this is why I love the Internet

Because it’s so much more interesting than mainstream music media.  AP Magazine asked Defiance, Ohio for an interview for an issue focusing on folk punk and we declined to do it.  Personally, I think that there’s too much focus on promotion and attaching music to genres and really narrow and rigid identities and values and by extension encouraging people reading media to attach to really narrow and rigid identities and values.  Also, it tends to focus on what’s cool in music instead of people’s relationships and experiences with music and music’s relationships and experiences within itself.  Today, I found that the Internet, in particular, Wikipedia offered the kind of more complex and connected information about music that feels more satisfying to read…

I’ve been listening to Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor and was interested in the track The Instrumental because it had this kind of icky sounding Linkin Park-style rock hook in it.  I was interested in who contributed to it, and it turns out it was Jonah Matranga who performed as OneLineDrawing who I used to listen to when I was in college.  The track is interesting because lyrically, it is a critical look at the influence of television yet according to Wikipedia was included in the soundtrack to the Madden 07 video game.

Jonah Matranga has a wikipedia user and I thought this was  interesting  from his user page:

I’m okay with (and happy about) being considered influential in the context of post-hardcore, anti-macho rock, but I take no responsibility for McEmo as it generally manifests today. I deplore the commodification of sincerity, and big budgets to make people look/sound ‘authentic’.

…

I am an utter rock geek, an art idealist, and I absolutely believe in the transformative, transcendent power of rocking the fuck out. Rocking the fuck out is in no way tied to volume or mood, it’s just letting go.

Although  I would also argue that macho rock is also in no way tied to volume or mood and one of the biggest problems with post-hardcore or “McEmo” is that it often reflects the same masculinites (and often mysogyny) as genres of music that are more frequently criticized for those things (metal, hip-hop).  I think that Weezer’s Pinkerton which is infectious and also chock-full of mysogyny and a sense of sexual entitlement is my textbook example of this.

memes for media literacy discussions

  • Lupe Fiasco on sexism (from masculinities in media blog). I heard about Lupe Fiasco when someone brought ihis music up in the Q&A after the MED lecture last month. I heard a really great song called Kick, Push about skateboarding by Lupe Fiasco along with a lot of other great music on the Pandora Radio site.
  • Gabriel Teodros (thanks st!) on multi-racial identity and language in Africa East.  More and more I feel like punk music doesn’t speak to the questions that I need help answering, or to my experience, or connecting my experience with bigger things.  If it does connect with my experience, it seems often to link from my intentional investment in a particular subculture.  That’s not entirely true, because I think punk culture and the experience of playing music and organizing shows in a small town was, and remains, so honestly and beautifully linked with my experience growing up in central PA (and my parents as college-educated middle class people and the lifestyle that created for me).  But, that’s not my whole story, and it’s more and more unsatisfying to feel so invested in music that seems to lack a language to talk about some things, or has a political motivation without a complete perspective (say, in punk’s consistent striving to talk about and against racism but doing so without talking about race).  I’m searching for, and would like to think that I can help make multicultural music, not stylistically in the Lotus Fest, Puntamaya sort of way, but in terms of theme and perspective.

Tonight! The Dark, Dark, Dark; Glorytellers (ex-Karate), Sticky and the Bees, Morrow @ Bear’s Place. 10:30p. $5

Glorytellers sound interesting, but honestly, I am so stoked about the Dark, Dark, Dark.  They played randomly at the Wylie House last year in the hospital parking lot and were really amazing.  They are a 4 piece with accordian, banjo, random percussion, and upright bass.  They play spooky sounding songs with an old-timey feel.  One of the best parts of their songs are the sultry vocal harmonies.  I played their CD-R almost nonstop last year.

From the press release about this show:

Friday March 21
@ Bear’s Place
-Glorytellers (Southern Records)
-Sticky and the Bees (Bloomington)
-Morrow (Bloomington)
-surprise opening set by Dark Dark Dark (not Bloomington)
10:30pm (for real)
$5

Glorytellers
http://www.myspace.com/glorytellers
“The creative force behind Glorytellers is guitarist/singer/songwriter Geoff Farina, who spent the better part of 14 years fronting Boston’s genre-bending Karate, and as one-half of the formative lo-fi duo Secret Stars. Gavin McCarthy (Karate, Cul de Sac), Joshua Larue (Him/Mice Parade), Luther Gray III (Ida, Joe Morris Trio), and engineer Andy Hong are also part of Glorytellers.” And they play good music too. Real good.

Morrow
http://www.myspace.com/weatherprophets
This Bloomington 3-piece plays southern-tinged gloom-rock with a passion unbeknownst to their droopy indie-rock peers. You must see this. Brilliant.

Sticky and the Bees
http://www.myspace.com/stickyandthebees
This is a band from Bloomingotn. Nobody in the band is called “Sticky” and there are zero bees involved. No bears will be harmed during their performance, or at least not in direct relation to their actions or words or musics. And this band will be playing some new songs that nobody has heard yet (not even the band)!

Dark Dark Dark
http://www.myspace.com/darkdarkdarkband
This is a great indie-folk band. They are on tour, so do yourself (and them) a favor and check it out. They will play a short set promptly at 10:30 pm.

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california communities at the margin

I think that California always has had this iconic quality of Americanness, capturing the most extreme visions of both this country’s aspirations and its challenging realities.

Collapsed structure near the Salton Sea

This weekend, Greg rented a documentary called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea about the Salton Sea, an area in California that, in the previous century, due to a strange set of ecological circumstances, saw both incredible development and growth and later, an equally magnificent collapse.  The landscape is now one of flooded and collapsed mobile homes and other structures and a small population of people, many of who moved there to escape conditions in larger California cities, or who moved to the area during the Sea’s boom and now find themselves without the economic resources to leave.

