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Fashion, failure, sincerity, authenticity, pop, emotion, simplicity, noise, unreliability, naiveté, earnestness, beauty, superficiality, seriousness, depth, insufficiency, playfulness, resignation, delusion, denial, decision, intention, and accident.
When I was an undergraduate, whiling away the hours between classes, I would read my library's copy of the Village Voice, it seemed so exotic and distant. After all it took a week to get to Mississippi. I would always make a point of reading Kyle Gann, learning the ins and outs of uptown vs downtown (happily, he was always pulling for the downtowners). And now he has a blog. If he had had it back then, I would have been so much more au currant.
The other night, while writing a CD review for a magazine, I referred to the Second Viennese School of composers in the first paragraph. And I thought to myself, "All those years of school so that I might use a phrase like this properly in a sentence that I'm not even getting paid to write." Well, somebody's got to do it.
Fundamentally SoundCast now has a new piece, this is a live performance I did at Rickshaw Stop the day after Bush was re-elected. It was a CD release party for Blevin Blectum. The mood of the audience was dreary, and so was mine.
The piece is made from vocal samples of some of my friends from all over the world answering the question, "How will my life change if Bush is re-elected?"
After yesterday's music video blogging marathon, I feel like my online journal reached a new level of self-referential superficiality. Well, that's what the medium is good for though.
Speaking of self-referential superficiality, American politicians, overall, sicken me. The Huffington Post is a good ring-side seat to watch the breaking stories on indictments being handed to the White House. I am a bit of a fan of Arianna Huffington, she seems to be one of the few rational voices in political punditry and is unrelenting in her criticism of journalistic corruption. You can also here her on KCRW's Left, Right, and Center.
Love this video. Teenage Riot
Especially Bull In the Heather.
And Chuck D in Kool thing. That video is still sexy.
Celeste Hutchins, a composer from Berkeley, is at CCMIX in Paris and having lots of adventures, from the sound of her blog. It's fun to read about the sketches she noticed still on the wall from Xenakis himself, her explanation of osciallator drift and interspersed among these topics, entries about her excursions in le Marais.
How to organize/categorize one's music collection. This is a real problem. And with iTunes it seems like things would be easier. But they're not. You still have to come up with defining names for the playlists, how to separate, say, a Mort Aux Vaches CD by Staalplaat from Outkast. You could say one is pop and one is non-pop, but that doesn't help much at all, that distinction really has no relationship to my tastes and says more about the way academicians might consider things.
But what do I need? Well, I came up with the perfect system. I realized that for me, probably the most significant factor in categorizing music is the length of the piece. So I've come up with playlists that divide my ever-expanding iTunes library into groups based on length. Anything 2 minutes and under is relegated to one group, the next size up is between 5 minutes and 2 minutes, then 8 minutes and 5 minutes. Between 8 and 15 gets its own group, then 15 to 45 is a group of its own. Above 45 minutes is probably going to be Feldman, Mahler, AMM, or a PolyPunk download from Digiki. This simple taxonomical system is probably the only way such a disparate group could ever be combined!
And this fits really well with iTunes' weighted-random play feature, when I'm just casually listening to music, my tastes are more in tune with the length of each song than its genre. So if I'm in sort of a restless mood needing quick hits of music, random mode in the two minute and under playlist is going to bring up lots of Mae-Shi, Ryoji Ikeda, Matthew Herbert, Dat Politics, the Homosexuals, and a bit of Harold Budd. If I could find a DJ that would play such a mix, I'd certainly be enthralled.
The New York Times has a review of a new book comparing human behavior to monkeys. In it, Frans de Waal draws a dichotomy between Chimp behavior, wherein society is controlled by a male-dominated power hierarchy, and Bonobo behavior, another species of ape, who don't fight as much, live in peaceful matriarchy, and often, use sexual activity to resolve conflict, "defusing the aggression with friendly physical contact." I think I know which tribe I'd prefer.
De Waal is fascinating, arguing that other aspects of human nature, like cooperation, have been neglected by scientists studying human nature. Some excerpts of conversations with him are here. And this is a very nice link to an article by de Waal on the behavior of the lovemaking Bonobos, in which he writes, "Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed." I think Americans could learn a lot from the Bonobos, this sounds like a good antidote to the common portrayal of sex as an uptight and schizophrenic activity in this country.
Last night George invited Lee and I out to Supper Club in San Francisco with a really interesting group of designers, some working for Yahoo and Apple. But the hottest topic of interest was what's on Terry's iPod.
My friend and schoolmate (Mills) Heather Heise has a blog now, it's full of lovely thoughts about music and the relationship of the musician to the music being made.
There's an excellent post on Click Opera today about Atelier Bow-wow. David added a link in the comments to a great video interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-wow.
New York Magazine has a long article on the possible identity or identities of the writer known as JT Leroy. And to find out that much of the drama is playing out blocks from my flat on Larkin Street! It makes me want to put on a disguise and start doing detective work myself. Maybe if I stake out the block between here and Polk I'll spot him. I did get an email from a "JT Leroy" once asking if he could use a quote from my blog. I responded and then he never wrote back again. My quote did appear on his webpage later though. Was it really JT? The suspense!
I'm almost inspired to make up a story about myself, maybe like as a kid who grew up in the countryside of Mississippi, listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground every day after coming home from high school, dreaming of a life in New York away from the endless soybean fields and scary racist farmers. Oh wait, but that's all true...
There are some advantages to tardiness: last night Lee and I rushed into the War Memorial Opera Hall about ten minutes past the beginning of Doctor Atomic. We had tickets waiting for us, and rather than force us to stand at the back of the hall for the hour and forty five minutes of the first act, the usher gave us a box. You know, it truly is a different world up there.
About the opera, I first have to say that I find Adams' music to be way too conservative for my taste. His forays into electronics, which he used a bit last night, sound as though he is still influenced by people like Varése. Has he not heard anything that has happened within the last fifty years? Putting that aside, there was a level of complexity, nuance, and virtuosity to the whole evening that was very refreshing. It was successful in making a kind of high drama out of people discussing endothermic/exothermic reactions, and so on. Now we know that scientists are just people too.
The whole time I was watching it I was so aware of how American the production was, especially the music. Adams' music is completely resistant to self-indulgence, which seems to be very American, the resistance I mean. He never goes off into an area that is too weird, he keeps everything within the realm of easy consumption, avoiding anything that might confound the audience. Maybe he is afraid of seeming arrogant. He obviously has the talent and the technical skill to pull it off, but he seems to hold himself in check, never veering too far off the beaten path.
I was confounded, irritated, and slightly upset by the ending. The piece trails off, right after the bomb has been tested in the New Mexico desert, with a voice in Japanese saying, "water, please." Come on, the incident that is being referred to should be the one that is receiving a multi-million dollar opera production. It is an event of all-too-real drama at which a mainstream American composer can only make a rather timid gesture. I think that is the act that needs to be reconciled in the American consciousness, not the sleepless nights of poor Oppenheimer and his crew of scientists who suffered cognitive dissonance from their work. That is the event that has never made a dent in the cultural fabric of this country which seems unable to take responsibility for its negative actions. I appreciate that Adams has at least taken such a nuanced and questioning view of the events leading up to the creation of the bomb, but I can't help but think that it's only the tip of the iceberg.
Last night Lee and I went to see Michelle Handelman's opening at Rx Gallery. It was impressive, a strange noise environment of hissing people sitting in chairs attached to the wall, and couples making out in slow rhythms on bails of hay. It was really just total spectacle but a cohesive and striking one. I didn't feel like we were in San Francisco anymore.
To see the larger version, just click on these thumbnails.
New on Fundamentally SoundCast, The Tokyo Cowboy Meets His Maker Under the Neon Stars. This is a revised version of the piece that I made for Tu' MP3 while living in Tokyo in 2001.
-Doctor Atomic, at the San Francisco Opera. I'm definitely not a big fan of John Adams but I'm intrigued by this production, especially Peter Sellars' role in it. October 7.
-Andy Goldsworthy in conversation in City Arts and Lectures. October 10.
-Philippe Monod & Catherine Bolle exhibit opening at Swissnex. October 12.
