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06 Nov 09
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Shocking Pinks /// “This Aching Deal” /// Shocking Pinks

And with that, What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 comes to a close. For now.  I’ll probably sprinkle a handful of entries in throughout the rest of the year.  But hey: Shocking Pinks know how to say goodbye.  What sounds like a solo project is actually a cast of various giggers who revolve around New Zealander Nick Harte, who had a hipster haircut before anyone else and goes well with crippling depression.  His shambling lo-fi has a serious Phil Elverum/Mount Eerie streak and all the uncomfortable intimacy that come with it.  Most of Shocking Pinks, which marked a move from Flying Nun to DFA, bears no mark of the new label, achieving a prickly post-punk whose industrial chill has been swapped out for a naturally cold dawn in frostbitten meadowlands.

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06 Nov 09

How Fiction Works

agrammar:

How Fiction Works - James WoodI’ve been meaning for a while to say something about reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works, but so much has already been said, and it’s tough to boil down a response to some succint kernel.

One thing that did surprise me was that the “imperious” tone many critics spoke of — the one that had Walter Kirn getting behind on labels and describing Wood as “flash[ing] the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic” — really isn’t about his language or how prescriptive he’s being or any of the usual places you’d expect to locate such things. Wood makes a pretty friendly and enthusiastic case for how a lot of literature really does work, and provides loads of interesting readings along the way. What’s odd is that you’d expect Wood — widely read, a working critic, and actually younger than most — to be completely aware of all the other ways people approach reading and writing fiction. You’d expect that, at book length, he’d either have to grapple seriously with those approaches or just modestly submit that he’s talking about one major way fiction works, but fiction is big and complicated and one great lively thing about it is that someone always sees it differently. The weird “imperiousness” is that he doesn’t do this. He even manages to create the sense that he views different perspectives as foreign and faintly ridiculous; when he bothers discussing them, he summarizes them in ways that seem less like he’s caricaturing the opposition and more like he actually doesn’t get what they’re saying.

And in the end, I honestly can’t tell whether he knows this or not. He spends the totality of the book, for instance, making an unspoken background assumption that the primary purpose of fiction is to represent some kind of reality. It’s not until the final chapter that he acknowledges that — amazingly enough — there are plenty of writers and readers and critics of fiction who are not sure this is entirely the case. His response to this is funny: he reduces that argument to a few 60s academics and William Gasses and funny post-structuralists who allegedly think that fiction is purely a linguistic performance and has no strict relationship with reality. To which Wood, in a tone that would be almost charming if it weren’t so rhetorically feeble, says to the reader: C’mon, buddy! You and I, we both know that’s not really true. You read a book and it portrays something “really” happening, am I right? Buddy, c’mon. And then, even more amazingly, he does a sentimental little dance around this somewhat obvious and vaguely point-missing response — isn’t fiction great, the way it can draw reality like that? — as the curtain closes on the book as a whole.

It’s really kind of weird. It’s no mystery how it enraged so many readers. Which is too bad, because apart from that habit — as a sort of traditionalist spin through the basic techniques and issues of fiction, an incomplete one, a by-no-means-prescriptive one, just a scratch through the main ways Western fiction has operated — it’s pretty good. It’s just too bad it gives off that whiff it does: not really that of someone “imperious,” I don’t think, not that of a prescriptivist or stodgy polemicist or a tweedy blowhard with an upturned nose. It’s more like someone with limited social skills, like the IT guy so enthralled with computers that he’s not quite able to fathom the way other people actually use them, and is too deep in his own approach to really entirely hear when other people try to explain the alternatives.

What’s funny to me about the book is that its failings spring directly from the sort of technique Woods prizes above all others: a whittling, line-editing, sculptural effort toward neoclassical clarity.  The fact that he doesn’t seriously address the other ways fiction works (linguistic ballet or otherwise) seems part and parcel of his craving for an elegant simplicity approaching some kind of antique golden ratio he dare not fully articulate.  The fact that David Foster Wallace is a recurring aesthetic villain is, in Woods’ own words, because the man’s prose is “hideously ugly” (ha, speaking of that excessiveness Woods abhors—why not just “ugly”?) and too willing to inhabit the trashiness of language as it’s commonly mangled today.  So much for creating reality. His precious ears can’t handle Wallace, meaning he treats fiction as a retreat from the tyranny of the garbage-tongued English-speaking world rather than a complex reflection of it, as he contends.  In striving for a bit of essence, Woods shies away from and derides most complicating factors—that doesn’t make his analysis particularly shitty, it just makes think this work could be re-titled In Defense Of 19th Century Literature or John Updike Should’ve Known Better or Why I Like The Stuff I Like.

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06 Nov 09

Connecting The Dots

On the New Order album Brotherhood, as “Way Of Life” wraps up, you can hear a faint echo of Bernard Sumner’s guitar part from Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and it hews in tone toward the modified Permanent mix.

