2010: Wandering with Badlands on the horizon
The video for True Blue by Dirty Beaches was posted on March 24th, 2010. Sometime thereafter, Brandon Welchez of Crocodiles watched the video and contacted Alex about putting out True Blue as a 7". We put that record out in July of 2010, so I was pretty busy with that and I knew at that point that blogging about every step of that process wasn't good material for my blog- no one cares about that inside baseball shit. Also at that point no one cared about Dirty Beaches. Meanwhile I was reading alot about the history of the record business- you can see that in the book reviews that I published in 2010.
Collected Posts from January-June 2010
Zeus: God of Thunder.
Jupiter: God of Thunder
Odin: God of Thunder
3/9/10
Meet the Owner of Kemado and Mexican Summer Records
I sat down with label owner Andres Santo Domingo and label head Keith Abrahamsson to get the latest and check out their new pad. (BLACKBOOK)
For those of you who don't know who Lauren Davis is, she is a socialite that turned into a Fashion Editor or better said Contributing Fashion Editor for Vogue US. Her husband is billionaire Andrés Santo Domingo . (SOME GOSSIP BLOG)
Julio Mario Santo Domingo (born 1924) is a Colombian businessman and patriarch of the wealthy Santo Domingo family originally fromBarranquilla, Colombia. He is the son of (Julio) Mario Santo Domingo and Beatriz Pumarejo. He controls more than 100 companies in the diversified portfolio of the "Santo Domingo Group." He is listed by Forbes magazine as one of the wealthiest men in the world, and the second wealthiest in Colombia, with a fortune of $4 billion US dollars.
Julio Mario Santo Domingo was born in Panamá.
Mr. Santo Domingo owns homes in New York City, in Paris, and Baru, a private island he owns off Cartagena, Colombia.
He married firstly, an aristocratic Brazilian named Edyala Braga, with whom he had a son who died in 2009 from cancer:
Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Jr. (1958 - 2009) m. Vera Rechulski, a Brazilian socialite
Tatiana Santo Domingo (born November 24, 1983), the girlfriend of Andrea Casiraghi
Julio Santo Domingo, III (born May 2, 1985)
He married secondly, Beatrice Dávila, and has two sons:
Alejandro Santo Domingo Dávila (born 1977)
Andrés Santo Domingo Dávila m. (2008) Lauren Davis, a US Vogue contributing editor
(WIKI)
Pretty DIY right?
"Who owns Kemado / Mexican Summer Records?
3/16/10
The Importance of Aphorisms in Music, Writing & Speech
 |
| Shirtless 50 Cent: Aphoristic Master with his 50 Rules of Power. |
Aphorisms are the general category for "saying," "maxims,"etc. (wikipedia)
If you are in the business of persuading audiences, then you would be well used to study aphorisms of all cultures. Buddhism, Hinduism and Confusionism are all rich sources of aphoristic thought.
I try to come up with my own aphorisms in my spare time. Here's one, "The intelligent man does something, the wise man, nothing."
 |
| Succesories Example: Focus |
Generally speaking the validity of an aphorism is entirely dependent on the audiences decision to accept it as valid. Although today we associate aphoristic thought with writing, it is almost certainly more effectively when spoken to a live audience.
Attempts to create series of aphorisms continue down to today. Two days ago, the front page of Yahoo! featured a story on the "48 Rules of Power" and described their influence on rapper 50 Cent (!) (AMAZON), though a more long-running contemporary example are those "Succesories" posters that you see parodied.
People who write those books or make money off aphorism generally are smart people. People, on the other hand, who buy those books or form that audience, are, for the most part, idiots. Tell me that you don't have to be a complete moron to appreciate the Successories posters in a non-ironic fashion. Tell me that 50 Cent is not an idiot. Think about the entire greeting card industry in the United States. Big business. Aphorisms.
3/28/10
success is a journey not a destination
4/28/10
dick clark's caravan of stars: 1959-1965
WROV HISTORY (1965): Herman's Hermits, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Reparata and the Delrons, Myron Lee and the Caddies, Bobby Freeman, the Hondells, Freddie Cannon, Detergents, Ikettes..
DICK CLARK'S CARAVAN OF STARS (WIKI)
HISTORY OF ROCK: CARAVAN OF STARS
KIOA HISTORY (1964): Fabian, the Crystals, the Reflections, the Jelly Beans, the Dixie Cups.
AMAZON: No book.
BURGER RECORDS CARAVAN OF STARS (announced April 13th, 2010)
POSTER
DICK CLARK'S CARAVAN OF STARS IS AMAZING; OFFICIALLY OBSESSED!!!
5/26/10
Artists, Human Sacrifice & Fertility Rituals
I think there is rather tepid interest in the area of ancient fertility rituals among my audience, but I'm going to make a pitch for their relevance. Praying for either the birth of a new child or the success of your crops every year is a tradition at the very center of what makes us all human. A sterile humanity is a non-existent humanity, so it makes intuitive sense that the culture built up to ensuring fertility would dominate early history as well as pre-history.
Like it or not, a primary method of ensuring fertility was human sacrifice. Human sacrifice has some audience. Your darker cultural groups, goths, fans of metal, romantics- they all have a penchant for more or less literal human sacrifice references.
I don't think it's hard to imagine the kind of emotional response that this ritual would have generated among participants. For more modern examples of this feeling you can think of a crowd reaction at a fight between Roman Gladiators or at a contemporary boxing match. Or UFC fight, I suppose. The fertility ritual is tied to blood, and lust.
The primary aspect that drops out of modern discussions of the All Mother and Fertility Rituals is how terrible the mother was. She demanded sacrifice. This can be seen in the story of Adonis in Greek mythology, which is itself adopted third hand from the Babylonian story of Tammuz. All of those stories involve a beautiful young man being basically eaten by his mother/lover in order to ensure the harvest.
Those kind of feelings are an example of what Carl Jung was talking about when he theorized about the role of the subconscious in human personality. The relationship between the conscious and subconscious parts of human behavior is a subject as old as the Upanishads, and a subject that has been the primary focus of areas as diverse as religion, philosophy, science and art. And while the analytic discussion shifts between difference disciplines over time, the exploration of the unconscious is largely limited to religion and art. Mostly, it's the role of the artist to explore the areas of the subconscious. The Artist should acquire all tools possible to understand that role, mostly thought- tools of inquiry and frameworks of reference.
3/8/10
Book Review:
Civilization Before Greece and Rome
by H.W.E. Saggs
(AMAZON)
Yet another amazing book you can buy on Amazon for 20 cents. Incredible. The title of Civilization Before Green and Rome sounds generic and obvious, but books written about this time period tend to be about one specific culture- comparative studies are few and far between. Also, contemporary advances in the different cultures are spread out through multiple languages and fields of inquiry(turkish archeology anyone?) All of which goes to say that the bang for your buck here is outstanding. Saggs leaves behind the specialist jargon while taking account of the finding made by specialists. Thus, he can tell you about recent (1980s) translations of Hittite legal documents, without writing 200 pages on the subject.
I enjoy reading about civilization before Greece and Rome. These civilizations- they were totally forgotten. Not just by the West, but by the people from THOSE AREAS. We're talking about a civilization that lasted THREE THOUSAND YEARS. Forgotten until the 20th century. It's breathtaking. I like to imagine our civilization the same way- being viewed three thousand years on as a curiosity by people who don't understand anything about us. Crumbling into the sands of history: An epic fate.
Considering the differences between people "then" vs. "now" gives you a better idea of what "now" actually means. Acquiring familiarity with people and how they thought and behaved in different time period generates insight on commonalities and differences between human beings. One of the dangers of the internet is that the user becomes fully immersed in the now. Not just in the sense that people always live in the here and now, but people are just super obsessed with right now.
3/14/10
Book Review:
The Gypsies by Angus Fraser
(AMAZON)
Gypsies: we're all familiar with the aesthetic, the music, maybe a little bit of the history- but what does anyone really know about the gypsies? After all, they do not have a written language, suffered grievously during the holocaust and, as this book discusses, have been subject to pretty aggressive legal action and persecution on a continuous basis in western Europe from the 1500's.
Turns out, what we know as "gypsies" are mostly the Rom, a group of gypsies from the greater Romania area who didn't emigrate out of Eastern Europe until the 19th century. These are the gypsies who emigrated to America. There are, in fact, multiple strata of gypsies. There are those who travelled into Europe as early the 1500's- those groups were persecuted, especially in the 17th century, and most of them "went underground." The relationship between the early gypsies and the later gypsies reminded me of the relationship between Jews from Germany who came to the US before the Jews who came from Eastern Europe later on: Tense.
After the Rom, there were several other larger clans that emigrated out after them, spreading gypsy groups through western europe into the 20th century. Fraser also distinguishes between Gypsies who are ethnically descended from some kind of Indian caste (they speak a variation of Hindi derived from Sanskrit, have an elaborate purity ritual that resembles Hinduism), and indigenous "travellers" from various countries in Europe who either existed prior to gypsy arrival (the tinkers of Ireland) or were inspired by the gypsy example (groups in the Netherlands and France). Everywhere, gypsy life was characterized by a nomadic existence on the fringes of society.
In Fraser's view, the main characteristics of "what is a gypsy" are 1) observance of the Romani purity ritual- not washing clothes and food dishes in the same sink, female segreation during fertile periods. 2) language descended from sanskrit with lots of loan words from languages like Hungarian and Romanian.
The English language continues to absorb words from the Romani language. One current example in the United Kingdom- the word "Chav" used to describe the track suit culture of the housing project is derived from the Anglo-Romi word for boy (Chaverie).
It was interesting to read how the Gypsies were subject to measures that presaged the holocaust- in countries other the Germany- even AFTER the holocaust. For example, the Swiss practiced forced adoption for gypsy children into the 1970s!
The Gypsies are interesting because of the incredible strength and durability of their culture despite literally thousands of years of persecution as well as the lack of a written language. The continued existence of gypsies seems to demonstrate that a common culture can survive all obstacles.
3/22/10
Book Review:
Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought
by David Hackett Fischer
Or take another issue, like the Texas State Textbook Committee issuing revised "conservative" standards for history books. Again: Only think funnier then the people in favor of this, are the people outraged by the same behavior. What are all these people lacking? Perspective. They all lack historical perspective. By historical perspective I mean "understanding formed by reading academic history written either by reputable, non-popular professors, be they "conservative" or "liberal."
Again, this is not to single out only one "conservatives dumb, liberals smart" relationship. In David Hackett Fischer's "Historians Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought" one of the best examples he gives is an essay that is currently en vogue right now: Richard Hofstrader's, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." That piece was published in Harper's magazine in November 1964, right after Barry Goldwater, a conservative, defeated Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate for the Republican nomination to the Presidency. Fischer rightly points out, in a sections discussing "ad hominem"(attacks against the person) fallacies of argument, that calling conservative essentially mentally ill doth not a valid argument make.
Historians Fallacies, written in 1970, remains fresh and vital today. Fischer marches through several hundred years of fallacy, arguments made by historians that just don't work logically, and breezily dispatches error like a Scholastic Monk proof reading a thesis. Most of his examples are drawn from American interpretations of the Civil War. The level of critique varies from the aforementioned "ad hominem" attacks, and an entire chapter on rhetorical/argumentative error introduced by their latin names; to high level discussions of laws in meta-historical arguments(Tonybee, Marx.)
Fischer points out something that I found profound: Just as many mistakes vis a vis history are made by people who remember TOO MUCH about history, or draw the wrong lessons from history then are made embodying Santayana's famous aphorism, "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Actually, Fischer would reply, "Those who remember the past are just as likely to repeat it as those who don't." In fact, my takeaway from this book is that if you are thinking strategically about something, you can't get too locked into past experience or you lose important insight.
5/1/10
The First Jesuits
by John O'Malley
Harvard University Press
published 1993
How can you even have an opinion about the world around you without possessing a solid understanding of the history of the Christian faith? The expansion of Christianity is maybe the single most important event in the history of human existence. I'm not speaking as a believer- I'm not. I do believe that the world look the way it does today largely because of Christianity. It's a big subject. You've got: pre origins, origins, expansion, foundation of the Roman church, conversion of Europe, Christianity in the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation, the world wide expansion and Christianity in the modern era. Phew!
The First Jesuits is a fair handed account of the creation of the Jesuit order in the 16th century. The Jesuits was a religious order started by St. Ignatius. He was raised a Spanish nobleman in the Basque region of the Iberian peninsula. He fought for the King of Spain, was wounded and experienced a religious conversion (which means he wasn't that religious, and then he became religious.) Spent some time begging n preaching in Spain, then went to France, where he studied at the University of Paris. While he was there he was exposed to the humanism of Erasmus. Erasmus, a Catholic himself, was someone who influenced reformers like Martin Luther with his argument that people should, you know, actually be able to understand scripture and read books and stuff like that. You know: Humanism.
Influenced by this perspective, Ignatius and some of his buddies moved down to Italy- splitting time between Venice and Rome. Here, Ignatius and his bros decided to start a new order that would be different then monastic orders like the Benedictines and the Dominicans. Specifically, he imagined a traveling group of brothers that would move from place to place, teaching and preaching. It was a bold move in it's time, and it aroused a fair amount of controversy. Jesuits were hauled before the Inquisition on several occasions and accused of practicing Protestantism. Hilarious!
Eventually of course, the Jesuits would fan out and start schools all over the world. In fact, it's fair to say that modern education sort of started with the Jesuits. They really were revolutionary, and there is a lot to recommend about their thought and their methods. After all: The Jesuits delivered results. No misery and hand wringing here. It's something that practitioners of modern day DIY should stop and think about. If you have the true faith, doubt doesn't enter into the analysis.
5/2/10
The Supremes
by Mark Ribowsky
published 2009
by De Capo Press
My friend Mario Orduno of Art Fag Recordings lent me this book. He and I often talk about the history of popular music. Not so much the recent stuff. I think probably his greatest direct influence on me is a focus on music created before 1967. Something definitely changed after 1967... for the worse... I think.
The Supremes are an act that took advantage of many of the changes that were sweeping popular music in mid 60s even as they retained a look and sound that set them apart from the love generation. It's hard to tell the story of the Supremes without telling the story of Motown. The real weakness of the music industry as it existed in the early 60s was in their handling of black artists. Tastes changed ahead of society, and the world that created Motown and the Supremes was a segregated world where Whites held all the cards and Blacks were left to pick up the scraps.
In the early 60s, Berry Gordy was a hustling young man from a wealthy black family in Detroit. When he started Motown, famously borrowing money from his family, he wasn't the only one with a record label. His sisters had record labels, too. Motown started in 1960 and so had the Supremes...under a different name (the Primettes). It took Motown a year or so to sign up the Supremes, pick them a new name, etc. Then it was a couple more years before the Supremes really broke... 1963 really. During that period, Gordy didn't lose the faith. The Supremes, of course, wrote none of their songs.
