In my May 14 entry, I flippantly dimissed the new look of Wired magazine with particular attention to the new house body and headline font.

First: a correction. I identified the new font choice as Helvetica. It’s actually Aksidenz Grotesk.

How did I learn this?

Well, Wired’s Creative Director, Darrin Perry, was curious or kind enough to drop by the entry for, um, his fair share of abuse, I guess. He was gracious enough to compliment this site’s primary font choice while pointing out my error.

I see Verdana when I look at the site, a choice which I must confess I inherited from Mena Trott, I believe, the designer half of Movable Type, which each one of you should download, use, and pay for.

So there’s a couple items on the agenda. First, what an interesting, wow-cool moment! Random mutterings concerning events and things that pass though my life have a reasonable possibility of being seen by the most appropriate viewer. Thank you, Google. Perhaps someday Aaron Cometbus will drop by, via Google, and learn about the Gizmos.

I have noticed that a large proportion of traffic to the site comes in via Google search requests for obscurities which I’ve written about here. Common search requests resulting in a site visit include “Aaron Cometbus”, “blimp rides”, “Wreck of the Shenandoah”, and, yes, “Bob’s Java Jive”.

Why “perfect candidate to hire for your high-paying house polymath position” has yet to generate a great deal of traffic remains unknown. At any rate, welcome Googlers – I hope your stay is both entertaining and informative.

Item two on the agenda is a more reasoned review of Wired’s new look. That will be the next entry.

So, a few people independently mentioned “American Hardcore: A Tribal History” (by Steven Blush) to me, and each said “It’s like ‘Please Kill Me‘. It’s pretty good.”. Multiple unsolicited reccomendations from disparate persons, each apparently making the same critical judgement.

“Alright,” I thought. “Let’s read them back to back.”

Reading them crammed against one another is an interesting experience, but not exactly one I’d recommend unless you were intimately involved in the later scene documented by these two books, the hardcore scene. Blush does not explicitly acknowledge it, but it’s clear that Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me” is the direct inspiration for his book. Both works use extended interviews with numerous participants in each of the scenes they document as the basis of the book’s content.

“Please Kill Me” does so with great technical rigor: there is no content in the book except for quotes from specific individuals. These paragraph-long quotes are carefully juxtaposed to create a clear, narrative-driven portrait of a very specific place and time. The narrative centers on the personal relationships of a core group, which includes Danny Fields (a music-industry person), Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Dee Dee Ramone.

At times the narrative becomes a litany of the horrible things these people did to one another and to those around them. Yet McNeil and McCain manage to accomplish the remarkable in squarely facing both the squalor and brilliance of the hairy thread of New York’s alternative music and art scene from 1967 to 1980 or thereabouts. Unfortunately for the reader, but accurately reflecting the perceptions of the participants, the narrative closes just as teenage America began to become aware of what the cast of characters in the book had been up to.

I really wish that the authors had taken the time to write about the Los Angeles scene at the time, and documented the development of the early punk scene there as well; but in such a sprawling tale, covering your home turf is a good idea.

Several interesting aspects of “Please Kill Me” struck me as I read it: the one that McNeil and McCain deliberately underplay is the amount of interchange and contact between their subjects and artists that I thought of as untouchable, not-quite-real, and worthless: as the enemy. Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin and others flit around the edges of the anecdotes so frequently, it’s clear that the ideological division between punk and rock was some sort of marketing tool, and not a marker of a social division. The first-generation artists from the New York scene were really set to be the inheritors of the rock industry, and were rejected by the industry because of the challenges inherent in molding and marketing nihilism.

Tales, repeated ad infinitum, of drug idiocy, incredibly excessive hotel behavior, cross-country flights to gigs, label-rented houses, and assorted other standard yawners of rock journalism litter the pages. What sets it apart from “The Song Remains the Same” is not the girls or the music (frequently, they are the same groupies, and musicans worked similar circuits) but the violence and retarded self-destruction.