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06 Nov 09
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Autolux ///  “Sugarless” /// Future Perfect

The rest of Future Perfect never clicked with me, but this song is my  sophomore year of college.  In the sense that I listened to it a dozen times daily and played it compulsively on campus radio, and probably in other, weirder senses too.  Just a bodyslam of a track.

(via bg5000)

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05 Nov 09
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Modest Mouse /// “Parting Of The Sensory” /// We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

Only Modest Mouse could have released an album this awe-inspiring and have no one give a shit.  Maybe it was the “Float On” hangover that kept people from really engaging with this one, but its stomp and sheen quickly made it my contrarian favorite out of their unimpeachable discography.  In my head it completes the wasteland trinity, connecting The Lonesome Crowded West and previous infatuation The Moon & Antarctica: the desert in every direction, then ice, then the sea.  But no multi-album narrative is needed to appreciate a death rattle hoedown like “Parting Of The Sensory.”  Isaac Brock sings that “someday you will die and somehow something’s gonna steal your carbon,” and you can put that on my tombstone, thanks.  What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 has up till now focused on newish bands that seemed to fall through the cracks, but someone has to stick up for such mastery of craft and lyric from a group that’s already been around the block.  Don’t bother setting out the laurels; Modest Mouse won’t be resting on them anytime soon.

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05 Nov 09
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Fuck Buttons /// “Olympians” /// Tarot Sport

jenrobinson:

hungryghoast and kafka-on-the-shore have pretty much nailed this one.  I have nothing to add.

hungryghoast: “like Kraftwerk firing pink noise at the inside of Vangelis’ skull as he composes “Chariots Of Fire.” In Goa.”  - Warren Ellis

kafka-on-the-shore: Oh look! Isn’t that me standing on that very crowded platform at Pitchfork station, trying to jump on the Fuck Buttons band wagon? Yes, it is. And I can see that the peeps already on board are looking rather irritated by that sudden influx of button fuckers. Tough shit, I say, they’ll just have to make room.

After listening to Tarot Sport once I knew I’d never listen to Street Horrrsing again.  ”Olympians” is easily the crown jewel, a track at first enjoyed as Dead Cities-era M83 material and then, at the 4:35 mark, marveled at as ionospheric Popol Vuh bliss-out.  It’s religious ecstasy.

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04 Nov 09
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A Sunny Day In Glasgow /// “A Mundane Phonecall To Jack Parsons” /// Scribble Mural Comic Journal

What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 perks up with A Sunny Day In Glasgow, a consistently excellent and overlooked Philly band with a few essential releases to their ray-of-hope name.  I’ve gushed about them previously, so there’s not much left to say.  Dream pop lost in a funhouse or shoegaze with a stack of twee records in the closet, it’s just instantly, fizzily, giddily good.

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04 Nov 09
The Office & 30 Rock /// Season 6 & Season 4
(Apologies for the TV dump, I just found myself compelled).  It’s probably not fair to review these shows together, but it must be said that neither one is doing a great job of holding my attention anymore.  The Office held some glimmers of hope after its horrible, horrible, horrible fifth season; now it seems on track to be just another rotating series of low-stakes hookups.  I love the shark-jumping move of having Michael date Pam’s mom, yet Pam’s shrill bitchiness on the subject sucked all enjoyment out of it.  What happened to that endearing awkwardness we used to love, Pam and Jim?  Oh right, now you’re smug married assholes who think that whatever veneer of tolerance you had for your co-workers should now be scrubbed clean off.  In the old days we would have seen people squrim under Michael’s ignorance and stealthily evade his friendship—in 2009 they’re calling him a repellent idiot to his face.  What about that could possibly ring true?  We know the office has some sort of compassion for their loser-in-chief; they can’t just be cruel.  Also, when the fuck are we going to stop wasting Dwight, the one character with any real torque?  His and Toby’s hard-boiled detective mission was a B-plot with game, and those shouldn’t be so rare.  As for 30 Rock, jeez.  Jeff Dunham, Betty White and self-deprecating Jimmy Fallon in the same episode.  Gay Halloween party.  Kenneth compromising his principles.  It doesn’t feel at all like this show knows what it wants to be.  It’s forcing a lot of top-down mechanisms instead of letting the real chaos of producing a television show give rise to organic premises.  Baldwin as Jack as all-too-human God is consistently the most rewarding conceit, and even better when he’s got a nemesis like Gob Banks to play against.  Elsewhere, it’s an ever more entropic mess.

