I first met Ethan & Caleb at the show pictured above, playing songs from their debut album Turquoise, released 2007. I was surprised and impressed hearing them for the first time, the way you can be, unexpectedly, when paying heed to opening bands. I was cautiously hopefully before I ever heard them play a note when I saw them rolling in the Hammond, checking the harmonica, and asking the sound man for as much reverb on the guitar as possible.

I am a sucker for music evocative of the emptier patches of the American southwest (Calexico, Friends of Dean Martinez, Valley of the Giants, etc). With a name like Headdress and an album decorated with feathers, tipis, and hand-stitching, they make no secret of their aim to follow the same trail with their pueblocore sound. Unlike the previously mentioned bands though, the music of Headdress feels slower, thinner, and more expansive, with the small sound of their two-piece band echoing to fill the shape of much larger space, suggesting all the stereotypical imagery of vast canyons and open plains.

The song they performed that night, ‘Sky Mountain Rising,’ was recorded live at The Mohawk, and is yet to be released, but still my favorite:

They spin themselves into a shamanistic, purifying drone, with chanting and rattles and bone-shaking low end. Truly great stuff. Ride the snake, boys.

Headdress are playing tomorrow at Webster Hall, New York City, 1-28-2009.
http://www.myspace.com/totemsongs

There’s a whole category of movies I love that celebrate niche groups and outsiders. The Wrestler is not a documentary like those—indeed it overstates its dramatization—but it is the only serious treatment of pro wrestling that I’ve ever seen. This movie exposes the physical and emotional addiction that tempts these performers into a career that leaves them broken and bruised. For the main character in this film, that physical decline is matched by a descent into obscurity, and an inability to assimilate after his one talent in life no longer pays the bills. In the mind of the audience, choreographed wrestling matches were transformed into gripping fights, where the age and frailty of the wrestlers created heart-pounding uncertainty about whether the pain on their faces was fake or real.

For me, the most poignant theme offered by this story was the profound loneliness of this man, who for all his warmth cannot seem to make connections with the people he meets outside of the wrestling world. During a brief scene, he invites one of the neighborhood boys into his trailer to play a video game. They play a game starring the wrestler himself, released during his heyday many years ago. But the boy, unimpressed, makes a careless remark about how old it is, declines a rematch and leaves to be with his friends. It was so affecting to see that even a child could simultaneously reject and make irrelevant this towering hulk of a man.

My only complaint about this movie would be how distractingly present the screenwriting was. Every person was a one dimensional character: jersey x’er with the hair metal tapes, lesbian with father issues, stripper with a heart of gold. Every carefully placed motion advanced the plot: does a glance askew mean he’s ADHD; does a labored autograph mean he’s illiterate? Blagh.

In fairness, no scene was wasted. The pace was fast and the message was clear: today’s heroes are tomorrow’s castaways. Maybe I’m just getting to the point where I’m too jaded to appreciate well-executed scriptcraft without noticing the numbers behind the paint.

Music with Roots in the Aether, Part 6: Pauline Oliveros (1975) was presented as part of the Looking At Music film series currently at the Museum of Modern Art.

This film was a triple threat with an interesting interview of influential composer Pauline Oliveros, a surreal setting that included costumed actors engaged in absurd performance in the background, and a final half hour full of pulsing drone as Oliveros gave an intimate concert.

Like most of the composers interviewed for this series, Oliveros first learned the language of traditional composition through her studies, and only earned her notoriety after developing her own voice. She described how her rebirth began with deep listening—a microphone in the windowsill inspired a promise to herself to always be aware of the sound environment around her.

I identified with her complaints of performance anxiety. Her attempts to free herself from that led to her current compositional process, which is an extreme form of detachment that she describes as “deformation.” It’s a state of improvised performance that she tries to reach by ignoring her own impulses, which she calls “intentions.” If she feels a conscious urge to create a sound, she ignores it, and instead waits for a hand of creation that seems to come not of her own will.

Also identified with her intensely introspective thinking. In her own words, she spends a great deal of time analyzing her own creative process with a scientific rigor, including the emotional setup and extraneous influences of setting and circumstance that combine to direct the result. She is her own analyst and observer and she reports on her thoughts and motivations with an insight and clarity that is telling of a very intelligent lady.

She also frees herself from painful scrutiny by drawing in “materials other than sound” into the “performance event” in order to disorient the audience by upsetting their expectations. I can see how that would create a situation where the audience is forced to respond to the piece on its own grounds, severed from any conventional wisdom about what makes music good or bad. Expectation taints perception. It is a prejudice that undermines the honesty of experience.

The back and forth between the interviewer, Robert Ashley, himself a noteworthy figure in highly academic contemporary music, was that of and informal chat among peers. I really enjoyed their sincere appreciation of each others work and comments on such, and the insider perspective enriching the whole discussion.

Anyone who enjoys thinking about what music is, how music is made, and how it can be performed would enjoy this documentary series. Also, this one in particular would be a mondo headfuck while on mushrooms.

Kranky is home to Stars of the Lid, a band I saw twice that weekend—once at the moody Le Poisson Rouge theater in Manhattan, and again at Brainwaves day 3. Stars of the Lid are a rotating string quartet anchored by the creative vision and electric guitar of Brian McBride. They are a perfect realization of concept in sound, with each of their expansive instrumental albums evoking star-streaked galaxies gliding through space.

For their LPR show, SotL played to a seated audience on a pitch black stage with only the tiny blue stand lights to illuminate the score. Behind them, projections of diffuse color in the purple-pink hues of nebulas and dust were cast across the length of the stage, flickering and dimming as the music swelled and burst.

I often wonder how anyone not accustomed to the style of SotL would react to a show. It is not demanding music, though it does require patience. It is not challenging nor discordant, though it is as loud as rock. Anyone could agree that it is exceedingly listenable; but would they catch even a glimpse of the sublime I would feel?

The kind of ambient rock played by SotL is sentimental, dramatic and intense; but so am I, so it suits me well. SotL and other favorites of mine work in long form with less structure and more gradual evolution. They sacrifice melody and lyrics for textures and tones. Ambient is also a fragmented form. This music relies less on bucketing its sounds into verse-chorus-verse, and instead gives us a series of impressions, abstract and indistinct, freed from the rules of song. Each musical fragment defines its own edges and bleeds into the next; sound vignettes smeared across time.

