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February 8, 2008
Pittsburgh’s most grudgingly tolerated NPR affilitate has begun yet another round of annoying fundraising. This happens every couple of months, so I should be used to it by now and have my routine of listening to another city’s NPR station down, but this time is different - because I’m no longer a member.
For years and years, heck, I think since I’ve moved out from under my parents’ roof, I’ve been a DUQ member, giving the pittance that is expected of students up to more and more substantial sums as I’ve grown into semi-respectability. Throughout all that time, I felt the station to be a broadcast version of a mentally disabled pet, or maybe a formerly likable relative whose personality and behavior have gotten more disturbing and embarrassing with age but, as civilization’s rules dictate, you have to be nice to them because they’re family. NPR, even in the truncated and jazz-riddled form that DUQ delivers to the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, is great stuff surely, but the station manages to both be monstrously biased and criminally incompetent. Every year, it becomes a little harder to turn a blind eye to these faults.
In this age of podcasting, where anyone with access to a microphone and computer can produce a ‘radio show’, you really get a taste of what the average person is capable of, and sad to say most of the DUQ personalities are far below that average level of ability. From Katherine Fink, whose personal touch is losing her train of thought mid-announcement and attempting to ad-lib her way out of the story, to the crack team of engineers who play the wrong show or fail to segue into the right show with depressing frequency, to the mysterious “Charlie Song” (she’s not listed on the DUQ website, so I’m guessing on the spelling), whose sleepily narcotic gait pads out a 30 second clip into a minute-plus segment. The news reports themselves follow a standard format - a stumbling lead about the story, which is either trails off into uncomfortable silence suddenly punctured by a badly recorded sound-bite of someone talking (generally barely audible over the background noise), then an awkward wrap-up. The alternate: exactly the same, except the sound-bite comes in before the announcer has finished his or her part. I am not an audio engineer, and have never worked in a newsroom, but I’m pretty sure that I could do a better job producing the news with the computer I’m typing on. This dedication to excellence extends to the DUQ website, where the “news” page is a link to their blog (and it’s on Blogger! What, would setting up a local Wordpress install have been too much hassle?) and the “weather” page is a feed from the National Weather Service.
Most NPR folk think of the network, and by extension the local stations that bring the network to them, as “theirs” - it’s all funded by donations, so there has to be some kind of symbiotic relationship in order for the model to work. Yeah, there’s a lot of shows that clearly are targeting the sweater vest and Birkenstocks crowd, but these days you’re pretty likely to hear punk or post-punk as the transition music on Marketplace or All Things Considered. In general, the news programs are left-leaning (or maybe just not right-leaning; I can’t tell anymore), and it’s the only place for someone without cable to hear actual in-depth reporting on stories. Pretty cool. And on the local level?
Well, I’ve already mentioned the “news” “reporting”, but they do produce a handful of original programming. WDUQ has always been the last refuge on the airwaves for Coma Jazz, which takes up the vast majority of the non-syndicated schedule - not my thing, but whatever. However, not only is the developed programming most politely described as ‘amateurish’, but much of it seems to be basically interviews with various Duquesne University administrators, or focused on various comings and goings within the local diocese, or providing a platform for local maniac Tom Burnett to assert that the proposed Westmoreland Co. Flight 93 memorial is shaped in an Islamic symbol. I don’t know who the audience that DUQ is serving is, but it’s sure not me.
The final indignity that caused my wife and I to cancel our membership was DUQ’s widely reported refusal to take underwriting money from Planned Parenthood in late 2007. At first, I thought that I would feel guilty about it. I also thought that, after canceling our monthly contribution and telling the station why, we would get some kind of response from them. After all, I’d been a member for over ten years; pretty doubtful that they’d reverse and decide to take PP’s money, but at least they could say… something. But, nope. Not a peep from them. And with time, I began to think that all the years I supposed that they were so lousy because they were underfunded were misguided and wrong - they weren’t lousy because the they didn’t have the resources to do better, they were/are lousy because they’re lousy, and no one has held them accountable for being lousy.
So here we are at another pledge drive, with the same unbearably lame promos and general displays of idiocy that I’ve come to expect, year after year, and generally tolerate. Is this a Pittsburgh thing? It seems like what we expect from our city government and services - yeah, the roads are a sheet of ice and the mayor’s screwing over the Hill District and they’re making an idiotic Law & Order reference in the pledge break; eh, whaddya want, it’s all we deserve. Maybe the politics comparison is unfair - after all, anyone reformer can run for office, but only DUQ can change its mediocrity.
So, DUQ, if you’re listening - help me help you. I want to have a public radio station that’s as good as Detroit’s, or West Virginia’s, or pretty much anywhere I’ve been’s. If you’re going to keep kowtowing to Duquesne U’s whims about who you should take money from and what you should report on, then you should be getting more money from them to offset the contributions that I would be giving you. And please, please, try to EQ the soundbites. It’s not hard, I swear.
