Panic! at Nabisco

Everyone rags on Glenn Beck, and there certainly is much reason to, but I think we need to spend more time looking hard at ourselves and how our society has come to a point where his style of discourse is the preferred method. Even though many of us might disagree with Beck factually, are we really doing a good job of upholding a higher, more logical, form of discourse? Don’t we seem to be running towards buzzworthy capsules of information and away from well constructed arguments, regardless of the position of those capsules? And we certainly don’t seem to be doing a very good job of teaching kids how to construct and interpret arguments, based on my experiences in ENGL 30 and other classes with peer editing. Aren’t our methods ultimately much closer to Beck than not? If his method of discourse truly takes over, how will anyone ever be able to argue against his assumptions (it’s already impossibly difficult)? Dunno, man.

loveorfabrication:

“A camera and two tape recorders can cut the lines laid down by a fully equipped film studio”

—

William S. Burroughs (via theminstrel)

Christ. I love him.

Me too, one of my favorite authors. Just finished The Ticket That Exploded recently. I am planning on writing my senior thesis on literary reactions to the atomic bomb, and he, along with Vonnegut and Pynchon, is going to be the central focus.

comicallyvintage:

What’s A Guy To Do?

“Orwell Plaza” - The Hourglass Orchestra

A near-final version of what’s probably my favorite song on the upcoming Hourglass Orchestra album, The Silent Era.

This isn’t a fully developed thought and just a passing idea, and I’ve since thought of like 34002402 exceptions, but after listening to “90s alternative” internet radio for the last 3 hours at work, I think I have decided that the “alternative” (i.e. major label) acts of the 90s, on a whole, were dramatically better than the “indie” (i.e. indie label, or at least those self-presented as such) artists of today. There’s a certain inherent lameness or cheakiness to the overall sound that perhaps lends itself to being thought of as “guilty pleasure” music (while indie’s overall sound tends to be more ironic in an intellectual and melancholy way, as opposed to a self-deprecating/silly/fun way), but ultimately the average 90s alt band, which is probably somewhere from “decent” to “pretty good”, and always inherently listenable, is much better than the average 00s indie band, which probably borders on embarassing in its confused counterpoint of sincerity and pretension with irony and whimsicality. Yet, it’s hard to say the 90s were actually a better musical decade, and not just because of what was going on in the pop and hip-hop sectors of music. I think the real problem is that, sometime around, I dunno, 1997?, the 90s gave up on the idea that they could ever achieve the sublime, and just completely embrased the reality of their musical existance. It’s debatable whether or not that’s, philosophically, a “good” action, but I think part of the indie artists charm is that a lot of them still think they can achieve something truly transcendent. The attempts and the sentiment are kind of lame, perhaps, and they’re often (read: usually) self-deprecating, with an air of “we’re not actually serious about this,” but at the same time, they’re deadly serious, and perhaps that’s what really what we should mean when we say “postpostmodern,” the realization that everything can be fake and self-conscious and meaningless like the 90s, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try anyway. Instead of stewing in self-referential mania, producing works of art that do little but tell us that the art itself is meaningless, we proceed towards meaning knowing we’ll never actually get there, like a mathematical limit. Perhaps music is at its best a journey of lost causes.

I really appreciate that reply, Mike. I like that we can disagree but still have a good discussion about an album (or any issue), which doesn’t always seem possible in the era of trolls and twitter. My big mistake with this album was probably reading the lyrics along as I was listening to it. I probably should have given it a purely aural listen before going back and relistening with an eye towards the lyrics. I take lyrics pretty seriously and something about the entire tone of the Suburbs really rubbed me the wrong way. But there’s clearly something there that lots of other people are hearing, so like most things it’ll probably grow on me a bit with time.

I’d love to write a song or a poem about Kasparov vs Deep Blue, though I wouldn’t want to do something too close to the AF song and then just have it be compared to it. But that’s totally the kind of evocative but not commonly discussed historical moment that it’s perfect to use as material. I kind of wish the song engaged with that material more directly. I need to look at the lyrics more closely, but I didn’t really see much connection between most of the song and the source material. But I suck at reading into poetry as much as I like writing it, so I’d be interested if anyone has a different interpretation of those lyrics.

moltenmich:

I probably shouldn’t even post this since everyone will hate me, but:

It’s not much more than a musically innocuous and lyrically embarrassing pop record. AF flirt with Funeral-era greatness in the title track (the only song on the album I can say at all approaches being “great” or even…

Interesting. Obviously I really enjoyed The Suburbs, but I’m not gonna hate on this at all. In fact I agree with your opinion on a lot of points. Month of May is pretty bad and the overuse of ‘suburb’ in the lyrics got to me. I totally enjoyed your play by play on FB. When you said Sprawl II reminded you of Surrender I could hear it. But to me it reminds me of Heart of Glass even more.

