Archives Project: STL #8

Title: The Eighth Art
Description: Semi-coherent ramblings about television
Date: 21 August 2003

A review of the television I was watching in summer 2003. I actually watch way less TV now. The commercials have really gotten to me, so I wait for almost everything on DVD now. Recent DVD series include The Sopranos, The Monarch of the Glen (BBC; J likes it), and the last season of Buffy.

Although I claim that Simplest Things Last is a “review of culture,” it has so far skirted the non-artistic manifestations of culture. Perhaps one day I will write about bistros and politics, but for now I want to concentrate on the arts. I noticed a few weeks ago that my topics have been pretty broad within the arts, and thought it might be clever to devote STL 8 to television. Stuffed in my head with other trivia is the fact that television has been called “the eighth art,” though I didn’t know where that designation came from, or what exactly the other seven arts were. Turns out there was a book called The Eighth Art: Twenty-Three Essays On Television published way back in the early sixties, but forty-some years before that Eisenstein had called cinema the eighth art. I haven’t inspected either of those texts, so I don’t know what seven arts they’re adding to, but if they mean to build on the Seven Liberal Arts they’re sadly misguided. The Seven Liberal Arts refer to the trivium and quadrivium of a medieval education, but I don’t think grammar and math are usually considered “arts” in the contemporary sense.

Regardless, I like the contest between television and film (perhaps I should say “movies” to distinguish from film as medium) for the title. Television and movies use different media (video vs. film), have different cultural significance, and different economic constraints. However, they share syntax and vocabulary, the basic components of language. A letter-boxed movie shown on television can’t be said to be categorically different then when shown in a theater, i.e. no “translation” needs to occur. Those other distinctions start to blur, too. Movies (I keep having to retype “movies” for its synecdoche “film”) are sometimes shot on digital video these days, and while these certainly look more like video than film, you couldn’t sensibly claim that Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is a television show. While some circles still dismiss television on principle, great numbers of culturally savvy and intelligent viewers are devoted to television shows, either for the considerable aesthetic achievement of shows the dear departed Buffy or The West Wing, or for the ironic kicks provided by reality shows. Though some of the cultural elite (which with some hilarity I realize I must be said to belong to) still poo-poo TV and claim they only own one to watch videos or TV, there has been enough compelling work to elevate the cultural significance of television.

Television, for better or worse, is the mirror of American culture. Right now, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” is on. It’s the summer hit I guess, emerging from cable to network TV. The show’s a lot of fun, but also is a watershed moment in mainstream entertainment in that is shows gay men as some cultural superheroes. Of course it plays into stereotypes (gay and straight) and of course it’s human and affecting. I don’t know if I’ll start watching it, if it will become one of “my shows,” but I doubt it. It just seems like it will run out of gas, and the “culture expert,” who weighs in on romance and what to look for in a picnic basket worries me. I didn’t realize that ‘culture’ was ‘gay,’ or food for that matter, but of course it’s true. Stereotypes of straight manhood are bereft of subtleties. I have a sinking feeling that I’ll keel into the guiltiness embodied by Fox’s The O.C. It looks terrible of course, and I thought I outgrew predictable sleaziness with Melrose Place. However, I caught a minute of it while popping a video in, and the background music was Rufus Wainwright, and when I stopped the tape I was watching, it was Nick Drake. Drake of course was unfortunately commercialized by Volkeswagen, and a tasteful music director can’t really carry a show. But then I heard that Jane Espenson, the wittiest of Buffy writers, was doing scripts, so maybe it’s not as tired as it seems.

There was a time in my early twenties when I didn’t watch any television. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even own one, so I had to catch my movies at the theater. If I can resist the lure of the O.C., I’ll be heading back in that direction. Buffy’s gone of course, but my loyalty extends to Angel, though it has never given me a fraction of the enjoyment. I may also give Eliza Dushku’s show a chance, and I heard that Espenson is writing for the Gilmore Girls as well. Bernie Mac offers intermittent charms but can hardly be considered appointment television. But the West Wing was pompous even with the departed Sorkin, so I imagine it will be pretty bad next year, 24 may have worn out its formula and parts of its cast (specifically Kim), and Alias never really got me. But that’s okay, I can always use my time to write on the other seven arts, whatever they may be.

