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366 Songs 158: The Dogs of B.A.

There are too many things about the song that I could list as loving: The sound of the rain before it starts, and the sound of the sea as it finishes; the longing that’s so present in Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn’s voice as she sings (“I looked into the darkening/And while the air did chill/I knew that though I’m here in exile/That you should love me still.” I adore that couplet, the history implied and the selfishness of love gone away with the “You should love me still”); the accordian that appears at 2:13, weirdly and wonderfully fitting as the spoken word section begins and a reminder of how like the sea this song has been until now, ebbing and flowing, wonderfully choppy.

“So many tears could make me blind.” Another lovely, melancholy line (I’m listening again, as I write).

There’s an exoticness to this song, an alienness. But it’s not necessarily an attractive one, which I find makes the song more compelling. There’s something to “The Dogs of B.A.” that reminds me of the feeling you sometimes get in unfamiliar locations, where you don’t understand the language or where you are; even though everything surrounding you is beautiful and unusual, there’s a fear there, too. A sense of being lost, and powerless. This song suggests that to me, and not just in physical locations; it transfers that idea to romance, and love affairs gone wrong. I like that.

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On Ana Marie Cox (Briefly)

I have long found myself identifying with Ana Marie Cox; I loved her writing when she was Wonkette, but since she left and went off to do her own thing, I’ve found myself following her from outlet to outlet and wondering whether I am destined to follow in her footsteps by accident (We both have the Gawker Media then Time thing happening). She was interviewed by Talking Points Memo this week about her media intake and output, and there are bits in there that just keep buzzing around my head:

What’s your writing day like?

I still appreciate all the things that are still cliche about the blogger. I do wear draw-string pants all day. I get up, I read, I email with my editor. I have a quota of about three pieces a week. The Guardian is not very rigid about what that looks like. I’m very lucky. I get to kind of pick the topics I’m passionate about. I’m most productive in the middle of the day or the end of the day. It’s been a kind of hard thing to learn about myself.

When I talked to The Guardian, blogging didn’t make sense anymore. It’s 140 characters or it’s something more thoughtful, or longer. People don’t really have an appetite for that 200-to-150 word post, I don’t think.

What’s the future of the “blog”?

I was an American history major, and leaned heavily on Marxist interpretations of history. Means of production determines what it is we trade. The technology supported the kind of short form, but not shortest form, posts of classic blogging. And technology now supports something different. It will depend on what technology supports, and what can be profitable. The blog format was not profitable. Who knows what is? I still think we might go back to nailing up signs on telephone poles.

One thing that can’t be undone: we will never go back to a period where only a privileged few get to put their voices out. I think journalists are finally coming to terms with that.

What use is Twitter?

Besides the news speed, I guess as a writer, my personality as a writer has always been that I like working within a form. If I was a poet, I’d write haiku. The restrictions and constrictions fit me, they bring out the trouble maker in me. Definitely Twitter does that. The trick of being able to say something in 140 characters is something I get satisfaction from pulling off. In a way Twitter is the area of writing where I am truly doing writing for its own sake. I get a lot of satisfaction knowing that I have added something to a conversation.

Should journalism be entertaining?

Of course. Not always, but it’s not bad to be entertaining. I sometimes think, there are journalists and writers who, when it’s convenient, call themselves entertainers. I’ve been guilty of that myself. Sometimes you practice journalism whether you like or not.

At what point does humor get in the way of a serious point? Does it ever?

It doesn’t have to get in the way. What I’ve learned the hard way is that if you offend enough people, they will lose sight of the point you are trying to make. There’s a way you can use offense to make a point. It’s an area that I can’t give you any boundaries about. It is a risk that I’m obviously willing to take a lot of the time. It’s what passes for maturity in my world that I try to sometimes rein it in because I feel like the point I want to make is more important than shock value.

There’s a lot there that I’m still unpacking; I feel like I totally agree on the use of Twitter as “pure” writing, as well as the line about offending enough people that they lose sight of the point you’re trying to make. I got the funniest brush-off from someone I’d reached out to on Twitter today for a Time piece, and it just made me think that he was one of those people; he’d decided that I was “the enemy” and had better things to do with his time. Ah, well.

