TRICKSTER!

Moving On Up

2011-02-03T15:08:06-05:00

Well, after years of blogging at Trickster followed by years of Trickster's existance as a part time but mostly ghost blog, I'm moving blogging activity to a new, simpler platform, Uniform Hieroglyphic, a blog devoted to American culture, politics and media where I'll write off the news with a cultural critics eye and a nationalist bent. I look forward to seeing you at UH, hearing from you there. C'mon and join the coversation

Al Weisel, 1963-2010

2010-03-03T18:02:33-05:00

My friend Al Weisel--to some political parody blogger Jon Swift, to others a movie critic and co-author of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause--died last weekend of an aortic aneurysm. He was a mere 46 years of age--in life he would have cringed about the publication of that little detail and routinely shaved years off his birthdate.

It's funny, because Al ended up a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker of the sort that only out-of-towners become (particularly out of towners like Al who come here and find a kind of liberation) but one of my first thoughts upon hearing of Al's horrific and shockingly sudden death was a memory of a late night in 1981 after some concert or other eating pizza at Ray's on 11th Street. When the two old timers next to us finishing a loaded pie became full and offered us--two skinny, hungry-looking college freshmen--the remainder, Al was open-mouth stunned. This kind of neighborly kindness didn't happen in New York he admitted that he honestly thought. Naive, misinformed, vulnerable, impressionable--these are NOT adjectives that would normally come to mind when thinking about Al. Smart (and smart-alecky), over-prepared, inured, blase--those are adjectives for Al. But my first memory of Al to arrive in his physical absence was a memory of his soft white underbelly--those sensitive parts of himself that he didn't like to expose. I loved those parts of Al: the tenderness beneath the outrage, the caring beneath the cynicism, the wonder that even at our advanced ages still occasionally peeped out from beneath the jaded shell of experience.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Al when we were both half-formed teenagers full of ego and intelligence, desperate to re-invent ourselves, cringingly carrying the pain of our teenage years in ways we were then just groping to understand. We lived together for a year as freshman college roommates, spending daily hours arguing about and jointly investigating music, movies, writing, New York. We were very different people, and yet not only did we share a lot of the same interests and ambitions (we both became writers--which in those days we consciously discussed setting out to become--and we both found out writing wasn't going pay for our retirements) but also many of the same personality traits--brash and cocksure on the one hand, nervous and insecure on the other.

In the nearly 30 years that I knew Al I didn't see him much--once or twice a year maybe, during some decades less, during some decades more. My sense of Al was that for him intimacy and emotion were never easy but there was something about our rare occasional conversations that I cherished deeply, and it was precisely the easy intimacy that results from sharing life events during those tender years when the vulnerable parts are all exposed no matter how well we think we're hiding them. I know that is the kind of friendship I'll never have the chance to develop again, so on a purely selfish level I'll miss Al more than probably he would have known.

Speaking of hiding things-- keeping secrets, was definitely one of Al's most treasured inner pastimes. For years, literally years, he would remind me with agitation about something I had written in the early Internet days to the effect that we've basically given up our privacy in the modern age anyway so why concern ourselves with protecting it online. Privacy, even secrecy, remained for Al a deeply cherished notion. I've been reading many of the blog posts eulogizing Al's Jon Swift persona. I know Al was proud of Jon Swift, perhaps a little frustrated by his inability to make it pay off in a kind of Matt Drudgey way. He certainly was gleeful about poking fun at conservative group think (sometimes the line between his parodies and the non-parodic statements of actual conservatives was indecipherable), and his malicious, gleeful, nervous laugh will be sorely missed. But I keep wondering, reading the Swift mourning, how many personae Al really had and who among his family, friends and lovers actually knew all of Al?

I know I didn't know all of him, but the part of him I did know I loved. In Al I had someone in my life who was as sharp, acerbic, judgmental and opinionated as I was but somehow, instead of setting us at odds it drew us together.