Instrumental music like this does not attract listeners easily. I’ve learned that people often connect with the message in the words from their favorite songs. But for me, lyrics are a distraction that demand their own memories and associations, separate from the music below it. Likewise, highly structured music is its own symbolic language, that tells its story by referencing the song form itself. Both of those things activate my thoughts and interrupt my experience of raw emotion. Words are once removed from feeling, and wordless music bypasses thought and connects directly to sense. It is music that allows you to reach a height of bliss that burns away the chatter, and makes your mind quiet by pouring your heart full.

Stars of the Lid @ Brainwaves Festival 2008 (Brainwashed.com) from nariposa on Vimeo.

Doug Aitken showcased his triple screen film installation Migration before an audience of the art hip, with guest improvisors to create the ambient soundtrack live.

Here are my unedited impressions jotted at the event—

Beautiful triple screen wide format HD video, with footage that takes full advantage of the vibrant color and crisp detail. Scenes consisted of stills and abstracts alternating with live animals exploring surreal and unlikely places. The screen was so large and the quality so fine you could see the tiny mesh of a window screen flush with the pink light of sunset, the grain pattern on a desk in an abandoned hotel room, the hairs on a beaver’s back as they caught golden light, and the textured gleam of closeup faucets, door handles, chain locks, and other sleek inanimate characters. The pace of the camera was slow and hypnotic, as movement passed gently from moving frame to now moving subject to now shifting depth of field. It was really art photography in motion—like Koyaanisqatsi performed live.

The film invited such close attention that several scenes are unforgettable.

And the backing music was so beautiful and fitting for the captivating visual presentation. I felt the little gasp that occurs inside, when the first note falls and you realize the show is going to be good—that it is exactly what you came to hear.

It was one hour of landscape sound emanating from beneath the landscape scenery. The music was an electroacoustic landscape for the lush scenery pictured above. It had the same minimalist clarity of subject, with a thin texture and close focus on one or two elements at a time. It captured the same pointilistic stillness as the slow moving austere frames on screen. And both were absent human subject, with the nonverbal vocalizations obscured beyond recognition and the players themselves cloaked in dim light.

White Rainbow played out the end of the set alone. It was the 5th time I’d seen him perform in so many cities over the past couple years. I am in love with his sound and I want to live in it, always.

My second show at The Stone, Manhattan’s tiny experimental concert space came by recommendation from a friend back home. This venue reminds me of Austin’s Hyde Park Theater, with its intimate seating, black walls, simple mood lighting and worn hardwood floors. As Wu Fei remarked during her introduction, “the night is cold but the room is warm.”

A staffer told me no photography is allowed, but the combination of lovely white spotlight against the ornate carvings of Wu Fei’s folk harp was too much to resist. I allowed myself two discreet shots taken at two unobtrusive moments.

The folk harp is called guzheng, or zheng/cheng, which is a type of zither. This instrument comes from China. I first heard a cheng performed by Adam Pierce while touring with his band Mice Parade. More recently I’ve been in love with the string music of French musician Colleen, herself a fan of exotic instruments both plucked and bowed. Recalling these points of reference I knew I would enjoy the show.

Sitting in the front row I could hear every feature of her unmic’ed guzheng–the creaks of the bridge as the strings strained against, the fingertips of her idle hand coming to rest on the string, and the faintest notes as they levitated and evaporated against the unlit black.

This was an evening of songs of folk tune length with accompanist Erik Friedlander, using some conventional eastern harmony and some unconventional technique and form.  Erik slapped and strummed his cello like a bass guitar, while Fei worked the back end of the string to accent or alter the pitch from the front.

Before the second piece she said “there it goes–have to tune already!” which is ironic because the following song was particularly full of out of tune notes, both in relation to scale and in relation to temperament.  These free-pitched notes came from the untuned back end of the guzheng (behind the bridge), marring the front end euphony to beautiful, earthy effect.

The third song brought the unexpected entrance of Wu Fei’s dulcet singing voice, with just a few plainsong words to play out the tune. The fourth song gave us more vocals, that you could tell were not words, but somehow still phonetically Chinese.  Coming to a venue that describes itself as experimental and avant-garde, I didn’t expect to hear such folksy and unpretentious cooing, the kind that brings to mind early blues–if such a feeling could be applied to her unique and adventurous musical style.

The highlight of the brief program was a showstopper drone, so moving and intense that I thought, “Who should I have brought to this show?” and “Who should I tell afterwards?”  Cellos are really made for drones, with their capacity for long bowed chords, a low anchoring register, fretless wavering of pitch, and a bright and beautiful tone. It’s a sound that billows out and fills the room, thick and heavy, even as it comes from such a relatively small acoustic source. Wu Fei’s singing over this was slight and silken by contrast, gliding through cheery and sonorous intervals and lingering on the piercing high peaks.  I know the twenty or so other audience members agreed with me, as the song ended with murmurs of appreciation.

The final song was chilly and bare in comparison, full of pointillistic tones each isolated in their own beat, pulled and pushed outside of their home pitch by slow and poignant bends.  I thought the words for this one must tell a life story, one equally bleak as the musical mood.

The set ended early I thought at fifty minutes, though that may be typical for this venue.  I overheard talk of an earlier performance with Brandon Seabrook and Trevor Dunn, and vowed to follow The Stone‘s calendar more closely.  Shows of this sort occur several nights a week, contributing to uniquely New York danger of death by overstimulation.  Wu Fei herself will appear there a couple more times, and she plays again with Erik Friedlander on this Saturday at Barbes in Brooklyn.  I hope to catch her once more for an album and an encore before her NYC stay ends.

The whole point of civilization and technology is to preclude the need for physical labor. We didn’t invent the wheel so that you could walk everywhere — walking is a snub of the legacy of your ancestors, fit people. And without the need for physical labor, all you have left are vain gymanistas who work out to attract a mate, under the pretense of enlightened living.

You know what’s enlightening? War and Peace. People ask me if I want to go running. I say no, tonight’s my night to read Tolstoy.  But hey, you go concentrate on moving your legs back and forth. I’ll focus on conserving energy and exercising my mind.

You think Stephen Hawking hits the treadmill? Fucking no, he’s too busy answering the great questions of the universe. Or making guest appearances on The Simpsons. The man has his priorities straight.

