Music Notes: March 2020
I had tickets to see Glen Matlock a few weeks back. Cancelled. Last week, the Murder Capital was postponed. I have tickets for Big Thief in July, but who knows? In any event, if you’re not going out, there’s plenty of music to listen to.
1 The Boomtown Rats – Citizens of Boomtown
Full disclosure, I was a huge Boomtown Rats fan – first two albums only. Both punk-ish, but the first with a strong R ‘n’ B influence, and the second distinctly New Wave. I lost interest after “I Don’t Like Mondays.” This slimmed down Rats album isn’t a huge disappointment – the biggest fear for any fan when their favourites reform. Likely it won’t replace any of your faves, but it’s a competent effort.
2 Devo – the Complete Truth about De-Evolution
Because of the success of things like “Whip It,” it’s easy to forget just how strange Devo were. This collection of videos sets that straight. Delving into the mythology of the band, the cheesy lo-fi makes it a very enjoyable experience.
3. The Murder Capital – When I Have Fears
Mmm. Moody post-punk. Go and listen to “Green & Blue” right now, and be forever changed.
4 Pearl Jam – Gigaton
Full disclosure, big fan of the first Pearl Jam record, not so much the others. They all kind of sound the same to me., but if you like that sound… Listened, enjoyed.
UPDATE: Listened again. Change mind. It’s very good! Recommended.
5 Kælan Mikla – Nott Eftir Nott
Icelandic synth-punk. Would really like to see this moody goth trio, but that doesn’t seem likely in the near future.
6 Bob Dylan – “Murder Most Foul”
Is a pandemic the best time for a 17 minute Bob Dylan track? The reviews say yes. I’m less convinced. The song meanders for about 10 minutes with lyrics that feels were written by a mediocre high school student (“wolfman, oh wolfman howl / rub-a-dub-dub it’s a murder most foul”). The tune never really improves, but the lyrics do, and are actually moving. Full disclosure, I love those early Dylan records, and everything I hear will be compared to them. Maybe that’s unfair. He’s Bob Dylan, and i’m not.
7 Sonic Youth
If you’re a fan of Sonic Youth, their Bandcamp page will delight. There’s now a bunch of live albums spanning their career. Saw SY twice, great shows.
8. Mark Paytress – Vicious: The Art of Dying Young
A quick read, but a good one. Paytress deftly covers Vicious’ brief life, his triumphs , his failures, and a lot of missed potential.
9. LAMF – Live at the Bowery Electric
Came across through browsing through Amazon. Thought for a moment it might be the actual band, but it’s Walter Lure and some famous friends doing the album. Still great, but at the same time I’m disappointed.
10. Adrienne Lenke – “Summer’s End”
Big Thief singer performs a beautiful cover of John Prine’s Summer’s End
Stay safe.
“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”
The Utopia of Rules is sitting near the top of my to-read list (just behind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), and Bullshit Jobs is on order. Plenty to read in the time of plague.
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David Graeber interview: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary.’ From the Guardian May 21, 2015. Stuart Jeffries
The anarchist author, coiner of the phrase ‘We are the 99%’, talks to Stuart Jeffries about ‘bullshit jobs’, our rule-bound lives and the importance of play
A few years ago David Graeber’s mother had a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone who’s ever been embroiled in bureaucratic procedures.
At one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down his given name as “Daid”; at another, because someone at Verizon had spelled his surname “Grueber”. Graeber made matters worse by printing his name on the line clearly marked “signature” on one of the forms. Steeped in Kafka, Catch-22 and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Graeber was alive to all the hellish ironies of the situation but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. “We spend so much of our time filling in forms,” he says. “The average American waits six months of her life waiting for the lights to change. If so, how many years of our life do we spend doing paperwork?”
The matter became academic, because Graeber’s mother died before she got Medicaid. But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. “Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?” writes the 53-year-old professor of anthropology in his new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. “Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?”
“I like to think I’m actually a smart person. Most people seem to agree with that,” Graeber says, in a restaurant near his London School of Economics office. “OK, I was emotionally distraught, but I was doing things that were really dumb. How did I not notice that the signature was on the wrong line? There’s something about being in that bureaucratic situation that encourages you to behave foolishly.”