Filed by d at February 8th, 2008 under media, pgh
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November 27, 2007
Technology gives a lot to the world, but it also at the same time takes a lot of what makes life special away. For instance, letters. Being both phone-averse and also cheap, I spent a good chunk of my life communicating with out of town friends via letters. Letters sent would be carefully composed over several days; getting a letter back from someone would make your week. At least one long distance relationship based on vague impressions which never should have been was instead artificially strengthened via letters, leading to much heartbreak and difficulty upon the return of the other party. Another long distance relationship which might have passed into nothing if not for obsessive writing has concluded much more happily. These days, thanks to email and instant messaging and all that stuff, I have acquaintances around the globe and friends living overseas that I talk to more frequently that people on my block. Yet I can’t think of the last time I sent an envelope through the mail that wasn’t a bill or card.Likewise, many an hour of my youth was spent making mixtapes for friends. Nick Hornsby or whoever can certainly document the appeal of mixtapes better than I can, but suffice to say discovered many of my favorite bands due to getting a song or two on a mix. In the olden days, you would hear about a band that’s supposed to be good, then track down a store with some of their recordings and choose one at random. This worked really well at times, leading to the purchase of “Are We Not Men?” by Devo. It also lead me to purchase “Tangled Up” by the Necros, “A Bell Is A Cup” by Wire, and numerous other albums that I’m sure every sale can be attributed to consumer ignorance. This is of course not a valid marketing stretegy - in the internet age, you can hear a sample of almost any band which has ever existed on the planet with 5 minutes of focused searching, and the sly music fan can download mp3s of the rarest and most sought-after recordings. It’s kind of awesome, but you have to admit that it kind of cheapens the whole process of discovery. Well, maybe ‘cheapen’ is the wrong term - it changes the game of discovering music dramatically, certainly. You won’t have the same experience of accidentally buying a horrible recording, perhaps, but you also won’t find yourself trying to make yourself like something you bought on someone’s recommendation that requires repeated listenings before it ‘clicks’ for you.While you think this would lead to people making quick judgments on new music, at the same time the world of mixtapes are out there, no postage required. Hell, you can even subscribe to someone’s podcast and have new ‘tapes’ show up in your player without you even noticing their arrival. It’s not custom made for you, but in a way that’s nice - now that you can track down everything that you know you like from your couch, other people that you never met are willing to share things that you’ve never even heard of. If you like them, you can dig deeper; if not, just hit delete. No need to wear your eject button even. And for those who like making mixtapes and find a sick fascination in finding the perfect track order, manipulating pitch and tempo to make the smoothest transitions, etc., this is a great time to be alive.Speaking of which, here’s a mix that I made for the 2007 Handmade Arcade, whereat I was upon the ones and twos (or zeros and ones, I suppose, in that I was playing off a laptop). Spanning dancehall, afropop, oi, grime, reggaeton and traditional musics among other neglected genres, this version is lacking in corporeal presence and is a lower bitrate than the CDR version, but the price is right. Tracks should be encoded with pertinent information, but artists contained are as follows:Green Arrows Ft. Jay-Z (an exclusive mashup by yours truly) / Harold Richardson And The Ticklers / Ms. Thing Ft. Sugar Daddy / Unknown Algerian Artist / DJ Playero / White Mice /Simpleton / Diam's / Ladysmith Black Mambazo / Massak / Latino Way Ft. Lorna / Durrty Goodz / Musicians From Kayanza / Mr. Soap / Cutty Ranks / Pressure Ft. Warrior Queen / JME / Hallelujah Chicken Run Band / Wiley / Héctor "El Father" / Macka Diamond Ft. Mad Cobra / Ivy Queen Ft. Gran Omar / Warrior Kids. Enjoy! Duppy Foodstamps Vol 2 [48M zip file]
Filed by d at November 27th, 2007 under music, philosophy
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October 31, 2007
One of my ongoing issues of discussion with friends and self is what makes up a person’s identity. More distinctly, how much of what you are is your own innate personality, your “true face” as Buddhists put it, and how much of it is the influence, pernicious or not, of your friends, family, society, or the world as a whole. It’s one of those big overarching questions that ties into pretty much everything you do. Really, who can think about their life thus far and the decisions they’ve made that have brought them to this point and say, with complete certainty, that the choices were really their own? You may have decided to rebel against society in some way or another, but deep down was that really your choosing, or was your act of opposition just a polarized response? To put into more salient and personal terms, when, in 8th grade, your friends showed you the picture of Johnny Rotten wearing his handmade “I hate Pink Floyd” shirt and presented this as evidence that, since you liked Pink Floyd, you couldn’t be punk, you decided to force yourself to continue to like Pink Floyd. This despite the fact that you realized that a lot of their later material was kind of lame - was that you asserting your actual musical tastes, or were you just being a contrarian?
See? Serious business, there. There’s something about being older and ‘wiser’ that kind of makes you philosophical about the foolish antics of the Young You, and interested in just what the eff we were thinking when we did the dumb things that we did. That naturally leads to an examination of Current You, and if the things you’re doing now are going to be looked back upon with much groaning and excuse-making. Usually, as with most human endeavors, there’s some kind of base advantage in behaving the way that we do, in believing in the things that we participate in. We believe in traditional marriages because we want the security and stability that comes with a formalized relationship. We write and play music because we enjoy it, and because we want people to pat us on the back and tell us we’re talented or creative or at least pay attention to us for brief periods of time. We go on internet message boards and start fights with strangers because we want to feel important without having to suffer the consequences or be punched. We do these things because they make us feel good, for some reason or another, even though we may at some point feel very differently about all of them, and chalk it up to being caught in the moment or whatever.