I guess what I’m saying is that working out is a poor use of my time. You know, not high value like blogging.

Plus you know it’s a total hot-bodied ego-fest at the gym, and as any drunk will tell you, a six pack makes you stupid. It’s not that beauty and brains can’t go together, it’s just that once you have the former, you don’t need to use the latter anymore. And as a fitness freak would say, if you don’t use that muscle, it will atrophy. Thus we have a bunch of hot looking slow people running around, distracting us with their god-like bodies and silly conversation.

It’s not just that vain people are dumb, they’re also unforgiving. The start sites like beautifulpeople.com where they can meet other gymbags with similarly uninspired personal priorities. That’s why I’d rather have a fat genius than a stupid beanpole any day.

I do end up dating a lot of fat guys. Besides the fact that their bellies make music, they’re always game for some recreational eating. With a hot-bodied guy, I’ll disappoint him inside a week.

I dated a beautiful guy once, and the first time I got naked for him, he said to me, “you know, you can get laser hair removal nowadays.”  I said are you for real?  Do they perform plastic surgery of the personality yet?  Cause if not, then I guess there’s no helping you.

Then I thought, I should sleep with him anyway. Because sex is the only exercise that I get!

Vicky & Cristina, played by Rebecca Hall & Scarlett Johansson, were unremarkable in their one-dimensional roles. Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz acted circles around them, playing the casanova and the provocateur. Passion or commitment can be a question of spiritual life or death, but here it is treated with such levity, with playful dialogue, a low-stakes plot, and the beautiful Spanish scenery and soundtrack.

Having said that, the movie ends not happily, with heavy unfulfillment staining the last scene. A poignant final frame filled with two pensive faces, meant to linger in your thoughts on love for minutes, days, or years to come.

My optimal path has always inclined towards pursuit of passion. I’d rather throw caution to the wind and taste the flavors of life than waste away, subsisting on stale, lukewarm relationship. Life is too precious for love with no sizzle. So get it while it’s hot folks, because at the end of this meal, you die.

-Departure-> | The pilgrims gathered in fabled sound hub Louisville, Kentucky. They traveled from near and far to meet in the sacred space for 4 days and 4 nights, seeking multicolor visions, ecstatic states, and the nourishment of the soul. Another terrastock festival, mecca for the psych rock devout, has commenced and wound to a close.

Terrastock 7 was held in its latest, semi-annual instantiation at the Mellwood Arts Center from June 19th through June 22nd. It is curated by and for a singular community of musicians, music writers, music geeks, and many many college radio DJs. You know you’re at terrastock when you overhear conversations in the parking lot about limited run Bardo Pond spinoffs and the tension between ambience and noise in the recordings of Nurse With Wound. Not a pound of hipster fat to trim anywhere — not that hipsters have any.

The religious analogy is a cliche, but it works so well here. Terrastock attendees are comprised of the enthusiastic fringe, who go out of their way to show the utmost respect, reverence, and worshipful attention to the performers on stage. They’re the kind of audience who maintain a pin drop quiet for the duration of the set, only to explode into a vigorous standing ovation after the last note has had time to exhale.

When Matt Valentine and Erika Elder took the stage on day 3, they recounted a story of how the Christians holding a convention at their hotel had invited them to play. Matt quipped that they were there that day to rock one out for God, and someone from the audience raised voice and testified: “THIS is our church!” Amen, brother.

Terrastock is like a good dive bar. A rotating roster of visiting bands, with some reliable house regulars. And everybody knows your name. It becomes a question of who is going to be outstanding this year, who is going to be just OK, and who is going perk your ears up, whip your head to attention and make you ask yourself, “Why didn’t I notice this band ever before?”

My impressions of the outstanding, ear-perking bands are as follows:

Pelt| The music nerds were all a flutter about the appearance of Pelt on the terrastock lineup, and with good reason. Pelt are legends for their sound innovation, with experimental playing techniques rooted in Indian influences and psychedelia.

For their highly anticipated late Sunday set, they stirred up a buzzing, shape-shifting drone, suspended in stasis even as the moving inner parts of it curled and uncurled.  They swept us in to the eye of the drone and guided us back out again with the quiet pitter clatter of brushed gong, bells and bowls, whispered chants, and bowed cymbals.   The sound became an evolving chorus of pitched humming from resonant boxes alive and dead.  It blanketed the room with a density of sound that laid thick on your skin and settled deep in your throat, vibrating there.  This is music that brushed the physical while speaking to the mental, activating multiple senses at once–a double conduit to the sublime.

Parlour | I was pleasantly surprised to see this band resurface, as they had seemingly dropped off the map after putting out an enjoyable album almost five years ago. I wondered, had they heard terrastock was coming to their home town and reunited just for the festival? As I explained to a friend, Louisville does have a scene. (It’s kind of a big deal.) So does Providence, Seattle, London, and all the other terrastock host towns who have imbued the festival with their local color over the years. Parlour represented their scene well, with their locomotive, circular brand of post rock.

Oneida | Oneida cracked open the day on Saturday with their pummeling, Neu-inspired jam, spinning a tight circle of roiling riffs over a repetitive, high-energy beat. Everyone thought their whole set would be one, long unbroken block of that single pounding groove, gaining steam until they exhaust the audience or themselves. We were mistaken. The opener lasted 20 minutes, instead of the whole 40.

Abunai! / Swing | Night 3 found us at a dive bar enjoying the sounds of a local jazz band, with dancing to boot. The directions to this late night rendezvous point were scrawled on the back of a paper and passed around for memorization as people finished scouring the merch room and trickled out in search of Act II.

As we enjoyed the sounds of Django Reinhardt covers and the athletic spins and dips of the swingin regulars, plans stitched together for an impromptu collaboration. After the swing kids took their bows, a house full of musicians traded turns on tag team instruments, shuffling through several formations that included Abunai! members Kris Thompson, Joe Turner, and Brendan Quinn, the local swing guitarist, Chris Barrus and KZSU’s own Your Imaginary Friend.

In its final formation, they gradually settled into a deep psych jam, a perfectly crafted krautrock gem lifted from time and appreciated anew. I later learned that they had improvised their way into a piece of a Can song, which they later morphed into something from Spacemen 3. Required listening during the wee hours of the night, proving again that the festival surrounding the festival is half the value of it.

