Quiet Bubble

Asterios Polyp

Yes, I’m reading it.  Yes, it was worth the wait.  Yes, I’ll be reading it again immediately after I finish it.  And yes, you should, too.  It’s nice when the hype is right, and the people you assume are capable of genius go right ahead and prove that your faith wasn’t misplaced.  It’s also nice when a “comic of ideas” is also a “comic of people”—David Mazzucchelli’s comic loves its characters as much as it loves its formal hijinks and philosophical digressions, and he makes it all into a nail-biting, awe-inspiring page turner with a fresh surprise in every panel.

More to come, but this will absorb me for the next two weeks.

Saadiq: Several takes

Raphael Saadiq might just be soul’s savior in these blighted times. As lead singer and songwriter of Tony! Toni! Toné!, he and his brothers fused 1960s soul, 1970s funk, and then-burgeoning 1980s hip-hop into a new genre. Along with Teddy Riley and New Edition, Tony! Toni! Toné! ushered in what was first called new jack swing, which then developed into neo-soul.

It was a hard-edged, rockier sound that nevertheless had the slick pop songcraft of the Motown sound. Horns and string sections were as present as they were in 1970s Philly soul but the bombast came in shorter, more clipped bursts than before, and the saxophone had to contend with turntable scratching and loops. Singers still talked about love but were less oblique about sex than even Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” and there was now a place for the occasional curse word.

Neo-soul’s acolytes flocked to Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Brand New Heavies, Joi, Jamiroquai, and other artists. While its commercial success has been limited, the genre’s influence is incalculable. In the late 1990s, Mariah Carey made it mainstream to invite hip-hop artists to collaborate on her songs, but the new jack swing had been in effect for a half-decade by then.

So, the genre occupies an odd place. It’s at once so hopelessly retro that its production appeals probably more to baby boomers than to their children and the movement that’s pushing R&B forward sonically and lyrically.

Since the mid-1980s, Saadiq—formerly Charlie Ray Wiggins, and then Raphael Wiggins after that—has been at the epicenter of that forward/backward momentum. When he and his brothers went their separate ways in the 1990s, Wiggins changed his name to Saadiq—mostly, it seems, because it sounds cool; or maybe the brothers really hate each other that much—and went solo. He produced and co-wrote songs for the cream of the “alternative” soul crop: D’Angelo, TLC, Macy Gray, John Legend, Mary J. Blige, Jill Scott. In 2000, he formed—with Dawn Robinson (lead singer of En Vogue) and Ali Shaheed Muhammed (DJ/producer of A Tribe Called Quest)—neo-soul’s first supergroup: Lucy Pearl. In 2007, he produced Joss Stone’s third album, and continues to collaborate all over the R&B map. Where soul seemed to be progressing most fervently, you’d look beneath the surface and find Saadiq’s name somewhere in the credits.

I said earlier that neo-soul wavers between its 1960s roots and its futuristic tendencies, and that’s nowhere more evident than on Saadiq’s (surprisingly few) solo projects. I’ve said my piece about 2008’s fantastic The Way I See It, which, as The New Yorker emphasizes, “has echoes of the Temptations, Booker T., and Bill Withers, but it is completely its own thing—so retro it’s avant.”

His first solo album, however, is so avant that it’s hard to call it soul. Even Robert Christgau, who likes 2002’s Instant Vintage as much as I do, seems befuddled by it: “Concentrate on it or fuck to it—anything in between and it'll seem too hookless for pop, too quiet for funk, too slight for words.” Saadiq took six years between the last Tony! Toni! Toné! and his first official solo project, and it shows. He throws everything into the kitchen sink—all pop genres are seemingly present, all modes of studio experimentation are in effect. Jazz plays a more prominent role than elsewhere in his work. So does surf rock. (I’m serious.) Songs have a habit of developing into multi-movement affairs. The lyrics range all over the place—along with the soul standard-bearing love songs and come-ons, there are impressionistic portraits of family life, autobiographical riffs, an ode to marijuana (that’s not even sung by him), a heart-to-heart letter to an old friend who’s going down the wrong path, a complicated take on what he love/hates about his hometown of Oakland, street swaggers. It could have been called The Many Moods of Raphael Saadiq. It’s made under the implicit assumption that he might not get another chance to make a record of his own. It’s sonically unified by Saadiq’s production design—beats are ever-present but I wouldn’t call it danceable; it’s full of sound but no instrument takes dominance for long in the mix. It’s a contemplative rather than body-shaking soul record, which might be an oxymoron. Like Common’s Electric Circus, which came out the same year, it’s trying to explode the boundaries of his given genre. It doesn’t entirely succeed as a collection of songs—but, then, neither does Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key Life or Prince’s Sign O’ the Times. Listened to as a whole, though, Instant Vintage is mesmerizing.

