Solo Compositions for Bicycle

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This is how close I've been, by bike, to Anthony Braxton for 2.5 years.

Oh Connecticut, you mysterious wonder of a state.

Working through Horace Ode I.IX

Videa ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto.

How do you write cold in music? How do you write warming up from cold by drinking? How do you write about a flight of fancy after drinking imagining some bar in some town where a woman is about to commit an infidelity?

Composing this week has been a small, dingy hole that I'm finally getting out of. The problem with the small dingy hole is that it was remarkably filled with friends and they were having a party until all hours. I would then climb out of that hole and into another hole that was filled with the persons and requirements from my 9-to-5.

It's a very strange duality. I miss other people in the most literal sense being alone all day. It's as if I'm attempting to hit a bank shot, but the ball goes through the backboard as if it were a hologram.

But, in order to help myself along, the Old Ball & Chain sat down with me this afternoon and we made a plan for due dates during the summer. My first one is going to be the Horace project, which I want to try out with some vocalist friends in the upcoming weeks.

At the moment, though, I'm listening to the neighborhood kids try kick-flips behind the middle school.

The way I see it, Barry, this should be a very dynamite show

Hat in Hand:
I'm restarting this blog. I still don't really understand the appeal of the act. I realize that I like privacy even more after I compromise my own privacy. So I'm wary of my own blogging, though I really enjoy reading blogs. Perhaps too much.

So I've gone through and cleaned up some past posts. They weren't really embarrassing, but they weren't about a particular focus. Back in 2006, I was trying to write about whatever, with maybe some music focus, but now what I'm after is different.

Hanging Out My Shingle:
I've just recently started to talk about myself as a composer. I've been doing composition since I was in high school, and I always took it seriously. But, for whatever reason, it wasn't the thing I could totally let myself be devoted to.

But over the past year, I've finally started to work on my music more often. I still have more ideas than I have time to make them, but I think that's a good thing.

The primary issue is loneliness. Many writing processes are solitary things, and this wouldn't be much of an issue, except that working from home requires me to be alone a lot of the day. I work in the same room as I compose in, chained to the internet.

My plan, then, is to use this blog as a sounding board to write about writing music. Since I don't feel that this writing is merely evaporating in the ether (which made me loathe to use it in the first place), now I can use it to report on what I'm doing. I'm hoping to fake myself out by using a solitary action to report to the greater world my musical progress.

Whoever you are, welcome. Enjoy these time capsules and cave paintings. I know I'm going to enjoy this mulligan very very much.

No more

Hey whoever reads this.

I don't think I want to do it anymore. I don't even want to think about it. I'm not going to delete it, because I might change my mind in the future.

But for now, I don't see a reason. I want my thoughts to be private. I thought I'd be able to compose something on here, but it's become a very minor albatross. The internet inspires much more firing off. I might read more pointless crap that results in this because of music blogs. Which is kind of what I wanted this to be.

For some reason, I never wanted to show it to anyone. And people found it anyway. Because it is public. There's no hurt or offense. I want one less thing to keep track of.

It doesn't feel like participating in something fun. It never really took off anyway, so I don't think anyone's going to get hurt.

I don't want to comment on society--I want to participate.

Sometimes you can't decide, and you just pick something.

So I'm stopping.

My love to everyone.

I swear to Gawd, this is true

This man is keeping my wife from going out with me right now. Stupid fancy schools.

A troupe of millionaires wrote a song called "On The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams"

I am doing this. And also this. I have a lot more ideas for the latter rather than the former, so of course I'm spending most of my time worrying about plots and characters.

Why do them both at once, when most of my time is usually spent getting irritated at not being able to do much? Trying to violently expunge. I want this to be sweat lodge time, because more than doing it, I want it to be done. I am hoping to find some gems inside the doing, and get beyond the thinking about doing.

The dog is skeptical. Or at least bemused. "Hey, aren't you starting, like, regular full-time employment at the same time?" Yes, dog, yes I am. I'll have "personal days" which is where they pay you even though you're not working, like if I brought you a half of a hot dog just for sitting in the sun.

I don't know why I have a blog most of the time. This act is freakishly public, even though barely anyone pays attention. I didn't write much before and I don't feel like writing much now because of that. If things will be saved on a wayback machine, I want to at least make a good stab at making something to be proud of. The "write a novel and an album in a month" project is part of this. The blog is not a good place to upchuck creativity. I work all day on teh interwebs as it is. I will update, maybe. Because I'm going to need some encouragement from the circuited ether to get through this.

