, who’d have thought that The Lord of the Rings ever would, either?
[tags]wired, cia, roger zelazny, lord of light[/tags]

Perfect iPod moments

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Steven Levy’s book about the iPod, The Perfect Thing, describes a transcendent moment the author experiences: In a funk one day in post-9/11 New York, with his iPod in shuffle mode, Levy hears the glorious opening chimes of the Byrds’ version of “My Back Pages,” and he has a Perfect Moment.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved that song, and would rather not wait for shuffle mode to surface it from my thousands of other songs. I continue to hand-pick my music, relying on shuffle only occasionally for novelty or distraction.

Still, iPod-fueled transcendence remains available even to us control freaks. This morning, for instance, I relieved a BART commute’s tedium by listening to the splendid live recording a fan made of a memorable Mountain Goats show I attended last month. (It’s posted here at the Internet Archive.) The set begins pensively with “Wild Sage’s” ruminations, makes its way to the equally melancholy “Get Lonely,” and then bursts into “Quito” — a defiant anthem of aspiring redemption and half-glimpsed rebirth. The song reached its visionary climax at the precise instant my train emerged from the tunnel into the morning Bay Area sun. Perfection! A film-editing wizard couldn’t have better synced sound and vision. I beamed; it made my morning.

It’s been a quarter century since the Walkman’s advent introduced us to the notion of provisioning our daily wanderings with a soundtrack of our choice. The iPod kicks this dynamic into a higher gear. (Levy ponders this and much else in his book; I covered his talk in Berkeley here.)

I’d argue that those of us who are not as shuffle-happy as Levy can feel a bit of extra pride: By virtue of our active personal DJ-ing, we become, instead of passive observers of serendipitous moments, more like coauthors of our own pleasurable juxtapositions. But either way, we’re having fun, and that’s what really matters.
[tags]ipod, steven levy[/tags]

Open endings

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One of the more common criticisms of Dreaming in Code is that some people are disappointed the book ends without a clear resolution to the Chandler story (which was still unfolding at the beginning of 2006, as I wrapped up my work on the book, and is still unfolding today). So my ears perked up last week as I listened to NPR’s Weekend Edition and heard its film critic, Elvis Mitchell, defending the David Fincher movie Zodiac (which I haven’t seen and have no opinion about) from Scott Simon’s complaint that it lacked a satisfying wrap-up. Mitchell argued that the whole movie is an homage to the ’70s indie-film aesthetic and that a willingness to tell stories without providing a traditional ends-tying conclusion was a hallmark of that era’s directors.

Here’s the passage:

SIMON: The film doesn’t tie anything together with a pretty — or in this case, since you’re talking about a murder, an ugly — series of bows. I know it’s real life, I know there was no way of avoiding it; but I found tht dramatically unsatisfying — to go through this long movie, and not have that at the end.

MITCHELL: It’s so funny you say that, Scott, because that’s a ’70s movie ethic — they’d say, basically, you can’t say that things are tied up anymore, these aren’t John Wayne movies, these aren’t Jimmy Stewart movies, these aren’t Henry Fonda movies. The real act of creative bravery in Zodiac is to follow with that, and to say that this is what these movies were, these movies that influenced me as a filmmaker, and I’m going to use that here, in a case where people really want that kind of closure, and not give it to them.

I can’t claim that my choice to conclude Dreaming in Code the way I did was any sort of statement of allegiance to authors or auteurs past. More, it was just a belief that, in non-fiction, you’d better let the shape of the story be dictated by reality and not wishful thinking.

Viacom vs. YouTube: Misreading history

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I’m reading the otherwise perfectly reasonable New York Times piece on the Viacom/Youtube lawsuit and I encounter this bizarre misrepresentation of recent history:

“In the early 1990s music companies let Web companies build business models on the back of their copyright,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “I think the video industry is being more aggressive for the right reasons, to protect the future value of those assets.”

It’s hard to imagine how one could find more ways to be wrong on this topic.

First, there were no “Web companies” in the early 1990s; the first Web companies emerged in 1994-5 — and aside from some unusual efforts, like Michael Goldberg’s Addicted to Noise zine, there was not a lot of music happening on the Web. The MP3 revolution didn’t begin to roll until late 1997 or early 1998 (here is Andrew Leonard’s early report on the MP3 scene, which I edited).

More important, Mr. Nathanson has the history here precisely inverted. What happened in the Napster era was that music companies refused to allow Web companies to build business models on the back of their copyright. They decided that MP3s were all about piracy and they sued Napster out of existence. They refused to do deals with companies that wanted to distribute their music online, and in fact they failed to offer their music online in any way palatable to consumers until Steve Jobs whacked them on the side of the head — and even then they saddled his whole iTunes enterprise with a cumbersome “digital rights management” scheme that even he is now disowning.

