Cultural Nudity: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Being

I was having trouble getting started on a post today. I've had an idea brewing since about the time I made that first post after a long break, but I haven't been able to find the time amidst my personal and professional chaos to sit down and write it. I started something an hour ago, involving tortured references to Foundationalism and Coherentism (which only applied in the most slanted possible way to the matter at hand), in addition to an attempt to tie it to this post and rumors of someone's misunderstanding thereof, and . . . well, it was just too dang thinky for me to parse out the relevant bits and get to the story I wanted to tell. What sucks is that all those connections--even the skewed philosophical ones, and especially the one relating to the other post--were actually quite real, and quite important, in my mind, whereas the story itself lacks resonance on its face. Could I rely on most readers to make the proper inferences? Would this post be of any worth without them?

I'm not gonna get into the whole debate as to whether blogs are supposed to be good writing or not, except to say that I try to keep things at least nominally thoughtful and somewhat (anti-)intellectual to differentiate it from the multitudes of bloggers who seem to think that their journals are interesting to anyone (though I certainly think some of them are correct; indeed, my hope is that my concepts, and the ways in which I write about them, will interest the reader in the being who formulated them, thus finding them willing to engage with my autobiographical details and prosaic musings). No, what just occurred to me was a conversation I had with 'Stine sometime in the last day or two. I was coming home, exhausted from a day at work following a weekend of some serious writing. See, I had a big deadline for the summer issue of ALARM on Monday, so I had three features and eleven reviews to write (actually, I'd already written four of the reviews, and transcribed all the interview text for the articles, but STILL . . . ) over the weekend. And quite accidentally, I said something to 'Stine that was more true, more profound than anything I could actually have cooked up from my arsenal of noetic recipes.

"If there's one thing the deadlines and money help me with, it's getting over any worry about whether my writing is any good. My title is 'contributing writer,' after all, not 'good writer.'"

Okay, it doesn't look so profound now that I've put it down. But it's still true, and truth trumps profundity. See, it doesn't really matter if I get the best of my craft out there; that's between me and whoever prints, publishes, edits, or markets my work. That's what those people are for. Since this is a forum where I rarely rewrite, and where all middle-men/-women are removed from twixt my readers and myself, I'm actually even LESS obligated to produce good writing, and more obligate to WRITE, to tell the damn story I wanted to tell.

So as far as either my philosophical interest or the connection to the other post goes, we can either address that in the comments, or--should this fail to draw any comment--in a future post, where the dialectics can be unburdened by mere observation. Here's what I was interested in noting, and what it seemed to mean aside from its relation to either big philosophy or its relationship to my other ideas.

I was listening to one of the CDs I'd requested from the list for review. I don't get everything I ask for from every list--there are other writers to take into account--but I don't get anything I didn't ask for, unless my review editor thinks there's something I'd enjoy based on her (remarkably astute) understanding of my tastes. In order to avoid falling into a rut, and only reviewing one or two kinds of music, I do like to shake my own foundations up a little, and request something that resides outside my tastes, if not entirely outside my musical values. **
The process can be a little risky, but it's often quite rewarding.

So I'm listening to one such gamble--we'll leave the artist's name out of it for now--and I'm finding myself a little put out, at least for the first track. It might be because it's blues rock, and I'm just suffering from precisely the prejudice I was trying to address in picking the CD; post-punk theory (because post-punk is nothing if not theoretical) has traditionally demanded that the blue be bled from the blues, hollowing out the recognized emotion constructs in order to create music that is resolutely deconstructionist, situationist, etc. This was partially a function of European bands trying to de-Americanize the essential tools of rock & roll, but, considering that American bands like Devo, Mission of Burma, Talking Heads, and Pere Ubu also engaged in this, it's also fair to say that they were rebelling against the Rousseauist warmth of '60s ideology (it's no coincedence that Rousseau's number one rival, the Marquis de Sade, was such a profound influence in the industrial camp, one of post-punks most easily recognizable sub-genres).

