This Year

I'm truly excited about 2011. For a variety of reasons, I believe it’s going to be a very positive and productive year and that it will mark the functional beginning of many good things for both of us. 2010 has been a particularly educational and watershed stretch, but we are grateful for the experiences that have helped re-direct our course on par with a life that we truly want. Entering the New Year seems like a good time to review a few of the biggest lessons that I’ve personally picked up in the past 365 days:

I’ve learned that the difference between practice and being is largely a matter of personal commitment.

I’ve learned that life is very much about every day, and every little moment - and not just about grand, distant plans.

I’ve learned that you can never really know who your friends are until they have to sacrifice something for you.

I’ve learned that in order to move toward real satisfaction you have to build the career and the life that you actually want, and not the one that you think it would be smart to have.

I've learned that I really enjoy tea, and that champagne depresses me.

I’ve learned that other people are rarely worth being dressed uncomfortably for.

I’ve learned that most of what is sold to us as new is in fact simply cleverly repackaged fetishizing of the past.

I've learned that it's nice to have some tradition and ritual in your life.

I’ve learned that unfortunately it is in fact the loudest voice in the room that most often wins, but also that it’s not wrong to fight fire with fire in defense of a good cause.

I've learned that dogs tend to offer better therapy than clinics.

I’ve learned that in terms of pure dollars and cents, my time is worth far more to me than it is to anyone else.

And though I believed it before, I’ve learned that you can choose your family.

Three Favorite Children’s Books

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is the most recent discovery here. This clever story creatively employs a magical realist perspective toward conveying the immigrant experience. A treasure in its art and originality, The Arrival’s principal victory may be its thoroughly effective and authentic use of the silent narrative voice.

I think one reason that I am still in love with Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and The Rats of NIMH is simply that it was one of the first books that helped me to fall in love with reading. More than one of my childhood pets was subsequently named after a NIHM character. However, I do have to say that I was disappointed with the film adaptation’s portrayal of Jenner, as well its unfortunate and unnecessary rewrite toward the demise of the Nicodemus (which DOES NOT happen in the book). Anyway…

Generally a fan of the body of Chris Van Allsberg’s work, I nonetheless think his most beautiful and magical piece remains The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. This book found me in third grade and it’s been the kind of gift I’ve wanted to share with other people ever since.

So, Merry Christmas, my dear fellow perennial children. Here’s to another year of imagination, adventure, and refusing to grow up.

First Christmas

I haven't bothered to get a Christmas tree since I first started living on my own. It always seemed pretty pointless. That was about 11 years ago.

When I was living in the basement apartment in Cambridge, I used to string up Christmas lights all through the exposed pipes every winter. I’ve always loved Christmas lights, and I used to leave them up in my place following the holiday until all the bulbs had finally burned out months later. I don’t really know why, but Christmas is still my favorite holiday.

A lot has changed in the last few months alone, and for a number of reasons life is much better now than it has been in years. Redhead and I are both finally doing what we really need to be doing. And personally, I feel like the music I’m writing is something I’ve been trying to write for a long time.

I recently picked up The Fountainhead for the first time since I was an undergrad. God bless Ayn Rand. I remember finishing Atlas Shrugged during a graveyard shift as a community college-attending security guard. It was a gorgeous night, and the book made me feel like anything was possible. I’ve never gotten over that. Reading The Fountainhead again recently, I was touched by Roark’s words in the first chapter: “I have, say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standard—and I set my own standards.”

Recently, Redhead and I bought our first ornaments for the artificial hand-me-down tree I’ve strapped to the bookshelf in lieu of a stand. The ornaments are little snowmen frames in which she put photos of us and our dogs. In so many ways, my wife is what makes us feel like a family.

This morning I took a walk with my beautiful dogs through the crisp LA winter morning—like a light New England Fall, almost raining. Witnessing my dogs' joy in the outdoors, I just took my time and enjoyed thinking about the music I would get to write today.

Evidence of Value

A value is derived ultimately from either an internal or an external source. While in actuality most motivators consist of a messy hybrid of the two, a single overriding authority will nonetheless tend to dominate every human decision.

People generally survive on some combination of externally and internally oriented values. On one hand, some modicum of practical, externally based validation and cultural awareness seems reasonable. To exist in any functional economy, for instance, requires a person to be in some way concerned with externally based values.

However, to depend principally upon the validation of outside opinions or forces is not only unhealthy, it is dangerous. Regarding the artist and his or her artistic work, this tendency is simply a contradiction in terms. The ultimate motivation and validation of the true artist approaching the creative product begins and ends internally.

For my part, I refuse to understand an individual’s belief system as existing separate from his or her track record of actions. When a person continually professes to believe something in contravention to what he or she actively incarnates, that person is either lying or simply doesn’t understand he or she actually believes. However imperfectly, internal value is evidenced in the life of the individual over time.

It is in the worst moments, under turmoil and duress, that an individual’s truest values are evidenced. Particularly here, what I am is truly what I believe. I have also come to hold the notion that adamance alone can assign incredible meaning and value to a thing, and even to a life. Macroscopically, the adamance of lone individuals has repeatedly altered the course of world events.

Money is also a signifier of value. I have heard artists dismiss money as corrupt, and cash remains a popular scapegoat for a variety of human concerns. However, currency is simply a reflection of collective value, a placeholder, a mirror – and what it reflects in the end is its respective user’s particular values. In fact, money’s only significance derives ultimately from our collective belief in its worth. In this sense, money is perhaps the chief example of an externally based value.

Money is simply a tool, not an end in itself but a means to something else. It doesn’t make sense for money to be worshiped or despised, just as it doesn’t make sense to hate a hammer for its inclusion in some crime. Money is amoral, and remains subject to the values of its masters. And while money is an important feature of human economy, it is crucial to remember that to base one’s values on money alone is to base them on an external and therefore an ephemeral source.

The real value of money is what it can do to improve our lives, whatever that really means to each of us. Money allows the greater potential engineering of desirable situations, but it remains the individual’s responsibility to execute moral decisions directing this instrument. As with philosophy, a misunderstanding or ignorance of money will tend to lead to an unfortunate shift toward the lowest common contextual denominator.

It can also be difficult when one's values are based principally upon internal motivators that do not translate conveniently to outside initiatives. For instance, an individual who carries a true passion for the art of real estate investment will likely need to worry less about additional income then someone following a passion for experimental sculpture. For these latter individuals in particular, the reality and consequences of one's values remains very present.

For a variety of reasons, the older we get the more our real values tend to become actualized. Time allows our choices the opportunity to incarnate and compound exponentially, and the results of our truest values grow increasingly evident as days stretch to years. The values people command seem far more real to me now then they used to, in large part because I’ve had the opportunity to witness what various philosophies do to real lives.

We all have only the time and space for a relatively limited set of real priorities, and it seems that significant value in our lives over time can only be achieved through the deliberate act of searching out these real priorities and actively placing them at the forefront of our daily choices. Emerson cautioned “Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” No, we can’t worry about the path; if we're on a path, it's likely we may already be lost. Instead, we can only move toward a greater discovery of what each of us truly values, and then strive to live and to remain involved with those people, things, activities, and ideas.

Organizing Principles

It’s always been difficult for me to understand precisely how anyone is able to teach another individual the creative act of music composition. Though I’ve been very lucky to study with a number of exceptional composers, I’ve nonetheless never stopped wondering at how anyone could be so insightful regarding the artistic work and unique journey of another person. Consequently, I am not really sure how I would teach music composition were I ever asked to do so. Maybe I would just try to share a few fundamental principals that I’ve collected so far and that I continue to find useful. To that end, following would probably be the first ten from an ongoing and perpetually imperfect list of things I think I've learned about the creative act of writing music so far:

1) Do whatever you want to do that you’re most frightened to do.

