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bloodybells1 · 6 months

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Access and Activation

I am prone to a kind of reflexive lunging for the blade in the haystack, the blade of stridency and political agitation which, during “normal” times, is kept hidden under needles of hay and which, during times of crisis, is fidgeted over with nervous hands parsing hay needles in order to get to the handle.

I like to bring the hatchet down. It’s in my nature. It always feels like the most correct course of action.

I am susceptible to the defensive posturing that happens during war, the hunched shoulders and darting eyes of those who have grown up with bombs.

However, I wasn’t the one who heard those bombs. That was my father.

I’ve written about how war, specifically the experience of World War Two on the part of my father, informs my perspective, how the imprint of war shapes my attitude and my behavior. It comes in the form of a generational trauma that lives on within me.

You experience this type of trauma not because of what was done to you but because of what was done to your parents and grandparents, a type of trauma that is passed down to you like a genetic flaw or disease.

But these aren’t the only contributors to the trauma of my father’s upbringing in mid-century Germany, the effects of his experience of war and bombs which he passed onto me.

The effects of the kind of society he grew up in, a white supremacist totalitarian society, factor into the unease I experience within me and mingle with the agitation brought about by the sounds and tremors of munitions and explosions.

With every knee-jerk reaction I experience when activated for combat, whether that combat be intellectual or physical, there is also the ugly inheritance of vague ideas about racial fitness.

It lives and breathes in my blood, as if there were all these radioactive amoebas swimming around and each one had a tiny mouth singing out one part of an overall harmony, a dreadful chorus about lineage and nations and unity of blood.

During such moments my yearning for access to deeper stories than these nativist ones soars very high, even as it is thwarted by the activation of these little sleeper cells of trauma and racial animus inside my body.

What always motivates my liberalism is the total rejection of these voices of ethnonationalism.

I grew up hearing horrid language about so-called racial realities and their determinative valences, that this can and should be understood politically, that one must organize in society according to skin color and that one must understand that the lighter the color the more deserving of justice.

I have a direct, eyewitness account of these sentiments, for I heard them every day growing up in my home.

When I see what is happening in the Middle East today, there is a direct recognition of the sparks of racial hatred.

The element of religion is present as well, for my father also tried to teach me that Christianity was superior to other religions, not because of some supposed scriptural connection to the real truth, but because it was a historical, organizing principle, a political force, around which the glories of Christendom and Europe have brought civilization, through empire and capitalism, to the entire world.

When something happens, like the horrifying escalation that occurred on October 7th, I run to the haystack and grab the blade and hold it up to the sun. I know how I will use it: it will be in defense of my beliefs, the principles I adhere to which stand in the starkest contradiction to all of those terrible lessons my father tried to teach me.

And still, the insufficiency of stopping there becomes apparent. For to many, the side which I must pick as a result of these stated beliefs is on the side of the IDF and on the side of the nation whose people we in the West must support.

But I can’t bring myself to pick that side.

Because of my politics, I can’t help but see imperialism on “that side of the fence,” and I have rejected imperialism in every form in which I see it.

What is my role, then?

I keep asking myself. There is a part of me that knows how direct my lineage is to the gas chambers. I have already written about my grandfather’s support of the Nazi regime.

How do I support Israelis without supporting their government? How do I support their right of self-determination without removing my support for the same right to the Palestinians? How do I express solidarity with Jews while also expressing solidarity with Muslims?

I’m not talking about politics. It is not enough to simply say that, in fact, many, many Jews are now protesting Israel’s actions and their presence on my “side of the fence,” on the side that is calling for a ceasefire, means I can now worry a little bit less about the need to have solidarity with all Jews.

It’s not enough to pick one political side of the Jewry and think you are advocating for all of the Jewry.

Germany does not select to which type of Jew its post-war policies towards Jews, its reparations regime, is directed. If you are Jewish, it doesn’t, nor should it, matter what political beliefs you have in order to qualify for the benefits.

This means that this policy is extra-political. And rightly so. And, as a descendant of a Nazi, I feel a very powerful desire to apply this same policy in my own personal advocacy, irrespective of how my politics will naturally bring me into conflict with it.

There is a part of me that demands solidarity with all of the descendants of the victims of the crimes of my ancestors. I feel a large responsibility towards all Jews, including those Jews whose politics I find abhorrent.

There seems to be an irrefutable logic to that demand. For how can I turn my back on the national project of the very people whose existence my own people tried to exterminate?

How can I ignore the need on my own part to continue to hold the torch out in their defense? this especially given how my father never demonstrated to me the slightest appreciation for the severity of Germany’s war crimes?

The editors at Tablet Magazine, staunch sympathetic voices for the actions of the Israeli government, had graciously given me a spot on their platform this past June to carry out some of this type of reckoning with my own lineage.

The magazine is a writer’s paradise. Every word is written with care and intelligence and probity. It’s an honor to be a contributor.

Yet, I knew what the politics of the magazine were when I wrote the piece for them. And now I wonder whether, if the piece were being written today, after October 7th, I wouldn’t try to find another outlet to publish it. I also wonder, assuming they’d be aware of my politics, if the keenness of the political clash between my beliefs and theirs wouldn’t make it difficult for them to give me the platform they did earlier in June.

When I think of this it seems clear to me that, while there is no limit to that historical defense of a people which issues from the demand coming from recognition of the crimes of my ancestors, there in fact is a limit to my defense of the actions of the Israeli government.

I will forever defend the legitimacy of the Israeli state, even as I denounce with every fiber of my being its government’s modern behavior.

There are many who don’t believe that such a division is theoretically possible, or even morally permissible. There are many who say that defense of Israel is defense of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and that you can’t have one without the other.

I humbly and respectfully disagree.

This piece, I found, did a fantastic job of analyzing, from a more linguistic standpoint, the difficulty of the public conversation at present.

I believe Israel is committing crimes which I can never bring myself to support. I tell myself—until I’m blue in the face—that my socialist politics make me see this conflict as an imperial one and therefore demand I reject wholeheartedly what Israel is doing.

But I will always feel like I’m betraying a cause when I do that, that there is a historical mandate placed on me which I am now turning my back on.

And yet, the other side is stronger. My politics are my politics. My politics are the result of some of my deepest beliefs about humanity in general. It seems as though there’s nothing to be done about that.

I continue to remain open to evolution. There are many beliefs I once had that I no longer hold onto.

But my politics, my core beliefs, my principles, must come before other responsibilities. Considering that my feeling about those responsibilities is situated within a highly personal legacy that dates back several generations, and is therefore issuing from a consensus that has long since passed, I think it’s reasonable that I nonetheless prioritize my political beliefs today, the absolute importance of remembering my connection to my ancestry, with all of its horrors, notwithstanding.

I wish I could speak in the way I am speaking now, only on Twitter. Unfortunately, that isn’t the venue for this kind of inquiry. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to use Twitter to express my political beliefs, with all of the two-dimensionality that limits such expression on that site. But it doesn’t exactly make me feel whole or good.

The task of putting the blade down, of threading the needle now, the task of finding access to the third way—in what appears to be a hopelessly, insoluble binary and zero sum conflict and crisis—seems more than ever out of reach.

It is very sad.

. . . . . .

I remember how utterly baffled I was by the 9/11 attacks.

Who hates us so much that they would be willing to do this and why? On top of all of the feelings of fear and anger, I was also very confused. I couldn’t understand what we had done that would make us such a target.

There wasn’t yet social media, but there was a brief precursor to the way social media circulates information in an informal way. They were called chain emails.

I remember scrolling through endless reply brackets of discourse on email, many of it humorous, much of it the stuff of urban legend. These emails were getting copied and resent many times over and their origin was often too distant to be able to detect, but the stories were by turns amusing, alarming, entertaining and serious, nonetheless; much like a lower powered version of the outrage hunting and doom scrolling that happens every day on Twitter.

After 9/11, I recall reading a quote from an interview with a prominent rabbi who said that, as a result of the attacks, we had entered the 21st Century through a ring of fire, and that we must now understand more than ever that we are all connected, that what we believe and what we support and what we advocate for has ripple effects throughout the world, that our policies have serious impacts on people with whom we share very little culturally, but who are human beings nonetheless, and to whose humanity we are in many ways responsible.

I’ll never forget it.

It was the first time that I understood how to approach the specter of political violence, how simply categorizing something as terrorism and stopping there is always insufficient. It put the 9/11 attacks for me in a completely different context. I wasn’t confused any longer. I watched the second tower fall from the vantage point of my East Village rooftop. Around me I heard the simultaneous cries of horror from all the others on rooftops all around me. I remember the fear I felt of being invaded, this newfound fear of being attacked. I remember the strange, blunt patriotism I never thought I would ever feel that came as a result. But amidst my fear and anger, I was still very confused. Until I wasn't. It was with those wise words which I read in the email chain that I understood there is a very great difference between “blaming the victim” and something more nuanced, the understanding that if everything is connected, then what I do affects others throughout the world, through ripple effects.

That was when I realized that critique of empire would be one of my chief political preoccupations for the rest of my days. Because the American Empire was on its last legs, though none of us knew it. But I knew that all of this business about War on Terror was a sham. I knew it was a sham because there was no space in it for understanding our role in the 9/11 attacks. I realized when I read that email chain that there was nothing wrong with admitting that the privileges of being an American, because of empire, come at the cost of other people in far off places. And at some point in time, the bill will need to be paid. That doesn't mean that it was "America's fault" that it got attacked. It just means that America plays a role in the conditions that brought about the attack. It’s almost impossible not to take a side these days. If I am unsuccessful in being neutral—and that is almost always the case—it is because I have to be honest with myself about my own political beliefs, which are very strong.

But I still have to ask why I have those beliefs. I have to ask what brought me here to this point holding the blade aloft.

Interestingly, I can see this blade is not only mine. It has bloodstains on it from previous eras. It’s been used before many times, by combatants on opposite sides of the fence, for this cause or for that cause.

The blood of the opponents in all of those matches commingles eerily on the shaft of the blade. I’ll never know whose blood belonged to whom. In death, the blood of one’s enemies merges with one’s own.

Perhaps I should just do everything in my power to simply hold this blade towards the cause my heart finally tells me to point it towards.

But never use it. Never thrust the blade.

Maybe that’s the best I can do. Maybe such incomplete and unsatisfying conclusions are the only realistic position for me to hold at this time.

But I will keep my eyes open and my ears alert. There’s still more to learn.

Peace to all humans.

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bloodybells1 · 11 months

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Farewell?

Hi Carlos!

What a pleasure Private Earth! Really. I am not a professional in the music industry, so my opinion is just the result of my emotions.

The whole album is gentle and at times joyful! Desert Flora is addictive (okay, pass me the term please, but it's almost a shamanic trance, I love getting carried away by the rhythmic component!). I love then, how Rising Mountain is such a sunny, positive, and fresh release.

But there is one moment in the entire album that has continued to speak to me, for hours, like an echo.

And I can even tell you exactly when it is. Everything begins with a dialogue between the different instruments; a dialogue made up of "words," silences, pauses, exchanges. Then, minute 7:27… it's like a hug, a moment that I would call indulgent and poetic. It's on Ancient Lake.

One last thing: I . . . read your new personal essay "A Farewell to Armbands".

It's really touching.

I don’t deny that I felt a certain contrast between the sweetness of Private Earth, which I had just listened to, and the (at times) raw words of what I had read. The healing power of music.

Yours,

Someone Sweet

———- ———- ———- ———-

Dear Someone Sweet,

I am so happy to hear that Moment 727—shall we call it that?—has found its way to your heart.

When I was composing “Ancient Lake” at the piano I went very slowly during that section. I was very inspired by Deuter, specifically his Atmospheres, an enchanting and resonant album of delicate piano and synth string arrangements. What I love about this album is its ability to conjure rich landscapes very minimally, with almost no movement. Much of the melodic material is childlike in its innocence, sometimes seeming like the simplistic lines of a lullaby. I half expect to hear the chimes of an infant’s mobile. It’s one of the album’s charms.

And Atmospheres was in the forefront of my consciousness as I labored over the chord progression beginning at Moment 727 in “Ancient Lake.” I wanted to emulate that sense of stillness, plainness, delicacy and innocence that Deuter is so good at, something so frail and delicate as to conjure the sound of the exhalation of seraphim. That this moment, Moment 727, came to you as an embrace makes me very happy: I wanted this section to be like the most ethereal caress imaginable.

Let’s face it: New Age music is limited. I say this not to criticize the genre, nor to make any special case, as I believe every music is limited, one way or another. But not every music is limited in the same way. Heavy metal, for example, is limited by its volume, intensity and cultural values: its affective disposition as an extreme engagement makes it unsuitable for a great many other avenues in life and forms of expression.

New Age has similar degrees of limitation, though manifested completely differently. It is a deeply stigmatized genre, for good and bad reasons, but one of the bad ones is for its purported simplistic musical value. It is true that musical innovation or even, I’ll grant you, sophistication, is inherently at odds with the core composition of this genre’s musical structure in general. But this is a disingenuous critique: a Hallmark card is not any less beautiful of an object for its lack of aesthetic sophistication when it is opened by the person to whom it is addressed: at that moment, fulfilling its use-value, which is to make the receiver happy, the card is one of the most beautiful things in the world. At such moments, we would not necessarily want to be greeted with the ingenious paintings of, say, a Matisse.

So, yes, its limitations are profound, though, crucially, far from disqualifying. I regard as unfortunate that its disgrace as a genre of music persists to this day, so much so that a great many contemporary New Age artists must perform ridiculous contortions in order to avoid the label. That is very sad to me.

Not all music need stand on its own. “Mere" practicality is not inherently disqualifying. So what if a music’s raison d’être is solely, as in the case of dance music, to move the feet? Then, what if it’s “merely” to calm the soul, as it is in New Age? These practical uses for music have monumental amounts of cultural value and should never contribute to a lowering of status in our eyes.

During our most vulnerable moments, or during moments when we are so overwhelmed we can barely tolerate the sound of a car passing by us, only a certain tenor of frequency may arrive at our ears in such a way as to support this delicate state, and not disrupt it. It is not a particularly interesting tenor, nor a particularly sophisticated one. But that precise tenor is nonetheless one of the only ones that will do for those moments.

Sometimes we can only hear bells, and nothing else.

Sometimes we can only hear a lone flute, and nothing else.

Sometimes our insides feel so riven with anguish and uncertainty, sometimes we are so frail, that only the simplistic sounds of this genre are tolerable.

Sometimes we are like a chick in a nest: a mere gust of wind and it’s over for us. Sometimes those rather sophisticated and interesting phrasings of a luminary of music, like Jimi Hendrix or Frank Sinatra, have too much sophistication, too much interest and too much personality for us to be able to tolerate, and those artists’ exertions become so many threatening gusts of wind tossing us out of our frail nests.

I’d venture to say that we still need a naive and jejune music such as New Age for those moments. And, as I can tell you from the relatively limited experience I have with this genre of music, it is a deceptively difficult task for music to accomplish. It is incredibly difficult to restrain oneself from being “too interesting.” Creating music that recedes to the background, but nonetheless engages with the soul, is very complicated and I am still learning more about it every day. May New Age continue to offer the solace it is designed for and which it accomplishes so well.

Perhaps by now, Someone Sweet, having read my eulogy for New Age music, you understand a little bit better this contrast which you pointed out happening between my recently published essay and my recently published album. Sometimes I wonder if I am not fashioning some sort of safe space for my soul in dedicating myself as much as I have to New Age music, given that, in my writing, I am focussed on a type of engagement that is far from the merely practical.

The writing that I am most interested in reading, and the kind I am most interested in pursuing as a craft, seeks to lock horns with a rather aggressive steed, the parts of the unconscious, both within oneself and within the larger sphere of human relations, which are hellbent on remaining unseen and unheard and will put up the bloodiest, most hostile resistance to having their truth announced to the world.

“A Farewell to Armbands” was the Somme, a titanic confrontation with the enemy in this ongoing war between the light of the self and the darkness of the unconscious. Not every one of my essays is, nor will be, so cataclysmic as this one was, but each one still has an element of that wrestling match with the dark. And there may yet be more Sommes in my future. That is what writing is for for me.

My favorite kind of writing is the kind that acts exactly as I ascribed to camp as a form of expression in the piece itself, as a kind of “hot lamp” that “cauterizes” wounds. Make no mistake, this is a dramatic and violent undertaking. And so, when we come back from this fight—a fight I would like to help as many people fight as I possibly can—we will also need to be soothed, to put the final gauze and the final unguent on the gaping wound. For me, that is not writing, where the battle takes place, but music, which should perform the necessary function of field medic. If you’ve been wounded in battle, maybe even lost a limb, you need morphine.

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bloodybells1 · 1 year

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Heavy Metal is Not Your Mascot

The modern recast of heavy metal as salubrious societal analgesic comes at the price of its originally subversive appeal.

This video came across my algorithmically determined online television viewing streaming platform—otherwise known as YouTube—earlier this afternoon and watching it made me think some more about a topic I’ve been meditating on now for a long time:

youtube

As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s listening to heavy metal, who is now an adult living well into the 21st Century, I’ve often found the ongoing evolution of the public perception of this most idiosyncratic music genre rather puzzling.

You see, I actually remember when the now laughable moral panic around heavy metal was in full swing, when the news show 2020 aired an episode about Ozzy eating a bat, about Judas Priest supposedly causing a couple of kids to shoot each other in the face and about Mötley Crüe being Satan worshippers because they put a pentagram on the cover of their second album.

I mean, anyone who was born after 1990 has got to look back at that saga and see something truly surreal. How is it that such caricatures were so compelling, so effective in scaring the well-to-do, those bourgeois patriarchs and matriarchs who today, in the age of Internet pornography and 5,678,987 television shows, are way too inundated with imagery to really be scandalized by these bespandexed dudes with long tongues? At least the McCarthy Hearings can be seen as a national security concern and therefore seem somewhat believable that it occurred, so long as you consider the country had only recently come out of a world war and its principle ally had now become a world power with a diametrically opposed economic system.

But some mumbly long haired white dude who chopped off the head of a bat in his mouth?

If a dude in America bit off the head of a bat the way Ozzy did decades ago, he’d be commandeered by the feds for gain of function research (drumroll cymbal crash I’m here all week, folks), not become the subject of a scandal. Actually a dude who chops off the head of a bat with his teeth would today more likely have a reality show than become the subject of Senate Hearings. In fact, eventually, that dude did have a reality show (more on that soon).

But the truth is that heavy metal did in fact scandalize. The satanic imagery and long hair festooning the average metal album back in the 80s, funny as it may seem to modern sensibilities, did actually have the power to shock, no matter the quaintness of the moral panic by today’s standards. For myself growing up as a teenager in the late 80s, the sight of a grown man with a big mane, an electric guitar and a leather jacket signified an authentically antiauthoritarian pose and an effective political tool that communicated independence and freethinking. But the only way that it was actually able to signify all of that relied on its counterdependent effect on pearl-clutching conservative adults. Without the ability to scandalize, disturb and deregulate the affect of the authoritarian class, we teenage underlings had no power. If we couldn’t scare anyone, it’d be like a milquetoast haunted house, not anything to worry about and therefore not worthy of notice.

But this ability to serve as the bugbear for conformist interests could also acquire a specifically dialectical manifestation. You didn’t just have to turn it up to eleven to get people’s attention, you could also speak your mind, something that some of the more articulate members of the “movement,” if we can even call it that, like Dave Mustaine and Alice Cooper, made a habit of doing during interviews. I have a vivid recollection of being moved out of my seat in 1985 at the sight of Dee Snider, curly mop swinging from his head, entering the committee hearings that Tipper Gore put on for the purpose of those warning labels that are now ubiquitous on extreme music catalogs, mostly on hip-hop records (perhaps an early version of the now common trigger warning). He entered a room full of suits and politicians and on national television read aloud his prepared notes, decrying censorship and governmental overreach. In the following interview conducted by the committee—which, funnily enough, included Al Gore—Snider was charming, funny and intelligent, totally comfortable in front of DC legislators and, more importantly, persuasive in his defense of the moral imperative of his way of life.

