auto-pilot

I am sick as a dog.

The interesting part of being sick is the way it can make us examine the things around us that we normally don't view in the excruciating detail that somehow I am viewing things today.

Maybe it's the mixture of ibuprofen, ephedrine, caffeine and Airborne™ but certain details just pop out more to me when my head feels slightly dissociated from the rest of my body.

And yet, I can't seem to write about any of them.

Running on autopilot.

Suspicious Packaging

I've been doing sort of lazy research for a few years now about a phenomenon I refer to as a "cultural spike." A change in the perception of a culture brought about usually through the exposition of some artistic phenomenon by the major media outlets. (Think punk rock or grunge, here.)

If you look at a cultural timeline of my life (and probably the lives of the few of you reading this) there are, so far, only two real cultural spikes on that line; Punk in 1977 when I was one year old and grunge in 1991 when I was fifteen. The music, art, movies and writing that has meant something in my short time here is tied up with these two cultural blips. Seventies punk being a significantly larger blip than grunge but more on that later.

The gist of the "spike" is this: Culture is cyclical. And I don't mean culture only in regard to art/music/literature/film etc. I mean the whole of social thought and perception. Since the dawn of modern communication changes and shifts in mass culture have been telegraphed by art, music, literature, etc.

Long before science has the right to say that the earth is not the center of the universe, artists have the freedom to express themselves in ways that were up to that point relatively taboo. Michelangelois the forebear of Galileo, Picasso is the forebear of Einstein, etc. The artistic eventually reflects in the social and ultimately pays off in the scientific, etc.

The reality of the situation is not that artistic people only come out of the woodwork every so often and that their work is only great enough to be noticed by the populace at large every fifteen years. That idea is patently absurd.

However, the idea that the business of art and its effect on culture follow this kind of cycle seems pretty obvious given even the most cursory observation. Media finds relatively decent/valid art/music/etc. and markets it to the people who aren't so eagerly buying pop records and bad hip hop inspired clothing. Media markets the art of someone who wants to get paid to do what they think they are best at.

But how can media deliver an idea? And let's face it, most art/music/etc. is bound by some kind of idea. In general, they don't market the idea. They market the artist. More to the point, they market what the artist looks like. Anyone remember the rabid interest in the way grunge rockers dressed? How flannel ended up in Vogue and suddenly every kid from Rapid City to Tallahassee wore flannel and didn't wash their hair every day? Makes it kind of easy to imagine that someone might get upset at seeing their own personal style and wardrobe aped by millions. Might make you believe that your idea was ruined by the masses and that this idea no longer had any power. Might make you think you needed to react to your own idea. But how do you do that when you haven't even borne the first idea out to fruition? Most of the time you don't. Or at least you don't do it well.

Maybe it's better when your genius isn't discovered by the masses. Maybe you actually have more power in obscurity, anonymity than you do as a mega-star.

Think about it. Hip hop is so marginalized as an artform by its own success that it essentially has no power. It's moved on up to the East Side so well that it doesn't care about destroying the system anymore. It's part of the system now.

I mean, in general artists and musicians who get paid to produce are slaves to the company that pays them to do so. They don't want to have to go back to their day job, right? In the record industry, being signed to a major label will get music out to the most people but it also puts artists in debt by default. (Steve Albini wrote a pretty nice piece about this for some rag way back when...) Doesn't it make sense that art you'd pay to make for the sake of making it is usually better than music you have to make to get paid anyway? There's a big difference between aesthetic quality and technical quality. I don't think anyone would disagree that there are great technical guitarists out there that can't put a bit of soul into their own work. Just like there are records that are technically better recorded than the demos of the same songs but that somehow lack the raw power or feeling that the less professionally recorded demos possess.

Making art to sell effectively castrates your art by making the sale the ultimate end of the art. And they sell the art by sellingYOU!

By owning your artwork in the traditional way you've already made it impotent. Your own ego, the same thing that probably makes that art good has made it powerless the second anyone attaches the artwork to your physical appearance. Your ideas take a backseat to the jacket photo on the back of your novel, the member list inside your CD cover, the press kit sitting on the gallery's front desk, the website and its accompanying bio page. People want to buy you, your success and your confidence, the supposed product is a nice freebie that comes with the packaging. And these days, a lot of the art/music/etc. isn't even packaged! It's downloaded. It's not even physical. It doesn't actually exist in a physical world. The artists are the only products now.

We're ripe for a spike. It's inevitable. The only question that needs to be answered is whether the spike is controlled by the people or the people who collect our money.

Parallel Tracks

Baltimore based Celebration's self-titled debut builds on a set of relationships more than a decade old. Hardly an actual first record, the three members have been playing together in various configurations for years. Vocalist Katrina Ford and multi-instrumentalist Sean Antanaitis are married and have been making music together for 13 years; first in the frenzied, blood-drenched Jaks, the brooding, shambling Love Life and then Birdland, basically Celebration in duo form with sequenced, electronic drums. Dave Bergander provided the duo with first rate percussion in their Love Life days and returns in this most recent permutation. The record was produced by Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio fame, with whom Ford made vocal turns on their debut EP and who also produced both Love Life records. Still, for a team that should benefit from such familiarity, their reach in this instance seems to exceed their grasp.

