a new low in topical enlightenment

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Issue #17 (October 28, 2009)

Los Angeles State Historic Park, Chinatown

Photo by Chris Collins


















Drawing by James Fotopoulos

















From the desk of Joe Carducci...

Ernie Terrell leaves Roseland.

The boxing sidebar to this story of Terrell giving up and moving out of his southside neighborhood due to building teenage gang violence hints at a reappraisal of Muhammad Ali to come sometime after his death. Ali's Parkinson's has functioned almost as the assassination of JFK did for his reputation -- putting all questions beyond the pale. But the pale of Camelot enlarged and so will the pale of Cassius. Any story about Terrell, Joe Frazier or other boxers of that era that one sees indicates that Ali's strange welding of black nationalism, black radicalism, the white hipster elite, and the new counter-culture fails to hold under inspection and the reappraisal has begun in black sports fandom.

Ali was a version of Staggerlee loose in the roiling pop culture of then, when many a psychotic trod their pathologies while disguised as communitarians of one sort or another. Nick Tosches wrote up his investigation into whether the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight(s) which launched Ali’s fame was a mob fix. Tosches judges Yes and wrote it up for Vanity Fair and as a book, The Devil and Sonny Liston.

Clay didn't know it according to Tosches, but then that makes him appear even more the fool as he verbally trashes his opponents. And his current condition leaves the stories told today coming from those who survived those titanic battles intact.

***

Ex-Chicago Tribune writer on the NYT hires for the coming Chicago edition.

They'd be hiring Sun-Times cast-offs if they really intended to cover the city. Meanwhile the new figures show only the WSJ gains circulation.

***

Crib-notes for the NYT on Chicago Personality Disorder by precinct.

***

In Wyoming news: Pete Williams on rancher-pol Cliff Hansen's death.

***

"The Muslim World Needs Reform"

Whatever Islam's doctrinal shortcomings, the faith is often used as cover for ancient cultural practices it was meant to supplant. It failed in this because its metaphysics seem conceived first to address sectarian concerns vis-a-vis Christendom and Judasim, and secondly to answer administrative problems on earth with the one-size-fits-all command: Submit. This can only work a short while.

Christ's story is more socially useful in today's world of economic and cultural dynamism -- its metaphysics are rooted in nature and man’s struggle to temper nature, rather than merely the political realm. Judaism has no evangelical aspect, but Islam might have been the faith growing in the new China -- it is one of the officially recognized religions. That that is inconceivable and there are now almost a hundred million Christians in China are of a piece. A dynamic China feels it needs something to temper the new business culture; they've tried the purely civic metaphysics of socialism and barely survived. Islam today is roiled not so much over Jews and Christians which it knows, but by the rising of Buddhist and Hindu nations above the Islamic world. These aren't even people of the Book, and that's a crisis.

***

Lightbourne turned me onto the book, Wittgenstein's Vienna, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and though it’s full of high-flyin’ stuff I barely got through, it also is the book that sent me on to more other books and subjects I didn't know I was interested in than anything I've read since Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind. The first thing I looked for was an anthology in translation of the work of Karl Kraus, who may have been the first modern newspaper columnist and media critic. Too expensive the last I looked but there is The Anti-Journalist by Paul Reitter (Chicago).

I haven't finished it but I will get back to it soon. I earlier hadn't finished Robert Musil's novel of that Vienna, The Man Without Qualities, which Chris had called to my attention a couple years ago. What is striking is how much of the modernist project centered in Vienna, rather than Berlin or Paris or London. The names include Freud, Schoenberg, Klimt, Wittgenstein, Loos and others. Kraus was unknown to me so I started with him. But Vienna itself -- Kraus called it "the proving ground for world destruction" -- where Islam was stopped, and the twin-crowned Austro-Hungarian Empire what did the stopping and whose heir to the throne's murder set The Great War in motion is on my radar now. Here's a nice appreciation of Vienna's Golden Ringstrasse, "great landmark of human freedom and urban design."

***






Mayor Antonio Ledezma of Caracas won office by defeating the Chavista candidate after which President Chavez created the jurisdiction of the Capitol Caracas District and transferred virtually all Mayoral authority to this new office, thus leaving Ledezma with plenty of time on his hands to try to reconstitute the opposition. It seems the nations of the former New Spain, and greater Kingdom of Portugal are only now, into their second century of independence, beginning to manifest their own unique syndromes. In the past it seemed the class divisions inherited from Iberia were about the same and the national borders down there were needless fictions. Now it seems that even neighboring countries like Colombia and Venezuela, and Argentina and Brazil are moving along completely different trajectories, perhaps determined by subtle differences in history and immigration patterns over the last four centuries, as well as topography. And then there's Mexico. God is still as far from Mexico as ever, but the United States' success in promoting free trade seems to have about dissolved that border. Certainly guns and drugs and laborers move back and forth with citizenship and legal formalities seeming mere administrative bottlenecks. Mexicans come north and if lucky have children who as American citizens join La Raza on campus and demand a Reconquista of the southwest -- figuring I guess that their kids can in turn escape the spread of Mexico to Canada, where I think the cuisine is just beginning to arrive. Argentina is another long-running basket-case of increasingly unique design. It was settled with a mix that included more Italians and Germans than usual down south and seemed to get stuck in the political culture of the 1930s when populism took the scientific edge off of socialism in the west. Argentina has better land and climate than most of Latin America but Argentines manage with their votes to parlay that into being forever in hock to the IMF. The International Monetary Fund was founded in 1944 and though it has changed and can be critiqued as a sugar-trap that doesn't encourage growth very efficiently, Argentina's problems began much earlier. The Kirchners, another power couple in the old thirties Perón-style only now as tag-team, may run out the string on these games, especially as Brazil has begun to lift itself out of the third world. Former Kirchner apparat Alberto Fernandez has broken his silence recently.

