EVERYBODY I KNOW CAN BE FOUND HERE

The virtuosity that cool audiences today applaud, the sort Celine always fumbles, is not about having a multi-octave voice or flamenco-fast fingers: It's about being able to manipulate signs and symbols, to hitch them up and decouple them in a blink of an eye, to quote Homer but in the voice of Homer Simpson.
Mark Brown: Bill & Ted's Totally Deep Hole


Dave Moore writes:
"[T]he bigger personal issue I have with the book is that it gestures toward a 'poptimist' position that no one holds, identifies an "omnivorous" position that no one SHOULD hold (not because omnivorousness is bad, but because it's not a position), and offers in 'compensation' for these self-constructed lacking modes of analysis a half-baked vision of what's already good about good pop criticism in the first place."

And he says elsewhere:

"I get no sense of Carl being moved by Celine, before or after his thought experiment."

Frank Kogan expands on this nicely in Dave's comment section:
"What I think we - or Carl, anyway - need to look at is why Carl (and people like him) think we have any responsibility beyond this, beyond getting to know what people like in the music and why they like it. Why would I then feel an obligation to like the music for the reasons that other people like it, or to like it at all? Or to like the people at all? I'd say that this is where my responsibility is to judge the music and its various fans on what I think is its and their merits, based on my values and sensibility. That is, understanding someone else's values and sensibility doesn't require that I adopt them."


Going back to Houston do the hot dog dance.
The Coathangers: Nestle in My Boobies


About a billion years ago, a friend I lived in a dorm with maintained a website listing his "top 50 movies of all-time". Stuff like Star Wars: Episode 1 and, as I recall, both Antz AND A Bug's Life were on there, at least in its original form. I remember rudely questioning how he could really consider those movies the best of all-time, and he pointed out that it was a list of his top movies, not mine, so he could put whatever he liked on there. He was right, of course. Sure, there are gaps in knowledge that might eventually lead people's tastes to change, but virtually all lists of top anythings of all-time are some person's (or group of people's) list. A notion that seems to be forgotten whenever somebody comes out with a new list.


Come back to our wet bar. It's still here, but you're gone.
Harold and Kumar trailer (NSFW)

About a million years ago, I read Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love. I scribbled down page after page of thoughts. They were oh-so-clever. Except they really probably weren't, and I can barely read my own handwriting, so I've been putting off my would-be epic Celine post for way too long. This will not be that post-- but first, a few thoughts.

For starters, Let's Talk About Love is really, really good. Wilson (full disclosure: a fellow Pitchfork writer) manages to admit the inherent subjectivity of the critic yet maintains his authoritativeness. True to his subtitle, "A Journey to the End of Taste," Wilson has what seems to this relative newcomer to the subject like a thorough account of the history of philosophies on taste, with thorough research that makes it feel like you've read a lot more books on this particular topic than I have. It's also well-researched on Celine Dion, who is in many ways the perfect subject for such a piece; she's hated by critics and loved by people who are demographically opposite of critics, and she's misunderstood-- even when you've realized you have no good reason to dislike her music, you still hate her music. And it's a victory for sentimentality, which gets mocked in contemporary pop culture (at least by critics) even as matters like misogyny and singing about the lifestyles of the elite get passionately defended (classism seems more like a defense Vampire Weekend defenders bring up than a charge anyone should think is valid against them-- read the rest of this fantastic Mike Barthel post that briefly touches on this, though, anyway). I remember a Jens Lekman review that made fun of him for singing about kissing. And yet when Clipse return to their stash of coke metaphors, they're (rightly) appraised from a formalist perspective. There shouldn't be a difference.

However, the ending doesn't really feel settled to me, either. By the time you reach the end of the book, it leaves the reader with a whole bunch of reasons why their disdain for Dion might be due to existing social structures-- matters of nationality and age and gender and education. And yet... I still think Dion sucks. And I get the feeling Wilson does, too. I think this irrational, human element is what's most interesting about taste, and yet-- probably for practical reasons of time/length-- it's not fleshed out.

Another thought, perhaps not my best thought: Where does one draw the line between art, our taste in which is apparently based largely on social factors, and other speech, the kind we like to think we can evaluate rationally? When is a piece of discourse NOT potentially art and therefore subject to all manner of subjective decisions, also possibly biased by our own personal experiences, in the evaluation of it?

Over the holidays, I watched that Joel Osteen fellow on TV. Televangelist who is so slick he doesn't ask for money and therefore is swimming in 35+ million of it. Watching him, I can comfortably, smugly conclude that he is bunk and awful, just like Celine, though he has a book on The New York Times bestsellers list. If I can call a non-artist like that schmuck out as tedious, trite, a snake-oil salesman such as people have faced since the 19th century if not before, am I making an unfair decision, as Wilson's book makes me feel I at least partly am about Celine? Because his message does, as he argues in his own defense, make people happy (and these people presumably don't enjoy the educational etc. advantages that I do). Should I write a book contemplating Osteen's popularity, trying to like HIM? What about politicians I dislike? Maybe?

My notes go on and on like this, nothing much more interesting, so I'll leave it somewhere around here. I think Let's Talk About Love is a great jumping-off point for discussion, but I worry that ultimately its conclusion is that there's no accounting for taste. Could be it's best just to state what you believe, tolerate those who disagree, and get on with life. Tolerating something doesn't mean you have to agree with it, though Wilson's experiment in taste shows the attempt can still make for a fantastic read.

Oh yeah, I was in SPIN again-- forgot to mention that during my radio silence. Gorillaz review here.


The big wheel era shoulda last forever.
Johnny Bond: Ten Little Bottles

Latest dollar purchases at my old neighborhood's Salvation Army (the selection isn't quite what it used to be-- I hear there are going to be a million people living there soon.)

- Jean Michel Jarre: Magnetic Fields (Polygram; 1981)
- V/A: 20 Famous Country Hits Vol. 4 (K-Tel; 1970-1971)
- V/A: Country Cream: 'The Cream of Country Music' (Columbia; 1967)
- Eon: What Is Music/Spice (Juan Atkins Mix) (Sony; 1992)
- Metropolis: I Love New York< (A Tom Moulton Mix) (Salsoul; 1978)
- The Salsoul Orchestra: Salsoul Orchestra (Salsoul; 1975) (Eric B and Rakim and 50 Cent have totally sampled this)
- Dory Previn: Reflections in a Mud Puddle (United Artists; 1971)
- Patsy Cline: Stop the World / The Heart You Break (2 lps) (The Longines Symphonette Society; 196x)
- Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life (Motown; 1976)
- Prince: "House Party" (this one's totally bootleg)

"RECORD SELECTOR is a new space age device for storing and selecting your favourite records. Simply place all your albums in the record selector, move the first record forward and all the other records flip slowly forward. When the selector reaches the album you wish to play, simply remove it and return all albums to their starting position. When you wish to return the album to the record selector, again flip the first record forward. The other albums will automatically flip slowly forward and the selector will stop at the spot where the record was removed. You can then replace the album.
The Record Selector is available at the point of sale or send $4.95 to:
Record Selector
421 Wilson St. N.E.
Minneapolis, Minn. 55413"