We need to be offended

(Look like anyone you know?)

I'm no expert on Baroque music. I certainly love it, and I actually play quite a bit of it in my role as the keyboardist for a local church. But I'm still a bit of an "outsider" when it comes to the finer points of the genre. So you may forgive me when I say that, until recently, I had never heard of Federico Maria Sardelli.

Yes, this is another discovery from my recent Italy fascination. (Which is a full-on syndrome for me at the moment. Honestly, how could I fail to love a country that produced something as magnificent as the Decameron?)

Anyway, for those of you, who, like me, didn't know from Sardelli, the always-helpful Wikipedia provides a pretty good introduction to the man:

Federico Maria Sardelli an Italian conductor, composer, musicologist and flautist. He is the founder of the baroque orchestra Modo Antiquo and has made more than forty recordings as soloist and conductor, some of them in co-production with the German broadcast company Westdeutscher Rundfunk. He has twice been nominated for the Grammy Awards. A notable protagonist in the Vivaldi renaissance, he has conducted the world premiere recordings and first modern performances of Arsilda, regina di Ponto, Orlando Furioso, Tito Manlio, Motezuma, and L'Atenaide. For his artistic merits, on 28th november 2009 the Government of Tuscany decorated Federico Maria Sardelli with the Gonfalone d'Argento, the highest medal of honour of the Regione Toscana.

All of which sounds pretty impressive, right?

Right! Personally, I discovered Sardelli through a gorgeous 2006 recording of Scarlatti compositions (with Elisabeth Scholl singing). I was duly impressed. To my ears, the dude has all the requisite characteristics to be a leading light in the oh-so-hoary-and-exclusive early music scene.

But if you read that Wikipedia article a little farther, you learn that there is another side to Sardelli, and that he is also

a longtime collaborator of the satirical magazine Il Vernacoliere and is valued because of his satire of Italian mainstream culture, religion and religious kitsch. His nonsensical style resembles that of Monty Python and Daniele Luttazzi, but he has a recognizable style of his own rooted in Tuscan popular humor.

Notable characters and strips by Sardelli include:

[...]

'Il Bibliotecario' ("The Librarian"): a peculiar comic strip made always of two-frames variations on the same theme: in the first the librarian greets an unnamed elderly woman with an (always slightly different) flowery and archaic sentence (e.g. "May I help thee, my Peripatetic Friend: if I can be a Spring of Fulfillment for thee, consider me unfailingly at Your Disposal"). The woman will ask for an (always different, and really existing) improbable ancient book, such as the "Gabinetto Armonico" of Filippo Bonanni. In the second frame the librarian will reply with a totally unconnected, often nonsensical and, more often than not, heavily offensive behaviour (for example by flashing his buttocks and asking her for advice on his new tattoo, or claiming he's the "King of Fried Food" and insulting her).

'Merda' ("Shit") : a mute strip where various characters are nonsensically obsessed by their relationship with excrement (being unable to flush it away, bringing it to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures to be used as a standard, or being able to flush it away only to cry at the loss).

'Circo' ("Circus"): about the adventures of a circus whose animals indulge in embarrassing activities like homosexual copulation just when the show is going on.

[...]

His Più Belle Cartoline Del Mondo ("Most Beautiful Postcards Of The World") are elaborate stories built around kitsch 60's and 70's postcards (often representing children or couples), written in an absurdly baroque and archaic style and lexicon, full of wonderful linguistic inventions [...] and with exhilarating plots rich in political uncorrectness and cynically unhappy ends; a recurring character in these stories is that of the fictional awful dwarf Gargilli Gargiulo.

Would it be wrong (or surprising) for me to suggest that in the US, this sort of thing would be much more difficult for a "respectable" musician (whether of the classical or the jazz persuasion) to get away with?

And that we're much worse off for it?

The purity test

And then I would, like, maybe come out, and they couldn’t calm down, and somebody would say something. And I’d say, “What?” And I’d turn, sit facing the audience, I’d say, “Okay, let’s hear it. What are we all talking about?” So somebody had asked for something, and I said, “No, I can’t do that right now.” Somebody said, “Play something long.” And I started to play these concerti. Like the Grieg, “Dah, da da dah, da da dah,” and then said, “No, no, no, that’s too long.” So it was like almost a comedy routine that they created. And then someone asked for Rachmaninoff’s 2nd, and I said, “That’s a good idea, but I usually have to play the 1st first.” So it was like they lost their inhibitions, and I did too, and you can’t hear that on the tape. But that’s what I like audiences to do.

-- Keith Jarrett (from an interview with Ethan Iverson)

Just noticed that our infamous "Incident at Umbria" video, which is about two years old now, has passed the 12,000 view mark on YouTube. Not a lot compared to, say, the Jonas Brothers, but a respectable number for an independent, hopelessly idiosyncratic ensemble like mine. In any case, it is by far our most popular video overall, which is maybe a little frustrating, given that I have written plenty of other tunes, and many of them are, um, much better.

Some of the commentary is entertaining. Consider:

This is just not funny.

Jarrett may have his personal flaws but that is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT when you hear the music he makes. The makers of this vid just show they have missed the point and lack any understanding of the process of a true artist.

Perhaps the next thing this lot creates could be something to move the spirit rather than titilate the less worthy aspects of one's nature...

And then this one:

next time i witness vultures feeding on carrion i'll remember this...embarassment.

gulliver and kj have something in common: they've been attacked by very little people.

Which is all well and good.



Or maybe not. Honestly, I don't get how "Umbria" could be imagined by anybody as an "attack." I mean, I could've written a song called "Keith Jarrett Is a Fucking Asshole" if I wanted to attack the guy. (After all, I did write something sort of along those lines with our John McCain song.)

I don't think Jarrett is an asshole at all, and I certainly don't have anything negative to say about his music. In fact, I actually love a lot of it.

To take the words that Jarrett spoke, and to place them in a musical context -- maybe not the most amazing musical context in the world, but one that did take effort, and that has a certain merit (and that stands out from pretty much anything else you're likely to hear at a "jazz" concert) -- how exactly does it titillate "the less worthy aspects of one's nature"?

What if I was trying to savor the weirdness of that particular situation? Weirdness too makes for good art. Personally, I have no idea what demons compel KJ to act out in his patented way. But the dynamic is very interesting to me. If one is self-assured enough to be able to talk shit to a enormous live audience, and yet fragile enough to be creatively threatened by the petty (and indeed typical) distractions of live performance -- that's a fertile tension, is it not?

Well, I thought so, anyway.

Every once in a while, I'm reminded of the fact that the old jazz purism never really dies. Like anything else, it goes through a heyday, laying down a set of rules about what subjects are "safe" to write about, what chords are appropriate to play, and all the rest. It becomes institutionalized, and loses the ability to think reflexively about itself. But even when it (eventually) falls out of favor and becomes eclipsed by healthier approaches, it never really goes away. There will be no "final victory" over it. It will always be lurking in a corner somewhere, hardly able to contain its enthusiasm for the next big chance to put the brakes on cultural progress and fullness.

