AVQ&A
The best shows that didn’t make our Top 40
Alasdair Wilkins, Kevin McFarland, Josh Modell, Myles McNutt, Zack Handlen, Carrie Raisler, Pilot Viruet, Molly Eichel, Caroline Framke, Phil Dyess-Nugent, Erik Adams, Rowan Kaiser, Ryan McGee, Sonia Saraiya, Brandon Nowalk, Les Chappell, David Sims, Dennis Perkins, and Emily Todd VanDerWerff
AVQ&AWelcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences.
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? Email us at avcqa@theonion.com.
Which TV show that didn’t make our top 40 were you most upset to see missing?
Todd VanDerWerff
When we first started the discussions that became our top-40 list, somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 different shows were mentioned. This meant that even when we pared them down to the 40-ish shows you see before you today (we did some cheating in the top 15, so it really ended up being closer to 50 shows), we still had a lot of great TV shows left out. So we thought we’d take this chance to make some recommendations of shows that deserved to make the big list but just didn’t.
Acquisition theater
New Girl & Girls
Sundance Channel arrives
Comedy Central’s new wave
25 honorable mentions
I’ll start: The final few episodes of 30 Rock were ineligible for the big list for mostly tedious reasons that have to do with Dollhouse (seriously). But there were few single episodes of TV I enjoyed as much this year as the final three half-hours of the show, particularly the next-to-last episode where Liz finally adopted her kids and the hour-long finale that doubled as a rousing defense of women in the workplace. When I think back on 2013, I will remember those final few episodes fondly. As far as shows that are making me laugh consistently right now, few can match ABC’s The Neighbors, a series that packs a surprising number of belly laughs in every episode from where I’m sitting. I’m not too broken up that it missed the top 40, since its storytelling leaves much to be desired, but the goofy aliens are among my favorite TV characters of the year. Finally, I made a brave goal-line stand for HBO’s Getting On when we were finalizing our runners-up list, and while I was defeated, I hope more people catch up with it in the year to come. It’s a gem that’s being sadly ignored.
Phil Dyess-Nugent
I didn’t see anything on TV more exciting in 2013 than HBO’s five-part miniseries Parade’s End, smartly adapted from the Ford Madox Ford novel by Tom Stoppard. The show was filmed with the combination of literate sophistication and kinetic dynamism one might expect from director Susanna White, who worked on both the most recent TV versions of Bleak House and Jane Eyre and the Iraq War series Generation Kill. For some reason, it didn’t seem to excite Benedict Cumberbatch’s fan base as much as almost everything else he does, but he gave his best performance in it, and Rebecca Hall, playing the wife with whom Cumberbatch is mismatched, gave the sexiest performance seen on a TV or movie screen this year. The movie critic David Thomson called it Downton Abbey for grown-ups, which sounds about right. I’ll also give a shout-out to two shows that were maybe too small-scale for a best-of-the-year list but that were smart, fun, and took real chances: Ryan Quincy’s animated IFC series Out There and Ovation’s Mikhail Bulgakov adaptation A Young Doctor’s Notebook, with Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm.
The last few seasons of Futurama will never be considered among the show’s best; too many sloppy story ideas, along with a growing sense that the writers had lost the spark that animated the best years, made the series’ time on Comedy Central inconsistent and occasionally disappointing. Yet there were still high points, and in a final run filled with decent (and sometimes good) episodes, it was especially gratifying that the cast and crew managed to save the best for last. Futurama already had a perfect finale in “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings,” and while “Meanwhile” doesn’t surpass perfection, it does quite well for itself. A great hook—Professor Farnsworth creates a device that can take the user 10 seconds into the past—combined with the acerbic but generous heart that made the show a beloved cult classic, served to bring things to a close on just the right note. I’m not hugely disappointed that the final season didn’t make our top 40 list, but I do wish there had been some way to honor one of the year’s strongest finales. Oh wait, I just did.
I’m not surprised we missed Don’t Trust The B—— In Apartment 23, since it ended early in the year and ABC mixed in a bunch of first-season episodes to extremely confusing effect, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. Krysten Ritter tore into her bitch character with biting relish. James Van Der Beek’s narcissistic parody of himself could have been its own show. And even Dreama Walker was better than she had any right to be as the B’s wet-blanket foil. The Sexiest Man Alive episode was one of my favorite half-hours all year. Also, not only is Aziz Ansari’s Netflix special Buried Alive exactly the kind of programming Netflix should be doing, but it sums him up perfectly: smart, more than a little manic, and enthusiastically contemporary. Love is the most well-worn topic for comedy, but Ansari stands out because he’s not just poking fun at depressing dating scenes; he’s truly fascinated with their modern evolution. It’s a credit to his talent that his bits seem so natural even as you can tell he’s practiced them to death.
Rowan Kaiser
2012 was a bad year for The Vampire Diaries. As its third season ended, the show crawled up its own ass, chasing its mythology while losing its strong characterization. Then the fourth season started with the worst set of episodes the show had done. After several stories in a row that failed to acknowledge the horrible rape-based gender politics Diaries were utilizing, I was juuuuussssttttt about ready to give up on it. And then, starting in January, the show went back to its basics, using a simple premise—a race for a vampirism cure—that brought back all the series’ character strengths, shifting alliances, and crazy back-stabbings. And it was great again. Meanwhile, spinning off several characters from Diaries to The Originals has allowed a deep examination of themes the parent show always ignored. Maybe neither show deserved top-40 status, but I’m happy I didn’t give up on them.
I’ve written plenty on this site about The Chris Gethard Show, but it really did have a tremendous year, from Murf’s on-air proposal to the rise of Messenger Bag to the big announcement that it’s shooting a pilot for Comedy Central. The archives are online, ready and waiting to be checked out. It’s honestly the most addictive show around. I’d also like to say some final words for the dear, departed Happy Endings, which is already dispersing its talented ensemble around the TV landscape. ABC burned off most of its terrific third season in 2013, but the show managed to end on a fun and hopeful note that emphasized its strengths while leaving things open for a fourth season that will never come. One of the most consistent comedies on TV, it’s already sorely missed from the sitcom landscape. And, finally, while there’s no reason to watch TNT’s Inside The NBA if you don’t like basketball, those who don’t watch are missing out on one of the funniest, frankest shows on television. The scintillating chemistry among Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kenny “The Jet” Smith cannot be overstated, and their willingness to discuss tough topics is pleasantly surprising.
Les Chappell
A lot of attention was justly paid to Netflix and Sundance for their new offerings this year, but there were some great shows on less prolific networks. IFC’s Portlandia delivered its most consistent season yet, applying a more serialized approach to its sketches while still sharply mocking the self-obsessed politics and small businesses of the Pacific Northwest. On the pay-cable side, Cinemax continued its commitment to developing scripted drama that’s full of the expected violence and gratuitous sex while also managing to be more fun than it has any right to be. Strike Back had another great year of explosions and mayhem, this time taking Scott and Stonebridge on a hunt for chemical weapons with set pieces ranging from a Beirut rooftop shootout to a Russian prison riot to a fight on top of a freaking train bound for Berlin. And a new series, Banshee, came out swinging, taking a fish-out-of-water/small-town-cop framework and spinning a plot that was just ludicrous enough to be delightful, involving the Russian mob, internal Amish politics, and a nearly invulnerable central character.
