(Joe) Mangum’s Progress

My brother Joe, after a long dry spell, has abandoned his “Naked Time” blog. However, he has embarked on a new endeavor, “Sans Comics“, which is more strictly devoted to the development of his art. Hopefully there will be more of those music videos. Those were awesome. And maybe I can get him to do more cartoons for me, too.

A Song for Sunday #38

This is part two in my Bach series. Classical music, like a lot of classical literature, is ignored by too many people by virtue of the fact that it is shoved down our throats by cultural authority figures who treat it like healthy food: Good for you, so it must taste terrible. Not so- in most cases classical works of art are not only not demonstrably good for you in a moral sense, but are often strange beyond description. Off the top of my head Macbeth, King Lear, Moby Dick, and Dante’s Inferno, most of Michelangelo’s work (despite ostensible intentions of spiritual didacticism in the latter two) all come to mind. So too with Bach, but at this stage in our culture it takes some work to bring out this aspect in his compositions. Nobody has done this better than modern composer Wendy Carlos (known as “Walter Carlos” before 1972), who worked mostly with the Moog synthesizer. You will certainly recognize the sound if you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which features Carlos’ versions of Beethoven as well as original compositions. Carlos actually had a hit with 1968’s Switched-On Bach.

Here is Prelude and Fugue #2 in C Minor. As you listen, contemplate this passage from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West:

For it was the wish, intensified to the point of a longing, to fill a special infinity with sound which produced . . . the two great families of keyboard instruments (organ, pianoforte, etc.) and bow instruments. . . . it was principally in Germany that the organ was developed into the space-commanding giant that we know, an instrument the like of  which does not exist in all musical history. The free organ playing of Bach and his time was nothing if not analysis- analysis of a strange and vast tone-world. . . . the history of the modern orchestra, with all its discoveries of new and modifications of old instruments, is in reality the self-contained history of one tone-world- a world, moreover, that is quite capable of being expressed in the forms of the higher analysis.

Gangstanomics in One Lesson

Party at the Fed! EconTalk’s Russ Roberts and Spike TV producer John Papola co-wrote this rap battle between Keynes and Hayek.

Belated Terrible Blogging

It’s been a rough year for me so far: starting school, looking for a new car, ignoring collection notices, battling my post-college football season depression, losing in chess to my brother, not drinking enough (I write best between two and four beers). And not wanting my dear dear opinions to dissipate into the blogospheric aether, I’ve set for myself a goal of two posts per week (one Song for Sunday and at least one other post during the week), but its been hard to stick to even that. So with that self-exculpatory preface noted, my apologies to anyone who cares. Now for a few brief updates:

Way overdue update on my bowl picks: I was just over 50 percent, with 17 right and 16 wrong. Good enough to try it again next year. I should note that some of my most confident picks (TCU, most notoriously) were the most wrong.

On two recent famous deaths: I read The Catcher in the Rye I think three times between ninth and tenth grade, and have not read it since. For some reason I was never impelled to read Salinger’s other published work, but my feeling is that he was really a one-hit wonder, like Ken Kesey, Chuck Palahniuk, and so many other American novelists. I’m not sure whether the book would hold up to a re-reading as an adult, either. A People’s History of the United States has long been on the top of my reading list, and since my live-in girlfriend (terrible phrase- sounds more like a job description rather than a relationship- but what am I going to call it since we have no state-sanctioned certificate?) owns a copy I have little excuse for not having read it. It always seems to happen that I discover an artist’s work right after they die, which has happened to me with John Fahey (2001) and William S. Burroughs (1997).

A few words on a book recently read: Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State has two main flaws as I that I can see. Its subtitle is An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory, which might lead one to think that it contains summaries and analysis of actual historical anarchist ideas, thinkers, schools, and controversies. Syndcalism, egoism, Christian pacifism; individualism versus social anarchism; whether anarcho-capitalism is genuine anarchism; how Proudhon was a sexist and Stirner was crazy- that sort of stuff. Instead Sartwell devotes the bulk of his book to a refutation of philosophic claims for state legitimacy, and a short section in the end giving an adumbration of the kind of anarchism he would like to see in the future (promising development of his ideas in a future book). Now this is a very minor flaw, since there are certainly other books devoted to historical and contemporary anarchism, but few that engage in academic political discourse in the way that this one does. This is a step toward anarchy being taken seriously. This leads to more serious flaw, which is that Sartwell admirably takes on the titans of political philosophy: Locke, Hume, Bentham,  Hegel, Rousseau, Hobbes, Nozick, and Rawls, just for starters. Yet he devotes less than 100 pages to this task. Mystics and idolators of state power Rousseau and Hegel are dismissed as presenting no real argument for legitimacy, and rightly so, but surely as lasting and widespread a theory as Hobbes’ deserves to be refuted in greater detail. Perhaps Sartwell is just that efficient. It’s hard for me to tell, since I happen to agree with every word, but I think a skeptic would want more.

