5. “Open Pit Mine”

George Jones, The New Favorites of George Jones (United Artists, 1962); composed by D.T. Gentry

This song came out as a single the same year as "She Thinks I Still Care," which alone would make Jones a genius singer in the way he makes the line about dialing his ex-lover's number "by mis-taaaaake today..." sound both hilarious and like you and he each lost a kidney. "Open Pit Mine," in contrast, is a murder ballad like no other, although in its outline it is like almost all others: the singer’s wife cheats, so he kills her and her lover together. And the Arizona copper mine of the title is a metaphor like a sack of doorknobs is: he makes the money he gives her for pleasure by working "like a slave" there; he runs to it after his crime; he has been digging his grave in it all along. But the shocking dispassion of Jones' performance makes the comparatively studied solemnity of Johnny Cash's own genuinely great moments sound utterly cornball. Neither sad resignation nor grief: just barely articulable horrified surprise. In contrast, for Bruce Springsteen to have Charlie Starkweather say that "there's just a meanness in this world" in “Nebraska” is just Bruce’s admission that his performance alone cannot do the math for us.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

4. “Give It Up Or Turn It A-Loose”

James Brown, Sex Machine (King, 1970); composed by Charles Bobbit

This edition of the JBs, with Clyde Stobblefield on drums and Bootsy Collins on bass is as different from the band that played on Live at the Apollo, Vol. II, released only two years earlier, as the storied 100 mile per gallon carburetor would be from a Hummer. The earlier music is classic, but the music made on this album constitutes one of the half dozen most pivotal shifts in 20th Century music. The only other musician to grasp the uniqueness of its implications compositionally was Miles Davis, but not as dance music, as which it is unequaled. It is as if James Brown invented something as pivotal as lightbulbs or automobiles but no one else could ever manufacture them. “Give It Up” is almost entirely variations on one highly complex counterpointed rhythmic figure. The verse is one chord. The bridge is another chord, up a major fourth. There are no other chords. Despite the obvious downbeats, the transitions between sections are impossible to predict by counting bars or beats; you simply have to remember where James cues the band. On this track, he cues the band with a shriek that sounds like he is falling out of an airplane.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

3. “Birdland”

Patti Smith, Horses (Arista, 1975); composed by Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Ivan Kral & Richard Sohl

The first Patti Smith "group" comprised Patti reciting, with Lenny Kaye on guitar and Richard Sohl on piano. “Birdland” is the one track on their first album using this drumless configuration, plus Ivan Kral’s bass. It is a slow two-chord vamp setting Patti’s semi-improvised, half-sung recitation describing Wilhelm Reich’s son after his father’s funeral, imagining his father turned into an alien (“very different tonight”) coming to take his son away in a spaceship. The implicit promise of the apparition is that Dr. Reich would take Peter away and sidestep the problem of death forever for both of them. As the vision solidifies in Peter Reich’s mind, he is overcome with joy, but then the ship vanishes. He is as alone as he had always been but with a new burning question before him: Can a mind even contemplate a level of grief so intense that one would gladly change species altogether on the outside chance that the metamorphosis might allow you the repose necessary to think it without feeling it? Or could accepting the entire package turn you into a prophet? This song is why I trust everything Patti says about Rimbaud, even when I disagree with it.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

2. “Midnight Rambler”

The Rolling Stones recorded live at a 1973 show in Munich, found on various bootlegs, most notably Bedspring Symphony; composed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

The most problematic aspect of the Rolling Stones’ discography is that an early business decision resulted in Allen Klein’s obtaining control of their ‘60s publishing. Accordingly, the Stones made a point of keeping those songs off concert recordings which is why the only official live album with Mick Taylor on it (Ya-Ya’s) was under their Decca contract when Taylor had only just joined. The full capabilities of that group as a live unit are not documented on any recording you can legally buy. This version of “Midnight Rambler” was recorded during a tour of Europe promoting Goats Head Soup, which is generally considered the beginning of a steep artistic decline and the point at which Keith Richards’ heroin use was making audible inroads on his ability to function. Nevertheless, this rendition of “Rambler” is over 13 minutes long, although its tempo is double that of any officially released version. Keith cues every part of it, including what Jagger does. You can tell that Keith’s guitar is all Charlie Watts hears in his monitor. Mick Taylor plays banshee slide over the top. It bears reminding that the Stones were a specifically musical phenomenon and their mystique was the tail of that comet.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

