Archive for ‘monomania’
Unfortunately, in my chosen job/job that’s chosen me, being successful and being well-known and being famous are all necessary, and I’m really not into being famous. I hope I’m not humblebragging, I mean that I’ve seen it and been close to it and DID NOT LIKE IT. It’s really hard to be emotionally stable and live in the state of constant grasping for attention necessary to be famous — one of the reasons I like David Bowie so much is that he managed to do it with only a good ten years of complete insanity in the middle. I have no problem being well-known. I’m like a resource — if you want to see Geoff Sebesta stuff, you know where to find it, and if you’re not in the mood you don’t have to. Being well-known means people can have what they need. Being famous means taking from them. It means demanding entrance, and then hoping for god’s sake you had a good reason to demand it. That part bugs me.
It’s gotta be done, even if I’m not the one to do it.
Which is why I’m grateful for people like Bowie. Get out there, man. Get on stage and avatarize.
I get into odd obsessions about music producers every once in a while. I was obsessed with Joe Meek for a while, and then recently I’ve been super into Martin Hannett. His obsessive approach to the drum intrigues me.
Right when I was starting to wander from the great Joy Division/Hannett Phase of December 2015, David Bowie went and died and it suddenly became apparent that he had amazing drumming on his albums. Not just on one or two, but on nearly all of his singles there was some sort of absolutely fascinating thing going on with the drums — but it was only around 1983, when Let’s Dance came out, that you could actually hear it!
Drums are one of the very few things that the 80s did right. Let’s Dance (and especially Modern Love) is one of the defining albums of the 1980s. It was everywhere at the time, and it still holds up — in fact, it seems positively prescient. Listening to it now, those are post-Hannett drums.
Short digression — why Hannett drums are important — because he recorded drums in complete isolation. They don’t bleed through on any of the other tracks at all, not even a little bit, not even with themselves. You can’t hear the kick in the snare, because it’s not there. He had the drummer come in and just play the kick part, and then they recorded the snare part, and then they recorded the next drum. I think at his craziest he was actually recording the squeak of the high hat pedal separately from the high hat, then adding them back together in post.
When you hear drums like that, surrounding you in very specific places, and you don’t hear them anywhere else in the track, it creates a very specific auditory space. You don’t feel like you’re listening to drums, you feel like you’re sitting in the middle of a bunch of drums. This shows a fundamental understanding of rock and roll that I don’t think people give Hannett enough credit for.
So now I’m intrigued, and I start looking. One of the nice thing about Bowie is that it’s very easy to find out what he was doing in chronological order. 1983 was Let’s Dance, his first album since Scary Monsters in 1980. Scary Monsters definitely doesn’t have Hannett drums. In fact, it’s sort of the end of his glam 70s sound.
After that, there are a couple years of small collaborations, like Under Pressure, and then Let’s Dance comes out in 1983 with an extremely synthetic studio-driven sound. Going back to the production on Under Pressure, you can really see the start of this. In fact, you can see how it was working when Bowie, who controlled the production and the mix to the point of war with the members of Queen, did the finger snaps and the claps and simple snare, and then when the drummer for Queen came in and refused to do it his way.
If you listen to the music he made for Cat People, in 1981-1982, it has the new drums. From here on out Bowie was working entirely within the studio vernacular of the 1980s. The defining sound (and look) of the 1980s traveled through him. Whether he was controlling it or it was controlling him or vice or versa is as relevant a question as, “Who drove the bus that hit ya?”
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/lets-dance/
There’s been some discussion as to what extent David Bowie appeared de novo and to what extent he was the product of the music industry and education system of his time. Allow me to submit this piece of evidence.
An orchestra is a highly specialized piece of technical equipment and you don’t just “figure out” how to run one. You don’t just stand in front of the orchestra, wave your arms and tell them to do the violin thing. No, sir, you go to school and learn, and then you get out of school and hire a lot of other people who also went to that school but have slightly different specialties. There’s no other way. You can’t fake this.
It requires educational investment and sustained economic investment to get a song like this. Without that, you can turn on the radio and that’s what you get.
Whoever the next blackstar is, he or she is going to have to do it all with a keyboard and samples. If they’re American, we’re gonna have to hope that they went to an area with a decent magnet school, because if they haven’t it’s gonna be 4/4 and C major.
Don’t get me wrong. It’ll still be good. It’ll still be very good, and very new, and exciting and fun.
But it won’t be anything like this.
Because we have lost this technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v–IqqusnNQ
Everybody knows that the reason Captain America was a hit is because we wanted to see Hitler get punched in the face and Jack Kirby gave it to us.
However, I feel like Cap punches Hitler on more levels than just one.
