That's Just Insipid!

LIKE SUNDAY

I'm here in Whitestone, Queens, reading a book about the role American publishing houses played in the public perception and reception of modernist literature. I'm also online. I'm also listening to the television broadcast of the NY Giants game, atypical Sunday behavior for me, and I just overheard something that resonated so powerfully with the original theme of this blog that I immediately thought of noting it here, after nearly a year's absense from blogging.

What I overheard is interesting in and of itself, if only incidental to the greater event of perhaps resuscitating That's Just Inspid!. It was an advertisement for the NFL on CBS, thus an ad for both the NFL industry and CBS/television, and though I believe that these institutions possess positive cultural value (value to which I have added in the form of countless hours of sports/television spectatorship), the ad itself offended me. It (ab)used the Morrissey song "Everyday is Like Sunday." Grounds for offense: 1) It was a poorly performed cover, warmly produced and sung with gooey, schmaltzy conventionality. 2) It excerpted only the operative title phrase from the song, ignoring the gist of the song's verses (with their playful concern with Armageddon and utter boredom) and original performance (with its arch affectation and idiosyncratic stylization). 3) It represents the worst form that cultural diffusion of interesting popular expression can take.

At the same time, I have reservations about my formerly dominant elitist impulses, as cultivated by certain influential individuals in high school and at Colgate. These impulses have gradually been balanced by my increasingly complicated understanding of and attitude towards popular culture, brought about largely through my two+ years of graduate study of, among other things, literary and cultural history and the relative value of competing forms of expressive culture. I'm more apt now to be critical of knee-jerk critiques of events such as the use of "Everyday is Like Sunday." That said, I find it difficult to squeeze any worthwhile bits of critical insight into televisual culture, the diffusion of Morrissey, trends in commercial advertising, destabilization of canons of taste in popular music. It seems to be pretty much a profoundly lame thing to have done, and I curse everyone involved.

In other news, I am now a Master of English and American literature, continuing on with study towards a Ph.D. And, though it is of course a complicated development, I'm no longer married.

(REVIEW IN PROGRESS; INCOMPLETE)

"15 Step" employs subtle tricks (an abbreviated "children cheering" effect, a glowing synth line, brief bass flourishes) sparingly in a successful attempt to keep the opening track fresh and danceable. Yorke's riff is quite aggressive, almost Jack White-ish in its eschewing a strong melodic line for pure balls-out barking; of course, it doesn't take long for the front man's signature dulcet falsetto to round out the song's choral dynamics. This contrast is typical of the album's deft swinging between straight-ahead rock and gorgeous expansive ballads--come to think of it, the same contrast that made OK Computer the landmark it is. Still, the track does not find Radiohead pioneering any new sounds of their own; it is no "Airbag" or "Planet Telex," but activates the album's energy quite like Amnesiac's "Pakt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box."

"Faust Arp" plays beautifully on the heels of "All I Need"'s full-tilt climax, spinning a simple guitar line that strongly echoes "Dear Prudence." Strings and patter-style lyrics (a la Hail to the Thief's "A Wolf at the Door") complete the song's sparse arrangement. Though by far the album's briefest track, it accomplishes a beautifully crooned bridge, enacting conventional song structure--not unlike the many gems from The White Album, a source from which many have observed Radiohead borrowing on previous albums (compare "Karma Police" and "Sexy Sadie," for example).

"Reckoner" Jonny recently mentioned that this song came together rather more quickly than the others. A first listen bears this comment out, as the song has "everything in its right place" from the first beat: Selway opens the track, playing a frisky ride-centered rhythm, anchored by a steady, reverbed tambourine. The song, like much of the album, achieves beauty (which many reviewers I think falsely confuse with "emotion") with seemingly the most simple, pared-down elements. "Reckoner" locates itself halfway between the eerie harmonies of "I Will" and the dense rush of "Knives Out," while retaining the strengths of each.

Animal Collective have made a career of music that communicates in purely musical terms the same effect that a great scary story communicates through language—the short but startling journey from the mundane to the bizarre. The songs from the new LP Strawberry Jam succeed best—and mostly succeed—when they unfold from this central dichotomy between the familiar and the unknown. This is nothing unexpected from a group who has from their very inception declared an intention to expand the boundaries of pop music. A vague, if disingenuously naïve, aim, Animal Collective deserve commemoration—even canonization—for making hay from such a simple ethos: over six albums, numerous EPs, and sundry side projects, the band have consistent turned out tasteful, provocative, and pleasurably consumable art by running seemingly familiar raw material—Beach Boys harmonics, Sonic Youth/Black Dice cacophony, Holy Modal Rounder avant-folk—through a phenomenal sausage press of their own idiosyncratic patent.

