A Minor Electrocution

My office has just become more like an office. Being that it's already starting to get colder in Chicago (the low last night was 47 F), static electricity has been getting particularly bad. That, coupled with the numerous keycard access point around the office, means that whenever I have to stride across a stretch of carpet to open a door with my card, I get shocked. And I don't mean just a little snap. There is a clearly audible pop, followed by a clearly audible swear word, and a bright, blue spark. Fucker hurts, let me tell you. At first I thought it was just "one of those things," then the carpet thing and the fast-approaching cold weather thing clicked in, and I realized that this is how I'm going to have to live my life; if I want to open a door, I have to resign myself to a minor electrocution. I'm coming close to shorting out the keycard system, I'm pretty sure.

And my co-workers are impressed with my beard. They don't say anything, but I can tell.

Giant Squid Photographed!

I'll bet it's all plump and juicy and not rubbery at all. Obviously the best of all possible calamari.

Fan Mail

In a comment to my last entry, Anonymous said:

"Blog is informative . Dont't stop. This may be of interest to you; how to buy & sell everything, like music on interest free credit; pay whenever you want."

I'm so grateful to have so many readers who look to me not just as a source of entertainment, but also as an informative news outlet. Don't worry, Anonymous, I won't stop. Not as long as readers like you, Boob4Free, and BuyAHomeZeroDown keep reading. Thanks for the encouragement.

Yngwie Malmsteen

Notable not so much for the fact of its existence, but for the barely-veiled ferocity of the author's devotion to his subject, this is my favorite Wikipedia entry.

I stumbled on this article a few months ago (well, obviously I was looking for it, but I nearly fell over after I read it), and while I could talk about the fact that this entry is interesting because its author is using an electronic reference guide as a sort of musico-cultural battle ground, whereby he defends certain values Malmsteen embodies (the figure of the "possessed virtuoso" - implicitly, then pretty much explicitly conjured by the link to the hilarious, drunken death threats Malmsteen issues to a fellow passenger aboard an airplane bound for Tokyo), which values the author obviously feels had lost a certain currency to the "simple," "emotional" leanings of "grunge" (although we should note that while my great-grandmother was eventually killed by a case of pneumonia, she was over 90 years old, and if it hadn't been the pneumonia, it might well have been the next brisk wind that did her in. So too with shred: it's time had come. "Grunge" [or whatever] just happened to be there), the reason it really stuck with me is because it's just so fucking funny that somebody loves Yngwie Malmsteen that much.

It's also kind of sad. Take this:

The most frequent criticism of Malmsteen is that his musical style focuses more on showing technical prowess than on substance, although a comparison between his different solos shows that he rarely chooses to play close to the edge of his skills or speed. Further, some of the lyrics employed in some of Malmsteen's songs have been questioned as commercial or "cheesy", but it is likely that these were merely a tool to gain more exposure and radio play in order to showcase his guitar playing. Instrumental passages such as "Sorrow" and "Far beyond the Sun" are generally considered to be his finest work.

The desperation of somebody just barely able to contain their love for Yngwie Malmsteen in the Wikipedia entry format is almost tragic. Think about the poor, discouraged kid, cheeks dusty with chimney soot, who waits breathlessly for the moment when the box office opens. There he buys his ticket and paces outside the club for days, weeks even, awaiting the hero's arrival, custom single-coil Di Marzio pick-ups aglow, strings like wound lightning, flames shooting from the unholy F's adorning his demon-lute, Malmsteen rolling in like an over-fucked twister. But instead, the evening of the show, the kid finds the axman bruised and incoherent, mumbling in the alley behind the club, ejected from his own show, drunk and disorderly. As the kid approaches, he can see the vomit carapace clinging to Malmsteen's battered, moth-eaten black tank-top, and what suddenly crystallizes from the would-be hero's now-flammable breath, the kid can hear as he gets closer, is an incantatory string of homophobic slurs, a polyglottal prism of profanities, Japanese, Swedish, English, and some untraceable Eastern European tongue.