The importance of that particular moment for me is difficult to overstate. More so than even the weekly diet of videos on Headbanger’s Ball every Saturday night, the event of Twisted Sister’s frontman speaking truth to power on network television transformed my sense of what it meant to stand up for personal autonomy. Something about the juxtaposition of an articulate voice with a rebellious mien, like a Hell’s Angel with a PhD, floored me and shook me deeply: it made me believe in the necessity for heavy metal to be undergirded by an ideology, one that needed to be clearly defended using the lexicon of the “oppressor” against the oppressor and deployed by a member of the tribe. From that point forward heavy metal was for me a political device, not just a fantastic type of music, but a rhetorical quiver in a bow, a language and style comprising a disruptive affect designed to incense the neighbors.

And it worked. After I grew my hair, stuck some pins on my denim jacket and ripped my jeans, I started having the impact I so desired. I made all the adults around me angry. All the teachers hated me. Every single grown person’s eye looked at me askance and clutched their children when they saw me walking down the block. And the reason why this all worked was because, back then, before our pop culture became recycled and regurgitated and remixed and mashed up over and over again, before the Internet made every new thing only yet another layer on a cultural palimpsest, heavy metal still had the ability to shock. There still were pockets in every suburb of every state suffused in middle class propriety with nary a flower pointing in the off direction, a purist fantasy more than easily defiled by the angry decibels of a car stereo blasting Iron Maiden.

But what happens when this all changes? What happens when the Pope of Evil himself, the chiropteran eater, the Pablo Escobar of the offense cartel, one Ozzy Osbourne, reinvents himself as a lovable, hapless, perfectly innocent pater familias within that most innovative medium known as the reality show? What does it say about the political device of heavy metal when its chief icon, who for a whole decade was seen as the black void of all morality, becomes normalized, through one of the most commercial mediums in television, as merely another version of modernity’s companionate figure, the flawed-but-well-meaning father?

I think what happens is what’s in that video I started off this post talking about. What happens is the evolution of a once disruptive force into a kind of medicinal compost, a panacea for the legions of stressed subjects littering the manifold of capitalist relations in the new millennium, a political device turned into a therapeutic regimen. In the world of this video, where psychologists may opine with straight faces about the salubrious properties of heavy metal music, Ozzy Osbourne is no longer the archetype of evil he once truly represented, but an avuncular wizard with John Lennon spectacles, promising peace and harmony, all while—quietly—socially reproducing the specter of the beloved nuclear family.

You might say that heavy metal is an example of that over-referenced business phenomenon, that is, the proverbial “victim of its own success.” It so captivated a whole generation of people, mostly Gen Xers, who’re by now all grown up, that these people have successfully, through shows like Stranger Things, influenced the subsequent generations’ curiosity for analog culture and managed to keep metal alive as a hotbed of durable cultural properties, though with the necessary consequence of deracinating it from any of its originally subversive potential.

It’s true that authentically subversive metal continues to live on in the diaspora of micro-niche territories for which YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify serve as the main platforms. Metal lives on, chiefly in the form of an extremely diversified field of thousands of new artists, many of whom have serious artistry and talent.

The video above is in fact accurate: metal doesn’t so much as shock or disrupt as it catalyzes self-improvement through extreme ritual. There’s a very strong case to be made for the spiritual benefits that extreme imagery have on society. In Hinduism, the displays of icons of evil gods in front of one’s homes is encouraged, something poet Robert Bly calls “embracing the Shadow.” By this reading, an embrace of the lifestyles and rituals in heavy metal fandom constitutes a successful invitation of the darker energies inhabiting all spheres of human experience and which we ignore at our own peril.

But the real sting is gone. The heavy metal of my adolescence was not a normalized construct which could be favorably documented for its restorative and spiritual potential. It was a terrifying and disruptive weapon that’d been placed in the hands of youths who were in desperate need to announce their personal autonomy. In my own case this took on the aspect of a need to set expectations around the adults in my life. I was to be understood not as a normal kid but as a self-described hellion and my manner of dress and musical taste reflected this desire to offend and frighten for the purpose of stating my preferred manner of being treated by adults, as someone who would not follow their prescriptions, values and career recommendations.

Maybe I’m just falling victim to the natural tendency for older folks to chafe at the loss of their beloved value environments. “These kids,” and so forth. I will say that if you haven’t yet, please read Freddie DeBoer’s essay on the 90s because it makes a very strong case for why this might not actually be the case. It is true that the innocence of several decades ago looks positively embarrassing by today’s standards, especially when coupled with the decadence and optimism of new media in the 1980s (see “Looks that Kill”). Furthermore, the notion of heavy metal as an authentic political device is severely problematized by the hegemonic impact of its mostly white, male and, way too frequently, nativist, affect. It can be said that the primary maxim in heavy metal of the freedom to flout the rules is merely a reproduction of a Eurocentric, masculinized “freedom” to thrive in the patriarchal caste system it relies on for its special privileges (see Disco Demolition Night). Kaleefa Sanneh has written compellingly about how the rockist critical analysis that dominated music criticism for so long is another reproduction of this narrative (click here for my review of his book Major Labels). Interestingly, this problematization itself also needs further problematization through a class lens, as heavy metal has hardly been hegemonic in its role of providing a soundtrack for working class solidarity (it’s true that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, we’re talking about a white working class solidarity, but let’s save that conversation for another post).

The idea that the public perception of heavy metal has been degraded from its originally revolutionary aspect relies on a certain element of the status quo that, since that time long ago, has greatly shifted. Cultural historian John Higgs has written powerfully about the exact nature of this shift, what he characterizes as an increase in emotional intelligence on the part of Gen Z. Read this piece he wrote about his experience watching one of the most beloved Gen X cultural properties, one that is situated perfectly with the zeitgeist of heavy metal’s classic 80s period, The Breakfast Club. To Higgs, having watched the film with a bunch of Gen Z kids led him to believe that this film, whose Bender protagonist so represented the deepest aspirations of nonconformists like myself, “no longer makes sense at all to modern teenagers.” It’s difficult to disagree with his analysis. Please do yourself a favor and read it (it’s short).

The meaningful difference between the two eras being discussed here, the era of my adolescence and the era of the microdoc YouTube video I posted above, lies in the fact that adults are no longer being treated suspiciously by adolescents. This makes perfect sense when you consider that those of us who grew up during the 80s were experiencing a transitional period in between a paternal model of development and our modern companionate model. Heavy metal music was a perfect vehicle to defy the paternalistic encroachment of the adults who were still stuck in a pre-Elvis era of puritanical conformity. This isn’t the time or place to fully flesh out what I believe might be troubling about some aspects of the companionate model. But I think it’s beyond doubt that, in sheer terms of critical awareness and empathic response, Gen Z are miles ahead of Gen X, and that is something to take note of, especially for what it says about family relations. Interestingly, this advent has done little to stay the epidemic of mental illness among this cohort, though the causes and correlations of that are likely found in different arenas than in the family (ahem, Instagram, ahem).

I will admit that it’s pretty clear that the revolutionary affect of the heavy metal of my teenage years appears more like a counterrevolutionary force in the present day. For a truly revolutionary art, punk music is a far more effective entity than heavy metal. Perhaps it was heavy metal’s more central provenance within the historical line of rock music that I found so persuasive back then. Unlike the zine pamphleteering and Xerox iconography of social unrest directly visible in punk music’s propaganda, heavy metal made a more mainstream case: it was a broader movement than anything punk could hope to muster. It’s interesting to consider that punk was popular only in its more tepid incarnations in college rock and Grunge while heavy metal could attain wide popularity with relatively less devaluation of its subversive content.

But it’s this more broad appeal that also complicates the picture of a heavy metal music as a truly revolutionary force.

At the same time, it’s hard for me to take seriously the idea that heavy metal today is to be lauded for its spirituality and therapeutic effects. The zeitgeist might have shifted to better, more humanistic environs. But heavy metal should not be regarded as the feisty commercialist mascot to a self-help movement.

#Youtube

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bloodybells1 · 1 year

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My Very First Colonoscopy

It’s definitely an aging milestone when your doctor tells you it’s time for a colonoscopy.

Recently, though, it may be less so. The AMA made an adjustment to its advisory statements on when to begin doing this procedure—they changed it to, I think, 45, from 50—and it’s a noteworthy indication that, perhaps, having a colonoscopy is not the same type of seniority signal it long has been.

Still, it’s cold comfort: there’s no way to lubricate it, when you hear the dreaded “C word” while you’re buttoning up your shirt and your doc’s typing into your file, it really means a very painful thing—you’re old.

But that wasn’t the whole of it. The news of the necessity for a colonoscopy, along with the increasing sense of my impending doom, came with an added twist: I’ve never gone under in my entire life and this procedure is not feasible without giving into a hit of propofol.

To give the reader a sense of the extent of my trepidation: when I was a teenager and had to get my wisdom teeth taken out, I opted for local anesthesia. The idea of choosing to lose consciousness was so horrifying to me that the disturbing crunch of pliers and saws on my molars, as though my mouth had turned into an active quarry, though a blood-dripping one, was deemed a less unpleasant experience than going into the deep end, losing consciousness and turning off the lights, even if only temporarily.

I know this has to do with loss of control, of course, how could it not. The act of submission to the gas is an irreducible act of trust. In essence, you are choosing to kill yourself and turn yourself into an inert mass which a bunch of specialists can then have their way with. You are trusting that these specialists will then wave some magic wand and resurrect your inanimate body from the dead, after which you somehow rise again to walk among the living.

So here it was, a moment I’d long deferred in my life, one which I’d been fortunate enough not to have needed to undergo because of anything more serious than a simple routine check for prostate cancer. I booked the date, postponed it a couple of times out of fear, and finally gave in and went to the hospital on the appointed date.

It was Colonoscopy Day at the doctor’s office and there were people coming in and out. And all of them, every single one, because they had submitted to the gas, were suicides magically restored to life. How was it possible that so much death and subsequent resurrection could occur in the span of only two hours? What kind of factory of death and reanimation was this place? My instinct told me that this event was way too major to be something that could happen at such scale. Aren’t there priests involved? Aren’t there lengthy and therefore costly rituals that must accompany these acts of suicide and sacrifice?

When my turn came and I was waiting to be ushered to the operating room after changing into scrubs, I saw the person who was ahead of me in the waiting room, a woman of probably sixty or so years, only moments before a fully ambulatory, sentient being, now dead and lifeless on a gurney being wheeled out of a room. In moments, I thought, that was going to be me. In moments, I contemplated, I will be reduced to mere matter, a pudgy assembly of tissues and bone that can be twisted about at will like a less-flexible Gumby. What horror is this life that it may include such awkward moments when some of us actually choose to become the Play-Doh of other beings.

I told the nurse how frightened I was and I think she misunderstood me because she gave me a speech about how we all fart and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. I didn’t have the energy to clarify. I was too anxious to think straight enough to tell her that I’m not embarrassed about what my body does but that I’m terrified that in a couple minutes I will be nothing but a body. But I took solace in the care and attention and sympathy she showed me and was grateful that her newly sacerdotal function was motioning me gently over to the other side. The air in the room had the tenor of the electric chair and last meals.

When the doctor came in he noticed that I’d brought the book I was reading into the operating room with me, something not all that common. I had thought that perhaps if I were distracting myself with my reading while the gas was introduced that I’d be spared the terror of knowing I was about to die. He inspected the cover and took note of the title: The Cultural Roots of National Socialism. I was reading this book as a primer for an essay I was writing about the German side of my family who were up and about in Bavaria during World War II. This book, long out of print, is a fascinating collection of the historical paraphernalia in Germany that, when all put together, paint an ominous picture of the state of the public German consciousness before the arrival of Hitler. In particular, it is an unsparing condemnation of the petit-bourgeois of Germany, whose middling cultural understanding and brutish jingoism and cruel antisemitism all but paved the way for the Nazis to take over.

I’m uncertain the doctor was able to glean all that from the title, though. He seemed puzzled by having to confront the words “National Socialism” just before administering a routine rectal probe.

Nonetheless, the book saved me, though not in the way I had originally intended. Being the chider, the doctor asked me to spell Mussolini backwards. I was too nervous to even get to the “L” and so he said, “Let me make it easier: spell ‘Czechoslovakia’ backwards, will you?” The gas was introduced (really it was an injection of liquid solution). I resumed my attempt to spell backwards. I didn’t make it to “V.”

Then, seemingly five seconds later, I heard the words, “Mr. Dengler, are you awake?” and when I arose from the dead I was so overjoyed that I started laughing out loud, joyously, for having been given the opportunity to live again. Soon, the doctor came in to give me the all-clear and I had to ask him what word he’d asked me to spell because I couldn’t even remember it. “Czechoslovakia” he said and disappeared behind the curtain to go kill someone else.

Pema Chodron writes in the indispensable When Things Fall Apart that we must look to all the things in life that resemble death for the meaning of death. We are already quite familiar with dying by the time it ultimately comes for us, she writes. With every passing year there is a death. Every passing breath is a micro-death. Breaking up with someone is a death. Saying good-bye to a loved one, even if only for an afternoon, is a type of death. Death is everywhere. There is death to be had in all of waking life if only we look for it, a familiarity that will teach us how to die when the moment of the ultimate sleep comes for us.

I am not 50, though I will be before I know it. So will you, even if you’re only in your twenties as you read this. In the grand scheme of things, even the deaths of Caesar, Socrates and Jesus Christ happened really only just yesterday. I have crossed a threshold in hearing the doctor refer me to a colonoscopist. I am now that much closer to the ultimate passing. I passed a big sign that read “The Grim Reaper, This Way” with a big arrow pointing in that direction. There’s something oddly comforting to me about this, a comfort made really tangible by the convincing simulation of death that came with the enforced losing of consciousness before the procedure. I have a little taste now of what it’s like to pass over to another state, one where the sharply demarcated lines of ego consciousness simply don’t abide. There’s a bliss in that and I think I now get it when I read stories of Bodhisattvas passing into the night of the unconscious with little smirks on their faces.

In order to be let out of the hospital I had to have a friend come and pick me up and sign me out. Apparently it’s a state law that someone who’s gone under needs a more conscious being to vouch for them. After he signed me out and we walked out of the hospital, still rubbing my eyes, my friend and I went to go have lunch. He was performing as Bernard in the late ’22 revival of Death of a Salesman on Broadway. We talked about this wonderful crossroads he had now passed: he was officially a Broadway actor now. Just by coincidence a high-end deli had opened around the corner and the owners had invited the cast to christen the new establishment, so that’s where we went to eat. My friend introduced me to Wendell Pierce who was playing Willy Loman. It was a distinct pleasure to shake hands with such an incredible talent and durable presence in our culture such as Wendell only minutes after some flexible, thin probe had concluded its investigation of my colon.

I sat with my friend and we talked. Then we went to check out the new location of Drama Book Shop. Soon, we parted ways. He would go to the theater and catch a nap before his evening performance. I went home to get back to my dogs and my work. It was another day of life.

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bloodybells1 · 1 year

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Fame is a Hologram

I remember feeling something funny when I realized that I’d become famous, something akin to a change in climate, like an afternoon breeze had come in. I could sense a shift in certain events which up until then had at times felt confusing or even frustrating and were now much more fluid.

Depending on the time of day and the neighborhood I was walking around in, the heads of passerby, whereas before they seemed oblivious to my bodily existence, now would suddenly turn in my direction—or, if there were two, inwards to each other while giddily whispering.

Depending on the restaurant, the maitre’d who greeted me, whereas before they arched their eyebrow slightly in suspicion, now curled the sides of their mouth and found me a conspicuously available table.

Depending on the venue, the celebrity at the event, whereas before they attended to their careful script of aloofness, now “recognized” me, graciously drew the veil on their mask of indifference and greeted me by my first name.

In many places it seemed like some particularly unhealthy weather pattern had suddenly shifted over to a tropical climate.

The word “recognition” comes from the Latin recognoscere which, transliterated, comes out to “know again” (re + cognoscere). In the Middle Ages, the verb form meant “resume possession of land” and was related to the Old French reconoistre, which looks a lot like “reconnoiter.” The verb was a back formation of “recognizance,” which meant “a bond acknowledging some obligation binding one over to do some particular act” and a little later, “acknowledgment of subjection or allegiance,” as to God or some other type of power or entity.

There seems to be an element of contractual obligation to the etymology. Perhaps our modern usage comes from this: recognition implies an aspect of objectivity. There’s a corroboration that establishes fact, like eyewitness testimony.

If someone “recognizes” you, most often that’s due to having made a previous acquaintance or maybe simply having seen someone repeatedly in the neighborhood. When they recognize you, they are affirming a correspondence (“know again”) between the present and the past, between the you that is right here in front of them and the you that was there before.

Lindsay Lohan knows she is being recognized, being associated with some part of her past, when someone approaches her with a pen and paper. When Charlie Sheen turns a corner on LaBrea and is briefly recognized by an onlooker who happened to catch his passing visage he may not know for sure if he was recognized in that moment, though he would likely place a bet on it if given the opportunity. And when Kanye West offers to consumers of apparel the knowledge of his enthusiasm for contretemps, he may very well be doing so specifically as a reaction to his understanding of his own recognition.

I recall the personal delectation I took in scandalizing interviewers. After a bit of practice it got to the point that I knew somewhere within me I was generating “good copy.” My words would be reproduced in print afterwards and I began to expect that I could hear those words echoed back to me in real life. It felt like I was being heard.

Orson Welles once revealed the secrets of the psychics on a talk show by demonstrating how unconscious is the process by which someone learns to say the right things. Psychics, apparently, are not entirely aware that they are learning a sophisticated skillset, but the rewards are sufficient to reinforce the behavior and they learn to continue it.

The word “recognition” has an interesting sense. Not all artists seek fame outright, but it’s not a stretch to say the overwhelming majority seek recognition. Certainly, the accruing of social capital that comes with celebrity—and which is reinforced by the kind of mass bodily recognition that happens in informal settings like supermarkets—is one of the least displeasurable facets of the experience of fame. But ask any artist, struggling or otherwise, what kind of recognition they hope for and you will likely hear more about the virtues of communication, of relation, of the feeling of placement, of the endowment of honors. In our putatively democratic era these concerns have been deemed empty and frivolous, even déclassé, though during more hierarchical times anxieties such as these around provenance and status had a much more concrete valence. They were seen as perfectly noble goals.

The tension between recognition and fame is what lends cases like Lohan and Sheen and West a degree of tragedy. The pursuits of recognition and fame both comprise essential aspects of the human experience. But recognition, not fame, seems to aspire beyond the confines of the isolated self, seems to persist by dint of a more ennobling cause. Questions of legacy, like questions of family, relate to what happens after we’re gone. These seem like completely legitimate concerns. On the other hand, fame is much more ephemeral and can have a tantalizing, even destructive, effect. Those who fall from grace sometimes seem to choose it, for they know, especially now with the immortal internet, they at least can never fall from fame. Even the ones forgotten by mortals may expect Wikipedia to remember.

At some point in time in my tenure in the spotlight I realized I was about to enter a space I wouldn’t ever be able to leave, a type of Rubicon crossing. I came to have a premonition of some sealed door slamming shut behind me, after which I would be forced to contend for the rest of my life with the hologram of fame that had run before my eyes for several years at that point. I had come to see that whatever apparition the public had been recognizing in me as my body made its way through the world had almost nothing to do with the very real person in whose likeness that media-transmitted apparition had been created. My hologram preceded me everywhere.

