The impossibility of the avant-garde

While aimlessly watching TV for the first time in days, I noticed the above spot, and it reminded me of something Stanley Kubrick once said about how some of the most "brilliant" cinema happens in TV commercials.

If that is true, I wonder about the effect -- either for cinema, or for art in general.

The clip above is fairly "weird" by the aesthetic standards of, say, People magazine. It has the feel of something designed to provoke, and intended as art. It is informed by experimental techniques, however inauthentically. But it is being deployed by a major corporation. To sell jeans. And it will probably be seen by millions of people.



The problem that follows is at least as old as mass media itself: how can there be an outside-of-the-mainstream, if anything can be absorbed and used by the mainstream?

Once upon a time, there was this idea (probably hooey to begin with) that being a "true" artist was about staying a step ahead of whatever the latest cultural "norm" was. Our mission as artists (so we thought) was to figure out which components of a particular practice had been done to death, and then to innovate something new.

We have that impulse toward innovation still, but what's the upshot? It doesn't even matter whether "everything has been done before" (the big complaint of young artists). When the raw power of anything can be instantly appropriated by the people who have the budgets, and the products to sell -- recall Jim O'Rourke's comments on "context" -- there has to be some other reason to make art.

As artists, we may find this or that aesthetic approach tiresome, and we may go after something different in the process of escaping what we already know (that's part of the fun) -- but nowadays, that's ultimately a personal journey, never a broadly groundbreaking act of artistic rebellion.

Which is maybe how it should be -- and maybe how it's always been, under the surface of our mass media economy. There really is no "mainstream" or "avant-garde." No "in" or "out." Art wants to be de-centered, despite all our attempts to organize and rank it. Art wants to be local (and not strictly in a geographical sense). And critical categories ("hip" / "square," "cutting edge" / "predictable") may make sense in the context of a particular microcosm, but beyond that, who really knows? Or cares?

(My wife just walked through the room. She wanted to know who I was yelling at.)

[photo credit: meddygarnet]

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Avant garde or mainstream, the Industrial Jazz Group needs your help! We're having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour. You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here.

Also! Check out the remix contest -- and, as of today, the IJG "The Job Song" video contest.

Sometimes the internets is a dangerous place, part two

I live in the strip club capital of the country, I have a male stripper in my band, and even I am weirded out by this.

Sometimes the internets is a dangerous place

It ain't me, babe

From today's junk mail intake. I think they sent it to the wrong house.

The world we have lost

Came across an interesting article on Jim O'Rourke today:

Mr. O’Rourke’s production style is precise and dry; he creates a sound picture in which tiny sonic details matter. But where his Drag City records are concerned, everything matters: the pacing, the length, the sound, the cover images. For this reason he won’t allow “The Visitor,” or any of his albums, to be sold as downloads, on iTunes or anywhere else. He’s taking a stand against the sound quality of MP3s; he’s also taking a stand in favor of artists being able to control the medium and reception of their work.

“You can no longer use context as part of your work,” he said, glumly, “because it doesn’t matter what you do, somebody’s going to change the context of it. The confusion of creativity, making something, with this Internet idea of democratization ...” he trailed off, disgusted. “It sounds like old-man stuff, but I think it’s disastrous for the possibilities of any art form.”

Like me, O'Rourke is 40. I suppose, when you're that "old," and faced with the sort of industry-wide upheaval that the music business is currently going through, you're entitled to a certain degree of curmudgeonliness. And while I generally try to resist that sort of thing, for the purposes of this post I'm going to broadly agree with O'Rourke's assessment of where music is at, because it gives me a convenient excuse to express a few thoughts I've been mulling over anyway.

First: the obvious. To the extent that jazz's viability as a music of the future is in jeopardy, that situation has a lot to do with various threats to the existence of a strong and extensive fan community.

But what is a fan? Consider: a true fan does much more than simply "like" a certain artist or genre. True fanhood is, essentially, an irrational enterprise.

For instance: I have written before about the importance of context for a fan's love of a given work. I may be fascinated by the biographies of my favorite musicians, because they provide an engaging frame -- but the music itself is no different whether I know the relevant background or not. The fact that I seem to enjoy a given tune more once I have obtained said information strikes me as somewhat odd.

But if you really want to talk about irrationality, think about the extent to which fanhood has traditionally involved elaborate rituals of fetishization. While true music fans love music, and love stories about music, we also love to fetishize the objects that convey music.

(Right? I'm assuming that you too have lovingly caressed a well-worn LP jacket.)

So the fact that we are developing a purely digital, artifact-less musical culture is maybe a little concerning. Cuz, you know: how do you fetishize an mp3?



