Ear Relevant

This is "the shit everyone else has turned me on to recently" edition.

Joey Bada$$
First head this at Justin Martin's apartment. I think he was cooking me some food. Or we were just drinking. Either way, this is tight. He (Joey, not Justin) collabed with Chance the Rapper recently, one of my Chicago hip-hop favs. Good beats, tight rhymes. Beats the shit out of the drill scene. Stream or download on this website RIGHT HERE.

Follakzoid
I missed these guys at the Empty Bottle the other week, but Peter saw them twice at SXSW and for good reason apparently. Chilean krautrock that you must check out. 



Faun and a Pan Flute
Greg Fox tweeted about this band at SXSW aaaannndd yeah, check 'em out. Atlanta experimental psych-rock in a word:



Alla
Jon Graef loves this band. I waited way too long to listen to them. Chicagoist has the exclusive download RIGHT HERE.

Sabina Sciubba
Singer from Brazilian Girls doing some solo stuff. Yes, this video is just as weird as you'd expect it to be, and her voice and the song is just as good as you'd expect it to be.



Gabe Liebowitz
Singer of Dastardly covers some good shit (Smiths, Bowie, the Stones), some funny banter, and not afraid to let his voice crack every now and again. WARNING: depressing as shit. ALSO: moving. ALSO: funny.



Still not enough music? Check out The Reader's Jukebox, featuring my suggestion of Marquee Moon.

Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life

Recently discovered what Open Culture is: a brilliant website that hosts free movies, language courses, ebooks, and other educational media. While perusing the movie section, I discovered this little gem, which imagines the difficulty Franz Kafka had while trying to write the Metamorphosis. The Open Culture page links to three parts, but HBO Films has it in one go (only 23 minutes) below. Enjoy.

52 Books 52 Weeks

I recently wrote about both these books for Frontier Psychiatrist. One I loved, one was meh. Let's start with the meh.

9. There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (finished March 6th)

Obviously the title is what attracted me to this book. Ominous, morbid, bizarre, I figured it'd be right up my alley. Unfortunately, the collection of short stories by the celebrated Russian author failed to really grip. What few moments of perceptive insight (is that a redundancy?) were overshadowed by the failure to create well-rounded characters, offering only a sketch of disappointingly unfulfilling stories. I try to seek the good in every censored writer, as it is something I doubt I will ever have to encounter and it takes courage to write in such an oppressive society, but there just wasn't anything memorable to me in the collection.

(click here for the full, original review)






10. A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (finished March 12th)

READ THIS BOOK. RIGHT NOW. I've gushed about this enough on Facebook and Twitter and to anyone who has had the (mis)fortune talking to me while I've been drunk since I read this book because I've just been going on and on about. Please someone else read this so we can talk about it. Long story short: woman in Vancouver finds a diary written by a girl in Tokyo, woman tries to find out more about this girl and her family's history. Learn about environmental devastation, crows, Marcel Proust, "the half-life of information," meta-fiction, and the differences (or lack thereof) between Zen Buddhism and quantum mechanics.

(click here for the full, original review)

Jamaican Queens

everytime
you’re feeling lonely
everytime
you’re feeling blue
everytime
you feel down hearted 

just remember
we’re all wormfood

Been awhile since I gushed over an album so much. But I really fucking love this new Jamaican Queens record. LISTEN TO THIS:

2011 Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan

(photo source)

I can't remember where I was when I first heard about the tsunami and earthquake in Japan in 2011. I know I was in France somewhere, probably too concerned with my immediate surroundings (ie, going to art museums and drinking wine) to worry about breaking world news. I do remember seeing images of whole buildings swept away by fantastic waves, resulting in towns that used to exist but no longer do.

Today is the anniversary of when the gigantic storm first hit. The nearest major city to the earthquake's epicenter was Sendai. I don't remember this name from news coverage back then, but I know it now. Coincidentally, I finished reading Ruth Ozeki's newest book today, A Tale for the Time Being. At the risk of violating critical ethics and saying too much before my official review, this was the most inspiring, brilliant page-turner I have read since Teju Cole's Open City. In short, it involves a woman in a small town near Vancouver who discovers a diary that washes up on shore from a girl in Japan, presumably killed in the 2011 tsunami. The book investigates time, fiction, quantum mechanics, and ecology all in one ambitious, but immensely gripping and satisfying story.

I have no real connection to Japan, but the more I read, the more interested in it I become. While Ozeki was born in America, half the book is from the point of view of a Japanese teenage girl, who uses many Japanese phrases which Ruth translates for us. Between this, recently reading Out, and Haruki Murakami in the past, it is definitely a culture of literature I need to explore more. And to find out if cats find their way into being a major character in every single Japanese novel or if this has just been a coincidence between the three.

In wake of such tragedies, it is always moving to find the ways humanity endures. One of my favorite art blogs, Colossal, posted today about an 88-foot tall sculpture that represents one remaining pine tree that survived for a year and a half after the storm hit. 

