fun with babel fish

Oh, Pitchfork.

They're lucky I link to 'em at all. The reason I do is they do manage to have reviews for the most notable of the new music releases, they have the largest staff of writers, and they cut a wide swath.

It sure isn't because of the reviews.

Every second review they publish contains gleaming examples of the reasons we should all hate them. Big talkers. See right through everything. Their review of the new Venetian Snares record was some kind of juggernaut of Aristotelian reasoning. (I don't like glitch! You can't make me like glitch!)

The Mars Volta review of today's date, however, is just frankly too big of a sandwich. It is emblematic of nearly everything, all at once, that is wrong, wrong, wrong with the site. Lest you click on it and get the wrong idea, it isn't the 2.0 grade that has attracted my ire. Well, it is. Such a small grade does act a bit like a homing beacon for any pent-up hatred and aggression. What I mean to say, though, before you go clicking, is that I'm not some big Mars Volta fan. I liked At the Drive-In, and I liked De-Loused in the Comatorium, the two times I bothered to listen to it. I don't however, give any shits whatsoever if their new album gets ripped, deservedly or otherwise.

I do, however, grow quickly tired at the posture of the average Pitchfork review, and this one is particularly affected. Click away.

Watch him begin with a statement that lets you know how much more he knows about music than other people who like music know about music:

Indie and prog-rock have a lot more in common than most of their listeners might like to admit.

Wow. Hidden indie-prog juncture about to be exposed! Somebody knows how to draw a double bubble map! You mean there are areas where one kind of music and another kind of music are similar? Shh, disbelievers, and let him explain his dangerous new thesis:

Both are dominated by apostate wallflowers who act a lot cooler and more self-assured than they really are, and their artists, despite creating an aura of aloofness, are notoriously defensive.

Musicians really aren't cool? They're only pretending? Holy shit, good thing I found that out before I became one. Is it too late to become a Pitchfork writer instead, or do you have to go to college for that?

If you wanna take the psychoanalytic bent, both have masculinity issues: Prog compensates with double kick drums and the phallic gratification of rabid shrrredding, while indie prefers to spin its shortcomings into anti-heroism.

Man alive. Just look at that. If you want to listen to music made by guys who have big dorks, I suppose there's a lot of easy-listening jazz that would fit your bill. I'm told John Tesh's is staggering. And just so we're not missing anything, the insinuation is that the dudes from Mars Volta are hung like squirrels. Whether it's because they're indie rockers or prog rockers hasn't been made clear yet, but we're sure to find out, because it's (standard Pitchfork gripe #1) so goddamned important to classify something before you can have an actual reaction to it.

This is not to detract from the legacy of either music-- both have rich and diverse histories-- but the reps of each have been tarnished by generations of feckless dudes whose spotlight-hogging has rendered the genres unusually susceptible to generalizations.

Oh well, in that case, generalize away. What he's done here is first to create the rules of the little game he is now going to play: Indie and prog are populated by "feckless dudes" who have ruined it for everyone else, and in such a convenient way that someone like Ubl can come along and make generalizations about the genres. Notice how this argument is a) totally unsubstantiated with examples and just comes out of nowhere, b) completely obliviated by the following reductio ad absurdum: "If indie and prog are entirely unpopulated by feckless dudes, then those genres of music are not susceptible to generalizations". Bullshit. You can make generalizations about everything from chalk to chicken fingers and if Ubl doesn't recognize that the onus is on him to substantiate his own generalizations, then he's the one who would seem to be lacking in the feck department.

In fact, the terms themselves are generalizations, almost always used negatively: These days, bands are most commonly dubbed "prog" or "indie" when their music isn't provocative enough to earn a more individually tailored description.

Does he mean descriptions like "discopunk"? Or some other brand of mouthwash? Almost any term would be a generalization when it dripped onto his smarmy little keyboard. Sklave zu den Zeiten, you can't review something without talking about it. You can't! Even though they try to do it all the time. Will they try again? Read on:

On De-Loused in the Comatorium, the Mars Volta weren't straddling any fencelines. Rather than carrying over characteristics from the rough-edged indie-esque stylings of their former band, At the Drive-In, or plunging headfirst into the never-ending math equations of psilocybic canterbury prog, they artfully missed both marks: too sincere for indie but not quite prolix enough for prog; too melody-driven for prog but not repetitive enough for indie.

