Writing my noir reviews made me curious to see what more informed (read: better) writers had to say about the state of genre fiction, so I did what any modern writer and blogger worth their salt would do: Google "genre fiction" and cull a few reputable articles from the results, then dump them onto my blog with a short introductory paragraph. Bingo. My noir reviews were inspired by Alexandra Alter's short piece in the very short Lifestyles section of the WSJ, which I have included. At first I was wary of linking to a Murdoch owned publication, but I've since been subpoenaed for my role in the NoW scandal, so I figured what the hell.
Hello again, internet denizens. I've been hunched over my desk for many an hour of late, drafting new material for this sinking ship of a blog that I've chained my internet persona to, and by golly you are all in for a treat. However (of course), said "new stuff" is still undergoing my stringent revision process, which could take months or even years. Or maybe I'll just put it up over the weekend, who can say. To tide you over, I offer this humble tidbit of avant-bluesy goodness.
Everyone knows The Black Keys, but did you know that they are huge fans of freak folk pioneer Captain Beefheart AKA Don Van Vliet AKA Frank Zappa's BFF? Well, now you do. The Keys have laid down some prime cuts of Beefheart over the years, first on record with "Grown So Ugly" on Rubber Factory, a cover of a track from 1967's Safe As Milk LP (which is itself a cover of an old school blues song by Robert Pete Williams, but this sentence is already confusing), but their Beefheart covers repertoire is actually fairly extensive. Here are four that I was able to track down on the Youtube. If you know of any more, please, let me know.
Grown So Ugly (Black Keys, Rubber Factory [2004])
This video was shot at an instore gig at Grimey's Records in Nashville.
I have an ongoing love affair with noir fiction. For about six months, I poured through the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I loved every minute of it, every serpentine subplot and planted holdout piece and surly dame. Chandler and Hammett wrote some great schlock, and I was often impressed with how concise and powerful their prose could be, especially the dialogue. However, once I'd read a few of their books, I felt like I'd read them all. Both authors established a basic blueprint for their plots early on (and for the genre at large), and then rarely bothered to stray far from its boundaries. More recent noir derived fiction tends to mess around with the genre conventions Ray and Dash layed out, and that's where I've found some really good reads. Here are a few that stand out.
The LA Quartet, by James Ellroy (Various Publishers, 1987-1992)
In spirit, James Ellroy is probably the author on this list that is closest to Chandler and Hammett in style and sensibility. In fact, Ellroy has said that he doesn't allow himself to read any contemporary fiction, lest its influence creep into his writing, and that Ray and Dash are two of the only authors of fiction that he enjoys. Ellroy's writing goes down darker, deeper holes than Ray and Dash's, and-at the risk of being painfully cliche- he's much "grittier"(sigh). Ellroy's fascination with crime began at a young age, in the aftermath of his mother's murder in 1958 (which he documents in his memoir My Dark Places). Ellroy has amassed an extensive body of work over his career, uniformly set in Los Angeles in the 40's and 50's. His earlier works are typical noir, albeit with a bit more craft than most, but it wasn't until he rammed the LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz) down America's throat that he started to receive serious attention in critical circles. The quartet follows a loosely defined plot arc, with a few overlapping characters and events that recur throughout all the books, but what joins the books as a quartet is not so much a plot or characters, but the setting of Los Angeles and Ellroy's fascination with human weakness, Machiavellian political maneuvering, and of course, sex, drugs and violence.
What I like the most about Ellroy is how compact and powerful his prose is, even more so than the sources it is derived from, more in line with masters of minimalism like Hemingway than the old masters of noir. Ellroy also has an eye for human weakness and a way of describing it without overtones of condescension or moralizing that I admire almost as much as his minimalism, and themes of weakness and corruption permeate everything that he writes. The way Ellroy renders his Los Angeles and the socio-political context of the early 20th century is also incredibly comprehensive and vivid, as is the way he weaves historical events and personalities into his plots (The Black Dahlia murders, Howard Hughes, Mickey Cohen and the Chavez Ravine controversy among others).each of the novels could easily be read and enjoyed by itself without the need to establish context by reading all of them chronologically. Indeed, I feel that readers who try to read the books in order might do themselves a diservice, as the first two novels are probably the least impressive. Out of the four, I feel that the latter two, LA Confidential and White Jazz, are the most impressive and readable of the bunch. For someone looking to get their feet wet, I'd read Confidential first, as it is probably the easiest and punchiest of the bunch to burn through. Even if you've seen the movie, you have no idea what kind of ride you're in for. White Jazz is my personal favorite, and it is stylistically much different than the other novels-Ellroy's original manuscript of it was 900 pages, but upon being asked to shorten it by his publisher, he clipped it to 350 by removing all of the verbs. The result, combined with Ellroy's already scant language, is incredibly coherent and powerful.
