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Shooting From, Or Possibly Toward, The Hip: Thoughts On KWNO and the Current

A friend of mine from Winona mentioned that my remarks on the Current brought to mind the 60-70s incarnation of our hometown station KWNO. He’s right, even though the Current is hipper than KWNO. Everyone is hipper than KWNO. Both were markedly eclectic. Both might play Frank Sinatra and Merle Haggard, although the Current might throw in French punk. 

(This also leads to the question: just what does hip mean, anyway? And is it a good thing? Or even a meaningful thing?  As a square, the word hip makes me cringe, invoking as it does fashionistas of the soul, people who use style to exclude rather than engage.) 

And the question of hipness leads me back again to Winona, which was large enough to have media but small enough that the media were unpolished. So Rod Hurd would broadcast the local beauty pageants and the 4th of July Fireworks on the radio. So Ernie Reeck–who played two hours of polka requests each afternoon from Arcadia, Wisconsin–would not simply refer to himself in the third person but do so with a touching wistfulness. He would announce “this is old Ern here” which his wobbly voice would sometimes render as “this is old Urine here.” 

On Track: Arthur and George

About 90 pages into Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George, it feels as if Barnes modeled his novel after the trains that crisscrossed England at the turn of the previous century.  Short alternating chapters, beginning with the birth of Arthur and George and taking them into adulthood, and quietly generating momentum; the title reassures that the stories will intersect, thus solving a structural problem before the first word is written. Like Ideas of Heaven, the book seems more concerned with the arc of lives than the complications of plot.

TOUCHING BASS: TV ON THE RADIO

1. Some music grows on you. When I first got TV on The Radio’s desperate youth, blood thirsty babes, I loved the more familiar numbers but thought everything else droned. But this morning, the songs assumed their shapes. 

2. This music lives in the lower register: rumbling guitars, prominent bass lines, algorithmic drums, seismic keyboards, even a barbershop quartet vocal that provides the bottom for “Ambulance.”  The singers carve out the song above the music. In the quieter songs, the vocals are an abraded whisper;  in the bolder ones, they’re fuller but still tinted with unstable highs. And the lyrics are more thought-provoking than most:  “I will be your ambulance if you will be my accident.”

3. I also like TV on the Radio for an autobiographical reason. When my old room-mate Kootch moved out in 91, I realized I didn’t have a TV. I didn’t want to buy a new one only to move in three weeks, so I bought a radio at Target that had TV reception. I listened to Seinfeld and Mad About You and Star Trek: The Next Generation as radio plays. Watching the reruns, the imagined and the actual shows collided.

4. And an ironic collision between the imagined and the real. I didn't see the photo in the CD and the sticker says, Made In Canada, so I was surprised when I played the  video and discovered the band is two Black guys (four on the video and web site) and one white guy from Brooklyn.  Even more weirdly, once I knew that the singers were Black, they then sounded Black.  And what the hell does that mean? I guess this, that I heard soul and jazz influences I hadn't heard before. How unsettling, to realize that even my ears aren't color-blind.

itunes uploads: Dreams, Staring at the Sun, Ambulance, Don’t Love You.

Ideas of Ideas of Heaven

I sometimes think that, if pushed hard enough, each book would become its own genre, with its own rules and possibilities. The micro-genre Joan Silber has created in Ideas of Heaven is stories with the arcs of novels. In thirty to fifty pages entire lives are covered. The result is an emotional resume, a spirit accumulating on the page as you read. The lack of scenes also gives the stories a sense of loneliness that more condensed stories can’t capture. And she writes well of both romance and faith, about a cast of characters who span continents and centuries, linked by coincidences that barely fatten into connections. The breadth of the canvas, the value of the experiment, and the power of the stories makes me think (without knowing the competition): yes, this was probably rightly nominated for a National Book Award.

Was There A Fight? Did I Miss It?

