I have a good friend who’s using Kickstarter to finance the editing of a documentary he’s working on. Now, I have lots of thoughts about Kickstarter, most of which don’t really belong in this here newsletter; but the thing that caught my interest on this particular day was the fact that, apparently, some of my friend’s Kickstarter pledges are people he’s never met. That’s right, he’s gotten a little viral action out of the social aspect of Kickstarter – and I’ve gotta say, I still don’t get it. At all. Read more »
Bridges
June 25th, 2011
I’ve got this thing about bridges. I don’t mean the kind you drive over – I mean the kind you sing. For some reason, I discover that my cleverest moments end up being in the bridge. You need an example, you say? Well, coincidentally, I’ve got one right here. Read more »
Losing Your Voice
May 20th, 2011
My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I – we’re sick. Not morally degenerate (although you could make a case for that), but rather, physically ill. We don’t know what it is – but it might be pertussis, otherwise known as whooping cough. Medieval, I know, but we didn’t really have any choice in the matter. Read more »
Artifacts
May 14th, 2011
(Originally appeared here. Check out http://www.we-support-local-music.com for other great local bloggers.)
Welcome to another installment of my occasional feature, Sam’s Book Corner, where I rise from my sofa and not actually review a book I’ve just finished. This time, we’re talking (or not talking) about “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!”, a biography by Douglas Coupland, a writer primarily known for the novel “Generation X”. McLuhan, of course, is the Renaissance scholar turned media critic most famous for terse, gnomic pronouncements like “The medium is the message”. Coupland plays this biography relatively straight, although there’s nothing really straight about the genre-busting nature of McLuhan’s scholarship. He’s commonly regarded as the prophet of the Internet age – but as Coupland articulates pretty clearly, his prophecy is more Biblical than some would care to admit.
And with that, we turn to electronics repair.
I have this digital organ. A Korg CX-3, for you aficionados out there, an original one (which they no longer make), not the reissue (which they also no longer make). I bought this organ, used, in 1987 or so, around the time I joined my ska band, Agent 13. I love this instrument – it sounds exactly like a Hammond B-3, right down to the drawbars and the rotary effect. I don’t use it much anymore, but it deserves to be cared for (as much as I ever care for anything, but that’s another, slightly humiliating, story).
And at the moment, it’s a bit broken. The particular problem isn’t important; what’s important is that it’s not in the appropriate shape to help me record my next album. So I asked my pal Jason Benjamin where I should take it, and he recommended a particular guy at a particular shop, and I gave him a call, and after some negotiating and haggling, he volunteered to take a look at it for me. And when I brought it into the shop, he went into the back room, and when he returned, he said, “This is the only reason I agreed to try to fix this for you”, and handed me a 30-year-old repair manual for the CX-3.
Artifacts like this – well, for a certain subset of geeks, it doesn’t get any better. It was yellow, and a bit dog-eared, and the staples had fallen out, but this repairman had hung onto this manual because, well, it’s invaluable. He used to repair a lot of these instruments, and while he doesn’t see them much anymore, he kept it around, just in case. And it got me thinking.
We live in an age of pure information. Everything that can be reduced to digital data, pretty much has been. You can use CAD software and three-dimensional printers to create all sorts of wacky things. Music has slipped the bounds of physical media and escaped into the ether. Video is a click away – either to view your favorite band, or upload a video of your own performance. The barriers to information exchange – at least in democratic societies – have essentially vanished.
It’s important to realize that this is a change. It’s neither virtuous nor evil, neither good nor bad. It has its advantages and its disadvantages, depending on who you are and under what circumstances you’re interacting with it. And we tend to focus a lot on the advantages – but for some of us who lived before the revolution, there’s something missing.
Take that manual, for instance. Sure, nowadays I can download any damn PDF I want to, and get manuals for all sorts of obscure devices – I can review user manuals for devices I haven’t even bought yet, which is a boon, I can tell you. But they’re not artifacts anymore. The paper doesn’t yellow, the staples don’t fall out – there’s no rarity, there’s no sense of history in the object itself, there’s no story to how it got to be in this particular set of hands at this particular time. The physical history of the information is gone.