And that's kind of sad.

[photo credit: exquisitur]

Separated at birth? (3)

Today's mix

Because I thought you might be hankering for a list.

The Black Keys: "Til I Get My Way"
Cheap Trick: "Surrender"
Cream: "Blue Condition"
Cream: "We're Going Wrong"
The Dukes of Stratosphear: "Collideascope"
Fiona Apple: "Extraordinary Machine"
Frank Zappa: "Let Me Take You to the Beach"
The Fully Celebrated Orchestra: "Reptoid Alliance"
George Harrison: "All Things Must Pass"
Heartless Bastards: "My Maker"
The Hollies: "Pay You Back with Interest"
Jeff Simmons: "I'm in the Music Business"
The Kinks: "Do You Remember Walter"
Led Zeppelin: "Out on the Tiles"
The Persuasions: "You Are What You Is"
Petra Haden: "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand"
R.L. Burnside: "Stole My Check"
Raphael Saadiq: "100 Yard Dash"
Skip James: "I'm So Glad"
The Turtles: "You Showed Me"
Yes: "Going for the One"

I'm sure there's a connection between all of these tunes, but I'm not sure what it is in every case.

Separated at birth? (2)

Back to the dust

Today we had to put poor Sadie-cat down. (I ain't a-tryin' to bum you out, but writing is what I do, and it's how I cope. So I'm writing.)

Every other animal I have ever owned has just died in its own way -- I've never had to initiate the process as an act of mercy. But Sadie had grown so weak that she wasn't even able to leave the couch on her own. In fact, over the past few weeks she had become afflicted by symptoms of her underlying condition so wretched and humiliating that out of respect for her I refuse to describe them for you. The bottom line is that we knew the vet's recommendation (euthanasia) was the humane thing to do. Of course, you know the kicker: that knowledge didn't make the experience any easier.

We had originally been thinking that we'd get Sadie cremated, but when I arrived at the vet's office and the nurse asked me what sort of "after care" I wanted (interesting term, by the way: "after care"), I had sort of an epiphany. We left LA (four years ago) in part so we could afford to own a home and a yard. Homes and yards are meant to be lived in, and to bear the evidence of that living -- not just in the obvious, display-oriented ways (e.g., portraits hung on walls), but also in the sense of the residue of important moments becoming embedded in and absorbed by the space itself.

In short, I was overcome with the feeling that it was very important that Sadie be allowed to physically become a part of the environment she had brought such joy to. So I asked that they let us bury her at home.

And actually, it was Thandie who put this idea into my head. We had been very up front with her through every step of Sadie's demise, and I'm incredibly proud that my girl did not shy away from the evidence of death when it finally came. She wanted to see the hole, she wanted to see her dead cat, she wanted to help with the burial, and she wanted to decorate the grave with flowers and pine cones:







Those of you who live in Portland know that we've been experiencing a period of pretty intense weather, most of which has been expressed as precipitation of one sort or another. Today was no exception -- driving home from the vet, the rain was heavy and fierce. But when the moment came to finally lay our cat to rest, the rain stopped, and the sun came out.

In an Oliver Stone movie, that would have seemed like heavy-handed symbolism. But in real life, it did my heart good.

Portrait of the artist as a young alt-rocker

Oh, my mis-spent youth.

I'm afraid it's time to inflict upon you (once again) some of the music I wrote when I was but a wee lad. (In this case, a wee lad of 19.)

Complaints regarding the following should be directed at one Mr. Darren O'Neill, an old friend and musical associate, who recently dug the below recording out of his own files (thus reminding me that this music even existed).

The year was 1988. I was living in Pittsburgh, attending Carnegie Mellon University for the first year of my undergraduate career. I would drop out by the summer, ending up at Berklee in the fall.

Ah, Carnegie Mellon. I initially made a brave attempt to "succeed at college" (whatever "succeeding at college" means). But halfway through that first year, haunted by a deep existential confusion over what I really wanted to do with my life (or, perhaps more accurately, how to do what I really wanted to do with my life), I succumbed to a vampire-like existence, sleeping all day and staying awake all night, and only making it to class, well, once in a while.

(And by the way, while I was at Carnegie Mellon, someone painted a crime-scene-esque body outline at the base of a five- or six-story stairwell in the computer science building. It was an image I could relate to.)

Alas, most of my CMU friends (we all lived in the same dorm, and collectively referred to ourselves as "Monkey Pus") went through the same transformation (from relatively innocent high schoolers to anti-social ne'er-do-wells). Like me, many of them would drop out of this esteemed institution by the end of the school year. At least one would go on to appear in a soap opera. Others were probably involved in the invention of the Internet.

But my closest friend was a fellow named Don Michaels, who (I seem to remember) was fond of saying that he had come to college for the express purpose of starting a band. Which of course seemed like a great idea to me, except that Don and I had very different musical tastes. He came from more of a "alternative rock" scene, and was a fan of bands like U2, REM, and the Cure, which I, coming from more of a classic rock / 80s metal vibe, didn't know much about at the time. (Keep in mind that this was before U2 and REM had achieved true "mega-star status" -- REM's Document was breaking just as I arrived at CMU.) Don was also completely untrained, musically. (So of course he became our singer.)

Still, I have never been one to scoff at an unusual creative opportunity when it presents itself. As we both grew more and more disaffected with the regimentation of higher education, Don and I started working on songs together, in what was probably one of the most directly collaborative experiences of my life.

I actually consider all of my music collaborative to some extent. That is: I know each piece I write is going to be transformed at least a little by the people who perform it. But the stuff Don and I wrote together at CMU was collaborative from the moment of its inception. As I recall, neither of us ever started writing outside of the context of that partnership. Everything would emerge during the songwriting session itself.

The very first song we wrote was a thing called "Just to See Your Face," and it is this song (unearthed by the intrepid Mr. O'Neill) that initiated the post you are now reading. Because even after all these years, I still kinda like it, despite its simple, innocuous catchiness.

As I recall, "Face" came about during an afternoon spent hanging out in the lounge of our dorm. I was fiddling with the guitar, and came up with the melody and, I think, a few of the words. (At least I'm pretty sure I came up with the opening salvo: "Give me sanctuary / I'm without a home"). Generally, when we wrote together, I got the idea of the song going, but Don finished it off, lyrically. He was superb at filling in the details and maintaining the concept of the thing. (Left to my own devices, I might've been inclined to corrupt it somehow.)

The very same evening (as I recall) we stayed up all night recording numerous versions of our first masterpiece onto cassette, with our friend Mark (the above-linked soap star) attempting to provide a bass line. At the time, it was a blast, though I don't know if the documentation still exists. Probably not. And probably for the best.

