The Year In Media: Part 4, Music

I had originally intended this series of posts to be focused on a list of my favorite albums of the year.  However, looking at media in general turned out to a more lengthy exercise.

But here we are.  I should start with an embarrassment.  At my particular age and space and time, I've somewhat lazily come to depend pretty much primarily on pitchforkmedia.com's album recommendations.  I've been following that site for over a decade now, and am generally satisfied that I'm not missing out on much that they don't catch.  (Although, one might ask, how would I know?)

But in the end, it really comes down to the amount of new music that I really have time to digest.  Between listening to four decades of popular music in alternating rotation, and discovering older material for the first time, there is only so much time in the day to properly involve oneself with brand new albums in an intimate way.  The albums on this list earned their status only after repeated listens, each of which is a great album in the classic sense: that it is generally excellent from start to finish.


Julia Holter - Ekstasis
The Men - Open Your Heart
Grizzly Bear - Shields
Frankie Rose - Interstellar
Lotus Plaza - Spooky Action at a Distance
Beach House - Bloom
Stina Nordenstam - The World Is Saved
Joyce Manor - Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired
Perfume Genius - Put Your Back N 2 It
dissapointments: Wild Nothings, Twin Shadow

One of my favorite experiences in the appreciation of music is the rare occasion upon which an album that seems dull, or even downright awful, on first listen grows on me more and more until something suddenly switches and I fall in love with it.  It is a strange and beautiful feeling, and at a larger level makes listening to music that much more exciting, as first impressions are not necessarily to be trusted, especially negative reactions.  An element of abandon is introduced in which I must give in to the process, trusting that the art itself, and not my reaction to it, will lead me to its beauty.

This happened in part with a few albums this year.  Julia Holter's Ekstasis felt oddly removed and alien, its avante garde stance feeling at first maybe gimmicky in the way that studiously fragmented classical new music can.  But rather quickly its emotion began to resonate and a strange beauty shone through.

Open Your Heart, by the Men worked in a somewhat opposite way.  It unfolded as a series of songs that felt kind of pedestrian at first.  Been there, done that, maybe.  Bonehead guitar solos were fun enough on the first couple of tracks, sliding then into countryfried psychedelia jamming.  Its like the Supersuckers took a break and channeled the Spacemen 3.  But out of this, midway into the album the tone becomes a bit more fragmented and dissonant, with abstract vocals, and sounding more like Sonic Youth.  Abruptly then, the jangling noise hardens into a thick mass of distortion, with delicate harmonies melancholically spinning above.  One can only think of My Bloody Valentine, a high honor indeed.  In its final half, the album plays with each of these themes, blending them together at times, in a mixture of emo/thrash and post-punk/shoegaze.  That these disparate elements can be pulled together with such consistent dexterity is quite a feat.

Joyce Manor's Of All This I Will Soon Grow Tired is classic hardcore emo, and as such, you have to be up for its in-your-face, heart-on-its-sleeve emotional exposition.  I suppose my listening habits have strayed in the past ten to fifteen years since bands like Fugazi were on heavy rotation.  As such, Of All This... felt somewhat of a throwback, and I probably will not ever be as excited about it as I might once have.  Nonetheless, it is enormously well-made.  The songs are short and sweet, and filled not just with hooks but with an admirable gravity.

Perfume Genius' Put Your Back In 2 It is a sad record.  It is beautiful, raw, and earnest, but terribly sad.  It may be that this year has been an emotional struggle for me in many ways, but I'm not sure I've still really been up for meeting the album on its own terms.  It's also a very gay album.  There's such a sense of fragile outsiderness to it, singer Mike Hadreas pouring out his vulnerability in a lilting, delicate tone.  Gospel progressions give the songs a sense of deep pain, struggle and triumphalism.  But all of this, not to mention the sort of Castro disco pseudo-R&B number pun in the title, makes me feel like I am listening to a gay record.  Again, an album to be taken on its own terms.

The other albums on the list were pretty much known quantities, constructed with the same brilliant dexterity as the artists' earlier works.  Bloom, by Beach House might just be my favorite of their yet.  Victoria Legrand seems to keep getting more and more powerful and determined with each new album.

Frankie Rose far surpassed anything with the Dum Dum Girls, creating in Interstellar a hugely dynamic and fascinating electro-pop orchestra. There has been a movement in recent years that might be called "Better Than the 80's", in which contemporary artists pick up the synthesized sounds, guitar tones, simple beats of eighties pop and, well, do it better.  There was always something haunting and melancholy about that era's production values and awkward danceability of its beat.  Shades of The Smiths, Depeche Mode, The Cure, as well as sillier pop acts like The Go Gos, the Bangles, The Eurythmics or Cindy Lauper echo throughout this new sound.  Frankie Rose works heavily in this area, sharing space with DIIV, Wild Nothings, Twin Shadows.  Other bands work deeper angles, such as Washed Out and M83's more ambient, Krautish sound, or How To Dress Well's thoroughly deconstructed R&B.

