Viva Rock. Not Rock Vegas. Just Rock.
Once upon a time there was a handsome, happy-go-lucky music critic. His career started, like most careers do, with enthusiasm. He played no instrument but the radio. He idolized the stars and the stragglers alike. Rock n’ roll was his life, his passion, his foundation. But years of having his fantasies shattered weakened that foundation. It cracked slowly at first, and eventually imploded into the frustrated dust of cynicism. The music critic, by now fat, greasy, and frustrated, gave up on his dream. “Rock is dead,” he wrote.
And so began the Keith Richards of music clichés. “Rock is dead” is a phrase that refuses to die. It transforms instead: “Punk is dead.” “Country is dead.” “Hip Hop is dead.”
None of these are dead. In fact, none were ever technically alive. They are genres not people. But even as genres, they were never dead. In fact, they are going on strong. Especially rock. Its purity tested by ever-escalating greed and ever-deteriorating mainstream tastes, rock has persevered.
Rock survives not in spite of the consumerism that many think killed it years ago, but because of it. Technology and nostalgia are rock’s best friends. The internet and satellite radio have lead to a whole new subcategory of band. The kind of band you don’t hear on MTV or KROQ, but still have access to without being part of a “scene,” or knowing the right people. The kind of band that sells out small to mid-sized venues worldwide without a trace of mainstream media attention. Gone are the days of exchanging vinyls and tapes. Here are the days of Myspace, YouTube, and BitTorrent.
For proof, here are some bands I discovered because of the internet. They are rock bands. They are alive. Rock is alive:
The Supersuckers.
The Supersuckers call themselves the greatest band in the world. They play sometimes cheesy, tongue-in-cheek, often country infused rock n’ roll. They play it hard and execute as well as anybody. It’s hard to find adjectives that this band has not already used to describe itself. Check out “Pretty Fucked Up,” and “Paid.”
Admiral James T.
Admiral James T is a one man band that consists of Admiral James T. He is Swiss and plays a brand of poppy but reckless rockabilly. He takes as much from The Beatles as he does from the Stray Cats. The Admiral is a recent discovery. He’s got a Social Distortion cover on his Myspace page that I like more than the original. Hard to believe because it’s a song I wrote a college essay about. Listen to it (“Don’t Drag Me Down”), and Ringo-inspired “55 Women” as soon as possible.
The Bellrays
A friend of mine introduced me to The Bellrays a couple years ago via email. He described them as “Aretha Franklin fronting The Stooges.” That’s pretty much right. They call it “Maximum Rock and Soul,” and it is unlike anything else out there. For The Bellrays performing live is a religious experience. And they expect it to be equally powerful for their audience. Singer Lisa Kekula commands the stage and preaches rock and roll like Al Sharpton in a cocktail dress. Take in “Detroit Breakdown and the quieter “Have a Little Faith.”
I plan on writing more about music from now on. Perhaps not so much recommending bands, like in this entry, but talking about the art and the industry and the characters. For the record, I don’t play music. I just like to listen.
And Rudy Giuliani Too
I got an email from the honors dept today with a calendar of upcoming events, scholarship opportunities, and other banalities. One of the events listed was the 2007 “Lavender Graduation,” which is sponsored by gay groups on campus. The event itself sounds totally uninteresting to me, but I got a kick out of the description.
“…celebration of the lives and accomplishments of the UW queer, bi, trans, two-spirit, gay, lesbian, intersex, same-gender-loving, questioning, and allied students!”
Are they making these categories up? What the hell are “two-spirit,” “intersex,” or “same-gender loving”? Am I that far out of touch? Did they discover three new sexual orientations since I’ve been in Europe? I support gay rights completely, but this compartmentalized PC labeling bullshit exhausts me. The more people try to categorize themselves the more insecure they’d be. And sadly that’s especially true in the gay community where suicide rates amongst young people are way too high.
There has to be an easier way. Why not just say non-heterosexual people and their friends?
