hickey (12:15 AM)
August 6, 2008
Not the kissin’ kind, either. Here’s an extended quotation from Dave Hickey’s essay “The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll,” as published in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, which I recently finished reading and really dug.
Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us—simpatico dudes that we are—while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time—while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works—but it doesn’t feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.
Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us—as damaged and anti-social as we are—might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can’t. The song’s too simple, and we’re too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we’re breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.
And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically “perfect” rock—like “free” jazz—sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we’re trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we’re all a bunch of flakes. That’s something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that’s all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.
Which to me sort of ties in with what I was saying the other night about the experimental music I saw. It was also well summarized by Robert Frost’s comment about writing free verse: “like playing tennis with the net down.” Not that I have ever written anything but free verse, when writing poetry.
Frost is describing the experience of writing “free,” while I was writing about the experience of hearing free. But they are connected.
As I write I’m listening to: “Let’s get real drunk / Let’s let it be our ruin.” — Rosco Gordon, “Let’s Get High.” Wikipedia says Gordon inspired reggae and ska. WTF? Anyway — what a line! Reminds me of Baudelaire’s “Get Drunk.” “One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.”
For the record, I am not drunk, though I did enjoy some of a really good Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout tonight.
newscaster's delight (10:39 PM)
August 5, 2008
The bugs seem loud tonight, louder lately, when I sit and work/play at day and night here in my room. As I walked home tonight up the dark street, the occasional cockroach scuttling across the sidewalk, I heard odd little chirps emerge overhead from a tree, and wondered what was making them. I remember once walking up the same street at night and looking up to see a flying squirrel on a tree branch — the only one I’ve ever seen. Funny-looking little bastards, especially when looking right at you with those big dark eyes.
It’s official, or as official as can be when you’re dealing with a radio station in the Pacifica network. I will be on WPFW doing newscasts Monday afternoons, at 1 and 3 p.m., starting August 18. Apparently I will walk into the station two hours beforehand on my first day with nary a clue of what I am going to do, but someone, I hope, is going to show me, and quickly, so that I can actually prepare a newscast (of how long? five minutes? I don’t even know!). It should be … interesting. And hopefully not mortifying.
I really want to make my newscasts works of art. The last time I did a newscast was when I was at WFDD, in 1999! And I think I was not the best newscaster you’ve ever heard. But of course I remember the slip-ups and shortcomings more than the highlights. I remember often running down the hall to grab the latest traffic report, coming off of the fax machine, which was still the kind that used that waxy shiny paper on the rolls — man, I haven’t seen one of those in a while. And as a result of the running, doing some newscasts slightly out of breath. But at that time the newscasts were 10 or 15 minutes apart, and I was rushed. I’ll have a whole two hours between newscasts when I’m on WPFW. Nonetheless, I’m anticipating the return of radio anxiety dreams, which I finally stopped having after eight years away from live radio, just in time to start doing this gig.
What are the limits of the newscast form, and how can I push them or break them? Not in a self-indulgent way, but I want to do a newscast that people will hear and think is really different, not like anything else on the air in D.C. NPR’s Tom Goldman once told me in an interview that John Hockenberry, formerly his colleague at NPR, delivered brilliant newscasts. Maybe I can dig up the quote here. (hold music plays while author searches contents of external drive)
Wow, I surprised myself. Here’s what Goldman said about Hockenberry: “To this day, there has never been a more interesting newscast at NPR than the ones he anchored.” Hockenberry used natural sound and was funny, Goldman said. Well, NPR newscasters do use the “nat sound” at times today. (Have you met my friend Nat Sound?) But I have never, ever heard one that made me laugh. It seems almost impossible. How could a newscaster get away with something approximating, gasp, levity in a newscast today on NPR? I’m not trying to undermine NPR newscasters or poke fun at them. I appreciate NPR, I respect their news very much. Some of my best friends (well, one) are newscasters. And the newscasts usually sound great and do all they should do. But they do not make me giggle. It’s not in their genetic makeup these days.
So can I be funny on WPFW? Or artful? Poetic? What are the possibilities?
I also want to try to get the station involved in podcasting. I don’t think there are any podcasts now offered on their website. Of course, I want first to create a podcast of my newscasts, self-interested creature that I am. But that could be extended to all the newscasts. And there’s some local news and talk programming on WPFW that ought to be podcast (podcasted?). Like the Blackademics. (Well heck, they have a podcast on their own website.)
There are a lot of small, mostly volunteer-run community radio stations around the country — I imagine that, with all of those minds out there, someone has developed a relatively workable means of quickly converting audio delivered on a radio station into a podcast, in some mostly automated fashion. I hope. It would save me a lot of trouble if I didn’t have to be the one to create it. I’ll look into this.
