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Me on Last.fm
I would, of course, be quite happy to take the Jonas Brothers over the real thing at this point. But does said real thing have to imitate Cheney’s ‘I’m going to lurk here like the puppetmaster for a while’ pose while he’s at it?
[UPDATE: WHOA, never mind. Just found something even better:
It...says so much.]
…David J’s best of LA. You know, I’m still annoyed I’ve never seen him do one of his solo sets. I need to fix that. (One of my greatest concert regrets: missing a small show at the Roxy or Whisky back in 1992. Opening act? PJ Harvey. You KNOW that ruled.) Much as I love the work of all four members of Bauhaus, collectively or individually, David’s work has always seemed the most underrated seemingly by intent, a deceptive downplaying of flash in favor of his calmly artistic presentation of style and self. I strongly suggest checking out his homepage, where among other things he’s started to stream a variety of rarities and experiments; meanwhile, his latest project, a musical based on the life of Edie Sedgwick called Silver for Gold, has just finished an initial LA run with plans to go off-Broadway in the future.
Nothing more much than this to say in this post, so as a bonus, the fun video for his almost solo hit back in 1990 “I’ll Be Your Chauffeur.” There’s something sweetly breezy about the visuals here, matching the enjoyable song equally well. The album it’s from, Songs From Another Season, is one of those understated delights that I forget how much I enjoy until I give it another listen. (You can find my AMG mutterings from some years back here.)
Anyway, the video:
Elsewhere, you will read and hear quite a bit about a certain figure reached in terms of certain casualties in a certain country. Set that aside.
Instead, I direct your attention to something else, related to that of course but much more than that. It’s a collection of pieces over at the LA Times where staff writers and photographers talk about military members they met and knew, either briefly or over a period of time, who are now gone.
I have said, quite simply and forthrightly over the years, that we must remember the dead — and that the dead are not simply those who have served in our military. The exact number is and will forever be in dispute but many, many thousands more have died in Iraq for no reason other than being born, raised and having lived there. This is always best remembered, no matter what angle you come from, or what you conclude, or you think our presence or absence would have changed that. I could say more but again, set that aside.
Turn instead to the stories I’ve linked — and note. The men you see talked about there, the men and women who are writing about them, neither are caricatures nor stereotypes. The servicemen are neither paragons of righteousness nor blood-soaked meatheads. The reporters are neither aggressive crusaders for truth nor tools of a mass media conspiracy.
No, they are human, and they are there, and they talk and think and differ and agree, and some are there because of one thing and some for another. The servicemen may have guns but they have brains and souls. The reporters may not fight but they put themselves at risk — and they too have brains and souls. Do I mention one group and your hackles rise? Do I mention another and cause scorn? If so, why so? At what do you react? An objective truth you somehow possess, or a perception based on indirect experience?
These are pat statements on my part, cliches, obvious observations. I pretend nothing in them of remarkable depth or insight. And I fall prey to errors and quick judgments as much as anyone, there is no excusing of that here. There is however a reminder:
Remember the dead. Remember the living who speak about them here. Create no plaster saints, no effigies to burn. No whitewashing, no tarring and feathering.
The numbers will yet rise. And that is all that can be concluded.
[UPDATE: The New York Times has a piece in a similar fashion, though in this case drawing on a variety of blog posts and letters from six soldiers now passed. Read, reflect, remember.]
As I continue in my slow but sure project to reduce down the amount of CDs I have around — to constantly and continually turn away, let go, to stop hoarding — I still allow for those occasional ones I will add to the collection or else trade up for. But some things I wasn’t going to replace even though I loved them dearly because I already had them in a way I could work with — thus Joy Division, whose box set Heart and Soul contained just about everything I could have wanted from them. So when the word of the reissues came out last year, I thought, “Eh, well…I don’t need to re-replace everything, and live sets aren’t necessarily enough.” I’d heard the live disc from the box, of course, as well as two further separately released live sets in later years, most sourced from any number of bootlegs long familiar to hyperfans (I could never count myself among them, much as I love them and New Order both — but a dedicated fan, yes).
Then Dr. C on ILM mentioned that the live discs for both Closer and Still were both fantastic, superb, ‘as good as it gets.’ Hmm, I thought, and made a mental note. Up in LA yesterday dumping off some stuff at Amoeba I ended up with more credit to spare than I had first guessed and decided to browse a bit — and found both of those reissues used, meaning I could get them for nothing and still have a lot left over. Hurrah for fortuitousness.