And the treasure hunter in me feels this loss pretty dramatically. Used record and CD stores aren’t interesting anymore when virtually every song ever recorded is on iTunes for 99 cents. I know where to find everything – it’s easy. There’s no challenge, there’s no hunt, there’s no joy of discovery, and there’s no physicality or history to the object itself. There’s no physical or social aspect to the act of browsing. It’s just me and a terminal and the universe of bytes.
Don’t get me wrong – the digital revolution has been very, very good to me. I’m in love with digital photography and digital audio recording. But while the frictionlessness of YouTube and Facebook make it possible to bypass the bloated and arbitrary corporate staircases to fame, they’ve just replaced it with a different sort of arbitrariness, a different set of skills to master (search engine optimization instead of cocktail party banter, for instance), and ultimately, the claws of capitalism find a way to seize hold of those channels as well. And while I can find just about any book I’ve ever wanted, online at Powell’s or Amazon, it’s not better than encountering it in a dusty, uncurated corner in a Harvard Square basement – it’s just different: a different set of actions, using different muscles, different senses, different notions of time. It changes the experience, and there’s nothing wrong with preferring the old experience.
Some of you might be tempted to remind me that some people miss the flicker of the gaslight flame, or the whir of the plane propellors, or the smell of horse manure from the carriages, or, less nobly, the invisibility of gays, the silence of women, the easy profit of slaves. But this is just cherry-picking; or, more accurately, feces-flinging. It trades on the trope that progress is positive, rather than engaging with the question in any honest way.
And this trope is dangerous. I encountered, the other day, someone selling, on eBay, a CD containing a scan of an original Gurian guitar catalog. Not the catalog itself, but a digital facsimile. Now, the only reason it’s a facsimile is because the original was a physical object; but it’s telling that the lifespan of this digital copy will likely be significantly shorter than the original (which our seller is keeping, by the way). File formats keep changing; disk formats keep changing. Part of me fears this dystopic moment when an electromagnetic pulse destroys the last digitized copy of the Gutenberg Bible, just a short time after we discard the original because “in digital form it will last forever”.
Which brings us back to McLuhan. McLuhan really was a Luddite – Coupland thinks that he hated the modern world, and the mistaken impression that he endorsed the new media society was a misinterpretation of his critical, value-free eye. McLuhan, for all his impenetrable aphorisms, saw through this trope, or, perhaps more accurately, discarded it as propaganda, as wrapping paper for the phenomena he was really interested in studying: the individual as she interacts with the changing media experience, for good or ill.
But while McLuhan could subjugate his disdain for the sake of scholarship, I can’t disengage in any comparable way. I love my digital recorder, but I hate the hard disk as jukebox; I love Craigslist and free commentary on the Intertubes, but I hate the decline of of the broadsheet newspaper. The world has changed – not improved, not deterioriated, just – changed.
Someday, the drawing of the capacitor that has strangled my CX-3 will be eaten by earthworms; and someday, that digital copy of the Gurian catalog will be struck by a camel-back-breaking cosmic particle, and descend into the realm of static. Something – something – will kill them both. And decades from now – hell, maybe even next year – my fondness for the broadsheet newspaper will be as transparently quaint as, oh, pining away for the days of the town crier. My experience – at this point in time, at this conjunction of media – will be gone, the tensions resolved, and history will be rewritten by the technological victors – but the lens of history is necessarily distorted, and it’s the moment that McLuhan was really interested in. There are billions of us living through this, just as there were millions of us living through the invention of movable type. And McLuhan was one of the first modern scholars to recognize that this experience – this engagement with ways we interact with the world – was worthy of study.
My Fellow Americans
April 22nd, 2011
So I’m reading the paper a while back, and Alex Beam has a column in which he mentions that my pal Chuck E. Costa has been named the official Connecticut state troubadour for 2011 and 2012. Now, I live in Cambridge, which has an official poet populist (no laureates for us here, nosiree), and this got me thinking. I mean, I’ve been waiting for someone with real authority to take this troubadour thing by the horns – they’ve been doing this in Connecticut since 1992, but Massachusetts is virgin territory, state-troubadour-wise. But before we follow Connecticut’s lead, there’s a few things we probably ought to take care of. Read more »
Music and the Renegade Tradition
March 30th, 2011
(Originally appeared here. Check out http://www.we-support-local-music.com for other great local bloggers.)