Al G and Da Assizault on Reason
Time has an excerpt from Al Gore’s new book “The Assault on Reason.” I didn’t read his global warming book, but I saw the movie and this is ten times more interesting. The excerpt reads more like a rallying cry. He writes on how to preserve the dialectic spirit of American democracy in the wake of disillusion and ineffectiveness caused by television and money. The fading role of logic in politics is something I think about a lot, and Gore cuts right to the essence of the problem.
My only criticism is minor. The passage leans heavily to the left despite the relatively nonpartisan subject matter. This topic deserves a big audience, so let’s hope the rest of the book is written by moderate 2000 Al Gore, not hippie 2007 Al Gore.
Jesus, Jerry, and the Jews
Apparently it is Christopher Hitchens week here at Eric’s brain. I wrote about him yesterday in my semi-confessionary “writing process” piece, and here I go again. In Slate today, Hitchens unloads on Jerry Falwell. No surprise. Falwell is an easy target and Hitchens is an aggressive atheist who loves to condemn the god he doesn’t believe in.
Like most people who aren’t fanatical Christians, I won’t shed a tear for Falwell. He was a hateful, manipulative prick. But I don’t have the vitriol or the patience to write a scathing or ironic obituary. It took about two hours for “Jerry Falwell is going to hell” articles to turn passé. Hitch’s piece has plenty of that. He mentions the anti-Semitism and homophobia, but also dives into something more important. Falwell’s (and the whole fundamentalist movement’s) relationship with Israel.
First, Hitchens frames Falwell’s pro-Israel activities as little more than good PR work:
“Seeking to deflect the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice, Falwell adopted the cause of the most thuggish and demented Israeli settlers, proclaiming that their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was a holy matter and hoping that they might help to bring on Armageddon and the return of the Messiah.”
I disagree on a couple of levels. First, Jerry Falwell didn’t care too much about anti-Jewish prejudices. His Moral Majority and the rest of the religious right were unlikely to hold that kind of thing against him. Their spiritual beliefs are already inherently anti-Jewish, so what’s the difference? Plus, when has prejudice ever hindered the career of a celebrity reverend? Pat Robertson gets away with it all the time. And on the other side of the coin, so do Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Falwell wouldn’t have been any different.
Second, even if Falwell really did want to look like he loved Jews, he would have done something else. Religion aside, Falwell had one of the most resourceful political minds in the country. He knew how transparent his support of Israel was. Zionists might have been willing to take his money, but they did so gritting their teeth. It was one of those “enemy of my enemy” situations.
In my mind, however, Israel and Israelis taking money from Falwell and friends is not just morally repugnant, but awful, horrible, misguided strategy. Jerry Falwell was not a Zionist. He liked the fact that Israel welcomed Christian tourists. And he probably figured the Jews were a little easier to deal with than the Muslims. But he was not a Zionist. He believed and preached that the antichrist would be a Jewish man. He believed and preached that any day now the Messiah would descend on Israel and either kill or convert every Jew bastard in the place.
Taking money from the Christian right is the equivalent of Israel selling it soul to the devil (who if he exists, probably isn’t religious). Israel is cozying up to a group whose views make them as much an enemy as Hezbollah or Hamas. The only difference is strategy. Where Jihadists try to blast their way through the front door, evangelicals are sneaking in through the back to much more success.
The pattern is bad enough in itself, but even worse when you consider that it is completely unnecessary. Israel’s government doesn’t need money or support. Consider the consequences if Israel were to tear up all the checks it got from groups like the Moral Majority. There wouldn’t be any. AIPAC is so strong that American politicians (especially conservatives) have no choice but to support Israel. Voting against Israel is voting against democracy is voting against America. No politician with any ambition is going to turn against one of America’s most fundamental foreign allies. The US foreign aid is not going anywhere.