But Graeber’s book doesn’t just present human idiocy in its bureaucratic form. Its main purpose is to free us from a rightwing misconception about bureaucracy. Ever since Ronald Reagan said: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, it has been commonplace to assume that bureaucracy means government. Wrong, Graeber argues. “If you go to the Mac store and somebody says: ‘I’m sorry, it’s obvious that what needs to happen here is you need a new screen, but you’re still going to have to wait a week to speak to the expert’, you don’t say ‘Oh damn bureaucrats’, even though that’s what it is – classic bureaucratic procedure. We’ve been propagandised into believing that bureaucracy means civil servants. Capitalism isn’t supposed to create meaningless positions. The last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.”
Graeber’s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”
Which jobs are bullshit? “A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.” He concedes that some might argue that his own work is meaningless. “There can be no objective measure of social value,” he says emolliently.
In The Utopia of Rules, Graeber goes further in his analysis of what went wrong. Technological advance was supposed to result in us teleporting to new planets, wasn’t it? He lists some of the other predicted technological wonders he’s disappointed don’t exist: flying cars, suspended animation, immortality drugs, androids, colonies on Mars. “Speaking as someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I have clear memories of calculating that I would be 39 years of age in the magic year 2000, and wondering what the world around me would be like. Did I honestly expect I would be living in a world of such wonders? Of course. Do I feel cheated now? Absolutely.”
But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”.
His bullshit jobs argument could be taken as a counterblast to the hyper-capitalist dystopia argument wherein the robots take over and humans are busted down to an eternity of playing Minecraft. Summarising predictions in recent futurological literature, John Lanchester has written: “There’s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much but having fun playing with its gadgets.” Lanchester drew attention to a league table drawn up by two Oxford economists of 702 jobs that might be better done by robots: at number one (most safe) were recreational therapists; at 702 (least safe) were telemarketers. Anthropologists, Graeber might be pleased to know, came in at 39, so he needn’t start burnishing his resume just yet – he’s much safer than writers (123) and editors (140).
Graeber believes that since the 1970s there has been a shift from technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment technologies that favoured labour discipline and social control. Hence the internet. “The control is so ubiquitous that we don’t see it.” We don’t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society, he claims. “The rarity with which the truncheons appear just helps to make violence harder to see,” he writes.
In 2011, at New York’s Zuccotti Park, he became involved in Occupy Wall Street, which he describes as an “experiment in a post-bureaucratic society”. He was responsible for the slogan “We are the 99%”. “We wanted to demonstrate we could do all the services that social service providers do without endless bureaucracy. In fact at one point at Zuccotti Park there was a giant plastic garbage bag that had $800,000 in it. People kept giving us money but we weren’t going to put it in the bank. You have all these rules and regulations. And Occupy Wall Street can’t have a bank account. I always say the principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”
He quotes with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc: “Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law, custom or prejudice – and it’s up to you to create the situations.” Academia was, he muses, once a haven for oddballs – it was one of the reasons he went into it. “It was a place of refuge. Not any more. Now, if you can’t act a little like a professional executive, you can kiss goodbye to the idea of an academic career.”
Why is that so terrible? “It means we’re taking a very large percentage of the greatest creative talent in our society and telling them to go to hell … The eccentrics have been drummed out of all institutions.” Well, perhaps not all of them. “I am an offbeat person. I am one of those guys who wouldn’t be allowed in the academy these days.” Indeed, he claims to have been blackballed by the American academy and found refuge in Britain. In 2005, he went on a year’s sabbatical from Yale, “and did a lot of direct action and was in the media”. When he returned he was, he says, snubbed by colleagues and did not have his contract renewed. Why? Partly, he believes, because his countercultural activities were an embarrassment to Yale.
