These pages have been somewhat neglected but that should change. The last two weeks have been a mad scrambled as I moved half way across the country. It is a good thing to shake things up once in a while. I feel like I have escaped from a rut.
Driving a cross country maybe a less of a common occurrence do to rising gas prices(I was thrilled to pay $3.69 imagine.) It was kind of a hassle but good to be reminded of the the the vast an diversity of the country in which I live.
Three days of Road Trip Music was not a bad thing either (though I did forget the banjo music for the drive through the Ozarks.) Road Trip Music seems to be produced less and less often these days. That does make sense through. The road trip is becoming a less common experience in modern America. We travel across the country at 30,000 feet more often or travel my road in SUV’s with DVD players. Jumping in the car with the big V-8 with the stereo blasting with the windows rolled down is a less common experience that has for environmental, economic and demographic reasons become less romanticized. So it is less written about. With oil prices sky rocketing it might become even less common.
It is to bad. The driving song might be relegated to a pleasant myth like Route 66. Long live Radar Love.
I work in a bad neighborhood. Some past mayor must have appointed his mentally challenged brother in-law as city planner. Warehouses and industrial buildings winding like a river through the area divide pockets of run down houses into shitty neighborhoods. People into those neighborhoods have no choice. It is mostly illegals with a minority of legal citizens way down on there luck. Who wants to live surrounded by salvage yards, carpet warehouses and pallet making operations the occasion that often go up in flames.
The thing is it has gotten hot but there are more street people than ever. And by street people I don’t mean just homeless. I include prostitutes, drunks, tweakers and other assorted sorry losers. Normally the heat thins there numbers dramatically. Normally there are not some many people outside. Normally not as many whores in thrift store prom dresses people outside and tweakers zooming around on bicycles over loaded with crap. The dive bar up the street must be bursting. People always in and out. You see a cluster of drunks when the door swings open. I love dives but this ain’t that kind of place. It not a place hipster hang out because Charles Bukowski drank there decades ago before the neighborhood was gentrified. This is the kind of place that sells fortified wine by the shot and you wish it smelled like stale beer. Twice I have seen a drunks stroll outside to piss on the side of the bar next to a long line of cars in the Taco Hell drive through next door. Not exactly an appetizer. Business I imagine most likely has surpassed the facilities.
Some of the things I see are in that neighborhood are better economic indicators than the clueless economist at the Fed will ever see. There seems to be a palatable sense of desperation in the air. You can breathe in the downturn. Even outside of that neighborhood people seem down. To steal a line from a famous peanut farmer there seems to be, “A Crisis of Confidence.” A kind of war that kind of has no end in sight, a credit crunch, a burst bubble, a disconnect between the American Dream and America and terms popping up not spoken since the era of my birth like stagflation. It seems like it one big bummer. You don’t need to be a pollster to know people aren’t feeling too great about things at the moment. It seems like people are cynical and tired. But It makes me feel more motivated about being creative. That malaise & desperation seems to inspire me more than when things are more warm and fuzzy and completely lacking that “Crisis of Confidence.” Smog makes me want to make art more than a rainbow.
It is really not that strange. Bad times in bad places make for good art. I am not claiming to be Barry Gordy Jr., Wayne Kramer, Iggy Pop or the Belleville Three but they serve as examples. When things got the most “interesting” in Detroit you got the birth of Motown, Punk Rock and Techno. The former murder capital has had made some damn good music. There are other examples like the summers of ‘76 in Manchester or ‘67 in San Francisco. Maybe if burst bubbles have silver linings it is these bad times will make better music. Whether we want to think about our problems or forget them the soundtrack might be better.
This idea reminds of the Harry Lime speech from The Third Man(it is at the end of the end of the clip.) It maybe more a about bloodshed but it still fits to my mind.
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. -Orson Welles from The Third Man
I can not mention The Third Man is with out bringing up the Anton Karas zither score. Maybe there has never been a better meld of music and film. The bouncing zither score would not have work so well with out the back drop of a battle scared Vienna that was that was suffering from very real post war fatigue. Great Art from bad times.
I am a Wilco and Jeff Tweedy fan so I am biased but I think that this is great. I am sure others would disagree. There seems to be more and more self centered people. They are too absorbed with self to have any regard for those around them. I am all for rock and roll but seriously if the performer at an acoustic show can hear you on stage talking in the back of the house you are an asshole. It is to bad the communal experience of being a member of a group feeding off of each other emotion has to be explained.
The argument that paying your hard earned money listen to music not a lecture doesn’t fly with me. I did not pay my hard earned money to listen to a few jerk talk over the music. If intervention is needed I am all for it. It is no different than talking during a movie. But I am not stodgy. If it is a horror movie and someone spontaneously yells, “don’t go it there.” Fine. OK. If you talk all the all through the film you are just an ass.
