Thursday, May 27, 2004
TEN
Pearl Jam, Tanqueray, David Letterman, the creators of the metric system: they all gave the requisite respect due to the almighty tenth numeral, ten.
While researching for a review today, I found a band's (Sawyer's) collection of "Top Ten Album" lists, and for the first time in a while, I challenged myself to make one.
Why ten? I suppose it's nearly innate now, this basing our conception of everyday math in sets of ten, but at some pre-Roman point ten was just as arbitary as eight or twelve.
I've found ten to be an increasingly* cruel space in which to list favorites of a certain category. The crucial a priori distinction to be made is will it be a "Best of" list (which are usually dubious), or a "Favorite of" list (which are subjective and therefore fluffy and toothless).
I think the trick is to just bite the bullet of arrogance and side with Kant: when we give an opinion on art, we do so as if we are giving the opinion of all men. That's probably an obscene simplification/misinterpretation, but it's at least what I'M trying to say.
I culled the names and memories of twenty-two albums that have made some significant impact on me in the past ten years. For some, sentimental gravity is stronger than anything else, but nothing could be listed that I couldn't still listen to without grimacing too much. Part of the excercise is accepting one of my former selves, one of more rudimentary appreciation of music, art, and greater ideas. Part of the excercise is reaffirming the years of elitism that followed, and the balance of both in which I've usually managed to dwell in recent years. I suppose the criteria for making this list are simply that the album is good through and through (flawless or near flawless), that I still feel this way and listen to it with some regularity, and that its music is somehow woven into a definite era/period of my life. So, this is not a "most influential" list, nor is it a "absolute objective best" list, but influence and my opinions on quality do factor in. I did not include examples from different genres to make sure an eclectic mix. It's music that has stuck and is golden to me above the rest.
Draft #1 of my top ten list, in no particular order:
Miles Davis Kind of Blue
Radiohead OK Computer
Elliot Smith X/O
Weezer s/t ("the blue album")
Joni Mitchell Blue
R.E.M. Lifes Rich Pageant
The Beatles "the white album"
The Smiths The Queen is Dead
Ben Folds Five The Unauthorized Biography of Rheinhold Messner
Jeff Buckley Grace
Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique
Merely a draft, and at best just a game. And there're 11, I know.
*(grr, gotta cut down on my adverbs)
Pearl Jam, Tanqueray, David Letterman, the creators of the metric system: they all gave the requisite respect due to the almighty tenth numeral, ten.
While researching for a review today, I found a band's (Sawyer's) collection of "Top Ten Album" lists, and for the first time in a while, I challenged myself to make one.
Why ten? I suppose it's nearly innate now, this basing our conception of everyday math in sets of ten, but at some pre-Roman point ten was just as arbitary as eight or twelve.
I've found ten to be an increasingly* cruel space in which to list favorites of a certain category. The crucial a priori distinction to be made is will it be a "Best of" list (which are usually dubious), or a "Favorite of" list (which are subjective and therefore fluffy and toothless).
I think the trick is to just bite the bullet of arrogance and side with Kant: when we give an opinion on art, we do so as if we are giving the opinion of all men. That's probably an obscene simplification/misinterpretation, but it's at least what I'M trying to say.
I culled the names and memories of twenty-two albums that have made some significant impact on me in the past ten years. For some, sentimental gravity is stronger than anything else, but nothing could be listed that I couldn't still listen to without grimacing too much. Part of the excercise is accepting one of my former selves, one of more rudimentary appreciation of music, art, and greater ideas. Part of the excercise is reaffirming the years of elitism that followed, and the balance of both in which I've usually managed to dwell in recent years. I suppose the criteria for making this list are simply that the album is good through and through (flawless or near flawless), that I still feel this way and listen to it with some regularity, and that its music is somehow woven into a definite era/period of my life. So, this is not a "most influential" list, nor is it a "absolute objective best" list, but influence and my opinions on quality do factor in. I did not include examples from different genres to make sure an eclectic mix. It's music that has stuck and is golden to me above the rest.
Draft #1 of my top ten list, in no particular order:
Miles Davis Kind of Blue
Radiohead OK Computer
Elliot Smith X/O
Weezer s/t ("the blue album")
Joni Mitchell Blue
R.E.M. Lifes Rich Pageant
The Beatles "the white album"
The Smiths The Queen is Dead
Ben Folds Five The Unauthorized Biography of Rheinhold Messner
Jeff Buckley Grace
Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique
Merely a draft, and at best just a game. And there're 11, I know.