Al was not too fond of getting older. He worried that he hadn't made any effort to save money and wanted to change careers into something that would give him some sense of security. He fretted over the loss of status and appeal that he felt came inevitably with getting older ("You just don't understand the gay subculture," he liked to lecture me, ludicrously I thought, as if youth was an exclusively gay cultural commodity). I guess he won't have to nurse those worries anymore.

Goodbye old friend.

Dim Witted & Amoral? Journalism Ethics Online Spark Debate

2009-07-15T13:46:57-04:00

Back when I was a full time practicing journalist I used to take offense at the pictures of my brethren drawn in movies, books, and TV shows. Characters from Richard Thornburg in the first Die Hard movies to Rita Skeeter in the Harry Potter books were and remain typical caricatures: venal, conniving, indecent, stop-at-nothing, self-important egoists who are soulless, dim-witted, and amoral. Ouch! Only attorneys get a worse rap in pop depictions. Even politicians and CEOs get off easier.

The explosion of new media journalism, "citizen-" and other wise--from the professional to the semi-pro to the purely DIY--has perhaps softened public attitudes toward practitioners. They are us, after all. But said explosion has also broadened the ethical gray area in which the practice of journalism lives and, in recent weeks, touched off a number of public brouhahas over right and wrong in online media--from widespread discussion about pay per post blog reviewing to virtual hand wringing over a decision by TechCrunch to publish confidential information about Twitter's business obtained from stolen documents.

The first set of dilemmas revolves around blogger reviews of products and services. Yesterday New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo reached a settlement with cosmetic surgery company Lifestyle Lift stemming from charges that the company both ordered employees to pose as customers and post positive reviews of the company's procedures on third party websites and created a website of its own--designed to look like a third party website but devoted to touting the company.

The action in New York State comes as the Federal Trade Commission is finalizing a set of guidelines for online endorsements that has been on the table since last November and which closely resembles the Commission's truth in advertising regulations that apply to print and broadcast media. The guidelines are designed to address not only the growing number or formal, corporate pay-per-post marketing schemes--from start ups like IZEA to campaigns by major brick and mortar retailers like Sears--but also citizen reviewers of the sort cited by reporter Pradnya Joshi in yesterday's New York Times.

Journalists don't like to admit it, but the business of reviewing has always inhabited a murky ethical universe. Among traditional media players, efforts to ensure the independence of reviewers opinions (and to inspire the trust of readers) have ranged from the no-advertising-accepted approach of Consumer Reports to policies disallowing the use of review excerpts in advertising (no: "I laughed....I cried...It was better than Cats!" pull quotes). Timesreporter Joshi notes that Colleen Padilla, whose Classymommy blog has reviewed nearly 1500 products, won't publish negative reviews--choosing instead not to publish a review of a product of which the blogger has a negative opinion. Joshi offers this example as a critical contrast to "most journalism outlets or independent review sites" But a close reading of many traditional outlets for reviews--particularly niche publications whose lifeblood is ad dollars from the companies whose products they review--suggest that many tacitly follow a similar standard. Even old line, general interest publications less susceptible to the sway of an insular advertising universe, should ask themselves what impact free CDs, books, concert admission and trade junkets have on reviewer's opinions. Does a music reviewer for The New York Times have the same reaction to a CD that's one of hundreds of annual freebies that a paying customer has to one they had to choose to buy ("I laid out $15 for this!?). Bias and influence among reviewers comes in many forms--some more subtle than others.

For cyber triumphalists who believe that citizen journalism solves all the woes of "mainstream media" the notion of transparency is often offered as a cure-all, a substitute for a code of ethics or other sorts of conflict of interest policies. Transparency and full-disclosure certainly help and are an important part of any policy. They are at the heart of the FTC's proposed guidelines and in most cases are more than enough (witness the open kimono piece about a day spent at Pepsi by the Harbrooke Group's Howard Greenstein, an typical tale of the kind of largely innocuous PR plying that makes journalism go around). But for someone like Colleen Padilla of Classymommy.com--who principally writes product reviews and whose site is enabled by freebies--disclosure that she won't publish negative reviews should, at the very least, also be part of her disclosure of freebies.

