rockcritics daily (phase 1)

IS THAT YOUR FINAL ANSWER?

I've never done one of these round-robin blogging survey things, but this one (via Naked Maja, via 86400 seconds, via God knows where else) looks kinda fun. I set myself two rules for this: 1) I didn't finish reading those other guys answers (any similarity is purely coincidental), and 2) I'm going to do this all in one go without going back to edit or amend. A-one, and a-two, and-a...

1. Do you try to look hot when you go to the grocery store just in case someone recognises you from your blog?
If I try to look hot when I go to the grocery store--and like anywhere else, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't--you can be rest assured that this has nothing to do with my blog! (I trust one exclamation mark will suffice here.)

2. Are the photos you post Photoshopped or otherwise altered? Photo blogs take ages to load and piss everyone off.
First of all, no, very little photoshopping or altering is done (I'm talking about the blog only here; when interviewees send photos for rockcritics.com, I do play around with those if necessary). I post photos from the web occasionally, but I have mixed feelings about the practise, so try to mainly just do it for things I'm sort of promoting (like book jackets, for instance).

3. Do you like it when creeps or dorks email you?
No, though I can't say I generate a lot of this type of mail. I am sick of being asked for certain people's e-mail addresses (not their fault, obviously, but I am apparently Mr. Middleman or something).

4. Do you lie in your blog?
It depends what the meaning of the word "in" is.

5. Are you passive-aggressive in your blog?
Yes. Terribly so. Must fight this tendency, for sure.

6. Do you ever threaten to quit writing so people will tell you not to stop?
Yeah, also guilty, but sometimes the "people" we're talking about here is me. I don't specifically say "I quit" and expect a flurry of "don't quit" letters in my inbox. More like I say, "I quit," then argue about it with myself. It's an argument that doesn't seem to end.

7. a) Are you in therapy? b) If not, should you be? c) If so, is it helping?
a) No. b) Not sure (I think about it often). c) It hasn't in the past. I've seen three or four therapists over the last 15 years, and none of them have helped, not a whit. In fact, they've all been negative experiences. The last person seemed so bored he more or less kept hinting that I didn't really need to be there. It was kind of demoralizing, actually, so I just stopped showing up. Another guy got really weird on me--started using me for staff discounts at the record store. I ended up buying this knob something like $180 worth of lazer discs. Totally creepy!

8. Do you delete mean comments? Do you fake nice ones?
I've faked silly ones on two or three occasions only, but I'm against the practise and don't plan to do it again. Really. (The idea of faking "nice" comments seems beyond ludicrous: "What a wonderful post this is. I'll be sure to tell all my friends!")

9. Have you ever rubbed one out while reading a blog? How about after?
This sounds like a British question. Pass.

10. If your readers knew you in person, would they like you more or like you less?
More, I presume. I'm a swell guy in person--much more confident, funnier, sillier, etc. I don't display the chip on my shoulder like I do on this blog (except maybe to those I'm closest with), and in fact, I'm more or less incapable of doing so (sometimes I plan to convey anger or disillusion when I'm meeting someone but it dissolves as soon as we're face to face). I generally go out of my way to be pleasant with people; I'm good at customer service, and I always have been.

11. Do you have a job?
Yes.

12. If someone offered you a decent salary to blog full-time without restrictions, would you do it?
Of course.

13. Which blogger do you want to meet in real life?
Does Bill Clinton have a blog?

14. How many bloggers have you made out with?
Don't know (it's possible that some of my exes have blogs, though I kinda doubt it).

15. Do you usually act like you have more money or less money than you really have?
I don't think I act either, but it's an interesting question. When I DJ what I call a "classy" wedding (i.e., one where a lot of money is clearly in evidence), I do try to convey not exactly "upward mobility" or something, but I am conscious of not wanting to look like rabble in the corner, so I try to hold my own with nice clothes at least (my wife helps a lot in this regard). Any attempt at looking like I'm not poor crumbles, however, when they see me (usually after the gig, thankfully) loading up my 18-year old slightly beat-up Volvo--the ultimate "I can fool myself that I come from money" kind of car, don't'cha think?

