THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1971

My first Christmas. Perhaps someone thought it would be cute to let the six-month-old me wade in a sea of wrapped presents. At that age, I’m not sure what it would’ve accomplished apart from overwhelming me, though that may have been the point. Yes, my son. This is what Christmas means: stimulus as far as one could crawl. And my god, it gets even more dazzling. From the photographic evidence, Christmases in the Daddino household up this point have been small-scale, with presents safely umbrella’ed under a not-too-big not-too-little fake metal tree. But now there are three children, and as we grow older and the family gets richer, our expectations rise and all of our eyes grow saucer-sized. Dad has already made amazing career gains the accountancy world, making us firmly middle-class-rising-to-upper-middle-class, split-level ranch and two cars in the heart of darkest suburbia. So in the Christmas photos I’ll be posting in the next couple of days, you’ll see this room get busier and busier, absolutely bursting with STUFF.

The other two kids tolerating my wriggling are my brothers. Tommy is the oldest, born 1966, and Bobby (here partially obscured by the green chair) is the middle one, born 1968. I myself was born on June 20th and adopted only a month or two later, thus I’m the newest presence in the house.

It’s difficult to suss out from the resized pic above, but those white, red and yellow blotches to the side of me constitute a doll I figure I must’ve carried around for a couple of years because I think I ruined it in a misguided attempt to give it a bath, then hid it in a toybox when it didn’t dry as fast as I had hoped. It had large buttons with which a toddler could practice motor skills. That excepted, I remember none of the toys at all. We apparently all got drums, probably in the spirit of kid equality. At that age, I had problems sitting up — what was I going to do with a drum?

MORTON FELDMAN - “Why Patterns?”

MORTON FELDMAN - “Why Patterns?”

I quite honestly don’t want to listen to this fucking thing again.

I played it while watching a TV show a few days ago and felt a chill, then felt…irritation. I turned it down and just let it play to the end. Today, sitting down for a serious listen, the dings and twees, bursts of moment and then long echo, seeped through my pores. But then my body followed the slow rhythms of the music and my heart jumped and my breathing staggered, like the arrival of anxiety attack. Then disengagement once again.

Other music I associate with that day, even other Feldman I can take but this is now just a shade too careful, a carefulness shading off into inadverant mockery, the mockery of a careful music helplessly referencing what is not careful.

Thanks to my job

Thanks to my job I’ve had some heavy-duty exposure to the Manchester United marketing machine recently - a John Simm-voiced video profile of their youth academy focusing specifically on skills development.

It was rich with the kind of decorative footballing froth (entirely devastating when deployed by the Red Devils, of course) that catches Tim H’s ire below. One hilarious sequence had Cristiano Ronaldo displaying his outrageous ball control for the assembled awestruck kiddies, all manic jabbing legs, like Twyla Tharp plugging a bag of locusts into the mains in an effort to incarnate speed metal. Never has so much F been D’d.

Roy and Rio were terribly good with the youngsters, while Ruud Boy emerged as the transcendentalist of the squad ‘ slipping into heavy-lidded reverie as he described last season’s rampaging solo goal vs Fulham; to score at Old Trafford was an “explosion inside you, and outside you too.”

Ole Gunnar played up to his cutie-pie image, as prepubescent as the children he was coaching, with an anecdote ‘ “I used to have, before, crisps. Now they measure all your body fats. And I’ve stopped that.” Aw, bless.

Oh, and Mr Beckham wasn’t mentioned once ‘ erased from history.

MORTON FELDMAN - “Why Patterns?”

MORTON FELDMAN - “Why Patterns?”

Outside, construction to the new room was still unfinished. The floor was dirty with Long Island sand; the apartment, eclipse-dark. Frigid, it was always frigid, what with it being on the ground and what with my parents, upstairs, being so fond of air-conditioning. Things were in boxes.

When I came back that day, after the train-ride, after the car-ride, after an insensate stumble down to the light fixture store, the hardware store, the church…this is what I came back to. Before, when people asked me, I would say: I live…. Then I’d recognize that the weird mis-wiring of my brain was acting up again and I would say: I mean, I work in the World Trade Center. But this place, my apartment, was where I lived, both in a legalistic and a felt sense. I left it two months later to be closer to the city; two years later, almost, my parents left it, moving forty miles further east. What once was home is very gone now.

