Now THIS is how you cook like a minimalist.
(via maura)
One of my ongoing disappointments with rhetoric is that no one has yet come up with a COOL or MANLY or NO-BULLSHIT sounding way to say unexciting middle-ground stuff like “if you take a second and brush on some olive oil it’ll sear up better and stay juicier” or “if you’ve got some rosemary you might as well sprinkle throw that on.” (Step one: don’t say “sprinkle.”)
reblogged from maura
Blue Lines Revisited: Roundtable Discussion: The Role Of The Record Label (via bwall05)
This strikes me as a pretty basic foundation of good criticism, and it’s definitely something Tom’s great at.
It’s also interesting to me, because I’ve always been happy — maybe even happier — to read about music I don’t think I’ll buy or hear. This isn’t necessarily because I love reading or criticism (though I suppose I enjoy both). It’s because it’s a quick way to learn what’s going on. People don’t much like to think of themselves as “music journalists” these days — criticism seems more apt and noble — but there’s a journalistic function even to criticism: on some level you’re telling people what’s happening. And one main purpose of journalism is so we can learn about stuff without having to go out and experience it ourselves, something that comes in handy when it comes to foreign wars / genres I hate hearing.
Obviously knowing a lot about “what’s happening” in music isn’t a top priority for most people; it’s not like all those records have some great global import. More than ever, there’s no central “what’s happening” that people could hope to keep up with anyway. There are a ton of different things happening, and the dominant mode of learning-about-music online is one of rapid, efficient sorting and discerning: using quick cues (like point ratings) and the speed of your mouse finger to find as much music you actually want to hear as possible in every given moment. No reason to waste time on something you’re not interested in when your web browser has a “back” button and an address bar right there in front of you.
But this is honestly different from the ways we treat other topics we’re interested in: most of us will, for instance, read just as much about politicians we can’t vote for (or against) as we will for our actual representatives. Because, well: we want to know what’s going on. The same thing held for print music magazines, which didn’t come with “back” buttons: stuck on a bus with a copy of one, you’d be a lot more likely to read about the genres and bands you didn’t like. Not just out of boredom, but to have a better idea of what surrounded the stuff you did like — what other people were listening to, or the ways they talked about it, or just what kinds of sub-trends and mediocrities and bad ideas were floating around your preferred genre, and what interesting conclusions might be drawn from them.
All this is just an attempt to argue the obvious: that reading a couple interesting things about music you don’t want to hear can be useful and actually even fun. It can even, in the end, make you more efficient at figuring out what you do want to hear — you might wind up with a better perspective on the territory, rather than just a laser focus on acquiring things that are already to your tastes. You might wind up with better ideas and tools for thinking about stuff. Or, yes, maybe you’ll just read a review of something you don’t care for but browse away thinking “oh, that was an interesting idea in there about X.”
reblogged from bwall05
in praise of Andy Falkous, who is an adult ...
… formerly of Mclusky; now fronting Future of the Left.
When the Singles Jukebox took on a recent Future of the Left song, Fergal O’Reilly — who liked it — described Falkous as “permanently enraged,” filled with “irrational fury,” and “browbeating.” I guess this is reasonably accurate. On “To Hell with Good Intentions,” one of Mclusky’s best-known songs, he sounds like he’s holding hostages and listing emotional demands. (Browbeating is a strength of his.) And the song in question, “Arming Eritrea,” shoots for a size and grandeur that Mclusky always steered clear of; it leaves Falkous sounding a lot more conventionally furious. But all this talk of throat-shredding and bile only describes one thing about Falkous — possibly a minor thing, and probably not the most interesting thing. It doesn’t even begin to explain how he can be so funny, so witty, so precise.
I think Falkous’s gift is that he gets something lots of rock singers don’t: he understands the value of individual utterances. Often he treats each individual line of singing — his voice and his lyrics both — as a single dramatic performance. Sometimes they even seem “overheard,” like you’re catching one person speaking to another in a very specific situation. Falkous doesn’t give us much context for those situations, and as a result it can be pretty difficult to say what his songs are “about,” narrative-wise. But they’re easy to understand on the level of the utterances themselves, because he shades them with wit and character and loads of different inflections — all the different modes in which people speak to one another — in ways that can really resonate. Beyond that, you can imagine the context and the connections: the situation of the person speaking, the person the line is addressed to, the circumstances it’s delivered in. You can design your own set around this dialogue.
