(Another Post about) Packing, Moving, Getting Rid of Things. (Or: Goodbye, Bronx. Hello, Queens!)

(I tried to connect this to other things, but it didn’t work.  So, this is another mundane moving-time post about sifting through things, throwing things out, and trying to pack…)

I will be moving from my present place to the new one pretty soon.  I’d rather not say exactly when (since I’m not even really sure myself), but it might be a little later than some people would like me to move.  Not much later, but just a little, and I doubt that there will be any consequences from that…

Unfortunately, though, I haven’t even begun packing, not to any great extent, and I definitely should have by now.  Each move seems to catch me more unprepared, which I like to think is the consequence of bad circumstances rather than an inability to “get my shit together” and that sort of thing.

This time around I have decided, more than ever before, that I really need to give up a lot of books.  The easiest thing for me to part with, actually, is the fiction books, which has been the case for the past several years.  Maybe that’s because I feel little need to reread any of the fiction or even refer to it (except to find a particular Ballard of Kafka passage - for example - to quote sometime)… 

The political books are still much harder for me to part with…  One would think that given the decline of my activism (along with everyone else’s), I might have been a little more able to part with some of the writings and ideas that first inspired me.  But that’s not true at all, mysteriously enough.   Unfortunately,  with the sort of life that I’m leading, I can’t exactly have a huge and comprehensive library in front of me all the time.

I’ve already dragged about 25 political books to someone’s house in Brooklyn, where I think they will be used for a worthy cause sometime in the near future, hopefully.  (I won’t go any more into that now.  But suffice to say, I would have been happy to bring 35 or 40 books if I thought I could manage them on the ride from the 6 train in The Bronx to the L train in Manhattan and all the way over to the Grand Street station in East Williamsburg/Bushwick, near the border between Brooklyn and Queens.  I probably could have done that, actually.  But I wimped out and brought only 25 or so, if that many.)  However, I still do have well more than twice that many books remaining, and it’s going to be difficult to leave most of those behind.

I’m thinking that it probably would not do me well to unearth all my political books right away at the place where I’m going, because the new roommate has no knowledge of my political leanings, and who knows what will freak a roommate out.  (Most other signs seem to indicate a good arrangement, but as I’ve learned, you never know what will happen, and when you’re eager for somebody to let you move into a place, you can’t exactly cover everything.)  However, while I’ve learned to be less in people’s faces about my politics (at least at first - I think…), these very important interests are a big part of me that I cannot permanently hide.  And, I still will want books to have around that I can refer to quite a bit without having to search for them on the Net.  So, I probably will keep at least a couple of well-filled boxes of books.

I’ve also been sifting through my CDs, going through some similar anguish in some cases.  However, the job of sifting has been made somewhat easier by the fact that I never took such good care of my CDs and many of those that are a decade old or older are unplayable anyway.  

Along the same lines, I have to think about my old records…  I’ve already cut my vinyl collection to about one third over the years, but I’m thinking of cutting it down to less than a quarter of that…  Maybe one out of four milk crates…  Will I be able to do that?  It will be kind of tough, but like many people, I hardly play my old records anyway (and I rarely splurge on the hip new 12″ single these days), so it might be just as well.  Especially since many of those are also pretty well trashed…  Of course, they could come in handy if I decide to take up turntablism - but once again, I can’t really plan for every possibility, especially when I need to move light.

And there is the computer…  My plan right now is to just dump the computer and get a new computer right after I’ve moved.  But it’s going to take some courage, because I am so addicted to this thing that just the brief step of physically parting with one model of computer before replacing it might be a somewhat traumatic experience for me.  Plus, do I have the courage to part with the $500 or so?  Sure, the money is actually there, for the first time in a long time.  But I could easily just spend $500 right away on my broken teeth.  (Sometimes I like to imagine what life would be like if I lived in a country that had universal, single-payer health coverage and I didn’t always have that sort of problem to think about.  But that’s for another post…)  

On the other hand, I have waited long enough and, the way things happen with me, if I don’t make this decision to dump the computer then I’ll spend the extra time and energy dragging this heavy antique over to the new place only to discover that it hasn’t survived the move.  Or it will blow right after I get there, since it’s been threatening to blow (with a thousand “Fatal Exception” messages) for well over a year.  So, I am going to replace it, right away.   I am.   I keep having to tell that to myself…

Next will be the question of the blog…  Once I’ve moved and have gotten a new computer, will I celebrate these events by doing something new with the blog?  Maybe I will split it up a little after all instead of leaving this increasingly schizophrenic blog exactly the way it is as the ratings continue to hemorrhage (even though I am getting good comments here and there).