Archives Project: STL #7

Title: Heights and Numbers
Description: An Untimely Survey of the Best American Poetry Series
Date: 15 August 2003

In the last installment of this...thing... I've been publishing here this summer, I praised a particular poem from The Best American Poetry 2002. These "best" series have been around since the late 80s. From fiction, essays, and poetry the genre has grown to music reviewing, sports reporting, erotica, and many other categories, but poetry is the only one I've followed at all, though not fanatically.

By implication of the title, Harry Mathews or somebody else "won," and wrote the best poem of the year. There are of course irresolvable problems with selecting the "best" poems of the year, and every year the guest editor proclaims this. Nevertheless, the series has an appeal to the general reader-- somebody really smart read all the poems published last year, and you get to read what he or she picked out as best, or at least favorite. And when reader and editor sensibilities overlap, it can be a wonderful learning experience. I read John Ashberry's inaugural selection (a few years after its 1988 publication) and discovered many poets I still read, including John Ash, Mathews, Rae Armantrout, Kenneth Koch, and many others. Creeley's volume mines similarly urbane and linguistically conscious ("experimental") territory, and has introduced me to Julianna Spahr, Ben Friedlander and others. The common experience is that a reader finds some number of 'personal bests' that work for you and others you shrug at and pass by.

If we are to rely on the fiction of the general reader, an open-minded and inquisitive sort, the series presents several features he or she (the g.r.) can rely on. The series editor David Lehman kicks off each volume with a shortish foreword, and then the guest editor, always a prominent American poet, recounts her year in reading, outlines his criteria, and bangs a drum. Despite the qualitative hierarchy I argue is implied, the contents disguises this with an alphabetical sequence of poets. This long stretch is mostly mysterious to our general reader, but the contributer's notes at back present short bio-bibliographies and give the poets the chance to self-explicate, thought some, like Ashberry, decline comment. Generally it's a handy and unpretentious volume, though it's been a cultural flashpoint at least once, as I'll get into later.

If the reader is well-served, so are the poets. The sales of these books, though modest, are orders of magnitude higher than books by the individual authors. My slap-dash research, based solely on Amazon.com sales rankings, suggest that contemporary poetry sells squat. Our poet laureate's best-seller clocks in at number 6,465, trailing the versification of Donald Rumsfeld at 5,770. The poetry event of the season (whatever that means) was Robert Lowell's Collected, which places at 5,357. Even Allen Ginsberg terminally hip Howl lingers down at 8,785.

And those are the highest rankings I could find. All the general reader's interest doesn't push the 2002 volume any higher than 48,207, though the 2001 volume is holding steady at 54,948, and the yet-to-be-released 2003 volume is pre-ordered to spot 76,798. I sampled the most recent books of a handful of the Best 2002 roster, including a few older poets, some mid-career, some new voices. As I said, the anthology figues are leaps and bounds better than on their own. In the following list, I took what seemed to be the most recent publication of the named poets. Remember, the numbers represent their ranking in Amazon.com book sales, however they compute that:

Donald Hall 117,704
Robert Creeley 156,891
Anne Carson 220,225
Forrest Gander 320,094
Louise Gluck 390,000
Jackson MacLow 604,747
Jennifer Moxley 758,068
Gustaf Sobin 836,289
Theodore Enslin 883,289
Anselm Berrigan 1,245,696
Ben Friedlander 2,040,703

Does the inclusion in the series lead to increased sales? Probably, but at this rate does it really matter? I doubt if any of the above make their living at poetry, but rather teaching, other kinds of writing, or other professions altogether. Nonetheless, getting your work to significantly more readers is at least gratifying, and a sign of cultural prominence.

While the series material success can be documented, its cultural impact is another matter. There was quite a flap a number of years ago, when Harold Bloom edited The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997. In his introduction, he makes clear his culling of the series is an act of canon-formation, unlike the yearly disclaimers by the poets which claim "this is just what I liked." He rehearsed his tired bromides against the "Culture of Complaint" and quotes Thucydides as his epigraph: "They have the numbers; we, the heights." In this formula, "they"= all these crazy multi-culturists and feminists swarming the universities and polluting our literature, and "we" are the dying breed, worshipers in the temple of Art. He mentions Adrienne Rich's 1996 Best volume by omission. In justifying his exclusion of the entire contents of that volume, which he characterizes as "The Most Socially Energetic American Poetry," he pointedly does not mention Rich's name. This is too coy by half, but demonstrates to some degree the fact that Rich is a straw (wo)man. After all, she selected poems by several members of Bloom's 'approved list,' most notably W.S. Merwin's "Lament for the Makers."

