On/In/Ensnared by Insomnia

"Sleep is a mere illusion; rest, a trick of the mind; but insomnia (and those blessed by its presence) knows reality and the untainted experience of restless bliss."

Self Destruction, Cadillacs, and Publicity

Publicity and I have a love-hate sort of relationship. On one hand, I find it disgusting that the marketing elite of the United States have such a firm grip on the minds of their country’s citizens; they say buy, and the people run to do their bidding.

On the other hand lays the interest of progress and a pursuit of a greater understanding of the human condition that stems from research on the effects of publicity. There is so much to be understood from merely observing people’s mental and physical reaction to advertisements that it would simply be blasphemy to ignore its presence.

Of course, there is no doubt that far more people will agree with me on the former than on the latter. And therein lies the distrust of publicity, the unkind Big Brother of marketing; a behemoth with the firm belief of the ignorance of the public, a conviction culminating only in results of the most self-destructive nature.

The reason behind these thoughts on publicity stems from a lecture on an advertisement that has been named one of the greatest campaigns in the history of marketing: The Penalty of Leadership written by Theodore F. MacManus for Cadillac in the early 20th century.

"In every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. When a man's work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be mediocre, he will be left severely alone - if he achieves a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a -wagging. Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius. Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious, continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountback, long after the big would had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy - but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant. There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as human passions - envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. And it all avails nothing. If the leader truly leads, he remains - the leader. Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live—lives.”

(At the time, Cadillac had been assaulted with accusations of fault with its 1915 V8 Touring model and though the ad ran only once, it carried the company into a great prosperity.)

That such a straightforward idea could carry a company to the forefront of a notoriously brutal market is nothing short of fascinating.

When compared to the ads we are assaulted by on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, it’s somewhat discouraging that the marketing firms of today have since lost so much faith in the intelligence of the consumer.

We are no longer assumed to understand (or to have the patience to read), but seen as lemmings that will laugh at, buy and consume anything that moves – we are driven by explosions, technology, and talking cavemen whose fabricated disgust with prejudice and stereotypes elicit hours of unrefined laughter.

I hate to advocate a return to simpler times, or play the part of the sandwich board toting “prophet,” but it does seem that if we are not given the benefit of the doubt in regards to intelligence, there will nothing stopping us from rejoining the ranks of the Geiko cavemen.

(Sorry for the rather longwinded and erratic commentary, but I needed to get this off my chest.)

Vices of the "Underground"

So, the trip to Portugal was certainly a success. Many memories were made, a plethora of pastries consumed, and countless hours of sleep lost (due in part to an oven-like train compartment and a hostelmate with the snoring volume of a chain-saw orchestra). But all in all, it was certainly worth it.

The following is the article I made mention of in the previous post. It's a satiric piece written from the perspective of a hipster that feels the music - a terrible fault/sin/whatever. Unlike the things that I write for the paper, this isn't available online and I'm not entirely sure what it looks like after editing, so here's the text in it's original form. (Supposedly in the next few weeks Move - the name of the magazine - will be online and I'll post the website at that time). Enjoy.

(Also, it should be kept in mind that it is indeed satire, and a sense of humor should be kept when reading it):

You’re only cool if you sway. Dancing, jumping, drinking, smiling, heaving, vomiting, passing out, smelling, smelling good, smelling bad…and breathing (unless enriched by a cigarette) are all strictly off limits.

It’s not that it’s an addiction. It’s an image. You all think this facial hair comes naturally? That these pants come this tight? That this hair comes this disheveled through powers of the divine? Man, you don’t even know.

It takes hours to get this outfit together. Each stitch carefully chosen from among the threads of Goodwill and Salvation Army; hours spent diving in piles and breathing dust balls, risking the devastating “dust-lung.” Belts with colors not known to man, clove cigarettes six years old, pin stripes that go beyond the coat into infinity.

Feel that beat. Feel its pulse. It’s alive and breathing, thumping, beating. Hit the bass and lash at the snare. Oh God, do it man – I feel it. It’s a part of me now. But I am a stone.

You never move, that’s the cardinal rule. Movement only serves to disturb the beautiful flow of rhythm that circulates through the air. Those of us who don’t move, speak, or give any signs of life are the saviors of the show among heathens; messiahs, if you will. You move, you die. That’s all there is to it. We’re also quite a bit better than you. At life.

The guy with two pitchers of beer belting out incoherent lyrics, covering the dance floor with movement; the girl sitting alongside the opener on the piano bench, her head thrown back and howling to the smiles of the crowd and security alike – do you think that they’re having fun, (no matter how many times they say they are)?

Psh, the animated don’t even know what their missing. I bet they can’t even hear the atonal 12-tone patterns this guy on stage is totally rocking, or the feeling of blood rushing to the feet due to the 20 minutes of complete inactivity.

Sure, I could quit. But someone’s got to represent the music virtuosos and connoisseurs. I mean, there’s really not that many of us. But I can feel it. There’s no one out there like me. I’m an individual.

But despite my all my incredible hip-ness, I feel that I’ve betrayed our Code, unspoken and beyond the ears of the proletariat. I have a confession that not even God (Steven Malkmus of saintly Pavement) can forgive: I’ve begun to feel the music in such a way that my muscles have begun to contract against my will.

At first, I believed it to be spasms brought on by the imported beer Belgium “bier” with a label weathered with age – perhaps the hops had mutated into some sort of stimulant?

But then I realized the worst, that these muscles pulsed evenly, mediated by the beats of the stage…and I realized that I was moving in such a way that it could be interpreting as “danc-ing.” I passed them off as epileptic fits, but I think some of the guys/girls have begun to talk (most have such donned an amount of clothing that sex has disappeared within the plaid and tweed that it’s simply easier to avoid distinction).

Recently, I’ve taken to filling my shoes with concrete to stave off hints of movement. I’ve got three compound fractures in my right ankle and it’s totally worth it. I’ve also been stuffing my ears with bad album art – I can’t hear the music and pus has saturated the areas around the plugs, so I should be all right. It’s an image.

The “ear plugs” have worked better than I could have ever imagined. Not only do I not have to worry about my limbs spontaneously moving, when people question me about music or why I have four inches of paper sticking out of my ears, I don’t hear them and can totally dig the music (or lack thereof).

But still there pulsed the movement – I could feel it in the vibrations. But now, thanks to my utter ingenuity and brilliance and sheer mind power, I have devised another option: I’ve decided to put myself in a coma with the assistance of a brick, and then be wheeled to shows. Not only will this kill the potential for movement, but it will also destroy any festering element of “lameness” that I might have been infected with by the surrounded “lameness-carriers.”

I’m about as indie as they come.

Portugal

So for the past few days I've been working on a humor piece for the section of my paper (for our entertainment "magazine" to be precise) entitled "Vices." Although it's already been completed and submitted to my editor, I can't put it up till Wednesday (the day when it will be actually be published).

As a side note, I'm heading to Portugal until Tuesday for a weekend trip, so there won't be any new posts until that time; however, I've been playing with an idea about travel that I think a lot of you will enjoy, so check back early next week.

!!! - Myth Takes Review

I wrote this album review last week for my university newspaper, The Maneater, as a "foreign correspondent." To my amazement, somewhere between my computer and their copy desk it picked up a couple of errors (something that I suppose should be applauded because the process is typically reversed). But such can be expected, so it wasn't so much as a surprise as it was a bit of an annoyance. It's all good.

Anyway, the errors that I caught have been fixed (and one or two sentences modified that have been marked with []), but if you want to see it, the original can be viewed on the website.



"[PAMPLONA], Spain — It’s music that can be enjoyed any number of ways. It’s bobbing heads on the dance floor, tripping hands that reach for nothing and decipherers of music who pick it apart piece by piece to find the gooey nougat center to explain the whole.
The diverse elements of sound blend well on Myth Takes, !!! (pronounced chk chk chk)’s newest album, and offer up an infinite amount of interpretations and prospects for delight. And though it remains a sporadic and hyper aural manifestation of ADD, it comes together as one progression in the pursuit of the psychedelic and the dance floor.
Because of its rather eclectic and dynamic nature, the best way to understand the musical development of Myth Takes would be to envision it as a dance party ([which also happens] to be the ideal place to play this album).
Everyone shows up at once, excited and muscles-spastic in the anticipation of [a night of] dancing. The album vaults into action with “Myth Takes,” driving with Nic Offer’s vocals, the pulsing drum set and an effervescent squealing that soars. It maintains an overall rigid structure until roughly halfway through the album when we hear “Heart of Hearts,” which begins a gradual and uneven descent into the obscure.
The party moves beyond physical presence into a state of musical and aural euphoria, and it becomes its own entity. The album becomes fluid and free moving, the music begins to breakdown foundations of structure and repetition that had chained it in the beginning, and it assumes a consciousness of its own.
The themes of parallelism and repetition keep the album strong and pulsating. Ideas find themselves repeated throughout songs, sometimes broken apart and reassembled. There are even times when they cross the restrictions of track definitions, jump borders and escape to hear themselves just one more time.
“A New Name,” the fifth track on the album (and one of those that possesses a defined structure), begins with a brief punctuated mallet line, soft in volume, complimented by a growing percussion element that eventually leads into vocals and the bulk of the track. [The mallet line is almost forgotten, however, it reappears in the end and serves to remind us of that initial theme.]
On the other side of the spectrum is “Break in Case of Anything” that sides with mutability of sound and experimentation, and is essentially the best track on the album — though there are several worthy contenders. It’s a beauty and the epitome of the final part of the album, disregarding the form of the previous half, dipping into the psychedelic, playing with synthetic and percussive sounds and mixed with horns and voices.
In “Must Be the Moon,” Nic Offer’s words of lust and alcohol go flying with a blend of '70s disco and hip-hop, all the while sidling among contrasts of high and low pitched vocals. Although the track gradually dives into a droning of earlier themes, the underlying snare beats easily maintain the movement of the listener’s head but grant rest enough to allow respite from heart attacks and angina.
Also, it should be mentioned that the melodic line of is unmistakably similar to that of “Name,” another display of the repetition of ideas.
Although the album as a whole relies on rhythmic and synthetic elements, Offer’s vibrant rhyming voice and the piano lines that often accompany it give the album a very dark and enigmatic feel. But when he drops into the lower registers, there is a loss of energy and it takes the listener out of the music, only to be dragged — blistering and pleading for more — back into the bends and pulls and beatings of the rhythm.
Myth Takes can be enjoyed any number of ways but trying to understand the sheer complexity of it will probably cause aneurisms. So your best bet is probably to relax and let it carry you on the dance floor. It’s only natural."

Admission of Submission, or a Stereotypical First Blog

How I desire to say that I was an unfortunate soul, left on the banks of obscurity with eyes shut tight against the technology of the previous few years – that I knew nothing of the blog until now.

Yet, I’d be lying if I said anything other than I had simply never had an interest in starting a blog, the global phenomenon that had reached my ears a thousand times before, but had been left to rot a thousand times over. It was only a few days ago when an Argentinean professor, José Luis Orihuela (ecuaderno.com/europe), was lecturing about the greatness of the almighty blog that I even contemplated the prospect of beginning one.

There was nothing entirely too spectacular in his presentation that would make lead to an epiphany of, "Oh! That's why people love blogs!" or, "Wow, my eyes have been opened! I had been blind, but now I see," and so on and so forth with a plethora of over-dramatic monologues and revelations; it was simply a PowerPoint presentation with a few slight grammatical errors that pointed out new media scenarios (“audience to user,” “one way to interactivity,” etc).

What made this presentation remarkable stemmed from the man’s identity rather than simply the content. Here was a man from a country completely foreign to me, speaking about the wonder of blogs as something completely commonplace and ordinary. Here was the extent of the blog looking me right in the face.

Although I had known it to be widespread, I had never really understood that it had gone that far – that literally anyone in the world with a computer could write in a blog. It was one of those revelations when one finally understands that although they might know about something, they really know nothing of it.

(And, to be more precise, the look in the face would probably be described better as a bitch-slap.)

Now, cue the epiphany: I realize now that the blogosphere is not simply a small collective of techno-savvy individuals bonded for the sake of spreading opinion and information; I realize now that there is a world here.

The endless possibilities of the blog are certainly more than enough to blow the mind of any non-blogger. But with a blown mind comes the potential to rebuild and start anew - the purpose of this first entry.

[With this blog, I intend to write about international communication (as it seems fitting seeing as I’m currently studying abroad), but also music reviews (because my editors at the university newspaper have asked me to continue to write them) as well as personal opinions.]