from the vaults, vol. 11.

The Fiery Furnaces – Widow City (2007)

the fiery furnaces are the kind of band that, in an ideal world, would be everyone’s favourite band. matthew and eleanor friedberger, siblings, have been making the oddest, whackiest pop music since 2003’s gallowsbird’s bark. the whole prog-pop thing they’re sort of famous for only started on the next year’s blueberry boat, though: an album of weird but addictive, synth-y long songs that change direction every 30 seconds.

combine this with eleanor’s deranged warbling about dancing naked at the court of the sultan, being carried off to decorate bordellos, emergency cigarettes behind glass, having a steam train-o-phobia, and mormons kidnapping her because she’s their leader’s great-granddaughter, and we have a winner.

widow city, the furnaces’ fifth album, was supposed to be their ‘classic rock’ album. yeah, whatever. they already made a ’synthpop’ album that didn’t sound all that different from what they usually do, and a ‘grandmother at the microphone’ album… which is best forgotten!

this one, though, is oddly groovy and has those hilarious, revved-up 70s guitars and cheesy synths a volonte. it actually sounds like the fiery furnaces have tried to limit the amount of melodies they usually manage to cram into one song, and it sounds much better for it. ‘the philadelphia grand jury’ starts out as a strangely sensuous groove, but quickly turns into eleanor barking desperately about the omnipotence of, yes, the philadelphia grand jury.

the closer you listen, the more it seems like eleanor is trying to tell us a coherent story. ‘my egyptian grammar’ is about a desperate woman who cycles around town, xeroxing hieroglyphs to attract the attention of another world entity. it’s also a great pop song, but whatevs. in ‘the old hag is sleeping’, presumably the same woman lives with a beast of a man (‘he smiles only when he can give me abuse’). and so on, and so on.

should eleanor call the domestic violence helpline? i don’t really care, as long as they keep releasing groovy cocktails of everything between twee pop and math rock. one last quote: ‘i’ll drink a restorative beer, to take my mind off these te-a-a-a-a-a-a-rs’. see, there is something going on here.

and, i’m seeing them tonight. someone’s psyched. whee!

shameless picture time, vol. 3.

your hero, wearing his new robe yaay, after his botched plastic surgery job (i told the surgeon i wanted a minnie mouse face. i told him so. 要殺要刮呀！):

je marche comme une somnambule.

so. i’ve been so tired the last weeks, and i thought it was just another symptom of the depression haunting me. then, this morning (well, at noon), i woke up, felt like i hadn’t slept at all, and noticed the soles of my feet were mysteriously dirty. like, wtf? i shower before i go to bed, and the road from bathroom to bed isn’t exactly boggy, swampy or murky.

and what’s with the coffee mugs and full ashtrays i keep finding around the house? why do i throw the newspaper in a corner without reading it, and then magically know the headlines the next day? why do i always feel seriously spent and like i’ve smoked two packs of cigarettes after ‘a good night’s sleep’? (and that reminds me, why are all my cigarettes always gone?)

yup, you guessed it. i’m sleepwalking, quite possibly all night long. bizarre!

physics makes us solid bitchuz.

today we discussed the legalists (法家) during philosophy class. for those not in the know (and i wish i wasn’t either): the legalists were a bunch of creepy crawlers who advocated a strict rule-of-law (and terror). in such conditions, with an invisible ruler (think 1984’s big brother, but worse), society would regulate itself and we’ll all live in a fascist utopia.

the ever-triumphant professor carine was musing on and on about han-fei-zi (韓非子) and his treatment of the hat-bearer and the cloak-bearer. han-fei-tzu’s overlord had a hat-bearer, who kept his hat tidy, and a cloak-bearer, who covered the overlord with a cloak if he was cold. once the cloak-bearer was off running errands, and the overlord was sleeping. the hat-bearer saw the overlord shiver and covered him with the cloak. when the overlord woke up, he ordered han-fei-zi to investigate the case.

when the latter discovered the cloak-bearer had been off running errands, he executed him: he hadn’t done his duty. the hat-bearer was executed too: he did more than his duty, after all, and people who act out of benevolence are dangerous fools, as everybody should know. carine sat there with a smile from ear to ear, mad as a hatter, and i was like, er, but, isn’t it much nicer and less… authoritarian to have a society based on tradition and common sense, as opposed to strict rule-of-law?

the frustrated hag yelped, verbatim: “YES, YOU THINK SO, YES, BECAUSE YOU’RE A MAN, YOU’VE GOT THE RIGHT BACKGROUND AND YOU’RE RICH. NOT EXACTLY A SURPRISE, NOOO!“

isn’t it pathetic if one is 45 y.o., has a ph.d. degree or two, and still feels frustrated towards others who might, possibly, have it a tiny bit better? i should think so.