Born in 1961 to working-class Jewish parents in New York, Graeber had a radical heritage. His father, Kenneth, was a plate stripper who fought in the Spanish civil war, and his mother, Ruth, was a garment worker who played the lead role in Pins and Needles, a 1930s musical revue staged by the international Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
Their son was calling himself an anarchist at the age of 16, but only got heavily involved in politics in 1999 when he became part of the protests against the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle. Later, while teaching at Yale, he joined the activists, artists and pranksters of the Direct Action Network in New York. Would he have got further at Yale if he hadn’t been an anarchist? “Maybe. I guess I had two strikes against me. One, I seemed to be enjoying my work too much. Plus I’m from the wrong class: I come from a working-class background.” The US’s loss is the UK’s gain: Graeber became a reader in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2008 and professor at the LSE two years ago.
His publications include Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), in which he laid out his vision of how society might be organised on less alienating lines, and Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009), a study of the global justice movement. In 2013, he wrote his most popularly political book yet, The Democracy Project. “I wanted it to be called ‘As if We Were Already Free’,” he tells me. “And the publishers laughed at me – a subjunctive in the title!” But it was Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published in 2011, that made him famous and has drawn praise from the likes of Thomas Piketty and Russell Brand. Financial Times journalist and fellow anthropologist Gillian Tett argued that the book was “not just thought-provoking but exceedingly timely”, not least, no doubt, because in it Graeber called for a biblical-style “jubilee”, meaning a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts.
At the end of The Utopia of Rules, Graeber distinguishes between play and games – the former involving free‑form creativity, the latter requiring participants to abide by rules. While there is pleasure in the latter (it is, to quote from the subtitle of the book, one of the secret joys of bureaucracy), it is the former that excites him as an antidote to our form‑filling red-taped society.
Just before he finishes his dinner, Graeber tells me about the new idea he’s toying with. “It’s about the play principle in nature. Usually, he argues, we project agency to nature insofar as there is some kind of economic interest. Hence, for instance, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. I begin to understand the idea better– it’s an anarchist theory of organisation starting with insects and animals and proceeding to humans. He is suggesting that, instead of being rule-following economic drones of capitalism, we are essentially playful. The most basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms. Graeber himself certainly seems to be having more fun than seems proper for a respected professor.
• The Utopia of Rules is published by Melville House
Corona Virus Playlist (I)
OK, the content has nothing to do with the virus, but the titles work…
1 Tiffany – I think we’re alone now
2. Bjork – It’s so Quiet
3. The Police – Don’t Stand so Close to Me
4. Joy Division – Isolation
5. Bruce Cockburn – The Trouble with Normal
6. Sparks – This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us
7. Mudhoney – Touch Me, I’m Sick
8. Buzzcocks – Why Can’t I Touch It?
9. Nirvana – Stay Away
10. Generation X – Dancing with Myself
And this …
On Freedom
There’s a great deal of talk about freedom these days, especially in light of increased talk of government enforced quarantines. In anticipating a policy that will likely kill millions in order to preserve the economy and his perceived re-election chances, President Trump and his talking heads talk of freedom., the people’s right to choose, and the economy. (Although, one would imagine millions of deaths could well have an effect on the economy and Trump’s re-election chances too)
But to see freedom as amassing a vast amount of commodities misses the point.
Freedom is not the freedom to accumulate, but the fact I have no need to accumulate
Max Horkheimer – Towards a New Manifesto
New Link: A Free Retriever’s Digest
This site was brought to my attention a few weeks back. Good collection of new Communist Left material as well as historical stuff as well. Impressive links page.
News of the Weird: Corona Virus Edition
Even in the midst of whatever this is, the news throws up weird stories for you. Here’s a couple that probably should make you go hmm…
1 Rand Paul, who recently voted against pandemic aid because he thought it would encourage companies to lay off workers to get government money, tested positive for the virus and is self-isolating at home. Luckily, he has an excellent benefits package from his employer.
2. The Pope recently announced that given the fear of contagion from Covid-19, Catholics didn’t need to go to church and talk with one of God’s emissaries, they could talk to God directly throwing away the last 500 years of Church dogma. Martin Luther is spinning in his grave.
3. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe debuted the Wasp, many were pleased that the on-screen character was a strong, smart female role model. Unfortunately, the actress Marvel chose to portray her, Evangeline Lilly, appears to be a dimwit: Talking about her decision not to quarantine, she wrote “Some people value their lives over freedom, some people value freedom over their lives. We all make our choices.” Rand Paul would no doubt agree with you.