Windy & Carl | My favorite performance was given by long time terrastock regulars, Windy & Carl. They played on the indoor stage, illuminated only by the spackled light of the projector, as all other lights were extinguished. As the sequence of heavily shadowed, dimly lit nature abstracts flickered upon their silhouetted figures, they put pick to string and began to make the rain fall. Their narcotic instrumentals are both clear and murky, with a pure, swollen guitar tone, laden with tendrils of echo that will never find their way home again. It’s music that drops your center of gravity and draws out the tears. It makes you heavy, drags you earthward, grounds your person and reverberates through you like a struck tuning fork.

After absorbing the great majesty, beauty and depth of their music, it was such a contrast to hear how humble and self-deprecating the chatty Windy Weber is between sets.  She apologizes for imperceptibly messing up the song, even as they just finished destroying you.  Do they know that they’re incredible?

Mokoto Kawabata | Mokoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple played a solo electric set for the final night of terrastock. He was a one man eruption of sound, taking us on a decibel journey that reached the loudest peak of the festival as well as swooping back down to scrape out the softest low. It was a stroke of genius programming him last. He blew away everyones mind while blowing out their eardrum with music that even in its sound had a crushing finality to it — a fitting way to conclude the festivities.

The set was both scathing and beautiful, and beautiful not just in the cerebral, detached, art fart sense. These sounds were beautiful on an instinctive, visceral level. Full, amorphous noise, so huge and dense as to be experienced both aurally and physically, an anvil of noise that rumbled the feet and pulsed in the head. And over that foundation of noise, an unhinged electric wail, clear and supple and undulating in its feralness. A sound picture of the heavy enormity of the ocean with the siren’s call cutting through. While swimming deep in that ensconcement of sound, I felt a second embrace, as warm as the first. As my feelings soared, I experienced a perfect agreement of hearing and heart.

-Arrival-> | A complaint that I have heard others mutter about multi-day music festivals is that it makes extraordinary bands ordinary. That you exhaust your capacity for elation by the end of day one. I have to disagree. Terrastock is designed for the multi-orgasmic. It is a relentless, four day high that leaves you spent, happy and exhausted. As it is, four days is just barely enough time to detoxify the mundane of the other 361. It nourishes your need for transcendental heights and the simple joy of familiar faces and collective passion.

My full photoset and short video are on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nariposa/collections/72157605692076584/

Several full length videos appear at http://youtube.com/narikiri

Spock is my type. Nerdy, skeptical, brusk, and above all he can arch his eyebrow. I think every man I have ever been attracted to has had the wiggle eyes.

This quote about the birth of the Spock character captures it best for me:

“The director, God bless him, said be different from everyone else,” Nimoy remembers. So on the next take: “Fascinating,” in that cool, collected way [...] that singular “fascinating” conveyed interest, skepticism and — layered deeply in there — a kind of wonder.

Curiosity, wonder and awe are all features of an agile and hungry mind — which is sexy to a girl like me. It is all part of the Gene Roddenberry vision: to celebrate exploration, to accumulate knowledge and understanding for its own sake, to confront the limitations humanity while promoting its positive evolution, to question, to grow, and to always contemplate the mysterious and profound. I buy into it wholeheartedly, as romantic as it may be.

I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and credit it for expanding my thought horizons. It is the most philosophically rich of the Star Treks, and the most engaging drama ever to air on prime time TV. All puns aside, it served to elevate as well as entertain. It introduced me to ideas I would not learn the words for until freshman humanities ten years later:

- Solipsism: the Ship in a Bottle episode, where an artificial character entraps the crew in a holodeck simulation, but the real participants don’t know that the setting and the other people aren’t real. The episode concludes with Picard tricking the artificial character into a perpetual holodeck simulation, where he will live out the rest of his life believing that he and his world are “real”, when they’re actually just computer generated. He then invites us to wonder whether any of us are real at all.

- Linguistics: Darmok at Tanagra, an episode about a species who communicate by only using referential metaphor. I spent hours as a kid wondering how the universal translators work. This was my first introduction to the fundamental problems of machine translation.

- Cosmology: in Cause and Effect, the crew are ensnared in a temporal loop, the start of which begins with the senior members playing poker. As clues in the environment slowly reveal their situation, they have to devise a way to send information from one fragment of time to the other. Themes of time are repeated like this throughout the series, with multiple parallel dimensions in the series finale. It boggles the mind.

- Justice: in the episode of the same name, Wesley beams down to an alien utopia and is sentenced to death for accidentally breaking a minor law. I love a good prime directive episode. This one invites us to ask whether our law ought to be universal, or whether it is only useful in the context of our own society. It hints at moral relativism, which really comes down to tolerance. We accept some foundational human rights, but we release claim to absolute truth on the whole of our laws, and allow for cultural variance in the interest of co-existing. Ideally.

- Anthropology: The Inner Light, my favorite episode, describes how Picard is absorbed in a realistic dream state for the duration of a few minutes, during which time he experiences an entire 50 years living among an alien culture, who devised this lifelength dream in order to preserve the memory of their people long after their planet is destroyed. So poignant. This is a lot like how Spielberg ended AI, with the little mechanical boy being the last vestige of human culture. The problem of information preservation disturbs me to this day. How will the future know what we were?

That is the kind of writing that made ST:TNG a cut above the rest. It had poeticism and depth, without being hammy and overplayed. And it was noble. ST:TNG never derailed into the soap operas, action fests, and sexed up glam that dominates the sci-fi television network these days.

Just the recollection of these episodes excites me, as it stirs the memory of first daydreaming about these concepts with my young, immature brain. I had an hour long bus ride in the 8th grade, and I used to amuse myself with fantasies involving the starship Enterprise. What would I say about us if I could transport to their time? What would they be able to teach me if one of them traveled back to mine? If the replicator can knit elements together to make food, why can’t they make everything out of it? And by what mechanism does the replicator function — is it connected to bins of atomic particles? How does it grasp them? What will remain when our sun finally dies? Could I save us if I were an omnipotent Q? Would I?

Star Trek lifts us out of the bland minutia of day to day concerns. The best episodes are tantalizing summations of the Big Questions, stimulating Spockian curiosity, wonder and awe — the flavor of life. I consider Big Think to be necessary maintenance for a healthy and happy brain. Not to get to the answers, but just to feel the enormity of the question.