Anyway, back to the buddhism. One of the ideas of zen that sticks with me the most is the idea that one of the purposes of life is to break away from and conquer “dualistic” thinking. Dualism in this context means defining something as being the opposite of something else - you’re a punk or a hippy/cop. You’re progressive or you’re a fascist. You’re a winner or a loser. While those examples may be examples of subjective concepts, dualism is a lot harder to escape - for instance, try to describe the concept of darkness without mentioning the absence of light. This is why most of the essential zen dialogs are expressed as nonsense - how else can you express ideas without resorting to dualism? So, unless you’re going to spend the time mediating or whatever to the point where your transcend rational thought and achieve satori, you’re stuck in the middle, trying to figure out where the world stops and where you begin, trying to see the reality of existence without going out of your mind.
Part of me admires monks who can go years without speaking to anyone to keep their minds free of outside ideas, or hermits who intentionally avoid all contact with other people. The other part of me thinks that they’re trying way too hard. Sure, it would be nice to know what your inner nature really is, but what does it really matter in the scheme of things if you ‘find yourself’ but then spend your life in a hut not talking to anyone? I guess it’s rife with personal fulfillment, but yet it reeks of ego; if you’re unwilling to interact with the world at all, on some level you might as well not exist, which kind of defeats the purpose of finding your true face in the first place.
Some people manage to find a happy medium within their lives. Dubstep ‘producer’ (that’s what you call people who make electronic music these days, I guess) Burial was recently profiled in London’s Guardian newspaper, and unbeknownst to me until now, it turns out that he’s a Thomas Pynchon-esque recluse (except that of course, people know Thomas Pynchon’s real name). He never DJs, has only been photographed when disguised, and even his closest friends don’t know that he has a secret life as a musician. I guess it isn’t hermit-tude in its most basic sense - after all, he could be some well known musical impresario in his day life, like it is offered rumored that the members of the Residents. However, it’s a way of sidestepping the usual annoyance and schmoozery which comes hand in hand with being a well respected musician in an up-and-coming genre, as well as the glory and social rewards. It reminds me of an interview with Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton, talking about a long period in which he lived on a farm with no contact with the music world - when he had completed an album, he sent the tapes and art off to the label. During this period he saw no reviews, received no feedback, no nothing, and later described this period as the most “pure” of his musical career.
It seems like a pretty interesting way to maximize your creative process, but with one problem: I really don’t think I like most of the aforementioned artists. I haven’t heard a lot of Burial, but what I have heard has lacked a certain something that his contemporaries have. It’s certainly not bad, but for all his mystery, the end result doesn’t sound particularly mindblowing. The same with the Residents or Nurse With Wound - it’s definitely out there, and the ideas are neat, but, like sitting in a cave until your legs fall off, the end result isn’t really all that appealing to me. There’s a kind of self-defeating rejection of normal musical convention; it’s cool stuff, but has anyone ever gotten a Residents song stuck in their head? I sure haven’t. I’ve gotten gamelon music stuck in my head, which is at least as ‘alien’ to North Smerican ears as the Residents are, yet it’s a form of music dating back the the 3rd century AD, and everyone playing it now much have just been roped into the tradition like we’re roped into thinking that we have to hate Pink Floyd if we like the Sex Pistols.
In other news, Hardtravelin’ Records, long running Pittsburgh hardcore / punk / whatever indie label, is closing its doors or taping shut the cardboard box or whatever the appropriate metaphor for the tiny label that’s run out of one’s spare room ending is. Hardtravelin’ put out or helped with the putting out of releases of musical endeavors of mine, for which I’m eternally thankful, as well as a putting out couple of great releases by a bunch of excellent local bands that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day otherwise. While it’s understandable for owner/operator Q to want to bow out after a very long period being a very small label boss, a position that involves all the hard work and stress of a real capitalistic venture without any hope of the usual rewards of capitalism, hopefully someone will step up and provide for the city what Hardtravelin’ once did. Respec.
Filed by d at October 31st, 2007 under music, philosophy
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October 23, 2007
My original plan was to keep myself in shape with writing by doing at least one reasonably-sized post per week (give or take a couple of days). My two rules were not to reveal any personal info (I know people are probably posting their sequenced genomes for download on MySpace now or something, but I don’t care about shifting community standards - I have real people in my life to talk about personal things, and plenty of people talk about their more exciting lives better than I do, so there), and no blatant fluff pieces. This doesn’t sound particularly ambitious, but I’m already dangerously close to missing a deadline, so perhaps as I sit here, twitching gently from my unconscious consumption of a large quantity of discounted halloween candy, this is the time to highlight some other blogsters who have been doing an excellent job of “keeping it real”. My three favorites:
Girls Are Pretty: Living proof of human victory over writers’ block: a (week)daily blog that never ceases to delight, disgust and confuse. Ostensibly a “comedy” blog in the same way that half the humor shows on cable are (wherein strange things happen, and some people find them amusing despite the lack of discernible jokes), this long-running blog is more about squeezing an incredible rainbow of ideas out of a simple concept. Each weekday on the blog has been given a name - such as You Weigh 800 Pounds Day!, Nearing The Conclusion Of Blind Man’s Bluff Day! or Your Boyfriend Is Blind And High-Maintenance Day!. Most of the stories feature sexual deviance, murder (or more non-specific death) and the futility of the human condition - not really a recipe for humor, but definitely a nice 2 minute break for your workday.