[Image: Spain-Portugal treaty]

***



And speaking of that Iberian weight upon LatAm: "The terror of Spanish painting" is at the National Gallery in London, and will move to the National Gallery of Art in DC.

***

And speaking of blood: The Modern Period.

***

Delete, the book, runs counter to conventional wisdom, but not so much about what the web is doing to memory. Instead, author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger stresses the importance of retaining the ability to forget. And in this interview with novelist Jonathan Lethem he recalls being advised culturally by the late Paul Nelson in the days before films could be easily accessed.

***

Fred Halliday’s answer to his own query, "What was communism?" is interesting, but his phrase “the great global civil war of 1914-91” in the first paragraph tips off his sympathy’s limitations. Elsewhere, Timothy Garton Ash reviews the books just out at the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall. He notes that the deaths on Tiananmen Square in China, which occurred in June 1989, helped turn European Communist opinion away from that live option later in that year. And Open Democracy also reprints a Russian analysis of that country’s difficulty with its 20th Century past. WWII as a world-historical event becomes a block to comprehension in a culture’s “historical memory”. In this country too, though mostly on domestic policy. In Russia it runs deeper as Stalin himself hid behind Mother Russia’s skirts to fight the Great Patriotic War. Remembering the four-year fight against the Germans is easy but, as Arseny Roginsky writes of the rest of the Soviet decades, “we mainly killed our own people, and our consciousness refuses to accept this fact.”

***

Jack Shafer veers near the subject of the scale of damage FDR did to this country and its political culture over his three-plus terms in order to put a gloss on President Obama's war on Fox News. And again, WWII as historical backstop disguises all everywhere. No danger we'll prosecute this war that way though. Standards have changed, returned to the pre-FDR norm, and risen just slightly from there perhaps.

***


[Ink painting by Joe Carducci, 1977]




Martin Shaw on the violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, "to call it 'fighting' would be to dignify what are mainly atrocities against civilians."

***

Here is a classic example of NYT politicized editing:
"Ten months after the Israeli military said it invaded this Palestinian coastal strip to stop the daily rocket fire of its Islamist rulers, there are many ways to measure the misery of Gaza."


The words "said it" dropped in do whatever it is the editors think needs doing to prove the Times is a neutral arbiter of the coming middle east peace of their dreams. They want to think of themselves as a player and it messes with the job they do. There used to be a guy here in Naperville who read the NY Times at the library and he would copy-edit with a ballpoint all the articles on the middle east what he surely saw as exhibiting the creeping anti-semitism of the New York Times. That was over a decade ago, and if it isn't that, it is worse whatever it is.

(Thanks: Roger Trilling, Andy Schwartz)

















Wednesday, October 21, Along the DuPage River, Naperville, Illinois

Photo by Joe Carducci






















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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Issue #16 (October 21, 2009)

Sunday at the Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois


Photo by Joe Carducci

















From the desk of Joe Carducci...

The Algorithm of Radio’s Death Spiral

“The Song Decoders” in the New York Times Magazine is about the internet radio-service Pandora’s Music Genome Project, an attempt to log and cross-ref “hundreds of data points” that are alleged to determine what it is a listener hears in a song and will presumably search out in other songs.

Well, okay, here’s what Pandora tells you about three songs that Chris checked out for me when I told him I was working on this:

Black Sabbath “Hole in the Sky”
Features of this song:
- hard rock roots
- mild rhythmic syncopation

- repetitive melodic phrasing

- a twelve-eight time signature

- mixed minor & major key tonality

- groove based composition

- a vocal-centric aesthetic

- electric rhythm guitars

- a dynamic male vocalist

- triple note feel
- similar songs are: Smashing Pumpkins "Today", Motorhead "We Are the Road Crew", Ministry "Supernaut", Led Zeppelin "Houses of the Holy".

Amon Duul II “The Return of Ruebezahl”
Features of this song:
- electric rock instrumentation

- extensive vamping

- minor key tonality

- electric rhythm guitars

- an instrumental arrangement

- similar songs: Kennelmus “Goodbye Pamela Ann”, Nektar “The Nine Lifeless Daughters of the Sun”, the Avengers VI “Heartbeat”, the David “Mister, You're a Better Man Than I”, Wigwam “Pig Storm”.

Black Flag "In My Head”
Features of this song:
- punk roots

- electric rock instrumentation

- a twelve-eight time signature

- minor key tonality

- a vocal-centric aesthetic

- electric guitar riffs

- a dynamic male vocalist

- triple note feel
- similar songs: Jesus Lizard "Uncommonly Good", the Birthday Party “Say a Spell”, Shellac “Canada”, Heatmiser “Dead Air”, the Butthole Surfers “Sea Ferring”.


