Oh ha ha. Ten pages in to my copy of Spring and All, in Volume I of the collected poems, I found notes to myself for one of my applications to graduate school - "why I want to go to graduate school in philosophy". These notes will not be reprinted here. But. I will say I have remained surprisingly consistent.

I've been looking for books of Ron Silliman's poetry since reading about it in Marjorie Perloff's Wittgenstein's Ladder. I didn't think to look to find that he has a blog. I love the interweb.

And, check what he writes in his first post: "The fact that the blog has the potential to carry forward the best elements of a journal and seems inherently prone to digressive, if not absolutely plotless, prose gives me hope that this form might prove amenable to critical thinking."

This train of thought continues soon after - in discussion of The H.D. Book. "So what we as readers must then confront is a text that straddles genres neatly between critical theory and autobiography and proceeds, as Shklovsky would have noticed, as plotless prose, a work whose point is never to get anywhere, but always to bring the reader into the presentness of reading itself." He also mentions WCW's Spring and All, which I've strangely written little about given how much I enjoyed it the last time I read it. That probably has something to do with the sharp music/non-music divide I try, perhaps ironically, to keep here sometimes. (I was keeping it more back then, the last time I was reading Williams a lot.)

A tape I made a friend. I couldn't make a copy of it, but I'd really like to hear it again, so I'm actually thinking of making another one with the same tracklisting.

A:
Duke Ellington feat. Mahalia Jackson - "Come Sunday (a capella)"
The Beta Band - "Dragon"
Talib Kweli - "Get By"
Basement Jaxx - "I Want U"
Miles Davis - "Rated X"
Yo La Tengo - "Be Thankful For What You've Got"
Saul Williams - "Twice the First Time"
Herbie Hancock - "Fat Albert Rotunda"
Spiritualized - "Lord Can You Hear Me"

B:
Stevie Wonder - "Have a Talk With God"
Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott - "Izzy Izzy Ahh"
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong - "Learnin' the Blues"
Cee-Lo - "Gettin' Grown"
Specials - "A Message To You Rudy"
No Doubt feat. Lady Saw - "Underneath It All"
Kardinal Offishall - "Maxine"
Outkast - "Spottieottiedopaliscious"
TLC - "Waterfalls"
DJ Vadim feat. Sarah Jones - "Your Revolution"

This is a drunken post. Do not worry.

The worst thing in the world ever that can happen to one (while drunken) is to have one's batteries die when one is walking the last two miles home from the bus at 2 AM and it is 2 degrees (that is Farenheit but yes two) outside.

The best thing in the world ever that can happen to one (while drunken, and while on one's way home from becoming drunken) is to put on one's headphones on the bus (while alone), and play music. If one is drunken enough then it is almost irrelevant how loud the headphones are. I am sure that tonight mine were up to 10, but they didn't seem very loud at all. I played the socalled "classic" Stevie Wonder album Fulfillingness' First Finale, which Stephen Thomas Erlewine (who one should not trust) of the All Music Guide (which one might occasionally trust in certain limited respects) calls a "slightly stoned" album. For all that one should not trust Mr. Erlewine, this seems accurate to me. Everything is kind of, how shall we say, mooshed together and feely. (I should note that I can only imagine what it would be like to be slightly stoned, as opposed to sufficiently drunk, but I can at least extrapolate from other "stoned" music and bad comedy routines where people say "man" a lot.) When one is drunk this mooshed-together-ness is, er, experienced differently. It is still mooshed and feely but it seems less important that things are thus.

The loudness, I should say, the 10 on my headphones, has to do with the sound, the way it (the outside sound, coming in to my ears, from the world, not necessarily just the sound from the headphones) is er reduced, muffled, damped, like big pillows. What I forgot to say about the best thing in the world ever above is, to be precise, that this dampening happens so one can't hear say the bus driver announcing stops, or the whoosh whoosh whoosh (only it's not really broken up like that) of the bus engine and the outside rushing by, or the loud annoying people on the bus, or the sound of my headphone cable catching and scratching against my left headphone. So, all of the sounds. Except the mooshed Stevie Wonder sounds, which as I have indicated are already somewhat reduced, garbled, but in a pleasant way.