Fast forward to the summer, after I had, you know, dropped out (cue sinister music). Don (who lived in Rhode Island) came down to NJ for a visit, and we ended up making a "real" recording of "Just to See Your Face" (plus two of our other tunes) with the aforementioned Mr. O'Neill providing an impressive guitar orchestration, and another friend and local heavyweight, Mr. Joe Bergamini, playing drums with his usual flair.

It was, in retrospect, a pretty pivotal period of my life. Shortly before the demise of my first real relationship, shortly before the death of a very close and important family member, and long before I finally found my post-high-school footing, the moment was chock-full of significance for me. This song still reminds me of how it felt.

I can't guarantee that you'll like it too, but feel free to check it out. At the very least, it's a lot different than anything you've heard from the IJG:

Just to See Your Face by uglyrug

Anyway, thanks, Darren, for this stroll down memory lane.

Danger belongs in music

Yesterday I had my first experience with the cultural juggernaut that is Cirque du Soleil.

Daphne and Thandie were both born in May, and in a sense, this outing was an opportunity to celebrate both birthdays at once. It was something we could all enjoy together, at least theoretically. Of course, I'm not sure it was the sort of thing I would've sought out if left to my own devices. But if nothing else, I was extremely gratified (and moved) to see the look of wonder my kid had on her face for three straight hours.



I won't make any argument from the weirdness on display -- though once again I do see a mingling of the so-called "avant-garde" and the so-called "mainstream" in this production. Nor will I expound on the delight I experienced at the consistently bawdy undertone to the whole thing. Except to say "Bravo!" (After awhile I lost count of the fart jokes, and the sex jokes.)

But the show did get me thinking about the notion of "safety" in art.

As I watched two demon figures do their ridiculously insane routine on the gigantic rotating gerbil wheels, who knows how many feet up in the air, I thought: "There is absolutely no room for error here." Everything had to go exactly as planned, or someone would be killed -- and rather spectacularly, too.

Of course, that demand for precision, executed at a very high level, is where the tension -- and the pleasure -- comes in for the audience.

At the same time, very little about the production had the feel of improvisatory openness. Even the clown routines (in which physical safety was not an issue, per se) felt like they were highly scripted, so as to ensure accurate syncing with the sound design. At one point a member of the high wire troupe seemed to slip and nearly lose his footing -- a move that only made his second attempt at the same routine appear even more triumphant. Turned out this was planned too, because the exact same thing happens on the DVD.

All of which is well and good, and entirely appropriate for the sort of production that Cirque du Soleil is. My point is just this: the experience of art is enhanced by the threat of danger. For the musician, that danger may come in the form of a complex passage that must be executed just so, or a section that has been left open to interpretation, or improvisation.

For the circus performer, the danger is more literal, and more physical, but not more real.

My Least Favorite Things

In the two years since I started teaching elementary/middle school music, I've been waiting for the right opportunity to try out the complaints choir concept.

If you're not familiar with complaints choirs, here's a primer. And here's a children's edition that works fairly well, I think:



This spring, my choir learned the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, "My Favorite Things." I soon realized that I couldn't ask for a better excuse to compose a complaints choir piece than the fact that "My Favorite Things" fairly screams out for some kind of counterpoint (cuz ya gotta take the bad with the good, right?).

So I am now writing a rather sullen, fully-customized thing called "My Least Favorite Things."

Yesterday I got the ball rolling by asking my students for items that could be included in the lyrics to our song. My question: "What are your least favorite things?" Here is what they gave me:

Boobah [a somewhat psychedelic kids' show]
spicy stuff
being lit on fire inside of a box
celery
an octopus grabbing onto you with suction cups all over your face
someone calling you names
nothing
when the cat pees on something valuable
school and anything involved in school
homework
schoolwork [hmmm... do I detect a theme here?]
embarrassment
writing
eating a dead fish
My Little Pony
Barbies

Wish us luck.



[photo credit: _nickd]

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Then again, some people just aren't down with animals at all.



Not even, I guess, armadillos? (That's my best guess as to what the creature in the middle is.)

By the way, there will be three animal-oriented songs on the new IJG record: "The Frog," "The Bee Dance," and "Antennae Town." So you know where my sympathies lie.

This ain't no damned Sarah McLachlan PSA

Still, it's raining here, and I've decided it's a good night for a short list of cats I have known (or have known about), who have died (or who may die soon), and who also have had some connection with music.

Ready?

Now-ish: the thing that prompted this post was a bittersweet tweet by Seattle trumpeter / blogger Jason Parker. My condolences, Jason, and RIP, Izzy.

Last year-ish: TC, adopted by Tany Ling. If I remember correctly, "TC" stands for "Trash Can." Got to know this sweetheart when I stayed at Tany's during the IJG's April 2009 tour.



A while ago-ish: Owen, the first cat my wife and I owned. He died unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, before my disbelieving eyes, of an enlarged heart. (Does that mean he loved too much?)



You may (or may not) be familiar with the tune "Little Owen," from the IJG album The Star Chamber. It's a song about that damned cat, if you must know. (Notice how it doesn't exactly end; rather, it just stops.)

Little Owen by uglyrug

And now there's Sadie, an elderly girl we adopted a month or two ago, whose sudden not-eating drama my Facebook friends have already been subjected to (sorry to lay that on ya, Facebook friends). She may or may not be long for this world (we're getting a second opinion on Wednesday).



It's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? All of the crazy, fucked-up shit going on in the world -- enough grief to fill a billion lifetimes -- and still I feel compelled to make room for sadness over the demise of these silly, furry creatures.

When music matters most

I finally had a chance to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2008) last week.

In spite of my reputation as a composer whose tastes run to the comic, I have always been fascinated (and driven) by the role music plays in contexts of exigency, crisis, or suffering -- whether we're talking about African-American spirituals and work songs, or an ensemble playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on a sinking ship, or the Quartet for the End of Time, which (in Alex Ross's telling) seemed to offer momentary respite from (and thus resistance to) a pinnacle of twentieth century barbarism:

The premiere of the Quartet took place on January 15, 1941 [at prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII A]. Several hundred prisoners of many nations crowded into the camp's makeshift theater, with the German officers sitting up front. The work bewildered much of the audience, but a respectful silence prevailed. [...] Like Britten in The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Messiaen responded to the mechanized insanity of the Second World War by offering up the purest, simplest sounds he could find.

The music of Acrassicauda (the subject of HMiB, and Iraq's only metal band) is anything but "pure" or "simple" -- instead, it sounds like an angst-soaked, rapid-fire reflection of the war-torn landscape of Iraq. And why shouldn't it? After all, as bass player Firas puts it, in Iraq, "headbanging itself could take you to jail forever." And, later:

Dude, I mean, I'm in a big risk right now, wearing this [Slipknot] T-shirt, because it's an American band... that could get you killed in Baghdad.

Back in high school I once had a conversation -- it was a typical high school conversation, I guess -- about whether suffering was a necessary prerequisite for true creativity. At the time, I took the devil's advocate position, arguing that the two weren't necessarily linked. (Ironically, I was suffering a lot at the time, while trying my damnedest to be as full-on creative as I could.)

