Notes for "Re-Wilding: Contemporary Psychedelic Music and Anti-Civilization Rhetorics"

For a paper currently under revision:

The sonic character of contemporary psychedelic music constitutes an argument (or at least an assertion) about the nature of signification.  Its claim can, however, be read in two ways.  Psych may be actively deconstructing the clarity of contemporary recording, just as Zerzan advocates for the erosion and eventual abolition of language.  Maybe psych is straining for some parallel musical form of the wordless 'pure experience' that Zerzan fetishizes.  Or maybe it's something quite different - maybe what psych is telling us is that the imperfection is where the appeal lies, both in music and in language.  Maybe psych is the valorization of the spaces between, of the failures - yes, of the apparent freedom those moments bring, but also of the continued struggle for clarity.

This is why were are specifically talking about contemporary psych, and particularly about its noisy tendencies.  Just as Pierre Menard could rewrite Don Quixote in the 20th century and have it received as an entirely different and brilliant work, contemporary psych musicians can harken back to the fuzz and grime and recording imperfections of their 1970s progenitors, and their sounds have an entirely different meaning.  They live in an era where some sort of perfection is possible, and they consciously reject that.

Also likely relevant - Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever.

Norman Towle: St. Petersburg's Henry Darger?

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art (like this!).  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Last night I hit the opening of one of the more exciting and challenging gallery shows I've seen in a while. The show is at the Venture Compound, a D.I.Y. music and art space in St. Petersburg, FL, and the opening coincided with the 29th installation of the Pangaea Project, an ambitious noise/avante-garde series curated by the Venture group.  The art is by Norman Towle, who died recently at the age of 99.  The show is said to encompass 95% of the work Towle produced in his lifetime.

Knowing Towle's story is key to understanding why this apparently unassuming work is so interesting.  After spending time in the Merchant Marine, Towle attended a technical art institute, then spent several decades as a commercial art retoucher, largely working for the New York Times.  He retired to Florida, only after which, apparently, he actually began to produce art of his own.

And what art.  The works - over a hundred of them - cover everything from local St. Petersburg landscapes, portraits of public figures, nonspecific scenes of everything from dancing to ocean life, abstract works that include elements of collage, and a little bit of softcore pornography.  These are all rendered in a hand that can be described as inexpert, even clumsy.

But the whole body of work, and many of its individual pieces, are profoundly absorbing and multidimensional.  This interest isn't because the work is 'good' in any conventional sense, either technically or because it advances some coherent, self-conscious aesthetic or social message.  Towle falls in that troubled and weird category known with measured condescension as 'folk art' - works and artists whose interest derives from the unselfconsciousness of their process, which allows them to represent, at best, a set of truths as deep as those in more conventional 'high' art.


In Towle's work, as in those of so much folk art, those truths are dual-edged.  On the one hand, when we connect Towle's story to his work, we see the way that modern society can limit human possibility.  These paintings show a man with a profoundly foreshortened vision of life, someone attracted primarily to the most banal of public figures and the safest modes of existence.  There are numerous pictures here of 'beautiful' farmhouses, churches, golf courses, suburban homes, and parking lots (!), and dozens of portraits of presidents and film stars and singers and models. Towle, at least according to his paintings, saw the world exactly as NBC, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have wanted him to.

At the same time, the traces of his own life in Towle's paintings show, through no intent of the artist, what utter lies he was reproducing.  Just as his life fulfilling the commands of others seems to have left him with little ability to reflect critically on the culture around him, decades of touching up other people's images as part of a process that reduced art to nothing but another industrial, assembly-line product seems to have left Towle himself with an imperfect command of fundamental artistic principles of perspective, figure, and color.  His apparent naive reverence for Pope John Paul and suburban normality, filtered through the imperfections that this banal world imposed on his abilities, reveals the absurdity, beauty, and even brutality of modern 'everyday life.'

There's also something profoundly troubling about a man trained in 'art' who produced no work of his own until retiring from his career in the art world.  There's a particular piece here that captures that poignancy - a desolately kitsch landscape of a flower garden, which nonetheless stands out from the other paintings in its technical refinement.  This is apparently another artist's work that Towle gave a few small touch-ups . . . and then signed.  It's one of those instances where the unvarnished reality of folk art manages to convey the desperation and sadness of the human condition far more effectively than 'high' art.  Here and elsewhere, Towle's work, in its way, shows the darkness that lies beneath the facade of normality better than Francis Bacon's.
 