The rise of the Supremes is from an era before artists had artistic control. Diana Ross may have been an outsized diva, but she didn't even have access to her own bank account. In that regard, it's hard to ignore the character of Berry Gordy and the role he plays in Supremes, both for better and most assuredly for worse. The Gordy/Ross relationship dominates the Supremes story, literally to the detriment of everyone else in the entire book. Almost half the book involved Gordy scheming to get Ross out of the Supremes so that she can fly solo.
Why are people so stupid? Why was Berry Gordy so obsessed with one artist? Here's a fact about Motown: In 1966 Motown had 200 artists under contract. Only 4 made money. What is it about turning art into commerce that can make even successful men look stupid? Like so many other men who succeed in the area of turning art into commerce, Gordy was a man working an area of the market where the big boys were pretty clueless, working in a geographic area with strong local networks and with artists and collaborators who were pliable and financially ignorant. Right time, right place, right product. The Supremes were that product.
The Supremes rose, and fell- there was conflict, tragedy and some reconciliation, but through it all everyone involved seemed to lack even a modicum of self reflection about their situation. Maybe that's why the art was so great: Because they were just doing it, not sitting around, talking about it all day. Great art is unself-reflective art.
5/21/10
The Phoenicians
The Purple Empire of the Ancient World
by Gerhard Herm
p. 1973 (GERMAN)
p. 1975 (ENGLISH TRANSLATION)
I think... if there were enough music content... I would simply blog about music. But if you are writing about a certain topic, and there isn't enough to write about, then you should switch topics. Back in the day that's what smart people did. I remember the image of William Morris, interior designer, writer, socialist, switching from working area to working area within his shop. You can go back to the Middle Ages and find people who were thought to know "everything there was in the world" (Erasmus) That sounds ridiculous now but back then there simply wasn't as much knowledge. A consequence of having more knowledge in the world is an increase in the specialization of knowledge itself. This naturally results in EVERYONE seeing less of the "big picture," and in my opinion it's this conflict that is at the heart of modernity.
To understand the present, I've been thinking a lot about the ancient world. The dividing line between ancient and modern is basically the birth of Jesus Christ, though you can quibble that the modern era didn't really begin till the later part of the middle ages. Whatever. On the one hand, ancient: Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Egyptians. On the other modern: Greece, Rome etc. It helps to understand that people have been thinking about that first group seriously for less then 200 years.
Even within the group of Ancient peoples, the Phoenicians get a bad rap because they didn't leave much behind. Oh, they invented the alphabet, but there just aren't any written documents to be had. The most amazing thing about Gerhard Herm's "The Phoenicians" is that it apparently sold 250,000 copies in Germany in the mid 1970s. 250 thousand people bought this book in West Germany in 1973? Wow. If you re-issued this book in the United States today it would sell 50 copies.
The Phoenicians is a work of popular history along the lines of a Steven Amrbose. The prose is scholarly-light, with a cursory bibliography at the back. In part this is because there aren't alot of speciality sources when it comes to the Phoenicians. Herm is left to describe the Phoenicians from the view points of the more verbose people who surrounded them. First, the Egyptians, then the Hebrews, then the Greeks, then the Romans. In fact, the Phoenicians is more a sequential history of different people's interacting with the Phoenicians then of the Phoenicians themselves.
Despite the breezy style some salient facts emerged:
FACT: The famous Phoenician purple dye was created by killing sea snails- thousands of them for each dyed piece of fabric.
FACT: Greek anti-Phoenician sentiment and attitudes is the forerunner of modern European anti-Semitisn.
FACT: Europe was named after the daughter of a Phoenician prince. (Europa)
FACT: Carthage's Phoenician-ism is demonstrated by the names of it's most famous citizens: Hannibal is "HANNA BAAL" or "GIFT OF BAAL" - Baal being an old Phoenician god.
FACT: Phoenicians practiced human sacrifice. A lot.
5/24/10
Book Review
The History of South Africa
2nd Edition (now in 3d edition)
Yale University Press
p. 1995
We got the World Cup 2010 coming up: in South Africa! Say what you will about the decision to have the world cup in South Africa, I'd like to know a little bit more about the place itself.
For me the European experience in Africa will always be encapsulated by Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." To talk about Africa is to talk about colonialism and imperialism. When discussing topics like colonialism and imperialism, it is important to distinguish two types of European colonies. The first, European majority colonies, where native inhabitants were either sparse to begin with or killed off entirely and whites constituted the majority. The second, Native majority colonies where the Europeans were a small portion of the total number of inhabitants. South Africa is interesting because it is a combination of both, and that led to conflict.
South Africa is an extraordinarily complex place, historically speaking. The complexity is a result of multiple conflicts which have taken place over the last five hundred years. Initially you have the Dutch settlers enslaving the hunter/gather types on the coast: CONFLICT! Then you have the British arriving and getting into it with the Dutch. Then you have the Dutch fighting with the Bantu speaking Africans. Then you have the British intervening in the fight between the Dutch and the Bantu speaking Africans. Then you have the Dutch fighting the British. Then you have a democracy which excluded 80 percent of the population. Finally, you have majority rule by the Africans and the 2010 World Cup.
It is fair to say that there is only so much of this history the reader has to know to understand that South Africa is a) super complex b) not as hugely fucked up as it used to be, but still kind of fucked up.
Teasing out the whys and where-fors of South African history strikes me as an extraordinarily complex task, and one that also implicates of interesting historiographical issues. The Author, a South African expatriate who taught at Yale University, is obviously aware of the difficulties and does an excellent job of describing the facts, noting the controversies and generally staying clear of the great imponderables of South African history.
I think that's a good place to be for all of us. If you only know one "fact" about South Africa before the World Cup starts it should be that South Africa defies any easy assessment.
The single most interesting chapter for this reader was the description of the hand-over of power from Whites to Blacks. In support of their apartheid regime, Whites created an elaborate species of governmentus bureautracticalias, to the point where the costs to administer apartheid threatened to overwhelm the entire economy. For example, during apartheid the state maintained parallel government departments in all social services area for Whites, Blacks and Coloured. At the same time, demographic trends ensured an ever diminishing white portion of the over-all population. Having seen the writing on the wall, the White government decided to negotiate from a position of strength, and that began an internal process that resulted in a more-or-less peaceful handover of power to the ANC.
This involved things like letting Nelson Mandela out of prison after 20 years and then commencing negotiations with him a week later that made him largely responsible for the government of South Africa. Can you imagine? It's as amazing a story as I think exists in 20th century history.
5/28/10
Shaka Zulu
by E.A. Ritter
p. 1955
Putnam Press
Man, South African history is really interesting. Interesting, and complicated. Shaka Zulu was born, an illegitimate child, in the late 1700s. His rise to power resulted in the emergence of the Zulu Nation in the early 1800s. The Zulu Nation dominated the affairs of the Eastern half of South Africa into the 20th century. The Zulu were defeated by the British, but they were never conquered. The Inkatha Freedom Party, the primary vehicle of political expression for the Zulus today, played an important role through the liberation movement and it remains active today.
That being said, this book is hardly the last word on Shaka or the Zulus. It's written by a guy descended from white settlers who was actually in the army that defeated the Zulu army in the late 19th century. He obviously admires Shaka, repeatedly referring to him as an African Napoleon, and he goes out of his way to discuss the ways in which Shaka rationalized Zulu society, specifically by standing up against the witch doctors. On the other hand, Shaka comes out as a ridiculously bloody thirsty guy- ordering people clubbed to death at the drop of a hat.
But if you treat Ritter's Shaka Zulu with a cautious eye there is narrative detail aplenty. Ritter is a fine writer, and even if he has a somewhat dated and unprofessional view of African's, his bias is balanced by a genuine affection for the discipline and courage of the Zulu warrior. I have to say, I've read a lot about Native Peoples are their struggles with encroaching European cultures in a variety of contexts. The Zulu are almost unique in that they weren't really disturbed until AFTER they had created their own nation. True, they didn't have guns, and they didn't beat the british, but they didn't go away, and they continue to exist today, being led by the same families that led them two hundred years ago.
It's quite an achievement, almost equivalent to the feats of resistance by the Ethiopian Kingdom into the 20th century. It's a story worth knowing, and something worth considering during this year's World Cup in South Africa.
Book Review
6/28/10
A History of Archaeological Thought
Second Edition
by Bruce G. Trigger
P. 2006
Cambridge University Press
Let me give you a tip about used book shopping: If you see a book that has been published by Cambridge University Press, and it's less then ten bucks, by it. I found this book at Moe's Used Books in Berkeley- and it was sixteen dollars- it would set you back 80 on Amazon. This was actually my second start down this path. Earlier, I bought a book about the great discoveries of archeological history and discovered that it was a boring book filled with the journal's of early 20th century archeologists. What a bunch of imperialist dicks. In fact, the main problem I have with archeology is the discipline itself. Archeology has been used to justify Nazism, Manifest Destiny and the superiority of classical civilization over that of the present. Hardly a resume which inspires confidence.
Most, if not all of the bad stuff from archaeology dates from before World War II. As the author points out, 90 percent of all archaeologists through out world history are active right now, so writing a history of archaeology is surprisingly easy. It's like that for most academic subjects. Trigger first wrote this book back in the mid 80s, twenty years later, he wrote this update, then he died. This book is just about as thorough and comprehensive as you might expect, and it could guide self study in the field of archaeology for a decade or more before you'd need to be brought up to speed with new developments.
Trigger's clear headed and comprehensive treatment of subjects like "antiquarianism" and "cultural historical archaeology" are conversation enders. I simply don't think that anything he says about older archaeological movements is even worth challenging. As he moves into more recent times, the filtering and discussion becomes a little more confused, a little more specialist then general audience. By the time he gets to his two hundred page discussion of "post processal" archaeology, I was just about ready to through my hands up in the air.
Like all other social science disciplines, archeology has suffered by being subjected the the vagaries of the university cultural production world- an emphasis on increasing specialization and specialized discourse leading to fewer cross connections both intra and inter discipline. The impression I got was of a wave of knowledge slowly building, only to hit a pier of French inspired critical theory and American academic polemic. In covering the grand sweep of archeology as a discipline, Trigger makes many of the points that Kevin Collins made about philosophers in his excellent the Sociology of Philosophies. Trigger's grasp of cybernetics and systems theory seems limited but he seems to intuitively grasp these interdisciplinary concepts and their relevance of archeology. He also neglects a discussion of the intellectual networks that produced the writers whose ideas he discusses. For example, his discussion of Walter Taylor and his impact on the "new archeology" in the United States seems to directly parallel the network analysis of philosophers in the Collins books.
You really don't need to talk about networks until the volume of material surpasses the limits of rational comprehension, which happens surprisingly late if ever for most intellectual subjects. Few, if any, intellectual subjects outside of the hard sciences reached this level of complexity before the 1960s.
Despite it's flaws, archaeology remains the main way that we can learn about cultures who either didn't write, or whose writing is incomprehensible to us, so we need to think about it. That doesn't mean the archaeologists know what they are doing- quite the opposite, it would seem, archaeological discourse should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt and all conclusions should be treated with skepticism.
Book Review
6/25/10
The Tarim Mummies:
Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West
by J.P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair
Thames & Hudson
p. 2000
I picked this book up at the Secrets of the Silk Road exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. Despite whole heartedly recommending this exhibition to my readers, I maintain some reservations about the influence of the Chinese government on the content of the exhibition. This influence, led, in my mind, to an exhibition catalogue that borders on the worthless (again, a full page color photo of a chinese won-ton?) and led me to look elsewhere for the context I needed to understand the "Europoid" mummies of North Central Asia.
This book, written by two reputable professors, is probably the only book any non-specialist needs to read about the Tarim Mummies. J.P. Mallory is a professor of pre historic archaeology at Queen's University in Belfast, and Victor Hair is a Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at University of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, Mallory is the world's foremost non insane authority on the Indo Europeans. The Indo Europeans are the semi-mythical linguistic/ethnic group that spawned the languages and people that comprise essentially all of Europe as well as Sanskrit and it's derivatives and Iranian. The debate over these people's was badly tarnished by a century and a half of racist ideology (No one calls them the Aryans anymore, even though they called themselves Aryans.) Regardless of the historical baggage, it's an interesting area to read about. Mallory has written multiple books about the subject either by himself (In Search of Indo Europeans) or in conjunction with others (Oxford's Guide to Proto Indo European Linguistics.)
The Tarim Mummies reads like a synthesis of his theories about indo european linguistics, but here he has added the insight of Victor Hair, who is able to bring Chinese records into the equation.
According to Mallory, the Tarim Mummies emigrated into the Tarim Basin from the North West. His thesis is that they represent the Eastern fringe of a "centrifugal" migration of Indo Europeans south from their ancestral homeland in the Russian Steppes. In doing so, Mallory is advancing his long running thesis that places the indo european "home land" in the Asian-Russian steppelands of the North, as supposed to those who would place it the Caucauses, the western steppes or in south-eastern Europe.
This homeland debate is anachronistic in my mind- we have been so accustomed to fixed national borders that it seems foreign to think that entire nations migrated thousands of miles in the early period of civilization. In fact, settling down was a pretty good way to get wiped off the face of the map by nomads who kept their fighting spirit. Such was the case with the Tarim Mummy culture, who founded cities at the center of the silk road, only to be levelled by Ughyurs and ulitmately dominated by the Chinese.
Mallory's use of comparative linguistics to buttress his arguments is fairly ingenious. I would like to see that technique applied to some other area of history besides the Indo European language question. It also helps take the matter out of the world of archaeology. I have issues with the discipline of archeology, but that is not a subject for today.
Book Review
7/1/10
A History of the Hapsburg Empire: 1526-1918
by Robert A. Kann
p. 1980
University of California Press
One consequence of WWII is that American universities picked up a ton of first-rate scholars. Robert Kann (two "n"s) was one of them. He was a German speaking historian and he came over to the United States and wrote a ton of books about the Austro-Hungarian empire that rely on almost 100% non-English language sources. Unfortunately, English was his second language and his prose reads like it.
This book is an example of something I like to call "Dad history," like it's counterpart, Dad music, Dad history shows high level of technical ability but is either out of date or lacks artistic inspiration. You know, culture... for dad's.
The story of the Hapsburg Empire is, to my mind, the strangest chapter of European history. If you are looking for in depth description of how an Absolutist European Monarch copes with the vicissitude of a multi-national polygot Empire during the birth of modernism.... unfortunately this isn't the right book for you. But: It is the right subject to be investigating.
I suppose the answer to "Who cares?" on this subject
consists of three names: Adolf Hitler, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka. Ok asshole you don't give a shit about Austria, but they produced some pretty heavy hitters there at the end. This is not the kind of book where the author gets into hows and whys but it does lay out the scenery of what this crazy place was all about.
Perhaps the most (only?) interesting chapter in Kann's book is the description of the implementation of an empire wide Congress, with political parties and everything, that was introduced by the Emperor in the mid 19th century. It's hard to ignore the role of this shift to participatory democracy and the rise of organized anti-antisemitism. SPECIFICALLY, Alois Hitler, Hitler's father worked in for the Austrian government as a CUSTOMS AGENT. One of the Austrian political parties drew heavily in it's support among German speaking public employees. This was the same party that early on adopted Antisemitism, before it was cool. Thus, Hitler grew up in the home of this government bureaucrat who was officially, politically anti-semitic.
