Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica is a terrible album, listened to, by me, in its entirety, and not abandoned after the first track, only because of the near-universal critical acclaim afforded it. In this respect, it was the most excruciating act of media consumption I have engaged in since reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

This is the apotheosis of hippie music. Not because of its sound—Trout Mask Replica has nothing in common with the psychedelic records we associate with the late 60′s. No, Captain Beefheart has managed, here, in 1969, with guitars, vocals, drums, and the occasional horn to perfectly encapsulate the worst of an already inane and self-absorbed subculture’s precipitous decline over the next 30 years.

Trout Mask Replica goes beyond being an album; it is an old, dirty, hippie, with its drug damage, bad wardrobe, false erudition, self-serious “irreverence,” cringe-inducing manner of speaking, slight greasiness, and most damningly of all, complete and utter regard for its own supposed genius. After 78 minutes of playtime, I think I can smell the thing, if that’s possible, and it’s making me nauseous. I wouldn’t want to leave this record alone in my house, lest I come home from work and find it walking around in its unwashed purple tye-die tshirt, rifling through my fridge and hitting on my sister.

I don’t mind atonality, experimentation, artifice, obfuscation, and jagged rhythms; these can all be effective artistic tools. Captain Beefheart has here employed them in a musical document so atrocious that it serves not only as an incrimination of their band, but of a subculture—and, very possibly, of an entire generation.

Browsing through photos of Washington, D.C. on Flickr and came across this image of the National Geographic Society’s old headquarters.

Now this is a structure that really speaks to the majesty and influence of the Society over the last 120 years; and it conveys in one look the rationality underpinning National Geographic as one of our country’s great scientific institutions.

Oops! I guess that’s why they’ve turned it into a museum, now! The current NGS building is this ugly, flattened, anonymous office building in the back. Was this edifice built for the use of the world’s premier photojournalists, or the staff in Accounts Receivable?

You know, those squinty windows and that terraced potted plant look reminds me of something else I’ve seen. Something I see pretty often… oh yeah, I remember, the Federal prison in downtown LA!

So I saw the new Bill Murray movie, Broken Flowers, the other day on DVD. Murray plays this burnt out ex-computer entrepreneur who receives an anonymous, detail sparse letter about a son he may or may not have fathered 20 years previously. At the prodding of his (really) enthusiastic, mystery-obsessed neighbor, Murray reluctantly sets off on a quest to find and talk to each of the women he knew at that time. Murray’s been creating a lot of great, ambivalent, melancholy characters lately, and this is another solid one in that vein.

But one of the most fascinating things for me, about the movie, was how director Jim Jarmusch uses architecture and design to quickly set up the characters. It starts in the opening pan, which follows a mail carrier on her rounds.

The neighbor’s first. Check it out, kids playing, green grass, toys all over the unkempt yard:

And Murray’s house, just next door, with its meticulous landscaping, square lines, lame fake rock, absence of any sign of life:

Architecture is a form of cinematic shorthand. Films use it because audiences immediately understand; they intuitively know what it reveals about the characters. Jarmusch uses environments expressionistically, to reveal the interiority of his characters’ souls.

This man’s dead inside. And look: his complete spiritual anomie is perfectly conveyed in just one glance by his tasteful, clean-lined designer modernist furnishings.

What gave them the idea to make everything that color? Beige, brown, and that slightly bile-y yellow—everything looks like it’s covered in one of those old, transparent vinyl sheets paranoid people put on their couches.

Compare the neighbor’s house, though. Every room’s a riot of color. Every wall is covered by paintings, posters, photographs, artwork and drawings from the kids

This guy works two jobs and still has the inclination to play amateur sleuth for his neighbor. He’s alive.

Look, I’m not saying redecorating is going to make your life worth living. But it has to be better than just sitting there.

Professional curmudgeon James Howard Kunstler has been running a great feature over at his site for the past few years called, fittingly enough, Eyesore of the Month. He writes frequently funny, often apopleptic, always well-considered illustrated dissections of atrocious architecture and landscaping unlucky enough to cross his path (or sometimes sent his way by readers). Take a look at this July 2004 review of a student housing complex at Harvard Business School:

Welcome to the new student housing complex at Harvard’s Business School, designed by cutting edgers Rudolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti. Notice the attempt to make this despotic corporate box sporty and playful with the arbitrary placement of windows. Interestingly the home page of the building’s website, doesn’t even show a picture of the building. What they’re really proud of is the “green space and courtyard.” Check it out:

Is that welcoming or what? Just take a seat under a 300-ton slab of concrete and steel and relax. . . like a pill bug under a hiking boot.

His critiques aren’t merely aesthetic; his ire is most often directed towards the social dimension of our built environment, and backed up by his belief in an impending oil apocalypse. Then again, sometimes he just does a bit of good old-fashioned bitching. Always a good read.

Via an oldish post on Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond, Design A Room, a Flash-based mini-game presented by the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum, gives you the chance to put together your very own horribly ugly room layouts using classic Modernist tables, lamps, chairs, and other design objects.

Bonuses include a similarly atrocious Arts & Crafts mode, and small, informative blurbs on each item, thoughtfully provided by the game creator, so that when you begin building your soulless formica dream house you know exactly what to ask for at Design Within Reach.

I thought I’d missed the boat as far as commenting on the recent cartoon riots, here at Angst Dei, but this weekend’s events in Nigeria have shown the intoonfada to have an unfortunately long set of legs.

It was hard to take these demonstrations seriously, at first; their very appellation, “cartoon riots,” makes referring to them with a straight face difficult. Nothing kills a joke faster than having to explain it; but the escalating violence and increasing body count demands a deadly serious explication of the origin of the comics and the original controversy—Time does this well in its most recent issue.

