Tuesday Morning Theme For Japan's Pacific Coast

I can't tell if I'm being ironic or not.

Pick Up the Pieces

Well, I was about two edits away from completing posts about the ongoing guitar-solo battle and America buttoning up its brownshirt - but given current local circumstances, both those topics seem, if not irrelevant, low-priority.

When the quake hit Friday afternoon, it took me about 20 seconds to realize this was not an average tremor: instead of the normal side-to-side shimmy, the ground was undulating in an unnervingly fluid manner. That it hadn't stopped after 20 seconds was an even worse sign. Not wishing to die pancaked under concrete, I dashed out into the street. I couldn't immediately tell quite how frightened I should've felt: my neighbourhood is populated largely by stoics, slackers, and seniors, all of whom were stolidly standing around watching the streetlights & stop signs rattle and groan. Taxi cabs and bicyclists obstinately struggled to steer straight as the asphalt warped beneath their wheels. Was this a fucking disaster or not?

Once the shaking stopped, I ran back inside to find my apartment totally intact - a minor miracle, considering its seemingly-shoddy construction and our laissez-faire approach to storage. Returning to my computer, I noticed my Caltech scientist friend had just logged on. I broke the news, to which he replied with the appropriate amount of incredulity:

me: Dude, we just had the biggest earthquake I've ever felt.
Scientist Friend: !!!
you ok?
hasn't shown up on my feed yet
me: No, I mean like JUST hit.
Scientist Friend: oh shiiiit

We then spent the better part of an hour swapping links & updates as information began flooding in... 7.9, epicenter near Sendai, 8.8, tsunami warnings, 8.9, the largest earthquake in Japan's history. This was a fucking disaster.

Wow, what an grossly unsuitable turn-of-phrase I just used. "Flooding in..." Less than an hour after the quake, I sat slack-jawed & stupefied watching live coverage of tsunamis bulldozing whole towns along the Pacific coast. There's no point in trying to describe the sight. Not only has the 24-hour news cycle chiseled these images into everyone's retinas, but there's no joy in, uh, eloquently and succinctly relating the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of people.*

Having had my fill of calamity-porn infotainment, I stepped out for some fresh air. The streets were eerily empty for a Friday evening. With mass transportation at a stand-still, everyone was still stuck at work. The signs of catastrophe were quietly obvious, as most shops were either shuttered or sweeping up their shattered wares. (As unpleasant as it is clearing away smashed liquor bottles or ceramics, I can't imagine how exasperating it must be to tidy up a pachinko parlour after an earthquake - ball bearings all over that sumbitch...) A couple of billboards threatened to fall from their perches. The ferroconcrete facade of one shop had collapsed, exposing the building's dainty wood skeleton. But mercifully, Koenji had escaped the quake largely unscathed.

Later Friday night, my wife & I were interviewed by CBC Radio as "eyewitnesses" to the disaster. We were dramatic enough to keep our account interesting, while at the same time emphasizing how little we could justifiably complain. Our misadventure wasn't a pale shade of the terror experienced by residents up north. We were speaking from a heated apartment with hot coffee and clean socks - how bad off could we really be?

Yesterday was a gorgeous blue-sky day with the resiny chill of early spring in the air. A friend & I enjoyed a lengthy hike across Western Tokyo to cure ourselves of cabin fever and the lingering stink of apocalyptic presentiment. However, whatever cheerfulness we'd won during the walk evaporated upon arrival at a friend's house, where we learned that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor had just popped its top. Our immediate course of action was obvious: start drinking like a bastard and pray the jet stream would whisk any & all radioactive toxins up over Siberia, because fuck reindeer, man.

I was spurred to an early retreat home by sudden rumours of rolling blackouts and supply shortages. I must have been slow off the blocks because already there was not a slice of bread, not a carton of milk to be found in any shop I entered. Faced with such a depleted selection, many shoppers had opted for foodstuffs that would strike a penniless college student as grossly unhealthy: boxes of Frosted Flakes, microwave pasta, chocolate-covered potato chips, and enough six-packs to make the U.S. marine corps plotz. I suppose diabetes kills you slower than starvation.