It just goes to show ya that democracy ain't always the greatest.
Book Review
7/2/10
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
Second Edition
by Philip D. Curtin
first published 1990, second edition 1998
Cambridge University Press
I think I've mentioned this before, but always be on the look out for history books, published by Cambridge University Press, that cost less then five bucks. Paying attention to the publisher can save you a lot of wasted reading time.
A major trend in history over the last thirty years has been the shift away from books that dealt with The History of Country X or The History of the Such and Such War to books that try to relate multiple events to one another as well as the elaboration of areas of inquiry that span separate historical subjects. A major example of this trend is the rise of "Atlantic History" which seeks to relate what happened in the new world with events in the old world in a specific and non-specious manner. In American History, the most notable authors in this area are David Hackett Fischer and his seminal Albion's Seed as well as Bernard Bailyn.
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex is a simple example of what I would call the "new atlantic history," written in an easy to read prose style that makes it accessible to anyone with an undergraduate level education. Curtin charts the rise of the Plantation complex in south America and the Caribbean with reference to the internal history of Africa, the settlement history of the New World, economic history and a heavy emphasis on demographics. It's a sophisticated, of the moment approach which undoubtedly explains why the edition I read was the 13th edition of the 2nd printing (i.e. it's a hit.) Perhaps the success has something to do with the moderate length (200 pages) and almost total lack of foot notes- I'm guessing this book is an undergraduate staple in history departments on three different continents.
Book Review
7/5/10
World Prehistory:
A New Outline
by Grahame Clark
Cambridge University Press
p. 1969
You wouldn't think that pre-historic archeology is a subject area where it's important to "stay current" but the fact is that almost everything that was written about archeology before the mid 1960s was wrong, more or less. In other words, pre-historic archeology has a time line that matches up well with less serious topics like "rock music" and "computer technology." I don't think people realize that when it comes to social sciences, the explosion of practitioners and texts dates entirely from the 1970s forward. There has been a 30 year long glut in the production of knowledge, and we owe that explosion, and the resultant confusion, almost entirely to the proliferation of shitty United States universities.
Archeology is no exception. During the 1960s, American archeologist trumpeted the arrival of the "new archeology" which basically meant archeology that moved away from the racist, bullshit historical-cultural archeology that saw western europe as the end all be all of human civilization and ignored and diminished all other forms of human civilization. Well, I hate to say it, the Brits got there first, and it was only the sad ignorance of the so-called 'new archeologists' in the United States about their own discipline that allowed them to proclaim the invention of an archeological method that was already in existence.
Specifically, the Cambridge archeological duo of Gordon Childe and Grahame Clark laid the groundwork for a less inaccurate archeology as early as the 1930s. World Prehistory: A New Outline represents a late synthesis of much of the "new thought" of archeology, and while it is obviously 40 years out of date, it is still super available, affordable (you can buy it for one cent on Amazon) and easy to read (200 pages, with no footnotes.) As such it represents an appropriate departure point for a layman's exploration of archeology, and you need not worry that Clark is filling your head with racists nonsense.
Book Review
7/6/10
The Harmless People
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
p. 1958
Vintage Books
This is a book about the "Bushmen" of the Kalahari desert- you can tell how old it is because the author refers to what are now known as the "San" people as "Bushmen" throughout. It's an old book, but no worse for wear after staying in print for half a century plus. It's also another one cent amazon wonder- a book you can buy, on amazon, for a penny. There are so many good books available for one cent it's a wonder that people spend their time reading crap, but c'est la vie.
When I think about what will be left off humanity after our current civilization craps out and destroys itself, my thoughts turn to what we now call "primitive" civilizations. Primitive? Maybe by our standards, but who do you think is going to survive when the average temperature of our planet rises by fifteen degrees and we run out of clean drinking water. Well, my money is on the people who are living in the desert right now. I think they will survive, and we will be destroyed. Unfortunately, our present civilization is so powerful that those peoples are almost entirely wiped out, and there may be none left when there time comes.
Is it too late to learn some lessons from the peoples at the margins? Maybe/Maybe not. Me- I'm trying to learn all I can about people who have survived at the margins for centuries. They may, in a certain sense, be "primitive" but man- are they tough. People who can survive for generations in the scorching hot deserts of south west Africa deserve mad props, and there is plenty that we can learn.
Harmless People is not an academic book. Written by a 23 year old co-ed in the mid 50s, Harmless People is an early example of the popular anthropology genre that took off in the 60s. Thus, given it's early publication date it's easy to see why this books has been such a success. Thomas has nothing but sympathy and respect for a people who were, even as she wrote this book, being hunted and enslaved by both blacks and whites in Southern Africa.
She shows the San to be a people with culture, religion and their own unique group of survival skills. For example, Thomas describes how the San gather poison for their arrows from one specific species of caterpillar. It's an incredibly complex process that the San managed to figure out without any science whatsoever. So to is their ability to survive out in the desert. They sound incredibly tough- the very essence of what humanity should be. Meanwhile, here we are: fat, lazy, complacent, incredibly arrogant. It is sobering to think about- how we have proliferated while the San have been hunted to extinction- literally: hunted to extinction. How embarrassing for all of us.
Book Review
7/8/10
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas Kuhn
University of Chicago Press
originally published 1962
this edition 1996
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the book that invented the phrase "paradigm shift." Every time you hear someone say the phrase "paradigm shift" they are referring to this book, even if they have no idea of this book's existence. As described in this book, a paradigm shift is the moment when a scientific community abandons one idea and simultaneously adopts another, conflicting idea. Kuhn's book was inspired by epistemological debates he had observed within the social science world. In other words, he was inspired by arguments between sociologists and psychologists about what constituted knowledge within those disciplines. Kuhn theorized that the same debates occurred within the "hard sciences' but that those debates were obscured by the biases of scientists themselves.
This idea was almost immediately adopted by writers all over the world, both academic and non-academic. The idea of "paradigm shift" itself inspired it's own paradigm shift by foreshadowing many of the more extreme arguments of french cultural theorists and post-modernists. The people latching onto the idea of paradigm shift have done much harm to the original work, which is a short (200 pages), concise, and to my mind, non-controversial description of the way that scientific knowledge is generated.
Chief among the non-controversial, common sense ideas that Kuhn invented is the idea that sea changes among communities are spurred by crises. That the individuals who create change are young people who are deeply immersed in the specific crisis they are seeking to solve, and that by virtue of their youth they have not yet 'made their reputation' by defending old ideas.
In every day language: You can't have intellectual change without failure and it is failure which inspires wide spread intellectual change. The failure of current ideas to explain anomalous events inspires faith in new ideas. At that point, the old ideas, and the activities which are spurred by the investigation of that idea, are abandoned- the intellectual equivalent of an abandoned ancient city. The members of the community who are inspired by the new idea create their own, new patterns of activity, the members who refuse to adapt stop generating new iterations of the old ideas and instead fight a rear guard action against activities of the folks motivated by the new idea.
8/7/10
Book Review
The Wave Watcher's Companion
From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life's Undulations
by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
p. 2010
Perigee Press (Penguin)
This book is interesting not just because of the subject matter, but for the genre of popular nonfiction it exemplifies. Call it non-fiction's answer to the novel: It's antecedents are journalists like Tom Wolfe, and Hunter Thompson. It's a style that is best represented by William Vollmann's epic *Imperial* but you would also have to include novelist/writers like David Foster Wallace, McSweeney's titan Dave Eggers. It's also featured in the book length magazine articles of Malcolm Gladwell. None of the writers I am talking about are unknowns- in fact- they all seem to do pretty well.
Other similar figures include Monocle magazine editor/Financial Times columnist Tyler Brule and the author of this book, Gavin Pretor-Pinney co-founder of The Idler magazine.
But I think if someone is sitting there thinking "what kind of book do i write" you are better going with the creative non-fiction category then the novel. First of all, no one gives a fuck about good novels, people like crap. Are you going to write a novel about a child wizard? A vampire? No? Then no one is going to care. On the other hand, a book like the Wave Watcher's Companion can generate a sensation using an easily recognizable format. Wave Watcher's Companion is a hit- the book itself its compact- fits in one hand, handsome cover, large text, footnotes in the back with a separate set of footnotes in the text. Photographs, illustrations, 19th century style section summaries placed onto the page. The over all impact of the book itself is one of distinct delight.
Pretor-Pinney has been down this road before, in addition to co-founding the Idler, an "alternative life style" magazine that has been hugely influential among the intellectual sets on both sides of the Atlantic since it started in the early 90s- he's also written "The Cloudspotter's Guide" which I have not read. The thing about Wave Watcher's Companion is that it is TIMELY. It is a Southern California zeitgeist atm and waves are very relevant.
Highly recommended. Worth the money!
Book Review
7/21/10
The Philosophy of Rhetoric
by I.A. Richards
p. 1936
New York: Oxford University Press
When I read Pitchfork it reminds me of what academics call New Criticism. Specifically, I think the "style" of Pitchfork is of popular version of techniques, like close reading which were developed by New Critics to talk about poetry. Close reading means:
New Criticism may have some use since it overlaps with other discourses, but man, 200 pages of poetry analysis puts me to sleep. Critics should learn about the techniques of New Criticism, and then do the opposite. What a waste of time.
Keats: A Biography
by Andrew Motion
p. 1997
I make a full confession of ignorance when it comes to the actual output of the German/English romantic poets of the late 18th and 19th centuries. I didn't major in literature in college, and honestly, I don't give a f*** about poetry itself except as it relates to song lyrics, and even then, it's not a big concern of mine. However, as I've been working on book about the relationship between intellectuals and music, I'm taking another look at the romantic poets.
First of all, Goethe and Schiller are seminal figures when it comes to the attitudes taken by subsequent intellectuals towards music. Second of all, the successors/contemporaries of those guys- specifically English romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelly and Byron have a huge influence on how contemporary intellectuals- artists and writers both, see the role of the artist of in society.
I think it's fair to say that even those contemporary artists who are utterly ignorant of English poetry in the 19th century share most, if not all, of the attitudes of those artists when it comes to how they see themselves. They hate the business world, they don't like capitalism, they despise or ignore their critics, they are less concerned with making a living then making a statement. The romantic poets of 19th century England are kind of the ur-romantic intellectual/artistic figures, so I felt like I should check out this 500 page plus biography of John Keats- one of the more flamboyant figures in a posse characterized by flamboyance.
John Keats was called a "cockney" poet during his brief, unsuccessful life. In Motion's lengthy, lengthy book- one of literally dozens of biographies of this subject- Keats emerges like an 18th century analogue of the 20th century pop musicians who comes up "from the streets." For example, many 50s rock and rollers couldn't read music. Keats, who drew almost exclusively on Greek myths for his reference points, couldn't read Greek. Unlike many of the other romantic poets- Keats did not come from a privileged, wealthy background. The untimely death of both of his parents left him enough money so that he didn't have to actually work for a living, but he was hardly gallivanting around the globe Byron style. His one trip abroad- to Italy- resulted in his death (at the age of 25.)
One of the benefits of writing about Keats is that he wrote during a time when people wrote tons of letters and his work was discussed by contemporary critics. The superabundance of materials makes it easier to talk Keats in a contemporary context. One interesting aspect of Keats that emerges in Motion's biography is the relationship between Keats, his critics and his friends. When Keats was writing poetry, poetry was reviewed in much the same way albums and films are reviewed today. Critics had sharp opinions about the merit of specific poets and their output. Keats, as a member of the middle classes espousing an anti-government line, came in for harsh, harsh criticism. He read that criticism, and it totally bummed him out. At the same time, Keats also had a circle of friends who loved his work and when he met his untimely death they came out and crushed the haters.
Today, the contemporary critics of Keats sound like morons and his poetry is read by many an American undergraduate. You wonder if it would have been the same story if he had lived to 85. Again, Keats is an archetype of the "live fast die young famous forever" artist that has so much influence on the mind of artists working today.
by Gerhard Herm
p. 1976
St. Martin's Press
I'm a big fan of cultural trends like "vampires" and "harry potter" because it helps me identify idiots whose opinions I wish to avoid. Don't get me wrong, I like True Blood as much as the next guy, but people who get obsessed with projects like 'Twilight" and "harry potter" are demonstrating a real lack of intelligence and cultural imagination. The internet has made the world of knowledge so available and accessible, and yet... Twilight. I don't begrudge pigs their slop, but that slop is not for me.
This is not to say that I'm not interested by the world of myth and fantasy. Quite the opposite. For a little over a year I've been mildly obsessed by the pre-historic world of the indo europeans- that group of people who spawned the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, the Celts, the Spanish, the English, the Slavs and the Hindus. I've read books, had discussions, attended museums, etc. etc, etc. I imagine I'm motivated by the same emotions that drive the Twilight fans: a desire for a lil magic in the day to day world.
It's hard to find good source materials when it comes to these indo europeans cultures- the field is filled with crack pots, kooks and psuedo-academic bs.... That's why I was kind of into The Celte, by Gerhard Herm. Herm also wrote a cool book about the Phoenicians. He is a German author, who wrote in the 70s. These books were hugely popular and sold millions of copies. Today the "celts" are largely equated with Ireland, but they were actually a prolific indo european culture that dominated Spain, France, the low countries and of course... the British Isles.
The Celts were conquered by the Romans and absorbed into the Empire- unlike the Germans, the continental Celts did not maintain a separate identity outside of the Roman Empire. The Celts in the British Isles maintained their separate identity well into the Christian period. In Ireland, they lasted long enough to create their own alphabet.
Who were the Celts? Well, they were fearsome warriors- not quite as fearsome as the Germans, but they liked to cut off their enemies heads and put them up on the walls of their huts. They liked to fight in the nude. They had their own religion and their own religious leaders (the Druids) whose practices are shrouded in mystery. Herm makes analogies to the Brahmin class in India to explain the function of Druids in Celtic culture. It's an analogy founded in base supposition, but you know what: it works for me.
The Metropolitan Experience
by Iain Chambers
p. 1986
London: Routledge Press
Intellectuals writing about music...what a fucking disaster. The utter and total failure of intellectuals inside and outside the university system to write accurately about the role of music in the lives of audiences didn't really manifest itself until after the full rise of popular music in the post World War II period: before then, music just wasn't ubiquitous or important enough in the lives of normal folks to expose specious intellectual attempts to discuss music and the it's role within the lives of audiences.
Regardless of the epic landscape of failure, the discriminating audience member needs to tackle this literature to understand the music of the present, and I would suggest that Iain Chamber's Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (1986) is a Culture/Music Theory 101. Popular Culture is paperbook size, but it functions as a punk rock text book describing intellectual theories about popular culture from the 1800s through the punk era.
The bibliography is super solid, and Chambers does a good job mimicking the 'cut-up' techniques of the modernist inspired layout. The book design aspects of Popular Culture double or triple the value of this book. It's something a pop star could carry on in her handbag during a european tour and read in 5 or 10 page bites. It's affordable enough for the part-time musician working in a coffee shop.