Enough blather for now. I should be working on other things, like a blog post for Scanning the Dial tomorrow. Courage.
experimental music (12:14 PM)
August 3, 2008
Good morning. I’m listening to Iron and Wine at the moment, drinking green tea and, it appears, writing my first blog post in a while (for this blog anyway — I post a lot at Scanning the Dial). Bernard is doing his best to get situated in my lap. He is doing much better since I took him in to get a steroid shot a few weeks ago — it seems to have cleared up the condition he had that was causing him to scratch himself frantically and rip himself up. Yay for a happier Bernard.
I wanted to write about my night last night, while it was still fresh in my mind. It began with my meeting up for drinks and dinner with Arin and two friends of hers, Ian and Jonas, at the Red Derby. I took the Metro in — I’ve been taking the Metro a lot more lately, even though it’s not as convenient in some ways, and I still don’t trust the bus system because the buses usually don’t come when they’re supposed to. I just don’t want to drive so much, use so much gas and harm the environment.
So I took the Metro to the Georgia Ave. stop and then got lost trying to find the Red Derby, but I got there eventually. We had a good time drinking beers in cans (such as Dale’s Pale Ale and Old Chub, for just $4 a can! that’s a bargain in D.C.) and eating and talking. I liked the Red Derby — it seemed homey, like a neighborhood hub. Apparently there’s a Sunday night drinking club of regulars, for example.
I really would like to live in D.C., but I don’t think I can afford it, and this is not a good time to sell. Or I’d even live in Arlington, but within walking distance of a Metro stop. That would be fine, too. Maybe someday. It would also be nice to have a neighborhood bar, or even a coffee house, within walking distance of where I live.
After hanging out at Red Derby for a while we walked up to this house where a concert was taking place. We ended up missing the first act, but got there in time to see Unicornicopia. Unicornicopia is a woman playing a keyboard and samplers and singing songs that to me seemed to be mostly about being a woman, a girl, female, and relating to others. I know, that’s a terrible description. The music didn’t lend itself to easy interpretation, though.
She was wearing a billowy yellow garment (maybe it was just yellow due to the lighting) that was tucked high on one leg, and on that leg she had a yellow band of fabric tied around her ankle. She had quite a magnetic presence, I thought. At times she would do this wild boogie dancing behind her keyboard or even come around the front and dance around. I enjoyed it. It was interesting, at least. I’m not sure what to compare it to, so it’s difficult to write about or place within a context for my own judgment. Not that that should be that important.
The house was cool — they call it the Lighthouse, apparently, and have noise/experimental concerts fairly often. There were many posters and paintings all over the walls, instruments and old media (LPs, cassettes) lying around. Folks gathered in the backyard and sat on the porch and smoked and talked. I talked to a guy, older than me and most of the people there (I think I was older than most of the people there), who happens to live a short walk from where I grew up and where my parents still live, in Fairfax. He plays cello with various people. He had played cello as a kid and teenager and then gave it up, only to pick it up again years later. Now he plays the best he’s ever played, he says. I also met one of the guys who lives in the house, who happens to be involved with Radio CPR, so that was interesting.
After a while we went back inside and went downstairs for the final performance, by Twilight Memories of the Three Suns (here’s a YouTube video). This relatively brief performance began with a guy flexing and shaking a large piece of metal, making noise with it, and a girl strumming an amplified tuneless homemade instrument of some kind of metal strings pulled straight across a piece of wood, sort of like an oversized homemade autoharp or something. After a while the guy began crumpling the piece of metal. Sometimes he would bury his face in it, and it looked as if the metal was swallowing him up and he was fighting to get free of it. He ended up on the floor bent over the metal, and the girl later just laid the harp-thing on the floor and pulled it back and forth, bobbled it up and down and the like.
I don’t know — experimental “music.” What’s to say about it? I’ve seen a fair amount of it. Sometimes it’s interesting. Sometimes it just seems self-indulgent and weakly expressive. People applaud, but what are they applauding? Especially when the music doesn’t necessarily involve any actual musical skill or even conception in that vein. As I was watching the final performance, I was thinking, “Heck, I could do that” (which I wasn’t thinking as I watched Unicornicopia). But I admit that I get really annoyed when people look at modern art and say, “My kid could do that!” So fine, my expectations are confounded, my vocabulary for describing such experiences is poor, and perhaps always will be, and perhaps that is the point. What do you think?
