Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

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letstalkaboutlove

I read this a while ago but forgot to blog about it.  Strongly recommend this instant classic, one of the smartest books on modern pop music I know.  (What else would I include in that list?  Books like Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could be Your Life, Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill, Robert Christgau’s review collections, Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. 1…probably forgetting a lot…)  Wilson’s book is part of the 33 1/3 series of books published by Continuum each dedicated to one pop album, in this case, Céline Dion’s 1997 Let’s Talk about Love. The series was a great idea for many reasons, among them the fact that the books are small & cute with an attractive uniform design — they in fact look kind of like miniature LPs on the shelf.  61 books have been published in the series so far, but Wilson’s is sui generis among them (as suggested by the fact that his is the only one granted a subtitle to date — oops, just noticed the U2 book has one too).

You certainly don’t need to care about Céline Dion to enjoy the book.  Or be Canadian, although the Toronto-raised Wilson is fascinating on Dion’s roots in French-Canadian Quebecois chanson/showbiz traditions.  Wilson takes Dion, one of the top-selling pop singers of our era, now in possession of her own schmaltzy Vegas show, as a test case for the practices, politics, and poetics of taste in popular music & culture.  For Wilson, Dion’s records somewhat resemble Russian conceptual artists Komar and Melamid’s “Peoples’ Choice” Most Wanted Paintings.  Crafted according to the specifications of a poll, the paintings contain landscapes, water, the color blue, soft curves, and representational images of people and wild animals, etc.  Dion’s music is arguably the Peoples’ Choice of pop, a statistically irrefutable embodiment of broad popular taste.  So is it awful or great?

Wilson, a right-thinking hipster with “good taste,” had always hated Dion’s music, but had become suspicious of his own aversion; the book is his exploration of what it means to hate or to love Céline Dion, or any kind of music — with particular attention to subcultures, embarrassment, sentimentality, class, canons, kitsch, and shame.  Wilson lays out the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu on taste and distinction in several lucid pages (the book would work fabulously in an undergrad course on cultural theory), and he’s well-informed in theories of aesthetics generally, but he’s a working pop music journalist with a snappy, funny style, and the book is a completely fun and brilliant read.

He’s especially insightful on the meanings of “sentimentality” in today’s pop culture:

Punk, metal, even social-justice rock such as U2 or Rage Against the Machine, with their emphatic slogans of individuality and independence, are as much “inspirational” or “motivational” music as Céline’s, but for different subcultural groups.  They are just as one-sided and unsubtle.  Morally you could fairly ask what is more laudable about excess in the name of rage and resentment than immoderation in thrall to love and connection.  The likely answer would be that Céline is conformist, quiescent, unsubversive.  “Subversion” today is sentimentality’s inverse: it is nearly always a term of approval.

Here’s a collection of press, reviews, interviews of/on the book.  New York Magazine named it one of the ten best books of the year, quite a feat for a little paperback that costs $8.76 on Amazon. Here’s Alex Ross on the book.

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid: Novels about the Swedish Anxiety

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300h

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid.  I’m a huge Henning Mankell fan, have probably read at least ten of his novels, all of the Kurt Wallender mysteries, I think, and even a Linda Wallender one (his daughter).  I discovered Mankell 6 or 7 years ago — I’d never gotten so into a thriller series, and I haven’t quite found anything else as addictive, although Mankell has opened me up to the genre generally.  A lot of what’s so distinctly great about the series has to do with the modern Swedish setting, social and natural.  I’m surprised no one has made a movie (perhaps starring Stellen Starsgard as Wallender), it would be great on film — the icy, cold, stark Swedish landscapes; the moody, mordant people; the eruptions of shocking violence.  Wallender is a really appealing detective, always brooding about his failed marriage, his difficult relationship with his daughter & father, sweating, drinking endless pots of coffee and too much booze too; he’s funny and has a real moral center, continually questioning the state of Swedish society which seems to him to be falling apart.  Many of the books are more or less explicitly about the changes Sweden has undergone in the the last decade or two — the fraying of the welfare net, the stresses of immigration, a shift to a more heterogeneous society and a new sense of embeddedness in a globally linked world.  Maybe that’s what makes the mysteries work so well, the sense of Sweden as this strangely homogenous, stable, harmonious society, filled with a lot of stalwart folks in isolated homes in the woods, that has finally started to transform in disruptive ways allegorized in crimes.  The series contains some starkly memorable images, like the young girl who sets herself on fire in the middle of a field (from Sidetracked).