16. Does your family read your blog?
My brother probably checks in. My wife occasionally, though I don't exactly rush to tell her about all the stupid things I just posted!

17. How old is your blog?
Almost a year. I think I posted the first couple entries around Canada Day last year. Then duly deleted them. It set the tone for more to come.

18. Do you get more than 1000 page views per day? Do you care?
No and no. Honestly, I'm flattered and genuinely surprised when someone out of the blue tells me they like the blog (rockcritics.com I can understand, but this thing?), but I don't think I'm doing enough with it for anyone else to care much.

19. Do you have another secret blog in which you write about being depressed, slutty, or a liar?
No, but I do in fact have about eight secret blogs. Seriously.

20. Have you ever given another blogger money for his/her writing?
No.

21. Do you report the money you earn from your blog on your taxes?
Ha.

22. Is blogging narcissistic?
Yes.

23. Do you feel guilty when you don't post for a long time?
No. Maybe.

24. Do you like John Mayer?
No. And I downloaded his stupid song for a wedding earlier this year (upon request) but thankfully never played it.

25. Do you have enemies?
Honestly don't know. I have a long list of people who I assume are my nemesis (and there are certainly lots of people out there I dislike, either them personally or their writing), but it's all silly mind games in the end, and no (or little) actual harm has been done from either direction. I feel some people have screwed me around in the past, but hasn't everyone been screwed over? (This question would get a completely different answer on another day...)

26. Are you lonely?
Sometimes, but I'm happily married too.

27. Why bother?
Dunno.

HISTORY OF HEAVY

My guess is that more people have heard about this than actually seen it: the first appearance of the phrase "heavy metal" in a record review, by Mike Saunders in Creem, May 1971.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

The good guys won tonight (or should I say the bad guys did not win?)--albeit with a minority government--but my guess is that one of the big stories about the Canadian election is going to be pollsters. Indeed, the subject is being batted around on CBC as I write this. The whole country was primed for a last minute squeaker, with poll predictions as recently as today showing less than a ten seat difference between the Liberals and New Conservatives, with the vote swinging in either direction, depending on which paper you were reading. All over the media these last few days, it was virtually promised that you wouldn't know until you woke up on Tuesday who would form the next government, so though I was relieved with the results when they were announced--when was it, 10:15 PM?--it was hardly the historic nail-biter we were promised, and most of the pot of coffee I brewed at 9:45 ended up down the drain. (The results showing on the screen right now: Liberals: 135 / New Conservatives: 97 / Bloc: 54 / NDP: 21 / Mike Reno Party: 1.) Just as well. I'll take good results over exciting TV (is it too much to ask for both?), and I happen to think a minority government is maybe the way to go right now: the Liberals deserve to be nocked down a notch, it will allow (or rather, force) Paul Martin to show what he has in him as a leader (as opposed to just a competent manager), and the end to the party's decade-plus streak of majority rule will allow Liberal haters across the land a chance to let off a bit of collective steam without doing any long term damage to the Charter of Rights. The negative possibility is that we'll be back at the polls again sooner rather than later (no minority gov't has lasted longer than three years, and some haven't made it through a single year).

Still, minority or no, the mandate was clear--at least in the sense that the New Conservatives didn't get nearly what was projected--so what of those misleading polls? Were people lying? Were they really that undecided as recently as a couple of days ago? Were the polls a plot to get people out to vote? (If so, it didn't work--apparently the turnout was only slightly better than 2000's all-time low.) Is the CBC that hard up for ratings?

And speaking of which: why do those bloody CBC theme bells keep ringing over top of commentators and speeches every 20 minutes or so? Is there not a single techie behind the scenes who's caught on to this after more than three hours of it? Oy Canada.