Oh, well.  All things to be worked out in the very near future…

When I am in Queens.

That’s right.  I am really moving to Queens.  I’ve had my heart set on this idea for a couple of months now.  Probably, first of all, because I’ve never lived in Queens before; it’s the only borough in New York City that I’ve never lived in, while I have spent extensive periods of time residing in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan and The Bronx.  Plus, I am moving to the place where Woodside borders on Jackson Heights…which means only about ten blocks away from the two or three streets that have the best cheap Indian restaurants in New York.  (This is a fact I heard about more than ten years ago - but one that  I only confirmed fairly recently, during the resurgence of my desiphilia.)

And there’s one place in particular, over on 74th Street, that has the greatest salt lassis…  Yes, I am moving to a neighborhood to be within walking distance of a good lassi.  That may seem a little trivial at first glance, but then again…  It seems like as good a reason as any other to move into a neighborhood.

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P.S.  OK, I’m being a little unnecessarily wry in the last paragraph above.   I do like this neighborhood for other reasons…  I think Woodside and Sunnyside are both pretty charming in odd ways.   For instance, I like the way they have those great little community parks right under the elevated 7 line - you don’t see that in many other parts of New York (and the “els” in The Bronx just seem so much uglier for some reason)…  And there’s a matter of the population…  I said I like diversity, and you can’t get more diverse than these neighborhoods in Queens!  So, altogether, the neighborhood should be a very nice experience.  Now, just need to cross my fingers (even though I don’t believe in that sort of thing) about the living situation… 

“Happy” Birthday, Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the greatest commie curmudgeons of all time.  And he was born 102 years ago, on June 21, 1905. 

Of course, it is still June 20 as I write this, at least for me, but it is June 21 in France.  Though what difference does it make?  A birthday really has no inherent meaning…  

But it does provide me with a good excuse to post some of my favorite quotes from Nausea:

I live alone, entirely alone.  I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something:  the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.  You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness.  But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes…

People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.  I have no friends.  Is that why my flesh is naked?  You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity…

The misanthrope is a man:  therefore the humanist must be misanthropic to a certain extent.  But he must be a scientist as well to have learned how to water down his hatred, and hate men only to love them better afterwards…

The past is a landlord’s luxury.  Where shall I keep mine?  You don’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house.  I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him.  I should not complain:  all I wanted was to be free.

(All quotes copied easily from the wonderful site, Sartre Online.)

Currently Reading: David Toop, Ocean of Sound

It’s been a while since I became absorbed in a book lately, especially one that I stumbled upon by chance.  But now I have, even if it is a book about music, and even if it is more like a collection of articles (with a lot of interviews).  It’s still a book that I can eagerly turn to whenever I’m in transit, or in office downtime, etc., and it’s been a while since I had that.

And that book (found at St. Marks Books, where I was looking for something to read on the subway) is David Toop’s Ocean of Sound.  Mainly, it’s about the development of ambient music, up to 1995.

In recent years, I’ve actually been moving away from ambient music, or so I thought - but Toop’s idea of ambient music extends far beyond the ultra-mellow European, British or American sounds that so many have come to associate with that (sub)genre.  Toop is good at ignoring borders between nations, cultures, and eras - which puts this book very much in line with other music-related things that I’ve been reading and writing recently, which means it’s also pertinent to much of the stuff I’ve been listening to. 

I’m still fairly near the beginning in terms fully reading this (still in the part about Marshall Jefferson’s Acid Tracks, from 1987), but I have skipped ahead and sampled (so to speak) some of the writing in the chapters to come.  And it’s all good.

For example, this passage from a somewhat later chapter…

Dub music is like a long echo delay, looping through time.  Regenerating every few years, sometimes so quiet that only a disciple could hear, sometimes shatteringly loud, dub unpicks music in the commercial sphere.  Spreading out a song or a groove over a landscape of peaks and deep trenches, extending hooks and beats to vanishing point, dub creates new maps of time, intangible sound sculptures, sacred sites, balm and shock for mind, body and spirit.