Still, there aren’t hit singles lurking in it. His next two records—the barely-released Raphael Saadiq as Ray Ray and The Way I See It—swing the pendulum the other way. Hits galore, though Ray Ray tries to split the difference between Instant Vintage’s weirdness and The Way I See It’s ultra-pop vibe. Still, the latter remains neo-soul and not just soul—Jay-Z makes an appearance; the background singers in “Calling” and “Keep Marchin’” sound oddly robotic; “Let’s Take A Walk” includes a sample of James Brown’s “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)”; “Sometimes” sounds like a b-side to a Tony! Toni! Toné! album. It’s retro, it’s modern, it’s Saadiq.

Everything above reflects on Saadiq’s production and composition, but none of it would work if he wasn’t one hell of a musician. His high, playful tenor can swing from squeals to coos, baby talk to struts, without losing focus. He plays most of the instruments on his albums, with a chiming, crisp guitar sound that’s effervescent. His bass playing is simply superb—melodic, warm, and jaunty. His musicianship is malleable, adapting itself equally well to Joss Stone’s disco pop, Macy Gray’s freakouts, and D’Angelo’s thick rumbling hip-hop.

All of neo-soul’s concerns, pretensions, contradictions, and extraordinary skills get played out in Saadiq’s career. If he’s not the genre’s central figure, he’s at least a great representative of it. So, after the jump, I’ve assembled a little Saadiq retrospective, which also serves to trace his genre’s trajectory.

All songs are available for download until 6 September 2009. Enjoy.

Commonplace

“But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature—of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself—then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal children they must deal with. Looking back on Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, ‘I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart.’ The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, “But the world isn’t like that.” These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label ‘escapist fare.’

“This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.”

Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be A Luddite?”

Moonwalker, 1958-2009

When I woke up this morning, I thought Farrah Fawcett’s death would dominate the news for the next few days. Joke’s on me, and you, too. Holy fuck.

In these days of iTunes, ultra-targeted radio programming, and level after level of niche marketing, our pop tastes have been stratified and narrowed so much that I fear it’s no longer possible to have a universal pop canon, a foundation of music that all youth knows. But Michael Jackson spoke to everyone. Along with Madonna and Prince, MJ represented the last generation of pop stars whose music and image everyone knew, who everyone sang along with. It, ahem, didn’t matter if you’re black or white, rich or poor, rural or urban, gay or straight. Because his career began with the Jackson 5, MJ crossed generations, too. My mom and dad love Jackson as much as I do, and grew up with his music just as I did.

If you grew up in the 1970s or 1980s, you either once owned a Michael Jackson record or knew someone who did.

He was the best pop dancer this world’s ever seen. He was the best singer, or at least in the top five, of any American pop artist. He wrote or co-wrote some of the most enduring songs of the last half century. His videos were among the most ambitious of the 1980s. He picked the best producer—Quincy Jones—with whom any pop star could hope to work and, together, they fused disco, funk, soul, and rock into a genre of their very own. That, in itself, is a major achievement. But they went further, and made that genre—distinct from the Motown Sound that dominated Jackson’s youth—into the soundtrack of an American generation.

I’m a little down today, and I’ll be a little down tomorrow.

UPDATE: Thanks, Achewood, for getting it right.