Meanwhile, leading technology news site TechCrunch set off an ethical furor of its own yesterday when it announced that it was in receipt of hundreds of internal documents from Twitter, one of the companies it covers most closely. The documents--which include internal memos, contracts, office floor plans, personnel records, phone logs, budget documents and business plans--were delivered to TechCrunch by a hacker who, in sending the documents to TechCrunch, announced also his or her plans to make the documents public.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington pre-announced his intention to publish at least some of the information--not personnel or office security material but "information that is relevant to Twitter’s business, particularly product notes and financial projections," resulting in a barrage of comments from readers mostly critical of Arrington's decision. Let's put aside speculation about motives behind the odd decision to announce the intention to publish something instead of merely publishing it and focus instead on the ethical issues at hand which are hardly unique to the Internet.

The most famous instance in which stolen documents were published is of course the case of the so-called Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense department study of the conduct of the Vietnam war which revealed long-standing government ambivalence about the conduct of the war and showed that internally the government had a completely different analysis of the progress of the war from the analysis it had been peddling to the public for a decade. A copy of the study was retained by one of its contributors then leaked to The New York Times which published the information from the documents and fended off legal challenges from the Nixon administration which set the Supreme Court precedent barring the federal government from restraining such publication.

The contributor who leaked the material--Daniel Ellsberg--was tried on charges of espionage, theft and conspiracy, but the charges were eventually dropped after it was found that the Nixon administration was guilty of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering in building its case against Ellsberg (Ellsberg's attorney's office was burglarized, Ellsburg was wiretapped, and White House council John Ehrlichman improperly met twice with the judge in the Ellsburg case).

Beyond the fact that the documents in both cases were obtained illegally, there's little similarity between the Pentagon Papers case and the TechCrunch/Twitter situation. In fact, the dissimilarities are notable. In the case of the Pentagon Papers there was clear public interest in the study which had been commissioned by the Defense department and paid for with public funds. Publishing private documents and trade secrets is a dicier legal matter. Certainly, journalism--including business journalism covering matters of non-governmental interest--has always relied on leaks of confidential information. Companies have, in the past taken action against publishers of confidential business information, the most famous recently was the case of Apple suing blogger Nicholas Ciarelli, known by the nom de blog Nick DePlume, whose blog ThinkSecret published confidential business information in 2005. Apple, which tried to argue that DePlume was bound to keep Apple's secrets the way an employee employee might be bound, was roundly criticized for its novel legal approach to the case, but in the end it was able to outlast DePlume settling the case out of court two years later in a deal that saw ThinkSecret cease publishing.

If TechCrunch is on decent legal ground in publishing the Twitter information, what of its ethical position? Is it ethical to publish private information knowing that it was obtained through possibly illegal means? Certainly this is an dilemma that has troubled journalists for years. Practitioners depend on leaks of confidential information and often those leaks involve violations of confidentiality agreements by the leakers, sometimes they even involve illegal actions like break-ins either actual or virtual. Clearly Arrington and his TechCrunch team have spent the last 24-hour deliberating over both the ethical and legal ramifications of publication, determining that the material they have chosen to publish (beginning today with a piece about a Twitter reality TV show proposal). No doubt Arrington is cleaving to a fairly well staked out journalistic position that the publication of news-worthy material is the job of journalists, not the protection of the confidentiality of the companies that journalists cover. I can't argue with that position but can only add that determining what is newsworthy and appropriate to publish can be a difficult decision and a matter of drawing some very fine lines. What is interesting however is the strongly negative response from readers to the idea of publication though, undoubtedly, the readers who complain about the decision to publish will devour the material that is published. It's part of the ambivalent, love-hate relationship we Americans seem to have with our journalists. We want the information, even if we think our journalists are venal, conniving, indecent, stop-at-nothing, self-important egoists who are soulless, dim-witted, and amoral.