Of course, "suffering" to a white lower-middle-class teenager in suburban 1980s America is not exactly comparable to the suffering of life in a war zone. I mean, my bands never had our practice space destroyed by a Scud missile, as Acrassicauda does in this film. There's a gap, as HMiB director Suroosh Alvi reminds us:

If you think about bands in the West, bands in Brooklyn, where our office is, they're all so spoiled, compared to Acrassicauda. In fact, we're all spoiled compared to these guys.

True enough. Still, I think most good artists, no matter how comfortable their material existence, strive for the level of creative urgency that is so clearly on display throughout this documentary.



Of course, there are degrees. Maybe the search for creative urgency does not typically include trying to make something so raw it can inspire fisticuffs. But most artists could probably find some point of resonance in sentiments like these (uttered by Marwan, Acrassicauda's drummer):

It just feels like you've been caged, like there's chains all around you. So you just want to, for two hours, for three hours, the practice time or, like, the live performance, free yourself from that chain, just like get that rage out. If I didn't play drums as hard as I can, as fast as I can, I was gonna kill someone. Each one of us will turn to be a killing machine.

Music born out of violence, so powerful that it can prevent violence: is there greater evidence of the power of this medium?

And in that vein, I'll close with this excerpt from the liner notes to Chris Schlarb's brilliant solo record, Twilight & Ghost Stories (which I got as a perk of our mixing session a few weeks ago):

Four years ago I was a sleeping ghost in an empty home. After quitting my job as an insurance adjuster I found myself working through a devastating separation which soon ended in divorce. Aimless and unemployed, I lost all structure and contact with the world outside. [...] Four years and fifty collaborators later, Twilight & Ghost Stories seems an odd choice for my first 'solo' album. There are hundreds of moments taken from their chronology in time and set alongside each other anew and I have acted only as the conductor of a giant, magnificent orchestra. To that orchestra, in some small way, I owe my life. [emphasis added]

And so say we all.

[Photo credit: US Army]

Music of the future

I was in beautiful Long Beach, CA, last weekend, to mix the new IJG album with the inimitable Chris Schlarb, who is also producing. I will have more to say about the specifics of this collaboration soon (I first hinted at it here), but for the time being let me say that the trip was fantastic (contrary to what you might think, I actually miss southern California sometimes), and I'm very excited by the work we got done and the shape the record appears to be taking. (The working genre description we came away with was "demented dance music" -- but don't hold me to that.)

Anyway, Chris works in Logic, which is unfamiliar to me. At one point, while I was observing him expertly fly through a rapid sequence of mixing moves, I was also completely lost as to what exactly he was doing. And so I allowed myself a momentary daydream about how records might be mixed in the future (say, fifty years from now).

At that point, I surmised, engineers will be able to plug their brains directly in to a given track, performing fades, EQ adjustments, quick edits, compression, and other processing, at will, and in real time. The music and all its characteristics will be represented by a hall-of-mirror-esque array of floating holographic screens that can be physically manipulated in the air around the engineer's head -- but the real key will be his or her total neural integration into the track. (Don't ask me why, but I found that to be a fairly compelling -- though not necessarily appealing -- concept.) The mix itself will become a kind of performance, almost to the point where the end result (the record) doesn't matter so much.



Or so I imagined. A few hours later, reading a bit of my Fellini book before heading off to bed, I came across this passage:

My greatest advantage in working at Cinecitta [a Roman film studio] is the freedom I have to direct my own way. Like a silent-film director, I talk to my actors as they perform their parts in front of the camera. Sometimes the actor doesn't even know what he's supposed to say, or the script has been changed too much at the last minute for him to have learned the lines, so I have to tell him his lines while the camera is rolling. [Fellini overdubbed all his dialogue later.] Obviously, in Hollywood with microphones this would be impossible. I would need a telepathic medium to communicate my last-minute instructions to the actors.

Interesting. Though I am big on the notion of collaboration, sometimes I think art can be defined as an attempt at (or desire for) total obsessiveness by a single author, who directs everything from a centralized location -- not unlike an air traffic controller or a juggler.

(Also, I promise not to keep quoting Fellini forever on this blog.)

Separated at birth?

Against the grain

When it comes to being a music fan, there is a side of me (the left side, I think) that is inherently curmudgeonly, and that likes being contrary for the sake of being contrary.

There, I said it.

Sometimes I am able to override this character flaw, because of course I recognize the silliness (or, I guess, the futility) of shunning something that everyone else likes -- something "hip," "in," or "hot" -- particularly when I have a sneaking suspicion that I am shunning it in part because everyone else likes it.

Alas, already I've stumbled onto shaky intellectual ground, because the notion of "everyone else" is fundamentally arbitrary -- sometimes I might use it to mean "most other listeners in the world," and sometimes I might use it to mean "most other listeners in a subset of most other listeners in the world" (jazz fans, say). In neither case am I literally talking about "everyone else."

But who cares? Sometimes I just want to go with my impulse as a music fan, and rationality be damned. I want to enjoy music, and ultimately I'm not particularly concerned with the question of whether my enjoyment is justified. And I'll admit that sometimes I'm (irrationally) terrified of getting lost in the mass commodification of culture, even when the culture being commodified is good. So to the extent that we choose (consciously or not) to like certain kinds of art as a matter of personal identity, I want to choose things that are, by some obscure criteria that may appeal only to me, different.

(Of course sometimes I go against the grain of the act of going against the grain, by publicly talking about my affection for certain kinds of music that are wildly popular.)

All of which is just a rambling prelude to this article, helpfully entitled "Your Favorite Band Sucks: Bands and Artists Bullz-Eye Writers Just Don't Get." In it, contributors to a trashy, mediocre, and mildly NSFW webzine attempt to argue against certain conventional wisdoms in the world of rock. Is it strange that I found the arguments unconvincing, but was nevertheless entertained by the piece?

On the Doors:

[...] they did indeed create a sound like no other band. But was that because no other band could successfully replicate their sound, or because no other band wanted to?

On Springsteen:

Perhaps Jello Biafra put it best when he referred to Bruce Springsteen as "Bob Dylan for jocks."

On Beck:

Beck is one of those artists, and one who critics use the word "groundbreaking" to describe. Yeah. If I took a sledgehammer to some concrete and took a shit in the hole in the ground I'd created, that would be groundbreaking too, wouldn't it?

On Pink Floyd:

But overall, their approach to music is decidedly non-musical; the bulk of their work feels like it was conceived mathematically or something…which, considering that three of 'em (Waters, Nick Mason, Rick Wright) were architecture students, should come as no surprise.

On Elvis Costello:

[...] when you're listening to Costello's collaboration with Allen Toussaint and suffering through track after track of Costello vocals while knowing that a perfectly wonderful soul singer was sitting right there at the piano while they were being recorded, it's just as hard not to want to muzzle the guy.

On Nine Inch Nails:

[...] a little Trent goes a long, long way. I have often tried to subscribe to the idea that he's some sort of genius. But I'm not buying it. A true genius won't subject his audience to 90 minutes of temple-pounding, unreasonably angry industrial rock without giving any sort of dynamic reprieve outside of "Hurt."

On Talking Heads:

Overall, they were good, but not great. Eccentric, but not head and shoulders above their peers. It's time to give up the charade and let the Talking Heads float down the river of East Coast artsy fartsy obscurity from whence they came.

On Frank Zappa:

Zappa's one of those guys where, if you tell one of his fans that you can't really get into his music, they generally find a way to let you know that it's probably just because you're too stupid to appreciate it. Now, I have never claimed to be a genius, so it's very possible that those Zappa aficionados are right on the money, but for my part, I've always just thought that Zappa's work too often felt like he was being weird solely for the sake of being weird.

Weird for the sake of being weird. I guess that brings me back to where I began.

[Photo credit: CarbonNYC]

[UPDATE]

Fellini, qtd. in I, Fellini:

All my life I've had a natural resistance to whatever everyone likes, or wants, or is "supposed" to do. I never was interested in soccer, either to play or to watch, and for a man to admit that in Italy is almost like admitting you aren't a man at all. I do not like to belong to political parties or to clubs. Partly this is probably in my black-sheep nature, but I think another very real reason is I remember the Black Shirts.

I was a child in a time when we wore the outfits of our school, or we wore the black shirts of fascism, and we were supposed to question nothing. That has made me question everything. I was always suspicious, not wanting to be one of the sheep going to the slaughter. So sometimes I may have missed out on a pleasure the sheep enjoyed which I could have had without becoming a lamb chop.

Sometimes...

...religious kooks (and in this case I say that lovingly) are more interesting than annoying.

I confirmed this when I watched the Danielson documentary last night.



I have admired this group for a while now. In fact, I posted something about them a few years ago, mostly regarding the fact that they are from New Jersey, where I grew up. (It's a place usually considered annoying, and rarely considered interesting.)

Honestly, I was only dimly aware of the religious connection until I saw the documentary. Still, I came away not caring about that particular detail, except in the sense that I can respect when someone is able to believe in something -- anything -- without using that belief to browbeat another human being into submissive agreement (a habit that besets way too many modern Christians, in my humble opinion).

I excerpted a few choice comments -- the first two made by fans of the group, and the last by Daniel Smith (the group leader and songwriter) -- below:

I'm really kinda freaked out by 'em, and I'm in a metal band, and they fucking freak me out. They scare me. So, they're doing something right, because of that, I guess.

Yeah, I listen to music about taking drugs -- I don't take drugs. I listen to music about taking Christ -- I don't take Christ. But I like the music, I like the sincerity of the message, I like that someone sincerely thinks that taking lots of ecstasy will make this a happy world, or that taking lots of Jesus will make this a happy better world.

Getting myself out of the way of these songs being made, so the lord can construct them himself -- that's the goal. I'm involved, but I try to remain humble and keep my ego, you know, out of the way. So in that sense I think it's the most natural way to create. But it's also humbling. But I think it's the most exciting way as well, because you're just watching things happen. Instead of trying to, you know, pretend you know better. [...] and I do struggle with that, of course. I go in there and say "Okay, this thing could go with this," and I do that sometimes, but it doesn't work. It just doesn't work for me. It's best to just kind of wait, and watch things point to each other.

That last bit seems kinda Zen to me. Take out the old-dude-in-the-sky reference, and it's not unlike the sort of thing most composers / improvisers say about their own process.

Attention must be paid

More words picked out from my recent Fellini addiction:

Since music has the power to condition subliminally, I prefer to avoid it whenever I am not listening consciously, as with my work. Music is too important to be relegated to the status of background noise. If I enter a restaurant or an apartment where recorded music is being played, as politely as I can, I request that it be turned off, much as I would ask someone to please stop smoking in close quarters. I resent being a captive listener, a captive inhaler, a captive anything. I don't understand how people can eat, drink, talk, drive, read, even make love while listening to music. Imagine having to chew faster to keep up with the beat. And the situation is getting ever worse. Unwanted music is becoming as pervasive as pollution. In New York, I heard music on the telephone, music in the elevators, music even in the toilets, where the ultimate captive audience is to be found.

I haven't ever thought of it that way, but second-hand smoke really is a perfect metaphor for the music that is forced upon us as we innocently try to go about our lives.

[Photo credit: Dominic's Pics]

Brick logic

I am old enough to remember the American Bicentennial, which was celebrated in 1976. I was in second grade at the time, and I clearly recall being forced to learn how to dance a minuet. I think there is a picture of me somewhere wearing a tri-corner hat over a white wig, and some big black shoes with those awkward Revolutionary buckles. (No, I will not scan or post it.)

How could I possibly have known back then that someday I'd see a variation on this very same outfit worn by grown men at political rallies?

There is of course a subtle message behind the imagery of the "Tea Party" movement, and it has nothing to do with patriotism. When your costume is more than two centuries old, you are, on some level, saying "I sure wish things could be the way they used to be." And I suspect that, for people of my generation, you are siding with your elementary school self (because, you know, we all had to do that Bicentennial minuet, in one way or another). Which probably also means that you're still into KISS.

Most revolutions happen in response to an actual event, imposition or injustice. There are usually concrete causative agents -- physical abuses, documented affronts against human dignity, and other longstanding grievances. Revolutions do not usually happen in response to the possibility of such causative agents.

The Tea Partiers (the artists formerly known as "Tea-baggers") are changing all that. They like to think they are spearheading a new revolution in American politics. But the truth is more complicated. Just as American right-wing politicians once perfected the notion of "preventive war," their Tea-Party base is now perfecting the notion of a preventive revolution. They are, in effect, rebelling against a new law before they even know whether it will work. And in the process, they are throwing out the social contract / common good baby with the no-new-taxes bathwater.

Theirs is a world in which PR exists for the sake of PR, and in which ideas do not deserve to be tested on their merits, but rather on how emotionally they are framed. Because, after all, if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is such a bad move for America, why not simply let it fail? Let its failure be spectacularly self-evident. November is not that far away. Victory would be all but assured. Wait patiently for a few months, and all your prayers could be answered.

The fact that you are now picking up bricks suggests that you're starting to become cognizant of the idea that the horrors you see in this law are not even remotely self-evident to reasonable people. Worse: they may be complete and utter bullshit on your part.

[Photo credit: a1mega]

I See Hawks in LA

Here is something of a dirty secret about me: I love country music. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

In fact, I feel that I can, with at least a little authority, proclaim that one of the best country bands in California (hell, in the world) is I See Hawks in LA, co-led by my friend Rob Waller (the band's lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and contributing songwriter). Waller and I met in grad school, where we both taught in USC's freshman writing program. We started our respective groups at roughly the same time, and even played a quirky double-bill together at Hollywood's version of the Knitting Factory (referenced in the discussion that ensues below). Later, occasional Hawks collaborator Joe Berardi played in the IJG for a short time (long enough to hold down the drumming duties for our Industrial Jazz a Go Go! album).

After I left USC, Waller and I stopped running into each other regularly (except for that one time our two bands, heading in opposite directions through the heart of California, happened to stop, mid-tour, at the same rest-stop on the 5 freeway). But with social media, none of us are ever really out of touch, I guess. At least, that was how I learned that the Hawks had released their fifth album, Shoulda Been Gold -- a "best of" compilation, but one that also included several new tracks (as well as a few rarities). I thought the occasion was a perfect opportunity to have an email conversation about this great band, and music in general.

If you've never heard the Hawks, here's a good place to start.

* * * * *

Durkin: Though at first blush it probably appears to the outsider that there could not be two genres more divergent than jazz and country, we've joked in the past about possible points of resonance too. A music historian might mention the existence of folks like Bob Wills, or the musical roots of someone like Charlie Haden, or even Sonny Rollins' cover for the Way Out West album. But I'm thinking too of deeper connections.

For instance: anyone playing jazz today has to deal somehow with the notion of authenticity. The music now has a history, a “tradition,” and a scholarship, and it is understood that each new generation of artists has to respond to that in one way or another (by fulfilling, tweaking, or rejecting certain expectations).

I could be wrong, but it seems like modern country musicians are faced with a similar dilemma. The music’s conventions are so well established that it must be hard for a young artist to maneuver without seeming to be derivative, or else too self-consciously “weird.” Plus, with country, you have that whole “Heartland of America” image to contend with. (Am I wrong in assuming that some audiences take that very seriously?)

Is this minefield real for you? Is it a minefield at all? And if so, how have the Hawks navigated it so elegantly?

RW: Ah, yes. "Jazz and Country, Together Again." I remember our Jazz and Country night at the Knitting Factory in LA some years back. If I remember correctly it went pretty well, our crowds weren't as divergent as we might've expected. But then we worked together and had some of the same friends. But yes, on to your question.

Authenticity is a major goal for us. It's something we aim at. The problem is that it's a moving target. Or, perhaps we're the ones who are moving and the target is getting farther away. I have a suspicion that it is getting more difficult to make authentic music today in any genre precisely because of the accumulation of recorded music (not to mention all the scholarship, 'zines, websites, listeners, authorities, etc.). There's so much music to listen to and be influenced by it's more difficult to just play it and feel it spontaneously, light-heartedly.

We've had the ability to record and reproduce music now for a little more than one hundred years. That's really not that long compared to the history of music. I imagine that if you stumbled upon some band playing music in 1850 you would be thrilled, you'd grab your friends and bring them over, you'd sit dumbfounded and delighted as you watched and listened to them play. But now music is everywhere, in the elevator, on the radio, at the grocery store, stacked in gigabytes in your computer. Its value has shrunk to zero, basically. Music is now free because it's everywhere and there's no need to actually pay for it. This is a real problem for musicians who take years to develop their craft.

Oh shit, I've gotten away from the question and headed into a bitter rant against technology once again. Sorry, let me get back to your question....

Yes. The answer is yes, it is a minefield but a minefield is only dangerous if you walk into it. And pretty much we haven't. It's more like, "Hey, there's a nasty minefield over there. Fuck it. Let's go in the opposite direction." Luckily we've had a group of people who has been interested and supportive of going with us. We take the things we love from the tradition, vocal harmonies, song structure, melodies, a connection to the earth, freak or outsider status (yes, even that is part of the tradition) and ignored the rest (bogus patriotism, xenophobia, trucks, mama).

Durkin: As one who is interested in freak / outsider status, I'd love to hear more about the freaks and outsiders of country music. Because that's not really part of the general perception of country music, as far as I can tell.

RW: One of my favorite aspects of country/folk music is precisely that freak, outsider, drunk perspective. My favorite country artists (Merle Haggard, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Stanley Brothers, Louvin Brothers) are always flaunting their flaws. Whether it's alcohol or being poor or being a criminal or turning your back on Jesus, the theme is often confessional and by association outsider. Here is who I am, here is what I've done, who I've killed, etc. I am guilty!

I first started getting into this music when I started dating my future wife. At the beginning of our relationship she made me a tape of murder ballads. Songs like "Katie Dear" or "Knoxville Girl" by the Louvin Brothers or "Pretty Polly" by whoever wrote that. These songs really got me and that's when I started writing in this tradition. David Allen Coe and Johnny Cash played shows in prisons and related to prisoners because they had been prisoners. It was a genuine connection. When you listen to Live at Folsom Prison, Johnny is one of them. He's not patronizing or clowning, he really feels for their circumstance and knows he might end up back there. He's a freak and a fuck-up too.

To me, classic country and folk often maintained a legitimate connection to real people and real problems. Of course, that's all pretty much gone from mainstream country now. It's mostly about the girls getting wild on Saturday night, kicking Osama's ass, and bullshit nostalgia for calculated, phony family values. It's not just the connection to real people that's been lost but the people themselves have become disconnected from their own reality. We're a nation in denial of how bad we have it, how bad we feel. We can't even properly imagine our own lack of freedom, our own cultural poverty, our own pain. We don't have the words for it. We can't even describe the pickle we're in. In much of the heartland including Minnesota where I grew up, any hint of dissatisfaction is somehow unpatriotic, whiny, and liberal.

Durkin: As a fellow leader-of-a-ten-year-old-band-sans-hits, I'd love to know more about the Hawks' adventures in the modern music industry. Ten years ago I seem to recall all sorts of exciting predictions about how we were entering a new age, in which independent musicians would use the tools of the digital era to storm the corrupt citadels of the music business. (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little.) Looking back, having survived the decade with a working band, what did you learn about how things actually went down? And where do you fall on the despair / hope continuum when it comes to the future of music? Is Twitter going to save us all?

RW: No, we are not going to be saved by Twitter. We are all going to die. But this is not a hopeless statement. It should be a galvanizing one. We are going to die! We are most likely not going to be rich or famous or even have health insurance. But so what? Everyone on the planet is going to die, the vast majority of them poor and unknown. And all of us are going to attempt to create meaning in our lives. By having families, jobs, growing plants, going to church, doing yoga, eating well, whatever. One of the main ways I create meaning in my life is by making music that I think is good according to my own twisted aesthetics. Ultimately, it's a spiritual practice. I do it with daily regularity to sustain meaning, to keep going back to that place where the muse lives, to avoid loneliness, isolation, CNN. But I don't want to minimize it and make it sound like a hobby. It's not. God, I hope music is never my hobby! It's my spiritual practice, identity, source of inspiration and meaning.

Durkin: That's great. I completely relate. It's interesting that most of the people I admire in music these days have some sort of "second job" to support what they do -- but I also think most of us aspire to be able to play music without having to worry about that distraction. And yet maybe making music into your "career" would kill the very things that attracted you to it (spiritual practice, etc.).

