Author: jdwhiting

This morning I drove downtown and stood in a parking lot and watched a 20 story building explode, then drove back home and went back to bed. I went to the library and picked up all my holds, the music I feel duty-bound to document. I fell asleep reading John Ashbery. I finally decided to buy the more expensive mountain bike, but I can’t bring myself to go to the bike store and buy it. The new Smashing Pumpkins album is better than I thought it would be, but still not all that great. Right now some people I know are water skiing, along with some people I don’t know. A stranger wrote a kind comment on my blog, which made me feel embarrassed, and she left me no way to reply. My life never really changed. The blind date was better than I had feared it might be, but still not all that great. The new Interpol album sounds like sitting in a new Mercedes that is stuck in the mud, spinning out the wheels and splattering it everywhere. I’m starving, but I don’t feel like going to any of the restaurants and all I have at home is junk food. It is a beautiful day, but what would be the point of driving up any of the canyons? I need a new pair of shoes for work. I wish someone would get out of the car and push.

The silent alarms start going off in your head, because it looks like it’s going to be prog rock before you even listen to it. The cover fits squarely into the surrealist landscape prog rock tradition. A cursory look at the tracklisting reveals a closing song entitled “Knights of Cydonia.” The sounds coming out of your speakers during the opening moments of the album do nothing to dissuade you, as they feature a synthesizer figure which bears more than a passing resemblance to the theme music from Dr. Who.

And then something incredible happens. Over all of this prog rock pomp, the band get all pop on us, aping the likes of Prince, Coldplay, Timbaland/Timberlake, and New Order. But its still all firmly bolted to that solid Queen/Rush/Radiohead prog base. I think this is the first unabashed prog-pop album I have ever heard. It sounds like what Marillion have been trying and failing to do for the past 15 years with all their attempts at “mainstream” singles, and it sounds like what I think a lot of people wish Radiohead had done since Oklahoma OK Computer. Whether you agree with that or not I don’t care. All I know is that the anti-prog rock processing chip that was interfaced with my brain a few years ago (I think maybe the Strokes put it there) finally malfunctioned, and at long last, thanks to this album, the loop is broken and I am deprogrammed. I suddenly have this aching desire to listen to prog and quasi-prog. I’m going to get my Marillion albums out. I’m going to get all the Catherine Wheel albums I can get my hands on. I’m going to jam Permanent Waves and Grace Under Pressure. I’m going to give The Mars Volta another chance. I going to listen to everything Pink Floyd ever did. I may even dig out that old vinyl copy of Tarkus I found in the 99 cents bin once. O, most wonderful world of immaculately produced, melodramatically delivered and sometimes pointlessly complex but delicious music: why did I ever turn away from you in 2001? I’m no longer worthy to be called by your name, only let me be your servant.

I actually have no idea if this is true or not. I was just curious about how many hits I would get if I put a title and tag like this on my blog. Ha ha. Sorry to disappoint you.

So basically the only hits I get on this blog (other than just random hits) come from the keyword search “Joshua Clover.” A month or two ago I wrote a post explaining that I had started reading Clover’s collection The Totality for Kids. Since then I haven’t ever looked at that post, but I have the feeling it was somewhat ignorant, and I am embarrassed when I see traffic from servers such as “The Office of the President at UC Davis,” being specifically drawn to that post, because it’s not all that academic up in here. But really, I am going to advocate that there is nothing wrong with that. Really, I find it a kind of sad commentary that contemporary poetry, even in comparison to other sub-cultural nitches, is so-little-blogged about that my little Joshua Clover entry from a month or two ago is still up there in a noticeable place on the search results. Of course, there is the possibility that, since I share a first name with said Clover and my blog is called Josh’s Froz-T-Freez, at least one of the visitors to my site thought that maybe they were happening onto Joshua Clover’s actual blog (he does have an actual blog by the way, called Jane Dark’s Sugar High. It’s worth checking out.), rather than the semi-destitute blog of a substitute teacher/temp secretary/possible aspiring school librarian from Utah.