The Viacom suit against YouTube does not represent a break with the way the music industry dealt with its rocky transition to the digital age; it is an instance of history repeating itself. The RIAA strategy of “sue your customers” may have succeeded in driving file-sharing underground, but it didn’t do anything to protect the profits of the music industry, which have been in a tailspin ever since. If the Viacom suit is an indication that the owners of TV shows and movies are going to pursue a similar strategy of I’d-rather-sue-than-deal, they may find themselves in a similar downward spiral.

Google has a pretty good case based on the 1996 Telecommunications Act safe harbor provision. If Viacom fails to win against its corporate opponent, will it start suing all the Jon Stewart fans (and, possibly, the show’s own staff) who are uploading clips to YouTube?

If the TV and film industries look carefully at the music industry’s story, they will see that their danger lies not in being too soft on copyright infringers but rather in missing the tidal wave of a platform shift.
[tags]youtube, google, viacom, napster, drm[/tags]

Goats galore

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I originally got hooked on the music of the Mountain Goats by listening to the first four tracks of the album “We Shall All Be Healed,” late one February night three years ago. The riffage of these low-tech rock songs reminded me of the Velvet Underground songs I grew up with, and formed memorable frames for the mysterious lyrics of John Darnielle — evocative, in songs like “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Letter From Belgium,” of sacred rituals, ancient science fiction plots, and David Lynch movies. (It was only later that I figured out that the whole album is a kind of memorial to doomed meth addicts Darnielle had hung with in his youth.)

As I made my way through the Goats’ voluminous back catalog I came to understand that these full-band song arrangements were the exception to Darnielle’s rule of recording mostly with an acoustic guitar, solo into a boombox mike — and touring, most of the time, as a duo, with bassist Peter Hughes.

All of which is by way of preface to a report from the last two evenings that I spent, enraptured, at the Independent (the venue I knew formerly as the Kennel Club), watching the Mountain Goats metamorphose into a rocking band. Yes, friends, the Mountain Goats are now a power trio, with a drummer joining Hughes and Darnielle and the latter trading in his acoustic for a natural-wood Telecaster after the first few songs of the set.

How did it sound? Wonderful. The last time Darnielle swung through San Francisco he gave a subdued show at the Bottom of the Hill; beset, apparently, by the flu, his set leaned heavily on the hushed falsetto of so many of the tunes on his most recent album, “Get Lonely.” (His voice was so shot he essentially turned over the vocal chores on “No Children” to the sing-along crowd — an event preserved in MP3 and celebrated in the blogosphere as an instance of band/audience bonding.) This week, those songs remained part of his set, but they have assumed their rightful place as the slow songs, serving as mood- and pace-changers rather than centerpieces.

The new full-band mode gave the Goats a chance to rearrange much of their catalog. Songs like “Jaipur,” “The Pigs That Ran…”, “The House that Dripped Blood,” “Quito,” “Lions Teeth,” and “See America Right” all emerged with extra-hard edges and careening speeds. Darnielle performed even more unexpected transformations on “Peacocks,” from Tallahassee (the quiet 6 a.m. song got an infusion of mid-tempo energy); and on “Dance Music,” which traded in some of its bop for some bittersweetness; and on “Dilaudid,” a desperate love song given a tougher bite.

Recent articles by All Axess describe how Darnielle is in full-throated form again, moving nimbly from a feather-light whisper to a piercing pleasing bray, never losing grip of the syllables that define each moment of each song as unique. As he bangs away on his electric guitar, jaw dropped open an inch or two to release a goofy “I still can’t believe I’m doing this!” smile, he looks like he has moved through all the pain in his songs, found his own little corner of nirvana and invited us in. (Here’s some good descriptive writing about his performance style.)

John Vanderslice joined the band for the conclusion of both shows, adding to the fun and layering “Palmcorder Yajna,” “Half Dead” and “This Year” with some extra exquisite crunch. Then the young women of Pony Up, the warmup act, trotted out to sing backup on Darnielle’s devotedly straight-faced cover of Thin Lizzy’s ode to vernal rebirth, “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

It’s a great time to see the Mountain Goats. Go if you can. They’re playing again tonight at the Bottom of the Hill. Full tour schedule here.
[tags]mountain goats, john darnielle[/tags]

Beginning to see the light

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I don’t read the East Bay Express as much as I used to since it lost its old-style Berkeley individuality and got swallowed up by the big alt-weekly chain that is now known as Village Voice Media. But I stumbled on this very funny interview in it today, in which a hapless music writer quizzes Lou Reed about his soundtrack for a new Tai Chi DVD.

