(no subject)
I subscribe to The Walrus, a Canadian arts and culture mag. In the October issue they published this poem:
The Eyes Have It
by John Bemrose
Just off the trail
among the quills of the birches
the porcupine had settled, comfortably
into its final business.
It looked like a fur hat
abandoned in the snow melt
a little mound of treachery
its white-tipped needles raked back
to its bristly, club-
handled, still-lethal tail.
It was clear the porcupine was up to something.
I knew he was dead and yet
his stillness kept a strange avidity.
Like a bullet in a chamber
or a fortress challenging the air
secretly, under his defences,
he was intent on something -
he was settling into a deeper focus
like a jeweller lost in the cellars of a diamond
no longer caring about getting back.
Curious, I kicked him over
exposing his black, wrinkled underbelly
like the face of a black person a century old
the little alien paws
like all things alien secretly human
the long, silver, jointed fingers
ripped from their contact with the earth
and his sooty squirrel’s face, so astonishingly small
under its mohawk of quills.
Later, driving off, I thought again of the porcupine -
how I had kicked over the hut of his privacy
broken his last dish
stared into the room
where his relatives sat grieving.
At least I could have tipped him back again.
But I had left him with his belly exposed
to the wind, and the constellations
and the quick, unholy communion of eyes.
The Walrus
10/2007
I don't especially care to break out the analysis - I'm just going to be here, quietly enjoying.
***
I just bought Kanye's Graduation and MIA's Kala. I haven't listened to them enough times to form coherent opinions about the albums but I know this: they are both awesome, but they are divergently awesome. Some reviews to back me up on this:
For all the pageantry, the most substantial takeaway from Kanye's new album is the realization that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself. Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, West's third album in four years is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet. It also caps off an incredible (maybe even unprecedented) run: In terms of consistency, prolificness, and general all-around ability, it's hard to find anyone in mainstream rap who can touch what he's achieved within the same timeframe.
Pitchfork
09/11/2007
Mark Pytlik
When Kanye West comes up in conversation, the word “restraint” doesn’t usually get thrown around much. West has always come off as exuberant and overexcitable, a twitchy little guy perpetually uncertain of his status. Even when he steps outside of himself and catches a fleeting bout of righteousness, there’s something embarrassing about it: witness his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” outburst, next to a horrified Mike Meyers, on national television. His music overflows with a similar spirit of torrential eagerness, sprouting codas and instrumental breakdowns and full choirs on its way up, up, up. There’s probably no more irrepressible persona in hip-hop than Kanye West, which is why one of the most shocking things about Graduation, his third album, is that in some ways he displays something nearing restraint.
Stylus
09/10/2007
Jayson Greene
Careerwise, the recent album M.I.A.'s Kala recalls is Kanye West's Late Registration -- an unexpectedly sure-footed follow-up to a brainy beat-adept's can-you-top-this debut. And though West is the more universal musician, especially as Americans conceive the universe, there are also musical similarities: Both albums challenge sophomore slump by risking pretension. But where West hired classically trained Jon Brion, the Sri Lankan-British rapper spread out and bent down low. Originally she'd hoped to trade the grimy beats of 2005's Arular for the more radio-friendly dirt of Timbaland. That plan fizzled, for two reasons -- not just the feds' refusal to let M.I.A. re-enter the U.S., but her instinctive reluctance to turn into Nelly Furtado once the chance was in her lap.
Plus, though she's polite about it, a sneaking suspicion that maybe Timbo wasn't all that -- that there were edgier beat-makers all over the place. With visa madness blockading her new Brooklyn apartment, she turned world traveler, pulling in multiple Indian musics and encompassing Jamaican dance-hall moves,Indian-Trinidadian multicontinental mash-up, Liberian vibes, a British-Nigerian rapper, Australian aboriginal hip-hop, Baltimore hip-hop, Jonathan Richman, the Clash and a bonus afterthought from Timbaland's solo album.
Rolling Stone
08/15/2007
Robert Christgau
So, yes, though we’ve tried to avoid it for as long as we could, the true deal breaker in M.I.A.’s and Kala’s bid for complete incandescence is just how aptly they, for the lack of a better word, truly fuck with our expectations for the body sound politic.
We give her all the DailyKos, liberal-guilt carte blanche and she turns her soapbox into cheeky, finger-flippng melodrama, Maya, on heartbreak: “I'm better off in North Korea / Yeah, droppin' from a barrel of a carrier.” She gives us ready-to-be-fetishized guest artists (an African rapping about “sell water and sugar and pepper”! Australian aboriginal kids crudely beat-boxing and fumbling through quiet rhymes about fishing and shaking a leg!) and then kills you by the cash register (the narcotic, gorgeous “Paper Planes”). It’s an impatient ballet of subversions and expectations centered in gender, power, commerce, violence, and language, all coated with dripping wet sound. She, and the world, has lost control again.
