SOUNDTRACK: THE VIOLET ARCHERS-Victoria, BC, October 2005 (2005).
This live bootleg comes from the Rheostatics Live website. If The Violet Archers were to become a huge internationally famous band (which, let’s face it, they’re not), this would be an awesome bootleg to have. It’s from a show before their first album was released, and, if the stage banter is to be believed, before they’d even thought of a name for the band. (There’s a joke that they wanted to call themselves The Gay Apparel, which is awesome).
Indeed, I assume that this show was recorded in 2004, not 2005 as listed online.
So, this show seems like it’s recorded in front of about 20 people. The recording quality isn’t ideal (the drums sound pretty dreadful) but it conveys the spirit of the show very well.
The first two songs are just Tim and his acoustic guitar (“Simple” sounds great in this context although “All the Good” works better as a band number). Then the band comes on. Ida Nilsen is not with them yet, but the band sounds great together and the songs are fully formed (the album is said to be coming out in the next spring).
It’s a great show and Tim Vesely sounds a lot more like he did with the Rheostatics than he does on the regular album. I guess the live setting brings out the old voice from Tim. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the guitarist with the great name: Yawd Sylvester. Outstanding!
[READ: September 28, 2010] “Imperial Bedroom”
This piece is about privacy. It was written 12 years ago, when the fear of the loss of privacy was in its infancy. And Franzen makes a very convincing case that we were (and I assume still are) overreacting in a big way to fears of privacy loss.
He opens by noting that the panic about privacy is all the rage, excepted that the public doesn’t seem to be genuinely alarmed. He sets his argument on the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewisnky Starr Report. And what he bemoans is that this most private of information is coming out of the most public of offices (and the most imperial of bedrooms). [With the valid corollary–who is ever going to run for office if this kind of shit is going to be made public on such a grand scale?]
He gives us a basic history if the “right to privacy” which he says legally is a tough concept. Because whatever you call the various forms of invasion of privacy, legally they often fall into other areas–trespass, defamation or theft. What’s left is emotional distress, which is always a nebulous concept.
He then mentions Richard Power’s concern over our vanishing privacy. Powers claims the threat is as great with consequence as the Cold War. Franzen undermines this hyperbole with this wonderful reasoning:
That Powers can seriously compares credit-card fraud and intercepted cell-phone calls to the threat of thermonuclear incineration, however, speaks mainly of the infectiousness of privacy panic.
He then states the argument that privacy experts are still bemoaning today: people will willingly give away all kinds of private information to get various things. Lawrence Lessig calls Americans “bovine” for giving away so much of their personal lives. But of course privacy means different things to different people. So JF is convincing when he states, “The curious thing about privacy, though, is that simply by expecting it we can usually achieve it.” I love the example that we’ve all experienced…when we send a postcard, we’re well aware than anyone could read it. But unless it happens to be the mail carrier who knows us, who really cares?
The real crux of the article though is that people argue there is “less privacy than there used to be.” It’s something that most Americans believe by dint of having heard it so often. But he argues that, for instance in 1890, in a small town, everyone, EVERYONE knew your business, from your parents to their friends to the shopkeepers who knew your name.
In fact, he says, it is more of the public sphere that we are in danger of losing, more specifically, keeping other people’s private life out of our public space (from people peeing in alleyways to revealing every private detail on a cell phone). It’s a valid (and common by now) argument. Although Franzen reveals his prudish side again when his complaint about publicly-aired grievances goes from the reasonable, “People now readily name their diseases, rents and anti-depressants. Sexual histories get spilled on first dates” all the way to “Birkenstocks and cut off infiltrate the office on casual Fridays.” I must ask, are my coworker’s shoes really an invasion of my personal space? Only if their shoes normally hide something I don’t want to see.
But he returns to quainter notions of privacy, especially within the city. He can look out his apartment window and see everything that his neighbors are doing (and, he assumes, vice-versa). The quaintness (and Rear Window-ness) of the last paragraph reveals that we give up our privacy all the time, and most of the time it doesn’t hurt anyone.
This was another enjoyable essay from Franzen. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (which I have not read) was published around this time (I don’t have an exact date of publication). And the next article that I’ll read is, in fact, a short story from the same period so how his late 90s fiction compares to his essays.
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