The most absurd thing is that the reaction of these Muslim mobs—the scores of dead—have turned what could, and should, have been dismissed as a petulant, reactionary, parodical line-drawing—Mohammed with a bomb as his turban—into an increasingly trenchant, incisive, and perceptive piece of agitprop. At least it feels that way.

The riots, the burnings, the deaths, have thrown into sharp relief once again the massive cultural divide between our free nations and the illiberal states infected with Islamicist ideology. The Danish government is absolutely correct in its assertion that it will not, and cannot, apologize for items printed in a privately owned newspaper. But this position is impossible to convey to human beings who have no concept of freedom of the press.

The important lesson to draw from these events is one many of us in the West have been loathe to learn. Our beliefs here in the United States, as enshrined in our great Constitution, have always had a universalist dimension to them; now, more than ever, we must realize that dimension explicitly. We have shied away from proselytization in the past, but we cannot do so any longer. In the era of instantaneous and common global communication, there are no local beliefs. When cartoons published in Denmark precipitate deaths in Nigeria we can no longer affect the fiction of cultural relativism; Nor can we pretend to isolation. Immanuel Kant’s maxim—that we should act the way we’d want the whole world to act—isn’t just a moral imperative anymore. It’s become a simple fact of life.

If my friend Bo closed his eyes and tried to imagine the most stereotypically British rock band he could, the Arctic Monkeys are probably the vision that would swim before him. Songs on their much-heralded debut album are consistently cheeky, upbeat guitar driven numbers with quintessentially English-accented vocals and pose. Everything here is fun, provided you’re into the sound; To these American ears, the best tracks are the ones that, like songs Dancing Shoes and Mardy Bum, concentrate on stronger, relatively simpler riffs, and eschew the slightly cheesy back-up singing scattered through the album.

Here’s the perfect occasion to mention my newly developed theory of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Syndrome, named after the lamentable Sean Connery film of the same name. What I’m talking about is the hurried packing, simply, of too much adventure in one composition. While this isn’t a criticism of the Arctic Monkeys, per se, the band does exemplify LXG Syndrome, in that it seems to be a defining feature of happy Britpop in general. Guitars work at cross purposes and nothing gets a chance to breathe; in the frenzy music loses its ability to evoke mood and emotion. These LXG Syndrome songs are fun, and make fun albums—but just a little stripping down on these very talented bands’ parts can produce an absolutely joyous cut. Think about Alright on Supergrass’s I Should Coco versus the rest of that album.

Now I’m prepared to admit my pet theory, here, isn’t objective, necessarily, so much as the result of the aformentioned American ears. The Arctic Monkey’s album is an exuberant piece of work. If it seems unlikely, to me, to convert those of us born on the wrong side of the pond, that doesn’t reduce its considerable charms.

04 – Dancing Shoes
09 – Mardy Bum

This is music for partying Brits and anglophiles, and given their native popularity I have a sneaking suspicion the Arctic Monkeys don’t give a toss, really, whether anyone else is into it.

So your girlfriend (or your wife) wants to buy you this sweater that she saw at the Gap and thinks you’d look ‘super handsome’ in. She also thinks it would be ‘cute’ to have you layer it on top of of a collared button up shirt or polo. You know just how lame this golf course yuppie look is, but she just doesn’t seem to understand. What you need, sir, is VISUAL EVIDENCE! >>

Why do so many people like this crap? And why do they like it so much?

The artwork, the track titles, the subject matter all seem to indicate this album should be “funny.” But there’s no funniness to be found here. I don’t get it.

Of course, I’d be fine with not getting the joke if the songs were worth listening to. They’re not. Sufjan’s vocals are affected and annoying, and the music—acoustic guitar, tambourines, banjo, scattered piano, horns, violin, and whatever that is that sounds like it was generated on one of those multi-instrument electronic organs they sell at the mall—barely rises to the level of boring. People talk about his “earnestness,” but I think that’s because their irony-meters are broken. Sufjan delivers every nufolk song—whether it’s about UFOs, serial killers, train cars, or tall buildings—so seemingly sincere that it must overload your average hipster’s circuits. No, maybe it’s the opposite. The people who like this must know—for them, listening to Sufjan Stevens is like being a mujahideen fighter tossed back through a time warp and landing in the camp of Saladin. A face to face encounter with their Ultimate Hero.

I can barely finish this review. Just listening to this album makes me want to strangle someone. I’ve never been in a fight in my life. But listening to these songs, I want to reach into my headphones, through the wires, across the internet, and beat the living crap out of Sufjan Stevens.

03 – Come On! Feel the Illinoise!
04 – John Wayne Gacy, Jr.

But maybe I’m just disappointed. A song with the title “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” should have been awesome. Instead, just because of the intro, it’s going to take a force of will to hear Schroeder’s piano ever again.

I promised Erika a new post tonight; instead she (and you) are getting a new feature: categories.

I’d wanted to add something like this for a while; I finally overcame my fabled procrastination and implemented it. The hype surrounding tags pushed me over the edge.

My category links are tag standard compliant, which means they get indexed as such by Technorati, et al. They’re also implemented using clean URLs, a technical nicety I had also been mulling over implementing for sometime. Blog entries may follow.

Future plans: A list of all categories added to the archive section; Going back and categorizing all my old posts; A filtering mechanism, so that you, dear reader, can decide what kind of entries you want to see, and avoid my moping or bad poetry; And perhaps adding micro-categories that would act more like the super specific tags that seem so prevalent on search engines.

For now, you can access a list of the posts I have tagged by clicking on the appropriate link below the entry. But you probably already figured that out. I’m tired, now, and going to bed.

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Update (Feb 08): Category list now in archives; Every post on the site tagged with at least one category.