Epigram, Unh! What is it Good For?

“Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There's been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. Had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches...”

David Foster Wallace, INFINITE JEST

“The next time you step on a cockroach, think about this: the tiny brain you just crushed is loaded with so many antibacterial molecules that it makes prescription drugs look like sugar pills...Cockroach molecules, while being so lethal to bacteria, aren't harmful to human cells...But many issues need to be hashed out before cockroach juice hits the drugstores.”

David DiSalvo, Mental Floss magazine

“We continue to call for a true peaceful uprising against the means of mass communication that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, contempt for the least powerful in our society, and for culture, general amnesia and the outrageous competition of all against all...TO CREATE IS TO RESIST. TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.

Stephane Hessel, INDIGNEZ-VOUS!

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2223

In Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), after a medical false alarm, Mickey (Woody Allen) has a crisis—he quits his job and nearly commits suicide, but then he wanders into a showing of the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP and finds it funny. He thinks, "What if the worst is true? What if there's no God, and you only go around once and that's it? Well, you know, don't you want to be part of the experience?"

Juliet Lapidos

Rufus T. Firefly: Lieutenant, why weren't the original indictment papers placed in my portfolio?

Bob Roland: Why, uh, I didn't think those papers were important at this time, your excellency.

Rufus T. Firefly: You didn't think they were important? Do you realize I had my dessert wrapped in those papers?

DUCK SOUP

Debatable

There's been a spate of articles about the Civil War as we've reached the sesquicentennial of the opening salvo on Fort Sumter. It's reopened the debate on race, as well as the nature of the union, and of course it's fascinating to think about why a black president was categorically impossible at the centennial point in 1961. But it made me think about the nature of debates now and then.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates just before the momentous election of 1860 were even more focused on slavery-related issues than our midterm elections were on the economy. And they established a pattern of official rules still used today for school debates, but they also were a good study in the rules of the game: finding isolate facts selected to buttress the case; appeals to emotion (usually fear) and ideology; invented facts and sometimes baseless assertions; and various levels of character assassination. Lincoln was very aware of being in a transitional realm between his moribund former party the Whigs and the emerging Republican party, and Douglas was aware of needing to alternately reassure and provide selective fearmongering for his Democratic base, which included Know-Nothings from the preceding years, arguably something like the Tea Party of the time in a way:

"The next question I put to [Mr. Lincoln] was, whether he was in favor of prohibiting the admission of any more Slave States into the Union. .. I asked him to answer me and you, whether he would vote to admit a State ...with slavery or without it... He did not answer that question. He dodges that question also, under the cover that he was not on the Committee at the time..."

And for every such thrust, Lincoln has a parry, and a similar thrust. Time-honored means keep repeating:

"The only concrete proposal in the President's plan that he'll roll out today is his plan to raise taxes, and I find that very unacceptable given we're several days out from tax day in this country. We don't believe that raising taxes is the answer here," - Eric Cantor, R-Va.

"As the President made clear, Democrats have a different view. We believe that the responsible approach is to make sure the wealthiest Americans contribute their fair share ..." - Harry Reid, D-Nev


What's interesting now, of course, is that all of the thrusts and parries are preserved forever on one or another web server just awaiting a query from all and sundry. Not only that, but there are a bevy of online debate sites operating within the classic structure, but adding the wrinkle of moderation by anyone, and participation by anyone. One difficulty now, as then, is distinguishing which elements are ideological first, and which are primarily a matter of pragmatic manipulation. For instance, many Republicans oppose in particular higher tax rates for the wealthy or big business first and foremost because they believe that those who have achieved success deserve to keep every penny. They may or may not pay lip service to the supply side argument of the inherent putative benefit of the most prosperous getting more prosperous, more jobs, and more spending creating more jobs. And Democrats tend to believe that the wealthy are predominantly greedy and power-mad, and in need of trammelling. But they'll tend to talk about idealistic social programs they want to use all those tax-the-wealthy dollars for rather than their mistrust of Big Oil.

Wouldn't it be a treat to see a site like createdebate.com, with its nifty side-by-sides and results rollups, have a debate on the deficit plan between, perhaps, Paul Krugman and Robert Samuelson, with voting by various knowledgable parties?

There's no reason, however, you couldn't press them into service for other pressing issues like the recently posted "New Heinz Ketchup Packets Or The Old Ones?"...