But Towle's work also shows the ability of people to transcend the limits imposed on them by society.  Every observation of Towle's technical limitations comes with the caveat that a great deal of this work was completed when he was in his 80s and 90s, with a hand that would have been unsteady for reasons having nothing to do with skill.  That he persevered at that age at producing any art at all is some kind of testament to human creative energy.  And there's a real joy to lot of the paintings,  something that could be seen as either childlike or just sincere.  It's particularly worth remembering that, as someone born in the early 1920s, who served in the military during the 1940s, Towle would have been close to enough darkness in his life that he might not have had much interest in reproducing it.  What looks to people my age like suburban banality and empty-headed celebrity culture may have been a fully justified retreat to psychic safety for those brutalized by world history and the machinations of social elites.

Big Announcement Time! About My New Book, Blown Horizonz

Hello friends!  I'm really excited to make an exciting announcement. About WRITINGS.

If you read this here blog, you see random, scattered, off-the-cuff musings on a semi-random assortment of popular culture nuggets, political haps, hot links, etc.  But you may also occasionally see links to my writing elsewhere, and maybe you've wondered at those times, HEY, WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?

What's it all about is that I pretty frequently for the last ten years or so have been writing about music for outlets like Tinymixtapes, the Japan Times, The Wag, Popmatters, Audiogalaxy, etc.  I've now finally taken the time to compile some of these pieces into my FIRST BOOK!

It is titled Blown Horizonz: Incidental Comments on Psychedelic Noise, Abstract Rap, and Other Music That Will End Your Mind, and it will be released on September 1st, 2012.

Actually I should have probably written "FIRST BOOK"! above, in scare quotes, because it may or may not be a real "book."  It's an ebook, which I'm self-releasing, with the generous cooperation of my various editors and publishers. Is that a real book?  Your call, bro.

The collection will contain essays about everything from free jazz to weird folk to U.K. garage to Kool Keith.  It includes interviews, mostly with white rappers like Cage, Themselves, and MC Paul Barman.  Some of these pieces are difficult or impossible to find, including essays on Japanese hip hop and the Night People scene that I published in the print-only magazine Signal to Noise, and pieces from a decade ago that only saw the light of day in small newsletters.  There will also be at least one piece written fresh for this collection.

One of the Signal to Noise essays was shortlisted for the 2010 edition of Da Capo Press's Best Music Writing, so that might be worth checking out.  My writing has also been praised by such luminaries as Michael Gira of Swans and Dylan Ettinger.  But just in case that's not compelling enough, you can watch this space over the next month for samples, plugs, and the like.

Best of all, the book will be FREE for at least two weeks after its initial release!  How will I make money, you ask?  And my answer is, of course, volume, my friend.  Volume.

I hope at least one or two of you are as excited about this as I am.  (Thanks Mom!)




If you would be interested in receiving a digital copy of the book for review, please let me know in the comments section below.  Thanks!

Subverts Unite!

We've got a pretty great thing going here in Tampa, what with all the Free Skools, collective spaces, art warehouses, and various mishigas.  But somewhere beneath all that, there's something sinister . . . something bleak and desperate.  A perverse Dadaist conspiracy!  Evidence of it only surfaces in fits and starts, but here is the latest sign that something sinister is afoot, replete with mind-bending tone poems of Reichian Orgone Therapy, violent insurrection, and subconscious mental manipulation.

Subverts Unite!  Issue 2

Steampunk Magazine #8: Late Twice.

I can't believe I didn't post anything about this already, but I guess I've been pretty lax with the blogging in general lately.  Three or four weeks ago saw the release of Steampunk Magazine #8 . . . which contains the first piece of fiction I've published in almost a decade, along with an essay about the ideological relationship between Occupy and Steampunk.  The issue is available online, but if you have the means and interest, I highly recommend you pick up the print version - it's a truly beautiful thing, full of illustrations that deserve to be appreciated in full size on good paper.  We actually have copies with the Occupy Tampa Mobile infoshop, so if you happen to run into us, you can get one without paying for shipping.  In fact, the Infoshop will be out in Gainesville this weekend at the Southeast Regional Convergence of Occupations, so keep an eye out.

Steampunk Magazine is a shockingly awesome radical science-fiction magazine.  Members of its writing and editorial staff have been heavily involved in Occupy, and long before Occupy were doing the godly work of understanding the radical past.  The deep interest in history that the magazine displays is really powerful.  Please check it out.