The Baffler returns

The heck with Virginia Quarterly Review. The hell with n+1. And screw McSweeney’s. (No, not really––I like Eggers and company, I swear!) Still, my introduction to serious but jargon-free discourse about art and popular culture and how capitalism sinks its teeth into it came from the long, much-missed Baffler. Thomas Frank’s infrequently published journal targeted all tenets of the Dot Com, “New” Economy, and established a tone––erudite but conversational; Leftist but working-class; engaged with business and pleasure in equal measures, and in how the two converged; and viciously funny.

If The Baffler were a person, I imagine it would be a woman I could take to a White Sox game, and talk over beer with her about the best baseball literature, Babe Ruth’s lifetime stats as a pitcher, the ethics of keeping Pete Rose out of the Hall of Fame, and how ridiculous Moneyball is as a concept... without breaking a sweat. (I made The Baffler female pointedly, since it seemed to actually publish intellectual work by women. Does n+1 do the same on a regular basis? Or is Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men as unintentionally keen a title as I think it is?)

The Baffler had its pulse on arguments about high and low culture but mostly was uninterested in the distinction. While its design wasn’t as visually impressive as McSweeney’s, it paved the way for culture-crit journals that gave a damn about layout and art. All of the aforementioned publications have tried to mimic its editorial tone, as have a horde of literary and political bloggers. Its writers have been picked up by everyone from Slate to The Wall Street Journal.

And now it’s BACK. Let’s let Frank––now that he’s famous and a genuine cultural/political influence instead of just a razzer on the sidelines––give City Journal and The New Criterion some much-needed competition on the small-journal front, and show Eggers, Gessen, and the rest how liberal-left cultural criticism should be done. A new dawn of bare-knuckle boxing has begun, and not a moment too soon.

(Thanks, Bookslut.)

Commonplace

“Conversation, as the late philosopher Richard Rorty liked to say, is the name of the game, and conversation is all around us. We talk back to our books, assuming we’re reading well. If we’ve got the imagination, we seek in nature some of the facts that undergird all human experience: we listen to nature, or try to, rather than impose our truths on it. Mostly, and best, we talk to each other. To be happily married, as I’ve been fortunate enough to be, is to be a partner in a conversation that can last a full adult life. To have a true friend is to be able to test your hypotheses against someone who’s receptive, but who won’t give ground forever, and then let your friend try his wares out on you. At its best, friendly conversation is about giving up all claims to property and priority and engaging in collaboration—so that, at least for the two of you, something like an improvised musical composition in two parts is taking place. You do some rhythm to his lead; he lays down a bass line when you want to run the thing out into space. You both wind up saying things and thinking things that, alone, you never could have. This kind of hybrid mixing, this collaborative creation, is greatly to be treasured: it’s one of the best parts of life. And it’s to be found in many places, some quite unexpected. Late in his career, even Emerson, prophet of self-reliance, had to admit that many good things come from others, come from abroad: ‘Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar?’ he asks. ‘It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.’”

––Mark Edmundson, “Enough Already,” The American Scholar (Summer 2009)

Slow pop

Cornershop takes its time between albums. Its last album, Handcream for a Generation, appeared in 2002. The album before that, the hit-making When I Was Born for the 7th Time, came out in 1997. In between them, there was 2000’s Disco Is the Halfway to Discontent, which—because Cornershop leader Tjinder Singh likes shooting himself in the foot—came out under the band name Clinton.

(In the mid-1990s, Singh and company were faster, but not as good—just a straightforward indie-punk band that could barely play its instruments. It’s not that Woman’s Gotta Have It or Hold On, It Hurts aren’t good, but the fusion of punk, Indian folk, disco, and impressionistic lyrics wasn’t perfected until 1997’s opus.)

The band’s chosen genre, pop, ain’t one that’s much made for longevity or long-term memory. So, I admire the band for its spite, for Singh’s sheer cocky willingness to release records on his own lazy schedule, as if it were big enough—like Madonna, or Michael Jackson, or Bruce Springsteen—to sustain a fanbase despite its slowness.