Pandora notes after each song breakdown, “[t]hese are just a few of the hundreds of attributes cataloged for this song by the Music Genome Project.” I don’t doubt that but as Ray Farrell tells me the tunes suggested by non-genome software at All Music Guide or iTunes are not so different. (Ray went from Rather Ripped Records to KPFA to Down Home to SST to Geffen to eMusic to RoyaltyShare.com so he about knows it all.) Just posted at Arthur is an interview with Josh Homme and John Paul Jones where Jay suggests that no matter how fringe the artists one enters into Pandora, the algorithm gradually moves you “to the center. It doesn't run around the edge,” which Homme then christens a “Vanilla-ator.”

Satellite radio attempted to please the music consumer by programming many channels by micro-genre -- a thousand narrowcasts. But what they play is ordered from over the heads of the on-air talent, even when that be music people who know far better what to play. Pandora’s answer is a more mechanistic attempt to fix what was broken back when radio got rid of all its music people. But Pandora does not want music people back either, because they might commence to listen, respond, and program with little regard for business considerations. (Managers and labels often threaten to withhold their big stars unless their newbie-foists are programmed.) Things could open up in uncontrollable ways, recombining as they might.

Music people as such were driven out of radio by 1973 or so, and since then earlier versions of these Numbers people created this death spiral which promises radio station owners better targeting of existing listenership and then proceeds to deliver smaller and smaller audiences as people tune out radio itself.

Station-owners’ answer has been to switch formats, but these too have the same problem: Country or R&B or Rock or Pop formats can only profit marginally from the ebb and flow of each other’s deterioration. Why? Because a programmer must build an audience through contrast and drama, and he needs to know music much better than the listeners, the sponsors, the sales people ever will. He has to be assembling and educating an audience for music that does not at first exist.

If the DJ himself has a clue and a personality you get something like you once had after ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) and the musicians union mercifully pulled all their professional pop music off the air in a bid to halt the playing of records over the air. They’d colluded to prevent this for a decade and clearly felt they could stone it for another. Radio then founded BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) to collect performance fees for the country and blues they’d been filling the air with for a year before a settlement was reached. To the astonishment of the musicians union head James C. Petrillo and ASCAP, BMI’s signings out of ghetto and holler stayed in the air, laying a path for Sun, Chess, and the rest.

In any case there was nothing but the Race and Hillbilly charts in Billboard for early rock and roll: Bill Haley on both, Elvis Presley on both… The Pop Chart wasn’t really conquered until Elvis’ end run around pop radio formats via a run of appearances on network television programs: “Stage Show” - CBS, “Milton Berle” - NBC, “Steve Allen” - NBC, “Ed Sullivan” - CBS. Thereafter Elvis, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent on all three charts, and if there‘d been a Gospel chart….

But it was a golden age due more to the music than media. American balladry had blued up under the influence of black Americans, and then it rhythmed up after the Civil War as Rags, Stomps, and varied Dance crazes washed over the music culture via early twentieth century jazz which was then further disseminated through the new media of records, radio, and then film and television. Rock and roll had built up a head of steam.

But radio and records gradually were taken from the hands of music people and low-life hustlers, and delivered into the hands of suits and swells, lawyers and accountants. And as done elsewhere they standardized products and routinized their selling. Music folk had to leave the business-side. Soon enough they were getting thrown out of the music-side too.

Something I like to do is periodically keep my eye off the ball. Well maybe keep it in peripheral vision, but look around a bit -- see who is moving where while attention is elsewhere. It can be enjoyable after a rec-biz career like mine to relish each internal crash of its collapse, but what’s more important is that as the old major labels threw themselves against the web, they did manage to rescue copyright for the big music publishers (Warner-Chappell, EMI, SonyATV, Universal…) to now wire up that web. Publishers do their promotion behind the scenes for satellite radio, advertising, television and movie soundtracks, etc. The promotional working of songs isn’t as visible as billboards and record shop display ads anymore, although NBC’s signing Bon Jovi as “performer in residence” to be “seen and heard across the multiple brands and platforms of NBC Universal” was so ridiculous they figured they’d have to make it visible.

Ray thinks Pandora’s new social networking feature that shows the playlists of others who have requested the same song is going to open up the system to knowledge beyond what their software scientists can isolate and identify. It also allows one to listen to what they’ve downloaded so may prompt more lawsuits.

But all these mechanisms to replace the old radio model that worked, turn music-hunting into something analogous to code-writing when what a listener needs, especially a young one, is have their code written by the ambient programming of a musically rich culture that comes at him or her from all directions in all styles, live and recorded. There still are music people in this country, Ray and Jay for two, but media has damaged content. There’s no doubting that at this point. And as the music industry people go about their survival drills they don’t see another way even as they claim to be looking for nothing else.

***

The NYT had an interesting review of a book called “The Curse of the Mogul”, written by three authors “bringing academic, financial and managerial credentials to their scorching critique of the media industry.” Apparently their argument is that it wasn’t even good business to build these behemoths, nevermind what they did to journalsim, the arts, etc. Especially as the media business has kept the first-person carny-hustler model of a Col. Tom Parker, their corporations dodder around in the dark like late Elvis looking for the fridge. Perhaps the internet’s creative destruction of Viacom, Disney, Comcast, TimeWarner, etc., is further disguising culpability.

The authors, according to reviewer Harry Hurt III, are suggesting these companies would have been better run on “traditional economic theory” with closer relationships to local rather than world markets. (This jibes with my sense that even with regard to Pop music, world Pop musics are far inferior and have harmed our style which comes of a far deeper syncretic tradition.) And here is Ted Turner right on time to confirm this, telling Bloomberg news in the same sit-down that he, 1) Feels like a dummy, and 2) Would like to get control of TimeWarner so he could run CNN again.