This book costs .63 cents usd + four usd shipping on AMAZON. It's a light, fun, easy read that packs a huge informational punch on the description of intellectuals and their theories about popular culture. If you flip through it and go straight to the bibliography, like I did, then more power to you.
Personally, I think the combination of used books on Amazon, streaming Netflix and Google Books represents a revolution in the production of knowledge that will surpass the rise of the university system in 18th century Germany. This is the time to get on board that three headed hydra: used books on Amazon, streaming Netlix, Google Books. What do you need a university for in terms of the production of knowledge?
The goal of this blog is to help other people find their own path to understanding using the new materials that are available, not to push people down one particular path: but you should go somewhere, do something. It's a revolution in the production of knowledge, so produce some fucking knowledge.
People who make a living from music should be familiar with what intellectuals have written about music, because that is how they are going to be judged. There's no magic or creativity to writing about music, rather, the interesting part is how little the music writers themselves understand what it is they are doing, or even trying to do.
Thus, musicians who have a conscious understanding of how and why people write about music will have an advantage of those who do not, and audience members who understand their 'place' in the discussion .... well I guess the benefit depends on how much you care about the role of music in your life. If you don't give a shit, then you don't need to care about any of this information.
by Peter Heather
Oxford University Press
Published March 4th, 2010
This is a history of the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the "Middle Ages," focusing mostly on the movement of peoples across the Roman frontier from Germania, the movement of Slavs into Eastern Europe and the movement of Vikings into the Greater British Isles area. In short, it's a migratory history of the period when the people who presently inhabit the nations of Europe got to where they were going.
Heather takes full advantage of recent developments in historiographical thought, explicitly drawing on the archeological shift in history as well as the development of 'migration studies' in the United States. He combines these newer methods and theory with the erudition and "pop" that you would expect from an author publishing a book called "Empire and Barbarians" through Oxford University Press. The quality I admire most about the history titles coming out of the OUP is that they combine tremendous learning with tremendous style. No dad's history books these. Heather isn't a stuffy writer, and he's not afraid to throw in anachronistic references to drive home a point.
Heather's main thesis, that population movements were a combination of different migratory trends that encompassed a variety of different social groups over time and place has tinges of both revisionism and counter-revisionism, but Heather is careful not to over step his claims. It's hard to ignore the conflict between his claims that "archeology is leading history" in this particular area of study with the lack of archeological materials that he actually cites. In many places, Heather rests his case on what he hopes will be revealed by future study. Didn't bother me, but it is a weakness.
Empires and Barbarians is at it's best when Heather introduces concepts from 'migration studies." One of the main points he makes in this area is how economic disparities draw people across international borders. Sounds obvious- but it does represent a revelation when it comes to this area of history and what has been written in the past. Heather argues that the posting of Roman legions on the border of Germania were economic trade zones that induced German tribes to step up agricultural production and spurred greater political development within the matrix of conquest/resistance.
Shamans, Mystics and Doctors
by Sudhir Kakar
p. 1982, University of Chicago Press Edition 1991
Mental illness is a subject near and dear to my heart. I deal with mental illness at least once a month in the course of my job as a criminal defense lawyer. Some of my clients are what they call "dual diagnosis" which typically means substance abuse + mental illness. Of course I'm interested in different approaches to curing mental illness, from western psychiatry to eastern Shamanism. Here is a truth about this entire area: Anything works as long as the patient and the doctor share the same believe system. This means that the curative power, for all these practices, lies with the patient rather than the Doctor/Shaman/Wizard.
This is the central thesis of Sudhir Kakar's illuminating Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. Kakar is an Indian Psychotherapist who wrote a book about the curative practices of a variety of Indian traditions: Muslim and Hindu Shaman. Shamans is divided into several chapters, each of which profile a different Guru or discipline with an approach to treating mental illness.
Considering the depths that traditional Freud inspired Psychotherapy has reached since Kakar wrote this in the early 1980s, his medical Doctor psychiatric oriented appears almost as dated as the Muslim and Hindu shaman's who exorcise demons by name. However, Kakar is right on when it points out that ANY approach to healing and mental health can work so long as there are a healer and a patient who believe in the SAME THING.
Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
p. 2005 Viking/Penguin
by Ken Emerson
This book tells the story of seven pairs of songwriters, all of whom worked writing pop songs starting in the late 1950s. The subjects of Always Magic are Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Barry Mann and Cythia Weil, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Between them, they quite literally dominated the pop music charts in a period between 1959 and 1962ish.
I think Emerson aptly sums up the role they played in the popular music world in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he says that they were "adults writing songs for teens." A half century into the rock era, such a statement sounds obvious, but all of these writers had an opportunity to excel because their predecessors didn't "get" rock music or teen music. The Brill Building writers (actually a misnomer since most of the worked at a nearby building, 1650 Broadway, rather then the Brill Building itself) sit on the divide between late 1950s rock and roll and the popular music of the time. As music professionals, they were well aware of ALL the trends that were bubbling up from youth and urban culture, but they were not romantic artist poet figures, rather they more resemble the characters from Mad Men: savvy professionals looking for a way up.
The beginning of the end for the Brill Building Era was the British Invasion. Although the triumphant British artists like the Beatles were well aware of the great song lyrical legacy of the writers working around the Brill Building, they didn't need other people to write their songs. Similarly, the techniques and styles popularized by the Brill Building writers were copied and imitated (and exceeded) by bit players (Phil Spector) and those further afield (Barry Gordy and Motown.) There was also a movement towards cynicism and trickery- the Brill Building writers were wholly responsible for the rock and roll atrocity of the Monkees.
Like so many other moment in Popular Music history, one can see the sun setting over the horizon even at high noon- that's how brief artistic/commercial triumph is. It's a simple fact that in a capitalist economy there is always going to be twenty people gunning for number one, and the Brill Building writers were no exception. It's also worth noting that many of them worked as salaried employees at a time when their songs were selling millions.
Personally, I find this business model attractive, but then again, I also think the patronage scheme in Renaissance Florence was pretty tight. The most successful Brill Building writers were those who could transition between different roles in the culture industry. The best example is Carole King, who was to become a successful solo artist in the 1970s.
Masterpieces of the Musee D'Orsay
at the De Young Museum
San Francisco, CA.
May 22- September 6th
A critic is a lot like a surfer. The surfer sits in the ocean, on his surf board, assessing the waves. The waves come in groups or "sets." The first task of the surfer is to assess which set to pick. Once the set is selected, the surfer selects a wave within the set, and puts herself in position to ride the wave. This involves being in front of the wave and paddling away from it so that the combination of forces carries you to the top of the wave. Then the surfer stands up and rides the wave to shore.
For the critics, the ocean is the universe of things he can write about. The sets of waves are the specific discourse the critic chooses to have opinions about. Riding the wave is the act of criticism. In both scenarios, the person standing on the shore, watching the surfer, is the audience.
Aside from the analogy itself, the comparison offers other insights. For example, the figure of the person watching the surfer is key. That person might be there just to watch the ocean, specifically to watch the waves or even to watch the surfer. Also, the same person might argue first, that the person on the shore doesn't matter to the surfer AND that the audience doesn't matter to the audience.
What can a critic say about the impressionists? Only that they are the most financially significant group of artistic products produced in the 19th and 20th century- at present, in fact, impressionist paintings dominate the top painting 100 sale prices of all time. A materialistic take on great art for sure, but the impressionists are the most appropriate group of cultural products to subject to economic analysis because the records are so clear.
This fact stems from the nature of the art market in Paris, France in the second half of the 19th century. The market was made by a royally designated art show called "the Salon." The Salon was a yearly show where individual patrons decided how to buy art. These patrons are what you would call "institutional" purchasers: government officials, city fathers, church officials. The Salon was a fully developed culture industry institution, and though it antedated the rise of bourgeois art market as well as market capitalism, it none the less directly influenced painters working then through it's all pervasive roll as the arbitrator of what patrons would buy.
In addition to being the market maker, the Salon also had it's own art-presentational aesthetic. All readers are familiar with the contemporary museum aesthetic in current art museums: low lighting, one painting for x amount of wall space, etc. That was not the style of the Salon. The Salon filled every available inch of the wall surface (and these were big walls) with huge canvases in ornate frames. In that sense the Salon represented the taste of the patrons: looking to fill wall space, pretty vulgar, etc. The prominent time period of the Salon was from 1725-1890s, when modern art really got it's game on.
The Museum Audio Tour manages to incorporate the voices of various Impressionist figures, though obviously read in English and not French. I think, actually the speaker was Claude Monet (1840-1926). Anyway, he complains that people won't buy his art because his art isn't in the Salon show. The Impressionists as a group became known as such because they were the first group of artists to D.I.Y. Specifically, in 1874 the Impressionists had their first art exhibit in a photographer's studio in Paris, and the rest is fucking magic.
Strolling through the Birth of Impressionism exhibit, I was struck by how thoroughly the individual artists just nailed it. These guys... understood what the bourgeois purchasers wanted to see. Dark colors, realistic themes, interesting use of color, abstraction. It's not like these intellectual themes were somehow unique to French painters, they were just anticipatory, they were in the right place at the right time and they had the technical ability to integrate techniques utilized by sophisticated "Salon" style painters in the service of their own modernist vision.
Through staging their own art show, they managed to create their own market, outside of the salon. This move coincided with the emergence of the industrial class as art purchasers. Wealthy French, British and Americans, in some cases the children of wealthy industrialists, in other cases the industrialists themselves, had money to spend and they didn't give a FUCK about the Salon. In fact, you could say they hated it, seeing as it was directed toward the pre-capitalist aristocrats and autocrats of French society.
Ultimately, success validates itself, and at this point, as the Impressionists continue to sell museum tickets and paintings at the highest level of the art world, there isn't anything left to do but ask "how?" and "why?" A viewer in 2010 doesn't need to see impressionist paintings AT ALL to appreciate their splendor, since their own advances in technique were incorporated by subsequent modernist artists and THOSE art works were hugely successful. It's not like "Impressionism" has any possible current relevance to the world except to just say, "Man, what a hit." but that is surely enough, since Impressionism is such a huge smash. Furthermore, the triumph of impressionism is so utter complete that it could serve as the basis for observing a documented change in the culture taste of the entire world. That makes Impressionism a worthy subject of thought, as indeed, it has been, almost literally since inception. As it continues today, and as it will be for as long as this particular world is still around.
VIENNA AUSTRIA
AGUSTA GEORGIA
BERLIN GERMANY
The Supremes are an act that took advantage of many of the changes that were sweeping popular music in mid 60s even as they retained a look and sound that set them apart from the love generation. It's hard to tell the story of the Supremes without telling the story of Motown. The real weakness of the music industry as it existed in the early 60s was in their handling of black artists. Tastes changed ahead of society, and the world that created Motown and the Supremes was a segregated world where Whites held all the cards and Blacks were left to pick up the scraps.
In the early 60s, Berry Gordy was a hustling young man from a wealthy black family in Detroit. When he started Motown, famously borrowing money from his family, he wasn't the only one with a record label. His sisters had record labels, too. Motown started in 1960 and so had the Supremes...under a different name (the Primettes). It took Motown a year or so to sign up the Supremes, pick them a new name, etc. Then it was a couple more years before the Supremes really broke... 1963 really. During that period, Gordy didn't lose the faith. The Supremes, of course, wrote none of their songs.
The rise of the Supremes is from an era before artists had artistic control. Diana Ross may have been an outsized diva, but she didn't even have access to her own bank account. In that regard, it's hard to ignore the character of Berry Gordy and the role he plays in Supremes, both for better and most assuredly for worse. The Gordy/Ross relationship dominates the Supremes story, literally to the detriment of everyone else in the entire book. Almost half the book involved Gordy scheming to get Ross out of the Supremes so that she can fly solo.
Why are people so stupid? Why was Berry Gordy so obsessed with one artist? Here's a fact about Motown: In 1966 Motown had 200 artists under contract. Only 4 made money. What is it about turning art into commerce that can make even successful men look stupid? Like so many other men who succeed in the area of turning art into commerce, Gordy was a man working an area of the market where the big boys were pretty clueless, working in a geographic area with strong local networks and with artists and collaborators who were pliable and financially ignorant. Right time, right place, right product. The Supremes were that product.
The Supremes rose, and fell- there was conflict, tragedy and some reconciliation, but through it all everyone involved seemed to lack even a modicum of self reflection about their situation. Maybe that's why the art was so great: Because they were just doing it, not sitting around, talking about it all day. Great art is unself-reflective art.
5/21/10
The Phoenicians
The Purple Empire of the Ancient World
by Gerhard Herm
p. 1973 (GERMAN)
p. 1975 (ENGLISH TRANSLATION)
I think... if there were enough music content... I would simply blog about music. But if you are writing about a certain topic, and there isn't enough to write about, then you should switch topics. Back in the day that's what smart people did. I remember the image of William Morris, interior designer, writer, socialist, switching from working area to working area within his shop. You can go back to the Middle Ages and find people who were thought to know "everything there was in the world" (Erasmus) That sounds ridiculous now but back then there simply wasn't as much knowledge. A consequence of having more knowledge in the world is an increase in the specialization of knowledge itself. This naturally results in EVERYONE seeing less of the "big picture," and in my opinion it's this conflict that is at the heart of modernity.
To understand the present, I've been thinking a lot about the ancient world. The dividing line between ancient and modern is basically the birth of Jesus Christ, though you can quibble that the modern era didn't really begin till the later part of the middle ages. Whatever. On the one hand, ancient: Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Egyptians. On the other modern: Greece, Rome etc. It helps to understand that people have been thinking about that first group seriously for less then 200 years.
Even within the group of Ancient peoples, the Phoenicians get a bad rap because they didn't leave much behind. Oh, they invented the alphabet, but there just aren't any written documents to be had. The most amazing thing about Gerhard Herm's "The Phoenicians" is that it apparently sold 250,000 copies in Germany in the mid 1970s. 250 thousand people bought this book in West Germany in 1973? Wow. If you re-issued this book in the United States today it would sell 50 copies.
The Phoenicians is a work of popular history along the lines of a Steven Amrbose. The prose is scholarly-light, with a cursory bibliography at the back. In part this is because there aren't alot of speciality sources when it comes to the Phoenicians. Herm is left to describe the Phoenicians from the view points of the more verbose people who surrounded them. First, the Egyptians, then the Hebrews, then the Greeks, then the Romans. In fact, the Phoenicians is more a sequential history of different people's interacting with the Phoenicians then of the Phoenicians themselves.
Despite the breezy style some salient facts emerged:
FACT: The famous Phoenician purple dye was created by killing sea snails- thousands of them for each dyed piece of fabric.
FACT: Greek anti-Phoenician sentiment and attitudes is the forerunner of modern European anti-Semitisn.
FACT: Europe was named after the daughter of a Phoenician prince. (Europa)
FACT: Carthage's Phoenician-ism is demonstrated by the names of it's most famous citizens: Hannibal is "HANNA BAAL" or "GIFT OF BAAL" - Baal being an old Phoenician god.