Whatever the reason, my relationship with the blues is tenuous. I love the old, scratchy stuff; I enjoy some revivalists like Mark Lanegan or Hillstomp; I LOVE artists like P.J. Harvey or the Kills who have appropriated aspects of the blues to tell stories that have more personal resonance with me than the ones usually held out by the old masters. But this recording struck me, on first listen to the first track, as belonging more to the school of '70s classic rock (which, if you haven't gathered yet, ain't my bag), with a vaguely Bob Seger-ish tinge that had me sulking.

Now, the album got a LOT better over the rest of the tracks, and I should note that, although that sense that this was sorta my parents music more than mine didn't quite dissipate, I was almost won over by the music itself. I can thank Quentin Tarantino (among others, probably) for contextualizing classic rock in a way that I could appreciate, and the right flavor of Americana can remind me of dusty road trips back in my old college stomping grounds in the SW, and the notion that this music could go quite well with a smoldering joint, a cheap (3.2%) beer, and a desert sunset did warm me to the whole enterprise. But my impulse was still to write this off as something that was only worth having if I was dying for something I could share with my friends who have no interest in motorik, post-punk, drone, dub, techno, hip-hop, art-punk, prog-metal, freak-folk, or anything else that I might refer to as my bread-and-butter.

Since it always behooves me to research an artist's past projects, I looked this guy up on allmusic.com. Turns out his music is most often classified as indie-rock, and is usually compared to post-hardcore acts like the Jesus Lizard. What the hell? Thing is though, as I'm reading his history, the bands that he's toured with, and the way previous reviewers had described his sound, I'm starting to wonder: Did I give the album a fair hearing? Was I tricked into thinking this music was something it wasn't because the blues element was up front, rather than subverted? Did my prejudices against a certain kind of sound make me miss something hiding in plain sight?

So I listened to the album again with new knowledge . . . and it was better. Oh, it still sounded the same, and it's not gonna be something I play all the time. But when I know who I'm listening to, where he comes from, what his widely-perceived intent is in appropriating the sounds he's appropriating, I hear the music differently.

All of this had me questioning . . . well, everything. Had my theory unduly prejudiced me against the music? Had that same theory converted me back? Did knowing this gentleman's history open my mind to his music, or had it blinded me to its flaws? Do we apprehend art with the raw senses or with the whole mind? Does how we absorb a message depend on who delivers that message? Is it shallow to prefer the music when I know it's been delivered by a tattooed (in theory; I don't know that he has any tats) punk rather than some red-state fogey?

Can we approach anything--art, family, politics, religion--culturally naked, without the noetic baggage accumulated over a lifetime? I tend to think not. Maybe when we were younger, more literally naked. But we DO come to define ourselves by the roles we play, because without those roles, we're more and more like everyone else. C.S. Lewis once noted the irony of people insisting that they were "more themselves" when nude, because the opposite is, in fact, true: any one man is more like every man without his trousers, and any one woman more like every woman. Individuation is a result of serial affectation, calcification, rejection, appropriation, socialization. These labels, identities, archetypes do bind us to other people, but we still find space in the contradictions to free ourselves from those binds, and even that would be impossible if we truly shed everything--language, culture, preference, ethics, philosophy. A human without theory--whether or not he or she calls it that--is an organism, a collection of biological needs with few, if any, strategies for fulfilling them.

Truth be told, my review of this record wasn't that far from my original impression (though another CD on which the same artist played with a trio was a slam-dunk, a fulfillment of the furious promise hiding under the surface of the solo work, so I like to think everything came up [bloody] roses in the end); I just softened the criticisms and looked a bit more closely at the silver linings. But I like to think I listened more completely in knowing what the music's context was. Maybe we should be able to consume art without this knowledge. But do we? Ever? It seems to me that by the time we even started to develop musical preferences, we already had language, already had friends who recommended music to us, templates and paradigms by which we judged good from bad. Maybe we've never arrived on art's doorstep without the requisite shirt and shoes (and trousers, of course, though that was always omitted form the convenience store signs).

** - I differentiate between values and tastes because tastes usually speak to matters of genre, where values can transcend genre. I hate to say I don't like x kind of music, but like y kind of music. More correct would be to say that x kind of music tends to operate from a value system different from my own, but when it does address my musical values, I CAN like it (say, Neko Case helping me like country); y kind of music reflects my values as a matter of its construct (say, dub music already being an intrinsically postmodern form), and therefore it doesn't necessarily have to work as hard to meet my criteria. But even that ties me to genre more than I prefer, because there's a lot of suck-ass dub out there, and one really oughtn't criticize country music for BEING country music.