The Return of Casey

“The action wasn’t groovy for the Endsville nine that day,

The beat was 4 to 2 with just one chorus more to sway,

And when old Cooney conked at first, and Burrows also sacked,

A nowhere rumble bugged up all the cats who dug the act.”

from Mad Magazine

It was with great, groovy joy that I attended a baseball poetry reading last week to kick off the 2011 baseball season. What a night: nine women reading an incredible range of poems, with a couple of token guys thrown in for good measure. The whole event was inspired and breathtaking. Highlights included Ann Menebroker's always thrilling triple plays and chin music, Peggy Kincaid's surprising rookie explosion on the scene with new work and riveting execution, and the ninth inning antics of home run slugger Viola Weinberg, resplendent in eye-gear that hinted at Winged Eel Fingerling, with verbal gymnastics and spoken jazz/rock to match. The seventh inning stretch featured one of the above mentioned dudes, who recited portions of about a half dozen variations on Ernest Thayer's Casey at the Bat, including my personal favorite, Mad Magazine's Cool Casey at the Bat. And then, as an extra innings treat, one of the women (whose name I must confess I don't have), who arrived late and didn't even hear the Casey Variations, took the batter's box and recited the original Casey at the Bat in all its amazing, dramatic glory! Ah, baseball bliss!

As I listened to her rendition of the great baseball poem, some memories came flooding back from many years ago, memories that I hadn't thought of in years. I actually began my performing life in elementary school, around the sixth grade, reciting Casey at the Bat. It must have been a school talent show. I remember getting up on the multi-purpose/cafeteria stage and emoting my way through a stirring rendition. The crowd went wild and I was hooked, setting out on a path of performance that I have maintained, although lately much less, to this day. At the time, I wasn't really that interested in baseball or any other professional sport; I loved to play, but never followed any sport. I can't say why I picked Casey at the Bat; it wasn't until 15 years later that I began to come under baseball's spell, eventually becoming hopelessly addicted after moving to Los Angeles, very close to Chavez Ravine.

And what happened after that was called Baseball Diary, a zine I published and edited, devoted to baseball and art (!), whose back issues will begin to be posted here in the next week, and whose new incarnation will also begin here within a few weeks. Play ball, indeed.

Snapshots

When you are around 60, there are certain things that are completely terrifying. One of them is that you have made the wrong choices in life, and now it’s too late to do anything about them.

- Henning Mankell

I'm painfully aware that I will never have another hit record ... Believe me, it took me years to get comfortable with that conclusion... But once I was comfortable, I could look around at my life and be pretty happy.

- Janis Ian

In April 1951 a woman probably thought, as her fourth child arrived, that he probably was as good a marker of her transition from Bohemian living to prosperous, suburban living as any. He was his grandfather's namesake due to his birthday being two days away, close enough under the circumstances.

In April 1961 the boy had left behind suburban living, that was gone as he entered fourth grade; the houses in his part of Tuolumne County were an acre or more apart, and the neighbors lived in a log cabin and brushed their teeth with salt and soda. The boy in that family, roughly the same age, was adept at catching rattlesnakes sunning themselves on the granite boulders in the fields. But the log cabin family seemed fairly stable; something was wrong in his own family. It was clear the marriage was in trouble, money was short, and his father had difficulty holding a job or sustaining a business.

In April 1971, the father had been dead for years, a casualty of bad habits. The boy had gone to college, and its fascination had been undercut by the erosion of the counterculture - higher education was just another means of co-opting some imagined natural state. The remnants of the Aquarian Age in Nixon's presidency appeared to be the results of the water-bearer dumping a huge vat of bleach over America, and for awhile most things seemed gray, desiccated bones were everywhere.

By April 1981, however, the thirty-year-old was still pursuing rock-n-roll dreams in Los Angeles. He was on the verge of a new career, though, and there was a girl...

April 1991 saw the man in a high-tech maelstrom, married and with a young daughter. Technical things made the day go quickly for a man well-established as a nerd in early life, but the singleminded ambition and acquisitiveness of his colleagues seemed oppressive.

Shortly before April 2001, his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and was undergoing aggressive treatment. The trio, happy and prosperous enough as the year began, faced an uncertain future.

April 2011 found the healthy couple with old friends exploring train cars a short distance from where the young rattlesnake hunter plied his skill. Their daughter was launching her career, making discoveries. It appeared that fate had conspired to smooth the rough edges, illuminate just enough the dark corners, and provide abundant entertainment along the way. And perhaps it wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine that each decade had its object lesson, its annealing factor. And perhaps that annealing is what keeps the terror at bay, but perhaps only for the fortunate.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

"... all music which has the power of purifying the soul affords a harmless pleasure to man."
- Aristotle, "On Music"

"Everything that pleases has a reason for pleasing..."
"The Beautiful is always strange."
- Baudelaire

I exchanged emails with a friend who saw Yusuf Islam's later output as less compelling than that of the heyday of the then Cat Stevens. I saw it the same way - but then started thinking about how thorny the problem of evaluating any such thing for someone else becomes, clear though your outlook on it might be.

