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.