Stylus
08/21/2007
Evan McGarvey
Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut Arular, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her followup were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, Arular-- which has quietly sold 130,000 copies in the U.S.-- ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much rockcrit catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical forum back towards the kinds of issues it doesn't grapple with nearly enough. Issues that feel more important than ever as our traditional notions of genre and geography melt away, namely: How we square our desire for freshness and fun with the ugly politics of cultural tourism, or whether we bother at all; how the internet works like a hall of mirrors on identity and meaning; whether there's really any such thing as an empty visceral gesture.
Pitchfork
08/21/2007
Mark Pytlik
Kanye and Maya are very different artists but they're probably the two I'm most excited about right now. I just like, mostly uncritically, what they do. Listening to their music gives me pure sonic pleasure - they're attentive, mindful and very deliberate artists. There's a lot of artifice in their work, but just as much emotional honesty. These are albums with real personality and character, and god, impatience - they want to be heard, and now.
It's interesting to listen to these albums together, or consider these artists together as Rolling Stone did in its review because different as their careers (and career goals) are, their are some freaky similarities in terms of the space they occupy in the market.
Neither is famous primarily for their vocal skills. They're both lauded for their articulation of ideas and experimentation with a wide and varied sonic palette. They sample and borrow widely and are just good synthesizers, a talent that's especially useful in a globalized, post-Napster music market. They're also willing and capable to talk about things, personal and public, and risk sounding juvenile in the process. There's something both charming and challenging in that.
They've both been the Next Big Thing and are brats, who weren't nearly as respectful of their NBT status as critics would have liked. And yet they both want to be liked and to parlay that NBT status into deeper, long-lasting success. They have things they want and need to talk about - whether it be Louis Vee or the Tamil Tigers - and they're respectful enough of their audience to do it intelligently and creatively. Kanye has an especially light touch on political issues. His favourite topic is of course himself, but when he does go there it's thoughtful and natural-seeming. Maya is often overtly political but not didactically, admonishingly so.
Anyway. To bed and the finishing of The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
I think they're both interesting enough, and hungry enough to do be here in ten years but don't quote me on that.
Now if only I could get them together to do a disco/bhangra/hip-hop record.
The Eyes Have It
by John Bemrose
Just off the trail
among the quills of the birches
the porcupine had settled, comfortably
into its final business.
It looked like a fur hat
abandoned in the snow melt
a little mound of treachery
its white-tipped needles raked back
to its bristly, club-
handled, still-lethal tail.
It was clear the porcupine was up to something.
I knew he was dead and yet
his stillness kept a strange avidity.
Like a bullet in a chamber
or a fortress challenging the air
secretly, under his defences,
he was intent on something -
he was settling into a deeper focus
like a jeweller lost in the cellars of a diamond
no longer caring about getting back.
Curious, I kicked him over
exposing his black, wrinkled underbelly
like the face of a black person a century old
the little alien paws
like all things alien secretly human
the long, silver, jointed fingers
ripped from their contact with the earth
and his sooty squirrel’s face, so astonishingly small
under its mohawk of quills.
Later, driving off, I thought again of the porcupine -
how I had kicked over the hut of his privacy
broken his last dish
stared into the room
where his relatives sat grieving.
At least I could have tipped him back again.
But I had left him with his belly exposed
to the wind, and the constellations
and the quick, unholy communion of eyes.
The Walrus
10/2007
I don't especially care to break out the analysis - I'm just going to be here, quietly enjoying.
***
I just bought Kanye's Graduation and MIA's Kala. I haven't listened to them enough times to form coherent opinions about the albums but I know this: they are both awesome, but they are divergently awesome. Some reviews to back me up on this:
For all the pageantry, the most substantial takeaway from Kanye's new album is the realization that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself. Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, West's third album in four years is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet. It also caps off an incredible (maybe even unprecedented) run: In terms of consistency, prolificness, and general all-around ability, it's hard to find anyone in mainstream rap who can touch what he's achieved within the same timeframe.
Pitchfork
09/11/2007
Mark Pytlik
When Kanye West comes up in conversation, the word “restraint” doesn’t usually get thrown around much. West has always come off as exuberant and overexcitable, a twitchy little guy perpetually uncertain of his status. Even when he steps outside of himself and catches a fleeting bout of righteousness, there’s something embarrassing about it: witness his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” outburst, next to a horrified Mike Meyers, on national television. His music overflows with a similar spirit of torrential eagerness, sprouting codas and instrumental breakdowns and full choirs on its way up, up, up. There’s probably no more irrepressible persona in hip-hop than Kanye West, which is why one of the most shocking things about Graduation, his third album, is that in some ways he displays something nearing restraint.