Rich at least has a well-articulated criteria, while Bloom's "test for the canonical" is that he can reread a work "with profit." (How this is different from "What I liked" I cannot say). Rich says she is looking for poetry with "a core (as in corazon). The core of a poem isn't something you extract from the poem's body and examine elsewhere; its living energies are manifest throughout, in rhythm, in language, in the arrangement of lines on the page and how this scoring translates into sound." To the workshop poem she prefers a poem from the streets or prison, anything "that was redemptive in the sense of offering a kind of deliverance or rescue of the imagination, and poetry that awoke delight--lip-to-lip, spark-to-spark, pleasure in recognition, pleasure in strangeness. " What she says she's looking for is a poetry that is aesthetically and socially defensible.

I used this clash when I taught an introduction to poetry course. After reading some of each's position, and Katha Pollit's sane summary, I asked them simply, whose side are you on. Almost everybody takes Rich's side, because she has a side. Me, I would love to take Bloom's side, to dwell in the heights offered by poetry, but wish he (or I, or someone) could articulate a non-reactionary apologia for doing so.

(For what it's worth, Bloom has the numbers, at least on Amazon. His Best of the Best ranks at 86,846 while Rich's is at 200,009.)

/Other/

Cheever quote: "So some Americans live in Rome because of the income tax and some Americans live in Rome because they're divorced or oversexed or poetic or have some other reason for feeling that they might be persecuted at home and some Americans live in Rome because they work there, but we live in Rome because my father's bones lie in the Protestant Cemetery." (from "Boy in Rome")

Reading: The Art of War; T.J. Clark's Farewell to an Idea; Cheever; Jane Eyre
Listening: Ray Charles box set
Watching: George Washington, Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters

Sales update 3/2007

Donald Hall 68,732 [up]
Robert Creeley 247,084 [down--but an expensive collected is the most recent]
Anne Carson 394,174 [down]
Forrest Gander 686,478 [way down]
Louise Gluck 95,879 [up, new book just out]
Jackson MacLow 1,634,558 [way down--not sure if his books are really available]
Jennifer Moxley 1,099,415 [down]
Gustaf Sobin 1,413,733 [down]
Theodore Enslin 844,019 [holding steady!]
Anselm Berrigan 688,680 [up]
Ben Friedlander [disappeared?]

Don Rumsfeld 113,379 [way, way down, but much better than most real poetry]
Ginsberg's Howl 19,087 [down, but competing with new hardcover edition]
Lowell's Collected 284,698 [paper pre-orders--I smell a hit!]
Bloom's Best 1,048,143 [way down]
Rich's Best 972,175 [also way down]

a few others
Juliana Spahr 267,312
Harryette Mullen 295,478
Koch Collected 132,669 [wow! for a $50 hardcover]
Zukofsky Selected 349,793
Latest Ashbery 14,579 [dang!]
Newest Best 29,136

The return

So, it's been awhile since my last post. A lot has happened--I interviewed for a job, was offered and took the job, finished and submitted (but not yet defended my dissertation) and finished revisions of one of two articles. There's plenty for me to talk about in upcoming weeks, though I won't start today. I have drafted my "listening protocols" for classical music, accumulated a number of comics since my last round-up, and need to think about a future research program. I'll do all this (and more) as I return to regular posting.

I like this blog:
http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/

Archives Project: STL #6

Sorry, dear readers, for the lack of new or old content in the last few weeks. I started up school again, so had to get used to my new schedule. I'll try to stay on schedule. New comics roundup tomorrow!

I remember that I enjoyed writing this one. Harry Mathews is a wonderful novelist--go read Cigarettes now.

Title: Blessing Clarified
Description: In praise of Harry Mathews
Date: 7 August 2003

I've been reading the 2002 Best American Poetry anthology on and off over the last few weeks. I will write about the book and the series soon, specifically the arguments about American poetry which the series engages, but this week I want to look at a single poem from the book, Harry Mathews's "Butter & Eggs."

