And, now, my favourite part of the holiday: reading all of my favourite websites on a six year old computer running Windows 95 and Netscape 4. Joy to the world, indeed.
by krisis
Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
And, now, my favourite part of the holiday: reading all of my favourite websites on a six year old computer running Windows 95 and Netscape 4. Joy to the world, indeed.
by krisis
Tonight i’ve been assaulting various and sundry instant message windows with my wandering attempts at creating a list of five favorite albums of 2001. I bought more cds during this year by a factor of nearly four over any other calendar year in history, but the great majority of them were filling in blanks in my collection — that is to say, they weren’t new releases. 2001 saw me adding records by Radiohead, Weezer, Ben Folds Five, Death Cab for Cutie, Erin McKeown, Velvet Underground, Magnetic Fields, Juliana Hatfield, and many more than a dozen other artists i had never bought before. Even of the acts i just named, only four of them released new discs this year in the midst of the 27 purchases i made from their catalogues. Point being, compiling a top five involves a lot more sifting than i thought it would — and that’s still before i have to actually decide on five discs.
The most obvious choice is Garbage’s Beautiful Garbage, which happens to be an excellent record in addition to being by my favorite band. Garbage didn’t make a record of the year, though; it’s consistently ranking on critic’s polls, but not in the top slot. I’ve honestly felt the same way about it since i bought it: it’s great, but it isn’t “best.” Something about the genre-hopping the band partakes in rubs my ears the wrong way, as if an album that at once acknowledges Phil Spector on “Can’t Cry These Tears” and Radiohead on “Nobody Loves You” while engaging in its own mischief on the instant-trash-classic “Silence is Golden” cannot possibly be my favorite of anything.
Speaking of Radiohead… must we? Over a year after first hearing it i’ll finally acknowledge that Kid A isn’t a piece of garbage, but i still remain remarkably undecided about Amnesiac Despite featuring a more intelligible set of songs, it is definitely a less cohesive piece, and I seem to be holding that against it … i want the compelling nature of the humming “Packt” and the falling forward of “Pyramid Song” combined with the howling “Idioteque” and grooving “Optimistic.” Is the middle ground represented by the live record i have yet to get my hands on? Or, more likely, should i forget that the previous record ever happened and try to place this one in my cannon without comparison?
If there’s any record comparison is helping its subject, it’s Photo Album by Death Cab for Cutie. Less aggressive and more cleanly produced than its predecessor, every song on it is a song in motion. It’s an album meant for a road trip, and i found myself playing it on every vehicle that got me to, around, and back from Florida with premeditation. Especially of note is the chiming “Movie Script Ending” and the biting romance-hinting travelogue “Why You’d Want to Live Here” (its having been written by someone who lives on the West Coast totally boggles me…). Photo is once painfully up-close and expertly rendered with broad enough strokes to allow a listener’s empathy. Of course, i have qualms about picking slight ten song albums by emo bands to top such a luminous collection … but i can’t very well ignore something i listened to every day for an entire month, can i?
If we were to award spots to all of my most listened-to records, Ani and Tori would be shoes in. They aren’t. As for Tori Amos, Strange Little Girls simply just isn’t an album that distinguishes 2001 in any way. The explosion of opener “New Age,” the roiling and aggressive “Real Men,” and the title track stick out of it as incredible, but the on the whole the record is sleepy and off-its mark (as you can hear me detail at length elsewhere). Ani DiFranco isn’t so surely crossed off the list; her double-length effort is intensely personal, unexpectedly funky, and eminently arranged. At the same time, its length acts against it through Ani’s inclusion of sleepy instrumentals and a handful of wince-worthy tunes that she might not have engaged in on a shorter record. Condensed to a single LP featuring such swiftly flowing jams as “Ain’t That the Way” and “o.k.” combined with more thoughtful ballads like “Marrow” and “So What,” Revelling and Reckoning might have wound up as my favorite DiFranco disc of all time. As it stands, even its place in my yearly pantheon is uncertain.
