SEASONALLY (IN)APPROPRIATE SOUNDTRACK

I know of four songs with "Endless Summer" in the title, and all of them are great. I wonder what makes this such an enduring image/idea? Anyway, on a wintry New Year's Eve night, here's a soundtrack for warmer times to come in 2012. Yep, this is what a New Year's Eve party soundtrack sounds like in the bourgeoiseaux household.

The Sandals - "Theme from The Endless Summer"

Fennesz - "Endless Summer"

Microstoria - "Endless Summer NAMM"

Microstoria/Stereolab - "Microlab: Endless Summer"

Am I missing any more great songs with "Endless Summer" in the title? Please let me know.

NEW YEAR'S EVE PLANS AND MY FAVOURITE HOLIDAY EVENT

I love the World Junior Hockey Championship. I think many Canadians do. It's my favourite event of the holiday season; I look forward to the first game of the tournament on Boxing Day more than Christmas Day, and have done so for years. A few years ago, Canada and the US played on New Year's Eve in an instant classic. Almost all New Year's Eve games at the World Juniors are required viewing. So what am I planning on doing tonight? Oh, you'd better believe it:

If this game lives up to the last few times Canada and the US have met, it will be phenomenal (although, it might be topped by Russia vs. Sweden afterwards, which should be a doozy of a game). The tournament is even more pleasurable to watch this year because TSN has ditched Pierre McGuire (who might be the most annoying man in hockey) for Ray Ferraro--you can hear how much Gord Miller is enjoying working with Ferraro, which makes the commentary much better.

A few reasons why I love this tournament (read: some overt displays of bias and partisanship):

I was in Corvallis when this game happened and had to listen to it as I couldn't get TSN's video stream. I remember telling my girlfriend at the time that if Canada lost the game, then I was going to be in a very bad mood. Heart-stopping brilliance right here (Ryan Ellis deserves as much credit as Jordan Eberle for keeping the puck in the zone on Russia's clearing attempt).

Eberle's game-tying goal is even better, but I can't embed it for some reason (Eberle very much earned his "Mr. Clutch" nickname--doing this in multiple games two years in a row? Unbelievable).

Next to this (which also has one of my favourite calls), this shootout is probably my favourite sports moment. I still get chills watching every second of it.

A BRIEF NOTE ON MAUS AND HAUNTOLOGY, INSPIRED BY METAMAUS

If there's a canon of American hauntological fiction, Maus is definitely part of it (other texts to be included in that list: Beloved, The Shining, a whole mess of Philip K. Dick [e.g. Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said], the New York Trilogy). I'm working my way through MetaMaus right now and this quote from Art Spiegelman is just so perfect, both in explaining why Maus is a hauntological work and why comics are an inherently hauntological medium:

What is most interesting about comics for me has to do with the abstraction and structurings that come with the comics page, the fact that moments in time are juxtaposed. In a story that is trying to make chronological and coherent the incomprehensible, the juxtaposing of past and present insists that past and present are always present--one doesn't displace the other the way it happens in film. (165)

This seems like a formal and material manifestation of Derrida's  "deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting 'out of joint' the authority of the 'is.' . . . measuring . . . against the historical experience--and this is history itself--against the experience of that which in the 'is,' in time or in the present time of 'is,' remains precisely 'out of joint'" ("The Time is Out of Joint" 25). In Spiegelman's description, Maus would fail if it gave authority to any "is;" the narrative works precisely because there remains no time or tense that gains priority. Spiegelman points to a passage early in the second volume in which the formal representation of the past and of the present are "butting . . . up against each other." The very rigid and regular grids of the present "have fallen away to reveal what's underneath. . . . By peeling away what would have been six of the panels on that fifteen-grid page, the map of Auschwitz that underlies our present is revealed" (181-82; my emphasis).

Similarly, the introduction to Auschwitz in the second volume--which up to now has been seen only as its iconic front gates--is accomplished via a similar displacement of the primacy of the present moment. In a way to get around the dread he felt at telling this part of his father's story, Spiegelman sought to enter Auschwitz in a way that "doesn't allow for the momentousness of the moment" (188). Thus, the introduction comes through a break in the present--one that reveals that the past was there all along, that any entry into Auschwitz by the narrative is a reentry--when, "after wandering around the bungalow colony with my father . . . a very small panel, a close-up of a snarling Nazi . . . interrupts the fairly fluid stroll through the country. It's very abrupt and perfunctory" (188). The Nazi's shout--ostensibly to the Jews who had been transported to Auschwitz in the truck carrying Vladek and Anja--is multivalent: a call to leave the present moment and a call to the past to expose itself as there in that present moment.

