Not the kissin’ kind, either. Here’s an extended quotation from Dave Hickey’s essay “The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll,” as published in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, which I recently finished reading and really dug.
Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us—simpatico dudes that we are—while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time—while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works—but it doesn’t feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.
Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us—as damaged and anti-social as we are—might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can’t. The song’s too simple, and we’re too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we’re breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.
And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically “perfect” rock—like “free” jazz—sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we’re trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we’re all a bunch of flakes. That’s something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that’s all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.
Which to me sort of ties in with what I was saying the other night about the experimental music I saw. It was also well summarized by Robert Frost’s comment about writing free verse: “like playing tennis with the net down.” Not that I have ever written anything but free verse, when writing poetry.
Frost is describing the experience of writing “free,” while I was writing about the experience of hearing free. But they are connected.
As I write I’m listening to: “Let’s get real drunk / Let’s let it be our ruin.” — Rosco Gordon, “Let’s Get High.” Wikipedia says Gordon inspired reggae and ska. WTF? Anyway — what a line! Reminds me of Baudelaire’s “Get Drunk.” “One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.”
For the record, I am not drunk, though I did enjoy some of a really good Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout tonight.
The bugs seem loud tonight, louder lately, when I sit and work/play at day and night here in my room. As I walked home tonight up the dark street, the occasional cockroach scuttling across the sidewalk, I heard odd little chirps emerge overhead from a tree, and wondered what was making them. I remember once walking up the same street at night and looking up to see a flying squirrel on a tree branch — the only one I’ve ever seen. Funny-looking little bastards, especially when looking right at you with those big dark eyes.
It’s official, or as official as can be when you’re dealing with a radio station in the Pacifica network. I will be on WPFW doing newscasts Monday afternoons, at 1 and 3 p.m., starting August 18. Apparently I will walk into the station two hours beforehand on my first day with nary a clue of what I am going to do, but someone, I hope, is going to show me, and quickly, so that I can actually prepare a newscast (of how long? five minutes? I don’t even know!). It should be … interesting. And hopefully not mortifying.
I really want to make my newscasts works of art. The last time I did a newscast was when I was at WFDD, in 1999! And I think I was not the best newscaster you’ve ever heard. But of course I remember the slip-ups and shortcomings more than the highlights. I remember often running down the hall to grab the latest traffic report, coming off of the fax machine, which was still the kind that used that waxy shiny paper on the rolls — man, I haven’t seen one of those in a while. And as a result of the running, doing some newscasts slightly out of breath. But at that time the newscasts were 10 or 15 minutes apart, and I was rushed. I’ll have a whole two hours between newscasts when I’m on WPFW. Nonetheless, I’m anticipating the return of radio anxiety dreams, which I finally stopped having after eight years away from live radio, just in time to start doing this gig.
What are the limits of the newscast form, and how can I push them or break them? Not in a self-indulgent way, but I want to do a newscast that people will hear and think is really different, not like anything else on the air in D.C. NPR’s Tom Goldman once told me in an interview that John Hockenberry, formerly his colleague at NPR, delivered brilliant newscasts. Maybe I can dig up the quote here. (hold music plays while author searches contents of external drive)
Wow, I surprised myself. Here’s what Goldman said about Hockenberry: “To this day, there has never been a more interesting newscast at NPR than the ones he anchored.” Hockenberry used natural sound and was funny, Goldman said. Well, NPR newscasters do use the “nat sound” at times today. (Have you met my friend Nat Sound?) But I have never, ever heard one that made me laugh. It seems almost impossible. How could a newscaster get away with something approximating, gasp, levity in a newscast today on NPR? I’m not trying to undermine NPR newscasters or poke fun at them. I appreciate NPR, I respect their news very much. Some of my best friends (well, one) are newscasters. And the newscasts usually sound great and do all they should do. But they do not make me giggle. It’s not in their genetic makeup these days.
So can I be funny on WPFW? Or artful? Poetic? What are the possibilities?
I also want to try to get the station involved in podcasting. I don’t think there are any podcasts now offered on their website. Of course, I want first to create a podcast of my newscasts, self-interested creature that I am. But that could be extended to all the newscasts. And there’s some local news and talk programming on WPFW that ought to be podcast (podcasted?). Like the Blackademics. (Well heck, they have a podcast on their own website.)
There are a lot of small, mostly volunteer-run community radio stations around the country — I imagine that, with all of those minds out there, someone has developed a relatively workable means of quickly converting audio delivered on a radio station into a podcast, in some mostly automated fashion. I hope. It would save me a lot of trouble if I didn’t have to be the one to create it. I’ll look into this.
Enough blather for now. I should be working on other things, like a blog post for Scanning the Dial tomorrow. Courage.