I know Mathews through his splendid novels (like Cigarettes), but he also writes shorter prose pieces and poetry. His best-known poem is probably the sestina "Histoire":

Tina and Seth met in the midst of an overcrowded militarism.
"Like a drink?" he asked her. "They make great alexanders over at the Marxism-Leninism."
She agreed. They shared cocktails. They behaved cautiously, as in a period of pre-fascism.
Afterwards he suggested dinner at a restaurant renowed for its Maoism.
"O.K.," she said, but first she had to phone a friend about her ailing Afghan, whose name was Racism.
Then she followed Seth across town past twilit alleys of sexism.


His writing is knowing, refined, and witty, as you'd expect of an associate of the New York Poets. The sole American member of the Oulipo, Mathews customarily establishes writing procedures to constrain and shape his work. I suppose this is notable for fiction writers, but poets have working with in constraints for as long as they've been in business. The sestina form, for instance, had been used for 800 years before becoming a 20th C darling. The Oulipo's inventions (or "research") go far beyond literary tradition, like the S+7 method that uses a mechanical procedure to replace all substantives in a passage with the word seven dictionary entries on, or George Perec's well-known renunciation of the letter 'e' in La Disparition. The results of these experiments are surprisingly varied: some are simply nonsense, some strange and wondrous, some quite moving*. In Mathews' prose, the procedures are seldom noticeable: they're just the scaffold used to construct the novels.

Mathews says that in "Butter & Eggs" he set out to write a poem that used neither Oulipian practices or "traditional poetic resources such as metaphor" yet would be "unmistakably poetry." While that last marker is radically subjective, I think Mathews reaches it. Trying to explain exactly how is hard to describe, but I think that he paradoxically reaches "the poetic" by walking away from it.

The topic of "Butter & Eggs" is, you guessed it, butter and eggs. Not what butter and eggs represent, or how they meaningfully intersect with our lives, but how to cook with them. He rests this anti-poem poem on a cook book frame: six sections describe six basic preparations. At first this seems to be a terrible decision. Even as a Mathews' devotee dutifully slugging through the anthology, I thought about skipping the rest after getting to the altitude adjustments for soft-boiling eggs ("In Santa Fe an egg is not cooked in less than five minutes."). But I allowed the devotion to detail, the strangely hopeful present tense (an egg is being cooked), and the discovery of patterns to take me in. The details are accurate and germane to the kitchen, not to metaphysics. "The circular iron skillet, used for nothing else, is an eighth of an inch thick" of the first line is a tool of the trade and so a token of total devotion to craft ("unmistakably poetry"?) which you discover not only in the scrupulous description but the sound patterns of the apparently mundane language (the a's and i's of "a ramekin of aspic lined with a thin slice of ham, with two leaves/ of blanched tarragon")

Every cooking procedure which is described begins with what you might call a medium: fat ("butter, bacon grease, mild oil") or water. The perfect medium combines qualities of fat and water; it clarified butter, a fluid distallation of butter. Mathews concludes by praising his medium: "This perfect cooking butter/will not turn rancid and, heated to high temperatures,/never brown or burn: it is the word "blessing" clarified." If he approaches metaphor in the end, it is only because what's essential in poetry, paying attention to the particulars of the world and the craft, is by nature transcendent. To be "unmistakably poetry," a poem should clarify a blessing of language or of the world.

*I am more frequently moved by work created with arbitrary procedures than work informed by cliched sentiment. An example of the former is Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa, which expands its potential vocabulary from words beginning with the letter "a" in the first chapter to all words in the twenty-sixth, then contracts it step-by-step in the mirroring second half. I became sick with dread for the fate of Queen Qhot in the middle of the book:Qhot would die; the world would not her live.

/Other/

Cheever quote: "She was one of those tireless wanderers who go to bed night after night and dream of bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches." ("A Woman Without a Country")

Reading: Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Cheever, Dennis Cooper's All Ears

Listening: Led Zeppelin, Tori Amos, the opera station on Internet radio

Watching: Led Zep DVD, Amelie, American Wedding

Archives Project: STL #5 (Wronk! Top 20 Guitar Albums)

Title: Wronk! Top 20 Guitar Albums. Description: A response to Mojo's Top 100 guitar albums Date: 29 July 2003 Oh, Mojo magazine, how I love thee in thy rock snobbery. I'm a little surprised to see Beck and Captain Beefheart on the list, and sort of embarrassed that Jimi Hendrix tops it. I'm feeling too dull to revise it now, but maybe soon.

