Friday, December 31, 2004

Coldplay: dull and three chords short of a melody

Coldplay came and went and I didn't pay much attention. Didn't hear anything worth listening to. It was boring. But in a video rental place last week, a Coldplay concert DVD or something happened to be playing on the monitors and through the store's sound system, so why not?

Coldplay are the “dogfood-and-downers” equivalent to the “meant-to-be-stimulating” self-righteousness assault perpetrated by U2. There are a lot of similarities: every song seems to consist of not very interesting lyrics formed around a refrain which is the title or a related phrase repeated ad nauseam, two chords which, if they were put into a sequence with three or four more might be enough for a decent three-minute pop song, but which are not. Add some mopey attitude and trudge through the lyrics as though they’re being exhaled by dint of massive effort by a 19th-century consumptive self-styled romantic, and you’ve got a worldwide smash.

This reads as though I’m some kind of cranky old guy. But the problem is not the novelty or unfamiliarity of this material and my inability to understand its relevance to the average concerned young person today. It’s the godawful derivative familiarity of it. Each new U2 record sounds like every other old U2 record. A lot of other things sound stale and familiar the first time you encounter them. It’s not a good situation to hear something for the first time and think, “Hmph . . .this again.” Coldplay are exactly like just about other one of those self-consciously low-key, quiet outfits that seemed to proliferate about 20 years ago, after punk had flamed out and collapsed into this weird hothouse thing that a comparatively tiny group of obsessives kept going like some leather-clad cargo cult.

It was right about the time Ian Curtis killed himself. Half the people you knew were listening to just plain bad, deliberately bad out-of tune noise like The Fall, Nick Cave and Einsturzende Neubauten, the other half were listening to pointedly polite people like Sade and Durutti Column. I should be able to think of other examples of that kind of thing, but I can’t. Hell, I think I probably spelled “Einsturznede Neubauten” wrong (I know there's supposed to be an ulmaut over the "u" in "einsturzende," for one thing). But you know the kind of thing I’m talking about. Was that the same time the pejorative term “rockist” started turning up in reviews in publications like The Face and the NME?

It seems like that was just before people noticed this “rap” or “hip-hop” stuff coming out of New York, which knocked all that overly intellectualized parsing of tinier and tinier slices of musical sub-genres and capillary hybrids off the table . . . for a while at least . . . until people started playing this Irish band called U2 and asking eagerly for your assent that in fact U2 were just so great . . . weren’t they?

How to disgruntle an anemic bum.

How about dismantling U2 and leaving them dismantled for 2005 and beyond? Can we do that? Their one-chord-per-song bombast was overbearing crap when it was post-punk adolescent posturing. The solemnity of the marketing that attended the release of The Joshua Tree was worse. Then came the self-serious crapulence of Rattle and Hum (and why wasn’t there a sequel, Hum and Hummer?) wherein Paul Hewson and David Evans hoped to introduce a generation of people to musical titans and genres that fell outside the confines of, well, overbearing, adolescent hectoring with a single chord per song. But they just keep grinding onward. Cancuklehead video channel MuchMusic has been running promos nonstop for a special “exclusive” interview with Hewson and drummer Larry Mullen, Junior about this latest record, which will sound exactly like every other record before it and exactly like the hundreds still to come, each of which will sound like every other U2 record.

U2 in general — and Bono, Holy Bono in particular — try so hard to be good, to be with it, to be groovy and politically correct and on the side of good. But their work is to music what McDonald’s is to food. They make the same thing over and over and over again, which is probably why a lot of people like it: it will never surprise or shock or take an unexpected turn. Maybe musical theorists who appreciate the work of people like Philip Glass and Steve Reich get a kick out of U2. Their career has been like Reich or Glass pieces that go on for twenty or thirty minutes and in which single notes in a chord sequence are changed one by one. By the time you get to the end of the piece, the “deedle-a, deedle-a-deedle-a” in, say, A flat major has mutated into “doodle-a-weedle-a” in D minor or something. Maybe that’s what U2’s doing: releasing the same record with the same songs on it, but changed so imperceptibly that at the end of their 30-year project, the record will be different from their first.

But don’t bet on much difference. That U2 will be releasing another record identical to the dozens that preceded it thirty years after they started, I expect.

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Derrida deconstructed

Eager student accidentally makes baffling French bloviator disappear by proving he doesn't exist

Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously irksome philosophers of the late 20th century, seemed to cease to exist on or about Friday, October 8 at a Paris hospital, the French president’s office announced. He was 74.

The cause of death was initially thought to be pancreatic cancer, according to French television, The Associated Press reported. The Modern Language Association and the Chronicle of Higher Education contended that Derrida’s refusal to allow the signifier to suffer coincidence with its signified might have done him in. Somebody said maybe Hilton Kramer shot him with the canon.
However, it turned out that a sophomore English student at Ohio State had inadvertently proven that Mr. Derrida did not, in fact, exist while trying to simultaneously make sense of and deconstruct “Of Grammatology,” Mr. Derrida’s intensive study aimed at finding out what his grandmother was really like. When that happened, the goofy-looking deep thinker suddenly disappeared.

The student, whose name, being nothing more than a random collection of meaningless phonemes commonly agreed to confer and signify status and the perpetuation of a patriarchal system of bourgeois primogeniture, is immaterial, said he felt “kinda bad” about having made Mr. Derrida disappear suddenly in a puff of acrid Gauloise smoke. He has been offered full professorships at numerous university English departments, and preparations continue for a tickertape parade in his honor, paid for by everybody who ever had to listen to some deconstruction-addled sophomore yammering about how nothing means anything because some French guy said so.

Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, as well as its mother, a “mother,” a bad mother (shut your mouth) and its orphan. It was a method of securing tenure that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts — whether literature, history, philosophy or Walter Scott’s “Personality Parade” in the Sunday paper — of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. Read a paragraph of Mr. Derrida’s baffling, tortured, tautological plafoodoo and you’ll get a sense of what that means. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture but most especially to anything that was suspected of having been written or read by a Caucasian male, especially a dead Caucasian male.

While he had a huge following — larger in the United States (where his rookie card is now worth four dollars) than in Europe — Mr. Derrida was the target of as much teasing and derisive hooting as admiration. For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, despite the fact it was never remotely cogent or intelligible enough to do that. They also did not like its excessive snootiness, nor did they care for its claims of association with divisive political causes which were almost universally nothing more than standard-issue sophomoric flirtations with introductory Marxism. The fact deconstruction made absolutely no sense and could not be defined or explained on even the most rudimentary level by anybody was just icing on the textual cake.

Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden meanings using a little hammer and several sets of special tweezers and rat-tail combs as well as oyster forks before forcing the resulting mushy residue through several used coffee filters. Many of the meanings they found were so well hidden that nobody had noticed them during centuries of close reading and analysis. For the deconstructionists, that process became particularly important if anything outside that paragraph didn’t match the wishful, fictional subverted “meaning” they ascribed to the tiny slice they’d chosen to focus their laser-like powers of credulity on. This happened just about the time people were pretty much convinced there couldn’t possibly be anything more ridiculous than semiotics. Boy, were they wrong. Advocates of feminism, gay rights, and third-world causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal the prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud and other “dead white male” icons of Western culture. Architects and designers could claim to take a “deconstructionist” approach to buildings by abandoning traditional symmetry and creating zigzaggy, sometimes disquieting, annoying or just plain butt-ugly spaces. The filmmaker Woody Allen titled one of his movies “Deconstructing Harry,” to suggest that his protagonist could best be understood by breaking down and analyzing his neurotic contradictions. Or maybe just to shoehorn a briefly trendy word into a movie title in order to mock it. Or maybe not.

Toward the end of the 20th century, deconstruction became a code word of intellectual discourse, much as existentialism and structuralism — two other fashionable, slippery philosophies that also emerged from France after World War II like a gaseous bubble out of too much thick, heavy cream sauce — had been before it. Mr. Derrida and his followers were unwilling — some say “couldn’t be bothered” — to define deconstruction with any precision or even in a half-assed sloppy way, so it has remained misunderstood, or interpreted in endlessly contradictory ways, all of which suited the deconstructionists just fine, since they always hoped somebody would just stumble on a definition and blurt out something they could use. But that never happened.

Typical of Mr. Derrida’s murky explanations of his philosophy was a 1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which began: “Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible. Or the impossibility of experience. Or maybe it doesn’t. I’m really not sure. And don’t hold me to that assertion that I’m not sure, because I might not be any too sure about that, either. Unless I am, but that’s subject to interpretation. Unless it isn’t. Maybe. Oh wow. Have you ever really, like, looked at your hands, man?”

Mr. Derrida was a prolific writer, but his 40-plus books on various aspects of deconstruction didn’t make a lot of sense. However, they were certainly thick, both in the sense of “having many pages” and in the sense of “obtuse.” Even some of their titles — “Of Grammatology,” “The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,” “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” “Papa Oom Mow Mow: Funniest Sound I Ever Heard,” “Louie Lou-eye, Oh Baby, We Gotta Go Now,” “Gabba Gabba Hey,” “Bomp Buh Buh Bomp, De Dang De Dang-Dang, De Ding De Dong Ding, Blue Moon,” “Everybody Knows That the Bird Is The Word,” “Who Put the Bomp In The Bomp-Shoo Bomp-Shoo Bomp; Who Put The Ram In the Rama Lama Ding Dong?,” “Marvel Spectacular Superstar Battle Royal: Hulk vs. Thing” — could be off-putting to the uninitiated, the initiated, and initially.

“Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction’s demise — if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it,” Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote in a 1994 article in The New York Times Magazine. Now, thanks to a zealous little grind at Ohio State, it would seem that has finally come to pass, although the fact that Derrida is dead means there will probably be even more contention and faculty-lounge squabbling over his jumbled legacy of half-baked yawp.

Mr. Derrida’s credibility, such as it was, was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul de Man, a Yale University professor who was the most acclaimed exponent of deconstruction in the United States and the origin of the phrase, “you de Man,” a term of approbation from Yale undergraduates whenever one of their number said something particularly confusing, annoying or meaningless. Four years after Mr. de Man’s death, it turned out he was a Nazi who’d written a thick wad of pro-Nazi articles for a Nazi newspaper in Belgium while it was under German occupation during World War II. In defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. de Man’s anti-Semitism. In fact, he was sharing it, not condoning it.

Nonetheless, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, Mr. Derrida’s “writings” and lectures gained him a huge following in major American universities at a time when heavy recreational drug use was common among both students and faculty. Mr. Derrida proved far more influential in the United States than in France. Go figure. For young, ambitious professors, his teachings became a gold-plated ticket to tenure. For many students, deconstruction was a rite of passage into the world of rebellious intellect. For many more, it was a king-size load of industrial-strength bullshit they were powerless to avoid. Its pervasiveness, combined with the demand of every English department that they either swallow the Kool-Aid or get off the bus made it impossible to get away from, no matter how hard they tried.

