While You Were Out: Grouper’s A I A: Alien Observer and A I A: Dream Loss

Paging Fox Mulder

Humans are at their lowest distinction when furthest away. From great heights, we kill, eat, breed, and die, like the ants we resemble. From still further, it’s all color wheels and nebular lushness; pretty, but lacking a finer drama. Most music of a shoegaze, dream pop bent is content to orbit without getting closer. But Grouper’s Liz Harris is something else entirely.

Alien Observer and Dream Loss are albums easy to listen to but difficult to be equal to. There’s a z-axis to her music that swells and fades apart from volume and texture, which some critics paw at when they call her work “spiritual,”  but which could easily be the enduring cosmic mystery of golden age science fiction (considering the “I Want to Believe” cover art of Alien Observer). It’s shadowy territory because at her most intelligible she’s Beach House, but at her outer limits we don’t yet, and may never, have a vocabulary for what she’s doing.

Tracks like “Vapor Trails” build with impossible patience, more a phase change than a crescendo, as if nurturing rudimentary forms of life. But where Alien Observer coos benignly, Dream Loss is more sinister and terrestrial. “I Saw a Ray” rides a thermal of early My Bloody Valentine distortion higher than it is safe to go. Warm and natal melodies which would grow true on the previous album here have dissonant bonsai gnarls.

Both these albums put me in mind of guitar ronin James Blackshaw, whose album The Cloud of Unknowing takes its name from a work of Christian mysticism expressing god as he who can be loved but not thought. It’s negative theology, the attempt to locate the spirit world in coordinate space by demarcating the region thought can’t penetrate, a region where unknowing is not the same as ignorance.

Grouper – Vapor Trails

James Blackshaw – Cross

Love in the Age After the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Part I

How many people do you think met their soulmates before the invention of the steam engine? If you wanted to get in on some Héloïse and Abelard action back then you had to work for it. In 1350 there were 370 million people on earth. Today there are 7 billion and they are all on OkCupid. The probability of finding someone who will put up with your weird toes and horrible personality is higher than ever. And wider familiarity with the internet and all those Match commercials with the cute, giggling couples I always wanted to strangle when I was single are quickly eroding any stigma online dating may have had. Since I’ve retired my jersey (and I’m 400 pages into Bolaño’s 2666 with no end in sight) let me share some thoughts for those still in the game. But hey bro, before you hit create profile on JDate play the field a little and find the dating website that really gets you.

P.S. None of this claims to be comprehensive and only represents my experience as an average looking dude interested in women. If you’re a smokeshow you can ignore all this and sail through dating as you do everything in life.

Match.com

Basically your vanilla of dating sites

Bland and professional with a healthy brand presence that puts dollar signs in shareholders’ eyes, Match.com is the girl next door of digital love engines (free Goldfrapp song title). Rather than deluge you with profiles, its well-meaning but purblind algorithms curate a daily slate of matches that despite its assertions will never learn from your feedback, ever. The fact that my ratings never nudged my suggestions towards people I was remotely interested in made me long for a future in which tailored and efficient nanorobots beep when in the presence of appropriate love interests.

Match has a pretty traditional profile structure but more barriers to communication than comparable websites. Winking is worthless so you pretty much just have to take the plunge. But there’s something to be said for that because Match costs money and the people on it are probably interested in serious relationships and not just idly playing an infinite game of Am I Hot or Not. I met my girlfriend on here so I have to thank it for that.

Why It Works: It attracts a comparatively small but fierce group of committed seekers willing to put in time and money to find someone important.

Why It Sucks: It’s smaller because of the cash barrier. It costs money. Its interface works well but won’t hold your hand.

E-Harmony

Whatever ice cream has the worst control issues

E-Harmony’s ad campaigns stress love and individuality complete with an aw shucks old family doctor who somehow created an online dating juggernaut, but the process is more bureaucratic than anything else. Like most of my generation I have a strong tendency to be really snarky when filling out forms so when faced with the 20+ page E-Harmony profile creator attempting to beat the deepest secrets of my personality out of me I at first got sarcastic and then just checked out. E-Harmony probably skews older because I think you’d have to be really dedicated to make it through even the first stage. The training wheels were really off-putting and filling out forms A-1 through J-8 sucked all the adventure out of the experience before it even started. Also I guess they’re super-Christian or were slow to accomodate gay dating?

Why It Works: For people who want to get all the work of dating out of the way so on the first date they can just shake hands and sign marriage documents.

Why It Sucks: E-Harmony hides it well (which is deeply creepy and insidious) but they’re probably a few holes on the bible belt away from being Christian Mingle.

Plenty of Fish

Like soft serve that fell on the ground

A fugly, back alley interface that looks like it belongs to a much younger internet turned me right around. People say they’ve had success on here but it seemed to make online dating exactly what it shouldn’t be anymore: kinda shameful. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Why It Works: For people who never got iPods and don’t understand that this young century is about design and NOTHING ELSE, maybe it does.