I made it home uneventfully after the show. Now I’m dong laundry and considering my plans. I must must must get to my garden after a long absence and do some work there. Weed, stake a Roma tomato plant, maybe plant some new things, dig the ground, and so forth. I’ve been so inconsistent about tending to my garden. I wonder whether I should still be doing this. But I do think it’s important. I will stick with it and just try to be more disciplined, I guess.
Tonight I’m going to play Scrabble at a hookah place, which I’m looking forward to, and what else is going on? Maybe poker sometime this week. I might volunteer for Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment at the Arlington County Fair next weekend.
today (01:30 AM)
July 5, 2008
I didn’t see fireworks today, unless you count the sparklers my cousins were twirling this afternoon. And, thinking about it, I’m not sure I care. It was the first 4th in a while, it seems, that I wasn’t watching at least a few fireworks. I think last year my friend Mark and I drank several pints at a bar in Old Town and then saw at least a firework or two framed by the buildings on King Street. Whatever the case, I don’t mind not seeing fireworks. It’s like missing an episode of a TV show you and a lot of other people watch. They’ll have that spectacle to recall, you won’t. And life goes on without serious hindrance.
But I took a walk to 7-Eleven a little while ago. I heard only ambient city hum for a time. Then I came within earshot of a crowd behind an apartment building on the hill to my right, their hubbub, and then music as a backing track, no doubt pouring from the window behind the group which also donated a faint light to the scene. It was James Brown, loud: “Please, Please, Please” as I walked to the store, and “Night Train” on my way back.
Forget fireworks — that’s July 4th: having a good time with friends, and listening to a musical trailblazer who fought for real freedom.
What did I do? Rode out with my daughter and my parents to Rawley Springs, where I saw various family members for a gathering. These are the cousins on my mom’s side of the family whom I see every year at Thanksgiving and yet seem to know less and less about as time passes. They accrue history, and I have only ten minutes over mashed potatoes each year to suss it all out. The accumulated children and homes and jobs and deaths blur in the reflection in the gravy boat.
There were some newcomers this year, such as a thin and intense man with a twirly handlebar moustache who has repaired cameras for 31 years. In just two years he found himself repairing 95 percent digital cameras. And people now buy new cameras at a rate far greater than they did when cameras were analog, giving the repairer of cameras fewer opportunities to fix them and thus stay in business. Consider that digital culture may be a sham to drain us of our time and resources. Perhaps this is not lamentable, that repairmen are shuttering their windows and closing their doors. It is just how things go. But I like old cameras and their heft and solid blackness and shiny metal. An old camera could sustain a fall off a 90-foot cliff and still take a good picture — or at least the camera puts up a good front. But dropping one of these wussy digital cameras would surely mean its demise. And I like the interiors of real camera stores. I used to go to one in Vienna and it seemed more like a hardware or auto parts store than a place where devices similar to those deployed by Alfred Steiglitz and Man Ray are sold. Riddled with parts, carpeted only functionally, inconsistent lighting, a man’s workspace, no glitz but the romance of interiors, the guts of the cameras all on view. Compare that to Best Buys, with their interior aspects no doubt designed to seduce you into opening your wallet, and the helpful blue-shirted staffers roaming like a squadron of factory-issue droids.
All this is why I felt a little sad about what the camera repairman told me.
Read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space — it might tie into this.
hi there (11:50 AM)
June 30, 2008
Coffee at 9:30 p.m. at the Java House. Q St. between 16th and 17th NW. We dream in a humid night, warm like a blanket, the people walking by with headphones or running shirtless. Car-horn squonk reminds me of Ornette Coleman. Piggybacking on unknown Internet connection “lyrical.” The problem with the Web is that form and function don’t jive for me. How to resolve? I’ve had ideas, never gotten around to them. Man next to me regards weathered paperback with skepticism, is it doing the trick? Next day he puts on slippers and develops a new scheme. How to make money without really trying. Meanwhile hair thins and bones creak.
I’ve settled into a rhythm. Enough money in the bank account right now that I don’t have to worry though I probably should. I would not mind a lit cigarette in my hand — earlier at the bus shelter a man sat next to me and exhaled cigarette smoke and I liked the smell. A woman standing nearby in a white shirt looked back possibly with displeasure or disgust. The girl in front of me wearing Chucks as well fidgets with her chignon. Next to her a guy thumbs a device and wears a wild yarmulke, not something you usually see. Most yarmulkes are unassuming and conservative. She stands and looks around and puts the book in a totebag with insignia that to me are cryptic. Mr. Mxlpytk! Now a kid walks by making noises that sound both like quacks but also unlike those made by any actual bird.