The amazing thing is that, with very few exceptions, the GAP author has made a new and completely unique post every weekday for at least five years. True, most of the posts are nothing but lightly fleshed out concepts, but hell, he doesn’t skimp on the concepts - considering the originality of the the ideas, it’s kind of hard to believe that this is the work of one person. Not to detract from the writing - some days are more inspired than others, but for the most part it’s quality stuff despite its fecundity. Also of note is that 1. there are no ads or other revenue generating ventures beyond a sponsorship plan and a link to the author’s book; seemingly all hosting costs are eaten as well, and 2. despite all this, he seems to be a relative unknown even to internet ephemera nerds. God knows why he does this (diligent self-promotion, a bet or some kind of gypsy curse are my best guesses), but it’s wonderful that he does.
Bikesnob NYC. Sort of the cycling community’s equivalent of the Mysterious Restaurant Reviewer, BSNYC has appeared out of nowhere as a sort of counterweight to cycling’s recent popularity and the resulting number of vanity sites for bikes . His blog shifts between singling out bikes for mockery and owners for abuse from craigslist or photo sites, and writing about various cycling issues. An excellent writer, but I worry that he will eventually run out of things to write about. Then again, it seems like there is a limitless pool of idiocy both within NYC cycling (which seems to simultaneously push every limit for decency and common sense, both as far as riders and riding conditions) and the cycling industry / “scene” / whatever.
Prancehall. Kind of the BSNYC for grime aficionados, this semi-anonymous writer (who has outed himself as a writer for Vice Magazine UK) has been posting several times a week for years now. Feature run the gamut from bizarre inside jokes / London humor which takes a couple of months of dedication to the lingo to get, to links to mp3s, videos and reviews that prior to the internet would have been only known to people in certain London neighborhoods, not unlike grime itself.
Ok. Posting obligation technically completed. Real non-recycled post coming up next, trust.
Filed by d at October 23rd, 2007 under Uncategorized
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October 11, 2007
Politics in Pittsburgh has been kind of a messy thing of late, following a lightly heated but ultimately futile challenge by Bill Peduto two primaries ago, and a couple of months of business-as-usual by the victorious Bob O’Connor, which was surprisingly ended with his sudden death. 27 year old Darlene Harris protege Luke Ravenstahl, showing that life sometimes does indeed imitate Putney Swope, was elected to be city council president and as such inherited the mayoral throne upon Bob’s departure. Luke behaved like you’d expect a twenty-something who rose to political power by familial connection and dumb luck would: promoting wife-beating cops in the police force, stalking Tiger Woods, borrowing federal armored vehicles to attend local country music jamborees, and letting the experienced politicians make all the decisions. Peduto acted like he was going to run again, then dropped out, leaving Republican Mark DeSantis the sole potential foil to the Machine’s will. The whole thing stank of quiet doom for the city leadership, and I was more than content to ignore the whole depressing thing, putting in a pointless vote against Luke on my way to work. But as luck would have it, my neighbor called asking if I wanted to come along to see the mayoral debate at the Heinz History Center, and I figured it would be good for a laugh if nothing else.
We arrived in the Strip just as things were getting underway. The two ‘real’ candidates were joined by the Libertarian Party candidate, an ex-paratrooper and Oakland resident, and the Socialist Worker Party candidate, described by an online acquaintance as “a 24 year old who works in a coal mine and thinks that it’s 1922″. The introductory statements were pretty much what you’d expect, paraphrased thusly:
DeSantis: Pittsburgh is great, but we’re up against the wall and things are going to fall apart if we don’t get some innovative leadership
Ravenstahl: Pittsburgh is great; Bob O’Connor was great and he entrusted me to carry out his vision; I’ve been doing this for 13 months now and I pretty much have it down
Libertarian Guy: Pittsburgh is great; we are being strangled by big government and brutal taxation
Socialist Guy: The workers must unite and overthrow the tyranny of the ruling class.
More or less, that was the tone of the evening. Especially the Socialist Guy. He would respond to a question about his favorite flavor of ice cream with some kind of random, inarticulate rant about how the cops are destroying the proletariat, like some kind of life-sized, Marxist Teddy Ruxpin doll. This may sound kind of amusing, but after a couple rounds of this my nervous titters were replaced with embarrassment which quickly devolved into contempt for his wasting of everyone’s time. If you’re going to say that democracy is a sham and the only winners are politicians, that’s one thing. You could have fun with it, and maybe raise some good points along the way. Be the Wacky Candidate; criticize the whole circus that politics has become, throw in a zinger or two. People may not agree with you or vote for you, but they’ll at least have a good time and maybe buy you a beer after the fact. This guy was like being cornered by a religious maniac who can’t even come up with a convincing spiel to get your attention on the corner.