Hey, I'll make everyone a promise. If I really and truly like stuff, I'll make it public.

mix list link blog binge purge

Because I read John Darnielle, I came across a nice new music blog and the idea of a half year mix. First half of 2006? Here's what I could do:

"Two Young Sheeps" Dirty Projectors
"Cornet Chop Suey" Louis Armstrong and His Hot (Five?/Seven?)
"Cheap Champagne" Georgie James
a song by Growing that I do not own and do not know the title of

Thank god that Growing song is pretty long.

We disappeared to China for a month, which was really wonderful now that I'm home and can think of it from this end. It was also trying and exhausting. As well as wonderful to see friends who make life worth living.

It made me happy to have an iPod there. The Missus and I were at the Terracotta Warriors, outside Xi'an. The audioguide was terrible. For reasons I can't figure (maybe the descriptions of the warriors uniforms?) I had "Venus in Furs" in my head. So we went back in the main hall, lucked out in finding a lull in the crowd, and split the headphones listening to the Velvet Underground and looking at the blank disctinct faces. "I am tired, I am weary/I could sleep for a thousand years." The clay men were two thousand years underground. Pretty neat.

Why is this man laughing at me?

Aw crap.

Ask my wife. Ask the singer from Fat Day.

I have a list of people who I'm going to ask to do their own interpretations of Sports et Divertissements. I don't know them, I have no money, I'm not sure how it's going to work. But this has been my dream for a long time.

There's something telling about that piece he wrote, though. Would the project be necessarily pretentious? In that, there's some idea behind it?

Chainsaws going off like crazy outside today. Summer is busy for sounds around here.

Back to the salt mines, without even changing position.

Ominous Foreboding

I was listing to the monthly mix at catbirdseat and thinking that something was missing. And then it dawned on me--conviction. Singers. Pipes.

The guts have been massively contrived these days. I'd say "in music" but I'm sure it's happening in almost every cultural product. But music is what I know best, so it's what I can talk about. Why why why do the people who seem to be able to burst the bubble fall victim to an attidute treadmill? Tough country artists, rockers, rappers--they are all complicit in a personality, and that's what they sell more than anything. You have to look tough rather than be tough. It's as common in normal life and even in politics.

But do we really need to react to it by acting smart? By breathlessly whispering? Is uncertainty really the best we can do? Or vanity and nihilism?

Are people afraid of grooves because they will be mislabeled?

Citizens of the world, please do not fall into that crap way of thinking. Face it--how cool can you possibly be?

I doubt very much that I'm going to like anything I write about here for a little while. I'm tired of the renovation of baby geniuses into heroes. They are neither geniuses nor heroic.

Or maybe I'm getting sensitive because dude got all puffy about my employment today.

music listening-brick

So I got an iPod. On sale, refurbished. But I went whole hog. 60Gb. It's biiiiiiiiig.

Having done this a bit, I've found some irritations.

- It has more space than my computer's hard drive.

- You can't rip songs directly to the iPod if you want to play them on the iPod,

- If you can listen to it on the iPod, you can't do *anything* to manipulate the file on iTunes, except create and edit playlists within the iPod. I assume this is because of copy protection. You can play songs via your computer, as long as the iPod is connected.

- However, you can use the iPod as a hard drive, to move data files around. This basically negates any piracy prevention mentioned above. I guess a hard drive is different from a media player, even if they actually are the same device.

- If you get a giant iPod, you will have a hard time filling it up. Even if you are able to fill it up what with owning a couple of thousand CDs, it will take you a long time to do it.

- Ripping your music, methodically or spastically, is kind of fun.

It seemed at first like I'd have to rip files to my computer, then copy them to both the iPod and an external hard drive, then delete the files from my computer. Crappily complicated. But there's a way to set any folder as the location for the iTunes library, so my big ass hard drive is now getting the rips directly. It's still complicated and crappy, but not as crappily complicated.

I wonder if I'll run out of room. I keep tweaking with the file format based on random, drifting standards of how important something is, how high the recording's orginal fidelity was, how much I like it. Sometimes I forget, so now I'm ripping the first Beat Happening album (which may have been recorded on a boombox or something) on a kind of high file format. That said, I'm going to do the same for all the Mountain Goats albums, because they have integrity, dammit.

