17 May 2011

I’ve started a new blog:  An Objective Listen.  Click below to read my first analysis.

Update:  Andrew W.K.-approved.

14 April 2011

The Salon of Sonic Craftsman, announced in this March video, will be having its fourth meeting next Thursday at my studio, 7:30 pm.  What is it?  An informal get together of Seattle songwriters & composers, at which each member shares and learns about the craft.  Each salon has a theme, and the next one is “shittiness.”  We’ll be talking about our own worst piece and the worst piece we’ve ever heard (hopefully not one and the same).  I know that a disproportionate number of this blog’s readers are from the city, so I thought I’d announce it here.  If you think you may be interested, drop me a line and I will tell you more.

Update:  

“To T. McVeigh,” written and recorded November 1999.  The shittiest song I’ve ever made, presented at the salon:

30 January 2011

Peter Joseph says the Zeitgeist Movement is scientific, rational, and based on things that would work in the real world… then he proposes building cities shaped like perfect circles. So, why are existing cities not laid out like circles?

Because they have adapted to make use of the uneven real world terrain of wherever they were founded.  Joseph’s inability to recognize this about cities is just one example of his preference for designing a future in his head over looking at what’s actually been successful. If this stuff were actually tried, and I don’t think that’s really the goal, it would be a disaster.

Peter Joseph is a 30-something marimba player who’s dabbled in advertising and in finance.  It’s an unadvertised fact that the first Zeitgeist film began as reel footage alongside a percussion performance in NYC.  Joseph’s great error is in letting his aesthetic preferences determine his political positions. I can understand this psychological dynamic and might have taken a Zeitgeist turn myself… i.e. by using the metaphorical imagery of Overwhelm to construct an “Overwhelm” political-propaganda video, rope in activist-minded listeners, etc.  But that would be unfair to both rational philosophical debate and to art itself.

“Who Wants That Honey?”

Everybody can’t be taken to Everest.  There must have been periods in history when it was possible to save the patient through less drastic measures…  There must have been periods when, in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience, you wouldn’t have to actually take them to Everest…  There was a time when you could have, for instance, just written Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austin, and I’m sure the people who read it had a pretty strong experience.  I’m sure they did.  Now you’re saying that people today wouldn’t get it, and maybe that’s true.  But isn’t there any kind of writing or any kind of play… isn’t it legitimate for writers to try to portray reality so that people can see it?  Tell me:  Why do we require a trip to Mount Everest in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality?  I mean, is Mount Everest more real than New York?  Isn’t New York real?

If you could become fully aware of what existed in a cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out.  Isn’t there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there in on Mount Everest?  I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there’s nothing that different, because reality is uniform in a way.  If your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go to Mount Everest, and sort of absurd.

-Wallace Shawn

It’s their feeling that there have to be centers now where people can come a reconstruct a new future for the world.  Actually, these centers are growing up everywhere now.  In a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school, or a new kind of monastery.  Björnstrand talks about the concept of ‘reserves’ – islands of safety where history can be remembered, and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a dark age.

In other words, we’re talking about an underground, which did exist in a different way during the dark ages in the mystical orders of the church.  The purpose of this underground is the find on out to preserve the light… life… the culture… how to keep things living.

I keep thinking that what we need is a new language – a language of the heart…. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is.

-Andre Gregory

All knowledge is occult — forever hidden to the blind. There is no objective underground.

“A Vision of Ourselves”

[Originally sent to a group of Facebook friends in the early morning of 5/20/10.  Now posted here for your consideration, particularly if you consider yourself an artist.]

Dear talented friend,

This is why I’m not interested in being an entertainer…

The culture industry can (via Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse):

1. Reduce human beings to the state of mass by hindering the development of emancipated individuals, who are capable of making rational decisions;

2. Replace the legitimate drive for autonomy and self-awareness by the safe laziness of conformism and passivity;

3. Validate the idea that men actually seek to escape the absurd and cruel world in which they live by losing themselves in a hypnotic state of self-satisfaction.

I intend to make art that is sublime/beautiful (via Edmund Burke) and honest. That’s it. I hope that’s where you’re at.

Do not disdain of Beyoncé Knowles; disdain of Sasha Fierce. Stefani Germanotta may be an ally, but the Fame Monster certainly isn’t. This mammoth-scale pop music, which lacks credible emotion, decency, and craft, is not some isolated quirk off somewhere: its stupid, unexamined nihilism floods out, at ~45,000 barrels daily, into small-time indie blogs and bedrooms everywhere.

I want you to know that the art you craft to divine proportion is objectively better than what is hyperrefined and dished out by AOL Time Warner, Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, Vivendi Universal, and Sony. You suspect it, but do you really know it? Do you?

-Gv

A Conversation With Mumbles

Mumbles, a.k.a. Baraka Noel, is a slam poet residing in San Francisco. He recently organized The Sky Is Falling, a seven-day poetry/music/painting/entertainment festival in which I had the privilege to participate. Scroll below the fold to hear some of Mumbles’ art, or keep reading for his and my conversation:

1

Grant Valdes: Did you want to be doing what you’re doing, or did you kind of grow into it?

