Tears of a Clownsilly

2009-04-04T20:43:00.001-07:00

I Failed

As I am busy readin, workin, and plannin my move to Los Angeles, my internet-thoughts will have to be short, sweet and posted here. Enjoy! Warning: They will be boring and pointless.

2009-03-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

"The Talmud states: 'The deeds of the righteous are greater than the making of the heavens and the earth.' The explanation of this is that the creation of the heavens and the earth was the formation of the reality of something from nothing. By contrast the righteous transform reality back to nothingness. For from all the things they do, even physical things like eating, they raise the holy sparks [tikkun] from this food upward, and the same is true of every matter they engage in. So we find that they transform the real into the divine Nothing."

-Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch (from 'Maggid Devarav LeYaakov)

2009-03-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Golden Key

"In the winter time, when deep snow lay on the ground, a poor boy was forced to go out on a sledge to fetch wood. When he had gathered it together, and packed it, he wished, as he was so frozen with cold, not to go home at once, but to light a fire and warm himself a little. So he scraped away the snow, and as he was thus clearing the ground, he found a tiny, gold key. Hereupon he thought that where the key was, the lock must be also, and dug in the ground and found an iron chest. "If the key does but fit it!" thought he; "no doubt there are precious things in that little box." He searched, but no keyhole was there. At last he discovered one, but so small that it was hardly visible. He tried it, and the key fitted it exactly. Then he turned it once round, and now we must wait until he has quite unlocked it and opened the lid, and then we shall learn what wonderful things were lying in that box."

-Brothers Grimm (KMH 200)

2009-03-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

Why I Like Gustav Moreau

Moreau's art is the product of a byzantine, classically-educated, almost autistic detail-oriented mind. While many of his fellow lotus-eaters could claim to opium fantasies, rarely were they of his caliber. So, you say you recently had a fever-dream of bedding Ethiopian princesses under the metalwork angels of St. Ambrose's crypt to the strains of Nonnus' poetry? Cool. But can you put it on vaporously-textured canvasses, hot-shot?

That's what I thought.

2009-03-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

Why I Don't Like MIA

Her music/image/art smell distinctly of a dual degree in art and "design" and cultural studies from an English university.

2009-02-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

Things that Make Me Groan (02/27/2009 Edition)

Things that make me groan: music that quotes the Dies Irae.

Great musicians have done it, in great pieces too (although this list has lots of pieces I haven't heard, there are still a few that I question, i.e. the dreamy, cradle-rocking flute chords of the opening of the second part of Le Sacre), but quoting the famous chant became cliché immediately after Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. From that moment on, a composer or musician using the melody in his or her piece would effectively be deploying a sort of Rip Taylor on the listener-a brightly adorned, loud entertainer tossing confetti upon your head with "gloom," "doom," and "death" written in big, clever letters on each of the scraps. It's the musicial equivalent of the car driving through the tunnel in a film. Subtle in a way more obvious than obvious.

2009-02-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

A Father's Gift

2009-02-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

The War Has to Continue

"Yes, the war has to continue. The muck-heap has been growing for decades...Believe me, if the war ended today, we should be back in the same old sordid squalor within a fortnight...It is not enough that shrapnel is knifing through the ranks of poor soldiers and even slitting up the money-bags of rich non-combatants. The war's great surprise will be in the guns, which are going to show a frivolous generation their utter emptiness..."

-Alban Berg (Letter to his wife, 1914)

2009-01-18T18:45:00.001-08:00

Whistle

As Guy Davenport is quite dead I don't have much reason to read the New Criterion anymore. Even so, I happened to catch a review of some new book on "Evolutionary Aesthetics" by John Derbyshire. Derbyshire is a British conservative curmudgeon who does most of his writing for the National Review. He is one of those conservatives, like Vox Day (no link-look him up-worst human being ever?) who likes to say OUTRAGEOUS and OFFENSIVE and CONTRARIAN things to get the ol' rile out of liberal pusses like me.
He also likes to imagine himself as very smart (as does Day). Thus its not a total surprise that the first sentence of his article, a long piece written in the top conservative arts magazine, is in fact, totally wrong:
"The modernist composer Anton Webern predicted that mailmen on their rounds would one day whistle his atonal non-melodies."

Actually, it was Schoenberg who said that; it is one of the more famous quotes from a modernist composer. And as for "non-melody," whatever that is, I'd love to hear John Derbyshire, or maybe even New Criterion's bow-tied editor and douchebag Roger Kimball's definition of what constitutes a "melody." Being the worldly, cultured dons of our country's right-wing I'm sure they've poured over Lach's 1913 Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Ornamentalen Melopoie countless times.
Actually, I am almost entirely sure that neither Derbyshire or Kimball has never actually heard Webern, or much less understands what atonality actually is. They most likely have a cloudy, vague notion of some sort of elitist, avant-garde ideological pitter-patter designed by ideologues to make people feel dumb. And sure, atonality was/is often that. Perhaps Derbyshire and Kimball have René Leibowitz in mind, and then I'd have to agree with them; but if they haven't heard of Webern you can be sure they've never even heard of Leibowitz. And again, that's okay, because René Leibowitz sucked.

But lets take Derbyshire's bait. He seems to imply that a melody it something memorable, tonal, and right for whistlin'. A "tune," if you will. But if a melody is something memorable that you can whistle I can whistle you* countless atonal melodies! Just ask me to and I will come over and charm you and your children. Sure, I'm no genius like Roger Kimball, but I can whistle several snatches from the symphonies of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, sing just about the whole of Wozzeck, or tap the wacky, thorny rhythms of the second of Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27 on your back (or thighs, for 10$ extra and a ride home). And although mailmen don't whistle atonal modernist music, do we really want them whistling at all? Why was that even a goal? Isn't it enough that every day the government sends a man in upsetting shorts to our door?

By the way, if you do a Googe for John Derbyshire's picture, you find that this is his most published photograph:

While I am surely no Lorenzo Lamas, I think you will agree that this looks like a pedophile's passport photo. Perhaps nubile 14 year-old, mail-ordered Cambodian boy-lover Rangsey Ung-Dim spiked his sherry with valium shortly before snapping it?

This is the above-mentioned Roger Kimball dressed as Orville Redenbacher. A typical article by Kimball will reference Anselm of Canterbury while defending Joe the Plumber.

*I cannot whistle.

2009-01-15T17:03:00.000-08:00

Metamorphosis

ει γάρ τις ο ζους οξυτόμω πελέκειε
ξερείψειεν μεγάλας δρυός, αισχύνοι δέ οι θαητον ειδος:
καὶφθινόκαρπος εοισα διδοι ψαφον περ' αυτας,
ει ποτε χειμέριον πυρ εξίκηται λοίσθιον:
η συν ορθαις κιόνεσσιν δεσποσύναισιν ερειδομένα
μόχθον α λλοις αμφέπει δύστανον εν τείχεσιν,
εον ερημώσαισα χω̂ρον...

...if a man with a
sharp blade
lops off a shoot from a great oak and disfigures its
glorious form,
even though it can no longer bear leaves it casts a vote in its
own favour,
whether it comes at the end to a fire in winter,
or, sustained by upright pillars in a master's house,
it performs a cheerless labour in an alien building,
having abandoned its native place.

-Pindar, Fourth Pythian Ode (trans. Anthony Verity)

It is currently -11 degrees in Minneapolis. Still, you have no idea of the intense pleasure that results from reading Pindar while listening to The Stylistics' self-titled debut. (Click here to see photo of me taken while writing the previous sentence.)

2009-01-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

Separated at Birth

Claudio Monteverdi (1597)

"The end of all good music is to affect the soul."

Prince (1991)

"Remind me of somethin' James used 2 say
'I like 'em fat, I like 'em proud
U got 2 have a mother 4 me'
Now move your big ass 'round this way
So I can work on that zipper, baby
2night U're a star and I'm the Big Dipper."

2009-01-06T14:09:00.000-08:00

In der Strafkolonie

...great stress was laid by the Sumerian courts on the need of making manifest to all, by means of the written word, the guilty for which the accused was punished. Thus, the thief and the woman who marries two husbands must be stoned with stones on which their evil intent has been inscribed; and the woman who has sinned by saying something to a man which she should not have said (the text giving her words [from the Urukagina document] is unfortunately unintelligible) must have her teeth crushed with burnt bricks upon which, presumably, her guilty deed has been inscribed.

-Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character (pg. 83)

2009-01-01T00:18:00.000-08:00

A Celan/Clownsilly New Years

A poem that I never forget to share with my family and friends in the warm New Year's Eve glow of champagne and Auld Lang Synes:

DAS ANGERBROCHENE JAHR
mit dem modern
den Kanten Wahnbrot.

Trink
aus meinen Mund.

THE BROACHED YEAR
with its mouldering crusts
of delusion bread.

Drink
from my mouth.

-Paul Celan (trans. Michael Hamburger)

Happy New Year!

2008-12-25T18:41:00.000-08:00

Oh Dear God.

Isaac Hayes and his "Shaft" band. Yes.

2008-12-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

Christmas Message

Humanitas vocabantur, cum pars servitutis esset.

"They called it civilization, when it was really part of servitude."

-Tacitus (Agricola)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

2008-12-01T22:17:00.000-08:00

Beckett

I seem to remember reading that Samuel Beckett was never caught on film. But here he is, as patient, quiet and friendly as he was supposed to be. His accent is interesting-Dublin by way of Paris (and not an outright brogue like his master, who was similarly multilingual and largely based on the mainland).

In related news, Beckett has returned from the dead in order to coach a promising pupil:

2008-11-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

Meeting With a Hipster

Yes? Oh-it's you. Come right in.

How are you? Please, take a seat.

I will cut to the chase. I have been reviewing your performance recently, and I just wanted to give you some feedback so you know where we stand.

I've put the feedback in powerpoint form.

CLOTHING

-You are doing a good job being a unique young person. Your clothes differentiate you from those of your parent's generation, and from young people who listen to different music than you.
-Those tight corduroy jeans you wear are hilariously tight BUT have enough pocket-space for various chains and Parliament cigarettes. SMOKING, SMOKING ALWAYS. If not smoking, thinking about it, if not thinking about it, sleeping, if not sleeping, working, if not working using paycheck to purchase cigarettes (and other drugs-though these are easily found at parties and that way you save for that new bike tire you've had your eye on, as well as that rock album you want so damn much) Also Patrick has been noticing that you wear the same boxers 3 days in a row. Excellent!
-Your vision isn't poor, but glasses must be utilized. Come on, we've gone over this. There are two types of glasses you can go for, both viewable here.