Sonia Saraiya
Hey, remember how much we loved Homeland last year? Yeah, me either. The spy drama went from being one of the most intriguing and suspenseful shows on television to being one of the most confusing. The second season was running on all cylinders, and it brushed the top of our year-end list for 2012. But that momentum sent the series into a wall, and it’s taken most of its third season to recover. It’s hard to stump for it, because I acknowledge its massive flaws. But Homeland is still one of the best canvases we have about the war on terror, delivering surprisingly subtle, insightful, and even beautiful episodes with characters who are becoming rapidly implausible. “Good Night” was a standout this season, proving the show could still be gripping. Meanwhile, Archer might never be able to live up to the glory of its second season, but its characters showed up and gamely played along, spinning out their stories with characteristic cynicism and invincibility. The visuals this year were better than ever, and Lana’s pregnancy promises an interesting fifth season, at the very least. And hey, I’m not even going to argue that it’s good, but Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is one of the few shows I catch up with week-to-week, because it’s like a teen soap opera, but with superpowers, and you don’t have to pay attention if you don’t want to!
Pilot Viruet
I’ve always loved MTV, but its original programming recently won me over, particularly Catfish and Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous. Catfish, depending on the episode, is either absolutely horrendous (the infamous slow-clap!) or shockingly sweet (you know, that one time it actually worked out). Either way, I couldn’t stop watching. Zach Stone, a clever takedown of reality shows, features an annoying main character and too much cringe-worthy humor, but it managed to inject some real sentimentality into its quieter moments. By the end of the short-lived series, I was rooting for Zach to make it. But the biggest surprise was how I somehow got sucked back into WWE’s Monday Night Raw. Ridiculous storylines, laughable pay-per-view events, the return of weirdos like Goldust, and the perfect duo of CM Punk and Daniel Bryan all made Raw hands-down the most entertaining program I’ve watched all year. It’s still no Attitude Era, but it’s the most I’ve cared about wrestling in about a decade.
Brandon Nowalk
It’s not surprising that my pick for show of the year, Arrested Development, didn’t make our list. What’s surprising is that it had so much support in the first place. This beloved comedy came back into our lives with a prickly new look and feel. The fourth season covers a lot of ground, from that final SEC raid through the housing crisis and the recession to a complete tangle of storylines that converge on a holiday created in order to maintain the white upper-class establishment of Newport Beach. With nobody keeping the family together through the years, the structure follows suit in a way that capitalizes on Netflix’s all-at-once season dump. And when Michael Bluth is no longer the center, his actions reveal a man as selfish as his family—all those “Her?” jokes are seen for what they are. By the end of the season, the rebellion of the younger generation hits notes I didn’t think Arrested Development was capable of. So does Tobias’ musical. Two other A-worthy experiments: The Eric Andre Show, the anti-est anti-talk-show, and TCM’s The Story Of Film, a landmark of annotated television.
After years of unremitting, unsentimental comic cruelty, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia uncapped its strongest season in a long time. Sunny’s audacious balancing act of callousness and comedy is breathtaking at its peak, and this year saw the show producing both huge laughs and some improbably affecting moments. There were missteps, but that’s the danger when you’re working the high wire. For History’s Vikings, the real challenge is convincing us that its characters are… other. They’re motivated by passions we can at least partly understand—but then often, shockingly, they’re operating from a cultural well that we cannot. The series is brilliantly anchored by Travis Fimmel’s performance as the ambitious, unpredictable Ragnar, whose enigmatic smile often signals impending Viking awesomeness. Finally, in defending The Mindy Project, I usually start with, “It’s funny, but…” Well, I’ve decided to end the sentence there for a change—The Mindy Project is funny. Oh, it’s a mess, but I laugh. A lot. She might not be “the next big female comedy TV voice,” but Mindy Kaling’s a gifted comedian, and she benefits from chemistry with an ideally suited sparring partner, Chris Messina. With the show’s future in doubt, it’s tempting to complain that it won’t have time to get its act together—but I like it messy.
Carrie Raisler
Though they’re not the flashiest shows, ABC Family has quietly built something special on Monday nights with Switched At Birth and The Fosters, creating a kind of television safe zone for socially conscious, multi-generational family dramas. After an iffy end to season one, Switched At Birth roared back in 2013 with a fantastic subplot about the school district’s threat to close the city’s all-deaf school, culminating in the groundbreaking episode “Uprising,” done almost entirely in American Sign Language. (If you watch any episode of the show, make it that one. It’s remarkable.) And while The Fosters, a drama about a lesbian couple raising a family of foster children—and one biological son, for maximum teen-romance plot awkwardness—is still only figuring out its way after 10 episodes, it’s a testament to this young show that its characters and their relationships feel so fully formed. (Check out “Vigil” if you want to have a good cry, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Neither were quite consistent enough to make my list, but both are tremendously moving—the kind of shows I’m just happy still exist somewhere in the television landscape.
Josh Modell
I’m more than a little shocked that the final season—probably?—of Eastbound & Down didn’t make the big list, especially considering the show was voted The A.V. Club’s 28th best of the 2000s. (And that’s a whole decade!) Season four did have a rocky start, though it ultimately proved itself more bizarrely cocksure—and Kenny Powers-like—by mid-season, which found Danny McBride once again ruining his own life in search of one more fame buzz. From his party time at the water park to his meltdown on a Christmas-themed episode of his own TV show within the TV show, McBride/Powers was never better, nor was a supporting cast that includes the incredible Steve Little (oh, that chin!) and Ken Marino as an even bigger asshole than McBride. It also tied things up better than the series’ original ending, calling back to Powers’ autobiography on tape with some more self-mythologizing. It was a hilarious, memorable end to a great, despicable character.
I was surprised that HBO’s Family Tree struggled to find an audience, considering that creator Christopher Guest more or less taught TV how to make a mockumentary with his films Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, and A Mighty Wind. But the most common knock on what Guest would prefer we not call his “mockumentaries”—that they’re more amusing than funny—certainly rang true when stretched to four hours. The show kicked into high gear, though, once Chris O’Dowd reached the American leg on his journey of self-discovery—which also happened to coincide with the arrival of Guest regular Fred Willard. At the very least, Family Tree provided Stateside exposure to the weird ventriloquism of Nina Conti. That attraction that’s only out-niched by the second season of Brad Neely’s spectacular Animal House-in-reverse effort for Adult Swim, China, IL. Fifteen minutes could no longer contain the students and faculty of the University Of China, Illinois, and the show expanded to a half-hour without diluting its heady mixture of scrambled U.S. history, misinterpreted spirituality, and academic satire. Also mixed in there: comedic songs that match anything Guest and company have ever sung.
Ryan McGee
Has Parks And Recreation lost a step or two since Leslie Knope won her City Council position at the end of season four? Even its most ardent fans would probably agree with that assessment. But did it lose enough to not merit mention in the top 40 shows of the year? That seems like a step too far. Due to its persistently perilous status, the show burned through plot in case it might not last another season. But at this point, it’s largely told the “necessary” stories it needed to, with many of its episodes going broad in the way that often happens with comedies at this stage of their runs. Still, even if Ann Perkins’ desire to have a child was often-cringe worthy, there’s plenty to love on this show. In particular, April Ludgate’s in-progress journey from disaffected introvert to committed citizen of Pawnee stands as a shining example of how Parks’ commitment to optimism is necessary in a medium filled with antiheroes. The show may soon be gone, but its importance will far outlast its run.
Kevin McFarland
I’ve got a vicious love/hate relationship with Suits. No other show makes me desperately yearn for a career I would hate with a passion that burns like the fire of a thousand suns. For 15 minutes after each episode ends, I’m amped up to take the LSAT and put myself on the road to becoming Harvey Spector. Then I think about all the inconsistencies, and how horribly unappealing the Mike/Rachel relationship has been (despite starring two gorgeous humans), and I regain my sanity. But I devour episodes more quickly than I do with Scandal, which tends to accrue a backlog. Grimm finally turned a corner in its second season and sorted out much of the awkward distance between its best characters, and the show is now shaping up to be an acceptable successor to David Greenwalt’s previous series, Angel. And PBS’ League Of Denial (still available to watch online) is my pick for best television documentary of the year, flaying the NFL for an utter lack of humanity in the face of overwhelming data that a multibillion-dollar industry like football can cause catastrophic brain damage. I feel massive internal conflict whenever I watch a game now, and League Of Denial presents a compelling summary of why.
