the whale doesn't know it's a metaphor

5.5.2004

Yeah, I went to school in Olympia. But I drink my sloe gin fizzes in Portland, Oregon.

I’ve long promised Whet a review of the new Modest Mouse album. In the meantime, Courtney Love, Prince and Loretta Lynn also released new records. What a reunion! It’s all the seminal figures of my late adolescence reunited in a benefit concert for my quarter-life crisis.

So here’s a report from the front as well as one more attempt to come to terms with my Courtney Love obsession.

The Grunge That Failed

Courtney Love
America’s Sweetheart

There’s a gendered reading of Courtney Love, that says she can only be properly appreciated and rocked out to by women and gay men. Unfortunately, I can’t offer any up any personal counter-examples. My ardent defense of Live Through This as the best rock album of the 90s draws laughs even from the straight emo boys wearing hair clips and women’s jeans. For Courtney Love fans, we want anything that sounds like even a tinny echo of that now decade-old teenage epiphany to ring true all over again. I play “Mono” on repeat again because it sounds so vintage 1991 Caroline. “Plague” because it’s full of the literal sounds of Courtney Love having a breakdown. Yet none of the songwriting on America’s Sweetheart even matches up to the weakest song on Live Through This. All the lyrics are still about doing a bunch of drugs/plastic surgeries/rock dudes in LA. If it wasn’t Courtney, some of the power ballads like “Hold On To Me” or “Almost Golden” would just as easily fit in on a Skid Row greatest hits album. In contrast, Live Through This was about the awful pain involved in making yourself vulnerable to men. It was about the intimate involvement with death involved in giving birth. Who sings about that? Who ever sang about that? How much more punk rock can you get? But these days all that is punk melts into pop. And though I listen to America’s Sweetheart almost every other day, I can no longer expect anyone to sympathize who doesn’t already share my sympathies.

Live Through Everything

Loretta Lynn
Van Lear Rose

OK. I was wrong. Fuck Courtney Love. This is the best feminist punk rock album I’ve heard since Live Through This. There is no other seventy-year-old woman alive who’s this sexy and ballsy (R.I.P. Celia Cruz). Lady Lynn wisely passed on the chance to make a super solemn quasi American Recordings and instead wrote all the songs and had Jack White garage rock the production. Hell, the duet with Jack White, “Portland, Oregon” should have actually been on the new Courtney Love record if she knew what she was doing. “Women’s Prison” is a song about how she kills for her man, dies in the electric chair and the last voice she hears on earth is her mama’s cry. "For love I've killed my darlin' and for love I'll lose my life.” Just a song later, she takes her babies to her husband’s mistress house, so they can see, “the lady that’s burning down our family tree.” And on the soon-to-be-in-constant-college-rotation cut, “Portland, Oregon”—a slow-burn, surf-punk-hillbilly guitar fuzz gives way to “Portland, Oregon and sloe-gin fizz/If that ain’t love/ tell me what is/ uh huh/uh huh/huh” Shit, “I Miss being Mrs. Tonight” is a fucking Courtney Love song. The ultimate ironic elegy to Kurt. (I took off my wedding band/ and put it on my right hand/ I miss being Mrs. tonight) This album is so good, that it actually tops some of her famed Coal Miner’s Daughter recordings. Loretta Lynn is going to heaven, for real. And I’m a schmuck who doesn’t deserve the liner notes I passed on by downloading it.

You Call This a Comeback?

Prince
Musicology

If this album came out in the 1980s, real Prince fans would still be referring to Musicology as an underappreciated gem known only to true believers. In 2004 however, Andre 3000 has already released the best Prince album of the foreseeable decade. Cody Chestnutt is hot on his heels. In wake of this, Musicology can’t help but come up short, a rhythmic retread of the days when men were men, kings were kings and Prince was Prince. Still, this is a serious huff of fresh paisley after ten damn dull years of releasing experimental elevator jazz.
The man can still make slinky bass grooves and the album is full of them from “Illusion Coma Pimp Circumstance” to “Life O The Party.” The best track is Cinnamon Girl. He lifts the hook and title from Neil Young and welds it onto a Prince tragi-fantasy straight out of Purple Rain—the heartrending plight of an unbelievably hot and curvaceous multiracial girl caught on the wrong side of the law. Props got to go to the Purple One for updating the lexicon of Princebonics with “If eye was the man in ur life.”

