Like GLaDOS sings, I'm still alive. (And thinking about teaching myself that song on the ukulele.) I took another trip to NYC, I went to New York Comic-Con and two very different seders, I came home, I read fiction I'd sort of written in front of an audience, I delivered "remarks" at a party, I went to Stumptown Comics Fest, I've been cranking away on a couple of work-related things and updating Circle the Globe and Mincing Up the Morning and occasionally posting to The Savage Critic(s) and doing my weekly radio show for Shouting Fire.
Where, if you'd been listening this week, you'd have heard:
- Aram Saroyan: Crickets (theme)
- Eno/Moebius/Roedelius: The Belldog
- Superchunk remixed by Mark Robinson: Eastern Terminal
- Arthur Russell: Get Around to It
- Laila France: David Hamilton
- Einstürzende Neubauten: NNNAAAMMM
- Mecca Normal: Water Cuts My Hands
- Little Richard: Brown Sugar
- Ida: Worried Mind Blues
- Can: The Million Game
- Carl Harvey: Guitar Inferno
- Maybe It's Reno: Feathers and Wings
Plus: both parents and in-laws visiting! Also: learning the difference between activity and productivity! And: planning out the summer!
My friends, if you're thinking I might be missing you right now, you are almost certainly right.
Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, who accidentally ingested some and then found out what it was really for, died today.
I met him in the 90’s in LA, back during the psychedelic “revival.” Maybe now there will be another one.
Hoffman was a soft-spoken and friendly fellow, always ready to answer a query without making you feel stupid for asking. That’s the kind of scientist I like.
(Weirdly, Hoffman’s death is not in his Wikipedia article yet.)
God, don't you hate it when you're a wealthy white guy with an MBA, but all these overweight, bald, slovenly poor people get in the way of your success? And if it's not fat poor schlubs, it's old people! Or, jesuseffingchrist, WOMEN! Why can't these peons keep to themselves and their little Craig's List, and leave the nice jobs to us?
Every time I speak, people ask me about new media and money - namely, how to make money through the internet. And they always bring up Rupert Murdoch. He wouldn’t have bought the Wall Street Journal if he didn’t think there was money in it, right?
Right, but wrong. There’s money for Murdoch in buying the Journal, but not the money you’re thinking about. What Murdoch wants is a respectable business brand. The WSJ is that. It was actually a profitable online business, too - their articles were valuable enough for people to pay real money to access them.
But that’s not the money Murdoch wants. Murdoch wants to spend the WSJ’s credibility on two very different things. First, he wants an international news brand for TV and the Internet. Fox is too O’Reilly-polluted to serve as a seemingly neutral source of authoritative financial news. WSJ has a good decade of international branding left in it before it would be totally watered down through overuse.
Second, the WSJ has enough credibility to influence markets. And that’s the real game being played here. The last of the credible top-down media companies will be employed in the continuing public relations strategy for deregulation, the stock market pyramid, or whatever else is in its owners’ interests. As people learn to look at bottom-up media for the credibility that top-down conglomerate-owned media must by definition lack, things will change again. This time for the better.
The RSS/Atom feeds should be working, now. I found a blank line in the functions.php file (for those of you who might be interested) which seemed to be generating an unwanted blank line before the xml thingee, which made some feed-readers break.
So now you should be able to subscribe to this blog (and, soon, my upcoming talks feed) by clicking on the orange button up and to your right.
For those of you unfamiliar with Feeds - most simply, it can create a mailbox for each of the blogs you read, right in your mail reader. New posts just show up, so you don’t have to prowl around the web to see who might have said something.
I was a junior in high school when I got my first kiss.
It wasn't because I didn't like girls, it was that I was petrified of them. And by my junior year, I was beginning to feel like the forty-year-old virgin. I mean, some of my classmates where having kids already and here I was.
I had met the girl when she moved into town my sophomore year. One of her parents was working with the same company my dad worked for. She had a car and lived nearby so she drove me to school. We became friends, but nothing more. In fact, she almost immediately began to date someone else, joined the cheer leading team, and became really popular. I took the smart classes and played on the soccer team. Not much more.
So they dated for a while and broke up over the summer. Though I didn't know it at the time, I think I was her rebound.
We probably went to a movie or two before the kiss. It happened when she was dropping me off at my house. We were in the driveway. She turned off the engine. My mouth went dry. It was plain daylight.
"You probably know I've never kissed anyone before," I said.
"I know."
"I don't even know what to do."
"Just lean back and close your eyes."
So I did, there, in the passenger seat, in my driveway, in plain sight of anyone and everyone.
I felt her coming closer.
When her lips touched mine I did an unexpected thing. I wrapped my arms around her tight and tried to shove my tongue as far down her throat as I possibly could.