The kid turns and walks out of the alley, kicks up some dust as he does so, and he can hear Malmsteen cough and choke on it, then vomit again and curse. The kid goes home and cries himself to sleep, and wakes up with his eyelashes bejeweled with salt from his own body. As he gets older, he comes to regard this image as a false memory, undercutting his own recollection of that moment in the alley with knowledge that the music industry had it in for Malmsteen from the start. That man in the alley was nothing but some industry disseminated emblem of everything the world had come to hate, no, envy about Malmsteen. It was a bad dream, a false past, and the kid would dedicate himself, in the years to come, to resurrecting that martyr from his tomb. He got himself a computer, went to college, fought the war, semiotic battles float invisible. And he preached, kicking up the words like dust, hoping to choke anybody who comes near enough to offer rebuke. He misses you, Yngwie Malmsteen. Don't let him down.

Life Kinks: It's Personal

Whenever I tell people that I used to (and occasionally still do) write music reviews, a common reaction is, "Oh, you can't review a record. Music is just too *sigh* personal. It's too subjective. It's just a matter of taste." And part of me, the part of me that likes to find the good in everything and can appreciate every piece of art as, on some level, a personal risk on the part of the artist and a statement that, in a truly free world, would be respected as the extension by the artist of something unique to their cognitive and physiological processes, no matter how derivative seeming or dull, wants to agree.

That part of me, though, is very small and quiet. Most of me believes that most things, most anything, is pretty bad. Art, music, books, whatever. Almost all of it is bad. Pick a random CD from the Amazon.com warehouse and, again, it's probably just going to suck. And I think most people will acknowledge this about some things. Given that most people who dis middle-to-late 20th / 21st Century art know nothing about it, I would guess it would be pretty easy to get your average, middle-class, college-educated person to agree that, despite knowing deep down that they are, in fact, ignorant, almost all contemporary art is bad (except maybe the "simple" and famous stuff by Warhol or Rothko - their ability to disguise immense complexity as simplicity is perhaps the most complex thing about them).

But for some reason music always gets a pass. It's always assumed that, even if one person likes it, there must be something worthwhile about it. It's music, I listen to it, it affects me, therefore it is personal to ME. (Not personal from the artist's standpoint, e.g. every song on Rumors is about somebody in Fleetwod Mac. It seems correct to call Rumors personal in that sense, but totally incorrect to call it personal because "Gold Dust Woman" reminds me of that time I was shot down by my 8th Grade crush . . . and 9th, 10th, and 11th Grade crushes.) The syllogism should be clear - nobody calls the weather too personal.

My own theory, my personal (and therefore irrefutable) theory, is that music can simply "happen" in ways that other artforms can't. That is, especially since the advent of the iPod and file-sharing, you can listen to music while you do pretty much anything. Walking down the street, skydiving, having sex, you always have your jams with you. I guess I might feel the same way about Underworld as I do about Bjork's Homogenic if I had ever gotten laid while reading a DeLillo novel. But, barring an unexpected, incredibly long and patient tryst, that doesn't seem likely to happen.

This isn't to say, of course, that literature, paintings, & c. can't carry with them the same sort of autobiographical tinge. Baldwin's Another Country will always remind me of a particularly bizarre, peaceful time of my life, and Barth's The End of the Road will always remind me of a desperate one. But I think most people would say these associations are incidental, and wouldn't do much in the way of preventing me (if I'm smart and good) from making a smart and good assessment of them as works of art.

So, yeah, of course I feel strongly about certain records, because certain things happened while they were playing. Radiohead's "Blackstar" used to be a motherfucker to try and get through, we all know what it feels like. But, come on, too personal? You wouldn't hate if you ignored your own life, just once, for three and a half minutes.

Follow the Money

Arnie's mandatory tallying-of-the-search-engine-hits post led me to check out my own. Apparently someone was directed here from here, which is totally baffling and delightful. Keep an eye on me, Chinese tech market watchers. I've got the magic.

Reading: Motherless Brooklyn

Right now I'm only about 200 pages into Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, which is, so far, a semi-detective story about a grown-up orphan with Tourette's Syndrome. Though I haven't finished the book yet, it's been a bit of a surprising experience.

I used to not be able to start a book without finishing it. If I made it past page five, I would feel guilt-stricken and dumb if I didn't soldier on through the entire thing, regardless of how "over my head" it felt at the time (something in my 16-year-old brain told me stop trying with Ulysses around page three). It was a strange compulsion, a weird self-imposed guilt, the echoes of which remain. The danger of a compulsion like this is that, if I'm not enjoying what I'm reading, or at least not engaged with it, I won't absorb anything, or at least not enough to justify the time and effort spent hammering my way through, say, The Fountainhead or The Executioner's Song or East of Eden or any of at least a dozen long-ass books that I read because I felt that I should, not because I particularly enjoyed them. (Okay, I enjoyed most of The Executioner's Song, but the last 200 pages were excruciating.)