2) Anything can be elegant.

3) Commit to the principal of Kaizen: a continual, incremental improvement.

4) Find your own process, perfect it, and then remain faithful to it. The process is the ritual and consistency of process, not local quantity, is the key to long-term progress and truly significant results.

5) Move beyond the need for external validation toward your creative work, particularly if you harbor intentions of accomplishing anything that is in any way actually new.

6) Strive to be utterly honest and brutally critical with yourself. No one else can critique your work in the way you can. Alternately, if you let yourself off the hook then no one will be there to hold you completely accountable and the work will suffer. You are the only real standard as well as the only real enforcer by which the standard is maintained.

7) Take all the time necessary to get this one moment absolutely right before you move on. Once it’s perfect, it’s perfect forever.

8) Anything that the creator experiences can serve to inform the artistic product. Nothing remains off limits or beyond the perimeter.

9) Imagine the body of work that you want to be proud of twenty years from now and get started on it immediately.

10) Cut, cut, cut away. Nothing is sacred but the very end product.

Gratitude

Among a host of other significant things and ideas, I remain particularly grateful today for my wife, my parents, my friends, my dogs, and my work.

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” — James Joyce

The Weight of Others

The best definition I’ve yet heard of the distinction between an Introvert and an Extrovert is simply that the former gains energy from time spent alone, while the latter tends to recuperate through direct involvement with others. It has nonetheless taken me a fair bit of time to really comprehend that an individual’s particular tendency one way or the other is not related to his or her relative like or dislike of people in general. An Introvert will just as easily love spending time with his friends, though he may simply be unable to engage with them in the same way or to the same degree as his extroverted counterpart.

Milan Kundera christened the “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” principally in reference to the idea of the “lightness” of existence. Through his novel’s title, the Czech author was alluding to life’s eternally transient quality – the perpetually fleeting and un-repeating nature of this present experience of being alive. In Kundera’s version, however, this transient aspect seems to render all that we have and are and do as consequently insignificant. Conversely, I don’t believe that impermanence implies insignificance. Additionally, I imagine that this larger notion of “lightness” could be extended and expanded to include a variety of metaphysical “weights” within our lives – the weights that keep us from floating away, from vanishing. These are the relationships, people, things, loves, rules, and so forth with which we actively maintain connections. Positive weights in appropriate amounts help keep us grounded, in touch with others and with living, and connected to a functioning concept of reality. Too little weight or too much or the wrong kind, however, and one can ultimately recede or suffocate, respectively. Given this, the lightness of our existences and the particularities of our needs require us each to engineer individualized counterbalances toward a healthy progress forward.

While balancing relationships with others may come easier to some Extroverts, Introverts carry with them the definitional handicap of possessing a particularly limited allotment of time in which they can be a good version of themselves around other people. As a result, Introverts may need to exact special care in choosing the human weights that are allowed to inhabit their lives and demand their attentions: Simply, time is limited, and for an Introvert around others, it remains even more so. Consequently, in order for Introverts to assure that time spent with their real friends and family is optimal, it seems particularly crucial for Introverts to make deliberate and sometimes brutal choices regarding their respective time investments. Freedom means being able to live life the way you want. Ironically though, as easily as they can be detriments, in so many instances it’s the weights within our lives that give us our real freedoms, that allow us to live the life we want and as well as we can. In fact, I cannot imagine my life worth living were it not for the various positive weights in my life – my family, my friends, my work, and so forth. Nonetheless, it will always remain a delicate balance for Introverts in particular, a struggle for each of us to choose and cultivate and maintain the best within our own lives – ideally binding ourselves to the most fantastic version of existence that we are presently capable of having.

— For my father: Happy Birthday.

A Study in Theater

No matter what an individual does or desires to do for a living, it’s rarely a bad idea to engage in at least a little marketing – meaning that it’s generally smart to try to get the word out about you and your work. This includes informing audiences or potential customers about how your product or service is unique and why they should be interested. Varying professionals tend to command an array of traditions vis-à-vis where and how their particular kind of commodity should be marketed. However, the basic need for some level of public announcement seems fairly universal, whether one is engaged in mass commerce or experimental art.

Words like “marketing” sometimes come shaded with mistakenly negative connotation, and various sectors of non-commercial art can consequently tend to consider themselves above the need for self-promotion. However, it is not wrong to look for improved mechanisms of honestly informing others regarding one's work, and it is unfortunate when good craftsmen let their goods go unnoticed. When a problem with marketing does exist, it is due only to the intention and product behind the particular campaign, and the honesty with which the message is delivered.

So I would certainly not begrudge artists or musicians their various marketing strategies. In a world composed principally of mediocrity, lovers of great quality indeed need to work hard to get the word out. However, a tremendous danger continues to exist in the righteous maintenance of this balance for those professions that fundamentally claim art before profit. Much of modern marketing seems concerned with the regular maintenance of attention, which consequently tends to incentivize an environment in which more is synonymous with successful. Unfortunately, this is not particular to the commercial sector. Strong reasons exit for those we unquestioningly believe are engaging in pure art to create works with the principal goal of marketing themselves, as opposed to marketing themselves in order to promote their good artistic work. And while it’s not bad to be smart about the jobs one takes, it seems that a fundamental principal of true art would that it be inspired first by a good idea, and not by the cash or popularity it promises to garner.

The ubiquity of this threat among the true arts was illustrated for me recently in the context of a theatrical production in Los Angeles. My wife just finished the run of a small show at a local independent theater, where she energetically helped support a fairly esoteric script. Unfamiliar with the inner workings of theater, I was surprised when she informed me that one of the principal actors in this black box production would suddenly be missing two nights out of an already fairly short run. With no understudy, the rest of the cast was simply excused for the evenings. It turned out that the protagonist in question had simply been offered better opportunities, and when I expressed my naive exasperation at such disrespect for his fellow actors, let alone the art, my wife (who was involved for free and for the love of it) explained that it is in fact not uncommon for actors to engage in art house productions principally for the purposes of self-marketing. With the priority centered on collecting attention instead of the art work at hand, artistic integrity ceases to be a motivating force, and consequently nothing can ever be depended on to keep the work alive in the event of a more exciting opportunity.

And with a wink, the once true artist transforms himself eagerly into a dancing monkey, his art now merely a shrink-wrap display case for agents, managers, producers ...(...Gould must be rolling in his grave). If art is indeed the soul of a culture, what hope do we have when even the independents won’t hesitate to put cash and career ahead of a previous commitment to some simple, good work?

Aquarium

Albert Einstein once declared that “the most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical,” proceeding to state that “he to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

I have often wondered at the tendency toward a general blandness exhibited by many people’s choices. How does one become a person who chooses the most ordinary thing possible in almost any given circumstance? Conversely, what is the lifestyle that breeds a general childlike curiosity and openness, the only point of departure for any real newness?

More macroscopically, as a created landscape tends to reflect the sensibility of its resident culture’s dominant paradigms, it seems that one can’t help but also wonder at the populaces whose histories and cultures have over time consistently led to one extreme or the other. What is the situation that cultivates a childlike curiosity? And alternately, how does a culture mange to produce largely identical choices even in the midst of a relatively free society? In the latter instance, I’m not speaking of Soviet imposed monochromaticism, but of a free culture outright choosing the least imaginative options available among a spectrum of possibilities.

As one universal trait of children tends to be a natural tendency toward curiosity and creativity, how do ennui-dominated cultures ultimately come to be and how do they remain that way? How is it that a given culture can so consistently manage to quash a general tendency toward originality, so that it ends up being the inborn trait of childlike curiosity that becomes the real endangered species?

Unfortunately, it’s the simplest thing in the world, and even more tragically, it seems to most often result from an unconscious authoritarian tendency (Soviet achitecture again being a notable exception in its deliberateness). The process of creating a lockstep mind in the midst of a free society is in fact as simple as something I witnessed the other day:

While visiting the breathtaking Monterey Bay Aquarium, Redhead and I were enjoying ourselves in the tide pool area, trying to steal a feel of the velvety sting ray. A little boy was doing the same, enraptured in the undeniable mystery of the ocean, when what must have been his mother scolded him harshly and abruptly pulled him away - and clearly without any regard for the value of the activity in which he was involved (and at the aquarium!). This is the precise instance of devaluation, the same as the moment in which the sad, lost teacher instructs her precocious preschool student that coloring the duck purple is actually somehow incorrect. Over time, this is how we stop bothering to explore.

How strange to realize that remaining a creative individual can in fact be one of the most difficult and rare activities in which humans engage.

The Zero

Categories are placeholders, designed to group together items or ideas that we experience as related. We do this instinctually, for the sake of efficiency of thought and communication, and it is not in and of itself an unwise tendency. Children for instance wouldn’t be able to learn the world without the use of strict categories. At its logical conclusion, however, every category that includes two or more discrete items will ultimately come up short, since by its very nature a category will always be limiting. Given this, a fundamental problem arises when, after exploiting categories to gain a basic understanding of a particular idea or thing, an individual never gets back to re-questioning the initial assumptions upon which his or her crude but useful categories were based. This can lead to a situation in which the thought process of the individual acts as de facto slave to an unconscious collection of categorical rules, as opposed to the individual simply using the categories as tools toward his or her broader understanding of the world.

Like the zero, the category holds a crucial place in our comprehension of reality. The ultimate point however is to understand the larger meaning of what’s being represented by the placeholder, the actual purpose behind this communicative tool. Broad categories are like mental training wheels or the kiddie pool - they help bring us into the fold of a new concept. However, in order to make sure that this automatic impulse doesn’t end up ruling our existence and limiting us from proceeding to a higher level of communication, we must at some point realize that the categories as they were given are barely a point of departure, a temporary and patchwork crutch. Consequently, in order to engage in any actual thinking an individual has to reach beyond the necessity for large categorical rules, to see a thing as discrete and in some way classification unto itself. The initial, wider category is merely an instigation - a stepping stone to get us closer to the real idea of the individual - and this tool should not be permitted to instead become a leash. Ironically, the actual thing or idea toward which we are driving, as it is individual and discrete, will always ultimately remain beyond the perimeter of true categorization.

I don’t believe in the concept of an a priori “chair.” Or, if it does exist, it’s only in the collective agreement of a particular culture as to the definitional characteristics of “chair." A common use definition of “chair” is functional and it arises out of a majority consensus of those using the term at that time. It is not an eternal idea to which we strive to be privy - as there is no permanent “chair,” only the “chair” upon which we here presently agree for our needs as we try to understand the world and talk to each other. A great deal of time seems to be wasted adamantly arguing over who’s version of “chair” is the “correct” one. This mistakenly treats the idea of something like “chair” as sacred, as if it were a notion to which we are beholden and not the other way around. The point here is not for us to understand an eternal concept or category (nonetheless nonexistent beyond our own consensus), but simply to make use of the most ideal tools for our own communication given the context in which we find ourselves. The end goal is the communication and our greater understanding of the discrete and unique - the category is simply a jumpstart to help get us there.

The Pleasures of Complexity

In the process of trying to explain why I love scotch, I realized recently that the reasons are very similar to those underlying why I am so attracted to certain kinds of complicated art, and that the respective experiences of each have a great deal in common for me.

Though I love it, I don’t drink scotch all that often. It’s more of an occasional delicacy, as I find that I enjoy it more when it’s consumed in smaller amounts and less frequently. Part of the reason for this is that for me a little goes a long way - not in terms of alcohol content but in pure weight of experience. I thoroughly enjoy the complexity of good scotch and the process of experiencing and working through this complexity. At the same time I find that this kind of extra depth in any experiential form naturally requires additional space in which to resonate, and therefore that avoiding saturation allows me to experience scotch more ideally when I do drink it. An amazing scotch is both challenging and comforting at the same time, and at its best the world of taste it offers is an autonomous rabbit hole. I know I would be frustrated were everything I consumed to be this rich and confronting. However, I nonetheless gratefully reserve a small space in my life in which to ideally enjoy this particular kind of aesthetic puzzle, simply because it adds something special that wasn’t there before.

I don’t drink cheap scotch unless it’s blanketed in a cocktail. For me, naked scotch is only worth taking the time and consideration for if it’s of a certain age and standard as, not unlike rich chocolate, it seems best consumed in high quality and sparing amounts. I enjoy different cocktails for different reasons and there’s nothing wrong with a one-dimensional drink: I love a sweet, cheap margarita. However, I also recognize that I enjoy a $5 margarita and a 15-year-old scotch in different ways and for very different reasons.

As with booze, different approaches to art and media are also best criticized and understood against a specific and appropriate context. I make no apologies for judging the music at the nightclub differently than that presented in the concert hall, because the two are deliberately designed with very different (yet both functional) goals in mind. However, each can be judged in terms of its craft and intentions within the context of its own world, as compared against its own goals. Craft is contextual, and with both art and booze, “good” remains a situational question.

The question of ultimate adjudication is also relevant to both alcohol and art. To become an expert in discerning and judging wine, a sommelier will dedicate copious time ingesting, considering, analyzing, and then articulating the minute distinctions in an endless library of variations. Given this, when an expert drinks a glass of wine and tells us what he or she tastes, we don’t wonder at the process. We understand that deep immersion in a specialized field tends to lead to a certain kind of heightened judgment concerning items within that field, and that we sometimes find this judgment very useful when, say, we’re trying to figure out what to order with dinner or what might be a good cellar investment.

A core problem, however, is that it can be difficult for a novice to accurately discern where a standard does or should lie, particularly when a field becomes very abstruse and we are unsure of the motivations of those helping to guide our choices. Every niche wine maker and scotch dealer wants you to believe that his or her product is the best, and so distinguishing between truth and marketing can be hard in these situations, especially when we ourselves are not experts in the field. Were leaders of any stripe inherently trustworthy and self-policing this would not be an issue. However, too many obvious incentives exist now for the keepers of arcane tastes not to educate toward an open and free thinking society, but to control the standard of what is tasteful for ultimately personal gain: by controlling resources, gerrymandering aesthetic rules, and mastering a game of rhetorical justifications, highly mediocre artists with theories far more creative and considered than their music are able to engineer little worlds that mathematically justify their work in utter spite of its impotence and irrelevance.

Therefore, though we may not be expert, in the end we have nothing but ourselves as the most trustworthy barometers when we approach the new thing about which we are curious. Whether scotch or complicated music or whatever else, our experience will always be incomplete, always imperfect, because in the end no one ever has a complete experience. Sure, those who’ve spent more time studying a thing will tend to understand more about its mechanics, but in the end no one sees everything and even the best judgments are easily be clouded by arrogance, insecurity, and other people’s bad opinions. Research, dig around for yourself, follow your own curiosity, and yes, do ask the advice of those who’ve dedicated their lives to the subject, whatever it may be. However, at the same time realize that if an individual can approach a new experience openly and honestly, then it’s ultimately the sole duty of that individual to make his or her own choices about the particular new experience - what was valuable about it, and whether something like it should be undertaken again.

