#unfacetious

[sroloc--elbisivni]

I would rather go to bed than spend time deliberating, so you get all four potential responses to this ranked in order from most to least facetious

1 (unnecessarily facetious): oh no i can’t believe i have to walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting

2: what, like morally, or like not canon

3: thank you for the levity this added to my life, I didn’t realize people actually got accused of wrongthink anymore

4 (completely unfacetious, in full sincerity): well, nothing’s for everyone! it’s okay, you don’t have to apologize, you get to hold that opinion. my inbox just feels like a very weird place to hold it, since I very happily and proudly wrote a dynamic you don’t like and you’ll have more fun if you ignore me.

I’m sorry, I really am, but I believe Usagi being rivals with Kenichi over Mariko and Jotaro is far better than some twisted threesome that people like to make an obsession over.

i’m very happy for you. live your truth. why are you telling me this???

[restekova]

[generallemarc]

Alright then, what was the point if not to criticize people for not making jokes in a politically acceptable way?

[ketamie]

im just sitting in this bar like. and i cross my legs and smoke a cigarette unfacetiously

[broodmotherdearest]

(Okay real talk I actually wrote out a fairly unfacetious thing expanding from that jokey thing that may actually be too long for an ask but first) 👀 are you an angel? I’ve heard the deep space pilots talk about them. They’re the most beautiful creatures in the universe. They live on the moons of Iego, I think.

As the stranger continues on, Mother's head tilts to the side. She has precisely no idea what they're talking about. Another poor soul stoned out of their mind on mother's milk, no doubt. Humans had long since proven they were unable to handle the chemical makeup of the Brood food source.

"I am not. I am a creature of flesh and blood and bone."

[dustedmagazine]

Brian Harnetty — Shawnee, Ohio (Karl)

Photo by Jennifer Harnetty

Shawnee, Ohio by BRIAN HARNETTY

[Ed. note: This review is a mini-Listening Post, encapsulating a dialogue between Peter Taber and Justin Cober-Lake on the album.]

Peter Taber: Brian Harnetty’s Shawnee, Ohio offers 13 tracks of archival interview and other recordings mostly made in the 1980s in a small northern Appalachian mining town, each paired with contemporary acoustic instrumentation composed by the artist. The album is presented as both a musical and a folkloristic project.  On the latter front, it enters complex ground, as Appalachia was important for the development of the field in the U.S. That work filtered out of the academy and into popular ways of regarding the region. Here, for example, the track “Boy” presents a recording of a child inquiring into the experiences of one of his elders.  The recording was made in the 1980s, but in the context of an Appalachian folklore project one senses the imprint of turn-of-the-century field research on the style of interview the boy’s been assigned to conduct (and the fact that he’s been assigned the task in the first place). His questions are overlain with contemporary, deliberately-paced chamber music, dramatizing the interaction. Across multiple temporal frames, then, we glimpse the processes by which communities inquire into, memorialize and nostalgize themselves. This is the most striking feature of the project for me. Justin, what were your initial thoughts?  

Justin Cober-Lake: My first thoughts were to try to figure out exactly what Shawnee, Ohio is. The more I feel unable to figure it out, the more I like the work. It's not a typical folklore project by any means. Harnetty's compositions make up the bulk of the music, and they're not typical Appalachian sounds, despite his interest in the region’s music. Some of it comes more from a chamber music tradition, and some of it connects more to modern indie-folk (I hear some Sufjan Stevens in the sparer moments). The work is also a memory of memory, retrieving decades-old interviews about events that happened decades before that. Some of it is self-aware, as when Jack Wright turns a song from a century ago into an anti-fracking singalong. Memory, anthropology, and music start to blend into a work of art that both encapsulates a town and stands at a remove from it, a pretty meditation on a challenged region. One of the strangest moments for me is the appearance of the saxophone on “John,” which could almost pass as Harnetty's cinematic accompaniment, but which actually comes from a street recording. The whole work becomes something more unified than pastiche, and more complicated than a snapshot, but also something that sits outside its subject more than I expected. I like your point about glimpsing “the processes by which communities...,” but I also wonder about the layer of Harnetty doing something new (memorializing?) with that communal memory. It's moving and revealing, and I imagine we could fill this space just following one of many possible themes, such as anthropology, modern composition, traditional music, or regional political history.  

Peter Taber: You highlighted two of the moments that really struck me, as well.  Like you, the saxophone on “John” caused me to do a double-take, as I attempted to figure out what temporal layer the music came from. The moment also stands out for its spontaneity on an album in which the predominant feeling is deliberative, whether in terms of musical composition or folkloristic inquiry. Finally, some of my confusion about “John” came from the way it had nothing to do with my own narrow vision of what Appalachia is. I was chastened to remember that if someone plays a saxophone in Appalachia, it is, in a very meaningful and unfacetious way, Appalachian music. So “John” is a useful track for me, in which Shawnee is made briefly strange to outsiders like myself by way of this ordinary moment in which no one performs any particular version of Appalachian-ness, but people simply go about living, jubilantly in this case.  “Jack”’s folk song referencing fracking similarly reminds us that struggles over how communities in the U.S., as well as the country overall, relate to fossil fuel extraction are very much ongoing, and that Shawnee is actually at the front lines of that battle. The piece thus pushes back on the fly-in-amber-in-amber quality that a project like this risks, though the textual framing of the work by Harnetty could have gone a little further in this regard for my taste. 

Justin Cober-Lake: I agree that he could have gone further with the framing, although I'm reacting in part to my own interest in understanding a more complicated version of Appalachia than the standard narrative. Harnetty hasn't presented a sociological report, but he's created modern art out of regional history. I don't mean that he's done it disrespectfully. I think just the opposite, in fact; he sees something worth presenting in a novel way to make sure that we listen, an approach that sets it apart from a set of field recordings. The oddity of the project keeps it engaging – I'm never quite sure what I'm mining for in any given listen (pun intended) – but it also delineates the challenges of creating a work like this one. You can get a taste of it online at Harnetty’s website, but I'd be interested to see this work performed as part of a multimedia presentation. I don't know that I'd take anything different away from it, but I'm curious. I'm also curious what audiences would take away. A nice night at a concert? An interest in exploring the area? A raised awareness about fracking? Fortunately the piece isn't so pristine as to be stuck on that first answer.  

Justin Cober-Lake and Peter Taber

[microlite1]

unfacetiously loves old cold black coffee

[lemizzhaphephobia-blog]

A friend of mine was rather viciously dissing me ungiftedly concerning my presentation, so obviously I had to retort unfacetiously with an infantry.. a vocabulary I've been gifted with since infancy, so in this instance she experienced consternation intimately. Imminently, admittedly my rejoinder was riddled with self adulation and immaturity, but stick with me... I said I had this gift since Sesame Street, but it isn't the only facet I've kept since infancy, see... words are my assets, but since I'm rhyming the same words twice... explicitly, I also took immaturity. Thinking purity was the apex... the pinnacle of life... Christianity. But I was cynical, so I asked which would be better... to maintain ones purity, evade jury duty, or effectively murder three. I'm getting side tracked purposely. Sometimes my presentation is shit, but I'm solely... only... totally just eating for me. But the food... I devoured hastily because it might look off, but I literally and symbolically made it tastefully. Blessèd be.