this took 6 hours, but the first 4 were me trying to compose something in Ableton and failing, then going back and doing it in Cubase and whizzing through it. Then the visuals turned out boring and so I had to fire up PureData to add those moving color shapes in the foreground. It's less boring, but still not a source of much pride this time. And the music turned out to be too poppy.
What I learnt:
If I want to do live performance, I'm going to have to compose with Cubase for the base track and stems that will then go into Ableton and add performable elements there, including visuals with PD or Max. But we're not there yet. One step at a time.
those first 4 hours were definitely not wasted, bc I learned a lot about Ableton today
as always in this project, the relationship between the images, the sound and the title are the piece. The only guarantee I want to make is that that relationship is carefully considered for each of these pieces.
a former student of Wheaton (Christian) College once told me that there was a joke among the student body explaining that "sex is prohibited on campus because it leads to dancing".
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a bunch of us were at an electronic music performance by 3 great guys from Spain and their music was great and afterwards they turned out to be really nice, zero-ego, nice fellows, which is good to see.
We all felt bad for them and for all the awesome venues that have live music that are not large nightclubs owned by bougie rich buttholes who are definitely behind the crackdown on dancing without permits by the cops. The venue we were at is about to be closed for the 2-month penalty. This has happened several times in the last few years and it really is killing independently owned bars and music venues that can't afford the licenses, or don't qualify for them. This is totally a shakedown to choke off competition and there is no end to it in sight.
so that got me thinking..
a completely legal way to solve this problem would be to have bands/performers do music that is not to be danced to, like IDM for one. Film screenings would work, performance artists, comedians, etc. could step in and fill the gap by filling seats and minds and tills at the same time, with no dancing at all. I love a great rock show as much as the next person and I've been in bands that relied on crowds of wildly dancing audiences. But these days the music that I make and play are more or less undanceable. The do, however (I hope) engage the mind and ear in (potentially) fulfilling ways and I'd love to see more of it in live venues here.
I've been thinking in terms of beat-less music for a while now and most of the best moments from most of my favorite musicians of late have been ambient, atmospheric music with thickly applied dynamic and complex rhythmic patterns and surprises that can only be appreciated when focusing your attention into the music/sound/visuals, etc. I'm almost done with the 4 on the floor kick thing. Yes yes, I know I do it in this project now and then, but I'm exploring it in the hopes that I can find a way out of it. One cannot (should not) properly break rules that they don't fully understand.
Anyway, I've got a bunch of things going on creatively and they all are moving in the abovementioned direction.
We can whine all we want about the cops and the organized bs behind it all but the only way to beat them is by surviving it. I'm proposing a groundswell of music that engages the sober mind instead of the drunken body.. for which there are always plenty of outlets. Let's lean into cerebral before-hours shows and then hit the bar and talk about it and anything else you want with our friends. And enjoy not having the cops knock on your door for a little while..
... until they make a law against music.
on a side note, I should mention that Chicago is famous for house music and it was exactly that. People weren't hearing the music they wanted in the clubs and bars so they bought a few kegs, got their friends to spin new records for them, charged $4 for a red plastic cup and opened up the house to an all night party where people just rolled up from the street. I went to tons of these while living in Chicago and they all fun - including the part where the cops inevitably showed up and people were flushing stuff down the toilet. I don't remember a whole lot from those parties, just the early evening parts of it, of course, but they were always fun. You found out about them from friends of friends and maybe a flyer copied at Kinkos or just heard the awesome music from down the street and you just joined in. "I'm a friend of Mike's" usually worked.
I don't think the house party culture really caught on here, but who knows, it might.
Until then, I suggest feeding our heads with music for a change. I know not a ton of people would agree but who knows? It might work.
watched I'm Not There (2007, Todd Haynes) last night.
I'd seen it before, but many parts were unfamiliar to me. but not the Cate Blanchett parts. I adore her. This was probably the performance that established that adoration.
