Oh, right.
I was—“procrastinating” is such an ugly word—I was organizing some notes, looking over the list of proposed titles for upcoming fits and remembering which ones I’d found epigrams for and which ones I hadn’t, when I tripped over “Frail,” there between an as-yet unnamed bit at no. 14 and “Plenty” at no. 16.
“Frail.” Hadn’t that been the one with the O’Brian quote? Aubrey to Maturin, or Maturin to Aubrey, one of ’em anyway laughing at what little it is that separates quickness from death? Which the hell book was that from? And why isn’t the quote in the neat little text file I’ve got of all my other epigrammic candidates?
So I opened up the various other text files I’ve accumulated over the years where notes have been stashed and squirreled away, and searched them with the various search tools at my disposal, looking for “frail.” Bupkes.
Did I forget maybe to put it somewhere? Noted it en passant, said to myself, oh, hey, keen, let’s remember to come back and get this later, okay? And then forgot? As it wouldn’t be the first time.
Okay. Okay. We could go look for it. Except I ran across it the last time I was bingeing through the first seven or so of the Aubrey-Maturin books, and I have no earthly idea which one it was in. And I don’t remember enough of the context to make skimming at all viable. Not through seven books. (Maybe I should start bingeing again? Put down The Orientalist and Evasion and Civilizations Before Greece and Rome and The Demon Lover and pick up Master and Commander for another go-round, grimly determined to pounce this time?)
I think I was actually typing “frail” in the Seach Inside the Book! feature over at Amazon when it hit me: maybe I’d written it down. You know, on paper. With a pen. In the main black notebook I’ve been using when I’m not, you know. Near a keyboard.
Found it in two: “Bless you, Jack, an inch of steel in the right place will do wonders. Man is a pitiably frail machine.” —Although I still don’t know which book. Or what context. Oh, well.
(At least I got a blog post out of it. Now. What in hell am I going to quote for “Surveilling”?)
Something I read that I liked.
There ought to be an anthem for grocery shopping, because carefully and clinically choosing the stuff you’ll be made out of is grade-A autonomy.
gimcrackeryPorch, with occasional rainbow.
Scott McCloud was here on Sunday. Fun was had.
Apparently, I’m waiting for something.
Though I know not what. —Y’all see anything likely, let me know, okay?
Monkeys and Wolves and termites, oh my!
The Known World is back from database hell. (For those interested in such things, of course.)
A twinkling merriment behind it all.
“Funerals,” the Operacycle; “Gonna Miss You,” Hub Moore and the Great Outdoors; “Tear in Your Hand,” Tori Amos; “Bhangra Fever,” MIDIval PunditZ; “Turning the Pearl,” Jeff Harrington; “Myth,” k.d. lang; “The President,” Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians; “I Want to be a Sideman,” Dave Frishberg; “Dizzy,” Siouxsie and the Banshees; “Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya,” Ella Fitzgerald.
Oh, Paarfi.
On the subject of returning, to which we just made reference in the previous sentence…
—Steven Brust, The Viscount of Adrilankha
“‘He rose from the chair upon which he was sitting.’ Well, which other chair should he have risen from, if not from that upon which he was sitting?” —And why did it take me so long to get back to these books? Teeth!
Don’t mind me.
You know. Distracted. Reading. Painting shelves. Pushing a reel mower through a month’s worth of shin-high grass. That sort of thing.
I thought I’d gone mad for a while there and was imagining we’re now a country that sanctions torture and secret imprisonment without trial and monarchial, even theocratic power vested in a deeply unpopular ruler and preemptive war and the use of nuclear weapons, but then I got better.
I know what you want; your magpies have come.
“And She Was,” Talking Heads; “Cory’s Song,” Kid Creole and the Coconuts; “Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; “Appalachian Spring (As at first, slowly),” Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic; “Come to Daddy (Little Lord Faulteroy mix),” Aphex Twin; “Gateway,” the Seatbelts; “Yes, Anastasia,” Tori Amos; “The Natural World,” Robin Holcomb; “Lute Score,” Momus; “Broken Arm,” the Weird Weeds.
Something to keep in mind (Jupiter drops).