Welcome to the second installment of my occasional feature, Sam’s Book Corner, where I rise from my sofa and not actually review a book I’ve just finished. I began back in October, with a not-actual-review of Steve Almond’s “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life”. This time, we’re talking about Thaddeus Russell’s “A Renegade History of the United States”, which is worth a read if only for the chapter which describes the Jewish domination of professional basketball in the first half of the 20th century. Yes, indeed, in case you’re not aware of this, we’re naturally gifted athletes – at least that’s what they were saying at the time…
Mr. Russell’s book is something of a provocation – at least, he’s not really intending that we take the thesis at face value. The idea is that what cemented American freedom was not the Founding Fathers, or the pioneers, but rather the parade of scofflaws, indolents and hedonists who challenged the ongoing Puritanism that this great country was founded on. The drunkards during the Revolution, the gangsters in the 20′s, the drag queens at Stonewall – these are the ingredients, he writes, of American freedom.
Now, this isn’t completely nuts. It’s hard for me, perhaps as a child of the sixties (not really, but close enough for folk music), to appreciate how robust the tradition of moral scold is in American history. The title track to my pal Chris Pahud’s first album, “Morton’s Return”, is about one of the incidents Mr. Russell talks about: how a man named Thomas Morton founded a non-Puritan settlement north of Plymouth which featured intolerable levels of debauchery (read: any enjoyment of anything at all). So the Pilgrims marched up to Quincy, with guns, and shut it down, thereby establishing a long American tradition of legal and extralegal enforcement of the moral virtue of not enjoying things. From the Puritans to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to Prohibition to the Hays Code to Tipper Gore and her explicit warning labels, normative America has always been about hard work, bland food, uninspired sex, and the connection between leisure time and the Apocalypse.
But the thing that really jumps out at me, as a musician, is the extent to which music – allmusic – is part of this “renegade” tradition. It seems to have started with dancing – after all, dancing is a horrible, dirty activity which occasionally involves touching a member of the opposite sex (well, whatever sex you happen to be interested in), which will lead immediately to venereal disease and the collapse of the Republic. It also meant that you weren’t working, and of course our country is built on hard work – never mind the fact that our economy seems to be driven almost entirely by blockbuster movies, snack foods and Internet pornography. The sin of spending money on leisure, especially leisure that would lead to other sorts of enjoyment – and get your mind out of the gutter, there – see, that’s exactly what I mean, there’s nothing wrong with having your mind in the gutter – no, actually, it’s not even the gutter, the problem is thinking that it’s the gutter in the first place – and here we are, in 21st century America, where white people still have no idea what to do with their bodies, pretty much all the time.
It’s hard to imagine how what I do, as a songwriter, is subversive or a challenge to the status quo. But I benefit from years of folks who did exactly that – the slaves who refused to yield to their circumstances of toil; the ragtime composers who made their livings in the lobbies of whorehouses; the jazz musicians who played for gangsters in speakeasies; Elvis Presley, who died as a joke but started out as someone so shocking that he could only be shown on television from the chest up; the anti-war music of the sixties. Not a single one of these people aimed for mainstream America.
And it doesn’t matter whether I think my own material is subversive – there’s probably someone out there who’s thinking it for me. If Mr. Russell’s thesis is right, I don’t have to be a war protester or a free-love advocate; my very existence is a threat to American values.
After all, I haven’t worked full-time in almost thirty years, because I love my music and my peace of mind more than I love the idea of working. And just in this past year, I wrote a song called “I Ain’t In It For The Money”, which not only challenges the employment status quo but also features a grammatical bastard child right there in the title. I’ve written songs that refuse to pass judgment on divorce, sex outside marriage – you name it, I refuse to be a moral scold about it. In fact, now that you mention it, I can feel the fabric of society shredding around me even as I write this.
If there is a moral here – well, I suppose we should call it an “amoral”, given the circumstances, but you know what I mean – it’s that somewhere, somehow, there’s always going to be someone or something out to get you. It may be your own fear, or your own unwillingness to rattle the cage, or your concern about being ostracized or mocked, or even a very real concern about being jailed, or worse. Art isn’t innocent. It requires us to sacrifice a bit of ourselves, to expose our neck to the knife – in ways we may not even be aware of. You may cause an uproar without even knowing it; you may start a revolution without intending to; but it does no good to backtrack after the fact, or to hold yourself back beforehand. We are all artists, after all – enjoying music is as much a skill as creating it, after all, and I’ve known concertgoers that invest far more energy in, and are far more knowledgeable about, what I do than I am. And if Thaddeus Russell is right, art, either making it or enjoying it, is one of the things that challenges American Puritanism – and makes us more free.