*(grr, gotta cut down on my adverbs)
Monday, May 24, 2004
New and Final Number of Days Since I Last Cut My Hair:
181
Yes, i'm back down to an inch all around. The -stans at the barber shop were grinning and I was grinning at the loss of so much hair. Six months worth. My inspiration was manifold: summer heat, annoyance when playing basketball, it had gotten absolutely molarish (EB & CTF), I know it would thrill Amanda, and more immediate would be as inspiration for the girl's varsity softball team as we face the team that beat us twice (21-2, 9-6) today in the league semifinal play-off. It should be a shock as they board the bus. (I've also compiled a classic pump-up tape for the busride.)
181
Yes, i'm back down to an inch all around. The -stans at the barber shop were grinning and I was grinning at the loss of so much hair. Six months worth. My inspiration was manifold: summer heat, annoyance when playing basketball, it had gotten absolutely molarish (EB & CTF), I know it would thrill Amanda, and more immediate would be as inspiration for the girl's varsity softball team as we face the team that beat us twice (21-2, 9-6) today in the league semifinal play-off. It should be a shock as they board the bus. (I've also compiled a classic pump-up tape for the busride.)
Darkness
There are nightly wars between racoons and feral cats in the fields and woods around my dorm on campus. Racoons are cute, I have decided, with their Zorro masks and cautious prowling; but their battle cries sound like electricity weeping.
There are racoons in all of us. I am seduced by the night and its intoxicants, and I've made bad decisions, but I've always been strong enough or programmed enough to stay within some boundaries. The work that is being done at this or at any school by its faculty is as tenuous as the work done by a college student. The degree of success achieved by the typical student at Colgate, I observed, was linked almost solely to their convictions and values as students. Definitely not the brightest mind in my college class, I think I enjoyed a good deal of my success because of the failure of others to maintain priorities. And I was passionate about the ideas and literature.
Maybe it is the great unspoken failure of recent generations, intoxication. (I wanted to write about it for my senior thesis, but some arrogant bastard didn't think it worthy of his time to help me through it.) I'm more and more convinced that as a culture gains economic, political, and social stability earned through years of rigid structure, idealism takes flight and two things proliferate: artistic expression and moral decay.
I can't write about what has happened, this burning wrong I know about, and it is cramping my brain. A nasty secret is as distracting as a lost wallet.
Can I be vague and yet precise? I'll try.
For all that can be said to be bad about a school, I feel the students and the administration share the blame 50-50. All that can be said to be good about a school probably falls more on the faculty (60-40) because it toils to allow each student chances to shine. If the child is the source of bad actions or negative ferment, they probably share their own share of the blame with those who provide/have provided their upbringing (parents/guardians/family). Therefore, when a faculty (particularly in a boarding school where to a degree the faculty members act as parents) is the source of bad events or bad currents in a school, they are at a greater fault; they have committed a greater sin.
Having just finished re-reading Heart of Darkness with the senior class, it is clearer than ever just how difficult a procedure installing civilization is. The jungle in Conrad's novel laughs at the absurdity of it all. How do you combat hormones and insecurities and the rages of last adolescence in such confinement as this? This job is a pressure chamber with only occasional release, and some of us fuck up and plug the release valves or else they just add more unneccesary pressure for us all to bear. And although we're not in the jungle, I sometimes feel we're sent a bunch of Kurtzes, damaged youth with so much promise and so much pain. And we too are the same, sometimes.