If it is a loud rock n roll show and you are talking who cares no one is going to hear you 3 feet away. The is a different code of conduct but there still is a code of conduct. But still people can ruin it and send out a bad vibe. Being a stick in the mud at a kinetic loud show is as bad. I have seen some get mad at people for standing or dancing. It is as bad as being a loud mouth at a quiet show. I have seen people get mad that people are pogoing or when mosh pit breaks out at a hardcore show. You have to go with the flow. At more aggressive shows intervention is still needed sometimes. I hate crowd surfing but at giant summer rock festival you might have to live with it. But people take it to far. Still I always remember the show being stopped to tell some serial crowd surfer that being a giant of a man (he was something like 6′4″ 300 lbs.) that he was simply too enormous to except for people to keep him aloft and people were going to get hurt. I have seen acts ask at least that the pass people back away from the stage so people did not get there necks crushed. I have been to other shows where they have put an end to crowd surfing, fighting, over zealous security guards. Most of the time I haven’t had a problem with it. Yet others do. I don’t think purchase a ticket is license to do what ever the hell you want. The artist have the respect and and a mic plugged into the PA which gives the a voice and power. Who else at a show is going to lead the sheep when the need to be lead.
Jeff Tweedy can come to the movies with me anytime.
I visit the Guardian quite often for being not only on the other side of the pond but almost to next pond. Sometimes it is good to get a foreign perspective on US events(there is less bias in indifference) but mostly being a football(no the other kind) in America I can’t read about by teams second half of the season collapse in the local paper.
I need to check the Culture section more often when I need to stop by because the is usually good stuff. Live and Let DIY is such. It shares my idea that people should have the power to remix there own culture. It is nice to see an article in a major publication not running with the standard line.
Bad Times Good Music or Crunches, Burst Bubbles and A Crisis of Confidence
I promise this becomes music related.
I work in a bad neighborhood. Some past mayor must have appointed his mentally challenged brother in-law as city planner. Warehouses and industrial buildings winding like a river through the area divide pockets of run down houses into shitty neighborhoods. People into those neighborhoods have no choice. It is mostly illegals with a minority of legal citizens way down on there luck. Who wants to live surrounded by salvage yards, carpet warehouses and pallet making operations the occasion that often go up in flames.
The thing is it has gotten hot but there are more street people than ever. And by street people I don’t mean just homeless. I include prostitutes, drunks, tweakers and other assorted sorry losers. Normally the heat thins there numbers dramatically. Normally there are not some many people outside. Normally not as many whores in thrift store prom dresses people outside and tweakers zooming around on bicycles over loaded with crap. The dive bar up the street must be bursting. People always in and out. You see a cluster of drunks when the door swings open. I love dives but this ain’t that kind of place. It not a place hipster hang out because Charles Bukowski drank there decades ago before the neighborhood was gentrified. This is the kind of place that sells fortified wine by the shot and you wish it smelled like stale beer. Twice I have seen a drunks stroll outside to piss on the side of the bar next to a long line of cars in the Taco Hell drive through next door. Not exactly an appetizer. Business I imagine most likely has surpassed the facilities.
Some of the things I see are in that neighborhood are better economic indicators than the clueless economist at the Fed will ever see. There seems to be a palatable sense of desperation in the air. You can breathe in the downturn. Even outside of that neighborhood people seem down. To steal a line from a famous peanut farmer there seems to be, “A Crisis of Confidence.” A kind of war that kind of has no end in sight, a credit crunch, a burst bubble, a disconnect between the American Dream and America and terms popping up not spoken since the era of my birth like stagflation. It seems like it one big bummer. You don’t need to be a pollster to know people aren’t feeling too great about things at the moment. It seems like people are cynical and tired. But It makes me feel more motivated about being creative. That malaise & desperation seems to inspire me more than when things are more warm and fuzzy and completely lacking that “Crisis of Confidence.” Smog makes me want to make art more than a rainbow.
It is really not that strange. Bad times in bad places make for good art. I am not claiming to be Barry Gordy Jr., Wayne Kramer, Iggy Pop or the Belleville Three but they serve as examples. When things got the most “interesting” in Detroit you got the birth of Motown, Punk Rock and Techno. The former murder capital has had made some damn good music. There are other examples like the summers of ‘76 in Manchester or ‘67 in San Francisco. Maybe if burst bubbles have silver linings it is these bad times will make better music. Whether we want to think about our problems or forget them the soundtrack might be better.
This idea reminds of the Harry Lime speech from The Third Man(it is at the end of the end of the clip.) It maybe more a about bloodshed but it still fits to my mind.
I can not mention The Third Man is with out bringing up the Anton Karas zither score. Maybe there has never been a better meld of music and film. The bouncing zither score would not have work so well with out the back drop of a battle scared Vienna that was that was suffering from very real post war fatigue. Great Art from bad times.
FIN