The man on the far right, near-sighted, needs his Elvis Costello glasses. This is choice A for a unique young person such as yourself. The choice B glasses can be seen on the man to his right. This man has fine vision, and wears them for style/saw other unique young people doing it/irony, but as you can see, they look fabulous. Not only are they incredibly ridiculous and ugly, they were the type of glasses preferred by middle-aged men with down syndrome in the 80s. As you know, those men were trailblazers in our field.

HAIR (FACIAL, HEAD, PUBIS)

-I was notified by our mutual friend Dusty (via his mp3 blog) that you washed your hair last Thursday for a family wedding practice. Don't do that again
-Never wash your hair. The grease in your hair should begin to have reflective properties. Never wash it UNLESS, of course, someone at the Dirty Projectors show pours his PBR over your head when he catches you making out with his girlfriend.
-Beards and mustaches reminiscent of gay man on the Just For Men box are a must.

BOOKS

-What your friends read. You know the deal. Keep it up. The Lacan Reader is a bit suspicious though, as is the Deleuze. People might figure out you just bought them for a class at community college.

MUSIC

-Pitchfork, mp3 blogs. Music is fun to listen to, and you might think of getting an iPod with your check from Computer Warehouse. (Without bud earphones, which will look too much like plug earrings, which aren't cool any more. Are they still cool? I will get Cindy on the line to verify. I was sure they became totally gay again. These things are moving too fast for me! I must be getting old.)

TIPS

When riding your old rusty 10-speed in front of Patrick's car on Hennepin, Franklin, Cedar and University avenues, be sure to use your malnourished, wispy Edward VI legs to work up no velocity or speed, forcing Patrick to slow down to 7 miles per hour until he can pass you by swerving into oncoming traffic. (By the way-while riding that bike-are you remembering to roll up one pant-leg and wear your kerchief scarf around your neck over that shirt that broadcasts your weak-chested, upsetting nipples in detail worthy of the Early Netherlandish School of painters?)

That is all for today. Any questions? No? You never have much to say. Well have a good day. We will keep in touch.

2008-11-11T19:46:00.000-08:00

Camille Paglia Sucks

Few people annoy me more than Camille Paglia. One of the people who annoys me more is a 11 year old boy named Billy who follows me around all day poking me and saying "Does this bother you? Does this bother you? Does this bother you?" But say what you will about little Billy- he never writes shit like this:

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.

Wow. That is, I mean, really dumb. The "be-bop saxophonist" line is a prime example of Paglia's tendency to write things that are incredibly, how does one say, wrong and dumb. I've heard hundreds of be-bop records, and I've heard enough of Sarah Palin talking to know that her style is more Charlie "Corky" Thacher on Life Goes On than Charlie Parker at Massey Hall. It has the "rippling momentum" of diarrhea; not Bud Powell's solo on "Dance of Infidels."
Here is how you write a piece by Camille Paglia: "I love talking about myself a lot and how I was controversial in the 80s and how I liked Madonna despite being a feminist (WHAT?! Did I throw you for a loopdy-doo there? That's what I do!) and I like to describe some lame-ass band like Jefferson Airplane as 'Dionysian' or some shit, and I like to ruffle all those wispy, girly feathers on the left and I'm in touch with popular culture please believe that please believe that I can bring up Botticelli when talking about Angelina Jolie I'm in touch and smart and opinionated and sassy. I like Matt Drudge and he's a maverick even though he refuses to acknowledge his own homosexuality because it would alienate all the mouth-breathing bigots who read his ugly site."

So, yeah, that's basically it I think. You know you are reading Paglia when you continually cringe at how lame she is when she tries to be cool ("like a be-bop saxophonist"=

)

My anger is mostly spurred by recently reading this thing about an anthology of poetry she put out. Oh it's got the cringe factor-the egotism, the lame pop cultural references, the sprinklings of "High Culture," along with that indefinable "high school teacher trying to be cool and dance with the students at Homecoming" quality. Anyways, It's about poetry. After reading it I actually want her to go back to writing 78 more pieces about how that award-show kiss between Britney Spears and signaled a rebirth of 5th century Athens in America or something. Her selections are often atrocious (i.e. "Howl is my favorite Allen Ginsberg poem"-Great choice! By any chance, is "Legend" your favorite Bob Marley album?), her taste is embarrassing (Bukowski over late Wallace Stevens? Yikes.) and her analyses are sub- 8th-grade English book report.

2008-11-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

November 4th, 2008

2008-10-31T21:02:00.001-07:00

The Greatest Songs of All-Time (cont'd)

The Beatles - "Tomorrow Never Knows"

For Halloween, a song I have always thought of as being the sound of pure evil. It's not my favorite Beatles song-it's not even my favorite track on "Revolver" (that would be this-I'm a card-carrying Paul man), but I find it hard to hear it as many do-an experimental, psychedelic pop song by everybody's favorite band. Of course it's that. But it's also song I have always found deeply disturbing (the menacing, warlike stop-start drumbeat, the prehistoric drone of bees and cicadas, the screaming seagulls circling a shipwreck, the machinery with syphilis) and one that has held a fascination for me ever since I was in fourth grade and devoured the complete Beatles catalogue like a piece of Pillsbury Funfetti cake© (I still can sing and play you just about every note on every record). Other bands would play with tape-loops and sitars and dabble in "Eastern philosophy," but none would even approach this band's ability to take all of it, and so much more, and then precede to then explode everything in feats of complete, immediate mastery . All pop musicians are still collecting the sparks and embers off of the ground like so much funfetti.

2008-10-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

Spirals

A spiral: " a plane curve generated by a point moving around a fixed point while constantly receding from or approaching it."

1551, from M.Fr. spiral, from M.L. spiralis "winding, coiling" (1255), from L. spira "coil," from Gk. speira "coil, twist, wreath," from PIE *sper- "to turn, twist."

Spiral-like formations are found in plants and animals. Prehistoric peoples, independent from each other, drew/carved spirals (particularly triple spirals) on rock walls (entrance of passage-tomb at Newgrange, Ireland 3000 BC).

For years artists have drawn attention to the spiral-like quality of the human ear

The image of the labyrinth is in Cretan art is a complex spiral.

Coins of Knossos [Crete] bore the symbol of the labyrinth. Symbols are natural shapes elevated to significance...The spiral is the shape a worm draws with its coiling bore, a fern with its bud, and a periwinkle with its shell...In Athenian work the spiral mirrors wind and waves; in Gothic, the serpent Satan. - Guy Davenport, "The House that Jack Built" from "The Geography of the Imagination. Forty Essays by Guy Davenport (pg 47-48) "San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

Davenport also notes how Brancusi's 'portrait' of James Joyce is a labyrinth spiral. The main character of Joyce's "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" and "Ulysses" is Stephen Dedalus. Daedalus designed the Cretan labyrinth which housed the minotaur. He is the ancient symbol of artist-creator.

Daedalus designed a golden honeycomb (hexagonal wax). When it was hung on a tree in the royal garden bees made it their hive and home for their young.

The supreme artist creates something worthy of nature.

Spirals coil and twist evenly around an immovable center. If you could stand on one, each point would present a different view of the immovable center.

The queen who lived after her time, named Nitocris, was wiser than she who had reigned before; and in the first place she left behind her monuments which I shall tell of; then secondly, seeing that the monarchy of the Medes was great and not apt to remain still, but that besides other cities even Nineveh had been captured by it, she made provision against it in so far as she was able. First, as regards the river Euphrates which flows through the midst of their city, whereas before this it flowed straight, she by digging channels above made it so winding that it actually comes three times in its course to one of the villages in Assyria; and the name of
the village to which the Euphrates comes is Ardericca; and at this day those who travel from this Sea of ours to Babylon, in their voyage down the river Euphrates will come to this village three times on different days.
-Herodotus, "The Histories" (Bk. 1 Ch. 182)

This river obviously was constructed in the manner of a spiral. The village repeatedly reached on three different days the center. And each day different men working, different women with baskets on their heads, different angles of trees, children, rooftops.

(Important; Spirals should not be confused with swirls, which if made with strawberries and sprinkles, is a delightful ice cream treat.)

The Lobelia plant (seen in one form above) is famous for its spiral formations:

Highly unpredictable if ingested. Various Native American tribes have been known to smoke small quantities of it, with an effect of euphoria. Perhaps many native people connected the euphoric daze with the illusion of movement in staring at the plant's spirals. The image and the function were mixed, as in the example of the ear-as-spiral (the sound formations of human language and thunder as entrants into maze). It was tested a few times on syphilis patients unsuccessfully. It is highly toxic and if eaten will result in coma and death.

2008-10-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

McCain/Palin/Satie

Longtime readers will know that I am a devotee of ytmnd, for better or worse. And every once in a while, one will find a particularly fascinating juxtaposition of text and image. Such is the case here, where a malfunctioning robot-McCain short circuits sina fine to the pellucid strains of an Satie arrangement.
The piece in question is the second of his second Nocturnes for piano (1919). The combination of the quickly sinking (in the polls, into the beckoning grave, etc.) presidential candidate as faltering automaton, along with Satie's uncannily colorless late masterpiece was striking; I have very recently sensed that there is some sort of aesthetic, spiritual affinity shared between the Satie of this (at the same time) strangely elegiac and mechanical work, which uses mathematical ratios in phrase lengths in a peculiar manner reminiscent of Machaut (c. 1300-1377), and the medieval mechanical clockmakers behind such wonders as the above-pictured Prague Astronomical Clock.

The warped circles of dials, the revolving hourly procession of character figures in robes, and a grinning skeleton Death, who silently rings the bell.

2008-10-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

Where Am I?

Some conjecture that my extended absences from this website are a result of finishing my final semester of college.

Actually, I have been on the road, supporting my wife:

Hope all of you are well.

2008-09-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

Officer Boulez

Do you know how fast you were trilling, ma'am? Oh I am a card.

Seriously though, I take back what I said about Boulez's style. He looks pretty fly here.

