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Sonic middle age: Everybody’s happy nowadays

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I’m knocked out, stunned, by the new Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped. I’m not one of the band’s cultists. Over the years, from the mid-’80s on, I’d hear, from friends who were, that I was missing out: They’d tell me that whatever their latest album was — “Daydream Nation”! “Goo”! — it was the album that would persuade me to join their ranks. I’d listen, feel respect for the legendary New York art-noise band’s work, but never feel like coming back for more.

So I’ve been out of the Sonic Youth orbit for a while. Maybe I missed some transformation or evolution; “Rather Ripped” is incredibly seductive — just melodic enough to engage you, just experimental enough to keep you hitting “repeat.” The guitars shimmer with lanky Lou Reed/Feelies lines; the lyrics are entirely audible; the incredibly tight rhythm section could do this in their sleep, but they’re wide awake. There is a fundamental joy working its way out in this music, in a fully audible way. I am hooked.

In other musical events, the Mountain Goats are slated to release a new album, Get Lonely, next month. But if you are impatient, there is an EP from their Australian tour titled Babylon Springs that is also a fine piece of work. If some of the chord sequences sound a tad familiar, the full-band arrangements are sparkling, the lyrics sharp, the feelings painfully intense.

The Dolls and the Aeneid

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I have been preoccupied with work and reviewing the copy edits on my book, a surprisingly lengthy and arduous process. (I thought I’d satisfied the gods of the Serial Comma, but there appear to be other complex negotiations I neglected relating to contractions and the use of “and” and “but” to begin sentences. Who knew? I am drawing the line at a proposed correction in the punctuation of my quotation from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which I think deserves a once and final “stet.”)

But I note with amazement the apparently imminent release of a new album by the New York Dolls. They are probably best known for their glam wear, but it was their proto-punk sound — in particular, the roaring bleating chords of their “Personality Crisis” — that won over my adolescent soul. Three of the original band’s lineup are now dead, including the astounding guitarist Johnny Thunders, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the surviving two, David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, from putting out a worthy reunion album, if Rob Levine’s piece in New York is to be believed.

What I am trying to wrap my brain around is their title, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. If I am not mistaken, this is a translation of one of the more famous lines from the Aeneid, which I was studying in high school around the time that the Dolls were putting out their second album — one of Aeneas’ rally-the-troops orations, in which he tells his men, chin up, someday you’ll be tickled to remember just how awful what you’re going through right now was.

Are the New York Dolls closet Latin freaks? Is there some actual relationship between these minstrels of our epoch’s imperial city and the epic poet who shaped the imagination of the Roman imperium? If we live long enough, do connections emerge between every single thing we know and love?

Desmond Dekker, R.I.P.

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I was sorry to read of the passing of Jamaican singer Desmond Dekker, whose hit song “The Israelites” appeared on my musical horizons in 1969 as a strange and alluring message from another world.

As a ten-year-old only just tuning into the world of top 40, I’d never heard anything quite like Dekker’s song, with its off-kilter rhythms, its patois lyrics, and those groaning backup harmonies. Dekker’s voice, a sweet tenor gliding effortlessly to an even sweeter falsetto, spoke of shantytown hardships in scriptural language. But it was the key changes rung by the rhythm guitar between the end of each chorus and the start of each new verse that really hooked me.

Over the years the ska, rock-steady and reggae rhythms would become more familiar, and I’d hear more of Dekker’s music and the sounds of his contemporaries in “The Harder They Come” and later compilations of Jamaican treasures. But the spell of “The Israelites” remains strong to this day.

Colbert’s critics should put away their laugh meters

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Today the agenda for discussing Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is, “Was he, or wasn’t he, funny?”

As any performer knows, humor is intensely subjective; it is brittle, circumstantial; it depends on the moment, what came before, who’s in the room, how much they drank. I wasn’t there in that banquet room. It seems that Antonin Scalia found Colbert’s jokes hilarious; President Bush, along with much of the crowd, apparently did not. Viewing the video after the fact, I happened to find much of it funny. So have millions of downloaders and Bittorrent-ers and Youtube-sters.

But none of that really matters. Evaluating this event on laugh-meter scores is absurd — it’s just one more way of marginalizing and dismissing what actually happened that night. Just for a moment, Colbert brought a heavily sheltered President Bush face to face with the outrage and revulsion that large swathes of the American public feel for him and what he has done to our country. He did so at an event in which a certain level of jovial kidding is sanctioned, but he stepped far beyond. His caricature of a right-wing media toady relied on irony, and irony rarely elicits belly laughs, but at its best, it provokes doubt and incites questions. The ultimate goal of Colbert’s routine was not to make you laugh but to make you think; it aimed not to tickle but to puncture.