Dee Dee Ramone emerges as a kind of hero, depicted here as the vital creative center of the Ramones, lauded for (among other things) his lyrical sensibilities, songwriting talent, fantastic level of drug dependency, his tendency to violence and his possible murder of persons unknown. He’s just died, but, um, I always thought Dee Dee’s songs were dumb, and frequently, I wouldn’t bother taping them when I picked up a Ramones album. Maybe I need to look at the credits again. I’m pretty sure “Wart Hog” was one of his numbers.

Or maybe the things that McNeil and NcCain have chosen to mythologize were the things I thought I was rebelling against as a teenager, and assumed that the New York crowd to whom I looked as role models were also interested in demolishing rockist sexism, violence and druggery. I guess I never really looked at the persons in question very hard. I suppose that means I was looking in the mirror all along.

That mirror, I suppose, is the one apparently smashed by Henry Rollins’ fist on the cover of the great Black Flag record, “Damaged”. Henry plays a large role in “American Hardcore”; author Blush was an east coast HC promoter who also crossed the country several times during the heyday of the music, the mid-eighties. He’s originally from DC, as was Henry, Ian MacKaye, and the Bad Brains.

Interestingly, the only character who appears in both books is Misfits bassist Jerry Only. In both books, the theme of territorial exclusion repeats over and over: the current kings of cool exclude and marginalize youngsters who appear and become interested in “the scene”.

The relation of the books is much like the relation of the music they are concerned with; “Kill Me” very clearly benefitted from professional backing. It’s a chapter from Joe Gould’s “Oral History” as he dreamed it for his audiences in Greenwich Vilage forty years before. Tightly copyedited, with practically no typos; carefully interweaving narrative viewpoints to create a cubist portrait of its’ people and places, it’s a satisfying read. It’s unquestionably the product of professionals operating within a mature support framework that encourages craft and technical reflection. It reaches for the brass ring of art, as did some of its’ subjects, and it succeeds.

“Hardcore” on the other hand, is clearly an indie effort by someone who loves and is knowledgeable about their topic but who did not have access to, for example, a gifted editor, or even a house style guide. Blush has chosen to Captialize things throughout the book, that while stylistically consistent, irritate me. Caucasians are White, persons of African descent are Black; fast, simple, aggressive music is Hardcore; this music developed from Punk Rock, and so on.

The lack of strong editorial feedback undermines the book’s compelling subject matter: the development of an explicitly anti-commercial, independent music distribution and performance network. By emulating the overlapping oral history approach of McNeil and McCain, detailed historical documentation of this network is minimized in favor of one obscure former punk kid after another relating which shows they played or attended, by and large.

This aspect of the book makes it feel much like a superannuated collection of Maximum Rock N Roll scene reports; only when Blush concentrates on specific band histories does the book pop into focus, ironically underlining the unique brilliance and star qualities of specific individuals: Greg Ginn, Henry, Ian, Glenn Danzig. Ian, unsurprisingly enough, comes across as a particularly thoughtful observer and participant, and spares himself no unflattering stories.

One thing I did not know was that just prior to the 1983 Samhain tour where I first saw them, Glenn had actually formed the band with Brian Baker and Lyle Presslar, the guitarists of Minor Threat. What a band that could have been!

To Blush’s credit, he pulls no punches when analyzing the fatal weaknesses of the music and personalities he covers. McNeil and McCain appear fascinated by the weaknesses of the personalities they allow others to discuss, and apparently retain faith in the power of the music associated with the people.

So in the end, both “American Hardcore” and “Please Kill Me” are appropriate reflections of the music they cover. “Kill Me”‘s artful, powerful construction reflects the artistic and moral values (or lack thereof) of the people it covers; “Hardcore” emulates the naive faith in the possibility of direct communication at the expense of reflective intellectualism that the music did itself. At the same time, it seems that Blush’s clear-eyed view of the limitations inherent in the form of the music and the social expectations of the subculture could inform a more nuanced product.

“American Hardcore” is perfectly true to the values of the scenes it documents, and does not attempt to accomplish an artistic goal, something that frustrated me as a reader. “Please Kill Me” has no values, and accomplishes the trick of becoming deep, reflective art by dint of dedication to craft while gleefully attempting to disguise its’ technical brilliance.