Stylus
09/10/2007
Jayson Greene
Careerwise, the recent album M.I.A.'s Kala recalls is Kanye West's Late Registration -- an unexpectedly sure-footed follow-up to a brainy beat-adept's can-you-top-this debut. And though West is the more universal musician, especially as Americans conceive the universe, there are also musical similarities: Both albums challenge sophomore slump by risking pretension. But where West hired classically trained Jon Brion, the Sri Lankan-British rapper spread out and bent down low. Originally she'd hoped to trade the grimy beats of 2005's Arular for the more radio-friendly dirt of Timbaland. That plan fizzled, for two reasons -- not just the feds' refusal to let M.I.A. re-enter the U.S., but her instinctive reluctance to turn into Nelly Furtado once the chance was in her lap.
Plus, though she's polite about it, a sneaking suspicion that maybe Timbo wasn't all that -- that there were edgier beat-makers all over the place. With visa madness blockading her new Brooklyn apartment, she turned world traveler, pulling in multiple Indian musics and encompassing Jamaican dance-hall moves,Indian-Trinidadian multicontinental mash-up, Liberian vibes, a British-Nigerian rapper, Australian aboriginal hip-hop, Baltimore hip-hop, Jonathan Richman, the Clash and a bonus afterthought from Timbaland's solo album.
Rolling Stone
08/15/2007
Robert Christgau
So, yes, though we’ve tried to avoid it for as long as we could, the true deal breaker in M.I.A.’s and Kala’s bid for complete incandescence is just how aptly they, for the lack of a better word, truly fuck with our expectations for the body sound politic.
We give her all the DailyKos, liberal-guilt carte blanche and she turns her soapbox into cheeky, finger-flippng melodrama, Maya, on heartbreak: “I'm better off in North Korea / Yeah, droppin' from a barrel of a carrier.” She gives us ready-to-be-fetishized guest artists (an African rapping about “sell water and sugar and pepper”! Australian aboriginal kids crudely beat-boxing and fumbling through quiet rhymes about fishing and shaking a leg!) and then kills you by the cash register (the narcotic, gorgeous “Paper Planes”). It’s an impatient ballet of subversions and expectations centered in gender, power, commerce, violence, and language, all coated with dripping wet sound. She, and the world, has lost control again.
Stylus
08/21/2007
Evan McGarvey
Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut Arular, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her followup were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, Arular-- which has quietly sold 130,000 copies in the U.S.-- ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much rockcrit catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical forum back towards the kinds of issues it doesn't grapple with nearly enough. Issues that feel more important than ever as our traditional notions of genre and geography melt away, namely: How we square our desire for freshness and fun with the ugly politics of cultural tourism, or whether we bother at all; how the internet works like a hall of mirrors on identity and meaning; whether there's really any such thing as an empty visceral gesture.
Pitchfork
08/21/2007
Mark Pytlik
Kanye and Maya are very different artists but they're probably the two I'm most excited about right now. I just like, mostly uncritically, what they do. Listening to their music gives me pure sonic pleasure - they're attentive, mindful and very deliberate artists. There's a lot of artifice in their work, but just as much emotional honesty. These are albums with real personality and character, and god, impatience - they want to be heard, and now.
It's interesting to listen to these albums together, or consider these artists together as Rolling Stone did in its review because different as their careers (and career goals) are, their are some freaky similarities in terms of the space they occupy in the market.
Neither is famous primarily for their vocal skills. They're both lauded for their articulation of ideas and experimentation with a wide and varied sonic palette. They sample and borrow widely and are just good synthesizers, a talent that's especially useful in a globalized, post-Napster music market. They're also willing and capable to talk about things, personal and public, and risk sounding juvenile in the process. There's something both charming and challenging in that.
They've both been the Next Big Thing and are brats, who weren't nearly as respectful of their NBT status as critics would have liked. And yet they both want to be liked and to parlay that NBT status into deeper, long-lasting success. They have things they want and need to talk about - whether it be Louis Vee or the Tamil Tigers - and they're respectful enough of their audience to do it intelligently and creatively. Kanye has an especially light touch on political issues. His favourite topic is of course himself, but when he does go there it's thoughtful and natural-seeming. Maya is often overtly political but not didactically, admonishingly so.
Anyway. To bed and the finishing of The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
I think they're both interesting enough, and hungry enough to do be here in ten years but don't quote me on that.
Now if only I could get them together to do a disco/bhangra/hip-hop record.