In that sense, those observers who have criticized Colbert for being rude to the president are absolutely right. As I wrote yesterday, the performance was a deliberate act of lese majeste. That means it was meant to pop the balloon of protective ritual around Bush and let reality in, so we can see him — along with those in the press who have been complicit with him — for what he is.

Inside the Beltway, humor is supposed to be disarming, “humanizing.” Ever since Richard Nixon appeared on “Laugh-in” and said “Sock it to me!,” suggesting that he was not quite the conservative gorgon that he seemed to be, politicians have wanted to use comedy as a prop in their own campaigns of self-promotion. But that’s a late-20th-century degradation of comedy. There’s an older tradition — stretching back to the commedia dell’arte and beyond, into the medieval court and its “all-licensed” fools — in which the comic seeks the discomfiture of the powerful.

Colbert’s act had less in common with cable-channel comedy shows than with the work of Dario Fo, the Italian iconoclast who specializes in lese majeste (he likes to poke fun at the Pope). In this it resembled Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but it was smarter than that propagandistic montage, and braver — delivered live, as it was, in the belly of the press-corps beast it was skewering.

So now we have the sad spectacle of the media desperately puffing air back into the popped balloon of the president’s dignity, pretending that nothing happened. The Bush impersonator was funnier! cry the pundits. Colbert bombed! Well, they can sneer all they want about whether or not he slayed ’em in D.C. Out here in the reality-based community that increasingly encompasses the American electorate, Colbert hit his targets. And they will never look quite the same.

Stephen Colbert and the Beltway disconnect

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Sunday and Monday the Net was abuzz with word of Stephen Colbert’s bracing, revelatory acts of lese majeste at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Videos were posted. Emails were exchanged. Word spread. This was, or at least felt like, a watershed event, an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of moment.

That, apparently, is not how it seemed from inside the Beltway bubble. Colbert’s highwire irony apparently left the D.C. press corps cold. It didn’t even merit a mention in the New York Times coverage of the event. Colbert “fell flat because he ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor: Make fun of yourself, not the other guy,” the Washington Post told us. It seemed that a silly routine that President Bush concocted with a Bush impersonator went over better with this crowd.

At Salon we’re well accustomed to this disconnection between the D.C. consensus and the view from beyond the Beltway. We felt it keenly during the mad Monica days, when capital insiders and mainstream media boffins puffed themselves up with outrage at an inconsequential presidential transgression while a significant portion of the rest of the nation sat there thinking, “Get over it — move on, and get back to work on the real problems we face.” Today, this dynamic is inverted: the outrage lies beyond the Beltway, where it’s almost impossible to believe how badly the nation has been run into the ground by the current administration and its allies.

In Washington, it seems, the emperor’s nudity remains a verboten topic, and our leader is to be feted with business-as-usual niceties. Meanwhile, beyond the corridors of power, the clothes vanished a long time ago, the folly is transparent, and we can’t believe the ugliness of the resulting spectacle. Our young people are dying in a war based on a lie, our national leadership reeks of corruption, our economic well-being has been sold out for a mess of tax-break pottage, the global environment is being wrecked for our children, the absence of a smart energy policy has left us powerless in the face of an oil shortage — and we are supposed to be nice?

Maybe the editors and reporters in that banquet room didn’t find Colbert funny. Watching his performance at home, I couldn’t stop laughing.

[Watch Colbert here (Videodog, Youtube 1, 2, 3); read Michael Scherer’s Salon piece; there’s a full transcript over at Kos.]

LATE ADD: Dave Johnson calls the absence of mainstream Colbert coverage an “intentional blackout.” Me, I don’t think it’s coordinated in quite that way; newsrooms independently reach the same (wrong) conclusion about what’s newsworthy — then see their choices reinforced by those of their colleagues at other outlets. Mostly I think they resented Colbert’s jabs at them — and cheered themselves up by telling themselves that he wasn’t really funny.

RIP, Jane Jacobs, urban visionary

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I was lucky enough, as a high school senior in New York City in the mid-’70s, to take an elective course in “urban studies.” The course consisted of reading a bunch of real books, not textbooks, and talking about them. (Later I came to understand that virtually every college course, at least in the humanities and social sciences, proceeded along the same lines.)