Consider, if you will, that Cap is Aryan. Literally super-Aryan, he was a little brown nobody and then a GERMAN SCIENTIST gave him a wonder-drug that turned him into the Aryan dream. He was more Aryan than Hitler (or Kirby for that matter) so when he punched Hitler it was like he was saying, “I am your fondest dream, and I just plain don’t like you. Even if everything went exactly like you wanted, I would still hate you.”
That’s some stern repudiation right there. Best way I know to refute a political philosophy is to take the best-case scenario and show it completely to suck. “You don’t even want what you want,” is what it’s saying. “As soon as your science-born Aryan superman gets here he’s going to punch you in the face.”
And you had it comin’.
Getting interested in the riddle of Sam Houston.
Sam Houston more or less considered himself a Native American. That seems like a contradiction to modern readers, because he was one of Jackson’s chief lieutenants, and Jackson is mostly known now for committing genocide against the Seminole. But this was the way of the world at the time, and Houston pledged his time and his allegiance equally between the US government and the Cherokee. He grew up with the Cherokee, married into their tribe, and essentially behaved towards them as we modern readers wish every Euro-American had. He appears to be the best of the “Indian Agents,” and Jackson was grooming him for President of America when he flipped out and went to live in Texas.
The Native Americans of the middle West appear to have had no problem whatsoever with slavery. This makes a lot of sense, when seen from their perspective. This explains why the Native Americans (I feel silly not typing “Indians,” because that’s what they were called at the time, or naming specific tribes like the Cherokee or the Creek or the Comanche, which is what I really should be doing, but I lack the knowledge to be that specific). Plantation slavery did not exist in their area. They thought of slavery as a small-scale, more personal thing, and did not differentiate between that and the other various forms of oppression that they encountered every day. Moreover, it was as easy to believe that black people were a different people from white people as it was to believe that the natives were a different species entirely than the white people.
Houston appears to have shared this attitude towards slavery. He didn’t want to participate in it or fight it as much as go someplace where it was irrelevant. I think he thought that slavery would hit the frontier and recoil. He was right, but it didn’t work out the way he wanted.
I think Houston thought that if he set up Texas as a country he could get the Indians a fair shake. He made a bargain with the slavers because he knew that plantation slavery would never take hold in Texas, and he believed from his personal experience that freedom would always be as close as the frontier. He was wrong, and he made the wrong friends, and he got to live long enough to see everything he loved destroyed. That’s what happens to good men in bad times.
I guess I have officially abandoned my livejournal. I had been randomly crossposting there for a while, and it really hadn’t been working. It was just annoying the people who were reading it, because for some reason the images weren’t posting with it. Too bad! But when you consider nobody’s writing over there either — my friends page is essentially 17 astronomy pictures of the day, 1 Wonderella strip, and two desolate blog posts, I guess I’m not missing much.
I thought of Livejournal because a friend of mine from the LJ days killed herself. It was sort of sad and extremely expected. I don’t have much to say about it except that I didn’t know her well but what I knew of her I liked. It’s too bad she never found a reason to live. I don’t blame her. She was 44 and didn’t like what she’d turned into, didn’t want to keep going that direction. So she missed the boat, well, so what. I missed the boat too. We all missed so many boats. It’s the way it is. I continue to keep going because I’m having a great time where I am. She didn’t. That’s all there is to it.
Monomania panel 15 and tl; dr: We are all equal before the machines
by Geoff on November 26, 2015 at 0708I know a lot of people. I know a lot of white people. I know a lot of white men. I know a lot of young white men. And I know that they feel that they’re getting trashed for things they never did. And they’re right, and I feel sorry for them. They’re too young to remember why white men had it coming.
Whatever the differences between the races, whatever the differences between the genders, whatever weird peccadilloes are particular to white men in specific, whatever they are or may be…now we are in a world where they are all equal. In America, there is no particular claim to virtue for any one gender or ethnic group.
But there was a time, recently, when a white man’s word was law. Ask older people, because they remember it. Last night somebody told me a story about driving drunk here in Austin in the 1970s. They ran a red light and hit a car. The car happened to have four black men in it. The cops arrived and arrested all four of the black men and let them go.
We know theses stories. But they aren’t so long ago. I’m not really old enough to remember them. Kids in their twenties sure aren’t old enough to remember them. But our society will remember them for hundreds of years.
So I do feel bad for these kids. I feel bad for poor white boys who can’t get any of these scholarships that are for anybody but poor white boys, but they can’t remember that there was a time when scholarships were only for poor white boys and we have to pay for that now.