Ah me.

West Helena Breakdown: Levon Helm's Electric Dirt

2009-07-13T10:32:02-04:00

Sixty miles or so south of Memphis, just across the river from Lula, MS (near Vicksburg), sits Helena, Arkansas--river port town in cotton growing country rising up from the muddy riverbank to the top of Crowley's Ridge and down again on the other side into West Helena. The elevation, a rare topographical feature in this river delta country, made Helena an area of strategic importance during the Civil War, when it was occupied by the Union army.

On July 4, 1863 Lt. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes, commander of the Confederate District of Arkansas led an attack on the heavily fortified Union positions around Helena in an attempt to weaken the support positions for the ongoing Union siege at Vicksburg. In every way it was a futile charge with the Confederate cavalry taking heavy casualties from the Union heavy guns (1600 rebel dead to 200 union); worse still, the charge came just as Confederate forces were surrendering to Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg.

There's no doubt you can hear Helena--like a child listening for the sound of the ocean in an empty conch shell--in the voice of Levon Helm (born in nearby Marvell in 1942) singing Robbie Robertson's brilliant evocation of southern pride and shame, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." In Helm's music you can hear not only the haunted soul of the old south, but also the echoes of specific sounds--the hoot of Sonny Boy Williamson II (aka Rice Miller), who played blues harp on a 15-minute midday show sponsored by King Biscuit Flour at Helena's 250-watt local radio station KFFA (little Levon, when he took trips into town with his Dad, would scramble down to the KFFA studios to watch Williamson and the King Biscuit boys perform); the confident, sexy sneer of Elvis Presley, who 13-year-old Levon watched perform at the nearby Marianna High School gym in 1955; the bump and grind of the midnight rambles Levon would stay out late to watch at the medicine shows that rolled into the outskirts of town on the back of flatbed trucks; the high lonesome sound of weekend family front porch singalongs led by Jasper "Diamond" Helm playing guitar when the hard sharecropper's work of planting and picking cotton was done (or of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys, whom Diamond took his six-year-old son to see in 1948).

Music-making is a guild craft, its secrets passed along by direct transmission, and Helm is one of the last living links in a chain that runs from Helena juke joints to the Woodstock festival to Madison Square Garden. One of rock's greatest drummers--a subtle, dancing timekeeper whose skittish beats and woody thumping tone defined the sound of The Band, and, by extension, Americana roots rock--and one of rock's most expressive singers, Helm is in the middle of a late career renaissance, regaining a measure of his voice after his vocal chords were damaged by throat cancer a decade ago.

That resurgence began in 2007 when, at the urging of his daughter Amy (who sings with him) and under the auspices of former Bob Dylan guitarist Larry Campbell, Helm made the excellent Dirt Farmer album--a collection of mostly old time traditional material including "Little Birds" a song Diamond Helm used to sing at family singalongs--which won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.

As good as Dirt Farmer was, the follow up, Electric Dirt, released last month by Vanguard Records, might be even better. There's no strictly traditional material in the repertoire. It's pulled instead from the work of Helm's heroes like Muddy Waters, Pops Staples, and Carter Stanley, as well as other contemporary songwriters like Randy Newman. If Helm's voice is thinner and more crackling than it was pre-cancer, it hardly robs the music of expressiveness. The sound of the Helm band--with Campbell still producing and playing multiple instruments--remains heavy on old time sonorities--high lonesome harmonies, accordions, fiddles and mandolins--but expanded now too on a few tunes (including a great version of the Dead's "Tennessee Jed") by horns, arranged in a few places by the great New Orleans writer-producer Allen Toussaint, who wrote arrangements for The Band's live album Rock of Ages. If "Tennessee Jed" is the album's novelty ringer, it's centerpiece and by far it's best song, is the only Helm original (co-written with Campbell), "Growin' Trade" a story song about the demise of the family farm that approaches that well worn theme with a knowingness and depth of transmitted experience that only Helm can bring.

