Hippies vs. Punks: Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage (2015)

Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage, released this year, is filled with one great song after another. Of all of them I believe my favorite is "Moksha."

Shilpa Ray is a Brooklyn chanteuse who plays a harmonium; she is a mid-tempo Punk rocker who absolutely blows her better known Brooklyn peer, Sharon Van Etten, right off the Williamsburg block. Ray's lyrics are super-smart and edgy. I don't usually pay that close attention to words, but it is hard not to when they are in lines like "My dick’s bigger, my breasts are thicker, whatever power means" from the song "Johnny Thunders Fantasy Space Camp" or the following first verse from my favorite, "Moksha":

There’s no entry for the foreigners
I’m your native girl with my
Tail between my bleeding ass
And I’m off to the gates of heaven
I’ve been fakin’ my drunken stupor
And my absence from your real world
I’m just better than prostrating bitches
Who make believe they’re misunderstood

In the end, I'm a sound guy. And what is powerful in "Moksha," and throughout Last Year's Savage, is the droning pump organ, the walloping drums -- like a burlesque strip tease, or a rug on a clothes line being beaten with a kitchen broom -- and Ray's voice.

Yesterday walking home up the hill I tried to remember why I was thinking about the time my ex-wife's mother's live-in boyfriend, Chris was his name, horrified me with a tale about how he had stopped reading. At the time, I was a university undergraduate, probably 20 or 21. 

Chris was a nurse who worked in the same hospital as my mother-in-law. His story of how he had stopped reading went something like this: During college and for the first few years after he got out into the workaday world, he read fulsomely -- history, philosophy, the weighty fiction of the masters. But gradually his passion for the text diminished, and Chris found himself moving away from serious prose to lighter fare like pulp paperbacks. Eventually, as the years sped by, he even stopped reading Michael Crichton and Stephen King, settling for the local small-town evening paper. Finally, at the time of his confession to me in the mid-1980s, he had even stopped reading the evening paper. Capping off his narrative, he said something like, "Now all I can manage is reading a Time article while I am on the toilet."

This hit me like a thunderbolt. I lived to read; reading was my life. I was studying philosophy at the university, reading Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, et al. The idea that there would be a time when I no longer read struck me as a kind of living death, life as a zombie where I would go, like Chris the nurse did, to work every day and then come home and smoke a joint and maybe go out for a run. The thing of it is, what made me panic at the time and seared the moment in my memory to recall this past week 30 years later, is that I knew right then and there that Chris was telling me the truth.

And sure enough, I, basically, like Chris thirty years ago, don't read anymore. Certainly, I try to read the newspaper every day, and a few comic books on Saturday. But the days of sitting down for hours with my snout in The Critique of Pure Reason or Beyond Good and Evil are long gone.

And then I remembered why I remembered Chris' story -- because all that reading of the Western philosophers I did while in college has never left me. I think about it all the time; it informs how I look at the world.

And one of those ideas, gleaned from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, is that we can never completely know the future. The system is always open, must remain open. Any attempt to close the system and declare the end of history or the achievement of perfection is doomed to failure.

What the artist does is nibble at the outer edge of the timeline, the place where the present intersects with the future, where the atmosphere meets the void of space; she brings the future back to us (we, the consumers, the witnesses) and regurgitates it; we then consume it.

This is why it is essential to keep listening to new music. It is how rationality works. Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage, like Future's DS2, is pure ambrosia.

"The Truth is Not Real"

Some housekeeping on this Saturday afternoon. Things pile up over time. You mean to do something, say something, and it never gets done or said. So where does it go?

Last weekend, last Saturday morning, suffering through a run, on the back end dealing with significant cramping in my right lower calf (which was a problem again this morning), I thought of the runner's race consciousness. There is a moment, usually in every race, where you are up against it. It being the primordial nature of being. The pain is extreme. You don't know if you can go on. You are looking into a mirror. It is opaque; the mirror is a dark wall you are looking into, but what is coming back at you from the dark mirror is a voice, the chatter of a monkey. Yes, it's you; you're looking into you, but you're not seeing anything; you're just hearing this monkey chatter telling you, "Oh, stop. Please, stop! Don't you see, you're hurting yourself. Give up. It doesn't matter. Nothing will change. At least slow down."

On it goes. You have to smash the opaque mirror, or, less dramatically, ignore the monkey chatter coming from it and push on to the finish line. It is why I love running road races. They put you in touch, glaringly so, with what it means to be self-conscious; the runner gets an immersion in the golden truth at the heart of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the transcendental unity of apperception. We are just a frame for fleeting images, sounds, pains. That's all the self is.

Maybe a month-and-a-half ago, when my bad left foot necessitated running on the artificial turf of a nearby soccer field, I cramped up in my right calf. Just when I was cutting my jog short a song shuffled on my iPod, "The Truth is Not Real" by Sagittarius. What the song really says is "But the truth is/You're not real."

How true. I am not real. I am a frame, a transcendental unity of apperception. My body is real. But I, my self, am not my body. I am not real. I am an invisible unity of a fleeting consciousness.

I went home and looked into Sagittarius. Sagittarius wasn't a real band but a studio project of Sixties super-producer Gary Usher. Usher is known for his work with the Beach Boys and the Byrds. For instance, he produced The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968) the same year as the album Present Tense (1968), on which "The Truth is Not Real" appears as the last track.

"The Truth is Not Real" was on my iPod because I had loaded Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965–1968 (2009), the Rhino Records collection devoted to the Sunset Strip scene in the mid-Sixties. The LA freak scene prefigured in many ways the rise of the Hippies. It needs to be explored as part of my now dormant Hippies vs. Punks project.

Gary Usher is an interesting person to look at. He seems to have got his ideas for "The Truth is Not Real" from one of those LA-based esoteric groups that show up as convenient foils in Raymond Chandler pulp fiction. The group is Builders of the Adytum and Gary Usher produced an album for them, An Esoteric Qabalistic Service (1966) featuring the Rev. Ann Davies. Worth looking into.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #46

I fiddled about on my undergraduate honors thesis for a couple of years before finally leaving the university the summer of 1988 without completing it. I shouldn't say "fiddled" because I worked quite long and hard on that thesis -- a discourse on Kant, Frege and Derrida that argued for the possibility of the analytic a posteriori (a type of statement Kant ruled out) -- though I would frequently say I was working on it when I was actually off drinking and copulating with one girlfriend or another who was not my wife-to-be.

Right before my betrothed and I left Berkeley in a VW bus bound for a quick Reno stopover in order to tie the knot on our way to the married-student housing offered by New York City's Columbia University Medical School, I inexplicably plucked from the fully-loaded bus a box containing the fruits of two years of research and writing -- countless days spent in branch libraries taking notes from academic journals and then spilling my musings into composition books while I drank coffee in Telegraph Avenue cafes -- and handed it to my father with instructions for him to mail it to me when we arrived in New York.

My father did what I asked of him, but the tomato box containing my honors thesis, my "magnum oh" that ingeniously (or so I imagined) bridged the gap between continental and analytic philosophy in au courant fashion, never made it to New York.

A cutout of the front portion of the box containing my father's return address was mailed back to him. My honors thesis had gone missing. The speculation was that the crack-and-peel label containing the address of our married-student apartment fell off the box. But if that were the case why not ship the whole box back to the return address which was still visible? The lid of the box must have become separated from the box itself.

My father was disconsolate; he felt responsible for the loss of the thesis. To this day he suspects some sort of foul play by the postal service. Just the other day he related to me that when he dropped off the box at the post office and was admonished by the woman working the counter for coming in so close to closing time with a such a heavy box that she was expected to lift.

Whatever it was, whether a label that had lost its adhesive or sabotage by a disgruntled clerk, my fate was sealed. I told myself I could recapitulate the pith of what was contained in all those boxed notes, and I made a half-hearted attempt evenings after work during the summer of 1989. But the jig was up. I used to be able to recite from memory the chapters of my thesis, how the argument moved from the analytic-synthetic distinction Kant makes at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); to Frege's logicist program in his Begriffsschrift (1879) and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and the ontological implications of defining arithmetic as analytic; to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) and the possibilities for a new, more ethical pedagogy. Now, I can barely remember the barest of outlines. Hopefully, I still have notes somewhere from that weak summer of '89 attempt to capture what was lost in that missing tomato box.

Autumn 1988 

Gentlemen,

The parcel which I'm looking for is a box, approximately 8"x12"x10", with a lid (it's much like an IBM photocopy-paper box). It has air holes on either side (I believe it was originally a box for shipping tomatoes). It weighs about twenty-five pounds.

CONTENTS

The box contains l) books, 2) photocopies of books, and 3) loose-leaf handwritten pages (see next page for sample of hand writing). A list of the authors and titles of the books is as follows:

Saul Kripke, NAMING AND NECESSITY
Jacques Derrida, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
Immanuel Kant, GROUNDWORK . . .
Gottlob Frege,FOUNDATIONS OF ARITHMETIC
John Sallis, SPACINGS

The package was sent from Fairfield, CA to New York City (10032). My biggest concern is not with recouping any dollar value for the missing material, but with finding it. You see, the box, which I had my dad send to me, had a year and a half's work in it. Without it I can't write this paper; and without this paper, I can't get my bachelor's degree. (A real, honest-to-goodness, tearjerker.) So I would sincerely appreciate any kind of reply, no matter how brief. 

Thank you,