I woke up this morning thinking about the movie from the previous night (as always). Aren't we all living multiple lives from day to day? Some more than others, of course, but I definitely feel that moodiness extends to longer scales of time during a life. If you know me well I don't blame you from laughing at that.. I'm one of the moodiest people I know. If you are thinking, Gordon's not moody.. then my constant efforts to hide it might be improving.
at the end, the VO mentions going to bed a different person than the one when you woke up that morning, like having yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room. Other than really enjoying the film in general, (except for the Heath Ledger parts, sorry) that made me sit up and think hey, I bet lots, if not everyone is a "many lives of.." person. It's an aspect that is really obvious when one of those first few "lives" made you famous. It seems like a very natural consequence of persistent self-improvement, right? Every "different" incarnation of Dylan (and it's a pretty common theme in other rock biopics) was born of his reaction to something that happened in his life or the world or the music scene, etc. What's he supposed to do? He could've ridden the gravy train of his first few albums, but he didn't. And to me that makes him far better an artist. I don't know how much shit people gave Picasso, Beethoven or Miles Davis for going through style changes. Likely some, but I relate to how Dylan lives his life and being shaped by his own decisions on how to deal with how the world reacts to him.
very unfinished thoughts today
i'm no authority on Dylan. I've read some books about him but not all of them. And I know his albums, just not all of them. and I might have missed the point of the film and his life, but it's got me reflecting on my own life and on life in general.. even if obliquely.
that's what blogs are for, aren't they? partly anyway.
didn't watch I'm Not There last night bc I was in the mood for something I haven't seen before.. so in the same category I chose: 24-hour Party People (2002, Winterbottom) with Steve Coogan as a (semi) fictional Tony Wilson, the "manager" of, among others, Joy Division and the various incarnations. Amazing performances all around. It maintained the documentary feel throughout. I especially loved Andy Sirkus as Martin Hannett, the studio genius/maniac behind the Manchester sound.
Some fantastic 4th wall breaks, especially when Coogan suddenly goes BTS and shows us which actual people from that era did cameos lest we may have missed them. The dude who plays Bez leaping up onstage and doing the Bez thing had me uncontrollably laughing each time he was on screen.
At one point, inevitably, Ian Curtis dies, and they dealt with it so beautifully, dropping the humor just enough to maintain the tone of the film and lovingly pay due respect. Coogan, who as an infamous c*nt in the rest of the film (I use that word only bc Ian Curtis when first meeting him, stands right in his face and calls him that, rightfully), but here in this one moment while alone in a room with Curtis' body lying in state, bends down and gently, if slightly awkwardly, kisses him on the forehead. It was the only time he showed a genuine albeit fleeting moment of compassion.
I'm seriously curious about how much of this film was fiction. However (I'm embarrassed to admit this), I don't think I'll read a book about the Manchester days between The Sex Pistols and the end of the Hacienda Club, aka, the "Madchester" years, only because I'm kind of saturated with sex drugs and rock and roll stories at the moment. And I have Dylan Jones' LOADED: The Life and Afterlife of the Velvet Underground sitting on my "things to read next" shelf.
But eventually I will.
And I will get to Kate and I'm Not There after I watch something completely different
watched Velvet Goldmine (1998) by Todd Haynes last night. pretty amazing stuff. One of the best music movies I've ever seen. Delighted to hear lots of stuff from Brian Eno's first album Here Come the Warm Jets, and probably the only Roxy Music song I like. I knew Ewan MacGregor had some edge in his range (see Trainspotting) but holy shit, dude. He looks and moves very much like Iggy Pop in the early days and the rest of the film he looks exactly like Kurt Cobain. This was released 4 years after Kurt died, so no coincidence there.
The blurb on Criterion said it was the Citizen Kane of rock biopics (or something like that) and it follows the general structure of CK and a bunch of times it outright steals from it. There's a dissolving transition from the ex-wife telling Christian Bale's character about the old days, exactly like when Jedediah (?) talks about Kane's first wife. Total homage. That was the most obvious one to me at the time.
I think it quotes a lot of Oscar Wilde, especially his snappy, head spinning ripostes and gales of theatrical laughter during press conferences with our Foster Kane/David Bowie/Bob Dylan character.
I love how it's a biopic about a dozen or so glam rock superstars rolled into 3 or 4 characters. David Bowie foremost, but reaches into the 90s, showing how the spectre of sex, drugs and rock and roll persists through the decades.
I've been watching tons of films about the punk rock years (Alex Cox, et al) and this is the best one I've seen yet, partly bc of how raw it is for a fictional biopic.
I liked it from the first moment. Words appear on a black screen at the beginning to the effect of..
"Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless..."
[pause]
"... be played at maximum volume"
Then goes into a little vignette suggesting Oscar Wilde was from another planet, a la Bowie's Starman.