***

Proof comes periodically that Chicago needs the Sun-Times, yea verily, but these hipsters Daley has made the city safe for don’t even read the Reader anymore. Sunday Sun-Times’ look at ex-Gov. Blagojevich’s database includes a sidebar on the President’s efforts on the behalf of his own list of ne’er-do-well shirt-tail brothers-and-sisters in Chicago politics. The Tribune has always been a regional paper for the mid-west and was further pulled from the city by its suburban strength -- though that‘s taken blows from the Daily Herald. The Trib’s one legit street feature is John Kass’s column. It’s now a tabloid on weekdays to compete with the Sun-Times for rail and bus commuters, but still a not-so-broadsheet on Sat & Sunday. The two papers don’t have much in common except for regular twin bouts of Wilco-mania, interrupted whenever R. Kelly drops his drawers. This is somewhat an improvement over the old days when the papers’ music writers would come together over the legitimate promotional needs of Styx and Richard Marx.

***

“Where the News Comes From” is an interesting experiment by New York magazine to track coverage of several news stories back through to the original reporting to find out where the real reporting was done -- currently a subject of much talk in journalism. Nice to know some editor and reporter team eventually decided to look into it.

***

This Chicago Reader review of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book gets at a contemporary syndrome.

***

The French language ain’t makin’ it. Xavier North, head of the General Delegation for the French Language and the Languages of France, claims, “Our citizens have a right to communicate without speaking English.” Okay, but don’t let me catch you speaking Italian neither.

***

The Comedy of the Commons.

One thing I remember about living up in northern Wisconsin is that once you log your property you can't sell it.  Firewood, like beer and ammo, is used as scrip up there, but one would rather log the commons for spending money, and keep your property wooded for sale at top dollar.  The trick is how to work your political representatives so as to get a no-bid contract to level some corner of public forest that you don't personally need for hunting.  All in all, I chose Wyoming over Wisconsin.

***

ONO, Travis - Friday, "The Demise of the Southside Community Arts Center"

Photo by Tamara L. Smith




I first heard about ONO from Al Jourgensen when he hung around the bay area after his band Special Affect broke up in San Francisco.  Systematic was distributing the SA album.  Al went back to Chicago and produced three recordings for ONO which became part of their first album, "Machines That Kill People" which Jon Boshard and I released on Thermidor in 1982; they followed up with a second in 1986, "Ennui".  As far as I know ONO have the noise-gospel musical genre entirely to themselves.  I first saw ONO play at Lincoln Hall on the Northwestern University Law School campus in downtown Chicago.  They performed what they called ZADA for a scattering of weirdos in a large, classical looking lecture hall on February 12, 1982.  Looking for them beforehand, as I'd never actually met them, I came upon Travis running down the hallway in a bridal gown and veil.  I decided not to interrupt him on what for all I knew was the happiest day of his life.  In those years of Ma Bell's long distance rates and federally regulated air travel, most independent record label business was conducted by mail, and oft-times one suspected one ought feel grateful for that.

Though I moved back to Chicago for ten years, Travis's Bio page shows that ONO wasn't very active in that period.  Now they are very active.  I met them at my Quimby's booksigning, and now that I'm in the area I went down to see them Friday at a special performance as part of "The Demise of the South Side Community Arts Center".  It wasn't a gig per se, but Travis opened things with FluiD, a one-man psychedelicized electronic band who then played his own short instrumental set.  Then Ono performed "Ode to Billy Joe" as a funeral dirge psychodrama.  Great sounds.  The Bronzeville Art Trolley stopped by during ONO's set and the place filled up nicely.  After three decades of south-side "Onomatopoeia Before Music" perhaps Travis and P. Michael have become a micro-institution.  Still, Travis assured me the Art Center was uneasy about this whole "Demise" program, which was occasioned to take advantage of the coming renovation of the Center's rooms. The Center is a south-side institution and it was dedicated by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1941.  Mighty nice of them to let the noise and graffiti up off the street and into the place.  The walls are coming down anyway (they'll be auctioned).  I didn't stay for the Black Monks of Mississippi performance but I met one of the players and he knew my name from the rock book.

The official ONO timeline

ONO photos and videos


















From the desk of Steve Beeho:



Stooges live recordings from 1971.




From Andy Schwartz:




















Drawing by James Fotopoulos

















Monday - Naperville, Illinois

Photo by Joe Carducci






















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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Issue #15 (October 14, 2009)

Venice, Italy

Photo by Jon Boshard

















Drawing by James Fotopoulos
















From the desk of Joe Carducci...

Brendan Mullen, RIP.
Brendan set up the Masque practice rooms and club in 1977 and ran Club Lingerie too. I got back in touch with him in '05 while working on my Enter Naomi book. I intended to quote liberally from his two books, We Got the Neutron Bomb, and Lexicon Devil. I remembered introducing him to Naomi Petersen at the Lingerie so she'd have the run of the place, and got to talk to him about those years and look through his archive. I was struck by his enthusiasm for drumming and he even hoped to get back in touch with Greg Ginn and play with him; I couldn't help him there but he wanted me to tell him about anything he didn't already know about the music scenes in California. I had the feeling he had a Neutron Bomb Vol. 2 in him the way he asked about the LAFMS, Monitor, the Stains, Saint Vitus, Across the River, Secret Hate, the Sleepers, Toiling Midgets, Fang... I made him a lot of tapes. He was still very enthusiastic about what had happened in Los Angeles in those years and very proud of his involvement. Perhaps there will be additional material to be published under his name. That will surely be more essential reading. It's nice to see his death and life noted in the papers and websites, though the NYT misrepresents L.A. as it was, in its obituary today. But that's the task they've often assumed.

