Reach of the Day

I received this press release this morning:

You may recall the late Michael Jackson sang, “If they say why, why, tell ‘em that it’s human nature.” With the same sense of wonder, author Kentetsu Takamori tells 65 stories about human nature that help us deal with loss and change and teach us to live more fully. He’s great for Japanese interviews, and for English, we have Takamori’s reps from the publisher, available to speak at length about his book and philosophy. Please see the press release below, and let me know if you would be interested in receiving an advanced copy of the book and to provide us with a written review that we can have printed in the book or on the back cover.

R.I.F.

Reading is Fun-damental, as a Saturday morning literacy slogan stated in the '70s, but only if you read all the words. As Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee chew furiously on Sotomayor's "Wise Latina" quote - referring to it in similar shorthand - they reveal either their intellectual dishonesty or their inability to recognize the meanings of words. She said:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

"I would hope" doesn't mean "I believe," and to assert that it does radically reconstructs what she said. I would hope that eating as I eat and exercising as little as I exercise will lead to weight loss, but I don't expect that to happen. I would hope that my experience as a writer makes me a good editor of others' writing, and that might or might not be true. But these statements reflect my desires - in the latter case, related what I hope is true but can't be sure. It's reasonable and just as self-flattering as those senators who'd like to believe that their white male-ness gives them a special awareness of America's social mainstream, even though whites and males no longer dominate either numerically.

But this comes as no surprise. Too often, Conservatives seem to overlook the basic notion that reading is the act of interpretation, asserting that their understanding of law and the Constitution is right and the Liberal understanding is a matter of interpretation. Their inability to account for all the words in one 31-word sentence suggests only the most superficial problem with that belief.

Band Hell

This paragraph by Zack Smith, drummer for local band Rotary Downs, captures perfectly the hell of being a local band. I don't know what the show was, but I gather it was a Rotary Downs gig:

I made $5 last night. I got to the Pearl ready for rehearsing a few tunes for the gig at the Saturn, but there was no rehearsal to be had, and we wouldn't be gigging for another 6 hours. By 2:30 we were on stage, i was tired as fuck, playing to 5 people who were still there. But, the crowd still did outnumber the band, even though they were at the bar..so we played. Loud blues, loud funk, space rock. im pretty sure J was singing, and some keys were played, but all i had was bass in my right ear and snare in my left - yeah. Reeger even made it to see the last few tunes, sorry you had to hear that. At 3:15 we ended, collected $5 for the gig (there were 6 bands) - to have some $ for food on Sunday (im broke, again) and went home.

A Theory of Lists

On the Anti- Blog, Beck Hansen interviews Tom Waits. As part of the conversation, they talk about lists. Since the pressure to list comes from all sides and in various forms, I found this interesting:

BH: I get asked to write "Best of" lists occasionally. An emphasis on ranking things. Having a hierarchy and having it be written in granite, written in stone.

TW: It's economic. So you can charge more.

BH: Yeah, it must be. But maybe it's just a need to have some order that's been established, and that everybody has been notified. I don't know.

TW: There's too much of everything.

BH: Maybe it's a millennial thing. It started around the millennium. "What are the best movies? What are the best songs?"

TW: Well, then there's the pressure of feeling that you need to have what has been already rated the best. A lot of people are afraid to explore their own peculiar taste for fear - that it would be uncool. Just like when you're a teenager you don't want to be caught with the wrong sports shirt, the wrong socks.

BH: I think there's a bit of that. Certain things haven't made it to the "List," so then they go into the category of guilty pleasure or something.

TW: My theory is that the innovators are the ones that open the door to things, and then behind them there's a huge crowd and they are trampled by the crowd behind them. And then you have to peel the innovators off the ground like in the movie, The Mask. Like a Colorform.

They Don't Have Cooties

I'm relistening to Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Little Girl, his project written for a female singer. Belle and Sebastian albums gave me hope for this, but the album gives me reason to wonder if he's ever actually talked to a woman.

Helpless

I love Carrie Brownstein's "Monitor Mix" blog for NPR.org, not because of what she writes but because I'm fascinated by the respondents. They invariably agree with her, no matter what position she takes. When she wrote that she didn't like her iPod's shuffle feature because it so rarely captured her mood, nobody asked why she's asking her iPod to randomly match her mood. Instead, they rallied around her and hated their shufflers too. Stupid shufflers never seem to know what their owners really want to hear.

They also suggest there are limits to perception of NPR as the place for eggheads. In today's post, Brownstein challenges a writer's assumption that the music you listen to is a reflection of your intelligence, associating Lynyrd Skynyrd with low intelligence and Bjork with high intelligence. Brownstein doesn't agree, and neither do her readers. One wrote:

This is a topic that I spent a great deal of time thinking about until, like Robin Williams' character in Good Will Hunting, I had one thought and it calmed the entire storm. Here it is: if you like it, it's good. It becomes good when you like it. Whether you dig DeBarge or one of the Popol Vuh's, your feelings about a song validate that song/ artist/ painting/ book's quality.

Like = good? Really? Isn't it more accurate to say like = like, and that we flatter ourselves to think that the things we like are all good? Or are we really going to say that Dane Cook, supermarket tabloids and The Biggest Loser are good?

Another responent wrote:

You can't help who you love...when you truly love them--music/bands are not exempt.

That sentence construction invites doubt because it posits us as helpless victims jerked around by our passions, but there's something in there that the writer Brownstein refers to - Geoffrey Miller in Spent - missed. He suggests our tastes are uniform and intelligence-driven. The reader counters that we're helpless where our loves are concerned. It's far more likely that different things appeal to us at different levels, and that we respond to different kinds of music - some smart, some boneheaded - because they speak to different things in us. When we talk about "guilty pleasures," we're tacitly acknowledging things we like that don't coincide with our notions of "good." They appeal to something in us other than our intelligence. Rather than throw up our hands and act as though our musical passions are unpredictable, a more productive response would be to contemplate what we're responding to when we like the bands and songs we like.

Notice Me

New Orleans "bounce" artist Kynt released this sad remix of "Off the Wall" as a "tribute" to Michael Jackson. I'd like to think that this is genuine but misguided tribute rather than an attempt to capitalize on the attention Jackson's music has received since his death. Whatever, listen for the point roughly two-and-a-half minutes in when you can hear Kynt run out of ideas with almost half the song left to go. Jackson deserves better, something more like "Michael Jackson Wit' It" by Monsta wit Da Fade. This is so exuberant and audacious as it takes "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" and interpolates it into a storm of hyperactive triggerman beats, quick edits and the dance floor command, "Michael Jackson wit' it." The possibilities for what that could mean are endless - to do the Thriller zombie dance? The toe stand? The crotch grab? An en masse moonwalk?

Thanks to Alison Fensterstock for referring me to this.