I’m always impressed by the Meryl Streeps of the world, who seem to gracefully tango with their apparitions. For the innumerable multitude of photographic facsimiles of Meryl that exist in the universe, she appears as someone who has kept knowledge of the corporeal self, the body and the mind, and cordoned it off from public influence. I heard once that she to this day insists on doing her own laundry. This insistence in doing something seemingly inessential is likely what keeps the integrity of the boundary between herself and the world.

She’d likely made a different decision than I’d made. When she saw that she was about to cross that Rubicon, she did so with the full knowledge that this was her lot for the rest of her life and had knowledge of a certain discipline which would enable her to police what would assuredly be a lifetime of tension between the public and the private selves.

I knew that I had no such discipline.

Yet I also knew, as I think a great so many others don’t have the opportunity to know, that, if I didn’t turn around, if I didn’t take my last chance to take the boat back to the mainland of the more average person, that I would likely grow insane from overexposure to my famous hologram, that I would seek to play with it, toy with it and manipulate it, like my very own “precious,” take enjoyment in seeing how the tiniest alterations to my hologram causes so many conversations, so much speculation, grants me ever more attention. I knew with what paltry self-control I would undertake these little experiments and I became mortally terrified about how addicted to it I would become.

Russell Brand is a bit of a lay addiction expert and has likened the experience of fame to the experience of addiction and he is not incorrect. The sense in which one must treat the experience of recognition as a potential threat to one’s health is what makes fame such a poorly understood phenomenon: it is the most rewarding of addictions and no less for its ability to economically sustain all who surround it. Yet it’s that sustenance, along with society’s cratering into image, into Debord’s “spectacle,” that complicates a better understanding and appreciation of fame’s destructive capacities.

I aver that the cultural obsession with the Wests of the world is missing this critical feature of fame when it undertakes its various expository summations. This would also count for the Lohans of the world and the Sheens of the world, those who at one time or another appear consumed with manipulating their own holograms. It’s impossible to ignore the important aspects of the fetid pool they at one time in their lives stepped into. In West’s example this has to do with issues such as racism and antisemitism, not to mention the obvious fact of his mental illness.

Yet I’m struck how little I hear about the effect of his fame. If Brand is right and fame is indeed an addiction, then a conversation about West’s illness would require an understanding of his fame.

Ten years after the fact, I still obsess over it, playing images in my mind, recalling salad days and glory years, kicking myself for not having the resources of Streep, cursing my lot for being saddled with the deficits of West, reminiscing over the time I had in front of my hologram, marveling over this gift, this “precious,” God had given me which had such sway in the world. I could generate a week’s worth of controversy with the push of a button! What power!

It’s no surprise it would have such a lasting imprint. Bowie dramatized his own crossing of the Rubicon in “Fame,” the vinegar-infused paean that served to purge him of the stresses of the new life he’d gained with his Ziggy success. I am no lyricist and could not piece it together this way. Instead, I write about it, as now.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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25 Ways to do Drugs: Number 9

A man directs a movie, and then another, and then another, until he amasses a reputation as a creator of gritty, urban, depraved, subversive cinema. Then one night he swipes my shoulder with the back of his hand demanding one more twenty to take with him to his cocaine dealer and in this moment his fiction has become his reality.

Am I wrong if I hold him to a higher standard of retaining distance from his creations than the one I abide for my own creations? I see myself as an avatar, my body is my canvas. Rock music is a type of performance art, a bloodsport (it was, at least), and my habits are merely elements in that narrative of performative dissolution. Yet, somehow I see a film director differently.

SETTING:

Luna Lounge was anomalous in the Ludlow Street pantheon of bohemian watering holes that were my semi-adult Disneyland for close to a decade, a convivial and spacious locale with a very uncool foosball table in front and a mediocre stage in a back room. The drinks were cheap and usually free when Dudley, a fellow party-er and erstwhile Interpol touring keyboardist, was bartending. Walking in was to unload from the annoying patter of hipness that were places like the across-the-street Max Fish which lured tourists and wannabes with its reputation as a ground zero for cool dudes. Luna Lounge was not a club in which one made appearances like these. It was a second home in which one put on slippers.

THE EVENT:

The director had been invited by a friend to come hang out and perhaps coordinate a separate visit with his dealer. To this day I haven’t seen all his movies, but the ones I have I adore for their merciless balancing act between the sacred and the profane—though, as far as what goes on on the screen, one would be hard pressed to find particularly memorable instances of the former.

I’d seen pictures of him before, a strong, square-jawed mien, as gritty as his flicks. But I’d never heard him before and hearing him demand that I give him another twenty dollar bill was to hear the raspy extension of an image that I’d already known though his work and his likeness. After I pulled a bill out of my wallet and he grabbed it, he hunched over to count the wad. He looked hard at work, as he might’ve looked talking to a DP on set, discussing an angle. He disappeared and reappeared with powder. In 3D, the mystique was now finally complete.

Interpol had once played a secret show at Luna Lounge, though I can’t recall when that happened on the timeline. Paul Banks, Interpol’s singer, was here on this particular night and, though he was a frequent patron, his presence was nonetheless notable. His presence was always notable for the intensity towards questions of procurement it tended to provoke. Only when Paul was absent did I feel at leisure to decide whether or not cocaine was to become a point of interest.

There’s something of a fever that takes hold when the question of cocaine is raised among a group of drunkards with no alarm clocks to obey. It’s like a horserace where the steeds are separate elements of a fun night: one steed is the bar, the other is the booze, another is the music on the jukebox, still another is the vibe of the crowd and so on. The steeds compete with each other and one of them is the winner the drunks all talk about the next day. Cocaine is one of the steeds but more often than not it’s the slow one, the one bringing up the rear that no one pays attention to. Until certain conditions take hold, like when some of the other steeds start lagging. Then all of a sudden Devil’s Dandruff starts overtaking horses and everyone starts taking notice and placing bets and yelling and jumping off their seats until finally at the finish line she arrives and everyone screams.

This night was one such horserace.

Dudley’s girl, Maggie, was there, a beautiful New Zealander who modeled and who, along with Dudley, did her part from time to time to reenact upsetting scenes from Sid and Nancy, complete with flying vessels.

Her mother was there, too. Which upset me. As a rule, these habits were for me the markers of prolonged adolescence, ritualistic simulacra of truancy and disobedience. That was the reason I so compulsively debased myself and others trying to drink all night and get laid, so that I could bolster the identity of the kid who did what he wanted, never mind how old he’s actually becoming (was I now 32, already?). But in order to sustain that illusion we couldn’t have any adults around participating which would immediately puncture the bubble with reality.

Paul, Maggie, Dudley, Maggie’s mother, the director, the director’s friend and me jumped into the handicapped bathroom to pass around the fresh bags of powder and during the extended holdup of the facility the director started making passes at the mother. Half an hour later the mother fell off her stool and the director was helping her up and the sight of an internationally acclaimed cineaste helping a middle-aged woman to a high chair while both of them breathed in a potent cloud of inebriation redolent with yeast and nicotine instead of doing something more wholesome like possibly getting married and starting a family was too much for me to bear.

What is it like when a newbie private looks up at the top brass and sees the costs of years fighting wars? Maybe it’s like what I felt at that moment. It was one of many chills I often experienced during the relatively brief time I spent being a party monster, frigid spells that I can only say today seem like communiqués from God, warnings about my ability to weather the dangers of proceeding down this path.

Though I don’t know for sure, the director heeded whatever warnings he must’ve been getting after that night. He’s still putting out pictures. I went to see one of them recently and thought it lacked the gusto of his earlier work but I didn’t fault it for that because it was much more imaginative and meditative than any of his previous work, all of which I consider to be a hallmark of maturity. I can only hope that that maturity translates to his being.

I can’t imagine that the beast one channels putting depraved images on a canvas is a particularly docile creature. Some of us come to know this sick boy within us, this shadow of pestilential visions lurking within all humans, and invite him to the table, as that director appeared to have been doing on that night—as I did regularly during all of my afterparties. But this fecund guest whom we refuse to leave in the back shed, as civilization had done for centuries, whom we regularly invite into our homes so that we can get to know it better, so that it may inspire us to continue to depict the infernal with verisimilitude, will one day betray us. It is a wild creature and can never be tamed. And for that we all need to learn tactics. David Lynch uses TM to quell the beast he has regularly summoned to help him produce the tawdry scenes of his camera’s eye. That’s just one example.

I guess I was surprised that the director was letting the wolf off the leash that night. I hadn’t assumed that it was possible to make movies showing wolves off leashes while one had an actual one off a leash. I assumed as much in my case because I believed that, as a rockstar, I was an avatar of destruction. I believed it was part of my job to walk around with a wolf off its leash. But didn’t directors have greater responsibilities? Don’t they have to meet with producers and higher-ups all the time and wouldn’t that get complicated with a man-eating beast around?

The bubble punctured that night. The reality set in. We were a bunch of drunks. There was little more to say than that afterwards. There was no magic in the air. For a moment, even art was lost. There was only a hungry wolf lurking around, terrifying the guests.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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On Your Marx

“How many different translations of Das Kapital does a man need?”

-my Aunt Martha

I recently paid a much overdue visit to my uncle who lives in Bogotá. The last time I was in Colombia, where a good chunk of my family resides, was in the mid-aughts, back when the aspect of the man I was greeted my family with a different mixture than today. They knew me as a nephew or a cousin, depending on who we’re talking about, who managed to become wildly successful in the music industry and they also knew me as someone with a slightly jaundiced complexion. The two were not unrelated, of course.

My aunt—married to my uncle who is the brother of my mother—has confirmed this impression, if perhaps without the hyperbole I’m certain the above paragraph contains. All she really said was that today, as compared with that erstwhile visit from over a decade-and-a-half, I seem to be a much more open human being, owing perhaps slightly to my greater facility with the Spanish language, but not exclusively so. There’s been a change, she said.

I mention this anecdote because it illustrates most directly how wonderful it is in life when time passes and someone confirms that change has indeed occurred. I may be more restless than average, but, regardless, it seems to be a universal truth that life is about change, so it’s good when there’s proof.

My uncle is a respected political scientist in Colombia and was instrumental in “El Proceso de Paz” and it was easy to detect all this in the way his impromptu lectures unfolded over the first handful of evenings I spent at his house the other week. He has that steady diction of a professor well-accustomed to spontaneous aggregates of clauses and arguments and he deploys rhetorical devices, such as self-questioning aloud, that move his cases forward. I learned more about Colombian history from him during the first part of my stay than in my entire life, along with my own family’s involvement with it.

I’ll write about the particulars of that involvement some other time. Today I’m enjoying looking at the image I’ve pasted at the top of this blog post. This is the view afforded by my uncle’s desk in his study.

As an artist I often question why I’m so drawn to politics. I am especially inquisitive about this recently, as my art has sought to evoke much quieter spaces, such as wilderness settings, than the boisterous and contentious atmospheres that characterize the political sphere. When I engage in political discussions, whether on Twitter or while talking with neighbors, I notice immediately the much more piquant vibe, a saucier texture of staccato rhythms and higher blood pressure, than, say, the singing bowl tintinnabulation of all of my meditation music and nebulous sound baths.

Why, then, do my interests in ideological contestation persist?

I think it’s just the way I’m made. Thanks to my father, I grew up suffused in politics. He was adamant about checking the progress of what he saw as liberal propaganda in the schools and on the television with the alternative framework of his conservative vision. Mostly this turned out to verge on the paranoiac and was almost singularly trained on the illumination of the moral failings of the liberal world view. I grew up with a steady stream of “owning the libs” rhetoric, before that was even a thing.

Sadly for him, his worldview could not compete with the persuasive power of modern media and education, both of which turned out to factor greatly into my turn to the left in my late teens.

I started out on the right and not just because of my dad. Patriarchy and racism were part and parcel of the working class Elmhurst, Queens of the ‘80s which was my home, along with the “small town” car mechanic culture I aligned with in the New Jersey suburbs as a metalhead in the early ‘90s.

Then a real big change happened when Grunge swept through the zeitgeist, when I ditched my suddenly uncool headbanger threads and got interested in more “real” musics which were becoming fashionable in the wake of Seattle’s incursion such as punk-hardcore. The friends I kept in this new circle were decidedly anti-racist—if not entirely non-patriarchal—and were instrumental in ushering me towards the pursuit of a more leftist politics than what I had known up to that point. When I read Kurt Cobain’s slightly hysterical antiracist/antisexist manifesto in the liner notes of In Utero, Nirvana’s follow-up to Nevermind, I hear an echo of the same unease I felt with being connected to a scene with a much more regressive politics than I had come to appreciate by hanging out with all of these leftist punks.

What I learned at that juncture basically stayed unchanged for about twenty years. I went around thinking I was very leftwing, not even aware of how I’d really only learned to appreciate a rather topical issue. Being on the leftwing side of cultural issues is only half of the puzzle, but I still didn’t know that all those years.

I stayed this way until 2020 when I discovered Bernie Sanders and the last vestige of my class interests dominating my politics cracked. I had noticed a sharp drop in my sense of status when I left the music industry and this was fairly traumatic for my ego. I’m still learning from this occurrence—even to this day. I think the reason why I’m so attracted to socialism is because of what that trauma made painfully clear to me: that the higher status I experienced in the music industry occluded my awareness of my own class interests. Socialism, then, with its rational deconstruction of the way social relations are defined by, and occluded by, capital, feels quite logical to me.

I’m struck by the difference between my politics today and the last time I saw my uncle all those years ago. Though I’d been a liberal for quite some time by that point, I still couldn't even define “leftism” back then. The spiritual change in myself that my aunt Martha noticed and took pains to point out correlates with a political one: despite my liberalism (or, some would say, because of it) my class interests when she first saw me over fifteen years ago dominated my politics. I read the New York Times every day and believed every neoliberal word that jumped out of the page. I could only see in the binary of left and right a difference in culture and failed to see the much more troubling economic consensus of class interests between both the left and the right that characterizes that paper’s program. In other words, when I looked at the above image over my uncle’s desk, I saw only a dude in a long beard and knew very little of the radicalism behind his thought, how Marxism demolishes the neat binaries of mainstream media.

Unlike my father, my uncle had no say in my turn to the left, the more recent, much more authentic, turn I have taken. Or, if he did, it was all rather indirect. The internal reverberations of the things I learned on this trip to Bogotá about my family’s political history, on the Colombian side, my mother’s side, are going to echo within me for a long time. Yet, already, I can see something that has happened conclusively and maybe it’s something that actually points out of the political arena, to a truth about what it means to be part of a family in general.

For if there is indeed an invisible line that ties us to our blood relations and to our ancestors and to our descendants, if there is some kind of spiritual thread that binds members of clans together, irrespective of narrative or persuasion, something, that is, ontological which links us as members of the same family, irrespective of conscious awareness, such that one might be able to talk with objectivity of family curses and family spells and family spirits, if all of this is indeed true, then it was with some wonderful recognition of the homecoming of a journey that I was able to see this poster hanging up on the wall in front of my uncle’s desk and notice that, independently of any possible influence he could’ve had over the last fifteen years, I had connected with a spirit within me that was older than I was.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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What I'm reading, June, 2022

Already by page 10 and I’m in a world of such specific—though somewhat airy—subjectivity that I’m convinced once again just how easy it is for a reader to feel at home within the solipsistic realms of writers daring to make such marvelous furniture out of their thoughts, feelings and perceptions. It’s like a magic trick that, rather than making us awestruck over some supernatural occurrence, makes all that is actually outside of the trick—the “trick” here being the conjuring of a subjective world by the memoirist—the uncanny thing, as opposed to the dependable, canny one we think is this more quotidian world.

I’m consumed by the thrill of continuing to read this book and am so looking forward to closing it on its final page just before I leave for Alaska so that the week I shall spend amidst the tundra and the permafrost will be imbued with the freshly opened spaces this book is already inserting into my consciousness. I leave for this epic trip next weekend. I expect it to be even more transformative as a result of having finished this book.

Already it convinces me that I’m on the right path with my own writing, that the time I am taking to make sure I get my own book right is being well-spent, that the patience I’m forcing upon myself to allow myself to get inspired along the way, so that I may be in a space that permits of these types of expressions, rather than constituting my genuflection to some frustrating holdup, is actually a well-meaning effort at enriching the exercise of writing the best possible book. I suspect that one such best possible book lies waiting for my page-turning fingers this week..

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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What I'm hearing, June, 2022

youtube

It may strike you as silly, but, at least in the case of Master of Puppets, it’s possible for these 8-bit renderings, which you can find all over YouTube, to reveal previously obscured facets of the overall brilliance of a given work.

It truly is a strange feeling to sit through the entirety of these Metallica covers, performed by basically a hacked Nintendo Entertainment System and, not only fail ever to get distracted from it or get bored by it, but also come to understand that much of the magic of this album is a matter of superhuman precision as much as it is of titanic heaviness.

Because if there’s one takeaway after consuming the entirety of Master of Puppets, a la the plastic homogeneity of a symphony of identical sawtooth waves, it’s the conspicuous feeling that almost nothing is lost when you reduce these particular overridden harmonics to their most basic ingredients this way. It’s like how an adaptation for piano of a grand Bach concerto might reveal compositional gems you wouldn’t notice with the entire orchestra banging away in a concert hall.

I’ve never been able to really understand what has made this album so unlike others in its genre. Is it the morbidity of the lyrics and themes? Is it the sheer bombast of its guitars? Is it the careful logic of its sequencing and song duration? Is it the production, the manner in which the recording captures the musical ingenuity in such a transparent way?

Despite the fact of all of those things, I’m venturing to say now that it’s actually something else, something which breaking down the Viking stature of the sonics of this album to a level perhaps best understood as the sound of chipmunks with Casio keyboards covering Metallica demonstrates more clearly than any deep dive into amplifiers, guitar pickups or picking technique could ever reveal.

The guilelessness of those Nintendo chipmunks reveals that all along what made this album so transformative was not its heaviness but actually its indefatigable thrust and its razor sharpness, elements both of which are retained in this cruder setting. The fact of that retention is what reveals the essence. That thrust and sharpness, that insistent, metronomic, precise execution, along with the Baroqueness of its sophisticated harmonic palette, is much more pronounced by the performance of the chipmunks and I would venture to say that is a very strange thing indeed.

If all you have is the most basic of sound generators, essentially a crude circuit board which today’s technology renders laughably antique, but the essence of an album is nonetheless carried through, then I think you’ve made a strong case—not for a noteworthy heavy metal album, but for a noteworthy piece of musical ingenuity that happens to be a heavy metal album.

And I think it’s that fact that makes this album a cut above the rest.

#Youtube

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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JUNE UPDATE

Jersey vibes acomin’ . . . .

For the upcoming publication of New Jersey Fan Club, a wonderful anthology I have the pleasure to have contributed to, I will be participating in a reading in Asbury Park, NJ on Friday, June 17th, which, if I’m not mistaken, is the actual release date for the book!

If you’re a New Jerseyan and have some affection for the state, pick up a copy of the book at bookshop.org , or any other independent book seller, and subscribe to the editor’s wonderful and influential newsletter, Jersey Collective by clicking here.

Life on Mars

Well, the newfangled Mars Review of Books is now officially out and, gotta say, I’m really quite stoked to have contributed. This journal is really shaping up to be something provocative (as if the cover doesn’t already let you know!).

My essay is basically a personal essay but it’s disguised as a book review of Kalefa Saneh’s wonderful critical analysis and history of music genres, Major Labels. I’m really quite proud of this writing and I hope you pick up a copy of the journal by clicking over here. There really is some incredibly thought-provoking material in the journal. Here is the link to my essay online. You can also subscribe to the editor’s illuminating sub stack “The Machine War, or, Ab Urbit Condita" here as he unfurls the case for the Urbit computing community, a new movement within the crypto-sphere.