“It’s 140 characters or it’s something more thoughtful, or longer.” I keep coming back to that. I don’t think she’s wrong.

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366 Songs 157: It’s Raining

My brain is too tired for commentary; today, I’ve declared something akin to a sick day – It’s officially my day of not producing content for people, and instead hanging out with my lovely wife and trying to pretend that writing about technology and pop culture isn’t a seven-days-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day gig. So, instead, this post written last night as you read this, during a rainstorm that is both chilly and refreshing, and a song that fits the bill for such days. I love Quasi’s scruffy pop; it’s funny and dirty and creaky in all the right ways. This is a great song, for all those very reasons.

(There’s another post in an hour or so, but I wrote that one on Friday evening as well. Technology!)

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“When Words Don’t Do The Trick Anymore”

A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing— when words won’t do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern. In the pilot of The Newsroom, a new series for HBO, TV news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) emotionally checked out years ago, and now he’s sitting on a college panel, hearing the same shouting match between right and left he’s been hearing forever, and the arguments have become noise. A student asks what makes America the world’s greatest country, and Will dodges the question with glib answers. But the moderator keeps needling him until…snap.

I really like this breakdown of a speech in the new Sorkin show, by Sorkin. The idea of the dialogue as music appeals to me, especially seeing how it affects Sorkin’s construction of said speech. “To resolve a melody, you have to end on either the tonic or the dominant. (Try humming ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ right now, but leave off ‘snow.’ You’ll feel like you need to sneeze.) So Will ends where he started.” Makes me want to try and get better at everything I write; I want to claim music in my writing, even though it’s just words.

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366 Songs 156: Son of Sam

Also from Elliott Smith’s Figure 8, also great: Son of Sam, which ends up with a lovely piano line but apparently started as something entirely guitar-based; this was originally released as a “demo version” of the song:

And here’s the final, album version with the piano taking the place of the guitar:

First off: The finished version really gains something from the piano, doesn’t it? Not that it wasn’t a great song before – It clearly was/is, not least of all because of the lyrics, which feature amongst some of Smith’s best; I’ll get back to that in a second – but the piano adds not just a fragility and variation in aural color, but also the greatness of the honky-tonk piano moment that happens after “King for a day” at 1:42.

Secondly, back to those lyrics: I love the creepiness inherent in the song, embedded deep in lines like “I’m not uncomfortable being weird/Long revered options disappear/But I know what to do” and “Acting under orders from above,” but the surrender as the song closes is a lovely piece of taking one common thing and turning it into something much less comfortable (As if naming the song after a serial killer wasn’t hint enough): “I may talk in my sleep tonight/Cause I don’t know what I am/I’m a little like you/More like the son of Sam,” followed by a “ahhhhh,ahhhh, ahhhh” breath out/pop note moment that’s just a little bit more unsettling because of where it ended up.

Here’s to being not uncomfortable, being weird.

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366 Songs 155: Stupidity Tries

This just in from the “Lovely little pop songs that sometimes get lost in the reputation of their creators” department. 2000’s Figure 8 is, looking back on it, a strange album for Elliott Smith; it’s the only one, for example, that doesn’t include a cuss word anywhere on it, and also the one where he’s at his most obviously “produced,” for want of a better way to put it. Because of that, I’ve tended to think of it in my head as his “pop” album, which both is – It was created with the intent of “crossing over” and building on the success of XO, after all – and isn’t – Smith was never really not pop, if you listen to his music and hear his influences and obvious gift for melody – true.

Nonetheless, “Stupidity Tries” is a great pop song, one that mixes subtle arrangement (At 1:11, the lovely use of horns, softening the moment even though there aren’t any horns anywhere else in the song, and get replaced with pedal steel when the moment recurs at 2:21; the strings that provide structure and grace, lifting from the guitars at 3:23 and take the song home from there) and wonderfully… Smithian lyrics (“The enemy/is within/Don’t confuse/me with him”) to come up with something that could only be more delicious if it didn’t fade out at the end. I mean, seriously people: You can even hear it finish really quietly before the fade’s done. You couldn’t just have let that happen…?

