As bitter as the cold...

I've never posted a review to Amazon before, but I felt compelled to defend Generation Debt's honor yesterday because it was being ragged on by older (well, age 35+) folks who didn't understand my generation's pain. My pen hadn't felt so poisonous in ages. It felt good to vent, and it also gave me something to do that wasn't aimlessly cruising online job sites. Part of what motivated me to write was my ongoing awareness of how few decent entry-level jobs are out there for educated people and how job searching is a much more demanding enterprise than it probably once was. But what do I know--I'm just a cranky young'un.

As for the job search, it has had its ups and downs. I had an interview last week for an organization that puts on a big battle-of-the-bands festival, but the job would have been a waste of my talents, even if it did relate to rockin', albeit tangentially.

I was also offered an interview with a life insurance firm yesterday, but turned it down because it would have been for a sales training program and, y'know, it's life insurance. Not for me. Plus, it would have required an hour commute. But I could have seen Ville Saint-Laurent, which, as the setting for Radio-Canada's The Office knockoff La Job, is comparable to Slough or Scranton.

Recent viewings

I’m starting to catch up on a few movies from last year that I missed, though I’m still woefully behind on pretty much every major award nominee. An Inconvenient Truth was better (and scarier) than expected; Hard Candy made me want to take a shower when it was over; and Grandma’s Boy was a very regrettable decision. There should be a special rating system for movies like that. Like “S-15”: viewers over 15 must be stoned.

Sloan put on a good ol’-fashioned show of the rock music on Thursday. There were a few too many shuffle beats, but otherwise a stompin’ good time was had by all.

Finally, I’ve started to watch the complete Ring Des Nibelungen on DVD with some of my musicology friends. Part of me is still pretty alarmed at just how little music I actually listened to as part of my grad school. Like, I expected that I’d have to be really familiar with all these canonical works in order to get a musicology degree (even if only a master’s). But, except for Die Meistersinger, Wagner was talked about much more than listened to in my time at school. And experiencing greatly great music like the Ring cycle is part of the reason why some of us went into musicology in the first place, so (re)discovering it is now a way to get back into actually enjoying music without the stress of having to prepare term papers or seminar presentations about it.

Anyway, we started with Das Rheingold on Wednesday to whet the appetite with the prologue, but it was much overshadowed by last night’s screening of Die Walküre. The Met production we watched was about fifteen years old, but Jimmy Levine still rocked the pit with his Jew-fro and Jessye Norman made for one helluva Sieglinde. Brünnhilde wasn’t the most impressive vocally or visually (she looked middle-aged and kind of schoolmarmish) but had the iron breastplate. I really envied Wotan’s spear, which he would stand on the ground decisively whenever he decreed the fate of something or other. I want me one of those.

Going in with very little advance knowledge of the Ring story, I wasn’t really prepared for just how classically and epically (?) Greek the whole thing would be, with all these ambivalent deities and honorable heroes and whatnot. Also, I wasn’t expecting Siegmund and Sieglinde to actually know about their incest until several acts later (like a Luke-and-Leia thing). But no, not even so much as a pause. What chutzpah. And this was all in the first act.

The music seemed to get better with each act, and I just loved the final scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde. It was sincere in a way that made up for some of the more awkward lyrics in Act I about bulging veins in Siegmund’s temples and Sieglinde’s request for him to be quiet so that she could better appreciate his voice.

It also came to mind yesterday how my friends Dave and Charles took a tape of about nine minutes of the Ride of the Valkyries and used it for their answering machine greeting. Outstanding. If I remember correctly, they told me that one person actually waited out the entire time to leave a message.

So, yeah. I’m into it. We won’t be trying to recreate a Bayreuth thing of consecutive nights of Wagner-mania, so Siegmund will be watched later in the week

I watched a documentary last week on the Pixies' reunion tour called Loudquietloud. I generally stay away from concert tour films because they tend to be rather a one-dimensional homage to glory of the subject without much insight or narrative development, charges of which this film is pretty guilty. But it was on TV on a quiet night and I wanted to see if it would have any clips of the rockin' show I went to in Montreal two years ago. (It didn't.)

Here are some of the things I learned:
-Everyone in the group really, really appreciated the revenue that came from going on tour.
-Frank Black is now Middle-Age Man with the family and the interest in recording solo old-timey Nashville twang. He's also really paunchy and has ferocious man-boobs.
-Kim Deal is trying oh-so-hard to stay sober.
-David Loverling is so much less cool than I ever could have imagined a drummer for an alt-rock band could be. He has a kind of avuncular charm to his cheesy semi-pro magic act, but the way he pops happy pills and spaces out is kinda uncomfortable to watch.

Anyway, there are a few good tunes, of course. But I still haven't seen a concert documentary that is as entertaining as the mockumentary of Spinal Tap.

Montreal moment

Last night it was about -15 degrees C, and I bravely (or foolishly) decided to go for a walk. 'Twas most unpleasant. The wind gave me the tears and I could actually feel the frost attaching itself to my beard.

A guy on the street stops me and asks for a light... not because he wanted to have a smoke, but because his car key was too cold to open his doors. I happened to have a dinky lighter on me, but it wheezed and sputtered in the wind and after about thirty seconds with my glove off I could hardly feel my fingers anymore. It seemed like there was enough of a small flame to do something for the key. I normally would have stuck around to see if the guy was actually successful in getting in, but that would have meant standing without moving for another minute.

Browsing through archival material for scholarship has its many drags: there’s the difficulty of obtaining the material, the problem of finding useful information and juicy quotations, and the inevitable microfilm vertigo. But it can have its rewards. Evidently, The Billboard magazine was once a general entertainment industy trade publication (before it dropped its title’s definite article and specialized on the music business. There are still the same sort of quick-hit blurbs about whether so-and-so and his/her new record or tour or sheet music will be a smash hit and the same praise for sales above artistry or other aesthetic criteria. In the 1920s, there were also a lot of amusingly quaint sections of the magazine that have now become extinct: a fashion column called “Feminine Frills” (with its brother page, “MANSTYLES”), a Vaudeville section, a Burlesque page, a section devoted to boat shows and ‘Tom’ shows and medicine shows, a page devoted to the latest happenings in minstrelsy (!), and “J.A. Jackson’s Page in the Interest of the Colored Actor, Showman and Musician of America,” which I think is the era’s equivalent of “Ask a Black Dude.” The minstrelsy column is plenty disturbing, especially with the cartoonish drawings of blackface performers at the page heading. There’s also some casual exoticism in other song titles (not just of the “coon” or “mammy” variety) which would also be judged racist by today’s standards but back then was a recipe for success: novelty hits like “Seminola” and “Egyptian Echoes” are borderline discomfiting, but “Hot Eskimo” and “Chink” (described as a “Mongolian fox-trot”) sound appalling for their titles alone. One can only imagine what kind of stereotypes adorned the sheet music.

(This will be the first in a series of one-paragraph reviews on books or TV or films or CDs or whatever I have recently spent a couple minutes or hours with. I hope to get back to blogging…gradually. But given that blogging was a New Year’s resolution and today is now January 9, I advise the reader not to get his/her hopes up about a full return of M&P.)

I don’t remember how I first came across Naomi Klein’s No Logo – I think it happened while I was at Indigo, browsing the non-fiction table and then finding it referenced in an old article about Radiohead as something Thom Yorke had just read and gotten would up about. In any case, No Logo is a well-written and insightful bit of muckraking on how global brands have, in effect, taken over the world through a combination of brand-centered ad campaigns that pervade every corner of public space and business policies that alienate workers at home and in the third-world. The usual superbrand suspects (Wal-Mart, Nike, the Gap, Starbucks, McDonald’s … basically anything that had an outlet torched during the Seattle WTO riots in 2000, right after this book came out) are shamed, of course, but what makes Klein’s reporting provocative and not merely rabble-rousing is how she ties together various factors – branding, globalization, sweatshops, corporate mergers, logo-conscious consumerism, etc. – into a web of postmodern/late capitalist critique. I haven’t yet finished the last section (about a mass of people who are “taking aim at the brand bullies” in a way suggested by the book’s subtitle), but it seems that Klein is overstating popular resistance to globalized superbrands as a way to make the book a little less dreary and suggest that there is hope for the masses to reclaim this or that. Even if I try to imagine myself back in 1999, I have trouble thinking of how the “people” were fighting back in meaningful ways; it seems the superbrands have only become more powerful since then. Perhaps discussing the inexorable growth of systems of power (a la Foucault) or talking about consumer society’s interplay of objects and desires (a la Baudrillard) would have been too much of a downer for some. Or maybe I just prefer those kinds of pessimistic analyses from too many grad school seminars.