Having been immersed in the MFA for three years, I’m behind in my controversies. I’m now reading Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories. I’ve vowed to eventually read all five of the books nominated for the 2004 National Book Award. Judging from the comments made by the irate, the problem with the books–in decreasing order of persuasiveness–is that they were written by writers from New York, that they hadn’t sold many copies, and that many people in publishing hadn’t read them. This last argument, which actually brandishes the speaker’s own ignorance, combines liberal indulgence of uninformed opinions with the capitalist idea that the customer is always right–even if they haven’t quite yet gotten around to being a customer.  If you haven’t read the nominees for a literary award, you have nothing to say about them, so shut up.  The substantive attack on the books is their sameness and safeness. We’ll see. 

Soon I will talk about the actual book. So far, it’s quite good.

THE THOUGHT PROJECT: FACING THE TRUTH

Link: THE THOUGHT PROJECT // BY SIMON HOEGSBERG. Sometimes it occurs to me that every face I pass on the street is an unread –or unwritten–novel. A Danish photographer has acted on this thought: take photographs of people on the street and ask them what they were thinking of right before he stopped them. 

Happy Birthday to the Current

I don’t think I would love the Current 89.3 so much if Twin Cities commercial radio didn’t make network television seem like a surrealist collective. I’m a commercial radio guy, still on the listen for the latest Beatles,  and I always felt smirky around the turtleneck modulations and weenie self-congratulation of public radio. But I love the Current. When I first tuned in, a week or two after its launch. I heard  a set of three David Bowie songs: one by Bowie, one by Bauhaus and one by a Brazilian singer who simply covered Bowie songs.  And I remember how people talked about the Current when it first arrived, with that particular tilt of excitement that people use to talk about music.  I haven’t kept my dial on 89.3 every minute since–sometimes in the morning a wan bit of Americana has me scurrying to commercial radio and then, disappointed in my inability to foresee my disappointment, back again. But the Current is the closest thing to a multi-genre, multi-ethnic (Diggable Planets, Blackalicious),  personal yet professional , eclectic but not diffuse, righteous but not penitential radio station I'm going to find any time soon. 

 

REINCARNATION: A SECOND PASS AT LYN HEJINIAN’S MY LIFE

I’ve started to reread My Life with the understanding–more or less confirmed by the text– that each chapter corresponds to a year in her life, and I was able to see what I’d previously sensed. When you assume that a newborn is thinking, “When daylight moves, we delight in distance” or that a one-year old is thinking, “Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn astronomy” or that a four year old thinks, “My mother’s childhood was a holy melodrama,” those observations somehow sharpen.   

The later chapters–I’m into her thirties–also brim with good lines such as this, uttered by the 28-year old self who has apparently lost a father, “There was no proper Christmas after he died.” But the grown up chapters are less vivid for an astonishingly simple reason: I’ve only read them once. Like much modern poetry, My Life frustrates first readings and rewards subsequent ones, although I suspect some lines will elude me forever. 

Word Count: The Short Version

Thanks to E for the photo.

Word Count: Loquacious Thoughts On Silence

So far today, I have looked at 30 web pages, read 16 emails, declined to read another dozen, composed and sent seven emails, created and sent two documents, reviewed and revised a series of nine postcards, studied four client-supplied documents (two word docs, two powerpoints), glanced at two books and received one phone message. I caught five minutes of the Today show while having breakfast and twenty minutes of ESPN News while having lunch. For what it’s worth, I’ve also prayed, to dubious effect, and chatted with E.. It is now 12:39 in the afternoon.  This has been a busy but not overwhelming day for me and, I suspect, a representative day for an American knowledge worker.

And that may be why the afternoon we spent last Saturday at our friend’s cabin on the Saint Croix has stayed with me.

I was walking Al from the cabin to the Saint Croix. Like a mechanic who never quite gets the grease out of his fingernails, I found my mind still dominated by words: leftover strategies from the week, bits of literal doggerel directed at Al (“Who’s the best hound around?”)  As I looked at the river, which still flowed, and the hazy trees across, and the detailed tree near me, I realized that the main occupant of this wilderness was what the Buddhists call my Monkey Mind. 

I forced myself to be quiet and to notice my surroundings. Later that afternoon, on a forested ridge, I did the same. 

I love words. I shape them into ads for clients and into books and essays and posts for my own purposes. I absorb them with joy. Among other things, this blog is a reading journal. 

But some words are weeds. This week, I have made some efforts to be silent, and to remove the gauze of culture and opinion and marketing.