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (Putnam, 2003)
If I had only one word to describe William Gibson's appeal and significance as an author, I would choose "prescience". Gibson is arguably best known for his first novel, Neuromancer, which won the Hugo award for best science fiction novel (basically the Pulitzer for Sci-Fi) and predicted the creation of the internet years before it actually took place. In his later works, Gibson would go on to predict cultural phenomena like reality television, cyber sex, and the death of the nation state (well, we're still waiting on that one...), and he's contributed a boatload of neologisms to the Oxford English Dictionary as well. Just how prophetic and original a writer Gibson actually is has been the subject of heated debate, but regardless of how well he's able to see into the future, nobody contests the fact that he's a damn good wordsmith. Gibson's understated dialogue and lush imagery are his most impressive tools, and in those respects he's drawn several critical comparisons to Chandler. He also has a facility with describing settings, particularly cities, that showcases his impressive understanding of all the myriad factors that determine what a place was, is, and could become.
Pattern Recognition is Gibson's first book that isn't science fiction, and in a way that makes it all the more impressive a novel, because it manages to be just as bizarre and thought provoking as his previous works while remaining within the realm of plausibility. The protagonist, Cayce Pollard, works as a freelance "coolhunter", who tracks social and economic trends to predict emergent consumer preferences. Cayce is unique in that she reacts physically to corporate trademarks and imagery in the same way other people's bodies do to allergens (rashes, itching, difficulty breathing), and she is able to use her psychosomatic condition to aid her in her work, as an indicator of how distinct and powerful a product or image is. Pollard spends her time outside of work on her hobby, trying to discover the origin of a set of mysterious internet videos collectively called "the footage". Eventually, Pollard finds her life consumed by the pursuit of knowledge regarding "the footage", and that is when the plot starts to take off. The thematic density of this book is astounding, and I couldn't do it justice in a few sentences, but its core is the same as every noir or detective story, a search for meaning and significance in a world that readily offers neither. Even the name, Pattern Recognition, suggests this process. Over the course of the book, Gibson touches on his perceptions of the impact of 9/11, a "nodal point" event after which the world is never the same. He also suggests that in the wake of the chaos caused by 9/11, Cayce's search for the meaning of "the footage" and a more all encompassing understanding of reality becomes a difficult, if not impossible task. Uh oh.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, 2007)
Michael Chabon? The guy that writes "sensitive guy with glasses" fiction that wins big awards? Yes, he has a book on the list too. Unlike Ellroy or Gibson, Chabon is diverging from his larger body of work into the noir motif with YPU, and his style is significantly less "hard boiled" yet equally enjoyable. Chabon's sentimentality and his character focused narrative style combine with the basic elements of noir in a way that only occasionally feels forced, and Chabon's efforts at brevity in contrast with the sprawling sentences and lavish descriptions of his previous works add an interesting element to the novel, and the moments when he truly accomplishes "more with less" are worth the trip through this book. Chabon also takes some time to play around with linguistics here, combining Yiddish with the lexicon of noir slang to create neologisms of a humorous bent (the Yiddish slang for gun is Sholem, the word meaning Peace). The persistent themes that Chabon established in his previous works (Judaism, homosexuality, the burdens of exceptionality) are all present here, albeit with a dramatically different method of presentation.
YPU is set in the present day in an alternate timeline where the United States granted land in Alaska to displaced Jews in the wake of World War II. The novel is set in Sitka, the largest city in this "safe zone", during the last few months before the zone is to be repatriated to the United States. Chabon's protagonist, Meyer Landsman, is a detective for the Sitka police department who stumbles into a web of conspiracy when he investigates the death of a man who lived in the same apartment complex as him. Landsman is a fairly typical detective protagonist of the Marlowe/Spade variety, with predictable demons like alcoholism and martial problems dogging him, but Chabon's attempts to breath some complexity into a fairly straight forward "jaded tough guy" trope worked well enough. The storyline is ambitious in scope, and to me felt a bit unfocused at times, but the magnificent set-piece sequences and occasionally masterful wordplay that Chabon puts to work in the novel overcame most of my qualms, and I enjoyed reading this book quite a bit. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Chabon's sentimentality, and there were certainly moments in YPU that were a bit too saccharine for my taste, but if you can get past the wishy washy parts there's an interesting noir hybrid here that's worth your time as a reader. Interestingly, the book has been optioned as a screenplay and is currently in pre-production with The Coen Brothers set to direct, on the heels of A Serious Man, a work that was itself focused on issues of Jewish identity. Yow-za.
I'm STILL working on the Molecular Gastronomy series. I know, it's been a few months. But I really want to do those articles justice, and my research is taking wayyyy longer than I thought it would. Here's something else to tide you over.