And when you sell your soul to the devil, there are consequences. Israel hasn’t felt them yet, but it will soon. It owes a favor to somebody whose interests will sometime in the future lie directly opposite to its own. Like Vito Corleone, Falwell’s evangelicals have Israel in their pocket. And when it comes time for Falwell’s cronies to cash in, Israel has no choice but to refuse. It simply cannot let a foreign special interest with conflicting religious interests dictate policy.
The only chance Israel has is to disengage from the relationship slowly and gracefully. It can’t and should not shut the gates to Capernaum or the Mount of Beatitudes, but it can shut its bank accounts to fundamentalist Christian interests. The international Jewish and secular communities provide plenty of money as it is.
Of course, there are exceptions within the Israeli community who will continue to take money from anybody who offers it. The people who refuse to disengage from the Gaza Strip or West Bank. They are the extremist, right wing settlers, recognizable by the big kippahs and tendency to fire on Israeli troops. They act outside the system and for it Hitchens places these people in the same category as Falwell. It’s a big hyperbolic stretch on his part. The settlers are wrong. But unlike Falwell, they are fueled by political conviction, not hatred and a massive power trip.
Hitchens weakens his own position by including a veiled attack of former Israeli PM Menachem Begin that does nothing to further his argument. He notes that in 1980 Begin awarded Falwell the Jabotinsky Centennial Medal, and implies that as “bigots and frauds,” Begin and Falwell are “brothers under the skin.”
He’s right about the award. Giving something so prestigious to a man like Falwell is puzzling at best, and stupid at worst. But Begin, who founded Israel’s conservative Likud party, was far from a bigot and fraud. He negotiated Israel’s peace with Egypt in 1979, and in doing so pulled all Israeli settlements from the Sinai; a move completely uncharacteristic of the extremists Hitchens tries to group him with. Begin also did more than any Israeli politician up to that time for the rights of Yemenites and other African Jews, whose unspoken oppression is one of Israel’s darker secrets.
Yesterday I called Chris Hitchens a crazy genius. The genius lies in his dead-on bullshit meter, skill for straightforward analysis, and is in his belligerent, antagonistic writing style. The crazy lies in his personality, the content of his analysis, and his belligerent, antagonistic writing style. And while it’s easy to admire his intelligence and talent, it’s also easy to see where his ego and his crazy get in their way. But maybe that’s what makes his work so provocative. Maybe that’s why I just spent a thousand words analyzing one paragraph of a column that on the whole, I agree with.
Actually I Wrote This Kind of Fast
Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the “writing process.” The “writing process” is easy to understand: It is the process of writing. Some writers say they have a specific routine, or bring a certain frame of mind to the keyboard. They write in favorite locations, at pre-designated times, or sitting with their bodies contorted a particular way.
I read a feature today from an old New Yorker about Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, in my opinion, is an insane genius. He is an asshole, a drunk, and I disagree with most of his politics. But the guy has one of the most powerful and polarizing voices out there. He’s a damn good writer and prolific. The story notes that when Hitchens writes, he does so fast and he rarely hits the delete button or bothers to edit. It likened his writing to the delivery of a grand lecture or speech. This pisses me off.
A friend of mine watched me write a research paper for class once. At first I had no idea why she wanted to watch me write a research paper for class, but fifteen minutes into the first paragraph I figured it out. She saw me pace the room, talk to myself, swing a baseball bat, swear at my computer, talk to myself in a much harsher tone, and refresh the Drudge Report three times.
On to sentence number two.
Writing for me isn’t always that difficult. The process is inconsistent. Inspiration comes in unexpected bursts that bring unexpected results. And even when the gods of writing whisper in my ear, the process can be painful. Only once or twice in my life have my ideas flowed so freely as those of Chris Hitchens. If he writes like he’s been holding it in for three hours, I have a kidney stone.
As for where I write, there are no secrets. What works for me one day fails the next. My general thesis is that location doesn’t matter all that much. Sometimes the coffee shops are the best. Sometimes my room. Sometimes the bus. Sometimes in class. It probably has something to do with my subconscious or something.