It must have only lasted a few seconds and then she pulled away.
That is the apt title of the Columbia University fight song. It's odd that I remember it, because I can't have heard it more than once or twice--my time there was the absolute nadir of school-spiritism, fraternities, attendance at sporting events. The old traditions were dying like bugs in a jar, and I did my best to help see them off. Still, the song's sentiment was implicit in the university's conduct, an arrogance barely dented by the events of a few years earlier--forty years ago this month.
Columbia University in the spring of 1968 was preparing to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park, a park outside the school's property line and used mostly by the residents of Harlem. Very generously (in its own view) the university would allow Harlemites--who in those days were nearly one hundred percent African American--use of the gym, as long as they entered through the back door. To make a complicated story very simple, Rap Brown informed the citizens of Harlem of Columbia's plan and Students for a Democratic Society informed the students, and very soon the campus was enjoying an occupation and a strike. The gym, and the Jim-Crow and land-grab matters it entailed, remained at the center of the outrage, although Vietnam, corporate investment, institutional racism and elitism, the purpose and design of education, unthinking assent to social injustice, and dormitory visiting rules also entered the equation. Few people realize that Columbia's Spring '68 bacchanal preceded the one in Paris by several weeks.
A bacchanal it remained only briefly, though. The administration refused to negotiate with the striking students, the police came in with helmets and clubs and badge numbers blacked out, and they were abetted both by right-wing students and by the faculty, whose studied neutrality led them to block food deliveries to the strikers--their high-minded cowardice illustrates better than anything why "liberal" remained a vitriolic insult on the left for many years. Quite a lot of blood was shed. The police broke heads of people who were only standing up for principles. Nothing like it had been seen, at least not subsequent to the 1930s or north of Mississippi. If you want to read more, please see Hilton Obenzinger's extraordinary personal account, Busy Dying (Tucson: Chax, 2008).
I entered Columbia in the fall of 1972. The last real flare-up had occurred the previous May, when an antiwar demonstration led to a Days of Rage-style smashing of Fifth Avenue shop windows. I enthusiastically attended the semester's first meeting of SDS, only to have it turn out to be the meeting at which the local chapter dissolved itself. After that came political fatigue. I first heard the term "political correctness" then, but what it meant was that some campus politico would confront you on the Walk and ask where you stood on, say, the Polisario Front, and you knew it was a trick question--were they the true Spearhead of the People, or merely running-dog roaders for the CIA? Political involvement meant endless factional disputes, paranoia, poison. Lyndon LaRouche was prominent, as well as several competing varieties of Maoists. You can tell by looking at the eyes of the figure above what replaced political passion for the rest of us.
Despite the prop robes, I never bothered graduating, although to be fair I had a number of great teachers and happily lost myself in the vastness of the library, as well as making seven or eight friends who are still my friends. Not having graduated (nine incompletes; hundreds of dollars in library fines) did not prevent me from returning to teach there, in the MFA program, a couple of decades later. The place was no friendlier then than when I had been a student, maybe even less, since the Reagan years had infused a renewed spirit of entitlement, and the radical shift in the value of Manhattan real estate had considerably increased the institution's wealth. Right now Columbia is engaged in a wholesale annexation of West Harlem, proving that some things never change, although today there is little organized resistance and no publicity given to what there is. Anyway, the university is now only one of a hundred entities that could adopt the fight song as its own.
"The magnificent light in Courbet's paintings is for me the same as that of the Place Vendôme, at the time the Column fell." --André Breton, Nadja
It's just occurred to me that I have less than a month to see shows at the Met by two of my favorite painters. For someone who runs a blog carrying a name that means "picture gallery," I've gotten very much out of the habit of visiting museums and galleries. And yet they were crucial to me once. If I had a single Damascus-road experience in my life, it was seeing Géricault’s "Raft of the Medusa" and Delacroix's "Massacre at Chios" at the Louvre when I was not quite nine years old. I went to high school a few blocks from the Met, when it was still free, and used to wander through at random, haunting it as if I were its ghost. When I was 20 and very earnest it seemed to me the whole point of traveling, to go see pictures in remote churches and unlikely state-run cultural complexes out in the middle of fuck-all.
Then, a few years later, I stopped. Why? Maybe it was the Met's Book of Kells show circa 1976, which as far as I'm aware began the era of massively hyped traveling exhibits with their advance ticketing and crowd control. Maybe it was the awkwardness of accompanying nice young ladies to museums on Sundays and shifting my weight from one foot to the other as they drank in the Monets. Maybe it was the increasing authority of the must-see dictates issued by the cultural commissars of the media in New York City. Maybe it was the time ten years ago when I visited the museum of fine arts in Lille, France, a vast train station of a museum laid out in an ellipse and stuffed with mediocrities, and I realized the best way to take in its holdings would be by bicycle or possibly roller skates. Maybe it was when I discovered that I derived more enjoyment and illumination from sifting through big piles of trash. But I figure I owe some discomfiture, at least, to Poussin and Courbet.