In these reveals, these explorations of the past and present as both always present, Maus is a tremendously uncanny text. It offers up what is to remain hidden in order for the present to assert its authority: the competing narrative of the past, whose presence, formerly skirting by at the edges of awareness, frame, and panel, now becomes fully visible. In this sense, Maus fits with Adam Harper's definition of hauntological art, in which the object possesses:

two stages, or layers. The first layer seems to present something that's in some way idealised - this is often but not always an image involving the past . . . The second "hauntological" layer problematises, compromises and obfuscates the first layer, undermining or damaging it in some way and introducing irony into the work, and represents the opinionated viewpoint of the present. While the first layer might express hope and confidence, the hauntological layer contradicts and undoes this by expressing a satirical doubt and disillusionment.

Here, Maus functions as a hauntological work because the ostensibly idealized life in America that Vladek enjoys in Rego Park is continually undercut by the reintroduction of the past (or the way it functions as an uncanny text). In a mirror of the map of Auschwitz underneath Vladek and Art's present conversation, the back cover of the second volume (reproduced within the body of the text) geographically and temporally displaces contemporary New York and New Jersey into Poland and Auschwitz.

Even Spiegelman's counterpart in the text, Art, cannot escape the past in his present moment of success after the publishing of the first volume. His writing desk rests on the bodies of dead mice, he's bordered by a swastika, and a guard tower looms outside his window. For Spiegelman, this "Time Flies" section serves "as a MetaMaus like commentary on the whole project."

Perhaps even more powerful, though slightly less visceral than the above sequence, is one of the motivating questions Spiegelman describes:

"So, how did you get born when you weren't supposed to?" In a way, taking on my parents' Holocaust story was a way of getting to the primal moment of my birth, because there was no way that they were both supposed to be alive and coupling after World War II. It is a specific journey that has nothing to do with history and everything to do with history; one or both of these people is supposed to be dead, which means that I'm not supposed to be here. (199)

Spiegelman's own presence, his body, destabilizes time and history here, complicating narratives that resist closure and refuse to add up. In this way, the hauntological elements of Maus are, I think, exactly what continue to make it relevant. As Spiegelman points out, casual racism is:

what festered into becoming the Final Solution; and it is what allows our current immigration debates to take certain kinds of appalling coloration now. It is what allows us to call Arabs "ragheads," it's what allows Arabs to think of Jews and Americans as wearing targets around their necks so one can kill them, it's that whole process of dehumanization. I'm not exempting myself, my father, or the Nazis or Poles from it; it seems to be a basic aspect of how tribes organize themselves. (36-37)

The call to remember in Maus, to account, introduces "Guilt . . . an explosive thing to live with, but it may be the price we humans must pay for civilization while trying to learn true Empathy" (158).* It might be possible to pair this statement with the ethical and political aspect of hauntology, its insistence that the present is not the only possibility: "The reason all these ghosts matter, the point of saying It wasn't always like this, is not that it was better then, let's go back, but to remind ourselves that it doesn't have to be this way. . . The ghosts that should most haunt us are the spectres of events that have not yet happened." The spectres raised by Maus, the history that the text bleeds, are not confined to the past, but extend into the returning future in which the preconditions for what takes place in Maus have never been eliminated.

Anyway, if you're a fan of Maus, do yourself a favour and pick up MetaMaus. The three long interview sections--"Why the Holocaust?," "Why Mice?," and "Why Comics?"--are illuminating, with Spiegelman's candid and articulate answers a real joy to read. Added treats: the unedited transcript of his initial interview with his father, Vladek, in 1972 and the DVD, containing audio clips of Spiegelman explaining his work and excerpts from the tape recordings of Vladek telling his story.

*Echoes of PKD's claim that empathy is the necessary characteristic of the human?

