I did.
It sounds fine.
But I'm not sure I really enjoy the music any more than I did before, on certifiably low-fi junk. The music, when it's really there, is just there. You can hear it coming out of the dented speaker grille of a Datsun B210 with holes in the floor. Sometimes that's the best way to hear it.
I knew a man once whose teen years had been L.A., jazz, the Forties. He spoke of afternoons he'd spent, utterly transported, playing 78-rpm recordings, "worn down white" with repeated applications of a sharp steel stylus. That is, the shellac that carried the grooves on these originally black records was plain gone: What he must have been listening to could only have been the faintest approximations of the original sound. (Rationing affected steel phonograph needles, he told me, desperate hipsters resorted to the spikes of the larger cactuses.)
That man heard that music.
I first heard the Rolling Stones on a battery-powered, basketball-shaped, pigskin-covered miniature phonograph of French manufacture--a piece of low tech as radical in its day as it is now obscure. Radical in that it enabled the teenage owner to transport LP records and the intoxicant of choice to suitably private locations--the boonies.
This constituted an entirely new way to listen to the music of choice. "Choice" being the key word. The revolutionary potential of the D-cell record player wasn't substantially bettered until the advent of the Walkman, which allows us to integrate the music of choice with virtually any landscape.
The Walkman changed the way we understand cities.
I first heard Joy Division on a Walkman, and I remain unable to separate the experience of the music's bleak majesty from the first heady discovery of the pleasures of musically encapsulated fast-forward urban motion.
In the Seventies, the Net writhed with growth. Gaps began to close. A paradox became increasingly evident: While artists needed the Net in order to reach a mass audience, it seemed to be the gaps through which the best art emerged, at least initially.
I am, by trade, a science-fiction writer. That is, the fiction I've written so far has arrived at the point of consumption via a marketing mechanism called "science fiction." During the past twenty years the Net has closed around mass-market publishing--and science fiction--as smoothly as it closed around the music industry and everything else.
As a science-fiction writer, I'm sometimes asked whether or not I think the Net is a good thing. That's like being asked if being human is a good thing. As for being a human being a good thing or not, I can't say--this has been referred to as the Postmodern Condition.
In any case it sometimes looks to me as though lots of us will eventually have a basis for comparison, by virtue of no longer being quite human at all, thank you.
Meanwhile, in my front room, the family media node is in metastasis, sprouting CDs, joysticks, you name it. My kids, like Mr. Otomo's, cluster like flies.
THE OTHER THING they ask you when you're a science-fiction writer is, "What do you think will happen?"
The day I reply with anything other than a qualified "I haven't got a clue," please shoot me. While science fiction is sometimes good at predicting things, it's seldom good at predicting what those things might actually do to us. For example, television, staple window dressing for hundreds of stories from the Twenties through the Forties, was usually presented as a mode of personal communication. Nobody predicted commercials, Hollywood Squares, or heavy-metal music videos.
With that disclaimer firmly in place, I predict the family media node growing into a trickier and more unified lump. The distinction among television, CD player, and computer seems particularly arbitrary these days, a tired scam designed to support the robots who solder circuit boards. But as to what your integrated Net Node will actually be able to do for you one day, my best bet is that the words for it haven't been invented yet.
Example. A BBC executive working on another vision of "interactive television" offered me a tour of a small research facility in San Francisco. He was interested in having me "do" something with this new technology: The lab we visited was devoted to . . . well, there weren't verbs. I looked at things, watched consoles as they were poked and prodded, and nobody there, it seemed, could even begin to explain what it was I might be doing if I were to, uh, do one of these projects, whatever it was. It wasn't writing, and it wasn't directing. It was definitely something, though, and they were certainly keen to do it, but they needed those verbs.
Another example. A week later I found myself in an FX compound situated off a quiet back street in North Hollywood, experiencing serious future-shock frisson. My hosts--young, fast, and scientific to the bone--had developed a real-time video puppet, a slack-faced Max Headroom suspended in the imaginary space behind a television screen. Invited to put my hand in a waldo that looked vaguely like a gyroscope, I caused this sleeping golem to twitch and shiver, and my own hair to stand on end. On the way out, I was given a tape of the thing being manipulated by a professional movie puppeteer. It looks a lot more natural than I ever do on television, but what are the verbs for what those young fast fellows were doing?
We hurtle toward an imaginary vortex, the century's end....
HE GETS UP in the morning and watches ten minutes of MuchMusic while the water boils for coffee. The kids aren't up yet because it's not quite time for Dinosaurs. MuchMusic is Canada's approximation of MTV. In the morning he usually watches it with the sound off, unless they show a video from Quebec, in which case he listens because he doesn't understand French.
Because he doesn't like the Net to gnaw at the remnants of the night's dreams. Not until he's ready for it to anyway.
These pieces aren't presented in chronological order, particularly, but this is quite an early example, and the product of considerable discomfort around the idea of just how one does this sort of thing when asked. The very fact of the commission was unsettling, I recall.
What I don't recall, quite, is what I would have imagined "the Net" to be, at that point, however freely I tossed the term around for Rolling Stone. I knew not Net, when I wrote this, though I had friends who talked Net, and fairly constantly. I communicated with them via fax, yards and yards of slippery, oddly scented photosensitive paper, longer docs coming or going via FedEx, either as printouts or on floppies. So I think it's safe to say that I was pretending to know what "the Net" might be, when I wrote this. Was it something to do with this "email" a few people seemed to know how to send between distant computers, or was it some more abstract expression of the totality of cyberspace? I think I opted for the latter, but phrased things in such a way as might seem I was better acquainted with the former than I actually was.
If I had seen a computer with an Internet connection, at that point, I hadn't been aware of it. The first I remember seeing was my own, and that was quite a few years later; I'd waited until they'd made it very simple, which I'd rightly assumed they would, eventually.
But I did own a Rocket Radio when I was a kid, and I did once infer the existence of the newfangled tape cassette from a single brown and tangled roadside skein.
The Datsun B-210 with rust-holes in the floor was my own, parked outside as I wrote.
GENE WOLFE ONCE said that being an only child whose parents are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilization there, an entire continent, but it's gone. And you alone remember. That's my story too, my father having died when I was six, my mother when I was eighteen. Brian Aldiss believes that if you look at the life of any novelist, you'll find an early traumatic break, and mine seems no exception.
I was born on the coast of South Carolina, where my parents liked to vacation when there was almost nothing there at all. My father was in some sort of middle-management position in a large and growing construction company. They'd built some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities, and paranoiac legends of "security" at Oak Ridge were part of our family culture. There was a cigar box full of strange-looking ID badges he'd worn there. But he'd done well at Oak Ridge
, evidently, and so had the company he worked for, and in the postwar South they were busy building entire red brick Levittown-style suburbs. We moved a lot, following these projects, and he was frequently away, scouting for new ones.
It was a world of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science-fiction themes. Then my father went off on one more business trip. He never came back. He choked on something in a restaurant, the Heimlich maneuver hadn't been discovered yet, and everything changed.
My mother took me back to the small town in southwestern Virginia where both she and my father were from, a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted. The trauma of my father's death aside, I'm convinced that it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction.
I eventually became exactly the sort of introverted, hyper-bookish boy you'll find in the biographies of most American science-fiction writers, obsessively filling shelves with paperbacks and digest-sized magazines, dreaming of one day becoming a writer myself.
At age fifteen, my chronically anxious and depressive mother having demonstrated an uncharacteristic burst of common sense in what today we call "parenting," I was shipped off to a private boys' school in Arizona. There, extracted grublike and blinking from my bedroom and those bulging plywood shelves, I began the forced invention of a less Lovecraftian persona--based in large part on a chance literary discovery a year or so before.
I had stumbled, in my ceaseless quest for more and/or better science fiction, on a writer named Burroughs--not Edgar Rice but William S., and with him had come his colleagues Kerouac and Ginsberg. I had read this stuff, or tried to, with no idea at all of what it might mean, and felt compelled--compelled to what, I didn't know. The effect, over the next few years, was to make me, at least in terms of my Virginia home, Patient Zero of what would later be called the counterculture. At the time, I had no way of knowing that millions of other boomer babes, changelings all, were undergoing the same metamorphosis.
In Arizona, science fiction was put aside with other childish things, as I set about negotiating puberty and trying on alternate personae with all the urgency and clumsiness that come with that, and was actually getting somewhere, I think, when my mother died with stunning suddenness. Dropped literally dead: the descent of an Other Shoe I'd been anticipating since age six.
Thereafter, probably needless to say, things didn't seem to go very well for quite a while. I left my school without graduating, joined up with the rest of the Children's Crusade of the day, and shortly found myself in Canada, a country I knew almost nothing about. I concentrated on evading the draft and staying alive, while trying to make sure I looked like I was at least enjoying the Summer of Love. I did literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me, and have lived here in Canada, more or less, ever since.
Having ridden out the crest of the Sixties in Toronto, aside from a brief, riot-torn spell in the District of Columbia, I met a girl from Vancouver, went off to Europe with her (concentrating on countries with fascist regimes and highly favorable rates of exchange), got married, and moved to British Columbia, where I watched the hot fat of the Sixties congeal as I earned a desultory bachelor's degree in English at UBC.
In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write.
And have been, ever since.
Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free. I did avoid the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an e-mail address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision.
I do have an e-mail address, yes, but, no, I won't give it to you. I am one and you are many, and even if you are, say, twenty-seven in grand global total, that's still too many. Because I need to have a life and waste time and write.
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.
I wrote this when Penguin USA was setting up a website for me. I'm sure they suggested it, but fortunately it didn't trigger any of that commission-by-a-major-publication adrenaline.
I now spend at least as much time on the Internet as the average person used to spend watching television. But I still watch very little television in the conventional, or previous, sense.
ARTISTIC COLLABORATIONIS IS A PROFOUNDLY strange business. Do it right up to the hilt, as it were, and you and your partner will generate a third party, some thoroughly Other, and often one capable of things neither you nor the very reasonable gentleman seated opposite would even begin to consider. "Who," asks one of those disembodied voices in Mr. Burroughs's multilevel scrapbooks, "is the Third who walks beside us?"
My theory, such as it is, about Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, is that their Third, their Other, Mistah Steely Dan hisself, proved so problematic an entity for the both of them, so seductive and determined a swirl of ectoplasm, that they opted to stay the hell away from him for twenty years.
He continues on, of course, in the atemporal reaches of electronic popular culture, and I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by the admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine, and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of, shall we say, a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: "Is anyone else hearing this?" Do the people who program these supermarket background tapes have any idea what this song is actually about? On this basis alone I have always maintained that Steely Dan's music was, has been, and remains among the most genuinely subversive oeuvres in late-twentieth-century pop.
There's a story about some hapless mook, down under the stadium there in Chicago where they did the hands-on prep for the first atomic bomb, who finds himself in the deeply unenviable position of having to shove together two halves of some grapefruit-sized mass of critically radioactive material. It ends, as they say, in tears, and that is what I've always imagined happened to Becker and Fagen; why they opted offshore and waited a couple of decades for the Geiger counters to stop clicking. Buried the two halves of that graphite core under their respective beds, maybe never to be reassembled.
Now whatever Mistah Dan might be--and I myself am inclined to think of him as a literary, or perhaps paraliterary, as much as a purely musical figure--Becker and Fagen are musos of the first water. Hence their respective solo output in the absence of Steely Dan. Which I've enjoyed, but in rather an oblique way, never quite able to stop glancing over my shoulder else that Third might loom suddenly into view, which he never did.
Now comes, as surely every Dan fan knows, Two Against Nature. The immediate and embarrassingly looming question being: Is He back? Have they resurrected His Bad Self?
Yes.
They have. The Stranger has signed in, his toe-cleavage ostrich loafers flaking red Maui clay on the studio broadloom.
Two Against Nature is actually
a rather eerie experience in that regard, like being present for the arrival of a time machine. But not one from any particular past, or future; this music manages (as it always has) to transcend the duller registers of the cultural calendar. It's as though it was composed in the time machine, in its own little pocket of temporality. I suspect that this is somehow the result of an encyclopedic sense of American music, an effortlessly graceful facility at collage and that patented Steely Dan studio wax, as though one were listening down through a hundred coats of hand-rubbed sonic carnauba, each glossy layer somehow highlighting a different aspect of the composition. But best ignore that, as I am anything but a musician. Suffice it to say: It sure sounds like Steely Dan to me, and the more so the longer I listen to it.
The DNA match is perfect. The real question, I think, is how close together have Becker and Fagen been willing to bring the two halves of the graphite core? Well, sometimes very close, it feels to me, and sometimes not so. My Dan counter starts to sizzle most seriously with "Jack of Speed" and "Cousin Dupree," two very different pieces. "Jack of Speed" is an instant classic in the Dan Archive of Loping Psychedelic Naturalism, one of those luminously unfocused mug shots they're so good at: Someone you once knew all too well, shuffled back, via the Dan magic, to stand in your doorway for a moment with Orphan Annie eyes. "Cousin Dupree" is Steely Dan at the very peak of droll American pop narrative, deeply comic and quietly merciless.
I'd say more about the other songs, but I'm starting to feel like a reviewer, which makes me intensely uncomfortable. I'm not a reviewer: I just want to say I like this record a lot, okay?
And I can only hope that Becker and Fagen decide that they can afford to let their Third out of the box a little more often, as there's nobody else remotely like him, and we need him. I know I do.