the new pornographers, live, here, yay!

yay, the new pornographers gig was really nice! it didn’t really start out all that well, since they started with a couple of songs from their latest album challengers, which sorta meandered and never really hit hard. then they played ‘mass romantic’, though, and an awesome, loud, energizing powerpoppy mix of mass romantic, electric version and twin cinema ensued. the audience went along with it fo sho: there were four encores. yay! AND they covered ELO’s ‘don’t bring me down’.

it’s really strange to see how the new pornographers are actually five jesus-like, bearded men in their fourties and this one seemingly 16 y.o. girl. (and neko case, but she’s a slut.) thank you, new pornos!

vidvid: the new pornographers play ‘use it’, as they did this time round. giddy!

on communism.

those who know me well enough know i’m not the biggest supporter of communism in most of its forms. it’s the same as fascism, period. mao zedong and stalin (and the current chinese communist party, for that matter), were not necessarily better than hitler and his gang of crazy meanies.

the fundamental premises of communism as formulated by marx (and yes, i’ve read marx and engels), are highly theoretical at best. marx constantly dabbles in speculation, mostly about the nature of labour. yes, labour is a social phenomenon; but it might be a stretch to label history as a linear progression (with digressive phases) of changing means of production. the whole idea of a progression from the earliest sedentary societies, through societies where slave labour was the primary mean of production and feudal systems to a bourgeois-infested capitalist system might be intellectually attractive, but isn’t forcibly how world history happened. (if you just look at america, a country where no feudalist phase whatsoever ever existed, you’ll instantly start appreciating the feudal system.)

his ideas about the structure of society are quite simplistic too. yes, there has to be a lower tier that caters to our primary needs in order to create an upper tier of cultural action; but that, too, is intrinsically a simplification of what is going on in the world.

let’s take a look at various schools of ‘communism’.

- the milquetoast communism upheld by french and italian political parties can’t be labeled as communism as such, but is more like a conservative kind of socialism (ie. redistribution of wealth without progressive ideas for the whole of society). their non-confrontational approach to society’s problems is not unlike the line of action that certain ‘non-aligned’ countries, including yugoslavia and hungaria, once had.

- russian leninist, and by times stalinis, communism emphasized the importance of the heavy industries; not a very innovative reading of marx’ treatise from the height of british industrial expansion. this sort of worked, but ultimately imploded in a flurry of economics of scarcity, corruption, et cetera. an extreme version of this school of thought can still be found in north korea, where farming has never been seen as an important activity; the only thing that matters is churning out even more diesel locomotives and generators. not an economically viable solution if you ask me.
the interesting bit about these regimes is that they never labelled themselves as communist; they called their societies socialist, with socialism defined as a transitional phase between capitalism and the layman’s communist utopia, a phase in which seemingly prescient long term planning would regulate economic growth and progress. in other words, the socialist phase was when you got to indoctrinate the working classes and slaughter mostly everyone else, the phase in which everyone would be poor in order to be rich someday. very encouraging.

- chinese communism doesn’t really exist as such. chairman mao and his goons first saw fit to imitate the russian industrial revolution, culminating in the ‘great leap forward’, when every household had its own steel foundry; needless to say, people didn’t have time to work on the fields, and all manner of unpleasant starvation ensued. the communists quickly ditched the russian model with its five year plans, and were somewhat uncertain about their course of action for the next couple of years, dangling the carrot of liberalisation in front of the intelligentsia’s eyes to see who they’d have to eliminate next. brezhnev had already criticised their great hero stalin, so their relations with the russians were at an all-time low, and chairman mao believed it was time for his own particular strain of communism.

maoism is as radical as it’s stupid: very. all power should belong to the masses, and there should be permanent revolution. in times of permanent revolution, power belongs to the revolutionaries, of course; and those were to be brainwashed school kids aka ‘red guards’. from 1966 to 1976, the ‘cultural revolution’ aka ’smash everything-fest’ raged through china, with the red guards acting on every whim of the formidable chairman, whose status had been elevated to olympic proportions.

of course, things got a bit out of hand, and the communist cadres soon started to lose control. some of mao’s own aides, including the ill-fated lin biao, began manipulating the revolution to suit their own needs (surprise, surprise). the revolution should only suit the grand chairman’s needs, so lin biao mysteriously died in a plain crash. the puppet president of the people’s republic spent years upon years of slow torture in prison for a few words he might or might not have said. in other words, the cultural revolution was a time of total, lawless terror for everyone involved.