I WISH I LIKED THE COCTEAU TWINS

I've said this a number of times, but I really wish I could love the Cocteau Twins. They are one of my favourite bands to read about because, when a decent writer discusses their music, it usually turns into a description of everything I love about music. Unfortunately, when I listen to the Cocteau Twins, I don't have the same experience. Part of it is the production--everything sounds impossibly dated and awkward (this is probably aided by reading guitar magazines as a teenager, which tended to demonize any and all uses of the chorus effect after its abuse in the 1980s)--but part of it is something I just can't nail down. I love Elizabeth Fraser's voice in other settings (Massive Attack's "Teardrop" or This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren," for example), but I often feel vaguely embarrassed when listening to her within the context of the Cocteau Twins. Similarly, I recognize how gorgeously detailed and layered Robin Guthrie's guitar sound is, but in action it often leaves me cold (or worse, bored). Thus, despite the fact that the Cocteau Twins helped invent/refine the kind of music that I love, I've pretty much shied away from listening to them. This is all the more surprising to me in light of the fact that I do really love a lot of things that sound like/bear an obvious debt to the Cocteau Twins, like Seefeel's Quique.

This is not to say that I hate the Cocteau Twins or actively dislike them. If anything, I'm ambivalent toward their music. I'll enjoy the odd song when I come across it, but the only album I own is Heaven or Las Vegas. Inspired to give that album another spin after writing about The Weeknd, who sample "Cherry-Coloured Funk" for "The Knowing" and have their own song titled "Heaven or Las Vegas," I was reminded how much I love the title track. Fraser's voice in the chorus is just perfect, lightly tripping through the syllables, and Guthrie's guitar is as neon and sparkly as the titular locales would suggest. Really, it's just a wonderful piece of pop that's sweet as the sugariest treat. I've always felt that the colour My Bloody Valentine used for the cover of Loveless is the perfect colour for that music (my own weak experience of synaesthesia). Similarly, the combination of Fraser's voice and Guthrie's guitar in "Heaven or Las Vegas" suggests the exact shape depicted on the cover of the album.

Browsing for the video for "Heaven or Las Vegas," I came across a band that, like the Cocteau Twins, I tend not to enjoy, despite their similarity to many other bands I do enjoy: Lush (whose album Spooky was produced by none other than Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins and who were also on 4AD). My brother is a Lush fan, and I remember him playing their albums while I was on the computer and he played video games, or vice versa.* One song I don't remember him ever playing, but that I've come to really like, is "Undertow" from their album Split (I think my brother stuck to things like "Desire Lines" and "Never-Never," though he didn't like The Cure, surprisingly). It's not hard to figure out what I love about "Undertow:" the opening drumbeat, so metallic and mysterious, the industrial-strength bass, and the swirling, sensual music (which owes not a little to Guthrie) that threatens to overwhelm the vocals until the lovely a cappella end. This is as heavily sexual as My Bloody Valentine, but unlike the fairly ambiguous/androgynous Loveless--and here is as good a place as any to acknowledge one of my favourite lines in any album review is Heather Phares' description of Loveless as "suggesting druggy sex or sexy drugs;" that's just so apt--the sexuality here is fiercely feminine, something like "Loomer" or "Blown a Wish," but deeper and darker somehow.

*There were three bands I can remember him playing in this situation: Lush, Buffalo Daughter, and Portishead. Clearly, only one of those three took. Actually, I think that Beth Gibbons and Elizabeth Fraser are not a million miles removed from each other in terms of technique, approach, subject matter, etc. This just makes my ambivalence toward the Cocteau Twins more confusing.

REFLECTIONS ON ALBUMS OF THE YEAR COUNTDOWN

I spent the past eleven days cataloguing my favourite albums of 2011 (it was supposed to be ten days, but I was in no mood to sit in front of my computer and write on Christmas Day). All told, it worked out to a little over 7750 words on fifteen albums. If you add in the two pieces I wrote on eleven songs I really liked in 2011, the count is up to almost 9500 words. That is a lot of words (if you've read your Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that clause should prove I am human. I will also say to you if you are very tall, "Oh, you're very tall!"). Anyway, the point here is not to toot my own horn about writing a certain number of words about music (akin, I suppose, to telling someone just how long you danced about architecture). Rather, I just wanted to think out loud a bit about my experience writing this list.

I. Format

I am surprised at how easy it was to decide on a format for the write-ups themselves. Basically, I knew that I wanted to avoid a general discussion of a particular album's strengths (cf. Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2011, not that there is anything wrong with that approach, necessarily). This was to be my list and it had to explain my understanding of the album (I made a conscious effort fairly early on to avoid the second person. I don't think it appears in anything after the Neon Indian write-up). Of course, entirely subjective and personal criteria do not necessarily make for great evaluations--a point I try desperately to make clear to my students--so I wanted something slightly more objective/universal and review like to accompany my own relationship to the album. Thus, the two paragraph structure seemed ideal. It was flexible enough to shift with albums whose place on the list owed more to the explanation accompanying the more objective components and with those whose place on the list owed more to my own encounter with them than anything else. Hopefully, if one paragraph wasn't engaging for the reader, the other paragraph would be. If neither paragraph was engaging, well, maybe the links to YouTube videos proved satisfying.