Firewall, which takes place in 1990, is the first Wallender mystery, so would be a good place to start, but this volume would be as well: it’s a kind of prequel, written later but including several stories and one novella covering the earlier phases in Wallender’s career as a policeman in the 1970s and 80s. The five stories all have characteristic Mankell plots, all containing some epistemological mystery often hinting at a political/social subtext, but they get resolved much more quickly.  The longest story (a novella, really), “The Pyramid,” is excellent on Mankell’s eccentric father, who spends his days painting variations of the same landscape, sometimes featuring a single wood grouse.

In his introduction Mankell lays out the political/social subtext, explaining that after completing the series, he recognized the subtitle it should have had: “Novels about the Swedish Anxiety”:

The books have always been variations on a single theme: ‘What is happening to the Swedish welfare state in the 1990s?  How will democracy survive if the foundations of the welfare state is no longer intact?  Is the price of Swedish democracy today too high and no longer worth paying?”

I remember reading a Mankell novel off and on, can’t remember which one, sitting in the hospital room with Sarah during her 12-hour labor delivering Celie and Iris.

My Will Oldham profile

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will-oldham-bonnie

Here’s my Will Oldham profile.  (Here’s the New Yorker‘s).

Will Oldham opened the door of his Louisville ranch house, which would have been the perfect size for an upwardly-mobile young family had it not been filled with overflowing boxes of pink tank tops and multi-colored Crocs.

He punched me quickly in the face, muttering ambiguously, “I don’t like press… but I did really love that Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 Ken Auletta profile of Ted Turner, which is the only reason I’m talking to you today.”

Chewing thoughtfully on marijuana-infused bubble gum, Oldham explained to me that he just wants to be recognized as a hip-hop superstar like his peers Li’l Wayne, R. Kelly and L’il Mama.  “I don’t understand why some listeners consider me to be contrived or affectedly backwoods,” he commented while absent-mindedly pulling old Gypsy good-luck charms, horse-shoe nails, baby mice, and fragments of burlap sacks from his bristling beard. He explained that his name changes every week according to a passphrase system “in order to keep the focus on the music.”  During our interview, his name changed to L’il Viceroy Archduke; when I accidentally addressed him as Mr. Oldham, he punched me in the face again, shouting furiously, “it’s all about the music, man!”

The brash hip-hop superstar, stripping down to nothing but a plaid flannel shirt,  a new pair of 4-color Cayman Crocs, and a pink Boston Red Sox cap, stepped into the shower. Morosely warbling the Mariah Carey smash “Fly Away (Butterfly Reprise),” he seemed to be having fun.

Freddy/ Mexico City

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We were going to depart San Miguel the way we’d come: some combination of buses and cabs.  San Miguel de Allende is about a 3 1/2 hour drive from Mexico City and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get there.  In retrospect, given how tiring the trip was overall, it probably would’ve killed us if we’d done the bus thing again on the return, and fortunately, some benevolent family members decided to pay for the expensive luxury of a driver to take us directly to the airport hotel (we were leaving at 9:20 the next morning).

So, we get picked up in this big SUV by Freddie, who speaks perfect (albeit heavily-accented) English because he lived for a while in Dallas and Cincinatti.

He was friendly and, once we drew him out a bit, chatty.  He has three kids, the oldest in junior college studying to be a teacher, which costs Freddy $160 a month.  He told us that minimum wage in Mexico is $60 a week.  For this drive, about 8 hours round trip, he was paid 300 pesos or about $27 (although we ended up more than doubling that with our tip; and to be clear, what he was paid was a fraction of what we paid the company).  He worked for some time in a factory in Mexico that was so dangerous that an ambulance came every day for an injured worker.  It came out that he crossed into the U.S. several times to work illegally and send money home.   The last time he was caught, though, and under the new mandatory immigration laws, was jailed for three (?) months, and so he says he can’t try to go to the States again (next time he’d be jailed for a year).

Talking with Freddy was humbling.  He seemed “like us,” and yet his perhaps-unattainable fantasy was to have a steady, non-dangerous job that would pay for his kids’ education.  Specifically, he’d like to start his own tourism company — have his own car to drive visitors around San Miguel.