1. "Uncloudy Day"

Vocal version by The Staple Singers (Vee-Jay, 1959); instrumental version by John Fahey on Blind Joe Death (Takoma, 1967); original composer unknown

The classic 1959 version of this song by the Staple Singers is about Heaven, because there is no weather there. Pop Staples’ tremolo-heavy guitar is the only accompaniment to the voices of his adult children, who harmonize so closely that the chords would be dissonant if all the notes occupying the same instants were transcribed together, but do not sound that way because the time of the song and its singers shifts constantly. Halfway through, Mavis Staples completely throws out the previous rhythm by reentering with a deep “WELL, well, well . . .” that initiates a coda that might be in three. John Fahey’s version of the song for solo guitar (I know the 1967 version best) recreates every note in the Staples’ vocal lines exactly, but the song is played in three-four time throughout, except for a skin-prickling intro in four with nothing but plucked harmonics. It is impossible to tell which version is faster. Fahey uses the Staples’ most dissonant note cluster as a refrain at the end of each verse. Fahey’s version of “Uncloudy Day” is not about Heaven, but it appears to have more than a little to do with what being dead is like.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

The Second Circuit Defines "Interactive" Digital Radio

This is a legal article adapted from a presentation I gave to the Copyright and Literary Property Committee of the NYC Bar on October 21, 2009. It's a little lengthy for a blog post, so here's a link to the article, and to the court decision discussed in it. It is also viewable through my firm's website.

Stuart Sherman = Stuart Sherman as Stuart Sherman → Stuart Sherman

The following is an essay I recently wrote for a catalogue accompanying a recently-closed exhibition entitled Stuart Sherman: Nothing Up My Sleeve, curated by Jonathan Berger at PARTICIPANT Inc. Gallery, 253 East Houston Street, NYC, running November 8 - December 20, 2009. See recent Art In America piece. (I am also - not so incidentally - the executor of Stuart Sherman's estate.)

I.

If you ever asked Stuart Sherman who “influenced” him, you’d get a boring answer, because it’s a boring question. He had a stock answer ready, anyway, of course: Magritte. I’m sure that was a good enough answer for most of the people who asked him that question, but I always thought he was just trying to be polite to them. I found that I got a better answer if I simply asked him whose work he liked, and sometimes an even better answer – a surprising one – when I asked him whose work he didn’t like. For instance, his frank distaste for Marcel Duchamp interested me a lot more than his claimed affinity for Magritte. It meant I had to think a lot harder about both Duchamp and Magritte, and even harder about Stuart himself.

One reason I believe Stuart and I became friends and (luckily) remained so until he died was that although he was reasonably sure that I liked and engaged his work on its own terms, he was also fully aware that the longer and deeper my familiarity with his work grew, the less confident I was in characterizing how it worked, or why, in any generalized way, it did. The more I knew the less I understood it, because what would “understanding” it amount to? You can give anyone who has never seen any of Stuart’s work a vague sense of its effect (or “affect,” as Stuart would punningly interject) by describing a handful of his devices and motifs. But that’s no more than the ring on a coffee table left when some slob misses the coaster. You could almost say Stuart’s “career” was a series of such seemingly-accidental precipitates, look right enough in saying that much, and be completely wrong.