As much as I categorize much of my methods as more liberal, I suffer such fits of conservative backlash that I'm never sure where I should be standing. More and more, I sense that idealism is just the Brutus of concepts: pure and true in theory, but always poisonously abused in practice. What keeps adults in check? It's so easy to substitute idealism in one's head for the laziness or apathy that is actually there. I think we're all, kids and students, just really weak inside, and it gnaws. It takes so much to fight weakness, and some of us are not fighting at all, and how are we equipping our charges to fight it? What keeps the kids from fucking up with rules when some of us say and suggest "fuck the rules" all the time. It works against everything we strive for; it kills me, this secret, for what it is and what it has undone. It's really really bad, and I feel guilty, somehow, even though I'm not involved — probably because the righteous part of me knows that I would never cross certain boundaries, but the strong doubting part of me admits it's not beyond my capacity. This is the second time in recent months that I've debated about taking moral credit for a good action (or, in this case, the lack of a bad one), and in neither case can I completely award myself credit. But I didn't take any money from that ATM machine, and I would never feel right or comfortable taking part in any of the afore-unmentioned-and-merely-alluded-to activities. I do know it feels good to be on this side of morality, and to have been on it for the greater number of decisions in my life thus far. And I'm so lucky to have and love someone so similar with which to share life. I can survive the disappointment I feel in friends and colleagues because Amanda is with me. I know this.
There are nightly wars between racoons and feral cats in the fields and woods around my dorm on campus. Racoons are cute, I have decided, with their Zorro masks and cautious prowling; but their battle cries sound like electricity weeping.
There are racoons in all of us. I am seduced by the night and its intoxicants, and I've made bad decisions, but I've always been strong enough or programmed enough to stay within some boundaries. The work that is being done at this or at any school by its faculty is as tenuous as the work done by a college student. The degree of success achieved by the typical student at Colgate, I observed, was linked almost solely to their convictions and values as students. Definitely not the brightest mind in my college class, I think I enjoyed a good deal of my success because of the failure of others to maintain priorities. And I was passionate about the ideas and literature.
Maybe it is the great unspoken failure of recent generations, intoxication. (I wanted to write about it for my senior thesis, but some arrogant bastard didn't think it worthy of his time to help me through it.) I'm more and more convinced that as a culture gains economic, political, and social stability earned through years of rigid structure, idealism takes flight and two things proliferate: artistic expression and moral decay.
I can't write about what has happened, this burning wrong I know about, and it is cramping my brain. A nasty secret is as distracting as a lost wallet.
Can I be vague and yet precise? I'll try.
For all that can be said to be bad about a school, I feel the students and the administration share the blame 50-50. All that can be said to be good about a school probably falls more on the faculty (60-40) because it toils to allow each student chances to shine. If the child is the source of bad actions or negative ferment, they probably share their own share of the blame with those who provide/have provided their upbringing (parents/guardians/family). Therefore, when a faculty (particularly in a boarding school where to a degree the faculty members act as parents) is the source of bad events or bad currents in a school, they are at a greater fault; they have committed a greater sin.
Having just finished re-reading Heart of Darkness with the senior class, it is clearer than ever just how difficult a procedure installing civilization is. The jungle in Conrad's novel laughs at the absurdity of it all. How do you combat hormones and insecurities and the rages of last adolescence in such confinement as this? This job is a pressure chamber with only occasional release, and some of us fuck up and plug the release valves or else they just add more unneccesary pressure for us all to bear. And although we're not in the jungle, I sometimes feel we're sent a bunch of Kurtzes, damaged youth with so much promise and so much pain. And we too are the same, sometimes.
As much as I categorize much of my methods as more liberal, I suffer such fits of conservative backlash that I'm never sure where I should be standing. More and more, I sense that idealism is just the Brutus of concepts: pure and true in theory, but always poisonously abused in practice. What keeps adults in check? It's so easy to substitute idealism in one's head for the laziness or apathy that is actually there. I think we're all, kids and students, just really weak inside, and it gnaws. It takes so much to fight weakness, and some of us are not fighting at all, and how are we equipping our charges to fight it? What keeps the kids from fucking up with rules when some of us say and suggest "fuck the rules" all the time. It works against everything we strive for; it kills me, this secret, for what it is and what it has undone. It's really really bad, and I feel guilty, somehow, even though I'm not involved — probably because the righteous part of me knows that I would never cross certain boundaries, but the strong doubting part of me admits it's not beyond my capacity. This is the second time in recent months that I've debated about taking moral credit for a good action (or, in this case, the lack of a bad one), and in neither case can I completely award myself credit. But I didn't take any money from that ATM machine, and I would never feel right or comfortable taking part in any of the afore-unmentioned-and-merely-alluded-to activities. I do know it feels good to be on this side of morality, and to have been on it for the greater number of decisions in my life thus far. And I'm so lucky to have and love someone so similar with which to share life. I can survive the disappointment I feel in friends and colleagues because Amanda is with me. I know this.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