Except at the beginning of "They Won't Go When I Go", for one, which is all quiet and contemplative because of its theme of death etc., which makes being quiet for an extended period of time appropriate.

Hey baby how you doin.

In the section before the extended outro, Herbert's remix of "Fantasy" (from Secondhand Sounds) takes a vocal segment where a woman sings "ain't my fantasy" and extracts the beginning (kind of "aeh" by itself) to turn it into a repeated sound that quickly becomes part of the beat ("beat" meaning all those sounds in what would be the rhythm section if this were a live band). Herbert leaves this going for a while, with the occasional stutter. It's so addictive to me that when the vocal line comes back once later in the sequence, for basically one full repetition, I'm annoyed that he's upset the levelling that's occurred.

(There might be something relevant here to say about "democratization" as Gracyk uses it in his defense of rock against criticisms like Bloom's and Adorno's in Rhythm and Noise, but I haven't gotten that far yet.)

I haven't written much directly about it here, but I've been working on and off on a paper since last spring, trying to flesh out the "plateau" concept that Simon Reynolds (writing in Generation Ecstasy) casually lifts from Deleuze and Guattari. He doesn't use it much, but I think it has an obvious appeal and appropriateness for not just dance music but all kinds of other music. It also provides a nice angle onto a couple of his other borrowed toys.

One big problem in fleshing out the concept is that Deleuze and Guattari don't use it much themselves, and what they really think of it involves a lot of their other concepts that make a lot less sense (especially, pragmatico-stubbornly thinking, if you want to know what the use is of this stuff for music and criticism) - immannence, desiring machines or assemblages (of er some sort), the body without organs, and it goes on, I'm sure.

This is part of why the quote below from Rodowick excites me. Some other things that Rodowick goes on to say in subsequent chapters make the time-image sound kind of like what Deleuze and Guattari say about plateaus, and it's the most concrete example of some of the things I think (?) plateaus have to offer as far as a concept for thinking about music goes.

Here is one of the relevant mentions of "plateau" from the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (p. 21): "A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. "Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value." They say something similar on p. 158 in a discussion of the body without organs, where they also say that "A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus."

The thing that excites me most about the quote below is that Rodowick makes it sound like Deleuze gives some actual psychological characterization of one of his concepts, which he seems to me to do rarely. I don't have the books on cinema so I don't know if Deleuze really does do this or if it's Rodowick's reading, but either way that psychological gloss - "an increased sensitivity to time" meaning that "the interval suspends the spectator in a state of uncertainty" provides me with a welcome way of connecting some of the more abstract stuff about the plateau and the concepts that share space with it with actual everyday experience of music. So too with the stuff about India Song. A more traditionalist (and well maybe to some extent Deleuze is, he's a pretty unrepentant modernist) reading of a film like that would probably, I think, see the editing as a way of aestheticizing the shots themselves, demanding that the viewer appreciate them "in themselves" (yeah I know whatever that means), for their sensual properties, formal properties, however "the aesthetic" might traditionally be characterized. Now compare to the idea that things like texture, the feel of a rhythm from moment to moment, the visceral reaction to timbre or volume or noise etc., are what become more important to experience of music which is structurally undeveloped, by western art music standards.

More later, more later. (I would like to actually finish this paper sometime this month - maybe I'll dump lots of its material here. If the things I've dropped from Deleuze lately seem confusing enough, then maybe the goal of the paper will please you: to map out where a concept like "plateau" would fit into a toolbox or arsenal of ideas about pop music.)

(For later thought - relevance of example below of the time-image for talk of "plateaus" in dance music, other music that could be said to involve plateaus; also stuff like this.)

