This afternoon from 1pm to 5pm in Harney Plaza at the University of San Francisco students will be holding a peaceful protest to object to proposed changes in the scheduling of classes.
A lot of the organizing has been happening on Facebook.
Below is the text of a letter composed by students suggesting that the University should reconsider its plans, which it will attempt to implement in the Fall of 2010.
+++
Protest Letter to the Student Body:
James Wiser, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, announced on Nov. 3rd that starting in Fall 2010, USF would change current scheduling practices to do a majority of Monday-Wednesday-Friday COURSES THAT WOULD ONLY LAST FOR 50 MINUTES PER CLASS!!! This is very similar to how most public high schools work. This change would also REMOVE CLASSES THAT MEET ONCE A WEEK! Additionally, more classes would be lowered to only two credits worth which would affect graduation/matriculation rates - more tuition over a longer period to complete one's USF education
If you have any concerns or questions about this new measure please contact:
James Wiser (the head academic advisor) Phone #: (415) 422-6136
Email: PROVOST@usfca.edu
Executive Assistant to the President, Ft. Privet Jaci NeesamPhone #: (415) 422-6712
Not counting the AIG/IOU fan, of course. He looks a little pissed, don't he?
Although his girl seemingly is slightly ambivalent, regarding her allegiances.
Quite understandable, really, given that her boy's best effort at a chant was "S**t" while we sang "Carefree/Wherever we may be/We are the faymous/CFC..." Etc.
For someone, surely not the professor of pop (forbid the very thought) responded to EVERY one of these brilliant & witty whines with loud & clear "F**k Off!"
And it could have been a right tonking if Jonny Evans had been given the red card he asked for by planting his studs into the middle of Didier Drogba's chest.
Plus, the CHELSEA boys&grrls took back our pub, the Mad Dog in the Fog, and the RedScummers hardly said a word all match. Perhaps they were dumb-struck. Or maybe just, you know, DUMB.
+++ Thanks to Chelsea boy Hiller for the AIG/IOU tip-off. Nice one mate!
Here as promised/threatened is a longer & earlier draft of my analysis of Led Zeppelin's 1971 track 'Black Dog' from the fourth album that was recently posted at Professor Steve Smith's illuminating blog HOOKS. The version there is tighter, focusing exclusively on beats & so forth, and it also contains 2 very helpful sound clips.
This version of my argument is being posted partly because it is becoming increasingly clear to me that many listeners simply do not LISTEN to Zeppelin, perhaps because they are too busy looking. Some people seem to think that Pink Floyd are the intellectual Brit rock band. They are wrong.
And anyway, even if the Floyd fans were correct to see Roger Waters' lyrics as some kind of modern poetry (& what a joke that is!) Zep have a major advantage: they have a drummer.
Black Dog -- Beats, Bets & Better Ways Of Listening
Progressive rock was famous for its traffic-light stops & starts, but Led Zeppelin generally eschewed that approach, deploying shifts of time-signature and tempo, along with a movement of the placement of rhythmic emphasis (what Steve Smith here so usefully calls pulses) and varying degrees of syncopation within the same song without drawing too much attention to these elements, none of which is easy to pull off, not when there are four of you and you are mostly recording live & in real time.
In fact, the beginning of the end of the musical logics that propelled Zeppelin were foreshadowed by three connected & unfortunate developments: first, 'Stairway To Heaven' with its daft lyrics and its blatant signalling of unmotivated timefucks that neither meld successfully ('Gallows Pole') nor create a delightful sudden change of gear ('Heartbreaker' -- the riff that Michael Jackson stole for his song 'Bad'). One gets the feeling that this is the first track in Zep's career when they are in fact killing time (2).
