Choice, Compassion, and David Foster Wallace

I recently found this introduction David Foster Wallace wrote for The Best American Essays 2007 and, like all his stuff, he manages to cover so much ground in one piece, and follow a line of thought further than most. It's also really interesting to me because I've also recently stumbled on some retroactive critiques of DFW that deride his fiction for lacking faith in character and story-telling, or--in really odd, severe criticism--lacking heart. Which is really weird to me. It makes me wonder if they've really read the man, or if they just rely on what certain Deciders have said about him. If you've read Infinite Jest and don't find little Mario Incandenza to be the most amazingly compassionate character whose story is moving, deeply sad, and hilarious, I think you might need to get your heart and soul checked out. And Mario's just one of dozens of characters in the book.

It's nearly impossible to look at his writing now without seeing it through the lens of his 2008 suicide, an event as powerful as a black hole pulling in almost everything he accomplished in life. So with that in mind, this introduction can seem even more earnest, and maybe it is--it's hard to say for sure, but either way it's beside the point. In this piece, there's so much compassion for the modern, every minute struggle of turning all the information that gets thrown at us into usable, practical knowledge. His writing shows that he was living that struggle, just like everyone else, without ever talking down to us or seeming to push some self-interested agenda or pretense. This is incredibly difficult to do.

Here's a couple neat snippets:

"You can drown in dogmatism now, too—radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly print—but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same. You don’t have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don’t even have to think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what you Know. This dogmatic lockstep is not the kind of inevitable dependence I’m talking about—or rather it’s only the most extreme and frightened form of that dependence." [This is just in a footnote, by the way]

"Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it."   

Thoughts on irony from a real human

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like there are articles written like this NY Times Opinionator column every 5-10 years, basically by someone who's grown up and tends to look at their own past too nostalgically, seeing in current 20-to-30-year-olds something that their generation did just slightly better.

Of course I'm sort of biased myself, being at the tail end of my 20s. The article is so smart in many ways, and its overall idea of taking an honest self-inventory and cultivating sincerity is an excellent framework. But the details of this column are quite odd. In a lot of places, the writing is completely blind to what I like to call basic real-human thought. Apparently this columnist did not throw up when her friend used the sentence "Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony." Did he also adjust his bow-tie and speak without moving his lower jaw? And I don't mean that entirely sarcastically/ironically.

I think we have a columnist who is occasionally a victim of over-intellectualizing and over-generalizing. If you haven't figured it out yet, I don't tend to be a fan of those things. Right out of the gates, first sentence: "If irony is the ethos of our age--and it is--then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living." What kind of a sentence is that anyway? Why start with an If that you're just going to turn around to say isn't an If at all? But I won't get too bogged down in sentence structure. How has this author figured out that 'our Age' has just this one ethos and its corresponding archetype? After rattling off her idea of exactly what a hipster is--apparently anybody who homebrews, rides fixed-gears, listens to records, and plays trombone (??)--she eventually gets to why irony might be so pervasive: "Life in the Internet Age has undoubtedly helped a certain ironic sensibility to flourish. An ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely through this medium."

The ol' Internet Age argument! If we're going to stereotype what a hipster is, how about I go ahead and use another stereotype: anyone who uses the phrase "In the Internet Age" is probably almost 40, or older than 40. If an ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely, doesn't that suggest that there might not just be one over-arching capital E-Ethos anymore? Take a peek at the Internet sometime; you can seriously find absolutely anything, and you can also find swarms of people interested in it. Practically everything has a niche and a way to flourish.

