MY New Music Blog

I’ve started a (mainly) music blog.  I’m going to tell people here, but I might not tell new readers of the new blog about Commie Curmudgeon.  (You can all keep a secret, right?)  Nothing’s going on there yet, really, except for some nice pictures and music blog links.  Here it is: 

http://roughinhere.wordpress.com 

More on David Toop

[A more extensive review of a writer whose work I got to read a bit more of while I was offline...]

Ocean of Sound and Exotica by David Toop - Toop is one of the most ambitious “rock critics” I’ve encountered - he goes pretty far afield from the original, basic subjects of his work.  He delves a lot into anthropology, somewhat into history, and sometimes directly into magical realism, surrealism, and even his own hallucinations (or at least deep imaginings), inspired by his many travels and personal trials. 

Ocean of Sound is focused on ambient music, or more broadly, electronic music, rave music and all the things that influenced those genres, covering everything from Brian Eno to The Orb to Gamelan music to Sun Ra.  Exotica focuses on (even) stranger stuff, including some acts that would at first seem to be extremely unlikely artistic “befellows”:  Carmen Miranda, Sun Ra (again), Les Baxter, Joesephine Baker, Bo Diddley, The Beach Boys, Throbbing Gristle, Burt Bacharach, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan…

I enjoyed Ocean of Sound because it told me a bunch of things I didn’t know already about music that I do know pretty well.  I think I liked Exotica even more because it delved a lot into human history and anthropology while informing me about plenty of music that is far less familiar to me. 

The only “rock critic” whose work I’ve encountered who explores this wide a range is Greil Marcus (that is, in Lipstick Traces).  But Toop is a little less overtly political and probably less grandiose.  (Though I don’t mean to slight Marcus - I think he is also a brilliant writer in many ways.)  Moreover, Toop doesn’t display Marcus’ overt interest in revolutionary movements and subversive music and culture of the 20th century.  But Toop does display a strong interest in the history of western imperialism and the way it influenced western imagination, which is directly related to Toop’s explorations of the ways that music that originated in the eastern or southern hemispheres, or from pre-capitalist or ”primitive” communities, got mixed in with a lot of popular music in the ”advanced” capitalist world. 

This is particularly true of Exotica, which discusses a lot of western literature as well.  In fact, Toop seems to become most political when he writes about fiction, and in Exotica, he engages us with some fascinating discussions of Conrad, Melville and Poe.

Sometimes I do wish that Toop would delve more deeply into the workings of the political and economic engines that drive the imperialism to which he so often refers. (And by the way, its obvious, from references here and there, that he has read his share of Marx.)  But he certainly takes on enough material already in these impressive books.

Back Online

All right, I’m back.  Some things need to be ironed out, and too much to do right now.  But there should be more here soon…

Past Week 2 of Being (Mostly) Offline…

A quick one, ten minutes left in the Internet Cafe…

One day I’ll have to post about the unfair elitism of limited ticket sales.  M.I.A. sold out Sudio B within five hours, through an online ticket sale that happened while I was alseep.  (Asleep and offline and without credit or debit card, which I imagine is how you have to buy these online tickets.)  Maya, next time, maybe you can find a way to provide more democratic access to your club engagements.  Pull up the people, you know?

Though, admittedly, she did play a free festival too, at Coney Island.  The festival was not so good (IMO), but the M.I.A. show was great, as expected.

Still offline right now, putting off the pain of getting the new computer (dealing with the hucksters, etc.), just enjoying my relaxation too much.  Many things to take care of soon.

Thanks to people for still tuning in (I’m actually getting more readers now than I did when I was regularly posting - strange)…

Exploring Multicultural Queens: Only the “Real” American Part Feels Alien

I haven’t moved my stuff to Woodside just yet, but I’ve been doing a few things over in Queens in preparation for the move, which should happen by the end of the week.  And, along the way, I’ve been exploring the area.

I’ve already talked about enjoying the Indian section, and I’ve wandered into East Asian sections and heavily Mexican areas too.  All of that has been pretty enjoyable for me, for the food (of course), but also the atmosphere, and I’m very glad that I’ll have this great mixture of cultures around me in my new neighborhood.

Now, a few weeks ago, at a gathering that I attended (related to my parental family - a long and not so pleasant story…), I got into a conversation with someone about Jackson Heights, and this guy went on a little about how Jackson Heights and the surrounding areas are so exotic, they can make you feel like you’re in a foreign country.  To which I might answer, yes and no.  They might give you the benefits of some access to the culture of a “foreign” country.  But none of it feels all that foreign to me. In addition to the contacts and affinity that I’ve had with the South Asian cultures (which seemed particularly strange to this guy), I am really fairly comfortable in almost any immigrant neighborhood that I wander into in New York City.  Certainly, I can be a little conscious while I’m in a particular restaurant or CD store that I am the only “white” guy present (being a guy of Russian/Ukrainian, culturally Jewish ancestry), but it’s never that big a deal to me, and it’s never an experience that’s going to make me feel that I’m lost in a foreign land, the way this guy seemed to describe it (even if his opinion of these neighborhoods was still generally favorable).