I'm sure that "rock critic" is a terrible job. Sporadic employment, hours listening to mediocre albums in order to write reviews no one will more than skim, poor pay, no health insurance. But, more than anyone else, they do get to make lists. No other kind of writing privileges the list like rockcrit: lists of fives, twenties, hundreds, even the occasional thousand, on any topic. I love the elegance of the list, and the assurance that not only can the things of the world be objectively quantified, but can then be contained by round numbers. There's even a website devoted to rock lists [offline in 2007], suggesting that others share my obsession. The latest rock list to capture my attention is Mojo's Top 100 guitar albums, packaged with the last issue as an independent booklet. Although Mojo really knows their stuff, there's always a burning need to argue with any list (that satisfying authority I mentioned is clearly an illusion). In this case, it's the exclusion of the prototype of the "guitar album" Led Zeppelin II, the template for all hard rock guitar heroics. Clearly, I must make my own list, if only to defend the honor of Jimmy Page.

When writing a list, you need to start with ground rules. With me, I always quibble with the semantics of the category. What is a "guitar album," and how should it be judged? An album is not simply the contents of a vinyl lp or a cd, but must be conceived of as a unity by the creators. This eliminates most of the pre-rock era, based on singles and live performance. That's fine, because no other genre ever exalted and mythologized a single instrument to such an extent. I've decided to limit my list to rock music since the mid-sixties, which is an ample field. (I do regret the exclusion of Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and others, but rules are rules). But while rock is largely guitar-based, not every album can really be considered a guitar album. The pleasure of the album must be intrinsic to the pleasure of the guitar sound, which will vary among listeners. Therefore, it's not right to include an album featuring guitars simply because it's a good album. For instance, I love Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville. It's got perfectly good guitar, but the guitar sound isn't a decisive factor in my enjoyment of the album (though even as I write this, the opening chords of "Divorce Song" ring in my head). My final rule is that no guitarist be included more than once. This saves me the embarrassment of ranking Back in Black, High Voltage, and Highway to Hell 1-2-3.

Having limited the field, I must devise criteria. Some technical competence should be exhibited, though I wouldn't want to differentiate between Ywngie Malmsteen and Steve Vai. As the saying goes, "it's only rock and roll," and more important than technical ability is an appealing sound, which might be something you've never heard before, or the joyous perfection of something you've heard a lot of. My ultimate criteria are simple: that I like the album a lot, and I the way the guitars sound is a significant aspect of what I like.

And so, without further ado, I present the list:

20. She Hangs Brightly (1990)/ Mazzy Star: One thing that appeals to me in music is texture. I might be starting an architecture-y jig here, but in this example, I mean the lovely result of David Roeback's thick, round guitar entwining with Hope Sandoval's narrow, delicate voice. It's not a strict dichotomy, male-female or otherwise, as both are shades of darkness.

19. Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (1998): Ribot is probably best known as Tom Waits's main guitarist, especially for his exceptional work on Rain Dogs. On this album he finds a Latin groove with his own band, including John Medeski on organ, on a tribute to Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez. 

18. Days of Wine and Roses (1982)/Dream Syndicate: I chose not to worry about influence with this list. If I did, these third-generation Velvets wouldn't have much of a chance. But since I didn't, I can recommend Karl Precoda and Steve Wynn's clashing, feedback-drenched duels that form the basis of songs like "When You Smile." The recent rerelease includes alternate takes that I like as much or more than the studio versions. 

17. Moving Pictures (1981)/Rush: Rush may be known as a musicians' band, but it's the drummer and bass player who usually get the attention. Moving Pictures is thought to represent the transition from the live-oriented prog rock of the seventies with a new studio-polished contempo version. Alex Lifeson fits right into the fabric, devising ingenious solos on Tom Sawyer, the instrumental YYZ, and the infamous Red Barchetta. 

16. Toys in the Attic (1975)/Aerosmith: This sounds like music you wouldn't need long fingers to play, but I'd take it over a stackful of Eddie Van Halen records any day. I was planning on commenting how nobody's ever noticed how funky Aerosmith is, especially Joe Perry's playing, but then I remember somebody did notice: Run-DMC. While on the topic of 80's rock-rap cross-overs, let me give a shout out to Slayer's Kerry King's guest solo on "Fight for Your to Par-tay." It's a shredder.  