When I came back, I put this on, just before a nap. If you listen to it awake, this is music that can suck the air out of a room. Like being in a snowstorm, it can slip you into a bubble of sound where anything outside is just a shout across the river. It can infect your surroundings with its stillness, as these sounds, silences, gaps and near misses between discreet sounds become what feel like the only lasting things in the world.

But it could also unmake my concentration, if I let it. Its slowness and repetition could catalyze a surrender to the unconscious. A day or two after Kurt Cobain died, I had this crazy wish to see him in my dreams. I got Beck instead. This time, my dreams conspired with me, allowing a wish untainted by Freudian repression: a view from the north side of Liberty street, facing west, near Greenwich, an echo of a world racing away from me at the speed of time.

MORTON FELDMAN — “Why Patterns?”

MORTON FELDMAN — “Why Patterns?”

Indeed, why patterns?

Well, repetition can lead to knowledge, and knowledge can lead to predictability, and predictability can lead to comfort, the comfort of knowing you live in a predictable universe. If the sun goes away, it will come back. In music, we can gain pleasure in the knowledge that the dominant chord will reach its tonic as it always does, and the chorus will kick in again, just like you half-hoped it would. Repetition can lull the listener into daydreams, sleep, love.

Out of all the music I kept reaching for in the anxiousness of 9/11 and its aftermath, “Why Patterns?” was shrugged off the quickest. Some tracks I needed had a good beat and a good line I could rip from context. Others were destruction-in-sound. D.I. Goes Pop, a music made of crashes, is bleak, so bleak that at one point Ian Crause doesn’t even seem sure there’ll be a next year. Yet even that album ends with our star-hopping children’s children flushed of God, free from the blood-red jackboot of history. Almost maybe the 1964 World’s Fair run by Situationists — what could be happier?

Morton Feldman can only offer the black hit of the void. These are sequences of sound with no beginnings and no ends, no resolutions, just the dark ironies of variations either too subtle for these ears or just not there at all. Some repetitions comfort, others cause anxiety. Anxiety has its own uncomfortable repetitions — compulsion and addiction, the mind turned robotic from fear. When I was a small child, I was afraid of counting past twenty: what if I can’t stop adding another number to the last? And I also thought: what if it snows and it never stops?

NELLY — “Hot in Here”

NELLY — “Hot in Here”

This is how softcore porn works, right? Woman complains about the heat, woman takes off her clothes, woman wants to have…THE SEX! Or maybe Nelly just do some nasty dancing out on the dance floor. Or maybe both. Probably both. You’ll also want to stick in the totally dubious sexual fetish of body inflation (”Girl, I think my butt gettin’ big!”) in there as well. And once again the Neptunes completely stomp all over Nelly’s juvenility, reformulating their basic beat yet again so it resembles the kind of slick, jazzy funk churned out by Brick or the Commodores at their hottest.

(I just have been informed that the title of the song is in fact “Hot in Herre,” which, uh…why? Is the record label insisting on Chaucerian pronunciation, making the word “here” two syllables, like “here-uh” or “her-uh,” like the way Mark E. Smith would say it. Huh. And to think I rejected parallelling the Neptunes’ continual variations-on-a-beat with the Fall’s yearly fuckaround with their basic avant-skiffle groove.)

No More Moby!: Why on earth is he so popular?

No More Moby!: Why on earth is he so popular?: A Slate writer seems to believe it is APE LAW that all music must rock, and with that, a promising anti-Moby rant turns to dog food.

OK, once more, with feeling — the antirockist position in a form that even a Clinton speechwriter might be able to understand: a musicworld where spontaneity, surprise and shock is a mandate rather than an option is a fucking oppressive one, like something out of a Firesign Theater future shock scenario. It’s also not very “rock,” either.

WILLIE NELSON -

WILLIE NELSON - WILLIE NELSON’S GREATEST HITS…AND SOME THAT WILL BE

Dig this: a little girl is born in the middle of WWII. She is Italian and she is Catholic and from Brooklyn. She also more than a little sensitive, in a good way. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of Martin Scorcese movies so you just know how overbearing almost everyone in her life is. She runs. But she only runs so far. She’s just a bit younger than John Lennon, but she doesn’t make the generational turn that others had made in the sixties. She marries, adopts some kids and moves about twenty miles away to a nice home in the heart of darkest suburbia. She is somewhat, but not entirely, happy.

