There’s a new horrorblog on the block, name of Corpse Eaters, and I’m already enjoying it quite a bit. Most promising is mononymed blogger Steven’s planned series examining interesting aspects of the Friday the 13th series. No kiddin’!

Also on the horrorblog tip, The Missus discovered a fascinatingly creepy series of posts by M Valdemar’s Howard Peirce on the time he spent living in a haunted house. Once again, no kiddin’!

My friend Karolyn Gehrig is a very talented artist, and she has a new website showcasing her work. I think it will be of interest to horror fans, just to stick with that theme, but by no means exclusively to them. Check it out.

It occurs to me that I should maybe mention when I have pieces out in dead-tree publications. Check out the latest issue of Giant Magazine (Tom Cruise’s beard is on the cover) for reviews of Joe Sacco’s War’s End and Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven.

Finally, I put some clips from my old gig as an editor and writer at Abercrombie & Fitch’s magazine/catalog/softcore hybrid the A&F Quarterly up on the site as PDFs for your perusal. Lots of fun humor features and tons of interviews, including ones with Frank Miller, Underworld, Brian Bendis, Fischerspooner, Paul Pope, Drea DeMatteo, Craig Thompson, the Dandy Warhols, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Bettie Page. Yes, that Bettie Page. One more time: No kiddin’!

I am utterly incapable of providing you with a dispassionate review of a Star Wars film–I do have a Rebel Alliance insignia tattooed on my right arm, after all–so I’m not going to bother trying. I do want to say that I loved this movie, and I’m going to try to articulate why:

It has all the seriousness, grandiosity, and gravitas with which a person like me, who grew up loving Star Wars so unbelievably much, imbued the events it chronicles as I constructed and imagined them in my young (and old) mind. It was not afraid to take itself just as seriously as I’ve always taken it. I appreciate that. I understand that this is also often a recipe for terrible, terrible genre art–the attempts of 35 year olds to justify their love of kiddie culture they’re embarrassed about liking by making it Grim And Gritty And Serious As A Heart Attack. The difference here, and I understand I might be parsing things in a too-indiosyncratic way, as some of my interlocutors have suggested I did in trying to differentiate between what Lost and Twin Peaks and Palomar do versus what Guiding Light or General Hospital do, but the difference here is that George Lucas was never embarrassed, and neither was I.

That’s all. I assure you there is next to no point in trying to engage me on this–my fault, not yours–but I’m not going to stop you if you feel you must.

With a little help from the Missus, I have at long last procured working links for PDF versions of the various papers on horror I wrote during my bright (or perhaps dark (but shining)?) college years. You can find them all here. Individual links are as follows:

The Things That Should Not Be: The Monumental Horror-Image and Its Relation to the Contemporary Horror Film (this one’s my Senior Essay, and probably the one you want to read if you are really interested in my take on the genre)

Pigs: Deliverance, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the Horror of a Dead Frontier (after my Senior Essay, this is the piece I’m proudest of)

Cry Havoc: The Use of Sound in Alfred Hitchcock

Last night I was dealt a remarkably lousy couple of hands by my favorite reality television programs (Kahlen and Vonzell were both ROBBED), so I was very happy to discover that the new episode of Lost was terrific, a real corker both in the flashbacks and on the island. In discussing it a bit at work today, it occurred to me that it’s unbelievable that a network television show is still raising more questions than it’s answering this deep into the season (next week’s two-hour episode is the season finale). That is very ballsy indeed. Now, you can already see some of the stupider TV critics and writers getting attention-span fatigue and complaining about the lack of “resolution” (ecch, ptooey), but there does seem to be an audience for this type of multi-tiered, complex, teased-out storytelling, which is enormously uplifting. And I think this phenomenon is getting much less rare since the advent of The HBO Original Series. Pre-Sopranos, you could probably count the examples of this type of show throughout the entire history of television on one hand with room left over; the only ones I can think of are Twin Peaks, (and from here on out I’m just telling you what I been told; never watched these series) Homicide, Wiseguy, and maybe Hill Street Blues and, if you credit the “mythology” episodes and ignore the standalone enigma-of-the-week ones, The X-Files.

