drowning in the why, starving for the how

This is a feeling I often have when teaching my “modernology” class–which is about how people in Japan have developed ways to understand and get to being modern. Modern in a myriad of ways–from sitting on street-corners and drawing people in kimonos and putting them in bar graphs compared to people wearing “western” clothing, to measuring the GNP, to listening to insects to hear if they still sound like they “did” in 11th c. imperial manuals of poetry, to tracking who practices inter-racial international marriage with whom.

The “5 Ws and an H” stuff is hard to come by, and I can understand why, given the focus on stereotype that drives what seem to be the same 5 stories about Japan, written in the rapidly dwindling number of papers that have foreign bureaus.

Students–I mean undergrads here–are often remarkably stubborn about releasing their a priori judgements. Many if not most of which come from  ideas derived from wartime and Occupation-era military anthropology–all those “shame” versus “guilt” studies, the mandatory kissing in movies to show democracy, and on and on. So this statement, in a book I’ve been reading about the Free Software and Open Source software movements, rang true, recommended by my friend J. This is from Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

It would be interesting to apply this to, say, cell-phone novels, or video-game music like Katamari Fortissimo Damacy, whose plot is driven by a breakway incident of binge-drinking…

… it is in Free Software and its history that the is-
sues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online po-
litical advocacy and “social” software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of organizations and “virtual” collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform:
practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how.

the case study seesaw hammock house

I stumbled onto this very fun installation on the way to a very serious concert at the Redcat by Yasunao Tone, an electronic musician, art writer and all-around charming fellow. Part of the charm is that although it is supposed to be kind of miniature–extracting 1 feature out of an idealized California house, in the manner of the postwar Case Study houses–it takes 2 attendants to get it going, kind of palanquin-like.

It’s kind of like a lazy-person’s seesaw. Or a 2-lazy-people’s seesaw, really, as you really need another bum on the other hammock to make the weights work. The attendants remove some sandbag weights, and depending on your respective balances, they move them around, to make it roughly balanced. Then you can push-me and pull-you, tho it is a straight up and down motion, not the arc of a seesaw. Still, it made me laugh like crazy and was immensely fun, especially in such a ’serious’ space.

The installation, by the architecture/space firm Atelier Bow-wow, has 2 other components, which are even more silly/wonderful. One is an area that is like a porch w/stadium seating, filled with some barbecues. The other is a large reclining pit, with pillows, from which you watch (a video projection of) a sunset.

The ABW gets its name, I think, because of its interest in “pet architecture,” which is to say, the built equivalent of pocket parks, “charming, small and humorous,” like pets, as one of their books says.

and that was something completely different

From the official statement released today of Cramps’ lead singer Lux Interior’s death. In Glendale, not half a mile from my house.

Their distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly.

Influenced by the burgeoning punk scene in New York with bands like The New York Dolls and The Ramones setting the standard the two decided they would start their own punk rock band, The Cramps. In contrast to other punk bands at the time however, they also mixed a heavy dose of Rockabilly and B-movie imagery to form their own unique image. It was during this time that Purkhiser took the stage name Lux Interior, taking his name from a car advert. He also created a unique stage personia, one of a complete honky tonky punk wild man, or as one reviewer put it “the psychosexual werewolf/ Elvis hybrid from hell”. The genre they helped create was later known as “Psychobilly” even though Interior denies that that is what their music really is. In 1978 The Cramps showed the world just how deep their love for the weird and the off beat went when they gave a free concert to the patients at the Nappa Valley State Mental Institution. The next year The Cramps released their first official EP, “Gravest Hits”. That same year they released their first LP, “Songs the Lord Taught Us”.

I saw them in SFO, it must have been 1992 or 1993. They were mesmerizing. The pacing was tight, saucy, sweaty, and fun as hell, decadent and seemingly indestructible. I always thought they were an LA band all around, but Cleveland makes sense.

And last but not least, cha cha cha.

archaic YMO c. 1978

Some interesting interview footage with the three + members of YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra). The venue is the studio in which Solid State Survivor, the second album, was put together.

I say “+” because usually they have “fourth man,” the synth programmer MATSUTAKE Hideki on deck, but I’m not sure how many people are in the shadows here, in and among the gadgets.

Around 1:10 is a funny sequence where SAKAMOTO Ryûichi shows-and-tells how hard it is for a human to manipulate the piano keys fast enough to get the tempo he wants (it’s in Japanese, but you can see/hear clearly what is going on by watching the demo).

like “befriending a porcupine”–Trout Mask Replica, 1969

Another beauty from the 33 1/3 people. I was at Skylight, looking over the wares, and got to talking to the other guy doing the same thing. He recommended this one.

It’s a bit different than many of the series. It does start with the “conversion narrative” beginning–how the world was forever made different, and given a direction, even a misguided one, by the acquaintance with the particular record. Writer Kevin Courrier recounts how the album was given to him by a speed dealer, earlier maimed by a train (it gets better in his version, trust me). Rather than meditating on the difference between trapped/stuck/mobile that such an opening sets up, and going into grotesquerie and irony, he turns to an exploration of the metaphorics of “fish”–as in Don Van Vliet’s persona, the trout–and “pond,” as a broad concept for the larger world and the world-lets within it.

The chapters follow how Van Vliet fashioned himself as a weird fish, a small fish, in the smallish pond of So-cal suburbia, “jumped” out of the pond, met and tangled and worked and collaborated with Zappa, and how in the end “everybody drinks from the same pond.” It’s not the most eco-friendly of ponds, but, hey.

Courrier succeeds in grounding Van Vliet in American/primitive/surrealist/blues counter-circles, at the same time he really conveys how the Trout Mask Replica album was just really out there. It was simply not devoted to being a “tissue sample” of its day and age, but is actually “an art album which actually forces the desert island experience on a listener, whether the listener wanted to retreat or not.”

Lester Bangs got at the extroverted anti-social-ness of Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby pretty well. Typical of Bangs’ style writ large, his review is full of generative words, which in this case fit the affirmative desperation of DVV’s particular brand of freakiness. The Courrier book got to me in a different way than Bangs’ headlong apreciation, because it effectively dramatized how yo-yo’ing a feel it is to swim in DVV’s world. One minute you’re immersed, the next, because of some over-the-top control freak move, like twenty sleigh bells full of syncopation, you’re cast out by over-saturation. True story from TMR rehearsal history: you’re living in a communal house in the San Fernando Valley where your food is rationed, and you find yourself crawling into the kitchen under cover of darkness, to filch yourself a little something to eat: pancake syrup squeezed from a bottle into a mug, which you drink, sip by syrupy sip.

Indeed, the album is, as Courrier says, like “trying to befriend a porcupine.” Cf DVV’s description of a watch: “you see, a lot of people put this little circle on their wrists, which is really amusing: keeping time.” You see, such circles are for squares: in the DVV universe, you can sneak into the rhythms of time, outrun it, get people lost in it, but you can’t, literally, keep it.

I have this album on LP. While I find it a bit too polarising to say “Zappa was shrewd. Beefheart was a visionary,” I see why Courrier included this 1971 breakdown as a representative point of view. There is no doubt that a song about a girl who sits on a burning waffle iron may indeed have a hard time finding mainstream success. A bit of Crumb-style fear of cooties streams through the blues moans, but then again, 1969 was a mixed-up year.

The social context cross-over that I actually found most jarring and pinpointed that yo-yo effect, to illustrate the “cast out of the pond” feel of the record, was the song “Pachuco Cadaver.” I know the 60’s had an affection for metaphor. In general, we’re supposed to read the maximalist hostility as a kind of devotion, at least in the case of the girl/big-mama songs. She’s glam and can kick his ass, so she has to be a bit overwheming, preferably in a way that has a delicious payoff (as do most of the romances in DVV’s songs).

But this one seemed a bit too referential, for someone growing up in Southern California as DVV did. Courrier sees the title as misleading, that it is actually a “surreal love letter” to “the Zoot Suit era of the 40’s and 50’s.” (I think he means the WW2 era, especially between Pearl Harbor and the summer of 1943, but he is writing from Toronto, and might not have the micro-view of So-cal histories.) It is indeed truly a joyful song, like happy Swordfishtrombones. But in my listen, despite the loopy imagery and wild-westy story-telling voice that strive for intimate folksiness, the “pachuco” figure is purely decorative, and very much sidelined.

I get this impression because while the singer gets the girl, the other guys are left out: “pachucos got the blues.” Turning to the lyrics, in the form of the song, I heard what Courrier hears as tribute more as triumph.  The singer (DVV) casts the patchwork surrealist girl as a hybrid of people and objects (she is 99, she wears a bolero, and “She looks like an old squaw indian,” all at the same time). She is an inaccessible figure, even if she is tempting in her gaudy display of experience (“She wears her past like uh present”). And what she wears is a predatory belt-notching past that has not been easy on soldiers (“Got her wheel out of uh B-29 Bomber”). But in the end she goes, if in fantasy, with the folksy but ultimately white singer.

Drives uh cartune around
Broma’ seltzer blue umbrella keeps her up off the ground
Round red sombreros wrap ‘er high tap horsey shoes
When she unfolds her umbrella pachucos got the blues
Her lovin’ makes me so happy
If I smiled I’d crack m’ chin

Not quite the moral panic that was called up in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, when, as Luis Alvarez writes, “As Chicano/s historians have demonstrated, hundreds, if not thousands, of young Mexican American men were violently attacked by white servicemen” (155). I know we’re not supposed to take loopy stream-of-consciousness surrealism at face value, but still, the song does stage a competition between the singer and the “Pachuco cadaver” left in the dust, a kind of drama of the (white-but-curious?) woman let loose to drive her own “cartune” during wartime, whose dalliances are now over, when the singer shows up.

I recently read Ken Gonzalez-Day’s history and photographic history  Lynching in the West, a history of unofficial justice between 1850 and 1935. Long story short, frontier justice was multi-cultural in its reach, and more executions and vigilante killings of Mexican Americans were conducted than of any other ethnic group. (The book contains some of Gonzalez-Day’s own photographs, a series he did of the “hang trees” where lynchings took place. It is a compelling outline of an under-known map of the city of LA and larger parts Californian/western.) So while I know “Pachuco cavader” is one of DVV’s “colorful” psychedelic throwaways, it bugged me, given the history.

Courrier does a great job of micro-mining the journalism and interviews for phrases such as this. The understatement and “blank space” he finds in descriptions of DVV the maximalist, who left room for virtually no “negative space.”  As a book that set its own terms, a system of metaphorics that goes way beyond the “conversion”/production/track-by-track structure of many of the books, I found it quite awesome.

435 los feliz

the phantom recipe: thanksgiving edition

+

Most of my cookbooks are plastered open to the pages I use the most, and drizzled with some manner of cooking material. I have had some pretty wild-card results when, in the process of cooking a new recipe from an unblemished page that does not, consequently, hold its place, the wind blows, the pages turn, and I don’t actually notice that I am following another recipe than the one I started out with. One time hoisin-peanut sauce from the Lemongrass cookbook got blown away halfway through, morphing into ginger-lime sauce with hoisin sauce, to go on top of noodles. That one was awesome. Lately I have been having the virtual equivalent of getting blown away by the wind, which is losing my place and forgetting to bookmark the thing, and having to reconstruct by memory.

This week, I was trying to come up with a Thanksgiving salad, and found this great-sounding recipe in the New York Times, for Pomegranate Quinoa. I threw in the towel and went to Whole Foods, thinking they would be the only ones around to have such a rarified and fussy item as seeded-pomegranates seeds, but came home empty-handed, at too late an hour to sit down and seed the fruit myself. So, plan B turned up a nice quinoa-lime salad. But I couldn’t for the life of me find it when I went to make it later on in the wee hours of the morning. So, I tweaked the NYT recipe, using tangerines from the yard, and came up with this:

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

3/4 teaspoon coriander seeds

–roast in a pan, and grind in a spice grinder. add to …2 tablespoons +/- olive oil, juice of a lime or 2, and whisk it up

1/2 medium red onion, chopped

–chop the onion, and add it to a can of (drained) chick peas, and a handful of slivered almonds and pine nuts that have been toasted in the pan after the spices…

add all this to…

1 cup quinoa, cooked (4 cups cooked quinoa)

–I cooked it in chicken broth. You can do this in a rice cooker (adding a knuckle’s worth of broth over the quinoa, which you have rinsed like you would rice). Make sure the quinoa is drained (a lot of recipes tell you to parboil it, basically, but the extra liquid will drown the spices if you leave it in)

Fold in

3-4 tangerines, with seeds squeezed out

Drizzle the spice/lime dressing over the quinoa, but only a little at a time–it is super-absorbant.

Cover it and let it sit a bit and let the flavors get used to each other. Maybe it is my cast-iron stomach talking, but I found it was good left to sit in the sun for a couple hours, before being eaten. The warm olive-y lime taste, cut with the tangerines and texture of chick peas was kind of divine. I might even add a bit of mint next time, but this was easy to pull off with on-hand ingredients, and cheap and tasty too.

Quinoa image from NY Times. Tangerine image from www.botany.hawaii.edu/…/images/cit_ret_mid.jpg.

the barter economy, five-and-dimed

Interesting LAT story yesterday on the new barter economy, people trading in goods and services rather than cash. I had no idea Craigslist had a barter section, but here you can even trade a “no-longer needed” engagement ring in for a motorcycle (sportbike preferred). Nor did I know that the going rate for a flat iron is five BB guns and 4 walkie-talkies.

I did note that all the people interviewed were white-collar workers: a writer, an actress, a violinist. The blue- or no-collar worker who does physical work does not seem to fare so well in this economy, either. Referring to the Pilates instructor:

She also barters for the smaller stuff. Rather than plunk down cash, she’s hoping to offer someone an hour of private Pilates instruction, which normally costs $150, to clean her house once a week.

An hour of Pilates instruction for cleaning someone’s whole houseful of a week’s worth of whatever needs to be cleaned? Even aside from the obvious “justice for janitors” issues of paying a living wage, can’t you get more than that in other sections of Craigslist for cleaning someone’s house, like, naked?

maid in Japan / café sci-fi+tique

eyeglasses • science • labcoats

An afternoon of science with gleaming glasses and suited-up scientists.

Top / Scientist profiles / Cafe-Sci forum

This is a screen shot from an art-education project, Café Scifi-tique, organized in Tokyo by famous sci-fi critics, who also happen to be degreed in science (the person who sent it to me is a very well-known writer who was a pharmacist in a past life.). It’s a kind of feminist retort to the maid cafés, where geeky guys are waited on by cute girls in frilly dress. Patrick Macias investigates how dreams come true here. (It is quite amazing how well the double entendres are enunciated on NHK’s “English conversation TV…”) Maid cafés have now half-morphed to LA, tho the fetishism is of a slightly different order–more about the commodity, and less about the poured-in love of the server…

In Café Scifi-tique, science geekiness is something to be flaunted, and the whole roster is devoted to making science entertaining and accessible. The September 29 salon, for example, featured a talk by a manga artist,　whose most recent work, Science Boy (Rikei-kun), is about a literary girl fated to fall for science guys. Kind of shôjo manga-ish in plot, but less doormat-y. A list of very cute profiles is attached, listing the “doctors’” favorite gadgets (gas chromatograph), their favorite cult scientist movies (The Man Who Stole The Sun), their specialties, etc.

Peaux des lièvres / Hare Skins

Sharon sent this today, after the first snow in Toronto. A video for a song by the Montréal band Tricot Machine (Knit Machine). It was animated using some 700 specially-knit sweaters.

Lovely song, too. A bit breathy, like winter should be.

CBC Radio 3 profile here.

The piano intro reminds me a lot of this Pierre Lapointe song, “Le lion imberbe”/The beardless lion.