For Strawberry Jam, they have run a batch of strawberries through that press. The production values are fruity-sweet, almost to a fault in the early tracks. Mostly abandoning the acoustic, hollow, woody textures of their previous albums, Sung Tongs (2004) and Feels (2006), Jam returns the band to the metallic mercury noise that characterized their early career, but with a more polished veneer. In the opening track “Peacebone,” for example, the various components that on albums like Here Comes the Indian and Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirt They’ve Vanished were intermixed practically beyond individual distinction are here almost embarrassingly (by AC’s own standards) teased apart for clarity. The song is redeemed by the frightening kindergartenism of its lyrics, as well as its quintessentially Animal Collective shout-and-response chorus that melds shrieking with upper-register tooting. Track two, “Unsolved Mysteries,” is by far the album’s weakest, a gaping flaw (uninspired arrangement, uninterestingly flat melody) in what by the forth track, the exuberant ode (though it has little musically to do with soul) “For Reverend Green,” sounds like a band well into a faultless set—one that you are glad has been recorded this richly.

“Reverend Green”’s impossibly intricate doo-doo-doo lines are followed by equally the marvelous loop-d-loop falsetto pyrotechnics that make “Fireworks” a consecutive highlight. “#1” follows these with an off-kilter, float-suggesting arrangement that plods slowly in front of a cascading synthesizer arpeggio which flutters in-and-out tempo with the dominant melody—the same effect that is seen when the turn signals of two cars blink in sequences that approach, achieve, and then depart from synchronicity. “Derek,” the final track, finds the band closest to the whacked sing-a-long spirit of Sung Tongs, only to through in throw a heavy, cash-register-ish percussion riff (reminiscent of Radiohead’s “Revolving Doors”) into the fray halfway through, catapulting the song into a new valence of energy.

The admirable thing about this music is that it seems to the listener so easy to have made—as simple as grasping a thick strawberry and squeezing it into a fascinating pulp. Not so: music this loose requires precision, even when its more regimented passages are performed with the unbridled, uncivilized energy that is the hallmark of all things Animal Collective. Years from now, it may justly been recognized that they have accomplished something that many like-minded musicians could not: a body of music as undeniably experimental, distancing and indecipherable as it is joyously accessible, welcoming, and felt.

"As a test case, consider three titles of current fellowship projects... :

• Traveling Philosophers: The Constitution of a Pragmatist International Network, 1890-1920.
• Stages of Transition: Performing South Africa's Truth Commission
• Lollard Affect and the Contestation of Holiness, 1370-1550

I invite you to guess from which departments these project statements emerge. Philosophy, political science, religious studies, in that order? No, the first, "Traveling Philosophers," is by a historian; the second, on South Africa's Truth Commission, is by a professor of theater; and the third, on the Lollard contestation of holiness, is by an English professor.

"Many of us regard this blurring of boundaries as a healthy sign, a marker of our newfound interdisciplinarity. Perhaps. But, whatever the inter- in the topics listed above, there is one discipline that is conspicuously absent, and that discipline is what the Greeks called poetike, the discipline of poetics. True, the South African Truth Commission may be better understood when we examine its workings as a form of theater, and the meaning of holiness for the followers of John Wycliff may well have a strong rhetorical component. But in these and related cases, the literary if it matters at all, is always secondary; it has at best an instrumental value. Accordingly, it would be more accurate to call the predominant activity of contemporary literary scholars other-disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary."

—Marjorie Perloff, "Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change." PMLA, May 2007.

It is refreshing and relieving to hear such a reasonable, if dubious, assessment of the professional arena into which I'm heading. Thus far, my greatest success and expansions of confidence have been founded upon my close readings, on a belief in the primacy of the art of the text, be it in human or purely aesthetic terms. If people are listening and willing to change, maybe there is a place for me (and other would-be literary scholars) in the world.

If not, reading this article has made me realize and affirm why teaching at a private boarding school really afforded me all I ever wanted from an occupation: reading attentively, helping others read attentively, growing together as thinkers, readers, and writers. If there isn't room for that in universities, then I'd be pleased to spend another four or forty years doing what was so fulfilling at The School.