There are probably several reasons for this relative renaissance, the most obvious one being that The Sopranos was a big hit, and the desire to make David Chase bucks made the suits a little more willing to take a chance on series that don’t have an immediate episode-to-episode payoff. But I wonder if new technologies like TiVo and DVDs aren’t also playing a major role in how narrative fiction is developing on the tube, insofar as they’re making complex series economically feasible in ways they didn’t used to be. Back in 1990, a show like Twin Peaks could make a huge splash, but if it demanded too much week-in week-out attention from its viewership, network pressure to make the show accessible (in Peaks‘s case by revealing whodunit) would quickly kill what was special in the show, if not kill the show outright. Nowadays viewers, and more importantly executives and producers, know that it’s easy enough to “catch up” by hitting a few buttons on your DVR or renting the first season through Netflix. Perhaps we can expect the complexity of televised fiction, even on the benighted networks, to expand accordingly.

I only recently realized that television has the potential to construct the same sort of growing, organic, expansive worlds that the best serialized comics can. Why aren’t there more shows like Love & Rockets (Jaime Hernanez’s Locas, Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar), or like a really great superhero-title run (Brubaker & Philips’s Sleeper, Bendis & Maleev’s Daredevil, Morrison’s New X-Men, to name but a few)? YMMV on each of those examples (though few people can get away with saying they care for neither Gilbert nor Jaime), but as networks discover that the money is in fact there to be made, the ability of serialized narrative to do long-lasting layered storytelling is a source of strength that TV is only beginning to tap into.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been informed that the book Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson addresses similar issues; you can find a debate between Johnson and Slate’s TV critic Dana Stevens here. Note that Johnson too picks up on the advantages TiVo and DVDs present to demanding storytelling, though he focuses only on the fact that these enable viewers to avoid the distraction of commercials.

Three unexpected places:

1) My dreams. In addition to the two extraordinarly vivid ones I described over at The Outbreak, I had another one involving a bizarre prelude to Star Wars Episode IV in which Luke was from Earth and got involved in a hideously violent child-gang massacre, and eventually executed their ganglord by hanging him from a tree with piano wire and leaving him to slowly asphyxiate.

2) My iTunes. Maybe it’s just because I was writing down my dreams at the time, but Elbow’s album Asleep in the Back is really chilling.

3) My weekly comics. Daredevil #73 is a surprisingly effective little horror comic, believe it or not. That’s about as much as I can say about that without getting in trouble, but if you read it you’ll see what I mean.

What with Little Terrors, Dark But Shining, M Valdemar, The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire, Infocult, Laylasweetie, Dracula Blogged, and all the other horrorblogs I’ve suddenly stumbled across, I thought now would be as good a time as any to point out that even before The Outbreak, I was something of a horrorblogger myself, sometimes quite intensely so.

While a quick Google search through the site for the term “horror” is as good a piece of evidence of this as any, my finest horrorblogging moment–well, less a moment than a month–was my October 2003 project Where the Monsters Go, a month-long horror blogathon. Presented below for your perusal are links to all the WtMG posts I did, from the initial posts in which I sketched out my broad feelings and specific theories about the genre (including those presented in my senior thesis from Yale) as well as explained the reasoning behind the project itself, to the big climax, The 13 Days of Halloween, during which I watched and reviewed the 13 scariest movies I ever seen. (Everyone diggin’ on that grammatical shout-out to Large Marge?) I really enjoy digging these posts up (pun certainly intended) and re-reading them every now and then; hopefully you will too. Consider them my contribution to this nascent (to me, at least) horror blogosphere.