Anyway. Ravenstahl said a bunch of stuff that was so vague and uninteresting that two days later I can’t even remember what 90% of it was. He championed his balancing the budget (which was helped by the fact that the state now pretty much controls our budget, so there’s not really anything any way to not balance the budget), adding 100 new cops (which DeSantis pointed out is also required by Act 47), and the ‘Pittsburgh Promise’, a plan to give all Pittsburgh School District students who get a certain GPA a scholarship to colleges in the area. DeSantis pointed out that in the 8 months since the Promise was announced, the city has raised $10,000 dollars, all of which came from one donor. That was basically it, except that Luke at point substituted the word “floated” for “flouted”, but, again, the rest of what he was saying was so boring that I’ve already forgotten the context.
So what of DeSantis, our great elephantine hope? He certainly did a good job nailing Luke to the wall on a couple of things, including taking credit for things that he has no right to take credit for, ridiculous behavior, and the usual stuff that’s easy to mock. As far as non-negatory stands, he really didn’t say too much either, and what he said that was of substance was phrased awkwardly, making him seem less like someone who wants to turn the city around and more like someone who wants to do scary Republican things. Privatization of city services was brought up; DeSantis said that he would look into it and consider it. Is this a bad idea? Not necessarily. I’m sure there’s plenty of bloat in the services. There seem to be Public Works trucks out and about constantly, yet nothing ever seems to be fixed. The problem might be endemic to the unions, but the problem is more about the fact that the work isn’t getting done. I don’t know if threatened privatization would make a difference. Yet, anyone who looks at it in a knee-jerk fashion is going to immediately see a Republican who is wanting to replace union jobs with minimum wage, no benefits ones. I hope DeSantis is looking at it is as being a way to get what’s best for the city as a whole, but, well, let’s hope, because he sure didn’t play against preconceptions.
Similarly with his answer to the question as to what the mayor would do to convince a hypothetical person that has been offered a similar job in Pittsburgh and in Charlotte to move here. Sad to say but Ravenstahl actually won this one by talking about what makes Pittsburgh great - the views, the standard of living, the Steelers (okay, I made the last one up, but seriously: fuck the Panthers). DeSantis somehow got lost in his response and went off about the lousy job market in Pittsburgh and how we have to be creating more jobs if we want to get more residents (one of his major themes, and a relevant one, really), which kind of made him seem like Mr. Bum Out compared to Luke. What I would like to have heard (from either of them) is 1. something acknowledging all the non-employment reasons to live here; the arts, the museums, the foundations, the fact that unlike Charlotte you don’t have to spend 20 minutes in your car to get anywhere, or 2. redirecting it into a city vs. suburbs thing.
I really don’t think that the job situation here is as dire as everyone loves to make it out to be, but it’s true that most of the specialized, ‘professional’ jobs are out in the suburbs, and if you want to live in the city you’re stuck making a wretched trek out to Cranberry or Monroeville or some other godforsaken mini-Charlotte. The sad fact is, that if someone was to relocate here for a job and they’re not an artsy fartsy type already dedicated to urban life, they’re probably going to be living in some crappy development way out in the sticks and coming into the city once a month, at best. The way I see it, the suburbs are just as responsible for Pittsburgh’s lousy finances as the shifting fortunes of the steel industy or whatever, and I almost pine for the days of the late Murphy administration where Tom was actually calling the suburbanites scared racists, which comes closer to speaking truth than almost anything else done during his administration.
But back to the debate. The final question (that I remember) of the night was something about how each candidate would better connect Downtown and Oakland. Comrade Nonsequitor said something about forming one big union and breaking the necks of all the cops and bosses; Lyndon LaDouche said that public money shouldn’t be wasted on public transportation; Luke said something about building more roads and busses between the two, and DeSantis said that there’s a lot of other places in Pittsburgh besides Downtown and Oakland that people need to get to too. He didn’t follow through as much as I’d like, but he got it. Oakland and Downtown are the two places in this city that it’s actually easy to get between, and they’re the two suckiest neighborhoods. Oakland, when I was in school in the mid 90s, was an awesome place where there were tons of interesting stores and restaurants, places to see bands, places to see movies, people hanging out all the time. Yeah, it was a college neighborhood, but it was a college neighborhood in the best way. Now, thanks to my alma mater buying everything and raising rents to astronomical levels, there’s almost nothing there other than a bunch of keg parties and chain stores. Downtown was kind of creepy during the workday during the three years I worked there and dead at night, and the only thing changed by all of Murphy’s idiotic attempts to ‘redevelop’ Downtown was the creation of more empty storefronts. It’s the type of area where buildings are 3/4s empty, yet rent is still absurdly high. Everything interesting in Pittsburgh is happening far from those these areas. Yeah, there’s a lot of offices there, but there always will be. Just because people have to go to a neighborhood to work doesn’t mean it’s more important than the one where they live.
So, unless DeSantis manages to do something really, really dumb in the next month, he’ll get my vote. On the way home, we discussed how the Democratic machine is going to be in power until the progressives manage to get someone like Richard Caliguiri, a Picksburgher who actually has ideas and wants to do something more than help out his buddies or his dad’s buddies. But until that day, looks like I’m voting for the lesser of two evils, as usual.