I’ve forgotten all but one of the books we read. But the one I remember, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I remember vividly, for its calm, reasonable, and, to me, profoundly persuasive rejection of the Big Central Plans approach to urban design — which had previously made perfect sense to my 17-year-old mind. Diversity matters, Jacobs argued; people crave variety in their experience of their surroundings, and engagement with other people, and living cities offer people wide and varied opportunities for hanging shingles and rubbing elbows and delighting others.

Jacobs’ book gave me a lifelong, visceral understanding of principles that I would later see popping up in other, unexpected contexts, thanks to writers like Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, and experiences I’d have in helping build one small corner of the online cityscape.

Jacobs died today at 89 [thanks to Kottke for the news].

Feeding the Bittorrent beast

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Dave Winer talks about the growing importance of Bittorrent, mentions how Opera (still my favorite browser!) now supports it, and asks for “more non-infringing content.”

Hollywood hates Bittorrent because some people use it to redistribute illegally copied movie and music files. In the case of music, you can use Bittorrent to move around large libraries very quickly.

But the most common use of Bittorrent I see out there is not trading humongo MP3 libraries but instead much-higher-quality (.flac, .shn, etc.) recordings of live shows by bands that support such trading. These “lossless” music files are much bigger than MP3s; Bittorrent makes it possible to download them in a reasonable amount of time. The file traders are religious about preferring the higher-quality compression scheme — many will include little notices begging you not to convert the files to the “lossy” MP3.

Personally, I consider these recordings “non-infringing,” though I don’t know what the lawyers would say. Largehearted Boy does a daily “Bittorrent Brunch” pointing to new postings, many at Dimeadozen.

Random links

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## “Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient” [link courtesy Metafilter]:

Ever since I discovered that my aging trove of files written in WordPerfect 4.x was getting harder and harder to rescue from the digital scrapheap, I have made a point of storing all my writing and notes in plain-text form. When the Web came along and I moved my career from print to online, this made even more sense, since for anything that’s going to end up as HTML, the detour into some proprietary word-processing format is not merely a waste of time but an active hazard, and at the end of the line you’re only going to want plain text anyway.

When the whole life-hacks movement got going I was pleased to learn that my own behavior matched those of many uber-geeks who preferred plain text files for their longevity and adaptability.

This “word processors” rant is an old piece but it makes a cogent argument for the separation of content from display formatting — a sensible principle that drives most content-management software and Web-site production tools today.

## Mark Dominus unearths the origin of the “equals” sign in a 16th-century manuscript page — and in the process, explains a fascinating phase in the development of English in a page from Robert Recorde’s “The Whetstone of Witte.” [Link courtesy Greg Knauss over at kottke.org]

 

I had recently learned that the twiddle in the Spanish ñ character was similarly a letter “n”. A word like “año” was originally “anno” (as it is in Latin) and the second “n” was later abbreviated to a diacritic over the first “n”. (This makes a nice counterpoint to the fact that the mathematical logical negation symbol ∼ was selected because of its resemblance to the letter “N”.) But I had no idea that anything of the sort was ever done in English.

Recorde’s book shows clearly that it was, at least for a time. The short passage illustrated above contains two examples. One is the word “examples” itself, which is written “exãples”, with a tilde over the “a”. The other is “alteration”, which is written “alteratiõ”, with a tilde over the “o”. More examples abound: “cõpendiousnesse”, “nõbers”, “denominatiõ”, and, I think, “reme~ber”.

Dominus follows up with more on diacritical marks here. Unlike other European languages, English gradually dropped this practice, but in some alternate universe, we might be spelling “annual” añual.

I am always delighted with such evidence of the fluidity and dynamism of English — the 16th century was a period when the language was constantly soaking up words and structures from other cultures. Shakespeare and his contemporaries took full advantage of the language melee around them, and even as standards and rules coalesced in later centuries, English never adopted a top-down system of rules dictated by some academy (or Academie). Which is why, while I enjoy the pedanticism of a book like “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” as much as anyone else who has ever edited copy, I am happy that no dictator governs the language I work with every day, and that it is free to evolve based on the needs and practices of the people who use it.

Odds and ends

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Cleaning out a reading backlog. Herewith some links, some going back months:

## Fascinating piece from the New York Times last week on the man who wrote the song that became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”: It started out, in Solomon Linda’s 1939 recording, as “Mbube,” which is pronounced “EEM-boo-bay.” That, in Pete Seeger’s hands, became “Wimoweh.” Then songwriter George Weiss added the “Lion” lyrics. Linda got 10 shillings for the rights in 1952. He died poor in 1962. His family did recently get some money from Disney, which used the song in “The Lion King.” There are over 150 recordings of the song. One is by Brian Eno (I still own a 7-inch single of the 1975 recording, somewhere).