Sadly for me, I don’t give a fuck about either history anymore, and instead of feeling that old sense of possibility and excitement as I read these books, I found myself repeatedly, deeply bored by them. Drugs, groupies, violence: who cares. MRR started a campaign against so and so: so what. So-and-so ripped someone else off: big deal. I believe this may be a result of the development of “punk history” as a discrete subgenre in music publishing; I suppose it’s also a result of the failure of the music, or the writing, to either transcend itself or to immanentize the eschaton, as they say. Whatever, I’m done reading about it. Next time you see me picking up a copy of “Midwest Punk Rock Archaeology Review”, please kill me.

Whilst in California, I ran short of reading material, and happened upon a paperback edition of the celebrated Joseph Mitchell omnibus, “Up in the Old Hotel“, beloved to many. I anticipated reading it with glee.

Encountering Mitchell’s extended elegy for the coots, crannies, crooks, and coke cellars of Old New York was lovely, as enjoyable as I’d expected. What surprised me was his insistent focus on the waterways of the greater region itself. This grew more powerful with the passage of time, as though Mitchell pursued the event horizon of pre-industrial New York. The watermen of the metropolitan area or the failing villages of near-in rural counties, their cemeteries overgrown with wildflowers within sight of the booming heart of Manhattan, increasingly occupy center stage.

His interest in the water and the men who live and die upon it is in keeping with my summer reading theme, leading up to the great Tall Ship Bout of ’02 to be held upon Lake Union in August.

Mitchell is a standard bearer of that standby of American general interest reportage, podunk journalism, whereby the urbane voice of mainstream American News brings us the true and half forgotten voices of our fantastically surreal nation. In turn, he handed off to Charles Kuralt and others; and as has been quite thouroughly discussed, quit writing in the middle of his career apparently in response to having deveopled a long piece concering the writings and life (or lack thereof) of one Joe Gould.

After I read the book, I of course became curious about Gould; making anyone’s task in researching it on the net considerably harder is the digital detritus of the marketing for the Stanley Tucci – Ian Holm film, “Joe Gould’s Secret”, which overwhelms any search request results. Despite that I’ve located several resources of interest to the curious:

Donna Kossy, of “Kooks” fame, hosts the Professor Seagull Exhibit. The Village Voice covers the discovery of undiscovered Gould diaries in April 2000. Not least, I found a portrait by e e cummings (to the right) and also the 1933 Alice Neel portrait (warning: genitalia) Mitchell describes somewhat inaccurately.

So why did Mitchell quit writing in response to covering Gould’s secret? It seems very much as though he lost faith in the future and the past at the same time, seeing Gould no longer as a charming rapscallion of an artist but as a fool and tragic failure; by extension, then Mitchell’s work was as much a scam, and as pointless, as Gould’s.

I think there’s another aspect of Gould as a persona that should be considered. During the time that Mitchell was covering Gould (in the forties) the butt-ends of a thousand cigarettes and joints coalesced to provide the worldview and modus operandi of the Beats, of Burroughs, Kerouac et al. Now, it’s clear that they produced something; it’s also clear that they attempted to build their creative lives upon the same practices that Gould had. Where he may have failed, they succeeded.

I have to wonder, is it possible that Mitchell wasn’t stumped by Gould’s lack of production; but more by Kerouac and Ginsberg’s profusion? In Mitchell’s role as interpreter to the bourgeoisie, the comforting lesson to the audience is that the boho scamster dies penniless and alone; Mitchell’s abandonment of his pen troubles even contemporary reviewers because it rebukes both their lives as also penniless and alone.

Good man.

ADDENDUM: A parting thought: the beatster who I was most reminded of in reading Mitchell’s descriptions of Gould is Harry Smith, the man responsible for the Folkways/Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music. Smith came to New York in the forties, about the time that Mitchell was first writing about Gould, and began his pursuit of a life of eccentricity and scmming poverty as colorful as that of Gould. It’s intereting to note that Gould’s time on an Indian reservation paralells Smith’s teenage ethnography, recording songs and ceremonies on Washington State’s Lummi indian reservation.