Today, I saw this video from the BBC via BoingBoing about tent cities inhabited by people who have lost their homes in the fallout of the subprime mortgage crisis.

“I feel the problem is that we’re not represented in our culture. We don’t create it and it’s not born of anything of us”

The title to this post is from a young person quoted in Susan Herrig‘s article Questioning the generational divide: Technological exoticism and adult construction of online youth identity. (In: D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (pp. 71-94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.) which deals with the differing perspectives of digital media from adults and youth.

I found the discussion of how youth use media pretty interesting:

Young people use new technologies for social ends that are much the same as for earlier
generations using old technologies. Young people instant message, text message, or email their friends much as my Baby Boomer generation talked on landline telephones. They abbreviate and use language creatively to signal their in-group identity, much as my friends and I wrote backwards (manipulating the affordances of the hand-written
medium) and created special writing conventions to pass notes in class. They flirt online, while we flirted on the phone or in the hallways at school. They express their daily angst in blogs, whereas my generation kept hand-written diaries. They painstakingly craft their profiles in social networking sites to win the approval of their peers, while we dressed up to be “seen” hanging out at school dances and community youth events. Moreover, “search engines [function] as a library, … product-based sites as a mall, and downloadable movies and games as a theater or video arcade.” As was also true when I was young, the ends are more interesting and important to the participants than the technological means, especially if the means have been available all one’s life.

as well as the discussion of some possible motivating factors of youth technology use:

Moreover, contrary to the stereotype that the digital generation is enamored of technology, for many youth, technology use may not be the most fun activity, but rather what is most available, a substitute for something they would rather do. In a recent survey of media use by 6-17 year olds in the U.K, a majority of teens said that they would rather go out to a movie or do something with friends than stay home and consume media, and they complained that their neighborhoods did not provide enough activities for youth. Increasingly, parents are afraid to let their children go out for fear that they will not be safe, especially in urban areas. According to new media researcher Henry Jenkins, more elaborate indoor media environments have evolved to compensate for unsafe or otherwise inhospitable outdoor environments. danah boyd, in her chapter in this volume, argues that social networking spaces such as MySpace.com substitute for traditional offline hangouts, whose numbers have dwindled dramatically in recent decades in the U.S.

Link to PDF of article.

sewing machine timing

Chiara’s sewing machine is broken.  The needle seems to collide with the hook.  It looks like the timing and hopefully the internet can save the day on this one.  It costs $60 to repair a sewing machine and I’m sure not much more to buy a new one.

Link to sewusa.com page on adjusting timing.

Review of Nothing But The Truth by Avi

Amy and I have started an ad-hoc young adult literature book club.  The first book that we read was Nothing But the Truth by Avi.  I thought it would be cool to conclude our discussion by posting a book review to Amazon but my notebook ran out of power before we could, so here’s my thoughts now.

I didn’t read Nothing But the Truth when I was young, but upon finishing it, I remembered that my brother, an avid reader, and a particular lover of books by Avi, had really liked it when he was young.  He was especially drawn to the tragic irony of the books conclusion.  I read other reviews of the book on Amazon and was struck by how the praise or criticism of the book seemed to be broken along lines of age, with older readers liking the book, and many of the 1-star reviews coming from younger readers.  One of the principal events in the book is the conflict of Phillip, the young protagonist and his English teacher and foil, Miss Narwin, over the book Call of the Wild, which Narwin regards as a classic of literature and Phillip regards dismissively.  It’s funny to think that the same difference of perspective might happen over this book.

Reading the book as an adult, I really enjoyed it.  Though  the events in the book snowball quickly out of the control, and the documentary style of the book, as the story is told through a series of memos, journal entries, personal letters, newspaper articles, and transcriptions of conversations, seems to quicken the pace and show only certain faces of the characters, the story is not without nuance and the bluntness of some of the perspectives accurately capture the dangerously singular vision of American politics and the personal political chasms of family and age.

Many other reviews that I read seemed to see the book as offering a very moral conclusion, warning of the destructive consequences of untruthfullness, but I found the story to instead complicate the idea of truth.  Truth is a relative concept and one that is heavily wrought by individual’s challenges and investments.  I found the inability of the characters to transcend these things to be tragic and sadly real.  Most poignent was the relationship between Narwin and Phillip, where neither acted out of particular malice, but both were absolutely unable to understand each other’s perspectives or interpret the signals that each so desperately put forth.  This was such a strange perspective, and I think it was one I was never exposed to as a youth.  I think I always saw adults as allies or adversaries but never as complex people who were both deeply comitted, empassioned, and concerned but also ultimately impotent.  Also sad was the communication between Phillip’s parents and between them and Phillip and the portrayal of parental concern and its interception by adult anxieties and responsibilities.  Finally, I found the depiction of school district politics and conservative talk radio very, very real and the imagery that the words evoked was of neighborly chats on the streets of my hometown, my mother’s frustrated stories of her navigation of school administrators, and the rantings of local shock jocks.

I want to think that this a very good book for youth to read, that the criticism of media, and, more importantly, the complication of how we perceive the words and actions of others, would be transformative.  Still, in thinking about this book, I begin to realize how much my finding of these things in this book comes from the experience and vision that has seperated me from the age of the book’s young protagonist.  Finding the truth about yourself, let alone in the world, is a constant and daunting task.  I hope that education can help equip young people to see the truth in their investments, beliefs, and ultimate actions, for their own well-being; to see others as both good and flawed, as that is so essential to an empathetic humanity; and to distill some more fundamental truth from the ever-volitile flow of “truths” in media and poltics.  Still, as this book argues, it is the challenge of educators to perform such alchemy in a venue so loaded by these forces.  Perhaps this book can be a device towards such ends.