Myles McNutt
While there are shows that didn’t make our list—like Awkward. or Parks And Recreation—that would have made my personal top 40, I wanted to use this space to highlight great elements of shows that would otherwise not garner much recognition. Corey Stoll’s Peter Russo was the one character on House Of Cards who combined a strong performance with a reason to care about him, and the fact that nothing on TV made me angrier this year than what the series did to Russo indicates the strength of Stoll’s work. In what has been the year of Allison Janney, including on Masters Of Sex, her work on Mom has helped keep the uneven freshman sitcom chugging along while it discovers itself (and potentially lands on our list next year). And despite the fact that her storylines are often just as silly as those dragging down Nashville in 2013, the series has finally realized that no matter what horrible things Juliette Barnes is doing, we will root for her, because Hayden Panettiere is just so much damn fun—and occasionally heartbreaking—to watch.
Molly Eichel
Trophy Wife is not the show that it could be with a little time and nurturing. But in the age of time-shifting, there’s something to be said about a show I want to watch first. It’s a family sitcom sans aw shucks attitude and forced sentimentality. But where a lot of family comedies rely on the long-suffering, no-fun mom, each of the women—even ball-busting, type-A+ Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and ultra space cadet Jackie (Michaela Watkins)—are imbued with so much humanity that it makes sense that Kate (Malin Akerman) hasn’t filed a restraining order against her previous incarnations. Trophy Wife’s greatest asset, though, is not the layered way it portrays the female relationships or a new perspective on the politics of the blended family, but Bert (Albert Tsai). His mere presence brings a lightness and enthusiasm to every scene. He’s Jackie’s partner-in-crime, but he’s got elements of all of the people who raised him, even if none of those people are blood relatives.
Will Harris
When the cast and creators of The Goldbergs made their appearance at the dog-and-pony show known as the Television Critics Association press tour, the stock line from just about everyone involved with the series was that the ’80s, while certainly part of the show, wasn’t really as much of a driving force as the show’s heart. I don’t know if that was just a line they were feeding the critics or if they just realized that the viewers actually wanted it to be more about the ‘80s, but either way, it ended up being complete bullshit. But I’ve fallen in love with the series, anyway. Yes, Jeff Garlin yells too much, and yes, Wendi McLendon-Covey takes it too far over the top at times, but there is still a lot of heart, and in addition to George Segal being uniformly great, the trio of young actors who play the kids—Sean Giambrone (Adam), Troy Gentile (Barry), and Hayley Orrantia (Erica)—work extremely well together as well as with the elder actors of the cast. Okay, so it’s kind of obnoxious that the show uses the ’80s as a playground for comedy rather than following any semblance of a real timeline. But it’s still funny, dammit.
Alasdair Wilkins
While 2013 did see The Colbert Report finally edge out The Daily Show for its first overall Emmy win, I’m a little disappointed that it couldn’t receive the far more prestigious honor of placement on our year-end list. The Report didn’t necessarily offer anything new in a year defined by innovation at Comedy Central, but it’s always worth recognizing just how absurdly difficult it is to churn out more than 150 episodes every year that are so consistently incisive and hilarious. Colbert can play his arch-conservative alter ego in his sleep at this point, but some of the year’s most memorable moments came when he dropped character—most notably his poignant eulogy for his mother—or when he blurred the line between reality and fiction with his response to Daft Punk’s cancellation. Elsewhere, Doctor Who fumbled its latest series-spanning mystery, but some strong individual episodes (particularly “Cold War” and “Hide”) and a bunch of rousing anniversary celebrations have allowed the show to close out its first half-century in style. Finally, Regular Show may be forever stuck in Adventure Time’s shadow, but its nimble, long-awaited progression of Mordecai and Margaret’s love story was emblematic of a generally impressive year for the series.
But, guys! What about Raising Hope? Or Parenthood?! Or Suburgatory or Childrens Hospital or The Greatest Event In Television History or Continuum or Call The Midwife or The Bletchley Circle or The Wrong Mans or The Bridge? Or, hell, even The Big Bang Theory, which had a surprisingly strong year. There was so much good TV! It was such a great year! And we haven’t even mentioned the glory and the wonder that was… Sharknado. C’mon, guys. We fucked that one up. See you in 2014.
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Seminar CXXXVII: reassessing the Pictish Church
Posted on 27 February 2013 | 9 comments
Maintaining this hectic momentum is obviously difficult but I thought it might be time to try and eat in a tiny bit more to my backlog of seminar reports. This one is slightly unusual, as it involved going back to Cambridge and returning to Oxford in the course of a day, something I’d usually try and avoid, but the cause was Alex Woolf of St Andrews giving the Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture on 30th April 2012 in Hughes Hall (no relation), and as an often-acclaimed Alex Woolf fan I might have tried to make that even if he hadn’t been speaking to the title, “The Churches of Pictavia”. Since he was, I was there, and therefore, despite a recent run of hostile comments about my daring to study Scotland with my mere one-eighth Scots blood, I’m going to write about it.
Slide from my lecture, “The Kingdoms of the North”, British History I (300-1087), University of Oxford 25th October 2012
Now, I have views on the Pictish Church, as you might expect, I’ve even explained them in lecture theatres myself albeit to a rather less exalted audience as you can see above, but my views are not very deep-seated. On the other hand they are not traditional, either. The traditional view of the Pictish Church would be that Bede knew what he was talking about and that half of Pictland was converted by missions from St Columba’s Iona and the other half by missions from St Nynia’s Whithorn, but that the southern half was more or less grabbed by Anglian Northumbria, to whom the Pictish king Nechtan map Der-Ilei entrusted the task of resourcing his new royal Church after he expelled the Columban monks around 717, whereafter the Church in Pictland seems to have remained roughly under royal control, with perhaps a centre at St Andrews (then Kilrymont), maybe later moved to Dunkeld, where its maybe-single bishop was based when not visiting the various monasteries that actually handled what passed for a ministry here.1 You can doubtless see a rather colonial narrative developed there in which the inhabitants of Scotland would be godless heathens but for foreign intervention, and predictably things seem to have been a bit more complex than that. Thanks to James Fraser we now have some doubts about where the Columban missions actually went, thanks to Thomas Owen Clancy we have doubts that St Nynia existed at all, and there’s a whole variety of older work pointing out other churches and founders around the edges of early Christian Pictland: Maelrubi at Applecross, Ethernan on the Black Isle (edit: of May), a Brigidine cult later claimed for Abernethy that might, if its association with the Pictish king-list has anything behind it, be the first `royal’ church centre….2 One could add more. Also, thanks to Thomas, it’s not clear that King Nechtan was actually in control of all of Pictland when he made his suit to Wearmouth-Jarrow, or that the expulsion of the Ionan monks was fully effective or durable, so I think that we have to think of several churches in Pictland: an Ionan one perhaps with a brief pause when they were subsumed into royal charge, an Anglian one that may likewise have later been combined with a royal one maybe based on Abernethy or St Andrews or both, whatever the grouping was that Whithorn apparently claimed in the south and a bunch of other smaller ones, single cells or clumps with their own founder legends.3 Mappings like that of James Fraser below thus seem to me a bit hopeful in their coherence, even when so unambitious.4 All of these groups were probably getting their episcopal ministry from outside quite often, I suspect, from Whithorn, from Anglian Abercorn while that lasted, from Gaelic Lismore, maybe even from Iona, though St Andrews and Dunkeld both have intermittent records of bishops in the Irish Annals in the tenth century so by then the united kingship may have been keener on centralising the Pictish or Alban epispocate near their new centres at St Andrews and Forteviot.5 It’s all so hypothetical, though, and I learnt much of this so long ago and may remember it so badly that I’d happily change any of this for a better-argued point of view; after all, it’s not so long ago that I saw Thomas Owen Clancy confront the questions, “when, where and what for were the churches of the Picts?” and conclude that the only safe answers were “during the Pictish period”, “in Pictland”, and “for the Picts to worship in”, and if anyone knows it’s him.