Recently, I read about a new local restaurant called Wichit, a sandwich shop that operates in the same assembly line style fashion as Chipotle. I still haven't been to Wichit, but in the process of reading some reviews of the restaurant I stumbled across some interesting articles about a recent sea change in the casual dining and fast food restaurant businesses. A new mutant strain of restaurant that industry analysts are calling "fast casual" dining, restaurants that fall somewhere between fast food and sit down restaurants, have slowly become a standard for mid-priced dining in America. I guess I had been aware that this was happening to some extent, but at least now I know what to call these restaurants. Chipotle and Qdoba, Panera, Five Guys and In N Out Burger all fall under the fast casual label, offering meals in the 10-15 dollar range for people who want "fast" food but don't feel like slumming it at Taco Bell or Wendy's.
All of these restaurants share a few important elements of business philosophy:
-They don't run a drive through window.
-Their dining spaces are fairly spartan, with little or no TGIF style street signs or nicknack crap up on the walls.
-They place an emphasis on the quality of their ingredients, and often document their business procedures and nutritional information for the consumer more extensively than other chain restaurants.
-They tend to use lower profile marketing techniques and rely on word of mouth to hype their business rather than engage in overt advertisement like billboards or television commercials.
-And finally, they pay their employees more generously than other food service positions, but demand a higher standard of excellence from them, requiring very strict adherence to food preparation, cleaning, and customer interaction policies.
Not bad ideas, really. And the food these places are slinging is uniformly better than typical microwaved or deep fried fast food; if you don't like eating Chipotle burritos, there may be something gravely wrong with you physically or psychologically. However, on closer examination, I began to feel that there was something vaguely ominous about fast casual. From a consumer perspective, the emergence of fast casual represents a windfall, but from the perspective of a small business owner it's just plain scary.
The business principles I listed above probably appeal to you because they've been staples of small restaurants all over the country, proto-fast casual businesses. You know, your local deli, taqueria, burger joint, etc. Now, corporate fast casual options have begun to erode the consumer base of all those local restaurants, and it's getting harder and harder to open a new independent restaurant in competition with fast casual chains. At the same time, some small businesses are mimicking the slick presentation of corporate fast casual to their own ends; Wichit, the sandwich place I mentioned earlier, is a good example of this phenomenon. They're not a chain, and unless they're a test restaurant for a corporate interest (which I doubt) they're a new small business that's competing with corporate chains using their own tactics and aesthetics. And it seems to be working for them. If you look at their website or read this blurb about their business philosophy you'll see what I mean.
So it's a good thing, and a bad thing at the same time. One of those...what do you call it? Dilemmas. Who knows what the long term implications of this trend will have on the restaurant business? Not me, at least as of now. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Here's a few articles I thought were helpful.
Forgive me, blogfolk, I have neglected my responsibilities vis a vis this collection of my ramblings. There's more content going up soon, but in the meantime, readers in the Cleveland area should check out Derek Hess's show at the William Busta Gallery on Prospect. This is Hess's first Cleveland based show in quite a while, and it runs from now until the end of July; it's a series of his reinterpretations of classic Playboy Magazine covers from the 60's and 70's, so if you're a big fan of Warholesque softcore, this is your lucky day. If you've got one of those nifty Facebook pages the kids these days are using, there's more info available here.
The underground music scene of the 1990s yielded scores of sub-genre creating bands, one of which was the "synth-punk" movement of post-hardcore, which was characterized by the use of synths and keyboards in conjunction with (or sometimes, independent of) conventional guitar-bass-drums archetypes of punk. If you want to know what Devo cross-pollinated with Black Flag sounds like, here are three albums that I think are fairly representative of the genre.
Brainiac-Bonsai Superstar (Grass/BGM, 1994)
Bonsai Superstar is the second album by Dayton, OH based synthpunk band Brainiac. This album represents a transition point in Brainiac's sound, as later projects like Hissing Prigs in Static Couture and Electroshock For President would turn progressively stranger and more synth heavy, but on Superstar their sound remains guitar centric and their song structures are somewhat more conventional than those later works. The best moments on Superstar come when vocalist and Moog abuser Tim Taylor and guitarist Jon Schmersal spiral off into weirdness and experimentation while Brainiac's awesome rhythm section maintain the low end with metronome precision behind them. Taylor's range and use of effects on his vocals add an interesting dimension to the music, especially when his singing or screaming meshes with the bizarre noises coming out of his Mini-Moog Voyager to create a complimentary wall of noise that sounds like a new kind of instrument. Check out Radio Apeshot and To The Baby Counter on Youtube and the band's wiki page if you want to learn more.