(The only caveat is that the frequently promised links to PDFs of various horror-focused papers I wrote while in college are all down; I’ll try and come up with a solution to this soon, but it’ll probably take a while. I promise you they all got As.)

(UPDATE: And they’re up! You’ll now be able to access all of my horror paper PDFs through the links you find in all the original posts below; you can also find a handy index of them here.)

One last thing before I leave you to the links: I was reading this Laylasweetie post when I got hit with the hugest attack of deja vu. And then I read this Haunted Vampire post about that Laylasweetie post and got hit with it again. To quote my beloved Lost Highway, this is some seriously spooky shit, sir.

And now, the monsters.

—–

10-1-2003: Where the Monsters Go: October is Horror Month at ADDTF

10-2-2003: Where the Monsters Go: The Things That Should Not Be (and yeah, I fixed the link)

10-2-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Scary Blogsters

10-3-2003: Where the Monsters Go: The Things That Should Not Be HTMLified

10-3-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Fear, Foreknowledge, Foreboding, Frisson, The Shining, Signs, Funk, Techno, Prog…

10-4-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “I don’t read horror comics”

10-5-2003: Where the Monsters Go: unfunnybooks

10-6-2003: Where the Monsters Go: I Will Be

10-7-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Scary Blogsters II

10-8-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Time

10-9-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Triple Double

10-10-2003: Where the Monsters Go: On with the Show

10-10-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Blood Feasts

10-11-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Game over

10-12-2003: Where the Monsters Go: in dreams I stalk with you

10-13-2003: Where the Monsters Go: In the Darkness bind them

10-14-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Paperhouse, or “So it begins”

10-14-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Here, There, and Everywhere

10-14-2003: Where the Monsters Go: IncisionDecision

10-15-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Disembodied brains

10-15-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “You know how things are: Life goes on”

10-16-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “What can we do? What can we do?

10-17-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Things I missed

10-18-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “People die every day”

10-19-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “No… No…“

10-20-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “You’ll simply never understand the true meaning of sacrifice.”

10-21-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “seeking human victims”

10-22-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “We’re all expecting great things”

10-22-2003: Where the Monsters Go: A feature, not a bug

10-23-2003: Where the Monsters Go: They’re all messed up

10-23-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Scottie’s choice

10-23-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “Fuck”

10-25-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Note

10-25-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “Don’t look at me”

10-26-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

10-26-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Beware of the Blog

10-26-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “they were screaming”

10-27-2003: Where the Monsters Go: feast your eyes

10-27-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “Don’t you understand?”

10-28-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “There’s just some things you have to do. Don’t mean you have to like it.”

10-29-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Later, again

10-29-2003: Where the Monsters Go: When there’s no more room in Hell

10-29-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “There is only one”

10-30-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over”

10-31-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Day of the Dead

10-31-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “What music they make!” 1

10-31-2003: Where the Monsters Go: A poem

10-31-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “What music they make!” 2

10-31-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “Help!”

10-31-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “What music they make!” 3

10-31-2003: Where the Monsters Go: “What music they make!” 4

11-3-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Picking up the pieces

11-4-2003: Where the Monsters Go: Requiem

05-15-2005: Where the Monsters Go: Resurrection

05-24-2005: Where the Monsters Go: Infernal words

Question for Blogger users: Did any of y’all notice a bizarre influx of random referrals from other Blogspot blogs yesterday, during a certain one-hour period? (I can’t figure out from my stat provider exactly what one-hour period it really was.) You know, the type of referral you get when someone clicks on that “next blog” button on the top of the page, only dozens of them almost all at once? I’d love to know what that was all about. Blogger maintenance of some sort?

In much more interesting metablog news, I’ve occasionally wondered aloud why there isn’t a horror blogosphere along the lines of the comics blogosphere we all know and love so well. I’d hoped that Kevin Melrose, Rick Geerling, and Sam Costello’s lovely site Dark, But Shining would spur some growth in that arena. Well, it has, as it turns out–just not in the way I expected. Apparently there already is something of a horror blogosphere out there, but I just hadn’t been looking in the right place! I discovered this when Sam used DBS to plug my autobiohorror site The Outbreak, along with the why-didn’t-I-think-of-that blog of the moment, Dracula Blogged (currently up to the awesome lizard-walk “what manner of man is this?” bit!) Sniffing through the comments left by DBS’s readers in that post, I discovered a whole slew of horrorblogs–and they also discovered me, or at least The Outbreak’s version of me, much to my delight. M. Valdemar and Benjamin are just a couple of the horror-centric bloggers out there. Feast your eyes, glut your soul!

The discovery I’m possibly most excited about from all this was made through Infocult, the regular blog of Dracublogger Bryan Alexander. It’s called Laylasweetie, and despite the innocuous, extremely LJ-typical name, it’s about a haunting. I presume it’s a fictional one, of course, which makes it a blog after my own heart; what makes it particularly interesting is the way the author has allowed the haunting to infect the blog itself, placing various clues, puzzles, and other spooky things throughout the entries and comments. Man, technology and people who like scary things can be a force to be reckoned with when put together properly. I heartily advise you to check it out.

First of all, there is a new, real post waaaaaaay down there. Click here if you can’t be arsed to scroll.

Second, here is a giant master mix, assembled from the three separate iTunes playlists I whipped up for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week. This is how me and the fellas in my office keep it moving.

1. Truckin’ (The Grateful Dead)

2. Jailbreak (Thin Lizzy)

3. The Fire Inside (Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band)

4. Steppin’ Out (Joe Jackson)

5. Rise [DFA Remix] (Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom)

6. Just Let Go (Fischerspooner)

7. That Girl Suicide (The Brian Jonestown Massacre)

8. Space Face [Live] (Doves)

9. Yeah [Pretentious Version] (LCD Soundsystem)

10. Erucu (Jermaine Jackson)

11. Superstition (Stevie Wonder)

12. Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine (James Brown)

13. Jungle Boogie (Kool & the Gang)

14. Jungle Jazz (Kool & the Gang)

15. Don’t Walk Away Boy (Jade)

16. Believe (Gus Gus)

17. It Began in Afrika (Chemical Brothers)

18. Lust for Life (Iggy Pop)

19. You Can’t Hurry Love (Diana Ross & the Supremes)

20. Ain’t No Love [Ain’t No Use] (Sub Sub feat. Melanie Williams)

21. Spill the Wine (War feat. Eric Burdon)

22. Mama Told Me Not to Come (Three Dog Night)

23. Susie Q (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

24. Susie Q [Part 2] (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

25. Be-In (The Dandy Warhols)

26. Boys Better (The Dandy Warhols)

27. Do You Wanna Touch Me There? [Oh, Yeah!] (Gary Glitter)

28. Rock and Roll [Parts 1 & 2] (Gary Glitter)

29. Can

Courtesy of The NIN Hotline (like CNN for people who know every word to “March of the Pigs”) comes a link to this Pitchfork interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and the DFA. Ostensibly a what-do-you-think-of-these-songs feature, it ends up being a fairly lengthy rumination on Murphy’s part about the anxiety of influence. Here’s a quote I liked a lot:

I think a canon is important, but you have to grow into it. That stuff can overwhelm you. You’re 24 years old, you’re in a band, and suddenly people are saying, “Hey, you guys sound a lot like Chrome. You should check out Chrome,” or “You guys sound a lot like Roxy Music,” and you’re like, “I’ve never heard them,” and you go find it and it can just overwhelm you. It can destroy a band. Because it’s powerful stuff. I mean, the Strokes are swimming up some incredibly serious stuff: Velvet Underground. Television. It’s kinda soul-crushing in a way to go listen to “Perfect Day” and say, “I’m gonna go write a song like that,” and it’ll be fucking horrible by comparison.

He also talks about the difference between Iggy Pop appropriating “You Can’t Hurry Love” for “Lust for Life” vs. Jet appropriating “Lust for Life” for “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”; the DFA’s strange pseudo-rivalries with the Rapture and Death from Above 1979; his nuanced and even-handed take on Trent Reznor (hence the NIN Hotline link), and more. I know the highly referential remix aesthetic has come in for some potshots around these parts lately, but if you’re interested in that sort of thinking at all, this is worth a read.

Pitchfork also has its review of with teeth up (again, courtesy of The NIN Hotline, which does not have permalinks–people, this is not hard). It’s laden with the kind of annoying I’m-too-snarky-for-this-album silliness that I usually associate with Spin‘s worse moments (or, at this point, anything from Rolling Stone), but I still thought it was interesting how the review points out that, where Reznor was once the maker of angry-teen music (what Murphy calls “lifeline music” in the interview linked above), he was supplanted by groups like Linkin Park, who stripped the music of both sex and existentialism and made it represent a very specific, personalized, journal-esque form of upsetment with one’s girlfriend or classmates. (Perhaps the smut migrated directly into hip-pop, leaving mook-rock to corner the anger market it inherited not just from Reznor and Cobain but from straightforward gangsta rap as well?)

While we’re on the subject, All Music Guide’s review of with teeth puts its finger right on my main problem with the album, namely that it does not feel like an album it should have taken five years to make. This goes double when its astoundingly laborious predecessor, the fragile, is taken into consideration. I like with teeth–I’ve probably listened to it two dozen times by now–but then, I really do have a direct line to Trent Reznor plugged into my brain someplace. It still feels to me like less effort went into creating this entire album than went into almost any one track off the fragile–“just like you imagined,” for example. Even if you were to remove virtuoso Bowie alums Mike Garson and Adrian Belew from that track, more would still be going on in just one of its crescendos than on songs 2-6 from wt.

Question: Does the reference-laden aesthetic of Kill Bill have anything in common with the reference-laden aesthetic of glam rock? I think too much of KB is outright homage to qualify Tarantino for the pasticheur tradition I’ve talked about in the past, but I wonder if there’s something there that explains my affinity toward both.

Also on the Kill Bill front, in one of his several posts on the subject Jon Hastings says the following:

But sometimes I get the sense that Sean (and others who share his anti-anti-nerd stance) won

Ol’ TCJ.com messboard pal Jim Dougan has written a comic that Roger “Fred the Clown” Langridge then deigned to illustrate: Oscar Chavez, Machismo Monitor!

And speaking of the TCJ.com messboard (normally we try not to), fine artist and occasional Jean Grey impersonator Karolyn Gehrig shows off her skills a booth babe in this thread.

Rad.

Today I found out that my therapist is dead. The way I found this out was me and Amy went for our appointment at his home office, and since the door was locked and the lights were out but I noticed people at home in the actual home, I rang the home doorbell, and his wife came out and I asked if Dr. _____ was around because we had an appointment, and she said, “Oh, oh, oh, I thought we had called everyone. My husband died last week.”

He was a terrific therapist and a really cool person. I miss him.

A couple of verdicts are in on my critique of Ron Rosenbaum’s anti-Kill Bill/Sin City piece: Jog liked it; J.W. didn’t, mainly because he thinks I basically made up an anti-white bias on Rosenbaum’s part.

For the record, I totally knew I was breakdancing on the fine line between inference and invention with regards to the racial subtext of Rosenbaum’s piece, especially when I wrote the bit about Rodriguez, Avilan, Wo-Ping, Chiba, and Liu. (The gender of Avilan, and of Uma Thurman, was at least as important a factor in my writing that section as the racial angle.)

The real meat of my argument had nothing to do with race–it was more a question of gender and class, specifically that subset of both known as fanboydom. I lumped the racial stuff in there for good measure more because fanboydom is so overwhelmingly white rather than anything specific that Rosenbaum said, as I tried (and seem to have failed) to clarify when I said “to be fair, Rosenbaum doesn’t come right out and play the race card.” (Except for the Orientalism bit, which was just silly, since the Pai Mei character he’s attacking appeared almost exactly as-is in several Asian-made flicks. From this I deduced that it Rosenbaum thought it was okay for them (assuming he knew they existed, which, if he had that Annotated Kill Bill book he kept talking about, he would) but not for Tarantino.) Rosenbaum does come right and say that the maleness of the filmmakers behind KB and SC, and also of their fans, is a drawback, so I think it’s safe to say he’s not above deploying that kind of argumentation.

What I’m trying to say is that the main thing really is the anti-male, anti-fanboy bias, which I hope J.W. addresses at some point because I’m curious to hear his take on it. The white stuff is just the vanilla icing on the cake. Anyway, I recommend you read J.W.’s piece in its entirety, not just to get an opposing take on the issues I brought up but to hear of further problems with Rosenbaum’s attempted take-down (eg. the fact that Sin City really isn’t all that referential, or at least not in the way that Kill Bill is; and that the “this sucks/this rocks” comparison Rosenbaum tries to set up with something he calls the “L.A. Collage School” is slapdash and arbitrary).

(As for the “self-evident brilliance of the Wu Tang Clan” with which J.W. so passionately disagrees, well, it’s self-evident on my blog, at least. 🙂 )

UPDATE: I had a hunch the illustrious Steven Berg would weigh in on the anti-KB side, but I was surprised to see that he, too, thought (as he put it) “the bulk of Sean

AWESOME. Thanks, honey!

Care of the Tom Spurgeon comes this New York Observer essay by Ron Rosenbaum on Kill Bill, Sin City, graphic novels and hyper-referentiality. I didn’t much care for it. Actually, that’s putting it mildly: For a brief while it made me consider writing off the entire critical enterprise and creating in a vacuum for the rest of my life. But that’s me all over, and it’s probably not one of my finer aspects as a critic, or as a consumer, or indeed as a creator, of art. I have a Goldwaterian attitude toward the defense of work that I love, coupled with an occasional inability (unwillingness?) to articulate why, that does not become me. Fortunately, I also have the almost physical need to run on at the e-mouth about stuff like this, which was ultimately the impulse that won out.

So, Rosenbaum. I’ve read and enjoyed, if not agreed with, some of his writing on popular culture in the past, his participation in Slate’s colloquy on The Sopranos Season Four, for example. What I consider the greatest single season of the greatest single show in the history of televison he wrote off as so much meandering overreach, so perhaps he and I simply have different tastes. Which is fine, of course–everyone is entitled to her opinion. Indeed, there has been a somewhat depressing tendency of late among the Internet circles I move in toward ascribing some larger mental bias cum widespread critical conspiracy to certain opinions, as if people cannot arrive, in good faith, at a verdict that disagrees with one’s own. (Steven Berg wrote a read-the-whole-thing-worthy essay on the topic, so I don’t really have to.)

However, when you yourself attempt to construct a Grand Theory out of your opinion, you open that Grand Theory up to criticism. Here is Rosenbaum’s, inspired by the trampling underfoot of Daryl Hannah’s eye by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill Vol. 2:

I don

I’m sort of surprised by the amount of radioblogging I’ve done since I kicked ADDTF back into gear, as I don’t really ever listen to the radio. Well, not to music radio, anyway–Imus in the Morning on WFAN 660 AM on the drive to work, and a few minutes of WCBS News Radio 880 AM (just long enough to catch the traffic and maybe a few of the headline stories) on the ride home.

But what you may not know (ooh! Secret Origin time!) is that I used to be a radio DJ, way back in the day, at WYBC 94.3FM New Haven, Yale’s old frequency. I had a weekly show (mostly poppier industrial, the big English electronic-music acts of the mid-to-late ’90s, that sort of thing) that was cancelled, along with all of the station’s rock, alternative, blues, and folk programming, when a couple of nitwits with aspirations of becoming big radio suits upon graduation staged a coup d’etat, locked us all out of the station, and replaced us with a semi-pro “urban contemporary” format. So the Great Homogenization hits close to home, you know?

Anyway, the great Jim Henley points to this NYT article on the continuing death of alt-rock radio. It’s interesting for several reasons:

1) It informed me that Philly’s Y-100, my Delaware-native wife’s source for Weezer and Live and Garbage and such back when we were courting, is now all-talk. Another one bites the dust.

2) It centers on how alt-rock radio’s transition into the exclusive preserve of male-oriented mook-rock since the Limp Bizkit explosion has cost it listeners but bad. It certainly cost them me, but one thing I hadn’t thought of in these specific terms is how many women it must have cost them, too. As Jim reminds us, time was you could hear quite a few female artists on alt-rock stations–I think he’s being a little generous with his list, as I can’t ever remember hearing P.J. Harvey on the radio, but he’s not wrong generally. I’ll see him and raise by adding that most alt-rock (new rock, really) stations didn’t just not play female acts, but avoided as much as possible playing acts that were even remotely feminine. The Postal Service, for example, has apparently sold 500,000 records, but to the best of my knowledge K-ROCK never went near ’em; and I’m always stunned to hear the likes of Franz Ferdinand or Interpol on stations like that (the few that still exist). (Heck, my guess is that this is the reason Franz never relased the unbelievably awesome and very queer “Michael” as a single.) I can’t help but be reminded of another infuriating winnowing of acceptable songs during the death of free-form, as chronicled vividly in Richard Neer’s excellent book FM: In a similarly misguided effort to “give the listeners what they want,” the suits back then slowly stripped black musicians out of rock playlists, so on rock stations where you’d once hear everyone from Miles Davis to P-Funk to the Temptations, you now pretty much only hear Jimi Hendrix (and occasionally Phil Lynott, but no one I know seems to realize that he’s black). You’ve probably noticed that this radio segregation continued even during the heydey of mook-rock radio, wherein, despite the heavy influence of hip-hop on the music, the only hip-hop acts you’d hear were the Beastie Boys and Eminem, with the occasional rock-y Cypress Hill (1/3 black, 1/3 white, 1/3 Latino) track thrown in on a lark. (This despite the exhiliaratingly alternative music being made by everyone from A Tribe Called Quest to the Wu-Tang Clan.) When women, and indeed any men not content with music that presents women in much the same way as the Howard Stern Show that occupied the morning slot on a great many new-rock stations, were were written out of the equation as well, you have a recipe for demographic disaster, it would seem.

How can alternative rock radio recover? It probably can’t. As I’ve said before, even if stations were to start playing actual good music tomorrow, my guess is their listenership would probably continue to plummet. Meanwhile, the type of listener who wants to hear Death Cab for Cutie or the Faint is likely savvy enough to have explored the many new-media venues for this, from iTunes to Acquisition to music blogs to podcasts to Internet radio to satellite radio to TiVo’ing the three hours’ worth of good music-video shows left on the TV. In the world of the iPod, quirky radio is almost redundant.

You know comics are a big pop-culture deal when jokes about the supposed pretentiousness of the term “graphic novels” are made in Levi’s commercials.

For your listening pleasure tonight (or until the ATF triumvirate sees what I’m doing, whatever), I present three chills-inducing Tori Amos live covers.

Father Figure (George Michael)–from her concert in San Francisco a couple of nights ago. Sexy.

Nights in White Satin (Moody Blues) One of my favorite songs, by my parents’ favorite band. Gorgeous, dead-on vocals and piano on this one–ooh, just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.

Purple Rain (Prince)–This tune (which served as, shall we say, “inspiration” for Tori’s song “Hey Jupiter” off Boys for Pele) is a perennial favorite amongst Toriphiles, but the version I’ve uploaded is one I hadn’t heard until recently. Rather than play it on her grand piano, she went with a harmonium instead, which is a very different and somehow more intimate vibe. There’s also some lovely, soaring guitar, just before those killer high notes.

More to come, if Ken, Ben, and Ton don’t yell at me.

(Blogging likely to remain sparse until the home-internet situation is fixed, which doesn’t look to be any time soon. Just F y’all’s I.)

Question: What kind of idiot would argue that Trent Reznor’s angst on the fragile felt phony and forced whereas his angst on with teeth constitutes “music we can believe in”?

Answer: The kind of idiot who writes cover stories for Spin!

It’s really fascinating to watch the critical consensus backtrack and rewrite itself Nineteen Eighty-Four-style. (This is what enables every Prince record to be his comeback, every David Bowie album to be the only one worth listening to since Scary Monsters, and The Blair Witch Project to once again be one of the best horror movies ever made now that The Ring uses videotape.) In this particular Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia incident, the author points out that Spin named the fragile the Best Album of 1999, but then goes on to say it’s a plodding, by-the-numbers affair that didn’t really deserve the accolade. I’ve seen this notion reflected in any number of reviews for with teeth, used to praise wt‘s (let’s put this politely) somewhat straightforward approach to songcraft as opposed to the fragile‘s legendarily obsessive construction. Boo, hiss. Not only is this a manifestation of Woody Allen style Earlier, Funnier Stuffitis (albeit in chronological reverse), it rejects earlier acknowledgements of the depth, intelligence, and beauty of the fragile pretty much solely because the album didn’t sell very well whereas with teeth‘s nu-rock-radio-friendly singles-in-waiting will probably do just fine. (Again, many reviewers have all but acknowledged this, and this feature’s no exception.) Blecch.

Interestingly (to me), I listened to the fragile today and it holds up unbelievably well, much better than I thought it might given my headspace now versus then. When listened to in headphones many tracks have an odd tendency to break into their constituent parts, almost like you can see the ProTools strings, but for my money that only enhances the insular man-and-his-madness transmission quality of the record.

Number of New York area radio stations that played mostly new alternative rock in 1994: Five (92.3 K-ROCK, 92.7 WDRE, 100.3 Z-100, 102.7 WNEW, 104.3 Q-104.3)

Number of New York area radio stations that play mostly new alternative rock now: Zero

If these posts have felt rushed and disjointed lately, it’s because they are: My net access is limited these days so I’m blogging in a hurry. Hopefully this will be rectified soon, but I’m not holding my breath. I hope you’ll tough it out with me.

Okay, now I can’t stop listening to with teeth. I’ve talked myself into really enjoying it a great deal. True, Trent is no longer at the vanguard of rock development–gone are the days where Spin would list him as the most vital artist in the industry. And the electroclashy moments, though naturally I enjoy the hell out of them, are more follower than leader. (O’course, he was there before them–you could slide “Ringfinger” into any Larry Tee DJ set you’d care to.) But as a whole it propels along with a crunchy glee. Even “every day is exactly the same” is starting to grow on me in its ploddingly catchy fashion; I just wish it did something unexpected at some point, like the wonderfully weird dance-rock of “Only” or that terrific dental-drill guitar(?) in “Sunspots.” Well, one thing I (re)discovered yesterday is that it sure feels great to roll down a suburban street with your car windows open, blasting a song that says “fuck” a lot.

Rose Curtin comments on the harmful effects of glib rape references, even when those references are made in ostensible protest of other glib rape references. The post is worth reading in its entirety and so I’m not going to run the risk of summarizing it by commenting upon it here. I will say that it reminds me that with the death of Dworkin, there are issues far more worth thinking about than debating whether or not Dworkin herself was a reactionary paranoiac.