Hardly an ambitious set of claims and yet still I quarrel…
That said, Alex has this habit of making long-vexed questions look unexpectedly simple, so you might wonder whether this was one of those occasions. And I will rediscover this with you, my readers, because though I remember being gobsmacked by this lecture, I was also somewhat blind-sided by a professional faux pas I later realised I’d made and besides it was ten months ago now, I just don’t remember what was said. BUT I HAVE NOTES. So, if they can be trusted, it went something like this. Alex spent some time setting up Pictland for us as a basically-British polity, using the analogy of the carrion and hooded crow which are actually the same species but differently identified in highland and lowland Britain because of a varied colouring more common in the north. This works on many levels, I love it. Pictland’s not some weird alien space, in other words, but a joined-up part of northern Britain. Alex suggested that parallels might be found between the stone sculpture of Iona and that of Dunkeld, fitting nicely with the putative royal take-over of a Columban start but suggesting much more of a Columban reach than I’d have allowed for; he added another founder saint (I told you one could) at St Vigeans, where there is of course yet more sculpture; and he stressed that despite its various possible divisions this Church shared the same literate and artistic culture as its Irish and Saxon brethren, something that Martin Carver’s excavations at Portmahomack also pointed towards by turning up a Pictish symbol stone and styli and possible evidence for parchment-making on the same site.6 These guys may not all have been singing off the same hymn-sheet or singing the same hymns at the same time (Alex elected not to talk about the reckoning of Easter…) but the books out of which they read their hymns would have been decorated much like those anywhere else in Northern Britain. It’s a while ago that the late Julian Brown observed that we may only think we have no Pictish manuscripts because we don’t think there are any but it remains true; there are a good few possible contendors.7
Pictish beasts? Brown’s controversial contendor was none other than the Book of Kells, of which this is fol. 27v, from Wikimedia Commons
So far so much nuance; more characteristically iconoclastic in their problem-solving ability were a number of references to later Scottish churches associated with mounds, prompting the suggestion that we have few churches evidenced because worship was done outdoors at old meeting sites, though it is also true that the archæology of early possible church sites in Scotland is basically unknown bar Forteviot and that the one guaranteedly Pictish church site we have, Portmahomack, has no such forebear, at least not very nearby though it’s an area busy with Pictish stones. (I note, though, that the recently-discovered probable monastic site at Fortingall shares its location with a very very old yew tree…) In other respects, however, the Pictish Church probably shouldn’t have been very different from those northern formations with whom it shared artistic tendencies and likely therefore liturgy (since they would be in the same books). The resource concentrations that implies, however, must have taken time to amass, and so the whole realisation of this may have been late, later than Columba, later than Nynia, still in formation perhaps under Adomnán, Columba’s biographer who signally did not claim Columba as apostle of the Pictish kingdom.8 The Church’s ability to do intensive lordship probably attracted the attention of the kings (and here one can find a very similar argument in John Blair’s theory about the decline of minster churches in Anglo-Saxon England) and thus after the take-over we might think of German-style Klosterpfälze, albeit on a lesser scale.9 The chronology of this seems a little uncertain to me in retrospect: I’m sure I’ve heard Alex argue that the Pictish symbol stones are post-conversion so if it signifies that Portmahomack is in an area rich with them must there not be some kind of church structure before it? Isn’t that already really very close to the supposed take-over period? It is likely that I have failed to record the full subtlety of what was being suggested here. In any case, there was evidently so much variety in this ecclesiastical set-up that it is, alas, quite possible that our nice, new and all-but-unique type-site may actually have been unusual.
The St Andrews sarcophagus, famous for its combination of Celtic and Old Testament artistic motives, as displayed in 2006, from Wikimedia Commons
You may be forgiven for thinking that it would take a somewhat impressionable cast of mind to depart from this basically-reasonable and plausible-sounding lecture `gobsmacked’, and OK, that is perhaps true. This is because what I haven’t told you is that in the final minutes Alex brought in the St Andrews Sarcophagus.10 One of the enigmas about this fine article of Pictish sculpture is that its iconography appears to be partly Persian, which takes some explaining. There have been explanations, largely involving motives transmitted in textile, which is sort of fair enough but what’s it doing here? Alex has what must be the answer. But because the Hughes lectures are published, and I’ve already here anticipated half a dozen of the things you might want your copy for, though hopefully only so much as to sharpen your Pictophile appetites, I will leave this one secret so that you have to get hold of it. It’ll be worth it….
1. One might seek such a view in works such as Alfred Smyth, Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland A. D. 80-1000 (London 1984), J. MacQueen, St. Nynia (Edinburgh 1961, rev. edn. 1991), or Alan MacQuarrie, The Saints of Scotland: essays in Scottish Church history A. D. 450-1093 (Edinburgh 1997). Perhaps the key introduction would be Kathleen Hughes, Early Christianity in Pictland, Jarrow Lecture 1970 (Jarrow 1970), repr. in eadem, Celtic Britain in the Early Middle Ages: studies in Scottish and Welsh sources, ed. David Dumville, Studies in Celtic History 1 (Woodbridge 1980), pp. 38-52, which was of course the prompt for Alex’s lecture subject.
2. James Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795, New Edinburgh History of Scotland 1 (Edinburgh 2009), pp. 94-115; Thomas Owen Clancy, “The real Saint Ninian” in Innes Review Vol. 52 (Glasgow 2001), pp. 1-28; P. A. Yeoman, “Pilgrims to St. Ethernan: the archaeology of an early saint of the Picts and Scots” in Barbara Crawford (ed.), Conversion and Christianity in the North Sea World, St John’s House Papers 8 (St Andrews 1998), pp. 75-91; Sally Foster, “Discovery, Recovery, Context and Display” in eadem (ed.), The St Andrews Sarcophagus: a Pictish masterpiece and its international connections (Dublin 1998), pp. 36-62 at pp. 42-50; and Abernethy and Dunkeld I have from Isabel Henderson, The Picts (Edinburgh 1967), pp. 84-90; there must be better references but I found it there in my notes and don’t fancy hunting for more.
3. Clancy, “Philosopher-King: Nechtan mac Der-Ilei” in Scottish Historical Review Vol. 83 (2004), pp. 125-149.
4. Fraser, Caledonia to Pictland, p. 110, though to be fair he does also observe, pp. 108 & 109: “It is a leap of faith to conclude from such scattered notices [as those he has just gathered] that Nér and Banchory were Columban monasteries in seventh-century Pictland….”
5. Henderson as in n. 2 above; for Forteviot, see Leslie Alcock, “Forteviot: a Pictish and Scottish royal church and palace” in Susan Pearce (ed.), The Early Church in Western Britain and Ireland: studies presented to C. A. Ralegh Radford arising from a conference organised in his honour by the Devon Archaeological Society and Exeter City Museum, British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 102 (Oxford 1982), pp. 211-239, though there must by now be something more given recent digs. Ah yes: websearching reveals Nicholas Aitchison, Forteviot: a Pictish and Scottish royal centre (Stroud 2006), though I’ve not seen this myself.
6. Martin Carver, Portmahomack: monastery of the Picts (Jarrow 2008); for wider context see Alcock, Kings & Warriors, Craftsmen & Priests in Northern Britain AD 550-850 (Edinburgh 2003), pp. 297-398.
