halloween is for suckers... and other treats

Last Halloween I posted a list of albums that celebrate the dark spirit of a holiday I don't much care for. It turned out to be a weirdly successful way of attracting hits. Apparently Massive Attack's Mezzanine has a lot of fans. I'm glad I could help.

I'm not a huge fan of Halloween, mostly for reasons having to do with my own laziness, but I can at least appreciate the spirit of a holiday that revels in the shadows. Perhaps if I still had my parents around to help me with my costume, Halloween parties wouldn't be prefaced by so much dread. I haven't had a decent costume in years. Perhaps this year will be different.

While I'm figuring out what to wear here's what I'll be listening to:

The Smiths - The Smiths
Since moving, it seems I've rediscovered this album and, while I've always held The Queen is Dead in highest regard, the Smith's debut keeps getting better each time I put it on. It may not have "Bigmouth Strikes Again" or "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" but The Smiths more than makes up for it. Instead we have the immature swagger of "This Charming Man," the narcissistic apathy of "Still Ill," and that infectious harmonica line in the erotic "Hand in Glove." Morrisey flaunts himself but its his awareness of audacity that his persona so compelling. It's the final song that gets me though. "Suffer Little Children," which is reportedly about Manchester's notorious Moors murders, is as haunting as anything in the Smiths' catalogue.

Future Islands - In Evening Air (Thrill Jockey)
Imagine a frontman as charismatic and weird as the Pixies' Frank Black backed by a band as dark and industrial as Joy Division. Combine that with upbeat electro-pop and you have some idea of Future Islands' sound. Released this summer, In Evening Air is at once unsettling and danceable, crass and cryptic.

Warpaint - The Fool (Rough Trade)
Released this past week, Warpaint's debut rocks hard but delicately. Unfortunately it's already getting a slew of erroneously mediocre reviews. On The Fool layers of disenchanted vocals (to my mind, reminiscent of Cat Power) are set against a heavily grunge-inspired background. The result sounds like it could have been crafted in the early 90s, but I'm always happy to hear someone using tremolo guitar settings.

"Maintaining now the specters of Marx"

After a (long) month of reading Derrida, Specters of Marx emerges as an easy (but actually quite difficult) favourite. It may have something to do with the timeliness of my reading (Halloween is just around the corner), but much my admiration for this text comes form the way in which Derrida uses the opening scenes of Hamlet as entry point for his discussion of ghosts and specters. However, it is in the final chapter (after Derrida has discussed the heterogeneity of Marx's voice and has offered a ruthless critique of Francis Fukuyama), that Derrida stages his critique of Marx.

At a basic level Derrida reads Marx in the same way that Marx reads the German philosopher Max Stirner in The German Ideology: as haunted (and obsessed) by the ghosts of Hegelian-Christian idealism. In their preoccupation with specters, both Marx and Stirner follow what Derrida calls the “[s]pecular circle: one chases after in order to chase away, one pursues, sets off in pursuit of someone to make him flee, but one makes him flee, distances him, expulses him so as to go after him again and remain in pursuit” (175). Here, as Derrida notes, we can see that hospitality and exclusion belong to the same impulse: the specter of communism that Marx would welcome is bound up with the ghosts that Marx would like to exterminate.

In Capital, Marx sets out to conjure away the “representative consciousness of a subject." In his attempt to think otherwise than Plato, not to mention Hegel, Marx privileges that which “survives outside the head.” Stirner has set out to annihilate his “phantomatic projections” of Christian Europe but in so doing, Marx argues, Stirner merely replaces these phantasms with a second ghost of corporeality: the “egological body." Stirner has not touched upon the “actual relations” that constitute the “fatherland." For Marx the phantasm is a product of material conditions; Stirner fails because he believes such ghosts can be defeated on their own terms. But as Marx points out, the ghosts will only finally disappear when social and economic conditions are transformed. Derrida suggests that, in this ontological tradition, Marx is doing precisely what he diagnoses as a “quid pro quo” in Stirner (an exchanging of one thing—one self-presenced origin—for another).

Though disguised as a rhetorical maneuver, Derrida consistently deploys the familiar binary of “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” in this critique. He has done this elsewhere, but in the context of this critique, the figure of the hand at once suggests labour and use-value: an immediate relation between the human subject and its object. But the hand can also be an instrument of deception. In this way, Derrida endeavors to show that within Marx’s writing there is a “sleight of hand” at work, which occurs in the relationship between the “head” (Stirner) and the “hands” (Marx). Both, of course, are still connected to the body.  Derrida’s trope of the hands mirrors Marx’s trope of the head (in his critique of Stirner), thereby disrupting Marx’s privileging of praxis over thought as the means to a world without ghosts. But such a world is pure phantasm.

As Derrida demonstrates throughout Specters of Marx, haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony. Therefore, "if he loves justice at least, the 'scholar' of the future, the 'intellectual' of tomorrow should learn it from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning how to make conversation withthe ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech . . . they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet" (221).

all hallows eve (a list of sorts)

It's a pretty safe bet that at most of tonight's Halloween parties people will make a REALLY big deal out of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Ahh...he's back from the dead! I also wouldn't be surprised to hear an ironic shout out to Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash." I used to hate the song, but now it reminds me of my favourite episode of Freaks and Geeks. And you can expect there to be a lot of folks dressed up like characters from Donnie Darko - especially the combination of a skeleton body suit with a zip up hoody from American Apparel. When I saw it in grade 10, Donnie Darko defined Halloween for me: the music (both the original score and the songs by Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Tears for Fears, etc.), the eerie suburban setting, the freaky costumes, the whole atmosphere really. So what if the plot about time travel is pretty much incomprehensible and the straight to video sequel looks like absolute garbage. If nothing else, Donnie Darko captured the mood (see Bat for Lashes' video for "What's a Girl to do"), the macabre spirit of 80's for all of us who were 20 years too late.

Here's my list of albums that go bump in the night. In other words, it'd be a grave mistake to spin these records on a sunny afternoon. It's probably a good thing I'm not having a party because, as you can see from this list, it'd be a real downer...














Adore - Smashing Pumpkins (1998)
This dark but unexpected departure for the band was the first without their previous drummer, J.C., and a quickly turned into therapeutic project for Corgan after the loss of his mother. Featuring late Victorian style photography and oodles of over the top gothic costumes, skeletal song structures, flirations with electronica, and barely-there vocals, this subdued departure was also the Pumpkins' last great album.















Random Spirit Lover - Sunset Rubdown (2007)
Everyone seems to have forgotten about this album, now that the critically acclaimed Dragonslayer is out. Personally, I prefer the extended meanderings of Spenser Krug to the tightly wound pop of the band's latest release. This was an album that channelled a host of spirits in carnivalesque celebration.















Disintegration - The Cure (1989)
Seems like an obvious choice, but what's so bad about that? Droning synths and lush orchestration. The Cure have a lot of albums that could be on this list, but Disintegration remains my favourite, probably because I discovered it at the perfect time.















Limbo, Panto - Wild Beasts (2008)
Though this year's Two Dancers is touted as a step forward for the band, I was pretty satisfied with their heavier debut. Songs like "His Grinning Skull" and "She Purred, While I Grrred" can't be replicated - the seedy nihilism of Limbo, Panto is almost intoxicating.















Mezzanine - Massive Attack (1998)
I don't think there's a better rainy day album. It's industrial: slick, lethal ("Inertia Creeps") and all of a sudden so chilled out ("Exchange"). The first time I heard "Teardrop" I kept it on repeat for hours. This album manages to evoke a wide spectrum of moods, while maintaining a stylish core of consumer malaise on the road to perdition.















Ocean Rain - Echo and the Bunnymen (1984)
I must confess, I only really got into this album after seeing Donnie Darko, but since then I've sung its praises. "Killing Moon" and "Thorn of Crowns" are perfectly sinister, full of epic ambition and metaphysical jargon.















Maxinquaye - Tricky (1995)
He sampled "Suffer" by the Smashing Pumpkins (appropriately named "Pumpkin") and hasn't come close to this sort of consistency or execution since this was released in the mid-90s. He named the album after his mother, Maxin Quaye. "Aftermath" is undoubtedly one of coolest tracks ever, managing to sample both Blade Runner and Marvin Gaye. And there's a flute! Tricky gets all the credit, but its really his then-girlfriend Martina Topley-Bird, whose angelic vocals contrast Tricky's grit, that steals the show.

This Halloween, the most interesting/disturbing but eerily appropriate band is without a doubt England's Wild Beasts. I've sung there praises before and this year they've usurped the title, previously held by Sunset Rubdown. Halloween is, I think, the perfect autumn holiday because, in this season especially, the presence of death is so obviously everywhere that it's impossible to ignore. The golden harvest is over, but clusters of brightly coloured leaves hang on to bare branches with doomed resilience. The frailty, the beauty of time's passage, is never so immediate.

What began as a pagan festival, seemingly baptised by the Catholic Church's decision to relocate All Saints Day to the first of November (which was also the beginning of the new year until it was overrided by the Church), is still more or less pagan; and perhaps we need that (pagan) freedom to name death, to locate that absence which the saints have passed through, to find true communion. When you think about what Halloween's become --children in costumes visiting the houses of strangers and asking for candy-- it's easy to get cynical (especially for the particularly pietistic).

I complain about Halloween for a number of reasons. Some of them are more valid than others. Most of them have more to do with consumer culture and my own laziness. But thinking about the holiday's evolution, from an "pagan" pre-Christian festival to a failed product of Western empire-building renews my interest and appreciation in what is one of the weirdest holidays on the calendar. Fall is undoubtably my favourite season. I just wish it wasn't so damn cold.