It’s maybe, what, fifteen blocks from our house to Salon Bédé? We usually walk it. And if I am for whatever reason walking by myself, I take my iPod. I take my iPod whenever I’m walking anywhere. It’s nice to have on the bus—that and a book and you’ve got your isolation bubble firmly in place (you and maybe half of everybody else)—but when I’m walking, I can hear it better. When I’m walking, I’m not doing anything else.
Last night, around about 42nd, something, I don’t remember what, but let’s say it was “Cyberbird” for the sake of argument, it fluttered to a stop, and then that rising ghostly hum-chord began, and crawling up out of it that unearthly backwards guitar, and maybe it was because it was a chilly night and I’d only grabbed a light jacket, but you know how Robert Graves goes on about poetry and the shaving mirror and the hairs on your chin? It was like that, only all the way down to my toes, and I stood there hanging between one step and the next until he began to sing, and it’s not the first time that’s ever happened.
And yet it isn’t the song, is it? Just? I’d play it for you, and you’d say maybe that was nice, or huh, but you wouldn’t hang there, unstuck from the moment-to-moment. (Unless.) —It’s everything I’ve put into the song, everything that unfolds when I hear it begin to play, a key only I can use for a lock only I’d want to open. —It’s all so very, very big. Without the song, where would I put it?
Here’s an alternate take on “Ubiquity is the abyss”; a polished remix of the earlier rough demo track. “Songs are fascist immigrants,” says Momus, elsewhere; “conquistadors who’ve come, inevitably, to slay indigenous sound wherever they find it.” —Well, yes. But not just slay. And not just sound.
Just so you know:
if you’re making oatmeal for breakfast and you put on the butter and the brown sugar and the milk and haven’t had enough coffee yet to realize you’ve just grabbed the cumin and not the cinnamon, well, it’s still edible.
Jupiter drops (four).
Where were we?
Opening fanfare, check. The basic theme; motives, episodes; the countersubject—
I’m beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!
What a strange thing to say. —“I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to read as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just seeing a book once a month, how amazing it must have seemed!” Imagine a glass of wine just once a year—the taste! (The anticipation of the taste; the concentration brought to the tasting; the memory of the taste—a whole language constructed to better remember that taste—) Imagine: sex, but once in your lifetime. What an amazing experience!
What a terrible price to pay, for such fleeting evanescence.
It’s a strange thing to say, isn’t it, for an airport musician, a furniture musician, a knife-and-fork musician?
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces—familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
—Brian Eno, “The ambient music manifesto”
To say that an airport musician has said?
As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I’m aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory)—
Yadda yadda concert but once a month amazing. —So I went and poked around for an interview given by Eno around the time he moved to St. Petersburg, in which he expressed his dissatisfaction with CDs. I wanted to see his own words, not Momus’s memory of his words; I wanted to get closer to how Eno had squared this particular circle. And I did find the column he wrote around the time he moved to St. Petersburg, in which he said:
I was in a big art gallery in Los Angeles once. There was a Frank Stella painting about 60 feet long, and next to it a tiny, jewel-like eight inch square collage, and a little further along a Boltanski piece using framed black and white photos and table lamps and boxes of old clothing, and next to that a Nam June Paik sculpture made of working TV sets. I found myself envying visual artists the endless range of forms their productions could take—big, small, 2D, 3D, 4D, colourful, dull, glossy, rough, smooth, figurative, abstract—and I compared it in my mind with making a CD. Suddenly that seemed like a narrow bottleneck through which all music had to be squeezed. Imagine if you said to all the visual artists of the world: “Okay guys… from now on the only way that people are going to see your work is in magazines—on 11" x 8" colour pages.” What would happen to painting? Well, Frank Stella probably wouldn’t bother with making his things 60 feet long—he’d make something that looked adequate at the 11" x 8" scale. Similarly all the others…. because if the final format is only capable of certain things, that’s what you’ll end up regarding as your working palette.
So what I find exciting now is discovering music that hasn’t obediently designed itself to slot within the constraints of this arbitrary medium—recorded music—and which is somehow bigger than it, overflowing at its edges, extending beyond its horizons. Yes—I want to feel the music is too big to fit on a little old CD, that there is more to it than that, that it has a separate life from my hi-fi—a life I can imagine and add to my aural experience of the music.