There’s not necessarily a ton of this in “Arming Eritrea,” but it’s definitely still there: hell, some of the first words are a fiery “C’mon, Rick, I’m not a child!” I don’t know who Rick is, or what he has to do with Eritrea. But the sense of the outburst itself seems complete. The speaker keeps insisting, in a tone somewhere between a plea and a declaration, that unlike some drunks out there, he knows his own worth, knows exactly where he stands, isn’t deluding himself that he’s special: “I’m an ADULT!” You can construct a lot of different contexts around that, but the sense of the utterance itself stays fixed, and Falkous knows how to give it voice. No matter who Rick turns out to be, you probably know what it means to want to scream at someone that you’re not a fool or a child.
There are better examples of his inflectional wit with Mclusky. One of my favorites was “Undress for Success,” which has not only a terrific range but a good sense of comic timing. The first half of the first verse is delivered in a relatively conventional rock shout — but in the second half Falkous starts parodying himself, barking and clipping his syllables to the point of laughter. (You can call it “parody” or just the good, clean, totally underrated fun of singing funny.) He’s got a killer line at the end of the chorus, and he breaks it in half to pace the effect just right: “When I lost my TEETH” — high, funny yelp on that last word — “I gained a friend.” Across the second verse he gets increasingly bug-eyed and comically serious — to the point of actually shouting “I AM ABSOLUTELY SERIOUS!” — and then deflates it by drifting into a smarmy, cliche-spouting, evening-news type of voice and following up: “And the weather was a bonus!” No matter what kind of scenario you imagine around this stuff — and I have an alarmingly specific environment I like to imagine this song taking place in — the stuff he’s doing with his inflections steals the show.
He did that rock-singing self-parody a lot with Mclusky — amusing the listener by going a little too far, getting too breathless, going comically unhinged for laughs. There’s plenty of humor in his lyrics, too. But the real great moments are when it all comes together in a knot: the words, the voice, the inflection, the performance of the thing like a piece of drama — it lets him telegraph emotion and get a laugh and get you on his side, all at the same time. He’s not just a bilious screamer: he gets so much more than that about voice.
One suspects Slate's "Dear Prudence" online chats have been compromised...
This week feels heavily pranked, which I mention only because it contains one really well-played punch line (in bold):
Cabo Rojo, P.R.: I’m a 57-year-old gorgeous professional blonde woman, with lots of brains and also many plastic surgeries. To begin, I got a beautiful full C cup breast augmentation, later I acquired lovely rounded buttocks implants and at 56 I had a partial facelift that left my face looking as young as I feel, which borders on forty. My students at school think I look in my twenties and everyone thinks I look super sexy and natural. Sure, only my doctors and close relatives know the truth! The problem is after my second divorce, I’ve become timid and insecure about actually having sex with a new man because I don’t know what I would say, if they asked why I had all these surgeries. Now after getting so many added assets to the many natural ones I myself used to have, has made me feel too perfect to be true or artificially beautiful.
Somewhere Out There: My girlfriend and I had an exclusive relationship for about two and a half years until last week. She’s nice, but I wouldn’t want to marry her or anything. We’re in our twenties. Anyway, I told her last week that we should start seeing other people. I meant other people in addition to each other. I didn’t want to stop seeing her entirely. She knew what I meant, but she said that if we start dating other people, she doesn’t want to be physically intimate with me anymore. That got me really angry, and we had a big fight. It wouldn’t bother me to be physically intimate with her while I dated other girls, so why should it bother her? How can I make her see how foolish she’s being?
Mexico: Hi Prudie, I hope you take my question as I have been struggling with this issue for years without finding a solution. I am 29 years old and my boyfriend of six years and me have been wanting to get married. The problem is my father. He is a very traditional, macho Mexican man who won’t have his daughters marry anyone. I understand he is being unreasonable, since I think is normal to get married.
Bern, Switzerland: Hi Emily, totally love your columns! I have a problem concerning flatulence.
This is one of the amazing tricks of the advice-column format, of course: most people are reading these things specifically to marvel at what laughably crazy issues other people have, which draws them inherently into that zone where (e.g.) a real good letter to Savage Love is, functionally, hardly any different from a prank good letter to Savage Love. Unless the people maintaining such columns fear some widespread unmasking of such a prank — and really, who has the time to bother — the prank only does their work for them: it’s as symbiotic as television’s discovery that you don’t have to pay actors to act crazy when ordinary people will happily go nuts, for free, just to be on TV.
