Found Writings, Part 2

What follows is an analysis/love note that I wrote about the Generation X song "Kiss Me Deadly," a song that I still think is probably the best punk song of all time.  It moves around a bit and might not be my best criticism, but I think parts of it still have legs.  I made some minor edits to the post for clarity.

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Post 1 – Kiss Me Deadly

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the topic for the first post.  Even though I have already posted once, that was just a general introduction and was just about setting up the context of the blog.  This one is the important one, though, because it establishes who I am and what this is going to be about.  I thought originally that I would write about my first punk show or my first punk album.  I was also very tempted to write about The Clash.  I don't think that any of those things are quite right.  For this post, I am going to write about just one song.  This is my favorite song and it is one that I listen to every day.  

The best song I have ever heard is “Kiss Me Deadly” by Generation X.  This song has everything: great lyrics, buzzsaw guitar, complex layering of lead, rhythm, and bass guitars, an unostentatious solo that absolutely rocks, Billy Fucking Idol on vocals, and a great hook.  It begins with a slow guitar plucking out a descending melody that will repeat throughout the song.  Idol sings the first verse and chorus to just the opening theme on guitar and the drums and guitars kick in during the second verse.  At this point you really just need to go listen to the song, even if you know it.  

Generation X formed around 1975, which puts them before bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks, and The Damned that are typically taken to be the first British punk bands.  Many of these bands were assembled by managers rather than forming organically out of groups of friends, which would be the norm later on.  Gen X has a big spot in punk rock history because of where the members came from and where they went.  Lead singer Billy Idol had previously been in a proto-punk band Chelsea and would go on to his successful solo career.  Gen X originally performed “Dancing with Myself” that Idol would go on to re-record and release to become a hit.  Bassist Tony James had played with eventual Clash members Mick Jones and Terry Chimes in a band called London SS, and would go on to play in Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the Sisters of Mercy, and eventually with Mick Jones again in Carbon/Silicon.

“Kiss Me Deadly” is a good illustration of the difference between the beginning years of punk rock and what it has become.  It is up-tempo but not particularly fast.  The music is fairly complex, displaying a level of composition that, with rare exceptions, would not resurface for some time.  What I like most about the song, though, is the way that it is heartfelt and uplifting while also being gritty.  Each verse describes a short story about growing up and being a punk in London.  

  The structure of the lyrics is quite poetic and is more complex than most punk songs (which tend to follow the verse/chorus/verse/chorus model but occasionally will also include a bridge).  After three verse/chorus exchanges and a solo, the song enters a bridge, which is a musical interlude in a different key than the verse and chorus.  Sometimes, but not always, bridges will include different patterns of lyrics: typically they will recall elements from the chorus and will have a different phrasing than in either verse or chorus.  What makes “Kiss Me Deadly” more clever than most is that the lyrics for each of the choruses differ slightly and these different parts run together in the bridge.  Musically, it is also interesting because the solo is performed in the bridge's key whereas solos are normally performed in the same key as the verse/chorus.  If this doesn't make sense, listen to the song again and pay attention to the key change after the third chorus.  The change is signaled by Idol's singing the last line of the chorus differently.  His voice almost sounds flat in comparison to earlier verses but this is because he has pitched his voice lower to transition into the bridge.  

At the end of the bridge, the song moves into an extended version of the chorus that brings different elements from earlier in the song together.  Each of the three choruses begin the same: “Having fun/Since I was six,” alter the third line, and end, “Kiss me/Deadly/Tonight.”  So the first chorus runs: 

Having fun

Since I was six

Hidden flick knife flicks

Kiss me deadly tonight.  

