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 Thu, 24 Oct 2002 01:19:45 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/2002/10/24/011945.php Prentiss RiddleThe Austin Chronicle's cover story this week is on the outside world's discovery of the cumbia scene in Monterrey, Mexico, and its reigning star Celso Piña. As gringolandian alternative rockers a few years back rediscovered and relaunched the Man in Black, so have Mexico's younger exponents of rap and rock en español made a star out of Piña. Cumbia has a characteristic heartbeat rhythm that you'll know if you've ever heard it. Here's the Chronicle on its origins: A folkloric music born in Colombia's Caribbean coastal region, cumbia sabanera and its cousin cumbia vallenata were forged from a fusion of European accordion, native Indian guacharaca (a bamboo scraper), and African rhythms played on the caja, a drum slightly larger than a bongo. Over time, the cumbia lineup supersized, sometimes rivaling salsa bands in its musical girth, incorporating everything from horn sections to keyboards. ... As salsa took the rest of Mexico by storm in the Sixties and Seventies, cumbia Colombiana found fertile ground in Monterrey. Piña is credited as the founder of Monterrey cumbia, which has pretty much been limited to that city's working-class barrios for the past twenty years. Until, that is, producer and DJ Toy Hernández of the Monterrey rap group Control Machete hit upon the idea of "cumbia dub". When word spread that Hernández would be producing Piña, the heavy hitters of Mexico's alternative music scene (and beyond) were quick to sign on, including members of Caf&eacute Tacuba, El Gran Silencio, Santa Sabina, and the New York Latin-rap-ska group King Chango. The result is said to be a delight for adventurous ears north and south of the border, both on the breakout track "Cumbia Sobre el Río" on the Barrio Bravo CD and on several tracks from his new release Mundo Colombia. I haven't actually heard these discs yet, but the samples available at Amazon and B&N make me believe it. Besides the dub and rock influences are intriguing ideas like a cumbia cover of the Antonio Carlos Jobim classic "Vivo Sonhando". Fans of Piña and Hernández's new sound should be aware, however, that some of the songs are likely to be more in the vein of traditional rough and ready Monterrey-style cumbia. Meanwhile, the Chronicle naturally puts an Austin angle on the story: Monterrey is "just" seven hours by bus from Austin; a singer whose connection to Piña isn't explained has spent the summer in Austin recording; Austin's own eclectic cumbia collective Grupo Fantasma and dub act Echobase are collaborating with Toy Hernández and have plans to play in Monterrey soon. I don't know whether this really means much; we've heard about the Next Big Thing coming from Mexico via Austin for years. But Grupo Fantasma is great and a listen to their self-titled release may make you agree that cumbia makes other latin styles popular north of the border sound sterile in comparison (e.g., salsa). I hear that Grupo Fantasma has a benefit show coming up to raise funds for their Monterrey trip. So if writing about an Austin-Monterrey axis might help make it happen, more power to the Chronicle. Music1486@blogcritics.org Thu, 24 Oct 2002 01:19:45 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/12/224226.php Prentiss RiddleAmid all the hoopla about Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections I had somehow overlooked it. I managed to catch the gist of Franzen's falling-out with Oprah (when she picked The Corrections for her book club, he made the mistake of telling Terry Gross that he was surprised she'd be interested in a "literary" writer like him, triggering a Hell-hath-no-fury response and possibly losing him a few million bucks in royalties). I'd also heard that the story was about three grown siblings and their trouble with their aging parents, a subject which didn't make me break any speed limits rushing out to buy the book. What I'd failed to hear was that the book is funny. Even the infamous Fresh Air interview is too earnest to get across how accessible the book is through humor. It was only when I noticed that a hilarious short story from a recent Granta was really an excerpt from the novel -- oh, that Jonathan Franzen! -- that I realized my error. The blurbs should say, "an intergenerational novel of a dysfunctional Midwestern family, as written by the staff of the Onion." In the September 30, 2002 New Yorker, by the way, Franzen addresses at length the question of difficulty and accessibility in fiction, as illustrated by his hate mail for The Corrections and his love-hate relationship with the work of William Gaddis. It turns out that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience. In one model, which was championed by Flaubert, the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it. We can call this the Status model... In the opposing model, a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group, whether the group consists of Finnegans Wake enthusiasts of fans of Barbara Cartland... A novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust. This is the Contract model... My mother would have liked it. Franzen's secret is that, however much he may be called an elitist, inside he believes in the Contract model. But as a reader and a writer he knows that the best reading experience, the one which most fulfills the Contract, is not necessarily the easiest; the ideal is to be accessible and "difficult". Finally, I love the cover of Franzen's new