If you’re not filling your mind with the big, then you’ll never use up the space.

The speculative reasons for this unusually large tide of dead penguin bodies are overfishing, pollution, global warming, or some combination of the three. Poor little penguins. They are helpless casualties in the fates of climate change.

I know it’s wrong of me to love a cute animal more than a fugly one, but come on, you know I cried during March of the Penguins just like everyone else. Morgan Freeman can melt any heart with that voice. Am I made of steel?

This news made me think of this song from a one off band called the Valley of the Giants. The song is called “Whaling Tale,” and it’s a straight monologue from an antarctic seaman about the story of a little penguin who wandered into the sights of a group of whalers. It’s a little vignette oddly placed in an album of mostly instrumental music, but I always thought it was so affecting. Good story, good storytelling, good voice, good musical backdrop, and a finish that vacuum pumps the existential void. Just listen:

The penguins are all washed up. C’est la vie.

First I pick the artists. Then I pick the songs. Then I mix the sounds. Sometimes the results work in unplanned ways.

Burning Star Core + Beauty Hunter =

Helena Espvall & Masaki Batoh + Zeranium =

Tetuzi Akiyama + She’s a B-Girl =

Pumice + Brownbrownbrown =

Nels Cline Singers + He Still Carries A Torch For Her =

Loren Connors + Come On In My Kitchen =

Matmos + Action at a Distance =

Recently I found this response to the recurring magical market thinking people employ in response to the problem of resource scarcity:

clipped from news.slashdot.org

Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017

Re:supply and demand – no real problem

The market doesn’t govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories.

Sometimes ‘cheaper alternatives’ just don’t exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been “Wait till it is cheaper” on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper – ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit.

The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it’s in short supply doesn’t cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most.

Stop treating economics like it’s a theory of everything.

Yes people, the market can’t make something out of nothing! We live on a finite planet as I like to say. There is not an unending supply of ANYTHING. Why is that so hard to understand? This ain’t medieval geography. The earth is a sphere, with dimensions and boundaries. And the stuff that we care about is all in the thin upper layer. And most of that layer is covered in undrinkable water. Not very much stuff to go around at all, when you think about it.

I understand the cognitive dissonance surrounding this point, because once you understand that, you realize that the way we live is insane. We are gorging on an energy bonanza that can’t last forever.

I was recently watching a CNN panel on gas prices, and the guest expert said something shocking. He admitted that he doesn’t see any other solution to the oil problem other than a drastic curtailment of our lifestyle, with driving a rare privilege. He made all the other talking heads uncomfortable. I thought, “this is a notable moment.” Now even the people who routinely lie to us (mainstream media) are shrugging their shoulders and averting their eyes!

Right now, oil production is about 86 million barrels per day. Demand is about 85 million barrels per day. And oil production declined slightly last year [Source]. I’ll let that sink in.

We’re meeting current demand by a sliver, and look at where gas prices are. Just imagine what will happen when demand outstrips supply. It ain’t going to be pretty. Economic prosperity maps in a direct, inverse proportional relationship to the price of energy. Price of energy go up, prosperity go down. Price of energy shoot up exponentially, prosperity dives into a toiletspin. That’s right, a tailspin crossed with a shitstorm! A flaming death spiral of unmitigated chaos and desperation. Like Christmas Eve at Walmart, but worse!

One thing’s for sure. If society breaks down, I am FUCKED without Lasik! Just like Piggy in Lord of the Flies! I think it’s my biggest fear in life to end up blind and helpless in a post-apocalyptic world.

Oh well. Maybe Obama can sprinkle enchanted hope dust on us and solve this complicated issue! Or we can shed the greed and entitlement that’s poisoning our minds and our planet. There is so much fat to trim in our lifestyle. Literally and figuratively. Perhaps there is enough wiggle room in scaling back the gratuitous energy orgy that is modern living, for us to do so while sustainable alternatives are introduced.

Of course that would require self sacrifice, and as Ken Burns so eloquently put it, sacrifice and duty are two words we don’t know the meaning of.

Listen to this story about China from NPR’s The World yesterday (or read it). It’s about how China went from being a bike riding, pedestrian accessible, friendly neighbor society, to a car driving, subdivision-building monument to pollution and isolation.

While listening to this I was thinking “wow, this is a great piece of radio,” and simultaneously, “wow, they know how to edit this to speak directly to my bleeding-heart tree-hugging NPR-listening attitudes!” I think both are true.

China Urbanization on The World from PRI

The point here is that even a huge city like Beijing once thrived without dependence on cars, and that urban planners are trying to reverse gears on the wasteful design choices that have sprung up to support the car culture.

The quote from the teenager at the end is priceless.

Question: is there anything wrong with towers, shopping malls, hustle and bustle?
Answer: nothing comes to mind…. oh yeah, the environment!

Sha totally! Like, dude, where’s my earth?

This is Jesse Kudler’s gear table. He and Chris Cogburn played the second set of the third show of June from the Church of the Friendly Ghost. They played a set of found sound semi-improvisational pieces, as well as a short encore (their “hit single” as Chris put it). The objects and instruments you see here include percussion, guitar, pedal, mixer, bow, tape decks, hair brush, handheld fan, other assorted noise-giving objects. Chris and Jesse create their own means of playing these objects, and their own ideas about how these sounds fit together to become music. They invent techniques and structure, and must carve out their sound in time and space without the aid of an established form.

The show was the same combination of music and performance art that I’ve come to expect from a Chris Cogburn collaboration. The movements they use to grasp their tool, invoke the sound, and replace it again are so seamless, graceful and deliberate. The subtle choices they make about how to play these are delightfully inventive. I watched Chris set a drum stick upright atop his drum and roll it between two palms while a string of bells dangling from his pinky tinkled and rang as a side effect; then he periodically lifted the bell hand in a looping motion that traced across the air an invisible half of a figure eight. That figure eight gesture was remarkable to me, because it was so insignificant to the sound but so satisfying to watch. Chris’s performances always have an almost ceremonial quality to them, because of the attention to presentation, mood, and the visual aspects of the performance.

