GOOD WINTER (music for the present)

You probably know that I am in a long term relationship with music. But given my commitment to Honesty, and after careful discussions with my family, I have an admission to make: this year I have had passionate if brief liaisons with these songs. 

A warning: this music, which can be listened to using the player on the left, and which can also be purchased as ringtones, is very listenable. 

- Alex Jazzera

White Winter Hymnal / Fleet Foxes

Like Edgar Allen Poe with the Raven, Fleet Foxes carefully take the best ingredients of Charles Ives and the Garden State soundtrack to create a nearly perfect winter holiday song. 

FIYA / TUNE-Yards

"You were always on my mind."

Sabali / Amadou & Miriam

I thought I might be able to make it through 2008 without falling in love with Amadou and Miriam again, but I was wrong. Again.

Oh No / Andrew Bird

Oh yes yes yes yes. I want to be Andrew Bird's friend, and cry together, and whistle together. I know he's not, but I still think he's saying calcium minds, as in calcified minds, but he's actually taking about mining. The layering of the bum-bum-bum kills me. He wrote about the song on a blog at New York Times (?):

In the instance of this song I was on a flight from New York back to Chicago and a young mother and her 3-year-old son sat in front of me and it was looking to be the classic scenario of the child screaming bloody murder. However, I was struck by the mournfulness of this kid’s wail. He just kept crying “oh no” in a way that only someone who is certain of their demise could. Pure terror. Completely inconsolable. It was more moving than annoying.

So when I got home I picked up my guitar and tried to capture the slowly descending arc of that kid’s cry. It fit nicely over a violin loop that I had been toying with which moves from C-major to A-major.

We could be friends, us harmless sociopaths. I can learn the guitar. There was a New Yorker piece recently by John Seabrook about sociopathy and psychopathy, terms which tend to overlap, but which refer to "the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population." 

I think that number should be a lot higher. Anyway, in the piece, John Seabrook subjects himself to an experimental test for sociopathy that involves looking at some distrubing images while being brain scanned by a functional magnetic residence imaging machine. The other night on 60 Minutes, a brain scientist was saying that within five years we should be able to read people's thoughts, based on the colorful computer maps created by fMRI scans. Pretty at least. But Seabrook:

The scanner was housed in a tractor-trailer parked behind the prison’s I.D. center. We followed a correctional officer through an internal courtyard to the rehab wing, which consisted of a large common area surrounded by two-man cells. The prisoners were standing at attention outside their cells, some holding mops and brooms. I entered a vacant cell and saw the occupant’s brain, a grainy black-and-white image on a piece of a paper, its edges curling, tacked up over the desk.
Then we walked through the common room and out a door at the other end, passing under a large poster with lines that read, “I am here because there is no refuge, finally, from myself.” 

Thanks to Alexis for this song.

Bag of Hammers /Thao Nguyen

"The trick is /you do not get on that interstate bus..." The song is about tearing down a house. Her name is sort of pronounced "Win." Video above from show where I first heard her.

Half Asleep / School of Seven Bells

Running away without watches, skipping alongside dandelions, riding unicorns with your friends from camp. 

But it's just a virtual reality machine; you're actually on board a spaceship, shooting into the sun.

Obama / Extra Golden

Once my passport was stolen. How is too embarassing to say. But I spent three nights combing the streets of Cambridge in vain looking for it, in the outside chance someone had just taken the pretty stamps and left the rest behind. My desperate, insane hunt likely had something to do with the timing. Within days, my passport was due at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC, where it would receive a stamp allowing me to begin a Siberian exile. Sure, that might sound like a strange thing to get worked up about, but that was just how it was back then. Phone calls ensued. Yelling and accusations. Often at automated phone operators.

Eventually I spoke with a man named Dastagir Samee. Emailed. Wrote. Via FedEx, I handed off photos, information, money to Dastagir. Days later, a passport, with a sturdy three-month Russian visa. I was not then in the mood to sing a song of praise to Dastagir Samee. But I perhaps knew half of the struggle of getting a visa to the U.S.  