I have a hard time not treating things as precious. This thing is aesthetically designed and over $250, so it gets at the weird "don't touch that!" feeling.

So, hey, I've got a PDA, a cell phone, and an iPod. I work from home. 21st Century man.

Flowing

I'm heading off for a weekend trip, away from Wife and Dog which is very sad. But I get to go to the west coast, to Portland, the Shire of 20-somethings with no jobs. I will subsist for 4 days on coffee and beer.

There is now wireless internet at my house. You just plug it in, which is freaky considering how amazing this technology is. Also, I've taken to speaking with a friend in China over iChat. I can talk to him for free and there's a 13-hour time difference between us. I am clearly getting very old because this type of thing blows me away.

For some reason, indigo children have started popping up everywhere. What's funny is that in high school, I took a personality test from a book called What Color is Your Aura, and I apparently have an indigo aura, according to that book. I then spent the next 3 days taking myself very seriously. After a few months, I pretty much forgot about it. Nothing like college to knock one off one's pedestal.

Speaking of which, I'm starting to return to my roots, in a way. Year end lists made me very depressed and irritated, and I began to joke when I was still in DC over New Years that I was going to listen solely to metal and classical. The reasoning was that everyone thought that Sufjan Stevens's Come On Feel the Illinoise album was the shit. I was being immature and silly. I have no reason to get so upset about the Sufjan phenomenon. However, I did realize that my subconcious wanted a little more out of my listening experience. And since my earliest record purchases were horrible hair metal while I was taking piano lessons, I think my subconcious was right.

So I've finally got the Emerson St. Quartet recording of the complete Bartok quartets on Deutsche Grammaphone, which is one of my favorite complete recordings of any cycle I can think of, some random Ives recording which was cheap (I am in Connecticut after all), Sunn 0)))'s Flight of the Behemoth, and the new Meshuggah record. I haven't listened to the classical yet. The Meshuggah record rules.

Since I've been so chafed by lists, for the record (and believe it or not, this is public and therefore a record) here is a list I like, from the Washington City Paper. Way to go!

New-o-city

There is a ton to go over. 2005, especially the end, was busy. We moved, my hometown experienced cataclysm, I got married (and found out my mother-in-law is the only person who reads this). Towards the end of the year, after Thanksgiving, a puppy followed me home. He's in search of sunbeams in my house now. He doesn't like being cold, which is sensible.

I'm sitting here with my guitar. NaSoAlMo passed me by and that's fine. I didn't want the responsibility. But the more I look the more I realize I need to be moving. I need to play and think and actually make music. I need to listen and compare and ponder and really think about music. Music is the best non-person thing in this life for me, and I want to really make something of it. Even if I do it while my hands and toes are frigid.

So, before I go back to the crappy computer with the drum machine on it, I'm going to write down the albums of 2005 that really got to me.

The Hold Steady--Separation Sunday
I also love that these guys will play pretty much anywhere. I saw them in New Britain and then at BAR in New Haven and they were great both times. They also played at a high school in Colorado and the school did a whole unit focusing on them, which is outreach taken to a wonderful place.

By the way, BAR is awesome, due to the completely free touring band on Sunday night shows. The place is uncomfortably Yuppie and Hipster, but who cares when you can see bands totally free. If I made a list of regrets for the year, on there would be missing Acid Mothers Temple and Akron/Family playing there (NB: they weren't playing together).

Dirty Projectors--The Getty Address
Utterly floored. Totally pompous but it works. Orchestras, guitars, little jerky beats. Different sections are sequenced into different tracks and it moves like leit-motifs in a real composition. They pulled it off live, too, which is shocking.

Chad VanGaalen--Infiniheart
I think I like this whole album more than most of my friends, but whatever. The melodies are wonderful and his singing pretty. Everybody loves that song "Traffic" too.

honorable mention: Harry Merry. He opened for Quintron and was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen on stage. Dutch-boy costume, songs in English about bus drivers and eating, clearly inspired by the Beatles and old 60s pop but I can't say just how. It's cohesive, somehow, despite feeling like a shreiking fat child on a malfunctioning carosel. I didn't say you'd like it, but you can't deny it either.

so there. Onto 2006.