Jacques Derrida was hatched on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria. His father was a salesman. His mother was dismayed. Even as a teenager, Mr. Derrida was a voracious reader whose eclectic interests embraced the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and the poet Paul Valéry. Unfortunately, although he read widely, he did not understand anything he read.

He failed his baccalaureate in his first attempt. He twice failed his entrance exam to the École Normal Supérieure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals, where he was finally admitted in 1952 just to shut him up. Unfortunately, that did not work. There he failed the oral portion of his final exams on his first attempt, which should have been a hint. After graduation in 1956, he studied briefly at Harvard University. Because he did not speak English, it was difficult and he did not distinguish himself. For most of the next 30 years, he taught philosophy and logic — mostly by denying they existed — at both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure, despite not being employed as a teacher at either institution. Yet he did not defend his doctoral dissertation until 1980, when he was 50 years old and enough of a big-shot that nobody dared tell him he was full of hot gas. Most people would have figured out by this point that a career as an academic was probably not for them. Not Mr. Derrida.

By the early 1960’s, Mr. Derrida had made a name for himself as a rising young intellectual in Paris by publishing articles on language and philosophy in leading academic journals that nobody read and by occasionally floating several inches off the ground. He claimed to have been especially influenced by the German philosophers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, both of whom he claimed were his close personal friends, even though Husserl died in 1938 and Heidegger said, “who’s doing what now?” when asked about Derrida. Both were strong critics of traditional metaphysics, a branch of philosophy which explored the basis and perception of reality. Mr. Derrida spent much of his time detached from reality, saying he considered it “a total bringdown.”

As a lecturer, Mr. Derrida cultivated charisma and mystery. Or maybe it was bafflement. For many years, he declined to be photographed for publication, fearing his soul would be stolen. “Bad juju,” he would mutter, putting his hands over his face and hissing. He cut a dashing, handsome figure at the lectern, with his thick thatch of prematurely white hair, tanned complexion, well-tailored suits, big floppy shoes and squirting lapel flower. He peppered his lectures with puns, rhymes and enigmatic pronouncements, like, “Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun,” or, “Too sweet to be sour, to nice to be mean, if I was breakfast sausage, I’d be the Jimmy Dean,” or, “Oh my friends, there is no friend,” something he usually said when people called him “my friend” and expected him to pay for the drinks. Then he would pull his empty pockets inside out and pout in an exaggerated, clownish manner while shrugging Gallicly.

Many readers found his prose turgid and baffling, even as nervous undergraduates eager to impress their T.A.’s claimed to find it “illuminating.” A single sentence could run for three pages, and a footnote even longer, and not one word of it would make even the slightest amount of sense, even by accident. Sometimes his books were written in “deconstructed” style. For example, “Glas” (1974) offers commentaries on the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the French novelist Jean Genet in parallel columns of the book’s pages; in between, there is an occasional third column of commentary about the two men’s ideas. A fourth column of text was published in another book entirely, no longer in print, and a fifth column was hidden in the old oak tree where it was eventually found by Joe and Frank’s chubby pal, Chet, and turned over to Detective Hardy.

Mr. Derrida appeared suddenly on the American intellectual landscape with a soft “pwoip” at a 1966 conference on the French intellectual movement known as structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Its high priest was French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who studied societies through their linguistic structure when he wasn’t sewing blue jeans with little red tabs on the edge of the back pocket or trying to deconstruct them using a pair of horses and some old-timey ’49er prospectors.

Mr. Derrida shocked his American audience by announcing that structuralism was already passé in France, and that Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, like his pants, were too rigid, at least until they’d been through the wash a couple of times. Instead, Mr. Derrida offered deconstruction as the new, triumphant philosophy without bothering to explain what it was.

His presentation fired up young professors who were in search of a new intellectual movement to call their own. Others said, “Wha—?”

Many people wondered why the deconstructionists, so intent on proving that “texts” meant nothing because they contradicted themselves, never applied that rigorous negation to teaching contracts, students’ marks, tenure, grant applications or their paychecks, all texts which were apparently sacrosanct and somehow magically resistant to any attempts at being rendered meaningless.

Mr. Derrida’s influence was especially strong in the Yale University literature department, where one of his close friends, Belgian-born Nazi, Paul de Man, emerged as a leading champignon of deconstruction in literary analysis, and where they seemed to get a bang out of this kind of crap. Mr. de Man had claimed to be a refugee from war-torn Europe, and even left the impression among particularly credulous colleagues that he had joined the Belgian resistance. But in 1987, four years after Mr. de Man’s death, research revealed that he had written over 170 articles in the early 1940s for Le Soir, a Nazi newspaper in Belgium. Apparently, the only thing he ever resisted was not being a Nazi.

The revelations became a major scandal at Yale and other campuses where the late Mr. de Man had been lionized as an intellectual hero. Some former colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But Mr. Derrida defended Mr. de Man, and even used literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate that the Belgian scholar’s newspaper articles were not really anti-Semitic. Anybody with any remaining doubt about the intellectual, historical or moral bankruptcy of deconstruction had to concede that Derrida’s stunt pretty much exemplified the banality of evil. Despite all that, some folks just couldn't figure it out, and continued to insist that deconstruction was still valid, applying it to everything from music videos to Bazooka Joe comics.

Almost as devastating for deconstruction and Mr. Derrida was the revelation, also in 1987, that Heidegger, one of his intellectual muses, was a dues-paying member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. Many gullible saps still refused to realize that deconstruction was basically some weird kind of fascism rewind in fake Marxist drag.