And what happens to fanhood when you no longer have an art object to fetishize? Do you stop caring about the art itself? I wonder. While people still do buy physical media, I suspect that in general our relationship with recordings (i.e., qua recordings) has become much more ethereal, and much more casual (I know, I know). Who really worries about losing, misplacing, or wearing out a recording anymore? In my own case, I transfer most of the digital music I download onto disc, but I rarely buy jewel cases in which to protectively house them. I also gave up on CD wallets. Generally I just let the damned things accumulate in piles on my desk, or else just stack 'em back on the spindle they came from. Once they have been "consumed" for a given period of time, the MP3s, in turn, get backed up onto numerous hard-drives, which I hardly ever consult because there is so much new music to get to.

One could argue that the whole history of recording technology thus far has been driven by the search for devices and media that make the experience of music durable, reliable, and convenient. At their most fragile, brittle, and finite, older forms of music media (the 78, say, or even the cassette, which was always getting "eaten" at the wrong time (in my experience, anyway)) seemed to invite a greater degree of fetishization. We knew they wouldn't last forever, we knew they might be hard to replace, we knew they actually required some effort to obtain -- so of course we treated them with greater reverence.

Now that everything is so much easier, more durable and convenient, is that reverence harder to come by?

[photo credits: puroticorico, carlcollins]

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Speaking of "fetishizing": the Industrial Jazz Group is having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour! You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here.

Oh yeah, and we also have a remix contest.

The blind interrupting the blind

(Yawn.)

UPDATE:

Apparently, Viacom decided this non-event (Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the VMA awards, if you must know) was so important and valuable that the video had to be removed from YouTube.

(Double yawn.)

Ah, well:

Political coda, plus assorted flim-flam

Okay. A parting shot on this subject before the weekend.

Probably the best political commentary I've seen this week comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

We (liberals) have spent so much of our time on the losing end of the past 30 years, that the impulse is to fight every battle, and challenge every press release. Moreover, media has uncovered our inner crazy. HuffPo blasts every utterance from Jon Kyl in bold font. Politico reports every feint and jab, like it's the whole fight. I'm not blaming them, they're doing well because they've figured out something about our inner animal.

It's fine for us laymen to indulge that, but I don't want to be led by people who think that outlets (including this one) which weigh in on who "won the week" are some kind of gauge of their actual progress. I don't want to be led by people who think that "getting angry" is a actual political strategy. I want to be led by a killer. A cold, unemotional, professional killer.

I keep meeting lefties who tell me Obama's "too soft" with these guys, and I keep looking at them like they're crazy. I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is something deeper at work here, something beyond the policy fights. I think a lot of us don't just want Obama to be effective, we want him to exact some measure of revenge. It's smart to understand the difference between the two, and moreover, how the desire for one can undermine the other. A section of conservatives love Sarah Palin because she drives liberals crazy. That she drives a lot of other people crazy too, and hence undermines herself, is beside the point.

Let's not make that mistake.

In other words, let's not be MORANS.

* * * * *

Other stuffs:

-- The New Yorker shout-out. (Big thanks to DJA for making this happen.)

-- "Yo, Jimbo!"

-- The Industrial Jazz Group Remix Contest.

-- I'm honored to be guest-posting on Seattle trumpeter Jason Parker's blog this coming Monday. Gonna try really hard not to fuck it up.

-- And finally, this:

Random weekend mobile photo interlude

We spent a good chunk of Labor Day weekend in the vicinity of Mt. Hood, in a charmingly-named unincorporated entity called Government Camp, with our dear friends Sarah and Matt, and the assorted kids.

Apparently, we were about two miles away from the Overlook Hotel (aka Timberline Lodge) -- and now I know what our next day-trip excursion is going to be (we didn't actually get to make the hike this time, since the weather was fairly lousy).

Sarah procured a number of zany toys to keep the kids occupied in the event of rain (this turned out to be a very smart strategy). The one shown below was my favorite, mostly because of the subheading:



(Really? What I do with them is up to me? Is it bad that I have always treated my toys this way?)

Coming back (Government Camp is about an hour's ride from PDX), we stopped at a quaint (okay, cheesy) restaurant / coffeehouse / bakery / knick-knack emporium, with the very simple goal of procuring some coffee. This beverage took forever to make, which initially seemed to bode well, since we assumed the barista was a perfectionist. We were wrong -- she was no perfectionist.

Anyway, while wandering through the knick-knack emporium, waiting for my cappuccino, I came across these:



And these:



One could say that my whole career is based on the juxtaposition of unlike things, but I still can't get my head around this bacon + sweet stuff phenomenon.

Jazz of the Future, part two

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Industrial Jazz Group in, like, twenty years:




Actually, these photos depict the Get a Life Marching Band, the big hit at each August's Multnomah Days, here in PDX.

Supplementary (or actually, essential) reading on the importance of amateur music is here. I may have to comment on that soon, it's quite sharp.

The circle of life, or something

My 4-year-old daughter helps our 94-year-old neighbor with his garden:




I'm still trying to figure out what this guy's longetivity secret is.

What do Superman, Orson Welles, and Mars have in common?

Apparently, this comic -- which I am sure I read as a kid but am now rediscovering in the process of introducing Thandie to various superheroes.



You've got to click to see the fine print, but here's part of it:

What on earth, or should we say, "what on Mars" is Orson Welles doing wearing that outlandish, ancient costume, and duelling with the fantastic huge-headed inhabitants o another planet? It all started in Italy, when the film "Black Magic," starring Orson Welles, was being filmed. Then a firecracker series of fantastic events blasted Orson Welles to Mars! Here he found himself fighting frantically to warn the world of a Martian invasion, this time a real one!

War of the Worlds has the synopsis:

The story featuring Orson Welles is called "Black Magic On Mars" and this does offer a clue that Welles or his publicists had a hand in the creation of the comic, for just as is recounted in the comic book, Welles was in Italy at the time, acting in a movie called "Black Magic". So this may well have been an early piece of creative cross-promotion, or equally plausible, the writer may just have read about Welles' project and decided to incorporate it. The story opens in Italy, with Welles atop a rooftop in the period costume of 18th century France, and just as in the climax of the film, Welles takes a fatal plunge.

Dusting himself off, Welles and his co-star Nancy Guild (she also was in the film playing Marie Antoinette), set off to attend a fancy dress party in their costumes. Driving through the Alps, they suddenly come across a rocket ship with its hatch open. As any fan of the science fiction of the period will know, this was a pretty common occurrence. Absent minded scientists were always building rocket ships in obscure locations and leaving the door open, and sure enough, curiosity gets the better of Welles, and he finds himself trapped in the rocket as it sets off for Mars.

Two hours later (that was some rocket engine), and Welles is stepping out onto the surface of Mars, where he is swiftly assailed by the Martians and brought before their leader, the Great Martler. The Martians speak English and goose step about like Nazi's, for Martler is an admirer of Hitler and has modelled his dictatorship after Nazi Germany, in which case, why don't they speak German? This linguistic peculiarity aside, Welles has arrived on the eve of a Martian invasion, and turning down Martler's offer of a job as propaganda minister on the soon to be conquered Earth, he uses his prop sword to seize control of a radio and broadcast a warning. Of course no one believes a word of it back on Earth, for as the listeners say, Welles has fooled America once before with his earlier broadcast. But Superman is not about to take any chances and speeds off to Mars, arriving just in time to prevent Welles getting disintegrated for his troubles.

The story goes into overdrive from here on, with Superman facing a fleet of one hundred thousand warships. It's a mighty challenge even for the Man Of Steel, but Orson has a plan, and a pretty insane one at that. Plucking one of the moons of Mars from its orbit, Superman fashions a slingshot from the thousands of miles of runways used to launch the fleet. Wrapping it round the moon, he sends it careering into the path of the invasion fleet, where they are helplessly snagged by its gravity and go harmlessly into orbit about it. Welles then sits a comatose Martler on his knee and performs an impromptu ventriloquism act to persuade his followers to give up on the plan of conquest. The Earth is saved, but poor Orson will never be believed.

So not the most realistic story imaginable, but enormous fun in its simplistic disregard of the laws of physics and nature.

Indeed!

The funmaker

Since I took my very first piano lesson in a Wurlitzer store in the 70s, it seems poetic that I managed to score a (gratis!) Wurlitzer Funmaker Custom Series 545 Organ yesterday.

You know, the one with the Leslie speakers! And the foot pedals! And it's in near mint condition!



Talk about luck: I had no real plan for getting this hefty beast home, and was unexpectedly assisted by the kindness of not one but two strangers in the process of getting it into and then back out of my Volvo station wagon.



A big shout-out to my awesome and beautiful wife for allowing my to drag this damned thing into our dining room. (She may or may not have seen it as a kind of "fee" for the chickens that are on their way to our house at this very moment.)



I can't be sure, but I suspect that this may be the very instrument used in soundtracks to many of the sci-fi and horror B-movies I seem to be addicted to these days.

And the kid likes it too!

The Truth May or May Not Hurt

Don't let all this blogging, facebooking, twittering, youtubing, myspacing, and flickring (etc.) -- not to mention this 16-piece bandleading! -- fool you. I'm fundamentally an introvert. Always have been.

Not sure what that means? Or how to explain that contradiction? Here's a primer.

(Okay, apparently this has been around for a while, but I just learned about it via @sivers.)

Particularly comical bits and pieces:

Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. [...]

Are introverts oppressed? I would have to say so. For one thing, extroverts are overrepresented in politics, a profession in which only the garrulous are really comfortable. Look at George W. Bush. Look at Bill Clinton. They seem to come fully to life only around other people. To think of the few introverts who did rise to the top in politics—Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon—is merely to drive home the point. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, whose fabled aloofness and privateness were probably signs of a deep introverted streak (many actors, I've read, are introverts, and many introverts, when socializing, feel like actors), introverts are not considered "naturals" in politics.

Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. [...]

With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. "People person" is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like "guarded," "loner," "reserved," "taciturn," "self-contained," "private"—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.

[...] We [introverts] tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, in an online review of a recent book called Why Should Extroverts Make All the Money? (I'm not making that up, either), "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.

Personality is a hilarious thing...

Read the fine print

The pooping pets are bad enough, but it's really the pooping owners you have to watch out for.

The plastic sleeve makes this extra hilarious!

(I discovered this on a recent walk around the neighborhood. I was accompanied by my pet, who never poops.)

Two great tastes that taste great together

Holy cow! Science and music: together again!

Rock-It Science is a musical event celebrating the interface between music and science. Rock-It Science is the brain child of Dr. Joseph LeDoux, and the event features scientists and academics who are also active performers of music (and science-friendly guest stars).

Rufus Wainright and Dee Sinder on the same bill? I am so there!

(Oh, wait, it's 3000 miles away. Damned scientists-who-haven't-invented-teleportation yet...)

A momentary lapse of reason

Stupid guitars, on the internet. Have yourself a break! (Some are NSF, and some are downright creepy.)

What Lil Beck said

Via my (increasingly pointless but occasionally entertaining) Twitter feed:

"respectfully disagrees w/ Gov. Jindal & the right wing. how can we afford to NOT fund a flying train?!"

Precisely. How long are we supposed to wait for the future?

Things I'm trying to reconcile

1. My sense that the Internet, in its many manifestations, is the structural element / organizing principle of the still-emerging 21st century music economy, and that "winning at the internet" is a key technique for making a living with your own music,

and

2. My sense that Internet addiction is a real phenomenon, with real negative physical and psychological consequences.

Ugh.

Halloween in February

In an effort to buffer some of the stressful politics-oriented reading I've been doing lately, I decided to start making my way through Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia today. Bad idea:

Dwight Mamlok was a cultivated man of seventy-five with mild high-frequency deafness who came to see me in 1999. He told me how he had first started to "hear music" -- very loud and in minute detail -- ten years earlier, on a flight from New York to California. It seemed to have been stimulated by the drone of the plane engine [...] and, indeed, the music ceased when he got off the plane. [...] The pattern changed when he flew to California in the summer of 1999, for this time the music continued when he got off the plane. It had been going on almost nonstop for three months when he first came to see me. [...]

When I asked Mr. Mamlok what his internal music was like, he exclaimed, angrily, that it was "tonal" and "corny." I found this choice of adjectives intriguing and asked him why he used them. His wife, he explained, was a composer of atonal music, and his own tastes were for Schoenberg and other atonal masters, though he was fond of classical and, especially, chamber music, too. But the music he hallucinated was nothing like this. It started, he said, with a German Christmas song (he immediately hummed this) and then other Christmas songs and lullabies; these were followed by marches, especially the Nazi marching songs he had heard growing up in Hamburg in the 1930s. These songs were particularly distressing to him, for he was Jewish and had lived in the terror of the Hitlerjugend, the belligerent gangs who had roamed the streets looking for Jews [pp. 60-62]

Certainly not the first time I've ever heard of the weird things the mind's ear can do as it ages (or responds to injury) -- but it spooked me all the same.

This is actually a fascinating book -- if I get my shit together at some point I'll write a more detailed commentary.

Everything suddenly got less interesting, and then more interesting again

Everybody's favorite left-wing, named-after-a-rock-guitar-god, Zappa-loving radio host is now off the air. Again.

I understand that some people hate her, and some people love her. But in terms of the overall picture of media bias in this country (which leans pretty far to the right once you get out of the big cities), I'd say on balance that this is a bad development. Though I imagine RR will soon be broadcasting again from somewhere else. The woman is clearly a survivor.

In other news, porn star Stormy Daniels seems to be engaging in a kind of performance art. Hooray for performance art!

(Or maybe it's for real? Nothing wrong with that, in principle. I mean, if this guy can be president...)