We are unprepared for the reality we accept

...I've been mulling over these thoughts for a few days, in the midst of doing work and trying to get over a multi-day case of heartburn.

A couple of days ago, someone sent me a link to Brad DeLong's blog. Though this is a person who's been ending his posting recently with the phrase "Impeach George Bush. Impeach him now," he's got this on his site from September 5 (I'd link, but I don't like/can't use trackback):

Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane. Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but the it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action. "The primary message is that eachperson is primarilyresponsibleforthemselves, for their own family and friends," Truehill said.

You would think that somebody--somewhere--would have called Washington and said, "You know, New Orleans doesn't have its act together enough to have a hurricane evacuation plan." And that somebody, somewhere--in Washington or in Baton Rouge--would have cared.

...

You know the situation is bad

When Harry Lee and Aaron Broussard come off looking like responsible public officials someone further up has seriously screwed the pooch. And got caught in the act.

What's going to happen when no one gets fired?

What's happened to us?

For the past few days, I've been glued to the news. Developments, or rather non-developments, have actually come at a fairly rapid clip. The press has gotten angry, and I honestly hope that there's a fire lit under people's asses. I would rather that George Bush come out of this looking good, because that means there's a chance that he's going to have done the right thing.

But I have very little faith. Because politics, and by extension government, on all levels as it relates to Louisiana and the gulf coast, has long been overwhelmingly corrupt. This means all the way from the mayor, through the governor, to the senators and an administration they support.

The way we are seeing this play out is that there is no one, not a soul, in government who has stepped up and said "this is my problem and it is the most important thing for me right now to solve it." We don't need men, we need a mensch. And until we find that person, this entire process, from saving the people who are alive to finding the people who have died, from draining the city to cleaning up the entire coast to rebuilding it, will be mired in the bog (tautology, -5) of overspending, underplanning, and covering your own ass.

Someone is going to have to answer for this. I don't mean the fact that a hurricane hit. Liberals, bless 'em, will try to use this to talk about environmental problems. God knows I want to. But for the amount we believe in the correctness of environmental causes, these are not the right questions to be asking now.

In my opinion, a better question is why have we structured a cannibalistic government, and yet not relived tax burdens on the largest sections of the population. If you want to cut taxes, why the hell does it seem to leave everything underprepared?

Even better ones involve who was hired for disaster management. Focus has mostly been on Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, and it should, because he's is a horse's ass that says bluntly stupid and insulting things about the situation he is supposed to be in charge of. A bigger problem is with his bosses. In a working company, his managers would have his ass in a sling, but that's not the way these people do business. And this is going to be a major problem up and down the entire chain of government. I can only predict what the situation in Louisiana will be, but given the level of corruption and nepotism that everyone in that state is completely accustomed to, I have a bad feeling that something terrible will come out. Disaster management seems to be an enormous money sink for a problem that may never materialize. You can hide friends and associates in that governmental structure for a very long time and for a lot of money and never be found out. That is, until there's a disaster.

What's horrible about this patronage bullshit is that it's happening on the Federal level, in the exact same way that it's happened on state and local levels.

Politicians promise so much these days. Even Bush, in the height of his powers, frequently promises to spend money on various programs. Afterwards it's difficult to see the results. Remember hydrogen fuel cells? Remember AIDS in Africa? Most people don't. But most people do remember the disaster that happened to this country and to a city four years ago. I never liked him, but he had a resolve that was infectious. I wanted to believe, and in no small way did believe, that an administration that had found it's political rudder responding to a disaster would want to seem competant if it occurred a second time.

Apparently not. It played its chances, short-changing the very preparedness it was supposed to stand for. This is disaster was terrible. The instant the 17th St. Canal breached, the disaster was terrible. The disaster that followed, the embarassing way that our governments responded, will resonate in American politics for a long time. I don't know how. But when David Brooks is saying that the government "violated the social fabric," this cannot help but be felt for a long time.

I'm still sad. And now I'm also very very angry.

Plan?

Does anyone get the feeling that they are making up the rescue and recovery process as they go along?

President Bush

I'm watching his newscast now.

Does he understand that thousands of people are still at risk in New Orleans?

Why is he talking about the freaking oil so much? This is not the biggest problem we're facing.

If he says "good folks" again, I'm going to ram my head against something.

New Orleans

I can't say anything clever now. I know that some of my friends and acquaintances are writing this. They are writers, and I'll leave it up to them.

But weirdly I feel like I do have somethings to say in a more public place.

Please find a good charity to give to.

Slate's writing, especially Josh Levin's (who's inbetween a friend and an acquaintance) and Jack Shafer's, has been really informative and thought-provoking.

Nola.com and local New Orleans news (wwltv.com, wdsu.org) have done a great job keeping us informed.

The national cable news, especially CNN, deserves to be pilloried for taking as long as they did to tell facts, and for spending too much time of specious analysis and projection.

I really should try to get back to work.

Musical interaction

I've been lucky enough to go to many shows recently.

Mountain Goats, Decemberists w/ Rebecca Gates, Deerhoof, Built to Spill.

Seeing the Mountain Goats and the Decemberists in the same week made me realize how much more I like the Mountain Goats than the Decemberists. I can't pretend that John Darnielle doesn't have a schtick, even though the schtick is part of what annoys me about the Dcmbrsts. He comes off as friendly on stage, but he's jerky by design--simply because he's on-stage. It's wonderful, though, to see a dork (let's be honest) get such a thrill out of playing and even writing songs. But, well, why not like the Decemberists? Charlie Haden's kid is in it, it must be good. In part, the reason is their cleverness. Both Colin Molloy and Darnielle are considered lyricists -- it has been written in the press and lo, it must be so. I understand from listening to his words that Molloy is very witty. He rhimes (rhymes?) "elan" with "divan" and then immediately uses the word "dalliant". SAT words are in force. But how much more Darnielle can do with so fewer syllables!

We are going to get through this
We are going to stay married
in this house like a Louisiana graveyard
where nothing dead stays buried
On Southwood Plantation Road
where the dead will walk again
put on their Sunday best
and go with unsupecting Christian men

That's not honors English diction, but it is honors English meaning.

Also, there aren't random characters. The Decemberists have a fetish for older language and scenes (therein, perhaps, lies the word-choice thing), but are we really supposed to get behind what they are talking about? Queer soldiers in a trench war? "Chimbly" sweeps (please) rodgering widows? (I know this is all one album, forgive me.) Old+sex+big words=deep, I guess. During some of their songs, I almost expected that John Lovitz "Tales of Ribaldry" character to come out, look sideway, put his hand to his mouth, and titter.

Now I'm not arguing that we're supposed to necessarily want to get into the lives of alcoholic, abusive married people in Florida or Texas speeddealers, but Darnielle's words take people way the hell into the mess others have made. And often, when I think he's taking a cheap turn (that song about the guy who shot the robber at the liquor store), he'll salvage it by the end (in that song by bringing up the first verse, and slightly modifying it). It's leaner and more effective.

The Decemberists played a wonderful show, in their little trench-coat, orange-scarf get ups. The crowd there was lapping them up. Poor Rebecca Gates got no respect from the crowd. Like a good Northwest indie rocker, she was not afraid to voice her displeasure. When a band is big enough to sell out the 9:30 club, it has arrived. When that show is being broadcast on NPR, you know it's even bigger.

The Moutain Goats show had more of what I wanted. There was an honest to god real encore. Not the fake rock-show encore where you know they're going to come back, either; Darnielle and the bassist (who's name I should know by now) and the folks from the opening bands who had played in the first encore, big band version of "Linda Blair was Born Innocent" or whatever song they had played left the stage, the house music started up, people stayed and clapped franticly, and Darnielle came back. They played the song "No Children" and he was frantic and jagged, and encouraged the crowd to sing. And they did. You heard them shouting along "I hope you die. I hope we both die.", both the crowd and the performer just eating each other up. It wasn't a recital, it was an experience. It was a man who's written often about the saving power of music putting it all into practice. I didn't know the words, I didn't know what the song was about, but I was completely sucked in, partly because you could tell (or at least be convinced) that the band (of 2 people) was sucked in too.

Music isn't there to help us prove how tasteful we are. This is a common thought in all of this music snobbiness, and you could look at indie dicks primarily but it's all over. Music is there to make our senses go crazy. It creates a taste in our mouths when there's nothing there. We feel different temperatures. For a second, you are in touch with something beyond the present moment, which is listening to well-organized (or, at least, purposefully-made) sound. And, I guess, the Decemberists just don't do it for me. I hope other people love that stuff the way I love other stuff, and don't just listen to them because they know the definition of "stevedores."