TS Eliot

"In an interesting essay in the volume of ESSAYS ON THE DEPOPULATION OF MELANESIA, the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers adduced evidence which has led him to believe that the 'civilization' forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom. When every theater has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when ever horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians."

Professor Longhair

But even as Ahmet began to produce music using pieces of the knowledge he had acquired as an enthusiast, he continued to look for the inaccessible thing, the thing with authority, the thing that did not need his help. “Herb Abramson and I went to New Orleans,” Ahmet told me. “And we heard about this Professor Longhair, and the very name fascinated me, you know. But I didn’t know where to find him. He didn’t have a telephone. We were taken to a place where he usually hung out, but he wasn’t there. They told us he was going to play that night. We took the address, and we thought that the address was in town—you know, a local address. But, as it turned out, that evening when we got in a taxi and gave him the address the driver said, ‘That’s across the river. You have to take a ferry across the river. And I won’t go there anyway, because that’s a niggertown.’ So the driver took us as far as the ferry. And when we got across the river it was very dark, because there were no street lights on the other side, but there were a couple of taxis. So we took a taxi, a white taxi, and we told him where we wanted to go. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can’t go there.’ So I said, ‘Well,’ and I made up some story. You had to make up stories in those days, because they were strict Jim Crow, you know. If you went to a Negro section of town, you’d have to have an excuse. If you said you were from a record company, that didn’t always work, so sometimes we’d say we were from Life magazine, or something like that. And so I made up a whole story. The man said, ‘The best I can do is take you near there, and you can walk over.’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t go in there for anything in the world,’ and so on and so forth. We said O.K. So in the middle of the night he took us and stopped in the middle of a field, it looked like, you know. Fields on both sides. And I wasn’t sure whether he was just, you know, taking some sort of revenge on us or something. So I said, ‘Where is it?’ So he said, ‘Well, you have to walk right across this field over there about a mile.’ Far away we could see some lights. He said, ‘That’s it over there, you see. This is as close as I can come.’ Well, I tell you, we tramped through this . . . field, in this pitch black, in the middle of the night. There was a bit of a moon out, so we could see our way. As we approached this village, we saw this house, which was bulging in and out. All the windows were brightly lit. A lot of light was coming out of the house. It was right in the town square, the main intersection, and from far away it looked, actually, as if people were falling out the windows. The music was just blaring. We thought this must be—‘My God, there’s a fantastic band in there!’ You know, there was a great sense of discovery to . . . tramping through this field and hearing this music from far away in this ugly black village, you know. ‘My God, Herb, we’ve really come upon a great discovery. It’s just what you dream about.’ When we arrived in the square there, people saw us, and a couple of people went running immediately into this house—this was a club, you know, where he was playing—because I guess every time they saw white people it meant trouble of some kind, you know. So we walked up into the place and we said, ‘We’re from Life magazine.’ And the guy at the door said, ‘Just a minute,’ and so on. ‘We’re also from this record company in New York,’ and so on, ‘and we want to see Professor Longhair.’ And there was a big row at the door. Some people ran out the back door. They weren’t quite sure. Thought we might be the sheriff or something, you know. After a few minutes’ talk, they let us come in and sit behind the piano, and— Oh, the thing that struck me when we arrived there, when we walked in, what I thought had been an R. & B. band turned out to be just Professor Longhair by himself. He was sitting there with a microphone between his legs. He used to play an upright piano, and he had a drum, kind of a drum, attached to the piano. Not a drum but a drumhead, you know, attached to the piano. He would hit it with his right foot while he was playing. He made a percussive sound. It was very loud. And he was playing the piano and singing full blast, and it really was the most incredible-sounding thing I ever heard. And he was doing it all by himself. And it was one of the most primitive dance halls I’d ever been in. There was just like . . . a club, you know, but people jammed in there dancing and this wild thing going on, and they hid us in the corner there and we were listening to the music. I thought, My God, we’ve really found an original—nobody’s ever heard this man. He played like nobody I’d ever heard. Had some of the characteristics of some of the early boogie-woogie piano players, but with a strong Latin influence. He had a little bit of Jelly Roll Morton, a little bit of Yancey, a little bit of— But he played in his own time. He kept a very strange, different tempo. And a lot of Spanish influences—West Indian, you know. And it was just a strange mixture but the most marvellous thing I’d ever heard. And I said, ‘My God, no white person has ever seen this man.’ So as soon as he finished, Herb and I, very excited, said, ‘Look, we have to tell you, we’re just astounded by your playing,’ you know, and shaking his hand. ‘We want very much to record you.’ He said, ‘Oh, what a shame. I just signed with Mercury.’”

songs

Playlist

Follow the link above to see the 50 songs that I've listened to the most over the last two years. Statistics tell us what we really like instead of what we think we like. It's a little disconcerting. What does this list say about me as a person?

Responses

http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-sex-andor-dating-game.html

This post, written in reply to my New York Magazine cover story on the Sex Diaries, seemed weirdly intelligent, and literary, from someone who identifies himself as a "life coach."

It turns out that the author is a former psychoanalyst who studied with Lacan in Paris and wrote an important book about the master for Harvard University Press.

But with the declining public interest in psychoanalysis, he has reinvented himself as an executive life coach. I find this act pretty interesting -- and of course, perfectly consistent with the doctrines espoused by life coaches. So one can have no doubt that Mr. Schneiderman in fact practices the practical credo he preaches.

I threw a party on Saturday night

It has always been my feeling that a party will reflect the character of the person throwing it. I threw a party on Saturday night. It would be false modesty to suggest that the party wasn't a reflection of my character. If the principle is true generally, there is no reason not to apply it when the person throwing the party is you.

And so, to all of the guests who attended my party, and helped to make it the pleasing occasion that it was, I would like to say: Thank you for providing a fitting reflection of my character.

Latest story at Tablet Magazine

I wrote about the Dreyfus Affair and Guantanamo Bay for Tablet Magazine.

Back by Popular Demand

A few years ago, I posted some videos onto YouTube. Filmed on the cheapest webcam extant, they portrayed a pixellated image of me wearing two buttoned-down shirts -- a black one with epaulets superimposed atop a blue one with white pinstripes -- bashing through acoustic cover versions of a handful of popular songs: Springsteen's Factory; U2's Van Diemen's Land; the slave ballad Old Black Joe; Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel; and the traditional Irish drinking ballad Whiskey in the Jar, in the somewhat grandiloquent baritone I was affecting in those days.

The audio and video were improperly sync-ed, the performances were too fast, and the guitar playing was hopelessly thrashy, max-ing out the levels and tipping the sound at certain important junctures of each song into that peculiarly wicked digital feedback that sounded like that moment in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game when, with the aid of the Infinite Improbability Drive, you wound up materializing inside of your own brain.

I received a surprising amount of feedback, a striking share of which did not consist of race baiting and abuse, and thousands of hits. It was a small satisfaction for a period of life in which there were no larger satisfactions on offer. It was understood by all, and most of all by me, to be a fairly pathetic thing to do -- on YouTube, one could participate in a perpetual coffee-house amateur hour to no tangible end, broadcasting around the globe the image of the earnest loser one no longer had to fear becoming, having become it -- and an even more pathetic thing to derive one's satisfactions from. But I was coming to understand that one would have to take whatever satisfactions one could get in the form that was given, and the Internet was rapidly extending the range of miniscule, nugatory, and ultimately self-undermining satisfactions which one would not have the self-possession to refuse.

You see, the videos went up right around the time it was clear that I was never going to attain the very modest ambitions I had once attached to music. I had pursued them desultorily, and without the requisite spirit of enterprise, and yet with a certain belief that I did, in fact, as a performer and songwriter, have something to offer the world. If you Google my name, you'll see that I am credited with my writing partner, G F McN, with a song that aired on the pilot of the television show the Gilmore Girls. I wrote, performed, and recorded that song. It's pretty good -- as competent and well-crafted as any album track on any of the large majority of major label releases; indeed, probably better than most. We recorded more than 30 songs on 4-track tape and even a handful at a small project studio run by a locally successful Central New Jersey band.

We were not good enough, maybe, to have made ourselves the next whatever whomever. But we were good enough to, you know, maybe do some regional tours, release some records on some indie labels, perhaps, even engage in the intermittent act of sexual intercourse -- disappointing in itself, but gratifying in what it signified, or in any case, gratifying inasmuch as it was preferable to its alternative (masturbating alone, desultorily, but then oddly, unaccountably, in tears) -- with a fan. We did not look like anything that anyone was going to pay much attention to,






and we did not sound like anything that was presently in vogue,



and the combination of our sound and image did not tap into some deep structure of shared desire among the sensitive liberal youth who would have been our prospective audiences, if we did not abhor them even more than we did the mainstream audiences who seemed so distant from us in sensibility that their existence could easily be forgotten. There would always be some male music nerds -- short, black-clad, pudgy but solid -- who would give us respect for sounding like we did, without any real passion, and then the beautiful girls -- neurasthenic, with diaphanous skin, invariably trailing some haughty ephebe -- who would watch for a while, and then turn away.

Right around then, these bands were emerging in New York City -- principally the Strokes -- who were creating a gorgeous pastiche of everything that excluded us. They were rich and urban and sophisticated, smart but anti-intellectual. They hung out with models and fashion people, while we were awkward, angry, suburban, and thwarted before we had even entered the contest. And we knew that they had everything that was going to rocket them fame while we could only remain forever mired in obscurity, and we had admit that some of their songs were just perfect, and so good that we were never going to match them.

There will be more to say about all of this, and further documentation of it all, when I can figure out how to post music and pictures, but for now, what I'm getting at is that I'm back up on YouTube. You see, I bought this great new digital camera, and the video I took has all these different shades of mustard and amber, and is pleasing to the eye for that reason.