Park Rapids recently got two feet of snow in two days. Even the snowplows got stuck. Needless to say, the Incident Report is saturated with rollovers and stuck-ness. Here is a selection of recent shenanigans:
A Park Rapids service counter representative reported an intoxicated customer; A pregnant woman reported being pushed and harassed by a male in Park Rapids; "Mudding" was reported on a closed forest road in Lakeport Township; A male was reported running southbound without a shirt, yelling for help with a bunch of guys chasing him in Farden Township (call cancelled, kids were making a video for YouTube); A caller reported he had a vehicle stolen and tracked it to a salvage yard, where it had been crushed; A water fountain was stolen from the Flower Boutique while in the process of moving; A stolen - and recovered- van was stuck in Straight River Township; Loud music and loud exhaust were reported in Park Rapids; A hitchhiker was reported flipping people off and "flashing" just west of Park Rapids; Passing on the right was reported in Straight River Township [note: this is reported on two separate days]; A male was reported to be possibly buying liquor for minors in Park Rapids; A verbal altercation was reported by Nevis School; A Park Rapids caller reported finding a locked safe under the Red Bridge; A male was reported trying to break down a door in Lake Hart Township, caller was hit in the face and cell phone taken; A field was on fire in Helga Township, imperiling buildings; Tires were taken from a vehicle parked at the county garage; Wood was reported stolen from property in Crow Wing Lake Township; A boat came off a trailer in Park Rapids; A young male reported his parents are in the ditch; A Hubbard Township caller reported his mother stuck in the ditch, twice.
The heifers, however, retain their typical pragmatism and foresight (as per caption.)
Interesting article in the globe today about the down economy hitting Roslindale. We were concerned when it didn’t even mention that we were leaving, until we noticed that they’d already taken our move into account by removing our building from the map.
I love the idea that butchers and thrift stores are counter cyclical - [...]
Took some time off due to rl and spent time in-world only to work on Ada Lovelace exhibition. And I found I missed my mates...got that feeling that I used to get in high school when my parents would drag me off to the country on the weekends - that I was missing the big party, something really fantastic. There's no feeling of guilt, like in rl, when it comes to balancing relationships in rl and sl. RL comes first, no questions asked.
That said, I want to spend some time cultivating my in-world friendships. Colleen and I just met a really wonderful gal, Wynn Grumiaux (there she is above, with her goggles on). She creates dioramas in an underground bunker she calls home, setting a mysterious scene full of artifacts; the fragment of a note, a book open to a specific page, a bottle full of mysterious liquid, a buzzing machines which invites you to twirl its knobs. The visitor wonders, what happened here? Wynn dresses for every occasion and is one of the wittiest chicks...she came up with a fabulous steampunk name for herself - Monocle Lewinski.
Anyway, back to blogging. I've got other plans which I've been putting off - furrydom and creating an alt. So, my dear, few and far between readers, onwards into the aetherworld...
Just back home from Comic-Con, where I had the unique pleasure of doing a “conversation” with Scott McCloud, moderated by Marianne Petit.
I’ve received dozens of emails from people who were unable to attend, asking if there’s a transcript anywhere. Turns out there’s a lot better: a full video and an audio podcast, along with some commentary from the brilliant folks at DailyCrosshatch.
The conversation, as well as the whole convention, made me feel quite at home in comics again, after a brief hiatus to get caught up on my regular book. Honestly, there’s nothing like comics, and I feel like we’re still safely insulated from some of the forces that are diluting the power of alternative media. It’s safe here on the margins.
Here’s the first part of the discussion, which amounts to a monologue from me about what attracted me to comics, and why McCloud had such an impact on me and my comic Testament.
I found the anniversary of my Dad's death, on St. Patrick's Day, more difficult to manage this year than ever before. And so too with the anniversary of his birth, today, St. George's Day. Previously on these occasions, I've been surrounded by familiarity; things familiar to both of us: London, my school friends, the Times, Arsenal, Vic Reeves, Broadstairs. But this year, I'm surrounded by the unfamiliar. There is nothing and nobody around me that he ever knew or ever will know. There is no fabric connecting the now me to the me when he was alive. I feel like I have drifted away from him. I missed him terribly on St. Patrick's Day and I miss him terribly today.
So my Mum's card, cheesy and sentimental though it was, helped soothe the deep wound. It didn't mention my Dad but it didn't need to.
I have a complicated relationship with my Mum. Distance, disconnection, denial. And all three in abundance since I've moved to Los Angeles. But sometimes I'll see a glimmer of something and remember why, despite all, I love her and always will.