Six Finger Satellite-Severe Exposure (Sub Pop, 1995)
Six Finger Satellite formed in Providence, RI in the early 90s, and famously toured with landmark post-hardcore acts like The Jesus Lizard and Shellac. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was the band's live soundman, and the soundsystem that he fed 6FS through which he nicknamed Death From Above would later inspire the name of Murphy's DFA Records label. Like Brainiac, 6FS's later albums tilted away from guitar rock and towards a purely synthetic sound, but their early albums, Severe Exposure in particular, showcase an aggressive and almost-but-not-quite dance friendly fusion of hardcore and electronic music. Guitarist Jon McClean's work on this album is particularly excellent, and the moments where his tone finds the midpoint between abrasion and melody are not to be missed. Drummer Rick Pelletier's brutal style of play suggests that he's not very concerned with the cost of new drum heads, and his machine gun quick fills bridge the gaps between McClean's guitar freakouts perfectly. Check out the songs Parlour Games and Rabies on Youtube for a good cross-section of the album, and the band's wiki.
The VSS-Nervous Circuits (Honey Bear Records, 1997)
The VSS formed later than Brainiac and Six Finger Satellite, and their approach to synth-punk is more aggressive and less melodic than those bands. On their earlier albums, The VSS used synth sporadically, usually as a compliment to their guitar sound or for minor textural passages and background sound rather than as another main instrument. On Nervous Circuits, their second full length LP, the synth comes out of the background and takes a more prominent role, and the result is a more distinctive and recognizable sound than that early material. If you've always wondered what Fugazi would sound like with a keyboardist, look this album up. Vocalist Sonny Kay sounds an awful lot like Guy Picciotto, and guitarist Josh Hughes's single guitar attack strains to amalgamate Picciotto and Ian MacKaye's plucking and riffing. Here's Lunar Weight on Youtube and the band's wiki if you're intrigued.
Bookspam is one of my new featurettes. Basically, it's going to be a list of interesting books that I've heard about or am in the process of reading. Feel free to throw your two cents in via the comments, if you've actually read any of these. This week's list is "post-modern fiction" flavored. Enjoy.
The Toy Collector by James Gunn (Bloomsbury, 2000)
James Gunn wears many hats: writer, director, ex-husband of Jenna Fisher AKA Pam from The Office. Gunn used to work for Troma Entertainment, so he's got some serious pulp art chops, which are evident in his films Slither and the more recent Super with Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page. His semi autobiographical novel The Toy Collector apparently contains the same mix of humor and the macabre that he showcased in his films; the protagonist (whose name is also James Gunn), is an orderly at a hospital who steals and sells drugs, then uses the money to add to his huge collection of toys. That concept alone sounds interesting, but Gunn's use of post-modern gimmicks straight out of the Delillo and Foster Wallace playbooks, like using his protagonist's toys as alternate narrators and interspersing flashbacks and drugged out interludes throughout the narrative, should add up to something special. This one's in my Amazon queue right now.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hill (Cannongate, 2007)
This one was suggested to me by a good friend, who said it "was like House of Leaves, but not as boring, and shorter". Sounds good so far. The jacket describes the books as "Melville meets Michael Crichton" and "Pynchon meets Douglas Adams". Ok, I'm a bit more intrigued. From the wiki article I learned that there are allusions to Jaws, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, and Toy Story in the book. After that, I was pretty much sold. This one's on my bedside table right now.
Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson (Picador, 2003)
The title pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this book: it's Gilligan's Island meets James Joyce, although it's more like Dubliners than Finnegan's Wake, if you ask me. The book is split into seven vignettes, each following a different character from Gilligan's Island through their lives after they've escaped the island and returned to 1950s-60s America, where they run into period events like Red Scare paranoia, the Kennedy Assassination, and the Beat Generation. Tom Carson's efforts to create distinctive voices for each of the characters are earnest, but sometimes it feels like he's trying a bit too hard. In my opinion, the best moments in the book come when he's having fun with the absurdity of his concept, rather than the "serious" meditations he makes on the social and moral climate of America. Check out the wiki if you want to learn more.
Devin Powers is a Brooklyn based artist whose work I recently became aware of through his brother, who I met in a creative writing class at the Harvard Extension School we're both taking. I don't have much in way of art criticism chops, so I won't pretend to understand Devin's work enough to speak on it at length; his drawings and paintings effect the same sort of complex emotional and intellectual response I have to other excellent abstract artists like Pollack and Kandinsky, so that must mean something good. The man himself has this to say about his work:
My work is made up of rudimentary geometric shapes. Sometimes these
shapes are arranged to look like something already in the world; for example, a
maze or a sheet of lined paper. More often the arrangement is abstract. Although
the abstract work does not represent any object in a concrete way, it often has a
familial resemblance to things other than itself, such as network visualizations,
generative algorithms, mathematical structures, star constellations, and complex
systems. There are also strong stylistic connections to Gothic architecture and
Islamic ornament, Russian Constructivism, Minimalism and Modernist
abstraction. I do not want my work to be seen as hermetic; these associations are
intentional and a part of the work. I am interested in creating powerful emotion through form and material.
