“I was never the sort of child who believed in ‘monsters under the bed’ or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father (who clearly ‘enjoyed’ me and my eccentricities) once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called ‘anti-paranoia,’ in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.”
–David Foster Wallace in “All That.” Gone far too soon.
15. Merriweather Post Pavilion-Animal Collective
It seems that most of the music world absolutely love MPP by Animal Collective. The truth is that it is a pretty good album. Best ever? Hardly, but quite good. There are some stellar tracks (i.e. “My Girls,” “Also Frightened,” “Summertime Clothes,” and “Lion in a Coma”) but the rest are–honestly–mediocre. Animal Collective’s eighth studio album finds the group making nice, poppy, accessible music that is much more open to those a bit scared off by their earlier releases. Overall, it’s a solid album but not earth shattering. If nothing else, it easily has the best album cover of the year.
Standout track: “My Girls”
14. Noble Beast-Andrew Bird
Indie music’s best whistler is at it again with his 2009 release, Noble Beast. The album shifts from opulent to bare-boned with regularity but the change is surprisingly unjarring. It took me a few times through the album to find it a comfortable listen, but the effort is well worth it. Bird is a brilliant musician with challenging lyrics and a unique style.
Standout track: “Effigy”
13. Dark Was The Night-Various Artists
Sure it’s a charity compilation album and sure, it’s not the best work of the artists involved but the sheer number of great artists on the album (Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, MMJ, The Decemberists, Yeasayer, New Pornographers, Sufjan Stevens (!), Beirut, etc.) has the makings of a great album. Produced by Aaron and Bryce Dressner of The National, Dark Was the Night benefits Red Hot Charity which works to fund HIV and AIDS research and prevention. My favorite songs are “Die” by Iron & Wine and “You Are The Blood” by Sufjan Stevens, natch.
Standout track: “You Are The Blood”
12. Embryonic-The Flaming Lips
They have been making music longer than I’ve been alive and still Embryonic, the latest release by The Flaming Lips, demands respect from musical folk in every aspect of criticism. The opening track is a bit trying, but once that’s through the Lips offer a sprawling romp through various styles and moods. Going quickly from euphoria to paranoia, they’ll heighten your senses and stir your musical soul. I don’t promote the ingestion of illicit substances, but if I did, I would also suggest this album as a companion to said substances.
Standout track: “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine”
11. Octahedron-The Mars Volta
Octahedron is the most accessible The Mars Volta album in years, perhaps ever, and it does not disappoint. Their style has been called many things–post-hardcore, prog-rock, jazz fusion, Latin-inspired, weird–and really, they’re all correct. The Mars Volta, now based out of Mexico, fuses a unique mixture of sounds to create their music and have been appropriately rewarded for their efforts, winning a Grammy in 2009 for their 2008 release The Bedlam in Goliath. This album, Octahedron, does not fall far from their older works but is somehow more new-listener friendly. They keep the sinister vibe of De-Loused in the Comatorium while somehow retaining a lyrical quality that invites new ears.
Standout track: “Teflon”
10. The Life of the World to Come-The Mountain Goats
This record registers as the most surprisingly incredible one of the year. Since I’ve recently been drawn to lusher sounds, I didn’t expect to love the famously lo-fi sound of The Mountain Goats or the straightforward lyrical delivery of singer John Darnielle, but I most certainly did. Darnielle’s lyrics are sterling and each song, titled with a verse from the Bible, adds to a fairly haunting narrative. The power of stripped-down simple folk rock is evident in this album. Don’t miss it.
Standout track: “1 Samuel 15:23″
9. Album-Girls
This jangly album from Girls seems to be what the music that went down the day to music died were it now produced by Brian Wilson. There is a decided Beach Boys influence tinged with other styles but they don’t fall prey to the frequent indie trope of sadly falling short of the Beach Boys at their height. The lead singer, Christopher Owens, was raised in the Children of God cult and his lyrics are appropriately eerie yet engaging. Overall, Album is a solid record that while flirting with a dark side remains sunny and warm.
