June 29, 2017 On Music In Stargoon’s Car By Paul Grimstad AI is changing the way we write songs—but music has always embraced machine language. Soon after I’d arrived in New York in the late nineties, I found a job in a vintage synthesizer shop (now gone) where I presided over restored Moog monophonic keyboards and was paid in rubber-banded rolls of twenty-dollar bills. I devised a lunch-break ritual: I’d walk a few blocks up to Gourmet Garage at Broome and West Broadway, where I would get a sourdough baguette and seltzer water. Then I’d head over to the bus shelter around the corner, where I’d sit and write in a spiral notebook. The entry for October 16, 1998, has the title “Franchise a rock band.” Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further specifications about instrumentation, lighting, sound effects, outfits, and so on. Anyone who had the kit could set up wherever they were—Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Cairo, Ann Arbor, Madrid, Singapore—and perform the material as the band, just as someone with overhead and staff could open a Taco Bell or a Dunkin’ Donuts. Different locales would introduce shades of difference in performance—surely the Helsinki band would sound different from the Orlando band—and then live recordings of the different instantiations could be compiled and released in elaborate vinyl anthologies with liner notes featuring various experts discussing the nature of authenticity, the vexed relation between art and commerce, and so on. This wasn’t about trying to get rich; I had no interest in making a profit. It stemmed rather from my desultory toilet reading in Andy Warhol’s POPism and also with my sense of the dreary uniformity of “indie rock”: always the same lanky guys (and the occasional girl) with carefully mussed hair looking identically “authentic,” dispensing more or less indistinguishable chords and melodies. Since my days not working in the Moog shop were spent making nine-minute songs with titles like “The Continuing Adventures of Cardinal Caterpillar” on a cassette multitrack recorder in a tiny room in Brooklyn, subsisting entirely on street-vendor coffee, bagels, SweeTarts, tap water, and Parliament Lights, the Franchised Band idea was a desperately contrived fantasy meant to achieve a conceptual sophistication along the lines of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, but within the constrained format of the rock band. This all strikes me now as completely preposterous—and to some degree it’s been superseded by the hyperefficient Swedish studio wizards that crank out perfect megahits for Britney Spears, Katy Perry, et al. But at the time I thought it was revolutionary. I pitched it to a bunch of label people in New York. As I explained it, every last one of them started to giggle. Read More
June 29, 2017 On the Shelf Breaking the Ten Commandments (Literally), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring In 2014, Reed ran his car into a monument at the Oklahoma capitol. Your car can get you from point A to point B, but if you’re willing to destroy it, it can do much more than that: it can serve as a mighty metaphor for the sanctity of the constitution. As the Washington Post reports, a man named Michael Tate Reed is “a serial destroyer of Ten Commandments monuments.” This week he plowed his car straight into a three-ton granite sculpture of the Commandments outside the Arkansas state capitol in Little Rock; in 2014, he did the same in Oklahoma. Reed, a devout man, seems to believe that it’s his God-given mission to uphold the boundary between church and state. I don’t mean to mock Reed, who is mentally unstable—but there’s something fascinating in his determination to reduce monuments to rubble. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. writes: “He sent a rambling letter to the newspaper apologizing and describing the voices in his head and his attempts to recover from mental health issues. He also detailed one incident where voices told him to crash his car into other vehicles, but instead he wrecked on a highway median. In the past, he’s walked into federal buildings to spit on portraits, made threats against former president Barack Obama and set money on fire … Reed appears to allude to the Oklahoma toppling incident in a Facebook post before the Arkansas statue was rammed. ‘I’m a firm believer that for our salvation we not only have faith in Jesus Christ … But one thing I do not support is the violation of our constitutional right to have the freedom that’s guaranteed to us, that guarantees us the separation of church and state, because no one religion should the government represent.’ Later, he says he’s ‘back at it again,’ and asks for people to donate money to help repair his car.” In Detroit, meanwhile, a new exhibition called “99 Cents or Less” looks at the role of the dollar store in contemporary America. Chris Hampton writes, “The museum’s senior curator at large, Jens Hoffmann, invited participants to consider the dollar store—and its proliferation since the Great Recession—as an emblem of widening economic inequality, globalization, complex supply chains and rampant consumerism … Detroit has an especially high concentration of dollar stores, Mr. Hoffmann pointed out. Products that might once have been made there are now born in South, Southeast and East Asian factories—delivered and sold for less than a buck … Acknowledging ‘it’s where most of America shops,’ the Los Angeles–based artist Sean Raspet sampled surface cleaners available in Detroit dollar stores and mixed them together, turning the resulting solution over to the maintenance staff to use on their regular rounds, emphasizing the sort of labor and goods that are often made invisible … Agnieszka Kurant offered a darker take, likening dollar-store goods to palliatives, painkillers and placebos. She bought items like self-help books, hula hoops, cooking utensils, ramen noodles and had the lot industrially pulverized, then pressed by a compacting company into pills.” Read More