This kind of music has a trance-like effect on me. Watching something so delicate and precise demands a higher amount of focus than usual. The volume is so hushed and the movement is so slight. Listening to this show reminded me so keenly of an experience I once had in my teens. I had politely accepted an invitation to my best friend’s bible study, which concluded with a living room full of young people speaking in tongues. They all preferred a very understated, almost whispered, low toned style of non-verbal vocalizing, creating a choir of quiet, atonal utterances. It was a hair raising and deeply calming experience. I feel the same sensory overload and inner still when I listen to the stylized, minimalist music Chris Cogburn makes.

The documentary studies the effects on the relatively new practice of mountain top mining on communities in West Virginia. It’s not a one-sided treehugger lovefest. But it’s not very hard to give the impression of impartiality–reality has a very anti-coal bias. If you did nothing more than show silent footage of before and after scenes of West Virginia 50 years ago and West Virginia now, that alone would play like a requiem of staggering loss.

The ironic upshot of watching this is that traditional mining methods end up looking like a non-invasive paragons of sustainable living–at least comparatively speaking. The truth is that mining was always ecologically and socially damaging. But now through the miracle of technology, coal mining has gone from merely damaging to utterly devastating. They invented bigger and better ways to extract more coal faster, and that bigger and better way is to bulldoze the whole mountain from the top down. What’s left at the site and in surrounding valleys is a humongous pile of rubble, burying all life that was there before.

Like all good documentaries though, the focus is on the stories of the people immediately affected. I thought the most moving scene was an interview with a local who poured a glass of tap water that was a brown-black viscous mess. He lives right on a stream, but is forced to drink and use this toxic water because he cannot afford to buy it imported. The ground water of the whole region is polluted by coal slurry runoff disposed of in nearby abandoned mines. The water analysis tests results said not only is the water unfit for drinking, it’s not safe to be touched. This man who has been drinking it for years and continues to do so has come to terms with the fact that he expects to die because of it, and is resigned to making arrangements for that occasion.

All I can think is that the people should sue the shit out of these coal companies. But when you think about it, everyone can claim damages, not just the people drinking toxic cocktails to their deaths. It’s not killing the rest of us — yet (see: global warming) — but there is another cost that is not being captured, and every human being has a stake. I can see it now, a class action lawsuit with 6.7 billion defendants worldwide. And hey, if we split it even, every one of us will a least get a buck.

Of course the international community cannot be moved to care about these complicated problems either. One of the heartwarming parts of the movie was the segment that followed these ordinary people taking time out of their ordinary responsibilities to organize. Community cohesion and grassroots activism in its finest incarnation. They were invited to present their case at the UN sustainable development committee. The feeling I get from the few scenes of how they were received brings to mind the phrase collateral damage. That their community and others will be violently smudged off the map through fatal poisoning and property flooding is considered a necessary and even trivial fact of providing coal-based electricity to the people lucky enough not to live next to the byproducts.

Another telling and memorable thing is that one of the coal propaganda videos said, triumphantly, “Clean coal can provide us with another 250 years of prosperity!” This wasn’t the point of the scene, but I just thought it so remarkable that the Appalachian mountains are being leveled, and the payoff that we’re supposed to be optimistic about is only 250 more years! That seems small to me, considering that human civilization has been going on for thousands of years. If you’re going to pull a nice round divisible-by-ten figure out of your ass like that, at least give us another 2500? Maybe they forgot a zero.

The proposition that 250 more years of electricity (give or take) is a tidy trade for converting several eastern states quite literally into total barren wastelands is deeply offensive to me. The coal industry likes to say, “well have you got a better idea?” They have a point. Renewable energy cannot replace the 50% of electricity that coal currently provides–it is physically impossible to scale that way, given the technology as it stands today. But there is a better idea; it’s just not very popular. It comes down to my two B’s: stop buying and stop breeding. Some people get very offended when I say these things. Good, be offended–those uncomfy feelings will help prepare you for the real uncomfortable work of moving towards sustainable living. In short, get used to disappointment!

All those UIL extemporaneous speaking exercises came back to me in a flash, and I was able to churn this out in 15 minutes. I’m mighty proud of this! This is blog-ready copy right here, and I didn’t even cheat and clean it up!

I pretty much said “fuck this, I’m leaving” to the presentation class after that.

Allow me to announce my first surefire top ten album of 2008, before ever announcing my favorites of 2007, and before even finishing my SXSW blog about discovering this band in the first place.

The band is Megafaun and the album is Bury the Square.

First let me just say, the degree to which the phrase ‘old timey‘ is dissected on urban dictionary is adorable. And familiar. I especially like the exposition on the relative old-timeyness of facial hair configurations, and the compare and contrast between the distantly related concept of retro chic. One wonders how long you could explore the usage and shades of meaning of the phrase ‘old timey’ as the sole thesis of a serious grad school paper. But I digress.

Megafaun are an Akron/Family sister band, and themselves an offshoot of another interrelated project. I didn’t know they existed until their performance on the tremendous Table of the Elements showcase at SXSW 2008. They moved me to tears with their plaintive set, full of wistful harmonizing. Now whenever I listen to their album, the memory of that emotion is pricked. And I’ve been listening to it frequently ever since.

I use the phrase old timey here loosely, and with apologies to the wordanistas over at the urban dictionary. It may not be a proper description of Megafaun in the specific musical genre sense, especially since the free-form, electrified bliss outs at the end of a couple of their songs have nothing old timey about them. But it does capture the mood of this and the Calexico/Iron & Wine song I blogged about just the other day. It is a direct descendant of vintage rural folk, and it evokes all the predictable imagery of and nostalgia for sepia-toned times predating my own.

I have an intense love for banjo and pedal steel, and will go to such great lengths to hear it as listening to country and bluegrass, when bands of those styles accidentally end up on stages I happen to be sitting near at the time. Megafaun has a song called Drains that features both, the tune of which has been on my tongue for some several weeks now. The blend of voices on this track so rich and resonant that it sinks into the throat and settles there, until the fullness of sound forces you to crack lips and sing along.

I do love Drains, but after debating it with myself for the amount of time I’ve been writing this post, I have decided to share the obvious standout track instead: Where We Belong. It is epic in every sense of the word: length, range, and majesty. It catapults out of the acoustic into a stormy, clipped electric climax, and back down to a fiddle led denouement sweeter than the best moments from the Dirty Three.