Standout track: “Big Bad Mean Mother”
8. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-Phoenix
My favorite French band Phoenix delivers with their 2009 release Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Their driving indie-pop feel manages to avoid the kitschiness that is frequently found in the genre and adds a certain zest to their sound. You’ve probably heard the track “Lisztomania” on a Cadillac commercial but don’t fault the band for selling out–the euro is way stronger than the dollar and pâté prices have skyrocketed.
Standout track: “Lisztomania”
7. Unmap-Volcano Choir
Volcano Choir is yet another permutation of Justin Vernon’s sound. This collaboration of Vernon (of Bon Iver) with members of Collections of Colonies of Bees is certainly experimental, but decidedly wonderful. Of this effort Vernon said, “I sing on it, but there aren’t a lot of lyrics– it’s definitely more on the experimental side of things,” and the vocals–more than anything–act as another instrument in the orchestration of the song, not the driving force.
Standout track: “Island, IS”
6. See Mystery Lights-YACHT
YACHT, before this album, consisted only of Jona Bechtolt but the group expanded to a duo adding Claire L. Evans as a full member before recording See Mystery Lights. The album is sonically interesting with each song differing from the previous just enough to keep a listener interested. Any group that fantastically treats T-Pain’s “I’m In Love With a Stripper” like YACHT does is worth a listen.
Standout track: “I’m In Love With a Ripper”
5. The BQE-Sufjan Stevens
Having seen the debut performance of Sufjan’s orchestral suite at BAM in 2007, I expected the album to be lackluster in comparison. To my pleasant surprise, the recording is spot-on and gives the listen a good impression of a live performance, though the instrumentation is flawless. Despite the rampant flute runs throughout (which is almost too common in Sufjan’s orchestration), the piece sounds as if it could have been written by any number of contemporary composers until the electronic interlude hits toward the middle of the piece. The excellent recording of a very good piece is accompanied by a dazzling book of photos of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the DVD of the film Sufjan shot to accompany the suite.
Standout track: “The BQE.” It has individual tracks named, but I refuse to call it more than one song.
4. LP-Discovery
The lovechild of Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij and Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot (both groups featured in last year’s list), Discovery is a delightful mix of their styles, relying more on synth leads and tech-inspired drums than either of their main groups. The lyrics are neither as clever as Vampire Weekend’s or as insightful as Ra Ra Riots, but they’re sufficient. Easily the best authentically summer sound of 2009. My favorite track is the auto-tuned cover of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” which is the best pre-emptive MJ tribute of the year.
Standout track: “Orange Shirt”
3. Hazards of Love-The Decemberists
The Hazards of Love is an ambitious album that really doesn’t take a wrong step. Colin Meloy and friends spend the full album telling the star-crossed love story of William, the shape-shifting forest dweller, and the lovely Margaret. The album features vocals by Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, Becky Stark from Lavender Diamond, and Jim James of My Morning Jacket to compliment the golden, oft compared to goats, pipes of Colin Meloy. In the last few weeks, The Decemberists released a full-length video/film of this album featuring the work of several different artists and designers.
Standout track: “The Queen’s Rebuke/The Crossing”
2. Ecstatic-Mos Def
The only true hip hop album on the list this year is Mos Def’s Ecstatic. The record pulls speeches from Malcolm X and Fela Kuti along with Arabic prayers into the tracks and uses diverse musical influences to augment his sound. There is a strong Middle Eastern influence in his songs, particularly in “The Embassy,” and the confidence in Mos Def’s flow carries the album fantastically. The lyrics are at times biting and others mellifluous but nearly always spot on.
Standout track: “Quiet Dog Bite Hard”
1. Bitte Orca-Dirty Projectors
With Bitte Orca, the Brooklyn-based Dirty Projectors have crafted the best album of the year. The record outstrips the group’s 2007 release, Rise Above, by miles and, for me, sets the gold standard against which I compare any unfamiliar group–whether that’s fair or not. The amalgamation of sounds–vocal and instrumental–creates a unique experience that is mildly unsettling but unavoidably wonderful. The vocals of Dave Longstreth and the rest of the group blend magnificently and more often than not function more for instrumentation than lyrical delivery. There is not a wrong step taken on this fantastic record. Each track fuses nicely with the next and Bitte Orca stands as the best representation of music in 2009.