Filed by d at October 11th, 2007 under politics
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September 23, 2007
Due to the return of football season and weekly Steelers games, I’ve started watching T.V. with regularity again, as is my usual routine. One of the difficult things which always takes me nearly until the playoffs to get used to is the commercials. This year, one of the few non-Payton Manning commercials that are played at this point in the season features a 20-ish dude trying to convince his lady to come to his loft-ish apartment, the whole of his argument based on his having basic cable and a working television. Nothing too exceptional there, premise aside (and even that holds water with me - heck, I’d probably go anywhere that has decent reception, let alone actual cable). The one interesting feature: in the backdrop of the guy’s remarkably clean apartment, leaned against the wall, is a Surly Steamroller bike, one of those newly hip fixed-gear bicycles that are all the rage with loft dwellers like, uh, me.
There’s always something vaguely disheartening about seeing something moderately unknown that you enjoy being employed as shorthand for urban coolness in a commercial for cable T.V. Folks of my age tend to call this the “Nirvana effect”, after the unexpected mainstream success of the grunge band that legitimized torn-up clothing and unnaturally died hair in high schools across the country. No one was sure whether it was an entirely good thing that school bullies now repected punks, goths and other groups that defined themselves largely by the contempt that they inspired in bullies. You could hear music on the radio that at least was in the same general universe as things that you listen to in your home. It held advantages, certainly, but made a lot of people wary, as though this was some kind of clever trick. Fifteen years later, as rap-metal-grunge and classic rock continue their stranglehold on the non-‘urban’ music stations, it remains to be seen how history will judge us.
It is certainly believable that this instance is some kind of trick too, a dastardly trick to take advantage of the cable-less cycling community. Several years out of high school now, I’ve been through several of cycles of things that I’ve had “first dibs” on having quietly infiltrated general pop culture. Heck, I barely bat an eye when they play Fugazi as the segue music on NPR - that I assume is just someone with decent musical taste getting to a position of power within the Public Radio music selection hierarchy. No, what I consistently find strange are the weird little references in commercials, often little cameos so subtle that you can’t imagine anyone not subconsciously on the lookout for such things to be aware of them. There are some overt instances such as the 2005-era Honda commercial featuring M.I.A.’s “Galang”, sure. But most of these things are on a level of blantantness akin to the track bike in the Comcast commercial. I’ll bet most of the people who saw that commercial didn’t even notice there was a bike in the background, let alone identifying the specific make and model of bike. Similarly with those iPhone ads that feature fairly obscure indie bands in the album lists being quickly flipped through, or the instrumental versions of songs by the Dead Kennedys or the Fall being background music for car ads. Most ‘normal’ people would not even notice these things; most of the ‘not normal’ people who would notice would probably be the cynical types that would interpret such things as cultural appropriation and would be even less likely to buy the advertised product.
So why do this? Do people find the Fall’s music appealing when it’s providing background sound for a SUV commercial, even thought would probably turn off the radio if it somehow they made it into rotation? Do bikes leaned against the wall in someone’s apartment build positive feelings toward the local cable monopoly and fictional consumers thereof, even if they honk and scream curses at actual cyclists when they’re out driving? Are there simply advertising executives who are trying to sneak non-country music into car commercials and imply that you can simultaneously subscribe to cable and exercise every once in a while? Did some production assistant figure out you can bill a new bike to a client by adding it onto the requisition list?
Who knows. I am taking the long view - if it convinces 1/10th of the people who discovered Nick Drake or Trio via car commercials that bikes are something owned and operated by people who are cool enough to not deserve to be run off the road, that’s something. As long as there have to be ads, they might as well have decent music and include nice bikes. I think.
Filed by d at September 23rd, 2007 under culture, cycling, music
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September 15, 2007
OR: Short and poorly constructed thoughts on the work of Salman Rushdie
I never really intended to own the complete works of Salman Rushdie, seriously - it was just one of those things that happened. You know how it goes - acquaintance expresses an interest in Rushdie, wife mentions said interest to mother, who volunteers at the Raleigh library system’s sales of de-circulated books and as such gets first crack; acquaintance hems and haws about coming by to pick up the books, then vanishes, and next thing you know, your bookshelves are groaning under the weight of a mess of hardback novels. Hating to see books go unread, despite the fact that your knowledge of Salman consists of the knowledge that he had had a fatwa ordered for his assassination by Khomani for interpreted heresy in his novel The Satanic Verses, you plunge in.
I’ve read four novels at this point (Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet), and reviews are decidedly mixed. Much of my feelings about his writing echo my feelings about a great number of the contemporary, lauded literati that get mention in more mainstream circles - namely that there’s something essential missing. You know all those punitive reading books that end up being discussed to death in high school literature courses, Billy Budd and Moby Dick and all that 18th century stuff? Or even the ancient Greek or Shakespearean equivalents? All that stuff is generally brutally painful to read - the actual language used to convey the plot is the linguistic equivalent of health-food; it makes you feel like you’re doing something good, but you have to force yourself to choke it down. However, once you manage to drill past the surface, the ideas being discussed are the timeless and universal ‘big ideas’ that have been discussed and refined since antiquity without being rendered boring or trite. Rushdie, in contrast, produces a book that you actually voluntarily want to read, having an artistic mastery of the language that Melville could never lay claim to (at least not to 2007 readers, anyway). However, he ends up producing a series of novels which end up as the college apartments of literature: they look good on the walkthrough, with lots of charm and neat features, but a closer inspection reveals a litany of cut corners, shoddy workmanship, and unorthodox use of caulk that speak of a cozy relationship with the local building inspector.