Watch editor-in-chief Noah Kumin discuss the journal in his usually eloquent fashion over here.

Aqueducts among us . . . .

I’m very pleased with how Aqueduct, my debut album, has been received. My goal was quite modest. I wanted to make a light footprint amongst fellow lovers of ambient and New Age music, with an eye to continuing this effort twice a year. So far so good. Thank you to all who made it possible!

Aqueduct received a lovely review on the Star's End update page which you can access here.

I will be appearing soon on the Tones and Drones podcast! Stay tuned on my Instagram or Twitter feed for the exact date and tune in to hear me talk with host Jason Miller about my creative process when I composed and recorded Aqueduct, along with other interesting topics! At one point, we took a deep dive into the spiritual value of gift-giving and I hope it makes it into his final edit because I found it to be a really lovely turn that the conversation took.

Here’re some playlists that music from Aqueduct made it onto, all really lovely compilations of some lush and relaxing New Age and ambient music out now:

One World Music Radio playlist #426

In the Stream #61

WPRB Princeton

Morning Breeze

Star’s End

I’ll be releasing a 4-track EP called Cascade sometime in early August. Specific release date will be published soon on one of my socials. Cascade will be a much more ambient effort with no percussion and a lot of open, soundscape-y sonics.

And at the end of the year I’ll be releasing my next album, Private Earth, a much more “live” sounding album with a much more active and rhythmic profile, featuring two tracks of amazing flute playing from Keith Bonner whom I recorded for Caverna on Aqueduct.

Effin’ Dads

I’m shooting a short film in early July called F**k His Dad, a story of a woman’s attempt to mend her heartbreak gone totally wrong. You guessed it, I’m playing the dad. The script by Annina Black and Julia Blauvelt is sharp, witty, funny and tragic and I’m working hard on the character they created which I hope I do justice to. I hope you can support the GoFundMe for the project by following this link here. Stay tuned for more info on where to catch a screening in the future.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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Q&A: WHAT IS TO BE DONE

A reader writes in and asks a necessary question about the state of our democracy and politics in the United States today. I am not a political theorist but I, like any citizen does, have a vested interest in discussing (some might even say a duty to discuss) our political climate. I try to give my best layman’s answer here . . . .

Dear Carlos,

The far right is gaining ground and becoming, I shudder to say it, more mainstream. With that rise is an increase in intolerance, overt racism, and violence.

Excuse my language, but what the fuck are we on the left to do? What is there to do?

What do you think it would take to galvanize the left?

Or what do you feel would precipitate the collapse of the two-party system?

-Samantha

I ask myself these questions every day. Every. Single. Day.

The reason why I take these questions so seriously is because I believe that what’s actually more important these days than trying to make an impact (sadly, the time may have already passed for that) is aligning oneself with where you believe is the most principled stand. Now is not the time for pragmatism, but for idealism. In an era where it appears we all stand a good chance of passing some rubicon past which this “experiment” in democracy no longer functions as such, finding the right course of action, as opposed to the most effective, is what I believe is what the time calls for.

But Carlos, when there’s so much at stake, shouldn’t we be looking to do the thing that best guarantees the security of our form of government, instead of aligning oneself ideologically in some camp?

Actually, let’s turn the premise of that question on its head.

Instead of thinking about our problem today as needing some best possible vantage on all of the factors and then coming up with some strategic response, let’s assume that such vantage is impossible, that things have gotten so bad that the noise overtakes the signal and it’s basically impossible to find a meaningful consensus amidst the babel of all the voices clamoring for ascendency in the collective political mind.

What then?

My view is that what then needs to happen is a deep soul search as to what one truly believes in and aligning oneself with that cause, calls for pragmatism be damned. Because if we really are just rearranging furniture on the Titanic, shouldn’t we all agree to occupy those corners which we believe in the most, if only to afford the dignity of dying for one’s own beliefs to all our fellow soon-to-be drowned companions?

That’s why it’s so important to me to take these questions as seriously as you seem to do. These are the questions of our time and we must answer them with the deepest respect to our fellow human beings, to our fellow citizens, to our fellow neighbors. Because whichever answers to these questions end up actually taking hold, they will potentially affect us all, irrespective of where you happened to stand on them.

Walter Benjamin wrote (and Slavoj Zizek loves to quote) the statement: “Behind every fascism is a failed revolution.” What that means to me is that the rise of the right is the failure of the left. The ascendent right is answering an urgent question, in my view, with a very bad response. But the question is legitimate. So, where a certain part of the political spectrum gets power because of a very bad answer to a very legitimate question, one has to ask, who let the ball drop?

For me the answer comes from Lenin, someone who, however you feel about his politics, most certainly did not drop the ball. Around the turn of the century, he wrote a pamphlet called “What is to be Done?” (which itself was based on a homonymous novel by a Russian revolutionary written in 1863), in which he laid out the strategy for making change. It called for the making of a dedicated party for the working class. Needless to say, at least in the beginning, it worked.

With Christian Smalls and the nascent Amazon Labor Union, along with all of the Starbucks unionizing and in other places seeing much needed union activity today, there is cause to hope that perhaps we might yet be able to lay out a similar path and create something approaching an authentic labor party. It's my belief that only a party unflinchingly wedded to labor is capable of offsetting the duopolistic status quo that is corroding the pipes underneath the structure of our country and which is in turn both hamstringing the hard left and bolstering the hard right. Something like a Sanders-style movement is necessary in order for any kind of real left unity. Right now, we don't have it.

You see, here’s the reason why I have joined so many on the more extreme left in an unceasing criticism of the Democratic Party. And this is a rather recent shift on my part. I cringe when I think of the complete Trump Derangement Syndrome of my early tweets in the wake of his election. To me, criticizing the Republican Party, MAGA and Trumpism is a complete dead end. It’s like criticizing the Pope for being Catholic.

You will always, always, always have an ascendent hard right when the establishment fails and ours is failing spectacularly. And in order to prevent the hard right from becoming ascendent when that establishment fails, you need a functional left wing. Which, like I said, we don’t have right now.

So in the meantime, whose ears are you going to blast your megaphone into in order to try to wake up the person behind those ears? The Republican Party? To me, that’s a waste of time. No, you must attack those who are standing in the way of the left. The hard right are too far on the other side of the political spectrum for them to be able to have much impact on the opposite side, which is the hard left. It would be like if I tried to stop a plane in Brisbane from taking off the runway by waving my arms around in Miami. We’re too far apart.

The only people standing in the way of the hard left is the establishment and the establishment right now is comprised of members of both parties and, I’d aver, more robustly by the Democratic Party.

If you believe, as I do, that only a robust left wing movement undergirded by an institution like a real labor party is the solution to the disintegration, the sinking Titanic we are all witnessing right now, then the only proper course of action is to train all of your energy on the dismantling of the iron grip of the Democratic Party. They are the ones who are throwing giant sums of money trying to stop more progressives from being elected to House seats. They are the ones who are peopling our administrations with some of the most neoliberalized apparatchiks we’ve ever seen. They are the ones who are, as Walter Shaub recently tweeted, rotating influence peddlers from the biggest law firms like a conveyer belt. The Republicans aren’t in power, so it certainly isn’t them. It's the Democratic Party.

I wish I could offer you something more optimistic. But unfortunately it's my belief that we're all in a death spiral. And this is my best answer to your question of “what is to be done.” I believe this is the right form of action because, to me, this is the way to go on the record with the gods above over having done the right thing before everything gets lit up in a blaze.

Yours sincerely

Carlos

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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Provenance and the Afterlife: a Whaleman's Anxiety

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

~Herman Melville fr. Moby Dick

To me nothing speaks more directly regarding the subconscious than the whale archetype.

Just look at the above image: like an iceberg, the greater portion is submerged. Which is very much like in our psyches. Anyone who’s been through a lot of therapy can attest to the vastness of the subconscious. Notice also the devilish eye, a crimson flare, like a possessed shark. And the open maw full of teeth, perfectly encapsulating the man-eating quality of the subconscious, the power of its great expanse swallowing you whole, that vertigo-like spell some of us in therapy have felt when it feels like we’re going to get swallowed up by some invisible monster.

This post, however, is not about the subconscious. Though, the subconscious should be by now a de rigeur entry point into Moby Dick. If the White Whale is a grand metaphor for unreachable knowledge, the object of a vainglorious quest to see what’s happening underneath, then it could be said that the novel as a whole is a stand-in for this terrible dive downwards into parts unknown. It feels criminal, then, to talk about the novel without at least throat-clearing this way.

Indeed, cetology as a proxy for analysis seems pretty straightforward here. What’s less so, however, is the above quote, which is the first sentence of Chapter 82: “The Honor and Glory of Whaling.”

The quote might be read prescriptively—and I’d totally look the other way if anyone wanted to cut and paste it onto a scrapbook for writing inspiration or any other type of prompt in the creative process.

But, when you read on throughout the chapter, it’s clear that’s not the use Melville intended.

Here’s the last sentence of the chapter, which tells you a lot of what you need to know about what the author had in mind:

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?

It’s obvious that what Melville meant by “disorderliness” was no how-to pointer for the burgeoning writer, how to “let go” and “be free” and “be creative,” say; no, I think it’s safe to say he was trafficking in the careful art of reputational management. All of those “disorderly” whalemen were in desperate need of a more positive spokesman.

Elsewhere in the novel he spends some time marshaling arguments in defense of whalemen against accusations of coarseness and criminality. In this chapter, Melville goes even further: he links the latter-day enterprise of whaling with nothing less than a hero, a legend, a saint, a demi-god and then a full-blown god! Melville might’ve been obliquely punning on the “disorderliness” of sailing culture; or maybe his own ruminative and tangentially-prone writing style; or even imputing some self-reflection to the narrator as he considers how spontaneous is his fascination with this lifestyle.

It might be any or all of those things, but the meaning is the same: not all enterprises need be 100% rational.

The chapter itself is a chapter about provenance. We know very little of Ishmael, the narrator; throughout close to 600 pages, he mentions next to nothing about his patronage, his family, his education, etc. This chapter stuck out to me, not only because of that wonderful first phrase, but also because of the anxiety I detect in the whole of the chapter. Like rappers listing their influences before heading further into a track, Ishmael wants the reader to know, maybe not so much whence he hails, but who his homies are and what is their provenance. There’s a presumption about preconceived notions in the writing and an urgency to get ahead of it, to establish a lineage. This is all the more poignant since Ishmael was careful at the beginning of the novel to point out that he has no experience with whaling whatsoever. Yet, look at him humble-bragging all of a sudden (maybe not so humbly, after all).

I had had no idea, prior to reading Moby Dick recently, that Melville apparently died in some slight obscurity. He was clearly recognized as a noteworthy author but Moby Dick had been out of print for years and he was living off his wife’s inheritances. In the forty years since the publication of Moby Dick he’d written poetry, all of it deemed masterful today, though, like the masterpiece of fiction about the great whale, completely ignored, and sometimes even panned, during his lifetime.

What benediction must Melville’s own very soul be feeling now! Congealed to that hard block of eternity, that non-stuff of the ether, which all of us are most assuredly headed towards on our indefatigable procession to meet with him one day, Melville now brags. Maybe he’s saying something like, “I told y’all I was a genius, but none of you believed me!”

Of course, these are anxious thoughts. They say more about us than him. And besides: what do we—the living—know of what the dead think? Isn’t this us projecting? We are always, and with good cause, remonstrated against anthropomorphization. Well then, shouldn’t we as well refrain from this type of projection, one which we seem to be perfectly comfortable casting onto our no-longer-here confreres? If there is even such a thing as Herman Melville in the great beyond, surely he has bigger fish to fry than relitigating the absence of literary acclaim during his lifetime. I’m certain that in the shadow of eternity, such ephemeralities are meaningless.

And yet:

If I might be so bold, my tweets up here accidentally frame the obverse of Moby Dick’s Chapter 82 (I was in the middle of reading the book when I wrote the tweets, so maybe it was accidental only in the sense of conscious awareness). Whereas Chapter 82 is all about lineage with the past, I seem to be concerned equally here with lineage of the future.

I live more by hope than by reverence. The same quest for authenticity, and the anxiety around the world’s possible refusal to grant it, that characterizes Ishmael’s listing of Perseus and St. George and Vishnu as whalemen progenitors, is the same quest I have apparently undertaken. But where this concern induces Ishmael to look back, it does so for me to look forward. I live, no longer to root myself in ancestry, but for possibilities that will play out in what comes after I’ve finished. I want to root myself ahead.

Previous quests for rootedness have granted me some fine results. I’ve led a pretty interesting life so far. But, of course, as is almost always the case with us artistes, the feeling that things are unfinished is unavoidable.

I’m 48 and it’s looking like children are not in the cards for me. And while I’m completely fine with that (it is, after all, somewhat of a conscious decision on my part to not have kids), this does leave me with that pesky problem of legacy. Kids are great for that. If you’re concerned about what you leave behind, you should have them. They’ll grow up and walk around and some part of you will live on in them.

But works such as paintings, buildings, companies and documents serve this function as well. The only problem is their shorter half-life. Even though they can be with us for a very long time, almost an eternity, once you die, whatever ventriloquistic function you wanted them to perform dies with you. They’ll be silent from that point on, condemned to a kind of nanny-state of conjecture and interpretation (perhaps a good idea to write some of your thoughts down about your work before you go, that is, if you care about this sort of thing; not every artist does). It goes without saying that this complicates the project of using these works as vessels of your living spirit well past your own death. At least kids can carry down your tradition for you for generations and, if you play your cards right, at least someone in your line is going to speak your praises in vivo.

Rather than a mammalian strategy, then, whereby cubs are nurtured and doted upon by parents to the exclusion of any other births for the time being, I seek a piscine one: I try to lay as many eggs as possible, in the hopes that some of them will make it to adulthood without being eradicated by greater forces than I can control. Promiscuous fertilization is the name of the game. Investment in statistics, as opposed to cultivation, is what I count on.

This blog is an example of that. (Which reminds me that I should upload all of my posts onto the more permanent IPFS network in case Tumblr ever decides to completely turn over). My newsletter, too, is an example of my ovarian approach. My YouTube channel. My albums. My essays. My book which will be coming out (hopefully soon). Any films I appear in. Or any other media I will perform in in the future. These are all eggs.

See: Melville probably didn’t know this but I’m not sure his Ishmael was talking all that much about ancestry. I mean, he was; and for the purposes of Moby Dick, that’s sufficient. Melville of course was not writing an autobiographical novel when he wrote this masterpiece of English language literature. So I think it’s fine to ask how much a certain anxiety about his own legacy he might’ve been thinking. Certainly, he had no need for an ovarian approach, much as he may have believed he needed one after the publication of Moby Dick, which, infamously, largely fell on deaf ears during his lifetime. His legacy, in terms of what his work would be doing for him after he passed, is being well taken care of with the release of a mere handful of unrepeatable and irreplaceable titles.

Yet, the ovarian approach is nonetheless the smartest way. There’s a great cautionary tale about operating otherwise. The most tragic thing to me is the Guns’n’Roses album Chinese Democracy,an utterly forgettable piece of mediocrity over which over a decade’s worth of labor was wasted.

Think of all of the little eggs Axl could’ve laid during that time, instead of focussing on nurturing this one giant whale!

May all of my eggs hatch, at some point; but if not, may at least some of them. They will all be traces of me.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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The Soothing Sublimity of Post-Politics

I went to a friend’s book event the other day in Brooklyn which also happened to include another friend’s music event. My musician friend played first, with his band, followed by my writer friend, who read some passages from his new book. The event was held in a small gallery space, I can’t remember the name, but it’s not important.

What actually is important, however, is that, seated on the several dozen or so chairs assembled for the audience, along with the twelve or so people left standing, were but a handful of Boomers and nary a Millennial to be found (to say nothing of a Zoomer). Which leaves to the rest of the bodies in the room, including mine, the distinction of inhabiting the only remaining extant generation of significance of the present day, namely, Generation X.

Is it just me or is it actually a little difficult to think of Gen X as a “generation of significance”? Maybe I’m paranoid but it feels like there’s some erasure of our cohort going on in a lot of the think-pieces covering this generation. Now that I think about it, I suppose this conspicuous tendency to skip over us is somewhat on-brand for us, given our standing posture of sullenness and defeat. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that the commentariat simply leaps from Boomer to Millennial, as though we never existed, whenever it wants to give compressed cultural breakdowns at scale. What’s more is that whenever Gen X is mentioned it’s more or less always in the context of the pop culture that came about during our brief heyday: late-era heavy metal, early hip-hop, Grunge, My So-Called Life, Steven Soderbergh, etc. World events are often thrown in, like the Gulf War and the Berlin Wall, but usually only to plant the pop culture in a greater historical arc. These gazes always seem as though people are looking into some bizarre aquarium, as if to say, “Look at what these crazies did.” It’s a rather objectifying stance, in my view, a way for the culture to demote the significance of what at the time most certainly felt like a revolutionary order. It’s frustrating to see that the only time writers seem to break from this habit of Stalinist-style airbrushing of the record when it comes to Gen X they reduce us to a curiosity.

I think I get it, though. Because at my friends’ event, both in the writing and in the music segments, I detected a kind of mirroring effect of this very objectification, somewhat in the way that dogs tend to reinforce the behavior that gets them attention from their masters. My friend is a gifted writer. He has a way of installing images in your head, very bizarre ones that are difficult to imagine on one’s own, to say nothing of articulating them using simply words. Every time he reads a passage, there they are all of a sudden, in your head. And they are quite a sight. They’re also incredibly personal and I’m always struck by how he’s able to ground the insanity with grit, sensitivity and meaning. Truly, his stories are fantastic, and they're written with a kind of gnomic—dare I say—hetero-masculine voice that reminds me of Hunter S. and Cormac McCarthy. I might be wrong, but, given that this style of writing was really popular when my cohort and I were coming of age in the 90s, it might be saying a lot about our cultural fixations as much as the quality of his writing.

My musician friend, he too is incredibly gifted. He can play all sorts of different styles of music, most notably jazz which really blows my mind: to this day, I still don't understand jazz technique and am always mystified in the best possible way when I hear it. His band was an earnest and light-hearted trio that were also stylistically eclectic, leaping at the drop of a hat from the meditative stomp of shoegaze to the saccharine glint of dream pop. While all the songs were fantastic in their own right, they were nonetheless also fairly straightforward in their backward facing posture.

Besides how impressed I was with my two friends' respective projects, none of this seemed particularly noteworthy to me, that is, until I took a look in the spiritual mirror. I thought a little about my own recent work, reflexively analyzing my chosen musical aesthetic of New Age, another musical genre that was popular in the 90s, in the light of what I was hearing at this event. I think it's fair to say that, as much as the connection I was making in my head at that moment could be understood as not just paranoia, my friends and I were conspicuously entranced with a culture that not only meant a lot to us because we grew up in it, but also meant a lot to us because there just might be something in the water when it comes to Gen X that entices us to look backwards.

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise. Look around at all of the movies, for example. For all of the implied verdicts on the insignificance of my generation, it seems that every single big cineplex event is produced by a member of this age group now, which seems to explain the prevailing nostalgic obsession with the reification of comic book heroes. It’s no accident that Chris Nolan reinvented Batman as an existentially-tinged antihero in a dungeon-y city. For us Gen Xers, growing up drenched in media handed down to us by corny Boomers, reframing our cherished narratives with the more mature gloss of a psychologically complicated Shakespeare play has been ever-present in our minds. Any kid who grew up loving the original Star Wars always had the scene in their head from the later Rogue One where Vader mows down a bunch of rebellion dudes. It only took one of us to grow up and become a big director for us to (finally) be given what we always wanted.