Good News For People Who Love Modest Mouse Anyway

Modest Mouse
Good News For People Who Love Bad News

Why does Courtney Love get so much shit for being a drug-addled shit-kicking freak? Did anyone read The Onion interview with Isaac Brock? Has anyone paid even marginal attention to his police blotter? He makes Courtney Love look like an emo boy. (Multiple DUIs, Attempted Murder (OK, just a curious technicality of Oregon drunk driving laws but still . . . broken jaw from a Chicago fistfight, crystal meth binges, strings of straight-up shitfaced drunk concerts). Modest Mouse has always had two geniuses. The first is the songcraft that rides R&B-like; rhythms over angular guitar hooks in a way that really hasn’t been done since the heyday of the Talking Heads. Then there’s the lyric-writing that touches a raw nerve in fans—unnerving portraits of suburban and exurban nowheres and nobodies whose search for love and meaningful contact is equaled only by their search for drugs in meaningful quantities. There’s no new ground broken here. But as a longtime fan who’s lived as long as Isaac Brock has, which is to say—some 26 years—and who has only lived out a tiny sliver of the man’s decadence or artistic output, it is more than enough.

K to the C

J 9:14 PM

4.30.2004

You can stand on the arms of the Williamsburg Bridge crying, 'Hey, man, this is Babylon'

11 days since last post. If you hadn't guessed, I am dying a thousand deaths this week.

More general thoughts on job search '04:

Folks seem to be divided on the city/town dilemma. Which isn't surprising, as it is the dilemma of our times--nay, of America. Anyway: I think the thing about small-town papers is this: they're actually kind of important but tend to suck big fat ****, at least mine did: the weekly Fincastle Herald, which, at least in an area where you could get a real newspaper, tended to be about who did what at 4-H tournaments and shit. It was the paper that, when your kid's Dixie League (I shit you not--red uniforms with "Classy Cut & Curl" on the front and a Confederate Flag patch on the sleeve) team did something good, you'd buy that and clip it for the scrap book.

But, as my friend Jacob pointed out (who comes from the LaCrosse area), if you live far enough from a major metro area, 10,000-20,000 circulation dailies are it when it comes down to actual useful information about where you live. Take it from someone who spent two years in central-eastern California/central-western Nevada: at some point, even f***ing Pahrump doesn't care about you, forget Las Vegas. You have to have something. And, thanks to the small-town brain drain, many of them are terrible papers.

Or I could work for, eg, the NYT. I mean I couldn't, but let's pretend. Now I'm not saying that any newspaper that managed to create a perfect storm of Jayson Blair's instability and Rick Bragg's dishonest bloviation--and put them both on the front page--is stocked to the brim with geniuses. But they've got more of it than anyone else. The bigger the paper, the less they tend to need talent, because they have it in droves and they have other talented people knocking on the door. No, really: the person who will probably fill the job at the W*** J****** D***** is 6-7 years older than me and has major paper bureau experience. And he's taking a part-time job. The market suxxx in big cities, 'cause it's where everyone wants to work. The Trib? The woman who hired me said that the woman she really wants in features is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

So: if we're talking needed, then small town papers it is. And when I say "needed" I mean both in a deeply practical sense and in a greater moral one. I'm not kidding on that second part, mind you. If there wasn't some kind of moral component to this, I'd do something that paid better.

With regards to getting all my information on the outside world from magazines: I do that anyway. I'm an agoraphobe who likes to read. Also, I think unless you live in either Washington DC or New York and have an important job, you do anyway.

There are still drawbacks: no MLB. No Metro/Empty Bottle/etc. No public transportation. Probably your editing isn't going to be as good, so it might be easier to get sloppy. Audience is less hip. You get paid less--cost of living is cheaper, but not that much.

But also: none of the terrible parts of cities, either: things are cheap. People are less likely to drive like maniacs. It gets dark. If you hear a gunshot, it's not automatically a bad thing. You can leave your car/house doors open, and people don't lose their shit when someone does lock the door and you have to go in through the window. Communities tend to be grounded in tangible things. Less posing.

