Compacted Disks, Compact Discs, and a Few Books
Too much time has passed since I last updated...as always, there is an explanation. In the rational and pissed-off world of McBain, there are always explanations. They may not be free of spite, disdain, or rage--but they are at least an approximation of reality.
My latest round of major health woes began roughly twelve weeks ago, when I awoke from a fitful sleep to find my neck and shoulders completely locked in a hideous muscle spasm. The injury was so intense that I could not perform any of these following actions for six weeks without serious, knee-buckling, horrifying pain:
1. lie down
2. lift my head upwards
3. read books
4. play music
5. be on the computer for more than 30 minutes consecutively
6. have sex
7. bend over to pick stuff up off the floor
8. walk without pain
9. ride in a car or the subway without pain
Needless to say, my time spent sleeping (already slightly disrupted due my pregnant wife's increase in size and ability to pump out heat) declined. And this of course led to many nights of the worst kind of thinking--the type of fear-ridden, insecure, and self-hating thinking that only arrives when a person cannot sleep despite high levels of physical exhaustion. My doctors were unable to help me get rid of the spasm, preferring to medicate intensively rather than figure out exactly what was wrong with me, so I turned to shiatsu deep tissue massage as a potential fixer. After a few sessions of this I improved slightly but found the massages themselves to be horribly painful--during my second session in particular I was moaning like someone during interrogation in a secret American facility, with torrents of tears pouring from my eyes. The massage therapist was anti-medication, so I tried to tough it out without ibuprofen, Fentanyl, and Vicodin, while relying heavily on my normal marijuana intake. After an MRI I was diagnosed with two herniated disks in my neck, along with some other neck damage. It is unbelievable how much this shit hurts me when it acts up. The pain has put up a nearly permanent barrier between me and the rest of the world, which oddly enough does have some side benefits.
Fortunately, I regained the ability to read books about four weeks ago, and have been in a reading frenzy ever since, working my way through the metastasizing pile of books throughout my house. I had just started Karl Popper's mammoth Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge Classics) when my neck began sapping my will to live. Picking it up again as soon as I was physically able, I was extremely impressed with his critique of inductive reasoning and Bacon's scientific method. At times Popper can be difficult to get through, but for a philosopher he writes quite lucidly and is very readable. I found this book to be a challenge to all of my preconceived notions of epistemology (which is always a good thing). When reading most philosophy I need to have something a little easier to fall back on when my logic circuitry begins hurting, which can be dangerous sometimes if my interest surges in a new book....which is exactly what happened recently.
I jumped ship from Popper to try a few pages in Simon Whitechapel's Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition (Creation Books, part of their Blood History series), and found myself compelled to finish the book. At a slim 154 pages in length, I thought this book might be a quick and dirty yet informative look at Torquemada. I was wrong; it was quick and dirty, but not very informative. I enjoyed Whitechapel's anti-Catholic outrage as he recounted the tales of several different autos de fe (the proper spelling of the term in Spanish; it appears the term that doubles as the title of this blog is from Portuguese), but found his prose so filled with venom that it quickly became tiresome and humorless. He makes some good points about the Inquisition being an early precursor of the modern police state, but overreaches in his attempts to link the Catholic Church to Hitler and Nazism. The book also prints all of its quotes from Spanish documents in both English and Spanish, as if they were concerned with the veracity of Whitechapel's translations. Overall the book was like a bad wreck on the road--you feel dirty for looking, but you can't look away.
I picked up a copy of Fred Coleman's Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (St. Martin's Press ) for six bucks at the Strand. Published in 1996, his latter-day conclusions for the direction of Russia's post-Soviet era are a little dated (not to mention incorrect), but the book covers the post-Stalinist era thoroughly and with no small amount of style. Coleman spent close to 30 years as a Moscow correspondent for the AP, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and though his perspective is thrown off kilter by his relentlessly jingoistic view of the US-USSR Cold War the book is really a solid piece of work. Particularly strong on the Khruschev and Brezhnev eras, I thought, and for once I can say I've read a history of the Khruschev era written by an American who did not spend his entire time dissecting the Cuban Missile Crisis. For that alone, this book is worth the time to read.