This sort of cultural recycling, this trawling through the second hand bins of the previous era for material to remix and mashup, is endemic to Gen X, but not exclusively so. Millennials and Zoomers also partake in the recasting of the past, though it is always noticeable when they are the ones doing it. This is especially the case with Zoomers, whose digital worldviews grant them access to visions previously unimaginable and certainly not yet completely come to fruition. My prediction is that my generation’s late-stage reframing efforts happening now are all going to look rather bad in the light of history. I think the cultural historians are going to look at the original work that was created during Gen X’s heyday with a particularly generous reappraisal of its worth and significance, but look upon the recycling effort of the second and third decades of the 21st Century as an embarrassing fixation with a cultural moment long past its sell-by date. The Zoomers will likely lead the charge here, perhaps extolling the virtues of my generation while disavowing the later stage revisitation we have foisted on them. No doubt by this point in time they will have codified a new set of rules that will have rescued us from the Groundhog Day of our continual going back to the well. One can hope, at least.

It is like a trance this fixation with the past. I noticed that at my friends’ event. I looked around at all the varying stages of hair loss and greying in the room and felt such a sense of commonality with everyone, especially with this curious perception of grief. In a way, we were all grieving that afternoon. Don’t get me wrong: it was a lovely event and it really wasn’t funereal per se. In fact, it was quite celebratory: my friend was publishing his first book and it was my other friend’s first gig with his new band. And they were both successes. There was a feeling of renewal in the air.

The letdown I’m talking about is a little more metaphysical, or perhaps a psycho-social phenomenon, not a palpable sentiment, more of a symbolic one, like a Lacanian signifier, though without any of the crazy repressed sexuality of Lacanian psychoanalysis. There was the sense of a curious fallout of what was once thought to be the greatest generation, the most sexually liberated, the most progressive, the most diverse, the most politically active, the most original. But for that last appraisal, I think it’s safe to say that we grossly overestimated ourselves. Look at standard Gen X fare, such as movies like Falling Down, and it’s not difficult to see just how wrong we were about our supposed progressivism. It’s no wonder that when we congregate it may be construed, perhaps in a philosophical way, as a type of funeral, that these cultural events, in their obsession with looking back, can often seem like people remembering a fallen hero, with everyone taking turns to get up in front and recount some story that brings the person back to life, if only for a moment.

I’m deliberately leaving out of that grieving process the originality of Gen X. I think in that respect we actually were not wrong. If the middle age crisis of my generation may be characterized by a conspicuous inability to stay present, always looking in the rearview mirror, I want to place as much credence as possible in the idea that it is in fact because we were so very original. We may have been totally wrong about how liberated we actually were but I don’t think we were wrong about how seminal we were. We were the first generation to have access to the tools of regeneration. We made mixtapes out of blank cassettes and we stitched together pirated movies onto one long VHS tape. We were the first generation to be able to cut, copy and paste. We were stuck with physical media, of course, and that naturally slowed things down, but the idea of a self-generating group of young people exchanging collages that were crafted out of scraps from on high, something that seems to define the main activity of being online today, began with us. We made up the whole idea that reality is something you create, not something, as the Boomers had accepted with little questioning, that is handed down to you intact and immutable.

It’s been said that we have entered the era of hyper-politics and that this is an outgrowth of a decidedly post-political era, one which began with events that recall a time of breathless optimism—the end of the Cold War, the fall of communism, the instantiation of geopolitical unipolarity, the rise of Fukuyama’s famed “End of History” years. And all of that has given us the present day, which is actually a very different sort of political behaviors and outlooks altogether. It’s not such a good one, though it is of course less pie-eyed. In contradistinction to the 90s, our era today is not one of post-politics but of hyper-politics, of incredible polarization, of infinitesimal and diasporal factions, of the politics of niche realities. You might place the beginning of the hyper-political era at 9/11. I don’t. I start it in ’08, with the financial crash. I think Lehmann Bros. was the death knell to the old optimism. I think that the head-spinning aspect to the fifteen or so years since, rising imperialism in the East, xenophobia in the West, Brexit, Trump, COVID, etc. can trace its DNA to the financial crash and not to 9/11. Regardless, wherever you plant the starting point, we are today firmly in a clamorous era where almost everything seems political, which is stark when you compare it to Fukuyama’s, since that era was pretty much the opposite.

Maybe that explains a little bit this tendency for thought leaders of today to either overlook us or objectify us. I mean, wouldn’t you be just a little bit jealous of a generation that had the luxury—imagined or not—to rest on its laurels and simply consume commodities? to recall your teenage years as coinciding with first, a period of incredible innovation and GDP growth (the 80s), and then, a Pollyanna of geopolitical realignment wherein the region you grew up in became the center of the world order (the 90s)? Compared to having to deal with the shit sandwich of COVID, I’d be looking to throw some pot shots myself if I myself were younger. To be clear, the prevailing policies, both domestic and foreign, of that time were shitty on a catastrophic level. It was the drunken nihilism of unfettered market deregulation in the 80s and the obtuse naïveté of “end of history” sentiment in the 90s that directly placed us in the shitpile we are in today. But it was a time when the ignorance wasn’t so steep—compared, at least, to other decades, like the 50s—and the benefits were enormous. Regressive fare like Falling Down aside, a lot of great culture came about, like its near contemporary Pulp Fiction, a work that has most certainly aged pretty well by comparison. And the feeling of possibility in the 90s was palpable. I was in my late teens and my early twenties. I’ve often scratched my head at how apolitical I was back then, but it of course makes sense that I was apolitical given that the period was post-political in nature. I was merely breathing in the “good vibes.” This was of course all a total illusion and 9/11 was the first prick that burst that bubble of ridiculous ignorance. It was, however, one of the grander illusions in the history of human civilization.

Gen X were a vanguard generation when it was young. You might try to write this generation out of the historical record, speciously citing our spare demographics. You might even try to turn us into a novelty item, a culture to be amused by rather than to be reckoned with. Both tendencies will bite you in the ass one day. I believe history is going to be kind to us. I believe the ignorance and racism and inanity that laces many of the cultural products of that time will be overlooked, giving way to a rise in adoration for the seminal works that were created. I absolutely do not think we will experience the much needed comeuppance that the Boomers are now rightly experiencing. How could that be as we’ve already been “come-upped”? I think it’s a mighty lot to be proud of and certainly explains why my friend’s book reading and my other friend’s performance in that art gallery could be imagined as a metaphysical funeral along with being a cultural event. Subconsciously, we were mourning greatness. It’s not our fault that maybe what came after isn’t as satisfying.

Yes, every middle-aged generation does this, says “I can’t keep up with what the kids are doing, our stuff was better.” I’m not really talking about that phenomenon. I think the nostalgia goes deeper than that. And I think there’s a very good reason why it does.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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ETHEREALS CAN BE SOLIDS, TOO, Part 1

What are NFTs?

Just. What. Are. They.

“No one seems to know!”

At least, that’s what they say, right?

Now, before I throw my hat into the messy ring of trying to answer the question of just what the heck NFTs are, I just want to say that there’s a reason for those scare quotes back there. That being that the story of NFTs has now seemed to have entered a certain famous-for-being-famous type of stage in the national discourse and that part of the meta layer of that fame is their reputation as these darnedest lil’ inexplicable little things. When they first came on the scene, no one’d ever heard of NFTs and, whenever someone tried to explain what they were, no one understood what the hell that person was talking about. But by now, thanks to a sea of think pieces and editorial takedowns, everyone’s heard of them, yet, in actuality, almost no headway’s been made in demystifying just their basic definition. Which means that now they’re known more for not being known. It’s the stuff of late-night jokes, with Bill Maher, most notably, raking them through the coals almost every week (it’s getting old.) NFTs are now like mysterious guests who keep showing up at parties: we will soon be asking them if they want any punch, questions about who sent them the invite be damned.

It doesn’t help that NFTs supposed inexplicability accounts for only one part of their nasty rep. They certainly have an image problem, chiefly from the many incidents wherein they’ve appeared as shady financial instruments or as fraudulent assets, and there are many loud—and many times intelligent—voices who believe wholeheartedly that the rep is justly earned. But I believe that, irrespective of the validity of that reputation, there’s another less well known story that’s more difficult to tell in this climate and the enduring inability for most people to really understand what these creatures truly are is part of that problem. In my opinion, they haven’t been properly demystified yet. Which is what I’m going to ever so humbly try to do here.

Actually, for those of us, call us the crypto-sanguine, who do have a basic handle on what NFTs actually are, this whole mixup seems pretty on brand, pretty expected. After all, NFTs are largely rhapsodized by us crypto-heads as metaphysical entities anyway, as aggregates of code that are somehow, someway, rare, or, as the term of art would have itself be known, artificially scarce. So it only makes sense they’d acquire this distinction of being a mystery item, of sorts. Surely, all of the breathless evangelism over these exotic bits of code called NFTs are partly to blame for the confusion about just what the heck are NFTs. The zealotry of the crypto evangelists casts these specific types of bits of ones and zeroes as a superior technology to their non-crypto forebears. For, apparently, they don’t merely tell the pixels on your screen what to throw at your face in this particular moment, the show of light as meaning incarnate, as it were. No, actually, NFTs are (supposed to be) somehow ontic, ones and zeroes rendered immutably, subsisting on the blockchain for all eternity, the digital equivalent of a Kantian Ding an Sich (thing-in-itself.)

And you know what? It’s true. NFTs kind of are eternal. I mean, it’s built into the underlying tech, otherwise known as The Blockchain. Unlike all the code that’s responsible for everything else you do on your computer—such as read this text, visit weather.com, refresh your Twitter feed—that entire evanescent sequence of data shuffling behind the scenes like a legion of termites passing in and out of existence (all in the breadth of a nanosecond, mind you), the code underlying a given NFT, by contrast, those particular ones and zeroes, the ones on The Blockchain, are, put simply, Here to Stay. And on top of that, there’s only one thing that the NFT really need do in order to be an NFT and that is point at something somewhere outside of itself, like the finger of some persistent phantom. Really, all an NFT actually “does” is this pointing function, this connection to the outside world from its eternal throne on The Blockchain, itself something like a palace square of multitudes of other such eternal thrones. And, except for that pointing function, NFTs don’t really need to do jack else to fulfill their mandate; they can just sit there like the Sphinx or the Grand Canyon, motionless, silent and, crucially, one-of-a-kind. Forever.

Ah, but there’s the rub!

What is it that it’s pointing at? If an NFT is only as good as its pointing function, then whatever it’s pointing at has got to be just as important as the NFT itself!

Is that thing being pointed at by the NFT, also like the NFT? that is, immutable, unchanging, unique?

Because if it ain’t, then Houston we have a problem.

Because something God-like like the NFT, something which seems so lustrous and transcendental, can’t actually be pointing to some plain old thing, like an old shoe, something that’s not going to be around much longer. I mean, it could, of course, though asserting this, whether the divine can meet with the mortal, too quickly invites a theological discussion. Not that I wouldn’t be down for that discussion, don’t get me wrong, I am a philosophy major, but the point I’m trying to make is not so, how shall I say, christological. The point I’m trying to make is much simpler: for if such a reliable thing as an NFT ever points to the wrong thing, that is, point to an unreliable thing, something which may cease to exist at some point like so many Error 404’s, then it immediately calls into question the value placed on that original reliable thing, the NFT. I don’t know about you but I’m not going to care very much how reliable a string of ones and zeroes actually is if the only thing it’s pointing to is my cousin’s broken link because he stopped paying his Squarespace bill.

Now, it’s worth taking a little bit of a tangent here to acknowledge a curious side issue, something most people don’t even know they’re talking about when they huff about NFTs being inexplicable, that side issue being that what’s inexplicable is not really the NFTs themselves, what’s inexplicable is what the whole point of this pointing situation is in the first place. Sometimes, after the purple fades from the face of the person you’re trying to explain all this to, you begin to see that what really ends up driving people bonkers about this whole debate is this idea that they’re supposed to believe in the first place that a scarce bunch of ones and zeroes should ever be so valuable merely because it’s pointing at something that some people somewhere happen to actually either like, love or just think is pretty cool. I won’t bring up this hackneyed Mona Lisa example that was dished out by crypto shills way, way back in the spring of ’21 (even though I just did) but the reason why that example was used all the time was those evangelists thought it would do a good job of explaining the importance of that pointing function. I mean, I didn’t really think so. In my opinion, most people don’t have a difficult time understanding that some canvas somewhere could be so valuable that it would need a 24/7 security detail. On the other hand, what they can’t quite wrap their heads around is why a jpeg would ever be worth something similar. The frustration amounts to a basic question: if I can’t hold it in my hand, then how does it matter? Hell, an NFT can point all it wants to some jpeg somewhere—and the NFT itself can be all of those beatific things that we’ve been imbuing them with, the ethereal, angelic, spiritual qualities of unyielding duration we normally set aside for the divine—they can do all that, but, since it’s pointing at something I can just right-click-save on, then, quite simply, It-Don’t-Matter.

We’ve basically arrived at the crux of what I’m trying get at in this tangent: yes, it’s true, the NFT is kind of like an over-glorified certificate of ownership, let’s say, basically a digital receipt that’s durable enough that it will never, ever go away. Interestingly, just like a paper version, the NFT qua receipt subsists on its own terms and is autonomous: you merely produce it for view and it automatically designates you as the owner of whichever product it corresponds to. But unlike its paper counterpart it’ll never blow away in the wind. You can’t crumble it up, take a scissor to it or otherwise destroy it. I mean, you can technically destroy an NFT through a process called “burning,” but the only person who can do that is the owner of the NFT and, well, if you wanted to do that then that’s your call. It’d be like ripping up a receipt, like for an expensive monitor from Best Buy, say, except it would be like doing that in a world where they don’t track your purchases in their computers and such action would be final—which in our world is not the case. In our world, everything’s backed up. Thing is, it’s always backed up by some centralized authority, in this case Best Buy and their servers. The point of NFTs however, is that these “receipts,” the NFTs, are not just incredibly durable, that is, they’re not going to blow away in the wind. In that case they’re very different than paper receipts. In that case, they’re basically like forever-receipts. No, it’s not just that, they’re also like paper receipts in the sense that a piece of paper can exist on its own terms, that is, it’s located on the palm of your hand and not on a centralized server. So, NFTs, as receipts, are actually the best of both worlds in this sense.

Ok. Thanks for making it this far.

So why all this hoopla over the advent of permanent receipts, one has every reason to ask. How is this any different than when the cashier at Macy’s asks me if I’d like my receipt emailed to me and I say yes please? And this even given this lauded decentralization component to the NFT. You could buy that Mona Lisa for the millions that it’s worth—it’s probably impossible to assign a dollar value to the Mona Lisa, but still, you get my point—but at least then you own “a thing” and not some “proof of purchase,” a piece of paper that says “I bought this,” one that’s been digitally bronzed into eternity, yes, but a receipt nonetheless. When I buy the small aquarelle by the local artist hanging on the wall of the local cafe for $300 I’m inclined to regard the painting itself as more valuable than the receipt I was handed when I bought it. Chances are that in ten years that aquarelle’s still going to be staring at me from the kitchen wall as I boil spaghetti, whereas the receipt that it came with will likely have made it to some landfill. Why on earth would I make a big deal about a new type of technology that is able to create a permanent, one-of-a-kind, digital version of this utterly forgettable piece of paper which pales in significance to that painting?

Good question.

So: to do my best to answer it, I think it’d be useful now to invoke a thought experiment to perhaps illuminate the tension in this situation a little bit. And, for the record, this is going to be a hopelessly cartoonish thought experiment, so bear with me. I know in real life things don’t go this way. I’m dealing cliches here, I get that. But there’s a reason, because I think painting in broad strokes this way should help us get around this corner.

Let’s say there’re two art school graduates, both equally talented and both destined for equal greatness, though they of course don’t know it yet. For now they’re making ends meet on a combination of tutoring gigs and scrappy adjunct professor stints.

Now, one of these grads paints canvases and the other also paints but has decided that their future lies with computer technology. They paint with pixels. At around the same time that the two of them graduate they each paint a magnum opus, one on a large canvas made out of linen and the other on a relatively large virtual canvas made out of pixels.

These two artists show these works as often as they can. The one with the linen canvas always invites people over and unveils it for their guests to gasps and chin strokes. And the other artist, the graphic designer, is always emailing their canvas, in the form of a jpeg, to all of their friends to likewise astonished reactions, though in their case they’re accompanied by emojis. But the two artists continue their day jobs for years, toiling in obscurity, scraping together their rent, living the good bohemian life, and their magnum opuses continue to languish, until eventually they both become equally successful, equally famous, equally esteemed artists flourishing in their respective fields, one as a painter and the other as a graphic artist.

Ok, now we need to run two versions of what happens next, which is when some connoisseur hears about these infamous early works of these two celebrated artists, the one linen canvas languishing in an apartment and the other digital one dispersed throughout the Internet, dispersed, mind you, as a series of multiplied clones of the original jpeg, each one birthed and rebirthed whenever the jpeg was emailed as an attachment or whenever it was right-click-saved from the artist’s website.

Now: let’s imagine first what happens in a world without The Blockchain, the database technology with an exquisite permanence structure underlying every single thing inputted onto its ledger. It’s the tech underlying everything crypto-related, currency, and, yes, somewhat famously, NFTs.

We’ll first imagine a world without this technology and then we’ll imagine the same scenario but in a world with this technology known as The Blockchain.

In Scenario A, a world without The Blockchain, that connoisseur first goes to the painter’s mansion to take a look at this infamous work from the salad days of this now famous artist and they walk out of the mansion perhaps $3,000, $30,000, $300,000, or maybe even $3,000,000, poorer—though, crucially, one unique painting richer. Then, that connoisseur hops into a cab to visit the other artist, the graphic designer who’s maybe a rich person now because, say, Apple hires them to do their logos. The connoisseur pays this visit not to buy anything—I mean, how could they, after all, when “information wants to be free”—but instead to express their deepest frustrations—and perhaps condolences—for the fickle finger of fate that created a deeply talented artist such as this one, yet, in a cruel twist, made them the “painter” of “free” pixels instead of the “costly” oils and acrylics. “Would that it were otherwise,” the connoisseur tells the artist after uncorking a conciliatory bottle of Malbec they’d purchased from a famed producer in France, “I’d surely fork over an equal amount for this brilliant original work of yours as I did for your friend just now.” They tap the rim of the frame of the newly purchased canvas from the other artist, the painter, and takes note of the knocking sound. They marvel at how “physical” it is.

After the connoisseur leaves, the graphic designer finishes the bottle of red and works on their next project, the layout for a complicated website for a new tech firm, one that will surely fund many rents to come. But, even with this steady stream of capital, the graphic designer may at some point grab a cigarette, open their balcony doors and light up as a cool evening breeze blows through their hair and a glorious moon lights their face. They may wonder about this difference in materials between the two artists’s chosen paths, the one in the “real world” of “things” in contrast to the other in the “virtual one” of bits. This artist would be well within their reason to inquire as to the curiously consequential difference between these two types of materials, potentially $3,000,0000 worth!

Now, as we imagine Scenario B, the world with The Blockchain, a different scenario unfolds, though only at the graphic designer’s house. At the painter’s, nothing has changed: the connoisseur drops a gargantuan wad of cash for this infamous painting from the days when this now famous artist was a pauper. But when the connoisseur now visits the graphic designer, instead of sharing a consolation of Malbec and departing for the evening in a sudden whisk, instead they drop an equally gargantuan wad of cash for—wait for it—yes, the NFT of that early image concocted way back when on Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator from when the artist had only recently graduated art school. There’s no sulking, no pats on the back of “there there,” no rueful shakes of the head. Instead, it’s the same scene as at the painter’s, one of jubilation for the victory of art, for the value of the good early work of serious artists, the two of them examples of exactly why art is made in the first place, to provide a singular communication to history. The connoisseur also pats themself on the back, as they see themself as a critical node in all of this goodwill; for it is their wealth which enables the art to flow, which protects it for the coming generations and which assures that value is assigned to talent.