7. Julian Brown, Northumbria and the Book of Kells, Jarrow Lecture 1971 (Jarrow 1972), rev. as “Northumbria and the Book of Kells” in Anglo-Saxon England Vol. 1 (Cambridge 1972), pp. 219-246; repr. in Brown, A Palaeographer’s View: the selected writings of Julian Brown, edd. Janet Bately, Michelle Brown and J. Roberts (London 1993), pp. 141-178.
8. Adomnán, Vita Columbae, edd. & transl. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Anderson as Adomnán’s Life of Columba (London 1961), rev. M. Anderson as Adomnán: Life of Columba (Oxford 1991), II.32-35.
9. John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford 2005), pp. 323-341; for Klosterpfälze see John W. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in early medieval Germany, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th Series, 21 (Cambridge 1993).
10. Foster, St Andrews Sarcophagus.
Posted in archaeology, Picts
Tagged Alex Woolf, Cambridge, Church, Dunkeld, Kathleen Hughes, Lismore, Portmahomack, St Andrews
In which Chris Lewis tells it better
A lightweight one, to get the wheels back on the road! I’d like to dedicate this post to Ted Buttrey, who knows what I mean when I say this: there’s a particular form of academic achievement that is not often recognised as highly as it should be, which is the joke in the footnote. This is a special achievement, not just because one is always up against a word-count and it has to survive, fitter than some other reference you might have put, but also because it then has to satisfy the referees and editors that it’s worth leaving even though academia r srs bizniz and so on. If it does, though, it’s one of the few things where endnotes rather than footnotes are preferable, because it adds distance between feedline and pay-off. For example, when I was putting this virtual exhibition together, I was reading quite a lot because as you can see it’s not about something I really know much on myself, and when I found in Dick Doty’s history of the Soho mint a sentence saying that a whole history could be written from what Matthew Boulton’s correspondence revealed about the world of eighteenth-century art production, with a reference, the faff of having to find my way to the right place two hundred pages further on actually made it funnier when I found that the reference was merely, “But not by me.”1 And on the morning of the day when I first drafted this post I had just found Chris Lewis doing similar, and the passage in question is Quite Interesting so I thought I’d just quote it all.2 You don’t mind, right? The pay-off is in the second footnote, so you have to read to the end.
The origin of the name Englefield… has to be sought… in an English adaptation of the territory’s Welsh name, Tegeingl…. The processes by which ‘Tegeingl’ was Anglicized as ‘Englefield’ are perhaps illuminated by Gerald of Wales in the course of recounting a laboured joke which he alleged illustrated the witticisms of the Welsh. The joke hinged on the coincidence that Tegeingl was also the name of a woman who had slept with each of the two princes, Dafydd ab Owain Gwynedd and his brother, who ruled the territory of Tegeingl in turn. Its punchline was a supposed saying from that time that Dafydd succeeded his brother as prince: ‘I don’t think Dafydd should have Tegeingl. His brother’s had her already.28 At first sight Gerald’s shaping of the story seems to be directed against the Welsh (dirty-minded, not funny), but it also acts in a more sophisticated way to score points off the English too. Teg was the Welsh for ‘beautiful’, and Teg-engl might be (deliberately) mistaken by a quick-witted Anglo-Welsh bilingual, such as Gerald, as meaning ‘the beautiful English(woman)’. Read like that, Gerald’s unfunny joke may have concealed a clever dig at the English: by ruling successively over the province of Tegeingl the two princely brothers had taken turns with a beautiful Englishwoman.29 When English speakers first reached north-east Wales, they may well have heard the Welsh name of of the territory as Gerald later would, as teg eingl, and understood its proper name to be Eingl, particularly appropriate (if misunderstood as a homophone) when they settled in part of it.
28 Gerald of Wales, Descriptio Kambriae in Works, ed. J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock and George F. Warner, 8 vols, RS 21 (1861-91) VI, 153-227, at pp. 190-1.
29 Walter Map would have told the same joke better.
How true those words are, even today. More serious content shortly I hope!
1. Richard Doty, The Soho Mint and the Industrialization of Money (London 1998).
2. C. P. Lewis, “Welsh Territories and Welsh Identities in Late Anglo-Saxon England” in Nick Higham (ed.), Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 7 (Woodbridge 2007), pp. 130-143 at p. 138.
Posted in Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Currently reading..., England, Humour
Tagged Chris Lewis, Ergyng, Gerald of Wales, place-names, Ted Buttrey, Wales


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Youngstown police hiring policy changed
By David Skolnick | January 5, 2011 at 12:03a.m.
Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams
By David Skolnick
skolnick@vindy.com
The city is changing its policy on hiring police officers, including reducing the importance of the written test by 50 percent and providing free sessions on what to expect from the exam.
The city’s current policy of dual hiring lists — one for white men and the other for minorities and females — for those seeking to be police officers and firefighters has faced criticism from city administrators and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The city typically hired one minority or female for every two white men it selected for the police and fire departments.
A federal appeals court declared the use of two lists by Shreveport, La., to be unconstitutional in 2006.
Minorities and women haven’t scored as well on the written test as white males, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified, said Mayor Jay Williams.
The city hired Barrett & Associates, a Cuyahoga Falls firm that specializes in legal and human-resources consulting, in October for $24,535 in October to change the policies and oversee the implementation.
Those changes go into effect now.
The new policy will “provide a fair and level playing field” for all applicants, Williams said.
The city is likely to implement the changes for future hires at the fire department, too, he said.
The current policy had those who passed the written test, a score of at least 70, take a physical agility test.
But the new policy calls for 50 percent of the test to be written and the same percentage for physical agility. The latter includes the physical activity of a police officer such as running, scaling a wall and simulating a rescue.
Being a good police officer combines both “intelligence and physical skills,” Williams said. “Critics will say this is lowering the bar, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.”
The written test will be given at 10 a.m. Feb. 5 at Youngstown State University’s Cushwa Hall. A date for the physical test hasn’t been determined.
The city will accept applications for the test between Jan. 10 and 21, but will stop earlier if 400 applications are received, said Jennifer Lewis, the city’s civil service commission administrator. The civil service office doesn’t have the staff — there are only two employees — or the money to offer the test to an unlimited number of people, she said.
The applications must be picked up in person at the civil service office, 7th floor of city hall, 26 S. Phelps St.
As part of the new policy, Barrett & Associates is having free written exam seminars today. The first is from 2-4 p.m. at the McGuffey Center, 1649 Jacobs Road. The other is from 6-8 p.m. at the Mill Creek Community Center, 496 Glenwood Ave.
Applications will be given at the sessions as well as study guides for the written test with Barrett employees going through the study guides, explaining the rules and procedures, and providing test preparation strategies.
Still to be determined is how the city will hire new officers. The city’s civil service commission will meet Jan. 19 to decide whether there will be a ranking based on the results of the written and physical tests or whether everyone who passes the test will be lumped together on a single list, Lewis said. Also to be discussed is possibly changing the passing grade from its current 70 percent.
The city will probably hire five to 15 new police officers in the next 12 to 18 months, Williams said.
Abigail Thernstrom, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ vice chairwoman, told The Vindicator the changes are “certainly a step in the right direction toward increasing the pool of qualified applicants regardless of race or gender.”
She said weighing the physical ability and written tests equally “is all well and good. But if in the end they end up hiring candidates because of their race or ethnicity that would be a violation of the law.
January 20, 2011 12:05 a.m.
YPD hiring policy revised
October 29, 2010 12:08 a.m.
Firm to help city with its police-hiring policy
US panel applauds change in YPD hiring policy
Youngstown to offer test for firefighters
April 21, 2010 12:08 a.m.