Secondly, there is the introduction of comedic pastiche (on Houses Of The Holy), with the stupidly conceived & poorly performed ‘D’yer Mak’er’ -- which also returned them to a machismo star-text – one originally based in the lyrics/music/iconography of the first two albums and reinforced by Teutonic, German signifers. The very cock-rock trap from which Robert Plant was attempting to extricate himself & his band mates, in other words (check out 'Friends', 'That’s The Way', 'Going To California', 'The Battle Of Nevermore') was now returning, but this time with a laugh track. Instead of avoiding this route (as they had done so successfully already; for instance in their dogged refusal of the terms and restrictions adopted by anyone who allows themselves to be interpellated as a “heavy metal” band) they walked directly into the bins with their sell-by dates already visible, that is to say into the sickening tracks where Black Sabbath, Deep Purple et al all fell, sooner or later.
And then – second guessing their error, Zeppelin compounded it with their worst attempt at hommage to African-American music: the appalling ‘The Crunge’ (a track that some members reportedly disliked to perform, 3.)
The third development, connected in my view to the second because it arose (although this is speculation) from a pendulum swing away from comedic pastiche, was the desire to make big, important tracks. But how to do this without becoming proggy? (4) Not while Jimmy Page was out to lunch on the very drugs that he so honestly insists were a part of his whole Zeppelin journey.
The result was In Through The Out Door, which produced that abomination ‘Carouselambra’.
Set against this desire to imitate, learn from, transcend and compete ambitiously with the best (the legacy of Presley, Johnson, Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, The Beatles and Cream, Jeff Beck – a childhood friend of Jimmy Page -- Eric Clapton (whom Page had replaced in The Yardbirds) -- Carmen Appice, The Who, The Incredible String Band, Jimi Hendrix, Bert Jansch, Davey Graham, The Pretty Things, Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, and – last and certainly not least, The Rolling Stones… although even this eclectic aesthetic obsessive-complusive opportunity must then have a coda, in the form of Page and Plant’s later investigations into the music of North West Africa), Zeppelin were also of course nostalgically drawn back to places and times that preceded their births – the blues.
But anyone who thinks that this is merely standardized routine 12/32-bar repetition has rather missed the dropped beats, the odd meters, the changes in tempo, the vocal/guitar inflection, cadences and intonations that can make subtle or shocking transformations of feel: those elastic moveable pulses.
And notice too that the spaces between the end of the last vocal line in each verse gets shorter each time, before the band crashes the silence, as the song progresses. (These musicians must have been playing live and watching one another for cues, although at the beginning you do hear Bonham’s sticks giving the count.) And this is progressive rock, if that term means anything. Recorded by Genesis or indeed Pink Floyd, no one would even consider to doubt the fact.
It is progressive for 3 reasons: i) it aggressively refuses the norm of the pop/rock song; ii) this means who have to listen to it (i.e. regressive listening is not an option); iii) the song itself progresses, getting more complex (working on the head, forcing your attention, stripping your wall-paper ears) and also more emotional (working on the heart, piling up the ‘guitar army’ and the intense anxiety of the vocal performance – the latter was first pointed out to me by Erik Davis.)
So if we now look at this track, composed and recorded (mostly live – the overdubs are largely Page’s synthetic-sounding hyper-treated guitar parts) when Zep were at the height of their powers, we hear a group that can perform a track with 98 times changes, absent sheet music or a conductor. Not only that but amongst these strict changes in time signature (including the tense and extremely funky simultaneous use of two different ones) the song hides syncopation on a grand scale. Listen to the “ooo baby pretty baby” sections & focus on the pick-up on the snare drum before the main backbeat & how Bonham is always following Page (not Jones, his bassist, which would be the norm – Jones had to watch Bonzo’s kick drum, to keep up, or rather to keep just behind). (In this their strategy resembles that of The Rolling Stones, where drummer Charlie Watts forms a tight nexus with guitarist Keith Richards. Although surely Zep would have made much more of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ that did Jagger & Co.) The whole groove changes during these sections -- a musical service The Stones finally deigned to provide on cuts like 'Brown Sugar' and 'Start Me Up'.
Actual time changes occur throughout 'Black Dog': from the verse/vocal part stolen from Fleetwood Mac’s 'Oh Well' to the twisting riff -- written by John-Paul Jones, who claims he stole it from Muddy Waters LP Electric Mud, although the (hardly new) idea of twisting riffs that cross bar structures does not constitute an actual nick of the song, or even of the bass part.