By the late 1980’s, Mr. Derrida’s intellectual star was on the wane on both sides of the Atlantic. But he remained a big draw at some East Coast universities and, for some inexplicable reason, at the University of California at Irvine, where he often flung sweat-soaked pages of his books to hordes of screeching fans and would usually offer his time-tested “built-in encore” of deconstructing “Slow Ride” by Foghat.

In his early years of intellectual fame, Mr. Derrida was criticized by European leftists for a lack of commitment to any political ideas except those shared by people who enjoyed goose-stepping, shiny boots and swastikas. But in the 1980’s, in a desperate, pathetic, day-late, dollar-short lunge for political correctness to pander to his fans on campuses in the United States, he became conspicuously active in a number of political causes, opposing apartheid, defending Czech dissidents, supporting the rights of North African immigrants in France, and saying that New Coke was not that good and that he preferred Dick Sargent's Darrin to that of Dick York on “Bewitched.”

Mr. Derrida also became far more accessible to the media. He marketed a line of talking dolls that babbled nonsense. Later there were T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads and cardboard cutouts of Mr. Derrida's head that made automobile interiors smell like a crochety French college professor. He sat still for photos and gave interviews that stripped away his formerly mysterious aura to reveal the mundane details of his personal life. And boy, were they mundane.

Rather than hang around the Left Bank cafés traditionally inhabited by French intellectuals, Mr. Derrida preferred the quiet of Ris-Orangis, a suburb south of Paris, where he lived in a small house with his large wife, Marguerite Aucouturier, a psychoanalyst who married him because, she said, she had “never met anybody that screwy. It would take a lifetime to cure him, and I love a challenge.” The couple had two sons, Pierre and Jean. He also had a son, Daniel, with Sylviane Agacinski, a philosophy teacher who later married the French political leader Lionel Jospin, who later married Marguerite Aucouturier, who was already married to Jacques Derrida, who was his own grandpa, as he conclusively proved in “Of Grampatology,” the sequel to “Of Grammatology.”

As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a professional soccer player. Soccer’s loss was philosophy’s disaster, and Mr. Derrida spent the rest of his life kicking Socrates, James Joyce, Shakespeare and everybody but Nazis instead of a leather spheroid. He also admitted to watching way too much television, happily gazing slack-jawed at everything from news to soap operas, and pestering Ms. Aucouturier to buy absolutely everything he saw advertised.

Late in his career, Mr. Derrida was asked, as he had been so often, what the hell deconstruction was. “Why don’t you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?” he replied, frostily, to a reporter in a 1998 interview. “Deconstruction requires work. If deconstruction is so obscure, why are the audiences in my lectures in the thousands? They feel they understand enough to understand more.”

“I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,” the reporter admitted later. “But it was obvious he didn’t either, so that kind of evened things out. And ‘audiences at my lectures in the thousands’? Please. Come on. I guess he couldn’t count any better than he could read or write.”

Asked later in the same interview to at least take a wild stab at defining deconstruction, just for the hell of it for once, Mr. Derrida said: “It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied.”

For the first and only time in his life, Mr. Derrida’s readers and several generations of college students knew exactly what he meant.

Friday, September 17, 2004

Rocking the ballot box

Alice Cooper’s Political Makeup
By Richard Leiby
The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 24, 2004; Page C03
No more Mr. Nice Guy: Alice Cooper, a shock rocker back in the old days and now a fan of President Bush, says rock stars who’ve jumped on the John Kerry bandwagon — Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen among them — are treasonous morons.

“To me, that’s treason. I call it treason against rock-and-roll, because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics,” the 56-year-old told the Canadian Press news service as he embarked last week on a 15-city Canadian tour.

Never one to avoid self-examination, Alice (aka Vincent Damon Furnier) added: “If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.” (We think he meant watching C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” or maybe he meant perusing The Washington Postand The Wall Street Journal, but either way you get the idea.)

“Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn’t already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that’s a good reason right there to vote for Bush.”


See also Denis Leary, No Cure For Cancer:
“Don Henley's gonna tell me how to vote? I don't f****** think so, okay? I got two words for Don Henley, Joe F****** Walsh, okay? Thanks for calling, Don. How long's your pony tail now?”

Of course, maybe Ms. Cooper/Mr. Furnier is disenchanted with the electoral process because of the selection of candidates.

As Alice himself sang in “Elected,” released as a single prior to the 1972 election (and given how that turned out, maybe Cooper wouldn’t have been a bad third-party alternative) and included on 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies LP (Cooper’s biggest seller):
I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice
I wanna be elected
A Yankee Doodle Dandy in a gold Rolls-Royce
I wanna be elected
Kids want a savior, don’t need a fake
I wanna be elected
We’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make
I wanna be elected, elected, elected
I never lied to you, I’ve always been cool
I wanna be elected, elected, elected
I gotta get the vote, and I told you about school
I wanna be elected, elected, elected


[fake Walter Winchell interjection: “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. The candidate is taking the country by storm.”]

Hallelujah, I wanna be elected
Everyone in the United States of America
We’re gonna win this one, take the country by storm
We’re gonna be elected
You and me together, young and strong
We’re gonna be elected, elected, elected
Respected, selected, call collected
I wanna be elected, elected

Given that Cooper felt this way and restrained himself from running, one has to conclude that although some of his views might seem objectionable, he’s smarter than Ralph Nader.

Which isn't saying much.

This presidential election offers a stark choice: a rich white guy who went to Yale and belonged to Skull & Bones, or a rich white guy who went to Yale and belonged to Skull & Bones.

(And since we’re drawing parallels with the 1972 election, see also Michael O’Donoghue’s “Freedom Of Choice,” National Lampoon, Volume 1, # 29, August 1972. You’ll have to look this one up yourself — it’s not online anywhere that I could find.)