When you double or dub, you replicate, reinvent, make one of many versions.  There is no such thing as an original mix, since music stored on milti-track tape, floppy or hard disk, is just a collection of bits.  The composition has been decomposed, already, by technology.   Dubbing, at its very best, takes each bit and imbues it with new life, turning a rational order of musical sequences into an ocean of sensation….

—————-

P.S. Also pertinent to a lot of the music I’ve been writing about lately, he’s at least as well known for a book he wrote earlier called Rap Attack.

Another New (actually much better) Article on M.I.A.

 Maybe I should just turn this into an M.I.A. fan blog!  Anyway, I hope people will bear with me…as I mention another new M.I.A. article, this time in  Fact Magazine… I think this article and the interview material it contains are downright fascinating.  Here’s an excerpt:

Do you think that most American hip-hop has lost that raw edge?

“Yep, because it’s a business….   When hip-hop came out, white people were the ones rolling in big cars, with ladies and panthers on a leash…it was like Rod Stewart or whatever.  Then the pendulum swings to some kid in the hood, wearing shorts stood next to a speaker by the lamppost, making music.  Now hip-hop is Rod Stewart.  The pendulum isn’t now gonna swing back to some kid on the street by the speaker in America, it’s gonna swing to somewhere in Africa, or China.  Because that’s what we haven’t heard yet.”  

Much like ‘Arular’, your new album is politicised, but this time around you have to listen more carefully to the lyrics to hear it…

“I know…that’s the weirdest thing.  I know that about my record, and kinda know that about me…’cos it’s like that with my artwork and everything that I’m doing, that I’ve decided that that’s what I am.  Everything exists in layers, culturally, visually, information wise, it’s just one big layering process.  I couldn’t get away from that.  Every song is like that.  It’s not like I recorded one song in India, and one song here, and one song there.  That could’ve been a really contrived, and probably quite easy, way of doing it.  I wish I could’ve stuck to it.  But it didn’t end up like that; every song has been made in every single country.  It’s got New York, Virginia, Baltimore, America and England, but at the same time those songs were also worked in India and Trinidad and Africa.  It’s like one big marble cake that you cut and slice.”

Do you think people are more willing to embrace a political record now than they were a few years ago?

“It doesn’t matter…the thing is, you have to reflect your life.  I have to be true to that – I can’t take certain things away.  I do have a political background.  I’m only in England, learning this language and building a life in this society, because of political reasons.  Why would I deny that?…”

Wayne(andwax) Describes the Best Things About “Nu Whirl” Music

The other day, I was trying to describe to an old friend what it was that distinguished the “global” music that I listen to now so much from the world music of yesteryear.  That’s because I simply enjoy the global music that is becoming prevalent now much more than the genre of world music that became well known back when I was in my 20s, in the 1980s.   This is especially true when I think of the world music back then not just as music originating in other countries, but as the better-known stuff being marketed as world music, produced and popularized by certain old rock or folk stars, etc. 

In my conversation with said friend, I mentioned that the global music that I like, which mostly comes from the contemporary dance scene(s), seems liveler, more spontanteous and more dynamic than much of the stuff that we got to recognize as world music a couple of decades ago.  But why is that?  I had trouble articulating that, which is why I am thankful to Wayne for pinpointing those distinctions so accurately:

In what we might call “trad” “world music” discourse (e.g., deriving largely from the marketing attempts of the 80s and 90s) - the language and images and ideas mediating the explorations of Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Ry Cooder, as well as such record labels as Rough Guide and Putumayo - authenticity is often conferred onto the traditional, the pristine, the timeless, the exotic, that which has been untainted by capitalism, by Western cultural imperialism more generally, etc.  Whereas the recent movements on the music blogosphere that I am thinking of tend to do the opposite: never mind these false ideas about purity, they seem to say, we want our global crunk, we want hybrids and fusions, we want mirror-mirror reflections and refractions of New World and Old World, North and South, East and West, we want music concerned with the future as much as (or more than) the past, we want drum machines and synthesizers and samples, for the local is always (trans)local and the global is (always already) here.

That, right there, is the essence of the difference that makes the new(er) global music so much more exciting.  Also, there is one other, very important point that Wayne mentioned in the next paragraph:

Moreover, we might go further and note the preference among devotees of the new “world music” for the low-fi and DIY rather than the slick and commercial…

That’s a significant difference that can be connected directly to the cultures of techno music, hip-hop and punk…which may be another reason that I’ve gravitated much more to the ”nu whirl” sounds.