Ernest Hemingway, one of my favorite writers, had some interesting tricks. First, he wrote in the morning, and only in the morning. Before actually writing anything each day, he would read or skim the whole piece up to that point, and edit as he went. He said it prepared him mentally and allowed him to perfect the work. And every day, when he finished writing, he would leave something in the tank. He would stop at a point in the story where he already knew what was coming next. The strategy forced him to always hit the ground writing.
Raymond Carver, who was “heavily influenced” by Hemingway, wrote only short stories, essays, and poems. He didn’t have the patience for anything longer. In fact, everything he wrote, he wrote in one sitting. For him, it was the only way to go. It was intuitive.
For me, nothing seems intuitive. Maybe because I lack experience. Or maybe because I have yet to “find my voice” (a much more pressing and nebulous task that I don’t understand well enough to write about or complete). As of now, my “writing process” is inconsistent. When, how, and where I write always seem to come as a surprise. All I can trust is a sense of neurotic pleasure that builds with every pressed-in key, and upon completion of a piece, settles into my gut as uneasy satisfaction.
Don’t Quote Me On This
I was introduced to quotes in eighth grade. My history teacher at the time, Ms. Dubois insisted that we include them in our essays and reports, and suggested that we buy quote books. I did this. I bought a very big quote book and I loved it very dearly.
It was full of pithy comments by smart-sounding people with important-sounding names. Ralph Waldo Emerson. What a name. That guy had like a million quotes. In fact, I still think of him as the guy with the quotes. When I look back at the writing I did for Ms. Dubois, I see it was terrible. Not by eighth grade standards I guess, but by my own.
The quotes for example, are poorly integrated. There is no intertextual analysis. Just vaguely relevant inspiration. I introduced essays about the Industrial Revolution with Chinese proverbs. It was a mess. I did a report about the Thirteen Colonies. It was called “Seeds of a Nation.” Good title. But between the table of contents and introduction, there were two pages of scattered quotes. Nine quotes. Nine. Some bordering on irrelevant. Some climbing that chain linked fence, swimming across that river, and crossing that border with desperate conviction.
But I thank Ms. Dubois. Those quotes were a foundation. The seeds of a writer, if you will. When high school came around and I had to begin quoting properly, I had a leg up on the competition. I had experience. And a quote book. Soon I was integrating quotes in ways that people like Doris Kearns Goodwin could only dream about. All thanks to Claudette Dubois, who also taught me what a thesis statement was, and how to write a five-paragraph essay.
I say this, because if Ms. Dubois were dead today, she would be rolling in her grave. Thankfully she isn’t. Ms. Dubois is alive and well and still teaching Social Studies. She is not, however, on Facebook. It’s a good thing to. Facebook is destroying the quotation.
It started innocently enough. A section on Facebook profiles for favorite quotes. A place for kids to credit their friends, offer some(body else’s) wisdom, or an insight into their soul or sense of humor. The quotes a person chooses can say a lot about their personality, or they can say nothing at all.
Where is the harm in this? The harm is multi-faceted. The power of quotes is completely contextual. There’s a saying in the Middle East that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” And quotes are kind of like that. Interpretation is everything. “One man’s inspiration is another man’s last straw.” Or something along those lines. Quotes, like religious violence, are best understood as part of a bigger picture.
That big picture can be an academic paper, a speech, a greeting card, anything. It can be meaningful, or it can be completely inane. But a Facebook profile? I think not. It isn’t fair to the quote. Ralph Waldo Emerson deserves better than to reside below a list of favorite movies that includes The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Garfield II. And in the context of a Facebook profile, do you think anybody is actually taking the time to consider what the quote means?
No. The whole point of these things is to make yourself attractive. On social networking sites, people cultivate the images they want for themselves. They are the person that they can’t be in real life. They have the charm that eludes them in person. In this context, the quote has no value. On Facebook, the quote is not a terrorist or a freedom fighter. It’s lipstick. It’s a piece of brand-name clothing. It’s that witty comeback you just wish you could have thought up 20 minutes faster. It’s the intellect you fail to demonstrate in person.