Standout track: “Stillness Is the Move”
Other notable albums of 2009:
Veckatimest-Grizzly Bear
xx-The xx
Hospice-The Antlers
Why There Are Mountains-Cymbals Eat Guitars
Blood Bank EP-Bon Iver
Two Dancers-Wild Beasts
As is bound to happen, I’m sure I’ve missed some stellar music this year but these albums are what my 2009 a little brighter than it would have been otherwise.
10 December 1830: American poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She lived a famously reclusive live but read voraciously–both her contemporaries and the classics. While she did have some poems published during her life–though some poems were edited to conform to traditional rhyme scheme– much of her work was published posthumously, despite her apparent wishes.
To celebrate the date of her birth, here’s one of my favorite Dickinson poems:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
It seems as if everyone has gone through an Ayn Rand phase somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Mine happened in my sophomore year of undergrad and lasted until I was about half-way through Atlas Shrugged. During that time (around about a year), I read all her major fiction (except the last half of the 60+ page monologue near the end of Atlas Shrugged, you know the one and I doubt you read it either) and found them enjoyable, if not inspiring.
Though I knew they were little more than anti-Communist propaganda, I was too unaware of politics to read much more than that. For an very brief period of time, I bought into Objectivism (except for the whole atheism bit, which seems to be the current practice of the extreme Right as of late) but quickly gave that up.
A recent article in the New Yorker, “Possessed: Did Ayn Rand’s Cult Outstrip Her Canon?” (subscription required) by Thomas Mallon brought Rand back to mind. Mallon paints a different Rand than I would have expected and recounts the lives and actions of her followers–each of which Rand alienated as she aged. Along with her personal relationship troubles, Mallon points out Rand’s less-than-stellar literary skills and briefly touches on her works of non-fiction which indicate that she was not at all well read. All her characters, even those who are given hundreds and hundreds of pages to become real, are little more than stereotypes in her much-too-long allegories of the virtues of selfishness.
All that having been said, Rand’s work is widely read and wildly influential. More than a half-century after its first publication, Atlas Shrugged–a doorstop of a book at 1200 pages–is #167 on Amazon’s bestseller list (though The Fountainhead, my favorite among hers, is only #1088). As would be expected of an author beloved of Alan Greenspan and the rightest of the right-wing pundits, Rand’s sales–like Fox News’ ratings–skyrocket during a Democratic president’s term. Some equate liberal lawmakers to the “moochers” of Rand’s fiction and predict a dystopian future of feckless, bottom-feeding rulers who leech from the best of society only to waste their best efforts on helping the lazy and incompetent. Please.
Me, I don’t put too much stock in Objectivism or the virtue of selfishness. I like to believe that there are greater things out there than personal gain and that the good in the world does more than warm the cockles of my self-interested heart. You may espouse the glory and hope of Galt’s Gulch and you can keep it. They wouldn’t want me anyway.
20 November 1936: American author Don DeLillo was born in the Bronx in New York City. DeLillo is regarded as one of America’s best living authors and is, perhaps, the most studied late-20th century author. To get a bit more personal, DeLillo is currently my favorite author and I’ve been lucky enough to read most (unfortunately not all) of his works–even the pseudonymous one.
DeLillo attended Fordham University and after graduating worked for several years in advertising after finding difficulty securing a job in the publishing industry. Before publishing his first novel, DeLillo quit his job in advertising later saying:
I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore. (NYT)
Lucky for him, he published his first novel, Americana, in 1971 and hasn’t slowed since then. He has published sixteen novels (including Amazons under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell and Point Omega which is set for release on 2 Feb. 2010), four plays, a screenplay, and numerous essays and short stories.
Though he has ventured into extraordinary and extreme areas of life, DeLillo’s best fiction centers on the quotidian normality of American life. White Noise, his most frequently taught work, covers the life of Jack Gladney–a rather ordinary professor of Hitler Studies (a fictional but not implausible area of study) at a rather ordinary liberal arts college–and the way he manages a minor crisis. His 1988 novel Libra is a fictionalized biography is Lee Harvey Oswald that, for me, is his best accessable piece of fiction and Underworld–published in 1997 attempts to anthologize the weltanschauung of the Cold War in America from its escalation in the 1950s through its effects in the mid 1990s. His most recent novel, Falling Man, is a surprisingly touching account of one (fictional) man’s experience during and after the attacks of 11 September 2001. As a native New Yorker, DeLillo takes the issue personally and, with Libra and Underworld, sufficiently deals with every major event in his lifetime.
