PostLeaf

SoundLeaf: "The Instinct" by Mark McGuire

SoundLeaf: "Devil We Know" by Lily & Madeleine

too precious, perhaps,

too flow'ry-sweet to excite:

yet - those harmonies

Leaf of Nostalgia: Friends, season two, February 1996. "The One with the Prom Video." Ross and Rachel, their heyday. A year and a half of will-they-or-won't-they cresting with this scene. Watched by 34 million, about twice as many as would watch any episode of any sitcom today.

The laugh track. No longer a staple in network sitcoms, and I'm mostly glad about that. But I do miss one thing: the presence, the palpable humanity of a studio audience in moments like the one from 0:37 to 1:05 above. As Rachel walks across the hardwood floor to Ross, you can hear a whole crowd of people tensing up, sitting forward, waiting. And that one stretch of near-silence is more exciting, I'm afraid, than anything I've seen in a contemporary single-camera sitcom.

1

In the past few weeks, as I've been Netflixing seasons 3 and 4 of Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing, my mind has often wandered back to "Sorkinisms," the best supercut-as-critique I've ever seen. In addition to being hilarious, it reveals Sorkin to be a serial recycler and an occasional dumpster diver. Who knew he cribbed one of President Bartlet's most memorable lines from a Tom Hanks acceptance speech? The streets of Sorkinville are too crowded with redundancies tonight...

2

Alas, for every pleasure there's a cost: "Sorkinisms" and its sequel have nearly ruined The West Wing for me - not only because I cringe-laugh every time a character says "YA THINK?" but also because I am now hyper-attuned to Sorkin's many other tics. For instance, have you noticed how often his characters ejaculate hot loads of obscure statistics all over each other? I mean, people hardly ever do this, even smart people who absorb a lot of information.

But Sorkin's characters, as Emily Nussbam felicitously puts it, "sing arias of facts" whenever they get angry. On The West Wing, President Bartlet and Josh Lyman, two otherwise well-rendered characters, are the worst offenders. I'm sure the show wants me to regard their recall for numbers as evidence of superior brainpower and erudition, but instead I find myself thinking: How much blow and Wikipedia did Sorkin consume while writing that episode?

Seriously, though, his jones for statistics suggests a major flaw in his dramatic technique. When he stages debates, he almost always stacks the deck in favor of his protagonists. Time and again we watch the anointed Sorkin Great Men™, like Bartlet and Lyman, spout super-precise census data - or scriptural references - while their opponents stutter, mouths agape. They have no numbers. No chapters, no verses. So one side of the debate is loaded with evidence and rhetoric, and the other is empty: we are denied the chance to decide for ourselves which argument we favor. And eventually we (that is, I) grow bored and resentful.

Above all, Sorkin seems unaware of one crucial fact about intelligence: most of the time, it's quiet.

3

In the decade since he left The West Wing Sorkin has given up coke but not, evidently, his other vices. Observe the preposterous opening scene of The Newsroom, in which newscaster Will McAvoy, during a Q&A for a panel, rebuts the assumption of a straw-"sorority girl" that "America is the greatest country in the world" by spitting, "We're seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports." Right. Off the top of his head, in the midst of a public meltdown, Will McAvoy just knew America's exact rank in eight different statistical categories.

But hey, perk up, Aaron. I bet we're still number one in Wikipedia editors.

SoundLeaf: "Middle Sea" by Yuck

here's a way to tell

you grew up loving alt rock:

this riff makes you go...

UUUUUNNNNNGGGGGHHHHH!

Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, the two Brits behind Goldfrapp, are best known for making slinky, bass-heavy dance music. Their 2005 album Supernature is a fine thing to have on your iPod when you're jogging. Or when you're hosting an orgy, I would imagine. But I actually prefer an earlier, spacier incarnation of the band. Back in 2000, Goldfrapp released Felt Mountain, which abounded with weird, low-BPM cosmic folk. The influences were overt - Portishead, cabaret, Spaghetti Westerns, ambient, James Bond ballads - but distinctively mingled. On "Utopia," Alison Goldfrapp whisper-sings about genetic engineering over fake violins, operatic backup vocals, and what sound like plucked piano wires. The beat gradually inflates, accrues electronic elements, and ruptures into a synthesizer-laced chorus: "Fascist baby / Utopia, utopia." It would be cheesy if it weren't so unsettling. Same goes for Goldfrapp's latest single, "Drew," which marks a return to the Felt Mountain sound: the processed strings, the minor-key composition, the sense of dread. When All Songs Considered spun "Drew" last month, the hosts were taken aback. Bob: "I didn't imagine this sound." Robin: "Not at all what I expected." Lars: "Sounded to me like a good James Bond movie." Everything old is new again.

Keep an eye out for...

The new album, Tales of Us, in early September.