And besides that, quotes are like anything else. They wear out. With every person that writes “Be the change you want to see in the world” on their Facebook page, Ghandi’s words become a little less inspiring. The magic fades. The fact that most people don’t actually follow the advice is completely irrelevant.
It’s the same concept of diminishing value that applies to quoting television shows or movies. Think about the rise and very hard fall of “I’m Rick James, bitch.” Stuff get’s played out. It happens quickly. Say a word enough times in a row and you lose its meaning. In the world of quotes, Facebook provides a forum for just that. Thanks to it, Gandhi is turning into Rick James, and I might have to find out what Ralph Waldo Emerson is actually famous for.
Farewell Mr. K
I saw a movie with a flying crab.
They launched it in a rocket,
Some kids and their grandpa.
It leisured down to earth,
Choking on the insides of clouds,
Pinching at the strings of its parachute,
And landing square on a bald man’s head.
He wore it like a dignified toupee.
On Mullets (A Work In Progress Forever).
Mullets in so many styles
Mullets that go on for miles
Mullet-watching in a plaza
Mullets often induce nausea
Mullet’s that inspire awe
Mullets begging for a saw
Mullets that fade into dreadlocks
Mullets smell like hippy socks*
Mullets frame heads like trashy crowns
Mullet is my favorite noun
Mullets on leather-clad punks
Mullets on white-capried hunks
Mullets as Spanish as paella
Mullets fluffed and puffed and layered
Mullets make pretty girls hideous
Mullets aren’t worn by the fastidious
Mullets don’t deserve real poems
Mullets don’t even deserve rhymes
*That is, if there are any hippies out there who wear socks.
** In the third to last stanza, pronounce the word layered in a Boston accent so as to make it rhyme why paella.
You Call This A Concentration Camp?
I walked into a small room. I could feel the coldness of the industrial concrete floors even through my shoes. There was a cot against the wall, a bucket in the corner, and no windows but for an eye-level slit on the rusted metal door. The ceilings were about six and a half feet high. Taller than me, but low enough that I ducked my head instinctually.
I chuckled to myself and rolled my eyes. “You call this a concentration camp?”
The cell is located in an 18th century fortress. The fortress in a small Czech town called Terezin. It is about one hundred kilometers from Prague, or a little over an hour by bus. The Nazis used the town as a hybrid ghetto and concentration camp in World War II. The fortress served as a prison. The German name is Theresienstadt.
From a historical perspective, Theresienstadt is fascinating. Unlike other ghettos it was never overcrowded. In fact, at a glance it was relatively pleasant. Inmates could wear civilian clothes. The children attended school. There were theater companies, orchestras, jazz collectives, soccer leagues, and even a magazine.
It opened before the final solution was enacted as a holding pen for privileged Jews from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany. It housed the rich and famous, the intellectuals, the politicians, the artists. After the Wannsee Conference in 1942, things changed in Theresienstadt.
Like so many other camps in central Europe, it became a pit stop on the way to death by Zyklon B. In the end 88,000 people were deported to death camps (mostly Auschwitz) and 33,000 died in Theresienstadt itself. Enough to warrant building a crematorium.
But that’s not what separated Theresienstadt.
On June 23, of 1944 the Red Cross visited. What they found was a pleasant, functional Central European town complete with mayor and all. There were bars, and theaters, and children playing in parks. The Red Cross delegation was completely oblivious to the fact that just before they arrived, 7,500 Jews were deported to Auschwitz to eliminate the appearance of overcrowding. It was a propaganda coupe for the Nazis.
Theresienstadt was half concentration camp and half movie set. In fact, the Nazis even filmed a propaganda piece there, forcing Jewish inmates to act, produce, and direct it. The movie was called “The Fuhrer Gives A City to The Jews.” The day after filming wrapped, director Kurt Gerron, well known in Germany before the war, was sent to Auschwitz and killed immediately upon arrival. It was just one day before Heinrich Himmler ordered the gas chambers turned off.
