January 2010
25 posts
dear new visitors
Welcome. Thanks for listening. Feel free to send more mail or make use of Tumblr’s Ask function, which allows you to leave any questions or comments you’d like.
In response to the main question I’m getting so far: the Reader website changed “white” to “mostly white” after the fact, presumably to address the obvious complaint. (It also fixed...
9 tags
The Rules of the Game: A Fuller Thought on J....
Yesterday I posted a fairly peeved note concerning Jessica Hopper’s Chicago Reader article about Vampire Weekend. (She’s responded to that note, very graciously, on her blog, but that seems to have vanished.) My note led to a spike in traffic, which was unexpected: if I’d realized it’d catch much attention, I might have explained myself more carefully. The essay below is an...
1 tag
jessica hopper should be sort of ashamed of...
desnoise:
acrophobicbird:[see link]
agrammar: [see link]
I don’t know that I fully agree with any of the sides here, but it does seem unfortunate to start getting into “who’s the less privileged, a white American woman or a Persian-American male who tells Details he has been buying $32 deodorant since his mom started getting it for him.” … I agree, it’s ironic and disappointing that...
4 tags
jessica hopper should be sort of ashamed of...
I’m a fan of Jessica Hopper’s music criticism, because she can bring to bear an energy, passion, and point of view that’s exciting — enough so that I’ll often look the other way about the fact that her strong point of view often extends to actively mischaracterizing others, playing fast and loose with perspectives that are not her own....
Salinger, #2
One of the chief embarrassments of Salinger fans is that he’s best known via The Catcher in the Rye. Most of them would probably point readers elsewhere — say, Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, or bits of Nine Stories like “The Laughing Man.” I provide those links for anyone who’s hearing a lot about Salinger today but hasn’t spent much time with him:...
Salinger
One morning a nice young man comes to your house. You invite him in and share some coffee. He’s thoughtful and charming — good company. He makes a miniature Ferris wheel out of toothpicks and jelly beans and sets it turning on your coffee table. That’s amazing, you say: how did you do that? He frowns and shakes his head.
Eventually he wanders off down the hall and locks himself...
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on joanna newsom, strangeness, and "authenticity"
… who is apparently set to release a triple LP. Her music is distinctly polarizing, right? It’s pretty obviously Not For Everyone. People who have bad reactions to it will point to various turn-offs. There’s the way she uses her voice, of course, which is singular and highly affected: it creaks like an old door and can remind people of anything from little girls to old crones and...
5 tags
a radically condensed (but still quite lengthy)...
Like a lot of people these days, I write and record music. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager. I am not particularly good at it, especially when it comes to singing, but that’s not really the point: it’s just a fun hobby. I particularly enjoy the production and mixing part, and over the years — in the process of learning more about techniques and equipment —...
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re: cliches
nerdshares:
katiecoyle:
Aw, come on. Conan telling his audience to be kind and Conan’s audience thinking that it’s sound advice is probably the most innocuous thing ever to happen in the world. I see your point, and you know I love you, but can’t we all just have a kumbaya moment here?
I think it’s a nice (sadly not always true) message and I think he was sincere in his address. I have no...
internet paradox
One of the strangest paradoxes of the internet, to me, is that it both encourages and chips away at the foundations of “niche” and “specialized” content. It nurtures the stuff while eroding the category altogether. It’s full of material that is very specifically Not For You, and yet it teaches you to feel that you have access to everything, that everything is for you....
What Fiction's Like
celebraterickysargulesh:
it’s worth pointing out that Ted Genoways’s Mother Jones article has a kind of different set of targets than the Chabon/Franzen/Foer contigent, and is ever-so-slightly more specific about what he means when he’s talking about Contemporary Fiction, which is, basically, “the stories he receives in his capacity as editor at VQR.”
Yes, absolutely: it falls closer to the...
What Fiction's Like
culturefink:
Isn’t it fair to say, though, that the audience for “What Fiction’s Like” pieces - and I’m not sure that isn’t a misnomer - does, in fact, think immediately of a few novelists that are presented, by critics, as the vanguard of What’s Going On In Contemporary Fiction? And in that context, isn’t it the case that they are largely young white men and also named Jonathan?