4. Donald Trump noted “I just don’t know what the government assistance would be for what I have,” and that even if he did qualify he wasn’t sure he would take it for his hotels. OK. But first of all, are you fucking kidding me? This is the guy who took money for 9/11 even though none of his properties were damaged, and second, aren’t these your sons’ businesses now? Aren’t you supposed to be arm’s length? Yeah, didn’t think so.
5. And Trump again. Announcing he had taken the test, a few hours before his doctor insisted he didn’t need to take it, Trump’s test was negative. Initially, I thought, it could be true, but even if he tested positive, they would lie about it. Of course, I realized later, he probably lied about taking the test in the first place.
6. Fox news host Laura Ingram tweeted, “Americans need to know date certain when this will end. The uncertainty for businesses, parents and kids is just not sustainable.” Leaving aside the curiously worded first sentence, I’d speak to the virus’ manager if I were you Laura.
7. Godfrey Bloom, whose twitter profile reads “author, blogger, prize winning fund manager, small holder, military historian, 80 million speeches & blog views, Austrian School Economist” recently tweeted, “Well, we didn’t close our pubs in the blitz. 60,000 people killed then.
What happened to our nation?” Bloom, who was born four years after the war ended, despite being a “military historian” seems to have failed to grasp the difference between an air-assault and an air-born contagion. Or maybe he has. A later tweet announced he was “self isolating on my Yorkshire small holding. We have a stand alone holiday cottage, two bedrooms, charming, suit city dwellers who live in a flat. Everything delivered to our tiny village. All local produce.” How nice for you.
8. According to an article published in The Guardian, when Dr. William Hanage heard about the UK government’s theory of Herd immunity to control the Corona Virus, this was his response: “I research and teach the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health. My colleagues here in the US, even as they are reeling from the stumbling response of the Donald Trump administration to the crisis, assumed that reports of the UK policy were satire – an example of the wry humour for which the country is famed. But they are all too real.”
9. Sad to say, it appears that doctors didn’t wear those beaky plague costumes after all
10. Lastly, a cure one. Apparently a number of vets are reported an upswing in “tail sprain.” Dogs wagging their tails too much because they’re happy their owners are home more. We’re going to be OK.
Albums for the Apocalypse (I)
If you only had ten albums to listen to, what would they be? Ask me tomorrow and you’ll get a different answer. But today…
1 The Clash – London Calling
Bought this the day it came out. A brilliant musical potpourri
2. Richard and Linda Thompson – I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight
Beautiful harmonies, beautiful songs.
3. Natacha Atlas – Diaspora
Her voice is so stunning, it almost makes me believe in a higher power
4. Joy Division – Closer
No words to describe this.
5. $75 Bill – Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock
Every time I listen, I hear new things
6. UB40 – Signing Off
Stunning debut. Political and seductive
7. The Cowboy Junkies – The Trinity Sessions
For when you want to chill
8. James Brown – 20 All -Time Greatest Hits
And for when you want to get down
9. The Velvet Underground and Nico – The Velvet Underground and Nico
Of course.
10. the Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique
Initially disappointed that it wasn’t Licenced to Ill 2. I was an idiot. This is much better
Camus on the Coronavirus
Well, not exactly, but Camus certainly had things to say about the meaning of life (to live it). And we’re likely all feeling a little existential these days (Yes, I know, Camus didn’t use that label). From Today’s New York Times. Finally read The Fall a few weeks back, will have to re-read The Plague now.
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In January 1941, Albert Camus began work on a story about a virus that spreads uncontrollably from animals to humans and ends up destroying half the population of “an ordinary town” called Oran, on the Algerian coast. “The Plague,” published in 1947, is frequently described as the greatest European novel of the postwar period.
As the book opens, an air of eerie normality reigns. The town’s inhabitants lead busy money-centered and denatured lives. Then, with the pacing of a thriller, the horror begins. The narrator, Dr. Rieux, comes across a dead rat. Then another and another. Soon an epidemic seizes Oran, the disease transmitting itself from citizen to citizen, spreading panic in every street.
