Living in Germantown has given me a brand new appreciation for birds

Hafez says:

One rosy face from the world's garden for us is enough,
And the shade of that one cypress in the field
Strolling along gracefully for us is enough.

Look at the flow of money and the suffering
Of the world. If this glimpse of profit and loss
Is not enough for you, for us it is enough.

The dearest companion of all is here. What
Else is there to look for? The delight of a few words
With the soul friend is enough.

--

Listening to Chopin in my room, both windows open and the rain pouring down outside, incense burning, watching that nocturne spinning around on a beautiful turntable. Cascading notes getting twisted up into the quiet, repetitive chaos of the rain.

I suppose it will sound hyperbolic to say it, but wouldn't it be somehow opulent to ask for another dose of this? In the interest of modesty alone, wouldn't it feel appropriate now to put away this whole business of recorded music? Surely for me one side of a good record at the right moment is enough.

This morning I experienced the glory of God on my front porch--I was eating a grapefruit at 830 in the morning, jobless "downwardly-mobile" bourgeois dilettante that I am; I was surveying the front yard. A moment of silence creeps up on you and then the foreground of Yard and Breakfast and Schedule and What-I-Am-Doing-With-My-Life starts disintegrating, like expanding holes of acid consuming a piece of paper (where the acid is the dull, stubborn insistence of the Background to be noticed). White noise becomes colored noise and suddenly I get startled to notice all of these birds, singing, taking turns, overlapping and interrupting, screaming, calling from every direction, up in the trees all around, at every distance, at varied volume, all shapes and sizes. Lord have mercy I live in the center ring of a bizarre circus. Help, my homo sapiens frame of reference is outnumbered, drowning in the chaotic net of delicate sounds and drowning in what it represents: The day-to-day routines of a million tiny winged bodies (twitching, contracting, jumping into the air, pooping, hungry again), none of whom for even a moment have felt the need of taking up the burden of self-awareness. For goodness sakes what has the Robin or the Cardinal ever done to accommodate the grand narrative of the human race, much less the arc of my life?

Surely for me a half an hour with these little chirping aliens is enough. Surely I could move back to the cement jungle of North Philadelphia and live there for the rest of my life without ever seeing another exotic-looking migratory bird, protected by the reality of one such encounter.

The whole world salivating

Adam Wiltzie, musician, on why it took six years for his band to release an album:

"What I learnt was essentially in the past (or I should say around finishing Tired Sounds) I was pretty fatigued, mentally. I wondered why I felt it was so necessary to make a record every year, or to be in the endless cycle of recording, then touring, and then starting over again. I reckon that, in general, musicians can fool themselves into thinking the whole world salivates for more new music, and the result is letting that false sense of reality push them into releasing music that is not really finished, or just to make the release date their label wants them to make so as to beat the Christmas rush, et cetera. So, some people will pre-suppose that six years is a long time to wait to release a new record. But I do not buy into that assumption."

And later, responding to a question about his influences:
"As I may have said, it is painfully uncomfortable for me to talk about my body of work with any sort of reverence..."

Maybe a portion of the world was salivating for a new Stars of the Lid album. But my hope is that Adam Wiltzie is among a perhaps small number of entertainers who are reasonably suspicious of the dysfunctionally co-dependent relationship of fan and celebrity. Such co-dependent cycles can be broken if one of the two parties are willing to call BS.

Thinking about music with Brian Eno

Brian Eno was born in the village of Woodbridge, Suffolk, on May 15, 1948 and educated by nuns and Brothers of the De La Salle order until he was 16 - at which point he enrolled for a two-year course at Ipswich Art School.

"I went to art school because I didn't want to do a conventional job. I saw a job as a trap and something to avoid. In fact, that's a characteristic of my life: making moves not so much towards things as away from them, avoiding them."

Although young Brian knew he didn't want to be ordinary, his conceptions were, at that point quite as ordinary as those of his fellow students. He was in need of a shake-up.

"By a stroke of luck I happened to go to a very good school. Ipswich was run by a guy called Roy Ascot - a very brilliant educationalist, I think - and what he and his staff were concerned with was not the teaching of technique so much as experimenting with notions of what constitutes creative behaviour.

"So, instead of sitting there doing little paintings, we found ourselves being required to get involved in discussions and self-investigation projects. Like, the first thing we had to do was a 'mind-map', which was constructing a series of tests to find out what sort of behaviour we exhibited in different situations, from which it was decided what sort of character type we each were .

"Having established that, we had to behave in a way diametrically opposed to our normal selves, ie., if you were naturally extrovert, you had to be introvert; if you were a born leader, you had to be a follower, etc."

Which were you?

"I had to become a follower. I had to execute everyone else's ideas, not make a fuss, not try to dominate the proceedings.

"Some people really pushed it. One girl was very perky and exuberant and the only way she could get herself to calm down was to tie her legs to her chair. Another girl, called Lily, was very nervous - she made herself learn how to walk the tight-rope.

"I sat on this porter's trolley all day. If anyone wanted me to do anything, they had to wheel me to where I was required.

"All of this was very exciting and disorientating and aroused in me a lasting interest in working with other people under what might normally be considered quite artificial restrictions."

During this period, Eno met a major influence in the artist Tom Phillips, who was one of the staff, and began to get interested in music via a chance encounter with John Cage's book Silence and the occasional visit to the school of avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew.

Unable, as yet, to manipulate a conventional musical instrument, he started playing about with tape-recorders and, by 1965 - at which juncture he left Ipswich for Winchester Art School - he had amassed about 30 machines, of which only two were in full working order.

Winchester was a traditional institution and Eno found his newly-inspired experimentalism forced underground. The staff and most of the other students made no secret of finding him rather odd.

"I felt that art was more serious and important than they seemed to think. They regarded it as merely decorative - or there to make things a bit better or something. I thought there was much more to it, but I couldn't then put my finger on it.

"Also, there was my mother-in-law - a very bright woman, a logician into scientific method - who'd always say to me things like 'I can't understand why somebody with your mind is wasting his time doing this'. She was very cutting about it indeed.

"So I was forced into justifying my position and that started what has been a continuous train of thinking over the last ten years."

*From New Musical Express, November 26th, 1977
Here's the full article.

Whitecaps of white noise

Fitting that Canadian sound explorer Tim Hecker sculpts seven and a half minutes of almost completely undifferentiated fuzz into a track called "The Work of Art in an Age of Cultural Overproduction." Fitting because he realizes that one has to start dealing with the reality of life in a big, viscous glut of cultural junk.

Obviously the social condition of cultural obesity has something to do with the fact that the primary way that I, an individual here in the beating heart of the media empire, am able to come to terms with my own identity is to cross the coveted threshold from media consumer to media producer. To lay down some tracks, to shoot and edit a film, to write a book (my memoirs!), to be interviewed on some documentary, to put some dumb video of myself online.

But in what sense is it socially desirable to add my voice or your voice to the already deafening roar of cultural white noise? There are too many records. Too many films showing in too many theaters. Too much must-see video programming. Too many new releases, too many staff picks, too many best-sellers. Too many logos, too much smart design play, too many fonts, too many slick magazines, and way too many clever advertising concepts. Too many photos taken of ourselves and too many of our friends in interesting places and positions, too many attempts at interesting angles. Too much data accessible on too many PDAs at any time and any place. Too many people eating lunch alone, accompanied only by one of those wireless cell phone earpieces. Too many mp3s. Too many "relevant" churches posting too many sermon podcasts to be played back on too many video iPods. Too many blogs with too many posts. And too many sleek Apple laptops cranking out this blather.

Maybe in some way cultural production can still be valid, but I can't imagine any worthwhile piece of art that doesn't first respond to it's relationship to all of the other cultural, virtual, enticing, bite-size media bits trying to edge it out for a second of our attention. Which is why tediously slow washes of barely harmonic sound that demand at least an hour of listening time is about all the cultural product that I can keep down these days.

And I know that the right thing to do is to not get so easily seduced into the belief that I exist to propagate of my own "unique" perspective on the world via the free market apparatus.

But I do get so easily seduced. And I start to make things. And I start to recommend cultural product like the artists above or the video below as an antidote to an overload of cultural product. Why do I do it, the thing I don't want to do?

Here is a great video.

A feeling of existential dread

The most recent chapter in my ongoing Philip Glass infatuation, I just picked up the Fog of War soundtrack from the library. Nothing ground-breaking, just more of the same old quality Glass.

I thought I'd pass on the following note from Errol Morris, the film-maker, that is found in the liner notes:

"How do you write music for a story that encompasses the 20th Century...? A story that also combines elements of caprice and destiny. And at its center a story that asks whether war is inevitable, unavoidable, part of human nature. This is my third collaboration with Philip Glass, and I cannot think of who else could have written the music. I once told Philip that he creates a feeling of existential dread better than anyone else I knew of. And this is a movie filled with existential dread. I like to think of it as music for the apocalypse, where the apocalypse is not so much the end of the world but just more of what we've seen before, more of the same."

I am reminded of how good of a movie that was. A fantastic example of the impression that a truly artful documentary can make.

Kurt Cobain

Sosumi!

An apocalyptic way to spend ten minutes

1. Download the following two songs by Woven Hand:
Sparrow falls and Bleary eyed duty
2. Once you've got them downloaded (it may take a few minutes), start them playing (preferably on headphones) and read the Wikipedia entry on the life of Keith Green.

Gymnopedia, to be performed at least three times a day

This is a self-portrait of Erik Satie, the original bohemian.

The text reads (translated from French):
"Project for a bust of Mr. Erik Satie (painted by the same), with a thought: 'I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old'"

Bakerman

Danish pop duo Laid Back, better known for their 1983 electro-funk classic "White Horse" (a track Prince is said to have called a favorite), here perform their 90s hit "Bakerman" in mid air. This exquisite music video, ultimately more popular than the song itself, was conceived and directed by Lars von Trier, a fellow Dane and an internationally recognized film director.

I really wanted you to see this video, which is why I made the effort to downloaded it from a bit-torrent client, register for an account with YouTube, then upload it onto their servers. So please enjoy it.

To witness yet another stratospheric musical spectacle, see Dayvan cowboy, the recent music video debut of the peerless Boards of Canada.