But of course the most striking surprise, surely one of the most shocking moments in rock history, occurs when Page and Jones go into a riff in 5:4 time and Bonham play across them in 4:4 time. Thus reaching a point of connection every 20 beats.
The story goes that originally John Bonham tried playing 8th notes, in keeping with the 5:4 time, but that he either lacked the technical ability to do this or that the effect sounded too much like The Mahavishnu Orchestra! In any case they toyed, they experimented, they played (that’s what musicians do – we are children) and they were willing to play this game: ignore la langue (the rules of rock) and make a new utterance (parole) – 4s over 5s until it resolves, then repeat the joke.
For this accidental joke did apparently reduce the four of them to laughter, the first time they played it, in rehearsal.
But this laughter is surely not ironic or pomo or a poking of fun at the audience: it was that of highly skilled musicians who just pulled off a new trick, barely having to the time to think of the intention behind it (if such there was), collective or otherwise. The thing is, they kept playing, through the tension of the 5/4 toe-curling and the mind-shaping concentration it takes at first to play the drums and not listen to the guitars too much, and the same goes of course for the bass and guitar. (Stop thinking! Just watch that kick drum!) And then someone, or all of them, saw the brilliance of what they had done (progressive rock in all but name but it sounds like a straight blues rock throwaway) and they did this intentionally.
They intended to play with the mistake and then they intended to keep it.
Because it was good.
+++
Footnotes
1.Quoted in Dave Lewis, Led Zeppelin: The ‘Tight But Loose’ Files, Celebration II (London: Omnibus, 2003).
2.Page has said that the one failing of the previous record (Led Zeppelin III) was that it lacked a long track. (He was wrong – 'Since I’ve Been Loving You' is that epic track.) Stairway was pieced together over years with a view to writing something epic (too much intentionality and therefore a surplus of self-awareness?) and in doing so it inevitably established a new Zeppelin’s star-text. They went from macho blues Brit dudes to spaced-out mystics from the dark side in one awful cinematic fiasco (The Song Remains The Same) and this development was based in part (watch the movie closely) on the dual discourses of the stairway to heaven and the stairway to rockgodom (which the lyrics cannot of course resolve). See my article, ‘Stairway To Stardom’.
3.As reported in Susan Fast’s book (via emails from John-Paul Jones), In The Houses Of The Holy: Rock Music And The Power Of Led Zeppelin (OUP: 2001)
4.In 1982 as Yes began to reform under the name Cinema (the album became the vapid best-seller 90125), Alan White and Chris Squire claim to have rehearsed with Jimmy Page, with a view to forming a band with the almost unbelievably corny name XYZ. Robert Plant attended a rehearsal (for how many minutes, do you suppose?) and concluded that the music was too “proggy”. Future historians of popular music (if there are any) will no doubt have cause to raise a glass to the memory of the very talented Mister Plant, for saving us all from this aural debacle. (see Tim Morse, Yes In Their Own Words (St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
So you're in the movie theatre watching The Damned United, a film about the dirtiest football team in the universe, and you are in the front row eyes glued to the screen, & as a Leeds United player commits a criminal assault on an opposing sportsman, you yell something not very nice at the Don "Brown Paper Bag" Revie character. So what happens? You get hissed @ by some stuck-in-her-own-righteousness posh Berkeley feminist.
Welcome to the left coast.
"Everything I ever learned about ethics I learned on the football field", said existentialist goalkeeper Albert Camus. We may assume that Revie, Bremner & Co. did not examine this statement in the dressing room while they were sharpening their studs.
+++
Football is music and music is football. An orchestra that assaulted rival orchestras with their instruments would presumably be banned for life from public performances. But in football the outcome was this -- the Football Association appointed Don Revie as the England manager! This tells us volumes about working-class culture (its ethics -- we all hate Leeds, even Leeds fans hate Leeds) and posh culture (the men in suits gave the most vicious & duplicitous man in football the top job).