Following Coleman's book was Simon Sebag Montefiore's magnificent biography of Josef Stalin, entitled Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar (Vintage). Montefiore limits his book's focus to Stalin's time as absolute leader of the Soviet Union, rather than delving too far into the nebulous available information about Stalin's early history as a possible double agent and bankrobber or the nasty rumors that surrounded his paternity as a child, and the book is all the stronger for it. Montefiore examines the impact of the deaths of Stalin's two wives upon the man much more intensively than any of the other bios I've seen about Stalin, and makes a good case for Stalin's loneliness and alienation from any other humans as being a major impetus in his purges of the 1930's. Even by the heartless standards of the early Bolsheviks, Stalin was a man whose capacity to inflict suffering was matched only by his competitiveness and his paranoia. Many portraits of Stalin (Solzhenitsyn's first among these, perhaps along with Trotsky's) have painted him as a "grey man", a bureaucratic mediocrity whose willingness to use the gun to solve problems was all too typical of the Bolshevik system. But in recent years writers like Edvard Radzinsky and Martin Amis have opened the door to a re-evaluation of Stalin's intellect and purposes. Montefiore considers Stalin to be a diabolical genius whose madness often got the better of his reason, which to me is a much more appropriate way to view a man who was such a master manipulator. The failures of the Soviet system are often attributed to Stalin, but few consider that Russia was an autocratic empire that had absolutely no tradition of nationhood, let alone democracy. At the time of Stalin's death in 1953, the average citizen of the Soviet empire was probably better educated and just as well fed as the average citizen of the Romanov empire. Though troubling to consider, Montefiore does not shy away from discussing the benefits Stalin brought to his people in the midst of so much blood and terror. Really an excellent book that rejects much of the conventional wisdom about the reign of the 20th century's greatest mass murderer.
After Big Joe, I figured I would give an American tyrant a look-see--so I read Robert Remini's solid history of Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (Penguin). Using language that eerily echoes our present day Choadmaster-in-Chief, Andrew Jackson stormed his way through the Southern states and became the most prolific killer of Native Americans in his day. As the corpses piled up, so did Jackson's governmental promotions and national honors--and although Jackson may have been less bloodthirsty towards Natives than popularly portrayed, he still comes off as a vicious alpha male who could barely control his own temper and had little sympathy for any views save his own. Remini claims that national security (in an era where European countries like Spain, Great Britain, and France loomed at every American border) was Jackson's primary concern in snatching millions of acres of land in Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida but also allows that Jackson's policy of removal of Native Americans was perhaps the single most monstrous act performed by any American President. Couched in racist pseudo-compassionate concerns, the removal policy was something that purported to be humane but turned out to be an exercise in eradication instead. The empirical "evidence" for the basis of the removal theory was pessimistic and grew out of a conviction that whites and Natives could never peacefully coexist. Remini lays the ultimate blame for the deaths of thousands of native peoples at Jackson's feet, but is oddly sympathetic to the idea that the two cultures would forever clash.
I picked up a few discs lately too--the ones that don't herniate. I have been listening nonstop to the new Jesu EP Silver (HydraHead) since I got it. More poppy than last year's LP, this release somehow manages to combine some very diverse sounds to create the heaviest shoegazer-styled rock music ever. The textures are dense, the songs are great, and it all points to the next Jesu full-length as being a killer. Keith Fullerton Whitman's Lisbon (Kranky) is a sweet little forty-one minute masterpiece, recorded from a live performance in October 2005. Using his self-designed Playthroughs guitar treatments system along with a laptop and several other effects, Whitman has crafted a predominantly ambient work of great beauty and emotional weight. A great listen first thing in the morning. Lair of the Minotaur are from Chicago and they play badass metal with lyrics inspired by very specific references to various Greek myths. Though that might sound a little Dungeons-and-Dragons, the music is brutal, well-played, and totally ass-kicking. Their new release, The Ultimate Destroyer (Southern Lord), kills from start to finish. These boys don't waste time with guitar solos; in fact they don't play any useless notes at all. Highly recommended for anyone who needs a serious dose of power, or feels that the Greek myths would have even more impact if they had been played by a heavy metal band rather than written by mere poets and scribes. The new AFX/Analord/Aphex Twin disc is called Chosen Lords (Rephlex), and whatever Richard D. James wishes to call his music is OK with me. This disc is a distillation of the 10-record, 40-track Analord series that James ran out into the marketplace starting in 2004. Having not heard any of those 12" records, I found this compilation to have the smooth-running feel of a regular album. It's also quite good--despite a few bad reviews, this effort is a strong one, focussing on beats and melodies more than rapid-fire techno percussion. I still prefer his ambient works, but I am a big enough person to say I really like this release as well. My last new pickup is the choptastic collaboration between Zach Hill of Hella and Mick Barr of Orthrelm and the Flying Luttenbachers. It's called Shred Earthship (5RC) and if you are at all familiar with the dizzying technique of both musicians than you might know what to expect--a searingly well-played and totally freaked collection of jams that redefines the concept of playing fast. Hill and Barr are blurs on their respective instruments, and this relentless pace might put off more than a few listeners. The two connect with each other pretty seriously however--and I find this release to be more enjoyable than anything I've heard from Hella. My only complaint is with the massive running time and tracklist--19 songs, over 77 minutes long. With this type of assaultive style it would have been better to put out two discs.
Other than that, I've been obsessed with Sun Ra lately--wearing out my copies of Space is the Place, Other Planes of There, and My Brother the Wind. As a younger listener I couldn't hang with the Arkestra; but now I am finding that this cosmic gentleman was an interstellar voyager of the highest pedigree and quality. I've also picked up a couple of outstanding reissues lately, buying the remastered version of This Heat's self-titled first record (ReR). Light years ahead of its time upon its release in 1979, this band utilized a ferociously openminded attitude towards composition that blended improvisation, found sound, cut-up techniques, and great ability. Much of this record sounds as if it was recorded yesterday, and drummer Charles Heyward deserves extra praise for his experimental treatments of his own fantastic drum playing. Not too many rock bands or musicians outside of Eno or Neu! were building songs by manipulating sounds at this point in time. Another bunch of English lads who seemed to be working in the future were the Swell Maps, who were often mentioned more in conjunction with members Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden and their respective solo pursuits. Their Jane from Occupied Europe (Secretly Canadian), released in 1980, puts together noise and song in a way that most bands shied away from at the time. Cool guitar sounds are put next to vacuum cleaners; drum sounds are deliberately distorted; and over the whole mess floats a relaxed and tuneful vibe that such later bands as Pavement mined successfully. Both of these discs are amazing, and the forward-looking nature of the music is really impressive.
So that's about it for me--my neck is fucking killing me, and there's a nice juicy pain at the bottom of my right shoulder blade right now that needs some special attention. Hopefully I can resume some sort of regularity in my postings, but we will see.
My latest round of major health woes began roughly twelve weeks ago, when I awoke from a fitful sleep to find my neck and shoulders completely locked in a hideous muscle spasm. The injury was so intense that I could not perform any of these following actions for six weeks without serious, knee-buckling, horrifying pain:
1. lie down
2. lift my head upwards
3. read books
4. play music
5. be on the computer for more than 30 minutes consecutively
6. have sex
7. bend over to pick stuff up off the floor
8. walk without pain
9. ride in a car or the subway without pain
Needless to say, my time spent sleeping (already slightly disrupted due my pregnant wife's increase in size and ability to pump out heat) declined. And this of course led to many nights of the worst kind of thinking--the type of fear-ridden, insecure, and self-hating thinking that only arrives when a person cannot sleep despite high levels of physical exhaustion. My doctors were unable to help me get rid of the spasm, preferring to medicate intensively rather than figure out exactly what was wrong with me, so I turned to shiatsu deep tissue massage as a potential fixer. After a few sessions of this I improved slightly but found the massages themselves to be horribly painful--during my second session in particular I was moaning like someone during interrogation in a secret American facility, with torrents of tears pouring from my eyes. The massage therapist was anti-medication, so I tried to tough it out without ibuprofen, Fentanyl, and Vicodin, while relying heavily on my normal marijuana intake. After an MRI I was diagnosed with two herniated disks in my neck, along with some other neck damage. It is unbelievable how much this shit hurts me when it acts up. The pain has put up a nearly permanent barrier between me and the rest of the world, which oddly enough does have some side benefits.
Fortunately, I regained the ability to read books about four weeks ago, and have been in a reading frenzy ever since, working my way through the metastasizing pile of books throughout my house. I had just started Karl Popper's mammoth Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge Classics) when my neck began sapping my will to live. Picking it up again as soon as I was physically able, I was extremely impressed with his critique of inductive reasoning and Bacon's scientific method. At times Popper can be difficult to get through, but for a philosopher he writes quite lucidly and is very readable. I found this book to be a challenge to all of my preconceived notions of epistemology (which is always a good thing). When reading most philosophy I need to have something a little easier to fall back on when my logic circuitry begins hurting, which can be dangerous sometimes if my interest surges in a new book....which is exactly what happened recently.