-----------------------------

Everybody check out Erin's blog, http://patchofsky.blogspot.com,. You're about to come in at the part where she quits the worst job in history.

Whet 1:55 AM

4.18.2004

Plastics

So my Java programming class was destroying my soul when my mood was lightened by a brief merging of scenes on the D Bus: the guy on the bus on his way to the Point, with his guitar, playing "Wonderwall" and singing in an undetermined foreign accent and trying to figure out the rhythm at the moment we turned onto 53rd St and passed a cute 10-year-old kid carrying a basketball and wearing a Paul Pierce jersey--a Kansas Paul Pierce jersey. It was nice to know that two people at that one moment had some shit figured out.

Job search '04 is officially on. Some of the highlights:

Reporter, River Valley Newspaper Group

Location: La Crosse (WI), Winona (MN) or one of eight "nearby weeklies."

Advantages: Stunning area. Have already been to and fallen in love with one of the nearby communities. I know people there. May be temperamentally suited to the upper Midwest. Have adjusted to cold winters reasonably well in Chicago. Less than a day's drive from Chicago. Idea of small-town newspaper is appealing. I miss it being quiet and dark at night. Idea of not locking my door is nice.

Disadvantages: Five hours from Chicago. Salaries for 12,000-circ. dailies not as good as the many paper-pushing jobs I could get here.

Copy Editor, The Doings

Location: Hinsdale

Advantages: In Chicago. Part-time. Could use copy-editing on my resume.

Disadvantages: Newspaper is called The Doings. Would need car for part-time job.

"Interactive Media"

Location: Evanston

Advantages: Part-time. $10 an hour.

Disadvantages: 3 hours on the train a day for $10 an hour.

Administrative Proofreader, publishing company

Location: Buffalo Grove

Advantages: $12 an hour. Part-time. Proofreading calms me.

Disadvantages: I don't know where Buffalo Grove is. This would probably involve a car. Unclear how an administrative proofreader is different from a proofreader.

Editor

Location: Merillville, IN

Advantages: Small town newspaper editor.

Disadvantages: Merillville = Rensselaer. If you've driven in from the SE, you understand. If anyone can give me a pronunciation on Rensselaer, I'd appreciate it.

Editorial Assistant, Esquire

Location: New York

Advantages: Connections. Esquire is pretty good as these things go. Fast-paced work environment.

Disadvantages: Not temperamentally suited to New York. Not temperamentally suited for men's magazines. Cannot be brought to care about high-end Fossil watches.

Featues Copy Editor, Raleigh News & Observer

Location: Raleigh, NC

Advantages: RNO rulezzzz. Is where I got my start in the features business. Was awesome when I was there. Raleigh is kind of happening. 3/4 time. 401k, though I'm a bit unclear on what those are. Seriously. Good place to move up from. Could probably write. The only thing in features that I can find. Triangle is awesome. Close to Roanoke. Best college basketball scene in the country.

Disadvantages: Far from Chicago. Raleigh is kind of miserable during the summer, like Chicago except 10 degrees hotter and 15% more humid.

Assistant Editor, current job

Location: Chicago

Advantages: High approval rating from employers. They're nice enough to keep me working there when they could probably get an intern for cheap. 333 W Wacker, 29th floor, is good for the ego. Pay is better than above part-time jobs. Actual editing experience. Closest job to the HPK. Have not yet said anything about my occasional disheveled state.

Disadvantages: Probably not sufficiently knowledgable about subject matter for job.

-----------------

Please cast your votes or suggestions via BlogBack.
Whet 10:12 PM

4.8.2004

Strap, God wants you on the floor

Yours truly just won a game of 21 after going on a basketball court for the first time in 2 1/2 years. My opponents were okay pickup players, but I want credit because they were clearly in much better shape than me.

Summary:

I can't finger roll, mostly because I don't have the speed/energy to get inside r/n. But the one thing I can do is fadeaway/running jumpers.

Holy fuck I'm out of shape. After 25 min. on the recumbent bike waiting for the volleyball team to get done, 25 min. of shooting, and a game of 21, I was near death at the end of the game and tried two heinous hookshots because I couldn't drive the lane, before just finally settling the matter with a running jumper.

