Acephalous

Someone took . . . in these pants.

The news that Pavement is reuniting and touring next year is not unwelcome, but it is a harbinger of impending senescence of your host, who vividly remembers listening to the widely distributed pre-release tape of Slanted and Enchanted in early 1992 and pining over the absence of culture and spies in his quiet suburban neighborhood.   He would say, as irate futurists do of flying cars, "Where are my forty million daggers?  I was promised forty million daggers!" 

Pavement were the second or third most important band of his youth, behind only the Replacements and R.E.M., both of whom he discovered in the "R" section of a Rolling Stone album guide that he browsed at the local library after he had been gifted his first "jam box" in fourth grade.  Understand: he did not want to waste his allowance on albums of insufficient quality, so he decided to research music and selected R.E.M.'s Murmur and the Replacements' Let It Be because both were awarded five stars and therefore guaranteed to be of the highest quality. 

Tickets for the September 18, 2010 show go on sale tomorrow and interest among aging hipsters who traded their indie cred in for a lectern is expected to be high.

(As to the title of this post, below the fold can be found the obligatory YouTube of an Ouzo-soaked Alexander the Great being born from a box after having been struck by an automobile.)

I do believe it all makes sense now (and if you don't agree with that you're a pretentious Martian from Venus).

Via The Guardian, a testament to my taste making sense:

Sunday night is Cohen night at Acephalous.

There are two kinds of Cohenim: those who like everything up to and including Songs of Love and Hate and those who prefer everything from Songs of Love and Hate onwards. That particular album divides fans because it's the last one with real instruments; it's the last one with backup singers who complement the song from the background; it's the first one in which the now-patented Cohen-growl appeared. It's actually my favorite album for the last reason—the voice matches the songs and the instrumentation matches the voice. For example:

But as his voice grizzled, his production values soared: shiny synthesizers and slick studio singers who were mixed as loudly (if not louder) than Cohen himself. It was almost as if he were trying to compensate for the rasp with the musical equivalent of a sickeningly sweet cough syrup. I like the songwriting on the later albums, but the songs are better when performed by other people. To the extent that the dead can own things, Jeff Buckley owns "Hallelujah."  (Do yourself a favor and lick on that clink.)

Recent Cohen concerts are dangerous affairs: they could be like that Austin City Limits appearance from a few years (decades?) back, when he sat there with a guitar and a Lyle Lovett and sang songs both old and new in the simplest way. Or they can be like that other appearance on Austin City Limits, when he had a full complement of backup singers and some fifty-year-olds whose synth-stylings scream how into Depeche Mode they were back in the day.

(You can all thank/blame the Modesto Kid for this post.  He's the one who inspired me to think about Cohen again.)

Storming Castles in the Air, a Request in D-Minor

[Cross-posted over yonder]

[Edit: Superfluous Swaddling Removed]

A broken Mr. Dorrit, recently of Marshalsea prison, moved over the French countryside.  Ensconced in his “snug corner,” he

fell to castle-building as he rode along. It was evident that he had a very large castle in hand. All day long he was running towers up, taking towers down, adding a wing here, putting on a battlement there, looking to the walls, strengthening the defences, giving ornamental touches to the interior, making in all respects a superb castle of it...

On the heels of last week’s discussion on alternative histories, I’m inspired by China Mieville’s The Scar to ask a similar question about a similar speculative endeavour: building castles in the air.  New Crobuzon’s one of the best realized castle-in-the-air I’ve ever encountered.  Its effectiveness, I’d wager, stems from the manner in which it seems not to have been created but evolved.  I once spent three months in Urbino and as soon as that city--with its unreal angles and centuries old inhumanly steep streets of inlaid brick ladders--seeps into your brain, the obsession with cities as agglutinate as German concept-nouns inevitably follows.  So it has.  (So much so I’m even fascinated by Jon Jerde’s excessively colorful simulations.) 

For the sake of clarity, I’ll call these “evolved cities,” as “representations of fictional cities earthed in a faux-historical developmental process such that it’s as compellingly complex and un-invented-seeming as Drieser’s Chicago or Chandler’s Los Angeles” sounds deeply stupid.  So, yes, literary representations of similarly “evolved cities.” I’ve located a number myself, including Marco Polo’s in Calvino’s Invisible Cities--although I’m looking for fully realized cities, so Calvino can’t really count--William Gibson’s suburb-on-a-bridge in Virtual Light; Gormenghast Castle in Peake’s Titus Groans and Gormenghast; the Orange/Los Angeles/San Diego County mall-complex in Robinson’s The Gold Coast; etc.  The unflattering way to phrase this request would be that I’m looking for works which’ll foster the felt-immersion of a fourteen-year-old’s first encounter with Tolkien or an undergraduate’s first flipping of Ulysses. 

So come on already!  This is a p-a-r-t-y!  Your quarter/semester/Monday’s done and what would you rather do than discuss your favorite fictional environs?  Don’t tell me you’re all off watching The Scholar.

A Highly Personal (and Possibly Inappropriate) P.S.: If anyone’s ever figured out all the film references on John Vanderslice’s Cellar Door and wouldn’t mind sharing them, I’d be forever in your debt.  I’ve connected the obvious--"Promising Actress” and Mulholland Drive and “When It Hits My Blood” and Requiem for a Dream--but outside of the obvious I’m as dense as ever.

Larry and Jeff...

If I composed a list of the names of people I respect and then placed odds on particular couplings appearing on-stage together, this one would've been around 10,000,000,000 to 1... nevertheless, I've learned that Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig will appear together at the New York Public Library on April 7.  I can't wait to hear Larry's rendition of "Company in My Back."  I'm also pretty damn  sure Tweedy's rendition of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity will rock the socks right off the feet of some unwitting library patrons.