This drive manifested an opposing guilt as well, which was to feel guilty whenever I was reading something I genuinely enjoyed, but felt wasn't "heavy" enough to bulk up all of the "intellectual capital" (i.e. pretentious bragging rights) I believed I was amassing. I love Kurt Vonnegut, yet I used to feel a sickening twinge whenever I picked up one of his novels because something told me I should be reading something else, something more edifying, something with some history, canonical, & c. Ditto DF Wallace. Ditto biographies (mostly musicians - Mingus, Coltrane, Monk, Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius . . . almost all jazz, except Jeff Buckley).

Obviously this helped me get through an undergrad degree in English with relative ease. It somehow felt "right" that I was reading what I was reading because it was endorsed by the complex of people and institutions that had somehow wheedled their way prematurely into my head and guts. It's a strange, palpable feeling, almost like being high, when you are doing exactly what you feel like you should be doing, and doing it pretty well. The upshot of this, of course, was that eventually I felt just fine about reading whatever the hell I wanted. I was suddenly freed of that guilt and set free to read whatever I wanted because after 15 hours of upper-division literature and writing classes, and God-knows-how-many hours outside of class, shit, I earned it.

Which brings me up to two recent decisions: 1) an upcoming tattoo (Vonnegut's line-drawing of a bomb with "Goodbye Blue Monday" scrawled across the side, ripped from Breakfast of Champions), and 2) a conscious decision to read more contemporary literature, including Motherless Brooklyn.

I'm not sure why I picked this novel. Partially because I bought it about 6 months ago at a thrift store in Tucson, and partially because of a recent trip to Brooklyn. And because I love swearing.

So far I'm not sure how I feel about the way that Lethem chooses to incorporate his narrator's Tourette's-induced "ticcing" into the text. On every page there is a random sampling of outbursts and the narrator, Lionel Essrog, explains his outbursts often and at length. Some of them are great ("Important monks, imported rugs, unimportant ducks" is one of my favorites), and some of them are just bursts of profanity, or garbled echoes of just-spoken dialogue. Around page 150 I began wondering when the explanations for the swearing were going to stop.

Then I realized the difficulty of the position Lethem has put himself in: he can't just stop explaining, expecting the reader to simply adjust, so he has to keep pointing out the tics, keep explaining them, and explaining them. He deals with this in a way that's either novel or cheap. At some point Lionel asks, "Have you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette's? Yup, you guessed it, it's a tic. Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tic plus ultra. I've got meta-Tourette's." Everything in the book, the dialogue, the characters, everything, then, becomes a symptom of the disease about which the book is written.

This passage recontextualizes the entire novel, effectively inverting form and content. What you thought was the content - the amusing outbursts, Lionel's accounts of his obsessive-compulsive behavior, the constant counting - is actually symptomatic of the form that the novel takes - that is, the behavioral structure of Tourette's (at least as it's explained in the novel). Early on, Lionel refers to echolalia, a trademark Tourette's tic, and this echolalia continues in Lionel's behavior, the repetition of which kept making me say, "Jesus Christ, is he going to keep doing that?" Which is, of course, exactly what characters keep saying to Lionel in the book.

To this extent Lethem is extremely clever, but his style is, by necessity, annoying. That's fine, though. Occupational hazard. The first two-thirds of Motherless Brooklyn has been pretty good, even moving on occasion. If I were more melodramatic, I'd probably try to cook up some bullshit about sympathizing with Lionel Essrog because, I, too, was hindered by behaviors beyond my control. But that would be manipulative and a lie, mostly. True in the sense that we're all controlled by things like that, but a lie because I am no more than most other people. But my compulsion is pretty much gone now, and all it took was forking over tens of thousands of dollars of my parents' money to a state university. A good literary beating was all it took. Pretty much.

Katrina

After the rains, the levee breaks, then the deluge.

I have a lot to say about the way Katrina fall-out has been handled. A lot of people have said it better than I can.

Instead of repeating what seems to be, swelling with a mourning that bolsters rage, a battle cry (incompetence, stupidity, racism, classism) I'd like to think of this post as some sort of milemarker. This is when it happened. I'm writing about not writing about it.

The Particle Board Anniversary

This is Thingness's one-month anniversary. Or birthday, I guess. Though, since it is a thing, I suppose it's an anniversary.