I am no educated connoisseur of scotch, just another fan. I ask recommendations and listen to those around me who know more, but in the end I understand that if I can have an honest experience then I need make no apology for making up my own mind. I’ve found some of the most precious things in my life this way, far outside of anything I thought I knew. However, to get to these treasures we have to first be comfortable cutting through the fortifications of expert nonsense, to just focus on simply what we are experiencing and what we love about that experience: Complexity, challenge, and the ongoing reward of spending a little extra time considering something special and beautiful.

Vindication

There is no test of a philosophy beyond the effect that occurs in reality upon that philosophy’s implementation. It’s very worthwhile to engage in discussion, debate, and patient, methodical consideration regarding a system of beliefs. However, the only and true test of an ideology is what happens when it crosses over the threshold to become an action, or a series of actions. Does the updated network make reality better than it was before? The new system need not be perfect - many of those in use are still quite flawed. However, in order for it to be of any actual value, it does need to induce some kind of real, physical progress.

It is a powerful thing to see a philosophy, good or bad, become incarnate through a person’s work and life - when an individual actually changes his or her mind, even a little, and then starts to actively put this change into practice. And it’s a particularly powerful thing to see a philosophy change something or someone for the better. I also believe that in this way people can change their environments and that the process can unfold out macroscopically: a consistent set of actions guided by a positive, functional philosophy can directly influence the environment of the individual in sometimes extraordinary and quite remarkable ways.

This last weekend, Redhead and I celebrated our wedding with many of our dearest friends. We wanted people to be allowed to be who they were, and in the end everything worked more perfectly that we could have imagined. Set in the Bay Area, amazing people of all stripes traveled from Boston, New York, LA, and Ohio. It was utterly ideal in so many ways, with one of the lesser important yet nonetheless notable lessons being simply how well it all worked. We believed that if you collect creative, good-willed people in a free, comfortable space then the results would be extraordinary, beautiful, and utterly effective. It turns out that we were right.

Thank you so much to our amazing friends - you are our family! 100910

Love

"For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

— Papa Rilke

Opiate of the Cognoscenti

It’s amazing how many highly intelligent people I’ve encountered who themselves are a slave to some grand, sorry dogma. I understand the reasoning behind this basic tendency: a dogma comes prepackaged, with all the major questions already covered in some way when you find it – and if the belief system is any good at all, with relatively self-consistent answers. This fulfills a practical need, as it limits the mental workload of the dogmatic person: it tightens the field of view, and thereby makes it easier to consider only the issues the individual actually wants to think about. A dogma also provides an automatic “us and them,” and consequently a built-in community – and for those who might have had a hard time making friends anyway, this is especially attractive. However, while these are both admittedly crucial traits, I believe the most addictive quality of a dogmatic system for an artist is, fundamentally, that it provides a way to articulate how “I” am better than “you.” It is a simple solution for a deep insecurity. This is one reason why it’s often easy to find that some of the most senselessly dogmatic are among the most lost people you will ever meet: it’s a security blanket, and the more lost the artist is when they find the system, the more it will tend to entrench in their life and work, and the greater a mental crutch it will become. The dogma fills up the empty person like water between rocks – a secular, justifiable god. The cognoscenti are fond of remarking negatively on the “simpler person’s” need for archaic faiths. Ironically, I have so often witnessed these same people argue desperately for the most threadbare, hand-me-down artistic dogmas – people who would claim to be on the absolute cutting edge of artist creation, free and wandering the perimeter.

The core and perennial problem with stylistic dogmatism in art is that, by definition, the degree to which it reigns in a given art object is the degree to which that object is no longer a work of art – at least not to the same degree, not anywhere near the same caliber, and however you slice it, certainly not what thinking people mean when they talk about the avant-garde. One of the principal costs of a dogma is that in exchange for its safety and somewhat complete answers, the artist must sacrifice his own decision-making power. Given this, the degree to which an artist's decisions are guided by an external, prefabricated doctrine is the degree to which the artist chooses to submit to the notion that nothing new is possible in this art object. And so wherever dogma is the guiding force, real experimentation cannot permitted, and therefore nothing truly new can happen. And with so few resources available, how can we have a new music worth supporting that isn’t actually new? Only in the areas from which dogmatism has been exorcised can truly honest art be possible.

It’s not a fresh idea: without breaking rules, the groundbreaking stuff just doesn’t happen. Thomas Kinkade is not the same thing as a work of Christo and Jean-Claude, no matter how well crafted the justifications and explanations surrounding the former may be. The really unfortunate thing is the reality that ensues when the dogmatic reign without recognizing their own dogmatisms. The dogmatic have traditionally been able to find a comfortable home in the academy, as it provides little real artistic challenge beyond a general game of semantics. Unfortunately, the lockstep artist seems by my little experience to represent the vast majority of those actively working in what they would call new music. The reason is, again, that it’s an easy and often accepted way of being, and more so, that the alternative is much more difficult: to figure it all out for yourself from scratch, to find the answers yourself, to dig out all the questions one by one with your own tired, dirty little hands. Without a doubt, this is a much, much more difficult thing to do. Truthfully, it’s not even in the same category of being. But then, it is also the only way to actually become an artist.

“And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not…A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.” — Rilke

Anarchy

"The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art."

— Federico García Lorca

From a Running List

Bill Waterson, Italo Calvino, Francis Bacon, Antonio Gaudi, Joseph Campbell, Federico Garcia Lorca, Klaus Kinski, Stanley Kubrick, Györgi Ligeti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Andy Goldsworthy, Virginia Woolfe, Gérard Grisey, Wes Anderson, Jose Luis Borges, Louis Andriessen, F.F. Coppola, J.M. Basquiat, Jane’s Addiction, Henry David Thoreau, John Zorn, Chris Van Allsberg, Maynard James Keenan, Giancinto Scelsi, Gabriel Garcia Marqeuz, Led Zeppelin, Marc Chagall, Ayn Rand, Conlon Nancarrow, L.V. Beethoven, J.S. Bach, M. Buonarroti, M. Mazzoni, Daniel Liebeskind, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Helmut Lachenmann, Terry Gilliam

Virginia

In 1929, Virginia Woolfe wrote that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." When she penned this, Ms. Woolf was resisting a system that tried to tell her what she could be, and she was offering a clear, pragmatic goal for others in her position. The particular fascism that she faced was patriarchal. However, her message speaks to anyone honestly engaged in the rare act of trying to be an individual - anyone attempting some true, good work in a largely disinterested world.

The need and vindication of the true artist arises internally. In the end, no one else can tell the artist what work she must do, nor when it is done. Woolf naturally understands this and so does not to speak to any artistic objective: she knows that if the reader is hungry enough for her advice, this question will already be within her hands. No, Ms. Woolf’s dicta is simply a clear, logistical message from an artist who wanted to help us acquire and maintain a freedom that she herself found so precious and necessary. Independence is the only path to artistic integrity.

RIP AVW 032841

Insight

"A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Systemic Flaw

Even perfect human systems still function at the mercy of the slowest common human denominator, the base limit of the laziest of those minds involved. In a society where both conscious, critical thought and a general sense of personal responsibility seem progressively, exponentially less common, we find ourselves with the paradox of both evolving machines and a regressing population. We waste a great deal of time tinkering with and comparing already perfect, good, or at least adequate systems – though ideally they would all be perfect, naturally – when the preponderance of the problem is in fact the presence and prowess of the individuals at work within and working the system(s). Human participation unfortunately renders even ideal systems imperfect, and we continue to suffer the same mistakes until we are able to cultivate a society interested in trying to be awake. Instead, we are regularly confronted with the evidence of a people on autopilot.

Dog parks often have a double-gated entrance, to insure against pet exit. Today, an oblivious family managed to leave both gates open long enough for one of our dogs to make it out onto the sidewalk, an escape that for a variety of reasons should never have come close to taking place. Given that this gate led almost directly onto the street, the chance for the situation to have become something more serious was high. Everything ended well, fortunately. However, it did leave me considering the kind of cage it is to see how things could be better and to simply not understand the simplest actions of those around you.

The double gate is a good, solid, simple system. Only a human could be stupid enough to screw it up.

The Honest Work

I do think that in the end it is and always will be the honesty of the work that matters most, that reaches through with its impossible syringe to communicate in some way so far past the point of our understanding, or any need for our understanding.

I wish, I wish, I wish, though it will never happen here because Californians are, for the most part, sissies

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - One Nevada gubernatorial hopeful sees a speedy fix to Nevada's budget crisis. Nonpartisan candidate Eugene "Gino" DiSimone believes people would pay for the privilege to drive up to 90 mph on designated highways—and fill the state's depleted coffers.

DiSimone calls his idea the "free limit plan." He estimates the plan would bring in $1 billion a year.

First, vehicles would have to pass a safety inspection. Then vehicle information would be loaded into a database, and motorists would purchase a transponder.

After setting up an account, anyone in a hurry could dial in, and for $25 charged to a credit card, be free to speed for 24 hours.

The Nevada Highway Patrol isn't keen on the idea, saying it would lead to increased injuries and traffic deaths.

- From:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9I1D6T01&show_article=1
"Nevada candidate touts speedy fix to budget crisis"
Sep 4 07:17 PM US/Eastern

The Next City

Lost Angeles. Second morning in the new place. The boys already know the routine. This apartment and waking up in the cool morning ocean city air reminds me of Santa Cruz and Grandma.

The neighbor’s dogs have received the unfortunate sobriquet Cerberus, for their insane unprovoked and relentless barking. The neighbors who owe the dogs seem very nice, just oblivious - and obliviousness is, after all, the predominant state of mankind. So it goes living with humans, and we need to keep this in mind when we go out into the wilderness and try to communicate with them.

On the opposite side of the lot stands a tall, beautiful bamboo wall. I’m pretty sure there are chickens living on the other side of this wall, as I occasionally hear them caballing. I wonder sometimes what they are planning. Thankfully, I have yet to hear a rooster.

Moving was cathartic; it always is - forcing tangible value decisions over the physical materials in one's life. It’s always good for me, cleansing, as it’s amazing how much useless garbage I collect so quickly. And especially odd considering how I imagine myself to be so vigilant in this respect. Anyway, whatever the cases, it feels good to be here, for so many reasons without reason to name.

The Redhead is utterly amazing; unbelievably, I love her more every day. She is this incredible blend of pioneer and modern woman, and for so many reasons and in so many ways I’d be utterly lost without her. We’re both so tired of moving now - we feel this deep, long, and long awaited exhaustion - and are hoping so much that this will be the last stop for a long time. We’re ready to settle in and get to work.

The first night in bed in the dark we drank the opening shots of 15-year-old Dalwhinnie Robb so awesomely gifted for my 33rd. The following afternoon we spent more than an hour at the dog park, in the heat and shade and joy. Also, I have become a gardener, raising as I now am five small herb plant with which I intend to make Stone Soup. By the way, this entry is belated for reasons of internet availability.

A good sign: The previous tenants, a young Canadian couple, left 2 Natural Lights in the fridge for us. Yes, good people do exist, even in LA.

American Gypsy, Part II

The Bay Area, Santa Barbara, Ma's Cambridge, Bangkok, Manhattan, San Francisco, and LA. What a funny thing to note that there are ways in which the latter will be the cheapest city in which I've every lived.

Expectation

No matter what you do, if it’s of any significance whatsoever, someone will laugh at you.

Natural Music

Distant geese on an overcast morning.

Wonderland

In my Alice it's a centipede, not a caterpillar.

Little Symbolisms

Only secondarily for its semiotic weight, as apart of the preparation for our upcoming move, today I filled a bunch of my old dress socks with bits of food, bones, and sundry toys, tied them into knots, and fed them to my very grateful dogs.

The Virtue of Impatience, Part One

Impatience is a reasonable reaction to the brevity of things. Life is infinitesimally short. However, it seems that by all accounts different people experience time differently, and that a quality of real urgency is actually something fairly rare.

Patience is, indeed, a virtue, and one often absent when warranted as well, no argument. However, it can also be a terrible fault to move too slowly, as deer-in-the-headlights-as-a-default will at times be the shortest route to extinction. Sometimes the virtuous thing is instead to charge forward with all force and speed, without hesitation.

Balance in this just like everything else.

Television

Bless Chef Gordon Ramsey and Simon Cowell for in some small way making a corner of popular television safe for the unabashed search for excellence, even a context of cheapest-seat entertainment.

Counterproductive Design

Though I wasn’t in a hurry, I was eager to move forward with my errand: there are things in life in which we should revel and take time, and there are things that exist that exist simply to be moved through, to be gotten done with — and a balanced life lends patience to the former but efficiency to the latter, as efficiency exists in a healthy environment to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible.

Pulling into the parking lot, the car immediately in front of me was an attractive, low-riding truck. The few large speed bumps between the destination and me would have been barely noticeable and quickly surpassed by my simple, stock vehicle and we would have been on our way without barely a glance. However, these ultimately came to be a great obstacle to the truck preceding me, and therefore, consequently, me, as the truck’s attractive design forced the vehicle to take a ridiculous amount of time and to drive diagonally as well, thereby taking up the entire driveway area and turning the stupid into an entire event. It was an amazing example of sadly counterproductive design. No, it is not enough to be pretty — the truly beautiful is also in some way useful.

Signage

This is the writing on the wall:

Increasingly we are told what to do, what not to do, and how to do whatever it is we’re still allowed to do. Collectively we grow increasingly comfortable with the extent of optional outside influence that we have permitted into in our lives, to the point where we now expect it, even demand it. What would we do without it? Packaging geared to the most pathetic, lazy, and ignorant of us conditions a population not to think independently or self-police, but to expect instructions as the default. We grow progressively inured to the notion that someone else will tell us what to do – the tragedy is how many people here might see that as an advantage. However, the cost of claiming this right to be sheep is that in doing so we cede the right to think and make decisions for ourselves. Now, what would “civilized” people these days do without signage? Even the most ridiculous instructions and warnings have to be articulated, since in the lieu of instructions all bets are off: reason is no longer expected or assumed. Reason is no longer the burden of the individual in the world. But as everyone knows, freedom doesn't work without responsibility, and so, in the end, those who choose to be sheep with receive a sheep's reward.

Incremental Improvements in Reality

Jay Shafer's small houses. Beautiful living!
http://vitality.yahoo.com/video-second-act-jay-shafer-20910192
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/home.html

Small Investments in the Continuing Composition

I was sitting in my little workroom when a towel that had been hung over the shower curtain rail since the previous morning suddenly slipped down and dropped gently to the floor. Though up to this point it had appeared to me to be still and unchanging, the forces leading up to this final and seemingly jagged action had in fact been present and progressing all along, patiently mounting their attack, adding in some small way throughout to the richness of the whole. This final action was simply an investment waiting for its moment of realization, until then just another unnoticed part of the whole mechanism of the fluid and continuing composition.

Size

“My music is never chamber music, not even in the case of a solo sonata.”