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

You've never been where?

Yes, the 1970s are a rich and fecund morass of pop effluvia . . . fecund like a compost heap. But recent efforts to identify the “worst ever” rock song from that decade are kind of hampered. The problem is the “rock” adjective; kind of limiting, since it pretty much demands some kind of Rocking Out passage or a Killer Riff movement or some such signature rock and/or roll moment of released tension roaring out of a Marshall stack with a mess of distortion and whatever other effects can bolster its assaultive power. A lot of the very worst pop songs aren’t really “rock” songs, nor are they rock and roll songs; they’re more like tuneless power ballads with saturation-level-high-fructose-corn-syrup-sweetening and extra bombast.

Some candidates:
1. Paradise by the Dashboard Light. Meat Loaf.
Yes, it is tempting to just list all the tracks on Bat Out Of Hell and leave it at that. But while accurate, that’s way too easy. This one song distills everything rotten about that record in one gooey, distasteful wad. Here are all the ingredients of enduring crapulence: too long, too many molto pretensioso “movements,” that stupid baseball play-by-play/seduction montage sequence two-thirds of the way through and the oh-so-clever “prayin’ for the end of time” twist at the finale. It’s like just one crappy rock song wasn’t enough; Jim Steinman had to write four and then mash them all together into one painfully swollen lump from which there was — and remains — no escape.

2. It’s Still Rock ’n’ Roll To Me. Billy Joel
Sure, everything Billy Joel ever recorded was overly calculated, labored, dishonest, faked schmaltz. But this thing is like proto coot-rock, or something. Some guy born too late and without the compositional chops to be Irving Berlin, who didn’t understand the rock idiom sufficiently to write three-chord stompers was so unsettled by “New Wave” or whatever the hell you want to call that late ’70s/early ’80s pop mutation that he wrote a cranky, dyspeptic sneer-fest about his inability to understand it. And it wasn’t even funny.

3. Lonely Boy. Andrew Gold.
Not a bad hook, I’ll grant you. But the lyrics suck what little enjoyment might result from the cheap but satisfying riffing out of the enterprise. Boy is born (on a summer’s day, 1951). His parents vow to take care of him, and do. Two years later, kid sister. Boy sulks for 16 years, until the winter of 1969 when he leaves home, screeching vituperation at his — no doubt — utterly baffled parents. Sis gets married, has child. Where exactly is the tragedy here or the trauma that would’ve made Mr. Gold such a tragically lonely boy?

4. I’ve Never Been To Me. Charlene.
The title of the song makes it look like an postally abbreviated statement: I’ve never been to Maine. The song itself makes a lot less sense than that. “I’ve been undressed by kings / And I’ve seen some things / That a woman ain’t supposed to see.” We’re never told what it is that women undressed by kings aren’t supposed to see, and I’m just as glad.

5. The Night Chicago Died. Paper Lace.
But the thing that never made any sense to me about this was the first line: “Daddy was a cop / On the east side of Chicago.” East side of Chicago? Isn’t that Lake Michigan? That ridiculous mistake almost salvages the song, because it suggests a cop from a 1930s Warner Brothers B movie dog-paddling and looking for gangsters. “Alright, O’Malley, enough of your shenanigans. Even if Capone’s running bootleg liquor across the lake, you’ll not catch him by swimming. Now dry off and go find me some racketeers.”

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Random synapse firing

How long must we endure the ducking, prevaricating, self-justification and nonsensical blather of Howell Raines? Every time he strikes a keyboard, he's just digging that hole deeper. And because he refuses to take responsibility for his failure, it becomes easier, at least, to understand how the Jayson Blair mess happened. If Raines is this delusional about how that happened ("it was the culture at the paper . . . it was the rush for deadline scoops . . . it was 9/11 . . . it definitely wasn't some cracker moron asleep at the switch and dreaming of righting the wrongs of 400 years of poor race relations by relying on a drunk lying crackhead") it isn't surprising it did.

And now, we have yet more plafoodoo to endure wherein he tries to somehow connect his slamming the good ship New York Times into an iceberg with the help of Jayson Blair with fly-fishing; that's right, Raines is writing a book for people who weren't infuriated enough by his many thousand words' worth of "it-was-everybody's-fault-but-mine" in The Atlantic Monthly. Yet again, "Caught In My Fly" seems like the most appropriate title for his forthcoming book, which we can only hope suffers exactly the same fate as Jayson Blair's Burning Down My Master's House, now languishing in 99-cent remainder bins everywhere.

* * * * * * * * * *

Madonna would now like to be known as Esther. Yet she still lives a good part of the time in England. She used to spend a lot of time in Miami. Maybe she'll be spending even more time there . . . although probably in a different part of Miami than she used to haunt. Guy Ritchie has announced he will now be called "Myron Lefkowitz," and will shortly stop making feature films in order to concentrate on retiring from his new career in the pants business.

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Get the hook

What is it about the confluence of being male, turning 40, fishing and the compulsion to write about all three? Is there some testosterone-tripped genetic switch that flips when a guy turns 40 that causes him -- like the force that drives spawning fish back up a river to where they were hatched -- to suddenly need to write simply yet poetically about noble, bedrock truths wrested from a big two-hearted river . . . or even a dinky, gutless creek? A certain kind of guy turns 40 and suddenly can't wait to max out his credit card acquiring thousands of dollars' worth of olde-timey trout-snagging gear, then drive at top speed to the nearest (or the most impossibly remote and inaccessible) river, creek, stream, high-speed drainage canal or ditch, wade into it, stand there in a pair of rubber pants and start waving his rod around while wistfully pondering the magnificence of God’s creation, the vicissitudes of life, the pratfalls of modern existence, the bittersweet lessons acquired as the wisdom of age is slowly and inexorably traded for the brash vitality of youth as a wily trout eludes capture in a dance as old as yadda, yadda, yadda . . . ?

