Portrait of the artist as a young singer-songwriter

(L-R: Jill Knapp, Darren O'Neill, Joe Bergamini (standing), Andrew Durkin (seated))

One of the funny things about having spent 30 manic years writing music (out of the 40 or so years I've been on this planet so far) is that I sometimes forget about songs I've written -- even when, at the time of their conception, I thought those same songs were pretty hot shit.

This song ("Spain") is, in retrospect, definitely not hot shit, but, hey -- it ain't bad either. In any case, I had completely forgotten about it. It's another thing revived by the aforementioned Mr. Darren O'Neill, who is proving (via Facebook) to be a key resource of obscure early Durkinalia. (The master tape of this recording was in the possession of Joe Bergamini, who played drums on the tune. Darren tracked the recording down and cleaned it up for this "release.")

Spain by uglyrug

What can I say about this song? Again, it was written during a pretty dark period for me -- roughly one year after "Just To See Your Face" (so sometime in 1989, when I was 20), and shortly after I had dropped out of Carnegie Mellon and Berklee College of Music. (I was a double dropout! Alas -- for a while there, I just couldn't find a school that worked for me.)

I had picked up a few classes at a local community college, and suddenly I was taking the "quest for knowledge" seriously. Mostly because of a beloved uncle's untimely death, which made me realize how short life really is (if you will forgive the cliche).

Anyway. This song had its origins in a geography course, which was attended by a beautiful raven-haired girl, who, for reasons I never understood, always wore tinted glasses. I never did work up the confidence to develop a friendship with her, but that didn't stop me from taking the artistic liberty of weaving a psychological portrait around that one (probably inconsequential) detail. I was convinced that she had to be hiding something, or hiding from something. Of course, I was actually the one who was doing the hiding -- there were many aspects of myself that I had yet to embrace. But I was content to project all of this psychic drama onto her for the time being.

Here's the lyric:

Spain
Why don't you say what you want to say?
Why must you hide from the truth every day?
Do you believe you've got nothing to gain?
Is that your game, Spain?

Spain
What must I do to relieve the pain
I can't believe that you're running away
You never were scared of what people would say
Don't be scared now, Spain

Oh I don't believe
That you could sit so idly by
While all your dreams would fly
Fly away

Spain
Here is the life you've been looking for
Don't tell me you don't have the guts anymore
You won't take the chance cuz you have to be sure
But you never will be pure

Spain
There's always tomorrow, another day
Sleep on your problems, they might go away
And if they don't, well, there's always a way
To fight back the pain, Spain

Oh I don't believe
That you could sit so idly by
While all your dreams would fly
Fly away

In retrospect, it's pretty hilarious to me that this song was conceived of in a geography class, and is named after a country (a connection I never made until now). Of course, the official reason for the title is that the girl in question had a Mediterranean look. On another level, the title may have come from a dipthong-tastic association with Billy Joel's "James" (which probably provided something of a thematic influence as well).

That's right, I went through a Billy Joel period (I have already written about this a bit) -- apologies if this song is too precious as a result. It is, in fact, far less precious than most of my other material from the same period, and, like "Just To See Your Face," is one of the few early tunes of mine that I'd be comfortable sharing in a more "official" context. It's a decent song, goddammit, and I think it holds up, despite its bombast.

If nothing else, consider this: it's not often that you get a fusion of a classical Spanish guitar and rock drums. Credit where it's due: Darren arranged and performed the guitar part, and composed the prelude. Personally, I think the song is much stronger as a result of these contributions.

In addition to Darren on guitars, and Joe on drums, I played synth bass (hardly audible in this mix), Jill Knapp handled lead vocals, and Angela Acosta sang backup.

[photo credit: Jeff Knapp]

All the music you will never listen to

"Narrative arts have been always limited by the capacities of the receiver (a human being) and of storage media. Throughout history, the first capacity has remained more or less the same: today the time we will devote to the reception of a single narrative may range from 15 seconds (a television commercial) to two hours (a feature film) to a number of short segments distributed over a large period of time (following a television series or reading a novel). However, the capacity of storage media recently changed dramatically. Instead of the ten minutes that can fit on a standard roll of film or the two hours that can fit on a digital video tape, a digital server can hold a practically unlimited amount of audiovisual recordings. The same applies for audio only, or for text."

Lev Manovich

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that the above-articulated idea is one of my regular themes. I often borrow Alvin Toffler's term for it ("overchoice"). It is, I think, a distinguishing feature of twenty-first century culture.

What it means for our relationship with art over the long-term is anyone's guess.

Does it mean the end of critical consensus? (How can you legitimately claim to be able to point to the best that has been thought or created if you are physically unable to consume a healthy sample of what's out there?)

Does it mean that we will soon lose the ability to experience art in depth, and with patience -- instead feeling compelled to experience a little bit of everything, simply because there is so much to be experienced?

Does it mean that commerce will finally be victorious in its quest to be the ultimate arbiter of taste and value, because the stuff that will "rise to the top" will in fact be the stuff that is most aggressively promoted, regardless of its actual quality? (How could anything rise to the top otherwise, given the number of things being produced?)

Beats me!

[photo credit: Andrew Choy]

Inverted man

Over this weekend, inspired by M.C. Escher (the artist, not the rapper), Thandie and I came up with a doodle that can be viewed two ways:





Top view: the cheesy sunglasses look.

Bottom view: the bald-Amish-dude-with-bad-teeth look.

Silly, I know.

Making fun

Frank Zappa once issued a CD called Does Humor Belong in Music?, and it's a question he was obsessed with throughout his life. And probably one of the records that's most interesting to consider in this light is Cruising with Ruben and the Jets, because it's regularly taken to be a parody of sweet rock and roll, or doo-wop, with the idea that if you do a parody of something, you hate what you're parodying, and you're only doing it to trash it. But you can listen to Ruben and the Jets in a completely different way. My friend Danny Huston told me that he had had a love affair that broke up, and he went home and played Ruben and the Jets, and wept all the way through, and took it completely literally.

That's Ben Watson, speaking in Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: In the 1960s, about what Zappa called his "neo-classical" album, Ruben and the Jets.

Stumbled across this last night and thought it would make a nice addition to the Jarrett and Sardelli posts.

Is it possible to ridicule (or critique) something and to love it -- I mean really love it -- at the same time?

I think so. In fact, I would say that this is one of the more productive and useful dynamics in all of creativity -- it's one way of separating yourself from the things that have inspired you, so as to not merely reproduce what has gone before.

I would also suggest that the best human relationships are like this. No true love happens purely. Our honest disappointment in each other, our outsider's cold objectivity, makes our affection that much more meaningful.

[photo credit: gimpbully]

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.