Driving into Mexico City at night was kind of eerie.  Freddy claimed it now had a population of 25 million — I just checked on Wikipedia and greater Mexico City has 19 million, it says.  You feel as if you’re entering an enormous presence — the air is terrible, of course, and you can kind of feel that population surrounding you, just this sense of so many people crowded in.  The electric poles have little spider-webs on the top — illegal hookups from people in the neighborhood.  Freddy says that he’s scared to enter the city b/c corrupt policemen will stop him on some pretext and demand a $20 or $40 payoff.

I should add that 13 or so years ago we spent some time in Mexico City and had a wonderful time — it is full of wonderful parks, museums and restaurants.

Las Posadas in San Miguel de Allende

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posadas

We are in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for the holidays, staying in my aunt’s house.

Christmas is a big deal here.  There are pinatas and other holiday decorations all over the town.  And there’s a neat tradition of nightly Posadas over the 9 (?) nights up to Xmas.  There’s one big one for the town each evening, I think, and then apparently many small neighborhood ones.  We were looking for “the posada” and fell into what we later realized was a little subsidiary one.  It’s sort of like carolling.  A group of people, including a lot of kids, walk slowly to different houses, singing and holding candles and small sparklers.  A little girl handed us candles but Celie and Iris found the sparklers to be too scary and the candles too difficult to keep lit.

The posada is a re-enactment of the virgin Mary and Joseph’s travels from door to door seeking shelter.  At each house the pasoda participants — peregrinos — sing (a kind of haunting, droning song), asking for shelter, and are refused.  Finally we come to a house where some of the group is invited in, and then bags of candy are handed out to all the kids, along with cups of punch.  So, las posadas are sort of like a cross between Christmas carolling and holloween, in a way.  I think a posada sometimes culminates in a theatrical event that can include the virgin Mary riding on an actual donkey, although ours wasn’t so elaborate.  We trailed along for a bit with the larger town posada that featured a pickup truck float with actors in the role of Mary, an angel, & Joseph.

We had bought pinatas that afternoon in the main market: a lion and a bear.  The girls were really excited to come home and stuff the pinatas with the candy from the posada.  I guess we’ll bust them open on Xmas day.

My mom was shocked that the girls asked who Baby Jesus is.  (They definitely have been told about Jesus before.)  They were fascinated by the church in the town square, especially by the statues of the bloody Jesus after having been taken off the cross.  Celie was quizzing me about what praying is.

“We spent as much money as we could”

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Weird/ surprising Victorian lit reference of the day: a line from Great Expectations as epitaph for the American reconstruction effort in Iraq:

At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from “Great Expectations” by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.”

This is really mind-bending: Pip and Herbert Pocket, living beyond their means at Bernard’s Inn, miserable but pretending they’re having a great time, as an analogy for the American occupation of Iraq.  Pip as a figure for the U.S. in its indebted, improvident ways.  So does this make “the Avenger” (Pip’s personal servant, whom he despises) the Iraqi resistence?  Or, I suppose a better analogy would be to the Iraqi forces working with the Americans.

What the Frack?: Battlestar Galactica

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We’ve been making our way through the first season of Battlestar Galactica.  I’d heard good things about it, but I’m not the biggest filmed sci-fi fan and it felt like a big commitment.  What finally inspired me was running into an old acquaintance who has pretty hip/smart taste who declared that he believes it may be the best t.v. show ever.

Not sure I’d go that far, but it’s definitely excellent.  It’s overwhelmingly a post-9/11 narrative: a comfortable, complacent way of life suddenly shattered; nothing will be the same; life in wartime; our way of life threatened by “others” who may be infiltrating our world; a return to wartime/military ways of thinking and feeling that had felt decades out of date, with the rise to prominence/call out of retirement of old military heroes; the enemy is like us but different/evil; strains of religious fundamentalism and old prophecies.

And of course, interrogation scenes.  There’s a painful one of the interrogation of a Cylon in which the interrogator gives a free rein to the most violent methods on the grounds that, of course, “he’s not actually human.”  The Cylons are, basically, robots who have “evolved” and surpassed human beings; one of their talents is the ability to mimic perfectly human form.  So they are not-human but human; the most interesting twist is that there are Cylons who have been placed as embedded spies in the human world and do not yet know that they are not human.