Today, further steps towards normalcy have been made. Electricity, gas, and water are still running. Bread & milk are back on the shelves and the trains are on time. But again, I speak from the privileged position of the resource-greedy capitol almost 400km from the epicenter. The slowly-unfolding horror of nuclear meltdown continues, and the people of Tohoku are in desperate need of assistance. If you're so inclined, donations can be made to the Red Cross and Globalgiving.org. It may seem unlikely that a first-world nation would so be in need, but remember: this is a first-world whose debt is over twice the value of its GDP with a population so aged that it makes the SCOTUS look like spring chickens. If the West still wants someone to manufacture semiconducters and service the American national debt, then help is absolutely necessary.



* - Having neither a television nor the interest, I haven't really watched CNN outside of hotel rooms until this weekend - wow, I had no idea they were such a lousy network. Not "lousy" meaning "transparently propagandist," à la Fox News, just straight-up bad. They've got analytical prowess of a 10-year-old and the emotional tenor of Woody Allen after a bout of heavy drinking. The spectacle will no doubt reach its faked climax Monday night when Anderson Cooper will stroll around the demolished mise-en-scène where the news used to be, feeling the story at us. Ugh.

And I swear, come Monday, if Stewart or Colbert falls back on one goddamned Godzilla joke...

All Shook Up

Well, I'd have a lot more to say about this if there weren't still aftershocks rattling my apartment. Watching live footage of tsunamis wipe whole towns off the map in Miyagi prefecture. Absolutely terrifying. (Roland Emmerich really is a fucking pornographer, isn't he?)

8.8, they're saying - larger than the Great Hanshin Earthquake of '95, one of the largest in recorded Japanese history. Carl, hope all is well down your end of the country.

This planet is bullshit, man.

Squibbity-flabbity-doo!

Labour's last stand in Wisconsin, turmoil in Libya, unsubstantiated xenophobia in the financial sector - how much horror can one ingest during the first cup of coffee? How angry can you get at breakfast? For want of any meaningful contribution to the conversation (and to preserve what fewed frayed nerves I've left), I gladly pick up the gauntlet cast by Simon Reynolds for a li'l musical frivolity.

Great guitar solos! Man, what are the odds of anyone under the age of twenty-five joining this debate? If the Great Riff War of 2010 was troubled by the recent restriction of the guitar to a supporting role, then the solo is an expressive mode dead & buried for two straight decades. Perhaps the last memorable moment a guitar stepped front-and-center was Kurt Cobain's minimal reiteration of the verse melody in "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Certainly, guitar solos have forever been stained with the nut-bustin' excesses of '80s metal. Whether you're an eyebrow-arching ironist or an melodramatic raconteur, the human voice is an unmediated, more easily-understood means of expression. You're not going to talk through your guitar. (With due respect to the possible exception of Stephen Malkmus.)

Yet many of my favourite guitar solos came after the finger-sports Olympics of the 1980s. This is partially due to my age: 1990 was the first year I paid attention to contemporary music in a conscious way. Granted, the window hadn't quite closed on masturbatory machismo at that time. Slash & Kirk Hammett were unarguably the most popular guitarists on the planet, and the friend who first encouraged me to pick up the instrument was still spending his days deciphering the flurried fretwork of Steve Vai and Nuno Bettencourt. But such pyrotechnical playing was a bridge way too far for an eight-year-old still struggling to form a bar chord. It also struck me as a kind of silly - but silly in that awkward way that is totally unaware of how silly it actually is. If I was going to go silly, I wanted to enjoy it overtly.