collection of essays, How to Be Alone, which as intended I first saw sitting on the New Releases table of my local Barnes & Noble, as though in a self-referential Escher print. Books1261@blogcritics.org Sat, 12 Oct 2002 22:42:26 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/12/204205.php Prentiss RiddleBruce Bartlett has compiled an attempt at a Conservative Top 40 of politically conservative pop songs since 1955, but it has been thoroughly and much more entertainingly refuted by Simon B of No Rock & Roll Fun. Interesting that skinhead punk and white supremacist metal didn't enter the discussion. Note to conservatives: rock&roll is the devil's music; get used to it. (Via yes/no interlude.) Music1259@blogcritics.org Sat, 12 Oct 2002 20:42:05 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/12/200425.php Prentiss RiddleI first heard Alex Coke back around 1978 or so when I was a freshman at UT and he hosted a weekly jazz jam at the old Buffalo Grill on far west 6th Street. I'd go to hear him and Rich Harney backing up various cocktail-lounge chanteuses at clubs around town and also blowing more experimental stuff now and then. I think I even attended the very first show of the Creative Opportunity Orchestra (CO2), the long-running big band dedicated to experimental jazz co-founded by Coke. In the intervening years Coke and I both left Austin and returned. From the Austin Chronicle I learned that he had gone to Amsterdam to be in the Willem Breuker Kollektief, an influential Dutch jazz group. Then from an inspirational piece on Fresh Air I learned that Breuker was all wrapped up in a musical movement known as "New Dutch Swing", documented in NPR jazz critic Kevin Whitehead's book of the same name. I was excited to hear that New Dutch Swing brought together the "traditional" elements of avant-garde jazz -- free improvisation and its antecedents in bop and Coltrane-era jazz -- and some not-so-common elements, notably a return to swinging rhythm, an openness to vernacular music outside the jazz repertoire and a quirky sense of humor. Wow, I thought. Let's hope Alex Coke bring some of that spirit back to Austin! So I was delighted when I heard about a project he had started under the name New Texas Swing. I took that phrase and let my imagination run with it, and soon visions were dancing in my head of Bob Wills colliding with Thelonius Monk, with a generous side of polka and a scoop of Ornette Coleman on top. Well, last night I finally got to hear the real thing at the New Texas Swing record release party at Waterloo Ice House. The lineup was Alex on tenor and flutes, CO2 leader Tina Marsh on vocals, and two players I didn't recognize on bass and drums. I was at once impressed and disappointed. Impressed because Coke and Marsh have grown in the 20+ years since I listened to them regularly into the possessors of monster technique. Coke was all over the sax and flutes, especially the bass flute. At times he played apparent polyphonics that seemed to be high and low, soft and loud at once. Marsh's vocal technique matched his, taking the role of an instrument as vocalists rarely succeed in doing; often it was hard to tell which sounds were Coke and which were Marsh. But I was disappointed, too, because I can't say I found much "new" in New Texas Swing. The music was not far from what I would have heard at one of Coke's or Marsh's avant-garde gigs twenty-plus years ago -- usually a driving rhythm and bare-bones bop-style melody and chord progression carried by the bass and drums, over which the winds and voice explored increasingly "outside" harmonic and tonal techniques. The emphasis on humor and swing I was hoping Coke might have picked up from his Dutch experience was nowhere in evidence. The "Texas" in New Texas Swing appeared to consist of an interest in the songs of Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Leadbelly), but with their earthy side removed so they sounded like spirituals. Of course I shouldn't fault Coke for not fulfilling an agenda I imposed on him. Coke and Marsh are superb musicians dedicated to their craft. If I've become a bit of a philistine when it comes to the tradition of free improvisation, that's probably my loss. But I still wonder: where are the musicians who could fulfill the promise of that name "New Texas Swing"? It seems to me that a fusion of Wills and Monk is still out there in the ether, waiting for someone to turn it into sound. (P.S. The New Texas Swing CD is unknown to Amazon or B&N. You can find ordering info or local Austin stores that carry it at Alex Coke's site and listen to samples at the CO2 site. And if you want to listen to that Fresh Air interview with Kevin Whitehead, it starts about 37:30 into the clip.) [More Prentiss Riddle: Music] Music1258@blogcritics.org Sat, 12 Oct 2002 20:04:25 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/26/134447.php Prentiss RiddleIn an effort to break with their colonial past, schools in East Timor are reportedly teaching first graders in Finnish. Although it has the hallmarks of an urban legend (e.g., the canard that the Timorese language Tetum has a "primitive grammar"), the Finnish press is reporting the story as fact and of course bloggers are picking it up. Finnish is one of the most isolated languages of Europe, distantly related to Hungarian and Turkish but spoken by very few non-Finns. It's also considered one of the most difficult languages for non-natives to learn. Supposedly its appeal to the East Timorese is that Finnish is neutral, Finland having little history of conquest, while Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia and English all have colonial associations in Timor. Timor's precolonial languages are said to be too fragmented by dialects to serve as a unifying force. For some lively discussion, see the link at Making Light. Participants are having a field day suggesting alternatives like Esperanto or Klingon. I'm surprised no one has suggested Basque, the only European language that clearly beats Finnish in difficulty and isolation. More seriously, a better alternative than any language without historical roots in Timor might be to attempt to codify a fusion of the Timorese dialects. Language planners have attempted something similar with other languages, notably Romani, the highly fragmented language spoken by Gypsies worldwide.