Live, the band benefits from the visual dichotomy surrounding Ford and Antanaitis. He is seated, stoically performing all of the melody parts, piano, organ, guitar and bass while Ford lurches, shakes, wails, purrs and coos lyrics of love, anger, indignation and escape. They balance Ford's chaos fostering high priestess persona and her husband's studied, highly technical working of the musical special effects that allow her to woo audiences into her church with Bergander’s pace-directing percussion.

Songs on the record alternate between slow burn and fever pitch. The opening “War,” a stampeding battle hymn that rails against present world troubles, careers always forward, whirling as it goes, gaining momentum until it crashes into the wall and Ford’s “Got more guns than anybody” refrain. “Diamonds” slows down to funeral march pace and adds TVOTR buddy Tunde Adebimpe to backing vocals. “Holiday” incorporates Sitek’s atmospheric, effects-laden guitar but neither song is really paid back by their involvement, with both additions to the mix detracting from the balance the band walks so tenuously in their live show.

Sitek’s production can never quite convey to the listener what the band is capable of live. The guitar on “Foxes” is less audible than one would expect but on “New Skin” they come through brilliantly. Songs that sounded nearly perfect on the demos that Sitek committed to tape for Ford and Antanaitis’ Birdland are muddier, more sedate and less immediate on the Celebration full-length, interesting considering that band’s lack of a drummer.

Ford’s vocals have been interesting, to say the least, since her Jaks days and this record sees her reaching higher octaves. On previous records it would be easy to mistake Ford’s voice for a man’s, something that she never claimed as an insult in the past. This time around, she embraces the upper register of her voice, opting more often for squeals and coos as counterpoint to couplets and quatrains than for howls and growls, though they’re still abundantly present as well. The vocal acrobatics do everything for mood but do little but hinder attempts at full comprehension. But in the end, this record isn’t expressing meaning with words as much as it is pelting the listener with stormy atmosphere.

“Good Ship” rolls eerily out of Antanaitis’ pump organ and pitches and rolls with Ford’s lament joined by various members of TVOTR belowdecks. This is the one song in which the band really reaches beyond their excellent live show and succeeds in the studio. The additional vocals are powerful but the production keeps them germane to the overall topic of the song. This song SHOULD cap off the record but it doesn’t.

“Stars” a slower, claustrophobic version of Birdland’s “Stars Don’t Shine In Banks” (one of my favorite songs from those tracks) is tacked on at the end and served with an additional and almost extraneous percussion coda. The song itself isn’t bad despite its changes from the duo version, but its placement among the other songs feels off, anticlimactic.

The Celebration record does its best to convince you to go see the band live. And really, that’s all it should do. It’s not a perfect image of the band’s inexplicable, teetering yet balanced visceral and technical performance but it comes as close as I think anything less than a fully rendered, live DVD of the band on stage can get to actually being in the room with Ford demanding that her audience be captivated in the grip of the ceremony she is presiding over.

And now background:

I have been acquainted with the people in this band for years. We have been friends and we have been less than friends. In the past I have been quick to give glowing praise to their work. Now, with us speaking irregularly if at all, I question my ability to accurately review their work. Was I too ready to lavish praise upon people who I admired and felt close to? Or am I more likely to be overly critical when I have less convivial feelings about my relationship to them and their body of work?

This is important to me. My ability to know what is good regardless of my personal interest in a piece of work is important. I rail against my father's sentimental predilection for latter-day music made by artists that are long since past their "genius-will-make-you-immortal" expiration date. (It really is better to burn out than to fade away.) And I rail against people who happily tell me that they like what they like and that their opinion regarding the fact that their like is good is as valid as anyone else's likes.

The fact is that your notion of what is good shouldn't have anything to do with what you like. However, what you like should at least be informed by what you try to know is good. The only way to do this is to develop a sense of empathy, an ability to exit your own perspective long enough to think about how others might or ought to see art/music, etc. when judged in the same disinterested way you ought to be doing so. Like or dislike should always come after judgment.

Similarly, who you are friends with shouldn't have any effect on whether you like what they do. A friendship between creative people shouldn't be predicated on appreciation of each other's work.

Shouldn't, but let's be honest with ourselves.

My reaction to the tracks on Sean and Katrina's Birdland record was significantly different than it has been to the Celebration record. What's the difference? There are aspects of the new record that are vastly superior to the demos, but in questioning whether I am being more objective now than I was two years ago, I can't easily make a definite determination as to the quality of my own criticism. At the same time, I feel like I did a good job pointing out what was good and bad about the record. A friend (who knows the situation) made comments about certain issues that relate to my knowledge of the band and their previous configuration. They were solid comments but I also feel as if they can easily be explained away by what amounts to simple research. A record should stand up to its predecessors and this one doesn't entirely do that.

So while I'm definitely attached to the material, I think my review works. What do you think?