Consider these two images:

Even considering that their subjects are completely different, is there something you could categorically say about their qualities of purification, pleasure, beauty, or strangeness? They both are fairly unmistakably American, and moreover probably to most, unmistakably in the canons of their respective creators, Thomas Kincade and Norman Rockwell. Both would be recognizable as very popular work. But there are clear divergences as well: the theme of the former is fairly vague, and has the feel of something you might see on a box of Christmas lights; and the latter clearly has a pretty specific theme, and doesn't have any obvious commercial orientation.

Now consider Robert Bechtle's Marin Avenue - Late Afternoon or many others, and contrast that with these two. What is it about that car, and that street, that has a sense of strangeness for me palpably greater than Rockwell's, and much greater than Kincade's? For the Kincade fan who might say, "I don't know art, but I know what I like", what might I say to him that would express a sort of continuum at one end of which is Kincade, and at the other Bechtle - or van Eyck, or van Gogh, or Duchamp, to somehow assign attributes to indicate some substance or profundity irrespective of taste?

Someone once said to me, in connection with a singer named Roger Whittaker, "I dare you not to like this guy!" He proceeded to play for my edification Whittaker's rendition of "Both Sides Now", during which I reflected that it would be hard for a competent singer to more effectively rob the song of its essence than he did. It actually distressed me, and made me quite sad for a while. But the source of my sadness was really that I heard Judy Collins' version, then quickly after, Joni Mitchell's original, well before having heard Whittaker's, and it was the negative contrast that colored everything. Had Whittaker written the song, and performed it exactly as he does, he would have been due no small songwriting kudos, and the fact that a Judy Collins did a more definitive performance than his would not have removed that much from the authorial glow. It was easier to consider the peculiarities of timing when I thought about Paul Siebel's song "Louise", and its power in the hands of Leo Kottke (a quick YouTube search reveals the de facto vote on which has "stuck".)

And yet there is fairly common agreement among at least critics on which is superior between the author's "Red Red Wine" and UB40's, Whittaker and Joni Mitchell, or Andy Warhol and Mr. Brainwash. But, even given limiting the criteria to originality or distinction, is it so obvious how to evaluate the various "You Really Got Me" versions, or Bechtle vs. Banksy, or Five Easy Pieces vs. Pulp Fiction? I know what I prefer instinctively for all of these, as surely as I can recognize a non-native English speaker or distinguish artificial banana flavoring from natural. But I'm not sure I would want to put much money on posterity's view of any of them a generation hence.

FAWMers March II: A Tale of Two Asses

“Light this day, light of joy! I say he who is sad

Must be turned away from this celebration.

This way let all hatred, all sorrow, be allayed;

They desire gaiety, those who celebrate the festivity of the ass.”

Anonymous medieval lyric, soon to be incorporated into my new song

“Do it for yourself. You have to love doing it. There is…no prize at the end of the road…the work itself is all that matters. Do the work because it’s what you HAVE to do when you wake up in the morning, not to get published, or to have fans or to have some bullshit [record contract]. Making a living in [it] is a nice benefit, but I would still be making the same [art] on my own if I weren’t getting paid to do it.” Artist Jeff Lemire

It was the tale of an ass leaving, and that same ass coming back. In between were several long, hard years and lessons. But before we get into that, I direct your attention to Spencer's post last week – I would pretty much agree with everything he said and encourage any songwriters out there to give this FAWM thing a try. Of course, it helps to have several other collaborators (most participants don't), but any way you do it, it's gonna be worthwhile.

The creative process is a funny thing. You never quite know if you're gonna finish what you set out to do, no matter how much you plan or what your track record has been. And of course, scariest of all, is you never quite know if what you come up with, even if you actually do come up with anything at all, will be any good. But if you concern yourself too much with those thoughts, you sometimes don't get anywhere.

At the end of January, Spence and I teamed up with two other songwriters in the hopes of tackling the FAWM challenge this year: write 14 songs in one month. We came up with a songwriting strategy: each of us would work on two songs with each of the other collaborators, and create one song entirely on our own, so that we would all end up working on seven songs apiece. This approach, if successful, would result in 16 songs, not 14, but we figured that would give us a couple of “extras” or give us some “wiggle” room if we didn't succeed in writing a song or two (illness, no visit from the muse, whatever).

I decided to write down a dozen or so possible song titles. The titles themselves had no connection to any actual song ideas; they were intended, rather, to be an “inspiration” point for whoever was writing the song. I sent the titles to the others. A few days later, Jack, one of the collaborators, came up with a “story-line” to also help us come up with song ideas. The songs could be based on the story or not; like the titles, it was intended to help but not constrict.

Jack requested to work on two of the titles I created, one of them being “The Ass is Back”. At that point, neither one of us had any idea what the song would be about. As February came upon us, I created titles for about a dozen songs, using some that I had already sent, and some inspired by what Jack had written, and it seemed like a good idea to actually have a “companion” title to “The Ass is Back”, so I threw in “The Ass is Gone” earlier in the song line-up to be a kind of precursor to “Back”, still having no idea what either of these would be “about”. The other collaborators then came up with the rest of the titles.