The third line for the next choruses are “Discovers teenage sex,” and “Violence for a fix.”  These altered lines each relate to the verses preceding them.  The extended verse at the end of the song pulls together these lines from each of the choruses:

Having fun

Since I was six

Having fun

Well hidden flick knife flicks

With violence for a fix

Discovers teenage sex

Try shooting up for kicks

Kiss me deadly

Of course I'm not the only one who loves this song.  “Kiss Me Deadly” plays in SLC Punk at the end of the movie when Steve-O leaves Heroin Bob's funeral even though Steve-O disdains British punk earlier in the movie.  The band Fifteen plays a modified version of the riff from the chorus in the opening to the song “Helter Smelter,” a song about blowing up cars and making everybody ride bikes.  Jeff Ott, the singer, comments that it “Sounds like Generation X,”  The rest of the song and the lyrics have nothing else to do with “Kiss Me Deadly” or Gen X (this is not an uncommon move for Fifteen, though.  In “No tion” (sic), the song after “Helter Smelter” on the album “Buzz,” the song opens with a copy of the opening to Operation Ivy's “Room without a Window” and, likewise, the rest of the song has nothing to do with OpIvy).  Green Day has been known to cover this song in concert (you can find videos of this on youtube if you look).  

Aaron Cometbus also writes about the song in #54 of his zine Cometbus.  In this issue, Cometbus is invited to go on the Asian leg of one of Green Day's tours (for those who don't know, in addition to writing the fantastic zine Cometbus, Aaron Cometbus also plays drums in a lot of other bands.  Some of the bands he has been in are Cleveland Bond Death Sentence with Paddy from Dillinger 4, Shotwell, Crimpshrine with the above mentioned Jeff Ott, and Thorns of Life with Blake Schwarzenbacher from Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil.  Cometbus has performed with Billie Joe from Green Day and they have released many albums as Pinhead Gun Powder, so the invitation to travel with the band would not be unusual).  At the final party that Cometbus attends on the tour, he describes Mike Dirnt putting “Kiss Me Deadly” on at the end of the party:

“Over the speakers came the notes that never fail to give me goosebumps: the opening chords of the greatest song of all time, 'Kiss Me Deadly' by Generation X.”

In that moment, Cometbus describes the nostalgia that washed over him as he danced with Billie Joe and remembered their friendship over the years, marveling at the idea that, despite Green Day's wild success and his own relative obscurity, this song brought them back together.  

This is also what this song does for me.  I remember listening to this song with my friend JJ when we first discovered Gen X.  We traded the same CD back and forth hundreds of time because it was pretty hard to find at the time.  Eventually, when I moved away, I gave him that copy of the CD and went years without hearing that song.  I hadn't dubbed the album before I gave it to him.  But when I was in college, we talked on the phone and Gen X would come up.  More than once I asked him to put the album on while we talked so that I could hear their music in the background.  To this day I associate Gen X with one hot summer in Ohio when we drove around smoking cigarettes and listening to music that, twenty years old at the time was brand new to us.  