At any rate, if you go ahead and google or technorati any contemporary poet’s name, you’re not going to find all that much being written on the blogoteca. Certainly less than they deserve. Maybe a couple of biographical blurbs from some institutional websites, maybe their name included on a reading schedule for some university or organization. That’s about it. You just don’t find that many people casually geeking out about Haryette Mullen or Frank Bidart on their blogs, the way you may find people doing so about Daydream Nation, scrapbooking or almost any other subject. Even Extreme ironing. Don’t we who love poetry love our poetry as much as those that love other things love their things? I think we do. Contemporary poetry needs more fanboys. Poetry needs its own Pitchforkmedia to enthusiastically report on things like when Craig Arnold’s next book is going to hit stores, W.S. Merwin’s public reading itinerary for 2007 and every time Jorie Graham has a poem published in a literary magazine. So I, for one, am going to try to post more about poetry on here, to help fill up the internet with a quantity of nonsense about a new subject area.

And as for Joshua Clover? I got sick of his book really quick. Too many references to things I didn’t know about and had no desire to investigate. So I read Star Dust by Frank Bidart instead. Insofar as you can consider a collection of poetry a pageturner, Star Dust was to me a definite pageturner. Bidart always is, in my opinion. Need to read more Bidart. Right now, I’m re-reading Mullen’s Sleeping With The Dictionary. I read it several years ago in college after one of my professors name-dropped it semi-sneeringly, and I liked it then, but I’m getting a lot more out of it now. Before, I don’t think I ever really got past the “fun with words” veneer to the subtlety and subversiveness beneath. But you don’t have to take my word for it: de-Doot-DOOT!

Yay for poetry!

p.s. It turns out Joshua Clover teaches at UC Davis, so it’s possible he’s googling himself, which seems kind of sad, but then I’d probably do the same thing. So, if it’s you, Hi Josh! No, I won’t accuse him of that. It’s more likely to be one of his students or colleagues. Or I guess the President of UC Davis? I’m starting to feel more and more that I might get into a little bit of trouble with this post. Probably not though.

I first heard Daydream Nation in 9th or 10th grade (circa 1994 or 1995). There was no super-hip older kid that told me to listen to it or anything like that. I was just an aspiring record geek and a Rolling Stone magazine article told me that if there had been no Sonic Youth, there would be no Pearl Jam or Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins. I loved Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, and I sort of liked Nirvana. I think I listened to part of the album at a music store that used to be in Salt Lake where they would slice open CDs and let you listen to them. I remember the guy behind the counter seemed sort of amused at me listening to it, and asked me if I liked it. I said yes, even though I wasn’t quite sure what to make of what I’d just heard and I didn’t buy it. Eventually I ended up with a copy of Daydream Nation on cassette rather than CD, I’m not exactly sure why. Actually, I do know why. It was a special request Christmas or birthday present from either my grandma or my uncle, and they bought me the cassette. I love the fact that I got this album that way, they having no idea what kind of volatile substance they had just distributed to me. A kind of musical Improvised Explosive Device. “What kind of music is that?” I now remember someone in the family asking.

I found it frightening and beautiful. It sounded like back-alleyways, trashcans, drug freak-outs and the crazy grimy city, but at the same time interstellar, sometimes oceanic. My closest touchstones were Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland (particularly the epic “1983”) and Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. It was definitely far beyond Pearl Jam, but I could see the watered-down influence. Getting smashed in the face by kids playing basketball, going home and blowing another amp. To me it sounded like about a million amps must have been blown out just to record the album. I think Kim Gordon scared me the most, with all her yelling and grunting and her “Come on down to the store”s. I never listened to that very last track. I thought she must be a prostitute or something. Remember I’m a Mormon boy from Utah, somewhat sheltered. But those ringing guitars and storms of feedback always kept me coming back for more.

I remember one time I was listening to it on my Walkman in World History class, and I had my friend listen to a bit of it. It was in the middle of one of those waves crashing/pastoral moments from “The Sprawl” or “‘Cross the Breeze.” I thought he might appreciate it, he’d gotten me into orchestral rock heroes Yes. But he just told me he thought it was boring. Obviously I played him the wrong moment. Oh well. You could easily accuse this album of being a lot of things: harsh at times, atonal, confrontational, grating at moments, inaccessible. But boring? No. But after that, I never shared this album with anyone ever again. Until today.

Coming soon…

my adventures in Canyonlands.