LA Times obit

LA Weekly's best of Brendan Mullen

***

The Rhythmless Method.
This scratches the surface of an interesting, rarely visited topic -- if it‘s true we've slid from Patriarchy to Gynocracy and now at risk of outright Gynarchy then this might be its last mention anywhere. There were all kinds of social side-effects of the Pill, including dramatic rises in the rates of rape, incest, STDs, the spread of caddishness now that it no longer required the soul-chill to shrug off a girl’s complete ruination. Even more perversely the Pill contributed to the decline of racism. But these University of Sheffield Drs Alexandra Alvergne and Virpi Lumma are noting that females reward more assertive, masculine men only during their fertile days, “However, if women are taking the Pill they no longer have fertile days.” Exit macho Steve McQueen, Enter user-friendly Zac Efron, according to the Daily Mail editors. Conde Nast meanwhile ties its Glamour and GQ mag sites readerships together in a new dating site based on fashion-sense. Presumably they have data suggesting that GQ’s readership is heterosexual.

***

The Chicago Way.
I’d focus on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee itself, vicarious sanctimonious livers-down of Alfred Nobel’s invention of the Anarchist's best friend dynamite, if only because in all their confidence that their every pronouncement is a learning opportunity for Americans, they’ve hurt the one they love. Actually it’s their own profile they lovingly tend to so I guess that wouldn't matter to them. But the Trib’s John Kass is worth reading for his funny recap of the 12 days of the Obama presidency that netted him the nom, plus his reminder that Illinois ex-Governor George Ryan was also nominated for one just prior to his trial and incarceration. The Nobel Peace Prize! What dreams are made of... Them things is shiny!

***

Predictioneering by the good Doctor.

***

New books by Ehrenreich and Derbyshire. Parallel lines do intersect; cheer up.

***

"There was no such thing as Tribeca back then." James Marshall on Lester Bangs.

***


The Community Method.
I made near-mentions of this syndrome in my Brave New Class essay in NV6. European politicians aren’t like normal ones like say in Chicago where they win Peace Prizes. No, in Europe politicians are mean and rotten and they, being to those manners born, do dislike their voters intensely. It’s a class thing and they can’t help trying to sign into law a whole lot of unreadable lingo translated into all those other constituent Latinate mumbo-jumbos so as to place an impenetrable wall of words between their prerogatives as royal-manqué and the judgment of the citizenry. But that doesn’t mean European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso wants the new post of President of the European Council to become a President of Europe, somebody like Tony Blair who would relegate him to paper-pushing in Brussels. Maybe Barroso has begun to appreciate the Czech check on things. Gideon Rachman in the FT suspects the dead hand of Jean Monnet behind the G20 as well. The mechanism of term limits seemed a mistake to me once, but who can say, maybe someday it will take Hal or Skynet or Gort to relieve us of these lawyers who specialize in the kind of international law that exists at the expense of free nations which are inclined to respect law, and to the profit of tyrannies which are not.

***

Roman's Method.
Sunday’s NYT finally put some seventies context to the Roman Polanski extradition story, now that all of his defenders have hurt his case. Since I’m not in Wyoming I am unable to dig out the one copy of the old L.A. Free Press that I saved from my first year out there in 1977. I was a pretty naïve 21 year-old when I got to Hollywood which was certainly the correct place to go for a cure. Reading the leaked police and hospital reports on the 13 year-old model’s condition and complaint because I had liked "Knife in the Water", and "Chinatown", made an impression on me and even influenced a couple of my scripts, now that I think about it. Not many of those forensic details have surfaced in accounts today. But this piece quotes two psychiatrists from that distant planet, 1977 Los Angeles: “Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century. While enriching the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.” Polanski’s childhood was to have been the basis for Jerzy Kosinki’s novel, The Painted Bird, when everyone stopped believing that it was based on its author's own life -- soon no-one even believed he’d authored it -- great book though. Polanski also had Nastassja Kinski at 15 when they made "Tess" in 1979, but of course she was Klaus Kinski’s daughter so perhaps Roman’s the plaintiff there. Among his wives he claimed to be happiest with Sharon Tate, so there you go. He feared psychoanalysis would destroy his art and preferred that French screenwriters do that.

***

BBC: Cooling Hotting Up.
Global Cooling is still Climate Change so everyone's right, everyone’s wrong. It’s called myopia, one of many human conditions each of which opens the door to a form of vanity. One where one’s fervent wish appears granted on a scale that seems existential and so quite sublime. Some activists sync up with al-Qaeda’s interest in the glories of the 8th century. Were our labs to master the moving around of atoms to allow for total 100% efficiency of solar energy conversion and transfer, many of our finest citizens would cry real tears as the rest of us zip around in our new solar-hellacious-mobiles. Plenty of our fellow citizens are now political combinations of The Puritans and The Indians. They fancy the stone age and are too socially concerned to bear to sight of others rambling around to their hearts content. I'm surprised the ELF hasn’t taken to blowing up those isolated wind-turbines out west. Or PETA for that matter as birds are batted out of the sky by the blades. They used to tour hydroelectric dams and geo-thermal power plants too, but turned on them for aesthetic reasons when no others came to mind.