In terms of the actual number of albums, I picked ten (with five honourable mentions) partly to force myself to evaluate albums rather than picking a number large enough to allow me to just list every album I listened to this year and partly for practical reasons: ten seemed like a good number that would keep this doable and lend some weight to the selections. I kept the albums separated into the top ten and the honourable mentions rather than top fifteen for much the same reason. It seemed important to have a demarcation between "good albums that I enjoyed" and "the best albums of the year" (I guess this is my own personal good record/important album distinction). Before I actually sat down to do the list, I assumed that several albums from the honourable mentions list would make the main list and I was somewhat surprised at how easy it was to separate the two lists once I started working.

II. Schedule

I anticipated that writing something every day for a set number of days would be difficult. I don't tend to work that way on anything. Doing the list this way proved to be both challenging and rewarding. There were a few entries on the list for which I had some notes written in advance (Neon Indian, Kode9 & the Spaceape, and Tim Hecker), but I tended to avoid using them. As much as possible, I wanted this to be a process of sitting down to the computer each day as the desire came over to me and writing the piece while listening to the album in question. In two or three cases I found my way into the write-up the night before, and wrote a few sentences or a draft paragraph, but largely these were drafted as I listened and then edited/expanded. Sometimes this task seemed daunting and unpleasant, with the desire clearly not about to come any time soon (My thought process: Another one? Really? Whose stupid idea was this? Oh, wait...), and at other times, all the desire in the world couldn't produce a useful sentence. During the second half of the list, my own schedule for this became increasingly rigid--generally, it was wake up, start working, finish and post by mid-morning. I'm not sure I really achieved this with any of the entries, but it gave me a structure within which I could work.

What made this worthwhile was not that it built in a sense of obligation or anything like that (though it did just that), but rather that these write-ups fed off each other, illuminating connections I'd never noticed or, at the least, never articulated to myself. If I'd just written these in a concentrated burst over a couple days or haphazardly as I felt like it, I doubt those themes would've emerged. In a similar way, I found that shared aesthetic properties (and the aesthetic properties that ultimately led me to pick these albums over others) became clear for me in a way that I think I was only subconsciously aware of prior to writing. Though I didn't take advantage of this at all, I also appreciated that doing the write-ups one album at a time allowed me to reconsider the list as I wrote it. There were a few minutes of dithering at times about the place of an album (especially 6/7 and 3/4), but I decided to stick with the order as I initially determined it.

III. Overall Reflections

Despite some complaining at times on my part, this albums of the year list was by far the most fun I've had with this blog. It felt like a simple and straightforward way to get back to why I started this blog, to have a place to write and think about music. In an age of such widespread access to music (via YouTube, Spotify, torrents and P2P, etc., etc.) there's bound to be at least a whiff of genre tourism to any list outside of one with a specialized focus. I don't really know a lot about the genres (hello, bass music!) out of which many of my favourite albums emerged, so I'm probably more of a tourist than most who are writing these lists (this was also part of my reasoning in focusing so heavily on my response to albums as the contextual framework, even when discussing an artist's past work and the new work in relation to that corpus). I hope, though, that the aesthetic and thematic connections that emerged in the write-ups offered something like a picture (if not clear, at least muddy) of my own aesthetic preferences. That is, I'd like to believe that taking into account the things I very clearly like (via what I said in the write-ups), nothing on this list should be too surprising or out of keeping with the other entries. This is the second year I've done an albums of the year list* and I plan to keep it up for as long as it remains a fun activity. It will be interesting for me (if for no one else) to see if the aesthetic concerns that are already apparent after two years of this continue to crystallize or if there is a radical shift.

Anyway, if you read any of the list, I hope you enjoyed it. If it introduced you to any new music, or reintroduced you to an artist you'd lost touch with, or just made you reevaluate--for even a second--something you dislike, then I think the list proved its worth. Onward to 2012 and more great music!


*Last year's best album (in my opinion, of course) was Cosmogramma by Flying Lotus (paired with the Pattern+Grid World EP). The runner-up was Four Tet's There Is Love In You.