Author Archives: oook

Mauled

The almost-tragic rootlessness of the (North?) American psyche is mightily exemplified in a New York Times article on The Mall of America. A snippet:

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the problem: We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer.

In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again.

So the mall we married has become the toxic spouse we can’t quit, though we really must quit, but just not any time soon. The mall, for its part, is wounded by our ambivalence and feels financially adrift.

Malls are Nacirema and Naidanac writ large, revealing all the brassy crumminess and deficiencies of taste that these societies celebrate in architecture and mass consumption (how’s that for blanket indictment?). Take a wander through deadmalls.com, and peek into deadmalls.blogspot.com for daily doses of mallery. Note that malls are the quintessential securitized Panopticons, bristling with CCTV and private police forces. And don’t let’s get started on mall food, probably the greatest concentrations of high-fructose corn syrup dispensing on the planet (and of deep fat frying too). And mall music…

…described as “pop contemporary adult hottest hits.” South Avenue collects the upscale, chic stores and pipes in “rock adult album alternative.” East Broadway is supposed to feel contemporary and gets “pop adult contemporary/modern.”

Oooooh.

Cuban music again

I confess and lament my cluelessness about Cuban music, and I’ve been working at repairing the historical part of the deficiency by a careful reading of Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. It’s a wonderful book on many counts, not least for its careful weaving of history (political, economic, ethnic) with musical disquisition. I (like most Americans) knew very little of Cuba’s history and woes, and little of the importance of Cuban musical ideas in American popular music –some names, but not much of the profound entanglements that are context for the last 50 years (which are not covered in Sublette’s book). I can’t recommend the book highly enough, though I do wish (on practically every page) that recorded snippets were available to illustrate the text. Some bits can be imagined, thanks to Sublette’s felicitous prose:

The intensity of Pérez Prado’s music came not only from its dissonance but from its rhythmic tension, the clarity of his writing, the physical impact of its brilliant, forceful timbre, the discipline of the ensemble, and the leader’s sense of humor. The breaks in Pérez Prado’s tunes were typically silences, punctuated by his sonic signature: a head-resonated grunt that some have romanticized as Ungh! and that sounded rather like someone undergoing a prostate exam. And then the trumpets assaulted again, as if to say: this is serious. (pg. 559)

King Coal

Doc Searls has some great pictures of Powder River coal lands (see his Flickr set), and he points to John McPhee’s 2005 articles in the New Yorker. After I’d read the articles in 2005 I did a bit of link-gathering and Google Earth messing, and it’s still worth a look as an addendum to Doc’s photos. As I updated the links on that page I realized how rusty I am with the mechanics of FTP… and in fact a lot of my former skills seem to have gone walkabout.

links for 2009-01-25