Last night Louisa and I set out to my garden plot, me on foot, her on her new bike for keeping at my place. She had ridden ahead of me across the low concrete bridge that crosses Four Mile Run. As I approached the bridge I noticed two men standing on the path and looking out into the creek. I wondered what they were studying. It took me a while to see it, but there it was: a large bird squatting upright, standing stock-still, looking straight ahead. One of the men asked me what it was, and I had to admit I had no idea. But later, as Louisa and I ate whole-wheat spaghetti with a sauce that included basil I clipped from the garden on that visit, I thumbed through a field guide to birds. Louisa looked with me and said she spotted the bird we saw. I doubted her at first, but as it turned out, I think she was right: it was a black-capped night heron. What a cool name.
The wind kicks up. Could it be about to rain?
look into the microscope (11:05 PM)
April 21, 2008
Tonight, for the first time in a while, I feel free from the pressure of deadlines, and it is a nice feeling. Well, I do have to put the finishing touches on a few articles for Retail Traffic, it’s true. But at least I don’t have the feeling of needing to write thousands of words hanging over me. Instead, I sit in the La-Z-Boy, drinking an Oskar Blues Ten Fidy, having just polished off dinner and a few episodes of Deadwood, listening to the distant sound of cars rolling by and trying to persuade the cat not to lie on my stomach. I suppose “persuade” is not really the most accurate word. And now he has prevailed and is purring loudly and lying on my wrists and making it very difficult to type.
What’s on the horizon? I have some posts to think about for Scanning the Dial, some work to do for the Amazon Conservation Association, posts to write for the Future of Music Coalition’s blog. And Wednesday I will be up very, very early to help out with my mom’s first farmers’ market under the Smart Markets banner, way out at the Fair Lakes Whole Foods. I’m working at that market for just a month, but for the whole season at the market at the Reston Town Center, as the so-called “market master.” Right on.
Meanwhile, I still have much digging to do in my own community garden plot, though with all this rain I’m not sure when I’ll get around to that.
I’ve gotten into playing Scrabulous on Facebook. At first I was just playing people I knew, but in my search for satisfying and multiple simultaneously games I started looking for opponents whom I don’t know. I’m sort of amazed at all the women who have to specify “no pervs” in their game requests. Amazed, I guess, but not surprised. But I really don’t understand how perviness and Scrabble go hand in hand. I mean, if I were a perv and seeking to inflict said perviness on other, and I also enjoyed Scrabble, I think I’d keep the two predilections separate, and indulge the perviness elsewhere. I can’t imagine how the two coexist all that well within the confines of a Scrabble game. But maybe I should broaden my horizons.
It’s official: I’m going to Bonnaroo. I am super excited.
wherein our author retires to the country (09:02 PM)
April 10, 2008
Life is funny. Life is just funny. It amuses me.
Here I sit, enjoying a Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale and full of spaghetti. This week I’ve been working on two articles for Retail Traffic and one for Current, as well as the website for my mom’s farmers’ markets, Scanning the Dial, setting up my new MacBook (yum), my taxes and sundry other things. I tell you, it’s enough to keep a man from all the online Scrabble he really ought to be playing.
Today, I worked steadily from 9 to 4. I know you people with 9-to-5 jobs are scoffing right now, but I have been reading (and loving) Tom Hodgkinson’s The Freedom Manifesto (I really prefer the British title, How to Be Free), and it is putting me in the mindset that really, seven hours of solid “work” in a day is about four hours too many. Come 4 o’clock, my back and legs were aching and I felt terribly restless. I was ready to join the circus or craft a nutty mask or do something equally drastic. But I did not undertake these things. Instead, I visited my community garden plot.
Hodgkinson, incidentally, is a big fan of gardening. But he’s not the reason I’ve started gardening — I was inspired to start growing things last fall, after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I filled out a form and sent it to Richmond, Va. (odd, I thought, that I was lobbying the state government, rather than my county, for a plot). And lo and behold I was granted one, just a short walk from my condo. I head out the door, descend to and cross the creek, go up the hill and I’m there. They provide everything I need. What a deal! I’m so glad that after years of walking or biking by this community garden I finally did something about it, and now I’m a part of it.