Yearly, his name is among those who were slighted by the Nobel committee for being American (along with Roth, Pynchon, and Oates), though perhaps that is just wishful thinking.
So happy birthday Don DeLillo. To celebrate, on lunch I’ll be reading more of Americana, listening to The Airborne Toxic Event, and feeding my healthy fear of death.
Just last weekend I had the good fortune to attend the Mid-Atlantic Pop/American Culture Association Conference in Boston, MA. Besides finally getting visit the lovely city of Boston, I was able to spend some time with Sam and Brooklynne who were incredibly kind and allowed me to crash on their couch and they also showed me around town. The weather, save for Friday, was excellent and I felt fully welcomed by Boston.
The conference was a very good experience. My presentation went well and those few who dragged themselves out of bed for the 8.30 am session seemed interested enough in the ins and outs of nerdcore hip hop. During the question section, I was given some great ideas for ways to augment my research and perhaps expand it to a study of nerd culture on the whole, using nerdcore as a gateway. For a first conference paper, I think it went pretty well.
As far as the conference as a whole is concerned, I had a pretty dandy time. I was able to hear several dozen papers from scholars who hail from all across the country and a few international speakers. With few exceptions, the presenters were excellent and I was pleased to learn about many subjects that I haven’t yet gotten to study. Since it is an interdisciplinary conference, the scholars come from many different humanities-oriented departments so it affords a much greater collective body of knowledge than a strict English conference. Indeed, my favorite two sessions were categorized under Fashion and Art, respectively. Within the next week or so, I plan to post about an artist discussed in the final panel I was able to attend.
Overall, it was an excellent weekend. I got to meet many interesting people and encounter unique ideas and perspectives. Thanks, MAP/ACA.
2 October 1879: Poet Wallace Stevens was born just up to road in Reading, Pennsylvania. Before beginning his career in poetry, Wallace worked in journalism, attended law school, and worked for an insurance company in Hartford, CT. Even after obtaining moderate success as a poet, he continued to work, saying: “It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job.”
Here’s one of my favorite Stevens poems:
Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Also on this day:
Pirate poet Shel Silverstein was born in 1930.
Graham Greene was born in 1904. Greene is notable for me because of his mention in Donnie Darko. The film enticed me to read Greene’s 1954 short story “The Destructors” and it remains one of my favorite pieces of short fiction.
As you may know, I have been busily working to complete my master’s thesis over the last several months. The paper, in general, is about graffiti and its practitioners who use street art to reclaim public space from corporate advertisers. Though the thesis is theoretically grounded in the works of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, much of my research concerns heretofore little-studied artists and techniques; as a result, many of my sources are flickr streams, blogs, and internet discussions. Having been taught for years that internet sources aren’t wholly kosher for research, I’ve had a difficult time justifying to myself that a large portion of my research is, indeed, valid. After convincing myself (because what else could I do?), I began questioning the validity of the internet.
Are blogs valid sources of research?
In recent years, notable scholars such as Stanley Fish and Paul Krugman have been blogging actively and I can’t see why their thoughts on the blog are any less relevant than what is published in journals or the Yale UP. It’s not as if their words, printed on the web, are less scrutinized than their academic publications. If anything, their blogs have more fact checkers than any peer review panel. Scholars today, for the most part, cannot publish nonsense without being called on the carpet for it.
Less famously, though perhaps more importantly, many contemporary scholars are opening up their research and putting much of it on the internet through their blogs, rather than reserving all their thoughts for scholarly journals. Mark Sample, professor at George Mason University, used his site Sample Reality, to discuss the literary hoax previously discussed here involving David Foster Wallace and Jay Murray Siskind. Along with cracking scholarly codes and jokes, Sample champions opening up his research and consequently shares his Zotero library for the world to see. It is his thought that the humanities can only benefit from a more open approach to research, and I agree.
All of that serves to say that I believe blogs and other writings published only online do, in fact, work for the purpose of academic research. I would never advise a student to rely on the internet (e.g. Wikipedia) as a sole research tool and I cannot say enough about the value of the library–using actual books!–but our academic culture is moving more and more toward open sources and we cannot allow our research to suffer by excluding wonderful sources from consideration.
As you may or may not have guessed from the title (which is taken from a Joanna Newsom song) and the associated image, The Treachery of Images by Magritte), today I want to talk about structuralism.
Earlier this summer, I was given the opportunity to teach a class session at Harding University’s Honor Choir for high school students. For the subject matter, I was given carte blance and was, more or less, sent to town. Since this was, in fact, honor choir and was attended primarily by chorus geeks (I a self-professed member of their ranks ) I reckoned that it would be best to stick to music related topics. Blending my love for music and all things literary, I put together a section on the importance of song lyrics.
My primary goal was for the students to realize the importance of the words they are singing and hearing in their daily music consumption. Too often I hear that listeners don’t pay attention to the lyrics of song, especially in regards to hip hop (the phrase “It’s not the words, it’s the beat!!” irks me to no end). To achieve this goal, I juxtaposed songs that have decided poetic value with more contemporary songs that may not be deemed too important.
Because I so enjoy the musical stylings of Sufjan Stevens, I couldn’t resist putting him in there. I placed his song “Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)” in dialogue with Robert Burns’ poem “Afton Waters” (as performed by Nickel Creek). I tried to set up both Burns and Sufjan as poets of the working class and draw parallels between their subject matter, sentiment, and end goals.
During the week, the students were learning seven different songs to be performed at the end of the week. One of those songs was “Jabberwocky,” written by Lewis Carroll. Having encountered this poem, and subsequent explication given by Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, I decided to connect the students to this song through structuralism! With “Jabberwocky,” I connected the song “This Side of the Blue” by Joanna Newsom and threaded together the notion that both poets (Carroll and Newsom) are, more than anything, playing with language and having a good time of it.
I didn’t get too in depth in regard to structuralism because a.) they’re high school students and b.) I haven’t studied it too deeply for a few years and I didn’t want to strain myself too much with research on top of my thesis work.
It may be wishful thinking, but I think they understood the general concept of the slipperiness of signifiers and signifieds. And really, that’s all I could ask for; that, and getting to force high school students (who, in general, listen to terrible music [I know I did, much to my shame]) listen to both Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom. Overall, it was a pretty great week.
As of late, I’ve been working to raise my ranking in the realm of coffee geekiness. I have spent probably far too much time at Coffee Geek and similar sites, but I’m not ashamed. Due to my coffee geekiness, I was quite excited to be visiting Chicago, the home of Intelligentsia Coffee. They have three shops in Chicago and, as strange as this is, I visited all three in only two days.
One of the highlights of Intelligentsia is that all their stores feature the Clover coffee machine that we’ve all read so much about. My first cup of Clover-brewed coffee was a single-origin coffee from El Salvador at the Monadnock location that was, frankly, underwhelming. I’m fairly certain that my palate was tainted by a night of driving while consuming high energy drinks and bad gas station coffee, so I’ll not count this taste as legit.
Luckily, my second taste at the Millennium Park Coffeebar was much tastier. It was Guatemalan Soledad and was delicious. I also sampled a regular espresso which (to my delight) was pulled on a semi-automatic machine–not super automatic like Starbucks. Perhaps the best part of visiting this particular coffeebar was that they were playing the full album Guitar Romantic by The Exploding Hearts.
Last of the three is their flagship shop on Broadway. The trip there was interesting because I knew nothing of Chicago and got fairly lost. It’s a wonder that mass transit maps aren’t superimposed on street-level maps more often. I’m no cartographer or director of tourism, but that just makes sense. Again, I sampled the suggested espresso blend and also got a latte that was delightfully presented with a rosetta (quite similar to the one pictured above) prepared by America’s best barista. Both were delightful, but I did manage to spill a pretty good amount of the latte on the floor–sorry Intelligentsia employees.
Overall, my high expectations of Intelligentsia Coffee were met. My only regret is that I did not get a pound of beans to bring home. Maybe next time.
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