Levon Helm remains the real deal and in an era when a direct connection with that weird old America is fast receding into history, Electric Dirt is a little treasure.

Tales from the CD Changer: 2nd Quarter Report

2009-07-10T12:11:07-04:00

It's been a doomy, gloomy spring around these parts--a period of seemingly constant, often torrential rain amid a deepening global recession that's beginning to look like a dark, endless tunnel. Precious little of the popular arts in the quarter reflected our grim reality, and I wonder why. Maybe artists and audiences alike are yearning for feel-good ecapism and we're due for an era like the one that gave us garish movie musicals when the new reels were all showing gray scenes of bread lines. Or maybe the popular arts have become a lagging indicator. Certainly the only pop art I came across in the quarter that reflected anything close to the story or sound of our times was Steven Soderbergh's quickie digital movie The Girlfriend Experience--a morose and compelling, if not exactly good, investigation of the detached transactional nature of human relations in the waning days of the recently departed New Gilded Age. Yet, even working quickly in a digital format, and releasing it first online--making GFE more immediate than most movies--Soderbergh's movie was like a transmission from a receeding planet.

So, if the musicin heavy rotation for me in the second quarter of 2009 seems like the soundtrack for a holding pattern, strangely detached from it's era, well, that's because it is, heavy on reissues, archival releases and retrospectives.

1. Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band - Outer South
I seem to like the Conor Oberst that the regular Conor Oberst fans don't care for all that much--the freewheeling, rockier, Band-ish kind of Conor Oberst, not the tremoulous, emo, Eliot Smithish kind of Oberst--the Conor Oberst of Cassadaga, not the Conor Oberst of, well, just about any other Bright Eyes album. In more of a cooperative effort here w/ a band of friends who split songwriting duties, Oberst comes closer to the roots rock feel I prefer out of him. Outer South ain't Cassadaga--it doesn't sprawl and it's short on ambition and concept. But though it lacks grandeur, it possesses an easy, charming warmth. And "Nikorette" was my number one earworm this quarter.

2. U.S. Music with Funkadelic
The finally-issued album by Plainfield NJ Funkadelic proteges (and soon to be full-fledged PFunk members) ain't exactly a lost masterpiece, but it is a raging slab of classic Funkadelia recorded around the time the band was working on it's 1972 classic America Eats Its Young, and that's never a bad thing. The wailing guitars of Gary Shider and Eddie Hazel have long made The Rat Kissed the Cat a popular rarity among PFunk collecors. Nice to have it commercially available at last. A welcome bit of nostalgic freedom and rock in these hard ass, vocoder-like autotune times of cookie cutter dance pop.

3. Joe Lovano's Us Five - Folk Art
Multi-reed man Lovano always makes interesting records although he seems to form new bands as often as teenage girls change their minds. This quintet of musicians mostly younger himself inspires Joe to explore the style I enjoy hearing him play best-- a kind of darting, swinging free bop--but a style in which he hasn't recorded all that frequently in recent years. A nice breath of fresh jazz from a big corporate label at a time when the best-capitalized record companies have all but abandoned the genre.

4. Allen Toussaint - The Bright Mississippi
An eminence grise of New Orleans R&B producer-arranger-songwriter-pianst Toussaint, in cooperation with producer Joe Henry, makes a sumputuously recorded blues & trad jazz record--not a nostalgic recreation of turn of the century New Orleans styles, but a body dive into the wellsprings of it all conducted by a fully equipped modern expeditionary team including the great two way (inside and out) clarinetist Don Byron. Great music, great musicians, excellent audio. What's not to like?

5. The Hold Steady - A Positive Rage
The Hold Stead is, by far, my favorite working rock band, with a huge, loud, classic sound build on hooks, riffs, singalong choruses, great lyrics, and a charismatic front man. This record -- a live set from Chicago 2007 when the band was on the road touring behind it's breakthrough album Boys and Girls in America--feels a bit like a retreat for the group. It is, after all, a two-year-old set featuring the same songs the band has tirelessly gigged behind lo these past few years. I wouldn't recommend it over any of their last three studio albums, all of which are brilliant. Still, on any given night there's no rock band I'd rather see live and they sound great as ever here--loud and ebulliant. Accompanied by a DVD, but who cares? I never watch music DVDs, they're a yawn. Haven't even played this DVD once yet and I may never do so. If you get a chance just go see the band, you won't regret it.

6. Sun Ra - Featuring Pharoah Sanders and Black Harold
A reissue of sorts. Recorded in 1964 during a period when tenor star John Gilmore had left the Arkestra and New York new-comer Pharoah Sanders was subbing, excerpted tapes of this concert spawned one relatively rare Saturn LP. The concert is released here for the first time in its entirety though the second half of the show--which made the Saturn LP--appears in mono while the newly issued material appears in stereo. No revelations here. In fact the best thing remains the best piece on the original album--the first recording of Ra's classic polymetric, ostinato-driven composition The Shadow World (here dubbed The World Shadow). But it's nice to have the Sun Ra material delivered with sessionographical clarity (would that Art Yard had done the same thing with the tapes of Ra's great early 70s Egyptian concert and TV appearence which spawned three Saturn albums. Instead of issuing a double disk set recreating the original concert, Art Yard issued two separate CDs that track Saturn's disjunct original release program).

7. Benny Goodman Centennial Broadcast, WKCR-FM
WKCR-FM, 89.9 on your FM dial in NY, wkcr.org online, is one of the great treasures of life in NYC. The shamefully undersupported (the station has been broadcasting in mono for 8 years since the 9/11 attacks wiped out it's stereo transmitting antenna) outlet for in-depth jazz programming out did itself in May playing two solid weeks of the King of Swing in honor of the centennial of Goodman's birth. For two weeks, at anytime of the day or night, you could count on miraculously great and often rarely heard music on the radio offering listeners a chance to marvel once again at undoubtedly the greatest clarinetist ever to wet a reed (no one else ever played with such perfect intonation, and few soloists on any instrument in any genre were ever as consistently musical and ingenious). Two things in particular I heard that I had never dug before--the first was Goodman playing Morton Gould's Derivations for Clarinet and Band (I'd heard Goodman's classical recordings w/ Bartok and Joseph Szigeti before but never this rock'em sock'em Gould piece), the second was the recreation of the his 30s small band sides that Goodman recorded in the 1950s for the soundtrack of the film biopic of his life. Normally later recreations are something to steer well clear of, and these have neither the sense of discovery nor the brilliant players of the earlier recordings (only Lionel Hampton recreates his parts, no Krupa, no Teddy Wilson, and natch, no Charlie Christian who was dead by this time). Still, these performances cook. If anything, in these post-bop recreations, Goodman himself sounds even more inventive than he did in the 30s. And the music is recorded in excellent golden age stereo.

One dud from the quarter for me was Dylan's latest, Together Through Life, written in collaboration with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter,. It's a collection of familiar blues melodies wtih new lyrics--a fascile modus operandi that has become lifelessly convenient for Bob--and it seems mostly half-baked (for this the greatest songwriter of his generation needed a collaborator?!). The music sounds good, bluesy and raw, but there's precious little substance to chew on here. Not only is there nothing for the canon there's almost nothing you'll remember an hour after listening. After two strong albums in a late career resurgence (the good but over rated Time Out of Mind, the excellent and underrated Love and Theft) Dylan's last two suggest the man is running thin on new material. At least Modern Times had a couple of notable songs (When the Deal Goes Down and Nettie Moore). There's nothing half that good here, although It's All Good sounds like a promising idea that no doubt will improve on the road and My Wife's Hometown is pretty funny.

And a couple of late June albums that just arrived and are likely to be in heavy rotation for the rest of this summer--Brad Paisley's latest, American Saturday Night, and the second chapter in Levon Helm's post-cancer resurgence, Electric Dirt. Digging 'em both after a brief listen to each.