Not a word about the ubiquity of music. Just the ubiquity of CDs. Not a word about the Middle Ages, or concerts once a month, but more, much more, and other and better and bigger and different. —And I don’t want to suggest that my search was in any way exhaustive. There could well be another interview or column somewhere about St. Petersburg that I missed, which starts with dissatisfaction and ends up with self-denial. There could be a remark somewhere else entirely, taken out of its other context, conflated. But I don’t want to suggest that Momus misspoke, or misremembered; he has as much Google as the rest of us. Nor do I wish to imply that he made up an authority to cite, the better to drive home his point. (The lurkers support him in email!) But I do want to remind you of his current gig: he’s the Unreliable Tour Guide for the Whitney Biennial.
And anyway, it isn’t the ubiquity of music that Momus is railing against, any more than it’s the fornication and the silk and the wine and the musical instruments that will lead Allah to let the mountain fall.
34°4'48" N, 49°42'0" E.
Arak is not an old city, though it is the capital of the Markazi Province, one of the oldest settled areas on the Iranian plateau.
That white patch in the upper-right is a sometime lake and salt-flat, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s the Kavir-e Mighan (or Miqan, or Miyqan, or MeiQan, depending), except this page says it’s the Shur Gel. I don’t remember; I do remember seeing plumes of dust rising hundreds of feet into a hard blue-white sky, the only sign of a convoy of trucks driving across it, lost somewhere in the shimmering heat-haze.
There’s a university in Arak, now: the Islamic Azad University of Arak, founded in 1985, some 23,000 students, degrees in drama, agricultural science, Islamic theology, English literature. —Actually, there’s several universities: the Arak University of Medical Sciences, the University of Arak, the Tarbiat Moallem University of Arak, a campus of the Iran University of Science and Technology. I don’t know how old any of those are. I don’t remember any of them; I remember a small town and dust and open sewers and the incongruities of an American-style suburb thrown up away from all that, platted blocks of yellow grass and red-brick houses and the high-rise apartment towers off over that way.
If I’m remembering correctly, the suburbs were at the southern end of Arak; we looked out on the mountains to the south and west. We’d drive up there and go tromping about. I spelled my name in flat rocks with letters taller than myself in the snow, but when we got back in the car and drove back down to our house and I got out and looked back, I couldn’t see them. When we went out into the country for the last day of Nawruz, I remember it looked a lot like this:
And I remember we could look out the window of our car and see farmers threshing wheat the way they had for centuries:
But if nothing changed for centuries, a lot can happen in thirty years.
Thirty miles to the northwest these days there’s a brand-new heavy water production plant. Heavy water is water made with deuterium atoms, rather than simple, light-water hydrogen; it’s used to moderate neutrons in nuclear reactors that run off natural uranium, rather than enriched uranium. Just the ticket if you’re trying to get a nuclear program off the ground.
I haven’t seen the list of 400 possible sites the president plans to attack in Iran, but I can tell you the Arak heavy water facility is on it. I don’t know if it’s hardened enough to require a nuclear bomb. If so, it’ll (probably) be a B61-11, which could generate between 25,000 and 1.5 million tons of radioactive debris—depending on the yield “dialed in”—some thirty miles northwest of a house I lived in, thirty years ago.
If not, it’ll just take a lot of conventional ordnance. —And I know, I know: who cares? The Russians loved their children, too. So did the Iraqis.
I just can’t help but take this personally. I’m only human.
—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugs
Dies Jovis.
“Lekar Ham Diwana Di,” Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar; “Time to Go,” Supergrass; “Stoned to Say the Least,” Saint Etienne; “Olson,” Boards of Canada; “The Laird of Inversnecky (premix),” Momus; “Can’t Get You Out of My Head on a Blue Monday (live),” Kylie Minogue, New Order; “The Beauty Regime,” The Divine Comedy; “Finisterre,” Saint Etienne; “Five Spot Blues,” Thelonious Monk Quartet; “Ba Doum,” 3 Leg Torso.
Jupiter drops (some further context).
Bunk has suffered through Gram Parson’s “Streets of Baltimore” on a hillbilly bar’s juke, just as Herc has been forced to police West Baltimore amid the throbbing bass lines of what passes for rap these days. Which is the point, perhaps.
“In real life you don’t get to punch the button on the song that you want to be playing when you get into the bar fight, when you’re in a car chase,” said Simon.
And so we have these buttons being punched on The Wire: 1972’s “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” by Looking Glass, played on a beat-up radio in the stevedore’s pierside shack when Frank Sobotka was worried about a can of contraband languishing on the docks; the Tokens singing that ridiculous, everything-that-Bob-Dylan-is-not folk song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as Jimmy McNulty and sons follow Stringer Bell through a city market; prosecutor Rhonda Pearlman, stuck at home doing paperwork, listening to the plaintive poetry of Lucinda Williams.
Yet one rule is strictly observed: All of the music has to be ambient, meaning it has to be justified by a source in the scene, either a boom box or a stereo or a car radio or a band belting it out in a bar that doesn’t even have a stage.
—George Pelecanos, “The Music of The Wire”
Might as well go with the flow of it. Jim puts on his “Supertragic Symphony,” a concoction of his own made up of the four saddest movements of symphonic music that he knows of. He’s recorded them in the sequence he thinks most effective. First comes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, grand and stirring in its resistance to fate, full of active grief as an opening movement should be. Second movement is the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the stately solemn tune that Bruno Walter discovered could be made into a dirge, if you ignored Beethoven’s instruction to play it allegretto and went to adagio. Heavy, solemn, moody, rhythmic.
The third movement is the third movement from Brahms’s Third Symphony, sweet and melancholy, the essence of October, all the sadness of all the autumns of all time wrapped up in a tuneful tristesse that owes its melodic structure to the previous movement from Beethoven’s Seventh. Jim likes this fact, which he discovered on his own; it makes it look like the “Supertragic Symphony” was meant to be.
Then the finale is the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, no fooling around here, all the stops pulled, time to just bawl your guts out! Despair, sorrow, grief, all of czarist Russia’s racking misery, Tchaikovsky’s personal troubles, all condensed into one final awful moan. The ultimate bummer.
What a symphony! Of course there’s a problem with the shifting key signatures, but Jim doesn’t give a damn about key signatures. Ignore them and he can gather up all of his downer feelings and sing them out, conduct them too, wandering around the ap trying feebly to clean up a bit, collapsing in chairs, crawling blackly over the floors as he waves an imaginary baton, getting lower and lower. Man, he’s low. He’s so low he’s getting high off it! And when it’s all over he feels drained. Catharsis has taken place. Everything’s a lot better.
—Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast
Jupiter drops (three).
Momus—that creepy Scottish guy? world’s smartest pop star?—Momus wants to take your iTunes away.
That’s not an apt comparison, because literature is not a time-based medium that hogs bandwidth and restricts the other things you can do with sound while it’s “playing.” The comparison between an iPod and a book is a slightly better one, and I do note approvingly the iPod’s tendency to “privatize” the listener’s taste.
Well. Not so much take your iTunes away. Certainly not your earbuds. But your Limewire? Your BitTorrent? Your 60-gig hard drive? Your wall of CDs? Your ten thousand songs every one of which instantly sortable by title or artist or key words or album or genre or folksonomic tags or play count? Your Friday random tens? Your MP3 blogs? Your rack of audiophilic equipment capable of reading wax ripples or lit-up bits or magnetic tape and running the signals through knee-high speakers placed in the room just so?
Music’s availability, streamability etc seems to be liberating, but when other people have the same access to, and control over, music that I do it can lead to a kind of sound hell. I’d say a parallel situation is cars: sure, if I get a car I get more mobility, more freedom of movement. But if everyone has a car, not only do we all end up in horrible conflictual gridlock, the environment suffers. We are now reaching car saturation, and music saturation, car gridlock and music gridlock.
Well, not quite so much them, either. Not as such. There’s rhetoric, and there’s praxis. —But still, puritanical trickster that he is, he’s after some way to pull music back to a one true only—
But for whatever reason, Steve and Rupert and the others have squeezed music into every blank bit of space in our lives. We are rapidly reaching the limits of our own ears (tinnitus, my headphoned friend?) and the saturation point at which music becomes utterly unremarkable, and thus, effectively, inaudible.
As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I’m aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory) “I’m beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!”
current music: “Alegria,” Kirsty MacColl
