Noise/Mummies/Trees

Just found out about this great new band. I should mention that it is experimental black metal. Does this have to mean that I am a hipster? The OED says that “hip” is a variant of “hep,” even though the first citation for hip is 1904, while hep is 1908. Hep is defined as “well-informed, knowledgeable, ‘wise to’, up-to-date; smart, stylish.” Okay, nothing terribly wrong with that, I guess. The first citation for hep is symptomatic in a rather funny way, from the Saturday Evening Post of December 5, 1908: “What puzzles me is how you can find anybody left in the world who isn't hep.”

Insofar as it’s pejorative, which it is in my book, would I disqualify myself for hipsterism if I said I listened to death metal when I was a teenager, and thus have a history with it, and am thus not just associating myself with one of the latest trends? Black metal is never going to be all that popular anyway, even in what one can loosely call indie culture. Or is simply saying that I listened to metal as a teenager also identify me as hip? Of course, one’s art consumption practices do possess social significance, and of course in some cases grant one cultural capital. I can’t very well adopt the naïve view of “I just want to listen to good-sounding music”; it sounds too much like the tautological “I like what I like,” and it begs the question of what "good" is.

A gigantic garbage truck or some other kind of industrial vehicle was parked yesterday afternoon at the service entrance to the undergraduate dining hall just down and across the street from where I live. I was walking out the library when I heard it. Its mechanism was doing some form of work, generating a massive drone that could be heard for blocks. I thought, wow, that’s really nice, an unintentional piece of sound art in the middle of the day. It continued for a good twenty minutes. It reminded me of KTL, and Marcus Schmickler, who I hope to see at Lampo this Saturday.

This past Sunday in the mid-day I went for a walk down the street to the look at the empty quads. On a whim I went into the Oriental Institute to walk through the exhibits and return home. At the far end of the first hall, under the huge Assyrian statuary there were two rather fetching women dressed up in Egyptian garb giving a demonstration of how to mummify a corpse, or a fabric imitation of one, on a table in front of them. They invited the three people standing there to take out the felt “organs,” place each one in a little container with tops that associated them with particular deities. We cured the body with “salt," brushed it with “resin” and wrapped it up. Fun stuff. Then we went to look at the actual mummification implements in the collection.

The lights are turned off in every single one of the rooms in the undergrad dorm across the street. This is the dorm that resembles a prison inside and out. I went inside once to visit the room of my former Chaplain at Berkeley who was at Chicago for a conference. We had to go through five locked doors before we got to his room. I can see the dorm through the gnarly top branches of a tree, now bare for the winter. A haunting image, especially at twilight. It reminds me of the view out one of my windows at Canterbury in Winter 1999, a dead tree through which I looked at the backside of the Berkeley City Club’s neo-gothic building, with its lush green backyard where classically trained singers would warm up before concerts, and the aquamarine light (what else?) from the gorgeous swimming pool slightly visible through a few windows. The tree was cut down soon after I moved into that room.

I can also see the Brutalist-style library from my window, which is a little disquieting for some reason. Lots of my friends have moved to other parts of Chicago, but I've been living about as close to campus as is possible for a grad student.