Expression is more important than concept in my work. The particular kind and
degree of emotion changes from work to work but overall I aim to evoke
something fundamental, omnipresent, interconnected, and overwhelming.
I'll be doing a Q & A with Devin sometime in the near future. In the meantime, check out other examples of his work here, or this interview he did with Brent Hallard at Visual Discrepancies.
The Crust Brothers were a one off collaboration between Stephen Malkmus of Pavement and the band Silkworm; they did a series of small club shows in the late 1990s playing nothing but classic rock covers. Most of the songs are from Bob Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes album, but there's some CCR, Skynyrd and Stones thrown in, too. If you can imagine this and this mixed with this, you'll have a pretty good idea what you're in for. This one's been out of print for years now, so pick it up from Mediafire (below).
In my interview with Steve Albini, I asked him to name a few bands from outside the US that he thought people should check out, and the Italian band Uzeda was of several that he mentioned. I had heard a little bit of Uzeda, but I was more familiar with Bellini, a sort of Touch & Go superband that Uzeda's guitarist Agostino Tillota and vocalist Giovanna Cacciola were (are?) in that also included Damon Che and Matthew Taylor of Don Caballero. I liked Bellini, so I figured I would also like Uzeda; I was right. Different Section Wires seemed like as good a starting point as any, and I was very impressed with what I heard.
This album is very diverse and well paced, and there is a sense of space and quality of expansiveness to a lot of the songs that was particularly interesting to me. Other reviews of Uzeda tended to emphasize the similarities of approach and composition that they share with other T&G bands like Don Cab (irregular time signatures, finger tapping) and Slint (minimalist composition, eclecticism), and while I don't think these comparisons aren't apt or warrented, Uzeda are not a sum of other band's parts, and they should be recognized as such.
There are dynamics and elements of pacing at work in this album that I hadn't seen in very many others that I've listened to; a track like Stomp (linked above), for instance, was defined to me in terms of "space" and contrast. The steady snare beat that opens the track remains a constant backdrop, but the elements that crop up around it, like Tillota's ticking guitar lines or Cacciola's subdued wailing, are few and far between for the first few minutes. When Raffaele Gulisano's bass kicks in around the two minute mark, all of the disparate elements that comprise Uzeda start to coalesce and slowly peak, reaching an apogee in the last minute or so of the song. The track after Stomp, Steel Man, is a bit more straight forward. It's loud from the very beginning, with the drums jumping out a bit more than Stomp, and the song length and structure conforming more to typical punk rock standards. Cacciola's tone reminded me of Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, and Tillota and Gulisano's guitars lock together to create a satisfying slab of noise. The longer, spacier tracks on the album, like Stomp and Milky Way, provide contrast to the other faster tracks and slow down the pace of the album nicely, and serve to build tension that is then released by faster, more aggressive tracks. In all, this album was very satisfying to listen to, and it's obvious that the band was extremely deliberate in their instrumentation and pacing.
I've started work on a series of articles about different aspects of molecular gastronomy, which I will be posting them as quickly as I can finish them. Hopefully, there will be two articles; the first will examine cooking methods (sous vide, sphereification, molecular mixology), and the second will profile restaurants and chefs (Grant Achatz @ Alinea, Heston Blumenthal @ The Fat Duck, Ferran Adria @ El Bulli). I'm not really a "foodie" type, but for whatever reason this subject has been a fascination of mine lately, and I've been reading about it non-stop for about a week. I've never written about food or restaurants before, and I hope at least a few people reading this blog will be interested in the subject.
EDIT (4/22): Still working on these! They should be up in a few days. Have patience, grasshoppers.
In general, I'm not really an enthusiastic fan of the whole "chillwave" aesthetic that's been percolating through the indie rock scene of late, but these guys are a notable exception. No Joy share the themes (beaches, summer, drugs, girls) and sonic influences (90's lo-fi, shoegaze, Weezer, more Weezer, Beach Boys, Dick Dale, more Weezer) of other chillwave bands like Real Estate and Surfer Blood. No Joy are on arguably the premier label for chillwave, Mexican Summer, whose roster also includes Best Coast and Wavves. No Joy distinguish themselves with a more muscular sound, which they achieve by jacking up the low end in their mixes and maintaining an often aggressive sounding juxtaposition of thick and murky rhythm guitar and bass with piercing leads and distorted vocals. It also helps that their drummer beats the shit out of her (his?) kit instead of relying on brushed snares and weird mixed percussion gimmicks we see from other chillwave percussionists, and is consistently locked in with the bassist. This sound is exemplified on one of the album's singles, Hawaii (posted above), on which the song's catchy hook establishes itself until about 0:14 in, when the drums and bass drop in behind a squalling exclamation point of feedback. The track that preceeds Hawaii, Pacific Pride, is a good example of the other end of No Joy's sonic spectrum; a quick, quiet, drone-y beach ballad that is slower and quieter, but just as enjoyable as the faster Hawaii. In short, this album's composition is diverse in a way that doesn't feel forced, but with consistent sonic themes running through all of the songs, so if you like one song, you'll probably like them all to some extent. In short, Ghost Blonde is worth forty five minutes of your life, get on it.
This is the first of what I hope will be many installments of Interview Yr Idols, which is my uninspired name for the interview segment of the blog. My subject is Steve Albini, a recording engineer, musician, and proponent of the DIY ethic. Steve has been a fixture in the underground music scene since the early 1980s as a musician in the band Big Black, and as a music critic and pundit in 'zines like Matter and Forced Exposure. Since the 1990s, he's been better known for fronting the band Shellac, and for his work as a recording engineer. Steve's worked on albums with bands like The Pixies , Nirvana, Cheap Trick, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and Iggy and the Stooges, just to name a few of his more prominent clients, but he's also worked with hundreds of other equally awesome if somewhat more obscure bands. If you want to learn more about Steve, first, pause and listen to the song that I've posted above....There, wasn't that awesome? Then, I'd suggest you read the comprehensive Wiki article on him, oneofthezillionotherinterviewshe'sdone, or his article "The Problem With Music".
Steve was gracious enough to answer a gigantic list of questions I foisted upon him by e-mail. My questions are in bold, his responses are in plain text.
What are your thoughts on Juggalos?
They are absolutely a joy. Unlike the Tea Party, their world will never overlap mine, and so I never need to take them seriously, I just get to enjoy them from a distance. Their sense of righteous ignorance is magical in the results it produces. Simply magical.
You keep your e-mail address and phone number available to general public and make time for interviews with anyone who ask you. Why?
I think it's odd when normal people isolate themselves from other normal people. If you're royalty or have social problems and don't know how to interact with normal people, then okay, make yourself hard to find. If you're comfortable talking to people and can't get talked into buying magazine subscriptions you have nothing to fear.
Have there been times you regret being so available, or do you think your experiences with people who have contacted you have been mostly positive?
When the phone rings at 4 am and it's some drunken fool showing his other drunken fool friends that he has my phone number it can be a little weird, but it's harmless even when it's a nuisance. Being available to people has allowed me to meet people who have become great friends and comrades. I'm very glad I haven't been protected from these wonderful people.
Today is the first of April. You, and also a great many of the people you've worked with in the past and present, have a history of practical jokes and a general reputation of having unconventional senses of humor. What are one or two of the pranks you or your friends have committed that amused you particularly?
An audio engineer friend of mine was visiting a rival studio, and he mentioned to the technical engineer that he heard some radio interference in the control room. Before he left for dinner, he hid a transistor radio turned down very low inside one of the big soffit-mounted monitor speakers by sticking it inside the bass port vent hole. The technical engineer spent all evening disconnecting equipment in the studio trying to get the sound to go away, getting more and more frustrated. Hours later, after dinner, my friend shut off the radio when the technical engineer was out of the room, and when he saw him, thanked the staff engineer for solving the problem. Before he left for the night, he moved turned the radio on and moved it to the other speaker, and alerted the technical engineer to the radio interference again. This went on for several days, and he apparently left the radio running when he left the studio at the end of the week.
Today is also the second day of the baseball season. You are a baseball fan, but you have stated that you're not so much a fan of any single team in the MLB as you are a fan of the sport in general. What aspects of the game of baseball do you think endear it to you over other sports? In the context of this season, what teams and players are you most interested in watching?
I'm locally aligned with the White Sox, and I like the addition of Adam Dunn, but I don't have a particularly good feeling about this year, given the state of the bullpen and nebulous closer spot. It would be beyond optimistic to expect Konerko to have another season like last year, and a number of key players (Pierzynski, Pierre, Vizquel) are showing their age and may be starting to wind down. It'll be interesting seeing Minnesota deal with Morneau and Mauer's potential physical fragility, since they've basically staked the franchise on them. The Phillies rotation should make every game worth watching, but I'm more interested in what happens with the Nationals, who should be growing into a legitimate contender as their younger players and prospects mature, especially if they make a stab at getting Pujols as a free agent as has been hinted. I'm also interested in the rejuvenation of the Orioles with Matt Wieters and a bunch of highly-touted young pitchers in the show all year. Also I love watching Vlad swing the bat.
