http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Sat, 3 May 2003 20:16:42 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/03/201642.php Armed LiberalIn the L.A. Times this week, there was a front-page story a man's fall and his steps toward redemption. I'm a sucker for those stories, because I believe in redemption (I once argued for hours with a friend that Pulp Fiction was most of all a moral film, because it was the story of Jules' - Samuel Jackson's character - redemption).And I was a deeper sucker for this story, because I sort of know the man involved, and because of the impact he indirectly had on my life.The 53-year-old diabetic with a weakened heart, a white, unkempt beard and several missing front teeth awakens in his $35-a-day room the size of a jail cell, cradling his electric guitar. He gets dressed and shambles a couple hundred feet down the street to a seedy BART plaza in the Mission district. He sits on a battery-powered amplifier, plugs in the guitar, puts a cardboard donation box on the ground and begins to play and sing. ... The notes are fuzzy and occasionally halting, but the technique is unmistakably sophisticated: chords and melody played simultaneously, the way Chet Atkins might have done. An old gravelly blues voice, perfectly cracked, effortlessly in tune, pours from the slumped singer. The truthfulness of the voice commands you to listen, but it also commands you to wonder: Who is this? What is a guy with these chops doing here?His name ... his stage name for 23 years ... is Carlos Guitarlos. Two decades ago, he was a member of a famously mercurial Los Angeles bar band, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs. The band, a collection of big, obstinate, blues-loving men who played and partied fiercely and disdained rehearsals, was at the epicenter of Los Angeles' club scene during a brief era when the roots-rock and punk-music movements collided, forging groups like the Blasters, Los Lobos, X and Fear. These bands were fraternities of elemental musicians, contemptuous of stardom, seeming to long only for one transcendent moment on stage.By the late 1980s, that fervor was largely gone, along with the Rhythm Pigs. Guitarlos became another obscure name in the long list of musicians felled by drugs and booze, desperately following his ex-wife and infant daughter to San Francisco, living by playing on the streets and sometimes sleeping on them, losing himself in cocaine.Which is where most of these stories end. Every once in a while, though, one of the fallen will rise and, as former Blasters guitarist and songwriter Dave Alvin puts it, "bear the symbolic cross for the others." And so it has come to pass that in this transit plaza, where commuters and drug dealers swirl in separate circles, paying little attention to him, Carlos Guitarlos is on the verge of resurrection, of making that new start.While I was raised in Los Angeles, I moved away early, and never meant to come back. My Parisian then-wife and I were transferred here by our employers, and we were unahppy about it, and with each other over it.We started going out; to plays, concerts, and little clubs, and in one little club (Club 88 on Pico) one night we saw three bands: Top Jimmy (with Carlos Guitarlos), Los Lobos, and then in an unbilled after-hours set, The Blasters. It was sweaty, beer-drenched, ear-ringing rock and roll perfection. I've seen a lot of concerts...Nine Inch Nails in a small club on Sunset, Jesus and Mary Chain at the Whiskey...that I was lucky to experience, but there was something Platonic about this one. And driving home, two things happened. First Wife #1 and I realized that we'd fallen in love with Los Angeles, and in turn reconnected with each other...which meant that we would go on to have Biggest Guy and Middle Guy, two of the three best things in my life...and I realized that I was in love with America, because unlike NIN or other bands, whose music cuts across cultures and unites a worldwide "youth culture", bands like Top Jimmy, Los Lobos, the Blasters, and X...the Los Angeles 'roots rock' bands of the 80's were specifically from and about America.That affection for place and love of country gelled, in part, because of that rock and roll show; and I'm grateful for that as well.Carlos Guitarlos' self-published new CD will be at Tower Records, and I think I'll go by and pick one up today. You may want to do the same, if you can talk your local music store into finding it for you.Who knows where it might lead...for him, or for you.[Note: Just went to Tower, and they won't have it for a week. It's available directly at his site, www.carlosguitarlos.com and via CDBaby ] Cross-posted on Winds of Change. Music5043@blogcritics.org Sat, 3 May 2003 20:16:42 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/27/234953.php Armed LiberalSo at the conclusion of predictable but truly strange chain of events, I wound up spending the day at Aldous Huxley's house in the Hollywood Hills with his widow, Laura, and some other folks (including Littlest Guy and Tenacious G), and had an odd kind of epiphany.We were sitting out on the back patio, overlooking the canyon and looking up to the Hollywood sign, chatting, cutting up fruit and watching the kids play, when I realized that this scene - perhaps this exact scene - must have played out on this exact spot, except that the people standing around on the deck would have included Huxley, his friend and sometime writing partner Christopher Isherwood, and the rest of the wartime expatriate