Which of course, can get old.  Disappointingly, Wild Nothings' album this year was unremarkable.  And Confess, Twin Shadows' follow up to 2010's gorgeous Forget, was, apart from its generally great first track, Golden Light, an often times aimless, unlistenable mess.

All in all, here's hoping 2013 is more interesting.

The Year In Media: Part 3, Books

Late this year I started a book club on Meetup.com called "The Society Book Club", with an emphasis on social, political and philosophical issues.  We meet every couple of months, and it's been fun.  The group dynamics are however interesting, as some members tend to Bogart the discussion.  As the de facto leader I do my best to promote everyone's voice, but I probably contribute to the problem to a degree.  Part of the issue is that a number of the members have rather "broad" political leanings.  By this I mean that, while everyone is generally liberal, these members seem enthralled with a type of cheap political analysis that relies on broad generalizations and grand theories of causality, where nuance and skepticism is sacrificed for a simplicity of moral confidence. 

Hence, the term "they" is often referred to as the source of most social ills, "they" being an amorphous liberal bogeyman equal parts corporate boardroom and wealthy 1%.  In this world view, these puppet-masters control what we think, what we buy, how we feel, what our priorities are, and how we behave.  Every social ill is thus easily explained by a larger pattern of social decay set in motion and determined by a small cadre of profit-hungry, greedy capitalists. 

One can see the allure of such a view.  It is indeed partially true.  But it is absurdly simplistic.  Not only does its convenience blind itself to nuance and general causal diversity, but it misses larger structural explanations that place blame not with rational individuals, but with larger, deeper systemic dynamics in which no one is to blame individually, but rather agreements and assumption we have all implicitly accepted as governing model for how we want to structure society.  The problem with seeing this larger structural narrative as a primary causal agent is that it is enormously unsatisfying.  Not only is it difficult to understand, but there is no one to really point our collective fingers at in blame.  And worse still, there is no clear vision for how to replace this structure.  For most progressives, there indeed are very specific policy proposals, in general looking like a more social-democratic, European model (however, even there social ills still remain).  But standing in the way is not necessarily any shadowy corporate malfeasance, but rather an enormous plurality of Americans who just profoundly disagree with the progressive vision, both in cause and solution.  It can be argued that these Americans are mere "sheep" to corporate advertisement, but the reality is that modern conservatism is a cohesive ideological narrative with deep historical roots that stands on its own, needing little help from corporate benefactors to promote its anti-progressive message.

 So, articulating all of that has become my hobby horse at our meetings.  Books we've read:

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules You Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinov
The Price of Inequality, by Joseph Stiglitz
The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
How Much Is Enough: Money and The Good Life, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky

Books I personally read this year:

The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger
Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kaufman (didn't finish)
Just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees
A Universe From Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss
Ben Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson
Neuromancer, by William Gibson

As you can see, I went on a bit of a sci-fi kick.  I was basically let go from my job at the continuation school, which I wrote about at the time, and needed some escapism to combat the profound despair I was feeling in the first few months of the year.  Philip K. Dick was gloriously savage in his deconstruction of the interaction between the psyche and the physical world, exposing again and again what we take for granted.  There is a spiritualism here, where the harsh mystery of science and the natural world bumps up against the feeble glue of human consciousness.

I then took on the universe, reading Kaufman, Rees and Krauss, in a succession of what I can humbly describe as fascinatingly vague explications of the physical nature of the universe and reality itself.  Fun, and profound, but nothing I can say I understood all that well.  What I did understand, though, was a beautiful vision of a cosmos the vastness and complexity of which we cannot but be humbled by.

Ben Franklin was a lot of fun.  Mostly however, not so much from an appreciation of the man himself, but from the world and events within which he was traveling.  I was struck by a picture of Philadelphia as a small town of a few thousand people.  Franklin the man was indeed a great mind, but in the end he was a somewhat tragic figure, forming few close bonds and basically leaving his family behind while he spent over a decade in Europe - unlike, say, the resolutely cranky John Adams, who was deeply connected to his family. 

William Gibson was sort of brilliant to read, thirty years later, the digital age well upon us.  His prose was ambitious, albeit messy and too often silly.  But he was establishing things that clearly came to fruition, not in the least the implosion of time and space itself as digital reality compresses all of our understandings of and interactions with our surrounding environment.