These Akron-cetera boys can do no wrong by me. It makes me want to buy up every volume of every related project out to six degrees of separation, in a mad fit of completionist abandon.

May my love /
Reach you all /
Please say it’s not too late /
Now that I’m dead and gone

Some of them have been told but don’t know, some of them know but haven’t been told, and some of them just have no idea what a gift they are or were in my life.

But wrapped up in the thought was the same awestruck feeling I sometimes indulge when listening to music so deeply satisfying and yet so unassuming — music that is perfect without trying to be. Dead’s Man Will and so many others are perfection in song.

The way that I came to love this particular song is that a certain local hero and radio DJ named John Aielli plays it frequently on his show. Just a short while ago, I got into my car in order to drive home for lunch, and I turned the radio to his show. I was instantly arrested by the sounds of vintage jazz, and I didn’t start the engine, and I didn’t return that phone call, and I didn’t release my fingers from the dial. I listened and savored the sounds of something new and beautiful to me, and waited patiently to hear the back announce of what this great thing was.

When John returned to the mic to talk about it, he said, “So many things in life are so terrible, and yet there are things like that that are so wonderful … just divine. That was Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.” Sentimental words about sustaining power of music, but very real nonetheless.

This is why John Aielli is so popular here in Austin, naysayers aside. He has a passion for music that he communicates with such a plain, unpretentious sincerity that it is infectious. It’s also because music is lonely without the experience of sharing it. At the end of the song, when both listeners find themselves humming in unison, it marks a kind of mutual intimacy that needs no words. The radio DJ and the listening audience can have this kind of relationship; and having been a DJ myself, I understand how rewarding it is to play a selection that sparks that kind of connection, whether you know for sure that you have reached someone or not.

Today I have reaffirmed my personal promise to announce my appreciation to all who have earned it, now, while I’m still alive and here. So to John Aielli, I wish to say that you are a treasure and a joy. I will continue to fuel my life with the musical gems discovered while listening to your show.

Bravo, Alex Kochno. You’ve managed to entertain and delight a couple hundred feminists while simultaneously legitimizing their cause! Maybe if I had a big male brain I could be doubly counterproductive too.

This presents a golden opportunity to talk about so many recent news items and experiences I’ve encountered on the topic of the gender wars. Just look at the letter. One has to wonder what moves this little republipig to take the time to send something so vicious. Is it backlash against perceived attacks on his values? Is it twisted emasculation fears? Is it hate? I’d say he’s just a troll, but trolls know better than to use their own email address.

I guess the most important feature of this letter to me is that he takes such satisfaction in belittling us stupid cunts. It’s one thing to assert female inferiority, it’s another thing to do so with glee. There’s a recent NYT blog post on “Misogyny vs. Sexism” that asks the question of whether the two can be separated. When we read articles like that describing acid attacks and stoning victims in those other sexist countries, we all get it: those backwards foreigners really hate women, with a ferocity that is hard to understand.

And yet we lack the awareness to turn the same scrutiny to our own culture. When Maxim runs pieces like “Get grossed out by the five unsexiest women alive” and the interwebs explode with cries of “Yeah, what an ugly bitch!” instead of cries of outrage, it smacks of the same stupefying hate that we decry everywhere else. That’s right, I’m drawing a parallel between literally stoning to death and symbolically stoning to death undeserving female victims; they are two points on the same trajectory.

And Sarah Jessica Parker did not deserve this culturally sanctioned hit piece, no matter what anyone says. No women’s magazine would dissect every physical feature of an average working actor. On the contrary, all the articles are about correcting their own appearance to avoid becoming target practice for the likes of Maxim and their readers! Parker is a beautiful woman who has never said anything to invite spontaneous criticism, but that’s besides the point. She wears what she was born with. What’s next Maxim? Get grossed out by the five unsexiest cleft palates? Look and barf at these mastectomy mamas? These are morally equivalent lists.

Granted, a rag like Maxim is written to appeal to human trash anyway: guys who read Maxim, measure female worth on a 10-point hotness scale, think warthogging is really cool, love to say “I’d hit it with a brown bag over her head,” and generally epitomize the lowest dregs of humanity. But Maxim is just an amplification of the pervasive objectification and brutal dehumanization of women in our culture. We accept it as common for people to delight in making women feel ugly, stupid, and worthless. It’s emotional and sociological terrorism.

I have so much more to say about this topic, but it’s time for all good little cunts to go to sleep.

I say depressing because the first three related articles I see are “Conquer Time Wasters,” “11 Tips for Nuking Laziness,” and my favorite, “Determine Never to Be Idle.” Why do you hate relaxation, lifehack? I hate to throw a kink in your mission statement, but laziness is good. If you are reading this on a personal computer, then you enjoy the richest standard of living at the most technologically sophisticated moment in human history with the greatest opportunity for leisure. I say roll with it. Or better yet, roll over and go back to sleep.

Then I go on to read that ideally, you should schedule 5-6 meals per day spaced out at equidistant points in time in order to maintain steady blood sugar. My reaction to this is: Are you insane? I take my food like I drop my logs: in reaction to spontaneous bodily signals. Granted, I have a preference for flexibility in all things, but even for those who run a tighter ship, this strikes me as extreme.

Here’s the root of my problem with sites like lifehack. They perpetuate the worship of efficiency, to the detriment of balance. People are sloppy creatures, not high performance engines to be tweaked and tuned for maximum results. How long can you burn the candle at both ends before you burnout altogether?

We did not evolve to be high precision temporal slaves. Time itself is a modern concept. We didn’t have watches for most of human history, and now you want me to eat every 1.6 hours and sleep for 8-8.5? Get real.

I’d rather be happy than effective.

I know, I know, it’s so easy — and some would say unfair — to laugh at these nutty religious rants, but this sample is just so exemplary in its comedic elements that I think it rises to the top. It’s the creme de la crazy! It’s like she spouted fragments of stuff she’s heard on AM radio but couldn’t pull it together into a coherent rant. She’s got the closer down — stinking hellhole of sin really catches the ears — but the stuff leading up to it just don’t wash. And I can’t figure out if that bobblehead dude in the background is in full agreement or is on the verge of cracking up. Either way, his contribution to the funny is key.