New music is fun again. I first heard this album on the radio a few days before it hit stores. I was so surprised. I was listening to a local commercial radio station*, and the DJ said, “Tonight at 11 o’clock I’m going to play the new White Stripes album straight through.” I found a cassette tape and I recorded the thing. I felt like I was nine years old again, recording music off the radio. It was awesome. I listened to the tape a couple of times. I’ve always thought the White Stripes sounded good on tape. I guess they would sound great on vinyl, with their analog obsession. It was so nice to hear the album like that on the radio, with the DJ cutting in now and then to make comments and play commercials. It made it feel real and alive.

For a while I made a habit of downloading new albums off the clandestine album blogs as soon as they leaked, sometimes weeks or months before their commercial release. I always justified it by the fact that I wanted to hear if they were any good before I bought them, and that if I liked the album, when it came out I would buy it. And many of these albums I did buy. But there’s something about not having to wait and not having to pay, not having to interact with anyone in any way, that makes the event of hearing new music feel anemic. It’s not earned. It’s just some files on your ipod. The ritual of going to the store and buying the thing, the ritual of putting on the record or the CD, is gone. It becomes more important that you heard something first, rather than that you heard it well. Say what you will, I’ve come to feel that, in addition to being dishonest, stealing the music seems to cheapen the music. Well, I stopped it a couple of months ago, and I’m glad I did. I can wait. I can be patient and honest. No one was ever impressed that someone had heard an album first, anyway. And then, hearing music on the radio for the first time becomes a treat, too.

So, about the album itself. It’s the White Stripes, so unsurprisingly, it’s another interesting, solid effort that calls for instant rock album canonization. It has that energy of some of their early stuff, but it has more studio craft. And they finally found a way for Meg’s vocals to add to the equation: shouting! And spoken word. No pitchy, willfully awkward Meg songs here. I’d love to hear even more of her this way. At any rate, another great rock and roll record from America’s finest. And if you never liked the White Stripes and have no desire to start liking them, I don’t think this one is going to change your mind.

*I guess since they do sweet things like play White Stripes albums all the way through, I ought to give them credit. It was X96 in Salt Lake City.

Ah, the nineties, when the guitars were huge and squalling, and the self-loathing was too palpable and overdubbed to be true.

I am in the middle of this project of going back through my music collection and listening to everything I own. My basic rule for the project is that I basically can’t seek out any new music until I have listened to everything I already own. It started because I realized I tend to get stuck on a small handful of albums and listen to them compulsively, and then set them aside where they languish with all the others. I feel I need to make more use of all the resources at my disposal.

So right now I’m digging back through all my pre-teen and teen-angst favorites: Siamese Dream, The Bends, Pearl Jam’s vs., and so on. I’m greatly enjoying it, which surprises me because I haven’t listened to some of this stuff in years. I might need to get a copy of Weezer’s blue album just to keep the vibe going a little bit longer. Nirvana will have to wait awhile, though, because I’m just not in the mood for them. Maybe I’ll dig really deep and find the old Catherine Wheel. Do I still have a copy of Stone Temple Pilots’ second album? Because I suddenly have need of it again.

Want to follow the progress of my listening project? You can see it here. The general idea is that I start with the newest and work back in time. But I listen to whatever I want to listen to that I haven’t listened to yet.

ONE HUNDRED THINGS OF SOLITUDE ABOUT ME #2:

When I am in a used record store, it always makes me sad when I see one of my favorite albums sitting there for sale. I assume it means someone at some point bought the album, and then later turned against it. Of course in reality it could be that it was fenced, or someone was short on cash, or a multitude of other possibilities. But still, I always go towards that melancholic thought that some other person just didn’t enjoy the album to the extent that I enjoy it. It’s not the fact that someone doesn’t share my tastes that bothers me, its the thought of the betrayal, the rejection. What is it that makes us turn away from our former selves? Is it really just a change of fashion, or something more? Why do we decide we have “moved beyond” something? Do we actually change our tastes, or are we just trying to revise our self-definition through a change in what we consume? To what extent do we really like what we like, and really not like what we don’t like? Are we being true to our feelings, our thoughts? Have you ever gotten rid of an album, and then ended up re-buying it a year or two later because you realized you missed it? Because I have.