Franny and Zooey

Last night I finished re-reading J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.  This book, like much of the other Salinger that I have recently read is pretty much what I remember it to be.  The characters are a little more grating to me than they were when I read this in college.  Having a little more distance, and reading more broadly since then, I think I have a better handle on what Salinger was doing.
In this novel and in much of his work there is a tension between maintaining a cool, ironic distance and sincerity.  In The Catcher in the Rye, and here, there is a lot of discussion of being a phony.  I think that there is a little better definition of what that means in this book, but it is still something ill-defined.  But this lack of definition seems more due to the struggle of sincerity itself.  If characters, or people want to be sincere, doesn't this undercut sincerity itself?  These works seem to ask the question whether one can try to be sincere.  This is a similar question that seems to plague Infinite Jest, but the irony is an even deeper one in that novel.
This book contains one short story titled "Franny" and a longer story, or novella Zooey, that are primarily about the two characters named in the titles.  In "Franny," the title character visits her boyfriend at his college and is disturbed by everything around her.  She tries to connect with the boy but finds his concerns juvenile.  She is irritable and distracted throughout their visit.  She collapses at the end of the story, presumably because she has not bee eating and due to the stress of her recent crisis of personality.  She is distanced from her studies and her own personal life.
This scene sets the stage for Zooey which falls into roughly three parts.  The first is a discussion between Zooey and his mother, Bessie Glass, while Zooey soaks in a bath.  In this section, Salinger does for Zooey much of what he does for Seymour in Seymour, an Introduction.  That is, he works to define his personality from Buddy Glass' perspective.  In the middle third of the piece, Zooey talks with Franny, who has returned to the family home to recover from her breakdown.  Zooey alternately comforts her and argues with her about her recitation of the "Jesus prayer."  The final third of the story is a continuation of Franny and Zooey's discussion, but over the phone with Zooey pretending to be their brother Buddy.  Franny realizes that it is actually Zooey and they are able to reach a sort of resolution to their disagreement.
The heart of this story lies in the Jesus prayer and Franny's search for meaning.  I won't go into detail here about the Jesus prayer.  I think there is something more interesting going on.  Zooey seems primarily worried that Franny is using the prayer for the wrong reasons.  The pair pretentiously judge others for wanting things for the wrong reasons, and for wanting things at all.  Franny dislikes professors who want to appear professorial, dislikes her peers for appearing to want to gain knowledge, and dislikes her boyfriend for being proud of an essay that he wrote.  Zooey warns her against this attitude, telling her that he had been guilty of the same judgements.
Zooey wants Franny to consider what her motivation is in using the Jesus prayer.  He wants her to have a knowledge of Jesus prior to using the prayer.  His concern over her intentions plays into the concept of phoniness that dogs so much of Salinger's work.  Zooey lumps a desire for knowledge into the same category as desire for prestige or desire for wealth.  These things are all superficial and those who desire them are phony.  This puts Zooey and Franny, and the other Glass children in a bind.  Franny is in crisis because she is having difficulty reconciling her desire for enlightenment and meaning against the charge of being phony.  She is blind to the true desires of those around her and is guilty of the same superficiality that she finds so off-putting.  Their discussion keeps circling these few points.
There is more to the story but I want to cap this off with a general observation.  This tension between sincerity and artifice will come to a boiling point in a lot of postmodern fiction.  The trouble with detached irony is that it has the ability to destabilize every utterance.  Franny can't tell when Zooey is being sincere and persistently begs him to just leave her alone.  Even when Zooey wants to help her, his own personality gets in the way.  Seymour is presented in Salinger's works as the paragon of sincerity.  He also kills himself.  Every other Glass child struggles with their own affectations and these discussions seem to keep recurring.  There does not seem to be a resolution.
Of course, the other possibility is that this is all just a reflection of Buddy's insecurity.  Buddy reveals himself to be the author of many of these pieces about the Glass family.  How much of this, one wonders, is just about Buddy himself?

Found Writings, Part 1

What follows is the introduction that I wrote for what I thought would become a blog focused on punk music.  I wrote a handful of posts, some of which may show up here at some point.  That blog idea grew into this blog and so, here are my initial thoughts on punk rock's appeal for me.

Post 1

I began listening to punk rock at a fairly young age.  When my brother introduced me to the music I didn't even know what it was called but it was fast, it was aggressive, and it engaged in a world that I knew.  I was a privileged kid growing up in the suburb of a major American city, so I was just like a lot of the people who performed this music.  We were angry about a well-being that bred complacency and had an inkling of our own entitlement, including the underlying unfairness.  We never worried about shelter or where our next meal would come from, but we did worry about maintaining a sense of integrity, being true to ourselves, and not losing sight of what we wanted to become.  Punk rock carried a negative connotation in the broader culture for a long time and it has been only relatively recently that it has started to become mainstreamed in a way that rehabilitates that image.  The rest of the world has begun to see that the nihilistic trappings of certain punk icons contained a critical depth that was easy to miss.

In a sense, I missed out on punk rock because the first wave happened before I was even born.  But in a broader sense, this music changed the shape of the culture, influencing multiple generations of young people to investigate the true nature of their surroundings and to investigate themselves.  In this sense, I experienced punk rock in its true essence.  I, and my friends, discovered community and  empathy.  We learned to care about other people's troubles and we learned what it meant to build a family of affiliation.  We learned how to think about the world in a different way.  