Just time enough for an under-the-table Modest Mouse testicle-smooch (standard Pitchfork gripe #2) and we're on to some real honest to goodness generalizing, instead of just talking about it. Indie isn't sincere? Prog's not melody-driven? Okay! Now we're mangling some real hash, hash-manglers!

Listeners' initial bemusement enabled the band to transcend genre reducibility, which won De-Loused quick (if hesitant) points from critics and fans. But two years later, there are few other recent records for which putatively in-the-know listeners are so cautious of voicing approval. If you liked De-Loused (or thought so, at least) but often found yourself biting your tongue in the company of others, you were probably in the majority.

"Putatively" in-the-know listeners, since, you know, thou shall have no other godz before Ubl and all that. If I am a stylish contrarian, and I am always the smartest person in any room, what the fuck does that make you, you charmingly uninformed rabble of sheep? KNEEL and repeat after me: "you were probably in the majority". The majority of what, Ubl, you dangling mod? Is the majority those who liked De-Loused, or those who bit their tongues in the company of others? He appears to be indicating that De-Loused may be a good album, but is couching that opinion in the contingency that you, the reader, like it too. That he appears to be sucking up to you and your crowd while somehow holding himself reservedly above such an unseemly emotion as liking the album himself is such a stark flare-up of the Pitchfork disease that it would be prudent for Chicago's mayor to call in the National Guard.

Here's a gathering of short quotes that describe the album that simply do not fit Ubl's "2.0" designation, no matter how they're qualified: "Predictably monolithic and impossibly huge, Frances never stops chugging"; "Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus"... builds to a powerful, string-driven climax at around the eight-minute mark but never bothers to come back down, staying aloft in a spiral of guitar arpeggios and overeager drumming before eventually devolving into a chorus of synth textures"; "Frances the Mute doesn't require a long attention span: It's as mesmeric as it is mercurial"; "...Frances largely retains the audacity of De-Loused's lyrics. "Cassandra Gemini" approaches storytelling with the same breed of macabre circumlocution that pocked the band's debut..." no matter how hard he may be trying to call this album down, he makes it sound really cool in spite of himself.

What is his problem? I've looked it up and down and this is the best justification I can find for such a low rating:

...no matter what your feelings for De-Loused, at least the band had a mind to curtail their most capricious jams before they lost all context. Here, they seem hellbent on making an album that's as contiguous as possible, and the result is a homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity.

Ooh, contiguity. That's, like, the way the album just blends into one solid listening experience, and perhaps is something you can sort of get involved with or lost in or any of those unfashionable listening practises. Tanzmusik! Tanzmusik! Discopunk uber alles!

Hunnhhh...

I like the album. More than De-Loused, I think, though I'd actually have to listen to that one again to be sure. It strobes that Ummagumma part of my cerebral cortex when it's not tossing some really nasty riffs at me. "L'via l'viaquez" is a monster, and if they'd cut the first 4:49 of it as its own song, Pitchfork would be tripping over it every time they walked up their parents' stairs into daylight. What the hell is wrong with contiguity?

The perverse truth is that I never would have bothered listening to it if the review hadn't gotten all up in my business the way it did. Which is why, in the ongoing evaluation of the list of sites I link to, Pitchfork stays. They are pretty much indispensable.

Still, I hate the snotty cool-hunting fuckers. You can tell them I said so.

Posts... becoming...more... infrequent...

My throat is sore. It's quite aggravating. I had a dream last night about smoking a cigarette. I haven't for six days. When is my throat supposed to improve?

Aha, unless the cause is some other. My cat is shedding. I pet him and my hand comes away a matted ball. He Who Is Nemesis may actually truly be poisoning me simply by virtue of proximity; perhaps he's one of those "frenemies" everyone seems to have these days.

Or perhaps it is reflux. Do I drink too much coffee? Too much alcohol? Should I elevate my head when I'm sleeping? Would telephone books be enough for that, or should I get some granite blocks? Do I eat too late in the day? You have to eat quite late when you work twelves.

Oh God, it's work! I work in an environment festooned with all kinds of bacteria. Those giant rotating drums puke out all kinds of pathogens. I must have a sinus infection. It doesn't feel like strep - not painful enough. Jesus, maybe I have tonsillitis.

Or, it's midwinter. The dryness of the air must be affecting me. A humidifier in the bedroom, that's the ticket. More water.