Ani has some stiff competition for her requisite folk-slot on my list from close associates. One threat is in the form of the Ani-produced Bitch and Animal disc Eternally Hard, which is too self-aware of its knotted sexuality and ironic lyrics to be anything but a hilarious listen. How can you dislike “Best Cock on the Block,” a sordid tale of a oft-beeped transgender and her collection of variously sized dildos? Rest assured, there’s more standard folk-fare within — albiet, rendered in bass, fiddle, djembe, and chick-rap. The second folk threat is from Erin McKeown and Peter Mulvey associate Rose Polenzani, whose self-titled disc veers from PJ Harvey stomp on one end to fluttering Joni-descended folk on the other. Sideman extraordinaire David Goodrich enhances throbbing opener “Fell” and the frollicking “Orange Crush,” but the purer acoustic songs inbetween are not quite as momentous. The missing momentum can be found carrying “Heaven Release Us” on Rose’s collaborative effort Voices on the Verge, which finds her sharing a Philadelphia studio with Erin, Beth Amsel, and Jess Klein. Voices is inconsistent by nature (Erin’s songs are mysterious in comparison to Jess’s, and Beth’s are especially plaintive) , but alluring all the same. All three of these discs easily outpace Ani when viewed as cohesive efforts, but they all have their flaws just the same.
I suppose there’s no such thing as a flawless record, though. Right? Really, it depends on the listener’s idea of a flaw. For me, a flawless record can be flawed in its own perfection. Case and point is Leona Naess, who easily produced the most effortlessly intricate disc i bought this year in I Tried to Rock You, but You Only Roll — a collection of folk guitars, electronic blips, and sugary melodies from a performer whose debut album i just as effortlessly declared as “Fiona-esque.” But, this disc is almost too-sweet … without anything jagged to get hopelessly hooked on. Similarly, Ivy’s Long Distance is a set of songs as excellent as it is undistinguished — when i listen to it i hear it as an entire album without isolating more than a song or two as it passes me by. Ben Folds puts in a similar performance, if an opposite one: all of Rockin’ the Suburbs‘s songs are memorable, but most of them sound like they could come from entirely different albums from each other (while lacking the overall arc that Garbage’s disc has to make up for its similar problem).
Alicia Keys’s Songs in a Minor is in a similar mess of songs, but is notable for hitting home with more hooks than the preceding. Closer still to perfection is Rufus Wainwright’s sophomore effort Poses, which suffers only from the fact that no album i own could keep up the pace that his first few songs set: “Poses” is a slice of melancholy perfection, “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” a lurid sounding list of things he’s avoiding an indulgence in, the faux-funk of “Shadows,” and “California”s hilariously extolling the not-quite-virtues of said state. By contrast, the back half of the album floats by in a haze while i’m still caught on the vicious riffs and open-mouthed pronunciation of the first few.
And then there are the albums i was too stupid to notice when they came out last year… Erin McKeown’s Distillation, Coldplay’s Parachutes, Sarah Harmer’s You Were Here, Andy Stochansky’s RadioFuseBox, and the aforementioned Death Cab for Cutie’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes — a top five in their own right. Next, there are the almost-albums from this year — the discs that didn’t quite make an impact on me. This group is lead up by the lamentably lengthless Weezer disc, the inconsistent Moulin Rouge soundtrack, and the sleepy Skin by Melissa Etheridge. And, finally, the top-five albums i’ve managed to miss: Dylan’s Love and Theft, Jewel’s This Way, Elton’s Songs From the West Coast, and the ever-intimidating Bjork’s Vespertine.
So, somewhere in that litany of stumbling blocks, chinks in sonic armor, and laments at unremarkability are my favorite five albums of 2001. What were they?
by krisis
Someone should really let FetishCrawler know that i’m not what they’re looking for. And, sweet jesus, i really don’t understand how a woman crushing frogs while wearing stiletto heels is sexy in any way, shape, or form. Blech.
by krisis
But, i miss it. I miss going to sleep with the huge book splayed open somewhere in the middle on the pillow next to me. I miss sneaking a peak forward to see how long i had to wait for another Pemulis appearance. Infinite Jest became a placeholder in my life for the dependency that it reviles … on entertainment, on liquor, on drugs, on other people … watching the characters in their endless dance of all of the above and even more left me free to do what i needed to do in my life without feeling the elastic pull of any of my various addictive tendencies in one direction or another.
As soon as i finished the last seven pages my grandmother was in the room, chirping like a bird. I had somehow managed to stave her off by showing her how close to finished i was, but i found myself without a defense and my first thought was “i need a drink.” I’ve never needed a drink before; in fact, i haven’t been drinking especially often lately. Suddenly, it became the focal point of my day: coming home to my empty apartment and getting blitzed enough so that everything was fuzzy around the edges like a peach and i could simmer quietly down into silence and sleep. Imagining the slippery slope to unconsciousness i might take later was enough to save me from the endless bickering of my septuagenarian family-members, and to get my on the plane.