Some ideas for upcoming posts: Since I’m taking all English classes, I have more literature than politics on the brain right now. But I have some notions of exploring the overlap, including Argentinian writer Jorge-Luis Borges as a conservative anarchist, and Jonathan Swift as both a proto-anarchist and a proto-totalitarian (so he was accused by George Orwell, referring specifically to book IV of Gulliver’s Travels). Expect possibly also some thoughts on Beowulf, William Blake, the Enlightenment and/versus Romanticism, Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Thomas More’s Utopia, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Coetzee, and so on.

Or maybe you won’t hear from me again until after finals.

A Song for Sunday #37

I’ve decided to embark on a new song series, devoted to the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, which gets us into the potentially sticky question of whether classical composers wrote “songs” or not. Most definitions include some reference to vocals. Songs must be sung. But Mendelssohn wrote “Songs without Words” and Blake wrote “Songs of Innocence and Experience” which have no music, so let’s say that the category is a bit malleable. I’ll keep the pieces short, anyway.

Of course, Bach pieces are often as great for vocal settings as instrumental ones, and one of the most delightful (something about Bach compels me to use that fruity and slightly anachronistic adjective) vocal settings of a Bach instrumental is by French a cappella group The Swingle Singers. Their Little Organ Fugue is a version of Bach-Werke–Verzeichnis 578, the “Little Fugue in G Minor”, which has also been put to use in the video game Mega Man Legends; by Cornelius (the Japanese Beck); and the electric guitar swashbucklery of Swedish metal man Yngwie Malmsteen.

Though I have played (badly), at various times piano, guitar, and trumpet, I have very little technical knowledge of music. My favorite song is probably “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen. The best understanding I have of a fugue is that it is a very complicated version of “Row Row Row Your Boat”. When I first heard Bach I thought it sounded like math. But it grew on me, and I’ve come to feel that this is really universal music, as Shakespeare is a universal poet. As the great science writer Lewis Thomas wrote, “Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.” So anyone with a mind ought to like it.

Mid-January Miscellany

The latest episode of Battleship Pretension is about Shakespeare movies. The unnamed listener who suggested the topic is none other than yours truly. I came away with some good recommendations (I still have not seen the Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet, and Prospero’s Books certainly seems intriguing), but was a bit disappointed that there was little mention of Kurosawa’s many films transposing Shakespeare into feudal Japan, and none of the greatest version of Macbeth on film, directed by Roman Polanski. And as an English major, I couldn’t help writhing in my seat as David tried to remember the name of the poet who wrote “things fall apart”, and the name of the poem it comes from. It’s William Butler Yeats, from “The Second Coming”, which is like, the most famous poem of the 20th century, after all that dreary stuff T.S. Eliot wrote.

The latest edition of the Entitled Opinions podcast is also about Shakespeare, though I have not listened to it yet.

And in local news, the latest episode of PRI’s Selected Shorts is a tribute to Wallace Stegner, who grew up in Salt Lake City and graduated from the University of Utah. Not only that, but it was performed live at our fine City Library. I’m not that familiar with Stegner’s work, but I wish I would have been able to catch that one, since the library is only a few blocks from my home.

Speaking of libraries and the U of U, one of the perks of being a college student again is having access to the University Library. I’ve been spending a lot of time there lately, reading Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (it’s about poop) and the beautiful Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf (the most awesome action movie of the middle ages). I happened to notice that they have a modest collection of books on anarchism (dwarfed, of course, by the collection devoted to Marxism, but quite ample compared to what the City Library has), and some modern libertarian books as well, including De Jasay and all three volumes of Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s Dialectics and Liberty trilogy. In my ambition, I have vowed to read the whole lot during my time at the University, and I have already begun with Crispin Sartwell’s recent Against the State: an Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory.

A Song for Sunday #36

I envy you dear reader, I truly do. I promised to deliver 52 songs this year, which means that when I miss a week, as I did on the Sunday of the 3rd, I have to deliver a double play at a later date. So this week it’s a double-stuffed, high-powered dose of A Song for Sunday! With a theme! Seriously, kids, take this stuff slow, okay? I disavow any responsibility for what might happen to you if you don’t.

In 1983, the pioneering Rap record label Sugar Hill Records released a 12″ entitled White Lines, credited to “Grandmaster and Melle Mel”. It is often mistaken to be a Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (of “The Message” fame) track, but the group had already split up. The group’s DJ Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Saddler is not on the record, which is by MC Melvin “Melle Mel” Glover, with backing by the Sugar Hill house band playing a bassline lifted from the song “Cavern”, by the postpunk dance group Liquid Liquid, and some vocal harmonies surely influenced by The Beatles version of “Twist and Shout”. Ostensibly an anti-drug song, one cannot help but feel the thrill of the illicit shot through it- the ambiguity perhaps being intentional. The line about a businessman being “caught with 24 kilos” refers to the unfortunate auto executive John DeLorean. Ah, the eighties!

