#354

Cartoonists and other people who are understood to wield an inkpen or other such marking stylus in the service of their craft* get to call flair, shortcuts to mastery, and flashes of genius or insight nibtricks. Nibtricks are cool because they're like any other trick: learnable and fun to perceive. Writers are understood to wield pens and therefore get pen vs. sword though we are largely denied nibtricks (at least since the printing press, as discussed in the footnote), but that is because we are understood to wield language itself, and everywhere you go around the world it plays out in history: fancy talkers and motherfuckers with shit wrote down got ahead on everybody else somehow and stayed like that. Therefore, writers have always been rightly accorded with powers slightly more mythological, demented, magical, and demonic than those of other artists**. So, not nibtricks, but Tricks, yes, capitalized.

This is all by way of saying that I'd love to steal giving a tip of the nib to writers off Alison Bechdel, and maybe I already have (regrettably if so) but I don't want to, because she gets to hold a pen while she does it because she's a cartoonist and I'm on a keyboard here and even the stuff I scribble has to get typed eventually for people to see it so it feels pretty...I don't know. I don't like it for some reason, apart from that it's disingenuous.

Can't tip a keyboard (tipping a pen conceivably pairs with tipping a glass; a keyboard/laptop not so) and I don't want to give anyone anything with a keystroke, that's weird. 

A clash of the keys? I'm cringing. But I'm cringing harder because once again I probably have already used it. Who knows. Maybe you, dear reader. 

Whatever! All that has almost nothing to do with music at all, it's basically shoehorning in a bonus post. The actuality for today's today's post is of course

FACTUALLY MUSICAL 2023 continuing apace like mutahfuxin DEFORESTATION, baybeeeeeeeeeeee

s-s-s-s-sTrAp in

*

Not this last summer but the one before that I listened to a bunch of bands I used to listen to in the aughts and early teens, their old records that played to me as if for the first time and their stuff that had dropped and had its day in the sun of newness while I was doing other stuff. "Indie" is what we called them then; perhaps now I would be inclined to think of more of them as post-pop than I was then willing to concede. "Indie" means nothing to me now and the label has fallen out of use, so thankfully I don't need to think too much about that right this second, but the umbrella known as Pop has gone from being something I tolerated (sometimes sang along to) in the car during the nineties to something I invested energy into hating as teenager in the aughts to something I basically didn't think about through the teens and early twenties to something I think about a lot the last couple years, big thoughts, deep listening ears pricked and swiveled. 

Part of it is that "Pop" exploded, or bloomed, and now I can think about a lot of exquisite petals or pieces of shrapnel without having to acknowledge stuff that used to serve as the hard protective material of a bud or shell casing, as far as I was concerned. I can think about electropop and pop-punk and swingpop and be listening to absolute bangers in each of those categories and the cross-pollination in completely out of control right now. It's fantastic. It's like a pile of tropical fruit basting in warm sunlight. Luscious. 

Stuff just lately: a friend just this week told me about Caroline Polachek and I found her albums to be commanding performances and in some spots tremendously lyrical, top-notch writing. The algorithm did its job very well as it does on occasion and led me to The Long Winters, whose first album I would have very decisively said was "indie" a few years after it came out but with the vantage and power of retrospect I could playfully term post-grunge for emotional intellectuals and which I thought was incredible; their next two albums were increasing in popicity, the pulse quickening, the structure soaring and lightening like rounded arches stretching and blooming into fluted lancets. These albums also contained very good writing and as I have intimated, excellent architecture--good structures, solid foundations, happy bones, whatever I mean and whatever you get from that--and also very good guitars especially remarkable for their restraint.

Kinda more in the past: Watching the Popes Young and New a la HBO got me extremely into Sofi Tukker and a whole load of new music in that vein and connected to those sountracks, themselves a huge part of my listening time this past year. So stuff like KILNAMANA, Karmic, Lane 8, just tracks from the soundtracks, lots of songs from lots of people, most of whom I have yet to fully explore but whose songs I do know are so good. One of the best things ever was listening to everything The Fiery Furnaces ever recorded from start to finish--so fucking good man, all of it, always growing, always expert, just the best. Architecture in Helsinki, Stars, Arcade Fire, The Shins, Broken Social Scene, The Polyphonic Spree, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, that album Zach Callison made, Islands, King Princess, newer Tegan and Sara before they looped back round (awesome all the way, never stop), Her Space Holiday, and Yo La Tengo last because they're so low down on the list unless you start from the bottom, making them among the first! 

Bands I remembered to check out or rediscover just from writing that: Say Hi to Your Mom, Wolf Parade, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Boards of Canada (not sure why this popped up), and TV on the Radio. 

Also I want to mention Dirty Projectors for some reason even though I still wouldn't put them under the umbrella. Dunno what I think of them, even though I know at least one of their albums by heart. Alternative? If so, let me put Regina Spektor on here. It may be that a lot of music branded "Alternative" has secretly just been pop all along. This bears research. 

*

After the first time I flunked/dropped out of college, "real" college that first time as opposed to community college ever after (lo, even unto now--I did so bad, I want to finish, but should I take a break? fuck) my dad took me home on the worst car ride of my entire life (a tall order) and then that summer he made me refurbish and repaint the deck out back of our condo. I did all the work slowly, in silence, listening to Delta blues and The Mountain Goats. I mention that because that's where I want to start next time. It'll take us places.

Factually Musical 2023 returns as the days go by, dragging my body through the streets

--JL

*including calligraphers but exempting writers, which is supremely ironic, but that's just how technology happened and we are alive at the time we are alive. This is important to understand when we try to understand how little we understand, especially about language and history. Anyway, like I said, we get the rep for shaping the very planet. The surface of this planet has a lot of three things: water, silicate minerals, and mythological potential. Writing is only ever mythologizing (because all writers can do is lie in pursuit of the truth [or just lie]), and myths off the dome are still much more powerful than the myths of science and technology. The pen has always been mightier than the sword, even when the pen was just a tongue and a bunch of memes. When you compose the programming language, you write the programming. It's devilishly, shuddersomely simple. It's so big and crazy. Example: somewhere in the world there is an old piece of paper with writing on it called the Magna Carta, and because of that piece of paper, you are probably reading this in English, in a world shaped by the implications of those words penned back in 1215.

Look, it runs even deeper: no pen, no sword. The monolith is code; code precedes tools. 

Hey, it's been a little while since we had to have a footnote! How charming. We'll call this one Tautology Wednesday: Oversimplification Edition!

**For some reasone sculptors and architects, it's mainly like "Yeah, you did your job. What else do you expect? You want me to rub you down? Fuck off." Only nerds about sculptures really care about sculptures, even though everyone goggles at sculpture all the time. I guess because sculptures feel like they animated themselves, like the subject is the artist and the sculptor, who puts out among the the realest, enduring, and most tactile pieces of art that can be said to exist, is the most ephemeral and vestigial of interpretative concerns. With buildings, it's that laborers and craftsmen swarm all over them, and also we live and work in them, and therefore are rude and human enough to be more or less ignored despite their titanic effect on the psyche, despite the fact that they are the art in which we spend our lives.

See, if I make one footnote, the tempation to double down is very powerful.