She saw Alan Freed revues at the Brooklyn Paramount; she wends her way through Martin Denny and the New Christy Minstrels and arrives at country music. Now you must remember this is a little unlikely. She’s awfully polite and maybe a little shy and yet she loves this corny corny music, with all its absurd myths, rendered maybe a little more absurd by the countypolitan glitz of the time. There are rebel truckers and venal motherfuckers and men and women in ridiculously overdetermined clothes fighting off Sunday Morning or drowning in a sea of heartbreak. Sometimes, horses are involved.

If you ask her about it now, she’ll laugh and say that she used to listen to Willie before HE BECAME A HIPPIE! Oh yeah. At some point in the early ’70’s, he abandons Nashville and heads to Austin. He reaches back to earlier forms, like western swing and Lefty Frizzell. He never gets pious about it, though. I’m not sure if he’s even capable of piousness. His singing could be described as communicating a rainbow assortment of carefully-constructed shrugs at life, even as sings about regret or contentment or all the fucking weirdness he knows. It’s not at all upight. It’s cowboy zen.

She gets a horse of her own at some point right about the same moment Willie had his commercial breakthrough. She called him “Golden Blaze.” Horses are all over the culture at that point, tackily signifying freedom and autonomy and a connection to nature. (Think “A Horse with No Name” or “Wildfire” or the cover of Against the Wind.) But for her, the horse and the culture that surrounds it — weekend morning riding rituals, horse lessons for the kids, the new group of slightly weird friends she rides with — really do mean all that. It is not exactly what she hears on the radio, but she’s certainly sensible enough not to want that, exactly. What matters is that she has now already started to redescribe her life in terms very different from the husband and an insular life she has little in common with. Eventually she is divorced, remarried, and reasonably happy. Ducks are also involved.

Or, anyway, that’s the narrative I spin when I think about that time. And I remember that time very, very well. But I don’t really remember her listening to this record at all (And I mean this record, because I have her copy now, since she doesn’t have a record player anymore.) I remember her playing Barry Manilow and oldies records VERY LOUDLY on the stereo we had that was designed to look like a piece of furniture. I also remember Pretty Paper playing a lot during Christmas. Not this one, though. Yet since every song kicks in with happy familiarity, so I figure I must’ve been within earshot of when she was treating herself to Willie’s version of personal freedom — the Austin, Texas within.

Willie Nelson co-starred in a movie she fell in love with: 1979’s The Electric Horseman. It’s a highly entertaining intersection of 70’s country outlaw and 70’s cinematic anti-hero ethos. The cereal-shilling has-been ex-rodeo star discovers the horse he’s been riding was fucked-up on tranquilizers and God knows what else. So he decides to free him in the wild, so he could run with the wild horses that populated the American West. Watching it on cable again a few years later, about the same time she started the divorce proceedings, she realized the ending was much more ambiguous than she first realized. The horse was fed and groomed all its life by careful human hands; now it would have to fend for itself. It would have to sleep under the stars rather than a stable. And knowing what she knew about the social behavior of animals, she also knew there was a good possibility the horse might never be accepted.

Knowing her, though, I’m certain she hoped for the best anyway.

Happy birthday, Mom.

David Wild and David Plotz

David Wild and David Plotz give the ’80’s a poke with a long stick to reassure themselves that, yep, they’re still dead. Inanity ensues.

If they want to be comtemptuous of their subject, fine. It’s their perogative. The problem is the form their contempt completely disables their critical faculties. Criticism connects the dots, compares x with y, spins narratives from discrete facts — which I guess is to say that a critic that does his job realizes that, strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as a fad, and that every historical fact has its reasons and its consequences. But none of that for the two Davids. They’d rather remind their readers, again and again and again, of the distance between the writers and their subject, and their subject’s almost total disconnect from history. Even when they admit to moments of the sublime, they’re tucked away into the safe irony of the “guilty pleasure.”