Death, Meaning, Motivation, Translation

(Construction cranes in the bamboo forest; Balancing nature and urbanization in China PSA Advertising)

From the Book of Northern Qi, 7th century Chinese text: "大丈夫寧可玉砕何能瓦全."

Translation: "A man would rather be a shattered jade than be a complete roof tile."

Alternative translation: "A great man should die as a shattered jewel rather than live as an intact tile."

Google translation: "A real man would rather jade Sui who can be your guns."


Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary: "Prefiero morir de pie que vivir de rodillas."

Translation: "It is better to die upon your feet than to live upon your knees."

Alternative translation: "I prefer to die standing than to live forever kneeling."

Google translation: "I'd rather die standing than live on your knees."

So You Want to Be A Writer?

Gene's response to my post yesterday about (what to pay writers / if writers should write for free / why someone should pay me to read) was a poem by Charles Bukowski. I'd bet Chuck'd be glad his stuff still gets shared on Facebook almost twenty years after his death. Speaking of, tomorrow is his deathday! Memento mori, y'all:

Charles Bukowski, "So You Want to Be A Writer"

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Who Pays Writers?

Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow (1956)

I keep seeing links to this site popping up in my twitter feed. Who Pays Writers? offers writers a chance to anonymously post what websites pay them for pieces, "intended to be informational, not judgmental." In addition to this, we have two points of view of a person who chooses to write for free and that of one who never does. And at the same time, we have two profiles of a day in the life of a freelance journalist in 2013 as well a day in the life of a digital editor at the Atlantic. Finally, an online conversation has been evolving between various people in charge of writer pay rates at well known websites (the Awl, Boing Boing, the Observer, the Atlantic, etc.) and a general discussion of how much a writer should get paid.

As someone with an interest in writing but with no educational background in any form of it (creative or journalistic), I recognize I am already a step behind every other person I have to compete with in either of these fields. I have few connections to people that can support, cultivate, motivate, edit, whatever to my work. Essentially, this is why I have to write for free. Perhaps it is naive on my part, maybe I really am the greatest fucking writer ever and I'm making a huge mistake by not putting myself out there and depriving the world of my unique perspective and keen social wit. Unfortunately, I have little to no ego, so I'm going to assume this is not the case. 

The thing is, I don't really have a problem writing for free right now. I try not to spread myself all over. I could probably have been on a bunch of online publications by now, but I have chosen to stick by a certain few, developing more of a relationship with my editors and fellow writers, instead of jumping from unknown site to unknown site. I think of "Better know nothing than half-know many things" and Badiou's philosophy of commitment and fidelity. 

Perhaps I'm also more patient than I realize. I have time to "make it" as a writer. I have time to go back to school to get a graduate degree. For right now I can work a part-time job that allows me to live in a city that I love, to attend cultural events, to work these writing gigs that aren't entirely without their perks, to take time off to travel, to expand my life experiences before I devote myself entirely to the written/typed word.

I'm also allowed more time before the inevitbale reality of repeated rejection. Right now I am a blank slate, free to explore any silly little ideas that creep into my mind, without a history to remain consistent with (not that I have ever worried about that; "with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do;" not that I believe in a soul; sorry, tangent).

There is no question that we live in a time where there is more written content than ever before, more writers, and more people that think they're writers. I am currently reading A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and she quotes Milan Kundera from Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980): "Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time isn't far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding." That was written in Nineteen-Fucking-Eighty. How prophetic. I want to attain that ability to be so perceptive. Which is part of why I continue to read more than I write. Essentially, I only write in order to read more. Which is why I propose this: somebody pay me to read. It would be much more preferable to writing. I wouldn't have to get into that whole messy business of revealing who I am to the world, exposing my innermost skeletons and shedding light on the darkness that the world inevitably creates in every single human being. I could just read! I wouldn't even need to be paid that much. So let's stop worrying about how much to pay you writers and start worrying how much to pay me, your reader.

Criticism

Francis Bacon, Figure with Meat (1954)

I've long been undecided on what to call it is what I do with my writing online. Is it fair to say I do book and music reviews? Can I consider myself a critic? I listen to a lot of stuff I don't like, and I generally just ignore it. With literature, I'm more particular about what I read, since it is more of a time involvement. Not to say I always play it safe, but I at least want to find something that will at least bring something new to the world of literature. So when I "review" things, they are generally positive. No press is bad press, so why waste time putting words together to indirectly promote something I don't like?

It's this point of view that many have argued is what is wrong with critics today. I'm not sure how much of a critical eye or ear I have. But I consume a lot, and for things that I like, I want to promote them. That's why you're here. You think that I have something to offer (a new band, a new book) that you as well will enjoy and will enhance your life in some way. Perhaps that is why I like Twitter. I can simply express distaste for something in a sentence or two, not worry about thinking about it critically.