So, one of the clever aspects of this remake is the way this hoary sci-fi kind of plot is in effect re-purposed as a post-9/11 allegory.  It could be read as quite “conservative” in its literalization of the instinct that “the enemy is not really human” — certainly the interrogation scenes are disquieting in this way — although I tend to interpret it as self-aware in smart ways.

We got Grandma Suzy into the show on her visit last month.

I’ve been amused by the show’s neologism “frack.”  This is a substitute for the obvious curse word, as in “what the frack.”  What’s funny about it is that it comes across as a bleeping-out of “fuck” for network t.v., sort of like when Sex and the City or the Sopranos ran on non-premium t.v. they absurdly dubbed out the curses: “I’m gonna kill that [twerp]”, etc.  But I suppose the idea is supposed to be that in this futuristic society, “frack” is the form into which the original term has evolved.  (Since contemporary human society is the ancient, mythical past of the Galactica humans.)

But — doesn’t that mean that “frack” is to “fuck” as Cylon is to human?????

“Wheep wheep wheeeeep:” R.I.P. Oliver Postgate

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R.I.P. Oliver Postgate:

  • Maev Kennedy
  • The Guardian, Wednesday December 10 2008

As Tiny Clanger might have remarked, mournfully pulling his ears over his eyes, “wheep wheep wheeeeep”: Oliver Postgate, creator of the Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, and the immortal Bagpuss, the cat who retained an ineffable dignity even when in grave danger of losing his stuffing, has died aged 83.

“We bow our heads in respect,” one award-winning animation team said, part of the generation profoundly influenced by Postgate’s slightly shabby creatures, looking precisely as if they had been hand-knitted or run up out of scraps of wood, and animated in a cowshed in Kent.

Yesterday Peter Lord and David Sproxton, co-founders of Aardman Animations, makers of Morph, Creature Comforts and Wallace and Gromit, said: “…Those of us in early middle age recall with great pleasure the Sunday afternoon ritual of watching Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine or The Clangers. With Peter Firmin, Oliver Postgate created wonderful, imaginative worlds, populated with delightful characters through which Oliver’s skill at story-telling shone through.

Has anyone fully theorized the long history of the aesthetic of British shabbiness?  I want to check out this book Austerity Britain 1945-1951 which I suspect may hold some clues.

I guess these Smallfilms shows were kind of like the British version of the Sid and Marty Krofft shows (H.R. Pufnstuf, etc.), much better-seeming, though.

Here’s an episode of the Clangers:

And one of Pogle’s Wood — kind of scary!:

This Youtube comment amused me:

Clangers nooooooooooo not the clangers again.
My shrink convinced me they were a fiction in my mind
but here they are
real again
Ohhh help me please
God I’m so disturbed again

New Moonraking Feature

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What I’m listening to/watching/reading

1/12/09

First episode of the new season of Damages on FX, with Glenn Close, Ted Danson and now William Hurt.  Wednesday nights.  We watched the first season on DVD — it’s great; very over the top with countless double-crosses, like some overheated old noir.  The NY Times review complained that the new season feels like a slight let-down, and maybe so, a bit, but it’s still fun.

Man on Wire.  Great documentary about French highwire-walker Philippe Petit’s attempt, with the help of a gang of co-conspirators, to cross the Twin Towers on a wire in August 1974.  It takes the form of a thriller or heist movie, moving forward, minute by minute, through the events of that day, and also stepping away to fill in the backstory.  The mood is often sweetly elegiac, which I think has a lot to do with a sense of lost innocence surrounding the World Trade Center in the 1970s, and a time when 5 guys with (almost literally) tons of equipment could sneak past the guards, shoot a string from one tower to the other with a bow and arrow, have one of them walk back and forth, and end up being celebrated as plucky heroes.  You have to figure today the police would shoot to kill…

1/4/09

Watched The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit with Gregory Peck.  It surprised me in several respects.  One was how much Mad Man seems to reference/rip it off.  There are so many parallels, so much so that I wonder if it was a bit of an in-joke among the Man Man people to slip in allusions (like the scene where he has to pick his wife up at the police station).  Was also surprised by how much it’s a war movie — there are these strangely extended flashback scenes from WW2 that go on and on.