Against this background we have the charismatic working-class hero Brian Clough, who took Nottingham Forest from the lower divisions to the top of the English league, and then, not content with that, on to win the European Cup. An achievement that will never be matched now that money rules the game.
Clough was never given the England job.
+++
The new movie The Damned United (based on David Peace's docu-novel) tells this story in the grainy tones that were so brilliantly deployed a year or two ago in This Is England. The chronology is a case study in non-linear non-avant-garde narrative skill. The performances are so close to life you want to get out of your seat and take out Billy Bremner. With a machete. The music is perfectly pitched, pulling us back to the seventies, commenting in subtle and clever ways ('Queen Bitch' by Bowie), but never getting in the way of the story.
My only beef with this film is the missing of one crucial quote (Clough: "If football had been meant to be played in the air, God would have put grass in the sky"); one crucial scene (when being cheated out of a European game by a fixed ref, Cloughie kept his team behind in the dressing room @ half-time until the ref showed up and stuck his head around the door. Clough: "Oh. So you want us, do you?"); and since the movie is about Brian Clough's 44 days (!) @ Leeds United we see little of his subsequent success with Forest, & so the effect is to make it seem as if the man was a nutter rather than a genius.
A flawed genius, mind. As my pal Tom Clancy pointed out to me, we needed to see Clough's dark side, not just his kindness & his triumphs. And in this the film succeeds. Maybe a little too much, for my taste.
Go see this film. (The prof saw it twice, on consecutive nights.) But maybe avoid a Berkeley screening, if poss, unless you can keep your mouth shut. Or like getting hissed at by cinema-goers who'd be better off waiting for the Muppet Christmas Carol.
+++ Also highly recommended, Duncan Hamilton's Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough, lent to me by my friend and neighbour Tony. Thanks Tony!
Today in our MEDIA THEORY & CRITICISM class my poor students will be treated to a 75 minute lecture on the Frankfurt School, whose chief theorist was the too-often invoked figure of T. W. (Teddy) Adorno -- an accomplished musician, composer & music critic. Too often invoked? Well, his image (like that of Cliff Richard) is usually cartoon-like & based on, oh, about 20 minutes of thinking. Better that he be invoked less often & with more thought.
2 issues emerge for me here above all -- regressive listening & authenticity. As for the latter, check out this photograph. An early attempt to market (now SIR) Cliff Richard as an English Elvis Presley. Not that Cliff & his shadows did not have their moments -- 'Out In The Country', for instance, was not bad. But this was part-interchangeability of a textbook type. Take a bit of Elvis, make him not quite so scary, shove some ballads in his mouth for the older folks and -- hey presto! -- CROSSOVER.
As for regressive listening, the professor of pop had some insight into this yesterday while suffering the torture that we call insomnia. Under the headphones listening to XTC's 'Senses Working Overtime', the music suddenly made no sense. In fact it no longer sounded like music at all. My ears were working (the prof is blessed/cursed with finely attuned listening devices) but my mind (now worn down by sleeplessness) could not de-code the music.
This was my experience. In both channels -- percussion. In both channels -- acoustic & electric guitars. In both channels -- acoustic drums, playing across the stereo-image. Vocals? Barely audible somewhere in the middle of the mix, sinking in a sort of sonic quicksand. The bass -- that was making sense, but it was the only part that my senses, working more than overtime, could understand as music. (Beautiful harmonies from Colin Moulding!)
In other words, although the sounds in the world (or rather in my headphones) were exactly the same as they had always been, my mind could not put them together into a coherent form. This tells me 2 things: i) the mind is where music happens; ii) absent a fully-functioning mind, putting the sounds back together after hearing the different parts separately just never happened. The result? Total aural confusion. The prof was almost unable to recognize the song & for a while thought that maybe my CD mix had been infected by a digital error.
What has this to do with regressive listening? Well there are 3 processes that musicians, critics, fans and scholars engage in & they each take us a loooooong way from the regular listening that most folks do. First, you listen to the overall structure of the song (drummers, anyway, like conductors, MUST do this). Second, you take the piece apart (drums, vox, guitar; violins, tympani, trumpets). Third, you then put them back together again, like a Humpty Dumpty, and then & only then do you begin to understand & appreciate the music.