Good morning. I’m listening to Iron and Wine at the moment, drinking green tea and, it appears, writing my first blog post in a while (for this blog anyway — I post a lot at Scanning the Dial). Bernard is doing his best to get situated in my lap. He is doing much better since I took him in to get a steroid shot a few weeks ago — it seems to have cleared up the condition he had that was causing him to scratch himself frantically and rip himself up. Yay for a happier Bernard.
I wanted to write about my night last night, while it was still fresh in my mind. It began with my meeting up for drinks and dinner with Arin and two friends of hers, Ian and Jonas, at the Red Derby. I took the Metro in — I’ve been taking the Metro a lot more lately, even though it’s not as convenient in some ways, and I still don’t trust the bus system because the buses usually don’t come when they’re supposed to. I just don’t want to drive so much, use so much gas and harm the environment.
So I took the Metro to the Georgia Ave. stop and then got lost trying to find the Red Derby, but I got there eventually. We had a good time drinking beers in cans (such as Dale’s Pale Ale and Old Chub, for just $4 a can! that’s a bargain in D.C.) and eating and talking. I liked the Red Derby — it seemed homey, like a neighborhood hub. Apparently there’s a Sunday night drinking club of regulars, for example.
I really would like to live in D.C., but I don’t think I can afford it, and this is not a good time to sell. Or I’d even live in Arlington, but within walking distance of a Metro stop. That would be fine, too. Maybe someday. It would also be nice to have a neighborhood bar, or even a coffee house, within walking distance of where I live.
After hanging out at Red Derby for a while we walked up to this house where a concert was taking place. We ended up missing the first act, but got there in time to see Unicornicopia. Unicornicopia is a woman playing a keyboard and samplers and singing songs that to me seemed to be mostly about being a woman, a girl, female, and relating to others. I know, that’s a terrible description. The music didn’t lend itself to easy interpretation, though.
She was wearing a billowy yellow garment (maybe it was just yellow due to the lighting) that was tucked high on one leg, and on that leg she had a yellow band of fabric tied around her ankle. She had quite a magnetic presence, I thought. At times she would do this wild boogie dancing behind her keyboard or even come around the front and dance around. I enjoyed it. It was interesting, at least. I’m not sure what to compare it to, so it’s difficult to write about or place within a context for my own judgment. Not that that should be that important.
The house was cool — they call it the Lighthouse, apparently, and have noise/experimental concerts fairly often. There were many posters and paintings all over the walls, instruments and old media (LPs, cassettes) lying around. Folks gathered in the backyard and sat on the porch and smoked and talked. I talked to a guy, older than me and most of the people there (I think I was older than most of the people there), who happens to live a short walk from where I grew up and where my parents still live, in Fairfax. He plays cello with various people. He had played cello as a kid and teenager and then gave it up, only to pick it up again years later. Now he plays the best he’s ever played, he says. I also met one of the guys who lives in the house, who happens to be involved with Radio CPR, so that was interesting.
After a while we went back inside and went downstairs for the final performance, by Twilight Memories of the Three Suns (here’s a YouTube video). This relatively brief performance began with a guy flexing and shaking a large piece of metal, making noise with it, and a girl strumming an amplified tuneless homemade instrument of some kind of metal strings pulled straight across a piece of wood, sort of like an oversized homemade autoharp or something. After a while the guy began crumpling the piece of metal. Sometimes he would bury his face in it, and it looked as if the metal was swallowing him up and he was fighting to get free of it. He ended up on the floor bent over the metal, and the girl later just laid the harp-thing on the floor and pulled it back and forth, bobbled it up and down and the like.
I don’t know — experimental “music.” What’s to say about it? I’ve seen a fair amount of it. Sometimes it’s interesting. Sometimes it just seems self-indulgent and weakly expressive. People applaud, but what are they applauding? Especially when the music doesn’t necessarily involve any actual musical skill or even conception in that vein. As I was watching the final performance, I was thinking, “Heck, I could do that” (which I wasn’t thinking as I watched Unicornicopia). But I admit that I get really annoyed when people look at modern art and say, “My kid could do that!” So fine, my expectations are confounded, my vocabulary for describing such experiences is poor, and perhaps always will be, and perhaps that is the point. What do you think?
I made it home uneventfully after the show. Now I’m dong laundry and considering my plans. I must must must get to my garden after a long absence and do some work there. Weed, stake a Roma tomato plant, maybe plant some new things, dig the ground, and so forth. I’ve been so inconsistent about tending to my garden. I wonder whether I should still be doing this. But I do think it’s important. I will stick with it and just try to be more disciplined, I guess.
Tonight I’m going to play Scrabble at a hookah place, which I’m looking forward to, and what else is going on? Maybe poker sometime this week. I might volunteer for Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment at the Arlington County Fair next weekend.