***

Steven F. Hayward’s parsing of the question of conservatism’s animacy is fair enough, though typically media-unsavvy for what goes on in the Washington Post and academe and think tanks -- Hayward is with American Enterprise Institute. He forgets in his contrasting Glenn Beck’s television program with the late William F. Buckley’s that Buckley lost his hour-long program in 1988. He was then shoehorned with his verbose guests into useless half-hour debate formats, and that was on PBS! “The Firing Line” began on WOR in 1966 and featured Buckley interviewing someone interesting for forty minutes before introducing a three guest questioners. These guest questioners were gifted grad students at top schools. Later there'd be one examiner, Pat Buchanan, Michael Kinsley, Mark Green, among them. I saw Buckley do a segment on cable news during his last year and as soon as he began talking I knew it would end clumsily with the host cutting him off and moving on to the usual unproductive mid-day info-flow, and that was Fox! So Hayward’s critique of television and radio programming, like most critiques, is dated and irrelevant. CSPAN is there for you when you want it; everything else is commercially-paced programming, including public television. People can learn from different formats what they seek and precious little else. I’ve seen Glenn Beck recently since my parents watch him and I can report that he does some good writing for his show and is often making subtler points than one imagines he could when you first hear liberals sticking pins into some new media titan of their imagination.

***

Empire, Multitude, and now, drumroll... Commonwealth (all Harvard).
Hardt and Negri are hard at work rewriting Marxist theory to keep up with the ongoing, accelerating Revolution of the Bourgeoisie, which, if Marx is to be believed and Karl seemed to forget this himself, must first churn through all familial, national, and cultural ground before it destroys its own root system and some bunch of college professors takes over in the name of a working class wishing for nothing so much as a Goddamn soul-destroying factory job. We can only pray our heroes Michael and Antonio might still be alive and out of prison when that day comes.

***

Lewis Sorley in Monday’s WSJ on Vietnam’s possible relevance to the Vietnam syndrome.

***



Ottoman revisionism.
After 9/11 it seemed to me that the West needed to rethink its casual dismissal of the fears of Turkey’s secular successors to Atatürk in the military, the ruling party, and academe. Maybe the hijab and all the rest of female dress issues are a form of fundamentalist patriarchal bullying that needs redress. This column by Soner Cagaptay interestingly probes whether the Ottoman Caliphate itself needs rethinking, at least as to whether it was actually the first step in the Westernization of Turkey and therefore is misunderstood by both the secularists and the Islamists.

***


And now a Brief Youtube History of SPARROW and STEPPENWOLF:

JACK LONDON & THE SPARROWS - “If You Don't Want My Love”
First single off of their one album released in Canada, featuring the Edmonton brothers, drummer Jerry and guitarist Dennis, a.k.a., Mars Bonfire.

THE SPARROWS - “Meet Me After Four”
No more Jack, now more surf-garage than Mersey.

THE SPARROW - “Isn't It Strange”
Now turned on and singular, you know, like the concept of The Sparrow, not just a bunch of birds.



JOHN KAY & THE SPARROW - “Down Goes Your Love Life”
Kay was a solo folk-blues performer in Toronto before he joined Sparrow. He makes an early appearance in the Neil Young bio, Shakey, when he teaches Young a blues in early sixties Canada. Goldie McJohn and Nick St. Nicholas of Sparrow and Steppenwolf had both been in The Mynah Birds with Young and Rick James. Sparrow moved to Boston, to San Francisco, and finally to Los Angeles and the name change, where Nick St. Nicholas also starred as the one true musician ideal in Pamela Des Barres book “I’m With the Band” (user-friendly pretty boys’ guitar-playing has deteriorated some).

STEPPENWOLF - “Sookie Sookie”
The Don Covay-Steve Cropper tune performed live on the “Playboy After Dark” syndicated television program. They jam on this.

STEPPENWOLF - “Born to be Wild”
The A-side Mars Bonfire Idiomorph. They jam on this and it was a #2 pop hit so some more would bum on its departure from the single.

STEPPENWOLF - “Screaming Night Hog”
They started to lose folks as they got more musical; live in an Australian radio studio 1970. Again they are jamming.



STEPPENWOLF - “Renegade”
From “7”, more or less John Kay’s creation story with album track studio jam.

STEPPENWOLF - “Shackles & Chains”
I’m not sure they got any radio off their last album, “For Ladies Only”, but they should’ve. Rock or pop once had this much blues in it.



After the breakup John Kay did two pretty good solo records before they got back together with Bobby Cochran on guitar. They were then notably less bluesy, though Eddie's nephew could play scales faster than Alvin Lee. They never got back to the blues and all hated each other. We got a pretty good demo from Goldie McJohn while I was at SST. I’d also asked John Kay to sing on the Minutemen’s cover of “Hey Lawdy Mama” since D. was having trouble with it; his people declined. Kay should tour like John Lee Hooker used to at his age, instead studio musicians have been playing Steppenwolf playing the oldies behind him. Such is the burden of their string of Top-40 hits. Not much jamming now.

***

Saint Vitus in New York.

Saint Vitus in Village Voice.

[European Council photo from the European Commission website; Ottoman empire map from the University of Texas at Austin website]
















Ocean Liner in Cape Town Harbor, 1957

Golden rectangle framing on 120 film, camera unknown. Photo by Anthony Collins

















Drawing by Henry Carlsen





















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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Issue #14 (October 7, 2009)

Another Pointless and Pure Baseball October in Wrigley Field, Saturday:

Photo by Joe Carducci
















From the desk of Joe Carducci...

