Dr. Rat

It is odd from a musical standpoint, certainly. There used to be a "world music" label here in the states called Xenophile, which I think got to the point. There are people aout there who really like the new, the unusual . . . they like learning about other people and other customs in the world and music is one of the main means of their doing this. So music festivals with Finnish musicans and Mandingo musicians on the same bill actually work for this kind of folk. From a marketers standpoint, someone who buys a JPP cd is probably 100x more likely to like Sunny Ade than your average music customer, even though the musics sound nothing alike. So the broad category continues to make some sense. --eric

Well, as somebody who was actually doing a world music radio show at the time Gabriel started putting stuff out on RealWorld, I have to say I don't recall "people" believing any such thing, though I can remember lots of people saying that "people" did. My interpretation was that this is what certain people wanted "people" to have believed. --eric edited to clarify, I hope

Agreed. The "world music" tag has got to go. Its justfication as a marketing tool doesn't mean you have to use it. Does this mean we should also talk about 4x4s in terms of their being "trail rated"? I mean what the hell is that...? Same goes for Sprint claiming to be the only/first wireless company "built from the ground up." That doesn't even mean anything, and yet it's the anchor of their ad campaign. The whole thing makes me nauseous... "let the products sell themselves fuck advertising and commercial psychology psychological methods to sell should be destroyed" -- the Minutemen ← Ummmmm, there's a difference between a "marketing category" which means a way of grouping people or things on an essentially ad hoc basis as a guide to marketers (whose job is ideally to help people find what they want and to help manufacturers and service providers find their customers), and a "marketing pitch." The sort of mass-market fictions you're throwing out as examples really have very little to do with what we're talking about. Show me the successful advertizing campaign that touts an artist as "world music." Show me the disatisfied customers who bought it expecting something of a rather more planetary nature than the national or local music they actually bought. Every single category you can possibly think of fails to reflect the particularity of the things in it. That's not a scandal: that's the purpose of categories. This particular category has no bearing on the music itself, it was created to help a certain niche market of Western customers find the records they wanted. A category like "Brazilian music" (Os Mutantes? Villa-Lobos? death metal?) is every bit as stupid vis-a-vis the music it refers to as "World Music" is. And if "World Music" is objectionable, how about "music?" Personally I think retail ventors should be forced to sell cds alongside of power drills and hair dryers and bulk split peas. Just so none of us gets the idea that the word "music" actually means anything! --eric

Perhaps a reflection of the patronising nature of the European/North American market! I do understand what you're saying. Having a 'flamenco' section with one CD in it would be equally annoying! And not all record stores blanket categorise it. You can find big record stores in places like London where there are much more specific categories. ← I'd compare it to going into a record store in India and finding a section of American Music in which was thrown hip-hop, jazz, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, Los Lobos . . . etc., etc. Practically nothing in common in the music except country of origin. I don't think I'd be insulted or even particualrly puzzled. It's just a hueristic device to help you find records. While the category might seem kind of arbitrary and neglectful of American music's increadible diversity of style, attitude, social origin blah blah blah, I don't think record store categorization systems need to reflect all these things. They just need to get you to some good music, and there you'll get all the details. --eric

Well, World Music is not a generic category. It's just a marketing category predicated on the idea that a Westerner interested in, say, flamenco, might also be interested in North African music or Cuban music or the music of the arabian peninsula. It implied no real similarity between the music thrown into that category, just that people looking for Gipsy Kings were way more likely to be interested in Outback or Cachao or the music of Reunion than was someone buying the Spice Girls. Having a flamenco section having any rights to the appelation is just not a viable option in record stores here. There's just not enough market for it. So you get a big "World Music" section generally subdivided into geographic (Oceana) and generic (salsa) subcategories. And usually very badly sorted. I don't think it's patronizing at all--it's just a response to the realities of the market. --eric

That was not a problem when I saw the film. The moment the movie began, it became the most eerily quiet theater I've ever been in. Not a popcorn movie - and no one was eating anything, let alone laughing. ← Well, that's about where my head was at, so whispering and laughing was really infuriating I don't think I've ever had the chance to watch the movie all the way through. --eric

I walked out of Platoon. Not because of the movie itself, but becuase of the idiot teenagers behind me trying to cope with the battle scenes by laughing. It was leave or sock one of them. I made the right choice. --eric

Happy Birthday! --eric

African Jazz Pioneers might be a stop. There's actually plenty of good South African jazz ranging from stuff along the lines of 30s swing to Dudu Pukwana, a lot of which drinks deeply from the well of African trad and pop. --eric

Well, we neglect the possibility that for Davis it might be well worth the ten bucks NOT to have to deal with folks like us. Which to me is totally fine. In fact, for a critic, maybe better. BTW: I'd like to see the list of Clems critics who are not succeptible to the same petty carping, wild ad hominem accusations and other random brickbats he launches against Davis. And, because aesthetics doesn't matter, I wonder how many of these 50 critics have aesthetic sensibilities deeply and significantly opposed to Clem's predilections. So let's have just one critic, who hates nearly everything that Clem loves and who is impeccible by every standard we can apply to him/her. Should be fun! --eric

Yea, verily. --eric

Ellroy has always been up and down. Some of his really early stuff where he helped pioneer the serial killer genre is really kinda lazy in the thinking department, if you asked me. American Tabloid definitely marked a sort of turning point. I didn't mind it so much as you seem to have--I think I was hopng he'd turn into some sort of Tim Powers-esque fantasist (al la Last Call and Declare), but he probably doesn't have it in him. He's just not capable of the sort of lightheartedness that'd take. Thanks for the Havana Bay tip, --eric

Well if you get the itch, you might want to try wamcom, which is an adapted Mozilla for OS 9 and its supposed to be better than iCab. It's probably still a bit behind the times (because it's apparently too difficult to fix the security problems with later versions of Mozilla on the OS 9 platform) but it may get you back to something a little more workable at some sites. I've got an ancient machine at home, and I've found that the open-source community is just great for finding ways of doing stuff you never thought possible. Your old dog can learn new tricks, though it may limp a little doing them! --eric --eric

Don't know if you've seen this which may help or may repeat everything you know already. --eric

So what's up with Elkins park? Going the way of the older suburb. When I was looking around 7 years ago or so it looked like it was on the cusp between really hitting the skids and turning into Cheltenham, which at that time looked like an interesting mixed neighborhood. How's Germantown doing? Thought long and hard about moving there, too. --eric

What is Soul!?

Oh, yeah. I LOVE this series. There is a sort of formulaic quality to them (not as much as many others, though), but the attitude is just right for my taste: rueful. Do you happen to remember the scene where Renko watches a building burn or collapse and makes uses it as a metaphor to expalin his fascination with murder? I've been trying to relocate it for months. --eric

Will these new features aid in our quest for enlightenment, or are they just so much window dressing? --eric

Check this out. Kinda Fonzie cool. --eric

Oh, I know I'll never walk alone. --eric

While I have little time for the masturbatory, I do have time for a bath (and perhaps the crying need to take a bath). Where can I get mine? --eric

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. I think the thing with cool is that it really originated as a negative thing--that is, it played off a manner that was "uncool." This goes back to Lester Young, who was streets away from being "cool" as in "natural" or "unaffected." Cool for him was a theatrical performance which sent up, flustered, frustrated, puzzled and thwarted the decidedly uncool. Unfortunately there is a bullying element to this--my reading of Young is that one of his core messages was "you have left the normal context behind." Language is now different, power relationships are different, values are different. I know the language, the sources of power and the values. You do not. In many ways it was the flip-side of what an intelligent, sensitive black man must have often experienced in his travels through American society. I am not altogether unsympathetic with this move, especially in Young's case, but I think there are some distinct limitations to this essentially hostile approach to the world at large. And as the balance of hostility has shifted--as the hostility of the cool to the uncool has been matched by the increasing indifference of the uncool--the whole business has become an exercise in courting self-affirming rejection from the ignorant bourgeois. Which, if you asked me, is pretty masturbatory. Which may be why adolescents are the folks most keenly aware of and obsessed with what is cool and uncool. I'm middle aged, I have no time for the masturbatory! --eric

I'll give him another try one of these days. I came back to Hammett becasue I ran out of Chandler and couldn't see what had put me off when I was younger. Issues with my male ratness, perhaps? Mike Hammer is pretty much off the map, for me: the hard-boiled detective after all the interesting bits have boiled off. --eric

Apparently a pretty stand-up guy, too: --eric

I'm with Jim on the Uninvisible rec. And until then I didn't like them much either--had similar feelings about the contrived quality of their sound, etc. But I think they really hit their stride on that album--something clicked. --eric