And maybe Singh is right. I’m still following them, after all. They’ve been trickling out new songs, and new album titles (Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast? Seriously, guys?), since 2003’s “Topknot.” The full CD EP featured a remix featuring the just-ascendant M.I.A. and a cover of “The Battle of New Orleans,” complete with sitar. The MySpace page includes a hard-rock instrumental anthem called “Who Fingered Rock and Roll?” (in the vein of Handcream’s brilliant “Lessons Learned from Rocky I through Rocky III”), and a song, “Easy Winners Part 1,” that sounds like electrofunk with robot voices. It’s just enough to tease fans, to keep us febrile and poised for booty-shaking goodness. The singles have a habit of slipping away; I bought “Topknot” on iTunes two years ago but a quick check reveals that it’s no longer available there. “Wop the Groove” slipped onto the website in 2006 without much fanfare, though it seems DJs were paying lots of attention.

And now another slow burner’s made it to the airwaves—“The Roll Off Characteristics (of History in the Making).” It starts with sitar, adds a horn section and a super beat within seconds, and features Singh riffing on global politics with that honeyed, casual but insistent voice. In short, it’s classic Cornershop, perfect for the headphones and the dancefloor.

Even better, there’s a video, crisply shot and jubilantly edited by Prashant Bhargava. As with his video for “Topknot,” Bhargava shot Indians at work and play in steadicam documentary style, and makes cuts so that the song seems to emerge from them. “Roll Off Characteristics” shows off a street festival—with firecrackers, dancing children, women in saris. I doubt everyone’s dancing, singing, and playing along with the Cornershop song, but Bhargava’s editing and rich compositions makes it seem that way.

Perhaps this is a cut from the forthcoming album; perhaps it’s just a random single given to the world. In any case, it’s good to have Cornershop—the laziest great band “working”—back in action.

Out and about (recession-proof edition)

How are you surviving the recession?  Well, I’ve rediscovered the local library and long walks. I have also stopped buying books, comics, CDs, iTunes, DVDs, or any other cultural products. (NetFlix rentals don’t count.) Chances are, you’re slowing down on these fronts as well.

But how to cope? Sure, there’s the internet but, culturally speaking, it favors essays over long-form work. This month’s edition of “Out and about” leads you to some free items online that can pull you into their worlds for days at a time. Most of it’s been available for a while, so consider this a cultural clearinghouse. Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.

First up, there’s Michael Ventura. I first heard of the Austin-based cultural critic in a profile for the L.A. Weekly. In it, John Powers describes Ventura this way:

What made Ventura’s criticism extraordinary was his faith in his own perceptions. He went to the wall for great directors who would never be popular—John Cassavetes had no more eloquent champion—and had a knack for noticing things that forever changed your way of seeing. I never felt the same about Third World movies after Ventura discussed the way Hollywood pointedly lightens or darkens ethnic skin tones for dramatic effect. Even when I found him silly—he once described some starlet’s breasts as “numinous”—or shuddered at his fondness for the execrable Henry Jaglom, that didn’t change anything. Maileresque in its baroque pithiness, Ventura’s movie criticism was so profoundly personal—so unlike anybody else’s in style and ambition—that I never picked up one of his reviews without a sense of high drama. I expected to find something new, something I’d never thought of before.

So, I sought out Ventura’s (well-designed) site, which features most of his writings over the last three decades. Of particular interest is his Filmcraft, a collection of his 1980s interviews with the big guns—Steven Spielberg, Louis Malle, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Vanessa Redgrave, John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, and more. It’s essential film reading.

On that score, but with a more scholarly approach, there’s David Bordwell and his Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, which he’s made available for free. Originally published in 1988, it’s one of the first (and still one of the most definitive) studies of the master Japanese filmmaker. It’s been a big help to me as I’ve wrestled with Ozu’s movies. Go here for the dedicated site where you can download the (big) book and read Bordwell’s new introduction to the book.

Bordwell’s a big deal amongst film intellectuals but I’ve always had a soft spot for the intellectuals who toil in relative obscurity. Ever since reading one of George Scialabba’s book reviews in an issue of N+1, I look eagerly for his byline. (He’s on my blogroll, folks. Hop to it.) His new collection, What Are Intellectuals Good For?, has brought him some much-deserved attention, but it’s his earlier book that made me a fan. In keeping with his Leftist principles, Scialabba has made his Divided Mind available on his site at no cost. It’s brief but it’ll have you thinking for a long time. (A particular favorite—and one that hits uncomfortably close to home—is the finale, “Message from Room 101.”)