It might be worth it for that one sentence, though, the way it pretends it’s about to shoot off in a fair-minded direction and then snaps insanely in the other: “It wouldn’t bother me to be physically intimate with her while I dated other girls, so why should it bother her?”
Pitchfork: Interviews: Atlas Sound (via desnoise)
Then later he’s talking about “chillwave” and saying: “[I]t also combines a lot of the stuff I miss about stuff like Casino Versus Japan — some of these older, more obscure electronic artists from the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s.”
Then later he’s talking about Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier doing a guest vocal on his record.
This is something that’s always fascinated me about Cox’s music, especially the Atlas Sound recordings, and especially given his age: more than anyone else working this vein, his sensibility seems incredibly rooted in a realm of the mid- to late 90s, this era of comfortably blurry ambience that revolved out of style at the century’s end and is surely — as surely as he says — a slightly forgotten past to a lot of his younger listeners.
It’s hard to draw a neat circle around the sensibility I’m thinking of, but his Casino Versus Japan reference is certainly toward the center. It’s a whole wide spread of things, maybe starting with “important” records like Slowdive’s Pygmalion and Seefeel’s Quique, roving on through forgotten stuff like the full roster of Darla Records’ Bliss Out series (Lilys, Sweet Trip, Orange Cake Mix), ranging out in directions like Japancakes and the American Analog Set and (some) High Llamas, certainly a component of better-known acts like the Sea & Cake and Stereolab, deeper or harder-edged on Kranky releases from Labradford or Stars of the Lid — but mostly found, for me, in late-90s CD purchases by chancer acts filed toward the bottom of the shelves: Flowchart’s Multi-Personality Tabletop Vacation and Tenjira and singles comps, Seely’s Julie Only, South’s self-titled (not the English South; the one on Jagjaguar), Olo’s Olorizedcoloralbum, For Stars’ Windows for Stars, a whole run of this stuff.
Don’t take all those references as exact: I haven’t listened to most of those records in years and years, and don’t have them handy to double-check. (I can definitely recommend the South record and For Stars’ “Catholic School.”) But I tend to be reminded of them when I hear Cox — the run off of post-rock and dream-pop and slow-core into a comfortably stoned late-90s cul-de-sac, its revival into “laptop folk” and Morr Music electronics, etc. If I were nearer those lower CD shelves this list would be longer. Obviously a lot of why I remember the chance generic instances of it is because this was a lot of where I sat through the late 90s, a lot of what I was interested in. What interests me these days is that if you’d handed me an Atlas Sound record anytime between 1997 and 2001, it would have fit right in; it’d have felt very natural to love and maybe even very of-the-moment. (It’s interesting, though, how Cox, who’d have been a bit younger at the time, doesn’t discriminate between indie and pop in this regard — Casino Versus Japan shares the era, truthfully, with LEN and Primitive Radio Gods.)
reblogged from desnoise
(cataloging the COG aesthetic)
Two additional relevant examples of the Cruddy / Ordinary / Grotesque aesthetic discussed, below, in “Weird 1970s Childhood”:
- the video for “Been Caught Stealing,” by Jane’s Addiction: weird things happening with food! cruddy ordinariness of grocery store environs! fraudulent grotesquerie of pregnancy drag! note timeframe-of-reference involved in security guard doing Elvis parody dance!
- Beavis & Butthead (Mike Judge, born 1962): not just about neglected lower-middle-class slacker kids eating horrible food, but actively literalizes the process of their sifting through junk culture and responding to it via a whole new frame of refence — plus many of the “junk culture” videos they’re watching are themselves completely wrapped in that Cruddy / Ordinary / Grotesque aesthetic: extremely high gross-food quotient in those things
Important note: trying to trace out this aesthetic in a kind of Gen-X-through-90s way is in no way intended to slight the pioneering contributions of people like Frank Zappa, the readers/writers of Creem, etc.
"weird 1970s childhood"
Talking to a friend about that overlong Nirvana post, it’s confirmed that we both got the same passed-down image of “weird 1970s childhood,” the one that “Sliver” reminds me of. She associates it with the teens-in-revolt movie Over the Edge, which turns out, amazingly, to be the inspiration for the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. (Neat little knot, right?) We’d seem to have a lot of the same images and reference points: western tract housing, divorce, lower middle class kids, crappy food…
Crappy food? Yes: crappy food.
