Zach + Will = the best thing I’ve seen in a while.

Zach Galinfianakis and Will Oldham get O.G. on Z-dawg’s North Carolina farm while lip synching to Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’”

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Final Fantasy – He Poos Clouds: or: How I deal with the discrepancy between hype and reality

She’s got a heart that will never melt

Though these aren’t the opening words to Final Fantasy’s 2006 He Poos Clouds, this was the line that has bugged me for months. At the time, I tried to like this music, I really did; but I couldn’t find a way inside it. It had so many of the things I enjoy in music: ornate string arrangements, idiosyncratic lyrics, on-a-dime chord and tempo changes and yet, and yet. Several friends even suggested that I give it a chance, often the ultimate key for a new and unfamiliar artist, and yet I kept stumping my toe over it. This was months ago.

Although I have a great deal of disdain for the blogosphere’s term for a “difficult” album, the species known as “a grower,” if I were to allow this album a singular buzz-centric phrase I would label it simply that; for me, it was a “grower.” Partially, this is because I was only listening to 4 pilfered tracks from various music blogs, not allowing the completeness of the album to enchant and answer my queries about Owen Pallett’s sense of continguity; ultimately, I was suffering from the disease of the digital age insofar as it relates to music evaluation/listening: fragmentation.

While I could use this space to prattle on about the fragmented world in which we live, one that lacks a grand, sweeping narrative or historical apex of termination, I would rather spare myself such rehashed and hackneyed phrases and rely upon one of our greatest fiction writers for a nice summation:

-I’m not trying to say I’m exempt from it, this modern disease, he went on with an insistence which prevented him from seeing that she was more than tired, was in fact exhausted in a sense so severe that it was physical only in its trembling expression. -That’s what it is, a disease, you can’t live we do without catching it. Because we get time given to us in fragments, that’s the only way we know it. Finally we can’t even conceive of a continuum of time. Every fragment exists by itself, and that’s why we live among palimpsests, because finally all the work should fit into one whole, and express and entire perfect action, as Aristotle says, and it’s impossible now, it’s impossible, because of the breakage, there are pieces everywhere…” William Gaddis; The Recognitions (p.615-616)

As Stanley puts it, continua are things of which it is difficult for us to conceive, living amongst the diseased time of fragmentation (or the disease of time fragmentation, however you want to read it); thus, being a sincere music reviewer, it is ever difficult to contextualize new information on anything more than a pass/fail basis with the trend and push towards fragmentation and samples and clips and the consumptive urge to purchase the singularity that is the iTunes track absent from its album’s ribs. Magically we expect this single track to conjure a holistic image for us, a simulated completion of the now fractured album waiting in the wings. However, I must resist the temptation to rant about the ethics of choosing the parts over the whole at the risk of sounding the hypocrite; I am a frequent iTunes/emusic shopper who often buys his music piecemeal. What I’m after (and remember, this is a self-criticism) is the tendency to rubber stamp a piece of the puzzle, a page in the novel, a track on the album without cross-referencing the whole. In my case, it caused me to miss out on the rhythmic brilliance of Pallett’s song textures (“Song Song Song” and “The Pooka Sings” come to mind) and his self-referential (if often oblique) lyrics.
As complex as his arrangements are, Pallett’s lyrics are the real gem of the record; he sings about video games (RPGs in particular), Dungeons and Dragons, literature and magic. Yet he explores such issues as digital identity, synthetic/real relationships, death, and responsible authorship through these lyrical foci in interesting ways:

On Responsible Authorship (via Flann O’Brien)

Oh! your eyes, your greedy eyes!
Your dry and desperate tongue
You’ve told a lie! a lie! a lie!
For every pretty note your reddy voice has sung
Do we believe in devils? No.
Winged men? The healing pow’r of love? No.
Enchantment? Social justice? No.
Dead child actors in a white, white world above? No.
Then why are all your songs about the things that don’t exist?
Do not resist! You’ll burn these lies tonight and never let them live
Oh, stoke the fire, you’ll burn these words tonight
I cannot let them live- “The Pooka Sings”

On having a digital identity:

Lazy, you lazy poet, your words are reckless, and I can’t feel it
But hey, hey, all the boys I have ever loved have been digital
I’ve been a guest, on a screen, or in a book!
I move ‘em with my thumbs, I move them with my thumbs
I write his name in nothing, he whispers to the author
That I will be the only one- “He Poos Clouds”

Though intially I labeled the album a “grower,” and one to which I could rarely listen, after acknowledging the naivety of these first assessments and acquiring the album in completion, I can now bestow upon my blessing and suggest that you go and henceforth listen. If given the task of assigning numbered stars though, I would rather be innumerate for this album; indeed for most albums, as such a system fails to take into account a sense of completeness or contextuality and contributes to our cultures fetish for ratings, pieces, slices, tastes, samples and bite-size bits of information that are quotable and prone to regurgitation.

Perhaps this review will serve as a template for my reflections on albums in the future, describing to some degree my own encounters with the music and artist and how I, as a person and not some digital grading machine, come to appreciate or dislike a particular record.

Either way, it was a joy to write and a joy to relisten to the album whilst writing it.

JCH

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Modern things include:

46

I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.
People are blowing and beating each other without mercy.
Drinks are boiling. Iced
drinks are boiling. The worse anyone feels, the worse
treated he is. Fools elect fools.
A harmless man at an intersection said, under his breath: “Christ!”

That word, so spoken, affected the vision
of, when they trod to work the next day, shopkeepers
who went & were fitted for glasses.
Enjoyed they then an appearance of love & law.
Millenia whift and waft–one, one–er, er . . .
Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw.

Man has undertaken the top job of all,
son fin. Good luck.
I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.
Followed other deaths. Among the last,
like the memory of a lovely fuck,
was: Do, ut des.

44

Tell it to the forest fire, tell it to the moon,
mention it in general to the moon
on the way down,
he’s about to have his lady, permanent;
and this is the worst of all came ever sent
writhing Henry’s way.

Ha ha, fifth column, quisling, genocide,
he held his hands & laught from side to side
a loverly time.
The berries & the rods left him alone less.
Thro’ a race of water once I went: happiness.
I’ll walk into the sky.

There the great flare & stench, O flying creatures,
surely will dim-dim? Bars will be closed.
No girl will again
concieve above your throes. A fine thunder peals
will with its friends and soon, from agony
put the fire out.

14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

from The Dream Songs

228

Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors, who never speak of sunsets, have made many sunsets intelligible to me, in all their colours. There is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish the values of beings, sounds and shapes, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green, and how much yellow is in the blue green of the sky.
It comes down to the same thing – the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends on the grammarians.

229

To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.

How shoddy and contemptible life is! Note that, for it to be shoddy and contemptible, all it takes is you not wanting it, it being given to you anyway and nothing about it depending on your will or even on you illusion of your will.

To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.

230

Art is a substitute for acting or living. If life is the willful expression of emotion, art is the intellectual expression of that same emotion. Whatever we don’t have, don’t attempt or don’t achieve can be possessed through dreams, and these are what we use to make art. At other times our emotion is so strong that, although reduced to action, this action dosen’t completely satisfy it; the leftover emotion, unexpressed in life, is used to produce the work of art. There are thus two types of artist: the one who expresses what he doesn’t have, and the one who expresses the surplus of what he did have.

457

Modern things include:
1) the development of mirrors;
2) wardrobes.

We evolved, body and soul, into clothed creatures. Since the soul always conforms to the body, it developed an intangible suit. We advanced to having a soul that’s basically clothed, in the same way that we advanced – as physical humans – to the category of clothed animals.
The point isn’t just that our suit has become an integral part of us; it’s the complexity of this suit and the curious lack of any real relationship between it and the features that make our body and our body’s movements naturally elegant.
Were I asked to discuss the social causes responsible for my soul’s condition, I would speechlessly point to a mirror, a clothes hanger, and a pen.

from The Book of Disquiet

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despite all my age i am still just a rat in a cage

During this week past I:

turned 23

found out that two of my best friends are engaged (congratulations Chris and Alice!)

saw The Smashing Pumpkins in concert

recieved some fantastic gifts and wonderful well-wishes from friends

started two more books in my rotating summer reading syllabus

worked on my next podcast

All in all, a good week.

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