15. Mellow Gold (1994)/Beck: Beck's known as many things: ironist, synthesizer of junk culture, post-modern gadfly. You don't often see mention of his guitar playing, but I love it on this album, especially the ZZ-Top under-water impression (Mountain Dew Rock). 

14. Sign of the Times (1987)/Prince: I questioned my rule about guitar being integral to my enjoyment of the album. While I love this album, it's Prince's attention to and control of detail that captivates me. But his guitar playing is a crucial aspect of that. On the few guitar rave-ups (like Your Got the Look, I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, The Cross) he shows complete command of rock guitar vocabulary, from power chords to funk lines to feedback, all almost too well polished. Yet even on tracks where the guitar is less prominent, it provides crucial (there's a Princian word for you) color. Consider for instance the title track, where the guitar comes late with an offhand three note figure, almost a throw-away, before continuing with a gripping, rhythmic solo. While this is one of those albums where Prince did everything himself, he's employed other talented guitarists at times. My all-time favorite solo is Wendy ("Yes Lisa") Melvoin's minimalist groove on "Kiss" from Parade, an album which does not otherwise extensively (crucially) employ guitar. 

13. Talking Timbuktu (1994)/Ry Cooder & Ali Farka Toure: Two truly guitarists working together. Toure is often written about as a sort of "missing link" between the African griot and the American bluesman, but reducing him to a cultural anthropological phenomenon is a great injustice to a wonderful musician. Cooder's involvement in world music, between this and the Buena Vista nexus, strikes me as more ethical than other dablers. There's a real dialogue going on here, unlike Paul Simon's or Peter Gabriel's appropriations. Not that I'm particularly troubled by the latter two, but this work is more dynamic as it speaks to potential rather than existing as a static assemblage. 

12. Trout Mask Replica/Captain Beefheart: I think the first duplicate from Mojo's 100. Zoot Horn Rollo and Antennae Jimmy Seimens work is dissonant, surprising, and inspired. My favorite: "Ella Guru." 

11. Garage Days Re-Revisited (1987)/Metallica: Mojo picked Kill 'Em All, which is probably right, but I've got a soft spot for this one-off covers album. I tuned into Metallica after Master of Puppets was out, so this was the first album of theirs I was waiting for. (And Justice for All, their next album, was the last.) The assassination of the slow doomy intro of the Small Hours by the speed demon riff is paradigmatic Metallica texture. This album is now available with a buttload of other covers on Garage, Inc. 

10. Living With the Law (1991)/Chris Whitley: I listened to this a lot working in the kitchen of a restaurant. One day my friend Jared walked in during the feedback-laden solo of "Dust Radio" and remarked "That's some burly guitar." That's the final word for me. 

9. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs(1970)/ Derek & the Dominoes: Caused a dilemma with the "one per musician rule." Not Clapton, who I hate except for this and Cream, but Duane Allman. I considered Eat a Peach, but picked this for Allman's slide on Layla's coda. 

8. Let It Bleed(1969)/Rolling Stones: Keith Richards playing from Between the Buttons to Tattoo You is also an embarrassment of riches. The Richards-Jagger interplay is echoed by the lead guitar- singer dynamic in a lot of other bands (like Aerosmith, most obviously) and it's the guitarist who's the silent, dangerous author of the noise and the singer is a prolix loudmouth who adds nothing so much as visibility. God bless them both. 

7. Paranoid/Black Sabbath: Another one from Mojo, the only repetition from their Top 20 Maybe it should be number 11, in honor of the volume, but I think it deserves a little better. Mojo has a nice feature in their blurbs, which is designated a "key moment" by track time. They nailed it for Sabbath: "War Pigs" 0:52, where Tony Iommi emerges from primordial ooze.

6. Sister (1987)/Sonic Youth: "Tuff Gnarl"= Portrait of the Artist. Thurston Moore's really smart and he's really fast. He's got a tuff gnarl in his head: The saving grace is a sonic pig pile, amazing grazing strange and raging. You gnarl out on my nerves; crush the cranking raunch

5. Shoot Out the Lights (1982)/Richard Thompson: The implication of the singer/guitarist dichotomy that I've invoked with the Stones and Mazzy Star is that a small drama is enacted in their interchanges in every performance. Obviously, that dynamic is missing when the singer is the guitarist, as is the case on several tracks here. (On the the remainder it's soon-to-be-ex-wife Linda, so the inherent drama is clear.) The story of the telling then is different; instead of resistance there's depth. Not to say that Fairport Convention didn't have depth, but this is a much lower place. 

4. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere/Neil Young: There's a story that Neil Young wrote "Cowgirl in the Sand" in bed with a fever. Young and Danny Whitten capture that creative fever on that song and a few others. 

3. Led Zeppelin II (1969): I'd begun to form a theory of guitar moments a little while before this list came out. The greatest moment of them all is when the band comes back from the radiosphere on Whole Lotta Love. After a couple of thudding chords, Jimmy Page leans back (your can hear him lean) and tosses of a quick, slightly pinched solo. A lot of pointless solos were born from this, but in the context the original is perfect--a bit of an "oh, this?" bravado before finishing the song and starting the rest of the album that created 70's rock. 

2. Back in Black(1980)/AC/DC: Anybody know how to make that little lightning bolt on a computer keyboard? If this is "better" than other albums is irrelevant, as it is now and forever The Holy Writ of Heavy Metal. Everything that Living Loving Maid implied is pushed to its absurd, wonderful extreme. 

1. Electric Ladyland (1968)/Jimi Hendrix: Any list not topped by Hendrix lacks credibility. I chose Ladyland instead of Purple Haze because I've heard the latter so many times I can't really hear it again, and in this double album lets Hendrix range further than he ever did elsewhere. The key moment is the "slight return" of 'Voodoo Chile' which is gigantic, immortal, anything but "slight."

Well, that's it. Someday I want to dig a little deeper into what I like so much about lists (even in books from the Bible and the Iliad to Rabelais to Gilbert Sorrentino. Not to mention pop-obsessed Nick Hornby's High Fidelity), but that can wait for another day.

I'm suspending the Cheever quote of the week until next time, but here's what else I've been up to:

Reading: Wuthering Heights, the Creeley anthology, The Business of Books by Andre Schiffren Watching: Sports Night, 28 Days Later. Listening: what do you think?

Archives Project: STL #4

Title: Life, the Serial
Description: STL #4: It starts with Chester Brown but ends with James Kolchalka! And makes passing references to TV in between!
Date: 24 July 2003

I've only become more attracted to the pamphlet form since writing this. Alan Moore called them "little slabs of culture you buy for pocket change," although "change" ain't what it used to be (heh). I actually got the collected Louis Riel as a gift, and it is a handsome object, but I love the sense of the story figuring itself out, and the pause and reflection represented by the back material. In my description below, "subtle and lyrical" is a personal cliche. Some of the links are probably dead.

Earlier this week, I finished Chester Brown's comic book series Louis Riel, a subtle and lyrical biography of the Canadian rebel leader. I had purchased the final two issues of the series (numbers 9 and 10) a couple of weeks ago, but didn't get around to them right away. I never had the convenience of picking up several issues of a series at once in my first life as a comics reader, when all the comics I had access to were returned after a month on the news-stand. Of course, that first life was mostly lived for the adventures of Batman and his cohort, so if a story stretched across two or more issues, I kept an eager eye out for the next installment and devoured it as soon as I got it. Louis Riel will come in book form this fall, like a lot of serialized comic book stories, but twenty yeas ago collections were all but unheard of. If you missed an issue of continuing story on the stands, you’d never know what happened. (I still don’t know how the Teen Titans got back from Starfire’s home planet.) While there are distinct pleasures of following a series (my nostalgia for the pamphlet form, the extras like letters or mini-essays in the back), I usually prefer waiting for the book collection. The dignified pace of Louis Riel encourages the slow and concentrated reading which the book form privileges, but I wasn’t sure it would be collected (Brown’s previous series, Underwater, hasn’t been), and since I admired his other work and had heard good things about this series, I bought the issues in batches.