after a hysterical show trial following mao’s death in ‘76, deng xiaoping cautiously opened china to capitalism, with his beautifully named idea of socialist market economics. in other words, they’d all had enough of ideological kicks, now they wanted cold hard cash, preferably western cash. we all know the results: it sort of worked… for now. for now, because another characteristic of chinese communism is that the establishment will sometimes try to entice people to go just that bit too far, to get just that bit too critical of the party, to amass just that bit too much of wealth and influence… and crack down on them in its rather merciless fashion. (example: tiananmen.) we’ll see what happens to china’s nouveau riches, then.

see, they really are a dreadful bunch. does this have anything to do with marxist communism, where man was supposed to be totally free and happy? i don’t think so. any communist regime only has one objective: to crush everyone under its boot, while the nomenklatura are dancing around the italian designer table and drink imported alcohol. especially the chinese regime. if i could kill those idiots with one push of a button, i wouldn’t hesitate. they are worse than nazis.

but. communists did something right once. i can’t help but feel sympathy for the vietnamese regime. first they kicked the french out (hm, not a very hard thing to do). then the americans came, and they gloriously kicked them out too. applause (and Schadenfreude)! then the chinese came, and the vietnamese taught them quite a lesson. those people sure know how to fight back, and if there’s any communist i could fall in love with, it’d be one of those pretty guerilla boys with black pj’s, a farmer hat and an AK-47. communism at least produced one archetype of what a sexy asian boy should look like! yay.

from the vaults, vol. 10.

Bowery Electric – Beat (1996)

how bleak the world must have seemed when it became painfully obvious my bloody valentine would never give us another loveless. slowdive, the best pretender to the shoegaze/postrock crown, turned into a boring alt-country band after the commercial disaster that pygmalion was. disco inferno might have gone pop on d.i. go pop, but afterwards they went exactly nowhere at all. shoegaze, in its original incarnation, was dead.

or was it? two new yorkers apparently didn’t really think so. lawrence chandler and martha schwedener worked towards a more claustrophobic version of guitar-heavy dream pop on their ‘95 self-titled debut, then bought a sampler and started experimenting with the combination of noisy guitars and looped samples.

beat is downtempo shoegaze infused with warped hiphop beats (the kind you find on crackly instrumental vinyl from the late 80s). if loveless was the aural equivalent of mdma, and souvlaki was xanax or ambien, then beat is definitely ketamine. i dare you to buy this record, snort enough K to get you in an abstract mood, and listen to ‘black light’ and ‘fear of flying’. it’s a mindfuck.

so what does it really sound like? the opener, ‘beat’, is built around guitar feedback and a simple, repeating beat. schwedener intones ‘words are just words, words are just only words’ like she’s going to jump off a cliff or something. the beautiful seven-minute dirge leaves you completely unprepared for ‘empty words” mesmerizing, towering beauty. strange, slowed-down beats and majestic guitars galore. schwedener and chandler chime in every now and then, dispassionately crooning their dispassionate words over the dispassionate soundscapes.

this, dear reader, is a record that doesn’t convey any emotion at all; it doesn’t need emotions to work its magic. some ’songs’ are actually just long, circular, starry-eyed drones, but then there’s swooning hallucinations like the insanely catchy ‘fear of flying’. fear of flying? wait a moment. this album is about ketamine. and for the law-abiding among you, it’s the closest to that weird, disaffected high you’ll ever come.

after beat, bowery electric managed to turn into a vapid portishead knock-off and disappear without a trace. triphopification, the plague of the end of the century, had got the best of them. so, beat will probably always stay a well-kept secret.

some closing thoughts. is this record very experimental? yes. is it sane? probably not. does it come with sc’s recommendation du chef? you bet your life it does.

valerie and her week of wonders.

i already have ideas for a second liesbethje van innis novel, yay! ‘THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE’ (tentative title) will see liesbeth open a vocational school in her house. the teachers are third-rate, embittered academics, and will bear an uncanny resemblance to the personnel of leuven uni. then, on a cold december day, dr. carine ‘the bottle’ verdoodt, ph.d., is found dead in the library (liesbeth’s kitchen). she was hit to death with her own teaching materials (ie. her handbook ‘holocaust negationism 101′).

who killed carine verdoodt? why are there muddy paw tracks all over the house? why is everybody going on the same singles cruise to the korean wetlands? is a dark, malignant force using ‘the university of life’ for its own, bloody goals? and… will liesbeth finally find love, atonement and happiness? if you happen to know valerie and her week of wonders, well, i want to write the literary equivalent to that film. fear, uncertainty and doubt everywhere.

i honestly don’t see why anybody would still read, say, ian mcewan with this little pearl of agatha christie-esque yet deep literature coming… erm… reasonably soon! ha.