The Year In Media: Part 2, Television and Film

2012 seemed a pretty lackluster year in cinema.  I honestly can think of very few memorable films.  Now, I'm not a huge movie enthusiast.  My tastes are regularly quite pedestrian.  Looking over rotten tomatoes list of  100 top rated films, these are the best I could come up with, of the few I'd actually seen:





Moonrise Kingdom
The Avengers
Bernie
Lincoln
Safety Not Guaranteed
Chronicle
Wreck It Ralph

I suppose there are two things I think about with film.  And this is probably true with art more generally.  First, is it entertaining, and second, is it important.  By important, it might be accomplishing different things; it might be doing something new.  There might be a particular aspect of the production of the piece that pushes the art forward.  Whether it is entertaining, is, well, pretty simple.  As I mentioned, I'm not a huge film fan.  What I mean by this is that I like to be entertained by film much more than I want to appreciate it's importance.  While I certainly love interesting cinematography, compelling characters and narratives, set design, etc., I'm ultimately not very forgiving of a film if it isn't entertaining enough.  With music, by contrast, I'm much more forgiving if I feel there is something important going on, even if I find the finished product lacking.

So what to make of the list above?  It seems embarrassingly low-brow. Lincoln and Moonrise Kingdom were maybe the only films interesting in being "important".  However neither seemed particularly interesting.  Daniel Day Lewis was brilliant as usual, and the historical recreation was fun.  Moonrise Kingdom was cute, but Anderson's precious shadowboxes were lacking in emotional depth this time out.  Bernie and Safety Not Guaranteed were I suppose too comedic to rise to that level.  Not that comedy precludes high-art, but it might get in the way of serious themes or artistic expressions by sacrificing depth for irony.  The other three films on the list are decidedly juvenile.  But I'd have to say they were more memorable.  There were moments in the Avengers that were possibly highlights of the year for me.  Being a life-long gamer, Wreck It Ralph couldn't have been more clever.  Chronicle, was beautifully inventive.


I rarely watch anything on cable television anymore, aside from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.  Netflix has come to dominate my viewing habits.  This past year has found me culling British and Foreign detective shows like George Gently and Wallander (the original Swedish version), as much I suppose for their convenient predictability as for their entertaining characters and mild intrigue.

But of everything I watched in 2012, maybe the most important and compelling was a little documentary produced for PBS' Frontline called The Interrupters.  Made by Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams, it follows the eponymous group of inner-city social workers who literally go out into the streets of Chicago and intervene in violent conflicts, trying to deescalate violent conflict between rival gangs and individuals.  Having come from the same neighborhoods themselves, they bring a depth of understanding and moral gravity into situations that are often minutes away from tragedy.  I showed the unedited version to my continuation students to completely rapt attention.

The Year in Media: Part 1, Politics and Discussion

I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at some of the more memorable media I've been digesting for the past year.  Aside from music, books and film, it occurred to me for a second that I might include media journalism in this category, but I quickly realized how daunting a task it might be to find and collate everything interesting I've read in the past 12 months.  I could however, simply list my sort of regular, go-to sources for information:


Online:
NY Times
Reality Based Community
Kevin Drum
The Awl
Science Blogs

Print:
The Week

Television:
Up w/Chris Hayes
Daily Show
Colbert Report
NBC Nightly News

Podcasts:
Bloggingheads
The Liberal Oasis
Little Atoms
New Yorker Outloud
The Slate Political Gabfest
On the Media
Fresh Air
Point of Inquiry
Vox & Friends

It's kind of interesting to see someone's little media universe.  I, of course, am not completely limited to these sources as there are always stories posted to my facebook feed, or otherwise linked somewhere.  And the NY Times doesn't tell you anything very specific about my information habits.  I will say that I've spent much less time reading about education.  Other than the fact that the level of public discourse around the subject is maddeningly misinformed, there just seems less and less to say.  Honestly, I don't know that I haven't said about all I have to say on the topic on this blog, and where I am at on the issue seems incredibly distant from where the front lines actually are in the debate, in terms of Democrats and Republicans largely thinking about the issue in similar ways.  And ultimately, the self interest of middle class Americans and the fact that the problem of education is at root a structural problem with capitalism itself makes the issue much more scary than most Americans are really interested in dealing with.

But back to media.  I listen to the bloggingheads podcasts a lot.  Doing dishes.  Mowing the lawn.  Driving to work.  The basic premise, for those who haven't checked it out, is to try and get really smart people on the left and the right to debate important issues of the day.  It tends to be moderates from both sides, with a good deal of libertarians sprinkled in.  Some of the regular participants are too annoying bother with, and my ears generally glaze over during the wonky foreign affairs discussions.  But overall I find the serious back and forth across partisan lines fascinating. 

Other mentions on the list: The New Yorker Out Loud podcast  is probably the closest I'll ever get to actually reading the magazine.  The authors themselves being interviewed is, while maybe not quite as good as the real story, a special thing in its own right.  I do most of my commenting on the Reality Based Community site.  The community of commenters there are top-notch, and often as interesting as the original post.  Up w/Chris Hayes is sometimes a bit too wonky, and for a supposedly inclusive talk show, gratuitously liberal, but Hayes is very sharp and fun to follow as he tries in earnest to pull out the substance from all sides.  Little Atoms is my most recent discovery and now one of my favorites.  The baseline is secular humanism and free thought, but the range of topics is vast and the conversations always intriguing.

I think I'll stop here and leave the "arts"  - music, books and film for next time.