US civil-rights panel blasts Youngstown hiring policies


Grill Yr Idols: John Frusciante on fame, free jazz and the...
Grill Yr Idols: John Frusciante on fame, free jazz and the genius of Public Enemy
By Jeremy Judelson, May 14 2016
Jeremy Judelson was a marketing intern at media outlet Mass Appeal when he snatched the chance to interview his idol, not knowing where his relationship with the reclusive musician would lead. A year later, he shares his rare conversation with the media-shy guitar-god-turned-synth-wielder, spanning hip-hop, Ornette Coleman, and why he may never play live again.
John Frusciante has gone through many evolutions in his career. He joined his favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as a guitarist in 1988 at the age of 17. He spent the next 20 years in and out of the band, experiencing all the unimaginable highs and disturbing lows that rock and roll stardom has to offer. Throughout it all, he remained a prolific solo artist, his albums ranging from the drug-addled four-track experiments of Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) to the acoustic folk-rock shamanism of Curtains (2005) and the enveloping studio mastery of The Empyrean (2009).
After leaving the Chili Peppers for the final time in 2007, his solo output began to span a wholly new set of styles: experimental electro-pop, acid house, atonal jungle-rock fusion, and old school hip-hop. His latest release, The Foregrow EP, released last month via Acid Test, is a selection of tracks made during 2009 and 2010, a period in which Frusciante had just begun using the Renoise DAW to track and edit his wild synthesizer journeys. For anyone who’s already a fan of his modular creations, it’s a record that will delight and enthral. For everyone else, welcome to the world of Frusciante.
The first time I heard music from his solo catalog was in 2010. It was a beautiful, chilly Sunday during Thanksgiving break and I was home from my freshman year at Wesleyan University. It was mid-afternoon and I was smoking a spliff in my friend’s Columbia dorm room. We thought it would be funny to go to the Hayden Planetarium stoned. He put on Shadows Collide with People, Frusciante’s 2004 solo record. Looking back, hundreds of listens later, I still remember the force that dug into me as album opener ‘Carvel’, with the barely audible click of a hi-hat, took a head-first dive into a one-of-a-kind, egoless rock and roll anthem. It was as spiritual and visceral as any song I had ever heard. Each track drew me further into its world of shimmering soundscapes and skeletal pop songs.
At the time, I was struggling at college with a mental health triumvirate of anxiety, compulsions, and depression. And while that first listen to Shadows was a gasp of fresh air that I needed, it didn’t last long. I returned to Connecticut for the second half of the semester and a bitter winter threw me into a dark hole. I didn’t leave my room much beyond going to class. I spent hours screaming into pillows and learned how to really smoke pot. During this time, for reasons I have only just begun to grasp, Frusciante became important to me. I made him an idol, a legend, but also a dependable friend. His story became my passion – the rock star turned reclusive auteur, the junkie turned spiritualist, the guitarist gone electronic. No number of YouTube interviews could satiate my hero-worship. It’s a weird thing when you adore a public person – you feel like you know them, yet the appeal of the whole exchange is that you never actually meet them. They can never really be your friend.
I graduated college in 2014, the same year that Frusciante began releasing hip-hop with the Black Knights, a Wu Tang-affiliated rap duo he had met through RZA. In 2015, I was interning at media outlet Mass Appeal when the collaboration’s second album was announced. My internship was in marketing, and although I didn’t necessarily want to be a music journalist, I wasn’t ruling it out. When I pitched the editor a review of the upcoming LP, The Almighty, he suggested I reach out for an interview. I contacted the Black Knights, who go by the names Rugged Monk and Crisis the Sharpshooter. They agreed to a phone call and I mustered up the courage to ask if John would be able to join. “Lol I know for a fact he isn’t doing no media type shit,” Crisis responded.
I tried to reassure him. “If there’s any part of him that’s scared it will be another Heavyweights Radio interview where I don’t know what he’s all about, you could assure him that’s not the case. No Chili Peppers questions.”
He replied: “He is is very private. We have no problem asking but he has no problem saying no.”
I knew this. I felt guilty at the prospect of imposing upon him, and selfish for trying to talk with him. I felt unqualified even asking. Yet, I already had. It didn’t seem realistic that he would say yes – if I could pull this off, then why couldn’t anybody? In spite of my doubts, it worked. I was put in touch with someone at his label, and two days later, John and I were set to speak over the phone.
“When I heard Public Enemy’s second record, the production on it blew my mind”
I spent the next two days constantly questioning myself: “What the fuck am I doing?” The whole thing was too perfect, and it scared me. But I prepared well. I returned to all of the old interviews, and the new ones. I asked my planetarium buddy Jacob what questions he would ask. I couldn’t help but see this moment as a turning point, some sort of narrative fulfilment in the arc of my relationship with John and his music. What was this going to mean for me me? Was it the end of the story or the beginning? How do I let him know what his music has meant to me? Do I want to?
When it came time to call him, I breathed deep and dialed. I felt like a conman until the moment he picked up.
“This is John.” It was odd to hear the voice addressing me, the same voice that I had spent thousands of hours listening to. We spent two hours talking, and since the context of the interview was his new album, I started by asking him about how he got into hip-hop.
“Initially I wasn’t interested in hip-hop, because I was a young kid learning how to play guitar and admiring drummers, and drum machines just didn’t sound as expressive to me as real drummers,” he recalled. “Then when I heard Public Enemy’s second record, the production on it blew my mind. I had no idea that sampling and drum machines could be so expressive. What Hank Shocklee was doing on there was just so remarkable from a musical standpoint, to be creating this collage from so many different things and transforming little pieces of music into one piece of art.”
At first he was “mystified” by how the music came to exist, but over the years he began to understand the technical aspects of sampling and discover the expressive capabilities it held. His first foray into sampling was Sect in Sgt, a 15-minute synthesis of breakbeats, classic rock samples and musique concréte. He heard the piece in its entirety during a dream and tried to replicate it precisely. Finding his own way into this sample-based music made him realise he could attempt to make hip-hop as well, as he did on a trio of albums with Wu-affiliated rap duo the Black Knights.
“Music like Autechre and Venetian Snares and Aphex and Squarepusher, [it’s] an extension of what Hank Shocklee had been doing with Public Enemy,” he explained. “This music that felt like it just came out of the air by magic or something.” (His belief in a near-mystical source of human creativity came up in conversation again and again.)
Talking about the Black Knights, he seemed nervous about saying the right thing, and openly acknowledged that his partnership with Rugged Monk and Crisis was an unusual match. “There’s a lot of things about each other that we’ll never understand. In a lot of ways I think I’m a mystery to them, and they are certainly a mystery to me.” There were no doubts in the studio, though – the rappers trusted him with all of the music, and he trusted them with all of the rhymes.
“Music like Autechre and Venetian Snares is an extension of what Hank Shocklee had been doing with Public Enemy”
“In the rock world, there’s a lot of second-guessing and people being unsure of themselves and people hiring producers to make them better than they are. Monk and Crisis didn’t require anything like that. They believed in what they wrote and they went up to the mic and did it. I’ve always had that same kind of confidence as a guitar player.” In recognizing each other as opposites, each side of the relationship become more whole. “I’ve always had [friendships] like that,” he stuttered, “where we tend to find a peace in arguing with each other. Not about music – our roles there are specifically defined – but just about life and race and politics or social conventions.”
After talking about hip-hop, I brought bring up his interest in free jazz – a genre that could be seen as a project of political and social, as well as musical, liberation. Frusciante played with Alice Coltrane-esque chord progressions and Sonny Sharrock-style guitar leads on The Outsides EP, and even has a tattoo of the album art from free jazz magus Ornette Coleman’s Dancing in Your Head. Coleman had died a few weeks prior to our interview, so I asked if he had any words to say about him.
He paused. “You’re kidding, I didn’t know that.” I apologized for being the bearer of bad news. He was flustered. “Fuck, I keep finding out about people like two weeks afterwards. Damn, pretty close to Charlie Haden, too.” I asked how their music influenced him but he was speechless; the news had hit him like a truck. “I’m just in shock about Ornette. Can I call you back?” He hung up.
I got a call back the next day. He began by saying that he didn’t want to talk about Coleman, but only a few minutes passed before he returned to the subject naturally. “For me as a musician, the whole point is to take as much from history as possible,” he said. “[Coleman] found freedom because he understood tradition, and he grew and learned and taught his entire life because he had that. He was a gentle person, a humble person, and a mild-mannered, shy person. As a musician he appeared to be some sort of anarchist or something, but the reason he was able to progress throughout his whole life and be just as good when he was 80 years old as when he was 30 is that he never stopped educating himself.”
Musicians should never stop studying, he continued. “You’re only going to make money if you play all original material. That puts a really weird thing in musicians’ heads, and it seems like in hip-hop especially, there’s no understanding of that kind of learning – that type of learning that every jazz musician had to do, that every folk musician had to do, that every rock musician had to do in the early days, which is spending years playing other people’s music. And with rap, with my friends, they were playing a CD of The Chronic or 36 Chambers, and I’m playing guitar along with it and Monk’s rapping along with it, and when we did that together it was kinda like studying together. It was like the teacher was coming out of the speakers and we were the students.”
By the end of our second call, all I wanted to do was go play along to some Frusciante records.
“I don’t want to make a spectacle of myself in the way that I did when I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers”
For months afterwards, I ignored the situation. I used a single quote in a piece for Mass Appeal and moved on to another job. In a way, I felt that as long as I kept the interview out of the public eye, our relationship was an authentic friendship rather than a professional engagement.
Less than a year afterwards, John announced that he would be releasing The Foregrow EP. I felt incapable of having his number in my phone and not using it. I unthinkingly sent him a text to see if he would talk to me about the new record. I waited a day and then he agreed: “Sure.”
This time things came more naturally. He knew that our last interview hadn’t come to anything more than a single quote. He seemed a bit confused. Why would this kid go through a whole two-hour interview for one lousy quote?
The Foregrow EP was rumored to be influenced by John Carpenter and footwork. Turns out that was just clickbait for music nerds. He quickly dispelled both of those claims, assuring me that when the EP was recorded in 2009, he had heard neither the horror director’s synth scores nor the Chicago dance style, although since then he had become interested in the latter. The incident hinted at how Frusciante loves to hide within his art, particularly under his new guise. “I’ve always been very careful about how I incorporate guitar into electronic music. I don’t want to make a spectacle of myself as a guitarist in the way that I did when I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I wanted to be inside the music, not standing outside of it to grab your attention.”
The EP came out on LA label Acid Test, run by Oliver Bristow. “He picked out the songs, not me,” said Frusciante. “The stuff on that Trickfinger album was recorded in 2007, despite the album saying that it was recorded in 2008 – that was a mistake. And by 2009, after I had already started working with Aaron Funk [Venetian Snares], I switched from recording directly from the machines into the mixer, then a CD burner, to recording on the computer on Renoise. Still using my machines, but Renoise became the recorder so I could do overdubs and stuff like in the second song, ‘Expre’act’, where the tempo is constantly shifting. That has been something I’ve been dying to do, because it’s something that Autechre has done wonderful things with, and Venetian Snares as well. That’s something you can’t do if you’re just syncing all your machines to each other without a master clock coming from the computer.”
It seemed that John had his talking points for the album prepared, and he was very to-the-point, which seemed odd. At the end of our interview he apologized for having drunk too much coffee. “What was also really exciting to me about having a computer was the fact that I could do what amounts to editing, where one section of music is totally unlike the next section of music,” he continued caffeinatedly. “I always liked it in progressive rock when a band like Yes would have a long piece of music with various sections that were clearly not done all in one pass. Where the entire atmosphere and environment is completely different and it’s like a different song. I was trying to do that same thing within a six or seven minute song.” There’s a lack of good prog-rock these days, he agreed, “and what parades as it is bullshit. I don’t consider it to be progressive rock, it’s all just heavy metal bullshit or whatever.”
Despite his tenure in one of the world’s biggest bands, he’s wary of rock star manoeuvres describing his recent music as “a bunch of weird anti-rock star guitar solos”. He continues, “Kurt Cobain’s improvisations are very impressive guitar solos because it’s more about his energy, his looseness, not trying to impress you with the flying fingers or whatever. Not adhering to things like staying in the right key – just play whatever note you want. That’s how it is in electronic music.” Frusciante’s anti-rock star ideal is a rejection of the highly technical guitar playing that dominated the airwaves in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “That’s why I’ve always been very careful about how I incorporate guitar into electronic music. I don’t want to make a spectacle of myself as a guitarist in the way that I did when I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I wanted to be inside the music, not standing outside of it to grab your attention.”
“The best musicians often have to hide themselves in order to be appealing to people. That’s what David Bowie was a master at”
His unmistakeable voice has provided similar difficulties. When I showed my friends Frusciante’s electronic music, they’d hardly believe it was the dude from the Chili Peppers – until he began singing. His backing vocals were an integral component of the band’s pop success; it’s hard to remove yourself when the world has already heard so much of you.
In a recent post on his website, he wrote about a set of lyrical rules that began to coalesce for him in 1997 – a philosophy that would allow him to mask his individuality, as he explained. “I was living in the house of a woman who was a witch and an occultist, and she gave me a copy of Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies. I was reading that and I also had the book that Ian Curtis’ wife’s wrote [with Joy Division lyrics in the back] and I saw a connection between the two of them, which was that the person was hidden, the personality was hidden, and they weren’t going to any great [lengths] to make the meaning of what they said clear. And yet you feel that they were revealing more of themselves than they would be if they were singing some romantic, sentimental ballad or something.”
The attention-grabbing aspect of his rock stardom still seemed to loom large as a perceived obstacle to Frusciante’s creativity. Of course, it always had. In the old interviews I’d watched so many times, he always rejected the “image as the thing,” the idea of the artist as an object, a cult of personality.
“You can’t possibly appeal to people and be sincere all the time. Oftentimes the best musicians have to hide themselves in order to be appealing to people. That’s what David Bowie was a master at. He was hiding all the time. He was always interviewed as a persona, and he was hidden as a person inside that persona. And I think that was the correct way to deal with a world in which it’s understood that if you want the backing of a record company, you have to sell yourself. If you’re gonna be fake and if you’re gonna be insincere, make it into an art form! And that’s what Bowie did. But not everybody has that talent.”
He’s fond of John Lennon’s 1971 Rolling Stone interview, the one where he disavowed Beatles mythology, shit-talked his ex-bandmates, and called his fans a bunch of bourgeois hypocrites. Frusciante may not have Lennon’s sarcastic and political edge, but he wants to address his fans similarly, to tell them their idol is a mirage. That’s what Frusciante meant when he said he “no longer makes music for an audience” – he wasn’t referring to individuals, but the audience more broadly, the monolithic social force that limits and defines popular art. He hoped to obliterate its influence.
The last question I asked him was about live performance – why was it no longer attractive to him? His last solo gig was in 2005, but selfishly, I held on to the hope of one day seeing him play.
“Music comes from the inside of the musician,” he responded, “and when you’re on tour, you’re so aware all the time of the impression you’re making on the people looking at you and listening to you. It gives you the feeling of being an object. And I think most musicians would be lying if they said that they didn’t, after touring for a long time, just think of an audience as a bunch of objects themselves. They objectify you, and you in turn objectify them. They respond the same way to the same things every night. They seem like machines at a certain point.”