June 28, 2017 Our Correspondents Carrying Away His Last Sheep By Anthony Madrid An illustration of Leopardi by Tullio Pericoli. It’s Leopardi’s birthday tomorrow. Happy 219, Giacomo. In remembrance of the occasion, I think we’d all better have a look at the following short poem by James Wright. I’ve never seen it in any anthology. It’s from Shall We Gather at the River (1968). Read More
June 28, 2017 Notes from a Biographer A Friendship Hiding in the Archives By Scott Schomburg Joseph Mitchell and Ralph Ellison at a New York Public Library Literary Lions event in 1990. Photo: Star Black Workers wheel Ralph Ellison’s coffin to a vault at the Trinity Church Cemetery on 153rd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan: “There’s no room in the ground to be buried.” His mourners follow the pallbearers out of a small, unadorned chapel. Classical music plays faintly from a cassette player. The vaults, about fifteen feet high, look like “oversized pink marble post office boxes in the sunlight.” The George Washington Bridge is visible in the distance, darkly present in the afternoon haze, like a bridge to a world beyond our own. I’m reading an account of Ralph Ellison’s funeral, nine pages typed, hiding in a folder among the 127 boxes of Joseph Mitchell’s extant papers, at the New York Public Library. There is no byline, and it isn’t Mitchell’s prose. I stumble on it during my third day in the archives, sitting under lamplight at a corner desk in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room. Mitchell and Ellison’s friendship has never been documented, as far as I know, but here in the preserved debris of Mitchell’s life, Ellison fills an entire folder. Four, in fact. I keep reading: “The ceremony is perfunctory, and except for watching Joe Mitchell comfort Mrs. Ellison, his arms encircling her small body, his sorrowful face bent toward hers, you almost forget someone has died.” Read More
June 28, 2017 On the Shelf Return of the Zombie McMansion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It lives. We thought we’d solved this problem. This time, we hoped, it was gone for good. But it’s back. Drive into the suburbs and you’ll see it, something out of the nightmares you have when you eat a big meal just before bed. Risen from the dead to stoke our deepest fears, it is: the Zombie McMansion. Okay, maybe its foam-filled, non-load-bearing Doric columns are showing their age a bit; maybe a few of the quoins are starting to peel off, and some of the two-dozen dormer windows no longer open. But it still stands, and worse still, young people are still willing to buy it. As Ana Swanson reports, the improved housing market means a return of architectural crimes against humanity: “Today, McMansions are not exactly cool, especially compared with the exposed-brick urban lofts young people today will pay exorbitant prices for. But with the recent recovery of the housing market, they are coming back anyway. As Americans have started building and flipping houses again, they are once again buying McMansions. Since 2009, construction of these homes has steadily trended upward, data from Zillow, a real-estate website, shows. The median home value of McMansions is also rising, at a pace that eclipses the value of the median American home … Many casual onlookers have forecast the death of the suburbs in recent years, especially as younger renters and buyers turn an eye to city centers … Yet younger people who are starting families are still moving to the suburbs for more room, she says. About half of all millennials that purchased a home last year did so in the suburbs, according to Zillow data.” While we’re looking at things that refuse to die, here’s Kyle Chayka on Monocle, that shiny symbol of the global elite—a magazine for the late aughts that persists, somehow, into the late teens: “Over the years, Monocle has become as much a status symbol as reading material. Its editor is one of the world’s foremost lifestyle auteurs, a tastemaker of late capitalism … While Monocle projects confidence in the march of globalization, it barely hints at the growing threats to the world of open borders and free-flowing capital it depicts. The magazine’s globalist chic contrasts sharply with the nationalist movements in the United States and Europe … Monocle views the world as a single, utopian marketplace, linked by digital technology and first-class air travel, bestridden by compelling brands and their executives. Diversity is part of the vision—the magazine’s subjects are from all over the world, and its fashion models come in every skin color—but this diversity is presented, in a vaguely colonialist way, more as a cool look to buy into than a tangible social ideal. Cities and countries are written up as commodities and investment opportunities rather than real places with intractable problems that require more than a subsidy to resolve.” Read More
June 27, 2017 First Person Starting Out in the Evening By Brian Cullman Photo: Dan McCoy, NARA, 1973. Years ago, a psychic of some sort told me that the top of my head was open, that I had a WELCOME mat where a locked door ought to be, and I should be careful: any passing or wandering spirits could just drift in and make themselves at home. It felt like that last night. Partly in terms of psychic disturbance, getting too many signals from too many stations—but also because everyone on the street wants to tell me something. Read More