RW: Yes, the tension between day job and music career is ongoing. In that same spirit of contradiction, they do often each make the other possible. I suspect that if I quit my day job altogether, I might be more likely to make more mainstream music, or play more covers, or play more weddings, or be more concerned with being timely and hip. The fact that I keep a day job which provides for me and my family also helps to maintain artistic freedom and integrity, I think (hope). My family's next meal does not depend on the song I'm writing.

Or maybe it just makes me lazy. I also wonder if the day job allows me to be too complacent, too comfortable being a freak, an outsider, an obscure toiling artist. Maybe I'd write better songs, more urgent songs, if I didn't have any safety net whatsoever. It's difficult to know the answer precisely.

Durkin: What was the selection process for including the previously released material on the new album? Were there any hard choices? Did you feel like anything got left out?

RW: Okay, an easy one. We went to the iTunes store and sorted all our songs by popularity then picked the tops ten songs. We wanted to let the fans decide and also avoid having a big band fight. We then added 5 new tunes, and a couple of curiosities for our die hard fans. If I had decided the list myself it would've been different but not that different. We do plan on a SBG: Volume Two down the road so there will be another opportunity to gather some of the left out tunes.



Durkin: The new album, from the title on down, is steeped in metaphors and images of despair, missed possibilities, promises broken. And yet you keep coming back to hope too. The upbeat protagonist in “Raised by Hippies,” the salvation of someone like Robert Byrd, the beautiful melodies and harmonies of “Laissez Les Bontemps Roulet,” all suggest an underlying belief in the possibility of redemption and happiness, even if bittersweet. Is there a coherent philosophy tying these extremes together? Or: as a thoughtful person making thoughtful music in a thoughtless age, how do you cope?

RW: I'm not sure how coherent the philosophy is but there is one. Even our band name is a metaphor. Here in Los Angeles, this concrete metropolis of monoculture, there is still wildlife (hawks, coyotes, skunks, possums, hummingbirds, the occasional condor) there are are still strange country rock bands like ours even though we don't get the kind of attention that say, Britney Spears or some other pop star gets. Yes, on a grand scale things are a bit hopeless. The earth really is headed for an environmental catastrophe. The political system and the economy really have been hijacked by the obscenely wealthy. These are troubling times and the problems are so big it's overwhelming.

But life goes on. Children are born and they shine some light in, some optimism. The hopelessness and the optimism exist side by side. I take some refuge in my own personal contradictions. I'm an environmentalist but I drive a GMC Yukon. I'm a country rock musician and lead singer who wears flashy outfits onstage but I'm also a mild-mannered writing instructor at a university (a job I compare to working in a convent, fashion and other-wise). I'm a parent but I'm still fairly reckless at times when it comes to money and planning for the future. I guess the thing that holds it all together is a belief in the grand life cycle of it all. Things will be born, hopefully thrive for some period, then die. Then something else will be born. In this way, I welcome the coming apocalypse.

Durkin: We're both dads, and in our art, if not our lives, we're both a little wry. I don't think either of us is predisposed to sugar-coating. And yet children, to some extent at least, inevitably require at least a little sugar-coating in their initial understanding of the world.

How do you reconcile these things? How does fatherhood coexist with the hint of nihilism, the vaguely apocalyptic strain that runs through your music? Do you play your music for your kids?

RW: Yes, I sure do play my music for my kids. They also know lots of the songs and sing along. My daughter Zola (5) came on the road with us to Scotland at one and a half. She still likes to sleep in my guitar case. For about six months she listened to one of our albums (Hallowed Ground) every night as she fell asleep. She knows the songs inside out. We recently played a show in Santa Barbara at a coffee house type place and there was a couch on stage behind the drums. Both Zola and her brother Henry (almost 2) danced around for a while then passed out on the couch for the rest of the show, sleeping right there on stage. That's how it's gone. Some of our tunes are fairly dark and require some censorship or explanation but overall there is a great deal of joyfulness present in music and the act of making the music that children pick up on the most. We'll see how it all turns out as they get older. But I do see a real creative spirit in both of them that I take some credit for and that I think will continue to develop. I'd be surprised if they ended up as nihilistic and apocalyptic as their old man just because their lives and experiences are inevitably going to be so much different than mine. Again, I guess I see the apocalypse as a good time!



Cross-eyed hawks: it's too bad they don't have a sense of humor.

Durkin: What is the unlikeliest thing (musical or otherwise) you have been inspired or influenced by?

RW: I think my wife's cooking has really influenced me as an artist. She's an amazing cook. She develops new techniques, explores unusual ingredients, takes her time and develops her craft but it is all done in a loving way that's about nurturing and feeding her family. I hope I can do the same with my music. Often, the dough I do make at gigs, etc goes right to the grocery store and turns into breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's a good feeling.

Durkin: Can music be effectively "political" (i.e., can it really matter, politically) in 2010, with its 24-hour hyper-media-with-a-vengeance vibe? Do you want the Hawks' music to be political? And if so, how do you know the difference between offending somebody (I'm thinking of the dropped line from "Humboldt") and educating them? [Editor's note: "Humboldt" originally ended with the line "You can have your September 11 / I'm heading off to a Stoney Heaven." According to the liner notes for Shoulda Been Gold, "when we sang the line in summer 2002 at Galapogos club in Brooklyn and the Knitting Factory only a stone's throw from the twin towers site, we could see a moment of hurt bewilderment sweep through the audience like a slap in the face. We dropped the line."]

RW: Hmm, not sure I have a good answer to this one. I guess music can be sort of political but I don't really expect it to change anything in any direct way. So, not too effective. I think the Hawks are a political band in many respects (particularly with regards to the environment) despite the fact that as a band we have diverging view points.

The Humboldt line change was an interesting phenomena. We definitely lost a few fans and one writer in particular who had written glowingly about us before really turned on us because of it. Part of the reason the line was changed (which we didn't mention in the liner notes) was I thought it might date the song too much to include September 11th. I don't know if I was right about that since 9/11 has become a permanent thing, also we kept the Bush line which also dates it but I just didn't have a good substitute for that one. "I quit my job at the 7/11" also seemed to fit the narrative of the song a bit better. Mostly, I think for myself as the the lead singer (the one singing the line) I didn't want to reflect on that event over and over every time we played that song. The song is kind of our big closer and it's a pot anthem that's mostly just about rocking out and having fun. The political element seemed out of place, somewhat. It also seemed cold and unfeeling to those who really did suffer on that day. Also, our libertarian bass player never said anything about it but I knew it was eating at him. His son is in the Air Force in the desert. The personal outweighed the political in that sense and that also lead to the line change. Who knows, maybe it was big mistake.

Raw art in two parts

Part one

Last Friday, I played a funeral for a 95 year-old woman I did not know (or, perhaps more accurately, for her family, who I also did not know). I've been doing this sort of gig regularly for two years now. (Someday, I suppose, I will provide you with a better idea of what it's like to be an agnostic who makes a good portion of his living providing live music for religious services. Hint: it's not a strange as I thought it would be, though of course I have a high tolerance for strangeness.)

Sometimes it's hard to tell ahead of time whether a particular hymn, sung by the church congregation, is going to "work," musically. After all, most of the congregants are in their 70s and 80s. Some of them are hard of hearing. Some possess what could only be called a "delayed" sense of rhythm. And at the funerals, anyway, there is no choir to help guide everybody else's singing. Add to that the fact that I'm playing the organ, from the choir loft -- so the sound is more diaphanous than focused -- and the chances that we're all actually going to be together on any given piece are, I would say, about 50/50.

This is true even for a well-known tune like "Amazing Grace," which was one of the hymns included in Friday's service. And since the deceased was 95, I stupidly assumed that her family had been well-prepared for her death, and that their grief, however genuine, would be pretty muted as a result. In other words, I wasn't expecting a terribly moving performance.

I was wrong. I'm not sure if it was the gloominess of the day, or the tearful eulogy delivered by one of the grandchildren, or the fact that I had been listening to DM Stith on the way in to work, or the possibility that I am basically a big sap -- but I discovered, after a few notes into that morning's rendition of "Amazing Grace," that sometimes beautiful things can happen in a church. It was quite moving, to hear those untrained voices singing strongly, with sad acceptance, and a palpable recognition of the mystery that afflicts us all. I know I am guilty of reading into the sounds I heard, based on my own physical and philosophical vantage point -- but I could swear I detected more poignant uncertainty in that piece than ever before. More importantly, it seemed to me to be vital in a way that I haven't heard in live music for awhile. And not at all because of the organ player.

Part two

One of the cooler features of my daughter's school is that students are encouraged to use drama and performance as a tool with which to understand history. They refer to it as a "living history curriculum." We went to one of the student productions last night.

The show had the typical middle-school flaws -- actors who struggled to enunciate, cheap costumes, the student's tendency to overact, the educator's tendency to over-direct -- and yet there were some beautiful moments. One came halfway through, with a little cotillion interlude that took place in the aisles created by the arrangement of audience folding chairs. The auditorium lights were off, but several spotlights awkwardly followed the student dancers as they moved in procession around the room.

There was something terribly strange and wonderful about this dance, as watched by us "grown-ups" (who, it seems to me, were middle schoolers ourselves only yesterday) -- some of us with our own kids, not yet old enough to be in the play. The music was typical Ken Burns-ish Civil War banjo and dulcimer stuff. Maudlin in any other setting, but somehow, at this moment, in the midst of this very obvious display of the various (fleeting) stages of human existence -- somehow it worked, and was, again, beautiful, vital.

Question

Today I found myself wondering: how can a professional ever hope to make art with the raw directness and vitality of an amateur?

[Photo credit: Jakob Montrasio]

Speaking of birds

This, from David Ocker:



Wonderful.

My favorite part is when the speckled guy comes in (at roughly the 40 second mark).

You get what you get and you don't get upset

A very good friend recently sent me a link to the transcript of a set of health insurance reform interviews Bill Moyers did last week. The whole thing is interesting and worth a read, but for me, this commentary, from Marcia Angell, positively leapt off the screen:

I think the problem is this, Bill. If this plan is passed, and I think there's real doubt as to whether it will be, and there's even more doubt as to whether it would ever be fully implemented, but let's say that it's passed. It will begin to unravel almost immediately. And then what will people do? Well, they'll say, "We tried health reform, and it didn't work. Better not try that anymore."

It'll be like what happened after the Clinton plan failed. There'll be another 16 years before anybody comes up with the courage to try that again. People say, "Too expensive. Just can't have universal care. Tried that, did that, didn't work, good-bye." Whereas if the bill dies now, people can say, "This bill died because it was a bad bill." And the problem is still on the front burner. And then one can hope that we get some version of Medicare for all. And that we don't have to wait 16 years.

Moyers asks exactly what I would have asked: "What makes you think it would come back in 16 years or more? What makes you think it will ever be back on the table?" To which Angell responds:

Oh, I think it has to be. I mean, I think that this system is unraveling so fast, doing nothing or doing the Obama plan, so fast, that something will have to be done. Unless we want to, you know, explicitly be a third world country. So I don't think it's going to wait. But if we pass this plan, it's going to delay.

This whole exchange strikes me as absurd.

Maybe folks like Dennis Kucinich are right, and "the bill" as it currently stands won't address the underlying problems in our health care system. But if the thing goes down, know this. Health insurance reform will not stay on the "front burner" -- at least not by any conceivable definition of "front burner" that I can imagine.

Can I extend the kitchen metaphor? Okay, how's this: like a cooking experiment gone horribly awry, health insurance reform will promptly go into the trash. And we will all need to adjust to the fact that we'll be having something else for dinner. (Sorry, I think I took that too far.)

Note how Angell compares the hypothetical success of the Obama bill to the failure of the Clinton plan. Get it? Since Clinton failed, and since that failure prevented us from revisiting the issue for nearly two decades... the success of Obama will produce the same result.

Call me crazy, but that seems to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of political behavior. "Failure," especially when bombastically proclaimed as such by the media, will lead not to more action but to inertia. I mean, consider the headache it has been to keep the issue on the front burner this year alone -- even though, by some estimations, we are already well on the way to third world status.

"Success" of the bill may not exactly bring "success" as Angell would define it (or, hell, as I would define it), but it will bring momentum. Some people will get a glimpse of a better life. Again, the fixes may not address the underlying problem, but a certain amount of desperation will be removed from the equation. All this birther, deather, Obama-as-Hitler bullshit we've had to put up with over the last year, and which has prevented any sort of reasonable dialogue on the subject at hand? That is mostly derived from desperation. You can't think rationally when you are treading water.

Look, I like Marcia Angell. I think she's very smart. But I wish she (and others like her) understood that, at the moment, we're in a triage ward. Brain surgery will have to wait.



[Photo credits: Redvers (top); Anyaka (bottom).]

"Very impressive, but no one is watching."

It was purely an accident (and in no way related to the untimely death of our chickens, I swear) that my wife and daughter and I ended up watching a documentary about birds tonight. It featured, in particular, the Birds of Paradise, of Papua New Guinea. If you've never seen these critters in action, they are singularly fascinating:



My question: is what the birds do as part of their mating ritual art? Especially once you take it out of its original context, and enclose it in a frame (such as the one provided so graphically by the YouTube interface)?

If it is art, who is the author? (Note that you're not allowed to answer "god," as that would be too trite for my purposes here.) Also, is the work any good?

I'm completely serious, of course.



[photo credit: Zorilla]

Blinders

Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic intuition and independence and originality of mind.

-- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

I love this paradox: sometimes ignorance can lead to insight, and even brilliance.

And yet it has to be the right kind of ignorance, doesn't it?

[photo credit: schizoform]