He is best remembered for the Anthology, a work which was in point of fact similar in concept to Gould’s oft-described “Oral History of our Time”; the music in Smith’s collection was arranged by him into four sets, one for each of the medieval humors and was visualzed by him as a magic incantation though which the same qualities that fascinated Mitchell – regionalisms, cussedness, peculiar customs, unutterable horrors, legends, and so forth – might be transmitted in to the developing post industrial state. Smith, of course, suceeded beyond his wildest imagination, and his Anthology is probably the most influential recording ever released.

But Smith was just as crazy a coot, and just as peripatetic, as Joe Gould. It simply appears that Smith, a generation younger than Gould, was able to conceptualize his great work of bohemian history in the media of his period, where Gould was wedded to the preceding technologies and was unable to master them.

So, we finally saw Attack of the Clones tonight, at one of the few digitally-equipped theaters nationwide (I heard, but, like, don’t quote me on this, that there are only two on the West Coast: Mumble’s [formerly Graumann’s] Chinese, in Hollywood, where the film premiered and one of the places we visited while in Cali, and the Cinerama here in Seattle, the place to catch SF and epics here in town, with a full cinescope setup).

My experience was marred by technical flaws, both within the film and in the screening: the film seemed dim throughout, as though I were watching it through sunglasses, and there were several times when the soundtrack became at least a quarter-second out of synch with the actor’s mouths, giving the impression of a poorly dubbed foreign film.

Additionally, and truly trivially, there was a visible moment of MPEG blocky corruption in one shot. But damn, this was supposed to be the poster child for digital projection! Once I’d been tenderized by these warts I was sensitized to every problematic use of digitally-derived FX in the movie, from the jerky motions of the digipuppet riding the herd-tick in the meadow to the inexplicable decision to shoot Princess Amidala’s recovery from a tumble to the sand with digital sand and shadows that failed to properly meet the lovely Ms. Portman in motion, causing that irritating “floating” appearance.

It made me grumpy.

As reported, the romance is a fine time and place to take a nap – I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but I yawned and yawned and Y-A-W-N-E-D.

Other than that the vastly more positive blog-world feedback you’ve undoubtedly noted is by and large borne out. Mostly, the big scenes go over well. The battlecruisers taking off in the final moments of the film, for example, was a perfect realization of the scope and power of seventies SF art that partially hooked me on SF to begin with. Also, the only time I actually felt emotionally involved in the film was in the climactic scene involving Yoda; again, as advertised.

So, I guess my take on it is, go see it on film, screw digital. At least the soundtrack ought to remain in synch.

Although seeing Christopher Lee reprise his role as Sauruman so soon was interesting, to say the least.

Currently:

The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd by Robert Zacks.

Tasty! Me timbers are shivrin’ to this exhaustively researched historical recounting of how the good Cap’n, one of the leading lights of the striving bourgeosie of 1680’s New York City was, er, tarred with the brush of piracy. See, Kidd started out on a voyage of pirate interdiction, armed with a commission that allowed him to sieze pirate cargo, and then, via various mishaps and miscalculations, found himself prosecuted for the very offense he sought to eliminate.

Did he deserve it? Mr Zacks stoutly defends the seafaring Scot, but reading the book actually created more questions for me than I had coming into it.

UPDATE: D’oh! I left it at me in-laws in Laguna Beach! Arrr!

Published by Theia, an imprint of Hyperion, in 2002.

Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck, by Paul Collins

So perfectly up my alley, I grabbed it and finished it in about two days. Collins originally published some of the book in McSweeney’s, and this book can be found in the rapidly expanding McSweeney’s section of your local booketorium. You can recognize the works by their McSweeney-derived typographical cover design (centered, wide-justified Times or Century type with a single illustrative element subordinated to the type).

Thirteen kooks of varying obsessed success, only a few of whom I’d ever heard and none of whom I knew anything in detail. Amusingly, those that I had heard of I learned about via short, short capsule stories in a book that got me a-readin’ as a child, the Reader’s Digest book of >Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Yummy!