Let’s set aside for the moment the rosiness in my picture and try to be objective and simply take stock of what has exactly changed here from the previous version, which was the one without the blockchain factor. In that scenario, Scenario A, where the painter makes a cool mil but the graphic designer doesn’t, the law of physical scarcity holds. This law says that only physical objects are scarce. Ones and zeroes? Not so much. In the non-physical, virtual world, objects of art are saved as files and get copied and sent and uploaded and downloaded and cloned, all in an endless iteration of lossless duplication that, unlike with the Xerox machine, never depreciates the value of any of the copies. In effect, with a flick of the wrist one may disperse armies of cloned files into the ether, each one indistinguishable to the other. Because an ocean of identical copies which is always on the verge of duplicating itself yet again can not have value in and of itself—imagine taking a drop out of the Pacific and trying to sell it—whosoever relies on the technology of circuits to try to sell their art directly into the hands of buyers is, for lack of a better word, effed. But the technology of linen and acrylic prevents the facility of the cloning process encountered online. You could try to clone a “real life” painting, but it would be orders of magnitude more difficult than the flick of a wrist on a right-click-save, which effectively instantly clones any virtual work of art. That’s why in Scenario A, the painter can try to find a living cozying up with the donor class, while, by contrast, the graphic designer must instead seek work as a contractor for monied projects.

What’s different about Scenario B? Well, since there’s this immutable virtual object called an NFT pointing at the graphic designer’s art object, their original virtual canvas, since the graphic designer is now able to virtually “sign” their work this way by assigning a digitized non-fungible token that will live forever, that will effectively eternally point to the piece of art they created, thereby authenticating their work in the same way the painter does by signing their name on a linen canvas, now we have a world of a different kind of scarcity, an artificial one, yes, but a scarce one nonetheless. And scarcity is the necessary factor in assigning value to any particular object, art or otherwise, hence why we don’t sell drops of oceans. In this world, a graphic designer now has the choice (theoretically, at least), as does the painter, of deciding whether they wish to sell their work to a patron or find some other way to make a living.

It’s worth noting that between the two scenarios there isn’t much of a difference at least in terms of mass consumption. I’m prone to believe that the impact of a connoisseur’s relative access to, say, a graphic designer’s work isn’t a salient issue within the dynamics of a work’s consumption at scale. Even today in the art world, many famous paintings are privately owned, but that provenance has little to do with their popularity. It is really the artistic community, the critics, the curators and the artists themselves, along with academics and a certain sliver of fine art aficionados, which seem to have the most meaningful impact on the visibility and commonly held belief in the importance of any given work. So, by the same logic, whether or not a graphic designer may enjoy something approaching this level of credibility shouldn’t really be affected by a connoisseur’s access to that graphic designer’s work. As I hope I’ve made somewhat clear, prior to NFTs, said connoisseur simply had no access to that graphic designer. But what the advent of the NFT now enables is for that connoisseur to, as in the case with the painter, get their hands on “something,” in this case the digitized, eternally inscribed signature of the artist themself coming in the form of this new technology. That is the new solid of once ethereal code: the new technology imbues the freely roaming ones and zeroes, which before were copiable in the extreme, to now hold still, as it were, still enough that they could be bought in their own right. And the connoisseur loves this, loves being able to “grab” these ones and zeroes that are eternally connected to the graphic designer’s virtual canvas, because having access to an artist is of paramount importance to them. And this new digital scarcity enables that access. Maybe, in a pre-NFT world, the graphic designer could’ve offered the connoisseur a signed paper receipt with the hopes of trying to accommodate the same functionality that the NFT does today. Well, try selling a paper receipt on the secondary market. NFTs may be bought and resold because they are impregnable, unlike paper receipts. This throws us back to the “best of both worlds” scenario I described earlier. Oh, and by the way, it also enables that artist, that graphic designer, to pursue revenue streams that were once the sole province of creators of so-called tactile objects like paintings, sculptures, and sometimes even less tactile works like performance art pieces. So, many artists who tended to lose in the past, now get to win, in my view, because of the advent of NFTs.

Now, you may question the utility, or even the morality, of the longstanding business model, principally in the fine arts, of artistic patronage, which is based on blue chip auctions and other types of unctuous glad-handing. Or you might be a crypto cynic, one who sincerely believes that the sooner we muzzle the entreaties on the part of techno-shysters and their zealotry over cryptocurrency, DeFi (decentralized finance), or any other such scandal-plagued use case that the advent of blockchain technology has foisted on the populace the better for the collective weal and common good. You may even wonder about the utility of discussions such as these given that cryptocurrency seems headed posthaste either to a cultural and economic dominance wherein Bitcoin becomes the new dollar hegemon or towards regulatory entropy that shackles its true potential at the hands of the overreaching Feds. Each of these debates is a worthy one and it is my sincere belief that coming down decisively on either side exposes you to potentially embarrassing or, shall we say, morally compromised positions downstream. It is simply too soon in this world to take a robust position like that. I cringe when I read the breathless manifestos of some of these new tokens and platforms: as a socialist, I am deeply suspicious of the slightest whiff of techno-utopianism. Historically, this ideology has often provided cover for the worst inhumanity evident in our current neoliberal dystopia. At the same time, there’s all too hasty condemnation coming from my corner on the left, most evident recently in Luke Savage’s piece from Jacobin’s blog titled “NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit,” a piece which commits a flagrant category error in ascribing to NFTs as a whole the characteristic phoniness of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, that garish elitist cabal running quite visibly in the wider NFT space. When I read that piece, I couldn’t help but to wonder if the allure of dunking on NFTs exposes an intellectual laziness on the part of some of my esteemed comrades on the left. I don’t know, maybe he sees the Bored Apes as a potent synecdoche that illustrates a certain general rot. I, for one, remain unconvinced.

The point is that, while it is of course wise not to be too heavy-handed right now, that also doesn’t mean we can’t establish some fairly clear knowns and one of them, I hope, is that, say what you will about blockchain hoopla in general, its singular ability to bestow an artificial, though none less material, scarcity onto a virtual object enables blockchain generally and NFTs specifically to replicate the dynamics of a business model that was once available only to artists trafficking in the physical, but not the virtual. I don’t think that it is hasty to say that we now live in a world where that is no longer the case, a world where the graphic designer enjoys access to the same business model as the painter. And I think we are better off for it as a result.

Next time I write about NFTs, I’m going to talk specifically about the problem I hinted at earlier in this piece, which is the ongoing issue around permanence, not of the NFT itself which is obviously permanent, but of the actual object to which it points. The metadata baked into an NFT needs to point to something in order to say “I am the receipt of this thing.” Otherwise, at least according to some, the NFT has no value. In that case, it truly becomes just like a paper receipt blowing in the wind. Rather, it must be tethered to an actual file somewhere, and issues around the permanence of that file, whether it be the original file created by the graphic designer or some clone of it, are salient to this conversation. This is where you see the now infamous phenomenon of rug pulls. I plan on tackling all of that soon.

I, for one, have an album coming out in April which I will be tokenizing and so I will want to address this concern prior to then.

But, for the time being, however, I need to drink some coffee.

#nft crypto #nftartists #non fungible tokens #nfts art

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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Gemütlichkeit and Adult Contemporary: my Journey into the New Age

Harold Budd, the late mood music composer whose oeuvre was largely defined by dark and introspective solo piano pieces, once summed up the power of the New Age taboo in an infamous quote during which he claimed that, whenever he heard those dreaded words in the same sentence as his music, he’d need to reach for his “revolver.”

Setting aside the relatively pressing question as to why on earth a composer of peaceful ambient music would have such ready access to a firearm, it didn’t surprise me nonetheless to read about this type of reaction at being called a New Age artist. Over the years, Budd had supplied a certain sector of engaged listenership with a breed of instrumental music—intelligent, tasteful, somewhat minimalist—uniquely vulnerable to appropriation by what was, at the time of the quote, a truly hegemonic force. It’s easy to forget these days just how popular New Age music was in the 80s and 90s, how hungry was its fanbase of spiritual aspirants and how zealous was its cadre of intrepid composers, your Ayurvedic yogis and amateur ethnomusicologists, for example, who were determined to reify a connection between soul-seeking and music. These New Age composers and fans and marketers had much sway in framing the prevailing narrative of mood music, such that it was easy for the casual listener not to really get what divided a composer like Harold Budd from, say, a composer like Iasos, an adventurous and jazzy New Age composer positively dripping with Marin Valley post-hippie goo. You might say Budd had been born in the wrong era, having composed his best work during the exact time of New Age’s hegemony, back when listeners were much more credulous about it than today.

The ardor of these New Age composers, supported mostly by bourgeois consumers with discretionary budgets, would end up faltering: it was an ignominious turn to a once hopeful story, a turn that would plant in the minds of listeners the opprobrium, now taken as canon, surrounding a genre of feel-good, vibratory-centered music that apparently had no business seeking spiritual unity and world peace, its nominal goals, but was really instead synonymous with cloying vagueness and only so much woo. I guess Harold Budd was prescient, because there’s still a lot of reaching for revolvers these days when it comes to those words being uttered, indicating the victory of the smear campaign against New Age that was conducted amongst certain cognoscenti proceeding out of the more idealistic 90s, which has amounted to the now pervasive aversion to a genre most reasonably engaged listeners in the 21st Century regard with eye-rolls and snickers. Budd might have been a persnickety naysayer back then, but today he looks the picture of valor, fighting the good fight against a pseudo-genre which many now believe more accurately constitutes a hyper-capitalistic marketing trend than a legitimate style of music.

I don’t begrudge Harold Budd his dyspepsia, this even despite my own newfound zeal for New Age music. As an artist I know how frustrating it can feel when your work is misunderstood—though I suspect Budd’s gripe was aggravated further by the radioactive connotations of the genre with which he was being associated. So, rather than the simple case of an aggrieved artist’s fist-shaking at media misunderstanding, I see Budd as embodying the fullest sense of the New Age taboo. It’s interesting to note his reaction in the light of modern developments given how thoroughly discredited New Age appears to the average listener today. I was reminded of this just the other day when I visited the observatory on top of the Freedom Tower and noted how the conventions of New Age music—nature sounds and synthetic, quasi-orchestral string arrangements—had so completely infiltrated public consciousness as the exhibit unfurled a bombastic introduction to the New York City skyline. And this cultural prevalence has had downstream effects. Try finding a modern music blog diving into anything remotely like the New Age genre that does not include de rigueur disclaimers about the value of a piece of music despite its possible association with New Age and you will quickly come up to date with the genre’s conspicuously problematic state-of-play in the minds of engaged music listeners. You’ll find all sorts of handwringing and pretzel-twisting in these blogs trying to get at the heart of the featured music, be it an album, artist or song, without uttering the dreaded words, as though one had to find the most politic manner of telling a host whose apartment you just visited that their toilet was clogged.

But as I see it, this debate is full of confusion, and Budd’s revolver only adds to it. Back then, most lay listeners were much less savvy and didn’t really see the differences between, say, a certain type of ambient and the New Age genre as a whole, hence the anxiety of the “Not New Age” commentariat in the Amazon user reviews of many ambient albums. There’s an enduring perception that ambient music must continue to be walled off from an ever encroaching New Age stain, even though the zeitgeist has progressed well past any such danger. The problem is compounded by the unwillingness of this cognoscenti to admit that in fact there is a similarity between intelligent ambient music, let’s call it “indie-ambient,” and New Age music, even if that similarity is a result of ignorance on the part of the casual listener. If you ask most lay listeners the basis of their criticism of this music you’d hear that the music, apparently, isn’t “doing” anything. The absence of “events” is one of the first things that is noticed in, not just New Age, but of the type of music Harold Budd himself was making. (Other subgenres which often receive this criticism are ambient electronica and some forms of modern classical). And while the prevalence of eventlessness would be harder to pin on many putatively New Age artists such as Yanni and Enya, it still has meaning there for a certain type of listener, one that believes that music should offer the listener some form of contact with recognizably (read: pop) substantive musical ideas, such as lyrical poetry or some form of vaguely defined “movement” that’s usually code for verse-chorus-verse-chorus. In the case of more rarefied musics like indie rock this critique comes in the form of wanting the music to grant the listener a certain degree of kudos for having “taste” or some other such misty skillset when it comes to appreciating music. On the other side of the spectrum, someone might say that the music of Celine Dion, an artist whom one might criticize for a certain vapidity, essentially “does nothing,” despite her recognizable pop song structures, and this is excused in the minds of most listeners because, hey, it’s pop music, and so its broad appeal inoculates it from accusations of a certain type of eventlessness. In any case, the critique often holds whether the eventlessness is in the music itself or in some incapacity to fully position the listener in a clearly defined, or, better put, clearly validated, context. That New Age so clearly abjures these standards—whether it does so intentionally or not is a whole other matter—and fails this litmus test of so-called authenticity partly explains why it has garnered a high degree of cultural ignominy.

I find that the truly problematic element in the history of New Age and its development among music listeners inheres not so much in its failure to measure up to standards defined by other genres as in its long and sordid allegiance with capital. I can’t think of a more distasteful signal of late capitalistic degradation than the ideal of “choice,” of an autonomous consumer as the germ of economic activity, and this individualist ontology is something which New Age music marketing, with its homeopathic appeals to functionality and pantheistic inclusion, was only too eager to exploit. It gets worse, though, when you consider much of New Age music’s problematic neocolonialist cant, with its invocations of journeys to exotic lands, either to Asia in the East or to the Puebloans in the West. There’s a long history here to this type of ugly Orientalism, not just in the music but in the New Age movement as a whole; I think it even dates all the way back to the birth of Western tourism after the Dutch East India Company’s push to commodify the lands it had just begun to colonize. Dave and Steve Gordon come to mind as perhaps one of the guiltiest parties in this heist: a look at their catalog from the 90s is a gaze into some fairly cringe-inducing fare, with lots of “Native-wave” iconography, like dreamcatchers and frame drums, all in dated illustrations and complete with Indiana Jones font. I think they ended up taking a hint from the shifting zeitgeist in the new millennium because, around the 00s, the catalog starts to shift towards the coldly scientific with lots of titles about theta-waves and their soporific benefits. Though the music’s preoccupation with functionality still holds, they seem to have retreated from the breathless naïveté of earlier New Age’s neocolonialism, its conspicuous Othering of indigenous and Eastern cultures and its primitivist belief that so-called native peoples embody some sort of prehistorical archetype full of spiritual resources of which Western post-industrialized humans, the “stressed subjects” comprising the main target of New Age marketing, can and should avail themselves.

I want to be a little clearer here, though, because it’s important to separate the artists from the marketers. Dave and Steve Gordon are perhaps outliers in this respect as they have long been both a musical duo and a record label called Sequoia Records. But a perusal of their library nonetheless reveals the dichotomy: as far as New Age is concerned, though the imagery is quaint, their music, on the other hand, is actually of a fairly high quality. What this tells me is that, with respect to this problematic genre as a whole, it wasn’t just foreign cultures that were becoming appropriated, but the artists themselves. That is to say that the artists’ reputations, irrespective of the quality of their various works, were unfortunately lumped in with the reputation of the genre. When the genre suffered, so did they. This echoes what happened with disco by the late 70s: the scarlet letter of that genre’s cultural fallout followed its artists for a long time. For proof, ask Nile Rodgers who co-founded disco pioneers Chic but had to hide in studios as a producer all throughout the 80s. This is clearly an outgrowth of the uniquely depersonalized affect of New Age music (which again echoes disco, odd as the connection may seem). With its turn away from the autonomy of the artist towards the autonomy of the listener, New Age, like disco with its nightclub goers, dispenses with any cults of performers and centers all of those stressed-out people sitting on yoga mats. It’s important to note that “The Golden Era of New Age,” roughly the mid 80s through the 90s, was really more like “The Golden Era of New Age Record Labels.” It has long been rather easy to dismiss the genre as only so much marketing pablum, and this has been permitted by the relative anonymity of the New Age composers themselves who, because of their lack of visibility, never seemed quite capable of defying whichever ascriptions to the genre ended up gaining traction. Once upon a time, the primal consumerist act in pop music was of a listener choosing to listen to an artist and, depending on the genre, signing up for whichever identification stratum such choice thrusted at the listener. If I bought, say, an Ozzy Osbourne CD, this meant that effectively I was choosing to support bat-head mastication, along with all of the subversive prescriptions such a stance entailed. But such “allegiances” with artists and their various ethics was complicated with New Age music, since its consumption resembled something more akin to a shopping experience, hence the primacy of the record label, as opposed to the artist, as the arbiter of taste and identification. For a long time it made perfect sense to say that one had purchased a New Age CD at the health food store, and perhaps picked up a tiny gong and some imported incense along the way.

Why then, Carlos, you may ask, why in God’s name, would you take the time, not only to write a whole blog post in defense of this seeming dumpster fire, but actually seek to explore this music in your own work?

The simple, less accurate, more disingenuous answer is that I can’t predict where my heatseeking artistic inclinations are going to take me. It just so happens that they’ve taken me here.

But the more substantive, and therefore truer, response is—not too surprisingly, I think—a lot more complicated and involved.

If you know at least part of my history, that I was a successful rock musician in the post-punk vein, then it basically says just about nothing about my pedigree that I consider Brian Eno to be a huge source of inspiration. The reason why it says so little is because he is that way for many artists with similar provenances as mine. Another way of putting it is that he is very much the patron saint of the wider “tastemaking” sector, in which my community was, and to a certain extent continues to be, located. What’s more is that Eno has parlayed that notoriety successfully into wider circles, notably as a producer of records for the likes of U2 and Coldplay. He’s acquired a level of prestige as some sort of celebrity whisperer. He’s a kind of guru for the NPR/New Yorker portion of the upwardly mobile, though—crucially—culturally literate, managerial class, aspiring or otherwise. And this is no accident. In his infamous liner notes to Music for Airports, an album that most critics and listeners regard as the inception point for ambient electronica, he was pretty clear about how this music should be digested and, more importantly, who should be doing so. He stated that ambient music could and should be both ignorable and interesting. That last descriptor is critical because interesting is often the sine qua non of valid listenership among this tastemaker community. Elsewhere in the liner notes he went to great pains in making clear what he thought of Muzak and elevator music (which today seems clearly a dig at New Age), that it was culturally ignominious and chiefly so because it was merely ignorable. Crucially, it lacked the interesting part.

What ensued over the course of Eno’s storied career, a prodigious string of albums that seemed intent on supplying this tastemaker set with the modern equivalent of something like Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement (“Music for Moving Furniture”), that is to say, an intelligent version of a music to “do things” by, was what many among this community have regarded as something of a rescue effort. The grand proliferation of a now famous genre of highly reflective mood music commonly known as “ambient” has only doubled down further on the sense of this type of “rescue operation.” Ambient music, that is, more specifically, legitimate ambient music, was, according to Eno, here to save the day. What Eno was saying in the liner notes essentially was that certain people didn’t deserve mood music, namely, the culturally illiterate ones, the naive and confused Rajneeshees, or the “stressed subjects” and mainstream petit-bourgeois who were New Age’s specific target audience, from whose clutches ambient music was now to be salvaged. The perception of these Baby Boomer, post-counterculturalists as mainstream dupes to the latest snake-oil sales-guru, your Oshos and your Hubbards of the world, gave credence to the belief that a harsh separation was needed. In the use of the word “interesting,” he was clearly bequeathing the ambient genre to its supposedly rightful heirs, the college-educated, liberal-minded cultural intelligentsia who “know what they’re talking about.” You can see the legacy of this rescue effort in the clear line drawn between the “spiritual” ambient composers “over there”—your Steve Roaches and Robert Riches of the world—and the much more “tasteful” indie ambient composers “over here”—e.g. Stars of the Lid and Marconi Union. The spiritual valence is key: there is no talk of ghosts and candles and forest nymphs on the indie side, only the abstract, cold and pallid atmospheres of psychologized “rooms” and “spaces.” Indie ambient, in offering an agnostic, woo-free climate of consumption to NPR listeners and other forms of secularized “Brahmin Left” elites, clearly aligns itself with the tastemaker project of the greater independent music movement which began with college rock radio. By contrast, “spiritual” ambient composers, with their closer ties to the counterculture and progressive rock of the 70s, have been deemed as more closely aligned with the New Age movement, with all of the stench the association has entailed.

