Without music or media

I've been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.

-- László Krasznahorkai in the New York Times blog

Of course, everyone in the world lived that way before the advent of the photograph and radio, the television, the home stereo system, piped-in Muzak, the "personal" media player, and so on.

Several years ago I spent six weeks in a remote mountain retreat. My mornings were spent in the kitchen, where music played all the time and made the time pass pleasantly. After that I enjoyed silence, solitude and time to work -- for a week. Then a young man moved in upstairs and blared his stereo. It took me several negotiations to get him to let me have, at least, the afternoons to work in silence. But the irony was that I had to negotiate silence at all in a remote mountain retreat.

Like time and space, the commodity of silence becomes more and more valuable -- especially as you get older.

Abandon everything, again. Hit the road.

Very nice essay about/interview with Townes Van Zandt, the songwriter-singer who inspired a generation of Texas songwriters -- including me -- in the LA Review of Books:

On songwriting and inspiration:

Well, sometimes they come from the top — from the roof. Sometimes they come from the floor. Sometimes they come from the window and sometimes the heart. Occasionally from the mind.

On the artist's calling:

But this land is covered with brilliant young and old musicians. What it takes is perseverance, and you have to be lazy. You have to be too lazy to work. When you start, at least, it helps not to have a family, because I started before I had a family. Young men come up to me and say, "I'd really like to do what you do, how shall I go about it?" I say, well you get a guitar or a piano (I prefer a guitar because it's a lot easier to carry than a piano), then you've got to blow off security, money, your family, your loved ones, your home, blow it all off and stay with your guitar somewhere under a bridge and learn how to play it. That's how it goes. That's what I did.

And that discourages a lot of them, 'cause some of them are like, "I have two kids and I work in a gas station. I'm going to save my money and go to Nashville for a week." But that ain't it. And girls, young ladies, occasionally ask me. I say, well first off, you've got to cut all your fingernails on your left hand off. And that stops most of them.

But it ain't easy. I mean, it's not hard; it ain't easy. It's killing me, I know that.

(Yes, I was a guitar player/songwriter when I was a college student in Texas at the same time, the mid 1970s, that TVZ was becoming famous, at least among Texas singer-songwriters. And I did cover some Townes Van Zandt songs -- but everyone did.)

(Post title comes from the English translation of the Visceral Realist manifesto by Roberto Bolaño.)

Film: Lou Harrison - A World of Music

Harrison House in Joshua Tree, Calif.

In September and October 2010 I spent five weeks in Joshua Tree, Calif. to research a novel. I rented a house owned by a performer and filmmaker, Eva Soltes, who also owns and administers a landmark house which happened to be across the street: a straw-bale house designed and built by American composer Lou Harrison. The house today is used by composers and other artists in residence to work on projects.

Soltes's film about Harrison, Lou Harrison: A World of Music, which includes footage on the design and construction of the desert retreat, is playing at the Roxie theater in San Francisco for a week beginning this Friday.

Some cultural things just go on and on and on

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- the hip electronic item for the home was the hi-fi. This was a large wooden cabinet six or seven feet long, containing a turntable, an amplifier and radio, and large cabinet speakers. (See this image, where an example sits in the center.) And to play on their hi-fis, middle-class people bought LPs. If they were educated, or just culturally aspiring, they might buy opera and symphony records; if they were only lightly-educated, and staid middle class people like my parents, they bought Broadway cast LPs and a series of curious recordings called Sing Along With Mitch.

(Just as a reference, while my parents bought those dubious pop records, my wife's parents, who were immigrants but understood what culture was in a way my own parents never did, bought opera and symphony records, and my wife sings arias around the house to this day.)

On each Mitch Miller recording was a dozen or so standards sung by a male chorus accompanied by a sprightly orchestra. Mostly folk songs or songs from the turn of the century, like "Peg O' My Heart," "The Sidewalks of New York," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Makin' Whoopie," and so on. I was a little kid and liked to sing, and the whole point of these records was that you were supposed to sing along, so they contained full lyric sheets, and that way I learned these moldy songs by heart. They struck me even then as utterly of the past, because even when I was 8 (C.E. 1964) I was listening almost literally religiously to Top 40 radio and memorizing those songs too ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Satisfaction," "House of the Rising Sun" and so on), and the difference was obvious, even to a little kid.

At that time "The Lawrence Welk Show" was not a syndicated museum piece as it is now, but still a regularly broadcast television program on a major network, ABC. My grandmother would simply not miss this show, with its happy-faced Barbie-and-Ken-doll cast singing mostly the same ancient songs (e.g. on YouTube: "The Beer Barrel Polka;" "Big Rock Candy Mountain"). This show, which drew from more or less the same songbook as Mitch Miller, seemed even stranger -- not just a similarly weird, old-fashioned indulgence, but an actively sinister force -- if you watched it, I felt, you would find yourself growing elderly by the minute.

Thirty-five years later, my wife's mother landed in an Alzheimer's care home, where one of the social activities was listening to live music. The music consisted of a person with an accordion playing those same old songs -- literally the same old songs, "Sidewalks of New York" and so on. Now if that was nostalgic music to my grandmother, who was maybe 10 years old in 1900, what was it supposed to represent to people 40 years younger than her, people who were, say, 70 in 2000? Why weren't they playing the Big Band music of the 1940s, which would be to those folks what the Lawrence Welk songbook would have been to my grandmother? Why, in fact, weren't they playing the classical music my wife's mother had chosen to buy and listen to when she had the choice?