Come to think of it, I believe I first read of dirigibles AND Captain Kidd in that same tome.

Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Steven Jay Gould.

Saddened to hear of the death of this entertaining essayist, when I saw this collection I glommed it and look forward to it. I always enjoy Gould’s prose and his joy in linking the diverse into tales that reveal the structures of human society or the natural world. The flashiness of his ability in so doing is something I still take a child’s joy in.

The Mummy Congress, by Heather Pringle

A survey of the underfunded and eccentric world of mummy studies, including info about the mismatch between the public’s fascination with mummies and the scientific establishment’s rather arms-length relationship to the topic.

“Noodles… I… slipped!”

I flipped into what I thought must have been the last 30 minutes of Leone’s spaghetti gangster epic (make that matzoh gangster epic, the only pasta in the pic is De Niro’s character name, Noodles). Oops!

The film actually starts with a grisly scene that turns into a transition from flashback to 1968 NYC, with virtually no dialog for the first 40 minutes of screen time. It had been so long since I’d seen it I’d totally forgotten it.

Anyway, it turned out to be the super-extended dance remix of the movie, and nearly four hours later, there I was, watching a big Mack truck drive off through the Long Island night. It was pleasant to see again. It’s a pretty undisciplined film at four hours though – extended sequences of great brilliance followed by tone-deaf schmalz. But I did notice that, yes, just as Ken Goldstein once wrote, Jennifer Connelly as the younger sister of Fat Moe is an attractive screen presence, even years ago.

NYT (May 2, 2002): Lessons learned at Dot-Com U.

I found this article on the fairly complete failure of online education to live up to the hype it endengered (is that a word?) in the higher education community to be very interesting. I’ve been hearing about the future of school and distributed education from my Dad, a professor in the business school at UNC- Chapel Hill, for quite some time; and I personally would love to see successful implementations of online courses, especially for technical topics.

In my case, I strongly suspect that higher mathematics would be the ideal topic, because I have no apparent ability to retain testable concepts from traditional mathematic education while at the same time having high aptitudes for procedural learning, symbolic logic, and analytic problem solving.

Indeed, in informal recollection of acquaintances’ experience, computer languages appear to lend themselves to this learning style very well.

However, I cannot imagine learning art history or english literature this way. The classroom is a stage upon which individuals with greater or lesser degrees of charismatic performance skill enact dramas of learning for the student audience; removing the element of charisma from “soft” topics would, I think, pretty much eliminate the motivation to learn them for many students.

Additionally, it’s important to note that for many of us, to the present, the years we spend at college are the most important formative years of our lives in terms of establishing our habits of work and of interaction with peers and figures of authority. A good friend of mine who, although very deeply self-educated, did not attend college in the conventional sense, pointed out to me that his difficulty in initiating and continuing romantic relationships may stem from his lack of practice: without exposure to the frenetic sex-and-mating-dance experimentation which is a part of that period of many of our lives, he lacks simple skills that the rest of us learned while still young enough to not fret over being stood up or turned down for a date.

Additionally, online community, although intense and of benefit to the verbally inclined, is brittle, as we all know from flame wars we’ve observed. This brittleness of community means that the lasting value of organically formed relationships simply can’t exist under present technologies. I’m not gong to say it just can’t exist when mediated by digital technology, but I am skeptical.

This brittleness of community is certainly in the interest of concentrated capital: if there’s no strong sense of organic community, there’s no effective means to organize for non-capitalist economic action, as in a union or a consumer organization.

This is in fact reflected in the basic concepts of online education as initially implemented: the courseware is developed under “work-for-hire” rules and therefore is the copyrighted intellectual property of the courseware distributor rather than the academic that developed the work. This is in opposition to the former practice of courses being the copyrighted intellectual property of the professor that oversees or develops them, as in the case of my father.

I rather imagine that this has something of an effect on the overall depth of effort that is invested in the given courses.