2008-09-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

I can make music sometimes

If you are feeling frisky, there are three new songs to peruse on my electrical music alter-ego Kid Icarus' MySpace.

-The first is a silly song about numbers I wrote and then recorded with my good friend Simon Larson for Mouthful of Bees. It might be on their (our? According to bassist and good friend Micky I'm sort of a de facto member even though this will be the final Bees album) upcoming record I helped out on. I sort of imagined writing a song that could be on Reading Rainbow, sans the name-dropping of Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel and use of "motherfucking"-not commonly accepted in kid's music. The song is cutesy and only a minute long and exhibits the sort of tortuously long, winding chord progressions I favor (I will be bold elevate this common feature of my music and say it's the influence of Gabriel Fauré. Done).

-The second thing is a piano sketch recorded directly onto my laptop for a song I will hopefully record in the near future and place on a full-length album I will hopefully also record in the near future. It will probably have singing and lyrics and all of that silly stuff. It is (for now) called "Strawberry Tree" and discerning listeners will of course note not only the conscious aroma of my beloved French composer/organist Jehan Alain in its alternating of limpidly drowsy and austerely spartan modalism (adverbs ahoy), a Romantically tragic quotation of Wagner, but also me stomping the beat on the pedals, messing up in several parts and the sound of someone watching 20/20 in the other room. Extra-discerning listeners probably won't like it very much and think the above description makes me sound like a massive d-bag.

-The third thing is another sketch of a tiny song I originally wrote to a text of a single verse in the Song of Solomon (4:16: Thou art a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and flowing streams from Lebanon) in the Hebrew. I thought it was simple, pretty and hypnotic but I am not sure I will end up using the words if I record it.

Tell me what you all think. All non-positive feedback will be promptly deleted.

NOTE: I must admit to taking much pleasure in placing that giant photo of Clay Aiken at the top of this post. I am going to see if there is a way it can always remain at the top of every page of this site.
Look into his eyes. Lose yourself in them.

UPDATE:
In case you haven't listened yet, there is another song there I wrote and recorded wit da Beez called "Thomas Aquinas." Fans of indie pop and poor mp3 transfers on MySpace will both have something to enjoy.

2008-08-29T01:07:00.000-07:00

A Further Endorsement

Longtime readers, along with readers who have only read since August 6th will remember that I then endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States.

Following tonight's historic speech, I would like to amend my previous endorsement with further support of Barack Obama in his apparent campaign to become the Aztec god of war and the sun, Huitzilopochtli.

O most-sacred Hummingbird, O Barack Obama, I know that I speak for all fellow bloggers who post a few meager times a month about classical music and literature when I say we will do everything we can to help you cut out John McCain's heart and offer it, bloody and still-beating, to the voracious rising eagle of the sun Quauhtlehuanitl.

2008-08-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

Cities (warning: stereotypes and generalizations follow)

I am a city dweller, and like nothing better than cruising through downtown at night blasting some Walter Piston, chewing spearmint gum and winking at all the girls with the tanning sprayed burnt sienna skin outside of Minneapolis night clubs. To my understanding, once you leave an American metropolitan area you will come upon, shortly after exiting the city limits, a burning-hot cement sea with archipelagos of car dealerships, Burger Kings, McDonalds, Arby's, White Castles, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Home Depots, Applebees, Taco Bells, Papa John's, Fuddruckers, Houlihans, Perkins, Denny's, Red Robins, Sonics, Starbucks, Walmarts, TGI Fridays, Bennigans (RIP), Pizza Huts, Ruby Tuesday's, Subways, Cheesecake Factory etc. etc.

These are all delicious, family friendly and often-fried symptoms of Urban Sprawl (read Jane Jacob's fabulous "The Life and Death of American Cities"). I forgot to mention people live here, in houses that tend to look the same and shelter seething youth.

Once you leave this area (and realize that it will take you a few hours to get out of just any one of the above-mentioned chain restaurant's parking lots, not to mention the Home Depot which could house several free standing structures by Brunelleschi in the garden-hose section alone), you will come to an area known as "God's Country" or "the Heartland" or "the Flyover zones." This area is home to endless farm land, some pretty national parks, small towns and most of the nation's meth addicts. I like this area more than the suburban area, but usually less than cities.

I must say with some puzzlement that cities have ceased to interest me recently. Motorists honk angrily at other motorists, the police blaze through the intersections, there are not enough trees, not enough chamois. I do like the Minneapolis skyline and how that when you approach it, the relations of the buildings in space alters. At first they face you as one jaggedly solid entity on a horizontal line. But as the highway subtly curves and approaches, the buildings become like those wonderful stacks of geometric solids one finds in early Renaissance art (as is well known, this profoundly influenced the so-called proto-cubist in Cézanne):

Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Effects of Good Government on City-Life, detail (c.1330)

Paul Cézanne: Gardanne (1885-86)

Maybe I just need to take a respite from all this movement and find a shady forest, a giant body of water, a desert.

In the Book of Genesis, Cain is both the first murderer (Genesis 4:8), and the first city-builder (4:17).

2008-08-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

"As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did."

-Bruno Schulz

2008-08-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

The Greatest Songs of All-Time (A Journey of Enlightenment)

Snoop Dogg- "Sexual Eruption"

2008-08-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

Richard "Lewis" Rorty

I envision myself as an old man who resembles British analytic philosopher Michael Dummett in this clip. Thick, lustrous, dyed hair, cigarette holder (I won't actually smoke cigarettes, just light them and hold them), sweater'd paunch. I will also laugh slyly at mountebank friends like Donald Davidson-"Ripping barb, Donald! Absolutely ripping." I will throw my head back during said laugh and throw a wink at my scandalously younger wife on the rebound.

2008-08-06T17:41:00.000-07:00

Tears of a Clownsilly Endorsement

I am making this official. I endorse Barack Obama for President.

Why? Because of one answer he gave during an interview with Rolling Stone:

"Is there anyone who you would say were musical heroes to you at the time?"

"If I had one, it would have to be Stevie Wonder. When I was just at that point where you start getting involved in music, Stevie had that run with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Fulfillingness' First Finale and Innervisions, and then Songs in the Key of Life. Those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we've ever seen."

Truer words have never been spoken. So, yeah, that, and McCain is a total douchebag.

2008-08-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

Glorious Return/Lou Bond

I have been busy playing and listening to music, reading, doing French homework, throwing a Frisbee and generally ignoring the internet.

I want to start posting here and make an effort to again make this the sort of place where people can come together and have a good time, a Boys and Girls Club that revolves around ME and not loser poor kids from the south side of Chicago.

Speaking of the south side of Chicago, and its antithesis, the MAN, this is a great song from the mysterious Stax soul poet Lou Bond. I first heard him on a mix of some of obscure 70s soul and R&B. One of his songs is called "Why Must Eyes Always Be Turned Backwards," which sounds more Nicholas of Cusa than Issac Hayes, but actually fits when you listen to it. The song has the classic Stax sound, thick bass and drums, chiming piano and mellow strings. Bond has a fine, slightly raspy voice, but his lyrics are the real interest for the uninitiated. Very political, very 70s. "Over there in Israel, that's what they call the Holy Land/That's where Christianity was supposed to first begin...The Protestants and Catholics are supposed to be so religious and profound/But they over there in Ireland and they burnin' each others' houses down/I just can't understand it, why our eyes must always be turned backwards?" Needless to say it is the first Stax track I've heard that mentions the conflict in Northern Ireland. But it's also damn catchy. The song linked to above, though, might be his classic, a 10 minute burner entitled "To the Establishment." Two chords hovering back and forth hypnotically whilst he complains about every god damn thing he has to deal with (including going to the grocery store to buy cherry chap stick) and how it's totally fucked up. Yes!
Sample line: "I want you to know that I think it's all a great big one-sided affair/If I had my way, I'd put you all in the electric chair." It's a hit at weddings.

2008-07-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

Great Wikipedia Articles on Music I

Richard Strauss' Violin Concerto.

"Richard Strauss's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor was written in 1881-1882.

Although virtuosic, the first movement in particular is clearly influenced by the Classical period."

Awesome! Thanks for the info Wikipedia!

2008-07-03T23:25:00.000-07:00

Enjoyments

Since I've been gone, here are some things I've been enjoyinating.

BOOK READIN'

MUSIC

If you are interested in these items, click on their pictures and you will be taken to a magical wonderland where you will be able to order them. A friendly robot will bring them to your door.

2008-07-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

Oracle

χρηστηριασαμένου αὐτοῦ τί πράττων ἄριστα βιώσεται, ἀπο-
κρίνασθαι τὸν θέον, εἰ συγχρωτίζοιτο τοῖς νεκροῖς·

When Zeno [of Citium] consulted the oracle to find out what he should do to live the best life the god answered that to live the best life he should join his flesh with the dead.

-Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Stoics, 7.2)

2008-06-23T18:01:00.000-07:00

Hope

"I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse."

-George Carlin (1937-2008)

2008-06-11T20:49:00.000-07:00

Sheep Circle

"When man approaches, sheep are timid and stupid; they have known the beatings and stones of his insolence. But if he stands stock still and stares into the distance, they forget about him. They stick their heads together then, ten or fifteen of them, and form the spokes of a wheel, with the big, heavy center-point of heads and the otherwise-colored spokes of their backs. They press their skulls tightly together. This is how they stand, and the wheel that they form won't budge for hours. They don't seem to want to feel anything but the wind and the sun, and between their foreheads, the seconds striking out eternity that beats in their blood and signals from head to head like the hammering of prisoners on prison walls."

-Robert Musil ("Posthumous Papers of a Living Author," trans. Wortsman)

(p.s. In case you didn't know, I've decided June shall be quotation month).

2008-06-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

Le Secret Changement

Les morts cachés sont bien dans cette terre
Qui les réchauffe et sèche leur mystère.
Midi là-haut, Midi sans mouvement
En soi se pense et convient à soi-même
Tête complète et parfait diadème,
Je suis en toi le secret changement.

The dead lie easy, hidden in earth where they
Are warmed and have their mysteries burnt away.
Motionless noon, noon aloft in the blue
Broods on itself -- a self-sufficient theme.
O rounded dome and perfect diadem,
I am what's changing secretly in you.