A little further down the calendar in April is Record Store Day. You're extensively on record (no pun) as feeling that vinyl has been and continues to be a much better format than other physical or digital mediums. Do you think that an event like Record Store Day actively prolongs the longevity of vinyl as a format, or is it just a fiesta for collector scum?
I'm not big on promotion of any kind. I'm content for things to find their natural audience organically, so on that level I don't care for advertising or things like it. I am gratified that vinyl seems to be set to outlast all other physical formats for music though. It's the only truly permanent medium, and there is a lot of amazing music out there that is unlikely to ever make it to iTunes.
On my first visit to Chicago, I had the great fortune of being introduced to Kuma's Corner, which until recently I had no idea was right up the street from Electrical Audio. Do you go there often, and if so, which of their burgers do you prefer? I've only had the Plaguebringer, myself.
We get food from there every week. The Yob (smoked Gouda, grilled peppers, onions and bacon) is my regular, but I have had maybe a dozen different hamburgers there.
The next time I visit Chicago, I plan to take better advantage of the restaurant scene. Are there any places you'd suggest offhand, especially on a small budget?
In this neighborhood, definitely Hot Doug's and Urban Belly. You should probably get a Maxwell Street polish sausage or pork chop sandwich from Jim's Original and an Italian Beef from a reputable joint (get a local to recommend his favorite). If you're up for a challenge, go to Riccobene's and get a full order sandwich. If you can finish it, I'll buy.
In a similar vein, I read that you recently dined at Garth Achatz's Alinea in Lincoln Park, which I've read is absolutely fantastic. Were there any courses or elements of presentation in your meal that you particularly enjoyed or thought were interesting?
It would take a long time to articulate my feelings about that meal, but it was nothing if not impressive. The flavors were not the most memorable parts of the meal, obviously, but food is more than taste.
The article I read about Alinea and Achatz mentioned that he suffered from mouth cancer, and that at one point he lost his sense of taste (and almost had his tongue cut out). There's something blackly poetic about a chef losing his tongue, and maybe it's a tangential connection, but that story immediately made me think of the prevalence and special implications of hearing loss among musicians. Do you think you could cope with the loss of your hearing? Do you take any special precautions to protect your hearing beyond the use of ear-plugs?
I protect my hearing when I'm not in a musical environment, but at a show or in the studio I don't. I want to be immersed in those settings. I'm getting older, so there will inevitably be some hearing loss, but the people I admire most as engineers (Geoff Emerick, George Massenburg, Al Schmitt) all maintained their acuity as they aged. I'm convinced hearing is only partly physiological, and by maintaining alertness about what I'm hearing I can retain my acuity as well. So far at least it's been fine.
You ran a card game station at ATP, and play poker quite a bit. I enjoy playing poker, but I'm pretty terrible at it. Are there any resources you'd suggest for me that could improve my play?
The best way to improve your poker game is to get involved with or develop a peer group of other players and discuss situations with them. The online resources and forums (2+2, Cardrunners, Leggo, Deuces Cracked) are all helpful, and the books published by 2+2 on each of the specialty games are outstanding, but you never learn as much by yourself as you do by talking about specific situations and hands with other poker players. Texas Holdem is the game of choice in most home games and casinos, but other disciplines and mixed games are becoming increasingly popular, so there is an opportunity that hasn't existed in a while to get ahead of your competition at a new discipline. If you're ahead of your friends in learning Triple Draw or Pot-Limit Omaha, then you can make a living in those specific games. You don't need to be a better poker player than everybody else, you just need to be better at one game.
You were on Animal Planet with Todd and Bob to talk about Uffizi, the excellent Italian greyhound. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from your interviews I've gotten the impression that you're more of a cat person. Not in the sense that you'll be found dead of toxoplasmosis in a garbage filled house, but that you just dig cats. Am I right? Do you have any funny cat stories?
Todd's relationship with Uffizi is unique. He loves that dog and that dog adores him and wants to do things with him. I've never had a relationship like that with a dog. Dogs are more inclined to be companions and helpers, cats just want to live their own lives, and I admire cats for their independence and crafty nature. I feel like I've learned things from my interactions with cats.
I was talking with someone recently about the differences between EPs and LPs, and I realized that I really couldn't think of too many artists who have put out EPs recently. I've always kind of thought of an EP as being analogous to a short story, with the artist being able to achieve a kind of focus and consistency they couldn't necessarily get out of an LP. What do you think are the stylistic advantages of the EP format, and why do you think less people put them out these days?