NEW SEVENTIES 'GOLDEN AGE' MOVIE BOOK

A review of Ryan Gilbey's It Don't Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies By Michael Rowin, Film Comment.

SAMPLE: "I've had the nagging suspicion that the consensus that the Seventies was a Golden Age of American Cinema is mainly rooted in one overriding sentiment: nostalgia. For over ten years, critics, filmmakers, and filmgoers have looked back on that decade with an unswerving and self-congratulatory devotion not dissimilar to their rock music counterparts' view of the Sixties. As myth would have it, these were eras of unsurpassed creative freedom, during which radical work was created within the mainstream until it all eventually collapsed into hedonistic and overblown fluff-just as the Western world began to distance itself from the political and societal turmoil that originally gave rise to this cultural ferment."

I buy heavily into this golden age "myth," of course (the movies themselves tend to crush all arguments against it), and anyway, it's not as though the period has really been explored or beaten to death. There are surprisingly few (a handful, maybe?) reputable books that look back on the era, and half of them are mentioned in the review. For every study of seventies film, you'll find a dozen or two dozen studies on film noir, a gap, granted, that'll surely close as we move further away from both.

There are some good arguments in the review, too, I just wanted to comment on that passage. And yeah, looking forward to reading this.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Post-Script: I heard about this through ILE, and assumed it was a brand new book, but it's more than a year old--behind the eight ball again I am.

More links about the book:

Amazon listing.

link posted by RCD 11:09 AM

COMPLETE THESE SENTENCES

Special My Life edition, for anyone who has read all 957 pages (or anyone who just wants to make shit up on the spot):

1) "The book that west coast rock critic Greil Marcus wrote about Elvis & myself..."

2) "Christopher Hitchens, on the other hand..."

3) "One band you'll probably be shocked to know that I'm hugely fanatical about is..."

HOBERMAN AT CINEMATHEQUE

Guess it would've made more sense in some ways to mention this before rather than after the fact, but had the pleasure this evening of sitting through The Manchurian Candidate at Toronto's Cinematheque, which was preceded by a lecture and Q&A session by J. Hoberman. This was the kick-off event to a "Sixties Cinema" retrospective, an excellent series that also features showings in the next week of The Chase, Medium Cool, Wild in the Streets, Zabriskie Point, The Wild Bunch, and The Parallax View, among others. If you live in Toronto, there are worse ways to spend your summer vacation money (I'll hopefully be able to fit in at least a couple more myself). Schedule here.

(Hoberman spoke engagingly and handled a lively set of questions. When he first came on and saw that the room was filled out, he cracked that he felt just like Michael Moore. He otherwise explored some of the themes in his book...Can't think of anything more salient than that to say right now, sorry.)

BASHVILLE?

The gay attacks on Pauline Kael.

How did America's leading film critic, who was fearlessly opposed to cant and dogma of all stripes, come to be seen as a homophobe?

(Salon prints an excerpt from Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me.)

BLOG POST

Two people wrote me today asking to see the post I deleted this morning. I really didn't mean to try and create a mystique about this! I just thought my stuff about the Canadian election was terribly naive and obvious and (worse) really, really strident: Political Analysis 101 sort of stuff (so much easier to just yap on the phone about it than to put something interesting down in words). Nothing remotely "controversial"--sorry. Just rather lame. But I'm okay with what I wrote about blogs--sort of--and they were nice enough to ask--so here's that:

I really don't post much here anymore because I'm just not paying much attention to the subject matter at hand--not just music criticism, but pop music itself. That is, for the last two or three months, I've barely made any attempt at all to stay on top of things, except insofar as I might need a new song every so often to play--by request--at a wedding (indeed, weddings are my primary music medium right now: not just for putting out but for taking in; the stereo at home is rarely turned on). If pressed, I could probably name you three or four songs I've liked so far this year, but that's it. And no, I'm not proud of this, but I'm not ashamed of it either. It's just the way it is, and I'm relieved to let this stuff go for now (surely not forever, though I imagine things'll be a bit different if I ever step back into it). A friend of mine told me recently he had nothing to talk about anymore. I have plenty to talk about, but music just isn't one of them right now. And movies barely more so.