But to get that feeling of being in a completely foreign land, I don’t need to go very far from those areas; I need only go about a mile and a half away from the place that I’m moving to, to the stretch of malls on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst.  I went to two malls in this area today, in search of a Dell Direct kiosk (which was also sort of a waste of time - but more on that another time), and in each one I felt completely disoriented and actually a little horrified.  And I began to get some feeling - and not a very good feeling at that - that I was experiencing a real part of a mostly foreign place known as Mainstream America…

In each of these malls, I also began to understand why some people focus so much on the consumerism of American society.  I don’t like to focus on that stuff all that much myself in my political criticism (especially not these days) because, for me, there is too much emphasis in American activism, especially among supposedly radical types, on this idea of fighting the consumer culture and resisting the temptation to be consumers.  And part of the reason that I’ve drifted away from that whole emphasis, especially recently, is that I never have much money to spend to begin with and I’m never surrounded by people who have a lot of money to spend; thus, from my perspective, it’s more important to focus on getting to a situation where we can get the things that we really need, like healthcare and some kind of stable housing, than to dwell so much on how much time and money affluent people spend on the things that they don’t need, etc.

But on the rare occasions when I visit big malls like the ones that I stumbled onto in Queens, I can begin to understand why so many activists consider outright moralizing against consumer culture to be their number one priority.  Because, I imagine, a lot of these activists who are now living in places like New York City - mainly in Manhattan or trendier areas of Brooklyn - actually grew up in the suburbs and were exposed to this utterly soulless kind of atmosphere, with its endless focus on shopping, and its complete lack of any aesthetics or cultural values outside of this emphasis on shopping, and they were left with an uncontrollable need to rebel against all of this deadening (not to mention extremely wasteful) stuff.  (And, by the way, I should stress that I’m not reacting myself so much to the idea of shopping for anything as I am to this high-consumerist, standardized mall shopping.  I’m perfectly aware that much of my enjoyment in the other places in Queens (and other parts of New York) comes from a kind of shopping - maybe not for typical consumer items, but for things like music and food.  Yet, that kind of shopping experience feels so different from the strange emptiness that I find in these malls.)

I once had a girlfriend, some 20 years ago, who’d spent most of her childhood and adolescence in suburban New Jersey and had somewhat absorbed the shop-all-day compulsion (which was a big problem from the start, and probably something I also rebelled against), but all along, from a very young age, she’d at least had the opportunity to go to the chic places in Manhattan (which could be contemptible in their own way but were at least somewhat more interesting), and she had some appreciation for other aspects of the surrounding culture.

But when I walk around these malls, I have to wonder what it’s really like to be socialized in such a way that you actually can enjoy spending your whole time in such places shopping…  Or to have grown up in an atmosphere in which you’re constantly told that these places can and should be your only source of enjoyment.

Yet, I can only imagine and speculate, because I cannot grasp what it’s like to spend a whole lot of time during your life in this kind of atmosphere.  This seems far more alien to me than any immigrant neighborhood that I might encounter -like an alien land out of some nightmarish dystopia.

—————-

P.S.  Regarding my disengagement from anti-consumerism…  I suppose I should address one question that somebody might come up with:  Wasn’t I part of this thing that asfo_del started called “Living on Less,” and didn’t I go along with this group idea of telling people to spend less, etc.?  To which I might answer, I always did have a particular angle on this, which was not “conventional” anti-consumerism:  Several  years ago, I liked this idea - arrived at in collaboration with asfo_del, etc. - of creating a system of mutual advisement among people who don’t have much money, regarding how we can make the best of what we do have by resisting the constant pressure to spend on things that we don’t have to spend on and/or that just aren’t going to make us happier.   I was hoping (as were my collaborators, I think) to help build a sort of bridge between anti-poverty and anti-consumerism:  not just morally lecturing to affluent people about their wasteful spending, but doing work among poor people (a class within which I’ve sometimes, justifiably, counted myself as a member, even if I have been educationally more “privileged” than most), in order to try to live best with what little we have:  “Living on Less” partly because we have to live on less.

But more recently, I’ve drifted far from even that approach for a number of reasons, too extensive to go into right now.  One thing I will say is that I got turned off by the moralism (disguised as parody of moralism) of Reverend Billy and Adbusters (also commented upon by asfo_del and some other bloggers), and I’m starting to recoil at the excessive publicity given to the relatively affluent dumpster divers of “freeganism.”  (And by the way, as another aside…  I’ve worked with this guy Adam, who’s being touted as the spokesguy for the “freegans,” and I think he’s done good things and is a very good organizer.  But the “freegan” publicity is getting to be more than a bit of a turn off at this point.)