FACT: Phoenicians practiced human sacrifice. A lot.
5/24/10
Book Review
The History of South Africa
2nd Edition (now in 3d edition)
Yale University Press
p. 1995
For me the European experience in Africa will always be encapsulated by Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." To talk about Africa is to talk about colonialism and imperialism. When discussing topics like colonialism and imperialism, it is important to distinguish two types of European colonies. The first, European majority colonies, where native inhabitants were either sparse to begin with or killed off entirely and whites constituted the majority. The second, Native majority colonies where the Europeans were a small portion of the total number of inhabitants. South Africa is interesting because it is a combination of both, and that led to conflict.
South Africa is an extraordinarily complex place, historically speaking. The complexity is a result of multiple conflicts which have taken place over the last five hundred years. Initially you have the Dutch settlers enslaving the hunter/gather types on the coast: CONFLICT! Then you have the British arriving and getting into it with the Dutch. Then you have the Dutch fighting with the Bantu speaking Africans. Then you have the British intervening in the fight between the Dutch and the Bantu speaking Africans. Then you have the Dutch fighting the British. Then you have a democracy which excluded 80 percent of the population. Finally, you have majority rule by the Africans and the 2010 World Cup.
It is fair to say that there is only so much of this history the reader has to know to understand that South Africa is a) super complex b) not as hugely fucked up as it used to be, but still kind of fucked up.
Teasing out the whys and where-fors of South African history strikes me as an extraordinarily complex task, and one that also implicates of interesting historiographical issues. The Author, a South African expatriate who taught at Yale University, is obviously aware of the difficulties and does an excellent job of describing the facts, noting the controversies and generally staying clear of the great imponderables of South African history.
I think that's a good place to be for all of us. If you only know one "fact" about South Africa before the World Cup starts it should be that South Africa defies any easy assessment.
The single most interesting chapter for this reader was the description of the hand-over of power from Whites to Blacks. In support of their apartheid regime, Whites created an elaborate species of governmentus bureautracticalias, to the point where the costs to administer apartheid threatened to overwhelm the entire economy. For example, during apartheid the state maintained parallel government departments in all social services area for Whites, Blacks and Coloured. At the same time, demographic trends ensured an ever diminishing white portion of the over-all population. Having seen the writing on the wall, the White government decided to negotiate from a position of strength, and that began an internal process that resulted in a more-or-less peaceful handover of power to the ANC.
This involved things like letting Nelson Mandela out of prison after 20 years and then commencing negotiations with him a week later that made him largely responsible for the government of South Africa. Can you imagine? It's as amazing a story as I think exists in 20th century history.
5/28/10
Shaka Zulu
by E.A. Ritter
p. 1955
Putnam Press
Man, South African history is really interesting. Interesting, and complicated. Shaka Zulu was born, an illegitimate child, in the late 1700s. His rise to power resulted in the emergence of the Zulu Nation in the early 1800s. The Zulu Nation dominated the affairs of the Eastern half of South Africa into the 20th century. The Zulu were defeated by the British, but they were never conquered. The Inkatha Freedom Party, the primary vehicle of political expression for the Zulus today, played an important role through the liberation movement and it remains active today.
That being said, this book is hardly the last word on Shaka or the Zulus. It's written by a guy descended from white settlers who was actually in the army that defeated the Zulu army in the late 19th century. He obviously admires Shaka, repeatedly referring to him as an African Napoleon, and he goes out of his way to discuss the ways in which Shaka rationalized Zulu society, specifically by standing up against the witch doctors. On the other hand, Shaka comes out as a ridiculously bloody thirsty guy- ordering people clubbed to death at the drop of a hat.
But if you treat Ritter's Shaka Zulu with a cautious eye there is narrative detail aplenty. Ritter is a fine writer, and even if he has a somewhat dated and unprofessional view of African's, his bias is balanced by a genuine affection for the discipline and courage of the Zulu warrior. I have to say, I've read a lot about Native Peoples are their struggles with encroaching European cultures in a variety of contexts. The Zulu are almost unique in that they weren't really disturbed until AFTER they had created their own nation. True, they didn't have guns, and they didn't beat the british, but they didn't go away, and they continue to exist today, being led by the same families that led them two hundred years ago.
It's quite an achievement, almost equivalent to the feats of resistance by the Ethiopian Kingdom into the 20th century. It's a story worth knowing, and something worth considering during this year's World Cup in South Africa.
Book Review
6/28/10
A History of Archaeological Thought
Second Edition
by Bruce G. Trigger
P. 2006
Cambridge University Press
Let me give you a tip about used book shopping: If you see a book that has been published by Cambridge University Press, and it's less then ten bucks, by it. I found this book at Moe's Used Books in Berkeley- and it was sixteen dollars- it would set you back 80 on Amazon. This was actually my second start down this path. Earlier, I bought a book about the great discoveries of archeological history and discovered that it was a boring book filled with the journal's of early 20th century archeologists. What a bunch of imperialist dicks. In fact, the main problem I have with archeology is the discipline itself. Archeology has been used to justify Nazism, Manifest Destiny and the superiority of classical civilization over that of the present. Hardly a resume which inspires confidence.
Most, if not all of the bad stuff from archaeology dates from before World War II. As the author points out, 90 percent of all archaeologists through out world history are active right now, so writing a history of archaeology is surprisingly easy. It's like that for most academic subjects. Trigger first wrote this book back in the mid 80s, twenty years later, he wrote this update, then he died. This book is just about as thorough and comprehensive as you might expect, and it could guide self study in the field of archaeology for a decade or more before you'd need to be brought up to speed with new developments.
Trigger's clear headed and comprehensive treatment of subjects like "antiquarianism" and "cultural historical archaeology" are conversation enders. I simply don't think that anything he says about older archaeological movements is even worth challenging. As he moves into more recent times, the filtering and discussion becomes a little more confused, a little more specialist then general audience. By the time he gets to his two hundred page discussion of "post processal" archaeology, I was just about ready to through my hands up in the air.
Like all other social science disciplines, archeology has suffered by being subjected the the vagaries of the university cultural production world- an emphasis on increasing specialization and specialized discourse leading to fewer cross connections both intra and inter discipline. The impression I got was of a wave of knowledge slowly building, only to hit a pier of French inspired critical theory and American academic polemic. In covering the grand sweep of archeology as a discipline, Trigger makes many of the points that Kevin Collins made about philosophers in his excellent the Sociology of Philosophies. Trigger's grasp of cybernetics and systems theory seems limited but he seems to intuitively grasp these interdisciplinary concepts and their relevance of archeology. He also neglects a discussion of the intellectual networks that produced the writers whose ideas he discusses. For example, his discussion of Walter Taylor and his impact on the "new archeology" in the United States seems to directly parallel the network analysis of philosophers in the Collins books.
You really don't need to talk about networks until the volume of material surpasses the limits of rational comprehension, which happens surprisingly late if ever for most intellectual subjects. Few, if any, intellectual subjects outside of the hard sciences reached this level of complexity before the 1960s.
Despite it's flaws, archaeology remains the main way that we can learn about cultures who either didn't write, or whose writing is incomprehensible to us, so we need to think about it. That doesn't mean the archaeologists know what they are doing- quite the opposite, it would seem, archaeological discourse should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt and all conclusions should be treated with skepticism.
Book Review
6/25/10
The Tarim Mummies:
Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West
by J.P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair
Thames & Hudson
p. 2000
I picked this book up at the Secrets of the Silk Road exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. Despite whole heartedly recommending this exhibition to my readers, I maintain some reservations about the influence of the Chinese government on the content of the exhibition. This influence, led, in my mind, to an exhibition catalogue that borders on the worthless (again, a full page color photo of a chinese won-ton?) and led me to look elsewhere for the context I needed to understand the "Europoid" mummies of North Central Asia.
This book, written by two reputable professors, is probably the only book any non-specialist needs to read about the Tarim Mummies. J.P. Mallory is a professor of pre historic archaeology at Queen's University in Belfast, and Victor Hair is a Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at University of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, Mallory is the world's foremost non insane authority on the Indo Europeans. The Indo Europeans are the semi-mythical linguistic/ethnic group that spawned the languages and people that comprise essentially all of Europe as well as Sanskrit and it's derivatives and Iranian. The debate over these people's was badly tarnished by a century and a half of racist ideology (No one calls them the Aryans anymore, even though they called themselves Aryans.) Regardless of the historical baggage, it's an interesting area to read about. Mallory has written multiple books about the subject either by himself (In Search of Indo Europeans) or in conjunction with others (Oxford's Guide to Proto Indo European Linguistics.)
The Tarim Mummies reads like a synthesis of his theories about indo european linguistics, but here he has added the insight of Victor Hair, who is able to bring Chinese records into the equation.
According to Mallory, the Tarim Mummies emigrated into the Tarim Basin from the North West. His thesis is that they represent the Eastern fringe of a "centrifugal" migration of Indo Europeans south from their ancestral homeland in the Russian Steppes. In doing so, Mallory is advancing his long running thesis that places the indo european "home land" in the Asian-Russian steppelands of the North, as supposed to those who would place it the Caucauses, the western steppes or in south-eastern Europe.
This homeland debate is anachronistic in my mind- we have been so accustomed to fixed national borders that it seems foreign to think that entire nations migrated thousands of miles in the early period of civilization. In fact, settling down was a pretty good way to get wiped off the face of the map by nomads who kept their fighting spirit. Such was the case with the Tarim Mummy culture, who founded cities at the center of the silk road, only to be levelled by Ughyurs and ulitmately dominated by the Chinese.
Mallory's use of comparative linguistics to buttress his arguments is fairly ingenious. I would like to see that technique applied to some other area of history besides the Indo European language question. It also helps take the matter out of the world of archaeology. I have issues with the discipline of archeology, but that is not a subject for today.
Book Review
7/1/10
 |
| Map of the Austro Hungarian Empire. |
A History of the Hapsburg Empire: 1526-1918
by Robert A. Kann
p. 1980
University of California Press
One consequence of WWII is that American universities picked up a ton of first-rate scholars. Robert Kann (two "n"s) was one of them. He was a German speaking historian and he came over to the United States and wrote a ton of books about the Austro-Hungarian empire that rely on almost 100% non-English language sources. Unfortunately, English was his second language and his prose reads like it.
This book is an example of something I like to call "Dad history," like it's counterpart, Dad music, Dad history shows high level of technical ability but is either out of date or lacks artistic inspiration. You know, culture... for dad's.
The story of the Hapsburg Empire is, to my mind, the strangest chapter of European history. If you are looking for in depth description of how an Absolutist European Monarch copes with the vicissitude of a multi-national polygot Empire during the birth of modernism.... unfortunately this isn't the right book for you. But: It is the right subject to be investigating.
I suppose the answer to "Who cares?" on this subject
consists of three names: Adolf Hitler, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka. Ok asshole you don't give a shit about Austria, but they produced some pretty heavy hitters there at the end. This is not the kind of book where the author gets into hows and whys but it does lay out the scenery of what this crazy place was all about.
Perhaps the most (only?) interesting chapter in Kann's book is the description of the implementation of an empire wide Congress, with political parties and everything, that was introduced by the Emperor in the mid 19th century. It's hard to ignore the role of this shift to participatory democracy and the rise of organized anti-antisemitism. SPECIFICALLY, Alois Hitler, Hitler's father worked in for the Austrian government as a CUSTOMS AGENT. One of the Austrian political parties drew heavily in it's support among German speaking public employees. This was the same party that early on adopted Antisemitism, before it was cool. Thus, Hitler grew up in the home of this government bureaucrat who was officially, politically anti-semitic.
It just goes to show ya that democracy ain't always the greatest.
Book Review
7/2/10
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
Second Edition
by Philip D. Curtin
first published 1990, second edition 1998
Cambridge University Press
I think I've mentioned this before, but always be on the look out for history books, published by Cambridge University Press, that cost less then five bucks. Paying attention to the publisher can save you a lot of wasted reading time.
A major trend in history over the last thirty years has been the shift away from books that dealt with The History of Country X or The History of the Such and Such War to books that try to relate multiple events to one another as well as the elaboration of areas of inquiry that span separate historical subjects. A major example of this trend is the rise of "Atlantic History" which seeks to relate what happened in the new world with events in the old world in a specific and non-specious manner. In American History, the most notable authors in this area are David Hackett Fischer and his seminal Albion's Seed as well as Bernard Bailyn.
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex is a simple example of what I would call the "new atlantic history," written in an easy to read prose style that makes it accessible to anyone with an undergraduate level education. Curtin charts the rise of the Plantation complex in south America and the Caribbean with reference to the internal history of Africa, the settlement history of the New World, economic history and a heavy emphasis on demographics. It's a sophisticated, of the moment approach which undoubtedly explains why the edition I read was the 13th edition of the 2nd printing (i.e. it's a hit.) Perhaps the success has something to do with the moderate length (200 pages) and almost total lack of foot notes- I'm guessing this book is an undergraduate staple in history departments on three different continents.
Book Review
7/5/10
World Prehistory:
A New Outline
by Grahame Clark
Cambridge University Press
p. 1969
You wouldn't think that pre-historic archeology is a subject area where it's important to "stay current" but the fact is that almost everything that was written about archeology before the mid 1960s was wrong, more or less. In other words, pre-historic archeology has a time line that matches up well with less serious topics like "rock music" and "computer technology." I don't think people realize that when it comes to social sciences, the explosion of practitioners and texts dates entirely from the 1970s forward. There has been a 30 year long glut in the production of knowledge, and we owe that explosion, and the resultant confusion, almost entirely to the proliferation of shitty United States universities.
Archeology is no exception. During the 1960s, American archeologist trumpeted the arrival of the "new archeology" which basically meant archeology that moved away from the racist, bullshit historical-cultural archeology that saw western europe as the end all be all of human civilization and ignored and diminished all other forms of human civilization. Well, I hate to say it, the Brits got there first, and it was only the sad ignorance of the so-called 'new archeologists' in the United States about their own discipline that allowed them to proclaim the invention of an archeological method that was already in existence.
Specifically, the Cambridge archeological duo of Gordon Childe and Grahame Clark laid the groundwork for a less inaccurate archeology as early as the 1930s. World Prehistory: A New Outline represents a late synthesis of much of the "new thought" of archeology, and while it is obviously 40 years out of date, it is still super available, affordable (you can buy it for one cent on Amazon) and easy to read (200 pages, with no footnotes.) As such it represents an appropriate departure point for a layman's exploration of archeology, and you need not worry that Clark is filling your head with racists nonsense.
Book Review
7/6/10
The Harmless People
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
p. 1958
Vintage Books
This is a book about the "Bushmen" of the Kalahari desert- you can tell how old it is because the author refers to what are now known as the "San" people as "Bushmen" throughout. It's an old book, but no worse for wear after staying in print for half a century plus. It's also another one cent amazon wonder- a book you can buy, on amazon, for a penny. There are so many good books available for one cent it's a wonder that people spend their time reading crap, but c'est la vie.