In many ways, this is all Eno’s work. And when Harold Budd, himself a one-time collaborator with Eno, reaches for his revolver at the mere mention of the words “New Age,” it is easy to hear in his distress the polemic ring of the liner notes from Music for Airports, with its calls for “interesting” music.

But since when does music have to be interesting? Or better put: what really counts as interesting? How is that determined? What are the metrics? And who is setting them?

I take a couple of examples from the art music world to illustrate the problem, namely La Monte Young’s consort, Theatre of Eternal Music, wherein performances often lasted for days, and John Cage’s As Slow as Possible, an organ work going on right this very second in a church in Germany, performed by attendants placing specifically timed weights onto keys: the performance of this work began in 2001 and is set to be completed in 2640. It’s an understatement to say that the “interest” in these examples certainly defies category. It’s also important to note just who are the people who are validating this kind of music as “interesting.” Of course, this isn’t at all to say that Music for Airports, likely a much more consonant experience for the average listener than the aforementioned art music, fails Eno’s own test. In fact, it is so very interesting that it had to be taken off the air once, after it had been looped in a Pittsburgh airport to see what would happen: airport patrons complained about the disruption and eventually they had to remove it and put back whatever conventional pop or token Bach was likely playing before it started. You could say this was an incredible victory for Eno to have made such a relaxing record be so interesting that it disrupted air traffic. Ironically enough, and, I suspect, very much in keeping with Eno’s original attempt, Music for Airports failed the letter of the album title’s goal, though not the spirit. Eno was likely well aware of the “Music for” tradition that dated back all the way to the hybrid jazz and classical LPS of the 50s and the 60s that served as the original template for functional music (“Music for Lovers,” and so forth). And if Eno wished to demonstrate that ambient music could and should be provocative, well then he succeeded. But provocation and interest are not joined at the hip. Nor is it always necessary to hold a genre accountable to a certain vision of what makes music interesting, a vision which, itself going all the way to Eno’s alma mater in Roxy Music, the very first college-educated art rock group, seems to ally itself with a certain elitist understanding of what “interesting” music should sound like.

In many ways he’s right. Purely functional music, either of the overtly “Music for” variety or simply of the larger New Age variety, is indeed not very interesting. And that is by design. In keeping with its goals, it is highly ignorable, something that, as of late, has for me been the much more important parameter. And when I say ignorable, I’m not talking about boring or dispensable. Ignorable can be just as emotive as the not so ignorable. To me, “ignorable” means rejecting the need for a certain type of close-listening scrutiny that is a convention of a different genre and community and class structure than the one which New Age music concerns itself with. The need for a music to recede and to blend in, something which Eno did emphasize in his liner notes, does not need to also be interesting in order for it to be valid. I see nothing more wrong with the consumptive model of the average New Age CD of yore, an item that sat as comfortably inside a shopping bag alongside books and tchotchkes as it did in a CD tower at home, than I do with the attentive, sacral hush that accompanies the informed and engaged listening of a classical symphony. The notion that a music must somehow rise above the level of a mere commodity is, depending on who is making that criticism, either classist bigotry or a bias coming from pop music hegemony. Modern copyright law reflects this sense of intellectual property ownership straining from the Western conception of this type of artistic genius. We only need to look outside of the Western gaze to see very different modalities in the consumption of intellectual property such as music. So-called merely ignorable Muzak or New Age has every right to claim legitimacy alongside its more interesting variants of the mood music scene.

Interestingly, the more you dive into these demarcations the more you see that the battle between these two visions of mood music is actually a battle between two different types of elite structures (and therefore not exactly the kind of fight one wants to bother with). On one hand you have the “initiated” ones, musicians and composers who graduate from art schools, as opposed to music schools, and rise to the favor of professional classes and critical gazes and whose efforts are subsequently deemed “valid” by a community that, for better or for worse, has become trusted by “serious” music consumers. This is the tastemaker sector which also has strong ties to the college rock movement. On the other, you have the “naive” ones, the more mainstream musicians and composers with training in more institutionalized forms of music, such as classical or jazz, and whose migration towards ambient and instrumental music is articulated along contours of spiritual searches. And, because of all of the whiffs of incense and pot smoke, many of these composers take on the mantle of providing soothing and relaxing and otherwise homeopathic modalities within their consumption models, with all of the elitist connotations implied in the price tags of all of those visits to the spa. For better or worse, there are many strictly ambient composers who’d likely prefer not to be too closely associated with this overtly New Age camp but, because of their less abstracted, more visceral takes on the ambient genre, are often lumped in with New Agers by the aforementioned tastemaker set (these are those “spiritual” ambient composers). In any case, no matter how you slice it, we’re dealing here with two highly constructed variants of mood music intended for two disparate though nonetheless equally privileged communities of elites. It’s important to realize that, in the case of the tastemakers, no matter how much they attempt to ground their vilification of the New Agers in some sort of doctrine of legitimacy, they will inevitably come off sounding like snobs, and rightly so; something different, though still apposite, happens in the case of the New Agers; no matter how much they claim to be simply spreading good vibes throughout the world, they’re really only talking to people who can afford membership plans at yoga studios and time off to go to Costa Rica on a meditation retreat. At the end of the day, they’re just two warring camps of elites. We should not be too concerned with whoever “wins.”

The “good vibes” claim, something which you can hear extolled in Stephen Halpern’s introduction to the legendary International Guide to New Age Music (whose last edition, tellingly, is from 1998), is instructive here because it’s where I’ve decided to insert myself into this wide-ranging spectrum of mood music. If the debacle at the Pittsburgh airport reveals only one important thing to me it’s that Brian Eno may claim that his ambient music is both ignorable and interesting, but maybe it’s really only the latter. The problem with this kind of mood music, as I see it, is that the relentless search for an artistic safe space from discredited music, the Muzak of his liner notes, usually means erring on the side of interesting. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with interesting music, any more than there is anything wrong with any music. But every time you slap a condition on an aesthetic you can expect to reap an imbalance somewhere down the line. That condition may seem pretty straightforward in your manifesto, but real-world factors weigh in in actual practice.

Rather than interesting, I’ve noticed that, when it comes to mood music, my essential preoccupation has been with magic and the metaphysical. This concern is of a piece with my general philosophy, which is much more theological than your average secularized liberal. I’ve noticed throughout all of my exploration of mood music that the essential ingredient that attracts me is a willing fraternization with elements surrounding nameless essences which have been approached in various incomplete ways by the wellness industry and other outgrowths of the post-countercultural diaspora. I know that many of my confreres react to this incompleteness with a visceral distaste. But I see in that reaction an echo of the distaste I encounter when I mention, for example, that I believe in God. (And that whole debate is better served in another essay). Of course, then, it should come as no surprise that my attraction to New Age has none too little to do with my own undertaking of the secularized pilgrimage of spiritual rejuvenation, commonly found in the self-help movement, with its concomitant zealous consumption of wellness industry products. So: guilty as charged. Fetishizations of nature, sound baths, vague stabs at theosophy, commercialized Buddhistic constructs, and, yes, an interest in folk musics from around the world, they all sound rather cringe-inducing, but the common denominator that I have found is that, in their sincere application of imagined therapies and systematized evocation of mystical experiences lies a tendency to produce a certain kind of music every bit as wonderful as Eno’s Music for Airports—along with subsequent examples of the genre it launched. It’s just what I’ve found that ends up sticking the most. Maybe its my own dogged, though nonetheless vague, spiritualism that attracts me to this type of music, my clear indebtedness to yogic evangelism which I know turns off many others; this would also explain my lack of interest in the indie ambient variety which strikes me as overly allied with a kind of godless scientism that leaves me dry. [It’s been noted elsewhere that the perception of disgrace is a key factor in the construction of magic within a given sphere of influence. As a disgraced form, so this scholar would have it, New Age is rife with magic. This is an interesting hypothesis and one which I’ll assume for the time being as I continue to piece together this tangled web of incipient musical exploration].

To me this music is most accurately deemed gemütlich: not just providing comfort but something a little higher. That would certainly be a start towards an understanding of what’s driving me. Indeed, when I think of the 47-year-old man that I am today, I can’t help but to have sympathy for progenitors of another maligned “gemütlich” genre, Adult Contemporary. This genre, itself a grab-bag like New Age, may include anything from the music of Celine Dion, who somewhat defines the genre, to the latter day efforts of Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen fame. Previously known as Easy Listening or Soft Rock, the genre concerns itself, spoiler alert, with aging, at least insofar as its target audience is older. The virtue of Adult Contemporary is precisely this earnest entreaty to the end of youthful glory days. I have always felt that the rock scene that spawned me into public consciousness was a young man’s game and have always bristled at this arena’s conspicuous absence of off-ramps for its aging members. Adult Contemporary is one such off-ramp from the insanity of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, for artist and listener alike. It is a soundtrack for greying hairs and encroaching crow’s feet and its chief virtue as such is its honesty and complete unwillingness to engage in controversy, drama and other types of youthful shenanigans, even at the cost of a certain absence of heft and so-called “legitimacy.” It is a music which easily slips into the back pocket of your aging dads and your soccer moms, instead of needing to be broadcast on a T-shirt. To me there is no more tragic figure than that of the “rocker who’ll never die,” the Mick Jagger wannabe sporting skull necklaces and bleached hair amidst a bramble of liver spots and wrinkling skin. Adult Contemporary offers you a deal: escape the embarrassing obsolescence of aging rockerdom by embracing the quieter pleasures of aging; the only sacrifice you’ll need to make is forgetting about ever being cool again. It strikes me as a very reasonable offer.

I will admit that there’s also a hint of doomerism in my full-throated appeal to New Agers, specifically a conspicuous eagerness to disavow the strictures of the indie-rock community. It’s complicated, obviously, because this community gave me a meaningful career over a decade ago and continues to provide me with meaningful capital today, both financial and cultural. But I also have to admit that I was never all that comfortable with the indie-rock community. I remember how thrilled I was when, in 2002, Interpol learned that Matador Records, the indie-rock record label par excellence, wanted to sign a deal. Nonetheless, I was concerned that the exposure this particular label would give the band would always be framed through the college rock radio lens and I was uncomfortable that this band I’d co-founded would become appropriated by a community I’d never seen myself as a willing member of. I was Goth back then, and before that I was various things, though always they were much more theatrical than anything the more sullen indie-rock genre liked to tolerate. Thankfully, my fear proved unfounded: for a variety of historical reasons, not least of which was the explosion of The Strokes with its much more “fun” centered affects, something which up to that time indie rock had shunned, Interpol was able to accomplish the reverse, that is, frame Matador’s legacy within the context of a more mood-oriented approach. It’s instructive to recall that The Strokes’ “fun-lovingness” was retroactively defined as the kind espoused by late-Seventies punk and barroom rock like The Modern Lovers and Richard Hell. A similar cast surrounded Interpol, but of a decidedly more Mancunian nature. This is all to say that, while indie rock was beginning an evolution towards its present incarnation as a panoply of musician scholars obsessed with lost musics of the past, a tradition that very much defines my own career, I was still eager to defy the expectations of this tastemaker set for what I suspected were those university-driven classist aspects which I think are now much more wide open than they were back then.

The irony here, then, is that there may be no more indie rock of a thing you can do today than to do what I’ve been doing, study the detritus of dustbin musics in search of previously discarded ore, those forsaken ingredients of a long lost genre, hoping to reverse-engineer the original prototype, only this time under the indie-rocker/scholar’s more culturally informed microscope. The ghost of Eno’s liner notes lives on! You can see that New Age is now getting the retro treatment in the burgeoning popularity of YouTube channels like Sounds of the Dawn. If Spotify and YouTube have enabled the construction of just so many Frankenstein’s monsters pieced together from the limbs of the past, then I guess I can say no other thing than, once again, “guilty as charged.” But this disappoints me; and that’s the irony. Because, actually, I wish it were otherwise. In many ways, I’m disappointed in the inescapability of my provenance, this lot into which I’ve placed myself, the perennially abstracted musician-connoisseur, able to reassemble the past through intelligence and savvy, the skillset that has always been essential to the full vista of indie rock excellence, a legacy that began with Roxy Music and The Velvet Underground. Whether it’s because of its clear indebtedness to university education or perhaps its conspicuous whiteness, I can’t help feeling like there’s something denuded about this purview. On a larger canvas, it bespeaks of the impoverishment of our decadent age, an era in which not even our politicians seem capable of escaping the public’s rabid preoccupation with nostalgia.

But I’ll also take the upside of this scenario. There’s something to be celebrated here. For the streaming platforms have once and for all decoupled the New Age CD, previously sequestered to spas and realization centers, from its community of spiritual aspirants. More accurately, these platforms, in their democratized access to universal taste, have removed the main hindrances which New Age has always encountered, owing first to its capture by the erstwhile Yuppies of the 80s and the 90s, and subsequently to its fall from grace in the light of changing mores and consumption habits. Spotify and YouTube have insured one no longer needs to engage with subcultures in order to partake of their aural wares. New Age, like all music, really, has now been installed within the cold Library of Congress-style enumeration of the various platforms’ algorithms, playlists and Pandora-style channels, divorced from the old and problematic consumption model of the wellness industry. And when you dive deep into the actual music of New Age, something which modern streaming facilitates to a hitherto unimaginable degree, what’s revealed is a rather uncomfortable truth: as it turns out, New Age music is actually not so very different after all from most other musics, at least when in comes to its proportion of good to bad. To assail the genre as hokum evinces either ignorance of the genre or willful blindness to the realities of more culturally acceptable fare. Trudging through Spotify playlists, “Fans Also Like” panels and good old fashioned artist catalogs, not only reveals that Spotify teems with mediocrity, but also unveils priceless gems to the tenacious explorer. This happens with any genre and New Age is no exception.

After the Teens and now in the Twenties, algorithms and subscriptions have decoupled the listener from their various and previously determined lifestyles and value sets. Marketing has necessarily shifted away from its emphasis on identity and morals and towards amorphous malleability: now the listener is centered and is free to shape-shift their listening habits according to taste, no matter how fickle or transient. We live in the age of the rabbit hole, and, no more so than in the realm of music consumption do we more clearly resemble a horde of librarians referencing a database of eternally codified entries which once, at some hopelessly quaint time, came in the form of physical units, accessible to touch and smell, and which, in their corporeality, seemed to offer the listener a private audience with some such genius or other.

No longer. If anything, this literally is the New Age. In many ways, because Silicon Valley has decreed it, the listener truly is king. It’s no longer a New Age thing. It’s across the board. The longstanding critique of New Age, which seemed entirely bolstered by the perception of its cynical catering to the cult of the individual, has been made moot via Big Tech’s transformation of the basic machinery of listening. Now, regardless of what floats our boat, we are all a sea of individuals.

It’s all just music now.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

Text

Some Other Aisle

As of late, the following words recur in my head:

Drifting leftwards . . . .

They come in and out of my awareness like waves. Sometimes I’m making breakfast and they loll in like a prerecorded mantra; the volume fader slowly goes up and then down and then the words disappear.

Other times they resemble the ambient calls from the hallways—I live in an apartment in the city—pinging and echoing in my head like the sundry canines and babies, the hellos and the door slams I hear above and below. The words pop in, linger in the air for a bit and then slowly disappear.

Drifting leftwards . . . .

What are they doing in my brain? They don’t seem to make all that much sense; there’s little context for them, at least as I stand over the pan searing my Beyond sausages. I guess you could say that they’re vaguely nautical. That doesn’t help me understand all that much, though, since I don’t boat. Without the endemic jargon of boaters—that lexicon which I’ve never been able to quite get (“aft,” “knot,” “halyard,” et al)—the words don’t place me anywhere, at least not in the way boating terminology places me. When someone says “Stay on port tack” (I hope I’m getting that right) we are instantly there, on the sea, looking up at a sail, smelling the brine. These words, however, in their mundanity, as specific as being stopped at a light after which one turns to who knows where, don’t capture a comparable sense of environment.

Drifting leftwards . . . .

Ok, so they’re not nautical; but, for the sake of argument, let’s just say they’re of a maritime nature.

I suppose that’s as it should be. If we’re talking about being adrift, that is. Yet, despite all this murk, the drift I’m experiencing does, in fact, have a direction. No Sargasso Sea here. So the words don’t imply off the bat that my movements in the ocean are random. I do seem to be going somewhere. After all, I may be drifting, but I’m still going left.

[I should note that this post will come with the second edition of my newsletter, called, not too coincidentally—now that I think about it—The Anchor. Should I take this as some kind of synchronicity]?

You might be able to guess by this point that I’m talking about politics. Which is slightly weird since I don’t usually write about politics. I used to, though mostly on social media. And it wasn’t pretty. So, a little over a year ago, I terminated my Twitter account, an action I carried out with the conviction of a toilet flush. Since then I’ve been consuming my usual intake of news, commentary and opinion pieces, which I might rate as above average. But, though a lot has been going in, almost nothing has been going out. The only time I pontificate these days is with my girlfriend and friends. Which I’ve truly savored the way recovering alcoholics savor their meetings. Unlike with social media, I consider the face-to-face gathering of friends to discuss important current affairs as a sacred event, tantamount to a kind of civic duty. I’m not a commentator, at least not by profession, so, while I certainly can’t go a day without gabbing about D.C., actually writing about politics doesn’t naturally occur to me.

But, I’ve been confused lately, what with little imaginary logographic boats sailing into view all the time, and so I feel the need to break my fast—though of course not on Twitter but in this much safer environ. I suspect that my confusion stems from not just my political orientation “drifting” but also from the nature of this particular type of drift, which looks now as if it’s in some late stage wherein my loyalty to the Democratic Party is being cast off. And, since this for me is also a recognition that there exists no viable political party to migrate into, I’m encountering what sounds like what many veteran Independents have already remarked upon, that this process traffics in mystification. The word on the street when it comes to being an Independent is that it’s a hazardous affair, a road full of potholes and dead-ends. Though, of course, we live in strange times anyway now, which explains why this strange migration I’m writing about now, a migration I’m undertaking in a definitive way, is becoming quite common indeed.

One of the first things that occurs to me is how long this has taken, how ironclad my loyalty to the party has been. It’s been like trying to wrest myself from a plush lounge with great vibes, though, as of late, the more I make for the exit the more it feels instead like prying myself from a hungry shark. I think many Americans believe they must be in one of these parties, and that if they aren’t that they’re betraying something terribly important. Sometimes it even seems like they sin if they don’t pledge fealty either way. What’s most interesting to me is how, now that we’ve all entered the so-called subtext-as-text phase of late-stage capitalism, the battle lines are drawn so firmly, etched so concretely, it’s impossible to ignore just how conspicuous the split-screen is. They used to do it with a modicum of grace. The line between us versus them used to be drawn with a fine stencil. Now they’re using magic marker. That aisle they love saying they used to cross all the time, the lost tradition of which they now with calibrated sighs bemoan, is truly a wonder now, a border wall within our politics that has developed into its own iconic status. The word “duopoly” is on everyone’s lips. It’s impossible to ignore. It’s also no longer possible not to see the sham of it all.