I jumped ship from Popper to try a few pages in Simon Whitechapel's Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition (Creation Books, part of their Blood History series), and found myself compelled to finish the book. At a slim 154 pages in length, I thought this book might be a quick and dirty yet informative look at Torquemada. I was wrong; it was quick and dirty, but not very informative. I enjoyed Whitechapel's anti-Catholic outrage as he recounted the tales of several different autos de fe (the proper spelling of the term in Spanish; it appears the term that doubles as the title of this blog is from Portuguese), but found his prose so filled with venom that it quickly became tiresome and humorless. He makes some good points about the Inquisition being an early precursor of the modern police state, but overreaches in his attempts to link the Catholic Church to Hitler and Nazism. The book also prints all of its quotes from Spanish documents in both English and Spanish, as if they were concerned with the veracity of Whitechapel's translations. Overall the book was like a bad wreck on the road--you feel dirty for looking, but you can't look away.
I picked up a copy of Fred Coleman's Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (St. Martin's Press ) for six bucks at the Strand. Published in 1996, his latter-day conclusions for the direction of Russia's post-Soviet era are a little dated (not to mention incorrect), but the book covers the post-Stalinist era thoroughly and with no small amount of style. Coleman spent close to 30 years as a Moscow correspondent for the AP, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and though his perspective is thrown off kilter by his relentlessly jingoistic view of the US-USSR Cold War the book is really a solid piece of work. Particularly strong on the Khruschev and Brezhnev eras, I thought, and for once I can say I've read a history of the Khruschev era written by an American who did not spend his entire time dissecting the Cuban Missile Crisis. For that alone, this book is worth the time to read.
Following Coleman's book was Simon Sebag Montefiore's magnificent biography of Josef Stalin, entitled Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar (Vintage). Montefiore limits his book's focus to Stalin's time as absolute leader of the Soviet Union, rather than delving too far into the nebulous available information about Stalin's early history as a possible double agent and bankrobber or the nasty rumors that surrounded his paternity as a child, and the book is all the stronger for it. Montefiore examines the impact of the deaths of Stalin's two wives upon the man much more intensively than any of the other bios I've seen about Stalin, and makes a good case for Stalin's loneliness and alienation from any other humans as being a major impetus in his purges of the 1930's. Even by the heartless standards of the early Bolsheviks, Stalin was a man whose capacity to inflict suffering was matched only by his competitiveness and his paranoia. Many portraits of Stalin (Solzhenitsyn's first among these, perhaps along with Trotsky's) have painted him as a "grey man", a bureaucratic mediocrity whose willingness to use the gun to solve problems was all too typical of the Bolshevik system. But in recent years writers like Edvard Radzinsky and Martin Amis have opened the door to a re-evaluation of Stalin's intellect and purposes. Montefiore considers Stalin to be a diabolical genius whose madness often got the better of his reason, which to me is a much more appropriate way to view a man who was such a master manipulator. The failures of the Soviet system are often attributed to Stalin, but few consider that Russia was an autocratic empire that had absolutely no tradition of nationhood, let alone democracy. At the time of Stalin's death in 1953, the average citizen of the Soviet empire was probably better educated and just as well fed as the average citizen of the Romanov empire. Though troubling to consider, Montefiore does not shy away from discussing the benefits Stalin brought to his people in the midst of so much blood and terror. Really an excellent book that rejects much of the conventional wisdom about the reign of the 20th century's greatest mass murderer.
After Big Joe, I figured I would give an American tyrant a look-see--so I read Robert Remini's solid history of Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (Penguin). Using language that eerily echoes our present day Choadmaster-in-Chief, Andrew Jackson stormed his way through the Southern states and became the most prolific killer of Native Americans in his day. As the corpses piled up, so did Jackson's governmental promotions and national honors--and although Jackson may have been less bloodthirsty towards Natives than popularly portrayed, he still comes off as a vicious alpha male who could barely control his own temper and had little sympathy for any views save his own. Remini claims that national security (in an era where European countries like Spain, Great Britain, and France loomed at every American border) was Jackson's primary concern in snatching millions of acres of land in Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida but also allows that Jackson's policy of removal of Native Americans was perhaps the single most monstrous act performed by any American President. Couched in racist pseudo-compassionate concerns, the removal policy was something that purported to be humane but turned out to be an exercise in eradication instead. The empirical "evidence" for the basis of the removal theory was pessimistic and grew out of a conviction that whites and Natives could never peacefully coexist. Remini lays the ultimate blame for the deaths of thousands of native peoples at Jackson's feet, but is oddly sympathetic to the idea that the two cultures would forever clash.