-Paul Valéry (from Le Cimitière marin, "Cemetery by the Sea," trans. Lewis)

2008-06-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

Alex Ross Bait (Me-Bait, too)

It looks to be almost certain that at a Vienna performance of Rienzi Hitler stood or perched in the top gallery while Theodore Herzl sat in the stalls. Hitler drank in, from the marching choruses, the programme for the Nuremberg rallies and the Wehrmacht's bellowing surge across Europe. Herzl tells us that these very same choruses, and Rienzi's ascent to the leadership of his Volk, sparked in him the vision of Zionism and of a return to a Jewish nation in Palestine. The dialectic of that evening is inexhaustible. It affirms that in all art which is beyond good and evil. It makes a mockery of censorship, let alone of the infantilism of 'political correctness'. It tells us of our near-total ignorance of the ways in which music invades, infects, energizes, elevates human consciousness. Israel on the one hand, the Shoah on the other, the founder of Zionism and the ultimate Jew-killer gathered up in the identical hour of musical magic. Thrust into opposite directions (or, God help us, were these directions all that opposite ?). The State of Israel continues to prohibit performances of Wagner. Do its Spartan guardians know about Herzl's Rienzi ?

The anatomy of Vienna was concentric. Its disproportionate contribution to modernity resulted from an implosive density of contact and encounter. The famous cafes were only one instrument of this daily creative collision. Its sexual parable is that of Schnitzler's Reigen or La Ronde. It was nearly impossible not to meet in that bustling centre and on the Ring. This means that, spatially, statistically, it is all but inconceivable that Hitler did not cross paths with, say, Mahler or Freud or Wittgenstein or Schoenberg, be it on the pavements, be it in a tram (when he could afford one). His eyes must have met the eyes of the shapers of that central European humanism, so richly Jewish, which he would reduce to ash.

-George Steiner ( "Hitler's Vienna," Salmagundi: Summer 2003, Iss. 139/140, pg. 64)

2008-06-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

Orentatio

Despite its importance for an understanding of the religious phenomenon, we shall not here discuss the problem of "hominization." It is sufficient to recall that the vertical posture already marks a transcending of the condition typical of the primates. Uprightness cannot be maintained except in a state of wakefulness. It is because of man's vertical posture that space is organized in a structure inaccessible to the prehominians: in four horizontal directions radiating from an "up"-"down" central axis. In other words space can be organized around the human body as extending forward, backward, to right, to left, upward, and downward. It is from this original and originating experience-feeling oneself "thrown" into the middle of an apparently limitless, unknown and threatening extension-that the different methods of 'orientatio' are developed; for it is impossible to survive for any length of time in the vertigo brought on by disorientation. This experience of space oriented around a "center" explains the importance of the paradigmatic divisions and distributions of territories, agglomerations, and habitations and their cosmological symbolism.

-Mircea Eliade ("A History of Religious Ideas: Volume One, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries," pg. 3)

2008-05-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

A World of Our Own

ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι

"The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own."

-Heraclitus (fr. 89)

A fascinating insight, but in the end, not quite right. The dualistic relationship between the "inner " and the "outer" worlds (which develops around the time of the Pre-Socratics, culminates in Descartes and his followers and enemies in the following centuries and structures much of our own thought and metaphors to this day) is a creation of a metaphor-generating consciousness that has located itself in a mirror. In truth, even giving credence to the split between the "inner-world" and the "outer-world," the outer-world still works its cumulative magic on us even when we sleep. The dreamworld can be shaped by outside stimuli. I remember one dream I had years ago that was strangely (even for the dream) interrupted by the Backstreet Boys steeping unto the stage of the my personal Cartesian theater. They sang one of their hits, popular at the time, and before I had a chance to ask for bad-boy A.J. McLean's autograph, I awoke to find the alarm-clock radio blasting, you guessed it, the Backstreet Boys.

Heraclitus' dreams might have been guided and shaped by the night-time murmuring of River Cayster, flowing outside his bedroom window in Ephesus. Mine are effected by this douchebag:

Wake up, honey. I made you breakfast.

(P.S. Kevin Richardson, the Backstreet Boy shown here, seems to prefer a style of facial hair popular in Spain, France and Italy during the 17th century. Perhaps he is trying to resemble French pirate François l'Olonnais?)

2008-05-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

PARTAY

Schoenberg knew how to party. This is some footage from various get-togethers of Los Angeles exiled intelligentsia and other friends . Guests in this clip include: Ira Gershwin, a pipe-smoking Bertrand Russell, the ridiculously lanky Aldous Huxley, and, best of all, Thomas Mann who drinks to your health at 3:08. He dresses like Sam Spade with sunglasses. Is that a Bloody Mary?

2008-05-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

Bill O'Reilly Goes to the Opera

Self-explanatory.

In related Fox News (the only cable news channel I watch religiously), you got to love the Fox and Friends crew using this graphic when discussing the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

I love the idea of Frederick Douglass (who delivered an eloquent and impromptu oratory at Lincoln's funeral) defending the institution of slavery against Lincoln in a debate. Yes, that graphic is real. And yet I could swear Doocy was a scholar of American History.

2008-05-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

Un Message d'un Maître

If you can't read it well due to the dual awful computer camera/quirky but effortless calligraphic script:

To Patrick Swanson
with my best wishes
for his own works
and every thing [else]
Sincerely,
Henri Dutilleux
Paris (October 2007) *

If you aren't hip to the skip: required listening. Dutilleux is, to my mind, one of the last direct inheritors of the Debussy/Ravel genome in the French musical tradition. I am, of course, a dude who sometimes goes on the internet.

*(October 2007? I received it quite late, really. Did Kafka design the French mail system? What's the deal with airplane peanuts? )

2008-05-22T20:02:00.000-07:00

Update

"The clocks are not in unison, the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner."

-Franz Kafka (Diary, 1/16/22)

2008-05-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

Mutual Promotion

See my version of Fred Astaire dancing with the vacuum cleaner here.

2008-05-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

Perfect Things (I)

Does perfection exist? Yes. A few perfect things that come to mind:

-The Band - The Band

-Piero della Francesca's Flagellation

-The 'Prelude' from Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin

-Sophia Loren's breasts in "Man of La Mancha" (see above)

-Henry James' "The Aspern Papers"

-And, of course:

2008-05-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

Just Checking In

Today on the way to French class I saw three Mormon students (with the customary matching white dress shirts, pocket-protectors, etc.) petting a camel.

Carry on.

2008-05-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

Baby and Candle

One of my favorite books is William James' massive Principles of Psychology. It is facking crazy to think that the book was published in 1890 - even with all the advances of the last century in neurobiology, genetics etc., the book remains an essential text for students of the brain. The book contains some fascinating relics from 19th century science, complete with a chapter in phrenology* (James dismisses it), and yet remains remarkably "contemporary" throughout in regards to its concern for the infinitely subtle spun web of consciousness, its full acceptance of the evolutionary history of the brain, etc.
The chapters can be read apart from each other, and some of them are masterpieces in themselves. See, for example, the famous "Streams of Thought" (where high school English teachers get "streams of consciousness"), "The Consciousness of Self," "The Perception of Time" and "Memory."
If you are like me, a lover of G-2 low-calorie cherry Gatorade and turkey sandwiches, you often read books of philosophy, science, psychology etc. as literature; James, a master stylist, can be read here as a profound thinker on science and philosophy, or a proto-modernist whose rock ripples in the ponds of Proust and Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

There are also some awesomely late-19th-century illustrations. Here is my favorite (it would make a awesome band t-shirt):

*

 Friday: Are you sure this is the woman you saw in the post office?
Burns: Absolutely!  Who could forget such a monstrous visage?  She
    has the sloping brow and cranial bumpage of the career
    criminal.
Smithers: Uh, Sir?  Phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago.
Burns: Of course you'd say that...you have the brainpan of a
    stagecoach tilter!

2008-04-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

Bridge

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

The way up and the way down is one and the same.

-Heraclitus

2008-04-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Epigraph for Spring

Car ce n’est pas travailler
que d’être une rose, dirait-on.
Dieu, en regardant par la fenêtre,
fait la maison.

Because it is isn't really work, you know,
to be a rose.
God, while looking out a window,
picks up the house.

-Rainer Maria Rilke ("Les Roses," XIX)

2008-04-22T21:07:00.000-07:00

Deux Choses

1) I was reading earlier today how Edward Elgar, a fellow animal-lover, had to give his dog away because his wife didn't like it. She never let him get another dog and he had to settle for playing with the dogs of friends. Elgar's wife was a bitch!

2) A video of Messiaen teaching (as seen in this new and wonderabulous DVD). In this case, a brief exploration of word-setting and color in Debussy's Pelléas. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that near the end of the clip he is interrogating none other than the the late, great Gérard Grisey (in his student days) on the "grey-violet" of a particular Debussyan voicing. Yeah, totally grey-violet. Orange? Sure. Green? Why not!

2008-04-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

Greatest Songs of All-Time (A Continuing Series of Videos for Songs I Say Are Great, And Therefore, Must Be)

OutKast (featuring Slick Rick) - "Da Art of Storytellin' (Part 1)"

If you don't already own "Aquemini," get it. Along with every other OutKast album (except "Idlewild"-that sucked). I think I'm going to start rocking the very smooth perm Big Boi has here.

2008-04-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

Captain Sibelius

I am pretty sure that last night I heard the glorious agony and triumph of the final pages of Sibelius' Fifth Symphony in a Captain Morgan commercial. The notorious alcoholic preferred (like Stravinsky) whiskey. I saw no rum in my cursory perusal of Sibelius' list of preferred liquors-mostly said whiskey, wine and brandy. Interesting, smart choice by Captain Morgan though, if it is truly what I heard. Perhaps the Captain can make it happen!

2008-04-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

Wanksters!

If you would like to see a hackish charlatan intellectually drowning in front of a crowd of the digital age's equivalent of divinity students, I bid you here. It's NYU professor, Derrida hanger-on, feminist, philosopher and (of course) performance artist Avital Ronell talking about...something. Something...that...isn't...quite...there. Something...profound? Perhaps....maybe...something...aeiawejksdjionaoaiooakersjs.
So much of theory is an endless preparation for a conversation that will never take place. It attempts to set barriers and parameters to an imaginary future discussion, it lays out the jargon that to be utilized, it creates the authority figures to be interrogated as oracles. In the end it only confirms Zeno's denial of motion. Nothing happens. Only wanking.
Really, for a group of people that wish (often admirably) to demolish tradition and reject authority, the authority of the "author," the law, the late-capitalist hierarchy, these people use their precursors, their Foucaults, Batailles, Nietzsches, Lacans, like Aquinas or Rashi used Aristotle or the Talmudic sages. It's pure ipse dixit. Hence, 'divinity students'.
I understand that bashing "post-modernism" or continental philosophy in the academy is an old trick, and something I've done a lot before, but really folks! This shit is BONKERS! Watch her randomly go from one foggy generality to another. It's almost touching, the way she unsuccessfully searches for an interesting thing to say, constantly to come up empty-handed. In the third part (yes, I watched all three. I am sick) she has to ask Judith Butler for a life-preserver, perhaps the most desperate situation of all for a thinking human being.

All said I'm sure she's a nice gal. Or not. Feel free to post your favorite quotes!
My favorite (this should be added the next edition of Bartlett's):

"For example, what's happening today isn't necessarily happening today [sic]. But is something that never stopped, um,retching, or, or, or, agitating, or, or, having a phantasmatic site (sight?) [sic] in something that, um, was calling from another time, or something. I could give you a really foolish example [thanks]: have you seen the 'Star Wars'...not 'Star Wars'...um, 'Star Trek' which takes place in San Francisco with the...[nerd in audience, probably fat: With the whales?]...okay...the punchline...They [the crew of the Millennium Falcon or whatever the fuck] thought it was, that, the, uh, uh, signaling was coming from a human, or a human figuration [?], but it was more like something from, and from the past [sic], but it was really from the future, and from a different, uh, let's say a different manifestation of dasein [let's not and say we did], from the whales....[looks at Butler in desperation]...okay how does this help?"

It doesn't. It absolutely does not help.

2008-03-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Popular Risk

It is sort of crushing when an artist you like makes something embarrassingly bad. This leads me to an opening question: is John Adams' I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky a parody? I refuse to believe it's from the pen of the man who wrote Phrygian Gates and Harmonielehre. It sounds like Andrew Lloyd Webber, but gayer. Gayer! Than this!
I know the piece is 15 years old-but I remember 1995. Memo to composers of today and tomorrow: Playing with popular music in your work is a risk. It will blow up in your face and show how shockingly out of touch you are. Don't do it. Not that it can't be done. Just probably not by you.

2008-03-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

Bill Clinton as Martin Heidegger

2008-03-21T15:18:00.000-07:00

Berg's Demonic Taste

Your demonic taste for civilization and illusion would find ample sustenance here, for nowhere is civilization more glassy than in Italy, and intense, though in a different, more positive sense than with us, for the whole of life, lived as it were to the point of destruction, resists constant stabilization and mirrors its own transience in illusion.

-Theodor Adorno (letter to Alban Berg, 12 September 1925)

2008-03-19T22:45:00.001-07:00

Does it make me a Nazi?

Of course not, but I still am eager to defend the Adagio of Bruckner's 7th as one of the most beautiful pieces of 19th century music I have ever heard. Yes, they played this on German radio following the death of Hitler. He didn't deserve it of course (I have always been very vocal about my dislike of Hitler-guy was a complete douchebag!). Hitler's funeral music should have something totally shitty, like this.

But, wow, this Bruckner fellow could write some amazing music for being such a village idiot. I have never read a biography of the man (are there any good books on Bruckner?) but that has to be overstated. So he was a devout Catholic and he wore crunchy pants. The mind that produces these symphonies and masses is far from being naive or simple. They are deep, deep works. And not just because of their length or cathedral-organ sound. And I'm not one of those guys who immediately associates everything Germanic with "depth". Fuck those guys!
Even early things like the Adagio of the Second Symphony are wonderful. Listen to the Adagio from the Second Symphony for me right now. Here's the score. You have no excuse. It is very deep music. So deep it'll put ya ass to sleep (quoth Ice Cube, though I believe he was referring to poignant Andante of Mahler's Sixth).

I have been enjoying this amazing set of Bruckner's symphonies conducted by Eugen Jochum. Here he is conducting the Adagio of the Seventh. Deep music.

2008-03-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

Saint Patrick's Day

*(Photo is of me and fellow John Adams fan Jenna. She loves two things: post-minimalism and my inexplicably waxy pectorals).

Sorry for the distance I've kept between us. I like to think it has given us a little space, a chance to breathe. I think we can agree that following my last return to this alcove, things moved a little too quickly. Now following the 239th absence, I don't want to make the same mistake. The things that were said, the genitals that were purposely brushed, etc.

It's okay. I understand.

The snow is melting and the blood begins to simmer once more. I have been busy with midterms and planning my summer classes. Also, the same constant reading and listening (not so much viewing).

I had a nice listening experience last night, in fact. Driving through downtown Minneapolis to a friend's house, I passed by a blue-raspberry-colored lake, ice splitting into smoking islands as a lemon sun lowered itself gently into the cold water like an old man into an ice bath. The sky was dusky and cherry-red and the whole scene reminded me of a natural world animated by Popsicle-spirits. For a night, at least, I worshiped as a Blue Bunny Shinto sect of one.

The music was John Adams' The Dharma at Big Sur, a concerto for electric violin and orchestra. The work is sort of a tribute to the West Coast and two of its post-war innovators Lou Harrison and Terry Riley. The influence is clear in the gamelan-like ensemble and the quasi-Eastern electric violin quarter-tone swoops and turns. The electric-violin is a cool sounding instrument in Adams' hands (as opposed to Robby Steinhardt's-sorry Rob! See you at Mystic Lake Casino). It has a crazy good range, the harmonics sound clearly, and, thanks to the virtuoso Tracy Silverman's playing, Eastern microtones are rich and gritty. Perhaps it's the recording (and although I read reviews of the work's Walt Disney hall premiere that made similar complaints) there is a caveat: the violin aurally dominates the orchestra. The brass, keyboards, harps and large battery of percussion (including a whole-Buddhist shrine of gongs) seem to play in another room, far away. It adds to the atmosphere, but one feels that they are missing out. Though the electric violin is the main voice, spinning a seemingly endless and improvisatory melody of often great beauty, it's obvious even on a mediocre car stereo that Adams has written much for the rest of the orchestra to do. In other words, the composer has missed out too. Perhaps future performances (and recordings) will bring out some of the riches of his zen tapestry.

I've been reading a lot too. Lots of things for school, of course, but also Strindberg's diary of alchemic insanity, Inferno. Homeboy went insane. Also, Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne, Shchedrin's gloomy and vicious Golovlyov Family and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. A depressing list. I read some happy things too, I think. I can't remember. I kept myself afloat by eating strawberry yogurt, listening to Bill Evans, Milton Nascimento, Ravel's Piano Trio and endlessly watching this:

2008-03-01T17:37:00.000-08:00

Animal Minds

Those who know me can attest to the fact that I greatly prefer animals to humans. And it is not any old idle "I love cute things!". My devotion to our fellow creatures is of a nobler, philosophical bent, and thus, better.*
On the really real, I am simply fascinated by them, how they act, communicate and, yes, think. There is a simplistic but entertaining cover story in the newest National Geographic on animal cognition called "Inside Animal Minds". It spends a few pages detailing the fascinating though controversial research of animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg on Alex the African Grey Parrot. Pepperberg studied Alex for 30 years. He had a vocabulary of over 100 words, was able to count, could differentiate between meaning and syntax
and, according to Pepperberg (no quack), understood the concept of zero.
And, this:

According to Dr. Pepperberg, the final time she saw Alex was on Thursday September 6. They went through their goodnight routine in which she told him it was time to go in the cage. She recalls that Alex said "You be good. I love you." She responded, "I love you, too." He said "You'll be in tomorrow," and she responded, "Yes, I'll be in tomorrow."

Watch him in action here:

And here:

*Joke. Animals are adorable too. If you are wondering why I chose a Border Collie for the photo here, the cover of the NG issue is a photo of a German Border Collie who has been proven to learn vocabulary at a rate that rivals young children.

UPDATE: After watching the videos, I've come to the conclusion that Alex is pretty damn impressive, and Irene Pepperberg is pretty damn sexayyy.

2008-02-24T21:17:00.000-08:00

Greatest Songs of All-Time

Stevie Wonder - "Creepin'". Bad sound quality here, but a great example of his harmonic genius.

2008-02-24T15:59:00.001-08:00

I Work it Into Everything

(Sartre: Shitty philosopher, but strikingly handsome nonetheless.)

Even an old French assignment I just found again on my computer:

"Je ne suis pas connu pour mes bonnes prédictions, mais je ferai une prophétie au sujet de quelque chose avec quoi je suis vraiment familier: la musique classique. C'est une bonne question: qu'est-ce que la musique classique sera dans 25 ans? J'essayerai de deviner.
Beaucoup de personnes pensent que la musique classique est morte; cela est une idée fausse. Il y a plusieurs compositeurs contemporains intéressants qui travaillant aujourd'hui. On pense à Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Thomas Adès. Une chose qui rend ces compositeurs modernes si intéressants, est leur utilisation d'autres genres de musique (par exemple, Steve Reich a été a influencé par les rythmes de discours hébreu et les rhythmes du Ghana) aussi bien que l'utilisation des technologies de la musique.
Je pense que dans 25 ans, beaucoup plus de compositeurs utiliseront les instruments électroniques et les ordinateurs dans leurs oeuvres. Naturellement, je crois que les compositeurs continueront à écrire la musique pour les instruments acoustiques. Pendant que la technologie domine nos vies, les compositeurs trouveront nouvelles assistances qui auront besoin seulement d'un ordinateur.
En plus, à l'avenir la télécommunication mondiale continuera à augmenter. Ainsi, les compositeurs et les musiciens pourront étudier la musique de partout dans
le monde ; les musiciens collaboreront par l'Internet et les compositeurs auront plus d'accès aux musiques du monde de toutes les périodes. Et même maintenant, on peut écouter Bach pendant une minute, Public Enemy la prochaine, et la musique Javanese de Gamelan apès ça. En effet, c'est incroyable et deviendra plus incroyable!"

2008-02-23T18:00:00.001-08:00

Those Were Different Times

The times when Dean Martin would introduce Casey Kasem playing Adolf Hitler to roast Don Rickles.

2008-02-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

I've Recorded a Pop Song

REPOST IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T LISTENED!@!!!

If you are in the mood for a pretty pop ditty you should head to my electronic music alter-ego Kid Icarus' Myspace and listen to "Thomas Aquinas", a song I've just finished. It was written with the help of Chris Farstad from the great Mouthful of Bees; my friends' group whom the Minneapolis City Pages named "Best New Band" this year. He also plays guitar and does the main vocal duties. It was produced and engineered by my friend since 1st grade, Simon Larson (also of a brilliant band-Tokyo Pop, a duo with my friend since 2nd grade, Peter Lutz).

The song is a love song. It's sort of latin-jazz-pop sounding, with a clear Steve Reich influence in the Music for 18 Musicians pianos, along with Animal Collective in the yelping at the end. I'm especially proud that the track uses, except for the bass, all acoustic instruments. Even the ambient wash of chords at the end are simply some piano overtones (a trick I stole from the song "Milky Way", from the Weather Report's debut album. Sue me!). I would play a run of fifths and then we would record the ensuing reverberations.

For those wanting to play along at home, you might want to simply whistle along, as the guitar tuning I wrote this in is BADF#AC#, which is guaranteed to break strings on some guitars. I know that all of you were wanting to play along at home.

WARNING: MySpace's sound quality on non-Tila Tequila songs put up by "artists" is awful. If you want to hear the actual song, which sounds very very good sound-wise, then it would be wise of you (wordplay) to contact me. The reason MySpace's quality is so horrible, again, is that MySpace is an evil thing that is ruining an already ruined nation and making America's incredibly dumb young people, even dumber.

2008-02-12T21:50:00.000-08:00

The Greatest Thing I Ever Wrote

Sometimes I coquettishly peek at my online flummery and hi jinx of yore. Though I don't like anything I write (yet, at least), this is the greatest sentence I have ever composed in all my years of writing for this blog, as well as the 14 papers I have written on "The Yellow Wallpaper":

Ms. Browne's strange and unsettling facial contortions should be viewed with due sympathy, as the spirits of the Eternal Feminine and all sorts of Vortex Crystal/Feng Shui paroxysms are competing within her head to divine their otherwordly secrets to the woman, so that she may pass them on to middle-aged suburban mothers who've paid for tickets to Montel and the Learning Annex.

God, I'm great.

2008-02-12T20:34:00.000-08:00

Luxury

I don't do drugs. I buy books, and this is my luxury. My most recent internet jaunt!:

(Acclaimed Michael Hamburger translation-time.)

(A new and supposedly very good translation of Kant, who writes with the passion of a washcloth. Penguin Classics always do shit str8 up and in style.)

(Also a new acclaimed translation by Robert Alter. Pretty damn good literary critic, and that is saying a lot, James Wood praised it for the London Review of Books here.)

(These Library of America editions are also the shit. Though the designs are sorta lame and the red white and blue stripes are more GI Joe than Henry James).

(A recent book I read on the evolution of language has made me completely interested in word etymology and history, a change that will surely mean more hot ass for me in the future).

It's admittedly not a fun list, but what can one do in these increasingly dark, Mittless times?

2008-02-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

Bream, Stravinsky and Dowland

Follow the link to watch a nervous and fanboyish Julian Bream talk with an exhausted but still (slightly) cordial Stravinsky. Bream then asks that eternal question-"Would you like to see my lute?", a pick-up line which has never worked for me.* Stravinsky is then hypnotized as Bream plays Dowland's Lachrimae Pavan.

This is from a Canadian documentary on Stravinsky that is quite worth seeking out. It has some great stuff in it: a classic recording session of "Symphony of Psalms" in Toronto (where this footage of Bream is taken), Stravinsky chatting in Russian, English, German and French over whiskey with Nicholas Nabokov (where the latter informs the former about the recent heart-attack that would soon kill Jean Cocteau), etc. etc. etc.

Stravinsky in later life quite liked the music of Dowland, and showed a surprising love of Elizabethan music, and the keyboard music from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book in particular. I myself have a Dover edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, but don't find myself opening it up that often. Perhaps I haven't yet the lordly taste to appreciate the finer subtleties of John Bull.

*Still, more successful than my other pick-up line: "Would you like to see my sackbut?"

2008-02-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

DJ Reich

Steve Reich is going to be hosting a special program on the fine and online Counterstream radio website. He will be spinnin' his favorite trax at 9pm. I think that is Eastern time?

Hopefully you and I will be around to check it out!!!

2008-02-03T17:54:00.001-08:00

Let's Get Serious

Fact:

The Who > Led Zeppelin.

2008-01-31T10:36:00.000-08:00

Worst Human-Being of All-Time

It has become clear to me that Miranda July is the worst human being of all-time. In my estimation, she even beats out Olywhr the Rapist, a 12th century Welsh cobbler/rapist and generally detestable guy. Oh and Hitler and Stalin and all of those boring ones too.

(Sure, Stalin and Mao killed millions and millions of people, but at least they weren't so precious. Hipster scum!)

2008-01-30T17:29:00.000-08:00

Radiohead vs. Hannah Montana

While I usually like to bemoan the state of Western culture and the effects of contemporary mass media and its dumbing down of everything for billions of consumers, there are moments when light breaks through my dim chamber. One of them was Radiohead's "In Rainbows" hitting Number 1 on the Billboard 100 even after they give the damn thing away for free. It's fair to call Radiohead the best band in the world, because they really earn their status and fame, as well as their critical success. The new album is another great one for them, and the fact that they are outselling Hannah Montana gives new hope for modern man.
Quick side question. Who the hell is Hannah Montana? Let me get this straight. She's a character on one of those painfully unfunny laugh-track sitcoms for borderline-retarded children on Disney. Her character is a singer and her character's dad is Billy Ray Cyrus. Or actually her dad in real-life is Billy Ray Cyrus. Her real name is Miley and she really does sing. People pay to listen to her sing and her fame and power has reached such a level that people are attempting to blow themselves up in order to kill her.
We have reached a new low in post-modernist consumer-culture folks. Pretty soon an album by GlaceauVitaminWater.com will go number one and terrorists will be killing you and I to get to the precious website/singer.

Anyways, Radiohead is great and they did an amazing movie for New Years Eve where they play all the new songs off "In Rainbows" live in their studio space. The way they reproduce the fascinating textures and complicated songs live is astounding. Nothing is note for note, but they still make it sound as if they record a lot of tracks live, rather than stacking up a million individual tracks. Here's the entire movie. My favorite song off the album, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" is posted above. Enjoy and I'll see YOU at the Myspace.com celebration of 2 years of Hannah Montana's deal with Burger King.com and Comtech Corps.

2008-01-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

Le maître sans cheveux

A recent post featured the vivid vestments of Pierre Boulez in 1971. Looking like the hybrid of a gay pimp, a British prog-rock keyboardist and a dreamsicle, Boulez was then ushering in a new era for the New York Philharmonic: the era of playing some new music and 12 or 13 other works by some early 20th century composers over and over again.
Truth be told, he's a great conductor and composer. But let's be honest. As Troy points out in the comments of that post, the poor man's hair has always given him a little trouble.

Boulez , according to all known biographies, did not have a childhood. Not in the Michael Jackson sense of "He never got a chance to play with little boys because he was recording 'Ben'", but quite literally: Boulez actually materialized one day in Messiaen's class at the Paris Conservatoire. Some say that he walked out of a forest in the Rhone one day wearing white dress shirt and black tie. (I believe Peyser's book adds that he was trailed by a pack of wolves over whom he had a sort of psychic power.)
Either way, wherever the place of his miraculous appearance on the music scene, he already was brash, intelligent, strangely charming, and sort of a dick.

Needless to say, he was already balding. Here we see his cut from the late 50s and early 60s. Most of the top is gone, but the follicles are vibrant and spiky, perhaps emanating some of his substantial brain-power. Here you see him doing one of two things:
1) (For those who have seen him rehearse an orchestra), he spends a lot of time concentrating on balancing the instruments, their tone and timbre. Perhaps here he is testing the E-flat of a muted trumpet (Boulez has perfect pitch).
2) He is holding a single hair that has fallen out during rehearsal. In complete heartbreak and disbelief, stares and curses at the heavens with impotent rage for their cruel ways.

The strain of constant conducting and too-little time for composing eventually had to make its mark, and we follow where it lead with trepidation:

Here we enter the darkest period of Boulez' life (at least in regard to his hair), an epoch that has yet to truly end. This is the age of the comb-over. Boulez is undoubtedly a genius musician and a great conductor. But how human the comb-over makes him! To compensate for the balding, he has simply taken hair from the right side of his head and combed it over! It's almost too simple for the man, and really a bit suspicious. Can the advocate of complexity, the composer of Structures really think this is an acceptably complex and intelligent reaction to male-pattern baldness?
Perhaps its his long-lost appropriation of minimalism. It is often thought that Boulez hates minimalism because of the aesthetic itself. Not true. He has a grudge against it because in 1985 Steve Reich and Phillip Glass chipped in to buy him this hat for his birthday:

Glass and Reich exemplify American musical iconoclasm, and, alas, unfortunately for Boulez, American humor. He did not find it funny and vowed never to conduct Gnarly Buttons. (John Adams reportedly protested: "Hey! What the fuck did I do? I had nothing to do with that goddamn hat!")

Now in his 80s, Boulez is still rocking the comb over. Luckily for him and admirers such as myself, he doesn't look like too much like a menacing Albanian loner anymore. In fact, for all his youthful ferocity, he's become quite a cute little old man. I'm sure he still doesn't suffer fools like me* gladly. But he's now mellowed out and conducting hyper-romantics Mahler and Bruckner (in his own icy, cerebral way) and still working on endlessly rewriting his old pieces. He's usually quite a sweet and funny guy to most accounts. He will reportedly be coming to my school for a week (as Elliott Carter did for a festival of his works two years ago) soon. There will be concerts and talks and seminars. I will probably get to be close-up to the man and talk with him a little bit. I will report on what he's like. Alas, I will kiss his ass and not make fun of his hair because I'm a wuss and I love Pli Selon Pli.

*I am 50% Irish, 20% Swedish, 20% Polish and 10% Foolish. Though the Polish makes that a full 30% LOL!!!!!! $&#$&#&$#& (Polacks are dumb).