Now, in the thirties and forties, musicians did not have to even pretend to be anti-drugs (well, maybe on the Grand Old Opry). This song by the folksinger/convicted murderer Huddie Leadbetter, a.k.a Leadbelly, Take a Whiff on Me sure doesn’t. Folksingers would often record the same song many different times with different verses, but here are some lyrics:

Chorus:
Take a whiff on me, take a whiff on me
And everybody, take a whiff on me.
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

Verses:                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Walked up Ellum and I come down Main
Tryin’ to bum a nickle, just to buy cocaine
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

Went to Mr. Lehman’s on a lope
Sign in the window said: “No more coke”.
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

Goin’ up State Street, comin’ down Main
Lookin’ for the woman that uses cocaine.
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

I’se got a nickle, you’se got a dime…
You buy the coke and I’ll buy the wine.
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice
Takes a brown-skinned woman, for my particular use.
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

Cocaine’s for horses and not for men
Doctors say t’will kill you but they don’t say when.
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

Whiff-a-ree and whiff-a-rye
Gonna keep on a whiffin’ boys, ’till I die.
Ho, ho, honey take a whiff on me.

Of course, few would reckon the itinerant lives of blues singers in general, and Leadbelly in particular, were exemplary. But the romantic part inside us, we respectable bourgeois, needs somebody to live out our dissolute and reckless yearnings.

The reference to “Ellum” refers to the legendary arts district and music hotspot in Dallas, Texas. I can only surmise that the line “cocaine’s for horses” comes from some anachronistic quackery. I tremble just a bit at the thought of horses on cocaine.

I’m tempted to go on, to versions of “Cocaine Running Around My Brain” by bluesman Reverend Gary Davis and reggae master Dillinger, but that’s enough for now. Time to crash.

What anti-authoritarian punk said it?

But I hear on all sides, “Do not argue!” The Officer says: “Do not argue but drill!” The tax collector: “Do not argue but pay!” The cleric: “Do not argue but believe!” Only one prince in the world says, “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!” Everywhere there is restriction on freedom.

See the answer here.

Trust the Tale, Pt. 2

Following up on what I said previously about The Wire, I found this post by Zunguzungu from early last year. While he takes a quite different (quasi-marxist critical theory) approach to the material than I do, he similarly concludes that there is a disconnect between what David Simon says to interviewers about the show he created, and the way the show actually presents itself. Some artists may have more insight into their own creations than others, but the old truism is the same nevertheless. There may be two reasons why, in the case of The Wire, the show presents itself in a more complex and articulate way than its creators can convey on their own. First, much as Simon fits the mold of television auteur, this is a highly collaborative work involving the comparatively taciturn co-creator Ed Burns, as well as several novelists, including George P. Pelacanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane. Second, while the Simon/Burns team do have a singular vision and a political mission of sorts with The Wire, they are conscientious enough artists to draw from their long experience with the professions they depict (cops, journalists, teachers), life in the city of Baltimore more generally, and their instincts as storytellers. But once the artist is finished with the creation and is asked to play the role of critic and interpreter, they are in no better position than the rest of us, and possibly a worse one sense they have an obvious conflict of interest.

Flannery O’Connor, a writer who had a great deal of insight into her own work, was quite insistent on the fact that fiction is not made out of abstract ideas, the stuff of political reform (and political criticism). From “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”:

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are most loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make the actual mystery of our position on earth. . . .

But the amazing thing about The Wire is how aware it is of problems and people, of questions and issues that are embedded in the “texture of existence”. O’Connor too, had certain aims which could have been expressed in abstract terms ( a devout Catholic, hers were theological rather than political). But in both cases verisimilitude came first and foremost.

I began writing this post wanting to show that critics are necessary, and not simply parasitic upon artists and their creations (and probably bitter, spiteful failed artists themselves to boot), that where the artist starts with his or her own unique perception of life, the critic starts with his or her own unique perception of art, and therefore must deal in more abstraction than the artist (if they want to do quality work) is allowed. But O’Connor has me wondering if  ideas as such have any meaningful place in the world of fiction. Why do we ask a television critic or David Simon about the meaning of The Wire? O’Connor again, from “Writing Short Stories” (both excerpts are from Mystery and Manners):

The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what the story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not about abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.

Here I think O’Connor takes her polemic against abstraction a bit too far. Much value may be lost in summarization just as in translation, but she comes dangerously close to insisting that a story is only about itself. Why not go further and insist that if stories are made out of the same materials as existence , why go in for even that level of imitation and just live life rather than read stories about it? On similar grounds Plato and followers such as Plotinus rejected art wholesale as a nearly worthless copy of a copy. (Also because poets were politically disruptive, which is not irrelevant to this case either.) But she does point to what is worthwhile about making critical statements. A critic helps “experience that meaning [of the work of art] more fully” just as art helps you experience life more fully.

With that though in mind, you should also read Zunguzungu’s essay, “In Withdrawal from Modernity: The Western and the West Side in The Wire”.

A Song for Sunday #35

Not much to say today, kids. I’m on my way to what is sure to be an all-day session of Risk, the game of world domination. Please to enjoy the exotic yet smooth tones of the Nat King Cole Trio’s version of the Duke Ellington standard, Caravan.

But stay tuned for my recap of college football bowl season, and how well I did with my picks (not to ruin the suspense or anything, but not very good).