Q: "Will Books Be Napsterized?" (Randall Stross in Sunday's NYT)
A: Yes! (Me here)

Stross writes,

"Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland. It says its customers have uploaded onto its servers more than 10 petabytes of files — that’s more than 10 million gigabytes — and can handle up to three million users simultaneously. Anyone can upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free."


The mechanics of file-sharing do matter, but as with the music industry, the publishing industry has made its bed since the cultural revo of the sixties woke it up. That its super-comfy feather-bed became a zinc-lined death-sled coffin fascinates those professionals involved, but it won't really surprise or alarm them for they are not really book-people. As in the music industry, where music obsessives were driven off by the collegiate class of lawyers, accountants, and statisticians attracted to the bigger money of baby boom market album-oriented economics, the book business ran down its own dead-end. Theirs features the end of the time-honored profession of book creation with emphases on the editor-writer relationship and distribution through long-running booksellers often named for their owners (Stuart Brent’s, Harry W. Schwartz’s…).

Today’s marketplace is increasingly made up of phone-reliant "readers". These readers require digests of news so they understand the night's jokes, and perhaps the lay of the political landscape on this or that policy debate or election. They buy books right or left, voting with their purchases, depending on television buzz and then these books filter through the used bookstores on their way to the shelves of Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, largely unread one supposes. The production of such books is a short-term strategy.

Of course the digesticization of information yields smarts rather than wisdom, and that's enough for politics. One wonders, though, whether the book writers who come out of today's news media can contribute anything as enduring as Mencken or Lippmann did. There's smarts in today's newspapers and magazines but it's producing micro-analyses and micro-histories, and the glib marketing reaches into the works themselves as they labor to launch terminology (Bo-Bos, Tipping Point, Shock Doctrine...).

The corruption of the books themselves is the true concern. The old relationship model has been de-professionalized with agents, brokers, lawyers, and media reps crowding in between editor and writer. And so the writer often takes a larger advance but has less time to research and write what I will call a real book. I spent over four years on my first book, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, beginning April, 1986 immediately upon leaving SST Records. The last addition to the first edition was the Camille Paglia quote which I added in late December, 1990 just before sending the book off to Eerdman’s for printing. I got 2,200 copies in hand by March, 1991. I sent out five promotional copies. When Henry Rollins read his he called to see how many I’d printed. When I told him he thought I’d never sell them all and he’d never get to add the book to his newly ramped up 2.13.61 catalog. The second call I got regarding the book was from Roger Trilling. He’d bought the book at Amok in L.A. and wanted me to write for Details magazine, which I did; he also wanted me to send a copy to Robert Christgau, which I also did. He reviewed it in the Village Voice -- didn’t quite approve of it or my editor-less style.

Thanks to Tower Records and those old-line bookshops I did sell them and I then revised it for Henry, spending another year updating and re-editing it. That edition of 3,500 or so came out in 1995. I begged off any editing help; not sure there was anyone in the world could tramp around profitably in that book. I improved it but it's still a slow motion Odessa-steps avalanche-massacre. (I don’t claim to be at my best in nonfiction; I always err on the side of content over form there.) But 2.13.61 hit the roll-out of Tower, Borders, and Barnes & Noble nationwide and that run sold out too. Then everything began to roll-back and fail as the web and Amazon.com expanded. Henry himself was the first person I knew who bought from Amazon. When Doug Biggert of Tower Magazines first called me to order R&TPN, we had a nice leisurely talk about Tower, SST and other things we were both hip to. Not so efficient maybe, but the book world (and the music world) misses that Tower know-how today.

Soon enough Henry had to re-frame his company around his own titles and I got back into the publishing business. It is now much more difficult to work from outside. My second book, Enter Naomi, a much easier read on the face of it, has sold two thousand copies to date, with hardly any of the reviews R&TPN received. But many of the shops are gone and the free weeklies, daily newspapers, and magazines are all in the process of melting into their websites. Whatever is coming probably does not include much of the things I spent my life inundated with, because every year the age of the web-crawl generation advances against the age of books, mags, papers, records, papyrus….

Beyond the mechanics of distribution, however, I believe that the content of books (and music and film…) was retarded when those first hustlers and hires out of the hippie wave succeeded in pulling up the ladder after themselves. It happened in radio programming most dramatically in the period between 1972-74. One has to ask what kept the Ramones off “Saturday Night,” never mind radio itself, when they are now heard over the P.A. in major league baseball parks?

I arrived in Hollywood in September, 1976; “Jaws” was still at the Cinerama Dome, “Rocky” was at the Pix, and that winter “Star Wars” opened at the Chinese. This pushed me from film to music. I like genre films, but there was something wrong with those films, and what followed was worse, more juvenile -- Saturday matinee serials weren‘t worth remaking at any budget never mind as overblown big-budget epics. My first stop in Hollywood was Pando Productions -- Peter Fonda’s company -- I had been very impressed with “The Hired Hand”. They had a small office south of Hollywood Blvd and the girls took one of my scripts and lo-and-behold nothing came of it.

I gradually got interested in punk rock as I read about it and began to hear the records. While at Systematic Record Distribution (1978-1981) and at SST Records (1981-1986) it became clear that we were faced with having to build our own parallel music industry-in-miniature -- from fanzines to labels, from college radio stations to music venues, from booking agents to distribution…. It was a formative experience for all of us, especially the bands. But the lifespan of most bands is a mere five years. (Read the attached interview Jordan did with the Louisville/NYC/France based band Circle X and marvel at the insouciance of their decades spent making music; why bother, most would ask, but it was the right strategy if you weren’t populist in the Black Flag manner.)