The Office & 30 Rock /// Season 6 & Season 4

(Apologies for the TV dump, I just found myself compelled).  It’s probably not fair to review these shows together, but it must be said that neither one is doing a great job of holding my attention anymore.  The Office held some glimmers of hope after its horrible, horrible, horrible fifth season; now it seems on track to be just another rotating series of low-stakes hookups.  I love the shark-jumping move of having Michael date Pam’s mom, yet Pam’s shrill bitchiness on the subject sucked all enjoyment out of it.  What happened to that endearing awkwardness we used to love, Pam and Jim?  Oh right, now you’re smug married assholes who think that whatever veneer of tolerance you had for your co-workers should now be scrubbed clean off.  In the old days we would have seen people squrim under Michael’s ignorance and stealthily evade his friendship—in 2009 they’re calling him a repellent idiot to his face.  What about that could possibly ring true?  We know the office has some sort of compassion for their loser-in-chief; they can’t just be cruel.  Also, when the fuck are we going to stop wasting Dwight, the one character with any real torque?  His and Toby’s hard-boiled detective mission was a B-plot with game, and those shouldn’t be so rare.  As for 30 Rock, jeez.  Jeff Dunham, Betty White and self-deprecating Jimmy Fallon in the same episode.  Gay Halloween party.  Kenneth compromising his principles.  It doesn’t feel at all like this show knows what it wants to be.  It’s forcing a lot of top-down mechanisms instead of letting the real chaos of producing a television show give rise to organic premises.  Baldwin as Jack as all-too-human God is consistently the most rewarding conceit, and even better when he’s got a nemesis like Gob Banks to play against.  Elsewhere, it’s an ever more entropic mess.


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04 Nov 09
Venture Brothers /// Season 4
Three episodes in and this show still seems to be the greatest single thing on television.  Insanely plotted, gobsmackingly hilarious and unrelentingly dark, this bizarro Hanna-Barbera universe is the stuff of Mormon nightmares.  Don’t try to jump in now; go back to the beginning of the series and blow the various parts of your mind in the intended order.

Venture Brothers /// Season 4

Three episodes in and this show still seems to be the greatest single thing on television.  Insanely plotted, gobsmackingly hilarious and unrelentingly dark, this bizarro Hanna-Barbera universe is the stuff of Mormon nightmares.  Don’t try to jump in now; go back to the beginning of the series and blow the various parts of your mind in the intended order.


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04 Nov 09
V /// Season One
A decent enough pilot.  An admirable economy of dialogue and action in setting the ensemble.  Far too many lingering, evil stares that basically trade on the viewer already knowing the core premise.  One thing that will really push it forward is insight into the Vs own internal strategizing and complications: if we’re seeing a coup in its final stages, it’d be nice to see the consequent tensions and reversals at the very top of the alien hierarchy.  Now then, the question at hand: is it anti-Obama?  Not really, just pro-skepticism.  Other reviewers have pointed out more salient parallels to Ponzi schemes and old-school fascism (there’s already a Hitler Youth plot in motion), but in fact the viral web-marketing aspect of the Vs’ propaganda effort is the most on the nose.  If it can be read as an attack on the president, that’s only because A) Obama has successfully branded himself and B) has been labeled as every kind of villain possible.  It’d be like calling a History Channel show on Stalin anti-Obama because the Drudge Report is running “Is Obama The Next Stalin?” stories 24/7.  Or, to give this version of V way too much credit, it actually cuts the other way, snarkily positing the zaniest conspiracies Fox devotees could dream up (socialist, totalitarian, elitist, fascist lizard people are brainwashing your kids via their own naïve idealism!) and confirming them as laughably deadpan realities.  What’s thematically awesome and funny here is that the new recruits to the human resistance are in fact the naturally bigoted among us, who are stuck somewhere beyond a self-fulfilling prophecy.

V /// Season One

A decent enough pilot.  An admirable economy of dialogue and action in setting the ensemble.  Far too many lingering, evil stares that basically trade on the viewer already knowing the core premise.  One thing that will really push it forward is insight into the Vs own internal strategizing and complications: if we’re seeing a coup in its final stages, it’d be nice to see the consequent tensions and reversals at the very top of the alien hierarchy.  Now then, the question at hand: is it anti-Obama?  Not really, just pro-skepticism.  Other reviewers have pointed out more salient parallels to Ponzi schemes and old-school fascism (there’s already a Hitler Youth plot in motion), but in fact the viral web-marketing aspect of the Vs’ propaganda effort is the most on the nose.  If it can be read as an attack on the president, that’s only because A) Obama has successfully branded himself and B) has been labeled as every kind of villain possible.  It’d be like calling a History Channel show on Stalin anti-Obama because the Drudge Report is running “Is Obama The Next Stalin?” stories 24/7.  Or, to give this version of V way too much credit, it actually cuts the other way, snarkily positing the zaniest conspiracies Fox devotees could dream up (socialist, totalitarian, elitist, fascist lizard people are brainwashing your kids via their own naïve idealism!) and confirming them as laughably deadpan realities.  What’s thematically awesome and funny here is that the new recruits to the human resistance are in fact the naturally bigoted among us, who are stuck somewhere beyond a self-fulfilling prophecy.


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