## Writer’s block or creative logjam? Now you don’t have to hunt for a collector’s item edition of Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards offering cryptically helpful aphorisms as rut escape strategies. It’s all online. And it’s probably been there forever, but I only found it recently.

## This interview with Ray Ozzie from ACM Queue from a few months ago is a great read. It’s especially insightful about the disparity today between individuals and small businesses and large enterprises — like Microsoft, where Ozzie is now a CTO. Little guys are free to adapt to the newest and most flexible technologies; big enterprises find themselves hogtied not only by the money they’ve already spent on older technologies, but by fear and turf-wars and regulations that make it almost impossible for them to embrace openness and change. Choice quote:

  RSS is an extremely important standard. It’s the HTML of the next generation of the Web, or some people might refer to it as the Unix pipe of the Internet. It’s a way of channeling data from one application to another in very interesting and robust fashion. Again, I think it’s important as a technique far beyond just collaborative software.

(For the non-Unix geeks out there, a “Unix pipe” is a fast, simple way in that operating system to connect the output of one program to the input of another.)

## Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos provides a crystal clear explanation of what Moore’s Law is and isn’t (it’s not about chips doubling in speed or halving in cost, it’s about doubling the number of transistors you can fit on a chip).

## Find yourself checking for new e-mail every five minutes? You might be a victim of continuous partial attention, but Rands in Repose has a slightly different take on the idea — he calls it Repetitive Information Injury. And a Discover column from Steven Johnson offers some novel ideas for new approaches to computer interfaces that are designed to help us focus more and multitask less when that’s what we want.

## Meanwhile, Paul Graham suggests that procrastination isn’t really a problem if you’re forsaking some dull work that you have to do in order to explore something you love. This advice is easier to act upon after you have sold your startup company, as Graham once did — those in need of a steady income may have greater trouble following his recommendations.

Furnace heat

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I’ve always found that the music I love best, the music that stays with me through the years, is music that takes a little time to warm to. Songs that are instantaneously ingratiating are often quick to pale into boredom, but those complex enough to be initially off-putting reveal their appeal on third or fourth or fifth listen and become long-term infatuations.

Unfortunately, my life as a working parent these days does not leave as much room as it once had for third or fourth or fifth listens. And so sometimes I’ll check out a new band’s music and, if my auditory fancy is not instantly seized, I’ll put the CD or the files aside for months, even years. Frequently, this means I’ll miss the boat for an unconscionable length of time.

I certainly missed The Blueberry Boat. This album by the Fiery Furnaces was an indie-critical sensation when it came out in 2004. But the spectral nautical rambling of the album’s 10-minute opener, “Quay Cur,” didn’t grab me quickly when I brought it home, so it languished at the bottom of my pile, and I am only falling in love with it now.

It’s a collection of long story-suites (the band’s brother-and-sister creators, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, have cited Who pop suites like “Rael” and “A Quick One While He’s Away” as influences) that hop restlessly from theme to theme, spitting off throwaway melodies and opaquely allusive, effusively articulate lyrics. The title track features an assault by pirates; “Chris Michaels” seems to tune onto the wavelength of a suburban gossip; “Mason City” takes snapshots of the 19th-century midwest from formal correspondence and railway company files; “Chief Inspector Blancheflower” seems to be a sort of Victorian policier unfolding in the mind of a bored typewriter-repairperson manque.

I hear fragments of everything from Phil Spector to Philip Glass in the mix; there are snarly-catchy guitar solos and even gospel flourishes (in the frantic “I Lost My Dog”). Some of Matthew Friedberger’s sound treatments hark back to the heyday of early Eno. (The fanfare at the start of “Mason City” sounds a lot like a sped-up outtake from Another Green World. And both Blueberry and Here Come the Warm Jets feature songs with “Paw-Paw” in their titles!) Other synthesizer flourishes fondly recall the bombast of the prog-rock era, though that label is one the Furnaces understandably do not embrace. One evening, when I turned up Blueberry Boat in my office, my wife shouted incredulously from the next room, “Wow — Emerson, Lake and Palmer?” Not exactly — but not crazy, either.

The followup to Blueberry, apparently a tribute to the Friedbergers’ grandmother titled Rehearsing My Choir, has gotten a colder critical reception. But before making up my own mind, I’m going to listen to it at least a half dozen times — as soon as I get the chance.