I bring this up because I find that everyone's preferences look snobbish to someone who doesn't share them, and I'm always taken aback when I--who like more individual bands and more individual kinds of music than pretty much anyone I know--am accused of elitism by people who surely dislike at least as many forms as I do (I remember being accused of elitism because I didn't like Neil Simon by someone who didn't like Theatre of the Absurd; I wondered why one set of preferences was perceived as affectation and the other as enlightened populism).

Be, and I'll Just Watch You

(Props to the criminally under-recognized Julian Cope for the lyric referenced in this post's title, from the song "Soul Desert," on the album Jehovahkill; the lyric quoted is followed, rather devastatingly, with the addendum, " . . . 'cause being is just too hard for me.")

I'm sorry I haven't called. Really. I didn't mean to leave you hanging. I've been busy, but that's not much of an excuse; I found time to play with my other friends over on the Fray, and I don't even like them all that much (I've actually got a lot more over there--click on the "More By This User" key to see what I've been up to--but this review is the only thing that got any honorable mention, so I chose to emphasize it). Well, maybe a few of them. Mostly I go over there to get into debates; it's like a bar I'd never take my wife to because I only go to start brawls.

I had a performance with UMO Ensemble on Sunday, for the Moisture Festival, a great idea (a week+ festival for burlesque, cabaret, clowning, magic, vaudeville, and other arguably archaic forms that, at one point, formed the basis for modern musicals and the Theatre of the Absurd, and a good basic ground for re-enervating, and hopefully innovating, the form) with a terribly and wholly inexplicable name. We were performing as buffoons (I don't actually appear in the picture, but I wore the costume/makeup for the tall one with the horns, and more or less looked exactly like that; the costume defines the buffoon at least as much as the wearer), a staple of the UMO roster with which I, being something of a newbie (I've been a member since 2003, but we've been on hiatus most of that time), had not yet engaged.

A buffoon is the ultimate outsider: deformed (indeed, in the case of Aztooth, not human at all), rejected, interdependent on other buffoons, living in holes in the earth near the landfills and sewers outside medieval towns . . . and liberated to tell nothing but the truth, to exist free of all social grace or obligation, oblivious to stigma, allowed to live in a state of perpetual toddlerdom.

Anyway, we were emceeing the event in question, so it involved a lot of flying by the seat of the pants. I'm a little creaky when it comes to verbal improv--words are a very carefully considered thing to me, though I can react quickly and organically enough on a physical basis--but, luckily, Aztooth is the least verbal of the crew, so I just had to live in the skin. Much hilarity seemed to ensue.

Of course, how could it not? One has a clearer--and giddier--view of truth and being when we use artifice to strip away pretense, costumed that we may run, socially naked and brutally honest, through the world without accountability. Clowns and fools always have a certain advantage when it comes to telling the truth, and fiends & monstrosities have a certain advantage when it comes to seeing it. The rest of us are so tied to the roles we feel obligated to play that we often don't see when the role is doing the talking for us. The role of buffoon speaks for its wearer, of course, but the role itself is obliged only to exist outside obligation; there is no fear of repercussion, no mercy, no sense of consequence, no concern for the consequence when it arrives. The buffoon laughs at being beaten, its anger just a more violent facet of its perpetual amusement.

This article in last week's Seattle Weekly, written by Mike Seely, got me thinking about roles & obligations, about labels and context (which continually both illuminate and obscure truth). The passage that really took me for a ride was this one, in which the narrator--a prank-playing indie rocker--is confronted by someone who chastises him with a label I have often used derisively:

'John, you're such a...a...frat boy!'

"The insult was the equivalent of slapping my face with a white calfskin glove," Roderick goes on. "The term 'frat boy,' as he intended it, had all the connotations of beer-swilling, date-raping, jock, macho crap. I laughed, because to me, a fraternity boy was someone who sneered insults at people with sarcastic WASPy smugness. His knotted-sweater, white-collar disapproval was everything I associated with the Greeks.