All this is a round about way of approaching serial story-telling. Serial narrative has always been culturally “low-brow”: the television series comes to mind, and comics, and even prose fiction in 19th-20th century magazines (these can sneak up to middlebrow and even highbrow when collected as novels.) This bias arises from the scattershot quality of the work, and its clear economic motivation: if you liked this, one element of the set says, then come back next week (or month, or whatever.) But the best serial narrative makes the most of its form. We can become intimately familiar with characters, independent of the stresses of specific plots, can experience the ritual pacing of each installment, can learn to see multiple thematic strands. Even after the excitement dies down when the series is cancelled, the strengths remain. Finally, thanks to DVD (for TV series) and the growing viability of comics reprints, we have access to what had previously been ephemeral.

None of which has to do with Chester Brown. I'll eventually, get to Brown’s versatile and impressive oeuvre (later in the series), but for now I’d like to turn to one of his contemporaries who pushes the implications of serial form to its logical extreme. James Kolchaka might be considered an indy rock offshoot of what Dylan Horrocks called the New Lyricism in comics (including Megan Kelso, John Porcellino, Tom Hart, and I think he'd include Brown). Readers of alternative comics probably know Kolchaka for his Kissers or Monkey vs. Robot, or from his appearances in various anthologies. The best moments of his work, whether his story is mundane or fantastic, capture offhand moments, striking set off black background in a broad relaxed contours. In his Sketchbook Diaries (Top Shelf 2001), his style finds the perfect form. This comic/book (thick, but stapled in the middle and clearly a pamphlet) collects one year’s worth of daily comics. He states in a prefatory comic that he “wanted to explore the rhythm of daily life, to become more conscious of what it really means to live.” The sequence of usually four panel strips capture the story of his life from October 1998 to October 1999, except that as he points out, life is lived without the structures of narrative. The “story” of his year then is a record of discontinuous moments. Reading them all, one sees the “natural” patterns—anxieties over art and health, his relationship with his wife and friends, and his peculiar attitude toward things. He’s likely to attribute motive to inaminate objects, and therefore tries to make friends with various things of the world. I should mention that Kolchalka draws himself as an elf named “Magic Boy,” his wife Amy is also an elf, his friend Jason as a dog, etc. Theoretically, this “masking” allows for greater identification between character and reader, if we believe Scott McCloud anyway. But I think the universiality of the work has less to do with the depiction and more with the fact that peculiarities aside, Kolchalka captures the essence of quotidian life in his art: all the small gestures which manage the impossible negotiations between ourselves and the people and things of the world. More importantly, he shows that his daily commitment to his work, his art, is the means (and the only means) of doing so.

Any element of this series is slight, based on a passing fancy, a joke, a moment in time. But in series, they gain the texture of life itself. I agonized over typing the phrase “life itself,” which strikes me as overused and hyperbolic but I think it’s justified in this case. Sketchbook Diaries is a major work of art.

Though I've been arguing that this series need to be viewed in a large quantity, you can see a small sampling of more recent installments online: American Elf: The Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka. Also see the homepage for daily installments, or to pay money to see his entire sketchbook.

/Other/

I'm reading Cheever "serially" too, pretending that I'm getting his stories in the mail and reading one before sleep most nights. So, lucky you, I'm starting the series, "John Cheever Quote of the Week": "It was getting more and more difficult for him to walk, but this pain did not change his handsomeness and seemed only to increase his vitality. When people saw him, they thought: How nice it will be to eat a cutlet, take a swim, or climb a mountain; how pleasant, after all, life is" (from "The Duchess")

Reading: Cheever, Creeley's anthology, Wuthering Heights, Modernisms by Peter Brooks


Listening: Smiths, Thelonius Monk

Seeing: Sports Night on DVD (grows on you in batches)

Improvised Blather

I'm a part-time college writing teacher. Today was the first day of my last semester at my current institution, and quite frankly I'm thinking of changing professions. I actually like teaching, especially planning course sequences and activities. I'm not so good at class discussion, and I hate reading student writing (it's bad y'all). Today in class we did the basic first day stuff, going over course policies and talking about the basic concepts of rhetoric. Because I've done this drill so many times before, I didn't prepare as much as I should have, and as a result started to ramble. When I start to ramble, I sometimes create/force connections that don't necessarily exist, and then I'm stuck with them.

My palliative for this practice is actually the blog I keep on the course site. Right after class, I revisit the territory we covered, and get to revise/restate whatever I may have said, and attempt to draw together strands of discussion. This reflective writing is probably the most important part of my practice.

In other news, I accidentally bought the "clean" version of Kelis's "Bossy."