So we get the cute but utterly pointless personal sub-anecdotes of that by-gone time. Hey, David Wild scored in the ’80’s! Yeah, like I give a fuck. And David Plotz offers even more needless reminiscences, embarrassing but “ingratiatingly” so, ha-ha-ha, boy, weren’t we all innocent cornballs then but we’re not now! Right? Right?

Since they figure since they can’t connect with the eighties, nobody else can either: ergo, David Plotz states matter-of-factly that the eighties revival has not occurred. That’s a claim that…well, fuck. Did either of them live through the same decade I did? The 90’s, I mean, not the ’80’s: 1984 at Crowbar started all the way back in 1991 or maybe 1990 even, the very grandaddy of 80’s revivalism, albeit less a “cocaine-fueled Members Only-themed ’80s” party than a chance for gay folk to relive their prom night the right way. Then you got minor little counter-exceptions like Daft Punk and the only Adam Sandler movie not worth obliterating; now we’ve got Cleopatra Records and The Cure vs. Missy Elliot bootlegs and the nu-electro movement.

This myopia for past and present events isn’t especially surprising. Like its older brother, the 70’s-themed Have a Nice Day series, it’s a vision of musical past that self-consciously passes over The Great Men (and Women) of Pop History and certain critically-acceptable subcultures. These are the organizning concepts with which most rock writers rely on to understand rock history. These writers assume anything that retained some degree of autonomy from these cultural prime movers must merely have quirks and dead-ends. So of course, this means the power ballad is now dead (not as long as Celine Dion or Marc Anthony has a job) or that “man-machine-hair-gel” was a “chimera” (last time I checked, non-acoustic sound and hair-care products were in just about every nook and cranny of the Top 40 and elsewhere).

I’m not asking either writer to love ’80’s music, or 00’s music for that matter, ’cause it also take a beating. In fact, I’d prefer it if they were more splenetic; it’d mean that something other than their smugness was at stake, plus it’d save us from all the smarmy Corey Hart refs. But it’d probably also mean they’d have to be a little more serious. Well, I hesitate to say “serious” because that implies a kind of academic approach that, while fun, is not something I expect to see in a general-interest webzine. OK, how about achieving a cool (but not humorless) rationality next time? Is that too much to ask for?

Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide

Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide: Also in the Voice this week is Da Dean’s verdict on bootlegs. He likes them! He gives the a new bootleg compilation that’s appeared in certain lovely record stores a big fat A! Can you dig it?

But he adds:

“A dubious ethos does prevail, at least on this selection. It’s as if the guilty pop pleasure — Eminem, Celine Dion, Salt-n-Pepa, even the rap of “Get Ur Freak On”…is somehow validated by its juxtaposition to Nirvana, the Clash, the Stones, the Stooges, the fucking Strokes, and for that matter fucking Gary Numan.”

I think this is spectacularly wrong. It’s hard to think of any of the tracks on the best bootlegs in the world ever.. as exercises in validating cheap pop thrills. Bootlegs are usually too tacky and crass to validate anything (other than the bootlegger’s skillz, maybe). At their cheesiest, they rework pop hits into dumb dance anthems for a new generation, sort oflike the identikit version of “Satisfaction” I heard at the last wedding I went to, what with its hyped-up drums and smoother vocals. But at their wittiest, they suggest equivalence between the A and the B in the A vs. B; they suggest that the seperation between the pleasures of the Stooges and Salt ‘n’ Pepa aren’t wide enough to spit through. Even more radically, they suggest the complete abolition of all hierachies of taste.

And anyway, how the hell could any, ANY work of art be validated by its proximity to the Dead Kennedys? (”Destiny Kennedies”) Or Blur? (”Don’t call Me Blur”) Or Herb fucking Alpert? (the ECC track) And how can anybody see “Bium Bium Bambalo” as anything but a labelled diagram demonstrating that Sigur R’s is as banal and soporific as Celine Dion?

If there’s any music that’s being validated by the RAWK acts Christgau cites, it sure isn’t pop…it’s sports metal. “Get Your 9lb. Cock On,” “Push It/No Fun,” and the currently uncompiled “Lisa’s Got Hives” all describe a world where this much-maligned fusion sucks neither in theory or in fact, or as Steve Erickson sez: “Imagine rap-metal created by African-American women with a sense of humor.”