I was in the audience last fall at the Web 2.0 conference when Reed’s iceberg-like self-possession collided with the tanker of the Web industry elite’s smug self-regard — a fiasco set up through the offices of then-AOL honcho Jonathan Miller, who explained that he and Reed met because they study with the same Tai Chi master. So Reed’s martial-arts enthusiasm didn’t come as the surprise to me that it seems to have for the Express writer.

What do you say to the people who can’t reconcile your classic Velvet Underground druggy image with this healthy New Age one?

“That was forty years ago!” he implores. “This is 2006! 2007! My God! I can’t worry about things like that. If I did, I wouldn’t do anything! I can’t live in 1967 for people. That’s crazy. I have a broader palette. Everything I do, I’ve always tried to do the best that I could as honestly as I could from wherever space I was viewing things at the time. I can’t satisfy everyone, and I’m not trying to.”

[tags]Lou Reed, martial arts, tai chi, dvds, east bay express[/tags]

Ed to Amanda to George

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First, Ed Cone was reading my book so he could interview me. Then, Amanda Congdon was dropping in on Ed to record a promo for the ConvergeSouth conference. Congdon was thumbing through Dreaming in Code at the start of the promo, so they worked in a little reference to the book. I found it amusing and posted it on my blog.

Now George Coates and his dramatic crew at BetterBadNews have taken this brief video clip and deconstructed it in a bizarrely funny way. “‘Dreaming in Code’ is probably one of those rare works of literature of the sort that you really have to read to enjoy,” the deadpan announcer begins. By the time the commentators have done picking the clip apart — “A dog? A guy without a head?” — we’re in David Lynch-land.

This tickles me in multiple ways, partly because I know Coates’s work from many years of covering the multimedia extravaganzas his theater company used to present, but mostly because I love the process by which this little meme has propagated — and now, mutated. (Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.)

Good reads: Danner on Iraq, Wolf on the new atheism

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Things have been quiet here lately as we prepare for January, which will be a big month at the Wordyard, what with Dreaming in Code arriving. More anon — as soon as we get through the holidays and I shake off my traditional solstitial cold virus.

In the meantime, a couple of odds and ends of valuable reading — links to curl up with next to the fire when you’ve got some time:

  • If you don’t have time to read the full texts of books like Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine and Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, you owe it to yourself to read Mark Danner’s New York Review of Books piece, “Iraq: The War of the Imagination,” which summarizes them and puts them — and the disastrous war they chronicle — in a grimly coherent context:

    Nearly four years into the Iraq war, as we enter the Time of Proposed Solutions, the consequences of those early decisions define the bloody landscape. By dismissing and humiliating the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi army our leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the insurgency. By bringing far too few troops to secure Saddam’s enormous arms depots they armed it. By bringing too few to keep order they presided over the looting and overwhelming violence and social disintegration that provided the insurgency such fertile soil. By blithely purging tens of thousands of the country’s Baathist elite, whatever their deeds, and by establishing a muscle-bound and inept American occupation without an “Iraqi face,” they created an increasing resentment among Iraqis that fostered the insurgency and encouraged people to shelter it. And by providing too few troops to secure Iraq’s borders they helped supply its forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic extremists from neighboring states. It was the foreign Islamists’ strategy above all to promote their jihadist cause by provoking a sectarian civil war in Iraq; by failing to prevent their attacks and to protect the Shia who became their targets, the US leaders have allowed them to succeed.

    …Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the product of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity. Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope—in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.

  • And over in Wired, don’t miss Gary Wolf‘s excellent discussion of the new evangelical atheism, “The Crusade Against Religion”. Here’s its rousing peroration, in a direct line of descent from Mill’s On Liberty:

    The irony of the New Atheism — this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism — is too much for me. The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.

[tags]atheism, iraq, mark danner, gary wolf[/tags]

The reader is the writer’s collaborator

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Here’s a wonderful quotation from Zadie Smith about reading as a collaborative act (from Michael Leddy via Boingboing):

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

And, in a comic riff on a similar theme, here’s Josh Kornbluth:

Reading is the best, because it allows/forces you to imagine an entire world. Radio is very good, because it only gives you the sounds, leaving you to supply the visuals for yourself. Television and film: well, at least they let you imagine touch and smell. But life, as we experience it, unmediated by media, leaves nothing — nothing — to the imagination.

You call that entertainment!?

Bonus Link: Steven Johnson’s great post from last year about why blogging and writing books are antithetical.
[tags]reading, writing, Zadie Smith, Josh Kornbluth, Steven Johnson[/tags]