Shambles.

Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin - a revisitation. (not a word)








I am not one who finds Wayne Coyne tiresome, really ever, until and unless I find myself tiresome. Coyne's interviews and general persona in the Lips docudrama evoke a sense of the kind of soft hippie adulation of possibility of which it is easy, but not mandatory, to disparage. I find myself tiresome retroactively, mostly, when it's clear that a certain dismissal was made out of hand and in service of that basic seen-it-all-done-it-all presumptiveness that, when identified, produces a shudder.

Coyne seems to be aware of this tiresomeness of things that starts with tiresomeness of one's own circumstances, and he's averse to it without being contemptuous of it. I like that - it comes off as acknowledging that it's possible to be willfully sullen but not really desirable. But it's not really that, either, this thing Coyne has going on, or not just that. "being open to possibility," for what that's worth as a description of a kind of stance toward the world Coyne urges, isn't such a bad notion to keep out in front of you in terms of negotiating the ephemeral happenstance stuff that contributes to one-day-and-the-next. It may be easier or more habitual to sort of assimilate the new into the old and keep it contained within the previous understanding - easier or more natural or more likely to be the response beaten into you by sheer repetition - but it can't be more fun or even more stimulating.

It's not clear how to weave together the way Coyne and the other Lips come off in self-representation with the music they make, nor is it necessarily something worth doing. I guess it's inviting in that the music (and I can only talk about the Soft Bulletin, which still confounds my understanding and digs its hooks into me without even trying, now, six or seven years after first coming to it) makes you wonder what its makers think about the process that led to it. After seeing the docudrama - I write that as if I know what it may connote, which I really don't, but it seems right - the thing that stuck is the absolute investment that Coyne makes in making music mean more than just making music. Not to get all Spin magazine or anything, but it is somehow easier to succumb to something when you know that part of what that thing is, is meant for you, expressly and without reservation or stinting pre-formulated idea about what that moment of contact may consist of. And the other slightly out of reach part of it, a dimension of it that is necessarily a product of conjecture, is - to me, here, about this album at least - a recognition that the creators' only assurance of what they make is to be wholly invested in the making of it and an invitation to contemplate what that investment was like at the time the thing was created.

If this doesn't make sense or relies on too much hazy pronoun antecedent confusion, where "it" could be seven things - well, that's part of the thing - and there may be an object lesson here about successful concept albums and the way they manage to elicit a fairly comprehensive engagement with the different possible concepts to which they may be pointing. And obviously if something is successful enough in what you take it to try to be accomplishing to make you wonder if what you take it to accomplish is what was intended to be accomplished, there's even more to think about.
So do it, if it charms you, is what I mean and what I've been doing.

The epitaph said – He loved the earth but could not stay

“The way I see it now is that you either make a little nation and solve its historical and personal problems within the format of your own household – accepting the mistakes that you’ve made, all the ones your parents made, all that your children make, and all the mistakes your country made – and you win that one or you lose the only war worth fighting. Moreover, as soon as you step out of this personally constructed world and, say, drive into town or stand out on I-90 and watch our nation cycle through these placeless arteries, it’s there that you confront the true horror of the other option.”

- a quotation from a novelist who lives near I-90.


Every once in awhile, remember that George the Bush claimed isolationist turf in his debates with as-wizened-then-as-now John the Pitbull McCain. This was back in 00 (double-ot, before things done changed) when the stars shone red and everyone was doing like Richard Dreyfuss and shaping mashed potatoes into Devil’s Tower facsimiles. George the Bush insinuated that he didn’t want American boys out solving troubles America had no part in making. If we don’t have a dog in the fight, he seemed to say (or I imagine him saying), don’t go buying a damn dog.

Now of course we are in the middle of the historical moment. Our kids may ask about it when they get to be indignantly idealistic (if we have kids and if idealism still exists as valid concept for the young). George the Bush no longer mutters much of anything that sounds isolationist, but the concept may still hold truck in how we relate to the historical moment itself. I am beginning to think that the answer you give your kids will say less about you than it says about the particular constellation of media sources to which you have consciously or unconsciously pledged fealty.

In that regard, are we all isolationists now? Not so much in our willingness to engage the world, either personally or via foreign policy, but in the sense that the stream of empirical data (statistics, polls, death toll numbers) and the narrative threads (amputee soldiers, water works projects, neighborhood “purification”) we encounter tend to be narrow and self-enclosed. Am I wrong about this? I get this feeling that there are a decent amount of people out there who think to themselves, “Well it can’t be going that badly” and who consider themselves to be informed on what’s going on over there. On the other side, there are people who go to go hear speakers on college campuses demonize George the Bush and the gaggle of blue-suited guys who head up his staff and, once enough shit is flung, the crowd starts to cheer. “This is what we came to hear. It really is that bad!” and the clapping goes on and the audience goes home knowing in their bleeding hearts that they had the real skinny on what’s going on over there.

I don’t consider myself to be informed on the issue – I mostly glance at the numbers listed in New York Times headlines and skim on occasional WSJ op-ed that insists good stuff is still going – but it’s seeming that media are only going to accentuate whatever fault lines have formed on basis of political, cultural, ethnic, regional, and economic identity because media are making their home on those fault lines. Make enough niche markets that pander to people’s need to have their basic worldview affirmed, and then market a Reagan as a reconciling force (or flip the coin three decades later and see what an Obama will get you) and see if your net is big enough to capture that minority in the middle that seem (all this seeming is making my brain hurt) to matter the most. Are you in that middle? Do you know where its fault lines lie? Do you care?

soma anyone?

1) alas another day in winterwonderland. i have ocular migraines, which are - as the name indicates - painful incidents during which unrelenting pressure builds up behind the
pupils and gives the world a shimmering look to it, especially in the lower corners of
your field of vision. Everything oscillates, and so if you look out at a field of snow in
the early morning sunlight and stare at it for awhile, listening to the pathetic robins
opine about the absurdity of their situation, the hallucinatory effect is disquieting and
grand, too, in its own way. The snow sparkles, and it seems like the sparkles are
vibrating against each other to create a kind of unified kinetic field of light playing off
itself.

2) Pundits continue to frame their punditry about Iraq in terms of winning and losing.
Are they still in a K-hole? Iraq is off the chain. It's one of those metastasizing outbreaks,
feral and unpredictable and disrespectful of whatever rhetorical categories you use to try
to tether it down. What would constitute "winning?" Not that most Americans really
give a shit. I'm beginning to think that our collective madness only exists in the aggregate
and subsists on a mixture of ignorance and puerile fascination with whatever artifact the publicity machine happens to have emitted at the time. On the other hand, it's hard not to
resent the chattering class conviction that leaving the country we've effectively immiserated is the only way to go.