What appealed to me as a teenager still resonates for me.  Punk rock still excites me: both the punk that I listened to in my youth and the waves of punk that followed.  While my attraction to punk rock as a teen was more raw, I have come to a different understanding as I have grown older.  Punk is political.  Punk is rhetorical.  Punk is aesthetic.  And punk is visceral.  But most of all, punk is powerful.  Punk is powerful because it helped a multitude of angry young folks to recognize that we were not alone and that we could direct our energy in a positive way.  Punk is powerful because it redirected the lives of many of us and showed us that we could influence the world.  Punk was powerful for me because it showed me that I could embrace this critical, sarcastic attitude and bend it to shape the world around me.  It convinced me that I could be an intellectual and it helped inspire me to become a teacher.

I initially envisioned this blog to be exclusively about punk music, but as I developed the idea I recognized that this might not be sustainable just because my interests are more diverse.  I envision writing about movies, books, philosophy, food, teaching, and whatever else interests me.  I have also thought about engaging some of the ideas that punk rock has introduced me to and writing about the ways that this music has changed my life.  At base, I want to do what punk rock has taught me to do: engage.

Hard Boiled Detectives

The first detective stories I remember reading are Encyclopedia Brown and a series about boy detectives call The Three Investigators.  Anyone who has read Encyclopedia Brown remembers that it all centered around a nerdy boy who annoyed everyone and found objects misplaced by adults.  The stakes were low and the only really interesting thing about them is the opportunity the reader is afforded to solve the problem based on clues in the stories.  I was never able to do this.
The other series, The Three Investigators, was for a slightly older reader and I devoured it.  I don't remember many of the mysteries the three solved or any other plot points, but I do remember the interaction of the boy detectives and the dangers they would sometimes face.  The stakes were higher in these stories as the mysteries often involved the adults in their lives and in the town they lived.  The boys were never injured, but they faced the possibility of it.  I continued reading mysteries and detective fiction, but these were my first forays into the genre.  I ran through a patch of Sherlock Holmes in my twenties, finding the literary character to be far more interesting than the watered down representations I had seen elsewhere.
My interest in detective fiction peaked when I enrolled in a special topics course called "Crime and Punishment" that focused on crime and detective fiction (not on the Dostoyevsky novel).
This class opened a new world to me in detective fiction.  We started with songs and old accounts from the Newgate Calendar, something like the first true-crime accounts.  This is worth looking into if you are unfamiliar with it.  The thing that stuck with me the most was our section on "hard-boiled" detectives.
These novels were rougher around the edges and were much darker.  The detectives did not always win the day by using their brains, but had to use cunning, deception, and muscle to get their way.  The hard-boiled detective was an even more ambiguous character than Holmes.  These detectives were often private eyes, which freed them from the constraints that law enforcement officials would be bound to.  This meant that they were also often outlaws, or at least operated in a "para-" legal, if not "extra-" legal sense.
These novels paralleled literary naturalism in the sense that they tried to depict a gritty, realistic world.  The detectives were hard because they were forced to be by human nature.

This is all a long introduction to provide context for a recent book I read.  Brett Halliday is one of the mystery authors I most like.  His work, along with John D. MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Dashiell Hammett, and others tend to feature a single detective.  The pulpy narratives can be fairly formulaic and the writing is sometimes terrible.  In this novel, Murder is My Business, Halliday's detective Mike Shayne picks up a case from a mother concerned that her son has fallen in with a bad element and may have been killed.  The story features a mayoral race in El Paso, TX, war profiteering, Nazi sympathizers, troubled border crossings, negative stereotypes of Mexicans and immigrants in general, and an overly-circuitous plot to smuggle silver across the border into America.