intellectual community.Two of whom would have been Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, founders of the Frankfurt School and root figures in the rise of 'critical theory', one of the roots of what I would today call Bad Philosophy.Huxley himself, with his search for transcendence, fits into the Romantic tradition which I've discussed as a further part of the cultural conflict in which we find ourselves.I think that the cultural/philosophical battles are just now rising to everyone's consciousness, and are not yet seen as critical, but will ultimately determine the outcome of this conflict.And here I was sitting on that very patio, chowing down on excellent pineapples and pears, and realizing that I'm a part of a Reformation aimed in part at the very man whose lovely home I enjoyed today, and all his friends and colleagues.Sometimes reality is just too damn weird.(cross-posted at Winds of Change) Books4900@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:49:53 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/25/150205.php Armed LiberalEmbattled Dreams: California in War and Peace 1940 - 1950(also on Armed Liberal)I have been a huge fan of Kevin Starr's boosterish histories of California since I read the first book, Americans and the California Dream. His work is the perfect anodyne to Mike Davis' self-flagellating critique of California and modernity, City of Quartz.Compare Starr: So too in the popular entertainment of 1940, so much of it originating in California, did the desire for amusement, fantasy, humor, and escape resist the dawning recognition that the United States would soon be entering the conflict. To Davis:Such relations of 'pure capitalism,' of course, are seen as invariable destructive of the identity of 'true' intellectuals, still self-defined as artisans or rentiers of their own unique mental productions. Snared in the nets of Hollywood, or entrapped by the Strangelovian logic of the missile industry, 'seduced' talents are 'wasted,' 'prostituted,' 'trivialized,' or 'destroyed.' To move to Lotusland is to sever connection with national reality, to lose historical and experiential footing, to surrender critical distance, to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud. Embattled Dreams is the sixth book in Starr's series, and in some ways the key one, because the roots of modern California were planted in World War II. There were older Californias, and we still can see their traces, but the California in which I live, and the California which serves as a bellwether for modernity, was laid out and built during and immediately after the war.In it he details the cultural and human impact of the war, and then touches on the rise of Republican Progressivism which has defined much of the postwar era. He talks at length about Earl Warren, the Republican prosecutor turned Progressive Governor turned liberal Supreme Court Justice.He also, I believe, tries to answer Davis and the critical challengers of the left by emphasizing the pernicious racism of the era, manifested by the anti-Japanese agitation that culminated in the relocation camps, and by the challenges of wartime integration.Where the book fails, I believe is in integrating both of those histories...of the hopeful, optimistic Folks (as he calls the Midwestern immigrants) with the hope and optimism that led the Japanese, Hispanic, and African-American immigrants to also settle in California - and what happened when their dreams and the fears of the Folks clashed.He concludes the book with the opening chapter of California red-baiting (which will figure prominently in his next book, I assume), and The ensuing decade would witness Earl Warren emerge as one of the most influential - and liberal - Chief Justices in American history. Calm, majestic, Warren seemed destined for the marble corridors of the Supreme Court. Now, as Chief Justice, the other side of Warren's nature - the liberal side of the California duality - was free to emerge. Historians would later describe Warren as reversing his philosophies and values after being appointed to the Court and turning liberal, even going soft, did not know the full complexity of Warren's California Progressive sensibility with its admixture of conservative and liberal values.I wish that the book had dug deeper into California Progressivism; I think it holds the key to understanding how we can reclaim the territory abandoned by the culture warriors of the right and left.Starr needs no defense against Davis; California itself is his defense. Books873@blogcritics.org Wed, 25 Sep 2002 15:02:05 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/02/203637.php Armed LiberalI know that most folks think that we spend all our time here at Casa de Armed Liberal reading Montesquieu's correspondence, obscure postmodern works by Baudrillard, or Jim Crews' excellent self-published book on urban shotgun. And we do all those things.But I have a secret...I'm actually a poetry nut.And the guy who triggered all this is a modern poet, fellow Slug (U.C. Santa Cruz type), and seriously over-the-top gay imagist, Mark Doty. Nine years ago, I was on a business trip to Washington, and I picked up a copy of Phoebe, the literary magazine of George Mason University. I have the issue here...Summer, 1993. And I read his poem "Two Cities," and got floored. Here are some excerpts:I had grown sick of human works, which seemed to me a sum and expression of failure: spoilers,brutalizers of animals and one another, self-absorbed until we couldn't see that