She's certainly not wrong that the ironic, sarcastic persona exists--and maybe in excess, though it kind of seems like there's an excess of everything right now--but she speaks of this persona like it's some wildly new thing to be newly feared. She even notes that her own memory might be over-nostalgic, but just rolls on and somehow remembers the 1990s as seeming "relatively irony-free." Hundreds, possibly thousands of comedians would beg to differ. Then there's the head-spinning sentence, "The Grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude..." The very idea of using the words "grunge", "aesthetic" and "movement" in the same sentence is kind of hilarious. Doesn't it seem like any real movement ends as soon as writers, critics, professors, etc start trying to find a way to classify and label the movement? Then, she references David Foster Wallace near the end of the column, talking about how he was part of something called a "New Sincerity movement" and, I think, tries to link that "movement" to an "attempt to banish irony." I wonder if she read DFW's 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. Irony has been pervasive in U.S. culture since the end of WWII, the introduction of broadcast and then cable TV, and sitcoms. Does our columnist remember M*A*S*H? What about David Letterman of the late 80s and 1990s (when he was quite good)? Or any sitcom from like 1970 onward that featured a snarky, self-loathing, ironic character? Basically, if you want to read about the intense U.S. history of irony, meta-referentiality, generational gaps, and so many other things, read DFW's essay, because it's far more comprehensive and doesn't try to tell you how to live. Where he talks about broadcast and cable television influencing U.S. fiction, you can pretty much substitute the Internet and extrapolate further. Wallace wasn't nearly trying to banish irony; nobody in their right mind would. But he was keenly aware of the dangers it presented if not used in balance with direct, real emotion. The best writers display this idea so well. It's never just good vs evil, or ironic vs. sincere, and so on. Everything's always been mixed and blurred; now we have 24/7 access to it all.

The column's penultimate paragraph is the most interesting and most disappointing part: 

"What will future generations make of this rampant sarcasm and unapologetic cultivation of silliness? Will we be satisfied to leave an archive filled with video clips of people doing stupid things? Is an ironic legacy even a legacy at all?" 

What about the rest of Youtube's archive that is incredible? Sure, there's a ton of crap on Youtube, but I can also watch an entire hour-long 1966 set of Thelonious Monk in Norway. A lot of this stuff comes down to personal choice, so instead of cataloging "How to live...", what about "How to sift through layers of bullshit." That'd be kind of awesome if the NY Times published that headline. It might turn a younger generation on to interesting intellectual thought. Or, where's the Why in the column? Why do deeply ironic people seem to have what she earlier calls "a deep aversion to risk...cultural numbness...emptiness and existential malaise." Maybe that could help figuring out why so many folks fill their computers with "stupid" videos. Could part of the problem possibly be that some folks in older generations seem dead-set on telling younger generations how they ought to do things?

I don't know what the answer is to cultural numbness, but I'm pretty sure it's not an article called "How to live..." And for someone who found sincerity in the "Grunge Movement"--a generation of folks who rejected being told how to live--you'd think our columnist would understand that this kind of writing only makes young people feel more alienated, more numb. 

Real Heroes

It is possible to love words a little too much. I had started writing this yesterday as a reflection on Veterans Day, and got warped into a rabbit hole vortex of wondering whether it sounds too joyous to say that we "celebrate" the day, a day where probably a lot of Veterans reflect on buddies who didn't make it home. Then I started thinking about the word Hero, about what it really means and how it gets flung around so much it starts to lessen the true meaning. But then I couldn't really come up with just one tried and true meaning of a Hero anyway, and also thought about how probably most Veterans don't like to think of themselves as Heroes. Most veterans I've spoken to, the ones who made it back home, use the word Lucky more than anything else.

I was thinking too much about words and the various subjective meanings everyone applies to make things fit neatly into whatever they're talking/writing about and my head started spinning.

Then I thought about how words can suddenly shrink down and feel totally puny when put into context with Action. It's not that words are meaningless--far from it--but sometimes they take a little bit of a back seat. Words are the way the story gets told, but they can't capture the essence of certain things, these universally huge things that we have important words for, like Sacrifice, Courage, Valor, Honor, Duty, Country. These words get close but still don't quite capture It (whatever it is), and it's hard to know how to feel let alone what to say.

I finally realized I should just write about a couple moments in my life where I truly understood what I idolize in certain people.

My Dad is a 1968 West Point graduate. He and my Mom married in June of '68, and from what I understand Dad was sent more or less straight from West Point to Vietnam. Of all the incredible stories I've heard about his service, two moments truly stand out for me:

1. Joining Dad at a West Point class reunion at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC, and shaking the hand of man who told me, "Your father is a good man. He saved my life." I'd never heard that story before, and Dad would never say that he saved another person's life, even though that appears to be exactly what he did. I bet what he'd say is that he did exactly what any of those other guys would have done for him.

2. Going through my parents' record collection one holiday, pulling out Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water LP, and listening to Mom talk about how she used to listen to that record, and the title song in particular, and pray for her husband to make it home safely. It was already one of my favorite records, but now I truly save it for sacred listens, imagining the power that song must have awakened in my mother, helping her hold on just a bit longer. When I really think about it, it shakes me to my core.