Also I’d love to see you create something inspired by Kasparov vs Deep Blue. Just sayin’.

I probably shouldn’t even post this since everyone will hate me, but:

It’s not much more than a musically innocuous and lyrically embarrassing pop record. AF flirt with Funeral-era greatness in the title track (the only song on the album I can say at all approaches being “great” or even “very good”) and with self-derived blandness in “Rococo” and “Ready to Start”, but the record is mostly inhabited by pretty good but not spectacular songs like “Half Light I” and “Suburban War.” Overall, this makes it fairly solid musically, depending on how closely you’re listening, in spite of a few bad songs and some really bad track order decisions (the album is devoid of flow).

But I mean, seriously, “City with No Children” is one of the better songs on the album and it’s very little more than meh. By the time I make it to the 7th track, I’m so disinterested and out of it that it could turn into Funeral 2.0 and I probably wouldn’t even notice. The lyrics, meanwhile, are just plain stupid and bad (see: “Ready to Start”, “Month of May”). They’re poetically idiotic and philosophically immature, putting an awful, spiteful sentiment across the entire album that reminds me more of Terrell Owens than Ted Williams. 5/10?

“Let me tell you about the other one I’m gonna write. Boy, my hand doesn’t work fast enough, you know? Ah, it’s gonna be nothing in it but names of birds. It’s gonna start off with bluebird, and then something else, another bird, another bird, another bird… another bird, another bird, verse, maybe a bridge, then another verse and a bridge. Nothing but birds. And the last chorus I think will be in Latin.”

“What’s it gonna be about?”

“Birds.”

- Townes Van Zandt

It’s an escape from the cold, cold earth,
A shadowed egg of Fabergé
Filled with puss and flem
And connector tubes.
With no mother hen to call its own,
You’re sure to sleep for thousand years,
Awakening in a new localle
Where no one would do such a sad silly thing
As cast the sonic cellhouse of a word in black on white
And call it “jazz” or “thoughts of fire”
And all that jazz. They’d sooner 
Burn your sad parade
Of verbish clowns in distressed paint
Lined up like soldiers, banner high, ready to charge on Babel,

Which was a real place with people and chairs
Swept up in the showers of an imagined tower
Filled with rooms where sandmen sleep, recalling
Memories of deer-drawn Morpheus,
Pathetic in their revery,
And if, one day, their slumber ceased
They’d crawl to dusty desks and link
Lombroso’s dozen graphs
Into a final, fleeting 
Theory of not.

But where the shadow cracks they have no time
For such nonsense. The cold, cold earth
Has been beaten and burned 
Into a festival of corn. 
The ears fall to the dust of dead kings 
Who rule the dirt in pride and silent arrogance,
Caked in their own domain.

Oh, and in Babel there was also a dog,
Who caught whiff of the invisible shade
Cast, like magician in top hat and tails, by the spire, enveloping all
That he and his masters
Ever would or could be, every dream and desire,
To a hairbrained scheme [it’s crazed, curled enacters] that
Lives on in insults and accents and just-faded sheen. 

He barks at the tower,
It crumbles without incident,
A man from Mexico City loses his vision,
And ears fall silent

To the dust of dead kings.

I’d sign up for a world of greys and blues
Where no one could label the sun
As a time of day,
But my pens all break like bottlerockets
So I’ve got to cut this short:

Never speed up for anyone,
And only carry half the lightstream in your darling 
     colorwheel
Your belt of privileged boulevards. The task
Is not to let on too plainly that
You’ve been through this before – 
First-timers get all the rations – and

Never speed up for anybody; they all think you’re far behind
In numbercrunching games, but you have
Counted every single number and
It struck you as too clean, so
You’ve moved on to mud and roasted grime,
The red red run of blackcloth knives 
     and terror knaves.

In essence, what I’m saying is you lapped them long ago, 
So let them chide you on, but 
What’s the need to rush? 
You'll only leave them 

To more dust I’d settle for a world of pink and greys,
Where no one had a reference point
Beyond their family names, ‘yadda yadda’
Call impatient crows, ‘there’s children 
     in yr blood,’
And I’d tell you what that means, but
Pens all break like bottlerockets,
     son.

Film is the sad under[ ]score,
The heartattack trumpeter, gyrating in silhouette,
Prophet of the city’s doom, a human skyline quick to sway.
Iconic by the lines,
The barrier between himself and all.
Iconic by the hole he leaves
In this place made of tones.

Film covers the hole like a forgotten bowl of soup.
The hole in the whole that you can’t see, trapped
In plastic memoriam  clear, black, and absent,
Like the ghost of the projection
That is its true content,
Like the smiling brass pariah, miles high,
Who, in spite of signifiers, is

Solid, not shade.
Mimicking himself in metaphor, in truth
His truth is lost  clear, black, and absent,
And plastic – inflammable (or flammable).
You cannot fill the hole,
So let’s light it on fire    the end.