Until We Bleed/ Kleerup

An eternal night that ends before you realize it. Eternal relationship that hasn't started yet. 

Love Lockdown (Flying Lotus Remix) / Kanye West

"Keep a secret code / So everybody else don't have to know." The song sounds like a brute force attack on the password. But: do alien frying pans and autotune cancel each other out?

Shake That Devil / Antony and the Johnstons

Bitch hunt turned sock hop.

What Is Not but Could Be If / Silver Jews

For the longest time I thought this song was in the past conditional. And then recently I realized it was just conditional.

Red, Yellow and Blue / Born Ruffians

It's certainly pretty. Sometimes subtlety is better (see this video, which I actually made).

Fatalist Palmistry / WHY?

One thing that musicians, unlike painters or filmmakers, don't have to worry about is lighting. 

Or do they?

Flaming Home / Mount Eerie

The illogical conclusion of Bag of Hammers, above.

Librarian / My Morning Jacket

When I was recently in California, I visited three libraries in the space of a week. It was really the only place to go. But I miss no one more than the one that doesn't miss me. 

Day n Nite / Kid Cudi

The song is sort of about lonelieness and desperation and stubborness and loss and failed dreams. Not exactly top 40 material. And yet it totally is. According to one Internet commenter, 

this kid is a official hype beast. this is the beginning of official hype beasts making it into the music world.

And that's the promise of America.

Bruises / Chairlift

Isn't it pretty to think so. And dance to.

Sad Song (RAC remix) / Au Revoir Simone

Again: bus, places that we left, song. 

"Put me in your suitcase, let me help you pack. Cuz you're never coming back." No?

Blackfly Rag / Carl Spidla

He's got so much to say and really should not stop.

Do Your Best / John Maus

The colors of points of light, waves of shadows, out the window late at night are not describeable in words, but they don't need to be because they don't belong to words, they don't belong to anything, and for a moment, when our eyes are both stuck in cycles of auto-focus in and out, they belong to me and you. Whoever you are.

Keep Yourself Warm / Frightened Rabbit

I am embarassed by the words, but it's the kind of glorious rock that I need to hear once and awhile. I'd like to see them take fellow Scots Snow Patrol in a fight. And Bono. Their Christmas one, which appeared on Alex-mas 2008, also verges on epic and kept me warm. Also: a lighter.

Family Tree / TV on the Radio

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Dinosaur on the Ark / Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit

The whole great album is free here. Tengazako and I are still on dancing terms.

Malawi, where Esau Mwamwaya comes from, was once known as Nyasaland. Nyasa means lake and it also means rubbish, or bad. Wikipedia opines that the colonists might have thought that about the "undeveloped" land there. In other places visited by British colonists, the word used was "waste," which was often synonomous with the word "wasteland." Waste, they reasoned, was a problem to be solved, like the Native Americans, who clearly didn't know how to "use" their largely untouched land. Turns out they didn't no either. No one does. 

Generations later, this thinking would yield phrases like "manifest destiny." As much as I detest waste in so many of its forms (fiscal, emotional, temporal, sometimes it's like my whale), but that's probably because I can't get enough of waste, its potential, its lack of logic, its pleasure, its pain (o the white waste!).  And this waste -- in the sense of the un-used, waiting to be used, developed, transformed -- I love it. I love what its old usage says about colonialism, about capitalism, about blindness, etc. But I really love its double-meaning, its infinite-meaning, its potential, its space, its full emptiness. If you think about it, a lake is like a waste in a way, a perfect waste. It is non-land, a space that cannot be used, cannot even be walked upon, an amorphous body, a collection of an excess. It is just there, just beautiful.

So the dinosaur (the fiance of MIA, not Esau) is walking through a waste land. "Africa, Africa!" sings Esau. Is it Nyasaland? I don't know. But boy is he happy.

