Zero hits!

Haha – zero hits today, as in goose egg! In another life, I’d be saddened by that fact, but in this post-facebook stage of mine, it is veritably liberating. A blog with no readership is simply a diary, and what exactly is wrong with that? Of course it is a rather public diary, that may or may not be discovered later. It is ironic – and I swear I say this without bitterness – that the many eager fans of my facebook statusing have nary an inclination to poke their head in this direction. In fairness, I haven’t exactly been Mr. Prolific in these quarters, so no bad blood.

Honestly, quitting has been far simpler than I imagined it would be. Far happier. Suddenly, the noise is just GONE. The addictive tick of scrolling through the news feed on my iPhone, that sense of just being a cog amidst the noisy workings of a massive, aimless machine, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing? Just evaporated – lifted and gone.

While I thought I might feel loneliness, I feel nothing of the sort. I just graded a stack of musical analyses that in the days of heavy facebook absorption would essentially have been an entire evening’s endeavor. Now I’m popping in for ten or twelve minutes to write this little communique (to future generations, scholars, you could say) and then I’ll get back to piles of paperwork, and if I’m diligent, even some lovely time at the piano. Who had time to pound that wooden thing even last week?

I feel a kind of sanity arising within me, not to make you puke, but really a groundedness. I am squarely planted in the here and now, under my roof, concerned primarily with my own comings and goings and those of the people I love (and like a lot). It’s just rather high-sterical that this feels to me like a novel invention. Like I’ve discovered some new form of living, some way of being absolutely modern.

I am not here to proselytize; but honestly, I suggest you quit too. I really do. You think you can’t, that it’s impossible, that life is just different now. I read somewhere that someone said if you’re not on facebook you’re just invisible. That’s true maybe. But isn’t invisibility the thing we all most desire? I mean – what’s more powerful than Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility, really? And all it takes to conjure one of your own is to deactivate? Too easy! Life isn’t really so different now. You don’t HAVE to be plugged in. You can turn on, tune in, and drop out, or maybe one or two of the above.

Okay – maybe you’ve barfed by now. I apologize. Don’t mean to be self righteous and smug. But right about now, oh dear zero readers, I feel pretty pretty darn happy with me old self. (Not the least of which because I’ve already completely crushed Arghablog productivity for the whole of 2010. Of course…I did that with the LAST post, actually.)

kbye!

 

On quitting Facebook – part 1

Oh hello! It’s been a while, to be sure. But it’s still me. I checked the blog stats for this page, and was delighted to see that for reasons completely unbeknownst to me, five whole people clicked on this blog today! Oh –  well maybe because I mentioned this address in my farewell facebook status. Yeah, probably that, actually.

I really didn’t give many detailed reasons over there. So I thought I’d post some here, where I have a readership of essentially zero, but where I know I can find this post, this record of my own thinking at this particular juncture on my path, whenever I choose. It won’t be lost some endless number of screens beyond reach.

Okay – so without further ado. Here are some reasons why I quit. And it goes without saying that by “quit” I mean “deactivated,” which is not quite as extreme (or as difficult) as “deleted”. I can go back, if I so choose. And I don’t swear on my life that I won’t, some day. But not now.

Reasons.

1. The time suck. Of course. But to just say I wasted too much time on there is to not really delve into anything. It begs the question of the very nature of wasting time – because surely some leisure activities are not actual wastes of time. So more…

2. My best thinking deserves to be elsewhere. People liked my statuses – I was rather popular on facebook. Sometimes big conversations would ensue under my statuses, with 20 or sometimes even 50 or 60 comments. This was a source of pleasure to me. I would, from time to time, consciously choose witty or clever statuses, or provocative ones, in order to generate some sort of scene on my facebook.

But facebook statuses are as useless a place to deposit fine thinking as I can imagine. Why? Because unlike blog posts, they aren’t archived in a way that makes them easily searchable. Ever want to go see what you were posting on facebook a year ago? Well good luck clicking “older posts” until you’re blue in the face.

Furthermore, my creativity really ought to go into more serious projects. My composition. The book I’m writing. That kind of thing. Clearly this isn’t an issue for everyone, but it became one for me.

3. A false social life. Being on facebook did wonders to stave off feelings of loneliness. We all feel lonely, in some way or another, from time to time. But with facebook there is this endless chorus of voices out there, always jabbering, eager to hear your own jabbering, making you feel like part of a community. But ultimately, much of this social interchange is hollow. Of the hundred people who tell you happy birthday, for instance, how many of them would actually remember it if it weren’t in your Info? Remember what it was like to get a phone call from a friend on your birthday? I have two or three friends whose birthdays I remember (and a bunch more relatives). And I call them each year. I go out of my way NOT to say happy birthday on their wall.