[More aprendiz de todo: language] Culture924@blogcritics.org Thu, 26 Sep 2002 13:44:47 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/12/145746.php Prentiss RiddleA flurry of coverage of novelist Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, has been brought on by its impending UK television adaptation and her forthcoming second novel, The Autograph Man.The Independent sympathizes with the British (or is it universal?) tendency to build them up, then tear them down. The BBC reports that she will be fleeing the intense UK publicity for the relative calm of graduate work at Harvard. The Guardian quizzes her on her feelings about the TV version of her work and presents a loafer's guide for viewers. Fortunately, the Guardian also gives us an excerpt from The Autograph Man.Says the Independent about her new novel: What remains the same is Smith's fascination with minority cultures, in the latest novel Jews. Black identification with the experience of Jewish life is hardly new: from the slaves in America singing spirituals about life in Egypt under the pharaohs to the post-war civil rights movements in the American South that drew on Jewish precedents... Her principal character, the autograph man himself, is writing a book cataloguing which characteristics and people are Jewish and which are goyish [gentile]; unsurprisingly the warm, humanly enhancing characteristics are Jewish, the distant, cool ones are goyish... There is another Lenny Bruce riff that comes to mind when thinking of Smith's own career thoughts: first to be a tap-shoe dancer, then a jazz singer and finally a popular writer. Bruce, discussing the survival strategies of minorities, instances entertainment as a traditional escape from enslavement and its modern form, pigeon-holing. This, he posits, is the real impulse behind black singing ("Hey slave, put that pick down and come over here and sing that song again") and Jewish charm ("Hey Jew, stop building that pyramid and come over here and be charming"). Listen to Smith herself comment on her decision to give up her ambition to be a dancer: "Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up timestep with shuffle." It's hard to imagine Zadie's kind of candor about race and culture making it to American television, however satirically packaged. Maybe to the big screen, provided it's branded as being from a known "irreverent" director. I look forward to renting White Teeth in 2004 or so.Meanwhile with all the interest the media have given to Zadie Smith's changing hairstyles, she has passed on the favor with the essay "On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair".[See more of Prentiss Riddle: books in my blog.] Culture571@blogcritics.org Thu, 12 Sep 2002 14:57:46 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/11/131721.php Prentiss RiddleBoingBoing links to the website of the allegedly musical Thai Elephant Orchestra and says, "The elephants not only play with the instruments, they play together on them, jamming in what is clearly recognizable as music."I'm not convinced. That the sounds are musical to our ears may say more about us than about the elephants. Given the inherent musicality of the lovely Thai gongs, etc., provided to the elephants, I'd have expected these instruments to sound just as pretty and just as much like "real" music whether set up as wind chimes or robotically played using a random number generator.Of course, if we accept John Cage's assertion that noise can be music, the question is not whether elephants can play music but whether elephants can play music that shows signs of (non-random) musical thought. Which suggests a sort of musical Turing test, in which respondents are asked whether an audio track produced by elephants (or for that matter musical robots with composition algorithms) sounds "more musical" than a control track of the same noises sequenced randomly. Has anyone ever tried this?Meanwhile, hear for yourself. 551@blogcritics.org Wed, 11 Sep 2002 13:17:21 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/10/124024.php Prentiss RiddleThe title of Arthur Phillips' novel Prague is a joke that sets the tone for the book: it takes place in Budapest but its characters, young North Americans playing the expat game in newly post-Cold War Hungary, all believe that life would be much cooler in Prague.Being one place and dreaming about another is the condition that Phillips explore at length in this very funny but equally sad book. One of his characters is a scholar of nostalgia who can tell you what previous times people pined for at any moment in history. He believes he has pinpointed the first European artists' cafe experience of which all others, from the Parisian boulevard haunts of your favorite literary figures right down to your local Starbuck's, are Nth-generation copies. Anyone