On a personal level, am I happy or excited as I scroll past page after page of grant opportunities that I can’t use? No, I’m simply bored. Does it thrill me when people go to conventions and set up panel discussions for anyone but white men? No, I ignore it, as they are explicitly not meant for me and I am not invited. When you tell me that you want to set up a women’s-only drawing group, what do you expect me to say? From my point, it’s hard enough to get people to leave their houses and draw anyway, so you’re just cutting your membership in half, and there’s not much I can do about it, because I’m pretty clearly not invited, and I have very little interest in groups that I am not invited to.
Would I ever start a group for white men only? No, I would never start a group that is limited by ethnicity or gender.
And I wish the rest of y’all would get it out of your system and cut it out. White men already tried that. It sucks. Get through what you need to get through and get back to what makes us all human. White men, the only group in America that is in an active struggle to completely refuse to segregate themselves, to refuse to give themselves any particular privileges or in any way distinguish themselves according to their ethnicity or gender, will be waiting when you get here.
It seems to me that in the 50s to the 80s feminism went through a period where it was necessary to proclaim that men and women are more or less the same, that anything a man can do a woman can do, that our common humanity is what gives us the right of action and agenda in this world and not any accident of our birth. It seems to me that after that we swung into this period where we are saying, “Actually, men and women are quite different. And that’s great.” Both are true, both emphases are necessary.
Women and men are not the same. As an artist, it would be ridiculous for me to pretend they’re the same. If I drew women and men to look the same I would not be describing their characters or our reality.
Previous eras misapplied these superficial differences to mean something they didn’t mean. They were wrong. We had to sweep those errors away with the powerful abstract bromide of “women and men are the same.” Pretending two things are the same is a great way to get rid of some of the abstract mental differences between them, but it doesn’t affect the fundamental realities of distribution of adipose tissue.
So when we are faced with biological reality, and we have somehow found a way to answer with legal equality, then we can have fun with it. We can celebrate what makes men men and women women and the people who want to go between can go between, whenever they want to. Masculine and feminine are just roles, they may be picked up or put down, they are only two large constellations in the galaxy of human behavior.
I fully expect to see the ramifications of legal equality between the genders to continue to unfold before our eyes. I think male and female wages will equalize, and quickly, especially now that there’s transit between the sexes and two full generations of children raised to believe in gender equality.
So now children who choose to do masculine things or feminine things will find them both to be choices. The associations have not disappeared, but the stigma has been removed. My daughter likes to wear pink clothes. Her outfit choices could be described as pink with random pastel highlights. She has a large number of stereotypically female characteristics, and this is her right as an American. I’m happy she’s happy. I think she’s lucky to have found a relatively uncomplicated identity, because not everybody has that convenience. But that’s all it is, a convenience. Her challenges will be found elsewhere.
I’d like to see racial relations in America come to this level. I think it’s impeding our artistic consciousness and historical development to have to pretend everybody everywhere is and always has been the same. But I understand that we have to get through this first. I understand it’s not me that decides. White people, white men in particular, are not in charge of telling other people how to get through the historical trauma that was inflicted by white people, white men in particular. Now is most emphatically not the time for the crisis of the white man. We either all lived through that in the 1940s-1950s or it is yet to come, but right now is not going to work.
But when you get through whatever fires gender and ethnicity may hold, we’ll be waiting. We might already be there. If freedom really is not having to feel sorry for who you are, maybe we’ll be able to show everyone how to be as goofily self-righteous, ignorant and innocently arrogant.
So we’re thinking about leaving Austin, sooner or later, one of these days, you know how it is. No rush, but we want to try somewheres else for a while. We also want the ability to come back, so I’ll be storing my stuff out in Blanco County or somewheres. It’s an anchor, to bring us home.
Because I truly feel at home here.
But the point of home is to leave. You can’t come back if you never leave to begin with.
In the meantime, before I go, I’m reading everything I possibly can about Austin history. For once in my life I’m going to do the research while I’m living in the town with the library that I need. I’ve spent enough of my life being glad that I don’t live in Kentucky but sad that I don’t have the local history room to do research. I should know so much more about the history of Clark County than I do. I should have been reading more Austin history all along, but since I only have the six months left I’m going to use them.
Quickly! To the book depository!
Does writing hundreds of articles about something make me an expert on it?
Does the fact that the articles I wrote before I knew anything are still sitting out there on the Internet mean anything? Will it act as a bar to others who come after me and want to do research on these topics?
I was doing research for an article today and came across a bunch of articles that were either written by me or by people exactly like me. Considering that I already know how much I know about the topic at hand, that worries me.
Maybe it should worry you too.
I wonder how much I really know about the law, roofing or addiction recovery. Anybody researching any of those topics should hope it’s more than nothing.