My old bands Big Black and Rapeman both put out EPs, and I like the format. It's a nice, digestible hunk of a band's aesthetic, without belaboring the point. In the current record economy, making an EP is a losing proposition, since manufacturing costs are the same as an LP but sale price is necessarily lower. I wouldn't rule it out, but the money is a pretty big obstacle.
You and Bob (Weston) both use Travis Bean guitars in Shellac, and you participated in a documentary about them. When did you find out about Travis Bean guitars, and what about them is special in relation to other guitars you've played?
They have a distinctive, strident sound and I've basically accommodated my playing style to the guitar, so I don't think I could play anything else now. I particularly like the way the neck can be bent without going out of tune, almost like a subtle whammy bar, and the way the toggle switch comes into play as an effect.
I recently discovered the band Brainiac, and I'm really enjoying what I've heard of them so far. Were you involved in the production of the albums they put out on T&G?
I worked on one Braniac session, but I think their best stuff was done with Jim O'Rourke a couple years later.
I read somewhere that you and Bob (Weston) offered advice to James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem, DFA Records) when he was setting up a recording studio in the mid 90s. What kind of advice did you give him? Do you guys keep in touch?
Bob and James are pretty good friends. I just helped him out with some power and noise problems for his old studio.
You and Corey Rusk have both said that you bonded over a shared interest in fireworks. Do you still blow things up regularly, or is that a phase that has run its course?
We had a big'n last year on the Fourth of July, and every couple of years I set my brother's kids up with a "care package," just to make sure there's a little danger in their lives.
Cover songs are a longstanding tradition in punk rock, and you yourself have played quite a few covers of bands you admired, like Wire and Cheap Trick. How does it make you feel to see bands covering your songs, like Japandroids covering Racer X, or the band My Disco naming itself after a Big Black song?
Any time somebody pays attention to your creative output it's a little flattering, but if you take things like that to heart you end up being full of your own dump, so I try not to dwell on it. Also, it's hard not to find fault with somebody else doing your thing, no matter how well, so I try not to take any of it personally.
Do you still own the TR-606 that you used in Big Black? If so, have you used it for anything since?
No, I traded it for a guitar amp.
In an interview you had with Mark Prindle, he mentions an anecdote you have about the moment in which you realized that you didn't have to care about what other people think. Can you provide some context as to what led you to this insight? What do you think you've gained or lost from adopting that mindset?
I was about 14 years old, and it had been on my mind that other people might think less of me for one reason or another, the way I looked or acted or talked or whatever, and it dawned on me that none of that, what other people thought of me, would materially affect me any more that what their favorite colors were, as long as I didn't care about it. So I decided not to care, and haven't cared what other people thought about me since.
Your outspoken views on the music industry's business ethics are articulated in your famous essay The Problem With Music and in countless other examples. Did you formulate these beliefs based on your own intellectual examination of the music industry, or were there events in your life or events recounted to you by other people that led you to formulate your opinions?
I got to see a lot of damage done by agents of the mainstream showbusiness industry, and I drew my own conclusions about their motives. I also decided that we in the underground, didn't need our own versions of those agents or power structures. No managers, no booking agents, no lawyers, no contracts, none of it. I haven't used any of that fol-de-rol since. What we needed to do (and I believe we have done) is make those people and those ways of conducting business irrelevant, not to create little dollhouse versions of regular showbusiness offices and hierarchies. I have no respect for the "punk rock lawyer" or "punk rock publicist," because they are ultimately lawyers and publicists, and their role is a corrosive one that should be eradicated, not indulged.
You've produced a lot of bands that come to you from outside the US, like Monotonix or Uzeda. Are there any bands you've worked with or listened to recently that listeners in the US might not have heard that you think are worth checking out?
Cool bands from Italy: Three Second Kiss, Uzeda, Cash, Zu, Alix
Cool bands from Japan: Zeni Geva, Space Streakings, Omoide Hatoba, Ruins, Mono
Cool bands from all over: the Ex, My Disco, Arabrot, Allroh, Honey for Petzi, Chevreuil... there are a bazillion cool bands. Seriously, just go to the record store and ask around.
Well, after several years of procrastination, here is my "blog". I've been meaning to set one up for a couple of years now, but I wanted to focus on a few subjects rather than create a typical "write about whatever pops into my head" blog, and it wasn't until recently that I was able to narrow down a list of my interests down to something that feels manageable and focused. Those areas of interest are: music, film, "the arts", literature, gastronomy, sports and bioethics. That still sounds pretty scattershot, actually, but whatever. Most of the content will be either reviews or commentary by me on one of these subjects, but I'm hoping to conduct a lot of interviews with people whose interests and experiences are relevant to my subject matter, and also provide obligatory links to articles that I think are interesting when I'm too lazy to put something to the page myself. Enjoy.