However, I’ve had reason to note over the past ten years that the rate of tuition increases for higher education has in fact increased from the rate ten years ago (the Seattle Community Colleges, in many ways a model of a 21st century continuing education system, raised tuition 11 percent for, I think, the third time in two years this past spring semester). It seems clear to me that we are well on the way to re-establishing economic limits upon higher education such that college returns to it’s historic status as the perogative of the extraordinarily ambitious and gifted or wealthy only.

Which in and of itself is both a giant step forward for the predominance of the Republican party in US politics and a giant step backwards for democracy, since high-school educated persons lacking college are polled as much more likely to vote Republican, and since economic power in the upcoming decades of this century is likely to rely increasingly upon the skills of persons with higher education, one must conclude that the interests of the less well-educated will be represented by persons with fundamentally differing economic interests and that therefore the interests of the less well-educated will be systematically ignored and demolished for the benefit of the individuals that hold real economic power.

Venerable technocapitalist cheerleader (or apologist) Wired has undergone a sobering redesign, in which quite a few changes have taken place. Gone, gone, gone, are the Wired Index (which is messed up: watching how tech stocks fare in a downturn is MUCH more interesting than watching them in a giant boom – wait, maybe they canned this a while ago) and the Ticker, that long, multi-page, one-line thread of text that was used as a divider in the opening profiles and news nuggets.

Also, apparently gone are the multipage visual introductions to features. The most subtle change I noticed was the abandonment of Wired’s house font, Wiredbaum, for body text.

In a flash of creativity (not), they’ve gone all out in the search for the most radical, challenging, forward looking font family that could possibly use for heads, subs, captions, and body copy and determined that the font which most fervently matches today’s zoom-zoom techno-conomy is…. Helvetica, a font which first came to prominence in the late 1920s and last saw truly universal employment in design during the recession of the 1970s.

Uh. Maybe this, like the well-known skirt index, is a sign that the current economic downturn will be a long one.

On a positive note, this was the first issue in a long time that I did not throw across the room in irritation at least once. I loved the first two years of Wired; but once they started running covers featuring 60-year-old money managers, I knew my love affair was over.

For the last few years Wired’s editorial direction was driven by the lust for dough and no longer the lust for technoutopia, no matter how hard they tried to convince their readership that they were the same thing. They ain’t, never have been, and shouldn’t be. The more they played up that neoclassical global capitalist cheerleading claptrap the more my stomach hurt from reading the damn thing.

I experimentally updated a post here to see how it would affect the MT front page update list.

It was immediately visible there, and stayed on their front page for just over 35 minutes. One site visitor came here from there in that time.

Although I know that updating their full donors list (a donation enables the update list there) is not at the top of the giant list of things they have to do, there are about 430 donors appearing on that list, at $20 (minimum) each. That’s a mere, if estimated, $8.6k. Not chump change, surely, but, my goodness, Movable Type is such an awesome piece of software I’d really have expected more.

Interestingly, if we assume that all 430 donors update their blogs on average once a day (obviously a shaky assumption), and further assume that those updates are evenly distributed over any given 24-hour period, then we can predict than in any given hour, about 17 blogs will rotate through the list of ten most recently updated blogs.

Which means that on average, the front-page link should last a bit longer than half an hour. Exactly what I observed.

In practice, of course, the updates aren’t evenly spread out over 24 hours. Since I’m on the left coast and tend to publish the next day’s entry at bedtime (11:30 to midnight, give or take), and the majority of MT’s users are probably located in the US, updates come slowly after that time of night, and my recently updated link tends to stay up much longer overnight.

And in fact, last night I had site visitors via that link from Japan, Hawaii, and Australia, as well as two nighthawks from Vanderbilt University and Baltimore over a three-and-a-half-hour window.

All of which I find interesting in a musing kind of manner.

So: Oz, I say “G’day” to ya!

Nippon, “Yo-koso!” (which, I sure hope. means “Welcome!”)

Update: Kiyo, via a comment on this entry, corrected my mis-spelling, which was “Yu-koso”. I corrected it, and (ahem) arigato, Kiyo-san!

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/japan/
will provide a handy link which should translate my site into kanji, I think.

Thanks for visiting! I hope I can be of service, or something.