dc's blog

"I do." The performative utterance that means somehow "I give me to you." What one gives is either explicit or implicit, and it is always changing. But from outside the negotiation, the ring is only a simple communication of the exchange, a reminder to the beloved and, as Nina sings it here, warning to the world outside. I suppose it's a classic reification, a standard country music trope, this gold band telling over and over the story of yes, but also the story of no.

What an envious dirge it is, with Nina at 25 singing "I'll rememb-errrr to my dy-ing day" over that piano-snare figure, her voice disappearing in a velvety fadeout that suggests the moan could go on until that very last minute. Funny to think of a ring as this - a life's curse as much as a promise, a phantom object worn in the mind of the dispossessed because of its material and spiritual wear on the beloved's body.

I'm not one much for possession, but today I am without two more rings promised me. I am sad for the situation, but not sad for losing them. My mother's house was robbed and the thief took the wedding rings of both her and my great-grandmother, among other things. In her tears to me she spoke of inheritance, of history, of her shame at the situation. All I could say to her, and all that was true, was that it does not matter.

They are melted hunks of gold by now, the little diamonds bent out and tossed into trays with others wretched through the violence of break-in, hold up, and other desperate, sometimes criminal, acts in my miserable hometown. It's the kind of place those Fox News 'cash for gold' ads really prey on and really, my only thought about our break in is - what took them so long? And my great-grandmother is dead, my mother is divorced, and I refuse the concept of possession on the grounds that, while Nina should sing such songs for the world, no lover suffer a feeling thwarted for my pettiness or insecurity. The envy Nina sings of scares me - she desires not sharing but a transfer of title - but I hold true that there is a way one can have a promise strong enough to withstand even such a passion as lover Nina's. And the rings were just some reminder of the way it did and didn't work before, and I have already inherited that.

We didn't invite the criminals in to our house, surely, and I would rather have some nice jewelry than not. But love is not that, and I guess it is important to keep it straight so when a disastrous phone call comes, like it did today, I can say the right thing at the right time: this is not the important thing. We have faith in our phantoms and our promises, our past and future, and we live to love each other right now. We respect the rings other people have, but we don't need them ourselves. We were free before, we are free now, and we will be free. Nothing can be stolen.

So it's pretty funny that the Midlake wiki says their newest album The Courage of Others "garnered generally good reviews," when it got a 3.6 on the Fork. Seems a UK/US divide, with a sharp turn among the Stateside tastemakers away from such beardo sincerity in 2010. Pretty much every person I ask who's listened to it hates it soundly, except my psychfolk superhero Neil, who wrote the band a personal letter to thank them for their 21st century reanimation of the Pentagle tradition. I guess Neil's letter is the reason obscure weird bands keep going round the world, so bravo to him. Less public fan art, more private fan mail.

I too love the heavy British folk influence and adore moments on the album. And I'll come right out and say I love it for the reason the US nerds hate it - it's tots sans irony. I do agree that the vocals are flat, lifeless, both in delivery and in the mix, but still...

"Rulers, Ruling All Things" has been on constant rotation in the glum moments that overtake me when I start wondering how it is that I am so far from home, which are less often then they were when I got here but somehow more acute in the spring. Yes, this is a song that contains the word "maidens" and they aren't for torturing, and it features the lower register of the flute for dramatic effect, but it also has the lovely, melancholy opening couplet "I have been cruel and kind without knowing/I fell in the silence overwhelmed by these days" that somehow describes exactly my non-research or teaching life right now. Quiet, a little medieval, and frankly humorless.

Except today, after Fleck left my house and I realized that I had no keys to get in but the window was open. One text message, ladder appropriation, and a few laughs later and I was back in, thanks to Keith - who is not just punk in Africa, but every damn place he goes.

So yeah, I guess Midlake might be a bit staid, but I guess right now I'm a bit staid, or feckless or simply between. I just started reading the anthropologist Michael Jackson's At Home In the World, and he has a lovely passage in his introduction about conjuctions as verbs. Right now I work, but in my private life, I am living a conjunction. And it sounds like Midlake.

Good night at Dox last night - we had the Czech premier of Copyright Criminals. I'm totally biased since the head writer of the film, Kembrew McLeod, is a friend of mine, but I really think it's a great intervention on the dialog about the nature of digital creativity and American copyright law. First off, it's extremely MUSICAL, which I remember talking to Kembrew about mostly because it was some kind of nightmare clearing all the vid samples for the montage sequences. There are a maybe a half dozen sequences illustrating the work of specific artists - Clyde Stubblefield, Public Enemy - and specific musical techniques like analog and digital scratching or famous sampling afterlife of "Funky Drummer." Second, it reframes the history of sampling as an artform popularized by black American musicians, which isn't news to anyone who loves music but might be to the people who read Lawrence Lessig or only jumped into the legal debates about appropriation through Illegal Art and/or after Girl Talk. Girl Talk is great party music, but the appropriation of a great sample into a new context has deeper meaning for listeners and creators alike, as was excellently discussed afterwards by my new friend Karl Vesely, who is writing the first Czech language book on the popular music of the Black Altantic (yes!). Then there's the real stories of the chilling effect of copyright law on creativity - De La Soul talking about how label execs sat with them and outlined what artists were in litigation over samples and therefore were offlimits for sampling.

The film is definitely not for those uninitiated in either hip hop or copyright issues, but since Good Copy, Bad Copy and Remix have been around this film builds on, clarifies, and illustrates in a great way that is potentially more useful for those interested in the musical implications of copyright law. Plus, it has the best soundtrack. Win.