When I think about what will be left off humanity after our current civilization craps out and destroys itself, my thoughts turn to what we now call "primitive" civilizations. Primitive? Maybe by our standards, but who do you think is going to survive when the average temperature of our planet rises by fifteen degrees and we run out of clean drinking water. Well, my money is on the people who are living in the desert right now. I think they will survive, and we will be destroyed. Unfortunately, our present civilization is so powerful that those peoples are almost entirely wiped out, and there may be none left when there time comes.
Is it too late to learn some lessons from the peoples at the margins? Maybe/Maybe not. Me- I'm trying to learn all I can about people who have survived at the margins for centuries. They may, in a certain sense, be "primitive" but man- are they tough. People who can survive for generations in the scorching hot deserts of south west Africa deserve mad props, and there is plenty that we can learn.
Harmless People is not an academic book. Written by a 23 year old co-ed in the mid 50s, Harmless People is an early example of the popular anthropology genre that took off in the 60s. Thus, given it's early publication date it's easy to see why this books has been such a success. Thomas has nothing but sympathy and respect for a people who were, even as she wrote this book, being hunted and enslaved by both blacks and whites in Southern Africa.
She shows the San to be a people with culture, religion and their own unique group of survival skills. For example, Thomas describes how the San gather poison for their arrows from one specific species of caterpillar. It's an incredibly complex process that the San managed to figure out without any science whatsoever. So to is their ability to survive out in the desert. They sound incredibly tough- the very essence of what humanity should be. Meanwhile, here we are: fat, lazy, complacent, incredibly arrogant. It is sobering to think about- how we have proliferated while the San have been hunted to extinction- literally: hunted to extinction. How embarrassing for all of us.
Book Review
7/8/10
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas Kuhn
University of Chicago Press
originally published 1962
this edition 1996
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the book that invented the phrase "paradigm shift." Every time you hear someone say the phrase "paradigm shift" they are referring to this book, even if they have no idea of this book's existence. As described in this book, a paradigm shift is the moment when a scientific community abandons one idea and simultaneously adopts another, conflicting idea. Kuhn's book was inspired by epistemological debates he had observed within the social science world. In other words, he was inspired by arguments between sociologists and psychologists about what constituted knowledge within those disciplines. Kuhn theorized that the same debates occurred within the "hard sciences' but that those debates were obscured by the biases of scientists themselves.
This idea was almost immediately adopted by writers all over the world, both academic and non-academic. The idea of "paradigm shift" itself inspired it's own paradigm shift by foreshadowing many of the more extreme arguments of french cultural theorists and post-modernists. The people latching onto the idea of paradigm shift have done much harm to the original work, which is a short (200 pages), concise, and to my mind, non-controversial description of the way that scientific knowledge is generated.
Chief among the non-controversial, common sense ideas that Kuhn invented is the idea that sea changes among communities are spurred by crises. That the individuals who create change are young people who are deeply immersed in the specific crisis they are seeking to solve, and that by virtue of their youth they have not yet 'made their reputation' by defending old ideas.
In every day language: You can't have intellectual change without failure and it is failure which inspires wide spread intellectual change. The failure of current ideas to explain anomalous events inspires faith in new ideas. At that point, the old ideas, and the activities which are spurred by the investigation of that idea, are abandoned- the intellectual equivalent of an abandoned ancient city. The members of the community who are inspired by the new idea create their own, new patterns of activity, the members who refuse to adapt stop generating new iterations of the old ideas and instead fight a rear guard action against activities of the folks motivated by the new idea.
8/7/10
Book Review
The Wave Watcher's Companion
From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life's Undulations
by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
p. 2010
Perigee Press (Penguin)
This book is interesting not just because of the subject matter, but for the genre of popular nonfiction it exemplifies. Call it non-fiction's answer to the novel: It's antecedents are journalists like Tom Wolfe, and Hunter Thompson. It's a style that is best represented by William Vollmann's epic *Imperial* but you would also have to include novelist/writers like David Foster Wallace, McSweeney's titan Dave Eggers. It's also featured in the book length magazine articles of Malcolm Gladwell. None of the writers I am talking about are unknowns- in fact- they all seem to do pretty well.
Other similar figures include Monocle magazine editor/Financial Times columnist Tyler Brule and the author of this book, Gavin Pretor-Pinney co-founder of The Idler magazine.
But I think if someone is sitting there thinking "what kind of book do i write" you are better going with the creative non-fiction category then the novel. First of all, no one gives a fuck about good novels, people like crap. Are you going to write a novel about a child wizard? A vampire? No? Then no one is going to care. On the other hand, a book like the Wave Watcher's Companion can generate a sensation using an easily recognizable format. Wave Watcher's Companion is a hit- the book itself its compact- fits in one hand, handsome cover, large text, footnotes in the back with a separate set of footnotes in the text. Photographs, illustrations, 19th century style section summaries placed onto the page. The over all impact of the book itself is one of distinct delight.
Pretor-Pinney has been down this road before, in addition to co-founding the Idler, an "alternative life style" magazine that has been hugely influential among the intellectual sets on both sides of the Atlantic since it started in the early 90s- he's also written "The Cloudspotter's Guide" which I have not read. The thing about Wave Watcher's Companion is that it is TIMELY. It is a Southern California zeitgeist atm and waves are very relevant.
Highly recommended. Worth the money!
Book Review
7/21/10
The Philosophy of Rhetoric
by I.A. Richards
p. 1936
New York: Oxford University Press
When I read Pitchfork it reminds me of what academics call New Criticism. Specifically, I think the "style" of Pitchfork is of popular version of techniques, like close reading which were developed by New Critics to talk about poetry. Close reading means:
A truly attentive close reading of a two-hundred-word poem might be thousands of words long without exhausting the possibilities for observation and insight. To take an even more extreme example, Jacques Derrida's essay Ulysses Gramophone, which J. Hillis Miller describes as a "hyperbolic, extravagant… explosion" of the technique of close reading, devotes more than eighty pages to an interpretation of the word "yes" in James Joyce's great modernist novel Ulysses. (WIKIPEDIA)Despite thinking this in my head, I really don't know anything about New Criticism or Literary Theory- also- I have no desire to know about any of that beyond bare framework. Close reading a poem is super annoying. BUT- I.A. Richards, who is one of New Criticism's FOUNDERS also wrote a book called "The Philosophy of Rhetoric," and I love rhetoric study so I was like "Hey- give him a shot." And you know what: The non-close reading parts are pretty interesting. The 20 page excerpts where he close reads a poem, not so much. From my perspective, Richards seems to be overlapping with Wittgenstein and the other language philosophers(another group of ideas I'm only barely familiar with) before he dives into the poetry nonsense.
New Criticism may have some use since it overlaps with other discourses, but man, 200 pages of poetry analysis puts me to sleep. Critics should learn about the techniques of New Criticism, and then do the opposite. What a waste of time.
8/16/10
BOOK REVIEWKeats: A Biography
by Andrew Motion
p. 1997
I make a full confession of ignorance when it comes to the actual output of the German/English romantic poets of the late 18th and 19th centuries. I didn't major in literature in college, and honestly, I don't give a f*** about poetry itself except as it relates to song lyrics, and even then, it's not a big concern of mine. However, as I've been working on book about the relationship between intellectuals and music, I'm taking another look at the romantic poets.
First of all, Goethe and Schiller are seminal figures when it comes to the attitudes taken by subsequent intellectuals towards music. Second of all, the successors/contemporaries of those guys- specifically English romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelly and Byron have a huge influence on how contemporary intellectuals- artists and writers both, see the role of the artist of in society.
I think it's fair to say that even those contemporary artists who are utterly ignorant of English poetry in the 19th century share most, if not all, of the attitudes of those artists when it comes to how they see themselves. They hate the business world, they don't like capitalism, they despise or ignore their critics, they are less concerned with making a living then making a statement. The romantic poets of 19th century England are kind of the ur-romantic intellectual/artistic figures, so I felt like I should check out this 500 page plus biography of John Keats- one of the more flamboyant figures in a posse characterized by flamboyance.
John Keats was called a "cockney" poet during his brief, unsuccessful life. In Motion's lengthy, lengthy book- one of literally dozens of biographies of this subject- Keats emerges like an 18th century analogue of the 20th century pop musicians who comes up "from the streets." For example, many 50s rock and rollers couldn't read music. Keats, who drew almost exclusively on Greek myths for his reference points, couldn't read Greek. Unlike many of the other romantic poets- Keats did not come from a privileged, wealthy background. The untimely death of both of his parents left him enough money so that he didn't have to actually work for a living, but he was hardly gallivanting around the globe Byron style. His one trip abroad- to Italy- resulted in his death (at the age of 25.)
One of the benefits of writing about Keats is that he wrote during a time when people wrote tons of letters and his work was discussed by contemporary critics. The superabundance of materials makes it easier to talk Keats in a contemporary context. One interesting aspect of Keats that emerges in Motion's biography is the relationship between Keats, his critics and his friends. When Keats was writing poetry, poetry was reviewed in much the same way albums and films are reviewed today. Critics had sharp opinions about the merit of specific poets and their output. Keats, as a member of the middle classes espousing an anti-government line, came in for harsh, harsh criticism. He read that criticism, and it totally bummed him out. At the same time, Keats also had a circle of friends who loved his work and when he met his untimely death they came out and crushed the haters.
Today, the contemporary critics of Keats sound like morons and his poetry is read by many an American undergraduate. You wonder if it would have been the same story if he had lived to 85. Again, Keats is an archetype of the "live fast die young famous forever" artist that has so much influence on the mind of artists working today.
In conclusion, I'd like to say that Keats life is wholly irrelevant to the work of artists and critics today, because he seems sorta ridiculous to me. However, it's impossible to ignore the fact that many of the tropes from this biography continue to repeat themselves down to the present day, and this makes Keats a pretty important dude, whether the artists and critics who unwittingly re-enact the episodes of his life in their own contemporary sparring know about him or not.
8/23/10
Book Review
The Celtsby Gerhard Herm
p. 1976
St. Martin's Press
I'm a big fan of cultural trends like "vampires" and "harry potter" because it helps me identify idiots whose opinions I wish to avoid. Don't get me wrong, I like True Blood as much as the next guy, but people who get obsessed with projects like 'Twilight" and "harry potter" are demonstrating a real lack of intelligence and cultural imagination. The internet has made the world of knowledge so available and accessible, and yet... Twilight. I don't begrudge pigs their slop, but that slop is not for me.
This is not to say that I'm not interested by the world of myth and fantasy. Quite the opposite. For a little over a year I've been mildly obsessed by the pre-historic world of the indo europeans- that group of people who spawned the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, the Celts, the Spanish, the English, the Slavs and the Hindus. I've read books, had discussions, attended museums, etc. etc, etc. I imagine I'm motivated by the same emotions that drive the Twilight fans: a desire for a lil magic in the day to day world.
It's hard to find good source materials when it comes to these indo europeans cultures- the field is filled with crack pots, kooks and psuedo-academic bs.... That's why I was kind of into The Celte, by Gerhard Herm. Herm also wrote a cool book about the Phoenicians. He is a German author, who wrote in the 70s. These books were hugely popular and sold millions of copies. Today the "celts" are largely equated with Ireland, but they were actually a prolific indo european culture that dominated Spain, France, the low countries and of course... the British Isles.
The Celts were conquered by the Romans and absorbed into the Empire- unlike the Germans, the continental Celts did not maintain a separate identity outside of the Roman Empire. The Celts in the British Isles maintained their separate identity well into the Christian period. In Ireland, they lasted long enough to create their own alphabet.
Who were the Celts? Well, they were fearsome warriors- not quite as fearsome as the Germans, but they liked to cut off their enemies heads and put them up on the walls of their huts. They liked to fight in the nude. They had their own religion and their own religious leaders (the Druids) whose practices are shrouded in mystery. Herm makes analogies to the Brahmin class in India to explain the function of Druids in Celtic culture. It's an analogy founded in base supposition, but you know what: it works for me.
The most interesting parts of the Celts are the chapters were Herm delves into Celtic mythology. These stories were written down by Christian monks in the 11th century, but the similarities between their stories and other indo eurpoean mythos (like the Rig Veda) are pretty amazing. The Celts sound like indo europeans through and through, and what's more, they are "our" Indo Europeans, to the point where we have sports teams named after them. Pretty cool stuff, and the book costs like thirty cents on Amazon. More interesting then vampires, I hope you'd agree.
Book Review
7/19/10
Popular Culture:The Metropolitan Experience
by Iain Chambers
p. 1986
London: Routledge Press
Intellectuals writing about music...what a fucking disaster. The utter and total failure of intellectuals inside and outside the university system to write accurately about the role of music in the lives of audiences didn't really manifest itself until after the full rise of popular music in the post World War II period: before then, music just wasn't ubiquitous or important enough in the lives of normal folks to expose specious intellectual attempts to discuss music and the it's role within the lives of audiences.
Regardless of the epic landscape of failure, the discriminating audience member needs to tackle this literature to understand the music of the present, and I would suggest that Iain Chamber's Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (1986) is a Culture/Music Theory 101. Popular Culture is paperbook size, but it functions as a punk rock text book describing intellectual theories about popular culture from the 1800s through the punk era.
The bibliography is super solid, and Chambers does a good job mimicking the 'cut-up' techniques of the modernist inspired layout. The book design aspects of Popular Culture double or triple the value of this book. It's something a pop star could carry on in her handbag during a european tour and read in 5 or 10 page bites. It's affordable enough for the part-time musician working in a coffee shop.
This book costs .63 cents usd + four usd shipping on AMAZON. It's a light, fun, easy read that packs a huge informational punch on the description of intellectuals and their theories about popular culture. If you flip through it and go straight to the bibliography, like I did, then more power to you.
Personally, I think the combination of used books on Amazon, streaming Netflix and Google Books represents a revolution in the production of knowledge that will surpass the rise of the university system in 18th century Germany. This is the time to get on board that three headed hydra: used books on Amazon, streaming Netlix, Google Books. What do you need a university for in terms of the production of knowledge?
The goal of this blog is to help other people find their own path to understanding using the new materials that are available, not to push people down one particular path: but you should go somewhere, do something. It's a revolution in the production of knowledge, so produce some fucking knowledge.
People who make a living from music should be familiar with what intellectuals have written about music, because that is how they are going to be judged. There's no magic or creativity to writing about music, rather, the interesting part is how little the music writers themselves understand what it is they are doing, or even trying to do.
Thus, musicians who have a conscious understanding of how and why people write about music will have an advantage of those who do not, and audience members who understand their 'place' in the discussion .... well I guess the benefit depends on how much you care about the role of music in your life. If you don't give a shit, then you don't need to care about any of this information.
On the other hand if music 'means' something to you, ignoring these ideas means you are ignorant. Not stupid, just ignorant. Most of intellectuals theorizing about popular culture is them writing 'about' the audience- not as a participant, as a detached 'scientific' observer. What a bunch of bullshit. Popular culture is about experience not observation.