Not to say that the novels are lacking in value; far from it. There are many novels sitting on my bookshelves that I have set aside far more quickly than I have done with any of Sir Rushdie’s work. The majority of his novels are at least partially set in post-colonial India, and his skill in writing about such topics (specifically Bombay/Mumbai) is incredibly vivid; writers who can paint such a believable picture of a place are always going to make an easy connection with me, and his prowess in this area is right up there with Faulkner’s or Joyce’s or that of any of the other masters of the English language. I have never been to Mumbai, but I feel as though I’ve been there as much as I have been to Oxford, or Dublin. No complaints there.
My ambivalence stems almost entirely from his plots. If there is a genre he works in, it would have to be Speculative History with a sub-specialization in Doomed Genealogy. Of the four novels I’ve read, they can pretty much be summed up as portraits of cursed people systematically ruining their lives. Not a bad subgenera to work in; pretty much where the Greek tragedies are coming from, although with perhaps more artistry. The difference, though, is that the world has theoretically evolved a lot past the days of the Greek tragedies. While in the days of yore, people actually believed that the lives of people were being determined by the Fates, the Gods, what have you, these days it seems a little bit like a cop-out to leave all this stuff up the whims of power beyond our control. Maybe I’m misinterpreting, and he’s actually going for a post-classisist statement about such things - how the actual workings of this life are so complex that it might as well be the result of the doings of a dysfunctional divine family for all the fairness and sense that comes out of it.
Regardless of motivation, there’s a definitive trend in his work where he just seems to carefully craft the narrative for about 2/3rd or three quarters of the arc, and then seemingly improvises from the that point to the conclusion. The results are sometimes interesting, sometimes kind of inexplicable. For instance, in a good number of his works, the incidental characters die off like flies in the last third, as though the author couldn’t think of some way to work them into the plot and just decided to write them out of the finale. In Midnight’s Children, the main character’s family, consisting of around 85% of the characters thus introduced, die in a bomb raid during the Pakistan-Indian war, with no real rhyme or reason. That’s actually one of the more believable ones, in a realistic sense if not a literary one. Take The Moor’s Last Sigh, where in the last third, the protagonist’s mother is killed by an assassin, most of the city of Bombay is destroyed in a rash of explosions, and finally the protagonist is imprisoned and more or less killed by his surrogate father. If you haven’t read the book, you might think that I’m simplifying the plot too much by taking out explanatory details. I swear, I really am not; it’s very close to the soap opera saw of the dead fiancee appearing at the wedding, or whatever.
Yet if there’s been any mention of this clunkiness in the professional reviews by people with real literature degrees who aren’t writing on blogs, I haven’t seen them. Even Fury, which charts as really, really, really bad on pretty much every possible scale or categorical axis of badness, has at worst gotten middling reviews. There are so many unbelievable sloppy aspects of the novel that it seems impossibly dated in 2007, 7 years after its publication. Here’s one, no hyperbole inserted: the protagonist, with the help of a gang of street-smart computer thugs, launches a website which contains an interactive story (it’s not specified exactly how this works), which becomes a worldwide success, making a lot of money (somehow) and building an overnight media empire. Another: a crucial plot point revolves around the likely scenario in which the protagonist and his girlfriend are ambushed in bed by three separate characters, all of whom have coincidentally decided to break into his apartment at 3 a.m. on the same night, one after another. Let’s not even mention that the protagonist’s girlfriend is taken directly from his then-girlfriend now-ex-wife Padma Lakshmi, up to and including the scars on her arm (as a sidenote, the male protagonist gets seduced by a woman half his age in every book - classy). Maybe these are all being played for laughs, but it lacks one of the essential qualities of jokedom, i.e. humor. Suffice to say that pretty much everyone dies in Fury, too.
Revisiting the Greek tragedies and whatnot, what makes those plays and poems relevant today is largely that the characters seem like real people. Sure, they may be fighting monsters and having their lives manipulated by gods, but otherwise they behave like people always have. They change, grow, learn the error of their ways, and generally demonstrate a clear psychology despite how long ago they were written. Rushdie’s work, despite being greatly devoted to character studies and plumbing the depths of their thoughts, never achieves that depth in his characters. This is partially due to the death of most of the characters, yes, but it’s also true for the protagonist. Throughout the book, all this stuff happens that should be having some kind of effect on him, but in most cases if there is a turning point it’s not discussed. Meanwhile, characters go crazy and become evil with maybe a paragraph or two of backstory. It’s an exciting world, but one for the most part stops at the skin.
If the truism is right, and we all do have a book or so in us, what’s the point of writing? The world has an endless supply of books, way more than any person could hope to scratch the surface of in a lifetime of reading, let alone working in any new ones. The only need for new books, or new writing in general, then, is to write about the present. The world right now has never existed before, and will never exist again, so anything that is written about it gets an automatic existential pass. The past certainly changes in the context of the present, as the interpretation of history evolves with time. It is telling, though, that Rushdie is a master at capturing places I’ve never been at times before I was born, yet his attempts to represent the here and now seem consistently to border on self-parody. Is modern life so stratified and diverse that any attempt to depict it seems plastic and unrealistic? Or is it that, when you’re writing about history, that history is the star and all you have to use good language to describe it? That strategy doesn’t work with the being-experienced present, or the remembered just-happened; it’s a blank slate, currently too lacking in agreed-upon analysis to have the same official import that historical events do. You can’t just let the present sell itself on glory or nostalgia, so you have to fill it in with ideas. And while there will always be an unquenchable supply of history, and while the people who can bring it to life will always be celebrated, ideas are always much harder to find.