Baraka Noel: The booking?

Grant: No, the whole thing. Performing. Period.

Baraka: I think the most accidental piece of it was the scouting. I’ve been an accidental talent scout for years and years, just because I like to learn and I like to be around dope people. So that’s a process. I’ve befriended just a bunch of really dope artists, and other ones, I’ve at least figured out how to get their phone number if not become their friend. That was accidental. I mean, I went to Oberlin [College] to learn how to write and perform better. I think that worked out pretty good.

I knew that had bad grammer, by the way. I just want to say that’s intentional. So fuck its.

Grant: Anything you want to say about Oberlin? I can’t imagine I’m going to use this on the internet…

Baraka: I had a lot of sex at Oberlin. That was great. No, I’m just kidding. I mean, I did have some sex. Not enough. On the real, I didn’t pay for it. I was really glad about that. Oberlin was great. Oberlin is small. I learned how to be small and awesome at Oberlin.

I learned how to rhyme, at least during the years I was in Oberlin. We would have never been able to record Copyright Law, which some people have heard. So thanks, Oberlin, for that.

Grant: Baraka is too modest to say this, but some guy in Nebraska just [voluntarily] duplicated a hundred copies of Sometimes I Just Can’t Get Outraged Over Copyright Law, and sent some of them over here.

Baraka: Actually, he did the full catalog of what he had access to.

Grant: The full catalog.

Baraka: Okay, we could talk about that. So, I have a couple of hip-hop records: The Mixtape Philosophies of Mushroom Black, Freestyle Theater Presents: Stolen Time, and Sometimes I Just Can’t Get Outraged Over Copyright Law . And then there’s some poems. People sometimes like those.

Grant: What does the recorded side mean to you?

Baraka: Well, I differentiate pretty wildly between poetics albums, which take no time at all to record, and are very easy, and hip-hop records, which take lots and lots and lots of hours.  I really annoy engineers all the time. Black Cock and Other Fairy Tales, Beautiful Shit City, Zach Approves This, and Drugs are all poetics albums. And they’re just attempts to do something interesting with that form, which is mostly pretty boring. ‘Cause I like poems sometimes, and I don’t really like to listen to poems that are recorded as albums, usually. But hip-hop records have saved my life so many times that I’m just trying to, you know, have a reason to speak.

2

Baraka: If I can make music that’s pretty, that’s pretty awesome. It used to be that I had a message, but I don’t really have a message right now. I just want to produce the craft and have it be beautiful. And then, the message can be whatever?

Grant: What happened to the message along the way?

Baraka: It’s not like I don’t have any message, it’s just that I don’t have an agenda in the same way. My agenda now is being able to make my art sustainable more than it is communicating to people that the U.S. government has raped and murdered people of color, primarily, for hundreds of years. I think we know that.

Rob Ager Interviewed by Andrew Dimitrov

Hello, this is Andrew Dimitrov for Shoestring Century.  I am privileged to bring to the fore some ideas and insights of Mr. Rob Ager, an independent film analyst, filmmaker and author who hails from Liverpool, England.  Mr. Ager is the mind behind Collative Learning Systems, a form of self-therapy which borrows from multiple psychological disciplines in a uniquely structured program.  Collative Learning Systems is the name of his self-published book, available on eBay, and CollativeLearning.com is the name of his popular website.

I first encountered Mr. Ager’s work about a year ago, when I stumbled upon his YouTube analyses of Stanley Kubrick’s films.  Mr. Ager provoked my intellect in ways untold by his careful analysis of minute diegetic details in Kubrick’s work.  His basic thesis of Kubrick’s canon is that Kubrick inserted a vast array of incremental structural details into his films that offer a concurrent dialogue to his overt storylines.

Two prominent examples are his review of The Shining, which suggests that Kubrick transformed Stephen King’s tale of alcoholism and familial collapse into an examination of Native American genocide by the white man, and his review of Eyes Wide Shut, which highlights the aristocratic fascism and patriarchy of millennial Manhattan’s elite, subsumed by the story of marital infidelity which forms only the tip of the story’s iceberg.  His reviews of both films and many others are available on YouTube and also at the website CollativeLearning.com. I give it my highest recommendation.

After some back-and-forth, I was privileged to submit to Mr. Ager some questions and we present them to you in interview format, for your listening pleasure only.  Mr. Ager, for various reasons, did not consent to an unrehearsed interview, but was gracious enough to send audio files of his voice so that we may simulate the experience for you.  So, without further ado, my questions and his answers:

The Interview

Andrew Dimitrov: Mr. Ager, you were the recipient of a lot of bad noise when you identified diegetic features of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that dealt with conspiracy theories.  You didn’t identify yourself as a conspiracy theorist, but nonetheless received backlash for exposing features of the movie that may have supported the idea of global conspiracy.  In retrospect, what is it about your review that was so instantly polarizing?

“Bellow, Shriek, and Roar Seemed Small Inside Their Hearts”

In a previous post, I stated almost in passing that we live in the shadow of a “fraudulent” culture.  That kind of claim requires further explanation.  Let me illustrate my view of the gap between a healthy, genuine cultural event and an unhealthy, synthesized cultural event by describing two evenings that I spent out on the town in 2009.   You decide which – in form, not in content – presents a better way forward.

#1:  Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness Tribute Show

The setting:  20/20 Cycle, a bicycle repair shop five minutes East of downtown Seattle.  Twenty eight musical acts assembled for a one time performance of The Smashing Pumpkins’ epic 1995 double LP Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, in its entirety – one band per song.  Ticket sales and donations benefited Hollow Earth Radio, an internet-based free-form radio station.  Crowded onto the shop’s low stage area were a drum kit, a couple of amps, and a couple of mics.  The room, whose walls jutted with hanging canisters of screws, dangling inner tubes, and other mysterious implements, was packed with bands and their friends.  The bands themselves could have filled the place; nevertheless, there was room to snugly mill about, and the main room was vented  when people walked around the block to have a smoke or stepped into a closet to tune up.

The set began with a buzzing, off-kilter keyboard rendition of  Mellon Collie‘s instrumental overture.  While we weren’t immediately treated to the crashing opening chords of track two, “Tonight, Tonight” – that followed a few obligatory minutes of stage shuffling – once  the next band was ready, they let it rip with guitars, bass, violin, drums, and voice (all said, it took about four hours to execute the two hour song cycle.  Not a bad 50/50 noise-to-instrument-plugging-in ratio).  Several numbers were approached with postmodern detachment:  ”Bullet With Butterfly Wings” received lounge treatment, with the singer stopping after every other line to wonder aloud about the meaning of what he had just belted.  For every shambling mess, there was an aching, perfected rendition – “Bullet” was immediately followed by a crystalline version of “To Forgive,” whispered by a burly woodsman-type who was flanked by a banjo player and violist.  An informal survey of which songs drew the smokers back indoors and to the side of the stage suggested which compositions had grown in stature over the past 14 years (“Here Is No Why,” “Thru the Eyes of Ruby,” “Lily, My One and Only”).  James Iha’s stock seems to have fallen through the floor:  the second-fiddle’s single contribution to Mellon Collie, the cloudy, maudlin “Take Me Down,” was the only song with no bands willing to learn it.  That was until a few performers (including the author) volunteered to take the stage for a completely disrespectful, terror-metal-tinged one-minute facsimile of the track.

I heard no one at 20/20 Cycle praising Billy Corgan’s compositions – but then, I’ve never heard someone praising the “Our Father” after reciting it in mass.  We were doing something far beyond assigning Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness four stars, or a 9.2 out of 10 - We were living it.

#2:  Seattle Premiere Screening of The Age of Stupid

The setting:  AMC Pacific Place 11, a movie theater in Seattle.  The setting, in a truer sense:  anywhere in the Western media-consuming world.   My friend and I were about to see our share of the worldwide premiere of global warming docudrama The Age of Stupid, which was bookended by live footage of MTV’s Gideon Yago interviewing Kofi Annan, Heather Graham, Moby, Thom Yorke, and other famous individuals at an austere outdoor “green carpet” event.  Rather than discuss the movie, I’d like to describe who I met outside of the theater.

My friend and I reached the cineplex on the late side and were greeted with the full attentions of four middle aged ladies sitting behind a long table.  One of them requested that we fill out a survey after leaving the screening.  A bit weary of any political movement that would use focus group tactics (and it is a movement… director Franny Armstrong says that The Age of Stupid was designed “to turn 250 million viewers into active citizens, and get them all focused on the crucially important Copenhagen Climate Summit”), I asked her who was paying her to hand out the forms.  She didn’t know.  One of the ladies gave the name of a market research sub-contractor.  I asked, genuinely not knowing, what entity was paying that company, i.e. who the money was behind the night’s feature.  Nobody there knew, although one of them replied with a sense of relief, “You know, you’re the first person all night to ask a question like that.  I ask those kinds of questions, too!”  At this point, another employee informed me that if I filled out a survey I would be given a $10 Wal-Mart gift card.

Okay, I’ve pretty well given away my preference by now.  This movie premiere, as a social event, was fraudulent.

Enticing people with celebrity appearances… Paying marketers who pay attendees (in gift cards)… Sitting people in a dark room silently for two hours and then, when the lights come up, recruiting them into an action campaign called Not Stupid (playing to the ever-popular social anxiety of being considered stupid)… Nowhere in this process is there genuine human-to-human interaction.  The entire event is manipulated, with roles predetermined, and your role is to be one of the hoped-for 250 million viewers.  In the video found at the end of this essay, we see a celebrity at the U.K. version of the film’s premiere say that he hopes The Age of Stupid will ”remind people how important society is.”  Indeed.  I walked out of the film early – not in protest, but simply because I already know how important society is, and the Manics were about to go onstage at a nearby rock club.

If you’d like to see footage from the “People’s Premiere” of The Age of Stupid, click here. I wish I could present a similar video from the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness show at that little bike shop in Seattle, but it seems the moments that build a genuine culture don’t often happen on camera.  They don’t have to because they’re carried from one individual to the next.  While The Age of Stupid proposed scores of solutions, the Mellon Collie show already was a solution.