There is no threshold of intimacy for facebook contact. People friend you who are barely acquaintances, and then feel free to comment on your wall. I don’t have a problem with this. But the net effect is to neutralize all communication, so that words from a dear friend appear no differently than words from someone who makes you think, how do I know that dude? It’s just so easy.

Remember when emailing was considered impersonal (as compared to, say, a phone call?) Now it’s downright intimate, since mostly people shoot you a facebook message, or worse, just comment right there on your wall for all to see.

When I said I was leaving, several folks urged me to reconsider, because they enjoyed being back in touch with me, and thought we wouldn’t be in touch in any other medium. But I very publicly made my contact info available. So what they really were saying is, our friendship doesn’t quite warrant one-on-one contact; just the occasional cohabitation on a comment thread. Is that what it means to be back in touch?

4. I want a private life back. Sure I know, this is all me. I mean, I know plenty of people who are occasional facebook users, and about whom little can be gleaned from trolling their site. But I’m public in my disposition. Facebook, sadly, was made for me. I like to be the center of attention; I like to zap photos of my day to day wanderings right up for all to see. I like to share details of my life that strike me as funny. And what results, unfortunately, is a rather rich chronicle of my day-to-day affairs, my time away from my job, friends, and colleagues, my time with my family. I need to regain a sense of personal mystery. There are moments of my life – or perhaps even whole categories of time (say, after teaching), that ought to be available only to those who know me well: close friends, family.

5. I get caught up in other people’s lives. People I don’t even care that much about. People who just happen to post a lot. I find myself feeling jealous, or sympathetic, supportive, hopeful, angry. I need to reserve these emotions, which take much out of me, for those with whom I’ve cast my lot. I’m no hater of humanity; but my days are short, and I am stretched thin. I need to remember who most needs my attention.

6. I spend time worrying about developing the version of myself I present to the world, at the expense of developing myself. Things sometimes take on value in direct proportion to how sharable they are in my facebook status. I might like to practice some Beethoven for a couple of hours one day. That’s great. But do I need to share that with the world? If I do, aren’t I doing only to construct the image of myself in other people’s minds that I would like them to have? Studious. Devoted. Musical. Driven. I need to BE those things, not to APPEAR to be.

7. Facebook is diluting friendship. Are we ALL friends? Forever? Are we meant to be? Aren’t there people who were important to us, but who are no longer helpful or useful as friends? Don’t we have falling outs, breakups, or just move on for a reason? Now we’re all just friends forever. And with so many friends, what and where is real friendship? You wanna be my friend? Call me up. Too much? Okay, send me an email. Do we have something to talk about – might we grab a bite, a coffee, catch a movie, or have a whiskey skype?

Anyway – there are some thoughts for now. Will I wait another year and a half before I post on dear old arghablog again? Who knows. But it should be clear that the death of arghablog, and its sister saxandsons, was facebook. Gradually it began to seem like, why post in this intimate, inner space, when hundreds of people would instantly see anything I put on facebook? Of course the answer is that, the people who tuned into these blogs went out of their way to do so. They came to me, I didn’t force my way into their feed. So maybe, just maybe, there’s some room for renewed blogging in my newly forming ethos. In any case, old fan or newly stumbled-upon, I am grateful for your loving gaze.

Kinky kinkathon kinking

In my time of deepest hmph I turn to arghablog as a balm to the spleen. If you, dear reader, lived in my brain (next to Goose Gossage), you would be privy to the finest blog posts ever written. I conceive them daily, with you, loyal thimbleful of arghablog hopefuls, who check your blogometers every day in the hopes that the dormant, tripleted fop who used to run this place might show up and juggle, in mind. But anyway they’ve not been writ, or wrought, so they just rot. I come back every few months with hat in hand, standing before you essentially naked, asking for forgiveness and coffee (for chrissakes).

Yeah, so here I be. And if arghablog is where my inner brain soaks these days, you should know it’s a kink-infused soak. I think of nothing else. In my Vanimal, my vanity-plated suburbanite mouseketeer auto, I plug my iPhone in to the audio jack and blair Kinks so loud as to thoroughly convince god I’m in a textbook midlife crisis. If I could be on a fucking Harley the ride would be complete (though then I suppose I’d have to listen to the Stones, which I did back in ’04). Anyway, I plug that bad boy in, but I have to hold the fancy cable because it’s shot and w/ 60s music I only get one channel if I don’t apply the pressure just so, and that channel is usually drastically incomplete. So I ride around and blast my incomplete collection of Kinks, which is unfair because once I owned them all on vinyl but where oh where is those bag o’ albums. I’ll never know.

I went to see Ray Davies in concert last Tuesday. He was really fine. Played with some really first rate musicians (though it didn’t stop me from missing Dave, whose biggest booster I’ve become of late. Him and Mick Avory. God, people spend so much time underestimating and taking for granted Ringo Starr that they leave hardly a moment to do the same to poor old Mick, who of late has wound up in the Kastoff Kinks, a collection of ex-Kink members who from time to time even include Ray Davies. What has this world come to?).

Gradually I’ve imagined this post where I say the following, but far more eloquently and edited and stuff – it’d have to be a book, I guess, were it to live up to my grand expectations and standards and whatnot. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society has become every thinking hipsters favorite album bar none, it’s the e-card passcode pin number into elite intellectual idea-traffic, don’t leave home without it. I read a book in the 33 and a third book series – that hipper than hip series about albums, each book dedicated to just one – about Village Green. All about how genius Ray was back then, and how the Kinks thoroughly and completely went to hell afterwards, like could you get more banal and stupid and sad as 70s Kinkdom? When I trod off to Kollege I was the only guy around w/ Village Green. But then it was discovered and I had to share my great love, and then in the intervening twenty or thirty or fifty years, when the hell are we, it’s become like Abraham Lincoln on the mountain, parting the red seas, greatest thing ever pooped by man, goes to eleven, don’t even look at that one. It makes me kind of mad (when I’m not busy loving it – because to my core I’m cool too. really).

It’s become overrated. I’m sorry to say it, I’m the wrong messenger. But Village Green is over rated. It’s overrated. I’m saying it. You can’t stop me. Look, no hands on the wheel, overrated. OVERRATED!!! hahahaha (evil snicker), I’m swerving off the road, I’m saying it and swerving off the road, you can’t see me, you can’t touch me, here I am driving at night on arghablog, swerving off the road, talking shit about the friggin Williamsburg Torah and you cannot even…oh shit…truck…TRUCK…..AUGHGUGHGUGHGUGHSGHGHGHGG…..

[I learned tonight that if you want to get a child to really listen to you, whisper.] The album you stupid Jaegermaester-drinking, Converse-hopping toads should be grinding into your breakfast mush came two later. Oh my poor friends – they hear this muchly. It’s Lola vs. Powerman and Moneygoround. I forgive you if push skip on Lola, I sometimes do it too. But go listen to that album again and again, as I do, again, and tell me we have anything to talk about anymore. We have nothing to talk about. You look like a clown in that shirt.

One day, when arghablog regains its decorum, its sobriety, I’ll tell you why. About how it’s one group’s coming into its own in the shadow of the 1970s, about how its Dave Davies capturing spirit, if not the letter, of Keith Richards, of how Get Back in the Line, and This Time Tomorrow, and even Dave’s Strangers, and certainly Ray’s Gotta Be Free are songs that should have made a Paul McCartney of the man, w/ interviews on Colbert and Superbowl appearances. If fate had been kinder. And to both of us. For as crappy as his luck has sometimes been, I shoulda been him.

Kinks

Like a dormant, potent volcano, arghablog rumbles. Dammit. I’m listening to the Kinks over and over again, like I’m sixteen again. When I was in high school I thought they sang just to me, so astute was Ray Davies’ insight into my engine. Now I’m graying and fatting, I’m saddled with responsibilities and wrinkled dreams, I’m becoming a character in one of his songs. If that’s what it takes, then okay. I believe – and this bold – that I have a greater capacity than other people to love the Kinks. Quality love, the kind you really have to pay for. I’ve got it, it’s right here.

Anyway I listen to Arthur and then Village Green, but more Arthur, lots and lots now. It started when I tried to get into Muswell Hillbillies, feeling like perhaps I had done it some sort of injustice over the years. But then I just got tired of it – it’s still boring all these years later – and threw on Victoria, which is one of the three or four best pop songs ever written. Then I let the iPod run on, playing through this glorious wreck of brilliance – Arthur – that I suddenly realized I have grossly, horrifically even, neglected. Odd that I would do that to an album sandwiched, chronologically, between two of my absolute favorites, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, and the obscenely underrated Lola vs. Powerman and Moneygoround. But I did it, and now in all my geriatric splendor I’m rediscovering a messy masterpiece that landed just a scant year before I did.

So I’m hatching this massive arghablog post, as if anyone still cares, about just this. It’ll be my magnum opus, masterpiece shingle, as Hume or Boretz might have once said, and wouldn’t it be ironic if it were just as ignored as Village Green – that poor album with the misfortune to be released on the same day as the White Album, which sold many millions more copies.

The nutshell is this – and I might as well offer it up seeing as I find it hard these days to follow through on all my monstrous goals. Arthur, (or the Decline  and Fall of the British Empire) is Davies’ quirky response to the abysmal commercial failure of Village Green. It’s a bizarre response. Village Green failed, the conventional wisdom goes, because it was thoroughly out of step with its time. While others were singing about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Davies once quipped, the Kinks were commemorating witches and old photo albums, pining for the fading into memory of the Victorian English way. So Arthur is Davies following every impulse all at once: the impulse to atone for his creative breakthrough/commercial catastrophe by catching up with the times; the impulse to just continue being himself, the quintessential not-like-everybody-else celebrating the England of 80 or 100 years ago; and the impulse to absorb and synthesize every significant motion in latter-60s rock all at once.

After Village Green, an album that so thoroughly came from Pluto, Ray went on to issue a timepiece, a memento of his age. Arthur is remarkably derivative in spots, an exercise in role-playing. There are snatches of Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Pepper, Beggar’s Banquet, as well as scads of nameless 60s psychedelic protest-jam-cock rock. Ray’s brother Dave spins in circles channeling alternately – and rather convincingly – the guitar work of mid-sixties George Harrison and later sixties Keith Richards. It’s an album that, essentially, shouldn’t be any good. A footnote the likes of Their Satanic Magesty’s Request, a work darkened by the towering shadows of those whose paths it follows.

You see – I just wanted to give a taste and get to bed, but darn if this isn’t going to eat me. The only thing more to say is that the album, instead of being a colossal non-item, is a staggering work of messy, derivative genius. The fact is that Ray not being Ray – and he sometimes IS Ray (no-one else on the planet could ever have written Victoria), is STILL a seismic force, especially in the last year of the 60s.

“Some Mother’s Son,” the single example I have time for now, is a blatant war protest song, not generally the Kinks’ flavor. From the start it sounds uncomfortably like someone else’s cause, or dare I cynically say an instance of Ray hopping on a trend. Be that as it may, though, it emerges as devastating – a gentle English ditty in saccharine tones that builds and builds, gradually and vividly depicting a gruesome battlefield death and the empty, officious rituals which surround it ["back home they put his picture in a frame; but all dead soldiers look the same"]. Though Ray seems somehow uncomfortable in this mask, his song is nonetheless better than anyone else’s on the topic. By the end you simply must forgive him his trespasses and love him (as only I truly can).

I have to sleep. It’s a rough draft and a first thought, but I might as well think out loud, as I encourage my students to do. Think out loud, you might not get the chance to say something fully thunk.

Dial Double Zero

Oh my god. I am speechless. Trembling – I can’t even tell you what I’m feeling. 

I have been haunted by a documentary I saw in about 1978 for 30 years. It was about Ray Bradbury and the process of writing, and featured a story he was working on called “Dial Double Zero,” which was dramatized intermittently throughout the documentary. I spent about 10 years trying to find that story. I remember looking in card catalogues, talking to stuffy librarians. Since the advent of internet, I’d google the story every now and then, and gradually I found out the backstory that the documentary was about a story that never actually was published, and that several other people had the exact same memory of it that I did. Haunting and mesmerizing. Apparently it was a documentary that aired only once, on NBC only on the West Coast, and then was rented out to schools such as mine – the John F. Kennedy elementary school. A few years back I saw it was available as a DVD, but I was too frightened to purchase it. I didn’t want to spoil that childhood memory. What if it wasn’t as magic? 

Well – I checked tonight, and as I suspected it might be, it’s on YouTube. I am freaking out. I am embedding it here in three parts. I haven’t seen it yet. Tell me what you think. 

poor old arghablog

Wow, it took three days for Sax & Sons to get more hits than arghablog has had in its entire WordPress existence (about one year). I’ve gotten some nice comments about my writing – and I do like to write – but it’s the loyal, faithful readers of arghablog who have known about it all along. I guess having identical triplets is more interesting than rambling about bagels…what can you do?

Anyway, I’m assembling a little best of – here are some of the posts into which I poured my heart, both at this location and at the old website. These constitute some of my favorite writing I ever did, and have been read by so few people I feel at least slightly justified in this little best hits collection. All six of you arghablog loyal readers have meant more to me than you can ever know.

1. Sundown - a sad one from the old site. 

2. Adieu CBGB – some musings on an old haunt, and my old band

3. 25 Halloweens Later – a memoir about my dad and mallomars

4. M Shanghai String Band – From The Air - the best review I’ve ever written

5. Words and Music – Ooh Ooh Child – some aesthetic musing

6. Some thoughts on bagels - just what it says

7. Some thoughts on bialys – even better than #6 

8. Judy Johnson’s Coming of Age – a little tribute

9. A Return To the Falls – remembering Chris Hume

10. Appreciation – thoughts on the end of a teaching semester

A new blog?

Hi everyone – there’s a whole new blog where I’m talking about some stuff I’ve been deliberately keeping out of Arghablog. Despite rumors to the contrary, Arghablog is not dead – but it does seem to be on hiatus. 

Meanwhile, if you miss my incisive wit and acerbic sharpness, it’s all still there at Sax and Sons – my new identical triplet blog (everyone should have one!!)

See you there, or back here!