"So here we stood, two indie rockers, faced off across a gaping cavern of American culture as defined by the term 'frat boy.' He dismissed my car-wreckin', prank-pullin', fire-startin', gun-shootin', whoop-it-up, call-the-cops American party-makin' with one word: frat. And I saw his sniffing, eye-rolling, weak-assed, big-vocabulary-but-not-quite-used-correctly tsk-tsking as more or less the same thing: fraternity boy. But in fact, we were both limp-wristed, lit-major indie rockers."

The operative words in Roderick's diatribe: "gaping cavern." The stigma associated with frat boys is not a one-size-fits-all-proposition, but has rather been expanded over time to signify anything that anyone might find remotely annoying about white heterosexual males.

Seely goes on to note that no one should get too worked up about the "poor white boy" thing, and I won't get into it here (much; it's probably unavoidable). But it's interesting for me to see not only how two-sided the label can be (or many-sided, if we buy the author's assertion that ANY annoying traits of the white, heterosexual male can be targeted), but on how many sides I've actually been when using the word (only once, that I know of, did anyone ever use the word to describe me; as I was in a bedroom with two naked women when it came out, I decided offense would've been a little out of line). Really, I've been both the merry prankster dismissing the uptight preppy and the trimmed metrosexual chastising the feral party animal; I've been the fashionista and the regular Joe straining at the boundaries of couture. Interestingly enough, while I champion independent music, I've often been dismissive of (some) indie rock (some of my favorite and least favorite bands are tagged with the label), as such, precisely because they seem like a fraternity, a collective with rigid standards of fashion and conduct wherein learning to sing or play instruments is dismissed as selling out (probably because some of them, if they shed the affectation of sloppiness, would be mere rock bands, about as indie as Bob Seger), with an off-putting sexlessness that seems counter to all that I consider revolutionary in art. But I do also see that as a reaction to what I've always perceived as the adolescent sexual culture of the more jockish franternities, where I always imagined that men got laid, but women never had orgasms. Of course, that view may be my envy and not getting laid nearly as much as I hoped I would in college, knowing full well that I could provide the orgasms I was sure the women weren't getting . . .

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah . . .

So anyway, that little exchange noted in the article--in which we see that both sides of the "gaping chasm" see frat boys on the other side--reminded me of this post from back in August. See, I realized as I read the article on the indie rocker/frat boy divide that the term "frat boy," while once indicative of membership in an organization, has become a term rather like "bourgeois," a way of commenting on class, aesthetics, and value systems. And like "bourgeois," it's a term generally only applied by those to whom it might BE applied. Whatever you mean by "frat boy," chances are, if you use it as an insult, that you're white, male, reasonably privileged, somewhat educated, pop-culture savvy (even if you pretend not to be), and either a self-styled bohemian or a meticulously constructed "average Joe." And if you're not at least, say, three of those things, you're not more than a degree separated from someone who's all of the above. I'd also bet money that if you're a male applying that term, you (like me) choke just a little on the envy in the term, probably still a little steamed at the girl who left you alone that night for her frat god, certain to spend her orgasm-less night (unless, you know, she came by such things--pun intended--easily) in the arms of cretin. If you're a female applying the term, I suspect that you either spent too much time around people like me, or you're one of those unfortunate girls who could've been having orgasms with the 'hound, but instead were duped, to your eternal regret, into sleeping with the devil in the alligator shirt.

Shit, what was I on about? Oh, okay . . . See, I don't really think we can possibly underestimate the role that envy plays in this whole tendency to disparage the frat boy; I can only take TREMENDOUS comfort in the fact that my wonderful wife, 'Stine (y'all know her, right?), chose me over a creature that, truth be told, is probably more like me than I care to admit. It seems to me that stratifying the people you see and know over such mundane details as whether you were into Joy Division or Def Leppard as adolescents, the Decemberists or Jack Johnson now; whether you're into arts or into sports; whether sex came easily to you or only infrequently and with tremendous personal, emotional investment . . . Well, it's all very bourgeois, isn't it? It's like the whole geeks/jocks/art fags thing really just followed us into adulthood. Everybody's adolescent angst has become the meat of our arts journalism, apparently.

But this problem isn't just about frat boys and indie bands. No, this is something else. Look at this article about how New Age culture cheapens yoga. I happen to agree with some of what the article is getting at. New Age-ism claims to have roots in Hermetism, Gnosticism, and Rosicrucianism, but it seems to get the doctrines wrong, and the hippie-turned-yuppie concerns of baby boomer self-actualization have done much to confuse my own understanding of spirituality and self-care. As a Western practicing Buddhist, I struggle not only with those who will criticize, en masse, all Westerners who practice Buddhism, but with the fact that they at least partially have a point: There ARE those who use Eastern thought as a way of avoiding the rigors of Christianity, who adapt it to their least noble instincts and create a consumer culture of fabricated needs disingenuously called "tools." The comfort I take--aside from the physical benefits of doing yoga and martial arts, of chanting, of studying the Lotus Sutra and the Nag Hammadi Library--is in knowing that this disdain is itself a function of the same occidental privilege. Atheists who chastise Western Buddhists as insincere are ultimately betraying their oneness of mind with American Christians, assuming that honest Westerners must surely be either Christians or Atheists, that all religions should be approached only in their orthodox forms.

But then, the Vedic cultures from which yoga arose were often anti-materialistic only in rhetoric; some yogis have been ascetics, but certainly not all. Similarly, the debate as to whether the tenets of Buddhism demand austerity was raging in the East long before it was cool in the West to meditate, chant, or read the Sutras. Western boxing neglects the feet, knees, and elbows as weapons, and anything outside the torso as target; indeed, ALL Western exercise before pilates fails to address the body from a holistic perspective. Moreover, if we LIVE in a material culture, in practicing arts or spiritual disciplines from elsewhere, we need to either adapt those arts to what we NEED TO DO to survive here, or we need to leave.

And I suppose you could make similar arguments for fraternities. People who belong to them develop social connections that help them in the free market; artists may even be able to network in ways that can help future career prospects, or to create a new audience. Hell, a fraternity produced one of my plays back in college, with no help from the theatre department itself, because one of them happened to like what he saw at one of my other pieces. Did I sell out? Did I accept help from a lesser being? Does the fact that I wanted to be Kafka suffer because he may possibly have been listening to Stone Temple Pilots back at the frat-house?

These prejudices, and the misunderstandings that surround them, are almost necessary for the color in our language and culture; abandoning "frat boy" as an insult isn't likely to happen soon, and I wouldn't want it to. Insults are prejudicial by nature, and a culture without insult is a culture without flavor. Disdain, discord, and elitism are the satirist's bread and butter; subcultures exist to oppose each other, and the greater good of the culture relies on the proliferation of subcultures, where innovation takes place to enrich the whole. I don't object, either, to our turning either our parts in these conflicts or the "objective" analysis of the conflicts themselves into fodder for critique. But I think we need to recognize, also, that there's something inherently frivolous, and a little hypocritical, about taking these things too seriously. We could be talking about the health benefits of yoga and the dangers/benefits of materialism. We could be talking about the effects of white privilege, about the harmful wages of social competition through sex, about different levels of entitlement, about aesthetic theories and the role of theory vs. technical proficiency in the creation of art. If we spend all our time talking about whether it's acceptable to meditate or chant for more money, trying to decide who is and who isn't more of a stereotypical frat boy, or scolding people for driving several hundred dollars worth of yoga equipment to a class in an SUV, it seems to me that we're missing the point.

Finally . . .

. . . my musings on music are available to the masses. Issue #25 of ALARM magazine is out. I've only found it on one newsstand in Seattle (Broadway News), but I'll have an update for you Seattleites as to where else you may find it; those of you who are elsewhere can check at any of the chains listed at the website, or email to ask where it may be sold in your area (though, being a quarterly magazine, a 2-year subscription is only $20, so if you really love me . . . ).

I just sent a couple reviews for the winter issue; I have a few more due early in January, and we're trying to set up an interview with a local(ish) blues band, so we'll be looking at another update in 3 months or so.

My kids came through like gangbusters for the final performance of my teaching project, and even had some striking things to say about using martial arts as a template for performance and cooperation. The project was troubled with unforseen losses, inclement weather, and what appeared, at the time, to be wavering support and institutional browbeating. But we all pulled through, and damn if it didn't bring some tears up at the end.

Rehearsals for Titus Andronicus are going full bore. I'm excited, but I'm also inclined to keep details close to the vest for now. More on that later.

You may have heard over here that 'Stine and I got a new car. So . . . uh, yeah, 'Stine and I got a new car. It's not that I'm not excited; I just have nothing to add (plus driving is more work than play for me, unless I have absolute control over what goes in the CD player).

Sometime in 2007, I promise a post with actual writing in it. Until then, owing to my being so insanely busy (and inclined to lethargy on the rare occasions when I have actual leisure time), you're stuck with my "Dear Diary" entries. Sorry 'bout that. :^)

Come What May

As of yesterday, I've turned in all my materials to the music magazine: my 7 CD reviews and my interview/feature about the hip-hop band. It's out of my hands now. I fear I made some rookie mistakes--my one and only pan may have been a little hasty and narrow-minded; my feature's a little wonkish, politically speaking, and seemed to require a level of journalistic experience I don't possess; and my tone is . . . well, what it is, and it may well be found off-putting. But the point is, I guess (I hope), that I took the assignment seriously--though not without a spirit of fun--and completed it (just barely) ahead of schedule. So while I can, and probably will, torture myself just a little with wondering whether any of it will be printed, whether they'll ask for the CDs back and tell me never to write again, or whatever, the truth is that I'm done unless they ask me to revise something (which would be a good sign, right?).

Between that and the successful completion of my first levels test, I can now turn my attention to worrying about my teaching project on a full time basis. Actually, I'm trying to absorb these last two landmarks, because I think they'll have a positive effect on my teaching, if they let them. My martial art studies have really gotten me thinking about what it means to be an artist who functions from a physical place, while writing about music has me thinking both about being an artist who addresses things by way of language and about being a critic, an artist whose art is to analyze art, critique it, try to generate (or discourage) the interest of a would-be audience. I'd like to think there are some lessons on perseverance and multi-tasking in there, as well.

All of this now has me hankering to perform again. That's neither good nor bad in and of itself. I don't have much control over whether anyone in town happens to produce anything that piques my interest; if I'm to write it myself--whatever it is, be it a solo show, music, mutant sketch comedy--it'll be months, at best, before anything is presentable. But I've got the itch, and it actually feels sort of good. It may be that I'm comforted that I still possess that urge to any degree, or it may be that I recognize in the things that I'm doing the seeds of my growth as a performer, and I'm just getting excited to start planting.

There's nothing that inspires me to perform like a truly inspiring performance, which brings me to last night. Well, other than a really BAD performance, in which case I want to perform just so I can fix the damn thing; but really, there's nothing that so cements my investment, my belief, in the vivid, sensual, violent, compassionate power of art than a performance that wields that power confidently, rapturously, and unapologetically.

So I thank my stars that I was able to witness the glory of TV on the Radio at the Showbox last night.

I'm a latecomer to TV on the Radio fandom; they just never showed up on my radar until this last year, when I heard them playing in the ticket office at the theatre where I'm employed. I was struck by a resemblance to . . . well, I thought at the time it was Genesis as led by Peter Gabriel, and I stick by that to a certain extent; my only revision is that they might more aptly be compared to Peter Gabriel at about the time when he recorded "Biko", after he'd worked with Fripp and Eno, when world music was his new tool and not the whole toolbox, and his gift with an anthemic melody was at its peak.

Anyway, I would hear them now and again over the last year, and think, "Damn, I should get me some o' that." But for some reason, I never did. There's just too much music out there, you know, and I only periodically scrape together enough money to purchase CDs (which points to one of the top 5 reasons I'm trying to turn myself into a published music writer: free music). Then, earlier this summer, when I decided to treat myself to some music, I simultaneously made the decision to specifically seek something new, so I could write about it and send the piece to the magazine with which I'd been in contact. As luck would have it, TVOTR had a brand new release: Return to Cookie Mountain. If you're interested, you can check out my review here. In any case, I've never looked back. The album truly grows richer and more complex with each listen. But what really emerges is something that you usually expect to see up front: an anthemic heat that speaks to some common passion buried deep in the cells. TVOTR is that rare collection of studio wonks that takes clear aim at a universal pop vocabulary, experimental populists who can navigate the perfect hook or a rogue harmonic theory with equal aplomb.

Did I say studio wonks? Guitarist/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek can't really escape that charge. Comparing him to Lee "Scratch" Perry and Brian Eno has become so pointedly the norm that it's no longer subject to charges of hyperbole, and the dense layers of noise that make up TVOTR's recorded output are clearly the product of someone--or several someones--playing with toys in their home studio (dammit, I want a home studio!!!). Given that, these boys have every right and reason to suck live.

Good thing they don't.

Return to Cookie Mountain is such an impressive feat of technology and songwriting that I'd like to think I could be forgiven to hearing the prog-rock and missing the sexy, sweaty soul music that actually sits at its core. If I still didn't recognize the soul after seeing them live, you'd have to conclude that I wasn't paying attention. Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe oozes charisma both sexual and spiritual, and sings with a fierce conviction rarely seen today in either the theory-drenched world of post-punk and indie rock or the prefab monotony of big studio pop. Kyp Malone adds a suitably weird presence to the proceeding, augmenting and harmonizing with Adebimpe's fervent yowl and blending the angular precision of funk guitar with the steady wash of noise championed by classic shoegazer bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Sitek is a more elusive presence visually, but he still makes that presence felt, both sonically and in the theatrical sense.

Collectively, TV on the Radio exude all the athletic grace and rhythmic rapture of a Gospel service, even a Pentacostal revival. When, on their first encore, a girl from the audience leapt onstage and began dancing with Malone and Adebimpe, they didn't miss a beat. When they invited Grizzly Bear--the opening band, a psychedelic folk outfit in the same vein as Animal Collective--onstage to tinker with percussion instruments for the final song of the evening, the idea of musical performance as ritual, as community gathering, as celebration was realized in a way that I haven't seen since my last Sky Cries Mary show (and TVOTR's songwriting is stronger). Even now, almost 12 hours after the fact, my feet still aren't quite touching the ground. Even at its earthiest, this experience was not of this earth.

Good Things and Unintended Consequences

This is gonna be a quick one. Basically, I wanted to say that I passed my martial arts level test; I'm now a phase one, level 2 student. There are three phases, and three levels in each phase. This really just expands the number of classes I have the option of taking, accelerates the pace a bit, and increases the number of weapons I may get to handle in any given class. It hardly puts me in any elite upper tier, but it moves me closer to where I can lobby to become a core team member (level 3 or above), and, eventually, start training to teach others.

I don't want to jinx anything, so I won't name names or count on publication . . . but I was finally contacted by a nationally distributed music magazine. They were interested in my writing, and I've been reviewing the CDs they sent me over the last two weeks (I've sent them 4 reviews; I've three more to cook up), and I had my first interview with a band yesterday for a 1500 word feature due . . . well, any day now. The transcription of the relevant points from the interview already well exceeds my necessary word count, so I'm not worried about coming up with the verbiage. Some judicious editing, a good intro/conclusion . . . we'll see. No guarantees at this point, but I've heard some great music, learned a lot about my own writing (when your reviews are supposed to be 250 words, you learn a lot about distillation), and had the opportunity to meet and speak with two of the nicest, most intelligent members of the Seattle arts community and of, I'm given to presume, the hip-hop community nationally.

If it turns out that any of what I've written gets printed, I'll be sure to let y'all know. And if you're a visitor to this site and DON'T buy my published work, I will find a way to punish you. No, really.

So once I write my remaining reviews (no sweat--of the 3 CDs left, two are actually among my favorites of the batch) and my feature (terrifying prospect, but at least I've got all the content I could possibly use--like I said, these cats were smart), my next major priority, aside from just plugging away at my training, will be the teaching project. Which still terrifies me, of course, but I feel like I've got a little more credibility simply through tackling these other obstacles.

It's funny how succeeding on your own terms can create as much angst as it does pleasure. I'm as stressed, anxious, and plagued with insecurity as ever: probably more so. I don't know if I'm good enough to do any of these things, that I'll be exposed as a fraud any minute now. But I'm getting better at simply acting on the demands placed upon me; my insecurities don't keep me from doing the things I feel unqualified to do.

Anyway, that's it for now. Hope the weekend finds you all well.