Back cover artwork for Murder is My Business

The story itself is most interesting for Shayne's actions and attitude.  He attempts to remain aloof from the legal battles that surround him, though he has a personal relationship with many of the involved parties and has a favored outcome.  He enters into the case without a clear motivation besides making money, and even that is uncertain because he is not sure who will ultimately pay him.  Eventually, Shayne will extort money form one of the central figures and mayoral candidate, only to double-cross him immediately and turn him over to the police anyway.
Shayne, like many of the hard-boiled detectives, plays criminals against the police for his own benefit.  Also like many hard-boiled detectives, he has a code of ethics that doesn't necessarily align with the law or with those around him, but is rock solid.  This can be a troubling aspect of these novels because this code can sometimes lead a detective to help someone against their own interests, but it can just as easily lead them to hurting or killing someone, or using illegal means to help the police to arrest someone.  These novels have both a distrust of police for their potential ineptitude and corruption, but also because they are unwilling or unable to go "far enough."  In more than one of these novels, the featured detective will violently coerce confessions from the bad guy to "help" the police make the case against them.  The novels tend not to present any moral ambiguity about this because there is rarely doubt that the detective is wrong.  However, in a real world where hunches are generally wrong and where personal prejudices often masquerade as deduction, this scenario looks more grim and definitely more suspect.
Before this gets too long, I will leave off with some more optimistic notes.  While in that special topics course, we read another author who has become another favorite of mine: Sara Paretsky.  Paretsky adopts many hard-boiled detective tropes but bends their politics a bit by introducing a woman detective.  VI Warshawski is as smart and tough as the other detectives and gets into the same sort of trouble that they do.  Her moral compass tends to read a bit more true and she also tends to be more sympathetic as a character.
I have recently purchased Paretsky's newest novel Shell Game, that I am sure will make an appearance in this blog at some point.

Bad Religion & Lawrence Arms

 Last weekend I went to see Bad Religion play with the Lawrence Arms at the Agora in Cleveland.  This is the first punk show that I have been to in a couple of years, having attended more metal shows recently.
This is also the first time I have seen Bad Religion play in maybe 15 years.  As I may have written about elsewhere (I write a lot of these in advance and bank them for some reason) I have a long history with this band.  To recap quickly: this was one of the very first punk bands that I ever heard and it was definitely the first that hit me really hard.  I won't get too far into that now, but it hit the right combination of speed, aggression, and thoughtful/witty lyrics for me at the right time.  I have seen this band more times than I can remember.
I think the first time I saw them was in 1995 or '96 at the same venue in Cleveland.  I would have gone with my brother and his friends.  This was also one of my first concerts ever.  Back then they used to play at the Agora pretty much every year around Thanksgiving.  I have also seen them play in Columbus at least twice and then at a couple of Warped Tours in the late '90s and early '00s.

The Lawrence Arms opened the show with a pretty good set.  I first discovered this band back in 2006 listening to their album Oh! Calcutta!.  I had this CD in pretty heavy rotation in my car for a lot

of 2006 and 2007.  I dropped off listening to them a bit after that but have always like returning to them.  Surprisingly, I knew a good number of the songs that they played for having only listened much to one album more than 10 years ago.

The 3-piece uses a lot out of call-and-response singing, making the band sound a lot fuller than most bands this size.  The drummer, Neil Hennessy also plays with an aggressive style, similar to Coady Willis of the Murder City Devils and a bunch of other bands.  A few highlights of the set: Chris McCaughan, the guitarist sang but never spoke and never looked at the bass player; Brendan Kelly, the aforementioned bassist drunkenly told the audience that they were going to play a song that only true fans would know because it was so new before launching into "The Devil's Takin' Names," a song from their 2006 album.