Why It Sucks: Self-evident.

 

OkCupid

Rocky road EYYYOOOOOO

With its bells, whistles, stars, hearts, beakers, robots and lush color scheme, OkCupid is the dating site for our overstimulated, image-fattened culture. It’s a constant dopamine drip that makes Facebook feel like children’s tylenol. If you’re single and live in a major city, welcome to your new “social” life. OkCupid has almost too much functionality. The main page is a revolving door of profiles that meet your parameters as well as a Facebook style newsfeed that floods your theta waves with the slightest articulations of a prospective match’s finger bone. It also has a function in which you “rate” (ughhh) profiles, and if they also rate you favorably you’ll both get a message telling you that they’re “really into you” and you “should totally talk to them.” OkCupid is the world’s most selfless and unwavering wing(wo)man. This is a great feature because it confirms physical attraction before you waste precious minutes writing a message. No amount of wit or “I like rock climbing too!!!” is gonna do it if they think you ugly. Overall, if you’re in your 20s or are new to a bigger city, OkCupid is probably the best option.

Why It Works: It’s free and therefore has a larger pool of profiles. It gives you a ton of tools to make it easy to make contact.

Why It Sucks: OkCupid has abstracted from actual dating and relationships the purest form of social networking crack commercially available (I’m sure there’s something in a government lab making monkeys catatonic right now.) It’s easy to get so into playing the game that you forget about actually meeting people. And beware, this shit can colonize your self-esteem until you feel like you need some kind of OkCupid notification to get through the day. Stay strong. (This mainly goes for dudes, if you’re a woman you’ll probably just be insanely creeped out.)

Later: curing the incurable, loneliness edition.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: Lester Bangs

Great job with the cover guys, looks like a self-published Masonic pamphlet

If you’re gonna bring ODB back to life, and I think you should, swing by and pick up Lester Bangs too. The unfairly but perhaps appropriately taken too soon critic died at 33, which means that, to a greater degree than most live fast types, he had a chance to grow up. And one of the chief pleasures of Psychotic Reactions is watching that happen, like A Clockwork Orange except with rotgut and Lou Reed rather than doped milk and Beethoven. The early essays are tainted, perhaps fatally, with beatnik fallout. For all their rambling, they do give a sense of how vital rock stars of the 60s were, even if now they’re ghoulish or embarrassing or both (oh God  the Who in that halftime show a few years back). But the paeans are the least interesting parts of this volume (and maybe music criticism in general if we’re going there). Lester was more interested in dismantling the idea of the rock star and in this he was aided by his ultimate frenemy Lou Reed, who had already started taking himself apart by the time Lester came around. The hilarious interviews with Reed and Lester’s perverse appreciation for Metal Machine Music are some of the best parts of the book, and go a long way towards a validation of rock music as something disgusting and truly offensive. And yet I admire how lucidly he resists figures like Richard Hell, apparently a perpetually suicidal black hole who thinks life is a joyless shitheap for him to flail around in. But give him a pass, he was young then. When you’re seventeen you just want to die and consume everything around you and then you get older and start taking gingko biloba because you’ve got work to do.

That’s the worst thing about Lester, he was old enough to know there was a future and he was writing better all the time. In an essay about Elvis written near the end of his life, Lester imagines becoming Elvis by digging through his intestines for the pills he had taken before he died. What results is something wholly alien to Pitchfork’s snide professionalism and Tinymixtapes’s graduate dissertations, something that can hardly belong solely to criticism. Lester got sophisticated without losing any of his nerve, which makes it truly sad that he isn’t raving about Ke$ha with a bomb strapped to his chest today.

Book Fuel: Counter Culture’s La Golondrina

12 ounces uncut Colombian

The great thing about coffee is that you can have a 20 minute conversation about it without anybody suspecting you’re actually talking about drugs. And like the latter industry, though the Columbians have traditionally done it best, the Kenyans and Ethiopians are definitely in heavy contention. In recent years with third wave espresso caffeinating the nation I feel like a lot of bean fiends have moved out of the deep roasty darkness into the brighter, subtler, dare I say fruitier light. I’ve always been on team light n’ bright (if you got blackcurrant in there then damnit I want to taste it) though there will always be a place in my heart for dark and hearty blends (family gatherings, all nighters, hangover medication).

But I have the palate of a golden retriever when it comes to these things. I get into the good graces of baristas by answering all their leading questions in the affirmative (“You getting that coconut?” “Oh fuck yeah it’s coming on real strong now.”) Further, I don’t know if that’s taste that’s sparking pleasure nodes or the drugs fording the blood-brain barrier. Like anything though, it’s more fun when you ruin other people’s fun by being pretentious so I’ve been practicing my coffee nerd spiel. I brew everything in the french press for maximum righteousness and I always drink it black first even if I put a little milk in it later on. The result is that I’m marginally better at picking up flavors and it is now impossible for me to enjoy normal people coffee. Mission accomplished I guess. Let’s take a crack at Counter Culture’s La Golondrina.

What They Say: Sourced directly from Cauca’s most skilled and quality-focused organic farmers, La Golondrina represents the very best of Colombian coffee with layered flavors of caramel, chocolate, cherry, and bright citrus.

What I Taste: Basically none of that. There’s definitely some darker sweetness going on, something like burnt cake (which I assume is on the caramel-cocoa continuum) and a sourness I’ve tracked over land and sea to the cherry notes. Honestly it’s good but not my fave. The flavors seem muddier than CC’s other brews and it doesn’t have the same kind of putting the spurs to Hidalgo energy that I associate with Columbian coffee. But it gets about 75% of your bull running.

The Feeling: Getting dust in your eyes on a mountaintop, but in a good way.

A Visit from the Goon Squad: Jennifer Egan

If only so your friends will shut up about it

So you like contemporary prize-winning fiction? You like a protean, twisting narrative delivered by multiple narrators separated in time and space? You like multi-generational immigrant epics centering on so-hot-right now obscure and sometimes not currently extant far flung hellholes? You like some sci-fi genre fuckery? Well you’ll get at least 80% of your fix from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. This is not to say this book doesn’t show chops and imagination, and that it isn’t better than the conceptually shit hot but deeply flawed Cloud Atlas and the deeply and unremittingly flawed Everything Matters! and the basically dead in the water (but still perversely enjoyable) The Four Fingers of Death. But I read this 300-odd page novel in two sittings. I can’t respect a book that lets me do that. I need something that puts up a fight, bores or disgusts or confounds me a little. But Goon Squad was buttery smooth from word one.

You’ve probably heard by now about that weird chapter and it is indeed the best part of the book. Hilarious, touching, inventive etc. Manages to capture a near-future family psychodrama with pretty meager tools. But aside from this segment, I was a little disappointed by the way in which the book (and many of its cohort of zippy, topical new novels) describes the new phase in human relations brought about by social networking without embodying it. Children are now being raised inside a virtual medium but we’re reading about it in the same coherent, capable prose we’ve been mega-speed-reading our way through for the last 50 years (at least)?

It’s unfair of course because I’m down on Goon Squad for being a good book and not a fault line in the way we read and live and think about our time. This is powerful writing of a familiar bent, and that’s not bad. But I do think it’s too molded to the modern reader’s digestive tract. Strangely, the chapter most superficially adapted to quick and frictionless understanding is the one that demands the closest (and slowest) scrutiny. This is what we need. Writing in tension with its own posterity, which interrogates the way we are emotionally affected in the context of a medium that makes it too easy. You can log on to any website and find a story far removed from your own experience that will move you. Little gel caps of pathos. What does it mean that we don’t have to wait for the new Dickens installment to get that fix?

War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy

This book weighs ten pounds at least

Have your borscht and eat it too with 19th Century Russia’s weaksauce answer to Game of Thrones. War and Peace captures a world in which cities burn, rich people have boring parties, and grown men vie for the affections of 13 year old girls, all in only 1200 pages. Make no mistake, either you live in this book or you don’t finish it; I knew I was going to make it when I started to daydream about making creepy little dolls of Natasha and Andrei and having them waltz around my living room. Still, it was never going to be easy. Tolstoy stuffs his beautiful novel with bafflingly dry treatises on the “great man” theory of history when all I want to do is go wolf hunting with chief party animal Nikolai Rostov or watch breathlessly as Pierre grows progressively fatter.

It’s a more enveloping but less perfect book than Anna Karenina, and in all honesty anybody but a shameless diletante with more free time than sense (this moi) would be better off with Karenina. That said, it does have a hypnagogic rhythm that helped me crush a hundred pages at a time on my better days, and there are oases of great lyricism and insight in the unfailingly lucid and accurate but often cheerless sweep of the book. It’s sort of a “How to Live. What to Do” for a turbulent Europe and any young ambitious ladder-climbers who feel like carving their names into history. Tend your garden, have your babies. Don’t try to be a great dude, just be a dude. And as much as it can be not just boring but boring in the sense of lobotomy, I can’t object to where the book takes you.

Jumper Cables; The Four Fingers of Death – Rick Moody

So I lost Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior in the course of moving, though I was able to finish it. And it was medium-good but I find I don’t have, like, opinions about it or anything. But opinions are kind of secondary to putting some numbers on the board, so I’m gonna let that one sentence be all I have to say about Bad Behavior and get back into killing tomes.

 Origin: Border’s fire sale. When I bought this they were ominously selling off the “fixtures.”

 Why I Didn’t Read It: I did, I’m doing it. Right now.

Threat Level: Adobe orange.

Time Limit: I’m already four hundo into this one and I don’t know where Moody goes after an 8-page (minor SPOILER) gay astronaut sex scene in space (/SPOILER) but I’ve got three hundred pages left to find out. Let’s say four days.