Lord in heaven don't let it be a tumor.

the blue scales of the sea monster

thet deep ends, he said
the scanner is lousy with yellow paper and he will not touch his food
inside the sancuary he is having compulsions
like rome, still a lord even only from the word
he's made up some story about shitting himself as a baby
at his own christening
it ichshpleyns the name they gev me, he said
somewhere it became the truth
years suffused in carbon monoxide
it lolled about him
his dead wife is tentatively climbing the stairs to the bedroom
in the house his sons pushed over two years ago

What could they possibly be looking for?

The new version of Soulseek has this feature that lets you see the terms other people typed in that got results from your files. It is priceless. Here's my favourites so far:

- Big
- piano
- jackson
- horse
- Still
- dance
- Blue Moon (jesus, is this in my files somewhere? shame...)
- SPACE
- jazz
- la la
- la la la
- remix
- people
- blue (maybe "blue moon" was too specific?)
- i know
- disco
- death

And, about thirty times an hour,

- sex

natural's not in it

Woohoo! My tickets are in the mail. Soon I'll be able to, um, sell them.

Ah well, the line-up was 90% shite anyways. At least Trail of Dead are coming to Edmonton, which is kind of weird. Maybe Gang of Four will too.

everything's natural

“(Carbon dioxide is) plant food, it’s a natural part of the atmosphere.”

- Carleton University geologist Tim Patterson, one of a handful of scientists across Canada who have become known as outspoken critics of the Kyoto protocol.

Happy Kyoto Accord Day, everyone. It starts today. Did you know that?

Human activity may bear a relatively small percentage of responsibility for recent global warming trends, it's true. But when you say that, it is not the same as saying that human activity has no effect on global warming and therefore we should just go ahead and let our cars idle all the time. The planet is a delicate balance, all things considered. It doesn't take much to push it off into some new direction. There's a lot of fucking planets out there, and not too many of them work.

By the way, carbon dioxide is toxic when inhaled in concentrations higher than 5% volume. Nice for plants. Bad for humans. Science is complicated, isn't it?

As though the concept behind this day weren't already execrable enough, here's Ada.

What a bunch of misandric twaddle.

It's an "anti-valentine", just in time for anti-valentine's day, which is a day I totally get because I've been single for a lot of them. If you're single, the best thing I can think of to say to you today is just keep your head down because it'll soon be over with.

Don't, please don't, write hatefully shallow, shallowly hateful memoranda like this Ada Calhoun has written. (Nerve.com, since it's such a shallowly hateful little taste-maker of a publication, has a two-week window for viewing articles in order to prevent non-subscribers from feeling superior for prior taste-making judgments proved false in the light of hindsight. However if you're coming upon this post sometime past Feb. 28th, you can, perversely, still find it at alternet, where normally they post social security anti-privatization rants and other vitriolic rejoinders to Bush propaganda alongside their weekly sex columns and theatre reviews.) Don't, please don't, write bad garbage just because you're frustrated, sexually or otherwise: always have a point.

I'll get into it in a bit, but first I want to set up a little scenario because I'm going to return to it later to illustrate something. Scenario: I'm about to be promoted, and I am currently training the fellow who's going to replace me in a week. The job I'm leaving, as well as the one I'll soon begin, are down-in-the-muck, physically demanding, not-terribly-mentally-taxing blue-coveralls jobs. 'Scuse all the hyphens.

We work twelve-hour shifts, and after an hour or so of training, it sort of becomes clear, or should anyways, what the job entails and whether or not you're going to have a knack for it. So I have hours of time to kill in close proximity with this man who is doing what I do and going where I go. The topic turns to music: we're listening to CBC Radio 3, which happens to be playing an aggravatingly wrong-headed profile of Edmonton's music scene. I offer:

"Man, you'd think there was nothing in Edmonton but alt-country and hardcore bands."

His reply:

"Yeah, but it's CBC after all."

I mistakenly think I get what he means, but I prod anyways:

"What do you mean?"

And he thusly mystifies me:

"Well, all that piano bullshit."

"Piano bullshit?"

"Yeah, you know, that classical piano shit. My dog could make better music than that."

And I see in a moment that the man has a huge hate-on for classical music of any kind. It takes me a moment to see this because we've been listening to boring roots-rockers and not classical pianisms, but I realize that it's probably the same to him anyways. For him there are three kinds of music: the classic rock you love, the new rock you need, and classical piano. Unless his dog actually did make music, which I suppose would for him constitute a fourth category, one somewhere between the first two and the last in terms of preferability.

He is, in short, the kind of man who talks about the things his dog can do even though he does not actually have one.