The Eye of the Beholder
March 30th, 2011
A while back, my pal Jon Waterman had a gig on his birthday, to which his significant other secretly invited a bunch of us, to share his birthday, and perhaps a song, perhaps one of his. I ultimately couldn’t go, but when I was planning on going, I tried working on a couple of Jon’s songs, and nothing was really working, and it hit me: why don’t I write a song for him? How often might this have happened in his life? (More than zero times, it turns out – after all, his significant other is also a songwriter. But this is me, not thinking.) Seems like a good birthday present, right? Read more »
The Music in You
February 19th, 2011
As most of my faithful readers know, I used to be in a band. This band was a happy-go-lucky ska/rock extravaganza called Agent 13 (named after the character in Get Smart who was always hidden in places – a mailbox, a sofa, a ship smokestack). One of the things I loved about this band was that we all really liked each other – I don’t think that the five or six core members ever had a stereotypical band quarrel in the six years we were together. Read more »
Green Acres
January 30th, 2011
(Originally appeared here. Check out http://www.we-support-local-music.com for other great local bloggers.)
It might have been a warm spring night, the sort of night where the moon seems to glow and promise drips from every budding tree. It was a party, a community dance, maybe, on the second floor, perhaps, of a grand old hotel in a small town in the center of Massachusetts. It might have been in 1965-era Technicolor, the colors garish and brilliant, like new toys.
Who knows what the occasion was – veteran’s benefit, May Day, a municipal election. But there he was at the piano: play a song, toss off a witty remark, play another song. He loved being the center of attention – the town librarian, Tony Randall on the set of Green Acres, married to the sharp-tongued, take-no-prisoners town clerk; Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, opening about as far off Broadway as you can get.
I was not at this party – it was long before I met Jim Sullivan. But I can see it – just like all the folks at his funeral could see it, vividly, knowing Jim and his love of the stage. He was an artist, an actor, a raging egotist, a generous mentor, and one of the most maddening men I’ve ever met. And he was my father-in-law, until the middle of October, when one morning he wasn’t feeling too well, and the next evening he was dead.
In many ways, life and the limelight were not particularly kind to Jim Sullivan. He aspired to be a great poet – he even nominated himself (there’s that ego, there) for the Pulitzer Prize – but recognition studiously escaped him. His wife died far too young. Parkinson’s eventually robbed him of his hands, and his ability to drive, and thus his spotlight. But in many other ways, he was as successful as any of us could ever dream. The town of Barre was his canvas – everybody, but everybody, knew him; he was omnipresent in town government, veteran’s affairs, social and intellectual life. He wrote a poem for the Barre Gazette every single week, just about, for thirty years or so – the last one appeared the day after he died. Life gave him a small pond, and he was as big a fish as they’d ever have.
Artists beget artists. His son is a newspaperman and a novelist; his daughter is a writer. His daughter hates the limelight, she says – yes, she bristled at her father’s egotism, and doesn’t want to be like that, but man, I’ve seen her work a room. It’s in her blood – she can’t fight it. And I – well, it seems that there’s this gesture that Jim made with his finger when he was holding forth that I can reproduce, almost eerily, as if I inherited it from him. He was a ham; I’m a ham.
Live performance is an ephemeral thing. Most performances aren’t recorded, in any way, except in our memories. They happen, and they’re gone. But the impact they have on people can last for decades. They’re fragile, weightless, but yet, at times, as substantial for the witnesses (and participants) as a rock.
My wife misses her father terribly, in good ways and in bad. In his illness, he was the center of her attention for almost a year. But the town of Barre has the luxury of missing him in those ways that recall the beauty and the impact of that night on the second floor of the grand hotel. Each of us, as an artist, has a chance to have that sort of effect on an audience; and each of you, the audience, has a chance at that memory, if you put down your book, put on your coat, and join the party.