Madcap Recap, Part 1: Semester's-End-Scribbles, Food For Thought, The I.D. Student, New Orleans, etc...

It's been far too long since I've posted here. This past semester's been rather hectic. Crazy, even. How crazy? This crazy-

(my paper-writing-process: scribbled on the living-room walls)

This entry, then, will be a sort of haphazard recap of the time since my last post, some lingering thought-fragments, etc, that I'd like to get out of the way before resuming "regular" postings. This will presumably end up being the first in a two-installment series on the topic, as there's quite a chunk of chaos I'd like to cover...

Some food for thought first, from Bruno Latour, inspired by an ongoing dialogue I've been having with another grad-student from a different University...

"Military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, their missiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gestures when everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids- yes, young recruits, young cadets- for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for which we are so thoroughly unprepared."

"Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools?"

Just a thought. Ok, then... where to start with the recap? Since my last pre-hiatus entry was a plug for my column at The Interdisciplinary Student, this is probably a good time to point out that I've since added another entry to that site, a bit of a playful deconstruction of the idea of "comparativism" and my tenuous involvement with it, prior to traveling to present a paper at the American Comparative Literature Association's annual conference. (Which reminds me that I never followed up at that site either... sorry Michelle... that's about the point in the term when things got really crazy.)

Logically, that brings me to my next topic. This semester, I travelled to New Orleans for my first literary conference. I was hoping to compile either a photo- or video-blog of my experiences that weekend, but unfortunately my Blackberry decided to come down with an odd ailment halfway through the trip, making this more difficult than it should have otherwise been. Here's a selection of photos that I did happen to capture, however, with brief and scattered caption-commentary-

Yes, I'm a big enough geek to take a picture of my name-badge. It's my first one. So what?

Arrival. The famous Hotel Monteleone, primary venue of the conference, and my Easter-weekend residence.

Royal from Bourbon, in shadows.

The view from the window of my room.

Oh yeah, did I mention I'd never been to New Orleans before?

I have a soft-spot for trellises...

Bourbon Street, predictably blurry at night...

La Fie Verte.

Odd juxtaposition. Holy weekend, Catholic city, notorious street of sin...

The "Literary Traditions" of the Big Easy are, of course, far cooler than elsewhere...

OK, that's probably enough for today...  lost-time-recap to-be-continued. 

Oh, one last thing, though, a brief house-keeping note- I've been getting a lot of spam comments lately... like junk about cheap generic drugs, websites featuring taboo sex-acts, or links to help me spam others with promo-bot-software. Does this mean my blog's hit some sort of a web-traffic radar? (I doubt it, but that's the best positive-spin I could give it...) What it DOES mean, though, is that I've changed a few minor settings about the way that things are set up around here (as it was, I can't seem to figure out how to delete them.) Most noticeable change is that if you leave a comment now, it will say that it needs to be approved by the admin before it posts. I want to make it VERY clear that this ISN'T in any way an attempt to censor comments here, or because I don't want discussions or feedback. It's merely because I'm tired of checking my phone and seeing that there's more corporate junk littering unrelated threads on my page. My apologies, wish I didn't have to do this... hope you'll understand, dear reader... and continue to communicate with my posts on the comment-threads.

"Hun, this is just syntax and prowess;" A Literary Look at The Stiletto Formal's "This is My Boomstick."

After more of a delay than I had anticipated (it’s been a pretty strange week), I’ll try to attempt to pick up where I left off in my last entry.



The first time that I saw The Stiletto Formal, I was familiar with their name, the sort of audience they tended to attract, and several of the bands that they habitually played shows with, and based on these alone I was prepared to dislike them fervently. (See my description of the third sort of band discussed in my prior entry and you’ll know what I’m talking about. The whine-whine-scream, slanty-hair bit.) I went to the show at Modified Arts in Phoenix to see TheStart, an electro-rock act from L.A. that they happened to be playing with that I have been a fan of for quite a while. I thought the choice of billing was strange for one band or the other, which definitely peaked my curiosity a bit.