Stuart was a lot more trouble for all of us than that – and for himself, for that matter – because he never had a career. He was an Artist. Capital “A,” like it or lump it, and your relationship with his work shifted accordingly, or you didn’t have one. His work comprised an entire cosmology, not just some narrow range of recondite obsessions. It was a universe he mapped obsessively and tirelessly – every single day of his life. Accordingly, for someone with a well-earned reputation for self-effacing kindness and generosity, there was nothing really self-effacing about him. He knew the Deal: He was an Artist. In this world, he could declare bankruptcy (which he did, at least twice), get a grant out of the blue and spend it all making more videos. He didn’t have a career; he had daily urgent duties: “Quotidian,” as he named his erstwhile production rubric and briefly self-published magazine. Quotidian was not to say workaday; it was life snatched from creeping disorder and disaster like dialysis or insulin shots. He also knew that any number of people who thought they were Artists, too, were not. More power to them if they meant well, he might say, but they didn’t have similarly urgent assignments in their in-boxes. He rarely had reason or occasion to make that sort of distinction aloud, but if anything could be a core belief for him, I’m reasonably certain that was one.

II.

One of the most interesting conversations I ever had with Stuart about his work was also one of the last few times we met. In his last years, he was traveling most of the time while subletting his New York apartment all year round, mostly emptied of his work by then (except for one closet crammed to the top, as I discovered posthumously). When Stuart was back in New York, we would meet for lunch. When he came for dinner, he always brought a small gift. After I had my first child, the gift would be for my son.

On one of these latter occasions, I mentioned that his work often reminded me of something I’d seen in an elementary school math textbook when I was very young – in an obscure introductory section that students never bothered to look at – describing the Properties of Equality. One of them was the “Reflexive Property”:

If a = a, then a = a.

I remembered wondering what possible use such a simple-minded principle could have. And then there was the “Symmetric Property”:

If a = b, then b = a.

Only slightly more useful. Then there was the third in the series, which was called the “Transitive Property”:

If a = b, and b = c, then a = c.

Well, useful enough, but that’s all.

Twenty odd years after grade school, however, Stuart Sherman’s work brought those “obvious” principles to my mind in a different way. As soon as I mentioned the Transitive Property of Equality to Stuart, he lighted right up. “I never thought anyone ever noticed that!” he exclaimed.

What if you were that rare – or even unique – someone for whom the “=” sign was in no way a reassuring indicator that the universe ever evens out? What if causing a to equal b was your job? And it was a struggle? What if it was really difficult to make a equal a, let alone equal b and equal c, too? And at the same time, what if the risk of failing to make them so – and failing to demonstrate that necessity to others – brought its own kind of existential dread for you? Stuart began each piece with no givens: as if the equivalence or equality between a, b and c was something that had to be theorized, diagrammed, constructed, proven, and won, constantly.

You can visualize this dilemma on your own.

Pick up a blank white letter-sized piece of paper. Attune yourself to the fact that you are holding and viewing, not only the said object, but also a legion of demons possessing it at the same time – including, but not limited to, (1) the name of the object, (2) the image of the object, (3) the name of the image, (4) the color of the object, (5) the shape of the object, (6) the function of the object, (7) the name of the function, (8) the image of the color and shape, and (9) the names of the color and shape – and that any of these can be substituted for, and function in the place of, any of the others. Or that the chain of associations can be broken down into separate parts, each of which may function independently. A = a = a.

Turn the piece of paper face toward you, holding it horizontally. This is a movie screen upon which is being projected a film called White Rectangle that plays continuously. A = b = a.

Keep holding the page. You are looking through a window. Since what’s visible through the window is completely white, either you are inside a room looking through the window at blinding sunlight outside, or you are outside in the night looking through this window into a room with lights on so bright you can’t make out any details. Perhaps the room inside the window is actually a movie theater you want to get into, and the movie you want to see is visible through the window as the film is projected inside the theater. The movie is called White Rectangle. The paper you are holding is your ticket for this movie. When the usher tears the ticket in two to let you in, the movie ends. A = b = c = b = a.

Welcome to Stuart’s universe. And yours.