The absurdity of this video for "Lovely Head," the lead-off track from Felt Mountain. A half-dressed Alison Goldfrapp stumbles druggily about someone's backyard, flinging lawn furniture.

Goldfrapp promoting Felt Mountain with "Utopia" on Conan. Vintage.

The fact that Goldfrapp is not a pseudonym, but an actual fucking last name. Goldfrapp.

"A&E," a ballad from an otherwise dancey Goldfrapp album. It's major-key and gorgeous and full of sad lyrics - as if custom-built for the soundtrack of a parallel-universe Dawson's Creek.

Still, he does stake out a few solid positions: that The O.C., briefly the most popular teen soap of the mid-aughts, helped turn indie rock into a lifestyle-marketing tool; that this development paralleled the rise of “poptimism,” a now-dominant tendency among aficionados to embrace “pop music music once deemed distasteful by critical elites”; and that the overall result has been the transformation of indie rock into “a genre who primary fan base includes plenty of… parents who listen to NPR on the way to Whole Foods.” For better or worse.

1

If I were to rank the most mind-numbingly vague labels for musical genres, I would put “indie rock” somewhere between “grunge” and “alternative.” So any claim about the current characteristics of the indie rock “genre,” singular, is vulnerable to a rebuttal that begins, “Yeah, but what about…”

(For instance: Yeah, but what about The Ty Segall Band’s Slaughterhouse and The Screaming Females’ Ugly and Metz’s Metz? All released last year, all well-regarded indie rock records. And all pretty fucking ungentrified.)

Yet the norms of music appreciation have changed since the late 1990s, and The O.C. does seem to be part of the story.

Here’s how I would tell it. In the past ten years, the cultural strands known as “indie” and “mainstream” have intertwined. Bands like The National and Grizzly Bear regularly ascend the Billboard charts, and websites like Pitchfork and Stereogum praise Drake as breathlessly as they do Dirty Projectors.

This wasn’t the case ten years ago. Just look at the Billboard 200 from August 2, 2003, the Saturday before The O.C. premiered. Now look at Pitchfork’s top 50 albums of the same year. Aside from the tentative inclusions of Jay-Z’s Black Album (#17) and Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/Love Below (#22, behind 21 inferior records), there are no mainstream releases to be found.

On last year’s Pitchfork list, the top trio of albums were Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, and Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel…: all three innovative in their aesthetics, but thoroughly mainstream in their production and distribution.

2

Distribution. A key issue. In fact, I would argue that digital distribution has been at the root of the recent restructuring of American musical taste.

It used to be that if you wanted the new Superchunk record you would have to travel to the nearest hip record store. If you didn’t live in or around a big city, you were probably out of luck. Now you can stream the new Superchunk record, I Hate Music, on the NPR Music website. (And you should; it’s excellent.) Soon you’ll be able to buy it on iTunes, or steal it from Pirate Bay. It's as easy to acquire as Kanye West’s Yeezus.

So the potential audience for indie rock has expanded enormously since 1999, when Napster went live. By 2003, the inaugural year of both The O.C. and the iTunes store, the gap between indie and mainstream distribution had nearly closed. Internet-using teenagers were ready for Modest Mouse to play the Bait Shop.

What’s more, the digital circulation of mp3s has changed what it means to be a musichead. Merely finding obscure music and owning cool records no longer marks you as an aficionado, because anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can discover obscure music and download cool records. These days you earn cultural capital by practicing discrimination, by learning how to distinguish between “good” and “bad” music. And sometimes the “good” overlaps with the mainstream. Missy Elliott. Justin Timberlake. Miranda Lambert. Behold: poptimism.

3

With the caveat that “good” and “bad” are critical constructs, not natural categories, I’m mostly upbeat about the cross-pollination of indie and mainstream music. Poptimism in particular has been a welcome corrective. It’s heartening to see the rock underground, long the province of sad young white boys, poptimistically embrace genres like hip hop, R&B, disco, and EDM - genres traditionally associated with women and minorities.

But we should remember what indie rock was supposed to be about: independence, both artistic and commercial. As the Stereogum article puts it, “somewhere along the line [‘indie’] shifted from a description of a business model to a description of a musical style.” Which is a shame, because it was a wonderful business model. To be indie was not to live in Brooklyn and wear a knit cap, but to seize the means of production, to self-make and self-distribute, to form communities that the corporate marketplace would either fail to produce or refuse to accommodate.

No, it wasn't perfect. Yes, it was "just" a business model. But it was also a way of clearing a space of play within late capitalism. A space that might still exist (somewhere online?), but will disappear unless we maintain it.

SoundLeaf: "Is This How You Feel?" by The Preatures

is fleetwood mac-style

lite-rock having a moment?

is this how that feels?