Even more mind-bendingly, this year I visited the Assisted Living facility where my own mother was living. And they had a man playing accordion, and he still played the same songs, including "Sidewalks of New York" and "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." WTF. Is there like a Nursing Home Songbook, with the same 25 numbers in it? I am really concerned about this. When I wind up in a freaking Assisted Living Facility in 20 or 30 years, they still better not be playing those same fucking songs; they better be playing some Beatles and Rolling Stones, or some accordion player is going to get bopped by my walker. Of course by then the accordion player will be robotic.

All this came to mind when I saw this jaw-dropping bit on Mediaite: On his own television program on his own network, ancient Pat Robertson hosted Condaleeza Rice, and when she suggested that "mac and cheese" was a wonderful holiday food, Robertson blurted out:

What is this "Mac and Cheese," is that a black thing?

And I thought, how the hell does this thing that is the 700 Club, and the Trinity Broadcast Network, survive? It's not like it's in syndication like the Welk show. (And for the record, at least on the Welk show they sang numbers from the 1940s and 50s and even contemporary numbers like -- God help us, I'm not kidding -- "One Toke Over the Line.") Who in the hell is giving money to this ancient fraud Robertson and the desperately out-of-touch worldview espoused on his network?

Then I realized -- things that somehow contain and epitomize cultural moments and worldviews, even if they do it terribly, just go on and on. It's like the culture as a whole needs these things as ballast, to balance out emanations like "TMZ" and the CW. Not that I claim to know the mechanism of how that works.

Friday things

Today's the 8th anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño in 2003. He died awaiting a liver transplant. Did you know you can donate a part of your own liver to someone whose liver is breaking, and both of you come out alive? Your liver grows back! Wow.

This morning in Whole Foods, among their usual greatest-hits-of-the-Sixties/Seventies/Eighties, the Muszak played Martha and the Muffins' great "Echo Beach," perhaps the greatest hit of 1980. (1980 also brought David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes," the B-52s' "Private Idaho" and "Rock Lobster," The Brian Eno/Talking Heads collaboration "Fear of Music," Michael Jackson's "Rock with You," and the Psychedelic Furs' "Sister Europe." Other than that it wasn't such a great year musically. Example: The Rolling Stones' disappointing followup to 1979's triple-awesome "Some Girls," the album "Emotional Rescue," of which the title song was the only really good cut.)

Readers know I make my living as a technical writer. McSweeney's just published a brilliant satire positing Gertrude Stein as a tech writer in Ben Greenman's awesome "Gertrude Stein Gets Her New iPhone."

Lisa B's 'Poetry of Groove'

Here's my friend Lisa B, with a nice little video for her jazz-pop tune "The Poetry of Groove." I like the dancing and the kinda DIY low tech quality.



Lisa's part of a circle or artists and activists I got to know in the mid-80s, among them my great friend Christine (lower left in this picture).

technorati: jazz, video

Old ladies making church

My friend Sara, whose religious conversion and consequent founding of a successful Food Pantry was the subject of her book Take This Bread, told me once that the old ladies who gather on the sidewalk for hours before the pantry opens to distribute food are, in their community with one another, fulfilling a spiritual need. "That's church too," she said of their alfresco klatsch.

I remembered Sara's words when I stumbled across this video:

Isn't that church too?

technorati: postmodernism,dancing, church, Sound of Music

Today's fake: Recorded classical piece played at Inauguration as musicians sawed

Remember the little scandal at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, when a pretty girl lip-synched while an uglier girl with a prettier voice sang behind the scenes? Something of that fakery was in action during Tuesday's inauguration when Yo Yo Ma, Yitzhak Perlman and two other classical musicians played an adaptation of Aaron Copland. Positioned high above the VIPs, the quartet was actually playing -- but what came out of speakers and was heard on television was a pre-recorded version of the piece, because it was so "wicked cold" -- as Ma put it -- that they didn't want to risk weather-related screeches.

Sigh.

technorati: inauguration

Karaoke crowd freaks when actual rock singer shows up

Mickey Dolenz, who sang many of the Monkees' hits, was having dinner at Elaine's in New York when someone realized that people in a karaoke club a few doors away were all singing along to one of his hits, "I'm a Believer." Dolenz was summoned, entered the karaoke bar, and the result was pandemonium.

The best part of the story was that it was a coincidence that Dolenz was nearby when the song -- which was repopularized in the 2001 film Shrek (YouTube clip here) -- was chosen by the under-20s at the karaoke club; they didn't know he was near.

No regrets, Coyote

The other evening, as part of a pledge drive, one of the local public radio stations played a 90-minute program on the career of Joni Mitchell. I only heard the last half, coming in around "Mingus," but I didn't need to hear the first half to know the difference between the soaring, heart-breaking beauty and amazing range of Mitchell's early voice, and the monotonous quality and paltry range of her later years. In a couple of tracks from her last, 2007 album, it's clear she has less than an octave of range and barely enough breath to croak out a short phrase. Even more awful was her speaking voice in interviews over the last ten or fifteen years -- hoarse and scratchy, sounding like every one of her sixty years and then some. Rarely photographed without a cigarette, in a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, she smoked two packs a day for fifty years, thus achieving her stated preference that she be not a pop singer but a painter.

I have a friend who was a dancer for many years until an injury put an end to it; but she did not hasten the end of her career by riding in cars without a seatbelt or pursuing a hobby as a downhill ski racer. It seems utterly stupid to do that to yourself, but strangely, it seems even the most brilliant people aren't happy being themselves. Seen as another in a long line of artists whose drug habits destroyed their careers, Mitchell is in good but sad company, and there was no real reason to think that the amazing insight and lyrical talent she demonstrated as a songwriter meant that she was above this type of self-sabotage.

technorati: Joni Mitchell