***

At my grandma's funeral this past September, there were so many incredible older photographs I'd never seen before. But the one at the top of this page made me need to sit down for a bit and think about the It (whatever it is) I was talking about above. That photo is of my grandpa (on my mother's side) in uniform with my grandma and their first child; it was his first time with his wife and first child after coming home from Okinawa.

***

Driving around Somerville yesterday I remembered that Sgt. Henry O. Hansen Memorial Park is just down the street from where I live. Hank Hansen was born in Somerville, Mass. in 1919, graduated from Somerville High and joined the Marines at age 18. He was killed at Iwo Jima, apparently by a sniper while being treated for wounds, on March 1, 1945; he was 25. (Both the book and movie Flags of our Fathers, and the Japanese counterpart Letters from Iwo Jima, tell the incredible story of this battle and all the subsequent drama that played out, and are definitely worth checking out, by the way). I'm not sure if it's attributed to Sgt. Hansen, but either way the inscription on a piece of granite in the memorial captures It:

When you go home

Tell them for us and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today.

There are so many other men and women out there just like these folks, and you're not likely to read too much about them, which I submit is not an accident. A journalism professor of mine at Richmond told me that, "for the most part, the people you read about in newspapers are people who want to be read about. It's the quiet folks who have the way more powerful stories inside them." 

It's very easy to talk superficially about things like Selflessness, Sacrifice, Valor, Courage, etc. It's quite another thing entirely to truly Give Yourself Up for Something/Someone Else, even if that something else is unnameable. Putting mere words and feeling into Action and embodying It takes Power on such a different level that, I think if you have that power, the thought of turning it into a story simply does not register. That's for somebody else to do.  

And that's the best part: Thanks to folks like the ones I mentioned--trust me, I simply believe deep down that there are so many others just like them, and they are very quiet and very amazing people--thanks to these people, most of us won't need to define It; putting It into the perfect wording isn't necessary. All we need to do is try our best to Remember as often as possible.

Back, Jack

Ohhhhhh yes, the blog. Back here for a little dance, I am.

Still writing and writing the ol' Novel, which now has a title: Last Night with the Holy Ghost. Should be ready to post a short excerpt from the first draft soon.

My newest band The Most Americans have just about finished recording our first album, and we just released two tracks mixed by Pretty & Nice's Jeremy Mendicino. You can stream and/or download for free on either our Bandcamp or Soundcloud pages. We'll be at O'Briens in Allston, MA Friday Nov. 16--dig it!

Pretty & Nice also just released a new EP called US YOU ALL WE and it's got my drumming DNA, and even a little vocal appearance, all over it. That above link will take you to iTunes, or you can get the vinyl, or a cassette, or go ahead and stream it at Spotify or Rdio. Look out for a full length LP sometime early next year. I made an adult decision and got myself a full-time job at a hospital this past July, which I'm very much enjoying, but it bittersweetly means I'm not P&N's touring drum-man anymore. But hey, that's life. You make strong decisions and don't regret them because regret is a little thing I like to call fucking poison.

I'm also reading Infinite Jest for the second time and it's even more remarkable this time around. If you're reading it, make sure to avoid the people who ask, "Oh, I've heard of that but is it actually any good?" I dunno man, why don't you calm down and just READ.

 THIS, though, is just incredible.

Next up after IJ is J. Robert Lennon's new book Familiar.

Internet Argument About the Internet & Music

Original blog post by NPR intern:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2012/06/16/154863819/i-never-owned-any-music-to-begin-with

Interesting emotional backlash that kind of misses her point but still is interesting, from David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Lowery's response has a distinct "letter you write but don't send" vibe. My biggest beef is how he throws in an anecdote in a very odd attempt to relate Mark Linkous' and Vic Chesnutt's suicides with people illegally downloading their music. I understand how he was close to these people and is probably still completely shocked, but I work in a mental health facility and from my experience peoples' reasons for committing suicide are plentiful and almost always go wayyyyy deeper than things a lot of us can even comprehend. Bringing this up in a music blog is, at best, bold, and at worst, shameful. Lowery tries to comfort our poor NPR intern, but comes off fairly condescending: "I present these two stories not because I'm pointing fingers or want to shame you. I just want to illustrate that 'small' personal decisions have very real consequences." Pointing fingers is precisely what he's doing! If only at a semi-conscious level.