- Galina Ustvolskaya

Incremental Improvements in Reality

The American Tradition

While many countries can claim more or less logical progressions of collectively cogent cultural traditions, the catalogue of truly excellent American New Music and its corresponding composers is for me a lineage of mavericks - determined, visionary individuals who have each to some extent made up their own musical traditions.

The ability to believe in and to follow out ones craziest imagining, ones most beautiful idea no matter how strange - even in the face of utter solitude and misunderstanding - this is the revolution in the blood and the core of our inherited legacy.

No matter where it happens, the art music scene will in one way or another continue to be mired in a milieu of marketing and very clever yet ultimately vapid and content-free filler, an onslaught of distractions and replications with only a handful of real treasures or worthwhile questions scattered among them. However, while it should be expected that garbage and mediocrity will continue to be the preponderance of what this scene exhales, I hope our best individuals never lose the ability and the courage to think and act beyond the common belief.

Ives, Cage, Bernstein, Partch, Nancarrow, Crumb, Zorn, Reich, Davidovsky - this is the American tradition.

Films for Artists: excerpts from a perpetual & unordered list

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
The Legend of 1900
Ratatouille
The Five Obstructions
Fitzcarraldo

Varying Ends

In November 1995, "The Wire" published an article titled "Advice to Clever Children." In the process of producing the interview, a package of tapes containing music from several artists, including Aphex Twin, was sent to Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Stockhausen commented:

“I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [wasn't] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.”

Aphex Twin responded:

"I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: "Didgeridoo," then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to."

- Wikipedia

The Swamp

The United States' New Music scene has, to its great credit, constructed itself principally on its own — a slow, brutal, Fabian advance, but an amazing and largely self-determined advance nonetheless.

A general lack of government support has forced unprotected activators in particular — e.g., those operating outside the armor of academia — to grow increasingly resourceful, to scrounge for new solutions, to consider and work outside of the projected and predictable boxes. [N.B — The token NEA funds that are available require so much bureaucratic application red tape that it’s often not worth the time or simply asks more resources than a small organization can reasonably manage.] Whether or not one believes that such government support is more help- or hurtful long-long-term for a scene like ours, the simple reality is that US composers and ensembles right now exist in a much more brutal world generally than, say, their French or German counterparts.

While it’s easy for those of us in the US New Music scene to jealously obsess over always-greener funding grasses, the general circumstance in which we find ourselves may also prove eventually to have been the compost heap out of which the next generation’s solutions were developed. A certain amount of discomfort is necessary for significant growth: not so much that the organism is crushed and defeated, but not so little that it forgets how to evolve beyond the world it knows. The ideal is just enough to force the maximum improvement.

This present US swamp of do-it-yourselfers and defiant music makers, this diasporitic congregation of hard-charging, problem-solving, imaginative, and willfully dedicated American minds all working and being and experimenting in this New Music project — this is the Factory of the Phoenix, this is our great, brilliant, and relentless wealth. This swamp army of passionate and hard-working mavericks owns the classic American recipe for our next evolution, and if we ever are to learn how to thrive in what the world is becoming — and not just panting to hungrily trail along — then this now will have been the laboratory for that victory.

I want to be careful to emphasize here that we are speaking strictly as to the question of how to thrive in a brutal economic and cultural environment while simultaneously maintaining the highest standards of artistic excellence. It is an old and easy trick to work at the lowest common denominator or mass produce under a standard of “high art,” providing the convenient content of popular culture with the warm feelings that come along with things that make us feel smart. However, a solution that compromises a fundamental value is simply not a solution, it is a distraction, and it does no one any good to conflate garbage and greatness. We are interested in looking for new mechanisms to create a better environment for the advancement of truly progressive artistic projects in the United States, and not for those works that simply make use of the label for marketing purposes.

This will continue to be a slow and dirty process, and when a solution emerges it won’t be a single item or cure, but a new network of evolved details — processes, ideas, mechanisms, partnerships, understandings, technologies, and so forth — and it will always require more work, more refinement, more improvement. However, if we ever are able to learn to do this, to thrive without government support, then this research will not only have been for us here, but for every composer in every country whose cultural support may have found itself desiccated in the face of mounting debts, less patient citizens, and generally more market-oriented mindsets. We have to keep pushing, to make sure that we don't find ourselves to be dinosaurs irritable and too slow to act regarding the onset of permanent winter.

Order

"Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system."

- Alfred North Whitehead

First Hearing

Someone once told me they saw a sign in a bookstore that proclaimed: “Read the good books first. You won’t have time to read them all.” It’s true. Resources are limited. Time is limited. And as much as I may hate to admit it, to spend time with one thing is to take time that could be invested in attention to another. We all have these choices to make, to the degree we have choices to make, and to the degree we realize the choices we have.

I am the harshest critic of contemporary music. I am suspicious of marketing and the avant-garde being so easily conflated and confused as it is, and beyond this I think "art" composers are too often allowed to get away with far too much sloppiness, inconsideration, and generally laziness, all in the name of modern artistic license (what Philistine can challenge them/us, after all?). To be fair, it’s somewhat hard to blame them when the system in place, in the US at least, strongly incentivizes this general behavior - quantity over quality, clever but baseless marketing tactics, and an obsession with recreating pretty formulas long since discovered safe enough to continue wringing out ovations. (E.g., not a whole lot different then some of your typical market economy behavior.) But still, it’s not why I got involved in all this, it turns my stomach, and even more to the point, I don’t completely understand how a new music “artist” could live with so much compromise. But then, I have heard it takes all kinds.

I’ve listened to a fair bit of new music by now. I know a bunch of people who’ve heard a lot more than me, indeed, but nonetheless I’m not a spring chicken. We all listen for different things and we all need different things. However, when I listen to a new work of contemporary art music now, I know what I’m after and I’m unapologetic in my brutality. Life is just too short and there is just too much great stuff out there and I have a lot of looking left to do.

To begin with, a work needs to reach in some way viscerally during the first hearing. This way can be small or atypical, but during this first listening there must be something that I feel physically or emotionally or somehow experientially beyond simply the math in my head. If I don’t experience anything during this first time, it’s likely I will never listen to the piece again. I am alive and I need life in my music. No, very little is impossible – a friend may push me to give it another listen, it may be by a composer I already admire, and so forth, yes, yes. However, I know that I have had amazing experiences with music, I know what these are like, and I really don’t have a lot of time for much other than the extraordinary. People say “it was nice.” Ugh, what a bore. This music that I love pushes edges, challenges, creates new sound experiences. Give me love or give me hate: “Nice” feels like an anathema.

But that’s only part of it. There is, obviously, a great deal of music that accomplishes the aforementioned in spades, but that we still just don’t care that much about, that won’t make a significant impact, and that we wouldn't be able to develop a developing relationship with over time. What I want is to become curious through listening, to feel something, and then to investigate and discover beyond this the work’s depth, the artist’s meticulous consideration. This is the great balance: seeing the "Pietà" and then reading "The Agony and the Ecstasy." There is something so satisfying, so holistically fulfilling artistically to experience a work like this, a work that is for me complete. And this rare thing is what I begin to look for when I first listen to a new work of contemporary art music, and all I feel I really have time for within the space that this precious, pregnant music occupies in my life.

Guitar, Part II

Redhead and I recently took a little driving vacation to the city of my undergrad alma mater, a little beach town. Though proficient in early music, and a singer in particular, until this trip my girl did not really play any small stringed instruments (though in the interest of full disclosure she did play upright bass in high school). But on the trip she decided to branch out and we got a little $50 classic guitar, beaten but authentic and beautiful, and with a few quick lessons she was playing and singling along to some of her favorite songs. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to share an instrument with your partner.

Guitar

I am in love with my 12-string acoustic guitar. Black and audacious, it’s traveled to the other side of the world with me. I got it from my parents for my 19th birthday and I’ve never heard any sound come out of it that wasn’t utterly gorgeous. But though I feel close to the guitar and I’ve never had anything against naming an owned thing per se, still for a long time the idea just never made much sense for my own little family of instruments.

Hexa (a.k.a. Mary Greitzer) gifted me a much beloved copy of Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” a few months before I moved to Thailand in 2007 to write my dissertation. An amazing and prescient book, it just struck me the way the right books at the right times can. Then I left the country for a year with a few bags and a guitar, to hide out and write an opera and then to travel. Though I’d trekked a fair bit elsewhere, I had not been to Asia before I arrived in Bangkok that first night with everything I’d have for the next year, when she named herself. Finally in my hotel room I ordered a large plate of pad thai, smoked a cigar, opened the Red Label left in the room (the kind for which one pays too much at checkout), and then carved “Rocinante” into my guitar’s hard, scraped, sticker-free plastic case before passing out around 4:00am.

Elegance at the Zoo

- The manner in which monkeys (in this case, white handed gibbons) move through space is elegant and amazing, and I think one particularly potent ingredient of this for me is how smooth and natural, how instinctual it all seems to be - how they manipulate space so casually. In some sense I think it's the awareness of the general depth of complexity of a thing that is made to look so utterly facile that really gets me (the "Crouching Tiger" Effect).

- I tend to find your average aquatic mammal more elegant than your average cold blooded swimming thing. I wonder whether this is 1) related to the previous point (in that it seems to me for some reason that it must be more difficult for mammals underwater and therefore I subconsciously root for them as the underdog as it were, even if the premise for my rooting isn't actually true), or 2) whether I just connect better with mammals. It's all likely nothing more than a matter of aesthetics - the trifles of fur, whiskers, and so forth - but whatever the case may be, otters are pretty cool.

- Giraffes and flamingos are both creatures that strike me as if they should be in some way awkward, but whose utter lithe elegance within this expectation makes them all the more lovely.

Idea and Action

It seems that one without the other is ultimately either briefly distracting or pointlessly frustrating, respectively, and that neither consequence is worth our time.

Seen from another side, what breathtaking human r/evolution ever resulted from something other than the two in concert?

The Musical Will

Not only can a musical character, personality, anima, entity move and evolve of its own accord, it can proliferate into other works as well. The Musical Work and its constitutive elements can themselves in the most ideal circumstances possess, or tap into, wills of their own: the Musical Will, the force passing through the pitches and instruments and rhythms and the breathing. The soul underneath and at the center of the honest, hard music. The teleological undercurrent that grabs my foot on the beach, endeavoring to drag me back into the sea.

Basquiat, part I

Sometime in the middle of grad school I was on a weekend trip to NYC and had the opportunity to see a large Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I’d already been a fan since sometime in the middle of high school—when my buddy Jason had introduced me to Warhol and the whole scene history—as from the beginning there had always been something special about Basquiat’s work that struck me, something that just seemed right.

I personally believe that the way to develop over time as an artist-composer—as opposed to a principally commercial-composer, which, though they do intersect and overlap, are different animals—is basically to look for and refine oneself, within ones work. Fundamentally, there are two constitutive pieces, or threads, to this: 1) the Idea(s), and 2) the Craft.

For some reason, at some time, we—meaning those of us who now call ourselves composers—fell in love with music, and then writing music; and this part, at least for me, was all about passion and ideas and excitement (and is in fact the same reason that I keep composing). We then take this childlike enthusiasm and this fresh pool of ideas, and we work to develop Craft, or the ability to ideally and accurately realize the Idea. We have the Idea—the creativity, the wide-eyed vision of the future yet-to-be—and the Craft—the skill set to make malleable any tool, to create any sound one imagines. The latter, generally, is what an academic institution will typically and predominately focus on helping with, and I’m not necessarily proposing any specific argument with any of that. However, what can unfortunately happen in higher music education is for Craft to somehow seem to become substitute for Idea, or to camouflage itself as Idea, or to lure us into believing that with enough Craft, Idea is just not all that important. The goal however is ideally to continually develop both creativity and engineering.

I’ve mentioned this before and am sure I will do so again and again, but I don’t believe Style is something for which one should directly, actively search. Instead, we create an existence—specifically, an artistic existence—in which we are open and able to collect ideas all the time and from everywhere (or from wherever the artist wants), filter them constantly, and over time work with and either discard the materials or make them our own. We find and refine our own tools. We find better ways of connecting our own poetries, re-collecting the internal diaspora, making the disparate as complete as it ever will be—perpetually as we can. We all come from a multitude of somewheres, and really, categories are so often for the lazy. I just look for the items—the metaphors, sounds, and suggestions—that I love and then try to work with them, as any artist does.

The much-later visit to the Brooklyn Museum took place when I was dealing a number of core concerns regarding my own composing. One of the emerging tendencies in my work was the strong, recurring gravitation toward certain core ideas, themes, motifs—a gravitation that seemed disproportionate, and whose influence demanded greater attention and became increasingly difficult to ignore the clearer and more self-confident I became with regard to other aspects of my composing. There were certain ideas—usually very general like a motif or metaphor, but occasionally more specific like a particular rhythmic motive—that kept interjecting, needing to be included again and again in different ways. And concomitantly, the new work would only feel right were the gregarious, seemingly-foreign entity ultimately incorporated.

It was an obsession with a handful of recurring, undercurrent ideas—a strange collection of things, it seemed to me, and strange how the collection allowed itself to be added to, like some secret society. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with or sure how I felt about this general compositional tendency, being in a particularly insecure part of my education at the time; I wondered, even amidst all my desires toward self-determination, whether this was “legitimate” (ah, the things we wonder about in school…)—whether this aspect of how I worked or felt compelled to work was “okay.”

The Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition had 150 paintings of all sizes, full of strong, jutting gestures, “crudeness” and elegance presented as anything but opposites, and endless examples of gorgeous, flagrant obsession: an entire personal iconography. The poet had created and exploited his own hieroglyphics of rough imageries, shapes, words, references, fragments of personal and cultural histories—a fundamental but personal alphabet, pieces of a language for endless combinations and degrees of inclusion and re-contextualization—and the results were there for all to see. For me, personally, it was genius.

Maybe we shouldn’t need to get permission; maybe we artists should just be able to evolve all on our own, to figure out what we need to do and then do it. Whatever the case may be, with this experience the man gave me permission to make obsession a permanent tool and I instead began thinking about how to to more ideally make use of this natural tendency within myself instead of fighting it. This experience had a permanent impact on the way that I think about creating, and I am still utterly taken by his work—what an absolutely unbelievable artist. RIP JMB 08121998.

Good moment

Raining outside, sitting on the bed, the dog asleep, working, listening to early Tom Waits.

Invasion

It bothers me that a local bookstore, part of a large chain, installed a television at their information booth. The screen runs a repeating advertisement for some series of products. When I politely mentioned to the gentleman in attendance whether they’d considered that some might find it offensive to be confronted with a television in a bookstore, he said no, that I was the first to have mentioned it. I said I understood there were much larger forces at work but wanted to go on record saying that I found it a little intrusive, being a person who deeply enjoys bookstores as one of our last citadels of silence and consideration in an ever cluttered, clamoring, and invasive world.

But so it goes.

Style and Substance

A thing that concerns me is, in our efforts and enthusiasm to create an improved space for new music in the United States, whether what it is that we're cultivating is in fact a system built around presenting truly great music, or whether it is instead nothing more than merely another style, a style known collectively as "new music."

In actual practice in particular, it often seems that the concert event is designed - whether intentionally or incidentally - to be about "being about new music," and it's first mission is not necessarily focused on great music that happens to be new music.

I tend to believe that focused missions/goal points and clear, simple priorities are necessary for an organization to thrive. I also tend to feel that the continued growth of new music in the US will necessitate us stepping up our game. Focus is a key, especially for the smaller organizations - resources are so tight and there is nothing to waste, and it is so hard to get people in seats even once in the first place. Once s/he's there, we need to do all we can to make absolutely sure that what the audience member then witnesses is something that is both artistically incredible and that will make them curious and anxious about coming back next time. Given the current US new music situation, to my mind one truly spectacular new music event is of more value than a thousand mediocre shows: I believe we need to bet big, with greater focus, for greater returns, instead of handing the new (and potentially lifelong) audience member something inconsistently ranging from bad to decent to occasionally great. We talk so much about the remarkable in our music but the public gets to see so little of this in reality.

I love new music in large part because of its particular ability to be so utterly fantastic, to push and pioneer out into the unknown music of the future, for the options that right now we have yet to have any idea about. And I see the potential of new music for creating this experience to be one of our great kinetic strengths in promoting ourselves to the civilian music world, and in changing the cultural landscape of the US as it relates to new music over the course of this and this next generation.

However, in our vigor to be ecumenical we can lose sight of the most important word necessary to maintain a crucial excellence: No. Excellence of intention, excellence of execution, excellence of curatorship. Not every newly composed work "deserves" to be presented at the same level, and pretending like they do encourages programmers, especially less experienced programmers, to flood an already struggling scene with so much mediocrity. Mediocrity is the albatross around the collective neck of our scene - and ironically so, as contemporary music has traditionally loved to pass itself off as quite elite. And while I tend to feel this attitude of elitism is intensely counterproductive, at the same time I believe that mediocrity will never save us. We need a consistent excellence, but absent an attitude of elitism. It is about the excellent and the fantastic.

Freedom

This week, a celebratory post.

Scenes from a Perpetual Question

I’ve had great listening experiences with instances from almost every strain of music that I’ve encountered—this is no surprise since, as is typical of people these days to a more or lesser degree I suspect, I enjoy listening to many different kinds of music. I also tend to prefer different styles and pieces differently, finding this or that music more or less preferable given the particular context—again, not an especially alien tendency. Music is like wine in more ways than one, and it matters which varietal accompanies which situation (though it’s always important to remember to keep some Carlo Rossi around for safety’s sake).

A great personal irony is that while I love to write so-called new music ("so-called" because this is the least-bad term anyone’s come up with so far for the lucid but elitist “Western contemporary art music”), and while this is what I’ve spent much of the body of my short career trying to actively advocate for, I personally find in reality that, as compared to examples of most other genres, a much smaller percentage of the new music that I encounter is likable. What I mean is that I am likelier to at least reasonably enjoy, or to be entertained by, one out a hundred rock songs, in the way I enjoy a rock song, than I am to enjoy one out of a hundred average works of contemporary music in the way I enjoy (when I really enjoy) a work of contemporary music. And before I go on I need to make clear that I’ve had transcendent experiences with rock songs. However, though most of new music seems so often average to boring and not at all a good use of available resources, the genre more than makes up for itself: In the end, my favorite works of all are still those of contemporary music. The great difference is that when a piece of new music really works, nothing else can touch it.

In the metaphor of the meal, amazing new music is something like an extremely dark rich decadent fudge. The kind of awesome and exhausting experience that you have once in a while and should only usually bother with in extreme quality.

Assuming the question

This has happened on a few occasions since we've recently started camping out in Agrestic. I find it annoying and indicative, symptomatic of something. Today the incident took place at the local incarnation of a large chain store specializing in technology and related paraphernalia:

Redhead and I are in need of a new backup system for our collective computers and we went in looking for what we knew we wanted, having spent some time previous to this trip researching the possibilities online, including going through this company's own website (a company for which we have a gift card obliging us to find use of it). After explaining what we wanted, "Daryl" waddled off to pass along his question to someone less uninformed, returning a little later telling us that the chain didn't carry this item. We explained that we'd seen it listed on the company's website earlier that day. Daryl then proceeds to being asking why we needed it. Why, Daryl, why do you need this information? Are you assuming that we - who came in knowing what we wanted and who only wanted a straight answer - don't know what we're talking about and don't really need what it is we're asking for? Daryl, if you don't think you have the item, what business is it of yours why we would need it? It's insulting - condescending and ignorant - to presume to understand our situation better than we do. This also happened regarding a nice pair of shoes I'd rather have repaired than throw away, when the potential cobbler was more interested in explaining how the necessary repairs wouldn't be worth the cost/work - reciting a laundry list of potential expenses in a tired, whiny tone - than to simply answer my question: which was whether it would be possible at all. Instead I just left. The business could have been his had he not just assumed he'd understood my complete perspective.

American Gypsy, Part I

The style and length of the previous post should be the exception to the rule. I expect these in general to be much more fragmentary, brief, and full of incomplete entities interrupting each other.

Here is the question: What happened to the traveling soul of the United States individual? With the exception of the Native Americans, aren’t we all within a few generations more or less of ancestors willing to leave their homeland to brave the odds for the sake of something potentially better? But though we are theoretically selection-biased towards seeking the new, we seem now to be the least intrepid of developed nations.

Redhead and I were at the park the other day, and while Oz was playing we were speaking with a sweet middle-aged lady who was declaring how lovely her first trip to Italy had been, how it had been a packaged deal - a tour - and that everything had been planned for her and she hadn’t had to figure anything out. My Redhead and I were polite, but noted later in the car how that what she was describing was exactly the opposite of at least a large part of what had been seeking out in our own traveling experiences. We want to actually experience the world, not just see it as a museum. Good traveling should be an education - and figuring it all out along the way in real-time instills among other things the understanding you that you have less to fear than you thought you did. There are travelers and there are tourists, but the two are worlds apart. There is no education like real traveling.

Beachhead

The first place in which I ever lived completely alone was on Laguna Street in Santa Barbara, not far from the park. It was an old but well-maintained Victorian house with a classic garden, and I had the small front upstairs apartment: a small room, a kitchen cove, a bathroom the path to which was blocked whenever the front door was open, and two large windows looking out into the street. I loved that apartment, the only furnishings of which were a short bed and an old butcher block that my family had passed on to me, where I ate and wrote music.

Much more recently: my girl and I have had a fairly crazy year, and are now just settling into our 3rd address here in the Bay Area since we moved from NYC a little less than a year ago. And though I grew up here, I haven't lived in the Bay Area since leaving for UCSB, and I haven't lived in California full-stop since moving East in 2001. My Redhead on the other hand has visited once in the past. In the the end though, in one way or another it's been new jungle altogether for both of us.

Our last apartment in SF was on Fell Street near Alamo Park. The dog -- Ozwald, Ozzie, Oz -- loved this, and Mike's Coffee (no, not it's real name but though I love the food and people I think the name is ill-fitting) has a a breakfast that can lead to a La Mancha addiction. It was a great location for us, and in front of the window in our bedroom was the butcher block that my Redhead's family had given her and we had brought with us. I would sit and write here when time permitted, which it hasn't so much in the last year -- but I can't complain as the last year has been an incomprehensible education, and the one piece that I have managed to finish made me incredibly happy to hear. Counter)Induction, by the way, is fantastic. And though I have a lot left to do, I know, still it has taken me a long time to get to this sound as it is.

So here we are, figuring out what will happen next. And her butcher block is sitting in our new place now, patient, amidst a number of items still left to be unpacked and put away.