Ghosts of motion

An escalator leading into the Union Station Metro stop is broken. This means that the other one is shut off so that people can walk up one side and down the other. What's interesting about the process isn't the care I take to avoid being pushed back down by the people coming down as I go up, it's noticing the way that my muscle memory assumes the escalator is moving and I feel myself almost slip forward as I step onto it. It's as if the machine is so used to going in one direction that it leaves a ghost of that motion behind even when it's turned off.

Hyperdrive Motivator

Friday evening I breezed home on the train and cleaned house to prep for a meeting with my editor to discuss some projects I am working on.

It went well. I've got work to do.

So now I have to get motivated and fast. This is a great thing for me but I have to admit that I'm not easily shaken loose from the inertia of my day to day life.

Sometimes I think it's the same fear of mediocrity I wrote of earlier but I notice that I don't feel as compelled to work hard when I'm not being paid for what I'm working on. This doesn't just involve my writing but commitments I've made designing as well. If I'm being paid and I have a deadline I am FAR more likely to take action.

I don't like the nebulous, "get it done whenever" nature of unpaid projects. I am absolutely more in gear when I know the limits of what I'm working on. 4,000 words by next Tuesday, 2 full layouts by the eighth, etc.

The money isn't even really the motivator, but the transaction is. It's the commitment, not the cash. I often don't feel that kind of an obligation when there's nothing else going on. It's weird that I need this kind of structure but I guess I do.

Re-examiner

Ever re-read something you wrote a year ago and believe that someone else wrote it?

One of the things I can say about my writing, even related to today's earlier post, is that when you read and edit something you wrote at different intervals you judge it differently. At some point there is enough separation between you and the work that you can see it as something independent of yourself. It exists outside of your own ego.

When I criticize much of my old work (poetry I wrote as a teenager, papers I wrote for philosophy courses in college, fiction I wrote three years ago, an unedited feature I did six months ago, etc.) I am not reading work I wrote. I’m reading work that a person I was wrote.

I can criticize the voice of that person I was. I can be embarrassed by ideas that person that I used to be saw as important. And I can praise the skill he might have had in crafting an article. I can be impressed by the way this guy tied his comments together at the end of his rant.

But this separation takes time. My ability to remove myself from my own perspective is limited when the piece is two hours old.

This doesn’t happen when I’m being edited by someone else. I always anticipate reading work I did that is actually printed and edited with baited breath. How much will they cut? Will the cuts and changes they make be judicious and will they represent me and the subject (bands mostly) the way I initially intended the writing to. I’ve been lucky at City Paper so far. Bret McCabe, as bitchy as he can be, and he’ll play this up more than I would, is fair and doesn’t alter the meaning of stories by fiddling with my texts. I appreciate his criticism and I admire his ability to be honest with someone when he doesn’t like what I’ve provided. But I don’t really consider much of what ends up on the page entirely MY work.

When I re-read that old blog entry from a year ago that I haven’t seen since I posted it, the work isn’t mine anymore. It’s independent of my ego and somehow it seems better for that.

Criticism vs. Creativity

I am a critic. I write critical reviews of music and other things for an alternative weekly. I would very much like to be more of a creative person as well. My critical mind prevents me from creating much as I worry about how my creative output will be criticised.

I don't think I'm alone.

This is a strange conundrum. I know what's good. I'm paid to think, know and write about what makes something good or bad, valuable or worthless. Being that I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the aesthetic value of other people's creative output I recognize a number of things with regard to my own creativity.

Thinking and writing critically isn't easy. It requires certain basic skills that I don't believe many people possess. These are skills that I think you can't develop without exercising some faculties that aren't easy to quantify. How do you determine if someone is a good empath? If someone is good at juding things while being aware of his/her own personal interests? How can anyone be sure that a judgment made is a pure one?) But at the same time, it's hard to just call criticism an art. I think it is creative in some respects but it's not in a lot of other ways too.

Creating things that are supposed to have inherent aesthetic values is a difficult thing. Anyone can produce "artistic" output but it's very difficult to actually make something that is beautiful or sublime.

So maybe it's a form of stagefright. How does the critic produce and why? How does someone whose job it is to qualitatively analyze a product by assigning it a value handle producing something that will inevitably be criticized (and probably with greater scrutiny) itself? How does a (relatively in my case) analytic mind go about subduing that analytic nature enough to believe that he or she is capable of making something that is valuable?

It's a hard thing to do, and as a good friend of mine said recently, "It's the creative writer's job to not care what other people think."

I find this funny largely because it seems to me that as a critical thinker/writer, it's also my job not to care what other people think about something I'm criticizing. I suppose the issue in the end is not so much that I worry about what others may think of what I create but that I worry about what I will think of my own output.

The simple fact of the matter is that I often feel that I'm not a good writer, which I think is a good reason, if not excuse, for my less than prolific output. Strange, considering that, as a critic you have to be confident that you know what's good and you have to be enough of an elitist to believe that your opinion is valuable, often with no actual proof or basis. So you're basically an elitist with low self-esteem. I'm an eltist with no self-esteem? How does that make any sense?