Book Review
7/17/10
Empires and Barbariansby Peter Heather
Oxford University Press
Published March 4th, 2010
This is a history of the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the "Middle Ages," focusing mostly on the movement of peoples across the Roman frontier from Germania, the movement of Slavs into Eastern Europe and the movement of Vikings into the Greater British Isles area. In short, it's a migratory history of the period when the people who presently inhabit the nations of Europe got to where they were going.
Heather takes full advantage of recent developments in historiographical thought, explicitly drawing on the archeological shift in history as well as the development of 'migration studies' in the United States. He combines these newer methods and theory with the erudition and "pop" that you would expect from an author publishing a book called "Empire and Barbarians" through Oxford University Press. The quality I admire most about the history titles coming out of the OUP is that they combine tremendous learning with tremendous style. No dad's history books these. Heather isn't a stuffy writer, and he's not afraid to throw in anachronistic references to drive home a point.
Heather's main thesis, that population movements were a combination of different migratory trends that encompassed a variety of different social groups over time and place has tinges of both revisionism and counter-revisionism, but Heather is careful not to over step his claims. It's hard to ignore the conflict between his claims that "archeology is leading history" in this particular area of study with the lack of archeological materials that he actually cites. In many places, Heather rests his case on what he hopes will be revealed by future study. Didn't bother me, but it is a weakness.
Empires and Barbarians is at it's best when Heather introduces concepts from 'migration studies." One of the main points he makes in this area is how economic disparities draw people across international borders. Sounds obvious- but it does represent a revelation when it comes to this area of history and what has been written in the past. Heather argues that the posting of Roman legions on the border of Germania were economic trade zones that induced German tribes to step up agricultural production and spurred greater political development within the matrix of conquest/resistance.
Heather has similarly insightful observations about the emergence of Slavs and the migrations of the Vikings- this is probably the one book for a general reader to take on about the confusing period in Europe between 300 and 100 ad.
10/12/10
Book ReviewShamans, Mystics and Doctors
by Sudhir Kakar
p. 1982, University of Chicago Press Edition 1991
Mental illness is a subject near and dear to my heart. I deal with mental illness at least once a month in the course of my job as a criminal defense lawyer. Some of my clients are what they call "dual diagnosis" which typically means substance abuse + mental illness. Of course I'm interested in different approaches to curing mental illness, from western psychiatry to eastern Shamanism. Here is a truth about this entire area: Anything works as long as the patient and the doctor share the same believe system. This means that the curative power, for all these practices, lies with the patient rather than the Doctor/Shaman/Wizard.
This is the central thesis of Sudhir Kakar's illuminating Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. Kakar is an Indian Psychotherapist who wrote a book about the curative practices of a variety of Indian traditions: Muslim and Hindu Shaman. Shamans is divided into several chapters, each of which profile a different Guru or discipline with an approach to treating mental illness.
Considering the depths that traditional Freud inspired Psychotherapy has reached since Kakar wrote this in the early 1980s, his medical Doctor psychiatric oriented appears almost as dated as the Muslim and Hindu shaman's who exorcise demons by name. However, Kakar is right on when it points out that ANY approach to healing and mental health can work so long as there are a healer and a patient who believe in the SAME THING.
Kakar also notes that the central experience held in common by all the various methods of Indian mental curing is the disassociation of the self- getting "outside" your self, how you do it doesn't matter, but it needs to be guided by someone else, you can't do it yourself.
10/19/10
BOOK REVIEWAlways Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
p. 2005 Viking/Penguin
by Ken Emerson
This book tells the story of seven pairs of songwriters, all of whom worked writing pop songs starting in the late 1950s. The subjects of Always Magic are Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Barry Mann and Cythia Weil, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Between them, they quite literally dominated the pop music charts in a period between 1959 and 1962ish.
I think Emerson aptly sums up the role they played in the popular music world in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he says that they were "adults writing songs for teens." A half century into the rock era, such a statement sounds obvious, but all of these writers had an opportunity to excel because their predecessors didn't "get" rock music or teen music. The Brill Building writers (actually a misnomer since most of the worked at a nearby building, 1650 Broadway, rather then the Brill Building itself) sit on the divide between late 1950s rock and roll and the popular music of the time. As music professionals, they were well aware of ALL the trends that were bubbling up from youth and urban culture, but they were not romantic artist poet figures, rather they more resemble the characters from Mad Men: savvy professionals looking for a way up.
The beginning of the end for the Brill Building Era was the British Invasion. Although the triumphant British artists like the Beatles were well aware of the great song lyrical legacy of the writers working around the Brill Building, they didn't need other people to write their songs. Similarly, the techniques and styles popularized by the Brill Building writers were copied and imitated (and exceeded) by bit players (Phil Spector) and those further afield (Barry Gordy and Motown.) There was also a movement towards cynicism and trickery- the Brill Building writers were wholly responsible for the rock and roll atrocity of the Monkees.
Like so many other moment in Popular Music history, one can see the sun setting over the horizon even at high noon- that's how brief artistic/commercial triumph is. It's a simple fact that in a capitalist economy there is always going to be twenty people gunning for number one, and the Brill Building writers were no exception. It's also worth noting that many of them worked as salaried employees at a time when their songs were selling millions.
Personally, I find this business model attractive, but then again, I also think the patronage scheme in Renaissance Florence was pretty tight. The most successful Brill Building writers were those who could transition between different roles in the culture industry. The best example is Carole King, who was to become a successful solo artist in the 1970s.
Finally, they made an enduring contribution to the sound of popular music, introducing classical and latin touches to early rock and roll. The Brill Building writers also created the best girl group music of the period, especially if one includes the work of Phil Spector. It's an enduring body of work, and a subject well worth hours of quiet contemplation.
at the De Young Museum
San Francisco, CA.
May 22- September 6th
A critic is a lot like a surfer. The surfer sits in the ocean, on his surf board, assessing the waves. The waves come in groups or "sets." The first task of the surfer is to assess which set to pick. Once the set is selected, the surfer selects a wave within the set, and puts herself in position to ride the wave. This involves being in front of the wave and paddling away from it so that the combination of forces carries you to the top of the wave. Then the surfer stands up and rides the wave to shore.
For the critics, the ocean is the universe of things he can write about. The sets of waves are the specific discourse the critic chooses to have opinions about. Riding the wave is the act of criticism. In both scenarios, the person standing on the shore, watching the surfer, is the audience.
Aside from the analogy itself, the comparison offers other insights. For example, the figure of the person watching the surfer is key. That person might be there just to watch the ocean, specifically to watch the waves or even to watch the surfer. Also, the same person might argue first, that the person on the shore doesn't matter to the surfer AND that the audience doesn't matter to the audience.
What can a critic say about the impressionists? Only that they are the most financially significant group of artistic products produced in the 19th and 20th century- at present, in fact, impressionist paintings dominate the top painting 100 sale prices of all time. A materialistic take on great art for sure, but the impressionists are the most appropriate group of cultural products to subject to economic analysis because the records are so clear.
This fact stems from the nature of the art market in Paris, France in the second half of the 19th century. The market was made by a royally designated art show called "the Salon." The Salon was a yearly show where individual patrons decided how to buy art. These patrons are what you would call "institutional" purchasers: government officials, city fathers, church officials. The Salon was a fully developed culture industry institution, and though it antedated the rise of bourgeois art market as well as market capitalism, it none the less directly influenced painters working then through it's all pervasive roll as the arbitrator of what patrons would buy.
In addition to being the market maker, the Salon also had it's own art-presentational aesthetic. All readers are familiar with the contemporary museum aesthetic in current art museums: low lighting, one painting for x amount of wall space, etc. That was not the style of the Salon. The Salon filled every available inch of the wall surface (and these were big walls) with huge canvases in ornate frames. In that sense the Salon represented the taste of the patrons: looking to fill wall space, pretty vulgar, etc. The prominent time period of the Salon was from 1725-1890s, when modern art really got it's game on.
The Museum Audio Tour manages to incorporate the voices of various Impressionist figures, though obviously read in English and not French. I think, actually the speaker was Claude Monet (1840-1926). Anyway, he complains that people won't buy his art because his art isn't in the Salon show. The Impressionists as a group became known as such because they were the first group of artists to D.I.Y. Specifically, in 1874 the Impressionists had their first art exhibit in a photographer's studio in Paris, and the rest is fucking magic.
Strolling through the Birth of Impressionism exhibit, I was struck by how thoroughly the individual artists just nailed it. These guys... understood what the bourgeois purchasers wanted to see. Dark colors, realistic themes, interesting use of color, abstraction. It's not like these intellectual themes were somehow unique to French painters, they were just anticipatory, they were in the right place at the right time and they had the technical ability to integrate techniques utilized by sophisticated "Salon" style painters in the service of their own modernist vision.
Through staging their own art show, they managed to create their own market, outside of the salon. This move coincided with the emergence of the industrial class as art purchasers. Wealthy French, British and Americans, in some cases the children of wealthy industrialists, in other cases the industrialists themselves, had money to spend and they didn't give a FUCK about the Salon. In fact, you could say they hated it, seeing as it was directed toward the pre-capitalist aristocrats and autocrats of French society.
Ultimately, success validates itself, and at this point, as the Impressionists continue to sell museum tickets and paintings at the highest level of the art world, there isn't anything left to do but ask "how?" and "why?" A viewer in 2010 doesn't need to see impressionist paintings AT ALL to appreciate their splendor, since their own advances in technique were incorporated by subsequent modernist artists and THOSE art works were hugely successful. It's not like "Impressionism" has any possible current relevance to the world except to just say, "Man, what a hit." but that is surely enough, since Impressionism is such a huge smash. Furthermore, the triumph of impressionism is so utter complete that it could serve as the basis for observing a documented change in the culture taste of the entire world. That makes Impressionism a worthy subject of thought, as indeed, it has been, almost literally since inception. As it continues today, and as it will be for as long as this particular world is still around.
Triple Elvis by Andy Warhol (1963): Modern Art Triumph.
Published 6/29/10
Published 6/29/10
From Calder to Warhol:
Introducing the Fisher Collections
@ The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
This exhibition is notable because it acknowledges a collection accumulated in a single "person," "Donald Fisher." It's important to observe in passing that "David Fisher" likely represented a combination of four or more people, the Donald Fisher, his wife, their agent and the museum itself. The market for fine art is cultural economics 101: high level of interest in the audience, high level of attention from specialists, and, most importantly, a s*** ton of money. What is it about the successful capitalists' soul that he or she seeks solace in painting, sculpture and architecture? Historically, "art" was limited to those three subjects. If you are talking about fine art subjects, it's important to recognize that the discourse for the three subjects has developed in tandem. It is proper to speak of the philosophy and history of art being wholly concerned with painting, sculpture and architecture.
It is well known that the original use of "post modernism" was in the field of architecture. It was a term that was developed, by the artists and critics of architecture, to describe specific groups of buildings built in the twentieth century. From architecture, it's use spread to anthropology, sociology and the other social sciences. From those disciplines, it spread through college education to the general public. Post Modernism represents what you might call a "Kuhnian Paradigm Shift" that goes MODERNISM---POST-MODERNISM. Now, after a generation of post modern everything, perhaps it's appropriate for a shift back to MODERNISM or an updated version.
If one was looking for institutions to participate/lead in this shift BACK to Modernism, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a good place to start. First of all, it has "Modern Art" in the title. Second of all, it showcases other fine arts and is itself an interesting example of architecture. Therefore, it is a place where a total discourse about art and meaning can occur. Donald Fisher founded the GAP, and as such he represents a later day Medici or Pope, using his vast resources to accumulate large quantities of fine art. Much of this work is painting, but the presence of Alexander Calder as a major feature brings sculpture into the mix.
Although most of Calder's corpus precedes World War II, everything else in the collection is post War World II paintings, starting at abstract impressionism and running strongly through pop (the triumphant "Triple Elvis" that anchors the last room of the exhibition is a true stunner.) It left me with a distinct sense of what was in and outside the canon of Modern Art/Painting. The presence of so many Alexander Calder mobiles left me craving a little space between the works. It's hard to really observe a three dimensional Alexander Calder mobile when there is another one right behind it. The exhibition notes mentioned that Fisher has about 50 of these mobiles which brought to mind the car warehouses of comedians like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. I'm sorry, is that like a mental disorder or something with these rich guys? Are they "proud" of buying so many objects? If you can figure that psychology out you should be able to become rich.
But I think the most important to take into the Fisher collection is some well collected thoughts about the relationship of the artist, collector, critic and museum and how they interact to create the experience you have as you view a Roy Lichtenstein painting a the SFMOMA. Such observations are particular valuable to those who work in the popular cultural arts world. While it is no longer accurate to talk about "high" and "low" art (how bourgeois can you get?) the distinction between "fine" and "popular" art markets is, if not a full dichotomy, an easily described continuum. On the one end you have: painting, sculpture, architecture, on the other end: advertising, commercial signs, consumer product design. In the middle, movies, music, literature. You can use the same disciplines to talk about all of them: history, art criticism, economics and they share a common critical vocabulary.
Introducing the Fisher Collections
@ The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
This exhibition is notable because it acknowledges a collection accumulated in a single "person," "Donald Fisher." It's important to observe in passing that "David Fisher" likely represented a combination of four or more people, the Donald Fisher, his wife, their agent and the museum itself. The market for fine art is cultural economics 101: high level of interest in the audience, high level of attention from specialists, and, most importantly, a s*** ton of money. What is it about the successful capitalists' soul that he or she seeks solace in painting, sculpture and architecture? Historically, "art" was limited to those three subjects. If you are talking about fine art subjects, it's important to recognize that the discourse for the three subjects has developed in tandem. It is proper to speak of the philosophy and history of art being wholly concerned with painting, sculpture and architecture.
It is well known that the original use of "post modernism" was in the field of architecture. It was a term that was developed, by the artists and critics of architecture, to describe specific groups of buildings built in the twentieth century. From architecture, it's use spread to anthropology, sociology and the other social sciences. From those disciplines, it spread through college education to the general public. Post Modernism represents what you might call a "Kuhnian Paradigm Shift" that goes MODERNISM---POST-MODERNISM. Now, after a generation of post modern everything, perhaps it's appropriate for a shift back to MODERNISM or an updated version.
If one was looking for institutions to participate/lead in this shift BACK to Modernism, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a good place to start. First of all, it has "Modern Art" in the title. Second of all, it showcases other fine arts and is itself an interesting example of architecture. Therefore, it is a place where a total discourse about art and meaning can occur. Donald Fisher founded the GAP, and as such he represents a later day Medici or Pope, using his vast resources to accumulate large quantities of fine art. Much of this work is painting, but the presence of Alexander Calder as a major feature brings sculpture into the mix.