I picked up a few discs lately too--the ones that don't herniate. I have been listening nonstop to the new Jesu EP Silver (HydraHead) since I got it. More poppy than last year's LP, this release somehow manages to combine some very diverse sounds to create the heaviest shoegazer-styled rock music ever. The textures are dense, the songs are great, and it all points to the next Jesu full-length as being a killer. Keith Fullerton Whitman's Lisbon (Kranky) is a sweet little forty-one minute masterpiece, recorded from a live performance in October 2005. Using his self-designed Playthroughs guitar treatments system along with a laptop and several other effects, Whitman has crafted a predominantly ambient work of great beauty and emotional weight. A great listen first thing in the morning. Lair of the Minotaur are from Chicago and they play badass metal with lyrics inspired by very specific references to various Greek myths. Though that might sound a little Dungeons-and-Dragons, the music is brutal, well-played, and totally ass-kicking. Their new release, The Ultimate Destroyer (Southern Lord), kills from start to finish. These boys don't waste time with guitar solos; in fact they don't play any useless notes at all. Highly recommended for anyone who needs a serious dose of power, or feels that the Greek myths would have even more impact if they had been played by a heavy metal band rather than written by mere poets and scribes. The new AFX/Analord/Aphex Twin disc is called Chosen Lords (Rephlex), and whatever Richard D. James wishes to call his music is OK with me. This disc is a distillation of the 10-record, 40-track Analord series that James ran out into the marketplace starting in 2004. Having not heard any of those 12" records, I found this compilation to have the smooth-running feel of a regular album. It's also quite good--despite a few bad reviews, this effort is a strong one, focussing on beats and melodies more than rapid-fire techno percussion. I still prefer his ambient works, but I am a big enough person to say I really like this release as well. My last new pickup is the choptastic collaboration between Zach Hill of Hella and Mick Barr of Orthrelm and the Flying Luttenbachers. It's called Shred Earthship (5RC) and if you are at all familiar with the dizzying technique of both musicians than you might know what to expect--a searingly well-played and totally freaked collection of jams that redefines the concept of playing fast. Hill and Barr are blurs on their respective instruments, and this relentless pace might put off more than a few listeners. The two connect with each other pretty seriously however--and I find this release to be more enjoyable than anything I've heard from Hella. My only complaint is with the massive running time and tracklist--19 songs, over 77 minutes long. With this type of assaultive style it would have been better to put out two discs.
Other than that, I've been obsessed with Sun Ra lately--wearing out my copies of Space is the Place, Other Planes of There, and My Brother the Wind. As a younger listener I couldn't hang with the Arkestra; but now I am finding that this cosmic gentleman was an interstellar voyager of the highest pedigree and quality. I've also picked up a couple of outstanding reissues lately, buying the remastered version of This Heat's self-titled first record (ReR). Light years ahead of its time upon its release in 1979, this band utilized a ferociously openminded attitude towards composition that blended improvisation, found sound, cut-up techniques, and great ability. Much of this record sounds as if it was recorded yesterday, and drummer Charles Heyward deserves extra praise for his experimental treatments of his own fantastic drum playing. Not too many rock bands or musicians outside of Eno or Neu! were building songs by manipulating sounds at this point in time. Another bunch of English lads who seemed to be working in the future were the Swell Maps, who were often mentioned more in conjunction with members Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden and their respective solo pursuits. Their Jane from Occupied Europe (Secretly Canadian), released in 1980, puts together noise and song in a way that most bands shied away from at the time. Cool guitar sounds are put next to vacuum cleaners; drum sounds are deliberately distorted; and over the whole mess floats a relaxed and tuneful vibe that such later bands as Pavement mined successfully. Both of these discs are amazing, and the forward-looking nature of the music is really impressive.
So that's about it for me--my neck is fucking killing me, and there's a nice juicy pain at the bottom of my right shoulder blade right now that needs some special attention. Hopefully I can resume some sort of regularity in my postings, but we will see.
posted by alyosha mcbain at 1:14 PM
3 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Something else to tuck into your reading list: Sun Ra - The Immeasurable Equations. It's a collection of poems, handbills and other prose compiled by James Wolfe.
Good to see you back.
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