As for music blogs, I still check into a number of them on a fairly regular basis but it's almost always just that: checking in, purely out of compulsion, just to note who's still alive, who's given up (quite a few have slowed down or dropped out altogether, it seems). I have difficulty reading more than a few sentences of any of it, and the flippancy, the coded language, the back and forth "dialogues"--all valid sub-particles in their own way, and note that flippancy has been more or less the dominant voice behind this whole venture since day one--don't move me and in fact tend to annoy me once I start to focus on them, which is why I don't. (I know there's thoughtful stuff out there too...ditto for "thoughtful.")...

THE 'PUBLISH' BUTTON IS MY ENEMY

In the interest of full public disclosure: last night I posted a lengthy diatribe about the Canadian elections (also my feelings about blogs and music right now). This morning I realized how tedious and irrelevant it all was, so I deleted it. Have I violated some blogging code of ethics by doing so? (I don't believe such a thing exists, but maybe I didn't receive the memo.) Do I lack all conviction or what? Is there an electronic device I can purchase to keep my finger at a safe distance from the 'publish post' button?

BOOKS I HAVEN'T READ (AND THUS CAN'T SAY A WHOLE LOT ABOUT JUST YET)

On shelves now:

MORE KAEL & SONTAG

[re: Craig Seligman's new book.]

KAEL vs SONTAG

Critical giants, in the spotlight. A review of Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me.

By Chris Navratil in Boston.com.

Sample (from the book itself): "Tone is perhaps the most obvious area where these two writers are at odds. Kael's hipness leads straight to her verbal bebop; Sontag's puritanism makes her criticism formal and rather icy. Slogging through Sontag can be difficult...and she means it to be difficult, to slow you down, to stymie you--that's how she sinks her points in."

Sold. But one caveat with Navratil's review. He writes: "Their writing was not only consistently thought provoking and often controversial, but typically was regarded as the 'final word' on the subject." Can't speak for Sontag--I've never been able to "slog" through more than 300 words of her at a time on any subject--but that strikes me as dead-wrong re: Kael. Kael's writing isn't (note tense) an end to thought, but a beginning.

(Note to Boston.com editor: the byline is wrong.)

THE ZEN OF JOHN KORDOSH

First interview with a rock critic we've posted at rockcritics.com in more than six months, but it's a good one. Anthe Rhodes, new to the rockcritics galaxy, speaks to John Kordosh, a former Creem editor and writer from what has become known as the "post-Bangs" era, years which surely deserve a book of their own. More to come from Anthe, too, so stay tuned (though not too tuned...no timeline on the next round of chats just yet).

And not to sully a great thing, but there are two references to Ronald Reagan in this interview: one of them is obvious, the other is very subtle, indeed, so subtle it can't really be called a specific "reference"--let's just say it's a coincidental semi-connection. See if you can guess what it is.

ON DECK

No lie--new interviews coming soon to rockcritics.com. Three interviews on deck with former '80s Creem guys (we'll have spoken to everyone from that place, janitor included, by the year 2010). Hopefully I'll be posting J. Kordosh in the next week or so, with two more mystery men to follow shortly thereafter. Also, early steps are being taken to branch the dot-com off into another semi-related direction (not ascii porn, not online Scrabble, though those are up for consideration also). It's not exactly a 180-degree turn, but it's surprisingly uncharted territory, sort of. Stay tuned (if you're still alive, that is).

IT'S NOT A BLOG (IT'S ONLY MUSIC CRITICISM, BUT I LIKE IT)

The site has been filled with lists of everybody's blogs lately, which for some reason, has been depressing to me. Well, today I checked out yetserday's Village Voice and read a piece on jazz by Greg Tate which reminded me of why I love music criticism and why we started rockcritics.com in the first place. All I can say is Tate's piece made me feel ALIVE.
steven ward