2008-01-29T21:16:00.000-08:00

Streamlining my Bottom-line

A corporate training survey that someone handed to me accidentally when I was speaking with a school friend on the street. It is only fair to fill it out.

What’s your purpose?

Silly question. Next!

What’s your passion?

Art, animals, homemade chocolate chip cookies.

What are your peak experiences?

What are they? Am I supposed to be having peak experiences regularly?! I'm even worse-off than I thought! Thanks.

What are the top qualities you look for in a good friend?

A heightened awareness of absurdity.

Who are your heroes and heroines from mythology and legend, and from history and religion?

In no order, Harold Bloom, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Claude Debussy, Franz Kafka, Andrei Tarkovsky, my mother, and Socrates. You can see that I'm perfect for your Fortune 500 company!

What are your unique talents and how do you like to express them?

Gettin' out the ol' acoustic 6-string and playing something laid back and good for parties, like Bob Marley. Something from his great album "Legend".

What are the best qualities you express in your relationships? (Those are the qualities that allow soul to manifest in the world and in the work place.)

I am a huge needy prick and say mean things and when someone legitimately disses your boy for being a douchebag, I assume a superior stance and quote Hamlet: "A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear." Then I cry and am lonely.
Oh you want the best quality? I'm infinitely caring and loving to my fellow beings. Another question: Is my soul supposed to be manifesting itself in the work place? How is this done, and why?

Would you hire me?

2008-01-28T19:17:00.000-08:00

Cover of Newsweek!?

Ahh...the good ol' days when the media reported on things that truly matter.

2008-01-24T19:40:00.001-08:00

Look Closely

Zu unserer Besserung bedürfen wir eines Spiegels.

For our improvement we need a mirror.

-Arthur Schopenhauer

2008-01-21T20:45:00.000-08:00

The Pool of Siloam is in Your Head

"A blind man sees his darkness".

-Julian Jaynes (from his amazing "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", which I am reading now. True brain-crack.)

2008-01-20T17:43:00.000-08:00

Greatest Singsongs of All Time

Beach Boys - "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)".
Jesus Christ.

2008-01-18T01:35:00.001-08:00

Masks

To always make it clear that all things are masks; and, more crucially, to make it clear that there is nothing beneath the masks.

This concept is very paradoxical, but that means nothing. Always look to etymology in the words you use if you want to see this. The English word "person", the noun you use to describe your own mother (among others, of course), is a word, like all others, that has transmuted and shifted meaning over time. It comes for the Greek word for "mask (sometimes transliterated as "persona"), as in a Greek tragedy*.

I mean more than words and their meanings. The very things you look at and hold and speak to and smell, are all masks that conceal nothing (because you will never see behind them).

*Tragedy itself most likely meant "goat song" or "goatsong"; in other words, the song of one about to be sacrificed. Know then that your mother, as a "person", is in a certain sense a mask in a play by Aeschylus perhaps, and she's even taking part (to go even further back, tracing the evolution of the Greek word) in a dead Attic ritual celebrating the slaughter of a goat to please Pan or Athena. When she asks you if you want more Bagel Bites, see if you can hear some residue of the bleating dying goat, with sheets of blood fountaining from the throat.

2008-01-16T21:01:00.000-08:00

I have been gone. Laptop broken and just received! Finals! Busy!

Comment if you read this. I must know if its worth it to start this massive crystalline engine back up again so soon!

2007-11-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

And now...a Trakl moment

Im hellen Spiegel der geklärten Fluten
Sehn wir die tote Zeit sich fremd beleben
Und unsre Leidenschaften im Verbluten,
Zu ferner’n Himmeln unsre Seelen heben.

Wir gehen durch die Tode neugestaltet
Zu tiefern Foltern ein und tiefern Wonnen,
Darin die unbekannte Gottheit waltet -
Und uns vollenden ewig neue Sonnen.

In the bright mirror of the clarified floods
We see dead time strangely animate itself
And our passions in the bleeding
Lift our souls to more distant heavens.

We go through deaths newly transformed
To deeper tortures and deeper delights,
Where the unknown deity governs -
And we are completed by eternally new suns.

-Georg Trakl ("Einklang")

2007-11-25T12:49:00.000-08:00

A Fauré Headache

Poulenc claimed that the music of Gabriel Fauré made him ill. The power of music! Now, the important thing to note is that he did not simply mean this as a generic broadside. Poulenc actually claimed that Fauré's musical language (and Fauré, one of the most underrated composers of all-time in my opinion, did create his own musical language), with all of its listless modulations, languorously acidic modalities and lethargic rhythmic development (or total lack thereof) made him truly, utterly physically ill.
"Physically ill" for Poulenc should also be qualified; if someone put Fauré's Pénélope on the hi-fi, it wouldn't trigger violent, Francis Poulenc-style marshy diarrhea *. Rather, those hallmarks of Fauré's peculiar style mentioned above, especially in the late music, had the ability to make Poulenc feel very uneasy and agitated. Despite my love of Fauré's music, I can understand where he is coming from. The music is strangely difficult. The infamous modulations create nonstop tension. The harmonic element, so unique and personal, is largely contrapuntal, built of interweaving lines that don't clash as much as they enigmatically susurrate to each other. One might read this and think I am describing Max Reger (oh you are a smart one, one!). In the end they sound nothing alike, because Reger's music is unceasingly chromatic in its polyphony and dynamic in sound. It is craggy and brash and takes the Beethoven of the late quartets as a starting point with the highly advanced motivic development.
Fauré's music on the other hand, is primarily modal (or polymodal). It is fluid and subtle, and the modulations always make sense. Still, the music requires strict attention and obedience. I remember reading pianist Emile Vuillermoz, Fauré student (and lifelong friend of Ravel), in his book on Fauré describe his teacher's music as constantly leading the listener around a labyrinth with a thread. The way in which Fauré teases the listener, Vuillermoz writes, breaking up the tension with a fleeting release only to pivot another corner in the exquisite maze, is "quite intoxicating". At least I can agree.

I can still somewhat sympathize with Poulenc, as the one composer who can make me profoundly uneasy by the very nature of his style is Scriabin. Scriabin, like Fauré, Reger, and to some extent early atonal Schoenberg delights in an absolute lack of harmonic contrast. I like his music, admire his craziness as a human being, but I have to be particularly brave to withstand more than 20 minutes of his cephalalgia-inducing theosophic quartal hexachords.

This post has been extremely boring.

*And you are quite welcome for this memorable image.

2007-11-25T12:25:00.000-08:00

My Philosophy of Life

From the wonderful site Engrish.com (a collection of mostly Japanese ads and products with hilariously mutilated English).

2007-11-22T13:48:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a time to thank the Christian God for the totally awesome things you own and no one can steal from you. I have made up another list (see also, here, for example) of material things I heartily recommend, and am thankful for.

2007-11-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

Tempo/Expression Mark of the Week

Lent et voilé comme une femme arabe.
"Slow and veiled like an Arab woman."

-From the first of Jehan Alain's Dix piéces pour piano

2007-11-12T17:34:00.000-08:00

Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies

My Amazon.com wishlist is nearing 300 items. I often put things on there simply for the record of what want to buy. I always find that when I am in bookstores I am aimlessly wandering around and forgetting what to look for.

On a unrelated note, my birthday is coming up soon on the 4th of December. But that is unrelated.

;)

2007-11-12T08:21:00.000-08:00

Maps and Mazes

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

-Cormac McCarthy ("The Road")

2007-11-07T08:28:00.000-08:00

Question and Answer

I am sure the Ensemble Sopeso are wonderful musicians, and I am always glad to see a group devoted to modern music. But who the hell does their interviews? All the questions are longer than the answers:
You speak of a work's "appropriate weighings of innovation and convention." Is this a dialectical, historical model? In spite of the traditional demand to recognize the radical innovation of great works, isn't a great work essentially conventional rather than innovatory? Isn't "convention" just another word for the permanent dégré zéro frame of mutual reference which must be assumed before we can enjoy "innovation"—"the revelation of new perspectives, according to constantly mutating sets of (musically immanent) rules of play?"

Nailed him! Yeah dude, what the fuck? Just come out and admit that you are using "convention" as a word for the permanent dégré zéro frame of mutual reference which must be assumed before we can enjoy "innovation"—"the revelation of new perspectives, according to constantly mutating sets of (musically immanent) rules of play"!!! Everyone knows it, you dick. Don't lie. And don't even pretend you don't know where that final sentence in quotes is from. Yeah, it's from Lacan's book where he psychoanalyzes his bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos. We've all read that and can attest to its intellectual importance in the history of civilization.

Seriously, though, if I may return from the clouds of academic obscurantism, why do all semi-intelligent writers feel the need to posture and drop French words and phrases in their sentences?* "Dégré zéro"? Jesus Christ. And a lot of the times, the French words or phrases they spruce up their paragraphs with are cognates, too! Let me pretend to be a writer, if I may:

"Daily, the news of Iraq places us of our place in the midst of une situation importante."
Just say "IMPORTANT SITUATION"! It's spelled nearly the same way, and it means the goddamn same thing!

In all fairness, I should let you know who is being interviewed here. None other than Brian "flute fluttertonguing in 7/16 time = complexity" Ferneyhough!

His answers aren't very helpful either, and if you have heard his music, typical. Quick, verbose, arcane and pointlessly articulate:
On the other hand it might be said that, whereas Brecht's strategy involves a consciously pre-calculated expulsion of the observer from one zone of otherwise integral mimetic witness into another, far bleaker space of alienation, Schoenberg's quartet actually lives through some sort of organic rebirth in and through the necessary flowering and fading of untenable discourse-immanent contradictions.

Hm, yes, yes. I always have a flowering and fading of untenable discourse-immanent contradictions first thing in the morning.

*(There is an awful, awful "Classical Liberal" columnist named Ilana Mercer who does this shit every column, often in Latin, another pointless trick that is supposed to inform the reader of the author's familiarty with the Ancient World. Check her out at the most hilarious news site in the world, World Net Daily. Also, go to her site. Lots of pictures of her pretending to be sexy and smart. Apparently, she likes Dream Theater, which immediately negates anything she could have to say politically, culturally, etc. )

2007-11-06T20:24:00.000-08:00

And You Call Yourself an Aesthete?

What's the most effete, decadent aesthete thing I've done in the last month? Oh, I don't know. I recently read the Book of Ezekiel high on painkillers (badly sprained ankle) while Szymanowski's piano triptych Métopes played on the stereo. Also be sure to note that my bedroom, a snug monk's cell of books, CDs, DVDs and blankets, was bathed in Christmas Lights majesty. The vital, brumal winds of a chilly autumn night ambled through the window, ruffling the fur of my cat as he slept at the foot of the bed.

Ezekiel the prophet's hissing padparadscha of a book, a glorious jungle of technicolor schizophrenia and advanced epilepsy culminating in a intensely visual and detailed tour of YHWH's temple

+

The effect of Analgesic on a hyper sensitive teetotaler

+

Szymanowski's sublimely personal, dissonant and erotic amalgum of Debussy, Stravinsky, Scriabin, Bartók, Polish and Oriental folk musics, all jangly broken arpeggios of octatonic and whole-tone scales, halting ostinati beneath ecstatic melismatic muezzin-calls.
=

Oscar Wilde ain't shit.

PS You can beat me in a fight.

2007-11-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

Autumn and most modal musics (From Indian Raga to Bill Evans to Jean Langlais) share the many of the same, cryptic secrets.

2007-10-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

Kiddush

"When Rabbi Elimelekh said the Prayer of Sanctification on the sabbath, he occasionally took out his watch and looked at it. For in that hour, his soul threatened to dissolve in bliss, and so he looked at his watch in order to steady himself in Time and the world."

-from Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters

2007-10-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

Jamestown

I will admit that I had to give up on Henry James' Roderick Hudson. Oh, it is ridiculously well-written and intelligent, but mostly a bore. I've never been terribly interested in James' obsessive treatment of American-European cross-pollination. But when he concentrates his eye on psychological detail and consciousness, brother is unstoppable.

The James family fascinates me. I always like those semi-freakish families where everybody speaks 10 languages and can paint, write poetry and dissect cadavers by age 12.

William James, especially, has been a hero (or nerd super-hero, if you like) for a while, and I have just started Richard D. Richardson's intellectual biography. Hot damn, what a fascinating time, family, person.
People are right to point out that James is one of the greatest writers to do philosophy, along with Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Plato, Augustine, Hume etc. I like the coda to his slightly bizarre "On Human Immortality" (a defense of the concept of immortality and eternity, or rather a skeptical look at human knowledge and the dead certainty of materialism):

For my own part, then, so far as logic goes, I am willing that every leaf that ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become immortal. It is purely a question: are the leaves so, or not? Abstract quantity, and the abstract needlessness in our eyes of so much reduplication of things so much alike, have no connection with the subject. For bigness and number and generic similarity are only manners of our finite way of thinking; and, considered in itself and apart from our imagination, one scale of dimensions and of numbers for the Universe is no more miraculous or inconceivable than another, the moment you grant to a universe the liberty to be at all, in place of the Non-entity that might conceivably have reigned.

The heart of being can have no exclusions akin to those which our poor little hearts set up. The inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight. If we feel a significance in our own life which would lead us spontaneously to claim its perpetuity, let us be at least tolerant of like claims made by other lives, however numerous, however unideal they may seem to us to be. Let us at any rate not decide adversely on our own claim, whose grounds we feel directly, because we cannot decide favorably on the alien claims, whose grounds we cannot feel at all. That would be letting blindness lay down the law to sight.

2007-10-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

Absence

The streets are alive with hearsay and rumor. From Jefferson County to Jerusalem, from the snowy wastelands and swaying conifers of Northern Canada to the muddy Yangtze banks, the talk is everywhere. Whispered tales of my demise, my fall from grace, my brief exploration of man-boy love in a Phnom Penh back alley basement/illegal magazine warehouse. I know you've heard them all.

Well I'm here to set the record straight. As per certain ongoing legal disputes, I can only categorically deny the first two of the above.

In truth, I've been very busy with school and various other thangs, and have been lazy/uninspired to update this crawlspace of genius. I've been enjoying the autumn air, taking frequent, pregnant-womanesque naps, reading much and listening much, recording the odd song with friends, maxin' and relaxin', u know how i do. Some highlights have been a free, intimate concert with Can's Damo Suzuki in which I sat cross-legged with friends way too close to the stage (literally 2 feet away-it was in a small basement) and almost went deaf within 35 seconds. Also, I saw Nico Muhly and his ensemble who were amazing.
I drink lots of Gatorade and read the Hebrew Bible and Henry James (Roderick Hudson). I take walks around the city and pet various animals. I very much like Animal Collective's new album, and what I have heard of Radiohead's "In Rainbows". I am excited for Alex Ross' book, which has been praised, of course justly, by every living being who has discovered the printed word, including Bjork and all the Republican Presidential candidates (except Duncan Hunter, who recently told veterans at an Iowa town-hall meeting, "The bastard devotes a chapter to Sibelius, and not that genius Helmut Lachenmann? You spilled your blood at Normandy and in the Vietnamese jungles for the post-dialectic, dissonant strains of Helmut Lachenmann and his musique concrète instrumentale, not "Finlandia" goddamn it!").

All in all, things have been okay. I hope your families and mistresses have been okay. I cannot say how inspired I will be to return here soon ("You were inspired before?"), but I will return. In the meantime, read all those sites I link to on the sidebar, and watch an acceptable-quality of that great Seinfeld episode with the Mandelbaums.

2007-09-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

Vote Lazy, Basset Hound-Faced Lobbyist in '08

The most hilariously clichéd campaign ad. Ever.

2007-09-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

A Hero of Mine

Please do check out Jack Chick's new tract, There Go the Dinosaurs. It's a keeper.

2007-08-31T01:01:00.000-07:00

R. Kelly/David Lynch

DJ Wolf has a good post with an interesting perspective on R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet". For me, R. Kelly's magnum opus is the work of a mildly creative and quirky, though fully psychopathic, mind. It is more disturbing than anything else. I remember watching him try to perform it tout seul at an MTV award show; it was like watching a small animal drown.
Taking into account the thing's absurdity, it still suffers from a mercilessly repetitive beat that isn't even mediocre R. Kelly. The plot also shares the same defect that plagued David Lynch's "Twin Peaks". That is, when you are forced to keep a story going that already is sort of silly, you eventually have to start piling on the most absurd shit. This happens when young kids are asked to write a "round robin" in an English Class. The pirate lost his patch (pass to the next child), who searched a mini-golf course for it (pass), where he met a purple alien (pass) who shot him with a gun made of chocolate...This can literally go on forever. The art of knowing when to stop is important. I would say that for both R. Kelly and David Lynch, one way to discern when the absurdities and non-sequiturs are getting tiresome, is when you bring in midgets. Lynch's talk backwards which is kind of interesting and cool, but when the Pied Piper of R&B brings in his dwarf in Chapter Nine of "Trapped in the Closet", it is somehow a let down. The midget card is so played out!

EDIT: Upon re-watching Chapters 1-12 of TINC I notice that R. Kelly connects his tableaux with long timpani rolls, just as Stravinsky does in "Petrushka". I also notice that the most hilarious thing ever is the scene with the midget. I especially love Kelly's hyper-dramatic emphasis on introducing the midget (who dresses like Steve Harvey) at 29:50; it's as if he is well aware that he is bringing us into a no-man's land, and wants to make sure we are ready. All those with weak constitutions turn back now.
Knowing that most opera librettos are written in verse, it is especially hilarious to render the following lines from Chapter 10:

Now the midget jumps outta the cabinet
and stomps the policemen on his toe
The policemen hoppin around on 1 leg
screamin "son of bitch" while he runs under the table
He yells ''Freeze!'' dives over the table and lands on the midget.
..while the midget is kickin real fast screamin out "Bridget! Bridget!"
She yells "Darlin don't hurt him!"
He says "Bridget, get yo' ass back!",
...then he continue to ruff up the midget
as if the midget was under attack...
Then Bridget runs up to her room,
goes in her purse and pulls a number out...
The police puts him on the table
and yells, "Man, what the hell you doin' in my house?!"
He wipes cherry-pie crust off his mouth
and says "Man, i was paid not to tell you"
Then the police pulls his gun out
and yells "Trespassin man, I got the right to shoot you!"
The midget says "Mr.,
the man that payed me to do do this would kill me if i tell..."
He [the "police" -ed.] points the gun in his face,
the midget says ''God i think i just shitted on myself''.

Ahhh....the arts.

2007-08-28T02:09:00.000-07:00

Telos

"Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn't reached its goal. A parable."

-Friedrich Nietzsche (From The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. Walter Kaufman)

2007-08-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

American Brilliance

Believe it or not, she is currently writing her thesis on Kurt Gödel.

2007-08-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

Quiz Time (Blogz R Fun!)

Via Soho the Dog:

1. What's the best quotation of a piece of music within another piece of music?
-Cliché, but I have to go with Berg's Bach quotation in the Violin Concerto.
2. Name the best classical crossover album ever made.
-I am fond of Isao Tomita's album of synthesized Debussy.
3. Great piece with a terrible title.
-Speaking of Debussy, maybe Le petit nègre? Or Prokofiev's Hail to Stalin?
4. If you had to choose: Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett?
-Britten by a long shot, but I heard Tippett's Triple Concerto the other day and quite liked parts of it.
5. Who's your favorite spouse of a composer/performer? (Besides your own.)
-Vera Stravinsky.
6. Terrible piece with a great title.
-Ambrose Thomas' Hamlet.
7. What's the best use of a classical warhorse in a Hollywood movie?
-Though it isn't a movie, I like whenever Delibes' "Flower Duet" is used, especially in the "Raging Bull"-montage in the Simpsons where Homer becomes a boxer.
8. Name the worst classical crossover album ever made.
-All of them.
9. If you had to choose: Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye?
-Both.
10. Name a creative type in a non-musical medium who would have been a great composer.
-Georg Trakl

2007-08-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

Very kind of you to leave a note...

From an inscription from Assyria's King Sennacherib following his destruction of Babylon:

"The city and [its] houses, from its foundation to its top, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. The wall and the outer wall, temples and gods, temple towers of brick and earth, as many as they were, I razed and dumped them into the Arakhtu Canal. Through the midst of that city I dug canals, I flooded its site with water, and the very foundations thereof I destroyed. I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood."