Snapsongs: “1984/Jump” by Van Halen

Thursday 1 August 2013 - Filed under Snapsongs

Another scene set here: summer of 1986. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. Halley’s Comet had been something of a bust, but there were interesting things happening in the summer sky, and I was tracking Mars, Jupiter and Saturn on a huge wall map of Wil Tirion’s Sky Atlas 2000. I was finally getting the hang of high school, but it was something of a tiring experience for a geeky boy who liked to stay in his own head most of the time. LBJ High School was a majority minority school; it was the first year of the Austin science magnet program established in part to keep the school from closing through low enrollment; I was in the throes of burgeoning adolescence. One bonus: I had grown six inches the summer before and was no longer chubby. One drawback: I was beginning to like girls, but had no clue how to deal with them. I had already met the subject of an obsessive infatuation that would make my sophomore year more than tumultuous. But that was far in the future. June of 1986 was the calm before the storm.

It so happened that an old friend of mine from middle school called me up and asked if I’d like to come stay with him for a few days. This sounded awesome. He and I had been best buds, writing space operas and satirical lyrics and playing video games on rainy days over at his house. His family had moved to Waco, Texas, a couple years before, and we hadn’t really kept in touch. So it was arranged: I would catch a ride with his older brother’s girlfriend and come up to stay in Waco. Not exactly a gripping vacation for many people, but it promised to be fun.

It was, but there were oddities that stood out. The girlfriend was pretty cool, and we had a good chat on the way up. Her boyfriend, the oldest brother, was on the cusp of chilling out of being a teenage asshole as he entered his twenties. My friend’s older sister had become hot. And his slightly-older brother had seamlessly claimed the teenage asshole role that his brother had just given up. His parents had become kinda annoying, but that could have been my own teenage assholism showing. They had, however, found a piece of the space shuttle Challenger on the beach in Florida, and had it displayed prominently on their mantlepiece. That was kinda odd. But they had a pool, and his mother schlepped us to the local video arcade and the movie theatre. That was the year that the “Star Wars” arcade game came came out, and it was soooooo cool, with its vector graphics of TIE fighters and sampled one-liners from the movie. And I got to see “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, which was a bonus in more ways than one. My parents weren’t up with keeping me abreast of the latest in popular culture through TV and movies, so this became a useful touchstone in my interactions with my peers.

Of course, the album “1984” had come out the previous year, but singles from the album were still on the air, and it was probably still a fixture on the turntables of many young men at the time. I liked the songs I’d heard, but I wouldn’t actually start purchasing albums on my own until later that summer, and I wasn’t much of a metalhead, at least not yet. I preferred the synth revolution of early New Wave before MIDI started displacing the drummer. But “1984” was the album where Eddie Van Halen had discovered the synth, so the sound of his sawtoothed Oberheim OB-Xa was pleasing to my ears. I was willing to give it a chance.

But the image that stays in my mind is not the video, or people rocking out, or listening to the song on my headphones at home. It’s a combination of sight, sound and smell that impressed itself into my mind as a singular scene. Picture: up in the converted attic where my friend and his near brother had their rooms. Nobody in the house had heard of lamps, so the place was always dark, and the conversion was haphazard and random, so it was always cramped. My friend and I came into his brother’s room, where the space-age attack-swoop-fuzz-decay sequence that is pretty much the entirety of the instrumental “1984” was already playing. The room was black except for the glowing stereo and a long violet tube emitting eye-wrenching radiance. Several posters on the walls were glowing in bright primary hues, and the addition of hundreds of little fluorescent labels stuck to every surface available made it that much more trippy. The posters that weren’t fluorescing were of the apolcalyptic sci-fi painting variety. And there was a peculiar smell that cinched the other-worldly nature of the scene in front of me. I realized later that it was the smell of the suntan lotion that my friend’s brother had put on to protect his shirtless body from the ultraviolet, but it seemed to flow from the tube itself, or maybe it was some scent-based drug that we were all now inhaling. My friend and I stood there for a minute, entranced, and then the song segued into “Jump”.

Right behind the turntable was a lovely piece of sci-fi artwork seemingly lifted from the pages of Omni Magazine. Multiarmed blue dudes wielded stacked zebra-striped keyboards, curved guitars with three or more fretboards and Gigeresque drumkits; they were all arrayed on a stage swooping in crescent forms over an alien audience. There, right there, was the sound of “Jump”, coming from those speakers that looked like engine nacelles from an off-brand Star Wars rip-off. It was mesmerizing; I both was aware of the fantasy and totally immersed in it. The scent of off-brand suntan lotion became a tantalizing whiff of an alien world, redolent with mystery and romance. Forget visions of boots stamping on the face of humanity forever. That, my friends, is my alternate vision of the world of 1984.

Update: the poster artwork has been found, by artist Rodney Matthews:

 ::  2013-08-01  ::  Edward Semblance

Snapsongs: “The New Style” by the Beastie Boys

Thursday 16 May 2013 - Filed under Snapsongs

Let’s start off with a truism: for anyone who grew up in the 1980s, the Beastie Boys’ album Licensed to Ill was a seminal piece of work. For those in the know, it was the commercialization of a culture that had been building and evolving for at least ten years. For those far from the center of things, it was something that blew open the doors of a portion of music that had previously been sequestered by demographics and circumstance to a specific area of the country and a specific profile of listener. I straddled the intersection of these sets. Through friends I’d been exposed to Doug E Fresh and Run DMC, so this whole “rap” thing wasn’t a complete surprise. I knew it was a ghetto/black/urban thing, I loved the wordplay, scratching was interesting (if somewhat confusing), and I didn’t get beatboxing at all. But I loved “The Show (Six Minutes)” and “Hit It Run”. So it was kinda odd that three white nebbishy guys from Manhattan were the breakthrough act of choice, but they definitely embraced the idiom and acquitted themselves competently. And their admixture of hard rock samples and guitars helped smooth the process somewhat for the vast majority who didn’t get the rap. Without the Beasties I (and millions of other young white kids) probably wouldn’t have explored other artists Erik B. and Rakim, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Ice T or Tribe Called Quest. So it worked out.

I realize that their later work, like Paul’s Boutique and Intergalactic, are held up by listeners and critics as far better pieces of artwork, but for me they were too polished and busy, and the schtick had gotten old. Licensed to Ill was the alpha and omega of the Beasties and their genre-busting audacity. The funny thing was that I always considered the two “rock oriented” cuts, “Fight for Your Right to Party” and “No Sleep Til Brooklyn”, the weakest on the album. It was like, you were doing so well with things like “Hold It Now Hit It” and “Slow Ride”, why interrupt the flow with bullshit rock? I usually fast-forwarded over those songs to get to the real meat. I don’t know if there’s a person alive who was a teenager at the time who doesn’t know the lyrics to “Paul Revere”. I could probably reel them off from memory right now.

But there’s a reason why “The New Style” rises above the others in terms of memory and fondness. For this, we set a scene. Summer of 1990, on my first trip abroad. An eight-hour train ride from Cologne, Germany to Paris, France, with my German friend Michael along for the ride. Friends of his parents owned a flat on Rue d’Alesia in the 14th Arrondisment, and were on holiday in England for several weeks, so we had a place to stay. The trip there was filled with goofy cut-ups, silliness and dumbassery. At one point my friend presented me with an open bag of almonds and said, “Have a nut?” I replied, “Hammer time!” We broke up in peals of laughter, probably annoying the people around us as only teenaged boys can do. The “Hammertime” call-and-response became an in-joke through the entire trip.

It was something of a stereotypical European getaway. Un-air-conditioned flat with minimal furnishings; weird French television with random naked people on it; buying baguettes and coldcuts from the nearby grocery for breakfast; aimless rambling through the Metro and the streets of Paris. Paris is a weird city. When it’s cloudy, it looks kinda bleached, scuffed and dumpy. When it’s sunny, it looks bright, aged and exquisite. You can’t see the Eiffel Tower anywhere except the valley of the Seine. Car headlights are yellow and dim, at least they were in 1990. People drive like maniacs, but pedestrians rule. There are random bronze fountains in public squares, some buffed and polished, some dark and scummed with algae. It’s disconcerting to see a total of 54.00 on a cash register for some snacks and drinks, but the franc was 6 to a dollar at the time.

We were heading home late one night, and the city was showing another side to us. We were beat from a day of sightseeing, but for some reason we decided not to take the Metro back to Rue d’Alesia and walked back to the flat. Some streets were dark, some were lit, people were out talking, laughing, shouting incomprehensibly in French. The busy thoroughfares glowed with muted yellow light. The temperature was mild, maybe slightly warm. And in the middle of our walk, something prompted one of us to start: “Let me clear my throat!” And thus the Parisian bourgeoisie were treated to AD Rock’s coda rap to “The New Style” performed by a young American and his German friend, as they wended their way back to their vacation lodgings:

Let me clear my throat!
Kick it over here baby pop, and let all the fly skimmies, feel the beat…
Mmmm, drop!

Coolin’ on the corner on a hot summer day
Just me, my posse and MCA
A lot of beer, a lot of girls, and a lot of cursing
Twenty-two automatic on my person
Got my hand in my pocket and my finger’s on the trigger
My posse’s gettin’ big, and my posse’s gettin’ bigger
Some voices got treble, some voices got bass
We got the kind of voices that are in your face
Like the bun to the burger, and like the burger to the bun
Like the cherry to the apple to the peach to the plum
I’m the king of the Ave., and I’m the king of the block
Well, I’m MCA, and I’m the King Ad Rock
Well, I’m Mike D, I got all the fly juice
On the checkin’ at the party on the forty deuce
Walking down the block with the fresh fly threads
Beastie Boys fly the biggest heads

 ::  2013-05-16  ::  Edward Semblance

Snapsongs: “Saved by Zero” by The Fixx

Thursday 2 May 2013 - Filed under Snapsongs

Sometimes a song doesn’t have to necessarily evoke a particular, specific reaction in its playing or construction. It doesn’t have to speak to the situation in its words or style. It just has to be at the right place and the right time, and enhance what is already there. The album Reach the Beach by The Fixx, and specifically the song “Saved by Zero”, was that enhancement to my first trip abroad.

Not that there’s anything out-of-character in that selection; there’s a driving bassline with added gingerbread, there’s spacey synth patches and interesting sonic filigree, there’s jangly 80s guitar with plenty of reverb, and there are quasi-cryptic lyrics based on a sci-fi storyline. It’s a cool song, a mid-tempo song, almost a groove song. It’s a good song to listen to while you’re staring out the window of a Bundesbahn train traveling from Frankfurt to Cologne in June of 1990.

The year before, in my senior year of high school, my German class had hosted a group of kids from a Gymnasium (a German high school for students on a professional, as opposed to a vocational, track) in Hamburg. Along with the crew from Hamburg came a teacher from Käserin Augusta Schüle in Cologne, Elke Daun-Barusch, and her son Michael. I’d volunteered to host a student, and Michael was that student. For three weeks he set up camp in my bedroom while I slept on the floor in my younger brother’s room. And we got along famously. Michael really didn’t know any of the kids from Hamburg, and he happened to be almost exactly between my brother and myself in age. He slotted into our family like a middle brother with a weird accent, and he slotted into my circle of friends like he belonged there. It was an amazingly fun three weeks, and at the end of it he and his mother told me that I was welcome to come to Germany at any time.

At the time I thanked them and figured, “Sure, that’d be great, maybe someday.” I got a job at a bookstore and went off to college, and as the year went along I found I was saving a decent amount of money by working and not being too crazy with the spending. By February I checked my balance and decided why the hell not? Germany it was. I got my passport, got traveler’s cheques in Deutschmarks, got plenty of film for my camera. And soon enough I was in Houston catching a Pan Am Clipper to jump over The Pond.

I took plenty of music with me, and various other songs stick out in my mind and may be covered in other essays. But I knew and loved Reach the Beach already, and as the trip progressed it became a slice of home to nibble on while I needed to decompress. It was my first trip out of the United States, and although my German was serviceable it was still hard to keep up sometimes, and there was a bit of culture shock as well. As a calming chunk of English, it worked far better than my chosen reading material: I had decided to investigate what a friend of mine called “the best book in the world”, and had purchased a copy of Atlas Shrugged to start on the plane. Even at the tender young age of 18 it only took about 150 pages for me to figure out the writing was poor, the characters cardboard, the logic laughable, and the concepts derisable. I finished it, but the ending made me positively furious. I was, evidently, not an Objectivist. In a cool, dark room, snuggled in a fluffy futon mattress with a real feather blanket, I rolled my eyes at Dagny Taggart while The Fixx played. That guest room became something of a sanctum sanctorum for the trip, a place I could hole up and process. Listening to a comfortable, favorite album was part of that processing.

“Saved by Zero” was a favorite probably because it does deal, obliquely, with ideas of suspense, alienation, separation, confusion, and perseverance. I’d had all of those experiences in pocket form when I landed in Frankfurt. Customs was a weird mix of excitement and trepidation. I was in Germany! Whee! Waiting in line to purchase a train ticket to Cologne, I struck up a conversation with an American in Germany on business. When he asked, I told him how to ask for a ticket in German, and actually heard him use the phrases I taught him when it was his turn at the window. Score! Leaving the station, I somehow got on the wrong train and ended up in a suburb of Frankfurt lost and confused. Fail! I managed to correct my vector and get on the right train, but only after I annoyed a Bundesbahn clerk by being American and her me for being German. Argh! On the correct train, a kindly older conductor listened to my broken explanation and gently assured me I was going where I needed to go and didn’t need to pay anything else. Whew! Finally, jet lagged and dead tired, I arrived in Cologne and called Michael to come pick me up. I took a turn outside the station to get my bearings, then settled in an alcove in the waiting area with my luggage to wait for him. At this point, a woman came up to me and asked, in some thick Eastern dialect, which way would she find the Cathedral. Since I had just admired the Kölner Dom in my brief foray outside, I simply pointed to the door and said, “Da drüben, ” which means “Right over there.” She complied, and as I watched her paroxysms of joy, I realized I had just given directions, in German, to a German who was as new to the city as myself. She had, to stretch the phrase, been saved by zero. If the expression had been coined at that time, I would have thought ZOMGWTFBBQ.

 ::  2013-05-02  ::  Edward Semblance

Snapsongs: “Slapstick Heart” by Sam Phillips

Wednesday 17 April 2013 - Filed under Snapsongs

Summer of 1996. I was living with two roommates in a funky little house in central Austin, where the floor in the living room had an odd wobble near the kitchen and you couldn’t run the air conditioning and dryer at the same time or else you’d blow a breaker. Besides that, it was a perfectly serviceable place to live, in fact quite nice, even if we were a little cavalier about lawn maintenance and drove the survivalist neighbors next door bugnuts. One roommate was working on his aerospace thesis project; the other was supplying Austin with a new-fangled service called “the Internet”. I was attempting to become a photographer.

Previously, I had been a low-level Accounts/Receivable clerk doing data entry and processing credit cards for a high-tech company that had kicked out an IPO before IPOs became trendy. As a young male in a department of middle-aged soccer moms, I’d been stuffed into the file room with a desk and a large dot-matrix line printer. This suited me fine, as I could leverage my hourly wage by only actually working two-thirds of the time. While the printer whined about running invoices I had the perfect cover for writing novellas and working out the plate tectonics of a planet I intended to write science fiction about. It was a peaceful existence, if somewhat monotonous and uncompelling.

The idyll was to be shattered when my grandfather died, which was not surprising – he’d had intestinal cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma for twelve years – but still unsettling. The surprise came when my father had a heart attack after shepherding my mother and grandmother through the death and funeral. Turns out a healthy-looking man in his late forties had been walking a tightrope with three blocked coronary arteries. This lead me to a period of alternating freakout and introspection. It was obviously time to make something happen.

I’d tried to get into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop the previous year, using one of my novellas as my submission. That hadn’t worked, but as it was a 1:10 chance I didn’t feel too bad about it. I decided it was time to try another one of my interests. I would take photography classes at the community college and try to make a go at freelance. And, as much as it pained me, I could tap in to the trust left to me by my paternal grandmother for education expenses.

This concept gave me an itching feeling across my neck and shoulderblades. I’d despised my undergraduate career, and had vowed never to go back to school. It wouldn’t be a “real” college, but ACC did kinda count toward that end. And I had a huge chip on my shoulder about paying my way, fiscal  independence and grass-roots bootstraps. Being a trustafarian was anathema, was Gehenna, was Tartarus. I didn’t want to be a lazy, shiftless, mooching artist. But it was the only way I was going to make it work.

So I did it. I quit my job, signed up for classes, and got a dba. I went out shooting. I shot tabletop, I shot portrait, I shot product. I shot editorial, I shot documentary, I shot landscape. I crawled around under the house with a camera when one of my roommates decided to shore up the wobbly spot in the floor with a floorjack, paving stone and treated post. I drove to West Texas and shot chaparral. I shot an industrial rock show and got caught in the mosh pit. I tried to get clients, but I wasn’t terribly successful at that.

And I discovered, to my amazement, that I felt old. I didn’t expect this. I was 24, I wasn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, regardless of my friends’ opinions when they asked me, snarkily, what it was like being 40. But whatever dues I’d paid slinging invoices and running credit cards had put something of a remove between myself and my 20-year-old classmates. It made it surprisingly difficult to deal with the drama, silliness and, yes, pettiness going on around me. It made it even more difficult when I found myself attracted to a particularly contrarian young woman, who persisted in making terrible choices and then blaming those choices on everyone around her. It didn’t help that at that point I hadn’t learned the lesson about healing wounded birds.

So… young but not feeling it, trying to hang out a shingle but feeling guilty for living off of free money, full of existential angst and the reality of death,  trying to define myself in this new world of adulthood while attempting to keep a toehold in the land of youth I’d just left, I was something of a walking, roiling confusion. As with many times in my life, music was the way I tried to keep stable. And this time I listened to Sam Phillips and felt somewhat better.

Sam Phillips is a relatively obscure artist, who abandoned Christian rock in the early 90s and recorded a series of idiosyncratic albums with her husband T Bone Burnett. Her style is part alternative, part experimental, part Beat, part pop. Programmed beats, overdubbed drums, strong guitars, Beatles vocal harmonies and odd sonic additives are part of the attraction for me. She also, like another fave female songwriter, layers equal sheets of snark with her somewhat idealistic latter-day hippie lyrics. Sometimes the technophobia turns me off, sometimes the longing for the simpler days makes me roll my eyes. But the musicianship is solid, and the brilliant nuggets are the payoff.

“Slapstick Heart” was the final track on the daringly outré, wildly erratic album “Omnipop”. Quite a bit of it doesn’t hold up over the years, but I’m fine with brilliant failure – although the general public isn’t, and it pretty much stopped her nascent career in its tracks. The song starts off with a wobbly whine, a doppler shift of guitar, followed with a fill and a pounding drum beat. A tootling Farfisa organ in the background sounds almost backwards-masked, and the bassline is simple and direct and moving. Phillips’ vocals are always dry, always rough, a sound that she has likened to a “braying donkey” at times. Here it deadpans a laconic commentary on the absurdity and perversity of life. I don’t like to quote lyrics often, but this is a nugget that I have to share:

Lost my balance, fell like rain / I half expected you to do the same
But you cried an ocean and broke my fall / That’s when I knew I couldn’t swim at all

We all keep falling for the slapstick heart, and keep getting poked in the eyes, smacked on the head, and pied in the face. But you keep playing that song, pushing that bass, weaving those arpeggios. That summer I felt the difficulty of making a way in the world that wasn’t predicated on a nine-to-five existence, one that would require a little more intelligence, artistry and perseverance to attain. And I wasn’t sure enough of myself or my identity to have the reflexes to avoid the pratfalls and seltzer bottles that invariably pop up. So, for the time, a grim commentary on the samsara of life was what sustained me.

 ::  2013-04-17  ::  Edward Semblance

Squibs: At the Community Garden

Sunday 14 April 2013 - Filed under Squibs

I love sitting in the shade of the supplants, over in the corner of the plots with a nice lawnchair set up on the firebreak stones. Some of the other gardeners won’t come over here, so it’s nice and peaceful, and the bees hum contentedly along with my iPod. I got the adapter, so I can just plug it into a stoma and not have to worry about the batteries. Plus a little sunhoney added to a beer tastes awesome.

During the hotter months others will actually join me, because the shade is pretty complete. There’s nothing getting through the blackleaf understory, they provide a nearly impenetrable barrier to the sun. It’s one of the reasons we set the flagstones up, as nothing will grow here. I’ve told Frank we should probably set up a mushroom patch where the shade is deepest. The breeze is cool, and the drips of sunolex from the converter interface adds a nice piney scent to the air.

The converter powers all of our grow lights, probably two full kilowatts all told, which makes me laugh. The Luddites at the other end of the community plots hate supplants for being “against nature”, and yet their yields are up because of the nightlights. The local Sungrid dealer takes the leftover sunolex and supplies us with genuine Sungrid fertilizer and micronutrients. Took all of twelve months for our grove to get to productive capacity; when they’re not being tapped for power, you can actually see supplants grow, they’re that efficient.

We came late to the game, so we didn’t have the learning curve other people had and knew to install the firebreaks and to keep sparks and open flame away from the saplings. And nobody’s turning down their monthly share of sunhoney, or complaining about the bees pollinating their vegetables. It’s really a very nice system. I’m definitely thinking of getting one for the home garden. My kids just love sunhoney.

 ::  2013-04-14  ::  Edward Semblance

Energal Environment

Sunday 14 April 2013 - Filed under Squibs

At some point in time, there were no energals. Geomancers could point to general lines in a cliffside: a horizon of rock where higher forms vanished, another where wisp spines no longer sifted out, and a final line where the tiny aerolith fossils petered out. Before that, only solarals: plants, fungi, animals. The debates raged in academic circles, but there was no real way to know for certain: was the emergence of energals an accident or was it planned? Did the Gearmaster spark a tiny glowing fragment in the vast meshing of his cogs? Did a colony of tiny algae unlock the talence source while reaching for more sun? Did a rough, brutish ancestor of Man think longingly of his crackling fire one cold, rainy day and accidentally birth the first wisp?

Whatever the logic and ex post factors argued about up the hill at the University, the main necessity of the Husbandry School was nurturing, tending, guarding and processing all important and useful species in the world, and energals were the most useful of such, and also the most perverse in their pathologies. It did no one any good to say that the reason the keltalaxi were ailing was because the small moon was in her first quarter, it was better to know why. Just like you always fed farrowing sows more mineral salts so their litters would stay viable, you could supplant the keltalaxi with more morning torches to balance out the lack of red light during the all-important post-midnight metagenism. Simple things like that, so that paying customers would not suddenly find their mechanisms seizing up.

 ::  2013-04-14  ::  Edward Semblance

Dockside

Thursday 11 April 2013 - Filed under Squibs

“Dockside” brings up scenes of salt spray, bobbing hulls and screaming gulls, but it’s just about the furthest from the truth in my line of work. Maybe in Solyi Pergani or Isildan, but not in Solyi Avanhoi. Dockside there is sand burn, whipping winds and croaking chensureets. It’s about repacking bearings and training talents. There’s no surf, no hard-and-fast boundary between sea and shoreline. No tides, no waves, no water. Just warehouses and garages on the last crumbled bits of earth before the rock begins.

 ::  2013-04-11  ::  Edward Semblance

Map Confusion

Thursday 11 April 2013 - Filed under Squibs

Nothing was getting through. English was not an option. The guy looked at me quizzically, a sympathetic smile forming on his mouth.

I said, “Well, maybe I’ll show you where I’m from, that will help.” So I pulled out a pen and a piece of paper, placing it on a flat part of the vehicle in front of us. I’m not an artist, nor a geographer, but I can at least give you a basic caricature of North America. East Coast, Florida, Gulf of Mexico, Isthmus, Baja California, Alaska, Hudson, Greenland. Done. I marked New York with a star.

He looked at it with a frown. Then turned it upside-down. Then sideways. He put it back down, rolling his head with what I can only guess was his version of a shake. I stared, confusion crawling in my stomach. “Okay, okay, maybe this will help,” I babbled, taking my pen and starting to add South America with a shaky hand. It wasn’t very good, Australia was more of a blob and I couldn’t remember exactly how the Middle East looked, but I got all the continents in their basic locations. I took a little to get India and Southeast Asia as detailed as possible, because that’s where I thought we were. I capped the pen with a flourish, gesturing at the map with hope.

He rolled his head again, but there was understanding in his eyes, of a sort. He unlimbered the satchel at his side and pulled out a folded notebook of sorts. He split it open lengthwise. One half was an electronic display with odd sliders and knobs, the other half was a collection of pages bound on the top side. The writing was unfamiliar in vertical lines. He licked his fingertip and flicked the top few pages aside, revealing what looked like all the world to be a Mercator-style map of the world.

Except it wasn’t. It was just about the only familiar visual style I’d seen: blues for the oceans, browns and greens for the land. Currents in wavy lines, borders in arbitrary colors. But there was nothing there. Nothing I could see that was true and familiar. Nothing at all.

I must have been somewhat wild-eyed at this point. I grabbed my homemade world and waved it in front of myself, eyes flicking from it to the map and back. “What do you mean, what is this? Where in the world are we? What are you talking about?” I spread my arms wide, crumpling my map in one hand and gesticulating around at the city surrounding up. “What is this place?”

He put his hand on my shoulder. I stopped, shuddering. He rolled his head again, and gently placed his finger on a spot near the apex of a triangular bay on the left side of a rambling, curling landmass. He said some words that I could barely follow, then repeated the last one. “Tecbrenai.” I spell it as I heard it, although the actual spelling is different and some of the sounds are subtly different.

He tapped the page again, and his eyes were very dark as he looked into mine and repeated, “Tecbrenai.”

 ::  2013-04-11  ::  Edward Semblance

Maintenance

Thursday 11 April 2013 - Filed under Squibs

You’re never late for maintenance. It’s not just mandatory. It’s unthinkable. People literally don’t think about maintenance, they just do it. Except for immigrants.

Immigrants don’t realize that the only way to make a home out here is by unceasing human effort. Nothing is provided by a benevolent biosphere that may give storms, predators and earthquakes, but provides water, prey and soil. Nature is so encompassing on Earth as to be automatic to the individual. Out here, that automation must reside in the human agency that can aspire to that compass. It must reside in culture.

 ::  2013-04-11  ::  Edward Semblance

Snapsongs: “Lickin Stick – Lickin Stick” by James Brown

Sunday 31 March 2013 - Filed under Snapsongs

How do I put this kindly? Well, there’s no way to do it. I am probably, as one of my high school friends told me, one of the whitest people in the world. I am a technical guy, a computer geek, a space nut, fascinated with processes and cerebral complications. I can’t dance, I can’t sing, I am the Toledo-born geeky son of Northern European stock with a long history in North America. My remote ancestors lived in places where you could comfortably go about in the noonday sun. The admixture of Mediterranean French from my father’s side keeps me from being transparent, but really the only evidence of that comes from the fact that I can, in fact, tan, if I expose myself to enough sun. I didn’t realize exactly how anathema the Texas climate was to my physical makeup until I moved to New England. I am about as excited about the sweaty, moist, visceral, id-driven foundations of soul as I am about heat and humidity.