Bad Religion put on a great show.  Their sound was good and they played a good mix of early, mid-, and late career material.  Their style has changed some over the years, so it was good to see this mix. They put on a good show full of energy and Greg Graffin using the same corny dance moves and song intros that I remember him using 20 years ago.  I didn't recognize all of their songs, but I didn't really care because they fit into the show well and were still fun to hear.
One thing that I have realized about their music is that even though I started listening to their earlier works (I played Suffer (1988) and Against the Grain (1990) constantly when I was in high school), I have grown to enjoy their work from the early/mid-2000s a bit more.
There were a few albums I never bothered to pick up when founding guitarist Brett Gurewitz left the band for a time in the late 1990s.  But when Process of Belief came out in 2002, I was back on board. Gurewitz had rejoined the band by that time and he bad brought some new sensibilities with him.  The lyrics and much of the delivery was still the same but there was a bit more complexity to the composition of the songs.  This combination held true for their next two studio albums, The Empire Strikes First (2004), and New Maps of Hell (2007).  After that I lost track again so I don't have much to say about that.  Funny things is that I still think of these three albums as BR's "new" work even though some of it is approaching 20 years old.

When the spotlight hit Gurewitz as he ripped into the opening riff of the night, my first thought was how old he looked.  It was uncharitable but it was a first impression.  After listening to him play all night, though, I have to say that he does not seem old.  The music, some of it, still seemed current to me.  I guess I have gotten old, too.  They are just a few years ahead of me.
Highlights of the set: the blistering renditions of songs that I have known for years (including: "Anesthesia," "Supersonic," "Overture/Sinister Rouge," and "I Want to Conquer the World"); scouting out all of the 40-somethings kitted out in their punk rock gear (yeah, I was one of these), some towing along their own kids; watching a very dogged security guard try to keep people out of the area behind the sound booth with a flashlight.

 2 dudes enjoying the show

Foundation, Part 1: An Introduction

I first read Isaac Asimov's classic novel Foundation while in graduate school working on my doctoral dissertation.  I was interested in the way that Asimov uses the encyclopedia as a focal point at the beginning of the novel.  As I have noted elsewhere, this is a point that drops out of the series fairly quickly.  At the time, I read the first couple of novels  before posting interest.  Later on, I read Foundation with my sci-fi group.  I don't remember the conversation about this one but I probably brought up encyclopedism and the Enlightenment a bunch.
Just recently, I decided to take a run at the whole series.  I have accumulated all of the books over the last few months and this is my attempt to read all of them and to write about them here.  I don't expect to enjoy all of the books, but I do hope to find the good in them.  Asimov is a writer who I think is great with ideas and plotting but terrible with character.
I don't have any particular aim in reading these books this time, so we'll see how this goes.
Be on the lookout for subsequent installments in this series.

Some thoughts after learning of Toni Morrison's death

After learning of Toni Morrison's death last week, I have had some time to think about the impact that her writing has had on me personally.  I have not kept up with all of Morrison's latest works but she has been a mainstay throughout my reading and academic life.  Her death was something of a shock because I have taken her presence so much for granted.  She was ever-present in the academic work that I did and I have returned to her work frequently through the years.
Although I have been aware of her work by reputation for much of my adult life, the first of her books that I actually read was Tar Baby in an American Lit class I took in college.  Soon after this I read Beloved and The Bluest Eye in quick succession.  What struck me most about these is how unapologetic Morrison is in her writing.  She writes very frankly about devastating sexual violence and human cruelty, both showing the ways that these impact lives and also the ways that they may be overcome.  These instances of violence were never gratuitous and do not romanticize the worst aspects of humanity.  She presents them as facts in the lives of her characters that must be dealt with in one way or another.  Her characters often carry the weight of their past actions with them, to be haunted psychically or literally by what they have done.
I taught her novel Beloved in a special topics class on American Gothic fiction that I designed years ago.  My students struggled with many of the novels in that class, but particularly with this one, because they were forced to rethink how they talked about books.  They enjoyed the work but were often appalled by the events in them.  They had to rethink how to praise a work when they had been so accustomed to telling me that they "liked" a certain part.  It is hard to "like" some of the reveals in Beloved.  It was instructive for me to watch how they were confronted with their own pre-conceptions about what literary criticism should be in a classroom.  My students were engaged and interested in discovering a new language to express the satisfaction of reading a difficult novel and their admiration for Morrison's narrative.
I think this is something that Morrison wanted.  She made us rethink whose stories could and should be told.  She definitely made us rethink how the stories could be told and what it means to tell our own stories.