D.N. Rodowick in Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, pp. 14-5, writing about Deleuze's concept of the time-image (as opposed to the movement-image) from his Cinema books:

"This difficult passage may be unpacked in reference to a well-known film and one of Deleuze's principal examples of the cinema of the time-image, Marguerite Duras's India Song (1975). The opening shot of the film frames a red sun setting into clouds over a verdant delta. This is a direct image of time in its simplest manifestation: an autonomous shot describing a single event as a simple duration. The ensuing shot of the piano in a darkened room is nowhere motivated by this image. Nor will there be any clear spatial or temporal links in the cascade of images that follow. The cut defines an unbridgeable interval, and having done so, each shot becomes an autonomous segment of time. Similarly, instead of linking one to another, the images divide into series -- the embassy interior with its piano and its mirror that unsettles the difference between on- and offscreen space, the ruined exterior of the villa, the tennis court, the park, the river.

The same may be said of the soundtrack. At the beginning we hear the beggar's cries, then the two "intemporal voices" whose mutual interrogation initiates India Song's uncertain narration. The sounds themselves divide into distinct series -- the beggar, "les intemporelles," the piano theme, the voices and music of the reception, the cries of the vice-consul -- and it is never certain whether they occupy the same time or not.

Between and within the relations of image and sound, the interval divides and regroups but never in a decidable or commensurable way. By the same token, this geometry is not totalizable as an image of Truth. This does not mean that India Song is randomly organized; quite the contrary, it is rigorously composed. But unlike the organic movement-image with its relatively determined and predictable relations, the image of time portrayed here is more probabilistic. The autonomy of the interval produced by the time-image renders every shot as an autonomous shot: a segment of duration where movement is subordinate to time. And because the interval defines only incommensurable relations, the divisions both between and within the image and soundtracks split into series whose progression can only be interpreted in a probabilistic manner. If, as Deleuze asserts, the crystalline regime produces an increased sensitivity to time, this means that the interval suspends the spectator in a state of uncertainty. Every interval becomes what probability physics calls a "bifurcation point," where it is impossible to know or predict in advance which direction change will take. The chronological time of the movement-image fragments into an image of uncertain becoming."

Three comments on The Blueprint 2:

1. By the time "Poppin' Tags" ends, without fail, I no longer feel as if I've been listening to a Jay-Z record. Part of this must be down to the style of the track; even though it seems a little thicker and less rhythmically clicky than any proper dirty south I've heard, it's still pretty distinct from most of Jay's past beats (maybe because it's Kanye West producing - I don't know if he's ever done any beats like this before). But he exacerbates the dominant effect the foreign style has by dropping his verse first, then disappearing (except for some yelps) for the rest of the six minute track to let three MCs more at home in the style than him rhyme.

2. The production on "I Did It My Way" confuses me.

3. Just how are we supposed to take Big's verse on "A Dream"? I'm not talking about the question of whether or not it's crass or deep to take a dead MC's verse and drop it in, Natalie Cole style. I like that part of it here, and think it works - somewhat strangely, since by now I've still heard The Blueprint 2 more than Ready to Die, and though I like Big as an MC I can't really profess any special love for him or interest in his death. No, it's not that stuff I'm worried about though it is important to think about. It's the way the verse is edited. The original in "Juicy" goes "time to get paid / blow up like the World Trade". Here that line is edited, audibly cut off right at the end of "the". "World Trade" disappears, and Big picks up the verse with the next line. There is no explicit mention of this in the rest of the track.

I don't know what to make of this, or rather, what I should make of it. (I do know how I react to it.)

I was wondering the other day when it became de rigueur for "remix" to mean, in certain cases, "the same mix basically only with some different verses over the beat and maybe the chorus parts moved around". But maybe that's always been one of the meanings of "remix" and I just never knew.

Anyway, as per our earlier discussion re world pop reform, I need an MC to guest on Einsturzende Neubauten's "Dingsaller". I find myself at a point of indecision. I am expecting some scatological rhymes based on the title, as well as some "dings alla y'all". I mean, come on. It's only natural.

Some funny German words, possibly in a funny German accent, would be ace too.

But only a few. Maybe kinda "watch while I freak it in Korean".