Yesterday, the Humpty Dumpty in my brain could not do task 3, and so the musical soldiers were never re-integrated. The point is -- it did not sound like music! It was just a bunch of noises. And it was a very unpleasant and disorienting experience. As if you picked up a book you read before, say, 1984 by George Orwell and the first sentence said this: "Idd wmama a 73737 day in naoao and the clock ahgshs striing a83."
One suspects that this is how a lot of people hear music. As a wallpaper device, a squashwash of sound whose pieces do not relate to each other (so there is nothing to think about, you just let it cover you like a nice warm blankie) either because you did not consider the overall structure/form at all, or maybe you did not break the music down into its different layers, or maybe you did and then you couldn't put them back together again.
A good example of regressive listening would be the attitude you must bring to, say, the music of Cliff Richard & The Shadows, who are, er, celebrating their 50th anniversary with a final show. The prof advices bringing this & only this attitude to this sort of music.
Otherwise, one discovers how deeply depressing bad music is.
The journal Popular Music & Society is to publish a special issue on the music & career of Michael Jackson. The issue will be edited by Susan Fast & Stan Hawkins.
Here are the details:
Special Issue:
Michael Jackson: Musical Subjectivities
Edited by Susan Fast and Stan Hawkins
Submissions are invited for a special edition of Popular Music and Society that examines constructions of subjectivity in Michael Jackson's music, with a focus on gender, sexuality, age, disability, and race.Contributors are invited to address ways in which Jackson's vocality, grooves, rhythmic invention, songwriting, conformity with and/or irreconcilability of generic categories, particular songs, song categories (such as ballads) or albums, record production, use of technology, and live or mediated performance work to produce his own, often spectacularized, subjectivities, as well as those of his listeners.
We are interested in drawing together articles that engage in an interdisciplinary manner the myriad ways in which subjectivity is constructed in Jackson's work: narratives of desire, healing, redemption, anger, violence, celebrity; engagement with world politics, charity; intergenerational relationships; the spectacular body in performance; illness as it impacted his music and performance; freakishness/the fantastic; challenges to hegemonic constructions of race, masculinity, sexuality, gender--to name only a few possibilities.Although we welcome contributions that employ a broad range of methodologies, including the development of new methodologies for the analysis of popular music, we intend that these essays address musical sound and sound related to text (lyrics), image(s), and dance directly.While the complexity, ambiguity, and irreconcilability of Jackson's subjectivity/ies have been covered exhaustively, mainly by the mass media, only a few scholarly essays have made significant inroads to understanding these phenomena; moreover, none of these has addressed musical sound in detail.
We therefore see the need for rigorous scholarship into Jackson's creative output, with specific emphasis on musical sound, the place where he, himself, arguably commented most explicitly upon the matters referred to above.Our vision is that this issue will include essays that range over Jackson's long career, from his time with the Jackson 5 through his last studio album, Invincible, and final live performances, perhaps including the forthcoming film documenting preparation for his This Is It tour.
Essays of 6,000-8,000 words are due by September 2010.Essays will be peer-reviewed.Inquiries regarding potential essay topics and their suitability for inclusion are welcome.Please include your professional/academic affiliations, a postal address, and preferred email contact with your essay; for purposes of blind peer-review, please do not include your name within the body of the essay.
Students of MEDIA THEORY & CRITICISM are studying the TV series The Prisoner this semester using a variety of techniques, including a sharp & thoroughly critical look this afternoon at the marxist concept of ideology. They will no doubt be intrigued by this story from The Guardian in England, about a man who escaped from prison by pretending to be his twin.
It's very clever stuff, too:
"The court heard that when he was later released from custody at Fareham magistrates' court, Maclellan claimed he only took advantage of the case of mistaken identity and it was not a planned attempt to escape from prison."
Escaping while pretending to be someone else while pretending that the person you are not is not attempting to escape! Maybe that's the way out! Worthy of Patrick McGoohan, who was of course trying to escape from the culture industry in general and Danger Man in particular while pretending to be a media hero.