And yet. This man is my replacement. He'll be doing for precisely twenty-five percent of his breathing time exactly the same things I've been doing with the same twenty-five percent of mine for the past six months. He'll be making the same money I did. He'll be experiencing shift lag to the same extent I did, though he may not think to call it "shitflag" as I do. He doesn't even live that far from me.

All of this is important, and I'll get into it. For now, back to Ada Calhoun.

She has grown disenchanted with what she calls "the clever, conceited men of McSweeney's" (it's hard not to picture a themed calendar), just as she once grew enchanted with the grunge crowd, typified for her by proto-yarler Eddie Vedder.

Vedder is rejected for being a paragon of a movement she rejects as "anti-intellectual" and unattractively sincere; Dave Eggers is tossed over for basically exactly the opposite reasons. The new, acceptable masculinity? Wes Anderson. His school of masculine aesthetic? The new New Sincerity, I suppose.

What the hell is she doing? These men are propped up as archetypes of masculinity and weighed against each other, which I guess is fair even though it's meaningless. She means, though, to present them as romantic possibilities, their essences reflected infinitely through all members of a certain class of men. Men are either Vedders or Eggerses, or Andersons if they're lucky, though next year Topher Grace might have an album out or something. The classic man you love, the new man you need.

It reminds me of a permanently lodged bit of dialogue from an ancient TV series called "Almost Grown" which starred Timothy Daly as one half of an endlessly reminiscing couple. The show was along the lines of "thirtysomething", and the line went something like this:

"In my father's day, men had it easy. There was one male archetype: John Wayne. Then MASH came along, and women wanted the sensitive, Alan Alda type. Now, who the hell are we supposed to be, Emilio Estevez?"

Now, who the hell are we supposed to be, Conor Oberst?

It is thinking like this that makes this day so fucking hard for any guy who doesn't have someone to share it with. And Ada Calhoun is perpetuating it. But fuck her.

Calhoun's romantic history is apparently littered with hopeful nightly trips to the neighborhood Chinese bakery through streets apparently littered themselves with television sets and computer monitors just asking to be smashed by hip young alternawriters with no sense of tasteful, romantic restraint. How facile and dishonest. When was the last time you came across an abandoned television on a jaunt through your neighborhood? I mean, okay, New York, but still. It's a regular occurrence?

Of course not. It's an invention designed to illustrate the hidden anti-social side of the affable McSweeney's gentleman. An archetype of man. Which she is now categorically rejecting. New year, new themed calendar.

We are, in the end, just men. We have much more in common with each other than we have areas where we differ. Me and the fellow I'm now training to replace me, who believes his dog could make better music than anything CBC Radio might be playing, belong to an archetype of man - the blue-collar shift-worker.

We are, though, unique in small ways, ways our mothers appreciate. And girlfriends, if we're lucky to have them, will hopefully appreciate them too. At least I hope my girlfriend's actually into me, including all the things I have in common with the guy with the talented non-existent dog, not, oh God I don't know, Emilio Estevez.

erotic poetry

...just doesn't do it for me. I don't mind reading about stuff that's been "splayed", or that what-have-you is "askew", or that various things may or may not be "moist". But it isn't gonna get me hot. Not when you describe your labia as "hungry".

I've emphasized before, I believe, about how important I think poetry is in daily life, and how it's a shame most of us are so cut off from it. But I still don't need to hear about your hungry labia.

I'm not gonna link to it. Tough luck, hungry-labia fetishists.

But seriously, JEEES-us. Guys don't want to think about a woman's nethers as being "hungry". Ever hear of vagina dentata? It's NOT COOL.

"next blog>>" button pays off again

I suppose it's not as strange or exciting as meeting the guy on the street, say, out shopping for panties for his daughter in nokomis, but it's still kind of freaky. And doesn't it make sense that he would have one? He also seems to be a fairly frequent contributor; hope he's not using it as an excuse not to exercise.

Ah well, the suspense is killing you: it's Bill Clinton's Daily Diary! Do visit him there, and kindly leave a comment. Guy seems to be as hard-up for traffic as I am.

---

Addendum: I've noticed that quite a few of you bloggers have edited out the code for the "next blog>>" button from your template. Please don't. It's really quite annoying. An interesting person you may be, but you're not the signpost at the end of the universe. If it's good enough for an ex-president, it ought to be good enough for you.

to hell with poverty

We are going to Coachella.
Also we're going to be poor for a little while longer. C'est la vie.

Mmmm. That's just good counsel!

Boo ya, suckers.