October 11 - 18, 2008

Murmur
by J. Nimi
33 1/3 books, 2007, paperback
14 cards

When I met Peter Buck I thanked him for R.E.M.'s introducing me to the music of The Soft Boys and the Velvet Underground. My friend Joel was shocked that I failed to express my love for R.E.M. to Peter Buck. It just seemed a given, I do hope he knew that. R.E.M. for me was like those friends who introduce you to things that help you figure out what you're about as well as share things that they know you will love. J. Nimi does just that in this book on Murmur. I also realize now I don't really know that much about Murmur and, while this book fills in some of that, his discussion of Walker Percy's The Message in the Bottle is his gift, as well as this thoughtful text about Murmur.

A few selections:
xi- "But isn't that how we feel about records we love- that without us, they wouldn't exist? That they continue to mediate your existence, even after you shut off the stereo, shelve the records, "outgrow" the band?
-Francisco Varela: "Every act of knowing brings forth a world."
xii- Richard Brilliant's My Laocoon- "how a personal experience of a work of art can become tainted by what history has to say about it."
xiii- restrain the imagination
-"Murmur is part object...part text...and part performance."
xiv- "Murmur was and is about not understanding things too quickly or too assuredly. An artist wants his or her work to be "understood," but by a particular means also inscribed as a part of that work."
1- recorded in Charlotte, NC
2- Carrboro
-donuts
12 (being in a band) "is not so much about freedom as it is about the giving up of one kind of burden for another."
43- "the common fear of not being heard"
50- Marat's death
52- "tell now what is dreaming"
55- Lionel Trilling: "The poet...may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather."
56- Thoreau: "each railroad tie was a soul- the passing of a freight train was a night requiem to the railroad ties..."
61-62- Kudzu- James Dickey- "unkillable ghosts"
62- kudzu to a Midwesterner
63- Gerhard Richter
68- Edmund Burke
-sublime
74- 1st demo tape- sticker, "do not open"
76- David Rothenberg: "The Phenomenology of Reverb" quoting Edmund Husserl: "...once a sound happens, it immediately goes away; and the moment it's over, we begin to forget it. That's what memory, in fact, is: the history of forgetting."
79- Irving Howe: "the Reaganites have largely succeeded in restoring popular confidence in the virtues of capitalism, the mystical beneficence of "the free market," and the attractiveness of a "minimalist state" even though that state, faithfully attending to corporate needs, has never been close to being minimalist."
80- "Coca-Cola didn't sell soda pop; they sold corn, in the form of corn syrup, a product that greatly offset the economic gap created in the wake of the gasoline crisis of the later 1970s."
89- Michael Stipe: "We want our records to be like doors to other worlds."
90- Walker Percy's "Metaphor as Mistake"
90-91- naming
93- Robert Frost, "poetry is what gets lost in translation"
-Eli Khamarov: "poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition."
93-94- MS: lyrics "a blank chalkboard for people to pick up and scribble over"
98- "Murmur is a record that needs to be completed by the listener, but she has written herself out of the picture altogether, not to mention the music."
101- "When you illuminate the sublime, you get a sharper darkness."
108- "For most of history, up until very recently, music was heard only when it was performed."
114- Magritte
125- "But part of projecting yourself into a pop song is the tacit notion that you're able to momentarily leave behind the real narrative that you normally inhabit."
126- strategy

August 31 - September 2, 2008

Horses

by Philip Shaw

33 1/3 Books, 2008, paperback

19 cards

The first time I saw Patti Smith was on R.E.M.'s Monster tour in 1995. I was in high school. I didn't know much about her yet but I knew that she was someone to find out more about, much like R.E.M. pointed me towards The Velvet Underground. I don't remember the quote exactly but I recall Michael Stipe saying once how when he heard Horses he realized anyone could sing, that he could sing. R.E.M.'s music and interests gave me a perspective beyond the one-traffic light town I lived in. Because of Horses significance to Stipe, the bits I know about Patti Smith, and the concerts of hers I've seen since, I was excited to see that the 33 1/3 book about her focused on Horses.

Philip Shaw's story of musical discovery and research bears some similarities to mine, though his was guided by Ian Curtis and Joy Division and Patti Smith, who he knew first through the Horses cover. The format and approach for 33 1/3 books varies with the author. Shaw writes about Horses as a fan, as well as the necessary invocation of Rimbaud while also discussing it through other texts. As he says, "...Horses is about what happens when we listen as well as read."

Selections:

3- "...but from Patti Smith I learned that the loss of control, a key word for Ian Curtis, need not lead to a suicidal walk 'upon the edge of escape' (She's Lost Control Again) As Land taught me, the loss of control could lead, equally, to the sea of possibilities."

7- Velvet Underground and Warhol

8- Bob Dylan

9- Robert Mapplethorpe

13- rigor and taking music seriously

-"Elvis Costello line (the attribution is disputed) 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture.'"

15- "unlike other cultural forms, music is where we are most likely to encounter ourselves"

16- "What music offers is the promise of release from the restrictions of everyday life. But such a release is, of course, illusory, and just as ideology works to convince its subjects that they are, in fact, outside ideology, thus rendering itself immune to critique and to the potential for revolt, so music, by concealing its origins in commerce, and by providing a sense of escape from the workaday world, operates as a lure to critical consciousness. To be lost in music, released form the nine to five, is to feel alive, but also, as Sister Sledge adds, to be 'Caught in a trap': for who, once they have experience such freedom, would wish to reflect on it? Might the act of close critical engagement ruin the illusion?"

19- "nothing is more heady in the sense of intoxicating, than the champagne froth of a radical new idea."

22- Benjamin

23- the Situationists

24- "With each song, Smith presents a sort of photographic negative, her characters inhabiting a shadow version of the land of the free."

28- Lacan: "A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject."

-"Patti Smith always distrusted the idea that human beings possess a fixed or stable identity."

29- "Yes, she is a poet, and she is a poem that is written."

-eye patch

30- Rimbaud- self-fashioning

33- Alice in Wonderland

37- Philadelphia Museum of Art

41- Illuminations

44- Piss Factory

-that photograph

49- drawings

52- "death by water"

-"how many tears on your pillow. crocodile or real. watershed."

52- T.S. Eliot

54- "the night stretched like a cloud"

55- (questions) "Perhaps all of these or none of these things."

56- PS: "I had to go to Paris to find myself as an artist, but I came back to New York filled with words and rhythms."

56- close alliance with Lenny Kaye

60- Sam Shepard- PS: Shepard's "whole life moves on rhythms. He's a drummer."

61- street angel

62- "her stress on the act of reading"

63- words, language

66- longing

67- Rimbaud quote- women

70- Artaud

72- Richard Hell: "The art-form of the future is celebrityhood."

76- Gross: "She was a woman who dared to get up on stage and not smile- not aim to please."

77-78- silences

86- Patty Hearst- "I am nobody's million dollar baby."

97- John Cale- mirror quote

98- Horses read as artifact

102- "Again, who is singing here, and to whom?"

106- Lacan, Zizek

121- album "form of memento mori, an artistic meditation on the limits of mortality."

122- Jim Morrison- the task

128- Voltaire- back to England- Louis XV- said to have asked him: 'What did you learn over there?' 'To think, sire.' (penser- to think), to which the King replied, 'Horses?' (panser- to groom horses)"

129- "Horses, then, is about thinking; or rather, it is about allowing oneself to be thought..."

131- Barthes

132- Lacan- child- mirror