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.