I was commencing to double-dig, which I was advised is the best way to create a healthy and high-yield plot. Here’s what double-digging is all about. It was a lot of work, especially for a lazy sort like me. It took me a good three hours just to get one-fifth of my whole plot done. But I was just starting, which probably prolonged it, plus I paused often to talk with Colleen, a friendly fellow gardener. Note that the wikiHow article advises the following: “Begin at one end of the bed and dig a spade-head depth (approx. 12” deep) trench across the bed’s width, placing the excavated dirt in a wheelbarrow.” And then: “Fill the LAST trench with the soil excavated from the first. (The soil in the wheelbarrow)” Sound advice. I didn’t do this and it created some extra work, plus I got the first trench worth’s of soil on a neighbor’s plot, and I really hope I didn’t smother any budding plants. I’m pretty sure I didn’t.
Colleen, my fellow gardener, discovered that she had several stick-skinny asparagus shoots growing out of her plot (like me, this is her first year in the garden). We picked and ate them — they were pretty good.
Like I said, it was hard work, but I loved it — being outdoors and in the sun, hearing the birds chirp, and watching people go by. My thoughts receded and I was absorbed in the process of driving the shovel into the soil, breaking it up, tossing away rocks and weeds. One biker yelled out encouragingly, “You got it man!” A woman seemed incredulous that I was actually digging the entire plot rather than using a tiller. (I’m now a little incredulous too. But I’d much rather use my own power than gas or whatever tillers use.) Some dudes hung out in the cul-de-sac nearby and, I think, lit up some weed.
WikiHow also advises: “An area of 20-30 square metres or 200-300 square feet is enough to tackle on any single day. If you do too much on your first day, your back will not thank you and you may not finish the plot. Be sensible and don’t overdo it.” I must have done, like, an eighth of that. Geez.
Also: I’m going to explore whether my condo development could put up some solar power panels. But I don’t know anything about how this is done. Let me know if you can suggest any resources to check out.
death by blogging? (10:42 PM)
April 7, 2008
Earlier I dashed off something quite like the following after reading this article in the New York Times, wherein the author makes a somewhat pathetic case that, for at least half a dozen people who were accessible by deadline, blogging for a living makes for an unhealthy lifestyle.
Ugh, let’s talk about bad grammar (or listen to me talk about it): “Some sites, like those owned by Gawker Media, give bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting benchmarks, like if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month.” “Like if the pages”? What? How about “…such as whether the pages…” Geez. And do you “write” a web page? No, you write a post. This is like when people say “He posted a blog.”
And this is in the New York Times. Or maybe I’m just picky. I’ll write an article about “In World of 24/7 Stress Over Grammar, Mike Nitpicks Until He Drops.”
I do think it’s silly — it’s making a mountain out of a molehill, for one. Two deaths does not a trend make. Trend stories are a blight in themselves, but come on, you should have more than two examples. I guess they admit it’s not even a trend, but that makes it even more disingenuous. Also, these people are choosing these lifestyles for themselves. Blogging doesn’t make them this way. They make themselves this way. If they weren’t blogging they’d probably have some other high-stress jobs that don’t get written about because they don’t make for catchy headlines.
Postscript: I’m blogging as a career move, for free these days, in case I haven’t mentioned that here before. Haven’t gained a pound so far.
no country (04:57 PM)
I use too many adverbs.
The Walkmen are right when they say that the Coen Bros.’ No Country for Old Men is better the second time. I saw it last week, in a theater, specifically the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, which I’d never visited. It was nice to be able to drink a beer and watch a movie in a theater. And I didn’t find the screen overweeningly small, but then, I rarely have that problem. I don’t care much about screen sizes. I have a small TV.
No Country is the rare movie that makes me want to read the book on which it’s based. The movie succeeds on all levels, but it stands out in its art and pacing, matters that I imagine are unique to the movie, less so to the book. Besides, I do like McCarthy, though I found Blood Meridian rather a slog, which I guess is to be expected. I want to read more just to see whether he can top All the Pretty Horses, which was enchanting.
peepers (11:40 PM)
April 1, 2008
Tonight, for the first night all year, I can hear the spring peepers. I think I noted this last year on this blog, so I feel it’s important to note it this year. It marks a real turning point.
And, in that way, this time of year marks a turning point for me — though I’m hard pressed to say exactly what it is. I am, I admit, being coy. But maybe life is like that. When are we not at a turning point? What would happen if we chose to acknowledge every moment that comes to us as a turning point? Well, well, well.
That is what R.L. Burnside said to the crowd at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, N.C., when I saw him years ago. After each song: “Well, well, well.” I had gone to see the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. And was confronted with an old dude sitting down, with a guitarist with the most amazing hair-metal hairdo, and the old dude saying “Well, well, well.” It was something. I love opening acts. Opening acts are there to dissuade you from the notion that you are actually in control of your concert-going experience — unless, in fact, you went expressly to see the opening act, in which case you’re in a different boat.