Ratner Athletic Center: your Title IX-inspired policy of having an equal number of men's and women's basketballs is admirable, but stupid in any kind of practical sense. Please have more men's basketballs in the future so that I can eliminate at least one asterisk from my victory.

Yes, I dogged it a bit on defense near the end. I feel a bit bad about that.

But, here's why I rule: 3ptr, two foul shots to get to 20, missed a foul shot to go down to 13, then got the rebound, turned around and hit an NBA 3 with my classic Sam Perkins eye-level flat quasi-jumper and 3 subsequent foul shots. Would have been f***ing epic if I'd then hit a jump shot, but it took me three attempts, two of which were unspeakable because I couldn't feel my legs.

Hitting NBA three-pointers: still the best thing you can do with your body ever.

Whet 7:45 PM

4.7.2004

I don't need none of that Mad Max bullshit

[ed. note--for a couple days this blog will turn into an embryonic review of the new Modest Mouse album]

Casey,

I remember that it was either you or Colin who got me into MM first--it might have been Colin when I was working in the garden during the summer. Anyway, what I remember you/him being so excited about, with regards to "Tundra/Desert," was the ambitiousness of the composition. Robert Christgau said of This is a Long Drive that, in a fair educational system, they'd all have music scholarships, which makes sense to me; historically, for Isaac Brock's lack of virtuosity, he makes up for it with a great musical imagination. I like how he takes the same basic premise and applies it caustically (Tundra/Desert) and beautifully (Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset). I'm getting less of that with Good News, save for "Bury Me With It," which sounds much more like old Modest Mouse (both in terms of structure, tone, and language), and is, I have to admit, my favorite song off the album. For all the different sounds, it's not as adventureous as previous albums, if that makes sense.

It's definitely a bit incoherent, not just in comparison to Moon & Anartica but to This is a Long Drive and Lonesome Crowded West, possibly due to Brock's change of scene--he apparently spends/has spent quite a bit of time in Florida due to romantic ties. It's where he discovered Holopaw, and the Southern influence shows--he's digging bluegrass now and a Tom Waits vibe that, fairly or not, I associate with New Orleans. They might assimilate this more successfully in the future, but right now their sound is all over the place.

That having been said, there are some highlights--"Bury Me With It" is great, and I kind of like "Bukowski," even though maybe I shouldn't. The melody's really catchy.

Lyrically I can't really get a grasp yet; that might have to wait for the album version. What I've heard isn't as stunning, yet, as some of their previous work. So far the only quotable leads off this posting. Any luck in not being disappointed?

--Whet
Whet 12:49 AM

3.29.2004

Conduit for sale

If you haven't checked it out, Neighbor Search at fundrace.org is worth at least 20 minutes of fun. Among the interesting things I learned:

1. Kurt Elling lives across the street from my girlfriend.

2. Sara Paretsky gave money to Wes Clark, which shows some spunk.

3. Hyde Park, to no one's surprise, is very Democratic.

4. Martha Nussbaum: $1,000 to Howard Dean, then another $500.

5. Marshall Sahlins also gave to Dean.

6. Achy Obejas: Wes Clark.

7. Jerry Reinsdorf appears to have given $2,000 to Carol Mosely Braun in addition to his $2,000 to GWB.

8. Jerry Springer: $2,000 to Dennis Kucinich.

So, anyway, this is one of the best tools invented to judge people since they invented Google. Give it a whirl.

Whet 3:09 PM

3.28.2004

Once you unscramble what is daddy doing

L.A. Story--the first movie in a very long time that I've stopped watching well before the end because it sucked so much. It's really causing me to doubt most of the Steve Martin project. What have we been thinking for the past decade or so? Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) appears to be his last verifiably good movie (besides The Spanish Prisoner, which doesn't count). If you ever work on something for SEVEN YEARS that turns out just to be a lovey-dovey tribute to your wife, don't foist it upon the rest of us.

Secretary--the creepiest part about this movie is that Maggie Gyllenhal looks a lot like Kirsten Dunst, as if there wasn't enough fucked-up sexual tension running through the movie already. Also, if you were James Spader, would you act really creepy around your friends just because you knew you were really, really good at being a weirdo? Probably. Actually a beautifully structured movie, although the end is about 10 minutes too long. Jeremy Davies: badly underused by an unappreciative society.

Whet 11:32 PM