Also lovely: Smith’s live versions of the song, which ditch the more elaborate orchestration for something more Beatles-rocking-out-y:

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Recently Read, Prose (6/22/12)

Apparently, I take more time to read good books than trashy books; the Rucka novels took a few days each – part of that, though, was also that the start of the week is heavier workwise and leaves me with less time to read – but the Star Trek book I ripped through in a couple of evenings despite it being longer than either Finder or Smoker. Go figure.

I will, at some point, write something about the trilogy of Keeper, Finder and Smoker; re-reading them this time, one right after the other, I realized that there’s a really clear narrative arc in the three books that I hadn’t realized before, with Rucka playing with expectations in the last of the three after shaping them in the first two – Plus, I had forgotten about Erika, one of the Kodiak series’ main characters, almost entirely until this re-read, and now I’m weirdly obsessed with her. So, when I have more time and/or brainspace, that’ll happen for sure.

The Trek book was… eh, pretty crappy, really; I would’ve given up more than once, but had nothing else to read and saw it through to an end that was, indeed, bitter. Normally, Peter David’s Trek books have more pace and humor to them, but this was a leaden, self-important thing that trudged on and made the reader earn every chapter up until the last third or so.

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366 Songs 154: Bad Ambassador

It sounds like an odd thing to say, but what I love most about “Bad Ambassador” by the Divine Comedy – probably my favorite song from the band, although I suspect I’m almost alone in that – is the tension between all the moving parts; the rising piano and strings as Neil Hannon’s voice sinks, singing “I wanna hold your hand/Hey, what’s your favorite band, honey?” or the way that the piano’s four notes at 2:19 act as a period, ending the tentative “Maybe some other time” (Notice the short rises and falls of the instruments in the background, as if it’s hopes rising and being pushed down by nerves, before those notes, and then everything swells amazingly, incredibly).

It’s such an unashamedly emotional song, so dramatic and aching with unrequited passion (Think of the way that the song is just a list of what Hannon wants to do, including “Play with the big boys/I wanna ride with the tough guys/On a Japanese motorbike,” but, as he goes on say, “Maybe some other time…”). The song even ends with a long fade that makes you think of ellipses, unfulfilled promise. It’s a song where the music is the text as much as the lyrics, one that tells a story in under four minutes and in that short time make you want the best for the character singing. Good job, Neil Hannon.

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366 Songs 153: Lonely At The Top

Written, it’s said, for Frank Sinatra – who apparently didn’t get the joke, and turned it down – “Lonely At The Top” remains one of the greatest missed opportunities in music from the last few decades. It’s one thing for the Randy Newman of the 1970s to sing “All the applause/And all the fame/And all the money/That I have made” because, well, at the time he wasn’t getting a lot of any of those, so it can be taken as sarcastic commentary on celebrity, but if it’d been Sinatra singing those words at the time… Well, that’d take things at least one stage more meta, wouldn’t it? How would his audiences have taken the line “Listen, all you fools out there/Go on and love me/I don’t care”?

(Missing in that video is the spectacular arrangement from the original version, which uses the orchestra to create something that’s both very Newman-esque and also, somehow, fit for Sinatra:

…I think, weirdly, it’s the horns that make it feel Sinatra-esque, although I can’t really think of any songs of his where the oompah thing happened often; Nelson Riddle was normally more subtle than that. But that banjo in the background feels wonderfully disrespectful, out of place and comedic, doesn’t it…?)

Of course, the song has been covered many times since its appearance; I think the Divine Comedy version gets the decadent, sad glamor of the idea best, for me:

Robbie Williams has, I’ve been told, performed the song live a couple of times, which seems particularly fitting; he has the fame, the humor and the sadness to “get” what Newman was trying to say in the first place. Maybe, one day, we’ll see a Justin Beiber version when he finally gets around to his big band album…