Identical twins are important because they are disturbing to the ego because they suggest a lack of individuality, because they can appear to be in two places at once (inside & outside the prison), because they have the ability to deceive us, and of course because they speak to an essential duality within us that we would rather not think about.
The Prisoner is obsessed with the individual's lone struggle against something called society & in that respect is tender meat for a marxist critique. But right there is the problem: The Prisoner can be shown, easily (in minutes, in a lecture), to support a bourgeois subject-position of individualism (you can't start a revolution in The Village -- or can you?) in a social situation that almost seems designed to create a sense of inertia, despair & statis in the viewer. Adorno should have a little study there, at the heart of The Village.
However, many Prisoner fans and viewers associate with The Unmutual, identify with a reading of Number 6 as a chap who is not a James Bond knock-off, and have had their lives changed by these perspectives. This TV show, in the end, plays out these contradictions -- you can't make a revolution on your own but you can't be in one unless you do something -- and this maybe helps explain the continuing fascination the series generates.
It will be interesting to say the least to see how The Prisoner's American twin -- which debuts on November 15th on AMC -- deals with these issues, at a time when The (global) Village where we live is looking a little rusty around the edges.
My deepest thanks to Professor Smith for allowing me this chance to offer a guest post, for all his encouragement & for the time he spent working on this, together. (Here are details of his band, btw.)
His blog is an inspiration -- one recommended very highly to any student of popular music. Smith is giving original ideas away here, for free. And his most shocking insight is the basis for the blog & its name -- hooks. For it is founded on the notion that one may fully enjoy both the completeness of a fine work and also find a complete aesthetic experience in the contemplation of some micro-detail that is for some reason central to the musical logic/appeal of the piece. Such as a vocal inflection, a lyrical nuance, or -- in this case -- a tour de force in hidden rhythmic complexity.
Oh they were magicians, alright, were Zeppelin. They knew how to hide things so well you didn't even know there was something being hidden.
+++
Addendum: Not wishing to draw traffic away from the excellent blog Hooks, POP will post a longer, first draft of this piece that places Black Dog within the context of Zeppelin's history in a few days' time.
[Minor declaration of interest again: my Zeppelin book is currently under review for publication by Britain's Equinox Press, which has just published Griffith's Costello book.]
+++ Elvis Costello once said that he had written thousands of songs & not all of them were classics. Viewed one way, a tremendous instance of Anglo-Irish wit. Look at it with less generosity and you wonder if perhaps his critical faculties (for which the man hardly lacks) were trying to give him some much-needed advice, on the old quality-control game.
Case in point: the greatness that is Armed Forces, Almost Blue, Imperial Bedroom [that the live performance of Beyond Belief below is train-wrecked almost beyond recognition in its closing stages merely adds to my admiration for his/their ambition & musical courage], King Of America, Blood & Chocolate, Brutal Youth. And then, the dross that is Get Happy!, Punch The Clock, Goodbye Cruel World, Spike, Mighty Like A Rose. And then there is the reaching, where we find ourselves looking for the yellow card but then indulgently changing the mind with a smile that says don't do that again sonny jim before replacing it in the top upper pocket: the Kronos Quartet stuff, iow. The professor of pop gave up with All This Useless Beauty, it being neither middlin nor muddlin.
Griffiths advices us not to shun the man, nor the musician & give North a listen. And this the prof shall do.
+++
Professor Dai Grffiths wants to focus on text (lyrical & musical) to an almost immanent degree (as does this series, which is why they might reject my proposal), in this he follows Richard Witts, in his illuminating book in this same series, The Velvet Underground [ditto dec of interest here]. And like Witts, Griffiths does things like deploying music theory so that one discovers that the opening section of 'The Greatest Thing' transports the listener (knowingly or not?) from G-Em in the opening line to G-Am & then a whole dazzling series of letters both upper case & lower case that apparently explain something about the chorus.