we ruined, finally,ourselves - what could we make? An epidemic ran unhalted, The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;...The dawn was angling into the city, A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck first a face, not human, terracotta,on an office building's intricate portico, seeming to fire the material from within, so that the skin was kindled,glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric; they were continuous with every city's dreamof itself, the made world's angled assault on heaven. The city was one splendidly lit idea - ..."Venice," Nietzsche said,"is a city of a hundred solitudes." New York is a city of ten million, And my American Venice- phantom boulevards rippling and doubled in the dark - a city of two hundred and fifty millionsolitaires, the restless dreamers' dreamed magnificence: our longing's troubled mirror, vaprous capitol.So now, Doty has a new book of poetry out: Source.And it's hard to review. It's brilliant. But it mines the same vein of imagery and emotion - the weight of adult life stilled by the quick gasp one gives when confronted by beauty - and while I'm glad to own it and recommend it, the shock of discovery is missing.Then again, it's a brilliant book.When I was in grad school, I always had trouble grading. How did you grade casual brilliance as opposed to grinding effort?Somehow, because of Mark Doty, I have been expecting poetry to change my life, and maybe it has, just a little, as I look in new ways at the sunlit buildings above me or the dead leaves below. Maybe I'm loading him with too much of my desire for transcendence, and maybe he's just a damn good poet.I'll leave you with a brief snipped from the new book (it's from the poem excerpted on Amazon, so I'm not giving his work away...).A little rabbit dead in the grassAll that was quick Soul of dart and hurry No soul now,And still the body - not even the length of my hand - seems poised for springing, legs jutting forwardand back as if in mid-leap... And here comesThe So? of poetry; Just one bunny dead Of mysterious causes,...Buy the damn book. Buy all the poetry you can find; it is the soul's beautiful armor. Books373@blogcritics.org Mon, 2 Sep 2002 20:36:37 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/08/12/232553.php Armed Liberal 'A Brief History of the Flood' by Jean Harfenist (disclaimer: I know the author. But I know several other authors with books out and you're not gonna see me talking about them.) I'm a city boy, raised under the brilliant glow of success and possibility which I saw everywhere around me. This is a novel about someone who grew up in a place where possibility was barely a faint glimmer on the horizon. It's a novel — there is a character, Lillian Anderson, who undergoes trial and changes as we watch. But it's written as a linked set of short stories (think Susan Minot) and so is episodic. Each of the stories closes you in more and more tightly, and in each one you see Lillian struggling harder and harder to get out. Unlike Ray Carver, who similarly wrote about isolated people on questionable roads, the love and respect the author has for these real characters comes through. But not at the expense of an acid point of view: "My sister is the kind of girl who thinks letting Buddy Franklin fuck her in the Hoffmans' hayloft is the same thing as a date" It's a modern Huckleberry Finn, with the modern demons (family rage, the limits of class) replacing the more-concrete demons (bandits, slave-catchers) that Huck and Jim faced together. But both the characters—Huck and Lillian—share a saucy grit that pulls you toward them, and makes you know that wherever they are today, their demons are at least a little bit behind them. And because of that, the book matters. Books30@blogcritics.org Mon, 12 Aug 2002 23:25:53 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/08/12/232457.php Armed LiberalHot Rod Circuit Sorry About Tomorrow/Vagrant Part of what is so cool about music is that it evokes place so well. Listen. Go put on a Springsteen or U2 disc: where are you? A stadium, packed shoulder to shoulder in a kind of Leni Riefenstahl collective human mass. Put on Bach's Suites for Solo Cello and suddenly you're in a church.My weakness is for the kind of music that makes you feel like you're leaning against the cigarette-grimed wall of a small club, a bottle of cold beer in your hand, as you shout to try and talk to the person next to you. There are a lot of subclasses here—you may be dodging chairs thrown from the mosh pit, or listening to synthesizers while watching clips from 50's TV projected on the wall, or actually dancing, as opposed to bobbing up and down in place, to a hard-edged update of Bob Wills—but the sweet spot is a band with 2 guitars, bass, and drums. The singer is a tortured intellectual with a reedy, slightly sharp voice who sings smart-sounding lyrics, and the guitars phase back and forth between a buzz of noise and melody. Some of my favorite bands sound sort of like that: Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pursuit of Happiness, Thirteen Engines, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and now Hot Rod Circuit.So call me a sucker for this style. Put the disc in and go open a Bud. You'll be transported back to every little rock club you've ever been to: feel all the edgy insecurity you felt being there, as well as that adolescent hunger for something more than sex that brought you there in the first place. Music29@blogcritics.org Mon, 12 Aug 2002 23:24:57 EDT