To write the book, Camus immersed himself in the history of plagues. He read about the Black Death that killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe in the 14th century, the Italian plague of 1630 that killed 280,000 across Lombardy and Veneto, the great plague of London of 1665 as well as plagues that ravaged cities on China’s eastern seaboard during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Camus was not writing about one plague in particular, nor was this narrowly, as has sometimes been suggested, a metaphoric tale about the Nazi occupation of France. He was drawn to his theme because he believed that the actual historical incidents we call plagues are merely concentrations of a universal precondition, dramatic instances of a perpetual rule: that all human beings are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated at any time, by a virus, an accident or the actions of our fellow man.
The people of Oran can’t accept this. Even when a quarter of the city is dying, they keep imagining reasons it won’t happen to them. They are modern people with phones, airplanes and newspapers. They are surely not going to die like the wretches of 17th-century London or 18th-century Canton.
“It’s impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West,” a character says. “Yes, everyone knew that,” Camus adds, “except the dead.”
For Camus, when it comes to dying, there is no progress in history, there is no escape from our frailty. Being alive always was and will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable “underlying condition.” Plague or no plague, there is always, as it were, the plague, if what we mean by that is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless.
This is what Camus meant when he talked about the “absurdity” of life. Recognizing this absurdity should lead us not to despair but to a tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralizing to joy and gratitude.
“The Plague” isn’t trying to panic us, because panic suggests a response to a dangerous but short-term condition from which we can eventually find safety. But there can never be safety — and that is why, for Camus, we need to love our fellow damned humans and work without hope or despair for the amelioration of suffering. Life is a hospice, never a hospital.
At the height of the contagion, when 500 people a week are dying, a Catholic priest called Paneloux gives a sermon that explains the plague as God’s punishment for depravity. But Dr. Rieux has watched a child die and knows better: Suffering is randomly distributed, it makes no sense, it is simply absurd, and that is the kindest thing one can say of it.
The doctor works tirelessly to lessen the suffering of those around him. But he is no hero. “This whole thing is not about heroism,” Dr. Rieux says. “It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Another character asks what decency is. “Doing my job,” the doctor replies.
Eventually, after more than a year, the plague ebbs away. The townspeople celebrate. Suffering is over. Normality can return. But Dr. Rieux “knew that this chronicle could not be a story of definitive victory,” Camus writes. “It could only be the record of what had to be done and what, no doubt, would have to be done again, against this terror.” The plague, he continues, “never dies”; it “waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers” for the day when it will once again “rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.”
Camus speaks to us in our own times not because he was a magical seer who could intimate what the best epidemiologists could not, but because he correctly sized up human nature. He knew, as we do not, that “everyone has it inside himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune.”
Alain de Botton is the author, most recently, of “The School of Life.”
Love Music
I’ve seriously listened to music since I was a teenager. Punk happened when I was about 12, and it changed my life. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s no less true for that. Over forty years later, I still love music, and especially live. The coronavirus has meant that in this streaming world, many bands who would derive their income from touring and from the merch table, haven’t been able to do so. But today, Bandcamp has come up with a nice initiative:
To support musicians during the Covid-19 pandemic, Bandcamp is waiving our revenue share on all sales this Friday, March 20, from midnight to midnight PST.
If you love music and the bands that make it, send ’em your cash.
The Unsung Heroes
I went to the grocery store this morning to gather a few items forgotten yesterday (I need celery for the salad!). As I’m there, it’s shockingly clear who the heroes are in the pandemic. Of course, the doctors and the medics, but the people who work in the food store, the people who deliver the post, the bus drivers and garbage collectors. The everyday forgotten workers who in times of crisis still work to ensure life continues. If they were gone, we can imagine the results. If the CEOs, the bankers, the captains of industry currently crying hard times were to vanish, would we notice?
There’s this line from the old union song “Solidarity Forever” that puts it well.
They have taken untold millions
That they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle
Not a single wheel can turn
We can break their haughty power
Gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong
Notes from Underground 