Unless you do not read music, that is, in which you ask yourself these (genuine -- not sarcastic!) questions -- i) Isn't the important pertinent fact concerning 'The Greatest Thing' that it is a pile of doo-doo (compared to what? why, compared to Costello's future potential & past output?); ii) how does my knowing the names of the chords add to this experiential/intellectual knowledge? iii) if it does not, then what is the point in notating music -- pop -- that was never written down in the first place? iv) if so, then how does it enhance my understanding, appreciation & ability to critique the music?
To what, as Wittgenstein might have asked, to these dots point?
The professor of pop is not dogmatic on these question. No, he is taking piano lessons! But still he awaits discussion, correction, criticism, conformation, even. That music theory is not just an add-on, a device used by musicians & critics for their own useful purposes but that is possibly irrelevant to the listener. (Unless s/he is singing music silently in his/her head while reading from sheet music, not exactly a hot moral panic craze these days.)
Griffiths: "Costello may have disliked the hunched warbers of 'Fire and Rain', 'Fountain of Sorrow' and 'Moonshadow' but he was firmly of their number."
Costello: "The level of comprehension at the average rock and roll show is not great."
Griffiths: "The handover from taste to value is crucial in determining whether an artist makes it to the canon." Walter Benjamin: "The tendency of a literary work can only be politically correct if it is also [aesthetically] correct."
And finally, Greil Marcus: "To make true political music, you have to say what decent people don't want to hear: that's something people fit for satellite benefit concerts will never understand."
[OH, AND PAGE 75 HAS A REALLY HELPFUL 12-point BREAKDOWN OF WHAT WE MEAN BY THAT HEADY ABSTRACT & CONFOUNDING FRENCH TERM 'THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE'. Very helpful for teaching when that sinking feeling occurs in the gut as a student boldly asks, "Professor Goodwin, could you explain that again?"]
Owen Hill's first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was a page-turner, read literally in one frenzied Saturday morning. Declaration of (minor) interest: Owen is a friend of a friend (& once kindly gave me discount @ Moe's but don't tell anyone that.)
Here's the opening para from his new novel The Incredible Double, words that will draw you in like a punter to a strip club -- ok then problem drinker to a dive bar --if you read them aloud:
+++
"My '87 Tercel is in great shape, only a hundred thousand miles and almost new everything, but it does have trouble with the Bay Area hills. Coming out of the tunnel on 24, leaving Berkeley, heading toward the suburbs, I was losing speed and the SUVs were losing patience. I shifted it down into second and wagged my middle finger. My best friend Marvin says that driving slow in a small car is a revolutionary act. Maybe's he right. A woman in a Hummer, no lie, who probably weighed in at 97 pounds, half of it hair, gave me a look that could kill and, waved her phone at me. When you think of spoiled little brats in military vehicles careening through the 'burbs, you know how rotten the twentieth-century will be."
+++
Most important 2 words: no lie. That gives you the genre for cert & tells you that while our narrator has some ironic distance on Marvin, they are perhaps (or were) ideological cousins. Owen isn't afraid of cheap shots if they're funny & tell you something ("half of it hair") because he knows he's been freed by genre. The prose never drifts into agitprop but it's constantly hinted at it, as if this were an Op-Ed piece in Socialist Worker, written by a poet with an acute sense of humour. The first para immediately sets up the dystopian world we are about to enter but you don't feel trapped in it exactly. You just know that the mise-en-scene for wherever our story & our narrator are headed is going to be "rotten".
And this rotten-ness dear voyeur from cyberspace is happening right here right now in river city as Berkeley gets increasingly comfy with being a rich town (a security guard asked Susan to move her bag from where it might be stolen last night @ about 6pm... on a main throughfare in mf Rockridge) where even the south side (site of the Historic POP Homeland) has monster homes and monster cars and of course therefore monster peeps.
Like The Chandler Apartments, The Incredible Double captures a time & a place perfectly: here, now. But that would be boring because it would be too obvious, so Hill never forgets that you make it interesting (& significant) if you pepper the story with nostalgia for times passed.