"The diegetic film is in general considerably more 'logical' and 'constructed' than the dream. Films of the fantastic or the supernatural, the most unrealistic films, are very often only films that obey another logic, a genre logic (like the realistic film itself), a set of ground rules which they have laid down at the outset (genres are institutions) and within which they are perfectly coherent. It rarely happens that we find in a film narrative that impression of true absurdity which we commonly experience when we remember our own dreams or read about others, that very specific very recognisable impression (from which intentionally absurd films, like the 'literature of the absurd' of not long ago, remain so remote) which includes both the internal obscurity of the elements and the confusion of their assemblage, the enigmatic brilliance of the zones that the wish dazzles and the dark, swarming shipwreck of the almost forgotten segments, the sensation of tension and relaxation, the suspected outcropping of a buried order and the evidence of an authentic incoherence, an incoherence which, unlike that of films that aspire to delirium, is not a laboured addition but the very core of the text.
--"The psychologist Rene Zazzo, touching on the basis of a repeated remark of Freud's, rightly affirms that the manifest content of a dream, if it were strictly transposed to the screen, would make an unintelligible film. A film, I may add, truly unintelligible (an object in fact very rare), and not one of those avant-garde or experimental films which, as the enlightened audience knows, it is appropriate at once to understand and not to understand (not understanding being the better way to understand and too much effort at understanding being the height of misunderstanding, etc.). These films, whose objective social function, at least in some cases, is to satisfy a certain kind of intellectual's naively desperate desire not to be naive, have intergrated within their institutional regime of intelligibility a certain dose of elegant and coded unintelligibility, in such a way that their very unintelligibility is, as a result, intelligible. What is in question here is again a genre, and one which illustrates the contrary of what it would like to show; it reveals how difficult it is for a film to achieve true absurdity, pure incomprehensibility, that very thing which our most ordinary dreams, at least in certain sequences, achieve directly and effortlessly." ---Chrisitan Metz, The Imaginary Signifier

Metz published this passage in 1977, the same year that David Lynch finally completed work on his first opus, Eraserhead. I would like to entertain some consideration of Lynch's cinema vis a vis Metz's emphatic doubt as to the ability of a film to recreate the sensation and affect of dreaming. Is Lynch the rare, and perhaps singular, example of a filmmaker whose best work most nearly accomplishes the "true absurdity" of the dream-state; or is he but the most conspicuously worshiped demagogue whom droves of "certain kinds of intellectual" over-enthusiastically adore?

The orders had arrived with the usual lack of ceremony or even common courtesy, by way of the Oyster Stew traditionally prepared each Thursday as the Plat du Jour by Miles Blundell, who, that morning, well before sunup, had visited the shellfish market in the teeming narrow lanes of the old town in Surabaya, East Java, where the boys were enjoying a few days of ground-leave. There, Miles had been approached by a gentleman of Japanese origin and unusual persuasiveness, who had sold him, at what did seem a remarkably attractive price, two buckets full of what he repeatedly described as "Special Japanese Oyster," these being in fact the only English words Miles would recall him having spoken. Miles had thought no more about it until the noon mess was interrupted by an agonized scream from Lindsay Noseworth, followed by a half minute of uncharacteristic profanity. On the mess-tray before him, where he had just vigorously expelled it from his mouth, lay a pearl of quite uncommon size and iridescence, seeming indeed to glow from within, which the boys, gathered about, recognized immediately as a communication from the Chums of Chance Upper Hierarchy.
--"Don't suppose you happened to get that oyster merchant's name or address," said Randolph St. Cosmo.
--"Only this." Miles produced a small business card covered with Japanese text, which, regrettably, none of the boys had ever learned to read.
--"Mighty helpful," sneered Darby Suckling. "But heck, we all know the story by now." Chick Counterfly had already brought out of its storage locker a peculiar-looking optical contraption of prisms, lenses, Nernst lamps, and adjustment screw, into an appropriate receptacle of which he now carefully placed the pearl. Lindsay, still clutching his jaw in dental discomfort and muttering aggrievedly, lowered the shades in the dining saloon against the tropical noontide, and the boys directed their attention to a reflective screen set on one bulkhead, where presently, like a photographic image emerging from its solution, a printed message began to appear.
--Through a highly secret technical process, developed in Japan at around the same time Dr. Mikimoto was producing his first cultured pearls, portions of the original aragonite--which made up the nacreous layers of the pearl--had, through "induced paramorphism," as it was known to the artful sons of Nippon, been selectively changed here and there to a different form of calcium carbonate--namely, to microscopic crystals of the doubly-refracting calcite know as Iceland spar. Ordinary light, passing through this mineral, was divided into two separate rays, termed "ordinary" and "extraordinary," a property which the Japanese scientists had then exploited to create an additional channel of optical communication wherever in the layered structure of the pearl one of the thousands of tiny, cunningly-arranged crystals might occur. When illuminated in a certain way, and the intricately refracted light projected upon a suitable surface, any pearl so modified could thus be made to yield a message.
--To the fiendishly clever Oriental mind, it had been but a trivial step to combine this paramorphic encryption with the Mikimoto process, whereupon every oyster at the daily markets of the world suddenly became a potential carrier of secret information. If pearls so modified were then further incorporated into jewelry, reasoned the ingenious Nipponese, the necks and earlobes of rich women in the industrial West might provide a medium even less merciful than the sea into whose brute flow messages of yearning or calls for help sealed in bottles were still being dropped and abandoned. What deliverance from the limitless mischief of pearls, what votive offering in return for it, would be possible?

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

Nobody takes Treat Williams seriously, including himself, and that's what makes him awesome.