Blue Öyster Cult: The Symbol Remains

I've been a huge Blue Öyster Cult fan since the late '90s, when, after repeated viewing of The Stöned Age, I picked up the On Your Feet or on Your Knees double LP from the Half Price Books on FM 1960 and Veterans Memorial, and subsequently all of BÖC's albums, also on vinyl (and CD, in some cases; I even have, thanks to my brother, A Long Day's Night on the frankly bullshit format known as "audio DVD"). I had a BÖC belt buckle until it broke, my wife got me a BÖC shirt that's as old if not older than me, and I've seen them live three times.

But all of these credentials went out the window when I learned, after the fact, that the band had released its first album in almost 20 years. And I don't mean I was a month or two behind the curve; the album in question, The Symbol Remains, came out last goddamned year. In my feeble defense, I don't follow music news like I used to, the last time I visited the BÖC webpage it was pretty stale, and it's not unreasonable to be surprised by a band led by septuagenarians putting out a record in the middle of a pandemic. But my laziness and excuses aren't the issue here; the record is.

Blue Öyster Cult's latter-day (i.e., 1998-present) output is better than you'd expect from a band that basically drifted apart in the '80s after making a few increasingly poppy, but never fully, objectively bad, records. It's a bit heavier here and there, and retains the melodies and that twist of weirdness that makes BÖC what they are. They even managed to write a song as good as, and maybe better than, any from their heyday: "Harvest Moon", from Heaven Forbid, is one of my favorite BÖC songs ever. (Check out the live version on A Long Day's Night.) It's a shame they didn't keep writing new stuff, but on some level, did they really need to? Their setlists from the album-lean, tour-heavy 21st century (BÖC is, after all, "on tour forever") could be slightly predictable, but they pulled enough good, semi-obscure material out of the catalogue to make resting on their laurels more than acceptable.

So the release of The Symbol Remains comes as a welcome surprise. Lyrically, the songwriting meets all your esoteric BÖC expectations, with writer John Shirley, who was responsible for many of the lyrics on their last couple records, returning here, along with Richard Meltzer, who's co-written his fair share of BÖC tunes over the years. Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom sound fantastic; the former's still got the vibe of a nice guy stuck in a disturbing sci-fi dream, and the latter's voice is as gloating and sinister as ever. Musically speaking, even the least interesting tunes on The Symbol Remains are still pretty good, and the really good ones ("Box in My Head", "Nightmare Epiphany", "Edge of the World", and "The Alchemist" stand out) are potential classics, or at least fan favorites, in the making. Especially noteworthy is that my favorite song here, "Edge of the World", is written completely by one of the "new" (read: since 2004) members, Richie Castellano, which goes to show that BÖC is (and always has been, really) more than just Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma. The whole thing comes together exceptionally well, with even the weaker songs playing a role in the ebb and flow of the album.

I don't want to jump the gun and say this is going to be the last Blue Öyster Cult album, because the band might pull a Thomas Pynchon and become uncharacteristically prolific in its later years, but if this is the last record they make, BÖC is going out with a bang. Beyond rightfully popular tunes like "(Don't Fear) The Reaper", BÖC has never really made the impact they should have, despite being, to probably slightly misquote Mike Watt, "the eye at the top of the pyramid." Maybe The Symbol Remains will do something to change that, but even if it doesn't, that's cool. We've gotten 50 years of heavy metal arcana and killer melodies, after all. Not a lot of bands can claim that kind of legacy.

Notes on the 2021 DSA National Convention

 I've been a DSA member for a few years now, but this is the first national convention I've attended. My attendance, like everyone else's this year, was virtual, due to the pandemic, but that was fine by me. I also was not a full delegate, but an alternate for the Houston delegation. Any fears I had before the convention began that I wouldn't get to participate—i.e., vote—were quickly laid to rest, as I ended up subbing in for my comrades on several occasions. Alas, my alternate status precluded me from voting on NPC candidates, though the final lineup contains most of the people I would've voted for.