When i left the hospital i wanted, more than anything else, to be somewhere other than in my own head. Yes, i wanted to go home. Yes, i was hungry. Most of all, though, i was craving an opportunity to poke at my perceptions and rattle my reasons. I wanted to feel disconnected in a wholly opposite way from how i felt in the hospital. And, i did. It was perhaps the most excruciatingly stupid single night of my life, but i woke up the next morning with that binge-stupidity as a tangible buffer between my sick and confined self and my well self — the two never saw an intersection because i made sure to remove myself from where they might’ve met.
This has become the function of substance to me, suddenly … separation. I’ve always thought that anything potentially addictive would be dangerous when it stopped just being fun and started being useful and i was entirely right, but i managed to forget about the entire situation while i had that thick book on my pillow filled with its own endless fucked up addicts to draw my escapism from. Now it’s gone, and i am set back to my continuing reality.
And, importantly: alone — no more characters to keep me up at night. So, maybe it wasn’t a reaction to the novel, but to the mental company it provided.
I’m not sure. I’m going to sleep on it.
by krisis
I finished Infinite Jest this morning on the floor of my grandmother’s bedroom in Florida. It’s over. Done. Completed. 1088 pages in a cover with the exact same colors as my second demo cd, starting while marooned in a hospital bed and finished while marooned in an retirement condo.
Somehow finishing it only seems like half as much an accomplishment as starting it. Starting a 1k+ page book, especially this particular 1k+ book, you need motivation, interest, and all of your wits about you as you are introduced to a seemingly endless cast of characters in no specific order, chronological or otherwise. You also should probably keep a notepad and several bookmarks handy. And make sure to rotate your reading posture every few dozen pages so that you don’t lose any limbs.
The great failing of Infinite Jest – and, believe me, it definitely fails – is two-fold. The first problem i (inevitably) had with it is that it featured a total lack of editing. Yes, everything was spelt as it should have been, and the grammar and syntax was impeccable where applicable. In fact, the writing was nearly perfect. The problem was that there was too damned much nearly perfect writing … too good to want to skim over, but absolutely non-vital to the story. Endless footnotes regarding the manufacturers of the umpteen prescription drugs each character is addicted to. Lengthy passages in ebonic street-slang to introduce a minor character who has no cumulative effect on the story at large. A complex subplot about the pursuit of happiness that is basically never resolved. David Foster Wallace is a great master of prose, but that’s all he seems to be … his plot doesn’t resolve it’s three major thrusts — my second major problem with the novel: the entire latter two hundred pages feel like a digression rather than a progression and the damned book ends with a wholly irrelevant flashback that would have been better suited as an introduction of Don Gately rather than an end to the book. I’m all for novels that leave readers with questions, but we are left in the dark about Hal, Orin, Pemulis, Stice, Wayne, Gately, Joelle, Marathe, Steeply, and all of the rest of our favourites; a re-read of the opening passage will give you an idea of where they all wound up, but not how they got there.
Essentially, Wallace set up a Jest too Infinite to follow through on; namely, a riveting and perfect novel so grand in scope and scheme that he is unable (or unwilling) to end it in any way in keeping with the rest of the novel. Yes, this is part of the jest, but it is also the mark of a sloppy conceptualist who should have had an editor take a hatchet to revisionist US history, endlessly tepid passages about Himself’s youth, the 20+ little buddies introduced in one lump sum, Hal’s sidebar trip to teddy-bear-land, and what turns out to be a novel in itself about Gately. Yes to the hilariously unnarrated conversations within the Incandenza clan. Yes to the laugh-out-loud Estachon game that makes Quidditch look like bumper-bowling. Yes to Pemulis and his hat full of narcotic wonders. Yes to Marathe and Steeply’s debate on the pursuit of happiness. In fact, yes to the entire world-weary tone of a society that is addicted to everything, including entertainment, and doesn’t know when to stop.
In a way the end of the novel is the perfect allegory for the the film that is the perfect allegory for the novel, but in failing to deliver the goods on any of the nearly dozen major plot threads he had been weaving together the entire time, David Foster Wallace ultimately proves himself an inept cock-tease of a writer who couldn’t help but throw all of his many tricks at the reader without every taking the time to bring anything quite to a climax.. Because, frankly, despite every indication that you’re headed there, you aren’t.