But tone aside, these are things I wonder about: Where does this notion of artists deserving to get paid really come from? Why does Lowery seem to jump directly to the idea that because people download music without paying for it, it means that the music must have no value for them? His overarching point--that downloading music online without paying for it is unethical--is too simplistic. People have and always will find the easiest way to get something they want. I guarantee that if music had been as widely and freely available in 1970 as it is today, the majority of people would have done the exact same thing "young people" are doing now. It doesn't make it right or wrong, it just has nothing to do with it being a different generational mindset. (Before the Internet, I dubbed songs onto cassette off the radio and nobody ever told me I was stealing anything. Maybe I was, but it was probably about the same shitty sound quality as the 128K mp3s most people are "stealing." There's kind of a larger point here: making people pay roughly the same price for what is, aurally-speaking, a worse product--I'm talking mp3 vs CD/vinyl here--you could probably make the argument that that's stealing...).

Soo...unethical? I'll get a tiny bit nerdy: ethics are the study of morals, so take the Latinate moralis, which kind of roughly meant the "proper behavior of a person in society." Lowery argues that technology and its big corporate backers are trying to change our morals. But this is kind of a strange argument, because our morals should be constantly evolving. If we were operating under the same morals as 100 years ago, women wouldn't be able to vote, among many other terrifying things that were just "normal." The recording industry has only been a powerful phenomenon for the past 50 (maybes it's more like 100, I really have no idea--either way not all that long in the grand scheme) years...maybe our morals are slowly starting to line up with the vague idea that artists probably shouldn't be millionaires, and anyway the value of art is really, really hard to quantify. Though it's very tricky because somebody is making tons of money off these folks (he talks about the venture capitalists who front cash for places like Pirate Bay, who then rake in billions in advertising revenue, which is all definitely dirty), and that's where I can certainly understand Lowery's frustration. He makes an eye opening point about how lots of us pay for the iPhone, the MacBook, the high-speed connection, yet don't cough up much money for the artists themselves, and that's a swift punch of truth in the stomach.

But--blame the consumer and call it "stealing"? I don't get it. Words like "steal" or "theft" or anything else like thievery I find very misleading, because the etymology of the words imply someone taking another person's property and calling it their own. In probably 999 out of 1,000 cases a person illegally downloading an album from the Internet is not turning around and telling their friends, "Hey, listen to this album I just recorded!"

Trust me, as a traveling musician struggling to make ends meet, it would be fantastic to get paid even a decent salary for all the work I've put in. But that isn't really why I got in the game anyway. Either way, blaming the consumer has got to be about the least effective thing anyone can do. There is that maxim, after all, that the consumer is always right; and I'd add an "even when they're wrong" to the end of that. It's up to the artists to continue to innovate and creative something so powerful and meaningful that people feel they can barely survive without it.

What we really need is a massive innovation, some kind of new format that has a wilder audio fidelity than we can even dream of. It feels like right now the music world is overwhelmed with people trying to get noticed (which makes Lowery's claim that "the number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000" seem incredibly odd. How do you define "professional" in a situation where nobody's making any money anyway?! When something like 2,000 bands play SXSW every year I think we can all agree that on one hand that's pretty amazing, and on the other we've got a fucking mess on our hands.). So, my only absolute solution is to try to make myself stand out in any creative way I can, and/or enjoy the hell out of it no matter what.

The artists who embrace this idea rather than complain about how things are deteriorating are succeeding like never before. Father John Misty packaged his new album with a ton of short stories he's been writing; Radiohead has recorded live in-studio video versions of their last two albums to go along with the records; Amanda fucking Palmer is a millionaire!! (??); the list goes wayyyyyyyyyy on (yes, I know Radiohead's an odd example since they were backed very strongly by "the corporate machine," but they are a fantastic example of a band continually innovating, whether you dig them or not).

If you subtract just ONE thing from this equation--$$$--it is the absolute best time to be an artist, and will probably get even better. Besides, when have the majority of artists ever made much money? So, in my open letter to David Lowery I think my point is: Grow up and be thankful you've had the opportunity to creatively contribute to society.   

Two quotes

"No matter what I played my whole life, I've always believed that a drum sounds better when you hit it really hard."
~Jonathan Kane, drummer for Swans (and many others)

"Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity."
~Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Life and Times: No one loves you like I do

These guys just keep getting better. Those Wolves Actually Happened opened for them in Boston a few years ago while they were touring for their record Tragic Boogie, and I learned that the singer/guitarist is Allen Epley from Shiner. Minor brain explosions ensued. No One Loves You Like I Do was released in late January 2012 and has that delicate blend of spacey atmosphere, rolling thunder, and warm melodies. There's also just the right amount of oddities; a kind of moody loneliness or longing that comes out in the performances. The concept seems fully realized and genuine here, a love so strange and powerful it's unlike any other, the kind of love that terrifies but ultimately makes for many many beautiful musical moments.

Stream the whole thing at The Life and Times' Bandcamp, and then pick up the vinyl for a wallet-friendly $12 right here, like I just did.

P&N tour wrap-up: Melvin becomes the avocado

I write to you now from a basement as old as your grandmother, and with similar smells. This is the magical, post-tour land known as Medical Records, where many a starving rock musician has traveled in pursuit of the fabled Paycheck upon returning from a musical crusade.

So I disappeared from Internet Writing Land during our stay at SXSW, where in all honestly I experienced my first bout of quite literally being too tired to write, think or, on particularly problematic days, even poop. And it was all amazing, with the logical caveat being that SXSW is a colossal clusterfuck and can't possibly be even remotely fun for the majority of people who live in Austin. But it was my first time and I got to play 3 day parties, plus after two of those shows we went crazy and drove to another city to play a nighttime show, so it was always an incredibly rewarding form of exhaustion. On one particular day we played a SXSW show at 3pm, packed immediately after the set and drove 6 hours south to McAllen, TX, where we played at the after party for a festival that Of Montreal headlined, and the people of McAllen were some of the world's greatest living humans.

The last week of tour got hot 'n sweaty, and unfortunately I was severely bummed to discover that the place we placed in Houston on 3/17 (called Fitzgerald's!) was labeling the show as a St. Patrick's Day party, yet DID NOT SERVE GUINNESS. No, I'm still not over it. Thankfully, later that night we crashed with lovely friends who had a real live domesticated pig named Orson, and they also wanted to burn a couch in a bonfire, so my spirits got quite a boost.

Let's see, after that we then enjoyed another hot tub, this one in Pensacola on a drive day to the Orlando show. Speaking of Orlando, we learned that certain locals enjoy wearing their hearts on their sleeves, angrily bawling when Miniature Tigers decide not to play certain older songs in their set. And then this person later decides to demand that the opening band's drummer (ie yours truly) find Miniature Tigers' manager so that she can express her "concern for the band's new direction."

Upon arriving in Atlanta the next day we realized that Orlando was probably going to be the last venue to be prepared and have the A/C on. I spent the last few days trying to soak everything in, wanting both to be back in my own bed and also tour forever. Between a hotel in North Carolina and my parents place in DC we had it pretty swell bed-and hospitality-wise; it was just enough luxury to convince myself that staying up after the Philly show and driving back to Boston was a good idea (it was).

Anyway, what a seriously ridiculous month. Time for my sappy but true closing: I don't think I can properly express how lucky I feel to have been able to travel the whole USofA playing drums. 15 year old me would have fainted out of pure joy, and 28 year old me came pretty close!

P&N Week 2: kevin becomes a real boy

The long, slow haul back across the country is now in full swing. Let's just say I had an equally awesome and rough time last night, though certainly I've had worse evenings! This time it was a very nice bartender in Tucson and several free glasses of wine and whiskey that eventually added up to Jeremy needing to pull the van over so I could have a detailed look at the beautiful Arizona vegetation by moonlight. It's possible I sat in a cactus.

Anyway, I'm all set now after a solid night's sleep, coffee, and ibuprofen. The wonders of our universe, folks. So let's see, after SF I got to hang with my good friend from Boston Big Mike, aka Miguel Grande, aka Le Grand Michel, who is one of the world's greatest living humans. Then Jeremy and I crashed at our buddy Moy's excellent pad in the Mission, where he treated us to grapes the sizes of plums and other assorted veggies. Sunday's show at the Troubadour in LA sold out and was totally surreal, easily one of the coolest shows I've ever played; plus afterward I got to hang with my amazing LA friend Cori, then for Miniature Tigers' encore a bunch of us swarmed the stage, thundered along on extra drums and my brain exploded. We had a day off Monday, which we spent eating In N Out and appreciating hotel pools & hot tubs thanks to lovely generous friends. At some point Holden passed out on my lap.

San Diego was strange and wonderful; we randomly met a fellow Walsh who was kind enough to let us crash at his place, and his chef roommate whipped a ridiculous duck cassoulet out of her back pocket. Seriously.

Now we're chilling at Charlie from Miniature Tigers' father's place near Phoenix (jesus that's an awkward sentence - AH, a parenthetical!). Tonight's the Crescent Ballroom and if the food there is half as good as everyone has been saying I'll be a very happy camper. Actually I'm already happy, so... hmm I'll have to think about that one.

Ok I lied; I forgot to work in a Harry Potter reference and don't feel like going back.

WINGARDIUM LEVIOSAAAAA -- god, I'm a nerd. SORRY.

Pretty & Nice travel times

            WELL folks, Pretty & Nice's unlaundered bottoms have made it across the country. We met up with the Modern Art tour in Seattle on Thursday and got to meet our tourmates Chain Gang of 1974, Geographer, and our good buddies Miniature Tigers. Lots of friendly talented dudes -- gonna be a killer, easy tour. Even though we’ve played a few shows of our own along the way, I got these first-night-of-tour-jitters right before we got on stage in Seattle. They went poof! soon as we started playing but it was weirdly cool in a way.

The past few days have had a couple really cool rock n roll things take place: like driving from Denver to Provo to stay with a kind gentlemen Holden and Roger met through Turntable.fm (ie. they met a stranger online); walking into said gentleman’s house where his roommates had just started Shindler’s List, so as we decompressed from the drive we got to see a couple brutal executions before going to eat delicious burgers; picking up t-shirts we had mailed to Bret Nelson from Built to Spill (who, amazingly, is a friend and fan of the band) in Boise, drinking several beers with Mr. Nelson while he locked down a last minute show for us in town; ending the night somehow in a hot tub, which belonged to the girlfriend of our friend Brian from the band Faux Bois (who are excellent); and driving through whiteout conditions over frightening mountain passes and listening to Holden express true fear (and why not one more parenthetical?).

Next we enjoyed the shortest van ride so far, Seattle to Portland, wandered Portland hunting for necessities like delay pedals and drippy, pants-ruining tacos, before playing a mammoth cavern doubling as a music venue/nightclub. It's always weird hearing your snare boomerang off the brick walls and having it hit you in the forehead just after you actually hit the drum. Best part of the night for me was seeing my sister and her husband, whom I get to see basically once or twice a year (cue: aww). Next thing I know, Faux Brian apparated from Boise to Oregon and was putting us up in another house, where apparently the washers and dryers play little jingles even when you don't use them. 

Four hours of sleep and 11 hours driving later and we're in SF about to max this stage to the EXTREME. I think we're finally settling into travel mode and getting all cozy. Next thing I write will have fewer parentheticals and more Harry Potter references. Week 1's done -- POOF!

Video game music favorites

This will have to be an ongoing thing; there's just TOO MUCH. Potential obvious point: it's really cool to me how earlier game music almost completely created the atmosphere that art directors of future installments used as a framework as graphics improved. I think people who say that current game music isn't as good are a little blinded by nostalgia, because there is some phenomenal fully orchestrated stuff coming out now. Back in the day there just wasn't as much to latch onto visually, so it makes sense that everybody gravitated toward the music as the main way to emotionally latch onto a game character. With the soundtrack playing along, your imagination fleshed things out. Now, like I find myself saying over and over, you just have to pay a little more attention with so much getting thrown at you visually. It's just different, but still beautiful and exciting to me at least.

METROID (NES) - Title Screen


SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS (PS2) - The Sunlit Earth


LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME (N64) - Ganon Final Battle


SHADOW OF THE COLUSSUS (PS2) - Creeping Shadow [kind of want to post the entire soundtrack to this game, but you can go find it]


CHRONO TRIGGER (SNES) - Corridors of Time


Man, there are so many more that are just as crucial! I'll be back.

Neil Young on MP3s being terrible

This Wired article worms its way into the audiophile rabbit hole, but I'd think even the casual music-listener would be interested to know that "...MP3s weren't good enough for Steve Jobs. According to Young, even Jobs himself wasn't satisfied with the sound quality of the iPod. The late Apple CEO, famously a music-lover and audiophile, preferred to listen to vinyl records instead of digital files."

Basically I feel like I need both, the iPod and vinyl. But if at all possible I try to find 320kbps MP3s. I really think it's all about paying attention (this is a much bigger beast; so much of life seems to be about the ability to focus and pay attention). If you are honestly paying attention there is no question that a low-quality digital music file is painful to your ears.

My eldest brother and I tend to have a similar good-natured argument every Christmas when the family is together and playing cards or something. He likes the convenience of throwing on Pandora and letting music shuffle around without having to do anything, which I think has its merits. He doesn't like how you have to flip the record, or swap in a new one when one ends. I tend to think that makes you appreciate the silences (and rest your ears), like an intermission at a play. I'm sure my brother would concede that vinyl sound-quality, as long as the record isn't totally ruined, is light years ahead of Pandora. But what really makes me uneasy about Pandora is that it's a robot telling you what music you will probably enjoy based on some algorithm, or based on really broad genres like "rock" or "punk", which can mean absolutely anything. I don't even know what station I was on, but Pandora once shuffled me from Nirvana to Nickleback. I'm pretty sure that was the last time I used Pandora. I know you can give stuff you don't like a thumbs-down and it gets factored in to what gets thrown at you. But, it's still a computer. Par exemple, if I thumbs-down a newer Queens of the Stone-age song that I don't like, it's probably not going to toss me anything from their album Songs for the Deaf, which I absolutely love. I need a human element.

The other thing to consider here is that maybe my brother just isn't as thrilled about the music in our parents' vinyl collection as I am.

Also, that pic of Neil Young for the Wired article is incredible. The man still has the wild fire in his eyes!

YouTube vid title = true statement

I believe I own an Earth, Wind & Fire record and it's possible I've even listened to it. Really other than that, this band doesn't enter my brain too often. I don't dislike them, just honestly rarely ever think of them. But look at this MONSTER of a drum solo I stumbled on somehow while searching for Jojo Mayer videos. I consider myself ignorant to the world of Sonny Emory, which I now plan to rectify. That man's posture is incredible! Oh and that shirt looks really comfy to drum in.

Also, just to note that youtube video titles are not always true statements. Case in point: the related video of "Obama playing drums" which is clearly Max Roach.

le fantôme dans la musique

Somehow I'm always listening to Air's soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola's 2000 film based on  Jeffrey Eugenides' novel. The book, film and soundtrack all captured something unnameable and pretty frightening. Horrifying, really. [Side note: the Latin horror has its root in 'veneration' or 'religious awe' -- the idea that something could be so powerful and/or inexplicably beautiful that it causes intense fright. Though, as I see it, not necessarily in a bad way, if that makes any sense.] It's kind of like looking in on this massive, gooey thing that's not quite of this planet, except when you get closer you can tell that all the ghostly little pieces that add up to the whole are pretty familiar.

Also the album artwork by Mike Mills (not the REM bassist, the other famous Mike Mills) might be my favorite ever.

Jackie Wilson

Somebody somewhere at some point in time once said, "When it comes to singers, there's Jackie Wilson, and then there's everybody else."

Sputnik Sweetheart

"Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?"

-Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Nouvelle/Nouveau

I liked these paragraphs from a new thing:


Silence. Then eerie whispering. The room felt dank with something dark and unknown. Danny thought of a massive hundred-legger, hanging upside down from the corner of an empty room, slowly cleaning its legs, waiting. He felt a hand on his knee and didn’t look up to see who it was. Whoever it was started to say something but didn’t get past a “he”-sounding syllable.

More eyes vectored on Danny, or so it seemed. His anger was fading into nothingness. He might have felt it if you pinched his bottom. Maybe. All the other drummers around him were either crying or had their heads in their hands, but Danny felt zero. Rien. Only his own anxiousness at feeling nothing, which was somehow receding, too. How do you describe nothing? He was there, witnessing the tears and grief, but felt neither bad nor good. He thought very briefly of a fresh piece of chalk pulled slowly from a full pack, one that hadn’t broken in transit.

how could you NOT vote for this guy???

DAMN B!