Enter Primus. My parents, bless 'em, bought me The Beavis & Butthead Experience on cassette for Christmas '93. A bunch of my favourite bands were on the dodgy cash-in compilation (Nirvana, Anthrax, et al.), but what seized me by the cerebellum were the first two tracks on the second side: "I Am Hell" by White Zombie and "Poetry & Prose" by Primus. White Zombie were gloriously coarse, like Metallica deprived of any artistic pretense, and Rob Zombie had the most resolutely unpleasant voice I'd heard - mesmeric in its repulsiveness. (You can imagine how excited I was when I finally heard Ministry six months later.) But Primus were just baffling: a nasal redneck spitting syllables at auctioneer speed over the Ren & Stimpy house band. And what was up with the guitar solo (which hits around the 1:30 mark)...



This fleet-fingered loon was desperately snatching notes all over the neck and grabbing the wrong one every time. I had no idea what to make of it. I'd never heard playing so willfully unhinged.

...That is, until I discovered Marc Ribot and Frank Zappa. Evidently, Larry Lalonde's two greatest influences were even further out in orbit that he was. Ribot's playing, particularly his more restrained performances behind Tom Waits, was what I thought the blues should sound like: gnarled, lacerating, and not quite on key. His solo on Waits' "Way Down In the Hole" has long been a favourite.

And Zappa - well, the first spin of Zappa's Apostrophe(') was my Damascene moment as a young musician. As I've written before, "it defied every rule that Top 40 radio had imposed on my impressionable mind: it was virtuosic but hilarious, it was orchestral but whimsical, it was psychedelic but cynical." His guitar playing was stupefying, especially for its near-total aversion to rhythmic regularity. Many people find his three-volume instrumental tome Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar overly indulgent, but I still think the opening salvo of "Five Five Five" is a terrifying piece of modernist improv.



After my prog-head period, I began gravitating towards more textural, deconstructive guitarists like Kevin Shields and Ian Williams. Still, players whose concepts exceeded their chops can surprise with the occasional searing solo, like Lee Renaldo's fuzzy freakout in "Kissability" or Chris Woodhouse's confounding blitzkrieg during the late, great Mayyors' "Metro". And I have to admit, two-meter sentient phallus though he may be, Billy Corgan killed it during the solo on "Zero".

But, as so often comes to pass with rock history, you gotta go old school for honest-to-god, as-yet-unmatched genius. The solo that scorched, then salted the earth so that nothing could grow in its wake was Robert Fripp's six-stringed exorcism on Eno's "Baby's On Fire". There's hardly a more exciting three-minute instrumental span in rock music, and its serrated howl echoes in every other solo I've cited above. Every time I listen to it, I simultaneously want to throw off my instrument in futile disgust and to kick on the Big Muff and run through Lydian scales until my fingers bleed.



Your move, Mr. Neville.

Hermeneutic Hem & Haw

Boredom is time's parasite, suckling & growing stronger in tandem with its host. Boredom is the devil on time's shoulder, advocate of ill deeds for the sake of novelty. In its unending quest for surprise & sensation, the human brain finds a special joy in complication and, unfortunately, the greatest trick boredom plays upon the conscious is making convolution almost indistinguishable from experimentation & exploration.

This is the boondoggle of cultural theory: where does purposeful deconstruction end and abstract masturbation begin? Beyond what boundary does analysis dissolve into self-serving shit-talking?

The more time spent pursuing a given subject, connections will be made to, and curiosity will be invested in, tangential areas of interest. I've yet to meet a graphic designer who wasn't also an impeccable dresser, or an archeologist who preferred the confines of the classroom to digging in the dirt. This is how hobbies become careers and how nerds become critics & cultural theorists.

Post-modernism was given popular currency by Generation-Xers who made a fetish of their mass-media-steeped childhoods. More recently, the portmanteau hauntology has been claimed by counter-cultural early adopters in England, as it invokes a spectral, analog, left-leaning potential they glimpsed during their childhoods, subsequently trampled under thirty years of digital & neoliberal hegemony. Meanwhile, the current proliferation of horror-movie & black-metal theory is the obvious product of an early-'90s adolescence locked in basement bedrooms, losing sleep to John Carpenter flicks & Cannibal Corpse albums.