Although most of Calder's corpus precedes World War II, everything else in the collection is post War World II paintings, starting at abstract impressionism and running strongly through pop (the triumphant "Triple Elvis" that anchors the last room of the exhibition is a true stunner.) It left me with a distinct sense of what was in and outside the canon of Modern Art/Painting. The presence of so many Alexander Calder mobiles left me craving a little space between the works. It's hard to really observe a three dimensional Alexander Calder mobile when there is another one right behind it. The exhibition notes mentioned that Fisher has about 50 of these mobiles which brought to mind the car warehouses of comedians like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. I'm sorry, is that like a mental disorder or something with these rich guys? Are they "proud" of buying so many objects? If you can figure that psychology out you should be able to become rich.
But I think the most important to take into the Fisher collection is some well collected thoughts about the relationship of the artist, collector, critic and museum and how they interact to create the experience you have as you view a Roy Lichtenstein painting a the SFMOMA. Such observations are particular valuable to those who work in the popular cultural arts world. While it is no longer accurate to talk about "high" and "low" art (how bourgeois can you get?) the distinction between "fine" and "popular" art markets is, if not a full dichotomy, an easily described continuum. On the one end you have: painting, sculpture, architecture, on the other end: advertising, commercial signs, consumer product design. In the middle, movies, music, literature. You can use the same disciplines to talk about all of them: history, art criticism, economics and they share a common critical vocabulary.
Published 7/14/10
RADIO TOWERS
VIENNA AUSTRIA
AGUSTA GEORGIA
BERLIN GERMANY
Published 7/21/10
Wallich's Music City Los Angeles, CA.
Published 9/6/10
Book Review
FOLK SONG IN ENGLAND
A.L. Lloyd
p. 1967uk/1975us
I've been thinking about folk music. Folk music is a category of popular music that precedes the term "popular music" itself. Folk song is the original popular culture "revival." The first folk song revival occured in the UK at the turn of the century inspired by the collecting of people like Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams. The second folk song revival started in the United States in the 1930s. This revival was brought about by a combination of spontaneous and state supported conditions, i.e. union activity in the appalachians and the work projects administration. Lloyd appears to have written Folk Song in England before the hippie revolution, which was obviously and deeply influenced by what Lloyd calls the second folk song revival.
I'm not sure if the post-60s hippie folk rock scene would constitute the "second folk song revival" or represents a "3rd folk song revival." At any rate, Lloyd, writing in the 1960s adopts cultural marxist attitude towards popular music. In fact, he specifically makes a distinction between folk song and popular music of the 19th and 20th century. Lloyd's description is priceless until he gets to the industrial revolution- the later chapters on Sea Shanties and Industrial Work Songs pretty much stink of tired 60s academic marxism.
It's interesting to see how Lloyd handles references to non-English folk music cultures. He is aware of similarities between folk songs in different Indo European languages but simply doesn't have the back ground to make any kind of in depth analysis. Lloyd is at his strongest marshaling sources that were cited by the first wave folk revival writers in the UK. For example, he talks extensively about "Common Place Books" that were kept by merchants in the 18th century- they would write down song lyrics, recipes or whatever. He's read these books. While Lloyd is obviously aware of American sources, he hardly mentions the fact that many English folk songs were preserved in the Appalachians into the 20th century.
Lloyd gives copious amounts of song lyrics- he prints the musical notes, too. Folk Song in England is pretty rad in that regard. What a treasure trove of proven lyrics. You could cover these songs and have a big hit with the geriatric crowd in the UK. GREENSLEEVES.
The design of the book itself is worth nothing- it's a 70s era paperback- with a cool illustration of a man carrying broadsheets for sale in the country side of England in the 18th century. Broadsheets- selling lyrics to a song a sheet- was an established business in England as early as the Elizabethan period.
Lloyd repeatedly notes that educated people thought folk music was not worthy of attention. Much of what might be known about song of the 16th through 18th centuries was also lost because censorious collectors substituted "proper" lyrics for bawdy ones. Lloyd also notes that many of the attributes that American writers attribute solely to Blues and African American folk idioms are common to many folk traditions-both in England and in places like Hungary and India (not to mention France, Germany and Scandanavia.)
10/8/10
BOOK REVIEW
The Triumph of Vulgarity
Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism
by Robert Pattison
I've come to the conclusion that is pretty cheap to blame "major labels" and "technology" for the decline in music sales. I think a more accurate observation is that the forms in which artists sell music to audiences have become obsolete, in the same way that the rolls that powered player pianos became obsolete when people stopped buying player pianos. Blaming the institutions that mediate the artist/audience relationship for a decline in audience support is like blaming the mayonnaise because your mayonnaise and broken glass sandwich cut your mouth up.
I've come to the conclusion that the failure lays jointly with artist and audience, and that the specific failure involved is an artistic analogue to shitty parenting. In other words, contemporary artists and audiences interested in popular music have absorbed the artistic equivalents of ignorance and laziness from their artistic idols. Those attitudes have in turn been transmitted from artists to their audiences (and back to the artists) in a feedback loop whose end result is contemporary popular music culture.
But what attitudes, specifically? What is the original sin that can explain the triumph of youth oriented popular music in the late 1950s all the way to it's present, oft maligned state? That is the subject of this book, Robert Pattison's The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, published in 1987.
In Pattison's opinion, the original sin in rock music, and all music derived from rock music since, is the projection of contemporary middle class fantasies about Romanticism and its idols onto African American artists who played blues and jazz in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Although written in 1987, what Pattison says about rock can be equally applied to any popular music artist today. Pattison is also arguing against people who deny the validity of rock music as an artistic form worthy of appreciation. Surely, it is this part of the argument which sounds stale. It's hard to say that rock music is less
To really understand what Pattison is talking about you need to understand the influence of romantic poetry from the 19th century on British and American rock musicians of the 60s and 70s. You also need to understand that there was a time before which popular music wasn't treated seriously by academics, so that an entire book written on this rather obvious subject was not written until the mid 1980s, and by an assistant professor at Long Island University at that- it was published by Oxford University Press, so that tells you something, too.
Artists quite consciously address the themes of the romantic tradition via their lyrics. One of the most winning aspects of the Triumph of Vulgarity is the author's recognition of the Ramones as one of rock's greatest bands. That reminded me of the recent musical history of New York where the author claimed that the Ramones initial performances at CBGB's were perceived as "performance art."
The most significant aspect of this book is its winning refutation of the "don't talk/write about music- just experience it." school of artist/intellectual. Pattison points out that rock and roll wouldn't exist without a self conscious emulation of 18th century and 19th century poets, coupled with an appreciation for American musical forms. Rock music and its descendants: punk, new wave, heavy metal, indie, emo, etc etc etc could not exist without both influences. Furthermore, starting with the Rolling Stones, such attitudes fully dominated artists and audiences for 20 years, only to be usurped by punk/new wavers who were even MORE obsessed with the same subjects.
Without the self awareness inherent in any modern revival of 18th century poetry, rock music would not exist. Therefore, any discussion of popular music possessing some inherent authenticity beyond the revival of romantic fantasies is tainted by conceptual failure. Pattison also points out that rock lyrics are not poetry, and the power of rock lyrics lies in the accompaniment by music, rather then as having any independent worth. To me, good popular song lyrics are like haiku, so I'm not sure I agree with him about that.
Published 10/11/10
FOLK SONG IN ENGLAND
A.L. Lloyd
p. 1967uk/1975us
I've been thinking about folk music. Folk music is a category of popular music that precedes the term "popular music" itself. Folk song is the original popular culture "revival." The first folk song revival occured in the UK at the turn of the century inspired by the collecting of people like Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams. The second folk song revival started in the United States in the 1930s. This revival was brought about by a combination of spontaneous and state supported conditions, i.e. union activity in the appalachians and the work projects administration. Lloyd appears to have written Folk Song in England before the hippie revolution, which was obviously and deeply influenced by what Lloyd calls the second folk song revival.
I'm not sure if the post-60s hippie folk rock scene would constitute the "second folk song revival" or represents a "3rd folk song revival." At any rate, Lloyd, writing in the 1960s adopts cultural marxist attitude towards popular music. In fact, he specifically makes a distinction between folk song and popular music of the 19th and 20th century. Lloyd's description is priceless until he gets to the industrial revolution- the later chapters on Sea Shanties and Industrial Work Songs pretty much stink of tired 60s academic marxism.
It's interesting to see how Lloyd handles references to non-English folk music cultures. He is aware of similarities between folk songs in different Indo European languages but simply doesn't have the back ground to make any kind of in depth analysis. Lloyd is at his strongest marshaling sources that were cited by the first wave folk revival writers in the UK. For example, he talks extensively about "Common Place Books" that were kept by merchants in the 18th century- they would write down song lyrics, recipes or whatever. He's read these books. While Lloyd is obviously aware of American sources, he hardly mentions the fact that many English folk songs were preserved in the Appalachians into the 20th century.
Lloyd gives copious amounts of song lyrics- he prints the musical notes, too. Folk Song in England is pretty rad in that regard. What a treasure trove of proven lyrics. You could cover these songs and have a big hit with the geriatric crowd in the UK. GREENSLEEVES.
The design of the book itself is worth nothing- it's a 70s era paperback- with a cool illustration of a man carrying broadsheets for sale in the country side of England in the 18th century. Broadsheets- selling lyrics to a song a sheet- was an established business in England as early as the Elizabethan period.
Lloyd repeatedly notes that educated people thought folk music was not worthy of attention. Much of what might be known about song of the 16th through 18th centuries was also lost because censorious collectors substituted "proper" lyrics for bawdy ones. Lloyd also notes that many of the attributes that American writers attribute solely to Blues and African American folk idioms are common to many folk traditions-both in England and in places like Hungary and India (not to mention France, Germany and Scandanavia.)
10/8/10
BOOK REVIEW
The Triumph of Vulgarity
Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism
by Robert Pattison
I've come to the conclusion that is pretty cheap to blame "major labels" and "technology" for the decline in music sales. I think a more accurate observation is that the forms in which artists sell music to audiences have become obsolete, in the same way that the rolls that powered player pianos became obsolete when people stopped buying player pianos. Blaming the institutions that mediate the artist/audience relationship for a decline in audience support is like blaming the mayonnaise because your mayonnaise and broken glass sandwich cut your mouth up.
I've come to the conclusion that the failure lays jointly with artist and audience, and that the specific failure involved is an artistic analogue to shitty parenting. In other words, contemporary artists and audiences interested in popular music have absorbed the artistic equivalents of ignorance and laziness from their artistic idols. Those attitudes have in turn been transmitted from artists to their audiences (and back to the artists) in a feedback loop whose end result is contemporary popular music culture.
But what attitudes, specifically? What is the original sin that can explain the triumph of youth oriented popular music in the late 1950s all the way to it's present, oft maligned state? That is the subject of this book, Robert Pattison's The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, published in 1987.
In Pattison's opinion, the original sin in rock music, and all music derived from rock music since, is the projection of contemporary middle class fantasies about Romanticism and its idols onto African American artists who played blues and jazz in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Although written in 1987, what Pattison says about rock can be equally applied to any popular music artist today. Pattison is also arguing against people who deny the validity of rock music as an artistic form worthy of appreciation. Surely, it is this part of the argument which sounds stale. It's hard to say that rock music is less
To really understand what Pattison is talking about you need to understand the influence of romantic poetry from the 19th century on British and American rock musicians of the 60s and 70s. You also need to understand that there was a time before which popular music wasn't treated seriously by academics, so that an entire book written on this rather obvious subject was not written until the mid 1980s, and by an assistant professor at Long Island University at that- it was published by Oxford University Press, so that tells you something, too.
Artists quite consciously address the themes of the romantic tradition via their lyrics. One of the most winning aspects of the Triumph of Vulgarity is the author's recognition of the Ramones as one of rock's greatest bands. That reminded me of the recent musical history of New York where the author claimed that the Ramones initial performances at CBGB's were perceived as "performance art."
The most significant aspect of this book is its winning refutation of the "don't talk/write about music- just experience it." school of artist/intellectual. Pattison points out that rock and roll wouldn't exist without a self conscious emulation of 18th century and 19th century poets, coupled with an appreciation for American musical forms. Rock music and its descendants: punk, new wave, heavy metal, indie, emo, etc etc etc could not exist without both influences. Furthermore, starting with the Rolling Stones, such attitudes fully dominated artists and audiences for 20 years, only to be usurped by punk/new wavers who were even MORE obsessed with the same subjects.
Without the self awareness inherent in any modern revival of 18th century poetry, rock music would not exist. Therefore, any discussion of popular music possessing some inherent authenticity beyond the revival of romantic fantasies is tainted by conceptual failure. Pattison also points out that rock lyrics are not poetry, and the power of rock lyrics lies in the accompaniment by music, rather then as having any independent worth. To me, good popular song lyrics are like haiku, so I'm not sure I agree with him about that.
Published 10/11/10
I Find the AK 47 Cliche
I try to stay away from the ak 47 in terms of assault rifles, unless I find myself participating in some savage third world civil conflict. I mean sure, the ak 47 fits the classic definition of "assault rifle" but we've come so far since those days in terms of the use of light weight materials and other features that showing up at your typical urban/western crime scene with an ak 47 marks you as an unsophisticated rube. What are the true ballers using when they need a go-to assault rifle? I have two suggestions. First, the IMI Tavor TAR-21 is has been tipped to be THE new assault rifle for the Israeli military- and they can be surprisingly loose with the goods if the price is right. You also might want to check out the Belgian designed (again, Belgians can be loose with their guns) FN F2000- sure to get people talking when you point it into their chest and make popping noises with your mouth.
Published 11/10/10
Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound
The Rise And Fall Of Phil Spector
by Mick Brown
Published 2007
Phil Spector, currently doing a life sentence, is a personal hero of mine. I don't think there is any one person who is more emblematic of the story of popular music in the 20th century then Spector. Spector was born in NYC, moved to LA as a kid, had a hit record before he was out of high school, gave up on a career as a performer before he was 20, hung out with the Brill Building Gang in NYC in the early days of rock n roll, invented the Wall Of Sound in a Los Angeles studio- recording in Mono, ran his own record label and publishing firm, made a Beatles record, made a John Lennon record, made a Ramones record, became an alcoholic, lived as a recluse for twenty years and killed a woman after a lifetime of drinking and playing with guns.
It is clear from Tearing Down the Wall of Sound that Spector had mental illness running strong in his family (his father was a suicide and his older sister spent her life in and out of mental institutions.) Independent of any issues regarding mental illness, he also had a lifetime inferiority complex that led him to isolate himself from humanity and led to the disintegration of almost human relationship he every formed.
Spector's main contribution to the history of popular music was his creation of the rock producer as star. That was his goal from the very beginning- he wanted to be 'bigger than the music.' He created the Wall of Sound by jamming dozens of musicians together in the same room and having them play the same note at the same time. The fact that he accomplished this...in Mono, is perhaps the most impressive part of the Spector legacy. He called his approach "writing little symphonies for the kids" and was the first person to take the art of rock and roll seriously. He understood that pop music for teenagers could be art before anyone else.
How this book has avoided becoming a movie is beyond me- Spector even had his lead actor picked out (Al Pacino.) I'd love to see a movie about Phil Spector. When can that happen?
Instagram
No comments:
Post a Comment