Drive on Driver / Magnetic Fields

The bad thing about L.A. is you have to drive everywhere. The good thing about L.A. is I don't know how to drive.

Bluster in the Air / No Kids

Listen for when he sings "time."

1259 Lullaby / Bedouin Soundclash

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re:stacks / Bon Iver

And concerning the number of books and the establishment of libraries and the collection in the Museum, why need I even speak when they are all the memory of men.

- Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae

Beijing Subway Is Fast. I Am Not (An Appreciation)

Video by Josh Chin, Wall Street Journal

One of my new year's resolutions is to be faster. More efficient, yes, but also faster. Like lasers, and the Beijing subway, which makes up for what it lacks in panache (privet, Moscow!) with sleek zippy trains that get built at record speed. (I make up for what I lack in panache with fingernail biting.) The subway isn't the most complete in the world (O Moskva!) but over the past 14 months, with the opening of line 5, and then lines 10, 8 and the Airport Express, it grew by almost half (!), and suddenly people were being zipped to places in the city they probably had never heard about, much less visited. It was like manna from the underground (Actually, I think you can buy some good dark khleb in the Moscow Metro, but not in the Beijing ditie). 

Look, I don't love the Beijing subway, at least not in its current prepubescent stage (as opposed to its future Three-Gorges-size version), but there's nothing like a city with a terrible, sprawling urban plan to make you really appreciate a subway. 

Not long after it opened -- just in time for the Olympics -- Josh Chin at the Wall Street Journal interviewed me about line 10, which he calls, correctly, "the iPhone of subways." Come to think of it, that, coupled with photos of the NYC subway, might actually be a really good marketing slogan to appeal to Beijing's rising middle class, who are buying cars the way New Yorkers buy iPhones (the Beijingers are buying iPhones too). If you want to see me, look for the guy in the video who is sporting a treehugger(.com) beard and speaking slower than the G train. I'm assuming this is why more of our interview wasn't used (to Josh's credit). 

Among the things left on the cutting room floor were my meditations on Beijing's smart cooperation with MTR, the private company that operates Hong Kong's Swiss watch of a subway in exchange for getting to own all the land above the subway too. MTR is developing Beijing's western line 4, and owns Ginza Mall, a Japanese watch of a shopping center that connects (surprise!) to the Dongzhimen metro station. I probably also talked about the pleasures of bicycles and pearl tea. Also: the problem with music criticism today.

I think we spoke for about half an hour, which means that by the time Josh left my apartment (to be accosted by a police officer checking registrations), somewhere in Beijing a new subway station had been planned, designed and built. 

Changing the Desire

If you think of the architects that we love the most, the ones that have really affected us, they didn’t simply build what they were asked to build – they built something that was surprisingly better than what they were asked for. They changed the desire. The good architect is the one who makes you realize that your desires could be more adventurous, and then who satisfies those new desires in ways that are very, very positive. That – that – is a really important social mission. If you say that the traditional architect monumentalizes existing desires, that doesn’t sound like such a hot mission anymore. 

-- mark wrigley in an interview withbldgblog.

it might be obvious, but isn't that what we want from every leader, and what we only get from the visionaries? the possibility for possibilities. 

but is it good enough that only architect (or the client) is actor? where is there room for the public?

Touch Down

A middling Hollywood film from the mid 90s. Actually you don't know if it's from the mid 90s or the late 90s or the late 80s -- it doesn't matter -- but the first thing you notice, somehow, is the sloppy set design and beige colored walls and corny background music. And then the cornier half aware acting, all framed by angles and techniques described in the early chapters of film school textbooks. The lighting alone makes you want to want to sit far away from the TV, crawl into the corner of the foreign hotel room. But it also, all of it, sucks you in too. And though you could have sworn you've seen it before, you can't help but watch it, can't even help but watch the terrible advertisements that interrupt it all. The way you want to watch a big wreck.

 

Some excerpts from the film:

"In the worst case scenario...I have to sleep here." - man on cell phone with slicked hair

"I asked for an early holiday. They didn't tell me I could only take off two weeks before Christmas!" - handsome man with a TSA jacket

"Go beyond the image, the controversy...CNN Showbiz" - television

"Tomorrow night, Larry King talks to Caylee's grandparents." - tv

"...but today Oprah weighs 200 pounds. She says she's embarassed." - tv

"Whether the economy is up exponentially or down exponentially, things here keep rolling along very well." - a man from the DC government

"What a modern airport." - my father, upon landing at Dulles, 20 years ago

"Modernist funeral home." - me, upon landing at Dulles, last week

An old couple never looked so scared to me.

New Beijing New Beijing

Xi Dawang Lu, Summer 2007

Fortunately it's still easy to get lost in Beijing. From the center, which harbors a labyrinthine imperial palace with a fabled 9,999-rooms, the old capital rambles in a maze of narrow alleys that can be as befuddling as they are charming, with their secret gardens, endless detours, dead ends and sometimes maddening lack of orienting landmarks. Many of the hutong – those that remain, that haven't yet been turned into shopping strips – look so identical and are so secluded from large buildings that they can feel like anywhere in Old Beijing, at almost anytime in history. Not knowing exactly where you are or what street you'll end up on is part of the ancient city's delight.

But as one city was dawdling and wandering in the hutong, another city was preparing for its biggest event ever. Even decades before the Olympic bunting went up and the buildings came down, New Beijing had the triumphal architecture and collectivist spirit, the security machine and love for spectacle that are the necessary ingredients for a grand international gathering. The city's ancient south-north axis is a perfect showpiece for the Games, sprouting the Olympic Green and getting a major face-lift under the auspices of Albert Speer, Jr. (the son of the man who reshaped Berlin for the 1936 Olympics). And then there's the general ambition, parallel to that of the Olympics themselves, not only to rally national spirit, but to spark development, investment and international connections on an unprecedented scale. Just as intense as the most heated track finals will be the race for foreign and local businessmen to forge billion-yuan deals that will continue to remake the city and the country. Even the Games' motto, "Citius, Altius, Fortius," or "Faster Higher Stronger," seems to describe this country better than any other Olympic host, and better than all of the other Olympic slogans plastered around the city.

It is impossible to know how things might have turned out differently if, say, the Olympic Committee had said "Paris" instead of "Beijing." It was one of Beijing's main competitors, the "most romantic" city in the world, that set the modern standards for Olympic-sized urban renovations. The Baron Haussmann called for untold numbers of the French capital's small alleys to be eviscerated in order to widen streets into massive, car-friendly boulevards that could also, if necessary, serve to make streets more accessible to soldiers and tanks. An inspiration to Mao's planners, Haussmann uprooted whole neighborhoods to bring the modern city to ferocious life, a transformation which might have become soul-crushing had Paris not retained the gorgeous, human-scale lanes that make it so charming and, boycotts aside, popular with Chinese tourists.

Thanks to the inescapable countdown clocks, Beijing's own preparations have progressed with the tick-tick-tick suspense of a new millennium, a space rocket launch, or something more sinister. But the city was already keeping pace with another set of timepieces. Old buildings crumbled like hourglass sand, new subways coursed through the city's ramshackle circuitry like status bars for a new software installation, while civility campaigns and hygiene campaigns and tree-planting campaigns enforced international compatibility. Amidst the uneven upgrade of hardware and software, there was hand-wringing and fighting and crying, but mostly it all happened so quickly that there wasn't much time to consider what had been erased. Just time to get in (an orderly) line, move on (or move out to the suburbs), and stare slack-jawed at what replaced it all. And then keep moving. That's Beijing.

Unlike everything else in the city, the new generation of Great Projects – like the famous ten monumental structures built in the city center in 1959 - seemed to transcend timelines. They were built in "no time," at least compared to construction in the West, as monuments to China's unforeseeable future. Thanks to the Olympics, they will also have all the airtime in the world too, becoming, overnight, as famous as the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. In the New York Times last month, Nicolai Ouroussoff offered only the latest gushing admiration. "There is no question that its role as a great laboratory for architectural ideas will endure for years to come," he wrote. "One wonders if the West will ever catch up.”

But to what exactly is the West supposed to catch up? Yes, these buildings are spectacular, but next to the cozy scale of the hutong, their enormous scale, futuristic skins, steel acrobatics and sheer daring make them mostly just spectacular. To our mere early 21st century senses, they do not really compute. The egg and the water cube and the nest and the dragon and the big shorts/pants are convenient monikers for buildings that don't look like any other buildings, or any thing we've seen before. Dazzle and provoke they do, but these surreal buildings also come close to confusing and alienating. Amidst a forest of gated communities and mammoth highways, those are qualities that perhaps should be less of a priority.

Even how they were made - their modes of production, Marx and Mao note, smiling - is well concealed, right down to the construction workers, who have been asked to leave Beijing as quickly as they came. The sensation of building something as massive as the airport or the stadium -- or merely looking at them -- is one that Franz Kafka imagined in "The Great Wall of China," a short story narrated by a worker on that epic project:

Could there really be a village where houses stand right beside each other covering the fields and reaching further than the view from our hills, with men standing shoulder to shoulder between these houses day and night? Rather than imagining such a city, it's easier for us to believe that Peking and its emperor are one, something like a cloud, peacefully moving along under the sun as the ages pass.

The posters ask us all to believe New Beijing is part of a similar pristine unity, one world, one dream. But what is this New Beijing, really? Was it decreed by the government and implemented by thousands of workers? Was it named by property developers and their wealthy clientele? Was it dreamt up by the media? In a city where things can so easily get lost, is it so hard to imagine something else?

*

For a brief time, before the hyperbolic real estate billboards would be taken down and replaced with Olympics logos, a piece of scaffolding surrounding a construction site near the Central Business District offered an oracular take on one of Beijing's mantras. "One Word One Dream," it said.

What must have been a typo, a pretty funny one, also seemed like an apt description of how Beijing would remake itself for its close-up and its continued growth: not just through wrecking balls and steel and glass and concrete but by a marshaling of words, by a state-sponsored, privately-owned or street-bound poetic imagination.

Consider the names of buildings. If the nicknames given by citizens to Beijing's new architecture are signs of intimacy and a desire to make some sense of them, the names doled out by the real estate industry speak to middle class aspirations and a desire to make cents. Some luxury housing complexes and gated communities are simply bootlegs: Central Park, Upper East Side, Orange County (who knows what Regentland and Space Montage are meant to evoke). New words were added to Beijing's realty poetry by two shopping malls: at The Place and The Village one is hard pressed to find a sense of place or the feel of a village, not anymore at least.

But the point is that how the city develops depends on how it is seen, and, more importantly, how it sees itself. "One Word One Dream" secretly an empowering idea, an Emersonian idea plopped into the Kafkaesque city. Beijing's future depends on the dreams – or the nightmares – of all its people, from the slogan makers to the slang-slingers.

I asked Mike Meyer, the author of simply the best new book there is on Beijing, Last Days of Old Beijing, what kind of a city the world will see when it arrives for the Olympics. "The world will see the Beijing it wants to see," he said. "Cities are not jars of clay, but ever-changing rivers, open to multiple interpretations. I have 'my' Beijing, and you have yours." By the same token, Beijing will show the world what it wants to show it. Afterwards, others will continue to decide what Beijing is. Surely there will be more timelines and new slogans and big countdowns. But like so much else, these will probably get lost in the maze of worlds and words and dreams that make the city every day, and that count towards a place that is more than just "New."