I must post more CDs, I am getting behind again. Reflexive update: I am listening to all the CDs I own, in order, because my wife challenged me to do so and, well, why not?
260) Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: Freak Out!
Freak out indeed, an early Zappa recording, Suzy Creamcheese and so forth, “Help, I’m a Rock!,” “Wowie Zowie,” it’s Zappa, great if you when you are in the mood, and luckily I was when this one’s turn came…
261) Prince: Sign O’ The Times
I thought “If I Was Your Girlfriend” was the greatest pop song ever for about 2 months after I heard it; I still think it’s a great song, but the spoken word goofiness in the middle part is a little too Prince-peculiar. But wow, what a consistantly great collection of songs, stunningly, uniformly of a quality most songwriters could only dream of…
262) Cabaret Voltaire: The Original Sound of Sheffield ‘78/’82
Very lo-fi electronic weirdness, not nearly as poppy or danceable as their later stuff (which is saying something); interesting in parts, dull as hell in other parts, might be fun to chop up and remix.
263) Astor Piazzolla: Tango: Zero Hour
I think I will listen to the Piazzolla box set when I hit #300. I can’t say enough about Piazzolla’s compositions, which would be stunning even if he were just a bandleader, but good god, be plays this stuff on a bandoneon…
As is wont to happen on the internet, several of the threads I was following got snarled together. Many people mistake these snarls for braids, or even weaving, but usually they are just snarls. So, while listening to Shogun Kunitoki, a Finnish electro band, I check out their website and find a brief statement of intent:
Shogun Kunitoki is a band from Helsinki, Finland, with a mission to help electronic music regress back to a more human state, the time of the tube organ and the ring modulator, the spring reverb and the test oscillator.
They sound a lot like Philip Glass, actually, but driving rather than meditative. In any case, they want to regress humanity back to a more human state, and through the use of moderately old electronic instruments; we were more human back in the 1970’s and 80’s, apparently. A common enough trope, the idea that we were closer to what is essentially human “back then,” though usually people cast back further… like, before electricity was readily available, for example, or, for Socrates, before the accursed new technology “writing” ruined humanities’ ability to know things:
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. (from Phaedrus)
This suggestion of a pre-technological Golden Age has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic trope so prevalent today, be it the “cosy catastrophe” where we are returned to a more pure age of naked power (supplanted with canned goods and rifle caches, of course) or a more bleak portrait, like C. McCarthy’s cowardly piece of titillation, The Road. In both cases, a desire to escape the anxiety of culture and other people is manifest, but if our very fragile civilization were really to crumble, our dependance on other people would very rapidly intensify, especially after we were herded into protective camps (because, my wee patriots, the folks behind stuff like the Joint Operating Environment report (PDF) have many more guns than you could even dream about, and the will besides). Certainly, this blogging shit would be right out. I recall reading somewhere that the post WWII generation were the first to grow up under the threat of total annihilation of the species, which almost seems quaint, or at least tidy, when you consider that more recent generations hae to live under the threat of the gradual, messy, tortured annihilation of the species. So, what to preserve, and how? “Why” is a questions for another day. James Lovelock:
We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of recorded history. I prefer sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s view of us as unfortunate tribal carnivores that have acquired intelligence. Our evolution is more like that of social insects; the advances in knowledge and understanding that we prize are more a property of the human nests we call civilization than of its individual members. The nest is always more powerful than a collection of individuals. Who dares disturb the hornet’s nest? Small bees easily destroy the huge and powerful but solitary Japanese hornet when it invades their nest. They cluster around it in a ball and cook it to death at 50oC. A large brain offers no protection for the sperm whale when attacked by possibly less-intelligent human hunters.
As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or switches? The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitous record of our civilization from which to restore it should it fail. We would have to start again at the beginning.
And so, some projects for preserving a record are collected here, and they are all infused with sadness, and not a little naivete; the door to the Crypt for Civilization, buried at Ogelthorpe University in GA, USA, has the following inscription:
We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.
Sportsmanship of poserity, indeed. As Lovelock notes elsewhere is his essay, “we live in adversarial, not thoughtful, times,” and sportsmanship has no place. It seems funny to even contemplate that there was a time when sportsmanship seemed a foundational notion, a part of how we conducted ourselves. And then I think about Georgia in 1936, and I realize I have fallen into the golden age trap myself. Sportsmanship my ass.
Guess I’ll keep doing my little part of preserving the species, pathetic as it is: everything we produce as a species in ephemeral, but the internet makes that quality more pronounced, everything you read on the web is electricity…
256) The Lustre Kings: Mark Gamsjager Rocks and the Lustre Kings Roll
Serviceable rockabilly, a little country swing, but way too steeped in self-consicous retroism; the liner notes say “this is that mythical American music. This is that walk, that talk, that look and that car. Bowling shoes and sharp shirts…” and it goes on from there. Talk about worshipping a golden age. Ah well, I’m sure they’re fun to see live.
257) Bebel Gilberto: Tanto Tempo Remixes
Unusual in that the remixes are uniformly good, but different enough to make the whole CD worth owning; the original CD is a nicely written collection of sleepy samba and bossa nova songs, and is well worth owning, but this one stands on its own as well.
258) The Flaming Lips: Transmissions From the Satellite Heart
This CD is right about when the Flaming Lips’ sound began to jell into something more than a Led Zep/Butthole Surfers hybrid. “She Don’t Use Jelly” was the hit, and still is a fun pop recording, but there are a bunch of well written songs here, usually with goofy titles: “Chewing the Apple of Your Eye,” “Pilot Canat the Queer of God,” and such like.
259) Magma: Udu Wudu
Some Magma fans hate this record (Julian Cope, for one), and it does twinkle with assorted annoying jazz-rock phrases, but there’s plenty of hearty weirdness and interesting melodies, too. And come on, it’s an hour of Christian Vander playing drums…