De File

There were several times today when I thought to myself, "It's September 11th and I'm not really doing anything special to commemorate that fact." But then, as midnight approached, I began to feel strange about letting the date pass unacknowledged. You see, I have a whole box of material from that fall that I have meant to revisit many times but have simply not been able to look at.

In fact, my aversion to recalling the months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon is so strong that it wasn't until a few minutes ago that I could bring myself to read the piece I started writing in November 2001 but never managed to finish. I think I might try to do that one day. For now, though, I thought I'd share it as-is, a long fragments whose incompleteness testifies better to my mental state then and, perhaps, now than something more polished ever could.

Cruising Through Europe

I

I couldn’t stop. Twenty hours earlier I had boarded a Lufthansa jet in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. Now I was in Italy for the first time, having finally managed to extricate myself from Venice’s Marco Polo Airport. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t have the right map. I didn’t have Italian currency, having discovered at the airport that the secret code for my ATM card was too long for European machines. I was driving a Fiat Brava rental car with a clutch radically different from my VW Passat’s back home. And I was unspeakably tired. Yet once I found the road, I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to drive.

I was sure that everything would work out if I could just keep moving. I’m still here, so it must have. But in the short term, my faith in movement only made things worse. Because I didn’t pause to get my bearings, I ended up missing the on-ramp for the Autostrada. I drove for hours on regional two-lane roads that seemed to be headed in the right direction, but were exceedingly slow going. Periodically, I would see signs for the Autostrada and head in that direction, only to find myself stuck in yet another belltower-dominated town, navigating a maze of traffic circles and one-way streets. Since few roads in Italy are numbered and my map only showed major highways, I had no way of knowing how badly I had lost my way.

At one point, sitting at a traffic light, I realized that my car had a cassette player. Digging through my carry-on bag, I found my case of tapes and extracted Yo La Tengo’s I Hear the Heart Beating as One. I’m enormously fond of the American road-trip. But I can’t imagine taking one unless I have control over the music I hear. There’s something comforting about the fusion of new landscape with old sounds. And on this day it was particularly welcome. Hearing the record’s first track slowly swell to volume, I relaxed. The call-and-response of song and steering wheel helped me through another 45 minutes. When the tape switched over to Yo La Tengo’s Painful on Side B, however, I started to panic again. I was supposed to arrive at my destination in the south of Austria by 6pm. It was already 4pm and I was still seeing signs for the same cluster of towns: Venezia, Treviso, Padua.

Finally, I located an entrance to the Autostrada. But I had no lire. As it turned out, I probably could have used my credit card to pay the toll, if I had known which lane to pick. With no knowledge of Italian, though, I was too frightened to get on a freeway I might not be able to leave. So I drove back to the nearest towns, looking for an ATM that might work. Because it was Friday afternoon, the banks were already closed. But I was sure that my experience at the airport had been an aberration. There had to be a machine that would accomodate a secret code of more than five digits. Wrong. When I returned to the States, a friend told me that there are Citibank ATMs in every major city that will do the trick. But I was mired in the small towns of the Veneto.

Despairing of ever escaping Italy, I decided to backtrack all the way to Venice. At least I would be able to get a cash advance on my credit card at the airport. And the signs for Venice were a lot easier to follow than the signs for points north. After another hour, I arrived back at Marco Polo. I finally did secure some lire, though my worn-out brain requested less than I should have. More importantly, I managed to extract myself from the airport’s parking garage. A few minutes later, I was finally on the Autostrada.

( Read the rest. . . )

When my friend Annalee asked me whether I had any thoughts on mash-up, I did my usual overzealous research, downloading and listening to as many as I could lay my virtual hands on. Most of them were not particularly compelling. But some moved me, either with the ingeniousness of the combination or the sense that they were transgressing boundaries that might otherwise never be breached. In the end, though, I found that I liked thinking about the genre more than listening to it:

I like to think about mash-ups in relation to covers. We use the word “cover” so reflexively that we don’t give it much thought. But what does it really mean? If a cover of a song completely “covers” the original song, then it isn’t really a cover. Aretha Franklin’s version of Otis Redding’s “Respect” comes awfully close to doing this, for example. There’s a moment during the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 when Redding introduces “Respect” by saying that Aretha sort of took it away from him. When he launches into his original version of the song, part of you feels like even the title no longer belongs to him. When we speak of a “great cover,” though, we have this sort of robbery in mind. The original has to be there in the background, giving depth to the interpretation. But the robbery is so righteous that it feels silly to complain.

When you’re talking about popular music, though, you have to confront the question of the “original” too. What is the original? Is it the song as transcribed in sheet music? Or is it the first recording of the song. Nobody would argue that the first recording of a Puccini opera from the 1920s constitutes the original music. But when you’re talking about, say, the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the way the record sounds matters a lot more than any notes printed on the page every could.

You could say that the quality of a cover version depends on its admixture of opacity and distortion. If it’s too opaque, the original song will be obscured. If it’s too neutrally transparent, it loses its raison d’être. The best covers tell the truth of the original, but tell it slant. They make you want to seek out the original without making themselves expendable.

Although mash-ups aren’t “covers” in a conventional sense, they also function according to this logic of the overlay. When the components of the mash-up are easily perceived, the ideal outcome is a track that interests you both in those components and in the way they are fused together. It matters a great deal, of course, what kind of components are used. The mash-up aesthetic derives in part from the way DJs function in rave culture. In that context it was – and is – common to overlay multiple repetitive, electronic tracks, often with the same number of beats per minute, in order to produce an integrated stream of sound in which the components matter considerably less individually than they do as a whole. At the opposite extreme are “pure” mash-ups that do little more than overlay two well-known songs without doing much of anything to alter them or even impose a more pronounced beat.

Even within this latter category, however, there are vast differences in feel between mash-ups that use components that seem to go together -- because of their lyrical content, their instrumentation, or a similar place in history – and those that strive for deliberately counter-intuitive combinations for aesthetic reasons. The mash-up that fuses the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” and the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” doesn’t do much to alter our perception of either song and principally inspires a desire to listen to the originals separately. By contrast, the one that brings the sweet flow of Missy Elliott to bear on Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” reshapes our sense of her opening salvo of “Hit me!” and makes the line “twenty years ago” resonate very differently indeed, reminding us of a time when punk and hip-hop didn’t have to be fused together because they were already in steady dialogue with each other.

It’s no accident that, as in the case I just mentioned, the most successful mash-ups often involve overlaying hip-hop words with music that isn’t typically associated with the genre. The best hip-hop has always pushed the envelope in terms of making listeners question what does and doesn’t belong together, implicitly advocating an intellectual miscegenation to match the more literal sort that has regularly come up in its lyrical content, from Public Enemy to Eminem.

Of course, when Public Enemy chopped up all-manner of “white” sources to construct the Byzantine mosaic of sounds that comprise its musical beds, they were still haunted by the 1% rule: a drop of black sound must make the whole song “black.” The title of their superb Fear of a Black Planet makes the point explicitly. Perhaps we should be heartened, then by the fact that one of today’s best-known and best-loved “mash-up” records, DJ Danger Mouse’s fusion of the Beatles and Jay-Z, is called The Gray Album. If the racial purity of music were still being as rigidly reinforced as it was during the second half of the 1980s, he might have felt the need to call it DJ Danger Mouse’s Black Album.

Jay-Z’s decision to release a vocals-only version of his Black Album and encourage DJs to remix it creatively marks a convergence of hip-hop, remix, and mash-up culture that bodes well for the future of musical innovation, even as it underscores the legal problems of using copyrighted material to make something “new.” Our sense of what does and doesn’t belong together isn’t simply the product of cultural conditioning. The legal system vigorously patrols the border between different commodities.

The mash-up aesthetic presents in an easily understood form the broader dilemma facing contemporary artists overrun with an unprecedented quantity of cultural artifacts that call out to us to inhabit particular identities even as they threaten to dissolve whatever sense of ourselves might exist outside the ever-expanding territory of the marketplace. We conceive of ourselves as an aggregation of parts that derive in large measure from consumer culture. Whether we have legitimately purchased these parts and can therefore claim to “own” them is secondary to our perception that self-possession depends on our ability to impose our own order on them. Until we achieve this, the parts that comprise our identity will own us.

I think the proliferation of file-sharing, which both makes homebrewed mash-up culture an affordable alternative to traditional music-making and serves as the principal means of distributing illegal productions like The Gray Album, is symptomatic of this search for an order that we have ordered ourselves. If you can put the songs that define you on your iPod, grouped in playlists of your own creation, then you have made yourself a portable self.

For this reason, I believe that the radical potential in mash-up culture inheres in its resistance to traditional consumerism. So long as you can’t buy The Gray Album in stores, it retains an aura of inaccessibility. You can get it easily enough, with the right connections. You can even pay someone to download it for you and burn it to a disc. But all of this has to take place outside the normal channels of consumer capitalism. At best, it’s a gray market commodity.

The pleasure of listening to mash-ups is not in thinking, “Wow, I never would have thought of that. I can’t do that myself,” but the exact opposite: “I can do that too!” This is where mash-up culture most resembles punk. When punk musicians on stage would “front” by playing worse than they were capable of playing – the story of the Sex Pistols, aside from Sid Vicious, is exemplary in this regard – they were making an implicit appeal to their audience: “Join us.” The appeal of the performance thus lay not in the prowess it demonstrated but the suggestion that technical knowledge is not the essence of art making, but a supplement to it. The desired outcome for people attending a punk show was the sense, to borrow the title of Michael Azerrad’s book on alternative rock in America, that this band could be your life.

It’s worth noting, to come full circle, that cover songs have been a big part of punk culture. When Hüsker Dü turns the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” or the theme song from the Mary Tyler Moore show into a wall of shimmering noise, it feels like a glorious shattering of the superficially impenetrable façade of the commodity. The best mash-ups do something analogous and, in the process, redeem songs that have been played to death. Although very slick by the standards of do-it-yourself mash-ups, the one that overlays Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know,” U2’s “With Or Without You,” and the well-oiled throb of a rave rhythm section does precisely that.

Full disclosure requires me to confess that I made a few changes to this fragment, though I usually post them without any changes. In rereading what I'd come up with, I had the sense that it probably wasn't the final version that I'd sent Annalee. There were a few places where it seemed like something had been accidentally deleted. And two paragraphs ended too abruptly for my taste. The only major addition, though, is the line about the gray market. I couldn't resist. Why didn't I think of that formulation back in 2004?

The notes I take in books have become increasingly minimal over the past two decades. I blame technological change. Because I stopped writing directly in books around 1990 or so, whatever I inscribe must fit onto something I affix to the page. Originally, I used the classic yellow Post-It notes, often to great excess. I have one copy of Moby Dick that I notated so overzealously that the pages are almost impossible to separate. Then I discovered tape flags, another fine 3M product. I liked the fact that they didn't tear or detach easily. And I welcomed the discipline of compressing my commentary onto the transparent portion of the notes, which has the added virtue of assuring that the referent is clear, since my text refers to the portion of text it adjoins. Now, however, those large tape flags have become an endangered species and I have been forced to switch to the narrower sort, which cost a lot less but only provide enough room to write two or three words.

Sometimes I will pick up one of my older books, the sort festooned with Post-Its, and, in the effort to read it with fresh eyes, remove my commentary. I'm doing that with my first copy of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction right now, which is filled with examples of what I was thinking about in 1993. Because I don't want to lose the labor that went into those Post-Its, I am transcribing them for posterity. It's an exhausting undertaking, but one that I would feel terrible to forsake. And at least there's the promise of a document at the end, however cryptic without the text it refers to, that can be used to transport myself back in time. Here are some Post-It notes I logged back in 2002, which date from around the same time as the ones I made on Distinction:

From Brian Wallis, editor, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Boston: David Godine, 1984)

[ALL NOTES ON POST-ITS UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED]

1) Robert Hughes, “The Rise of Andy Warhol” (45-57)

[NOTES COME FROM PREPARATIONS FOR BAD SUBJECTS “WIRED?” PIECE FROM ISSUE #10, FALL 1993]

• 49m: Note equation of Warhol and a TV, mention of his “mysterious circuitry”
• 52t: “Roughly silkscreened, full of slips” like “sleazy color of TV”
• 53t: I’m offended by the dis of (German) Marxists, but actually I’d have to agree in a way (since that’s the substance of my critique)
• 55t "Bleeding out a good deal of information from the image by reducing it to monochrome , and then printing it over a fudgy background of decorative color, applied with a wide, loaded brush to give the impression of verve” -- no relation to background

2 Frederic Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia; or Can We Imagine the Future” (239-252)

[NOTE MUST COME FROM BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY PAPER PREPARATION, CIRCA FALL 1992 OR SPRING 1993]

• 240t (Two adjoining tape flags w/o comment, perhaps added later than 1993): The paragraph in question concerns the equivalent to the “master fantasy” of progress
• 245t: Key to Benjamin on Moscow = Visiting new city, land makes us see things, ‘slip’ on the suddenly impermeable materiality of ‘daily’ existence (water into ice). Sci-Fi (244) and Raymond Chandler (245) similarly make present (in manner of all good art? -- Russian Formalists) ‘strange’, make it, therefore, ‘appear’

3) Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” (417-432)

[NOTES COME FROM PREPARATIONS FOR BAD SUBJECTS “WIRED?” PIECE FROM ISSUE #10, FALL 1993]

• 419t, Paragraph #3: Props to Frankfurt School
• 419t Paragraph #4: How Foucault is different: local analysis of different fields, i.e. where Frankfurt School totalized /was general, he’ll not be
• 420t, Paragraph #3: A privileging of ‘immediate’ struggles seems to be at work here -- i.e. not looking for the ‘chief enemy’ (like ‘capitalism’) but immediate enemies… though there are problems w/this for me, obviously, I do see benefits to learning what ‘immediate enemies’ are
• 420t, Paragraph #3: No ‘final’ liberation, ‘revolution’ -- ‘anarchistic struggles’ (Foucault seems to be privileging them, aiding my point about him and anarchism)
• 420m, Paragraph #4: Don’t see things being so utopian -- see our Bad Subjects critique of a certain kind of multiculturalism
• 421m: Foucault invokes Renaissance -- chatting with Greenblatt???
• 421b: State’s power is “both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power”
• 424t, Paragraph #2: Task might now be to refuse ‘who we are’ -- refusing totalization/individualization double-bind
• 424m, Paragraph #4: ‘Prefer not’ = shades of Bartleby in this refusal (paragraph #2)?! (‘Tho it’s a different article!)
• 424m, Paragraph #4: Not questioning nature of power -- I agree, but does Foucault question his own -- electrical -- metaphorics of power?
• 425t: ‘Power’ relations can’t be reduced merely to “relationships of communication” [SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE, 2002: Habermas is the target here, as indicated by the footnote] -- “power relations have a specific nature”
• 426b, Last Two Paragraphs: A Marxist kind of move -- instead of reifying Power “itself”, he states that power is always relational AND “not simply a relationship between partners (i.e. not equal)
• 427t, Paragraph #2: Civilized power hides itself (ME: like beauty in a white noise-drenched post-punk song?) -- power in ‘DRAG’ (Anno’s contribution) -- distinction between power and violence… Power is a set of “actions upon other actions”
• 427b: Re: electrical -- ‘conduct’
• 428t, Paragraph #2: “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” -- “In this game freedom may well appear as the condition of the exercise of power” -- At “heart” of power relations are “the relationships of the will and the intransigence of freedom”
• 428-9 [A stand-alone Pooh note stuck in these pages]: P.429 and earlier, A.A.M. -- Could Foucault’s ‘intransigence’/’intransitivity’ of freedom be linked to that which alters, distorts the flow of power through itself?? -- Freedom in ‘failure’
• 429b, Last Paragraph: Re: ‘differentiations’ -- “Every relationship of power puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and results -- vgl. making of ‘distinctions’ a la Bourdieu (I’m thinking of alternative music here)
• 431b: “It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape”
• 432: Power relations vs. adversarial relations -- citizens vs. enemies, sort of… Last paragraph is weak

The "Wired?" piece I mentioned in my transcription -- here offered in the Courier version included in a Nettime collection -- was one of my most successful pieces for Bad Subjects, though it has not aged as well as others. I was reading Michel Foucault as a theorist of networked existence, even though he wasn't overtly addressing the concerns of cybernetics. That stuff was in the air for much of the post-World War II era, though, as famous passages in the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida attest. I suppose my implicit argument was that Foucault was mindful of the discourse they invoke, even though he shied away from its terminology. After all, he had a tendency to shy away from most of the dominant intellectual language of his day, as his relation to Marxism indicates. Oh, and I should mention, in light of that "Wired?" piece, that it's funny to remember when a "wireless" experience implied a vacation from computer technology, rather than its deeper penetration of everyday life. These days, "wireless" means you owe them something, to paraphrase a poem that has been running through my head lately.

This fragment comes from a piece I originally began prior to the 2004 Presidential election. It kept changing over time, until it was a 20,000 word monster in need of an organizing principle. Perhaps I'll publish it one day. In the interim, here's an autobiographical segment I wrote to provide background for a points I wanted to make about my daughter's political education in the post-9/11 era:

I'm a child of the Bicentennial. Growing up in a part of Pennsylvania steeped in my nation's history, I received steady doses of Americana. Some of my earliest memories are of playing in our living room, a half-timbered cabin from the early 1700s around which a much larger house was gradually constructed. I felt the rough grain of the beams, toed the uneven stone of the large fireplace, peered out the cut in the wall where one of the cabin's original windows had turned into an alcove between our living-room and kitchen. While living this way was "normal" to me – a number of my friends lived in houses of similar age – the build-up to 1976 transformed my surroundings into a superb foundation for fantasy.

It wasn't hard for me to imagine existence before the Revolution or the Civil War, because reminders of the distant past were everywhere. Thus, when we took school trips to see the place where George Washington crossed the Delaware or sat along 212 to witness the recreation of the Liberty Bell's retreat from Philadelphia, I never had the sense of being forced to absorb someone else's history. It was mine as surely as my own home was. One of the great surprises I had going to college in California was learning that even the brightest students from that state tended to regard Colonial history as irrelevant to their own lives, as much of an imposition as the demand that they show a hall pass in high school.

For me, by contrast, it was only the history of my own lifetime that felt like an imposition. My earliest memories of politics are hearing my mother and grandmother talk about "Tricky Dick" while I played with my Matchbox cars. I recall my mother watching George McGovern on television, though I didn't really understand who he was. My only distinct memory is surely a false one. McGovern is introduced to Hollywood premiere-style applause and slowly descends a curving staircase onto a stage. I'm intrigued by the spectacle, but also annoyed that his appearance is preempting my favorite television program Temperature's Rising. It wasn't until years later that I retroactively comprehended the relationship between Nixon and McGovern. It's probably better that way. The commercial with the crying Indian depressed me enough on its own. Had I connected its impact on me to the reality of American politics in 1972, I might have been traumatized for life.

Later, when my mother watched hour after hour of the Watergate hearings instead of her usual soap operas, I understood that something special was happening, but was never able to attach significance to the names that dominated my day: Dean, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Liddy. The same went for news of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, which was all over WOR, but no more comprehensible for being covered so thoroughly. The day Richard Nixon resigned, my parents told me to pay attention because it was an event of great historical significance. I did as instructed, but the memory of that day takes a back seat to the one from earlier in the year of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home-run record. The following year, I began to watch the news on television regularly. Even so, I continued to have difficulty making sense of political events. Ask me what I recall of 1975 and I'll be hard-pressed to come up with more than, "Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Beirut." Indeed, it was not until the Presidential campaign of the Bicenntennial year that I felt confident enough to articulate a position of my own. Even then, however, I felt a lot more certain about the past than the present.

My sense of historical continuity stayed with me throughout my grade-school years. When I moved on to playing World War II, my fantasies of leading a rustic eighteenth-century American life were like undergarments beneath my current make-believe. The stories of military heroism I read and acted out were refracted through my sense of early American virtue. Rather than perceiving the link between tales about vanquishing the Nazis and Japs and the contemporary American policies that inspired so much confusion in me, I instead saw them through the red-white-and-blue lenses of Revolutionary War patriotism. Like most children who became aware of the world in the hangover from the 1960s, I experienced a profound disjunction between the glorious past when it was acceptable to root for the United States and the inglorious present when such partisanship seemed foolish at best.

When I reflect back on my experience of the 1970s today, I remember the decade first and foremost as a time of perpetual and inexplicable crisis, one major news event after another an exception to the way things were supposed to work. Coming in the midst of so much confusion, the Bicentennial kept my belief in simple truths alive. Without its influence, I might have become a grade-school cynic, much like those children from broken homes whose world-weary visages betray a permanent loss of innocence. Instead, I became a willful idealist.

By the time the 1980 Presidential campaign rolled around, I had developed a much firmer sense of my political views. For many people my age, the candidacy of Ronald Reagan held out the promise of a return to a simpler time, when it was easy for Americans to feel proud of their country. I didn't see it that way. Although I was only twelve, I had already seen and read enough to conclude that I would never be a Republican. I pinned my hopes on the people trying to prevent Reagan's election. But I was energized. Like my friend who was enamored of John Anderson's independent candidacy, I believed enough in the political process to insist that it mattered a great deal who became President. If I shuddered at the thought of a Reagan Administration, it was because I held the office in high regard. He was not worthy, I thought, of taking the place of Jefferson, Lincoln, or the Roosevelts. But I never doubted the worthiness of the place itself.

I didn't mention it here, but I remember finding Ronald Reagan scary during his 1976 challenge to Gerald Ford for the Republican Presidential nomination. The genial aspect he often presented, whether by choice or compulsion, in the White House was largely missing on the campaign trail in that failed bid. He was trying to round up a conservative base, not appeal to a broad spectrum of American society. I think my strong opposition to his 1980 candidacy had a lot to do with remembering his angry demeanor of 1976.

I couldn’t stop. Twenty hours earlier I had boarded a Lufthansa jet in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. Now I was in Italy for the first time, having finally managed to extricate myself from Venice’s Marco Polo Airport. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t have the right map. I didn’t have Italian currency, having discovered at the airport that the secret code for my ATM card was too long for European machines. I was driving a Fiat Brava rental car with a clutch radically different from my VW Passat’s back home. And I was unspeakably tired. Yet once I found the road, I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to drive.

I was sure that everything would work out if I could just keep moving. I’m still here, so it must have. But in the short term, my faith in movement only made things worse. Because I didn’t pause to get my bearings, I ended up missing the on-ramp for the Autostrada. I drove for hours on regional two-lane roads that seemed to be headed in the right direction, but were exceedingly slow going. Periodically, I would see signs for the Autostrada and head in that direction, only to find myself stuck in yet another belltower-dominated town, navigating a maze of traffic circles and one-way streets. Since few roads in Italy are numbered and my map only showed major highways, I had no way of knowing how badly I had lost my way.

At one point, sitting at a traffic light, I realized that my car had a cassette player. Digging through my carry-on bag, I found my case of tapes and extracted Yo La Tengo’s I Hear the Heart Beating as One. I’m enormously fond of the American road-trip. But I can’t imagine taking one unless I have control over the music I hear. There’s something comforting about the fusion of new landscape with old sounds. And on this day it was particularly welcome. Hearing the record’s first track slowly swell to volume, I relaxed. The call-and-response of song and steering wheel helped me through another 45 minutes. When the tape switched over to Yo La Tengo’s Painful on Side B, however, I started to panic again. I was supposed to arrive at my destination in the south of Austria by 6pm. It was already 4pm and I was still seeing signs for the same cluster of towns: Venezia, Treviso, Padua.

Finally, I located an entrance to the Autostrada. But I had no lire. As it turned out, I probably could have used my credit card to pay the toll, if I had known which lane to pick. With no knowledge of Italian, though, I was too frightened to get on a freeway I might not be able to leave. So I drove back to the nearest towns, looking for an ATM that might work. Because it was Friday afternoon, the banks were already closed. But I was sure that my experience at the airport had been an aberration. There had to be a machine that would accomodate a secret code of more than five digits. Wrong. When I returned to the States, a friend told me that there are Citibank ATMs in every major city that will do the trick. But I was mired in the small towns of the Veneto.

Despairing of ever escaping Italy, I decided to backtrack all the way to Venice. At least I would be able to get a cash advance on my credit card at the airport. And the signs for Venice were a lot easier to follow than the signs for points north. After another hour, I arrived back at Marco Polo. I finally did secure some lire, though my worn-out brain requested less than I should have. More importantly, I managed to extract myself from the airport’s parking garage. A few minutes later, I was finally on the Autostrada.

This was one occasion when I would have reached my destination faster by slowing down. But I was overwhelmed by the desire to stay in motion. Michael Herr describes a similar feeling in Dispatches, his book on the Vietnam War:

“Best way’s to just keep moving,” one of them told us.

“Just keep moving, stay in motion, you know what I’m saying?”

We knew. He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a true child of thewar, because except for the rare times when you were pinned or stranded the system was geared to keep you mobile, if that was what you wanted. As a technique for staying alive it seemed to make as much sense as anything, given naturally that you were there to begin with and see it close; it started out sound and straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the more you moved the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides death and mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that the more you would have to let go of one day as a “survivor.”

Herr’s breathless prose here provides a window on the specific horror of the first televised war. But it also reveals something important about American identity. We aren’t accustomed to feeling like targets. And when we do, we hit the road.

Like most Americans, I definitely felt like a target in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Once I had collected myself, I realized that my long-anticipated trip to Austria was in jeopardy. Yet I still booked my flight for Europe in late September, figuring that air travel would be safer because of the new security measures. If the world situation worsened prior to my departure, I would stay home. Ironically, it was the situation at home that took a turn for the worse. Even while the American-led intervention in Afghanistan struggled to make headway, it was already clear that there was little chance of the conflict spreading in the immediate future. But the comfort that this realization might have brought Americans was deflected by the discovery of multiple letters containing anthrax in the postal system. Suddenly, it wasn’t just men from the Middle East who were inspiring anxiety, but our trusted mail carriers.

As I write this, we still have no idea who sent those deadly letters. Yet, whatever their intentions may have been, they certainly picked a perfect strategy for undermining the American home. Having a mailing address is a prerequisite for participating fully in the modern world. Without one, you can’t use credit cards, own property, or vote. Some wealthy people have a separate office to handle their correspondence. For most of us, however, mail comes to our place of residence. It is the place where our private and public lives most consistently overlap. We are delighted when the mail brings good news, depressed when it brings bad. I’ve heard people say that an unwelcome letter or unanticipated bill has “contaminated” their space. Now the metaphor has become frighteningly literal. But the metaphor lives on.

Like many Americans in the wake of September 11th, my partner and I had to make a conscious effort to limit the flow of information into our house. Not only did we make it a point to keep the television off when our almost three-year-old daughter was up, we also told ourselves not to look too hard or long at the horrifying images. The fact that FOX News and CNN rapidly developed a strident “yellow journalism” that would have made William Randolph Hearst proud gave us another reason to tune out. Even brief exposure to the marketing of “American’s New War” made it hard to remember that we were, in fact, the victims of a terrorist attack. In the first few weeks afterwards, we got most of our information from The New York Times, whose daily supplement in section B, “A Nation Challenged,” forcefully reminded us that the appropriate injunction was not “Remember the Maine!” but “Remember the Arizona!”

Once the anthrax scare began to dominate the headlines, though, our attitude towards The New York Times changed. Somehow, the fact that the newspaper was delivered to our door like the mail marked it as being part of the problem. The mere act of removing its blue plastic sheath seemed dangerous. But it was reading the paper that proved hardest. I vowed to read the summary of the previous day’s developments printed on the bottom of page B1, yet found it increasingly difficult to complete even that five-minute task. My partner stopped reading the “news” altogether, confining herself to “Arts and Leisure.” From that point, our commitment to staying current rapidly decreased. By the middle of October, I was taking two or three of that week’s papers out of their wrapper on recycling day.

I recognize that this is a fundamentally irrational response to the prospect of bad news, like that of the person who refuses to get screened for cancer just in case he has it. The parental role we had exercised in limiting our daughter’s exposure to potentially disturbing knowledge had been turned back on ourselves. We were content to live as toddlers. But we were happier as a result. To read the paper was to risk losing what little sense of security we had left. The more information we absorbed, the more we perceived ourselves to be “sitting ducks.” In contrast to Herr’s experience as a wartime correspondent, this was one case when it might have been easier to preserve our innocence by staying in motion. The “cone” of awareness Herr describes grew in proportion, not to how much ground we covered, but to how much news we allowed into our home.

As I boarded the plane in Phoenix on October 25th, I was glad that I had decided to fly Lufthansa to Europe. I could have taken comfort in Lufthansa’s safety record, in its stringent security measures, in the mere fact that it wasn’t an American airline. But what pleased me was something far more mundane: the newspapers. The racks at the end of the jetway presented me with the new issue of the weekly Die Zeit, as well as the Frankfurter Allgemine Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau. I eagerly clutched them all to my chest, intent on immersing myself in the minutiae of German life. Sure enough, although the papers held planty of information on the war in Afghanistan and the latest events in the anthrax crisis, their tone conveyed a sense that these stories were simply more “news of the world.” The melodrama of American television and the fixation on details in The New York Times was absent. In fact, you almost had the impression that September 11th had only marked a watershed for the United States. By traveling to Europe, I hoped to be temporarily moving back to a time when it was still possible for me to read the news with detachment.

As I left Marco Polo Airport behind me for a second time on October 26th, I felt relief. I could finally immerse myself in the familiar logic of the expressway. From that point onward, my drive to the Austrian town of Klagenfurt became considerably less stressful. Yet it did take longer than it should have. Traffic was heavy. I wasn’t sure of my car’s capabilities. But mostly I was just too tired to make time. Years of making ridiculously long drives with my partner – we once left Chicago at dinner time and were in Denver by 8:30 the next morning – has impressed upon me the importance of stopping to refresh my eyes. When I start to zone out these days, I pull over. Luckily, this wasn’t hard to do on the Autostrada. My friend Joel had told me to look for the Italian roadside rest areas. “You can get a wonderful espresso and tasty panini, Charlie. You’ll love it.” With this helpful advice in mind, I stopped repeatedly.

At first I only had the courage to order coffee, figuring correctly that I could pronounce “espresso.” The panini were another matter. There were many to choose from and I was sure that I would be asked questions about my selection. So I waited until I was close enough to the Austrian border to be able to make my requests in German without feeling overly rude. The panini were pretty good, though more like convenience food than I had imagined. Then again, it was difficult to gauge their taste through all the cigarette smoke. We’ve become very spoiled in the United States. It’s actually possible for non-smokers here to avoid all but the briefest encounters with tobacco. Europe is another matter. I actually enjoy the scent of good tobacco when I stand outside with my friends who smoke on a cold, rainy San Francisco night. But my asthma acts up whenever I’m in a room where someone is smoking. As a consequence, my stops at rest areas became a strange balancing act. I stayed long enough to clear my head, but left while I still had reasonably clear lungs.

The strange thing was that, for all of the discomfort that cigarette smoke brings me, I actually found the bad air quality comforting. It reminded me of my childhood, when my grandmother would provide biting commentary on the world, perched over the ashtray. And this memory proved peculiarly consonant with my desire to escape to a safer time in American history. The events of September 11th were responsible for many ironies. But the fact that the 1970s suddenly seemed like a time of pastoral innocence – when highjackers wanted to go to Cuba instead of their graves – was certainly not the least of these.

Here's another entry in the "fragment" category, this time with a few separate items from the same day:

I need to redeploy that "tan without apology" line some day. It has a nice ring to it. And the bit about the luggage could provide the foundation for a moment of reflection in a story, whether described in the first or third person, if handled deftly. Then again, I'm as noted for my deftness as I am for my dépêche mode. . .

Inspired by the "archive fever" of the redoubtable flw, I'm debuting a new feature today. It parallels one I recently revived after a long hiatus. Both represent an attempt to rethink the aesthetics of the fragment, with both Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel and Walter Benjamin in mind. Everything I post under this tag will be presented as it was originally written, without any editing for content. And none of it will have been made public before appearing here:

Last week I was talking to my best friend about music and mentioned that I was surprised at the excitement generated by Bob Dylan's new album Modern Times. "It's terrible," he said. Although this report wasn't exactly unexpected -- nothing I'd read about it suggested that it was up his alley -- it's vehemence caught me off guard. I wasn't sure what to say. I knew I didn't want to back myself into a rhetorical corner by agreeing implicitly to a critical assessment for which I had no evidence of my own to draw upon. But, as often happens when I'm in conversations about matters of taste, I also didn't want to introduce unnecessary tension into the conversation, particularly since it what was turning out to be an extremely refreshing interlude within a week of enervating stress. So I hedged.

"Although I probably won't like it that much, I'm sure I'll like it better than you," I told him. Then I proceeded to give my take on Dylan's much-discussed renaissance of the past decade-plus. "I didn't like Love and Theft as much as Time Out of Mind. But I liked World Gone Wrong better than either. I like that he was just covering other people's songs in that one." My friend and I then went on to discuss other moments in Dylan's career, including the relative low point of the 1980s. "I liked Infidels," my friend confided, praising its harshness. I reiterated my weakness for sentimental Americana of the sort that inspires Greil Marcus to wax hyperbolic and made it clear that I knew my friend, whose childhood included stints in Israel and Europe, did not share this particular taste preference.

Eventually, the conversation turned to other matters including, rather curiously, the punk-metal band The Melvins, about which I may be writing in a future issue of the magazine. But the portion devoted to Dylan stuck with me through the remainder of the week. Thursday my daughter and I dropped my wife off at the airport at 5:45am and then made our way to Starbucks to read and relax before it was time for her school to start. At various junctures in her still youthful youth -- she will soon turn eight -- we have played her Bob Dylan songs, both in cover versions and on the Greatest Hits collection that confines itself largely to his pre-motorcycle crash incarnations. At first she liked "Blowin' in the Wind," which she knew from a Peter, Paul and Mary album, and "Mr. Tambourine Man" best.

When I put the CD in the car last month, though, needing a change from our recent driving-to-school staples, The Carpenters' Greatest Hits, Cabaret, and Carole King's Tapestry, I was surprised to perceive how her taste for Dylan had broadened. This time the songs she wanted to hear repeatedly were "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Like a Rolling Stone," to which she joined her mother and I in several rousing sing-a-longs that were rich with deeper significance for her parents, because she was finding her way in a lyrical landscape that played an important part in her mother's teenage years and, as a consequence, her father's investment in the song. The timing of Dylan's new album was therefore ideal from my perspective as someone who cares deeply about his daughter's cultural education. I told her about the record and promised that we would buy it when it came out.

As it turned out, it took me longer than I'd expected. I had too many other things to do to go to the places where it would be less than $16.95. When we arrived at Starbucks a little after 6am on Thursday and the record was displayed right by the register, I decided that I might as well buy it there. Clearly, I wasn't the only one who made that impulse purchase, since Modern Times debuted at #1 on the Billboard Charts, the first Dylan record in thirty years to do so. Then again, the new Rolling Stones was displayed just as prominently at Starbucks last fall and didn't do as well, so there must be more to the resurgence in Dylan's commerical success than good product placement.

One thing I've been able to notice, as someone who teaches literature and film to English majors, is that a surprising number of literarily inclined twenty-somethings in the post-9/11 era have a thing for Bob Dylan that can't reduced to a general interest in "Classic Rock" or the 1960s. Obviously, a lot of the reason why Dylan's record is doing so well has to do with all the Baby Boomers and againg Gen-Xers who felt obligated to buy it, whether for themselves or as something to share with their children. But I'd warrant that more people in the pre-settled-down stage of life have purchased Modern Times than someone out of touch with college-age students would have expected.

At any rate, as soon as we began the drive up the hill to my daughter's school, I put the album on for us to hear. She seemed to like it, although she was taken aback by how different the Dylan of the 2000s sounds than the Dylan of the 1960s. I, however, was immediately hooked. I have a deeply ingrained tendency to want to redeem cultural offerings that others reject out of hand, so my friend's "It's terrible" may have inspired me, paradoxically, to listen with a more open mind than usual. But as my desire to hear Modern Times has persisted over the weekend and as, more importantly, the songs on it have repeatedly surfaced as a mental soundtrack when I'm not listening to it, I've had to acknowledge that my taste for it goes deeper than any contrarian impulse. That weakness for sentimental Americana is also to blame. Strangely, though, the album's 1950s-era rock stylings have been striking me, not as nostalgic, but fresh and forward-looking.

Much has been made of Dylan name-checking Alicia Keys on Modern Times' first track, with most commentators seeing it as a sign that he isn't willing to curl up inside a music universe shut off from the contemporary scene. And that seems like a good reading. What I've found, though, is that the record's strangely novel lack of musical novelty is more important than any specific up-to-dateness of Dylan's lyrics. It's like he and his collaborators found the way to reveal the roots in the rock tradition without making the music sound retro. The last song, "Ain't Talkin'," even resembles a mid-70s Fleetwood Mac tune at times, but without feeling in any way derivative.

To me, that is. As my conversation with my friend who found the record "terrible" indicates, there is no guarantee that other listeners will join me in this assessment of Modern Times. Even though it doesn't seem to be a period piece to my ears, I do think that an affection for sentimental Americana may be a pre-requisite for genuine pleasure. More than that, though, I believe that it won't be possible for someone to embrace the album the way I have unless she or he is in a mood to hear gentle love songs. Although there's still plenty of irony in both Dylan's words and delivery, Modern Times is ultimately a collection of love songs in both a literal sense -- the second song "Spirit in the Water" is almost like a late Louis Armstrong song in its unabashed cuteness -- and a metaphoric sense -- the music romances the tradition that it invokes.

Maybe the reason that the record doesn't sound retro to me is that it the songs never lose this sense of an addressee. If there is mimicry here, it is mimicry in the service of continuing the conversation, the way you say, "Yes," to a friend even though you might rather say, "No," just because you want to keep talking. In other words, I'm suggesting that Modern Times manages to avoid the sheen of nostalgia by never forgetting that the music it refers to requires wooing. Without that persistent sense of dialogue, Modern Times might as well have been sung in Latin.

I still hear that record in my head all the time. For whatever reason, it penetrated my intellectual defenses and reached that place in my mind where feeling comes first. I do think that it's an excellent and, now that the initial hype has faded, underrated album. But my relation to it traces a detour around any attempt at passing objective judgment on it.

When I conjure Modern Times now, I keep picturing the orange end cap I used for my now-deceased iPod Shuffle, the one that was frozen in time for over a year with a playlist from the summer of 2006: The Silver Jews and Sparklehorse's last offerings, Band of Horses and Bloc Party's debut albums, and the Danielson LP I kept skipping through because it got on my nerves. As much great music as I had on that playlist, however, it's Modern Times I associate with the device, because for some inexplicable reason it would always start playing in the middle of that record. This is how I came to realize that I loved it, for I would almost always listen to several songs before painstakingly seeking out the album I wanted to hear.

I ended up writing a review for Tikkun in which I turned this fragment inside out, focusing most of my attention on the Melvins, who are mentioned in passing here, but using the example of Bob Dylan to prove my central point: "The success of Bob Dylan’s Modern Times testifies not to the renewed vitality of the traditional music industry, but to the fact that there will never be another Bob Dylan." As I sit here contemplating Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, the Dylan-inspired deconstruction of the biopic genre, I'm moved to second my own motion. But I'll also add that there will never be another iPod Shuffle like my malfunctioning one with the orange end cap.