I'm definitely (re)watching Haynes' I'm Not There, more than a little bc Kate Blanchett (among others) plays Bob Dylan in it.
reading more these days, which is good. this project was taking too much time away from reading, but now I'm gaining some balance. Susan Sontag's essay, Against Interpretation, is my at home book at the moment, in tandem with Brian Eno Visual Musicby Christopher Scoates (almost done). My subway/coffeeshop book is Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman, a re-read, but it might get bumped by Sontag for now. Yeah, I'm more of a non-fiction person.
welcome RSS feedster, the inimitable Lady Anne Bell!
today's took 4 hours, but is quite short. It would've taken half that time but I had do completely redo the strings bc they sounded too much like a certain film composer.. now they sound like another certain film composer but it's too late for a third version.
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recently watched a documentary about primitive cave art and at one point the narrator/guide says it qualifies as ART partly because it shows a desire for it to be seen by others. Immediately I jump up and say "See?! There's nothing wrong with wanting others to see and hear my work! What the hell is wrong with me??"
Yes, I can and willbitch and moan about the internet and still participate on my own terms.
someone recently told me that I have "presence", socially. I hope in a good way. A stone in my shoe has presence too. He might have just been slyly criticizing my admittedly uninformed sense of fashion. If so, then fair enough. I think that's funny too. He is a friend of mine but I don't know him well enough to tell sarcasm from benign observation. I may never know, because I don't rest much importance on impressing people in social situations. I just want to be a decent fellow that people can relax with while spending time with me. That's all, really.
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I force myself to look at my social media accounts every other day for a few minutes (bc that's frankly all I can stand). I do it bc I feel like kind of a heel if I don't reciprocate attention in that way. I like my friends and since I've committed to posting my art online, it's only fair I give something back, right? The captains of tech (our apparent overlords) fully intend to leverage this guilt to trap us in this system of society they've engineered. Of course. I get it.
The algorithm is constantly figuring out what I'm interested in from day to day, but it still shows me all kinds of shit I hate. so much so that I'm convinced that algorithms are not only interested in learning what interests me - they are partly tasked with changing what interests me.
I grew up on TV and I was all in without thinking about it until I spent 3 months away from TV when I first went to university. I was simply too busy and the campus only had TVs in dorm building lounges and similar places. Of course, this was ~15 years before smartphones. So upon returning to my childhood home during semester break, there was the family TV right where it was before I left. That was when TV shows and especially advertisements suddenly seemed wrong to me. I suddenly objected to being told what to like, think, feel, do.. all that. It was all of a sudden insulting. I've had a skeptical/cynical relationship with TV and ads ever since.
FF to today. I get the same annoyance at social media formats now except it's 10x worse. If people say we're like this bc we're old.. yeah, that's correct. But it's not crusty obstinance and willful ignorance.. it's because the appropriate reaction to being gaslit, lied to and manipulated all in order to control our thoughts and to separate us from our money - is anger! Skepticism is the product of a functioning bullshit detector. I know people in their 20s who are even more resentful of social media than I am, but they're having a harder time of it because it's WAY harder for young people to function in society if they eschew the means by which society functions. I get it. No one cares if I don't have my finger on the pulse of all the memes and all the news that I'm supposed to be fluent in partly because my demographic is not as important from a marketing standpoint. Maybe. I don't know. I don't really care.
Anyway, what I do know is that all the time I don't spend staring at my phone is time I can truly call my own.
I need to go easy on myself. I should step back and look at how much has happened in the last couple of years and allow myself to not suddenly be a 100% adjusted/balanced human being. These things take time to process and subside.
I know that my life is good and I should be happy and consider myself lucky, but things still feel weird underneath it all for some reason. That reason could be simply that I've never had so few stressors in my life and that in itself feels weird. Yeah, let's go with that for now. I've been functionally dysfunctional my entire life, why stop being so now that I've never had it so good?
Then I think, hold on, you lost both parents and the best job you ever had in the last 3 years. That leaves a mark. I'm not made of titanium.
How many blogs are titled apropos of nothing? Answer: exactly one shit ton. In fact, that is the official definition of a shit ton.
chances of me ever naming a blog apropos of nothing: negative one shit ton. Again, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures concurs.
/nothing
something related to the piece above/
done with the piece before lunch again! (it's 10:55am)
later attending a French-centric art exhibition opening. That's the way it was described to me. Sebastien Simon has a short film there. I'm fairly certain he would murder us if we didn't attend. That's not why we're going. We never miss events involving Sebastien in Busan. He's awesome.
this took all day (but felt like 40 minutes of work)
from ~8am to 6:20pm stopping only for lunch and a shower
our friend Gina Smith is coming over to watch some Andor episodes (we're star wars nerds and she's never seen it!) while eating chicken and drinking beer
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