A recent article by Maria Popova is quite in line with my point of view. The brief article culminates in this final line: "That is the promise of the critic-as-celebrator—to inform and shape culture by virtue of elevation." Which reinforces that you don't have to like everything: not everyone deserves a trophy. And yeah, I guess it is a little hippieish, not wasting time spreading negative energy and all that. Ultimately, if a book is so shitty that it creates feelings of ire from the depths of my being, it may be worth writing about for stirring as intense of an emotion that the most brilliantly life-changing novels have made me feel. But boredom, dislike, or (worst of all) a complete lack of any emotional stir isn't worth the time that I already spent reading such a piece of garbage. 


Further reading:

The Decline of Book Reviewing

Against Enthusiasm

The Case for Positive Book Reviews

Ear Relevant

Damn, last week was a busy music week. Writing and going to shows. Recap time:

Monday:

First part of Frontier Psychiatrist's timeline of the 22 years between between My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and the new album, mbv. My pieces include albums by the Lilys, the Swirlies, and Spiritualized' smashterpiece Ladies and Gentlemen We're Floating in Space. 

That night, I saw the Ex Cops at the Empty Bottle. A short set, a little sloppy, but definitely a band with potential. Like a shoegaze version the Go Betweens, more melodic, than wall of noise sound. Songs are short and sweet, and their new album True Hallucinations gets better with each listen.

Tuesday:

Part two of FP's timeline. I reviewed Autolux, and discovered I didn't hate No Age as much as when I first heard them.

That night saw Bosnian Rainbows at the Bottom Lounge, then hightailed it over to a basement in Logan Square to catch the end of Dada Trash Collage's set. Wish I caught more. New EP just came out. Surprise hit of the night was catching Selectronics, also with a new album. Very visual live show with projections, a red light-up cube, tapedeck rapping, hip-hop beats and lo-fi analog aesthetics. Definitely one to catch if you see the name around.

Wednesday:

Nearing exhaustion, managed to catch Mountains at the Hideout with White/Cream and Bitchin Bajas. Recap up on Windy City Rock. Mountains' experimental/ambient Centralia is one of the best this year so far, although they unfortunately didn't perform any of it.

Thursday:

Reviewed the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album Push the Sky Away for Frontier Psychiatrist as well as previewed Conductive Alliance's upcoming album, Opticks, on Windy City Rock.

52 Books 52 Weeks

Uh oh. I'm falling behind. Shit. Ok. Here's a recent recap.

(5a. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

I know I know I know. I'm not counting this one for my 52 book count. It was a quick read of short memoirs published posthumously. I started it since I was reading a lot about the modernist period, and Hemingway not only has some great passages that give insight into his first marriage, but to Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald as well. Not to mention Paris in the 20s was no doubt a magical time of creativity, so much so that even the seemingly innocuous or simple stories are downright inspiring within that setting and Hemingway's use of language as a 1-2 punch to bring his point home.)









(Full reviews for Pow! and How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia are on Frontier Psychiatrist: Don't Speak, Tell...)

6. Pow! by Mo Yan (finished February 8th)

Last year's Nobel Prize winner in literature has been under much criticism. Since he is a Communist Party member, other Chinese writers and artists say he is not true in his words, and he has been criticized for not speaking out enough for jailed contemporaries. He responded to many of these allegations in his first interview since winning the prize. As for the story itself, it weaves contemporary with traditional themes, in a tale that focuses around a family that works in a slaughterhouse. Bathed in dark humor and magical realism, the alternating timelines and vulgarity of the book made for an unexpectedly fascinating read. The ending was unfortunately a bit rushed, but Yan had me in his grips all the way leading up to then. As disappointing as the end was, the rest of the novel was enough for me to want to check out his earlier works. 





7. How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid (finished February 12th)

This is the third novel by Pakistani born Mohsin Hamid. As its title implies, it reads as a how-to book, and can be read as one character's life over seven decades, or various storylines happening simultaneously. It was a quick read, and danced between a light-heartedness as well as uncovering the harsh reality of trying to better ones place in "Rising Asia." While the setting is most likely inspired by Hamid's native Lahore, it never specifically mentions it. The book was good overall, but something about the quick pace of it leaves me wanting more, and not necessarily in a good way. What I do appreciate about the book is its attempt (inadvertently, I'm sure) to break the barrier between First and Third World Issues, when so often they are the exact same thing.





 8. Out by Natsuo Kirino (finished February 25th)

Whoa, this was a fucked up book. Four women work the night shift at a boxed lunch factory, and all struggle in their personal lives. One with a family that ignores her, one who has to take care of her own senile mother, one who's husband leaves her after a dramatic fight, and one who ends up murdering her husband. This last woman gets the help from the other women to help her out, but cutting up the body into tiny pieces and disposing of it in various places around the suburbs Tokyo. Between reading this and recently watching Lost in Beijing (a film banned in mainland China, which involves the lives of two Chinese couples dealing with the consequences of rape and infidelity), not to mention the previous two books, my head is reeling in how seedy, dirty, and unethical the entire continent of Asia is. I jest of course, but it was certainly eye-opening, surprising, and an intense cerebral experience to take in all of this in a short period of time.