In December, I visited those gas chambers in Auschwitz. What struck me more than anything was their size. Birkenau is massive. You can’t see across it. And every single inch resonates with despair. It is the world’s biggest grave. The emptiness leaves an impression. It leaves you with this vague sliver of an idea of the Holocaust. A sliver that only brings more questions and makes it harder to comprehend. You realize that you will never understand. The experience is completely emotional. There is no making sense of it. No logic. You don’t think about names or dates or facts. You just feel.
Theresienstadt was different for me. There was no emotion. It was more like walking through a Civil War battlefield or Alcatraz. I thought about the history.
“Wow, isn’t it interesting that this happened here?”
I read the brochures and went to the points of interest on my map. I smiled with the other tourists, interested, but not attached. For me, it was a stroll through a museum; stopping and starting at my own leisure.
I’m not sure why. It isn’t Birkenau or Majdanek, but Theresienstadt is in many ways equally tragic. More so than any other camp, it symbolizes the world’s ignorance and Nazi manipulation. Then there are the deaths.
But I wasn’t sad there. I was engrossed, I was cold, and I was a little hungry. But I wasn’t sad. It was not an emotional experience. Maybe it’s because I went in expecting that emotional impact and didn’t find it, but I really did think to myself, “You call this a concentration camp?”
That idea troubles me. The idea that after seeing maybe the darkest historical monuments the world has to offer, I will never appreciate other tragedies. If I go to Cambodia, and see the killing fields, will I think “sure it’s sad, but it’s no Auschwitz.”? I hope not.
Most young people laugh at the politicians and talking heads who bluster about desensitization. About how violent video games or films or music have shattered the collective conscience of American youth. But under all the insincere compassion and partisan bullshit, there is a trace of truth. They just have the source wrong.
It isn’t video games or music or “24” reruns that desensitize us, it’s reality. It’s the seeing explosions on CNN, reading death toll numbers from Iraq in the New York Times, getting handed the same pamphlets about Darfur every day. The acknowledgment of distant tragedy is as much a part of the college life as red plastic cups. Faraway misfortune is like ugly wallpaper in a rented house. We see it and don’t like it, but the large majority of us choose to ignore it. It isn’t fiction, but for most of us it isn’t reality either.
I know I am guilty of not feeling enough. I have no sense of the suffering caused by the AIDS epidemic. I rarely imagine myself walking in the shoes of the downtrodden. Why should I? My shoes are comfortable. I don’t feel their pain, I just know it exists.
But that should be enough. No matter how vivid my imagination is, I will never understand. Knowledge should inspire action the same way emotion does. It isn’t my or your responsibility to bare the crosses of millions. Only to alleviate the burdens of those whose crosses are heavier.
Tragedies are not like batting averages or stock prices. They are not to be measured by statistics. Taken alone, the number 6 Million doesn’t mean anything. In a human context it means something so profound as to be beyond definition. Tragedy, at least in my eyes, is entirely human. So I don’t believe it was the smaller death toll that prevented me from feeling anything at Theresienstadt. Maybe it was my own state of mind. Maybe it was how the place looked.
People live there now. It is their home. Kids ride bikes past the fortress, and play in the park across from the Holocaust museum. They learn, marry, and die in this place. It just looks like any drab Central European town. Sure it has the old fortress and fortifications, but it also has a river, a Spanish restaurant, and a bike path. The people of Terezin aren’t living in an old ghetto. They are living at home.
Big Freckles
Freckles on the face of a nation
Their beauty a matter of perspective
Bruised knees, wasted souls
Tithe their way to poverty
For the sake of blinding alters
That could feed whole cities
Spend a buck to see these opulent scars
Take a picture; history in your pocket
Stubborn echoes of a dead language
Fade outside it’s fortress walls
Ghost town air tastes like stale communion wafers
But here the crumbs are always swept up.