I was at SST in Redondo Beach when I read reviews of first novels by Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. You knew they didn’t know what was going on outside of some soshe-world on elite campuses or in Manhattan nightclubs so how could they write anything important? Goes without saying they weren’t old enough to offer masterful insight into the human condition, so that leaves zeitgeist-work. My guess then was they had to be new-journo-damaged at best, Vonnegut gimmickry more likely. I figured I was likely the best writer of my generation, but I wrote nothing but screenplays and press releases for SST. My PR prose occasionally met with approval; most notably when Richard Meltzer reprinted one about a Rollins spoken-word event in his L.A. Reader column, or the time Greg Ginn made me throw a thousand copies of a trade-show press release about Black Flag’s 1984 rut through Florida in the trash. Curt Kirkwood didn‘t have a mind for PR-ese but I handed him one release I‘d written about Hüsker Dü and he told me the only thing in it he could relate to was my referring to them as potato-eaters. I took that as high praise.

There is little question today that I was in the cockpit of the culture, if rock and roll still counted. But exactly what generation was I anyway? I didn’t consider myself a punk, never mind hardcore; I never did shave my beard off or stop listening to Steppenwolf. But since a generation was forced onto a siding by the hippie mercenaries who’d gotten a chokehold on the music and media business, its art didn’t rate in the historical parade of generations. When I left SST in March 1986 we were still so underground that I didn’t receive a single job offer from another label, major or minor. I think I’d signed an agreement with SST not to go to work for another label for one year. Not that I was going to… And then fifteen years after the Ramones and the rest did the heavy lifting, Nirvana and then Green Day and then Fall Out Boy struck platinum and further buried the history of punk as it was in the seventies. The culture’s been retarded ever since; thank you Jan Wenner. Thank you Lee Abrams. The record industry by necessity had to follow the press and the radio and cut the music’s ties to its own historical evolution. It won’t prove enough that young kids hear the Ramones at the baseball stadium today, thirty-five years after the fact. As I said, “Retarded.”

In the latest oral history of punk -- SF’s “Gimme Something Better” -- the authors explain their deal with Penguin and how it wasn’t enough time or pages to cover it all. They prove that, I’m afraid. For my books I’ve had all the time my biological clock gives me, though no money at all. But decades of the major and minor publisher’s investing in instant books written on the clock by hacks trying to clamber up out of dying dailies, weeklies, and monthlies has swindled and driven book buyers away by foisting one too many glorified magazine features into fake books, barely worth the remaindered price. Why not google for the url and check out RapidShare if you’ve grown up with the web at your fingertips?

***

James Belich's "Replenishing the Earth - The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world", reviewed by Bernard Porter, author of "The Absent-Minded Imperialists".

***

Michael Rother interview.

***

Christian rock band Flyleaf’s second album. I thought Clive Davis was going to have the singer go solo by now. They never released the best tune off their debut, “Perfect”, as a single but the record did go gold in slow motion over the last three years.

***

L.A. punk was as early in its origins as NYC. Try telling that to posterity.

***

Michael Hurley animator

***

Baader-Meinhof Komplex explained.

***

Ford’s reward.

***

Jordan Mamone interviews Circle X "the Americans who became Sioux". French version published by Revue et Corrigée.

***

Arthur Miller unraveled.

***

Marion Davies recuperated.

***

Any Chinese version of the BBC or Reuters or TimeWarner or News Corp or Bloomberg will be good news for Chinese letters arts, and these guys. Scary thought given ours.
















Movie Review
by Chris Collins

Come and See, (Idi i smotri), (1985)






A Soviet film, directed by Elem Klimov, set during World War Two which veers between the surreal, the brutal, and the crude.

Florya, a peasant boy from a Belorussian village joins a band of partisan guerrillas in 1943 with little more apparent motivation than adventure and patriotism. From there, like Fabrizio in the Charterhouse of Parma, he is less a participant in the war than a spectator, getting lost in the woods, meeting a girl there, and then returning with her to his village to find his family and everybody else massacred, possibly in reprisal for his enlisting.

In an apocalyptic climax, he is caught in the middle of an SS rampage through another village. Hellish incidents accumulate, of such oppressive violence as to break the film, with its theretofore muted dread and surrealist touches, into two pieces. Villagers are packed into a barn which is then set alight. A German grabs him and places a pistol at his temple while another photographs him, then lets him go. And finally, the girl he met in the woods rematerializes, stumbling toward him, raped and bleeding.

The Russians get revenge of a kind, but the boy's mind is lost, past disgust and rage. He raises his rifle and slowly empties it at a portrait of Hitler left in the mud, and as he shoots, black and white newsreel footage of the war runs in reverse to ultimately reveal a picture of the infant Hitler. The effect is one of the boy's mind, and that of the filmmaker, struggling to undo horrors which have their origins in a single diseased psyche. While the film does not attempt to shed light on that psyche, its vision of manifold evils metastasizing from it is indelible.
















Not Wyoming

Photo by Joe Carducci





















To receive a weekly update notice for the NV, send an email to newvulgate[at]sbcglobal.net with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. To stop receiving notices, do the same with the word UNSUBSCRIBE.

• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer