music: Geoff Scott’s Altitude Music- 1/21/03
I’m proud to say that Live Live celebrated its second anniversary tonight.
(It’s pronounced “Liv Live,” by the way. Get it straight.)
music: Beck- Sea Change
Exams are finally over after over a month of drawn-out anguish. I made the mistake of relaxing for a little bit this weekend and inertia has carried me into sickness. The NyQuill should leave me drooling all over myself in a matter of minutes, but before I drop off I want to quickly process some of my thoughts on the past couple of days. Things are pivoting. Changes are afoot and I’m quite happy about them all.
My full-on student teaching began today. I am now responsible for a class of kids and I love it. There was so much that was familiar about the opening day experience; I was working through emotions pretty much identical to those I experienced on the porch of Cabin 10 in the summer of 1997. Opening day is opening day, no matter if it is at camp or school. Things went smoothly. My class was almost too mellow and quiet for comfort. I suppose I should enjoy that while I still can. They seem like a good group and I’m excited about going in every day to work with them. Simpler than that, too: I’m excited about going in every day. My graduate education becomes more practical now and I’m going to assume a more regular work schedule. I’ll have to wake up at 6:30 every morning, but it’s good.
Live Live is up and running again. It’s something I really have not paid much attention to over the past couple months, but it’s good to be pushing those fronts again. I’m sending out emails to bands due to play in Boston in the near future, asking for interviews, all that. The fact that I’m scheduled to be a guest lecturer in a University course about Live Live has spurred me to some sort of action with the program. That, and I fear the station will not renew its lease in April and will go under. Another lesson from camp: go out with a bang.
Up North is finished and is en route to AJM and The Doctor. My path as an original creator of music has begun in earnest with that little CD sampler of our time Up North, and I’m excited to pursue some musical ideas I’ve been sitting on with what limited time I may have .
1ey left today for Ecuador. He’s been gone from Boston for some time, but this was the big push. I spoke with him briefly last night and he sounds excited and a little nervous. Appropriately so. While he packed for his grand journey, a good collection of us listened to the music he left behind as we shared a wonderful Sunday night at 12 Curtis: myself, JoJo, tmo, Peet, and others modestly celebrated friendship and good times with quesadillas, beer, laughter, all with the 1ey’s music in the background. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to see my friends at the 1-2. Hopefully with a more normal schedule I’ll get to spend some more quality time with them.
And on top of all that, I’m having an absolutely positive time making new friends out of old friends. Unexpected, improbable, maybe even wildly rediculous, but completely wonderful.
It’s funny: usually this time of year is marked by a certain stagnation and hibernation. Usually people are biding their time until things warm up a bit, weathering the winter, riding out the cold snap. But I seem to be getting somewhere with a quickness these days. There’s a strong wind blowing for me right now, and I’m doing all I can to catch it and ride it fast and far.
music: Nick Drake- Pink Moon
I’va always had a propensity to organize, document, and catalog things in my life. I think about my binders of baseball cards meticulously organized by team alphebetically, and players within each team alphabetically, the books I just won’t get rid of, my box of college work…the list (a well-organized list, to be sure) goes on. I think I get it from mom, who has made a career out of doing just that. There’s something genetic at work: collect and save.
It’s not stuff that I’m after. That was a big hump to get over, but I’ve been in the process of shedding extraneous material possessions over the past couple of years. It’s a good practice, but something rubs me the wrong way every time I discard that pencil box I’ve been carrying around for all these years. I’ve learned to do it anyway. This past December saw a purging of epic proportions back in Milwaukee. But what remained was carefully orgainzed and cataloged. Old work, old pictures, items that capture a very specific place and time. I’m glad that I have them around still-they trigger memories that otherwise would have gotten lost in the cognitive shuffle.
I think the goal in all this organizing and cataloging of artifacts from my past is the attempt to capture my thoughts and position in the world at that very moment. There have been several ways in which I documented my thoughts over the years, some more successful than others. I have kept various notebooks of various sizes, some reserved for late night broodings and others pocket sized for quick and regular access. I have shoeboxes full of old pictures. Here in Boston, the pictures date back to about 1983. I carried a dictophone for the better part of two years and have cassette tapes full of sound clips: ambient noise, street performers, confesstion-style testimonials, snippets of conversations. And I suppose that the final link in this chain of documenting my thoughts is this here weblog.
One thing I’ve never been too good at is taking pictures. Mom does it with religious fervor when the kids are in town; Grandma D. also is quite a shutterbug. It’s always been such a hassle, though. And expensive. As a result, I don’t have many pictures that I have taken myself, and those pictures I do have leave gaping holes in the fossil record of my past. Yet, I enjoy looking at old pictures and using photography as a medium of documentation. It is accessible, distributable, and the like. I take pictures of funny things, though: I think I have a picture of every room I have lived in since sophomore year of college (they all look surprisingly similar).
I’m not entirely sure why, but I spent my birthday money on a digital camera. It arrived today, and now, for the first time in years, I have a camera again. I got it because I knew that I would have to do some documenation for teaching in the near future, as well as some press work for the recently revived Live Live website, but other than that, I’m not sure how I will go about documenting my life with the thing. Taking pictures feels almost unnatural to me, like writing with my right hand. I don’t like how cameras intrude into the natural flow of an activity. Given my genetic inheritance, I’ll probably get over that at some point. Especially now that I have this tool of documentation.
I’m still not quite adept at handling the thing and getting quality results. Again I am reminded: I may know a thing or two, but I’m no 1ey The genius of digital is that I don’t have to worry about wasting film and can experiment as much as I please.
I think that the process of organizing and cataloging, and even collecting, has become that much easier now that we can use computers to do it. Not only does it make things like alphebetizing by hand completely obsolete, it is also makes tangible objects obsolete. That I can fit hundreds of thousands of pictures and sound clips onto this computer without sacrificing physical space is a feat, something that might just make the process of documenting my thoughts that much more viable.
Some pictures from inside my room: January 21, 2004
Guitar and Books
Flower
Whiteboard
Buttpack
music: “Up North” - The Northwoods Recording Sessions NYE 2004
(Posts are becoming more sparse. Must be some meta-awareness that people are actually paying attention…)
It was about two years ago a that tmo and I started making noises about doing a radio show. Talking hypothetically, of cousre, as tmo thrives in the realm of ideas. “We talk about music so much,” says he, “we should find a way to lend it some legitimacy.” The lightbulb then goes off that if I do have a radio show to call my own, I would then become a member of the fabled “media” and be able to reap the benefits that a member of the media enjoys, including free promotional cds and media passes to concerts. This was, of course, most appealing to me, being unemployed and having a serious music habit that needed feeding.
Two years later, steps have been taken. The radio show has become a staple in the weekly schedule. We are about to celebrate Live Live’s second anniversary at the end of the month, and our 100th show some time in February. And dozens of concerts and hundreds of cds later, I feel that my music habit has a certain degree of legitmacy.
There was a week last year where I ended up on the Yonder Mountain String Band and Sound Tribe Sector 9 tour buses within the span of one week. That was an achievement. I interviewed Michael Franti after he got offstage with Trey Anastasio. That was an achievement. But I think that legitimacy has reached its peak only now, even with the decreased amounts of time I have had to dedicate to the show. I found out this week that I will be the guest speaker in a course at the University of Colorado-Boulder. JOUR4871: Doing Media Research on the Music Industry. February 19th, 12:30pm. I’ll be talking about doing interviews.
All courtesy of the quick thinking of my colleague AJM, who is TA‘ing the course. He can’t believe he’s getting away with this. And at the same time, he’s really digging this music thing. A perfect symbiosis, I think. A resume-builder, he says. Legitimacy, I say. I’ll say more on the 19th of February in Boulder.
But music is not something to talk about and study exclusively. As the guest speaker, it is my role to do something, and the class’s role to analyze it. Fine. but that is not enough. This is not a spectator sport. The steps I’ve taken with music have been pointing towards production rather than consumption, authentic work rather than recycled reproductions. I started off consuming music like the majority of our lemming society, then moved towards a more intellecutal relationship with it. I played other people’s music at campfires during the summer and at scattered open mics throughout college. It was production, but not original production. With Live Live, I began producing something original, but it was still a step removed from the product itself. And as of this New Year’s vacation, I began to work through some original music with some friends. I’m listening to it now.
I spent a good chunk of time this weekend sifting through the Northwoods Recording Sessions and have distilled the best of our moments to fit on one CD, with room for some other goodies I’ve been working on over the past month or two. There are covers included, but there are also moments of pure creation. It is the first time I can point to original work and claim it as my own, or at least partially my own. And already I’m unsatisfied. There is more to do, a degree of quality to attain, places to go with this work. I need to continue to develop my own voice and style. I’m still not as fluent in the language as I would like to be, nor are my hands able to keep up with my head, but there are moments. There definitely are moments. It seems that making music captures the perfect balance of Love and Work, Freud’s two criteria for mental health.
I remember telling myself some time in high school that while music was fun for me, I never would want to pursue it in earnest. I think it was partially because I was scared to actually put something original out there for people to potentially reject. I wasn’t sure if I had the talent, if I had anything that other people would want to listen to. I still don’t know for sure. But the process of making this music and now having a very concrete resultant product was exhilirating. And now I have an 80-minute cd to show for it.
Perhaps i’ll indulge and give “Up North” some airplay on Tuesday.. Legitimacy.
All this in the middle of a torrent of demands from graduate school. I still have one monster of a Final hanging over my head, and there’s not enough time or relevance to teaching to be interested in it. Plus, my head is spinning with new song ideas. But all things considered, things are in relative balance. Love and work have found harmony. The music flows, and I feel good.
music: Aretha Franklin- 30 Greatest Hits
This one was a doozy, but it is done. Well, not done exactly…I think that I could be working on this paper for the rest of my life. The syntax and content are at the point now where anything else would be the icing on the icing on the cake, so it’s time to stop. So for the purposes of handing it in, it is done. And it feels good to have it done. Because I don’t have to work on it anymore and can move on to the rest of my work for Finals, and because I think I’ve gotten some good thinking down with regard to solitude and its relationship with wilderness. But don’t take my word for it.
I think I’ve decided upon finishing this work that it’s time to shift my focus away from solitude for a little bit.
music: Sound Tribe Sector 9- 10/31/00
I just finished reading an extraordinary article about blogging and feel the need now to justify (or at least more thoroughly explain) myself. Indeed, blogging has become a phenomenon among the younger members of our society, a phenomenon worthy of some real attention for various reasons. So I will indulge for a bit and meditate on this blog thing, here at post #100. It’s only fitting.
The article focuses on the high school aged bloggers of the world, explaining the weblog or online journal as a cross-breed of the instant messenger and reality-television type vouyerism. To a lot of teenagers, it seems, blogging is a social phenomenon. Teens know that their friends and classmates are reading. teens use their blogs to fill various social functions, from announcing parties to bitching about this and that to an extension of therapy. Blogs range from one line rants to full-on, uncensored descriptions of the most deep-down private thoughts a young person might have. All in all, an intruiging psychological and sociological study, to be sure. The internet, as tmo would say, is a strange place.
And here I find myself composing an entry that will be posted on a blog of my own. The plot thickens.
My knee-jerk reaction is that I’m nothing like these kids described in the article. I’m not announcing any parties, I’m not bitching about this and that, I’m not disclosing my inner life to the extent that I wouldn’t want my parents to read this (in fact, I encouraged mom to read). What am I doing, then? I think that I’m processing, thinking out loud to nobody and everybody about whatever happens to be weighing on my mind on a given day. Admittedly, it’s been a positive exercise. Writing about what I’ve been thinking about has helped me mentally navigate and frame my world in a very healthy way, and has brought a level of reflection back to my life that was absent for some years.
Why not write in a book and keep it in a sock drawer, then? I used to do that. Why did I stop? Why, now, am I writing things that I know people will read, that deep down I want people to read? This, after all, is the essence of the blog-we write because we know there is an audience. If there were no audience, or we didn’t care about writing for them, we would still be writing in books and keeping them in our sock drawers. The answer, for me, has to do with giving people access to my thoughts. I’ve sometimes been accused of being a bit inaccessible, of being hard to read, and I think that I started this thing in the hopes that people could more easily gain access to my thinking if they wanted to.
And at the same time, I think I’ve been so diligent about writing because there has been nobody here late at night to talk to. I’ve been doing this during my time in grad school, a decidedly lonely period. I’ve noticed that when I’ve had good and positive interactions with people in my world, I’m less inclined to write here. Writing in a private way but so others can read it gives me the feeling that there is still a social context late at night when I can’t do any more schoolwork and everyone else is asleep. Much in the same way, I think, that television makes people feel less lonely. Maybe this is my television, since I haven’t really watched the box in over 7 years. Maybe the blog is following in the footsteps of reality television, contributing to our society’s peeping tom fetish, and I am just a part of that trend. Maybe.
Still, I would like to believe that there is something qualitatively different between me and the teenaged bloggers referred to in that article. For one, I am 25 and in graduate school. I also write in complete sentences. I strive for some substantive content, for expanding my personal experience to more general themes that any passerby might be interested in reading about. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure that much is different between the twentysomething intellectuals of anize.org and the teenaged bloggers of livejournal, except that in my peer group, I am the exception. When some of my friends find out that I keep a weblog, they laugh a little. It is something that my generation missed by a couple years, much in the same way that we missed instant messaging.
Sometimes I think that it is rather odd that I’m so prolific online. I would like to believe that we anize’ers really do have something to say, that we can contribute original and substantive content to the onslaught of information, that we can counterbalance the terabytes of absolute shit that is out there, but it may not be so. We may be guilty of the same things these teenagers are guilty of, except at a more highbrow intellectual level. The contemplation of one’s navel can take many forms.
Will I stop blogging? Probably not. Will I consider my purposes in writing more in the future? Yes. Am I ashamed of all this? Not really. Has this been an important reality check? Absolutely. Sometimes I forget that what I type here, by myself, usually deep into the night, is transmitted to the world, and therefore becomes part of a larger social context. Nothing exists in isolation. I am not excluded from the implications of that article. The trick is to figure out exactly where this piece fits, and then what to do with it. After 100 posts, it seems that I’m not there yet. Ever onwards. To struggle is to progress.
music: Mad Dog Trio- Ex Nihilo
One conclusion resulting from a bit of quasi-impulsive reality testing this past weekend, submitted for approval:
One of the most elegant equations in Newtonian physics is also one of the simplest and most widely known: rate is a function of distance and time. This equation describes the motion of objects through space; it gives us a way to describe speed. I have come to realize as of late that this equation applies equally to human relationships, except that the rate of relationship, I think, also refers to its quality (which is a generally constant value decided upon by factors far too complex to model quantitatively), and distance and time fluctuate in inverse proportion accordingly. Which is unfortunate.
This, of cousre, fails to take into account the more modern Einsteinean model which states that rate, or quality, is responsible for the dilation of both distance and time. Which makes things a little more interesting.
I’m happy to say that before any other conclusions are reached, more data will need to be collected. Applied mechanics is nothing if not thorough, and this researcher is nothing if not patient.
music: Bob Marley- Songs of Freedom d.2
Brown students know the drill: the SciLi closes, and you gather your stuff up, walk across that concrete balance beam, and plant yourself in the CIT until whatever it is you are working on is done. That’s how it goes during finals. The CIT was a zoo-people sleeping in the corners of hallways, coffee and cigarettes, people sleeping at their computers because they didn’t want to give up their spot, etc etc.
Three years later. Different scene, same deal. I’ve left the Lamont and made my way to the Cabot, the 24-hour study space du jour. The drab interior, the chairs just uncomfortable enough to keep you awake…yes, yes. I’m right at home, ready to type into the wee hours. It’s probably better that there are no windows.
It’s early in reading period, so things aren’t crazy yet, but I’m looking at one of those nights. And teaching tomorrow. It’s finals. And to put a cramp on things, I’m considering a quick trip out of town Friday-Saturday. That, really, is why the crunch is on tonight and tomorrow. It’s gonna suck, but I’ll get through it. I’m armed with some things I didn’t have last time around: my laptop and my chinatown slippers. Both are indespensible tools at this hour. But enough. No more time to waste typing here…I have a long night of solitude ahead of me so I can…um…write about solitude. How meta-appropriate.
music: Taj Mahal- In Progress and In Motion
It is one thing to enroll in a graduate program and complete it (gettin’ there). It is quite another to represent the program publicly. True, true, this one was voluntary. I figure: someone’s gotta represent the program. And if they really want me to represent the program, then I’ll represent the program. But, I made clear, it will be me representing the program. My words were left pretty much intact, which is important. I wasn’t too contraversial in my submission, even though I’ve somehow gotten a reputation around HGSE as a revolutionary. Still, somehow I doubt they will want link to anize.org…
music: Godspeed You Black Emperor!- f#a#oo
I woke up this morning in a basement hide-a-bed in Milwaukee, and am now sitting in my apartment in Boston. I spent the last hour or two putting everything away from my sojourn to the homelands of the midwest and now, by all measures, I’m back. My break is over and everything is pretty much just as I left it, ready to be picked up and worked through. Breaks are cruel in this regard.
I spent a good deal of time organizing and sorting and getting from here to there with the least amount of friction possible. Mom, as always, was indespensible on the Milwaukee end, and tmo was a lifesaver on the Boston end. I brought back my drumset which made things a little trickier than usual, but I miraculously didn’t have to pay extra for any of the oversized and overweight boxes. Between a rolling cart and tmo’s truck, the drums found their way safely to 9 Lothrop and will see good use there under the care of our newly engaged friends, along with OGD, Jeff, and the dog called Sam. They couldn’t have a better home. I guess anything beats them collecting dust in the attic as they have been doing for the past 2 years. But time for music will become a luxury in the next few months.
Now that everything is back in its proper place I can take a minute to glimpse at the state of things here and now, and it does look like I’m standing under a tsunami. I have to finish researching the solitude paper, finish planning a unit on water for my teaching, and write two essays on cognitive theory between the 20th and 23rd of this month. I inherit my own chemistry classroom on the 26th. I realize that right now is the moment of calm before the mad rush; once things are set in motion, I don’t see them slowing down until June when I graduate. And here I am, already thinking about the summer and beyond. I’m getting ahead of myself. There are promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
Taking a break was nice, but it really killed any momentum that I had as far as school was concerned. I hit a nice pace here and had figured out a decent and somewhat sane schedule, but no more. Milwaukee has made me soft. After spending two weeks in revelry and sleep, having meals cooked for me, driving everywhere, enjoying the quiet and the open space, I got soft. I lost some sort of edge that the hustle and bustle, the crowdedness, the intensity of Boston and the East coast keeps sharp. The two places are indeed different, and it is only when I slip between worlds that I see just how different they are. Although I sometimes would have it otherwise, I am glad to be out here, caught up in this chaos and din, being pushed into action and productivity. Things in the midwest move such that I’m not sure I would have the momentum to accomplish all the things I’m setting out to do here. Tonight, though, it’s more of a struggle to work with such pressures after I’ve been free of them for the better part of two weeks. I have gone soft, out of shape. It’s been quite a nice time spending my day how I most would like to spend it, but here, back in the real world, I have promises to keep. The post-travelling ritual of putting everything back in its place today has given me some degree of focus; tomorrow the workout resumes in earnest.
music: master recordings from Wabeno, WI- 12/29/03 — 1/1/04
2004 has arrived and my time in the midwest is rapidly coming to a close. It’s been time enough here. There are things that need my attention (and lots of it) out East, and although I’m staring down a series of very demanding weeks, I’m anxious to be getting back to my current and chosen reality. Milwaukee was a nice respite from my obligations in Boston, but it is definitely time to dig back in. So I grit my teeth, and set myself, and prepare for the onslaught of full time teaching, final exams, and everything else my life out East demands of me.
The trip home was productive on several fronts. I spent some time with family members and friends who I haven’t seen in a long time. I made some headway on school work, although not nearly as much as I would have liked. But perhaps most importantly, I made some music.
I found myself in a cabin in Wabeno, WI with some friends from camp to ring in the new year. AJM, The Doctor, and I used a good deal of time in the back room of that cabin to record some music. The conditions were less than optimal: three guys, three acoustic guitars, and a less-than-professional microphone, but it came together better than I thought it would. When all was said and done, we committed about two and a half hours’ worth of our music to hard drive space. Included in that archive were several original works, which represented an important step for me in my own creative process.
I’ve fiddled around with snippets of musical ideas for some time, but haven’t really had the wherewithall to produce a song. I think that the collaboration with friends Up North this weekend really spurred the songwriter in me. As I sit here, a night after returning, I am still energized with possibility and creativity. I think a lot of it had to do with the reinforcement my friends provided. So much of the music I make falls on my bedroom walls, and there is nobody there to add their own voice, but this week two of my friends were there to contribue their voices and visions to the product.
I learned “Gato Negro” this weekend, a tune that AJM wrote with The Doctor last year, and I am really impressed with it. So much so that its existence somehow proves to me that this songwriting endeavour is possible, that producing quality original work is absolutely within my reach. It is something that I need in order to carry forth; it is something I am listening to right now.
The music itself is rough and isn’t mixed too well (to be fair, it is pretty good considering what we had to work with), but it represents something greater. After making music with my friends this week and having it to listen to now, the production of my own song(s) seems that much more within reach. I’ve stuggled with the producer/consumer dichotomy for the past couple of year, wishing to fall more on the producer side of things, and after the recording sessions this past week I finally feel like I’m taking a step in the right direction. The real challenge will be keeping up the momentum in Boston, where I will be far away from my New Year’s collaborators and more likely than not working in isolation. Yet another challenge to add to the long list for when I return. But this is important; making music is one of the best uses of my time and energy that I can imagine. A certain threshold has been crossed, and I aim to use this inertia to push my practice in the months to come. As AJM might say: “Forward.”