(on police records)
Just a word of explanation on the post below, and why the distinction matters to me. I have this sense that the wide net of “has a criminal record / drug arrest” is often thrown over young men in poor or dangerous neighborhoods as a way of abdicating responsibility, making them The Problem. In way too many cases, that’s accurate, and they really are The Problem. But it’s an extremely wide net, especially considering how easy it is, in poor and heavily policed neighborhoods, to acquire that kind of record. Having grown up among a lot of middle-class kids, it seems pretty obvious to me that loads of them, even in areas where it’s hard to get into real trouble, commit plenty of criminal offenses: drug possession, drug distribution, DWIs, petty vandalism and destruction of property, minor assault and battery, sexual assault and (unreported) rape, theft, etc. They’re just not policed, caught, or charged, because they don’t live in places that are monitored that way.
This is not to equate serious urban violence with petty teenage Judas Priest lawbreaking or anything — but I’m suspicious of “has a criminal record / drug arrest” as a category because that’s exactly what it does. It feels like some extra differentiating step might be necessary to distinguish along the spectrum of city kids running from murderous gangsters to weed-carriers and minor fuck-ups and petty thieves and guys who get in fights too often. One net is really wide, and makes it a little too easy to write off a giant class as a hardened, intractable criminal problem, an enemy.
what do crime statistics tell us
via ezra One answer is very, very dangerous:
Baltimore is, statistically, the second-deadliest city in the USA; only in Detroit are you more likely to be murdered. Last year there were 234 homicides in the city, which has a population of 650,000. It was a 20-year-low, but still meant that one in every 2,700 people was murdered. In Britain, that figure is about one in 85,000.The other answer is that it depends on who you are:
One columnist at the Baltimore Sun recently described Baltimore as a city of two worlds. It is in the “other world”, the one populated by drug dealers and gangsters, that most murders occur. Those not involved in the drug trade are apparently as unlikely to be murdered in Baltimore as they are in any other civilised city in the world.
Figures seem to suggest that is true. Of the 234 murders last year, 194 of the victims (82 per cent) had criminal records and 163 (70 per cent) had a history of being arrested for drug offences.
On one level this is fairly obvious. Baltimore’s own Ta-Nehisi Coates takes up about the aspect of it I’d expect — the reminder that plenty of people live in poor, violent neighborhoods, and that being able to do so safely involves knowing how to remove yourself from that violence. (He would know; he did.)
But if we’re talking about “the problem with statistics” — that “they’re not always measuring what people think they are,” we should probably notice a huge weird slippage in that data above. Notice how casually the second quote slips from “the world populated by drug dealers and gangsters” to a different system of measurement: criminal records and arrests for drug offenses. No doubt there’s a huge overlap between those things, but they’re not exactly the same — which makes it problematic to write off all those murders as entirely contained to a hardened gangster class. I’d assume that a whole lot of impoverished young men in Baltimore have criminal records of some sort, ranging from minor to extensive. I’d also assume that a whole lot of those records are drug-related, ranging from use and possession to wholesale trafficking.
Klein himself says statistics don’t always measure what you think they do, but he’s weirdly passive about this one — a stat that doesn’t actually (or at least visibly) differentiate between “drugs dealers and gangsters” and someone who got arrested a few times with some weed.
reblogged from abbyjean
on nirvana, the 1990s, irony, and how david foster wallace predicted rivers cuomo's decline, all at great length
As a kid, in the early 90s, I didn’t listen to a ton of Nirvana — already too caught up in mopey, romantic British stuff, your Smiths and Cures and whatnot. Soon enough Cobain was gone and alt-rock had shot off in new directions anyway; the band felt more like background and bedrock, the starting gun for “alternative” as a newly commercial thing — settled news among fresh battles. This is probably why I haven’t been able to resist picking through this new Live at Reading release: it’s honestly one of the first times I’ve listened closely to Nirvana in hindsight, with adult ears and new perspective. (That, after all, is the whole utility of these packages, these attempts to milk new product out of acts that don’t exist any more — we get to re-hear the music, outside our frozen reactions to recordings we already know too well.)