I was to work on the first of the Ass duo with Gary, the fourth collaborator. For various reasons that I won't go into right now, I had convinced the other three that I would only be writing lyrics, not music, for all “my” songs (with the exception, of course, of the one I had to do on my own). So I started thinking about just what a song called “The Ass is Gone” would actually be? Now the thing about FAWM is this: if you're actually going to finish 14 (or 16) songs in a month, you don't have a lot of time to think about things. Basically, I had to do my half of two songs a week for three consecutive weeks, and complete another song on my own. So you have to make some decisions pretty quickly and start working. I finally figured I'd do a story about a present day farmer, who lived just off Absalom Road, who was a proud man, not necessarily a bad man, but a man who had certain requirements in his life, and who demanded certain things of his wife. So the song became the story of how this man pushes his wife too far, and she leaves him, causing all manner of mishap, including the disappearance of some of his farm animals (i.e., his ass). How Gary could take this peculiar tale and turn it into the extraordinary blues number he wrote is a mystery only he can answer.

In any case, when we posted the song, a peculiar thing happened: it was stuck with a NSFW (Not Suitable For Work) label! We weren't exactly clear on what that meant, but it couldn't be anything good. Would other FAWMers shy away from it? Would it be banned from the FAWM “radio playlist”? And why was it given this label in the first place? Now I will admit this: the way the word is used might imply several meanings: an animal, a pejorative thrown at the wife, a sexual connotation. But the first intention and actual meaning was as an animal – in fact, a few lines before the title line, the lyric is “the goat is gone”. In any case, I couldn't spend too much time thinking about this, as I still had SIX songs to write!

As the month came to a close I began thinking about the song's “companion” piece. Should it have anything to do with the first song? And then it hit me in one of those “aha” moments: of course, the song should continue the farmer's story, but a few years later, after he has had a lonely time reflecting on what he did and why his wife left him. The lyrics for “The Ass is Back” were born and sent to Jack. And then another amazing thing happened: Jack took a COMPLETELY different approach to the music than I had considered, and he completely nailed it! And these, of course, are yet more reasons to participate in such an endeavor as FAWM – the exploration and discovery of creative moments that you couldn't ever imagine.

So “The Ass is Back” was posted and immediately hit with the NSFW label. Jack became enraged at this additional perceived insult, and started a thread on the FAWM sight that has resulted in over a hundred remarks. But to this date, NO ONE has commented on “The Ass is Back”, and it remains the only song we wrote that has that “distinction”. But it's okay, FAWM, we forgive you. The positives far outweigh this spat in the face. You're still the greatest. Seeya next year.

FAWMers March

Hail to the FAWM!

Just finished is eight years of a sort of vanity project writ large, February Album Writing Month, hosted at fawm.org. I was a little part of over 5000 "FAWMers", representing a significantly larger number of people that, of various backgrounds, individually and as collaborators, taking a stab a writing something like a song every couple of days during February.

The thing that is magnificent about this venture is that it more or less allows you to challenge yourself to simply produce. One of my favorite quotes from the busy FAWM forum last year was "March is for polish" - which I took to mean, "favor the completion of some song placeholder in all cases." Don't worry about warts, let that extra track go. But more than the peculiar pride associated with that completion, there has somehow been cultivated this community of people who, even given the limited time and fleeting nature of the entity, manage to feed each others egos in just about the right way.

For instance, someone invented a thread about tear-invoking songs. One poster said "Men don't cry but this was almost too close!" about a song with this lyric:

I come from a line of good Kings
I've got to follow them

- and truly the sense of the "king for a day" applied here not uniquely among the 10,000+ songs that were created last month.

It may well be that in the 19th century, when those observing trends like Victor Hugo's "fiction factory" were bemoaning the loss of the age of minstrelsy and the kings who supported them, Hugo's guild was presupposing the advent of the everyman cult of fanzines of the last half of the 20th. But then, you had to be on a mailing list to get one, and deploy a mimeograph and give one. Now the minstrels sing to the world with the use of few, cheap, and common tools, and that ubiquitousness could only come with the Internet era.

This is definitely a project about singers and songwriters - although not necessarily requiring singing - rather than someone looking for a carefully worked-out band arrangement.(I think of that as being associated more with the RPM Challenge.) The suggestion is to target a three-minute length for most songs, and that has always felt right - and it represents an interesting constraint. How can you present something with three or four chords and a basic melody that sounds somehow distinct? It's more the sort of challenge that applies to folk and country than jazz or classical, whose palette has always been bigger.

So hats off to the visionary FAWM creators and hosts that gave us this uniquely effective way to both challenge and stroke ourselves - and to all my fellow FAWMers who made the trip that much more interesting.