But at what point do the questions become excessive? Is Watchmen actually just fairly crap science fiction? Is The Big Lebowski really "about" anything? Wasn't G.G. Allin just a raging asshole? "Sometimes a pig is just a pig."

This month, I'm working on the sound design & musical score for a zombie movie by some friends of mine. Brief mention of this endeavor prompted an acquaintance to wax philosophic about how Japanese horror films, with their ubiquitous onryō, attest to a culture irredeemably haunted by a past from which it's been traumatically severed. By the time he unfurled his interpretation of Versus as an elegy for bushido, I had to meekly explain that, actually, the film I'm working on is just a slapstick punch-up between zombies having a picnic.

But I'm more often on the receiving end of such conversational shut-downs. My latest micro-screed about The Arcade Fire caught the attention of a former high-school classmate, who closed a decade-plus gap in correspondence with the following communiqué:

don't you think you're getting a little old for this "my opinion is the only opinion" crap?

Clearly, she's never heard of Robert Christgau. But to be fair, why would a margin-walker like myself care about mainstream rock stars receiving mainstream acclaim? As I elaborated in the comment thread, my problem specifically with The Arcade Fire has to do with their histrionic populism & pseudo-dissident posturing. Their pose as a "true alternative," as an irreverent fringe element convinces their audience that they - both the band and its fan base - are far more artistically fearless & politically radical than they actually are. The Arcade Fire are musical Soma, tethering listeners' imaginations to a beige middleground.

Mind you, the audience often doesn't care to be fooled into thinking themselves audacious or unconventional - they're perfectly happy with a toe-tappin' beat and a karaoke chorus, thank you very much. It'd be silly to expect dogmatic vanguardism of everyone, given that most people have concerns more pressing than music. It's disappointing, though, to see those who have as much as (if not more than) I invested in music being lazy as listeners to the point of belittling the sonically inquisitive. I was surprised, for example, to see Simon Reynolds chuck the following barb at cult icon Scott Walker:

I thought, yes, yes, a campaign petitioning Walker to stop recording angst-wracked avant-garde Masterpieces (that you never feel like playing) and write/sing/release an actual, you know, tune

...which is a silly complaint, not the least because we already know what Scott Walker courting the mainstream, dutifully trend-hopping, adopting & discarding musical personae, would sound like: David Bowie. And is anyone particularly pleased with the self-impersonating mediocrity into which Bowie and so many other over-50 rockers settled? Worse still, what sadist would doom Walker to spend his autumn years grudgingly running through the Belgian bagatelle "Jackie" for the millionth time? (Besides Marc Almond, of course.)

I also feel there's a slight double-standard at work, hinging on the Scott Walker brand. Let's imagine The Drift had been released as the new Swans album, exchanging Walker's honeyed croon for Michael Gira's croakier baritone. Walker's always been framed as a wounded bourgeois romantic and consequently never had much rebel cachet, whereas Gira has long been cast as one of rock's great primitivists. Thus, my guess is that those who wish Walker hadn't stretched conventions any further than "Plastic Palace People" would absolutely puke superlatives over The Drift, were it released under the Swans imprimatur.

I also suspect one of the reasons that Reynolds dislikes Scott Walker's recent work is that it's "inside baseball": the only people who will listen to a song from the perspective of Mussolini's dead mistress are the kind of people who actively seek such esoterica. Put another way: the only people who listen to Einstürzende Neubauten are the ones who can spell the band's name. Junk culture, on the other hand, can potentially infect a larger audience than any deliberately high-minded art-house fare. Most people don't know what "post-serialist composition" is, but many of them have heard it in The Shining, Shutter Island, even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

This is why junk culture is such a potent target for criticism. Art is never apolitical, ergo within even the most apparently banal & crass cultural detritus lurk multiple meanings & encrypted themes. Critical overreach can imbue easily-dismissed dreck with radical portent, as in Zizek's famous rendering of They Live! as covert Marxist screed. Intellectual rigor can also guard against more dangerous & reactionary subtexts: the Saw series, for example, was clearly an attempt to anesthetize American audiences to scenes of gruesome torture so that when Abu Ghraib blew up, it was met with raised eyebrows instead of shrieking outrage.