See, part of...
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What Fiction's Like
celebraterickysargulesh:
Oh, goody, another article about the state of contemporary fiction.
What’s wrong with writing today? Why, it’s navel-gazing! It’s academic! It’s “dainty and polite”! It’s disinterested in “reaching out to readers”! The writers have “forgotten how to write about big issues”! And those poor effeminate boys can’t write a sex scene to save their lives!
And there’s...
the last long thing on genre, "indie," and...
tomewing:
agrammar:
At the beginning of this century, I got more “weird pop” vibes out of the r&b on the radio, and out of dance music, and through the latter half of the past decade, I’ve gotten flashes of it out of artists vaguely similar to that cluster outlined above — a group that, much like new-wave pop’s weird jumble of punk and disco and soul and electronic dance music, seems to be...
back to the past's future, contd.
Emailing about this with a friend — he points out that the narrative of Forrest Gump is a sterling example of life beginning innocently in the 1950s and growing more and more vexed and post-Edenic from there — I realize I forgot to mention one of the most important factors here: the Baby Boom. At any given point since the 60s, American culture has simply contained a plurality of people...
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back to the past's future
If Back to the Future were made today, Marty would have travelled back in time to 1980.
Jason Kottke mentioned this on his blog the other day. What’s fascinating about it is that it might not be true. Which is to say: if someone were making that movie today, would they really send Marty back to 1980? If they did, would anyone care?
I ask because the Marty of the film travels back to...
the last long thing on genre, "indie," and...
A lot of people sneer at so-called “NPR rock” for being wimpy or something, but it’s a hoary cliché that underground music has to be loud, fast, and out of control. Once upon a time, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied… . But in 2010, mainstream culture isn’t complacent; it’s stupid and angry. So underground culture has become...
two amendments
1.
Yesterday, I made a passing reference to a music critic who has a well-earned reputation, in certain corners of the internet, as a reliably vehement detractor of anything that remotely smacks of “indie.” For those of you who happen to know who I meant, I should clarify that I think this person is a solid and perceptive critic of those areas of music he does care about, that it was...
as a side note --
— all this stuff I’ve been posting about today? Like “indie” in terms of class and race, its connections with other kinds of music, its possible insularity, its embrace by what’s perceived as a privileged/elite group, etc. etc.? These are topics critics talk about a lot, and they’re frequently raised by people who are airing major criticisms of...
“There is at least one critic in my circles who I know would rep for Shakira and...”
– - Nitsuh.
I hope this isn’t me! Not because I haven’t entertained a base prejudice against Of Montreal but because I think I’ve been fair enough not to state it anywhere more than a handful of people might actually read it. Anyway, I’ll bite (awoo): what OM songs should I be listening to that I...
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more hacking through "indie" and criticism and...
Since that last post, I’ve been asked whether I think the indie bent of middlebrow music critics is actually A Bad Thing. Part of what I’m trying to do here, of course, is reject the terms of that question; I think the question itself is flawed. Beyond that, I’d give it a qualified “yes,” though maybe not for the reasons you’d think. My reasons for saying yes...
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a lengthy hack through recent music-crit stuff...
I’m going to attempt to make this edifying even for those who aren’t already neck-deep w/r/t the “Issues in Contemporary Music Criticism” syllabus, though I doubt I’ll succeed. If that’s you, let me catch you up. The central issue is something you may have noticed: if you sit down and take in a certain realm of “music criticism” — in this case,...
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owen pallett -- heartland
My review of the new Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) album, Heartland, is up at Pitchfork today. This was an easy one. I think Pallett’s a real gem, and he’s made an excellent record that’s accessible to a wide variety of ears — it lowers the barriers to entry, doing the unique things he does in a way that requires fewer justifications and caveats about how his uniqueness...
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ask = enabled
Taking a brief break to attend to some other writing, but in the meantime, the “ask” function is enabled for Tumblr users.
My belief is that the “ask” function is a prank designed to reveal our collective narcissism — sudden digital proof that most of us are far more interested in being asked questions than asking them of others, naturally more interested in being...