A short trip to Austin earlier this month felt like a homecoming, even though I’ve never been there before. I’ve rarely been bombarded with so much music, with so little planning or effort, for so long into the night, since I left Chicago for California more than two decades ago. Austin is the sort of place where you venture out for coffee after your night of music and find out that the coffeehouse (in this case, Jo’s Hot Coffee on South Congress) has its own house band playing a bang-up set of western swing. A record store mural across the street from the UT/ Austin campus registers the city’s sense of music history: among others, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash share wall space with Dylan, Iggy, and the Clash.
If one figure spans all those influences, it is the provocateur, painter, raconteur and raver Jon Langford. The Welsh-born Leeds-to-Chicago transplant and Bloodshot Records mainstay has—in the 23-year stretch dating from the Mekons’ often-mentioned, seldom heard Fear and Whiskey—done more than just about anyone else to resuscitate the withered heart of post-punk and reclaim the tarnished soul of American country. In Austin, I was thrilled to discover that the Yard Dog Gallery has a fantastic collection of Langford’s visual art, mostly densely layered, distressed images of iconic American roots musicians in graveyard settings. Blindfolded, sullied and marked for extinction, the characters remind me of Chicago artist Ivan Albright’s studies of decay and corruption; constantly “dancing with death,” they are unsettlingly alive and a reminder of the slow death that comes out of greed, fear and homogenization.
As a curmudgeonly first-generation art school punk who writes lines like “John Glenn drinks cocktails with God at a café in downtown Saigon,” Langford is smart enough to realize he doesn’t play or paint “authentic” honky tonk any more than Vampire Weekend is a gang of African tribesmen. And unlike some of his retro-worshipping peers, he acknowledges that the “golden age” of county music had its own problems with pills and pretenders and poor directions. Yet he uses his outsider’s distance as an advantage. While bemoaning the death of country music at the hands of what he calls “suburban rock music with a cowboy hat on,” Langford’s work cuts deeper than that, excavating the signs of life in a cultural landscape pockmarked with interchangeable strip malls and Kenny Chesney records. There’s also a redemptive element in the search; like his protagonist in his Waco Brothers anthem “Hell’s Roof,” he’s reclaiming a lost history, “walking on hell’s roof, looking at the flowers” (and not “walking in a clown suit, looking at the flowers,” as I misheard Langford’s impassioned growl for more than a year).
Jon Langford, “Hell’s Roof”
Many of Langford’s paintings are collected in Langford’s 2006 book Nashville Radio: Art, Words and Music, which intersperses his artwork with lyrics and some unforgettable stories. One of my favorites involves Jon and the gang in East Berlin just before the wall fell, unable to buy souvenir Stalinist bric-a-brac with their worthless East German marks; another, during their short brush with near-fame following the release of 1989’s Mekons Rock and Roll, found A&M cofounder/ vice-chairman Herb Alpert’s secretary forging an autograph on a CD for Langford’s mother: “Dear Mrs. Langford, you have a fine and talented son—Herb Alpert” (sadly, Alpert himself was never present to shower them in whipped cream and other delights).
The Nashville Radio book also comes with a thoroughly enjoyable 18-song CD, The Nashville Radio Companion Earwig, which contains powerful acoustic renditions of some of Langford’s most striking country-related songs, supported by a strong cast of Langford comrades including singer Sally Timms, bassist Tony Maimone, and violinist Jean Cook. Earwig is an indispensable treat if, like me, you find it too daunting to keep up with every release of Langford’s many groups (to name a few, the Three Johns, the Waco Brothers, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, the Sadies, Ship and Pilot, and even a children’s music band, the Wee Hairy Beasties). Keeping up with these could be a full-time job. The Waco Brothers just put out Waco Express, a first-rate live album recorded in Chicago. On April 27, Victory Gardens in Chicago will debut a theatrical version of Langford’s 2004 solo concept album, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds.
All of Jon Langford’s bleak musing about commerce and decaying culture could come off as misanthropic and pretentious if he didn’t spend most of his time being genial and side-splittingly funny. If you find yourself in a Langford book-buying mood, don’t miss his amazing turn (under the moniker Chuck Death) as the illustrator of the cynical, hilarious and usually dead-on music criticism cartoon book Great Pop Things, penned by his Pythonesque partner in crime Colin B. Morton. In its only slightly fictionalized history, the bass player in Led Zeppelin was Jean-Paul Sartre. Brian Eno is credited with the creation of “ambivalent music, which you can’t quite tell if you are listening to it or not.” Bono gets mercilessly tweaked, and Morrissey takes it on the chin more than once. Robert Christgau reports that at the EMP Conference, Langford defended himself against charges of cynicism by saying, “We really like all these people. Except Sting, of course.”
