Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town

Hilary Clinton wants to send 100 00 more troops to Iraq, and when I was trying to formulate a response to this, i-tunes popped up with this song.

Its weird, it seems like i-tunes has replaced the goats stomach, tarot cards and dice as divination tool of choice. Its shuffling function provides a way of throwing the I Ching - connecting it to popular cultures ubiquitous search for meaning.

So, Waylon Jennings version of the song is on the stereo right now and though it is 25 years ago, the shock of familiarity stings. The first line that really comes thru is he chucking away the central point of the song, namely: “it wasn’t me who started that crazy Asian war/but I was proud to be my patriotic chore”.

It might be helpful here to get some context. His girl is cheating on him, and he cannot physically leave his room or his chair - and this isolation matches her loneliness; the actual suffering of an unjust war is made explicit. (I.e. “its hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralyzed”).

In this gothic version of Coming Home makes one, of course think of the popular culture of resistance that provided a constant correction to the pentagons view of the war in Vietnam. But this song is more of a problem then the Hollywood lefts arrogance found in movies like Coming Home and the Deer Hunter, it gives the credit to the solider, as brave, as sad, as tragic, but as unwilling to be viewed as a hero.

I wonder what the implications of patriotic chore are in relation to the implications of this song. The man does not die but he has no legs and no useful cock and nothing but a sense of exhausted loneliness, which the person who was supposed to take care of him takes advantage of.

The work cannot even end as a proper Appalachian murder ballad, though it tries (”if I could move/I’d get my gun/and put her in the ground”)—violence begets violence, and the war across an ocean becomes a localized domestic fury and there is no solution, the song ends with ambiguity and exhaustion.

What needs to be said was this song was so popular that it became almost a country standard at the same time as the ballad of the green berets, for example. It was recorded and often a hit for Bobby Bare and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. The version by Kenny Rogers is advertised in several late night ads for K-Tel comps for Christ’s sake.

My question is then, where is this now? The closest we have to someone with the personae of a Waylon is Toby Keith, and he has been in enough Iraqi hospitals plus Walter Reed to know that this pattern of boys and girls with their arms and legs blown off cannot work anymore. Then there is Chely Wright, and her refusal to brook any dissent on the war, in the chilling Bumper of My SUV, or Clint Blacks silly and opportunist Iraq and I Roll a dozen of examples, but not one recent one I can think about that have the dissenting power of Ruby and her vet lover.

Any one has any ideas?

New York London Paris Ulan Bator–Pop Music

Here you can download a Tuvan throat singing duo covering Love Can Tear Us Apart, and its amazing, hard, low, moaning–and as sad as anything, at first its a novelty, but throat singing always seems to be better at tragic then comic, and the barritone of Ian Curtis sounds remarkably like these fellows.

Fancy–Reba McIntyre/Bobby Gentry

It is so strange. It refutes the nobility of poverty that is so
canonical in country. Though it features grinding poverty, welfare
taking the children away, and dying babies, it also has a mother selling
her child into white slavery. But the oddest thing about this song is
its refusal to make any moral judgements at a desire to crawl up the
class ladder by any means possible. This leads the daughter, evocatively
called Fancy (i.e. “I might have been born plain white trash/but Fancy
is my name”), to be a high class whore to “a king, a congressman, an
occasional artistocrat” and for her troubles to be rewarded with a
“Georgia mansion and an elegant New York town-house flat”. The last few
lines–”I didn’t have to worry about nothing, for nigh on fifteen
years–and the calculation of the mother, the idea that “mama was gonna
move (Fancy) up town” and her advice to the child-be nice to the
gentlemen, and the gentlemen will be nice to you- makes it jaw-dropping
in its ambition. There is something amazing in the lack of a hypocrite’s
polite social graces that is so contrary to what is expected in
country–namely a poverty that is difficult but whose noble suffering is
expected to reward through grace. The best thing is that Fancy never
goes back down home and would never even consider it. Down home is the
equivelent of selling out but here never coming back, selling pussy for
fame and fortune, fits perfectly into Brecht’s moral axiom First Bread,
Then Ethics. Fancy is an all-American Pirate Jenny, without Jenny dying.

Pefect 15 Seconds in Pop Music–Jessica Simpsons introduction to These Boots

1) the girl with the golden voice– has all of these connections to money and class, to fame, pop desire that completely is against the idea of hazzards–radical reinvention of american pop culture. everyone knows golden voice means golden hair.
2) she is claiming her own saftey–which gets me all fuzzy intertextually, if we you belive the rumours of her and johnny knoxville’s anal adventures
3) how she combines girl pop, hip hop, faux country, and her own insanely powerful voice means it combines more genres, with more history in the introduction to this song, then cowboy troy does in his whole album
4) her random trellsimo, meraunged to the heaven–crash entirely into a hip hop chorus
5) her mentioning of her ass twice in 5 seconds, as the primary source of pleasure, voids any of the virginial silliness that m arked her meterotic rise.
6) her singing sooooooweeeee and yeaaaaa haaaaa was silly, but hot.
7) the inclusion of the 70 something willie nelson as dirty ol man, means that he is perhaps the slyest person working today–is like the concessions made by johnny cash in rubins american recordings, but with out any of the cannonical rockism, its like Cash deciding to cut an album with britney spears ca hit me baby one more time—a song that Richard Thompson called one of the best written of all time.
8) and all of this before the fantastic opening stutter start that made every single solitary cover of this song interesting.

the video is supposed to be even better.

from the edges to the center

is peter halley a comics artist ?

no
a) he doesnt work on paper (ie he is not ephemeral)
b) he doesnt use words (is the usual conflation and split b/w language and image requiste?)
c) his work can appear apart (ie can it be modular and still be sequential ?)
d) his abstraction (ie do you have to know it is a sequence or is being told enough?)

yes
a) his work is intended to work in sequence (or so he says)
b) a subliminal political narrative is implied (ie he calls them prisons, conduits and cells–and he talks of the objects connecting to each other–flowing and ending as power flows and ends) (is narrative nessc. for comics?)

i guess my question is then–how formally distended can a work become before it is no longer considered a comic.

are questions of taxonomy that interesting?

links to work:
http://www.waddington-galleries.com/ARTIST/HALL/SHALL.HTM
http://www.maryboonegallery.com/exhibitions/2003-2004/halley/
http://www.peterhalley.com/

Alan Jackson-Talking Repair Man Blues.

Alan Jackson
Talking Repair Man Blues.

Alan Jackson is the best example of countryist, a historically minded obsession with purity mars the rest of his music and this is the latest example, after examples like Gone Country (which, even with the huge sales, seems horribly outdated), Chasing that Neon Rainbow (which is why the j-pop cover has a certain perverse genius), and Murder on Music Row (with George Strait, a fellow purist). The song in question is a talking blues and he?s been doing story songs like that, even if he isn’t talking about what happens when pop starts taking over Nashville.

This one’s weird though, it’s also a template for making the perfect country song, and a mockery of everyone who thinks they can do it. It is a mechanical paean to the power of a good hook and that, said it sounds it. No real energy, no rambunctious joy?just a barely disguised fuck you.

Alright, what happens here is that Alan Jackson brings his work to a mechanic, who told poor Alan that his car repairs would take nine hundred bucks, after spending the entire verse cataloging everything that could be wrong with his car?the chorus starts and it’s supposed to be a sing-along, but it’s sort of anemic, and he harmonica is perfunctory.

The mechanic sings?and then Alan Jackson talks about how badly written the song is, about too many adverbs and verbs that are too weak, well that works, that’s easy writing advice if you are bob Dylan or Britney Spears. Where it gets weir ,are the next lines. The most technical explicit discussion of the actual transcribing and writing of music I have ever encountered, it’s studio notes from the guitar gnomes of Nashville made public.

Do you think that anyone who listens to country knows what ?it?s got so many dotted eighth notes in it? or the importance of ?50 beats per minute? or how many ?augmented chords? are too much. He then charges the mechanic a hundred bucks more then the car?proving to the world that mechanical, technical craft is needed and a form of skilled labour, like carpentry or being a rigpig?something that blue collar, but just a little more special, a hundred bucks more special, really. Smarmy shit all around, and not as humble as he needs to be.

Finch flying out from Johns

Reading this http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/cfinch/finch5-18-05.asp catty, and bitchy review of the new Johns show by Charlie Finch, of Caluga and Most Art Sucks fame, caused me deep anger. Not only because it seemed to be homophobic, but also because it is so canonical and not very creative—below an iconoclast like Finch?who is usually a complicated and astute critic. But the assumption that from the beginning, was that johns work was queer work?that his discretion and dislike of interpretation could be viewed as being closeted?that all of his work was queer work, and that the work got worse because of his hermeticism.

Now that his newest colleges, is his most sexual, the only work that directly concerns issues of male bodies working together queerly, people are on the attack. What happens if this is the only work that is gay?what if before this and after this, johns work was about formal concerns, about repeating colours, shapes and found objects reclaimed as high art. Could we talk about it in relation to classical connections to copreality (targets), or what language recreated as painting looks like or a wry comment on hi/lo classicism (The Ballantine).? Does every man who sucks cock make every peice of art about cock sucking ? Up to this series, it was not clear at all that he sucked cock at all. (and with the subject matter, title, and ambugities—the new works called Catenary (which is the muscle that holds up both the penis and the labia) is much closer to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster (which rises the testicles), a rampantly phallicly agressive peice towards women)

It is like what Rauschenberg said about Hughes assuming the Goat in the 1959 combine Monogram was about sodomy?namely wondering why he didn?t get run over more often, suggests the wry dismissal of critical tactics that both encounter. This is because, in the case of these two, the critics take the literal and refuse either the symbolic or the formal.

What if he is shallow? Am I letting him off the hook? Is it not just banal romanticism that we assume that every work is a coded work about the author?s deep personal trauma? Maybe Johns refuses to acknowledge biography because it rewards shallowness?

Ashley Andel

Ashley Andel went to an art high school, and reads lots of art and design books, plus he listens to music loads, and reads magazines, lots and lots of magazines, porn, tabloids, art rags, and everything else–he works in a toy store, one of those who sells lots of pretty and clever things, figurines of elephantys, hello kitty televisions, sigmund freud action figures–that sort of thing.

So his art is collegey, with lots of source material from obscure german records to hustler magazine to family photos to photocopies from the big art books he gets from the library. he is sort of like sigmar polke, but polke is really clever and is full of himself, or david salle, but salle has a bit of a misogyny problem, something i never got from ashley. plus i think he really loves his source material, i think he gets a kick out it.

the other thing is that he is dirty, nothing is pure in his designs, they collide and interact and play together, and there are a million colours (well not a million, but in this i saw pistachio green,cheap strawberry ice cream pink, lemon yellow, powder blue, cowboy red gingham, the colours of kitsch and childhood–except kitsch suggests a lack of respect for his source material, and he loves it) and a million black and white imgaes (well not a millon but dozens esp. related to recasting and reworking representations of the human body, and dozens of words in dozens of fonts all over the place, but that lack of purity doesnt mean that there is not a general cohesiveness, maybe thats his skill, is his ability to play both ends against the middle, a cohesive chaos–if thats even possible.

lately his work has become smaller, more intimate, less direct and more decortative, but in a way that manages to complicate the rest of the texts, cnavases the size of a hand, in these bone whites and pale pinks, handsome and joyful creations that are riffs on visual culture, shorthand on things we see everyday, but stranger and more entagled. they are getting better and better–and i thik that he is the best artist working in edmonton, even if we are friends.

if he moved to vancouver or toronto, he would make a fortune, more then a fortune, he would be famous–i think he is happier where he is, and i doubt there are many edmonton readers of this blog, but its nice to see a local artist happy with smaller markets, and showing–he wouldnt show for a long time and wouldnt sell–then there were gigs in record stores and cafes–maybe people will sit up and look, when it is in a local place.

Nebraska

http://www.robotsonstrike.com/motion/ROSnebraskaqt.html

robots on strike has made a short video, with a small ambient soundtrack, black and white, blury scenes of nebraska, hand wound and sped up–sounds almost dull and horribly prententiuos, but there is something road trippy in the absence of men and the presence of men, the subtle suggestion of narrative, the explictness of human interaction into a landscape, and also a robert frank aesthtic of looking in terms of things like cars and cattle, pick up trucks and trailer homes–i wonder how he does it techincally ?

Who’s Who in the Purple Gang

I was reading Revolution in the Head, and the writer told me that the song You?ve Got to Hide your Love Away had no queer content at all?and I always thot it was the most queer song in pop before the rainbow broke ca 1970, reading the lyrics again and talking to the always astute Martin Skidmore, he called the lyrics of you?ve got to hide your love away slight?that it was almost impossible to read anything into it. We didn?t really talk about Jailhouse Rock

Jailhouse Rock works as both coded and uncoded—lines like ?Number forty-seven said to number three:/You?re the cutest jailbird I ever did see./I sure would be delighted with your company,/Come on and do the jailhouse rock with me” abut lines about slide trombones and purple gangs. It is unequivocal in its celebration of sodomy. But it is sodomy in a prison, a signifer of appropriate same sexual activity. (at least outside of prisons–i am talking generalizations here)

You?ve got to Hide your Love Away is filled with filling ins and legends?how it is a secret anti-love song concerning john lennon, brian Epstein and a beach in spain?but there is nothing at all said in the work at all. There is no reason given and everything is hidden. The reflection of middle class sexual identities as a binary of homosexual and heterosexual could exist here, with the langageu of secerts and desire placed somewhere in the middle. Or it could not.

The ambiguity then, of desire, the complications of finding love outside an approite milleiu, make the beatles song deeply queer?but it is not something Richardson notices, as astute a critic he is in dealing with musical minutiate, he doesn?t plumb well the emotional kind.

the question, then, i guess–is why do we assume that ambiguity means complexity and not just poor writing ?