To be brief, what I saw from the Phoenix-based act proved to be far from what I had expected. The instrumentation was diverse, the performance energetic and dramatic in a way that had more in common with an opera than a hardcore show, and the songs were extremely well-written. This was a far cry from what we’re used to hearing 15-year olds who think themselves “fashionable” erroneously calling “screamo” post-Thursday and Blood Brothers. (When I hear the word “screamo” I still stubbornly think of band like Small Brown Bike, The Casket Lottery, Coalesce, etc… which are a far cry from Atreyu from the standpoint of sound…)

I’ll admit, the moment that completely sold me on the act came fairly late into the set… singer Kyle Howard announced that they were about to play a “new” song called “Tastes Like Black Licorice”… to which a white-belt-wearing high-schooler near the front yelled “Yaegermeister!” Mr. Howard looked down at him, with an expression somewhere between perplexion and contempt, and stammered in a ‘Like, duh’ tone into the microphone “Uh, no… absinthe.” I tucked my hands deeper into the pockets of my tweed coat, smirked, and nodded. There was definitely more to this band than a good portion of the trend-jumping facet of their crowd seemed able to process and appreciate. To me, that’s always a positive sign.

Shortly after this show, I picked up a copy of the band’s “This is My Boomstick” EP, which had been recently released around the time.

I would love to be able to take this EP and conduct a song-by-song in-depth analysis, viewing the musical context as creative utilization of objects in the act’s diverse poetic toolbox, but I fear that would prove far too long-winded for this medium; I can only cross my fingers that this band becomes as popular as they deserve to be so that I can someday pitch a longer form of this to some University Press or other as “pertinent” cultural analysis. Pipe-dreams from all angles, I know. But this is a possibility for music crit. that is able to be approached as lit. crit., which is far more rare than I wish that it was. This is what I live for. This record is Literature written without the confines of writing with mere words alone, and this hybridity, to my ear, suggests its staying-power, although as more of a museum-specimen of Art with a capital “A,” (destined most likely, as most of the sort, to be truly appreciated only long after its appearance) than as a commercially-viable object of current “music” alone as it is currently produced, bought, and sold.

In continuation of a past discussion of how a critic’s marginalia can be criticism, and thus Art, itself, I present here a sample-page of my scribbles on a print-out of the lyrics to the record.

Yes, once again, I am well aware that my hand-writing is atrocious.

So, visit the band’s website, pick up a copy of the EP (which, if you haven’t noticed yet, I highly recommend) and give it a few really close listens.

Pay attention to the way that the music is sculpted in such a way as to ebb and flow with the meaning and tone of the lyrics, how Kyle’s voice (which, I will be the first one to admit, takes most people a bit of time to warm up to) rises and falls in intensity and emotion with an operatic sense of melodrama and attention to detail that very few acts would even consider putting the effort into achieving (after getting to know the songs, you’ll find that every time he slips into the falsetto shrieks that will most probably seem jarring at first, it is completely appropriate and necessary to thoroughly express the purpose of the piece). Pay attention to how accurately the overall experience of the song “Tastes Like Black Licorice” captures the foggy lucidity of a good absinthe-buzz, and how the escalation and climax of the song’s plot, the turn from tender to sinister, affection to threat, situates the band as a torch-bearer of a poetic tradition that has been utilized in the past by artists with such names as Poe, Tolstoy, John Fowles, Nick Cave, and hundreds of others. Listen to “The Fall of Ambrose Bierce” with a mind to the work of Bierce himself, who, from what I can gather, the song is written from the perspective of, and replicates the ideas and verbal stylings of extremely well. (For those who aren't familiar with the idiosyncracies of Bierce's biography, and thus the civil war scenarios that lend the song its substance, check here.) Listen closely to “I Sing The Body Electric” and try to figure out what the Whitman connection is that the title implies. I have some pretty good guesses, but I’m not positive. If you have an interesting idea, I’d love to hear it, discuss, and try to piece it together further.

My guess has something to do with this-

“4

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop on company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any on, or rest my arm ever so lightly
Round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as a sea.

-Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"