Critical overreach will not always produce useful or true results, but critical underreach never will. The only caveat is to temper evaluative exercise with a healthy heap of self-skepticism. As I've mentioned before, obscurantist indulgence is often a smokescreen for personal fancy, "a far more noble & ego-inflating position for a writer, rather than have to admit that, for reasons as inarticulable & irrational as emotions, they just don't dig something."

To the Delight of Caucasian Dullards Everywhere

Well, look who took home top prize at the music industry's annual closed-circle-jerk. Doubtlessly, such an achievement by a 1.3 million-selling band that has licensed its songs to major corporations, has performed at private functions for political insiders, and whose record label doesn't happen to have a corporate parent, will be hailed as another culture-industry equivalent to David taking down Goliath. Backslaps all around, you smug pricks!

Honestly, who is excited by this band any more? Scratch that - who ever thought an anemic, sphincter-clenching hybrid of "Once In a Lifetime" and "Born To Run" was a good idea? I swear, anyone thrilled by the Arcade Fire's coronation at the Cocksucker's Ball is such a boring, beige-souled, conservative bastard that they'd have similarly picked Tom Jones' "Green, Green Grass of Home" over anything off Revolver for Record of the Year 1966.

Etc.

And I thought the Super Bowl was Imperial America's own Nürnberg pageant even before I saw Fergie's absurd technotopian S&M outfit.

Fourth-and-ten macht frei!

In an unrelated story, I found the most perfectly succinct encapsulation of indie culture's nostalgic self-cannibalization:

Damn it I miss the 90's. I need to move to portland.

Commenting on this video, naturally. And evidently feeling no shame in re-viewing the most embarrassing & amateur music video by revered countercultural icons since "Dancing In the Street".

Oh, and why no long-form rants or raves recently? Honestly, the still-unfolding situation in Egypt is crushing my mind grapes, and there's already enough analysis - both good and batshit lunatic - to choke a pelican. Meditating upon (speaking of embarrassment) Jesus Jones' "Right Here, Right Now", Simon Reynolds addressed the awkwardness of watching the gears of history shift from a safe seat on the sofa:

he sings "right here right now, there is no other place I want to be"

but "right here" = sat on a sofa, in front of a screen

what's changed in the 20 years since that song is that the real-time mediation of politics has been amped up so drastically that there's an even more electrifying and involving illusion of witnessing History

which is where the temptation to pontificate comes in... because to analyse and "take a position" seems active, a contribution of some kind

...which, of course, it bloody well isn't. I'm not dodging American-made tear gas canisters whilst dragging armed goons off their camels; I'm sitting in a heated apartment wondering which Nick Cave record I want to listen to next. I'm in greater danger of being hit by a North Korean nuke than of being trampled in an anti-government riot. I'm sitting pretty. The temptation to pontificate is only so seductive because it involves no actual risk on my part. So I'm keeping my mouth fucking shut.

Gip, Gip, Hooray!

In (dis)honour of what would've been Ronnie's centennial, please take note of Tim Kreider's reflections upon Reagan's passing in 2004:

If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.

Today's Aphorism

Anyone who complains that their "tweet" was misread, has misread Twitter altogether.

Actually, you only live once...

John Barry's passed on. Now, the fear is that Morricone can't be far behind him, after whom we'll have lost every forward-thinking modernist film composer. Seriously, we'll be stuck with the likes of Rota plagiarist Danny Elfman and Hans bloody Zimmer, whose most impressive contribution to the art of film scoring boils down to BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHM!

At least Barry left us with an endlessly entertaining body of work.