I love how she sets up the intellectuals as the obvious enemy, and I love even more how the commenters on this video are all surprised by it. Don’t they know there’s a culture war going on? The other side does. Intellectual is commonly accepted code language for “educated liberal nogoodnik.” And her reference to that old open-to-everybody hippie stuff is code language for “god hates fags.”

Earth to crazy lady: Jesus thinks you’re an intolerant bore. If you want to shut down a stinking hole of vile putrification, close your mouth.

I’m not a cynic. Nor am I one of those people who don’t know love. I’m just saying there’s no need to romanticize romance to a degree that’s irrational.

In a discussion on digg.com about some research a few years ago that revealed that passionate love fades on average a year after it begins, there was rampant resistance to the idea that scientific analysis can be applied to the phenomenon of love.

My two cents on this were the following: Why would something need to be mystical, mysterious, or beyond reduction to a scientific explanation in order for it to be beautiful? Does knowing that our experience of infatuation is regulated by hormones in any way cheapen the intensity of it?

I was always so annoyed by the scene in Contact where Matthew McConaughey turns to Jodie Foster and asks her, “Do you love your father? Prove it.” As if to imply, we can’t prove God or love, but they’re both real. Aggh, stab me with a spoon! There are several problems with this “argument,” not the least of which being that it is emotionally manipulative hollywood claptrap, but for the purposes of this blog post I will just say this. We can prove love. We can see it on an MRI and measure it on an EEG. We can observe recurrent patterns and fit it into a model of human behavior. Love is actually quite well documented.

So what is love? Love is hormones and neurons firing off in such a way as to yield an evolutionary advantage. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great ride. I just don’t entertain any illusions about the cosmic significance of it.

I’ve been building to this purchase for over a year, during which time my interest in and knowledge of photography has blossomed, in part thanks to flickr. isado, siskind, fuzuoko, and bjenright are just a few of the photographers who have delighted and inspired me with their public photostreams. By emulating them and others I have learned a thing or two about how to compose a shot. But, much as I love my Fuji Finepix, most of its output comes out looking like what the flickristas would derisively call a ‘snapshot’. Until this:

I thought for a second about what a fitting first subject for my Nikon would be, and right away I knew the answer. My friend Sasan, who works at Wolf and helped me select the camera.

We both marvelled at how professional it looks. I said, incredulously, “It softened the background.” He said, “It’s supposed to.” I said, “I know, I just can’t believe how nice it came out.” My fuji had a portrait mode too, but I never got results like this. He said it’s the best picture anyone has taken of him in years.

This camera is quickly destroying the high photography mystique. All this time, I’ve sort of believed that the fabulous pictures I find all the time on flickr are due to some combination of superior technique and superior post-processing. Now I realize it’s largely superior equipment. I was just using the wrong tool. Ironically, all I did here was point, and shoot. With the Nikon, all you have to do is to know what to look for and how to frame, and the camera makes it gorgeous.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I can snap pictures far more judiciously. With the Fuji I’d burn through 50 shots of the same subject just to have one turn out well, whereas with the Nikon I can just take the one picture and my work here is done.

When we went back into the shop to print Sasan’s picture, a woman buying a low-end Canon remarked on the size of my camera. She asked, “Are you a photographer?” I said, “I am now.”

I’m always fascinated by genre. What does creative music mean, exactly? It must be something special if it has a such a strong claim to creativity inherent in its name.

Judging purely on sound, I can only deduce from a layman’s perspective that it is some niche in the intersection between experimental, new music, avant garde, and free jazz, with the sharpest point of differentiation between these genres being audience and venue. Somebody needs to create a clever flowchart of all these pools of outsider music in the style of the geek hierarchy.

The first evening of the fest began at the Austin Figurative Gallery, which heretofore I’d only known for its SXSW day parties. But apparently they host low-key art parties there every Saturday, as well as other one-off events. As my focus on Austin sharpens, hidden details like this continue to emerge.

Nafta

Here we see pictured Juan Garcia and Chris Cogburn, the local musician focusing on extended percussion technique. On the table next to him are laid out his tools of the trade — a collection of dust, brushes, tuning forks, and other stuff I won’t even try to identify; all selected for the way they sound when applied to a drum. I imagine that these sounds were chosen for their strong character, so that when you hear them in sequence they can speak their own narrative without relying on traditional structures.

Bhob Rainey

Most of the festival was improvisational music, of the quiet and still variety. My favorite set of the festival was Bhob Rainey, performing solo saxophone in the clip above.

Music like this only works in a small room, to a sympathetic audience. When is the last club show you saw where 50 people were willing to sustain a near perfect silence for a performer making almost no sound? All focused forward, ears strained.

This short video does cannot express the intimacy of the space, nor the tension of the audience, nor the softness and subtlety of the sound. It’s just an excerpt of the set, and the louder half of the set at that. Not captured is the two minute opening that consisted only of controlled breathing through the chamber of the sax, without reed. It filled the openness of the theater with a fragile, pitched whisper. And it was the perfect opening, slow and alluring, like the graze of a finger.

I have an analogy for this music. To me the comparison is obvious. I draw the same peculiar satisfaction from hearing it performed as I do from a visit to the doctor’s office. There’s something about the precise, slight exhalations of sound that are parallel in my mind to the precise, slight movements of the nurse performing a routine exam. Clinical, still, and restrained. The accompaniment of shallow breathing. The mediated touch of the stethoscope. The fullness of sensation from just two fingers on your pulse. The depressor on your tongue. In my mind these little strokes are exactly the same as the little sound objects a performer like Bhob Rainey uses to touch you.

Tetuzi Akiyama

Tetuzi Akiyama’s set was more of the same, except on acoustic guitar. The difference was that his set was also a treat to watch. Every movement from him is pure grace. He’d delicately land a single finger on the string, then lift it with a broad stroke that arced through his entire arm, like a motion you’d expect from a ballerina.

The Long Telegram

Next I saw Nick Hennies play this truly insane set with Kurt Newman, a lineup they call The Long Telegram, captured above. This virtuosity is so ridiculous it’s actually redonkulous. I love the long, full moments of empty, punctuated by sudden bursts of note clouds, made more electrifying by the unpredictability of either.

Nameless Sound Ensemble

Finally, I captured an excerpt of this larger ensemble of Houston and Austin area improvisers, during an extended lull.

They’ve opened it to public tagging, commenting and notation — which I have been contributing to for the past couple hours. A visual feast, as they say.