The convention was run across a number of platforms, which made things clunky at best and a total mess at worst. The pace was slowed by an endless variety of procedural fuckery, with people making motions that did nothing but cause headaches, technical issues that led to (temporarily) missing votes, and what seemed to be last-minute rule changes and different rulings by different chairs—things that couldn't always be fixed by the support staff, who must have been swamped from the get-go. (Thanks for all your hard work to keep things running, comrades.) If you want to get a sense of how things moved, Tempest Magazine has an incomplete report of the convention, complete with blow-by-blow notes on motions and such.

Since I don't really use Twitter, I missed a lot of acrimonious shit-slinging regarding some of the convention's controversial occurrences, namely the credentialing of some delegates and the removal or withdrawal of several NPC candidates. There was also a lot of heated debate about some of the resolutions under consideration, but from what I saw—within the confines of the convention framework, not on Twitter or whatever—it stayed pretty civil.

The issue of internationalism, which revolved around one resolution in particular, was a real sticking point. I don't doubt that the folks who argued in favor of the resolution (and who won the vote to pass it) did so in good faith, and I don't totally disagree with them or the resolution, but I'm a little wary of the potential for the DSA to hitch itself to movements and mass parties overseas that may not share the same values, and/or are little more than state-aligned or ineffective organizations. Thankfully, there's nothing binding in the resolution with regard to action, so I'm happy to wait and see what happens.

As a result of the convention, DSA has a national platform for the first time. It's not perfect, but it's a start. There was also overwhelming support for the Green New Deal and eco-socialism, which to me was the most important thing that came out of the convention. While there's obviously no disentangling politics from the climate crisis, the almost unimaginable weight of the latter exerts such gravitational pull that it takes precedence in a way nothing else under discussion can, and everything ends up being seen through the lens of climate collapse. There's no world to win if there's no world at all.

What else? I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Nathan Robinson, editor of the superb Current Affairs, via the convention's virtual tabling feature. I wish there had been a better, more permanent way of keeping in touch with people from DSA chapters around the country, but so it goes. I also wish I'd joined my Houston comrades at the firefighters' union hall to attend virtually together, but the current state of COVID-19 infections around here has made me reluctant to spend more time indoors than is necessary.

All in all, despite the issues discussed above, I'm very glad I attended the 2021 DSA National Convention, and that I got to represent my chapter. Will I do it again in 2023, when the high decision-making body of DSA meets again, presumably in person? Maybe. Reading and hearing comrades debate, I got the feeling that DSA is on the cusp of something, but I don't know what, exactly. We're close to 100,000 members, but what does that actually mean for socialist politics in the US? As I mentioned, the climate crisis demands a full-scale revolution in human behavior in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, and I think that extends into how we act politically. Building the DSA into an old-style party won't cut it, and I think a lot of us know it. What we do with that knowledge remains to be seen, and unless there are a lot of stupid mistakes made in the next couple years, I intend on sticking around to find out.

 

Ursula K. Le Guin and José Saramago, bloggers extraordinaire

There was a post on Metafilter yesterday noting that Ursula K. Le Guin's blog is available again. I never really read it when she was working on it, but I plan on fixing that. I've been a fan of Le Guin since high school, and the world is a poorer place for her absence. Luckily, she left behind a number of amazing books, and also helped found the National Writers Union, of which I'm a member.

What's especially cool is that Le Guin was inspired to blog by none other than José Saramago, probably the most influential, or at least well-known, Portuguese writer of the last few decades. His blog (in Portuguese, of course), which I was unaware of until now, is full of good material. 

Reading these two writers' blogs makes me want to spend more time on my own. (They also make me miss William Gibson's blog, which appears to be replicating some of the visual digital rot he described in Idoru.) I'm not really working on anything else, aside from some stray translations, and in some ways I'm not really interested in writing fiction at all anymore, so posting random bullshit here should scratch what remains of the writing itch.