Listening to Vinyl: Dust in the Grooves

 

I used to think music fans who insisted on the superiority of vinyl records over compact discs were just pretentious. Surely, I thought, digital recording methods are better. That changed, however, when my wife bought me a simple Sony record player a few Christmases back and I gave vinyl another try.

One of the benefits was quickly amassing a decent record collection because unless you’re into collector’s items, used LPs sell for cheap. I bought quite a few rock records at Vinyl Solution Records in San Mateo, California for about $5 apiece, and my classical music collection went from zero to 33 1/3 in no time flat as I picked up armloads as cheap as five for a dollar. A hardbound, six-disc pressing of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung with illustrated libretto for $9.99? I couldn’t be happier.

I scavenged some albums out of the clearance bins at Rasputin Music in downtown San Francisco just for the artwork, like Astra by Asia. The illustration by English artist Roger Dean is evocative of every sci-fi dream I’ve ever had and surely looks better on a 12×12 cardboard sleeve than it would on a CD insert:

 

The sleeve is often the highlight of the packaging, but many LPs have foldouts, posters, 12” booklets, and so forth. My copy of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery is sorely worn, but that only heightens the effect of H.R. Geiger’s biomechanical art known for its hidden phallus.

 

The packaging of many old classical records is nothing more than a cardboard sleeve, but some deluxe editions have a sturdy elegance unmatched by any subsequent formats. One of the jewels of my collection is Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The front opens like a book and inside is a lengthy commentary accompanied by photographs and illustrations stretching back to the ballet’s 19th-Century origins.

Old classical album text is a joy to read for its oddly quaint and frequently curious language. The sleeve for Sergei Rachmaninoff Plays Concert III, for example, describes Rachmaninoff as “a triple-threat”--I guess because he was a composer, conductor and pianist--and goes on to brag about now decades-outdated technology:

“That elusive, yet very real joie-de-vivre is amply demonstrated on this recording, as Sergei Rachmaninoff brings us all-time piano masterpieces in a flawless, noise-free stereo recital made possible by Klavier’s unique process of re-creating great performances of the past using high-fidelity tools and techniques of the present and the future.”

As with the Rachmaninoff album mentioned above, there is something magical to hearing history’s biggest stars of the classical world perform on a recording printed in their own day: Ruggiero Ricci playing Paganini on a Stradivarius, Arturo Toscanini conducting Helen Traubel before an audience many of whose members have since passed away, Maria Callas performing Medea at La Scala when she was still upsetting the opera world, igniting scandals, and recasting the diva mold in her own image. The sounds themselves are a record of the past, and so is the medium.

They’ve been saying since the Nineties that vinyl is making a comeback, and I finally believe it. Most new music today comes out in an LP format, often with a free digital download. Colored vinyl and picture discs are nothing new, but it’s good to see that record manufacturers haven’t abandoned such collector’s items in a time when physical releases are an afterthought to the official digital release or the unofficial leak. My copy of Death’s The Sound of Perseverance (from Amoeba Music in San Francisco’s famed Haight-Ashbury district) is translucent with blood-like flecks. And recently, I ran across a Record Store Day-only 10” picture disc single of Rush’s “The Garden” (Recofan in Shibuya, Tokyo):

 

 

No one, however, has taken their dedication to vinyl further than Jack White. Last year, Lazaretto broke a 20-year-old record for vinyl sales in an album’s first week of release. White and his record company Third Man Records designed an “Ultra LP” that plays on three speeds, has hidden tracks, plays from the center out on one side, and even projects a holographic angel over the label. He could barely contain himself when he described it to Conan O’Brien.

But does vinyl really sound better? When it comes to clear, dynamic sound, the best I can ascertain after some poking around the internet is that it depends on a number of factors and there’s a lot of disagreement. Some music is overly compressed today, which can leave it sounding shallow and tinny compared to the roomy and rich sound regularly enjoyed last century. There are, however, pitfalls with vinyl as well, so . . . it’s complicated. Jack White’s Ultra LP boasts no compression, so perhaps he has found the perfect way to record music.

 

 

 

Vinylophiles have also long claimed that LPs sound better because of their grainy sound. I used to view this as mere audiophilic Ludditism, but there’s something to it. I find dust in the grooves to be an impediment to enjoying classical music, but it’s perfect for a lot of classic rock: The Doors, Fleetwood Mac, Blue Oyster Cult, Joan Jett . . .  Ultimately, it’s ineffable, but the experience doesn’t lie.

Another aspect of vinyl that’s difficult to describe is the pleasure derived from the listening process. I can locate, purchase, download and start listening to something on iTunes in the time it takes to remove an album from the sleeve and lay it on the turntable. Then you have to wait for the machinery to move the needle into place--unless you’re maneuvering it by hand. And then, of course, you have to switch sides several songs later. It’s slow and clunky--and certainly not ideal for concept albums best experienced as a whole, like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon--but the physical involvement and the decreased speed enhances enjoyment. You have to stop . . . stop and attend to the music.

It’s strange to think that a medium stretching back to the 19th Century and repeatedly challenged by smaller and in some ways better formats would experience a resurgence in the 21st Century, but that appears to be what is happening. Vinyl records will never be the dominant medium again, but many like me are discovering that the newest technology is not always the most satisfying.

 

 

The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

Woefully unimportant things have a way of lodging in my brain, so I never forgot about the unexpected success of Zombie Strippers back in 2008. When I ran across the DVD recently, I picked it up out of curiosity and was pleased to find it references several major philosophers.

When a facility running tests on zombies shares a building with a strip club, the worst is bound to happen. A zombie escapes and bites a pole dancer and it’s all downhill from there. The strippers feed on their clientele, discolor, and fall apart, but they keep on gyrating and peeling off garments. Eventually, the guns come out and the gore ramps up even further.

 

Surprisingly, Zombie Strippers is a cut above your usual B-movie about zombies or strippers, so if any of the above sounds intriguing, knock yourself out and look for these nods to great thinkers.

 

 

SOCRATES (470/469-399 BC)

Early in the film, the strip club DJ introduces the next dancer to take the floor:

“Now Bobby Sox, is gonna tease you with her Socrates!”

You caught the pun, right? Socrates was the ancient Greek philosopher made to drink hemlock for corrupting the youth of Athens. It was his habit to hang out in the agora, the city’s public gathering space, to discuss the issues of the day: What is the perfect form of society? Is there an afterlife? What is the nature of language? Much of what we know about Socrates comes to us through the writings of other ancients, most notably the dialogues of Plato.

Plato’s dialogues showcase a form of discussion lacking in public discourse today. Typically, the interlocutors will venture their respective ideas of, say, justice, and then make rational objections to each other’s hypotheses. Often, when reason reveals a flaw in an argument, its purveyor will abandon or revise his position. The result is a conversation that makes progress, steadily drawing near a more perfect conception of the truth. When was the last time a talking head on television showed any capacity for backing down in the face of a superior argument?

 

RENÉ DESCARTES (1596-1650)

Proceeding forward along the history of philosophy, our next thinker appears as the club descends into mayhem. A stripper and her ditzy boyfriend confront a soldier hunting zombies. The soldier demands that they say something human to prove they aren't zombies, and the boyfriend does his best:

“Uh . . . shit! Could you give me something easier? Okay, okay! Um, I think therefore I am. I think? Actually, I have doubts about that one.”

“I think therefore I am” is the common English translation of French philosopher René Descartes’ Latin dictum Cogito ergo sum. Descartes wanted to set the sciences on a firm foundation but realized our senses often deceive us. In fact, it was possible to doubt just about everything. He even considered the possibility that the whole world was but a dream concocted by an evil daemon. So he looked around for one thing he couldn’t doubt, something solid to serve as a beginning point for constructing an entire system of knowledge, and--Voilà!--he realized that with all this doubting (thinking) going on, the existence of a doubter (the self) was certain.

 

 

Philosophers never let a good a proposition stand, so they have poked holes in this elegant maxim in the centuries since it appeared in Discourse on Method (1637). However, while it would be faint consolation to the philosophe, I still think we can say his first principle is pretty good.

 

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Earlier in the film, Kat (played by porn star Jenna Jameson) is in the dressing room reading The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche and even quotes it:

“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

Okay, most of us know that one, but she can do even better:

“Yeah sure, but everything great must first wear a hideous and monstrous mask in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher dear to me, although it has been years since I read and reread most of his major works. The first quote is from Twilight of the Idols (1888). The second has proven harder to pinpoint, but it may be from Beyond Good and Evil (1886), so Kat appears to have made it to the later Nietzsche.

Nietzsche remains a scary philosopher in the public imagination because of his bombastic writing style, iconoclastic quotes like “God is dead” and concepts like the will to power. Unfortunately, his ideas were not fully understood or even widely available until long after they had been purveyed in a twisted form by his sister and some of the 19th-Century’s worst political actors. The Übermensh, for example, describes an individual who is superior through self-overcoming, with no need to seek validation through power over others (previous post). In fact--if I remember my Walter Kaufmann correctly--Nietzsche was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a soft-spoken and polite fellow.

 

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)

The philosophical references in Zombie Strippers are too numerous and forced not to be an intentional motif. When aspiring stripper Jessy is walking home one night, she passes a large sign bearing the name of her fictional hometown: SARTRE, NEBRASKA.

Jean-Paul Sartre, while not generally considered the handsomest of philosophers, was nonetheless able to convince his romantic partner, early feminist thinker and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, that an open relationship would be a good idea so he could entertain a young Algerian mistress whom he later adopted as a daughter.

JP--as I assume his amants knew him--is known as one of the great existentialist philosophers. In a wonderful essay entitled “What Is Existentialism?” he explains that whereas for centuries we have been taught that our essence (our soul) exists first and then comes to inhabit the flesh in existence, it’s actually the other way around. We are born, and through the experience of living in existence, we determine our essence. The choices you make, with no confidant but your own conscience, determine who you are. This is Descartes in reverse: I am, therefore I think.

Conclusion

What does all of this philosophy have to do with the deeper content of Zombie Strippers? At first, I was tempted to say there is no deeper content to Zombie Strippers--after all, it has a bit about a zombie firing pool balls out of her vagina--but the film actually makes an effort to comment on the cheap thrills pervasive in America today, cheap thrills that the movie itself represents but also underscores through references to our rich heritage of philosophical thought.

I would say all the philosophy I’ve described above is Philosophy 101, but of the above thinkers, I only studied Socrates and Descartes as an undergrad. I had to study Nietzsche and Sartre on my own, so I guess that makes this a notch above Philosophy 101. But that doesn’t spare this from being one of the most pointless blog posts ever.

 

 

The Three Lives of Malcolm X

 

“My life has always been one of changes.” –Malcolm X

Everyone knows about Malcolm X. He’s the man wearing the goatee, black horn-rimmed glasses and intellectual demeanor in photos from the 1960s. He’s the “angry and violent” civil rights leader as opposed to the “peaceful” Martin Luther King Jr. But do we really know Malcolm X? I didn’t, until I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (co-authored with Alex Haley) and found much to admire.

There is, of course, Malcolm X’s fierce stand for civil rights, which he vigorously pursued up until the moment of his assassination. As interesting as that is, what I mainly want to discuss here, what inspired me most, was his ability to change. His adult life strikes me as passing through three stages, each clearly distinct from the others.

In his younger years in Harlem, Malcolm X, then using his birth name Malcolm Little, was a hustler. He began shining shoes, but moved on to running numbers in betting schemes, selling drugs, pimping and eventually burglary. No doubt he was as sharp as a tack even then, but he was uneducated and mostly spoke slang to the extent that many couldn’t even understand him. He was high on drugs all the time, carried guns, and ruined lives. He was, to be blunt, an unrepentant scumbag and he ended up in Charlestown State Prison.

In prison, his second life began. He improved his vocabulary by copying the dictionary by hand, further educated himself by reading as many books from the prison library as he could, and participated in organized debates between inmates. The results are enviable. Forever afterward, he would think quick on his feet and speak in lucid and powerful sentences.

It was also in prison that he began his conversion to the Nation of Islam, then headed by Elijah Muhammad. The Nation of Islam reversed the white supremacy dominant in America by proclaiming that black folk were superior and white folk were “devils.” The lifestyles of members of the Nation of Islam were to be squeaky clean, and after leaving prison, Malcolm Little, now Malcolm X, would exemplify that, going so far as to become a minister.

This second phase is the one that remains strongest before the eye of history, but Malcolm X was not done evolving.

Traitorous goings-on within the Nation of Islam around the time Malcolm X performed the hajj and toured the Middle East and Africa resulted in his expulsion from the group. The Islam that he witnessed while traveling was one of people of all nationalities coming together to worship Allah without any distinctions of class or color. All were part of a shared humanity--even whites.

Whereas before, Malcolm X--now using the name Malik El-Shabazz--had advocated a racist ideology, he now applied a new “yardstick” to everything:

“ . . . that to me the earth’s most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as one, especially in the Western world.”

Many were shocked by Malcolm X’s change of tone upon his return from Mecca, but before his new efforts could take off, Nation of Islam assassins gunned him down during a presentation. From criminal to Nation of Islam minister to internationalist leader for civil rights, his life had indeed been, as he himself described, “one of changes.”

Throughout the autobiography, Malcolm X unflinchingly relates many of his worst traits at different times in his life, many of his dirtiest deeds, and his biggest mistakes. Twice his thought underwent a shift so radical that he completely renounced his former lifestyle and beliefs.

In his own words:

“Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”

This speaks to me, because I’ve experienced similar changes. Once deeply Christian and conservative politically, I’m now an atheist who identifies in politics most closely with the style of intellectuals who go where their reason leads them, often in defiance of the simple Right-Left divide: Gore Vidal, Hunter S. Thompson, Bernard Henri-Levy, Christopher Hitchens,  Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Amartya Sen, Slavoj Zizek, Camille Paglia, Gianni Vattimo, Paul Krugman, Andrew Sullivan, and others.

Of course, few people change completely. Often there is an unchanging core to one’s personality that offers guidance through the changes. This is true for me, and I believe it was true for Malcolm X. Somewhere in the pimp Malcolm Little was the enlightened Malik El-Shabazz, and it is this thread of conscience-driven mutability running through each incarnation of the man that I find so impressive.