who has ever envied Hemingway and Fitzgerald their lostness while harboring doubts about whether there was really any there there on the Left Bank, either, will be able to relate.The book opens with another of its themes, the parlor game Sincerity, in which players go around the table telling precisely three lies and one truth and points are earned for distinguishing between them. (Heather Champ hosts a weblogger's variation on the game in her blog.) Deception, that staple of 20th century genres from the simple mystery to the self-conscious literary tale told by an unreliable narrator, is ubiquitous in the world of Prague. Everyone is fooling everyone else, most of all themselves. And yet, as in the game of Sincerity, truth creeps in as well and can be harder to swallow than the lies.A couple of quotes. Here is the historian of nostalgia: No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren't rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn't scratchy until television, and silent movies weren't a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded that you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, plug-juggling operator was the highest of high-tech. To know it was anything less would have been like acknowledging you were going to die and life was transient and you were already halfway to being a memory or worse. The real and worst tragedy of twentieth-century East Europeans: They had known they were old-fashioned before they could do anything about it. The jokes in Prague mostly depend on the characters and so are hard to catch the flavor of here. Here is one character's childhood list of lessons learned from his precocious reading: age 8: avoid sea travel (Treasure Island)age 9: as you get older, it's harder to have any fun (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)age 9: don't go looking for trouble (The Hobbit)age 10: it takes a lot of money to get out of trouble (The Count of Monte Cristo)age 11: sometimes it's better to just leave well enough alone (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)age 12: if you're not really, really careful, you'll grow up bitter (Moby-Dick)age 13: always know where your escape routes are and what you can use as a weapon in case of trouble (The Heart of Darkness)age 13: don't read too much (Don Quixote)age 15: it's better to die, even to die slowly, than to get married (War and Peace)age 15: a lot of people feel like I do, but they've learned to hide it (The Stranger) because they're phonies (The Catcher in the Rye)age 16: I want to live inside a glowing circle of love and romance (title never included; entry violently scratched out with black ink shortly after being written)age 17: once it's past, forget it; it won't help to think about it (The Great Gatsby)age 19, last entry, freshman year of college: No one cares. And why should they? (No Exit, Nausea) With which Phillips sets up the character in question and mocks the reader for trying to glean any simple lessons from his book. Okay, so maybe you had to be there to catch the humor -- Prague is worth the trip. Books: Literature and Fiction515@blogcritics.org Tue, 10 Sep 2002 12:40:24 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/06/190603.php Prentiss RiddleGorillas only know three chords, but man, they know how to use them -- that's the lesson of the Eddie Angel's Guitar Party disc I found in the bargain bin last week. You are in a maze of twisty surf guitar tunes, all different, from Eddie Angel and friends. Amazon shows this thing as having 37 tracks but mine only has 12, so where are the other 25? And how does he hit those tasty licks without opposable thumbs? Music: Rock462@blogcritics.org Fri, 6 Sep 2002 19:06:03 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/06/185524.php Prentiss RiddleAfter letting it glower at me from the shelf for a couple of years, I finally read Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, an account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. I suppose I procrastinated because I expected a grim catalog of horrors. The horrors are there, but this is no catalog: Gourevitch's writing is nuanced, not numbing.There's a good introduction to the book in this section of an overall rather pedestrian interview with the author. Some take-home points: the Hutu-Tutsi conflict was not ancient but a product of colonialism and 19th century racist pseudoscience. The West and the UN failed to act in 1994 when Hutus killed 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbors in 100 days, an efficiency that put Nazi Germany to shame. Then when exiled Rwandans (both Tutsi and Hutu) mounted an invasion to stop the genocide, the West and the UN prolonged it by setting up mismanaged refugee camps which the Hutu forces used as bases from which to continue their attacks. Ultimately the anti-genocidal forces prevailed, not only taking Rwanda but spawning the force which overthrew dictator Mobutu of neighboring Zaire, arguably the most cruel and corrupt despot in Africa.Gourevitch explores both causes and consequences of these events in detail. I found his portrait of Paul Kagame, leader of the anti-genocidal RPF, particularly thought-provoking. Kagame seems to combine military brilliance with the restraint and self-criticism of a Gandhi. Is such a combination really possible? If Gourevitch and his army of fact checkers are correct in their assessment of Kagame, then he deserves to be a household name like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama. Books: History461@blogcritics.org Fri, 6 Sep 2002 18:55:24 EDT