Year / 2007

by Matthew Tiffany

A ghost is bored.

Free from the constraints of a supposedly all-lit lit-blog, here I go with some reflections on music. (I’m allowed – there’s a category for it, see?) Internets, ho!

Pitchfork has a pretty clear-eyed look at Wilco’s new album. The whole thing should be read for the full effect, but here’s the money shot:

Jeff Tweedy’s restlessness has always been one of his greatest strengths. Since Wilco’s inception more than a decade ago, his willingness to explore an ever-widening spectrum of sounds and genres, and to keep the revolving door of the band’s line-up well-oiled, has paid off in a discography that’s as diverse as it is indispensable. Though his songwriting DNA was bound tight during the later days of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has nurtured it in different ways with each successive album, from the transitional sunset country-rock of the first two, through the keyboard-thick pop of Summerteeth, the fractured deconstructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the languid abstractions of A Ghost Is Born. Following that last record, Wilco swelled to its largest and (according to Tweedy himself) best lineup ever, with the addition of guitar hero Nels Cline and utilityman Pat Sansone. Charged up and bursting with eccentric and experimental talent, Wilco Mk. 5 seemed poised to generate the band’s finest– or at least most interesting– music yet. Instead, it produced Sky Blue Sky.

An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise. Never has the band sounded more passive, from the direct and domestic nature of Tweedy’s lyrics, to the soft-rock-plus-solos format (already hinted at on Ghost’s “At Least That’s What You Said” and “Hell Is Chrome”) that most of its songs adhere to. The lackluster spirit even pervades the song titles: “Shake It Off” is probably most accurate (not to mention the album’s worst track), but “On and On and On” and “Please Be Patient With Me” are both strong alternatives.

I agree with this assessment. I’ve listened to this album a whole bunch, with pretty mixed results. “Either Way” and “You Are My Face”, early pre-released tracks, are solid; the latter more so, with some fine singing from Tweedy. “Either Way” is unoffensive, and dad-rock sums it up nicely. (Sums up the whole album nicely. Being a Dad, this is appealing at times; I do like the mellow. Have you heard Neil Young Live at Massey Hall? You should. At other times, Tweedy for fuck’s sake I get a whole lot of being a dad when the kid needs to be carried downstairs at 3 am for a pee break, can I please rock out in my truck a bit, thanks) From there, the album goes completely off the tracks with the horrid “Impossible Germany”. Sorry, that isn’t a good guitar solo. Not at all. “Sky Blue Sky” and “Side with the Seeds” are very nice. “Shake It Off” – god, I want to like it, I want to imagine them wailing on it live, but it just won’t gel. “Please Be Patient with Me” is ok, but Tweedy solo is better for this track. Same with “Walken”, which is pretty bad – I saw one review declaring it to sound just like ZZ Top, which couldn’t be too much more wrong.

“Hate it Here” sucks.

“Leave Me Like You Found Me” seems to be holding up the best under repeated listens. (“Please Be Patient with Me” sounded like I’d heard it 3,000 times the fourth time I heard it. This is not good.) “What Light” is good enough, as is the closer. But as a whole, the album is sub-par Wilco. Comparisons to The Band are legion for this album, but there’s enough rootsy Band-ish tracks on their other albums for you to burn onto one CD that really deserve the comparison. The gentle-Tweedy tracks on this album have too much cliche to them; there are no rockers, no “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” anywhere near this album. And why did they exclude the mighty fine “Is That the Thanks I Get?”

For all my grousing, the album is not destined for the dustbin; some music you need to let soak into you over time. I hope this is the case here. If not, well, pass the Summerteeth.

by Ed Park

Call of Chthonic

Poetry fans: Check out, if you haven’t already, this excellent interview with Guy Maddin about his new Brand Upon the Brain!, a mind-meltingly good silent movie (“A Remembrance in 12 chapters”) with a lot of exclamation points. It’s being screened as I write this along with live narration, an 11-piece orchestra, a castrato (!), and fun sound effects.

In the interview, Jessica Winter asks Maddin about the aesthetic kinship he shares with John Ashbery, who narrated a performance of Brand! last night in New York.

(This is neither here nor there, but did you know that Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother, Heigo, was a benshi—a narrator of silent films? I’ve had this factoid lodged in my brain for nearly five years, ever since writing this article; I wasn’t able to deploy it then, but I’m glad I can share it now.)

Back to Brand Upon the Brain!:

New Yorkers, you have until tomorrow to watch it!

Other people, the show might come to your town! (Here’s the schedule.)

UPDATE: Just as this post was “going to press,” Jessica W. e-mailed me about last night’s Ashbery-voxed perf:

Ashbery’s authoritative monotone and deliberate pace, familiar from his readings, made a perfect complement with the feverish melodrama onscreen—just as it underlined his own influence on Maddin’s intertitles. As the story flung itself toward its climax, the effect of Ashbery’s steady intonations became—maybe I just love a chance to use this word, but—chthonic, like an ancient voice from long ago and far away was just reaching us. We were spellbound.

by Dave White

For My First Post: I’m going to cheat

Hey guys, I’ve posted this piece a couple of places, but I wanted to see what reaction it would get from a different audience. Originally I posted this at my blog and over at Crimespace, so if you’ve seen this post there, my apologies for the cross post. More original work to follow in the coming days.

There’s a conversation going on on Crimespace about pet peeves of incorrect grammar. Everybody has one. Mine is people saying “I could care less” when they mean “I couldn’t care less.” But I have another argument as well.

Grammar is not important.

Well, I’ll back off of that… simple grammar is something everyone should learn young and grasp. But after that, who really cares?

What is important, and what I stress when I teach, is meaning. A student has to be able to put together an argument or a storyline or a sentence that has meaning. They have to learn how to put together a logical progression and THEN you can go back and fix grammar.

Hell, look at a lot of writing in books these days. People break grammar rules all the time, whether to sound colloquial or to create effect. I understand that you have to understand grammar to break the rules, but grammar should still not be the end all be all of writing.

It should be the least important thing.

National tests these days do not grade on grammar and spelling. They let most errors go as long as it does not affect meaning. Hence, meaning is where we should focus. That’s what I work on.

If a story starts:

“Me and you went to the store. Your a giraffe and heads spilld across the road.”

I am not going to sit there and help fix the “me and you” and the correct “your” first. I’m going to ask why is there a giraffe in this story, why were there head’s spilling across the road, and what does that have to do with the store you went to.

I want to get to the point where someone will write “Me and you went to the store. You bought skittles and I bought a soda.”

Then we can go back and fix grammar.

I think people worry about grammar because it’s easy to fix. You can–when you edit someone’s piece–say well this is wrong and this is wrong and it’s easier than saying, but there’s a plot hole here on page 202 and I don’t know how you can fix it. That involves a back and forth and a conversation.

I’m always willing to talk about writing, be it with students or with other writers. I’m always willing to brainstorm plot ideas and why a paragraph works as a thought. But folks, what it comes down to is this: Whether you are in 8th grade or writing for ten years, most grammatical errors can be fixed by just reading your sentence out loud.

Meaning, however, takes work.

What do you think?

FOR THE RECORD: This is in no way an attempt to trash teachers. I am a teacher and I believe in teachers. All teachers want to make students smarter and more well rounded young men and woman.

However, I think there is an old fashioned thinking vs. a new type of thinking among all citizens of the United States on whether or not grammar should be the key to good writing.