Leaf of Nostalgia: The Lemonheads playing Letterman. 1992ish. "It's a Shame about Ray," a still-great song from a still-great album. Evan Dando, sandy mane luxuriant, mohair coat resplendent, bantering with Dave: "I didn't know what I wanted, exactly." Sonic aesthetic somewhere between early Weezer and early Counting Crows. Paul Shaffer strumming along, beaming.

SoundLeaf: "The Wire" by HAIM

a rare breed these days:

the pop-tempo guitar band -

think john hughes, montage

"For whom is the funhouse fun?" (John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse")

"Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass - the rumor, the story, whatever it was." (William Faulkner, "Dry September")

"I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting." (E. B. White, "Death of a Pig")

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream." (John Steinbeck, Cannery Row)

"America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp." (Sam Lipsyte, The Ask)

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

"I'd been staying at a Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin." (Denis Johnson, "Work")

"The Mississippi is well worth reading about." (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi)

"I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; - that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; - and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: - Had they duly weighted and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, - I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me." (Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy)

"She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue." (James Joyce, "Eveline")

I find that a firm belief in the traditional values, and the ability to understand and the willingness to defend them, are rare. Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country, and an appreciation of their special qualities and values.

1

What are "the traditional values"? Whose "country," whose "Western civilization" is the Professor talking about? Which "we"?

For me, these kinds of questions are at the center of a liberal education. For Donald Kagan, they are distractions, or even the underpinnings of nihilism.

(Footnote: The term "liberal education" does not mean "progressive" or "leftist" education. Here's a definition.)

2

Ten years ago, when I arrived in New Haven seeking a liberal education, I was urged to take Professor Donald Kagan's survey course on Ancient Greek history. "Life-changing," said my freshman counselor. The first lecture, which I "shopped," wasn't so much an overview of the subject as it was a jeremiad against the intellectual "nihilism" I would find elsewhere at Yale.

A version of this lecture, delivered five years later, can be found online. Professor Kagan finishes with a flourish: "The abandonment of such a study [of the Western experience] or its adulteration for current political purposes would be a terrible loss for all of humanity."

Good thing Professor Kagan himself abjures all "current political purposes" when he teaches history.

That's why he waits until deep into his fifth lecture before he mentions that, hey, the Ancient Greeks owned slaves. 

3

I did not remain in Professor Kagan's course; in fact, I ran straight into the arms of the nihilists. Here are some things they taught me:

That the world has seen a number of what another Yale historian calls "slave societies," where "slavery affected everything about society," where "the whole social structure... was rooted in slavery."

That the antebellum American South was one such society. That Ancient Greece was another.

That if you want to understand a slave society, you must study slavery and society; the one suffuses the other.

That what Donald Kagan calls "nihilism" is often just a principled recognition of complexity and interdependence in human affairs.

To wit: "we" cannot properly study white America in isolation from black America. Or Grecian democracy in isolation from Grecian slavery. Or "Western civilization" in isolation from the crosshatched world system that "we" have helped produce, and that continues to produce "us."

So it's been fun, Donald. Your martyrly moaning to the contrary, the academy loves an antagonist. But really, feel free to stay retired.

SoundLeaf: "Ralph Macchio" by Annie

rollerskating beat

bobbysocks and the eighties -

sweep the fucking leg

Borrowing a premise from the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, the season one finale of Frasier offers up 22 minutes of a single conversation. One setting, one chunk of time: Frasier meets Niles at Café Nervosa, and they talk. They order drinks and send them back, bat around the minutia of each others' lives, bitch about the oiliness of the moisturizer in the restroom, pick at each others' old scabs, get interrupted by their father and Daphne and Roz, philosophize about happiness and how to achieve it. The conversation is erudite but never pretentious; it meanders but never tires out; it veers from the sublime to the mundane and back again. In the process, Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce reveal themselves to be virtuosos, two of the most fluid actors ever to star in a network sitcom. Who else could have turned a pair of snobs into such likable leading men? From the beginning of "My Coffee with Niles" they lock into harmony with each other, Frasier taking the baritone and Niles the tenor. Around these melodic strands, their father's growl, Daphne's chirp, and Roz's drawl form an intricate coherence. This is the core of Frasier. Notwithstanding the show's later triumphs in farce ("The Innkeepers," "The Two Mrs. Cranes," "The Ski Lodge") and romantic comedy ("Moon Dance," "Mixed Doubles," "First Date"), its greatness lay its ability to generate humor and pathos simply by showing the characters talking and listening to each other. Talking, listening, and trying - sometimes successfully - to connect.

Keep an eye out for...

Ruminations on Niles's shoes: "Do you like them?" "Well, they're very nice." "What about the tassels?" "I'm not really much of a tassel guy." "No, neither am I, but nevertheless: there they are."

Toast sweat

Daphne: "At least someone appreciates my mother tongue." Niles: "Yes, I've always had an ear for your tongue."

A majestic spit take

Find it...

On Netflix

Barring a recent copyright cleanse, via YouTube search