I’m not positive but I’m pretty sure I first heard of Joy Division in specific via an issue of Musician magazine from early 1988, which I picked up because of the Pink Floyd story on the cover (as I said a little while back, this was part and parcel of my high school classic rock phase in senior year, but at the same time I wasn’t limiting myself to just that, thankfully). The story was by Robert Palmer (not THAT one, the one who was the writer) and while bits of it seemed a bit forced then and still do now, overall it fulfilled its brief very well, namely talking about both Joy Division and New Order in a context that an older-than-me music-following audience unaware of either might get to grips with.
I’d already heard about New Order for a couple of years before then. That was the point, everyone had, or so it seemed. Four songs in particular — “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “Shell Shock,” “True Faith” and “Blue Monday” — had received enough airplay even on local San Diego Top 40 radio to get my attention, while doubtless my many classmates who openly worshipped at the altar of 91X knew them all a lot more than I did. I remember seeing people carrying around the cassettes of the then newly released Substance for their walkmen at school and then there was also the video for “True Faith,” all over MTV and which was so much odd nonsense (but in the context of the many videos done for the band over the years, surprisingly apt, another cryptic dodge that didn’t so much work with the band as around it). Soon after we got a CD player one of the first ones I picked up was Brotherhood, an album that I retain a particular affection for still, as partially detailed in this old ILM thread. So encountering this article, and learning, as mentioned pretty much for the first time, about this earlier band was instructive.
(Just typing all this makes me laugh a bit at how things have changed in terms of finding out about bands, or anything else you’re interested in. That iPhone story I linked the other day shows that much. But I’m not going to venerate some sort of golden age of spending a lot of time to find out about something — it’s not the means, it’s the person. There are, for instance, approximately eight million trillion bits of information I could find out about NASCAR right this second should I so choose, but I don’t care about NASCAR.)
Anyway, thanks in part to a couple of interestingly odd Anton Corbijn photos to go with it, the article stuck in the mind, as did mentions of the fact that Joy Division themselves were going to get a collection of their own coming out soon, also called Substance. Though I didn’t know it at all at the time, I was the unwittingly beneficiary of something that apparently had long been asked for by fans — a proper overview of the group’s many singles, including a nearly impossible to find release of “Atmosphere” and “Dead Souls.” The vinyl release had ten songs but the CD release had seventeen, so being able to hear all this stuff made me all the more interested, and so soon thereafter I had my copy of it. I remember being initially surprised and confused by the earliest songs like “Warsaw,” thrashy, strange, somewhat contextless beyond the vaguest of impressions. But as the disc progressed, things became…not more familiar, but more understandable, and further relistens of everything over and again helped bring it all more to life.
Turning this all into a full discussion of my sinking into Joy Division is actually not my goal here, though — better to briefly say that within a year or so I owned the initial Warners reissues of Unknown Pleasures and Closer, as well as the two Peel Session EPs, while sometime after that I first taped Still from a roommate at UCLA then found a CD copy on import. To say that I grew fascinated by and reasonably knowledgeable about the story of Joy Division — building up of course to Ian Curtis’s suicide and the aftermath — is true, yet both music and story were not, I think, as overwhelming presences to me and my way of thinking about things musically as many other things were. They were a strong part of it, as was New Order, but both their presences have felt, after that initial series of exposures, constant instead of overwhelming — and yet always somehow core, deeply felt and understood but not worn on my sleeve (or on a T-shirt, though I do have a knockoff of the Unknown Pleasures image that features on an old shirt for the now departed Costa Mesa record store Noise Noise Noise).
In ways, though, my acting diffident on this matter is a bit of a runaround — there’s a lot I could say about Bernard Sumner in particular, whose tragedy-driven forcing to the center stage after initial unsureness turned him into an anti-icon icon, somebody whose essential everydayness, but not without a quiet sense of style, makes him this compelling figure that has had more of an impact than I think a lot of people will fully allow for, including himself. But this is a long brewing piece for another day (seriously, I’ve been thinking about it on and off for about two, three years now!).
As with much I heard back then, the presence of Joy Division in my regular listening is low — it’s comfortable, familiar, brought out only every so often, and much new and old that’s unknown to me is what I hear most now. But the indulgences of a reissue that had been so praised had to be obeyed in this instance, and so I bought and listened and read.
Read, very importantly — there were liner notes for both of the ones I got (doubtless for Unknown Pleasures too) and perhaps unsurprisingly Paul Morley did the ones for Closer, along with all the bandmembers minus the obvious, while Jon Wozencroft did the honors for Still. Both live up to their reputations, providing information while simultaneously obscuring some details and demystifying others, such as how Wozencroft heard himself on a bootleg that ended up being the source for the bonus disc material, as well as being able to meet the original record of that tape and to get his words on the matter.
And the live bonus discs — as advertised, quite good. Audience recordings that aren’t muffled except by the inevitable limitations of the original recording equipment; I’m sure I’ve heard far worse ‘official’ live recordings from bands over time. The struggles between band and producer Martin Hannett to get their sound captured in a way they liked are part of the legend so at base hearing more of what the band sounded like to themselves, at least in some form, is of definite interest. There’s actually more going on in those live performances which paralleled the eventual releases than the band might have recognized at the time, or even now.
It’s also fascinating to see what the band brought to their setlists — on both these live discs, done a few weeks before Closer was even recorded in one intense two week session in London, the band sticks almost entirely to that new material as well as other new songs, notably “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “These Days.” On one disc the only Unknown Pleasures song that appears is “Insight,” on another “Disorder.” And the crowd, far from being restless, audibly loves all the new stuff, as it would have been then. Not a unique situation, but still something that happens less often than might be hoped, even now.
It’s getting late and I do need to wrap up — the work grind tomorrow calls — but hearing all these familiar-yet-different songs remind me how I can still be surprised, even from a supposedly well-known source. As I said the other day, I’m glad to be living in 2008 rather than 1988, but I’m more than happy with this particular flashback. Even down to that goofy cover of “Sister Ray” that surfaced on Still.
All the candy’s cheap tomorrow.
Hope everyone’s been having a good day — this weekend has been rest, recuperation and more, god knows I’ve needed it. It’s beautiful outside and I’m looking forward to either trying out an old recipe I like or else trying a new one for the hell of it — we’ll see how I feel — but either way it’ll make a great dinner. Spring’s here and my mood is already well on the up.
More books, music, politics and more to talk and think about soon, trust me — including a couple of fine purchases I snagged for free yesterday at Amoeba…
And I kinda assume that’s my shadow in the corner. But who knows. Welcome spring and happy Easter in any event!
So two weeks into owning one — and it is a treat and all — and I’m amused to see this article over in the LA Times about “the risk for iPhone users: they know too much,” complete with lame illustrative photo.
Now on the one hand I can see why people get annoyed in situations like this:
Backstage recently in a Little Rock, Ark., theater, actress Natalie Canerday said the cast of a play was enjoying debating the year Bruce Springsteen’s album “Born to Run” was released. Then the director took out his iPhone. All conversation stopped as he sought the answer: 1975, according to Wikipedia.
“Everyone said, ‘Oh,’ ” Canerday recalled. It was another awkward iPhone moment.
(Admittedly my problem would have been the fact that they were discussing that album to start with, but set that aside.)
However, this I don’t get:
Daniel Bernstein had one when he arranged to meet friends at a bowling alley in Daly City, near San Francisco. The lanes were booked. Bernstein used his iPhone to locate another bowling alley 10 miles away, find out how long the wait for a lane was and get driving directions.
Bernstein, director of business development at an Internet company, said his friends seemed more irked than appreciative. “They said, ‘Thank you, iPhone,’ ” and not very nicely.
I get this image that Bernstein’s friends would have much preferred sitting around complaining about the slow bowlers on the one lane they desperately wish would have been freed up. Which, I should say, I can understand as an impulse, but if you’re wanting to go do something, just go do it!
Which is why I’m out the door for a good chunk of the day. Have a great Saturday!
So I had thought I wasn’t going to say much more tonight about things — though I am waiting to hear back from a friend about stepping out for a quick chat and a drink — but in waiting I stumbled across this story, one of a flood on Iraq given the five years since the invasion. Not an obscure story, really — it’s on the front page of the New York Times — but it focuses on something that had been fairly obscure to me, namely the nature of death benefits and how they have been distributed among survivors of the dead American military members in Iraq.
The parents of Sgt. Eli Parker of the Marines, killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, used the $500,000 to finance their retirement, remodel their house near Syracuse and travel to Washington for the Marine Corps Marathon. After Sgt. Dominic J. Sacco of the Army was killed three years ago by an insurgent attack on his tank, his widow, Brandy, fielded requests for cash from family members she had not talked to for years — as well as from her husband’s ex-wife and a woman in prison who claimed that Sergeant Sacco had fathered her son.