Derik A. Badman (aka Mad Ink Beard) is a comics theorist and cartoonist with a growing reputation as a formalist thinker. With Two Pages, Two Comics, One Abstraction, he’s brought together in zine form some of his greatest hits from his blog and other sites. He’s an exciting voice on the scene, and a disciplined alternative to the Scott McCloud and Comics Journal schools of comics argument.

I’ve made no secret of my love for Kelly Link’s short stories, or her publishing outfit, Small Beer Press. A forward thinker in terms of e-books and online distribution, she’s made her first two collections of sexy, plainspoken, uncommonly magical and scary stories available for free. Yes, Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners (well, most of it, anyway) are free for download, with Link’s encouragement. You no longer have an excuse not to fall for her.

Would you like a free primer on hip-hop? Oh my, I have the gift for you. The Rub, a Brooklyn-based DJ collective, has created a 20-year “History of Hip-Hop” series. Each mix is devoted to a single year, starting in 1979. You will spend days listening happily to the best beats ever created.

Finally, it’s… well, I don’t remember where I downloaded this from. Pinball, 1973 is one of Haruki Murakami’s earliest novellas, and the only one of his books not available in English in the U.S. Well, here it is, as translated by Alfred Birnbaum. I love Murakami, and I think others ought to love him, too, so I’ll keep it up until I’m told not to, so download it NOW.

That is all.

“Humiliation,” round 2

So, La Bella and I are plowing through the BBC’s new TV adaptation of Little Dorrit. It’s fascinating, in large part because: 1) the acting is so strong that the acting styles can veer from naturalistic (Arthur Clennam) to melodramatic (Tattycoram) to ridiculously hyperbolic (Mr. Flintwinch) to broadly comic (Pet Gowan), without flying apart tonally; 2 the direction is so consciously unstagy and knowingly (maybe too knowingly) cinematic, with its emphasis on odd angles and constant camera movement, rapid focal shifts that emphasize the background and then the foreground and back again, close-ups so tight and colors so over-vibrant that they disorient you, and compositions that are almost abstract before they resolve back into narrative purpose; and 3) an overall writing vision that’s so strong that the BBC calls this an adaptation by Andrew Davies (the screenwriter) rather than its three directors—this, even though it’s so consciously directed to be modern and against the mechanics of the theater.

(#3, of course, is common for British TV series, and maybe for American shows, too. Dennis Potter is known as a TV auteur even though he was mostly a writer, but the same’s true of Joss Whedon and David Simon. Why is this the case?)

Anyway, watching Little Dorrit has got me thinking about “Humiliation,” the parlor game invented by David Lodge in his hilarious novel Changing Places. Back in 2005, I described the rules in terms of my relationship to Jane Austen:

It goes like this: each person in the group names a book that s/he hasn’t read, but which s/he assumes everyone else in the group has read, and scores a point for every person who answers in the affirmative. At the end of several rounds, the person with the most points wins. Basically, you win by humiliating yourself intellectually. It’s funnier than it sounds—a professor at the party loses his chance for tenure by proclaiming loudly and almost proudly that he’s never read Hamlet.

I’ve since rectified the Jane Austen but I’ve got an even-bigger gap to admit to. I have a B.A. in English from a well-regarded liberal arts college. I read a book a week, maybe more. I have cultured friends who lead me to invigorating literature all the time. I read millions of words every year.

And not one of them was written by Charles Dickens.

And, yes, that means I’ve never read A Christmas Carol.

I’m tired of this lapse. Hell, I’m tired of a lot of my lapses, but I can do something about this one. So, your job, dear friends, is to direct me. In the comments box, please describe—in 200 words or less—the Dickens novel with which I should begin my education, and why. What should I expect? (A friend has suggested that, because I love Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, I’ll find lots to admire in Dickens’s vivid characters who are drawn through dialogue, interlocking stories winding themselves around a geographically small city, and fortunate, freakish coincidences.) What shouldn’t I expect? Let me know; help the cause. I thank you in advance.

Commonplace: An apology

"Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one."

––Benjamin Franklin

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"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight."

––Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints (1966)