The paragraphs that follow in the article are very good too (especially where he quotes M.I.A., of course), but there are two slight issues I might take with the generalizations expressed above…

First, as Wayne also knows, this contemporary global music was actually alive and thriving in different places a dozen years ago.  My first exposure to this kind of mixture and dynamic, at least as it emerged from the cultures of the large western metropolitan areas, was through Transglobal Underground, back in about 1993 or ‘94.  Of course, there had been all kinds of mixing of cultures, musics and technology going on in different genres, including hip-hop and (as Wayne has mentioned) early Asian Underground (thinking of Bally Sagoo, etc.).  But when I think about club music that’s known and  accessible to an ethnically diverse crowd - especially the variety that can even get through to white people - TGU definitely comes to mind. 

There were other bands  and DJs associated with the Nation Records group back in the early ’90s that fit into this category somewhat too.  Fun-Da-Mental did, though they were more intent on doing a sort of British-Pakistani answer to Public Enemy (at least back in the beginning), so they didn’t have quite the reach or diversity of TGU.  And there was Loop Guru, but they were more limited in an opposite way, much more heavily based on ambient and trance music.  It’s hard to think of another outfit coming out of the rave/techno scene(s) that mixed things up as much as TGU.    When I think of the mix tape ethos that people talk about today (e.g., the one described by Urb in their article about M.I.A.) I always think of Transglobal Underground.   

Another thing that I wanted to mention is that Wayne might be a little unfair in characterizing Rough Guides as an old-style world music label.  Actually, I have been surprised by the way Rough Guides has kept up with the times.

Recently, I picked up their Bhangra Dance compilation (which came out in 2006), and I think it’s one of the best contemporary compilations around.  I had gotten an earlier Rough Guide bhangra compilation several years ago, but I like this one much more.  And part of the reason, as the liner notes acknowledge, is the increase in diversity.  This comp ranges from bhangra-dancehall to bhangra-hip-hop to bhangra going back to traditional Indian folk music and wedding ceremonies.  If the comp had merely focused on the more traditional-sounding material, then this might be the sort of Rough Guide that Wayne was referring to.  But the more traditional sounds are delightfully complemented by the most contemporary hybrids.

—————–  

P.S.  A note about my personal history with TGU…  One thing that struck me when I first heard them was how much some of their stuff reminded me of Dead Can Dance.  Dead Can Dance was another good example of a group heavily influenced by music from a variety of different cultures (and eras, for that matter) which was somewhat different from the ventures of so many post-hippie world music popularizers at the time.  Maybe this  is because DCD had come out of a post-punk, goth culture, so they were a little darker and more minimalist from the beginning, and also had more of a DIY ethos.  But DCD also had their obvious nostalgia for music untouched by capitalism or modernism; it was a big part of their reason for being.  And their music often had a lower energy level better associated with world fusion ventures than with contemporary global club music.  (Much as I always loved them, you can’t say they were always full of frenetic energy.  Though they did do that rocking saltarello sometime back…)        

Trumped-up Criminal Sentences Render the Word “Terrorist” More Meaningless Than Ever

It’s not exactly as obscene as the sentence once handed down to Jeffrey Luers, but the recent rash of sentencing in the “Green Scare” cases (i.e., crackdown on eco-saboteurs) is still pretty ridiculous.  Most absurd is the judges’ repeated use of “terrorist enhancement” in their sentencing, declaring that people who committed property destruction without any violence against other human beings are somehow “terrorists.”

Hello, terrorists kill people.  They kill as many people as possible to make their point, and they deliberately kill innocent people, ordinary people trying to go about their daily business, to maximize the shock, i.e., the terror.

Eco-saboteurs generally do not fit that description, and the people recently sentenced especially do not.  Whom did they injure?  Whom did they kill? 

The word “terrorism” is rendered increasingly meaningless.

Meanwhile, NYC activist-organizer Daneil McGowan got seven years for being a “terrorist.”

Oh, well, no surprises there, actually.  Bombs and Shields has the grim details.

————-

P.S. Also via Bombs and Shields, a very good opinion piece published by the Los Angeles Times,  My brother, the ‘terrorist.’