Kayla Avery, whose husband was killed seven months after their West Point wedding, invested most of the payout, but not before buying new bedroom furniture, a Louis Vuitton wallet and a purple Coach bag to match her funeral clothes.
“I thought, ‘Well, this is my husband’s last Christmas gift to me,’ ” said Ms. Avery, 25, a graduate student in psychology who lives in Tennessee, near Fort Campbell, where her husband, First Lt. Garrison C. Avery, was an Army platoon leader.
Three understandable situations each — the second is the most obviously troubling, but was outside of the control of the widow. The other two are similar to each other in how the money was used, a balance of personal betterment, material goods and some forethought (Avery herself credits a financial adviser for helping her with her money — and having been through grad school I can agree it’s good to have a cushion, for sure).
There’s not much I can add to the story itself — I think overall it does a very deft job of noting how the collision of high emotion, potential inexperience and the quantifying of a life via an amount of money results in a spread of possible results that vary situation to situation, person to person. (The contrasting stories of the widow feeling resentful over her husband’s family getting most of the money versus — in a separate situation — the mother who thinks that the widow received attention equally due to herself and her family shows just how tricky this all is, and how the idea of a perfect resolution is chimeric, the potential of insult added to injury taken to a depressing but unsurprising extreme.)
But it does make me think a bit about my own background — my dad’s service being in the sub fleet, there was really no risk run during Vietnam, the most above-board conflict that occurred during his service which he would have faced a direct combat role, as opposed to a higher-serving position in command, which is what he eventually did in his final Navy tour of duty overseeing an intelligence installation at Point Loma during the Gulf War. The idea of my dad possibly never coming back from his job honestly never occurred to me, I’m sure — whatever nuclear war concerns I had in the eighties, and I did have them, they had the perverse virtue of being all-encompassing. I wouldn’t have to worry about being left behind, in that nobody would be around.
Perhaps unduly flippant, given the subject matter. But experience and expectation forms mindsets, and had my dad passed in the line of duty, how would the family have handled things? Of course I’m relieved that the question is entirely academic, but much like the fright that my sister’s disastrous plunge at Honolulu’s airport when she was a baby caused all of us, it puts the what-if question to the fore. As with that situation, I am happy to count my blessings and good fortune.
But to turn from my personal lens — this story serves as a reminder of something that is, theoretically, apolitical. Regardless of what one feels regarding the validity of the original Iraq invasion or the act of still being there, the idea of doing something for the survivors is beyond reproach, a natural extension of the presumed commitment in military service and the honoring of responsibilities and promises kept on the part of the government. That the amount granted has been increased, and retroactively applied to October 2001, is good — but ultimately there are institutional considerations at work which belong to no party, and which are never going to be ‘solved’ in a way that provides a happy answer to all parties involved.
Still, I also think this — these are situations where, for all the pain and sorrow and more involved, there is an end to the story in some respects, a finality on the part of the dead serviceman or servicewoman. But there are many, many more injured or affected than dead, and their struggles, from the minimal to the harrowing, up to and including suicide, cannot be ignored either. In many ways, they have not been all this time, but in others, I think that they have not been fully understood or appreciated. Ultimately, especially with reference to those whose struggles may solely be psychological, the responsibility is one that should be shouldered by a government and administration dedicated to their care, as appropriate, as needed. If someone supported the war, they should be willing to support the committing of resources via the VA or whatever means seems best to assist as a veteran needs or desires it. If someone opposed it, they should do similar. And this commitment can and will run for decades.
To step back, though — this is not a presumption that everyone who served has been scarred or feels traumatized. Such a conclusion denies agency on the part of those who have served and have their own thoughts, which can and do run the gamut, from BlackFive to the Winter Soldiers and back again.
But for the dead, whose thoughts are now forever stilled, there are the survivors, the disbursements, the decisions. Money can make people do strange things to our eyes, perhaps — but would we have done any better?
I had thought I might do some sort of reflective post tonight about something or other, having had a nice dinner, a bit of a stretch and a long soak in the shower (good for mind body and soul, I find), but courtesy of friend Mike I’ve now seen this dumbfounding artifact from 1969:
And really, I have nothing to add. The past is not merely a foreign country where they do things differently there, it is a place inhabited by the insane.