Which is, probably, why all my friends reacted with arched-eyebrow disbelief when I purchased the James Brown boxed set Star Time in 1991. But from my point of view, it was something that was necessary and important. And how do I put this without sounding smug, or pretentious, or annoying? There probably is no way, given the history of race relations and other things. So, I’ll just say: I have never been oblivious to the reality of differences of race or culture, but those distinctions just seemed secondary in my estimations. Especially in music. From a very early age I understood that different groups of people produced different varieties of sounds and rhythms and vocal tropes, but all I cared about was whether I liked them or not. Perhaps soul was not my home style, but it was a perfectly good style nonetheless.

Anyway. Why did a white boy go out and purchase the collected works of The Godfather of Soul? Because he wanted a primer, and he wanted it from the source. In 1991 I was finally coming to the realization that, despite my lack of talent in dance and song, I had a deep-seated desire to make music. I was still a year from taking the final step and purchasing an instrument, but I was fascinated by the bass guitar. The year before I’d had something of a belated epiphany while walking the family dog wearing my Sony Walkman: I was following bass lines. The songs I gravitated toward had definite, clear, dynamic bass parts. When I wasn’t singing along with the words, I was humming the bass, not the lead, not the rhythm, not the drums. My air-guitar stylings were in actuality air-bass.  Obviously, my subconscious was telling me something.

And I was somewhat conscious of an inadvertent bias in my musical collection. While I would listen to quite a few different genres, I was a 20-year-old white boy, I had purchased lots of white-boy albums. What I didn’t have was much of anything else. So I was already starting to seek out different things, to try to get some oddity in the mix, something not quite so stereotypical. When I chanced upon Star Time at the downtown Waterloo Records, the thought struck me that this would be a pretty good way to get a crash course in soul, from the master himself. It took me a few weeks to save up the cash for the purchase, but soon enough the set was mine.

And, yes, it was a revelation. It took me a while to listen to the whole thing, because I had to navigate through the disparate styles through Brown’s career, and some stuff was more easily assimilated than others. To this day I still don’t much care for the first disc, which is mostly Famous Flames material and stuff from the 50s and early 60s, before the James Brown Sound emerged. It was decent stuff, it had passion, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. Likewise, the fourth disc contains a lot of latter day material, when Brown’s heyday was well over and the sound was either dated or retreaded. The second and third disc were the gold mine, the motherload. That’s where the soul lived. That’s where I went.

I like quite a few songs on these discs, but “Lickin Stick – Lickin Stick” is first among equals. It starts with the bassline, natch, any wonder why it gets bumped the top of the list? The bassline is, in itself, a primer. Soul is not about ego-trip virtuosity, it’s about competency, structure and timing. This bassline is not simple, but it’s not flashy. It is, in the final analysis, the anchor. Scale run, up-down-up-down, pause, casual fillip. Done. Start again. And again. And again. The magic comes from the fact that you play the same thing precisely enough to make it dependable but adaptive enough to swing with the song structure. And you have to swing, because of the drums. Lovely, lovely syncopation.  Lovely mid-tempo groove. I’m not sure much needs to be said about Brown’s vocals, because he’s the Most Sampled Man in Show Biz. The lyrics are not scintillating, but you really don’t listen to them for meaning. When you get into the groove, they just become another instrument. Finally, the horns. I’m not much of a guy for brass, but the James Brown horn section just rocks. The horn section totally intermeshes with everything else; the gingerbread grace runs elevate the song to pure genius. Yes, yes, hyperbole, I know. It’s James Brown. He invites hyperbole.

When I finally got my bass, Star Time became another kind of primer. Soul is where you learn to be funky before you’re ready for funk. Soul is where you learn the understated bedrock role, as opposed to the dynamic melodic role of, say, progressive. You learn to be careful, to make sure you see the line through the measure, to make sure you see the song through to the end. And that, my friends, is why this white boy decided it was time for Star Time.

 ::  2013-03-31  ::  Edward Semblance