So what next? What happens when you finally cross some other aisle, the one that most people either don’t know about or, worse, don’t take seriously, that specific weird aisle reserved for the curious and strange, the soon-to-be politically homeless? This is the aisle that divides those with membership in a party from those without. Already I can hear the war drums beating in my head, warning me of doom should I cross. There are people who use their influence to frame any other aisle than that binary defined by cable news as nothing but a chimera. Or, if you press the point, they’ll insist on a certain closetedness: “you’re sounding like them over there” is what you’ll hear the moment you express the barest nuance. Which is why they’ve largely succeeded in painting the independents who reject the binary as only so many anomalous simps.

Have I, in my confusion, in my consternation, internalized this sophistry? Does my procrastination in cutting the cord with the Democratic Party indicate an abdication of free thought? Have they succeeded in a kind of coercion?

Or could it be that my confusion is not confusion at all, but merely the oh so strange sensation of real liberty?

Now that I’ve tasted this wine, I most certainly believe the latter.

And yet, still, the question persists: what to do now?

I guess what I’m describing is the experience of not having a tent, of running in between the awnings and getting stuck in the rain. The big tent I’ve been under my whole life has become intolerable, the duplicities unconscionable.

I should also note that not all Independents are created equal. Some truly have no political affiliation, are agnostic to their bones. You could call these people “winnable,” “persuadable,” or “available” for either flank of the duopoly.

But I suspect that many are like me. Many have fled their party and have seen only two exits from the tent, one to the right and one to the left, and have decided to pick a direction to go in. They haven’t just entered an escape pod into deep space, they’ve made a decision that their own party doesn’t have enough of a certain direction. I guess that, by this logic, my drift doesn’t look like drift at all, but actually something like forward momentum in a specific direction.

Though it still consoles me only a little bit. Because, now that I’ve picked a direction, I see that those two exits in this tent both have real problems.

To me, the rightward exit from the Democratic Party looks like a chaotic bazaar, like a crazy festival saturated in personality cults all centered around a Randian neoliberal hellscape that believes in running the economy like it’s a grotesque hotrod engine that should be free to ride the highways with no speed limit. So, needless to say, no can do.

But the one to the left, seems, well, like Siberia. “A Leftist in the United States” are about the loneliest words on the planet. “Anyone home?” It’s so cold on this side of the tent it’s enough to instill a desire to trick oneself into taking the snake-oil on the right. After all, bazaars are fun. That right-wing snake-oil even seems more American somehow. They love waving that flag. In a way, they’re right. They certainly have the optics. The thought over on that side of the political spectrum has metastasized over several centuries into a bunch of indelible tropes, from the snare and piccolo accompanied ostentation of Old Glory to the baked-in fetish for John Wayne individualism. It bespeaks of a hopeless ontology of right-wing sentiment in the American soul. So, to actually drift away from that, towards what is ostensibly opposite of what it means to be American, away from the bazaar of one side to the permafrost of the other, seems like a kind of masochism.

Yet: what else am I to do? I do love the woods, so I guess my direction makes sense. Though that offers little help with the vertigo.

- - - - - -

I was eighteen when Bill Clinton won in ’92. My hot take the next day was telling my friend that “I don’t trust that guy." At the time, I knew little of politics. I only knew to parrot my father’s condemnation of all things “big D” Democratic. His politics and how he came to judge the candidates, typically, I suppose, for a certain type of Republican, was a matter of scents: one needed only to hear where they stood on gays in the military and the rest could be easily derived from a kind of intuition that was equal parts Holmesian induction and animal instinct. And so Bill with his aw-shucks smirks and his suspicious charm and his saxophone was immediately written off as a shyster. My father, unlike me, would never waver from his discontent: late-stage Bill, awash in controversy, was as offensive to my father as the early one that won the first term. Like many Americans during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, I watched Bill tell the camera live that he didn’t have relations, though, in my case, as was the case with many who had angry, right-wing parents, that broadcast was accompanied for me with an audience response (“You’re an effing liar!”).

For my part, when I was eighteen, I barely understood the difference between the two parties. I knew only of certain optics, that there’d been twelve years of Republican rule and that it had come in two forms, in the persons of two scions of elite moralism. First, in the person of Reagan, with his Californian scrupulousness and throwback to old-timey Hollywood—with all of the American exceptionalism coded in. And second, in what followed for another four years, another term of Republican rule in the form of upstanding CIA-style technocracy, in the person of the elder Bush—though H.W. also mixed it with some of the can-do Calvinism of New England WASPS (brilliant).

And then along come a hammer to bash all of this Comstockery into smithereens with some Dionysian fun from the South, a devil from the Bayou in the person of Slick Willy, a good ol’ boy from Arkansas with a thick drawl that spoke of marshes and barbecue sauce. It was like for twelve years we’d been attending some Heritage Foundation conference, complete with $500 tables (or, more likely $5,000) and suddenly some greasy libertine who souped-up his neighbor’s cars for a living had now crashed the event and taken over the microphone (never mind the cleverness of Bill’s working class disguise, which lopped over and around his tenure as a Rhodes scholar like a Laudian vestment in reverse).

I’ll never forget the smile on election night, which seemed to already telegraph how much of the tenor, if not the substance, of the times were about to change. Indeed Bill’s own face, the one which that night would induce my skepticism, was a hallmark of the coming era. Unlike those of his 80s Republican forebears, whose narrow features made them a little more difficult to lampoon, Bill’s was a face made for the comic strip. Along with that smile there was the symmetry of those gigantic cheeks, and of course that nose, a proboscis which over the years would so often turn red and sometimes seemed even to grow. He was to become both Rudolph and Pinocchio, at once the odd one out and the liar.

After the steady drip of my father’s nativism throughout my childhood, really the entirety of my conscious years up to that point—I was six when Reagan was elected—I was only now beginning to figure out where I stood. It was becoming clear to me that I was not to follow in his bigoted boots. Which made Election ’92 something of a political inception point, something that ushered in the very drift I’m experiencing right now, thirty years later. It was the first time I became conscious of a swing, of the possibility of this central aisle in American politics. I could feel the change. I wasn’t completely free of the nationalism and xenophobia I grew up with, still prone to repeating my father’s propaganda about white countries (he was a big Pat Buchanan guy). But Bill Clinton’s election had triggered the first stirrings of honest political consciousness on my part. In the 90s, I became aware of myself and my peers as being defined not only by the music we listened to but in our belief in Bill and the Democratic Party. And it was to be a long haul: I was already back in New York at NYU when he was reelected four years later, by that point well on my way in my effort at ditching my working class affects and seeking entry into the rarified climes of the so-called liberal coastal elite.

But what’s as important as having ultimately shed my father’s atavism was having begun my long drift, the one towards the leftward exit from the big tent which I’m finally taking now.

By the time of Clinton’s tome of an autobiography, My Life, which I read cover to cover during the later neocon thicket of the Dubya era, Bill hadn’t been Slick Willy to me for a long time. He’d been a hero. He’d become ensconced into the storybook of past warriors, much the way Obama is looked upon now, as the de facto leader of the party. And just as the memory of the good warrior Obama functioned during the Trump administration, as a carefully placed reminder to hold the party ticket line, to make way for the future good king that shall save us from the present bad one, so too did the memory of Bill furnish that necessary coercive maneuver on the part of the elites seeking to shore up the liberal vote and keep it in line for the next election. In the face of Dubya’s psychotic Middle Eastern rampage, Bill’s face was soothing, especially on the cover of his book, proboscis and all. It was a reminder that we’d only been a couple of hanging chads’ worth away from victory and that we best hold on, never mind that the road to Baghdad had been paved long before Dubya, by Bill’s minions in the CIA. I, of course, fell for it all, hook, line and sinker.

There actually was one meaningful difference between Bill and Obama, though. Contrary to his Democratic heir, Bill had served as an exemplar of a certain type of liberalism—free-thinking, sexually liberated, compassionate—which Obama would slightly temper. It was the kind that had been fought for during the Civil Rights Era and Vietnam War, one which, whether I consciously knew it or not, had informed my every move during my previous adulthood. Indeed, every nascent lesson had come to me under the wing of the Pax Clintonia. Every experience, every benchmark of post-adolescent growth, from high school graduation to moving out of the house to going back to school to moving back to New York, from my first love to my first car accident to my first mosh pit to my first sexual experiment, all were undertaken under the bright aegis of Clintonian liberalism. Bill, our first baby boomer POTUS, had ushered in a countercultural victory—what with his cheeky failures at inhalation—and so far my life was headed in the exact direction of that particular mandate, one that was so carefully balanced within, if not outrightly epitomized by, the winking insouciance of the lothario whose love for Third Way policy was matched only by his lust for workplace sex. And with the dawning of the new millennium just up ahead every decision I made and every milestone I achieved in those early years of adulthood smacked of a last-minute bargain during the End of Days. Only, owing to post-Cold War optimism, it was in reverse. The promised land of liberation from cultural strangleholds had come early, and we were to partake of the harvest freely. We were Generation “Move On.” And, like many during the dark ages before Generation MeToo, before belated conversations about power relations and patriarchy would pose a meaningful challenge to the prerogatives of the counterculture, I had been proud of being a part of it.

That I’m now making for the exit from the big Clintonian tent is actually not the saddest part of this story of disenchantment. That’s merely bittersweet, since I know that I now see the truth, my soon-to-be political homelessness notwithstanding. The scales have fallen from my eyes, as it were. “. . . [W]hereas I was blind, now I see” [Saint Paul].

No, what’s saddest isn’t unregistering from the Democratic Party, but, rather, thinking back to my blindness during the Clintonian era, along with the nauseating pendulum swing to the War on Terror that came fast on its heels. It’s humbling now to see how much darkness had in fact surrounded me and how little I knew of it, like a straggler in the woods at night mistaking the moon for the sun. What today I see as the plain truth, that this New Democrat-Third Way is actually a cleverly disguised dead end, something that is almost consciously tailored by oligarchic forces to forestall economic justice, the very same economic justice that the Democratic Party claims as one of its ideological pillars, was obscured during the Dubya era by something rather maudlin stirring within me, which I feel chagrin even thinking about today. It was the man from Hope’s smile on the cover of his book. I used to look at it longingly after reading passages of his autobiography, all of the studiously reproduced details of his administration, no doubt culled from endless minutes and meeting transcripts, of his intervention in Sarajevo, of his steadfastness during the government shutdown, of his long, post-Monica affinity for sleeping on the living room couch. It was thrilling, like reading about what the Kingdom of Earth was like up in the castle during my very first years as an adult. I’d finish a long passage and close the book and look at his face on the cover. My brain would be addled by the ubiquitous “Hail to the Chimp” renderings circulating the media of then present-day POTUS. I would look into that smile, the one that had fostered such visceral distrust back in ’92, and instead see a bright glimmer of hope during a time of war. I would think, “Save us from the chimp.”

I need to have sympathy for myself in thinking back to the bamboozlement of all of this. The con job’s a tough one to crack. I could not have known how intoxicated I was back then while I was so entranced by Bill’s face; I could not have known how much this movement was scripted, how my consent was so maneuvered, the puppeteering of it all. In the same way that a mother props up a stuffed toy on her lap and animates it with her hand and tricks her newborn into gleeful smiles, so the duopoly had successfully manipulated my own credulity around this figure of Bill the Savior, the previous good-guy whose book we should now read to keep the home fire burning during times of darkness when the bad guy is the king. Keep it burning, they say, for the good king shall rise again, just you wait. Only, of course, another bad king shall rise in his wake as assuredly as this current bad king lives and breathes. And onward and so on and so forth into the horizon like a flock of sheep.

What’s really scandalous to me is thinking back to how I’d read Bill’s book and incanted this ritual at thirty thousand feet, in business class, with the loud background roar of jet turbines constantly reminding me that I was a “Somebody-Headed-Somewhere.” This was when I played with the band Interpol, when I very busy touring and performing across the globe. I was making a lot of very popular music, making a lot of money and making a lot of appearances.

I guess it only makes sense, then, how I failed so spectacularly to see what is plainly evident today, how Clinton’s Democrats were not all very different from Reagan’s, nor, for that matter, from Republicans in general. It makes sense to me now how I stayed in the dark, how that smile, as I gazed longingly at Bill on the cover of his book, could offer me such misplaced hope. The chief difference between Bill and George was that the former’s vision of America made room for cherished liberal ideals, specific ones, though, the ones that made for good news and party enlistment, ideals centered around racial equality and the right to choose. Beyond that, there was very little. Let’s not be obtuse. Sure, it’s pretty likely Gore wouldn’t have brought us to Iraq, though I think we can now see that something just as troubling as, say, Obama’s drones would’ve arisen. After all, they always, Republican or Democrat, find a way to appease the brass. This is to say nothing of the gutting of American manufacturing, of course, nor anything else regarding the working class.

There was still relative prosperity for many back then, so we still weren’t at a time for rallies around minimum wage and healthcare to be viable seat fillers. At the end of the day, only the specter of “the other side” gaining power satisfied the political consumer’s appetite for bread and circuses. That’s still a problem today, but it was believed in much more prevalently back then. Obviously, there were plenty of people at the time who could see past the propaganda, like I only have gotten around to at this relatively late juncture. There were no doubt many Lefties to go around. But, pre-Bernie, they were living in an even more profound darkness than today. I certainly didn’t even know they existed. I didn’t even know what a Lefty was.

I was too drunk on the Clintonian-countercultural promise, the rise of the enlightened liberal outlook, the world of Move-On where the sexual advances, and even abuses, of a lecherous boss should before anything be understood as honest desire and that to litigate it is the worst—read, most Republican—offense any good liberal could ever hope to make. It was an attractive carrot to hold in front of the libs, back during less complicated moments for sexual liberation. But that promise should’ve always been qualified, heavily, since its noble valence of a world free of intrusive oversight, sexual domination and gendered coercion, without the necessary correlate of economic justice, easily curdles into its more cynical variant of a consumer-driven hedonic paradise. There are still problems with a party that leads with the counterculture even in the best case, since all of that Berkeley campus gusto did very little to address the growing income inequality. For my part, the bargain was as conspicuous as it was reductive. It amounted to a basic fact around heteronormativity, hormones and rising social capital, all realities that proved themselves to be in my case—somewhat embarrassingly in hindsight—worthy of electability ipso facto.

I can see pretty clearly now that the buy-in to the duopoly, forever toggling between good and bad kings, politics as cinematic kayfabe, was deeply aligned with my class interests at the time. At the end of the day, the Admirals Club really only votes in one direction, even when they cast their vote for the “good guy.” They think that they’re voting to help the little guys when they vote-blue-no-matter-who. If you spend enough time on cable news or reading literary journals like The New York Times, then, yes, of course, you will believe that these are the good guys. And speaking for myself as an erstwhile member, I had completely drunk the New Democrat Kool-Aid. How could I not have? I grew up during its regime. And my moral vanity was now benefitting from its dibs. I had failed to make the connection, that, for people with my class interests, the difference between a Democrat and a Republican in office is merely a matter of window dressing. We well-off liberals are made to endure periods of four or eight years wherein some group of people we don’t like have put up curtains that we find tacky. But in terms of the structure of the house, its foundation, its plumbing, its electricity, there is no real difference. The lights stay on regardless. And in order to evade having to look squarely in the face of this “inconvenient truth” we buy in wholesale into the kayfabe and convince ourselves that the scripted professional wrestling is actually a real match. And so, rather disingenuously, we believe that we are voting for the little guy when we vote-blue-no-matter-who but in fact we are only voting for ourselves and our class interests. That middle aisle that everyone always seems to think is so very wide, such a giant chasm, is actually quite narrow, not much wider than the one I knew so well up above in the airplane in business class, only about as wide, in fact, as the opening of an unfolded wallet.

- - - - - -

Today, I became an Independent. I sent in the form. I do not say this jubilantly. It’s a statement of a kind of homelessness, of a drifting into the woods. The value of growing up during Clinton’s time, of having a more compassionate politics than that of my parents, had certainly been accomplished. But like any tutelage under the wing of a corporate Democrat, it came with a price tag, one that today I can no longer afford. There is no party for me, at least for now. So there’s no chance of setting myself down firmly at a table. Maybe I’ll go Green. I tend to be skeptical of third parties, but that could change. My drift continues.

I know I’m not reinventing the wheel with this decision. I know that Independents have been growing ever since Reagan began the decades-long, successful luring of the working class away from the Democrats. I also know that my own class interests are very different from these people. So I’m not looking to gain credit by making a play to join their ranks. I don’t have that ability since, for a while now and for all intents and purposes, I've been a member of the managerial class.

But from this point forward I intend to hold solidarity with their class interests, not mine. Because I’m not the one suffering. They are. It sucks it took me this long to leave this tacky, tired party, this party that has sold out this class of people over and over again for decades, and which continues to do so. But better late than never, I suppose.

The real reason I’ve written this post, though, is not to litigate my various disappointments over the years. I’m sure it has sounded that way. But I can only trust that I went into a historical account to serve its necessary expositional role. This has been a long journey. One that began during a very different time.

The real reason I’ve written all of this down is to address the curious feeling I’ve had since I’ve made this decision. I’ve crossed some other aisle I never knew existed, the one between the people with political addresses and those without them. I’m beginning to sense that there is some other affiliation here, one that puts me with strange bedfellows, people with some views that I can never support, but whose realities and experiences I somehow sympathize with. What unites me with these people is our missing political addresses. Within the bifurcated panopticon of Red/Blue politics there seems to be no other valence than the digital toggle, the on/off switch between the two parties. I ask, then: where’s the dimmer? I long for shades of colors. At the very least, irrespective of our views on religion, sex, racism, patriarchy and so on, I have one very important point of solidarity with all of these latter-day strange bedfellows: a rejection of the binary. Or at least, a rejection of that binary.

It feels way different. Even almost like a betrayal. I have come to believe so forthrightly in progress and in all of the forms of justice that our country sorely lacks, racial and otherwise. Naturally, this won’t change for me, but it still feels almost verboten to go the economic justice route, because I’ve believed that the other forms of justice should come first before anything else. I have brothers and sisters to think of, fellow humans that I care about with whom I wish never to waver in my solidarity. It’s just that now I’ve come to believe that the best way to fortify that pact is through a labor union. And, sadly, we don’t live in a particularly union-heavy universe, which means needing to take this torch, the torch of the working class, up first.

Drifting leftwards . . . .

Yes, very strange times indeed. I think it’s why those words keep wafting into my field of attention, when I’m walking the dog or decorating the tree. The drift is gradual. It’s not that I’m kicking myself out into the street after an eviction. It’s a slow process of untethering, of slackening the leash until I’m out there in the wilderness. It feels as though I’ve just now taken a very important step in that process, kind of like the feeling of the car dropping you off at the trailhead with nothing but a backpack on and no one around.

There’ll be rallies in the future, sure. There’ll be chances to break bread with fellow travelers. But the likelihood that any of these efforts will result in real power, real change and real meaning is very low. Interestingly, I almost wrote just now that the reason for this absence of potential is that we don’t have the numbers, but that’s actually not true. All of these policies poll extremely well. They are prima facie net goods. No one says no to a government check. There are so many sleepy would-be socialists out across this great land. We do have the numbers. We just don’t have a working class with class consciousness. They are not permitted to, not under the current system. And so long as the working class sleeps, nothing will ever change. Power concedes nothing.

This is a dark vision, yes. But the acknowledgment of surrounding darkness is itself a form of light. Because it induces you to light a candle, a tiny little light of truth that you can use to light your way as you amble through the catacombs. I can’t say that I’m happy that I’m going to spend the rest of my days in the wilderness. But I will enjoy it greatly when I begin to see another faint light in the distance, another candle lit for someone else’s path, and draw closer to it so that when the twain shall meet, bread will be broken, stories will be told, feelings will be exchanged and, with this nourishment in the belly, the two shall separate again and drift on until the next time.

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