Filed by d at September 15th, 2007 under literature
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August 30, 2007
I will always take something that provokes a violent reaction over something that comes and goes without making much noise, and as such, I guess all of M.I.A.’s work has been an unqualified success. From the stripped down, gurgling digital dancehall of her early singles, to the brilliant hip-hop heavy Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape, to the boring electroclash of Arular, it’s always been tricky to classify what exactly she’s going for musically. To make things more difficult, it’s kind of hard to see past the artist herself (or at least the media image that’s been built around her) to evaluate the music and lyrics on their own merit. Much has been made over her South Asian good looks, her namedropping the PLO and the Tamil Tigers, affinity towards neon and puff-paint styled 80s graphic design, and lyrical criticisms of capitalism and imperialism. Less mentioned in the press is that, juxtaposing the jungle guerilla image that’s draped on her, the 30 year old artist was born and mostly raised in England, went to art school and spent a substantial portion of her adult life as the videographer for mostly forgotten new wave band Elastica.
The backstory to Kala, her second full-length album, is that she escaped the massive media buzz following her rise to stardom and spent the past year or two traveling the world and writing music with various native musicians that she met along the way. To be sure, the music has a lot more ethnic timbre to it now, with plenty of live percussion and woodwinds replacing the drum machines and monosynths of earlier songs. While the older stuff didn’t fit neatly into one category, the production on Kala are genuinely all over the place. A couple of songs sound like 80s Indian disco, a couple like beat-infused field recordings of folk music, and a couple like modern southern hip hop with some eccentric flourishes. Sounds pretty nice on first brush, but subsequent listens reveal that the much-vaunted field recordings are for the most part used as a little rhythmic flavoring, casually added to the song to make it more interesting. Then you realize that the didgeridoo rap of”Mango Pickle Down River” is a recording made by a youth outreach project in the Outback with a bunch of pre-adolescents, which she has inserted herself into. Also, you notice that “Jimmy”, the song that sounds like a lost Indian disco classic, actually is an Indian Disco classic (Parvati Khan’s “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja”), snatched from a Bollywood movie, held down and vocalized upon in the same way that Puff Daddy did with Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”.
And indeed, that’s where this album fails for me. Despite the constant references to her ‘incendiary lyrics’, nothing is getting burned down or lit up here. Earlier songs contained some questionable lines and nonsensical bits here and there, but these new tunes manage to be both morally questionable and lazy. There’s a song or two talking about third world poverty, but most of the songs seem to glorify drug dealing, violence, generalized “partying”, designer goods. Nothing you wouldn’t hear on American urban radio, certainly, but you kind of wonder how someone from somewhere as violence-ridden as Sri Lanka can feel good about writing a songs with a chorus that goes “all I wanna do is (gunshots) and a (cash register noise) and take your money”, let alone a refrain of “some some some of them I murder, some of them I let go”. Maybe it’s not my place to criticize the lyrics of someone who at least sort of is from a place that’s been in the midst of a civil war for as long as I’ve been alive, but what can I say; it stinks of gadgetry, like the legion of hip hop guys who repeat their tagline and mention where they’re from every 20 seconds. If mine is the place to criticize nothing else, she begins the album by repeating verbatim lines from “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers, despite the song having nothing to do with cars. There are endless examples of rhyme schemes that are just abandoned arbitrarily (attempting to join “UPS trucks” and “gas” is the first one that comes to mind). When political sentiments are voiced, it really doesn’t seem like anything your average high school punk band couldn’t have come up with. And so on. After a while, it gets a little creepy. You begin to get the feeling that she’s perhaps borrowing a little too loosely from the developing world, and also maybe she’s using her background ‘realness’ to sidestep criticism thereof.
Yet, when it works, it works. “Boyz” manages to incorporate live drumming and what sounds like chopped and processed Hindi vocals into a song where the ‘world music’ element is the foundation, not just garnish. Likewise, the baile-ish electronic “XR2″ has the mumbly vocals and driving beats that made the early stuff work so well that I barely notice the product placement or drug references. It kind of makes me wonder if I didn’t come to this with so much baggage if I would be able to enjoy it more. That’s the problem with marketing strategies though - once an image has been built. I would say that the moral of the story is that the smart musician lets their music speak for itself, but let’s be honest - you gotta have a gimmick these days, and who would have heard of her if she kept things subtle? Right?
Filed by d at August 30th, 2007 under culture, music
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August 28, 2007
Hi.
Not sure what exactly I’m going to be posting about, but just as a guess it’s mostly going to be about cycling, various mumblings about music that originated on continents that are not this one (or at least not on mainland North America; reckon the Caribbean will be mentioned), and probably some occasional this and that about various Pittsburgh goings-on.
Hold tight.
Filed by d at August 28th, 2007 under Uncategorized
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