And those are only steps one and two. Step three is squeezing a pencil or punishing a keyboard (preferably on a battered-but-unbowed manual Remington) to set down these plangent apercus in simple, declarative sentences that are supposed to have the powerful depth and unhurried, poetic cadence of a Montana trout stream, but which usually read more like random submissions from the Hallmark slush pile.

Publishers must have realized a few years back that greeting-card "philostophy" about fishing is one of those evergreen genres that will always sell. The audience for this kind of book is either endlessly gullible, so forgetful it can read the same book over and over again without realizing it, or endlessly renewed as each year’s batch of newly-minted 40-year-olds decide fish are probably the best guides through the shoals of middle age.

There's a subgenre of books about sports that belong in this endlessly replicable category, too. In the United States, they're always thoughtful ruminations on the essential qualities of the American soul as expressed through baseball. They’re gentle, lyrical, self-consciously poetic and a lot like baseball itself: slow-moving, frequently dull, take way too long to get to the point and seem like they're a lot more fun to perpetrate than they are to consume. Sadly, however, books about baseball as a metaphor for life in the United States of America aren't punctuated by people trying to sell hotdogs, beer, peanuts or anybody playing choruses of "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" on a wheezing Wurlitzer through a crummy PA system.

In Canada, it's hockey books. You can slap just about anything about people chasing a puck around on a slab of ice and hitting each other between a pair of covers and it’ll earn out its advance and probably turn a profit. Without hockey books and government largesse, there wouldn't be a Canadian publishing industry. As baseball books aim to serve as a mirror for the American national character, hockey books aim to locate and limn the Canucklehead soul. Canadians invented an entire sport so they could box wearing skates, and that's supposed to indicate something about the essential nature of Canadians . . . although what it seems to indicate is that they're lousy boxers who'd prefer to be figure skaters, and figuring out what that indicates is probably a job for a clinical psychologist.

Americans get characterized as being bellicose and overbearing, and the sport they define themselves with is a pastoral, bucolic game that moves very slowly and in which there’s no physical contact. Canadians, quietly, internally proud of their "peace, order and good government," their international status as postwar referee/peacekeepers and their legendary politeness find their essential nature in a sport where dopey thugs with rage-management problems are celebrated and players who skate well are derided variously as "fancy," "European," or "gay."

But we were talking about fish. Books in which fishing is presented as a means to understand male aging are legion, with more appearing every year. This idea that the greatest truths of human existence can be grasped while waiting for a fish to try to swallow a fake bug on a string has been around for a long time. The first book of its kind was, of course, The Compleat Angler, written by Izaak Walton and first published in 1653. Three hundred and fifty years later, it's still in print. In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, the last two chapters of which are the first and second halves of "Big Two-Hearted River," which also uses fishing as means to greater truth and insight, but less prescriptively than Walton. Fifty-one years passed. Retired English teacher Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It appeared in 1976.

I haven't read The Compleat Angler. In Our Time and A River Runs Through It are both fiction, and they’re both by people who know how to write, and how to write something worth reading and how to connect with a reader without it mattering whether the reader even likes fish, let alone fishing. There should be a requirement that anybody who wants to write about fly fishing except in a purely instructional way should first have to read both Maclean’s and Hemingway's work on the subject. And — what the hell — Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America, too. After that, if they think they can do better, they can have a shot at it. But an editor ought to make the final judgment.

But that rule’s not in effect, unfortunately. So after Maclean's book, 18 years went by, and, in 1994, Howell Raines — apparently bummed for some reason about being The New York Times’s Washington bureau chief, wrote Fly Fishing Through The Midlife Crisis. Nothing wrong with that. Fishing helps you, you want to write about it, go right ahead. But then Anchor published it, and suddenly every middle-management Babbitt moping about having peaked five years earlier without realizing it attached himself to the thing like a lamprey. A friend of mine came up with a much better title for Raines’s book: Caught In My Fly.

(And now that Raines has quit the Times, he’s — what else? — gone fishing. Maybe Rick Bragg’s out there with him, both of them waggling their rods around, snagging each other's shirts with their lovingly hand-crafted Creagle McSquintly's Wee Hours Boofer Bear™ lures, swilling George Dickel from hip flasks as they work out the details for a co-written book: Reelin’ In The Years: How Two Soggy Crackers Got Caught, Cleaned, Pan-Fried and Eaten Before They Knew What Hit Them . . .and it's more likely an eager, anonymous kid will bait Bragg's hooks, cast his lines, reel his fish almost all the way in, then summon Rick to actually jerk them out of the water and into the landing net.)

In 1995, novelist/screenwriter Paul Quarrington wrote Fishing With My Old Guy, explaining it this way: "I have a theory about the transitional nature of a human life, how one needs someone to facilitate passage, how this is often accomplished by an elder under the pretense of imparting the minutiae of some art or craft. Some anglers, near the end of their days, have acquired that knowledge, which they can then share with the young ones. Fishing is an area that can, even in this decidedly unmagical day and age, still produce magi. I call them Old Guys."

Others call them Elves, Curmudgeons, Mugwumps, Codgers or Coots. Some call them "Grandpa."

No less a personage than faux-folksy radio raconteur Stuart Maclean, Canada's own Garrison Keillor manqué, deemed Quarrington’s fish story "a book of great heart. It is also a book that will make you laugh out loud, and when everyone is asleep and you are still reading, you will nudge the person beside you and say, 'Are you awake? Can I read you one more thing?'"

At which point, said person will snarl, "I am now, and no you can't. Please. No more twee crap about bits of fishing tackle with names that sound like Tolkein characters. No more wry observations. No more avuncular chuckling, eyebrow-cocking, twinkling or wistful gazing into the middle distance. One more word about fish and the men who love catching them too much and you’ll be sleeping with them.”

But the thing must have sold better than anything else Quarrington wrote, because by 2001 there was Fishing for Brookies, Browns & Bows: The Old Guy's Compleat Guide to Catching Trout. And it’s probably just a matter of time until The Even Older Guy vs. The Trout: This Time It’s Personal.

Until then, baffle yourself with Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life by Mark Kingwell. The Penguin catalog copy says, "The philosopher who wrote Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness may have found something better than Plato or Prozac — fly-fishing. The family joke was that Mark Kingwell would skip 'The Weekend' — two days of trout fishing with his father and two brothers. Fishing is stupid, believed Kingwell, scarred by his earlier, dismal experiences with the sport. When he finally agrees to accompany his father and brothers, he huffs, 'I will sit in the back of the boat reading The Critique of Pure Reason, but I will not fish.' What a difference two days make. Over the course of the weekend, Kingwell comes to understand fly-fishing's appeal, and he learns that it's not just about the fish. A celebration of male companionship and the one that got away, Catch and Release is a wonderful slice of life from an unlikely angler."

"Slice of life"? Well, I'm sure its a slice of something, although probably not life, at least, not as most of us would understand it. Never mind that the copy's tenses meander all over the place, or that it seems to promise a celebration of a male companion that got away, or that it describes remaining perfectly still and quiet and holding a rod as a "sport" (if fishing is a sport, what does that make chess?) . . . ponder instead how strenuously Kingwell is striving to turn himself from an overweening, self-consciously "with it" philosophy professor into a tenure-limpet, clinging to his suburban satellite campus sinecure: One minute, he's repurposing his unresearched, subjective musings into books offering Introduction to Philosophy, E-Z-Read-R Classics Illustrated version. An instant later, he's written Squeeze and Release: Caught In My Fly II (or, if you prefer, any of the following:) Still Waters, Deep Thoughts: The Comfort Of My Rod, Maybe Dick, Leviathan (“What? Who’s Thomas Hobbes? Really? Damn!”), The Fishin’ Semiotician, Ikhthus Agonistes, or Live Bait: Musings Of A Hip Wader. From hipster doofus to crusty uncle in a single trout season.

The only time I've ever gone fishing and not figured there was something better I could have been doing was with my wife's uncle about seven years ago. His family started and ran a big commercial fishing operation in British Columbia for years, and he still goes out to catch salmon just about every day. (When he's not catching salmon, he's catching prawns.) Before I could marry my wife, we had to spend a day going after salmon with him; it was a west coast familial rite of passage. We woke up at four a.m., drove across town, were on the water by five a.m. or so and done by eleven, having caught a number of fish. His boat is a kind of minimal fishing machine, built to catch fish and do nothing else. That's exactly what it did, even on a morning where every other person he talked to on the radio was fishless, including a charter operator with a boat full of perplexed and increasingly annoyed tourists.

That kind of fishing I could understand, more so because it was the first step in a process that included smoking and eventually eating the fish as well as catching them, and because he’d dedicated his entire life to it, and it was inspiring to see somebody who voluntarily did in retirement something that had been his job since he was a kid.

But the trout kind of fishing where arrested adolescents hit 40 and decide the best way to spend their remaining time on earth is to match wits with fish, the kind that makes people reel in simple stream-borne truths and modest book advances for regurgitating hokey bromides in a damp idyll -- the appeal of that kind of fishing is a mystery.

"Well . . . a lot of madness has flowed under our various bridges since then, and we have all presumably learned a lot of things . . . and my feeling for national politics is about the same as my feeling for deep-sea fishing, buying land in Cozumel or anything else where the losers end up thrashing around in the water on a barbed hook."—Hunter S. Thompson, "The Great Shark Hunt," Playboy, December 1974

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Da Ya Think I'm Wretched?

Rod Stewart is now a crooner of some kind, and, more remarkably, nobody seems to be calling him on it. One minute, boomer CD players are rotating Bruce Hornsby, Marc Cohn and every other faceless adult contemporary one-hit nobody with another sound-alike pleasant-enough-I-guess chunk of aural wallpaper, the next it's their parents' music, only performed by people who haven't got the chops for it.

Why the refusal to just listen to the actual old recordings of the classic American popular music canon -- the standards? Why do that? I blame Linda Ronstadt. Some of you may remember her attempt to go "new wave" in the late 1970s by recording clueless, over-produced covers of about a half-a-dozen Costello/Attractions numbers. The effort flamed out, mainly because it was transparent, ill-conceived and anybody who cared already knew the Costello versions, and could tell immediately they were better.

Linda didn't let that misstep get her down, though . . . putting that pain behind her, she switched direction abruptly and took a page from the Firesign Theatre playbook: "Forward -- into the past!" Linda, being a joke, was unable to take one or recognize one: she corralled poor old Nelson Riddle into arranging a mess of venerated musical chestnuts with an orchestra and tried to turn herself into a combination facsimile of Patti Page, Gogi Grant and Kay Starr, murmuring breathily while leaning against a lush bank of strings, her ample frame stuffed into a strapless rayon sheath -- say hello to Linda Ronstadt, cocktail wiener . . . or maybe that's sausage.

But these days, Linda (or her management -- whoever thought that move up) looks visionary. Exhuming the Tin Pan Alley classics has now become the standard career third-act/fourth-quarter gambit to stay in the spotlight and sell a few more records.
Too old to rock and roll? Put on a tuxedo or cocktail dress, climb onto the cabaret's postage-stamp stage, settle your hip into that dent in the baby grand and pretend to be all world-weary. What used to be world-weary is now just kind of post-detox drug-and-alcohol-damage gappiness. But if don't know the difference between having drunk too deeply from the well of life and just plain having drunk too much . . . or being too drunk too often, well, they probably come across much the same.

Rod Stewart's last good record was probably Never A Dull Moment. I'll accept the singles "Stay With Me" and "You Wear It Well," too. But from Atlantic Crossing onward, things got worse and worse. The wretched, desperate clumsiness of everything else makes his early work seem like a series of lucky flukes. More likely, it seems as though the Faces got work out of Stewart that nobody else could.

Stewart's producers Richard Perry, Phil Ramone and label-owner Clive Davis seem to have figured that nobody bought Bryan Ferry's collection of old cabaret numbers and used it to compile the repertoire for Rod Croaks The Classics, doubtless an endless series. It's eerie how many selections the projects have in common.

Just as tough to understand as not one but two volumes of Rod Stewart mangling material he's not nearly up to: Bette Midler's teaming up with Barry Manilow to try to turn herself into Rosemary Clooney. Who asked her to do this? Why Rosemary Clooney? The poor woman had a tough enough life. Now she has to keep suffering for the sake of some bizarre Continental Baths reunion project. The idea that an unabashed schmaltz-and-syrup-extruder like Manilow would choose Rosemary Clooney's back catalog seems kind of funny, though. Is this his bid for respectability or legitimacy? Is this Barry's idea of getting "tough"?

If you wanted to listen to Rosemary Clooney, wouldn't you just listen to Rosemary Clooney, rather than Bette Midler pretending to be Rosemary Clooney? It's not like her recorded work is hard to find. Amazon offers 122 Rosemary Clooney albums for sale.

This Midler record and the two Stewart efforts seem like introductions to the classic canon for people who can't just figure out how to listen to this stuff on their own. What I don't get is why there has to be some kind of special E-Z version of something as innately likeable as pop standards. It's not like it's tough or challenging to listen to Sinatra's Capitol recordings, or Tony Bennett's work, or Ella Fitzgerald or Blossom Dearie or [your favorite pre-rock-and-roll performer here]. The CD boom ensures that all this stuff has been hauled out of vaults, tidied up sonically, remastered and made available. If you're just curious and unwilling even to order The Best of Frank Sinatra's Capitol Years through Amazon, there's always downloading.

Why would there be any trepidation or resistance anyway? It's not like any of this material is in any way challenging or confrontational or assaultive. The chord progressions are swell, the melodies all use only the pretty notes, and the lyrics are models of poetic concision and subtly calibrated emotional truth. This is work composed by the Gershwins and Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers & Hart -- people who wrote popular music -- not Edgard Varese. Also, these are standards -- everybody and his dog has cut them in every imaginable configuration pretty regularly for 80 years and then some. That ought to make it easy for even the dimmest, most drug-battered ignoroid to find a version to imitate.

The only people who'd figure the Rod Stewart take on the pop music canon was worthwhile are people for whom the songs themselves are a revelation. And a lot of his choices are wonderful songs. It's hard to make them truly ugly.

But it's easy to cheapen, degrade, disrespect and devalue them through a combination of exploitive greed and stupid arrogance and lacking a clue about what to do next in your sorry, meretricious career.

But face it, Rod: you'll never make up for "Tonight's The Night" or "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" or putting yourself in a Renoir on the cover of A Night On the Town, never mind the mess you made of "Downtown Train." Why make God even angrier by soiling the achievements of Tin Pan Alley's finest? Rod Stewart demonstrates, finally and totally and in a completely negative way, that it really is the singer not the song.

Madame Tarantino?


(Left to right) Wayland Flowers, Madame, Quentin Tarantino


Don't know if this means anything, and there probably aren't many people who could appreciate it (well, okay, possibly Tom Servo or Crow T. Robot, but they're fictional and not even on television anymore).

Quentin Tarantino was inescapable recently, turning up all over everywhere in a promotional frenzy trying to push Faster, Urma Thermal, Kill Bill Volume II. Each time I saw him, I kept thinking he looked like somebody else, although I couldn't say who, exactly. At least not at first. But then it came to me.

Quentin Tarantino is midway through turning into "Madame," the papier-mache Tallulah-Bankhead-based ventriloquist's dummy operated by the late Wayland Flowers.

This goes beyond spooky. Who'd have guessed that Tarantino's smirky po-mo/irony-impaired mania for 1970s pop-culture detritus would turn him into an example of same?

I'd say it's like an episode of The Twilight Zone, but when I write that, I can hear Quentin Tarantino saying it, and that makes me shudder.

A couple of days after I wrote this, I was sorting through a pile of old SPY magazines, and there, in a late one (mid 1990s, post-Carter, post-Andersen, and probably post-Hendra) was the "Separated At Birth" feature, in which Mr. Tarantino's similarity to Madame was highlighted.

So I guess, like George Harrison with "My Sweet Lord" and "He's So Fine," I must have had that similarity stored somewhere in my head and had it reassert itself during the Kill Bill PR saturation bombing campaign.

We were never told Madame's surname. I always assumed it was Flowers, after her operator. But it's possible she was Madame Tarantino.