It doesn’t surprise me that he is more comfortable making music with machines these days. People try desperately not to be automatons, yet when they are part of that crowd, that’s exactly what they become. The night after our second conversation, I closed my eyes with Shadows blasting in my headphones and heard a line that had never quite made sense before: “Omit myself as a favor to God. Suffer fate cause it’s the only lift you’ve got.” It struck me that, just as Ornette Coleman’s humility allowed him to become a visionary, Frusciante tries to keep his ego out of his art, in the hope of being a vessel for something greater.
Tags: John Frusciante
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Kent’s professional experience includes accounting, business consulting, tax experience and land development. He started his career at Delloite and Touche, spent 8 years at Eide Bailly as a tax manager, and has owned and operated his own firm (Busek Olson & Associates) since 2003.
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Continu Selected for This Year’s Entrepreneur 360 List
The Entrepreneur 360 Ranking delivers the most comprehensive analysis of private companies in America. This study, forged by Entrepreneur, has been designed to provide a multidimensional view of entrepreneurship today, recognizing well-rounded, privately-held companies based on their impact, innovation, growth and leadership.
Continu is thrilled to be included on this year’s Entrepreneur 360 list — an achievement that affirms our growth as a product and as a team.
“The Entrepreneur 360 List celebrates outstanding companies for the value they bring to the world, not just the worth of their company,” says Ryan Shea, president of Entrepreneur Media, Inc. “The companies on this list exemplify growth, not just in top and bottom line, but in their ability to create a superior value for their customers, build adaptive learning cultures, and drive innovation in their marketplace.”
Learn more about the award and this year’s recipients here.


Obama Has Middle Class All Teed Up For New Taxes
by Jeff Dunetz | Aug 4, 2009 | Other
In the past few days we have learned that Congress wants to tax the “rich” to pay for Obamacare, but even a tax on the rich cannot pay for Obamacare. So the money will have to come from the middle class, but the president promised no middle class tax hikes and a break with that promise will hurt Obama’s credibility as much as George HW Bush’s break with his tax pledge hurt his.
But Obama WILL break his tax pledge, well, it will be more like wiggling his way out of his way out of it.
The middle class will have their taxes increased, in two different ways, through the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts, which he will be able to easily explain away, and through a national VAT (Sales Tax) which will enable him to say that he didn’t touch the tax rates of the middle class:
Teeing Up the Middle Class
Joe the Plumber’s tax vindication is nigh.
Few of President Obama’s 2008 campaign pledges were more definitive than his vow that anyone making less than $250,000 a year “will not see their taxes increase by a single dime” if he was elected. And he was right, very strictly speaking: It’s going to be many, many, many billions of dimes.
Asked about raising taxes on the middle class on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” White House economist Larry Summers wouldn’t repeat Mr. Obama’s pre-election promise. “It is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out no matter what,” Mr. Summers said—except, apparently, when his boss is running for office. Meanwhile, on ABC’s “This Week,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also slid around Mr. Obama’s vow and said, “We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically. And that’s going to require some very hard choices.”
These aren’t even nondenial denials. The Obama advisers are laying the groundwork for taxing the middle class while claiming the deficit made them do it.
The liberal establishment is even further along in finally admitting that Mr. Obama wasn’t, er, telling the truth. A piece in the New York Times over the weekend declared in a headline that “the Rich Can’t Pay for Everything, Analysts Say.” And it quoted Leonard Burman, a veteran of the Clinton Treasury who now runs the Brookings Tax Policy Center, as saying that “This idea that everything new that government provides ought to be paid for by the top 5%, that’s a basically unstable way of governing.” They’re right, but where were they during the campaign?
In an editorial on February 26, “The 2% Illusion,” we wrote that the feds could take 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning more than $500,000 and still have raised only $1.3 trillion even in the boom year of 2006. The rich are fewer and less rich now, while the Obama budget is nearly $4 trillion.
Democrats already plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts, but that won’t raise enough money. So they’re proposing an income tax surcharge on “the wealthy,” but that won’t raise enough either. Democrats have no choice but to soak the middle class because only they have enough money to finance the liberal dream of yoking the middle class to cradle-to-grave government entitlements.
Democrats have already taxed the middle class by raising cigarette taxes to pay for the children’s health-care expansion. They’re also teeing up average earners with their cap-and-tax energy bill. Mr. Obama had hoped that cap-and-tax would raise some $646 billion over a decade, but Democrats in the House had to give most of that away in bribes to business to pass their bill. To finance ObamaCare, they’re also proposing another 10-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax on firms and individuals that don’t purchase health insurance. But this won’t raise enough money either.
So waiting in the wings is the biggest middle-class tax increase of them all: a European-style value added tax, or VAT. This tax would apply to every level of production or service, and it is beloved by politicians in Europe because it raises so much money so easily without voters noticing. Ezekiel Emanuel, a White House aide and brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has advocated a 10% VAT to finance national health care. Look for a VAT to be one of the prominent options when Mr. Obama’s tax reform commission issues its report later this year.
The undeniable reality is that you can’t run a European-style welfare-entitlement state without European-style levels of taxation on the middle class (and eventually without low European-style growth and high jobless rates). It’s looking more and more like Mr. Obama’s no-middle-class-tax pledge was one of the greatest confidence tricks in American political history.
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Expert: Stuxnet Virus Infected Russian Nuclear Plant
By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai 2013-11-12 16:49:53 UTC
Once a computer virus starts to spread, it's rather hard to stop. This is even true for Stuxnet, perhaps the most sophisticated computer worm ever designed, which was programmed specifically to target only Iranian nuclear facilities. But even Stuxnet spun out of control and now has allegedly reached a Russian nuclear power plant.
Eugene Kaspersky, a famous security expert and head of the eponymous antivirus firm, made this revelation at a talk in Australia last week. During this talk, he warned of the dangers of releasing powerful cyberweapons into the wild, where they can spread freely.
See also: How One Hacker's Mistake Fashioned the Internet You Use Today
Kaspersky referred to the Russian nuclear plant as a cautionary tale for the future: Targeted cyberattacks, like Stuxnet, can easily go awry.
"In cyberspace, everything you do it's a boomerang, it will get back to you," he said last week. (Watch his full remarks here.)
Even presumably secure systems, like those of the International Space Station, can be infected from time to time, Kaspersky said in his talk. The ISS routinely gets infected by viruses from infected USB sticks, he added.
It's important to note, however, that Kaspersky didn't allege the ISS was infected by Stuxnet, as other outlets have reported.
The security expert didn't provide many further details about either of the two examples. He only referred to testimonies from a friend working at a nuclear power plant and "Russian space guys."
"While there is no hard data to verify this information, the fact is that Stuxnet managed to infect many computer systems outside of its intended target and spread out of control (which led to its discovery)," Kaspersky Lab wrote to Mashable in a statement.
In both examples, the viruses spread via infected USB sticks, since neither the ISS nor the Russian nuclear plant were connected to the Internet, Kaspersky said.
Stuxnet, which has been labeled an "act of force," was allegedly designed in a joint effortby the United States and Israel as a cyberweapon against Iranian nuclear facilities. The virus was programmed to target the systems controlling the nuclear centrifuges, spinning them out of control.
But it then spread outside of Iran. By the end of September 2010, Stuxnet had infected more than 100,000 computer systems in approximately 30,000 organizations around the world, according to data from the Kaspersky Security Network.
Kaspersky has long advocated for caution in cyberspace and is a prominent supporter of the international regulation of cyberweapons. In his opinion, cyberweapons should be tightly controlled and treated like nuclear or biological ones.
Image: Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Topics: computer virus, Space, malware, stuxnet, U.S., World