Reading Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketo Mehta.   It’s been on my shelf for a year or two and then the Mumbai bombings (and an Op-Ed Mehta published in the Times) got me to pick it up finally.

1/1/09

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid.

12/15/08

The new short film by Blu: an ambiguous animation painted on public walls in Buenos Aires and Baden.  Really amazing!

Attack (TNR article by Adam Kirsch) and counter-attack (comments section) on Slavoj Zizek.

12/13/08

Meaningful-core bands.

12/11/08

Battlestar Galactica first season.

12/10/08

Pingwings, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss on Youtube.

12/8/08

Erik Davis’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3; Continuum).  Very smart and funny obsessive excavation of Led Zep’s occult roots.  For some reason the single historical detail that most surprised me here, though, amidst all the analysis of the band’s debt to Aleister Crowley, etc., was the revelation that “before forming Led Zeppelin and playing with the Yardbirds, [Jimmy] Page spent three years as a session player, playing on an estimated 50 to 90% of all the records made in England between 1963 and 1965, including early hits by the Who and the Kinks”(48).  WTF??   Very bizarre.  I had no idea.

12/7/08

The Mekons’ Fear and Whiskey (Sin Records, 1985).  An old favorite of mine that I’m thinking of trying to write something about, so have returned to.  British art-school punks fall into American roots music (Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, etc) as a conceptual wormhole out of Thatcherite England.

This is the only really old Mekons video I dug up on Youtube: “Where Were You?” on New Year’s Eve 1980, opening for the Gang of Four. ”When I was waiting in a bar, where were you?/ When I was buying you a drink, where were you? When I was crying at home in bed, where were you?…/I want to talk to you all night, do you like me?/ I want to find out about your life, do you like me?/ Could you ever be my wife, do you love me?”

Taraf de Haidouks,   Musique Des Tziganes De Roumanie.  The live Band of Gypsies is also great.  Wild, sad, take-no-prisoners party music that I’m sure the Mekons would enjoy.  They’re Romanian Roma musicians — appear in the film Gypsy Caravan which I haven’t seen.  (You can get all of these on emusic.)

Art or Not? t.v. show on Ovation.  See my post.

Profile of Naomi Klein in The New Yorker.  Sarah is a big fan of The Shock Doctrine — I think I am going to read it over the holidays.

Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Care Bears dvd from public library.  Celie and Iris were SO excited about this DVD.  We spent the drive home discussing metaphysical puzzles raised by the show e.g. “I wonder how they get up on those rainbows?”  (I refrained from giving the correct answer: the poorly-paid animator in Thailand drew them up there.)  I could not bring myself to watch more than a couple minutes of this tripe.

Jello Sculpture Art or Not?

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jello

Sarah discovered this t.v. show Art or Not? which is on the Ovation channel, whatever that is.

It’s entertaining, although there’s something about the premise that is a little bit corny — I mean, the question isn’t really whether the jello sculpture, say, is art (what else would it be?), but whether it’s crappy art or at all smart/interesting.  Each episode features some contemporary artist and then a few responses to the work by critics, art professionals, and ordinary joe types.  Most of the commentators are blandly positive: “conceptually, the jello sculpture makes a really interesting statement…”  What makes the show is this guy Matt Gleason who is amusingly mean and biting with a kind of Michiko Kukatani flair for the crushing one-liner.  On Shepard Fairey, for example, creator of the Andre the Giant icon and, recently, one of the better-known Obama posters (which we actually have on our wall): “he’s a brand promoter… At the end of the day, it’s a very empty experience.”

Gleason is the (an?) editor of the Coagula Art Journal which on a quick perusal seems really good.

I’m sure Gleason is very conservative about the contemporary art scene and perhaps unfairly prejudiced against certain kinds of conceptual art, but it’s just fun to encounter a strong-willed critic who has a forceful P.O.V. and is not afraid to call out work he finds empty or vacuous.  This drives me crazy about a lot of contemporary art criticism (what little I see of it), its tendency towards bland description as a norm.

I’ll also point out that Gleason was a big fan of the tattoo artist they had on the show, so it’s not as if he’s only into oil painting or whatever.  This is an excerpt from the Shepard Fairey episode of the show: