WFMU: This Is The Modern World with Trouble: Playlist from May 15, 2012

Listener comments!
	9:03am trouble: good morning tuesday and all of tuesdays fans, and not
	9:04am annie: no work today, so i am able to hear the sounds of your voice and musical selections, yay!
	9:05am trouble: good morning annie, welcome
	9:05am Cheri Pi: I like this atmosphere Trouble!
	9:07am Brian in UK: Hello trouble. Can you rotate the image during the show? Looking forward to the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican. Best one in forty years. http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409
	9:07am still b/p: It took a moment to see a couple...no several...no , 20+ faces in the Kusama.
	9:20am dc pat: wow, nice painting
	9:21am dc pat: dammit. I started a painting a month or 2 ago and still haven't finished it. must. make. time.
	9:22am trouble: hello cheri pi, merci. @brian, umm no. i can hardly get the image right side up never mind sideways at this hour. today's artist is yayoi kusama
	9:24am BSI: I am awash in a churning vortex of yellow eyes (again?)
	9:28am annie: (dcpat, it was l frank baum, believe it or not)
	9:29am dc pat: yeah, I just saw that. not good.
	9:30am dc pat: oh well, I still like the movie and I like Journey to the End of the Night even though Celine was Nazi supporter.
	9:44am Parq: Speaking of Nazi supporters, if you're a Roald Dahl fan, I have some bad news for you ...
	9:51am ausmanx: ah, gertrude stein was with old Adolf too... where does it stop? even Elton John played at Rush Limbaugh's wedding!
	9:55am dc pat: well, we'll always have Charlie Chaplin on our side..
	9:56am ?: I'll bet Limbaugh wouldn't approve of Elton's wedding.
	9:57am trouble: i don't want to validate bad behavior, but it is sort of childlike of our society to assume artists whom we enjoy and respect have to be good people. like we dont want to admit that our parents r effed up, we don't want to admit that artists can be ugly, just like people. we are all ugly in one or many ways
	9:58am ausmanx: rush and elton have been getting it on for years, i reckon. anyone seen Iron Sky yet? moon nazis return to earth for Sarah Palin's 2020 presidential campaign
	9:58am Jennique: I feel like I am looking through a microscope when I look at this painting. Lots of cilia and mitochondria and the beginnings of life.
	10:00am Cecile: hello, all! Annie!
	10:00am BSI: Mitochondria!
	10:01am annie: cecile!!! i'm still pretty happy here, surprise surprise!!
	10:01am dc pat: I think you're right on there trouble but that doesn't mean we have to like them. It's a bonus for me to dig a piece of art and also be able to respect the artist. Not a requirement though
	10:01am ausmanx: actually, trouble, i DO think artists weigh very heavily on the humanist side of the spectrum, and so, childlike or not, i still assume that good work incorporates humane values. nazism was fundamentally anti-art anyway (at least in terms of imagination - it only accepted representation)
	10:03am Cecile: that is so awesome
	10:04am fred von helsing: yup Iron Sky is very OK !
	10:05am Cecile: I think there is as wide a swath of internalized (not neccessarily expressed) political belief within artists as there are human beliefs. I used to be frustrated with people who were absolute morons and jackasses being able to draw me under the table. The gift doesn't choose the vessel.
	10:06am trouble: hey jennique!
	10:06am Cecile: I say that a lot. Also, "a stopped clock is right two times a day." Keeps me from punching people in the head.
	10:07am Parq: @Trouble, 9:46 -- my point exactly.
	10:08am annie: ( i was going to type a comment, then i deleted it)
	10:10am duke: If you are a public artist and you make public statements, it seems the public has the right to judge you on it. I don't see that talent gives you a pass.
	10:11am annie: i know sure certain that my point of view of a writer whose work i love would definitely be tainted by his/her politics, yet i would hope to transcend that narrow view and see the work for its own worth....
	10:11am trouble: yes dc pat, i do want to like my idols, sadly sometimes, i can't. @ausmanx, nazism seems attractive to people who feel powerless, that is the root of art for some, and for others that makes them unable to act. following seems easier to them. being humane seems low on the human needs pyramid to that type.
	10:11am goldfrapp: I am a monster to work with. Deal with it.
	10:11am Cecile: no, it does not. But what I'm saying is that, it's kind of futile to not expect humans to, well, be humans no matter what beauty they create.
	10:12am annie: even great writers go through periods and phases of creativity and thought, tolstoy for instance, to name only one
	10:13am Cecile: I think for fascists their version of "humane' (everyone happy and perfectly orderly) is so abstract and global that the personal cost of an individual is a minor inconvenience.
	10:14am ausmanx: i think art can be appreicated in a vacuum if the vacuum exists, but once you know about the poison it has to taint the work. lucky are those who read nothing about gertrude stein's personal life, and just read the books. gunter grass is of course one of the most fascinating people in this respect - the greatest writer about nazism ends up admitting he was waffen ss. but that's another story...
	10:15am Cecile: I actually believe highly in knowing the writer's/artist's history. I can appreciate William Burroughs's work while at the same time knowing he was not a nice man at all.
	10:15am BDR: Eno's 64 today. Hint.
	10:16am dc pat: shit did not know that about Grass....see? Why are you people telling me this??
	10:17am Cecile: sorree. I guess I won't tell you that Jerzy Kozinski's "The Painted Bird" was also mostly made up.
	10:17am Cecile: whoops.
	10:19am dc pat: But Grass is a good example: on the surface a statement like "he was in the Waffen SS" is pretty bad but it turns out he was conscripted as a teenager near the end of the war so what does that really say about his art?
	10:20am duke: Burroughs doesn't come off as all that nice in his books.
	10:20am annie: so, if a writer were to just write his mind out in the open, how would it affect the way you read the work? if it was hidden in allegory we would have a different reaction, almost precieving it as a wondrous work of art; the same thing can even be said about painting, sculpture.. any form of expression, so l frank baum was racist, isn't there some small piece of that riffling through the books?
	10:21am ffrr: Maurice Chavalier's unique talent transcended his performing for Nazi-pied France. He wasn't vilified for it until years later, when they signed him for 'Gigi'. My friend doesn't like Patricia Heaton simply because she's Catholic/Pro Life, even though she's quite funny and talented. Can't please everyone.
	10:22am ausmanx: dcpat, absolutely. just makes grass more interesting really, as it raises the issue of how much of the ideology you actually bought into to become part of the system. in his case, not very much, i assume. it's the issue for the whole of german society, and grass thus becomes an even more important part of that historical analysis
	10:22am Cecile: 1) I believe the Baum piece in question was supposed to be satire. 2) Yeh, I love the Oz books, but toward the end, the Oz-ites come across as really smug and self-absorbed. I'm still bitter about how Dorothy's friend Hank was treated. Patricia Heaton may be pro-life, but she is also pro-birth control, which is sensible to me.
	10:23am annie: and i heard some great spoken work from bukowsky, it shone a light on his romantic aspect which had been hidden from me, same thing in the reverse can be said about leo cohen... he had a difficult time with women; some of his poetry was down-right abusive
	10:24am Jennique: This song reminds me of the theme to Knight Rider.
	10:24am Cecile: No, Burroughs wasn't nice in his work, duke, but a lot of people emulated him. Would they emulate him if they knew what he was really like? I think not as many people would do that.
	10:26am annie: .....and where to begin with the multiple aspects of henry miller!!
	10:26am dc pat: (where else would you get a conversation like this? I'm honored to be posting along side of folks who have such depth and wisdom)
	10:27am ausmanx: okay, after midnight here so i'm off to curl up with a little Mein Kampf... good night all!
	10:27am trouble: i thought this was a fascinating insight into roald dahl's world:thisrecording.com...
	10:27am John Lennon: I promoted peace to mankind but I was quite a dick at times to people close to me...
	10:27am dc pat: that's just it annie! These people are maybe necessarily complex as hell so the safe bet is to just go with Millers books and take what you can from them
	10:28am Cecile: I have less problem with artists being inconsistent than athletes. They are touted as being role models, but sure ain't. I pretty much stopped watching pro basketball when I learned the extent of Robert Parish's serial spousal abuse and how it was covered up. I went to myself "if the NBA wants female fans, it can't let the players treat them like punching bags."
	10:29am still b/p: Dropping the Baum -- wasn't familiar with this until a couple of weeks ago, some of it is self-contradictory, but I don't know about satirical: http://tinyurl.com/btalmfa
	10:30am Cecile: I still get a hankering to sit in front of the TV to watch 3 playoff games in a row, but i can't. One guy I know goes "well I never saw them as role models, so what's your problem?" I go "infidelity is one thing, drug use another, but battery is a whole new can of worms."
	10:30am annie: and that i surely did, each and every one of them,including his watercolors and letters..... .. in order to understand a writer/artist the whole body of work must be observed.. even yours mr lennon!
	10:30am duke: Imitating an artist's behavior instead of her art is often a bad idea. How many musicians messed their lives up because they decided that if Charlie Parker used smack and could play like that, heroin must be the key to play like Bird?
	10:31am Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw-RYsIGhL0&feature=player_embedded
	10:32am ausmanx: pretty right, duke... i've known far too many heroin usrs who think it's creative largely due to Burroughs. it was Burroughs, people, not the heroin!
	10:32am Cecile: oh, duke, exactly
	10:33am annie: and my friend mark points out that this is the 50-year anniversary of clockwork orange's publication, a brilliant piece of work on its own..
	10:33am Cecile: thanks, relevant. I'll save that for later.
	10:35am listener mark: good morning trouble good morning everyone William S. Burroughs shocked me as a young lad when I read "Naked Lunch."
	10:37am Cecile: still b/p, that's what he claimed. as I said to someone about the lousy new De La Soul video, "it's satire. It's not successful satire."
	10:37am Cecile: I suspect Mr. Baum was kind of backpedaling, personally.
	10:39am Brian in UK: ojos de brujo - the sourcerers' eyes.
	10:41am annie: the source of this is a comment he made about the elimination of the indigenous peoples of this continent. he was referring to sitting bull's death
	10:41am dc pat: yee, I dunno. If that's satire, it's downright horrible satire...
	10:41am Patrick: good morning trouble! finally getting a nice spring here in the midwest, how is the east?
	10:43am duke: That kind of satire reminds me of those comedians who launch into a insulting, racist screed and then end with "But I kid, because I love."
	10:44am Cecile: Yes, it's bad. I actually talked to some antiquarian booksellers who said that not only these views but also the fact he was rumored to like young boys keep him from getting the full-on Tolkien treatment.
	10:45am Staceyjoy: That last set was genius, Trouble! The best! Incredible show today, as usual.xxoo
	10:46am Cecile: talk about warts and all, man. And yet the first 5 Oz books were a huge, huge influence on me in terms of imagination.
	10:46am Parq: Dang, Annie, you really started something this morning. I got work to do, but I just had to read the whole thread first. And Miss T, the excellence of your musical selections is as welcome as always.
	10:48am Parq: Seriously, how can you not take an artist's personality into account when you evaluate his or her work? How can you understand the work when you're pretending that a big chunk of what went into it didn't exist?
	10:49am dc pat: it's funny that it actually started on FB and then bled over to WFMU...
	10:49am annie: i loved "la duetto"! hey parq, i can copy and paste the whole thing for you .. save it for later..yeah, right, cecile... and how do we reconcile all this knowledge when we read these stories to our innocents?? i had alot of those issues when my kid was growing up.. how much to share and when to shut up, and then there3 is the whole "fairy-tale" genre, full of murder, mayhem, and dismemberment..
	10:50am annie: exactly parq..
	10:50am Cecile: well, that's why I had issues with my materialist and deconstructionist lit professors at school.
	10:51am listener mark: Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer They weren't "good" people but they changed the boundaries of people's thinking.
	10:51am dc pat: parq: what do you know about the artist who painted the painting to our left? I don't know anything about her and to me it doesn't matter. When I learn something about her, the painting may change a bit with my perception but my appreciation of the piece is certainly not dependent on the artist acting or thinking in specific ways. I see what you're saying but not sure an artists personality should matter.
	10:53am Kevin: OK, I never knew this was the song that PM DAWN sampled! "Reality used to be a Friend of Mine.." Shout out to Jersey City, Prince Be...
	10:56am trouble: the artist's personality has zip to do with art! we make art to converse with our time period,other artists, history, color, you name it. not to tell you a story of what we ate for breakfast and then how it felt going down. or if we felt loved growing up...
	10:56am Andrew: Shouldn't an artist's work be MORE impressive if it speaks to us even though we disagree with her life choices or find her personality distasteful?
	10:56am duke: @dc I think that may be true for an isolated work, but what about when you look at an artist's body of work? It tells some sort of story about the artist's thought processes as they developed and it's hard to isolate the art from other aspects.
	10:57am Andrew: Right on, Trouble!
	10:58am still b/p: I wondered about the thread's phantom first mention. There's a long exchange/dispute in Wiki Talk about changes made to Baum entry by one editor, re genocide, and objections by article author, among several edit disagreements. Watched Kusama's Self-Obliteration film this morning on ubuweb. I hope there ain't no nuggets...or polka dots...of reprehensible history to be tossed into the picture...
	10:58am dc pat: don't get me wrong, I'm part Cherokee and have a strong visceral reaction to that crap Baum wrote, satire or not. But, I still dig his books.
	10:58am Cecile: it has everything to do with art! Your choice of subject matter, what you choose to convey, who you choose to collaborate with, how you respond to different schools of thought.
	10:58am John Wayne Gacy: What do you guys think of my "work"? http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/assets_c/2010/04/gacy2-thumb-500x267.jpg
	10:59am allan: i missed a good talk day! "What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?"
	11:00am dc pat: duke: not saying it's easy and sometimes it's impossible. Hitler was a pretty good watercolor painter but there is no way I can look at his work objectively.
	11:00am annie: wow, i love that allan!! as if the artist's life was slowly draining away with each piece created, rod serling material!
	11:00am allan: Borges felt the same way, seperate art from the artist. Celine wrote one of the best novels of the past 100 years and was a nazi sympathizer. polanski and woody allen both like young girls. the list goes on and on...
	11:01am still b/p: Surprising that Leni Riefenstahl hasn't come up yet. She's often a headliner in these discussions.
	11:01am annie: .... and...
	11:02am Andrew: I don't agree with Allan's quote, whoever said it. Identifying one's worth as a human with one's work strikes me as a dangerous neurosis.
	11:02am allan: @ annie the quote is william gaddis, one of the best
	11:02am dc pat: also, look at it the other way: should we expect a piece of fiction to be the personal philosophy of the writer? Certainly not. Wow, Celine mentioned twice on one playlist! Right on FMUers!!
	11:03am Leni Riefenstahl: Triumph of the Will is Hitler's A Hard Days Night!
	11:03am Parq: Actually, it's kind of difficult to name a producer of great art who wasn't at all dark or troubled (no pun intended).
	11:04am Andrew: Difficult to name a human being of that description!
	11:04am Cecile: I say, if you can separate it, great. But don't criticize those who can't. Excuse me while I go throw darts at a picture of Bertold Brecht. :D
	11:04am annie: i would expect the opposite, pat, interesting thought, too, as i think i may have, now and then, judged a writer by his fiction..i recall how much in love with steinbeck i had been.
	11:05am dc pat: you said it parq. Like Gogol's idea that it may be necessary for the artist to be insane. Sounds good Cecile.
	11:06am dc pat: same here annie. It sure isn't cut and dried.
	11:07am annie: and every single thing miller wrote was the same, yet different,including his "non-fiction"..
	11:07am Andrew: I don't like the romantic idea that creativity = insanity. How in the heck is "art therapy" supposed to work, then? Should the patients' works get worse and worse, until they're cured?
	11:10am allan: identifying one's worth as a human with one's artistic output is the silly shit that drives a lot of great art. it's not healthy but neither is being alive. I like John Ruskin's art criticism knowing that he was a pedophile. there is no room for a debate on aesthetics here, but wrt therapy...yikes. life's wack, get over it
	11:11am allan: i volunteered for an art therapy place, its relation to "Art" or "folk art" is usually that of "lightning to a lightning bug"
	11:12am PJ: Somebody once said that fascism involved the aestheticization of politics, while communism involved the politicization of art. Both produced terrible art, and terrible environments for artists and free-thinkers, but both were terribly attractive to some artists for obvious reasons.
	11:12am dc pat: There's nothing romantic about insanity. Maybe not insanity, then but creativity may benefit from an outsiders viewpoint.
	11:12am listener mark: Is art a different view of the world? the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. ~~ Ezra Pound
	11:13am annie: so, getting all literary criticism here, i read malcolm cowley's essays on writers of his generation and how they did or did not move him, all that... it seemed to me he brought a bit of arrogance to his critiques, although i enjoyed reading them, i did not especially agree
	11:14am dc pat: listner mark: exactly what I was trying to say. And Pound, another Nazi sympathizer!!
	11:15am annie: omg, pat, my father LOVED him.... at one point in my life i knew some of that by heart..
	11:15am Andrew: I feel like mental problems are often the impetus to create art, but then the art is more or less successful in relation to the artists' ability to communicate with others, which could be seen as a measure of sanity.
	11:15am GI Joe: Sometimes artistic output helps one deal with the harsh cruel realities in life that can otherwise drive you insane... Witness my ear necklace....
	11:15am Jennique: I've always hated that stereotype of the insane artist. As if the mental illness was some direct channel to creativity that was otherwise absent. I think Van Gogh would actually have been better if he had some way to control his illness. Think of all the work we missed out on because of it. Also, have you ever noticed how many great paintings are UNTITLED. Many artists just want you to look at the art and make your own observations, bios/artist interpretations be damned.
	11:16am listener mark: Sometimes you go out to the edge to get a better view of the world.
	11:17am allan: it's all aesthetic "choice", whether you identify the work with its creator and if that makes you like it more or less is up to you. something like the rap group die antwoord who are 90% visual, the music doesn't stand alone but the a/v "carries" it, what does it mean? art is controlled insanity
	11:17am Andrew: Yeah. I have friends who hold onto their neuroses proudly because they think they make their art better. Makes me really sad.
	11:18am Cecile: Yes, that's true, Jennique, but half the fact of researching an artist's work is that you become capitvated with the mind that made the piece. I can look at a piece by an anonymous artist, but then I get curious. What were they like? What made them do this piece? why is it anonymous?
	11:18am annie: so, an interesting perspective on insanity and creativity: i am not at all creative and cannot even draw a straight line; the way i express my deep-seated fears and emotions is to listen to music, any and all, and i find it fascinating... there is some music which brings me to tears... THAT is how i release my inner traumas..
	11:18am PJ: In general, people are complicated, artists perhaps a little more so than others because they have some compulsion to externalize inchoate feelings that others keep unexpressed. Many of us like to think of ourselves as good people making a positive contribution to society, but if others knew us as we know ourselves, they might have a different assessment.
	11:19am Cecile: Ha! You are so bloody creative I can't even go there. And anyone can draw if they are relaxed and just look at shapes in front of them.
	11:19am annie: yup...
	11:20am Cecile: creativity can extend to everthing. Even the guy who's spackling a wall and goes "I can make something way better than this."
	11:20am listener mark: I draw stick people at work. my co-workers think I'm crazy. I'm just lazy. But I'm surprised how much definition I can draw with a stick person.
	11:20am PJ: I would also add that imposing any work of art on the public involves an act of egoism, and sometimes the other effects of that ego are indeed ugly.
	11:21am Cecile: I mean, you've managed to live a very exciting life in the time I've known you by just thinking up opportunities and making them happen. I haven't been able to do that lately.
	11:21am Cecile: listener mark - it worked for xkcd dude.
	11:21am allan: "I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue" orwell i'm "creative", i've published a novel and paint lots of shit. but i'm not crazy, i just read a lot. and right now i have to get to work!
	11:22am allan: oh man as for imposing work on the public...so guilty
	11:22am Andrew: I was with ya up until that one, PJ. I don't think the impulse to communicate is necessarily egoic.
	11:22am Parq: May I be so bold as to suggest that, when we reduce the past 2 1/2 hours' conversation to "great art = insanity", we do dishonor to the complexity of both art and the mind? I should add that, by that, I mean the mind of the viewer/listener as much as the mind of the creator.
	11:22am Brian in UK: We are normal and we want out freedom. We are normal and we dig Bert Weedon.
	11:23am dc pat: thanks parq, was trying to phrase the same point.
	11:23am annie: the web-comic cecile? what a gold mine that is!!
	11:24am CFK: "rosebud"
	11:24am too much coffee: liminal... yes, very liminal right now... yessss.......
	11:24am allan: great art isn't insanity. you miss the whole point. the truly insane never make it back.
	11:25am Andrew: Sorry, Parq, I wasn't trying to reduce the whole discussion to that. That was just one branch of it.
	11:25am Parq: I'm supposed to go through about 4 or 5 files an hour at this job. So far this morning, I've done one. Dang you, FMU community, for being so engrossing!
	11:25am too much coffee: I wish my garden sounded like this all the time
	11:26am dc pat: I'm just glad my boss works hundreds of miles away from here.
	11:26am too much coffee: @allan: exactly!
	11:26am duke: I'm not getting anything done either. We've got to stop meeting like this.
	11:27am PJ: Someone did a study examining medical records of prominent artists over the past 200 years and found that, very, very few artists could be classified as insane. This makes sense, because if you are, say, schizophrenic, it's very hard to get it together enough to produce artwork, and if you're manic-depressive, if you are in the depths of depression, you're not getting out of bed, and if you're manic, your mind is moving a thousand miles a minute and it's very hard to focus and finish anything. However, they did find that many artists had relatives that were crippled by manic-depression. My take from this is that strong sensitivity to one's environment and feelings is conducive to making great art, but too much sensitivity bleeds into emotional/mental illness.
	11:27am Jennique: PJ - thank you for using the word inchoate. I am an artist and will use that word liberally from now on. By the way, I have about 13 illustrations to do and managed to do one and a half so far. Not feeling the least bit bad about how my time is spent with FMU.
	11:27am too much coffee: and those who pretend to be insane are the ones who never get anywhere
	11:27am dc pat: and we have exactly 32 minutes to come to a conclusion on all these issues!!
	11:27am Mike East: the company's accountant was just at my desk inquiring if this was "Satan Worshipping music"
	11:27am annie: perhaps it's the strong desire and (self-perceived) inability to express one's emotions which makes it appear that the artist is insane? inner turmoil and all that
	11:28am maja: i suppose an artist is always looking for his or her truth, to catch it and one can go very far And we can not do without making mistakes, actually i nead them to keep me on track
	11:28am duke: @Mike I hope you said yes.
	11:28am Le Pétomane: True art comes from one's fundement.
	11:29am too much coffee: which is why excessive drug use -- which definitely fits under the umbrella of pretending to be insane, according to my observation -- is also pretty much mutually exclusive with serious creative work
	11:29am Jennique: I guess this all depends on what you call "sane." Lots of people I come across who claim to be sane are seriously crazy underneath a very, very fine layer of concealment.
	11:29am Andrew: Very interesting and well said, PJ!
	11:29am CFK: what is pretending?
	11:29am Mike East: @duke, I did. I told him its part of my morning routine, kind of like daily affirmations...except to Satan.
	11:30am Cecile: And what about the "craft" vs. art? Trouble might have to take a second shift to finish this one up.
	11:30am Parq: It's also worth noting that what the medical profession means by "insane" and what art fans mean are two different things. Really, the word is almost meaningless nowadays. How many times have you heard some rich preppy, who wouldn't know the road less traveled if he tripped face down onto it, proudly call himself "crazy"? How many commercials promise that, with a certain consumer product, you can be "crazy" and "just like everybody else" at the same time?
	11:30am too much coffee: which is not to say that one cannot -occasionally- flirt with, or dance around the borders of insanity.
	11:32am Brian in UK: Enjoying the music by the bye, trouble.
	11:32am Andrew: Advertisers are truly "mad men."
	11:32am PJ: Andrew, I think there's a difference between simple communication and art. Art presupposes some kind of permanence and some kind of public, and, for me, at least, thinking that whatever I have to communicate is worth the time of people who don't know me personally and who perhaps cannot know me involves a belief in some kind of importance to whatever I might create, which is sheer egoism.
	11:32am too much coffee: ...but what it all circles back to is Hunter S. Thompson's notion of "The Edge."
	11:33am robyn: interesting discussion. i'm sad i missed most of it. the one person i would volunteer in terms of the art v. personality debate is the marquis de sade. in real life, not a good person, but not as bad as the people in his work, and all the same, his work is endlessly interesting and has inspired equally interesting work from many other authors.
	11:33am too much coffee: or as HST says: "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later."
	11:34am Cecile: It's completely not romantic to me at all. I think non-conformity, spontaneousness and quirkiness are too often described as true insanity.
	11:34am allan: fear and loathing was written on no drugs about a journalism story were drugs were mostly absent, at least according to thompson's letters
	11:35am Andrew: Hmm... you may be right, PJ. But what about when the artist feels like a vessel for communications from the infinite or whatever, that need to be heard by everyone, even though she doesn't know where they came from?
	11:36am too much coffee: I like to think of FMU's mission as, in part, to give us a guided tour of sorts to some of the interesting liminal zones that exist in greater frequency as one moves gently but carefully in the general direction of The Edge.
	11:36am Parq: Ceclie, my point is, not just those things, but simple gut-level excess and renunciation of responsibility. To pluck an EG from the news, I bet Mitt's friends reacted to the hair-cutting incident by proudly declaring him "crazy".
	11:37am annie: at the point in my career, when my profession was coming to a direct and screeching halt, i felt that call to the "edge" it was extremely tempting, yet i knew.... there was no going back.. i chose "sanity", for what it was worth, and it was a long haul, i have to say..
	11:38am Cecile: oh, I know. I used to draw pictures to amuse myself of the "wacky" fratboy intellectuals I would encounter. They weren't really.
	11:38am Jennique: If trees could talk, they would say OWOWOW!! if you carved your initials in them. (referring to song)
	11:38am Keith Moon: Artistic genius or raving lunatic?
	11:39am Brian in UK: @robyn I refer you to 11:21.
	11:39am too much coffee: @allan: yup, in one of the better docs about him his wife confirms the fact that the drug use thing was kind of a shtick from the very start. and that his creative output declined (abysmally) more or less in proportion to the drug + alcohol use, when it became far more than shtick.
	11:39am dc pat: I think we can all agree on crazy being over-used and little understood. WHat I'm trying to get at is the less traveled road that Parq mentioned. Maybe the artist is the only one who actually sees that road and there's something in his/her mental condition that allows this, not insanity, different perspective.
	11:40am too much coffee: and the interesting thing about HST's self destructive spiral is that the single most damaging substance was probably alcohol.
	11:40am Jennique: Keith Moon: artistic genius driven to madness by fame.
	11:41am dc pat: too much coffee: totally, bourbon to be precise.
	11:41am too much coffee: @dcpat: yup, it's all about seeking the road less travelled. which sometimes have a risk of leading one off into the briar, the tar pits, the craggy rocks, etc. but it's not that those destinations are the goal (quite the opposite).
	11:41am Jennique: dc pat: your explanation works for me, being an artist and all.
	11:41am allan: but then there's lil' wayne who got worse when he got off the codeine. but that seems to me more of a case of running out of steam after 1000 solid tracks
	11:42am dc pat: but do you think Keith Moon could have lived in any normal way had he not become famous? I don't think so.
	11:42am Viv Stanshall: Absolutely not!
	11:43am PJ: Andrew, that kind of "ecstatic" (for lack of a better term) art could be seen as sublimating the ego to some greater power (or dissolving the ego in something larger), but it still seems to rely on the belief that there is something so madly important it needs to be memorialized. Of course, there is also a pure joy in creating something, even if no one else will ever see or hear it. That, I think, is egoless.
	11:44am Brian in UK: Moon was a pain even when he was at skool. That's from someone who was at the same one. Hello Viv. See 11:21. Missing you.
	11:44am Parq: Two files in the can! I rule!
	11:45am too much coffee: trouble doesn't need to weigh in directly on these topics. she teaches us plenty just through her selections of what she plays.
	11:45am Jennique: Keith Moon could have started a cult out in the woods and bred goats. That's kinda normal.
	11:46am Brian in UK: There ain't no shepherds or bush in Shepherd Bush!
	11:47am PJ: dcpat: I think that distinguishes great artists is a kind of heightened sensitivity, an awareness of things that other people miss or don't wish to see or is too frightening or big to try to get a handle on.
	11:47am robyn: the one person who is always the subject of these discussions for me is Michael Jackson. He's an interesting case because he was such a huge pop culture icon. I enjoy his music and his weirdness, regardless of his alleged activities.
	11:49am Brian in UK: For the first time since the Second World War; Michael is not in the top ten of boys names. Mason? Jayden?
	11:49am PJ: Keith Moon was, reportedly, one of those people, like Bob Stinson, whose performance could be enhanced by a little intoxication and destroyed by too much. Certainly he wore out his body in his 32 years. (I felt so old when I realized one day I was older than Keith Moon would ever be.)
	11:50am allan: now everyone should debate the opposing side. (are there sides?) there is no answer just have fun, and if you make a masterful Kunstwerk good for you. no reason to fear failing at something that wasn't worth doing in the first place
	11:50am Brian in UK: PJ you will never be as old as Keith.
	11:50am duke: MJ is an interesting case. I know people who think he was a freak and love his music and people who won't listen to him because of what they know about him.
	11:51am annie: he lost my respect when he went whitey
	11:52am Viv Stanshall: Nice one BiUK!
	11:52am Andrew: PJ, I see the egoism coming from motive. If you make something and don't really feel a sense of ownership or identification with it, then I think a desire for others to see it is not egoic. Making art purely for one's own enjoyment strikes me as MORE selfish, in those cases.
	11:53am PJ: I'm not much of a fan of MJ after Off the Wall, but, whatever you think about him, he was definitely the strangest man in the world. Money will buy you almost everything but it can't give you a childhood you never had.
	11:53am duke: In the case of a pop artist like MJ, it's almost impossible to separate art from life because there's an huge gossip industry dedicated to telling us every detail about them.
	11:53am Jennique: Santigold is just wonderful. Thanks for playing her. The interesting thing about MJ is his progression of strangeness in his adult life. I first listened to MJ with the Off The Wall album. For that I am glad, as it was a great starting point to enjoy his music. I suppose if missed that, I would not have the same experience.
	11:54am robyn: @annie isn't that part of his significance tho? i mean other than genesis p-orridge who has done more and so publicly in terms of body experimentation. (of course there may be many more and i just don't know)
	11:55am Torbjørn: The emergency alert system sounded quite different today. Is that a sign of the pending zombie apocalypse ?
	11:57am annie: and this is where, i fear, i may get judgemental; he wrote that song "black or white" which i thought was a great piece of work, and then proceeded to change his skin color. i realize now, he was greatly disturbed, but in the moment it annoyed me he was being hypocritical
	11:57am Brian in UK: Apocalypso anyone.
	11:57am too much coffee: @torbjorn: yup, & it made a nice segue to the current track
	11:57am gawkby: Isn't it 99% hearsay? I never met or spoke with Michael Jackson, the musician. You?
	11:57am PJ: Andrew, thanks, I will have to think about that. I will say that I wish more people would create things, particularly if they are not "art", because I think there's a wealth of strange (to me) perspectives I am missing out on.
	11:58am annie: great show trouble, so glad i could be here...
	11:58am dc pat: crap, got pulled away at the last minute. great discussin with you all, have a good one...
	11:58am PJ: I'd just like to say that I came in late but I really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you everyone, and, of course, thank you Trouble, for the great music!
	11:58am duke: I think most news is hearsay.
	11:59am moose: keep missing show due to 'work' catching last 2 minutes! archive listening later...
	11:59am Andrew: Agreed! Thanks for the nice discussion, everyone.
	11:59am Brian in UK: Peerless, trouble.
	12:00pm too much coffee: what a nice finish!
	12:00pm allan: in 1888 Sir Arthur Sullivan complained to Thomas Edison, terrified that with his new invention "so much hideous and bad music may be put on records forever!"
	12:00pm kayt: obrigada trouble!
	12:03pm robyn: @duke hearsay = news, i agree...
	12:04pm robyn: great music, great thread.

This Is The Modern World with Trouble: Playlist from May 15, 2012

View Trouble's profile

A viking ship appears on the horizon, a likeness of Alice Coltrane carved into its bow. Rare birds flock together to sing Francoise Hardy as soul hits. A sunset of blips and bleeps fills the air.

<-- Previous playlist | Back to This Is The Modern World with Trouble playlists | Next playlist -->

May 15, 2012: listening to my garden

Listen to this show: Pop-up listen Pop-up player!

(* = new)

Artist	Track	Album	Label	Format	Comments	New	Approx. start time
black to comm	thrones "thrones" by "black to comm"	music for the film earth by ho tzu nyen	de stijl			*	0:00:00 (Pop-up)
the caretaker	cloudy, since you went away	A Stairway To The Stars					0:04:25 (Pop-up)
	generique/paris nous appartient "generique/paris nous appartient"	la Nouvelle Vague:Films of the French New Wave					0:08:34 (Pop-up)
	generique/le beau serge "generique/le beau serge"	la Nouvelle Vague:Films of the French New Wave					0:10:04 (Pop-up)
the caretaker	robins and roses "robins and roses" by "the caretaker"	A Stairway To The Stars					0:11:59 (Pop-up)
charles trenet	imaginez "imaginez" by "charles trenet"						0:14:32 (Pop-up)
	isolde "isolde"	Le Frisson des Vampires (Soundtrack)					0:16:57 (Pop-up)
merchandise	satellite "satellite" by "merchandise"	children of desire	katagora works	Vinyl		*	0:20:10 (Pop-up)
damon albarn	o spirit, animate us	dr dee	emi			*	0:23:49 (Pop-up)
jackie deshannon	happy go lucky girl	laurel canyon					0:27:29 (Pop-up)

make asakawa	#4 "#4" by "make asakawa"	maki asakawa					0:34:53 (Pop-up)
les momies de palerme	brules ce coeur	brulez ce coeur	constellation			*	0:37:36 (Pop-up)

les momies de palerme	brulez ce coeur	brulez ce coeur	constellation			*	0:43:47 (Pop-up)
marsen jules	sunrise on 3rd avenue	lost in the humming air v/a	oktaf			*	0:43:03 (Pop-up)
adem	x is for kisses "x is for kisses" by "adem"	love and other planets					0:49:51 (Pop-up)
alex chilton	The EMI Song (Smile for Me)	free again: the "1970" sessions	Omnivore Recordings			*	0:54:11 (Pop-up)
beach boys	i know there's an answer	the pet sounds sesions					0:58:17 (Pop-up)

beirut	the gulag orkestar "the gulag orkestar" by "beirut"	Gulag Orkestar					1:04:41 (Pop-up)
goldfrapp	black cherry "black cherry" by "goldfrapp"	the singles				*	1:09:13 (Pop-up)
Orchestra Baobab	dee moo wor "dee moo wor" by "Orchestra Baobab"	specialist in all styles					1:17:07 (Pop-up)
bela karoli	Psychosomatic "Psychosomatic" by "bela karoli"	furnished rooms					1:18:17 (Pop-up)
antonym	cinnamon air "cinnamon air" by "antonym"	the minimal wave tapes vol 2 v/a	stones throw			*	1:22:01 (Pop-up)
ojos de brujo	buleria del ay! "buleria del ay!" by "ojos de brujo"	bari					1:25:36 (Pop-up)
air	sexy boy (cassius radio mix) "sexy boy (cassius radio mix)" by "air"	sexy boy 5 track					1:29:17 (Pop-up)
world domination enterprises	i can't live wirthout my radio	lets play domination					1:34:22 (Pop-up)
delibes/choeurs et orchestre du theatre national de l'opera	duettino viens mallika	delibes lakme					1:36:47 (Pop-up)

chris bell/icewater	looking forward	I Am The Cosmos: Deluxe Edition					1:45:06 (Pop-up)
John Jacob Niles	i'm goin' away "i'm goin' away" by "John Jacob Niles"	the boone-tolliver recordings	LM dupli-cation			*	1:48:44 (Pop-up)
diane & carole	feelin the pain "feelin the pain" by "diane & carole"	Boogaloo Pow Wow (V/A)					1:50:46 (Pop-up)
jon brion	monday "monday" by "jon brion"	ost i "heart" huckabees					1:53:22 (Pop-up)
the daisy chain	got to get you in my arms						1:56:36 (Pop-up)
brigitte fontaine	tanka II "tanka II" by "brigitte fontaine"						1:58:05 (Pop-up)
betrand burgalat	le pays imaginaire	the sssound of mmmusic					2:00:50 (Pop-up)
duncan browne	mignon "mignon" by "duncan browne"	duncan browne					2:02:37 (Pop-up)
massive attack	protection ( the eno mix)				happy birthday brian eno		2:07:03 (Pop-up)
simon fisher turner	#6 edit "#6 edit" by "simon fisher turner"	ost the garden					2:14:18 (Pop-up)
beach house	lazuli "lazuli" by "beach house"	bloom	sub pop			*	2:18:28 (Pop-up)
nico edouard	tues lacena "tues lacena" by "nico edouard"	( nico edouard/courge solfi/krinator/koonda holaa) untitled	label brique	Vinyl		*	2:26:22 (Pop-up)
catpower	naked if i want to "naked if i want to" by "catpower"	jukebox					2:28:13 (Pop-up)
the cats and the fiddle	chant of the rain	we cats will swing for you 1939-40					2:33:30 (Pop-up)
samantha juste	if trees could talk						2:35:43 (Pop-up)

francoise hardy	bati mon nid "bati mon nid" by "francoise hardy"	la question					2:43:57 (Pop-up)
nancy sinatra and lee hazelwood	ladybird						2:46:31 (Pop-up)
santigold	god from the machine "god from the machine" by "santigold"	master of my make believe				*	2:49:30 (Pop-up)
senorita tristeza	scsi -9 "scsi -9" by "senorita tristeza"						2:56:33 (Pop-up)

RSS feeds for This Is The Modern World with Trouble: Playlists feed | MP3 archives feed

| E-mail Trouble | Other WFMU Playlists | All artists played by This Is The Modern World with Trouble |

Listener comments!
	9:03am trouble: good morning tuesday and all of tuesdays fans, and not
	9:04am annie: no work today, so i am able to hear the sounds of your voice and musical selections, yay!
	9:05am trouble: good morning annie, welcome
	9:05am Cheri Pi: I like this atmosphere Trouble!
	9:07am Brian in UK: Hello trouble. Can you rotate the image during the show? Looking forward to the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican. Best one in forty years. http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409
	9:07am still b/p: It took a moment to see a couple...no several...no , 20+ faces in the Kusama.
	9:20am dc pat: wow, nice painting
	9:21am dc pat: dammit. I started a painting a month or 2 ago and still haven't finished it. must. make. time.
	9:22am trouble: hello cheri pi, merci. @brian, umm no. i can hardly get the image right side up never mind sideways at this hour. today's artist is yayoi kusama
	9:24am BSI: I am awash in a churning vortex of yellow eyes (again?)
	9:28am annie: (dcpat, it was l frank baum, believe it or not)
	9:29am dc pat: yeah, I just saw that. not good.
	9:30am dc pat: oh well, I still like the movie and I like Journey to the End of the Night even though Celine was Nazi supporter.
	9:44am Parq: Speaking of Nazi supporters, if you're a Roald Dahl fan, I have some bad news for you ...
	9:51am ausmanx: ah, gertrude stein was with old Adolf too... where does it stop? even Elton John played at Rush Limbaugh's wedding!
	9:55am dc pat: well, we'll always have Charlie Chaplin on our side..
	9:56am ?: I'll bet Limbaugh wouldn't approve of Elton's wedding.
	9:57am trouble: i don't want to validate bad behavior, but it is sort of childlike of our society to assume artists whom we enjoy and respect have to be good people. like we dont want to admit that our parents r effed up, we don't want to admit that artists can be ugly, just like people. we are all ugly in one or many ways
	9:58am ausmanx: rush and elton have been getting it on for years, i reckon. anyone seen Iron Sky yet? moon nazis return to earth for Sarah Palin's 2020 presidential campaign
	9:58am Jennique: I feel like I am looking through a microscope when I look at this painting. Lots of cilia and mitochondria and the beginnings of life.
	10:00am Cecile: hello, all! Annie!
	10:00am BSI: Mitochondria!
	10:01am annie: cecile!!! i'm still pretty happy here, surprise surprise!!
	10:01am dc pat: I think you're right on there trouble but that doesn't mean we have to like them. It's a bonus for me to dig a piece of art and also be able to respect the artist. Not a requirement though
	10:01am ausmanx: actually, trouble, i DO think artists weigh very heavily on the humanist side of the spectrum, and so, childlike or not, i still assume that good work incorporates humane values. nazism was fundamentally anti-art anyway (at least in terms of imagination - it only accepted representation)
	10:03am Cecile: that is so awesome
	10:04am fred von helsing: yup Iron Sky is very OK !
	10:05am Cecile: I think there is as wide a swath of internalized (not neccessarily expressed) political belief within artists as there are human beliefs. I used to be frustrated with people who were absolute morons and jackasses being able to draw me under the table. The gift doesn't choose the vessel.
	10:06am trouble: hey jennique!
	10:06am Cecile: I say that a lot. Also, "a stopped clock is right two times a day." Keeps me from punching people in the head.
	10:07am Parq: @Trouble, 9:46 -- my point exactly.
	10:08am annie: ( i was going to type a comment, then i deleted it)
	10:10am duke: If you are a public artist and you make public statements, it seems the public has the right to judge you on it. I don't see that talent gives you a pass.
	10:11am annie: i know sure certain that my point of view of a writer whose work i love would definitely be tainted by his/her politics, yet i would hope to transcend that narrow view and see the work for its own worth....
	10:11am trouble: yes dc pat, i do want to like my idols, sadly sometimes, i can't. @ausmanx, nazism seems attractive to people who feel powerless, that is the root of art for some, and for others that makes them unable to act. following seems easier to them. being humane seems low on the human needs pyramid to that type.
	10:11am goldfrapp: I am a monster to work with. Deal with it.
	10:11am Cecile: no, it does not. But what I'm saying is that, it's kind of futile to not expect humans to, well, be humans no matter what beauty they create.
	10:12am annie: even great writers go through periods and phases of creativity and thought, tolstoy for instance, to name only one
	10:13am Cecile: I think for fascists their version of "humane' (everyone happy and perfectly orderly) is so abstract and global that the personal cost of an individual is a minor inconvenience.
	10:14am ausmanx: i think art can be appreicated in a vacuum if the vacuum exists, but once you know about the poison it has to taint the work. lucky are those who read nothing about gertrude stein's personal life, and just read the books. gunter grass is of course one of the most fascinating people in this respect - the greatest writer about nazism ends up admitting he was waffen ss. but that's another story...
	10:15am Cecile: I actually believe highly in knowing the writer's/artist's history. I can appreciate William Burroughs's work while at the same time knowing he was not a nice man at all.
	10:15am BDR: Eno's 64 today. Hint.
	10:16am dc pat: shit did not know that about Grass....see? Why are you people telling me this??
	10:17am Cecile: sorree. I guess I won't tell you that Jerzy Kozinski's "The Painted Bird" was also mostly made up.
	10:17am Cecile: whoops.
	10:19am dc pat: But Grass is a good example: on the surface a statement like "he was in the Waffen SS" is pretty bad but it turns out he was conscripted as a teenager near the end of the war so what does that really say about his art?
	10:20am duke: Burroughs doesn't come off as all that nice in his books.
	10:20am annie: so, if a writer were to just write his mind out in the open, how would it affect the way you read the work? if it was hidden in allegory we would have a different reaction, almost precieving it as a wondrous work of art; the same thing can even be said about painting, sculpture.. any form of expression, so l frank baum was racist, isn't there some small piece of that riffling through the books?
	10:21am ffrr: Maurice Chavalier's unique talent transcended his performing for Nazi-pied France. He wasn't vilified for it until years later, when they signed him for 'Gigi'. My friend doesn't like Patricia Heaton simply because she's Catholic/Pro Life, even though she's quite funny and talented. Can't please everyone.
	10:22am ausmanx: dcpat, absolutely. just makes grass more interesting really, as it raises the issue of how much of the ideology you actually bought into to become part of the system. in his case, not very much, i assume. it's the issue for the whole of german society, and grass thus becomes an even more important part of that historical analysis
	10:22am Cecile: 1) I believe the Baum piece in question was supposed to be satire. 2) Yeh, I love the Oz books, but toward the end, the Oz-ites come across as really smug and self-absorbed. I'm still bitter about how Dorothy's friend Hank was treated. Patricia Heaton may be pro-life, but she is also pro-birth control, which is sensible to me.
	10:23am annie: and i heard some great spoken work from bukowsky, it shone a light on his romantic aspect which had been hidden from me, same thing in the reverse can be said about leo cohen... he had a difficult time with women; some of his poetry was down-right abusive
	10:24am Jennique: This song reminds me of the theme to Knight Rider.
	10:24am Cecile: No, Burroughs wasn't nice in his work, duke, but a lot of people emulated him. Would they emulate him if they knew what he was really like? I think not as many people would do that.
	10:26am annie: .....and where to begin with the multiple aspects of henry miller!!
	10:26am dc pat: (where else would you get a conversation like this? I'm honored to be posting along side of folks who have such depth and wisdom)
	10:27am ausmanx: okay, after midnight here so i'm off to curl up with a little Mein Kampf... good night all!
	10:27am trouble: i thought this was a fascinating insight into roald dahl's world:thisrecording.com...
	10:27am John Lennon: I promoted peace to mankind but I was quite a dick at times to people close to me...
	10:27am dc pat: that's just it annie! These people are maybe necessarily complex as hell so the safe bet is to just go with Millers books and take what you can from them
	10:28am Cecile: I have less problem with artists being inconsistent than athletes. They are touted as being role models, but sure ain't. I pretty much stopped watching pro basketball when I learned the extent of Robert Parish's serial spousal abuse and how it was covered up. I went to myself "if the NBA wants female fans, it can't let the players treat them like punching bags."
	10:29am still b/p: Dropping the Baum -- wasn't familiar with this until a couple of weeks ago, some of it is self-contradictory, but I don't know about satirical: http://tinyurl.com/btalmfa
	10:30am Cecile: I still get a hankering to sit in front of the TV to watch 3 playoff games in a row, but i can't. One guy I know goes "well I never saw them as role models, so what's your problem?" I go "infidelity is one thing, drug use another, but battery is a whole new can of worms."
	10:30am annie: and that i surely did, each and every one of them,including his watercolors and letters..... .. in order to understand a writer/artist the whole body of work must be observed.. even yours mr lennon!
	10:30am duke: Imitating an artist's behavior instead of her art is often a bad idea. How many musicians messed their lives up because they decided that if Charlie Parker used smack and could play like that, heroin must be the key to play like Bird?
	10:31am Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw-RYsIGhL0&feature=player_embedded
	10:32am ausmanx: pretty right, duke... i've known far too many heroin usrs who think it's creative largely due to Burroughs. it was Burroughs, people, not the heroin!
	10:32am Cecile: oh, duke, exactly
	10:33am annie: and my friend mark points out that this is the 50-year anniversary of clockwork orange's publication, a brilliant piece of work on its own..
	10:33am Cecile: thanks, relevant. I'll save that for later.
	10:35am listener mark: good morning trouble good morning everyone William S. Burroughs shocked me as a young lad when I read "Naked Lunch."
	10:37am Cecile: still b/p, that's what he claimed. as I said to someone about the lousy new De La Soul video, "it's satire. It's not successful satire."
	10:37am Cecile: I suspect Mr. Baum was kind of backpedaling, personally.
	10:39am Brian in UK: ojos de brujo - the sourcerers' eyes.
	10:41am annie: the source of this is a comment he made about the elimination of the indigenous peoples of this continent. he was referring to sitting bull's death
	10:41am dc pat: yee, I dunno. If that's satire, it's downright horrible satire...
	10:41am Patrick: good morning trouble! finally getting a nice spring here in the midwest, how is the east?
	10:43am duke: That kind of satire reminds me of those comedians who launch into a insulting, racist screed and then end with "But I kid, because I love."
	10:44am Cecile: Yes, it's bad. I actually talked to some antiquarian booksellers who said that not only these views but also the fact he was rumored to like young boys keep him from getting the full-on Tolkien treatment.
	10:45am Staceyjoy: That last set was genius, Trouble! The best! Incredible show today, as usual.xxoo
	10:46am Cecile: talk about warts and all, man. And yet the first 5 Oz books were a huge, huge influence on me in terms of imagination.
	10:46am Parq: Dang, Annie, you really started something this morning. I got work to do, but I just had to read the whole thread first. And Miss T, the excellence of your musical selections is as welcome as always.
	10:48am Parq: Seriously, how can you not take an artist's personality into account when you evaluate his or her work? How can you understand the work when you're pretending that a big chunk of what went into it didn't exist?
	10:49am dc pat: it's funny that it actually started on FB and then bled over to WFMU...
	10:49am annie: i loved "la duetto"! hey parq, i can copy and paste the whole thing for you .. save it for later..yeah, right, cecile... and how do we reconcile all this knowledge when we read these stories to our innocents?? i had alot of those issues when my kid was growing up.. how much to share and when to shut up, and then there3 is the whole "fairy-tale" genre, full of murder, mayhem, and dismemberment..
	10:50am annie: exactly parq..
	10:50am Cecile: well, that's why I had issues with my materialist and deconstructionist lit professors at school.
	10:51am listener mark: Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer They weren't "good" people but they changed the boundaries of people's thinking.
	10:51am dc pat: parq: what do you know about the artist who painted the painting to our left? I don't know anything about her and to me it doesn't matter. When I learn something about her, the painting may change a bit with my perception but my appreciation of the piece is certainly not dependent on the artist acting or thinking in specific ways. I see what you're saying but not sure an artists personality should matter.
	10:53am Kevin: OK, I never knew this was the song that PM DAWN sampled! "Reality used to be a Friend of Mine.." Shout out to Jersey City, Prince Be...
	10:56am trouble: the artist's personality has zip to do with art! we make art to converse with our time period,other artists, history, color, you name it. not to tell you a story of what we ate for breakfast and then how it felt going down. or if we felt loved growing up...
	10:56am Andrew: Shouldn't an artist's work be MORE impressive if it speaks to us even though we disagree with her life choices or find her personality distasteful?
	10:56am duke: @dc I think that may be true for an isolated work, but what about when you look at an artist's body of work? It tells some sort of story about the artist's thought processes as they developed and it's hard to isolate the art from other aspects.
	10:57am Andrew: Right on, Trouble!
	10:58am still b/p: I wondered about the thread's phantom first mention. There's a long exchange/dispute in Wiki Talk about changes made to Baum entry by one editor, re genocide, and objections by article author, among several edit disagreements. Watched Kusama's Self-Obliteration film this morning on ubuweb. I hope there ain't no nuggets...or polka dots...of reprehensible history to be tossed into the picture...
	10:58am dc pat: don't get me wrong, I'm part Cherokee and have a strong visceral reaction to that crap Baum wrote, satire or not. But, I still dig his books.
	10:58am Cecile: it has everything to do with art! Your choice of subject matter, what you choose to convey, who you choose to collaborate with, how you respond to different schools of thought.
	10:58am John Wayne Gacy: What do you guys think of my "work"? http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/assets_c/2010/04/gacy2-thumb-500x267.jpg
	10:59am allan: i missed a good talk day! "What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?"
	11:00am dc pat: duke: not saying it's easy and sometimes it's impossible. Hitler was a pretty good watercolor painter but there is no way I can look at his work objectively.
	11:00am annie: wow, i love that allan!! as if the artist's life was slowly draining away with each piece created, rod serling material!
	11:00am allan: Borges felt the same way, seperate art from the artist. Celine wrote one of the best novels of the past 100 years and was a nazi sympathizer. polanski and woody allen both like young girls. the list goes on and on...
	11:01am still b/p: Surprising that Leni Riefenstahl hasn't come up yet. She's often a headliner in these discussions.
	11:01am annie: .... and...
	11:02am Andrew: I don't agree with Allan's quote, whoever said it. Identifying one's worth as a human with one's work strikes me as a dangerous neurosis.
	11:02am allan: @ annie the quote is william gaddis, one of the best
	11:02am dc pat: also, look at it the other way: should we expect a piece of fiction to be the personal philosophy of the writer? Certainly not. Wow, Celine mentioned twice on one playlist! Right on FMUers!!
	11:03am Leni Riefenstahl: Triumph of the Will is Hitler's A Hard Days Night!
	11:03am Parq: Actually, it's kind of difficult to name a producer of great art who wasn't at all dark or troubled (no pun intended).
	11:04am Andrew: Difficult to name a human being of that description!
	11:04am Cecile: I say, if you can separate it, great. But don't criticize those who can't. Excuse me while I go throw darts at a picture of Bertold Brecht. :D
	11:04am annie: i would expect the opposite, pat, interesting thought, too, as i think i may have, now and then, judged a writer by his fiction..i recall how much in love with steinbeck i had been.
	11:05am dc pat: you said it parq. Like Gogol's idea that it may be necessary for the artist to be insane. Sounds good Cecile.
	11:06am dc pat: same here annie. It sure isn't cut and dried.
	11:07am annie: and every single thing miller wrote was the same, yet different,including his "non-fiction"..
	11:07am Andrew: I don't like the romantic idea that creativity = insanity. How in the heck is "art therapy" supposed to work, then? Should the patients' works get worse and worse, until they're cured?
	11:10am allan: identifying one's worth as a human with one's artistic output is the silly shit that drives a lot of great art. it's not healthy but neither is being alive. I like John Ruskin's art criticism knowing that he was a pedophile. there is no room for a debate on aesthetics here, but wrt therapy...yikes. life's wack, get over it
	11:11am allan: i volunteered for an art therapy place, its relation to "Art" or "folk art" is usually that of "lightning to a lightning bug"
	11:12am PJ: Somebody once said that fascism involved the aestheticization of politics, while communism involved the politicization of art. Both produced terrible art, and terrible environments for artists and free-thinkers, but both were terribly attractive to some artists for obvious reasons.
	11:12am dc pat: There's nothing romantic about insanity. Maybe not insanity, then but creativity may benefit from an outsiders viewpoint.
	11:12am listener mark: Is art a different view of the world? the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. ~~ Ezra Pound
	11:13am annie: so, getting all literary criticism here, i read malcolm cowley's essays on writers of his generation and how they did or did not move him, all that... it seemed to me he brought a bit of arrogance to his critiques, although i enjoyed reading them, i did not especially agree
	11:14am dc pat: listner mark: exactly what I was trying to say. And Pound, another Nazi sympathizer!!
	11:15am annie: omg, pat, my father LOVED him.... at one point in my life i knew some of that by heart..
	11:15am Andrew: I feel like mental problems are often the impetus to create art, but then the art is more or less successful in relation to the artists' ability to communicate with others, which could be seen as a measure of sanity.
	11:15am GI Joe: Sometimes artistic output helps one deal with the harsh cruel realities in life that can otherwise drive you insane... Witness my ear necklace....
	11:15am Jennique: I've always hated that stereotype of the insane artist. As if the mental illness was some direct channel to creativity that was otherwise absent. I think Van Gogh would actually have been better if he had some way to control his illness. Think of all the work we missed out on because of it. Also, have you ever noticed how many great paintings are UNTITLED. Many artists just want you to look at the art and make your own observations, bios/artist interpretations be damned.
	11:16am listener mark: Sometimes you go out to the edge to get a better view of the world.
	11:17am allan: it's all aesthetic "choice", whether you identify the work with its creator and if that makes you like it more or less is up to you. something like the rap group die antwoord who are 90% visual, the music doesn't stand alone but the a/v "carries" it, what does it mean? art is controlled insanity
	11:17am Andrew: Yeah. I have friends who hold onto their neuroses proudly because they think they make their art better. Makes me really sad.
	11:18am Cecile: Yes, that's true, Jennique, but half the fact of researching an artist's work is that you become capitvated with the mind that made the piece. I can look at a piece by an anonymous artist, but then I get curious. What were they like? What made them do this piece? why is it anonymous?
	11:18am annie: so, an interesting perspective on insanity and creativity: i am not at all creative and cannot even draw a straight line; the way i express my deep-seated fears and emotions is to listen to music, any and all, and i find it fascinating... there is some music which brings me to tears... THAT is how i release my inner traumas..
	11:18am PJ: In general, people are complicated, artists perhaps a little more so than others because they have some compulsion to externalize inchoate feelings that others keep unexpressed. Many of us like to think of ourselves as good people making a positive contribution to society, but if others knew us as we know ourselves, they might have a different assessment.
	11:19am Cecile: Ha! You are so bloody creative I can't even go there. And anyone can draw if they are relaxed and just look at shapes in front of them.
	11:19am annie: yup...
	11:20am Cecile: creativity can extend to everthing. Even the guy who's spackling a wall and goes "I can make something way better than this."
	11:20am listener mark: I draw stick people at work. my co-workers think I'm crazy. I'm just lazy. But I'm surprised how much definition I can draw with a stick person.
	11:20am PJ: I would also add that imposing any work of art on the public involves an act of egoism, and sometimes the other effects of that ego are indeed ugly.
	11:21am Cecile: I mean, you've managed to live a very exciting life in the time I've known you by just thinking up opportunities and making them happen. I haven't been able to do that lately.
	11:21am Cecile: listener mark - it worked for xkcd dude.
	11:21am allan: "I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue" orwell i'm "creative", i've published a novel and paint lots of shit. but i'm not crazy, i just read a lot. and right now i have to get to work!
	11:22am allan: oh man as for imposing work on the public...so guilty
	11:22am Andrew: I was with ya up until that one, PJ. I don't think the impulse to communicate is necessarily egoic.
	11:22am Parq: May I be so bold as to suggest that, when we reduce the past 2 1/2 hours' conversation to "great art = insanity", we do dishonor to the complexity of both art and the mind? I should add that, by that, I mean the mind of the viewer/listener as much as the mind of the creator.
	11:22am Brian in UK: We are normal and we want out freedom. We are normal and we dig Bert Weedon.
	11:23am dc pat: thanks parq, was trying to phrase the same point.
	11:23am annie: the web-comic cecile? what a gold mine that is!!
	11:24am CFK: "rosebud"
	11:24am too much coffee: liminal... yes, very liminal right now... yessss.......
	11:24am allan: great art isn't insanity. you miss the whole point. the truly insane never make it back.
	11:25am Andrew: Sorry, Parq, I wasn't trying to reduce the whole discussion to that. That was just one branch of it.
	11:25am Parq: I'm supposed to go through about 4 or 5 files an hour at this job. So far this morning, I've done one. Dang you, FMU community, for being so engrossing!
	11:25am too much coffee: I wish my garden sounded like this all the time
	11:26am dc pat: I'm just glad my boss works hundreds of miles away from here.
	11:26am too much coffee: @allan: exactly!
	11:26am duke: I'm not getting anything done either. We've got to stop meeting like this.
	11:27am PJ: Someone did a study examining medical records of prominent artists over the past 200 years and found that, very, very few artists could be classified as insane. This makes sense, because if you are, say, schizophrenic, it's very hard to get it together enough to produce artwork, and if you're manic-depressive, if you are in the depths of depression, you're not getting out of bed, and if you're manic, your mind is moving a thousand miles a minute and it's very hard to focus and finish anything. However, they did find that many artists had relatives that were crippled by manic-depression. My take from this is that strong sensitivity to one's environment and feelings is conducive to making great art, but too much sensitivity bleeds into emotional/mental illness.
	11:27am Jennique: PJ - thank you for using the word inchoate. I am an artist and will use that word liberally from now on. By the way, I have about 13 illustrations to do and managed to do one and a half so far. Not feeling the least bit bad about how my time is spent with FMU.
	11:27am too much coffee: and those who pretend to be insane are the ones who never get anywhere
	11:27am dc pat: and we have exactly 32 minutes to come to a conclusion on all these issues!!
	11:27am Mike East: the company's accountant was just at my desk inquiring if this was "Satan Worshipping music"
	11:27am annie: perhaps it's the strong desire and (self-perceived) inability to express one's emotions which makes it appear that the artist is insane? inner turmoil and all that
	11:28am maja: i suppose an artist is always looking for his or her truth, to catch it and one can go very far And we can not do without making mistakes, actually i nead them to keep me on track
	11:28am duke: @Mike I hope you said yes.
	11:28am Le Pétomane: True art comes from one's fundement.
	11:29am too much coffee: which is why excessive drug use -- which definitely fits under the umbrella of pretending to be insane, according to my observation -- is also pretty much mutually exclusive with serious creative work
	11:29am Jennique: I guess this all depends on what you call "sane." Lots of people I come across who claim to be sane are seriously crazy underneath a very, very fine layer of concealment.
	11:29am Andrew: Very interesting and well said, PJ!
	11:29am CFK: what is pretending?
	11:29am Mike East: @duke, I did. I told him its part of my morning routine, kind of like daily affirmations...except to Satan.
	11:30am Cecile: And what about the "craft" vs. art? Trouble might have to take a second shift to finish this one up.
	11:30am Parq: It's also worth noting that what the medical profession means by "insane" and what art fans mean are two different things. Really, the word is almost meaningless nowadays. How many times have you heard some rich preppy, who wouldn't know the road less traveled if he tripped face down onto it, proudly call himself "crazy"? How many commercials promise that, with a certain consumer product, you can be "crazy" and "just like everybody else" at the same time?
	11:30am too much coffee: which is not to say that one cannot -occasionally- flirt with, or dance around the borders of insanity.
	11:32am Brian in UK: Enjoying the music by the bye, trouble.
	11:32am Andrew: Advertisers are truly "mad men."
	11:32am PJ: Andrew, I think there's a difference between simple communication and art. Art presupposes some kind of permanence and some kind of public, and, for me, at least, thinking that whatever I have to communicate is worth the time of people who don't know me personally and who perhaps cannot know me involves a belief in some kind of importance to whatever I might create, which is sheer egoism.
	11:32am too much coffee: ...but what it all circles back to is Hunter S. Thompson's notion of "The Edge."
	11:33am robyn: interesting discussion. i'm sad i missed most of it. the one person i would volunteer in terms of the art v. personality debate is the marquis de sade. in real life, not a good person, but not as bad as the people in his work, and all the same, his work is endlessly interesting and has inspired equally interesting work from many other authors.
	11:33am too much coffee: or as HST says: "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later."
	11:34am Cecile: It's completely not romantic to me at all. I think non-conformity, spontaneousness and quirkiness are too often described as true insanity.
	11:34am allan: fear and loathing was written on no drugs about a journalism story were drugs were mostly absent, at least according to thompson's letters
	11:35am Andrew: Hmm... you may be right, PJ. But what about when the artist feels like a vessel for communications from the infinite or whatever, that need to be heard by everyone, even though she doesn't know where they came from?
	11:36am too much coffee: I like to think of FMU's mission as, in part, to give us a guided tour of sorts to some of the interesting liminal zones that exist in greater frequency as one moves gently but carefully in the general direction of The Edge.
	11:36am Parq: Ceclie, my point is, not just those things, but simple gut-level excess and renunciation of responsibility. To pluck an EG from the news, I bet Mitt's friends reacted to the hair-cutting incident by proudly declaring him "crazy".
	11:37am annie: at the point in my career, when my profession was coming to a direct and screeching halt, i felt that call to the "edge" it was extremely tempting, yet i knew.... there was no going back.. i chose "sanity", for what it was worth, and it was a long haul, i have to say..
	11:38am Cecile: oh, I know. I used to draw pictures to amuse myself of the "wacky" fratboy intellectuals I would encounter. They weren't really.
	11:38am Jennique: If trees could talk, they would say OWOWOW!! if you carved your initials in them. (referring to song)
	11:38am Keith Moon: Artistic genius or raving lunatic?
	11:39am Brian in UK: @robyn I refer you to 11:21.
	11:39am too much coffee: @allan: yup, in one of the better docs about him his wife confirms the fact that the drug use thing was kind of a shtick from the very start. and that his creative output declined (abysmally) more or less in proportion to the drug + alcohol use, when it became far more than shtick.
	11:39am dc pat: I think we can all agree on crazy being over-used and little understood. WHat I'm trying to get at is the less traveled road that Parq mentioned. Maybe the artist is the only one who actually sees that road and there's something in his/her mental condition that allows this, not insanity, different perspective.
	11:40am too much coffee: and the interesting thing about HST's self destructive spiral is that the single most damaging substance was probably alcohol.
	11:40am Jennique: Keith Moon: artistic genius driven to madness by fame.
	11:41am dc pat: too much coffee: totally, bourbon to be precise.
	11:41am too much coffee: @dcpat: yup, it's all about seeking the road less travelled. which sometimes have a risk of leading one off into the briar, the tar pits, the craggy rocks, etc. but it's not that those destinations are the goal (quite the opposite).
	11:41am Jennique: dc pat: your explanation works for me, being an artist and all.
	11:41am allan: but then there's lil' wayne who got worse when he got off the codeine. but that seems to me more of a case of running out of steam after 1000 solid tracks
	11:42am dc pat: but do you think Keith Moon could have lived in any normal way had he not become famous? I don't think so.
	11:42am Viv Stanshall: Absolutely not!
	11:43am PJ: Andrew, that kind of "ecstatic" (for lack of a better term) art could be seen as sublimating the ego to some greater power (or dissolving the ego in something larger), but it still seems to rely on the belief that there is something so madly important it needs to be memorialized. Of course, there is also a pure joy in creating something, even if no one else will ever see or hear it. That, I think, is egoless.
	11:44am Brian in UK: Moon was a pain even when he was at skool. That's from someone who was at the same one. Hello Viv. See 11:21. Missing you.
	11:44am Parq: Two files in the can! I rule!
	11:45am too much coffee: trouble doesn't need to weigh in directly on these topics. she teaches us plenty just through her selections of what she plays.
	11:45am Jennique: Keith Moon could have started a cult out in the woods and bred goats. That's kinda normal.
	11:46am Brian in UK: There ain't no shepherds or bush in Shepherd Bush!
	11:47am PJ: dcpat: I think that distinguishes great artists is a kind of heightened sensitivity, an awareness of things that other people miss or don't wish to see or is too frightening or big to try to get a handle on.
	11:47am robyn: the one person who is always the subject of these discussions for me is Michael Jackson. He's an interesting case because he was such a huge pop culture icon. I enjoy his music and his weirdness, regardless of his alleged activities.
	11:49am Brian in UK: For the first time since the Second World War; Michael is not in the top ten of boys names. Mason? Jayden?
	11:49am PJ: Keith Moon was, reportedly, one of those people, like Bob Stinson, whose performance could be enhanced by a little intoxication and destroyed by too much. Certainly he wore out his body in his 32 years. (I felt so old when I realized one day I was older than Keith Moon would ever be.)
	11:50am allan: now everyone should debate the opposing side. (are there sides?) there is no answer just have fun, and if you make a masterful Kunstwerk good for you. no reason to fear failing at something that wasn't worth doing in the first place
	11:50am Brian in UK: PJ you will never be as old as Keith.
	11:50am duke: MJ is an interesting case. I know people who think he was a freak and love his music and people who won't listen to him because of what they know about him.
	11:51am annie: he lost my respect when he went whitey
	11:52am Viv Stanshall: Nice one BiUK!
	11:52am Andrew: PJ, I see the egoism coming from motive. If you make something and don't really feel a sense of ownership or identification with it, then I think a desire for others to see it is not egoic. Making art purely for one's own enjoyment strikes me as MORE selfish, in those cases.
	11:53am PJ: I'm not much of a fan of MJ after Off the Wall, but, whatever you think about him, he was definitely the strangest man in the world. Money will buy you almost everything but it can't give you a childhood you never had.
	11:53am duke: In the case of a pop artist like MJ, it's almost impossible to separate art from life because there's an huge gossip industry dedicated to telling us every detail about them.
	11:53am Jennique: Santigold is just wonderful. Thanks for playing her. The interesting thing about MJ is his progression of strangeness in his adult life. I first listened to MJ with the Off The Wall album. For that I am glad, as it was a great starting point to enjoy his music. I suppose if missed that, I would not have the same experience.
	11:54am robyn: @annie isn't that part of his significance tho? i mean other than genesis p-orridge who has done more and so publicly in terms of body experimentation. (of course there may be many more and i just don't know)
	11:55am Torbjørn: The emergency alert system sounded quite different today. Is that a sign of the pending zombie apocalypse ?
	11:57am annie: and this is where, i fear, i may get judgemental; he wrote that song "black or white" which i thought was a great piece of work, and then proceeded to change his skin color. i realize now, he was greatly disturbed, but in the moment it annoyed me he was being hypocritical
	11:57am Brian in UK: Apocalypso anyone.
	11:57am too much coffee: @torbjorn: yup, & it made a nice segue to the current track
	11:57am gawkby: Isn't it 99% hearsay? I never met or spoke with Michael Jackson, the musician. You?
	11:57am PJ: Andrew, thanks, I will have to think about that. I will say that I wish more people would create things, particularly if they are not "art", because I think there's a wealth of strange (to me) perspectives I am missing out on.
	11:58am annie: great show trouble, so glad i could be here...
	11:58am dc pat: crap, got pulled away at the last minute. great discussin with you all, have a good one...
	11:58am PJ: I'd just like to say that I came in late but I really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you everyone, and, of course, thank you Trouble, for the great music!
	11:58am duke: I think most news is hearsay.
	11:59am moose: keep missing show due to 'work' catching last 2 minutes! archive listening later...
	11:59am Andrew: Agreed! Thanks for the nice discussion, everyone.
	11:59am Brian in UK: Peerless, trouble.
	12:00pm too much coffee: what a nice finish!
	12:00pm allan: in 1888 Sir Arthur Sullivan complained to Thomas Edison, terrified that with his new invention "so much hideous and bad music may be put on records forever!"
	12:00pm kayt: obrigada trouble!
	12:03pm robyn: @duke hearsay = news, i agree...
	12:04pm robyn: great music, great thread.

This Is The Modern World with Trouble: Playlist from May 15, 2012

Listener comments!

(C) 2024 WFMU. Generated by KenzoDB, written 2000-2024 by Ken Garson