He does, after all, drive an '87 Tercel. Raymond Williams once described literature as a record of lived experience which is of course not always the case since neither lived nor experience are really the correct terms for a lot of contemporary fiction. But in the case of the savvy crime-thriller, if you can set the noir against the nostalgia then you have one powerful vehicle (if you're a poet) for evoking the time & the place that is the fag-end of Berkeley as we now know it.
And anyway, whether or not you care about that (& you should), Owen Hill has written another page-turner.
A professor of pop asks: when the fuck are gmail going to sort out their problems & how many of us are now seriously considering ONE LAST switch back to Yahoo?
Gemeinschafted this morning, too @ Peet's (upscale coffee shop where they serve you like zen students -- actually a much respected bzc student & pal of mine works there -- & OF COURSE they call you by name), by Angry Hipster Rebel with health insurance, well for Lord's sake this dude totally failed to listen & then failed to include the raw sugars.
The current issue of MEDIA, CULTURE & SOCIETY (vol. 31, No. 5) contains an essay titled CULTURAL ANXIETY 2.0 (and who doesn't want to read that!)
Also in this latest issue:
Silvio Waisbord, Enrique Peruzotti -- The environmental story that wasn't: advocacy, journalism, and the asambleismo movement in Argentina
Chin-Chuan Lee, Yong Z Volz -- American pragmatism and Chinese modernization: importing the Missouri model of journalism education in modern China
Adedayo Ladigbolu Abah -- Pop Culture and social change in Africa: the case of the Nigerian video industry
Dave Everitt, Simon Mills -- Cultural anxiety 2.0
Alessandro D'Arma -- Broadcasting policy in Italy's 'Second Republic': national politics and european influences
Maria Trinidad Garcia Leiva, Michael John Starks -- Digital switchover across the globe: the emergence of complex regional parties
Mary Bebrett -- Riding the wave: public service television in the multi-platform era
There is also a very informative Commentary by Deborah Tudor on Who Counts? Who is being counted? How audience measurement embeds neoliberalism into urban space. [Ah but where is Ien Ang in the refs?)
+++
Highlights (the hit singles) from Dave Everitt & Simon Mills, 'Cultural Anxiety 2.0'. A middle of the night skim yields this (later today, a proper, thorough read):
"However the borrowed branding can fail to transfer the culture of development and original intentions of the 'Web 2.0 suffix..." (p. 794)
"To this end we explore the contrast between may what be termed 'technological-independent' applications of the metaphorical suffix and those that may be termed 'technological-independent' with regard to how accurately they reflect the tenets behind the original concept." (p.794)
"It is mistaken that technological advances prompted the advance of Web 2.0." (p. 752)
"The envy is to imitate (technology/independent metaphor theory)." (p. 752)
And: "We have demonstrated how the actual principles and cultural shifts behind 'Web 2.0' -- rather than the suffix -- are the real drivers behind the phenomenon."
Finally: "The adoption of 2.0 suffixes that force expectations of a coming 3.0 and presumptions about a previous 1.0 must be seen as trivial or, at best, temporary responses to an anxiety in the face of the new, especially with 'Web 3.0' already on the horizon." (p. 765) Coming soon? Web 17.0?
+++
Some observations:
1.MEDIA THEORY & CRITICISM students could learn so much from a careful & picky skim-read (30 minutes or less) of this issue of the journal.
2. No doubt Web developments are an important modern movement, one that like most new things has wonderfuls & failings.
3. However, the dumbing down of media studies proceeds now at a ever more rapid & disturbing pace, via on-line Webtubes assignments that must reach an ENDGAME at some point, since there isn't THAT much that is new here.
4. Making media, just for its own sake, is pointless unless you have something to say & a reason for saying it.
ANDREW GOODWIN is Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. He a lifelong supporter of Chelsea Football Club. Last Fall he taught a class about Led Zeppelin, and he is now finishing a book about their music. In 2006 he completed a collection of pop songs titled PROFESSOR OF POP. His drumming appears on several Dry Rib tracks re-released last year on the CD Whose Last Trickle (Messthetics #213) by Hyped2Death. You are welcome to email me at professorofpopATgmail.com
