today (04:03 PM)
November 30, 2008
This seems to be the perfect afternoon, given the preconditions. I’m drinking coffee and listening to jazz. The coffee turned out well — I used a different grinder, and I’ve determined that my other grinder is not suitable for coffee any longer. The grind is too uneven and generates too much dust. This one is better. Still, I want a burr grinder.
The jazz is good, too. Actually it’s a mix of music, all of which I’ve deemed fit for playing on WPFW, if I ever get a music show on the station. I’m trying to rate more of this music (jazz, blues, reggae, zydeco, African, Latin) so I can make better playlists. Right now I’m listening to a live recording of some pianist, and I don’t know who it is. Possibly Bill Evans, live in Tokyo?
I’m not sure what the day holds. It’s cold and rainy out. Maybe tonight I’ll check out a band at Iota. Or a film at Busboys and Poets. Or neither. I really ought to scare up some post-worthy material for Scanning the Dial, which I’ve been neglecting lately. So that’s a priority. I feel like making music, or trying to.
thoughts on radio (10:00 PM)
November 25, 2008
Ruminatrix. The scumbled scudded matrix. I love the word “scud.” As well as “scumble,” yes.
I am boiling soup and listening to jazz. The soup is boiling itself. The stove is boiling the soup. Electricity is boiling the soup. Today I spent a long time IMing with Catherine and then finally got up and out of the house, for the purpose of finding red lentils and a can of diced tomatoes for my soup. It’s a soup of butternut squash and red lentils, my contribution to my mom’s side of the family’s Thanksgiving get-together, the annual ritual. This year it’s being held at some place in Blackstone, Va., southwest of Richmond. And it’s near Fort Pickett. What is Fort Pickett? A National Guard installation, according to Wikipedia.
I still have not auditioned for my show for WPFW, but last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I was imagining having a show and encouraging people to contact me via IM and Twitter, to make requests or comments. And they could record their own audio files and e-mail them to me, and I could play them on the air. That would rock. Perhaps it’s telling that my idea of what would make radio more interesting would be to make it more like the Internet. Of which, see more below.
Last night I went to see that documentary, Pirate Radio USA, at the Black Cat. (Just checked out the website — ouch, I’m a little sad for them that one of their blurbed reviews is only three stars! Maybe the Austin-American Statesman doesn’t go to four stars, so three is actually the best?) It was charming and valuable. Charming thanks to the amiable goateed host and unguarded hostess. Valuable in particular because it documented the World Trade Organization protests and how the independent media covered those protests. The WTO protests happened just as I was at the cusp of some sort of political awareness. So I was largely ignorant of the bravery and determination so many people showed at that event, and I admire that. I was inspired to see them make a stand. It also made me think: as promising as Obama’s election may be, the Establishment is still the Establishment. I’ve thought that since he won, but the documentary reinforced it.
On the other hand, the documentary was somewhat self-indulgent and had that flavor of the self-satisfied lefty activist echo chamber. This was reinforced by the level of discourse some of these featured radio pirates engaged in on the air, as depicted in the doc, which amounted to statements such as “The border police suck” or “The WTO sucks.” Well, sure, lots of lefties are going to hear that and pump their fists in passionate assent (I think at least one at the screening did). Meanwhile, even more non-lefties are going to hear it and turn off the radio or need a little more persuasion on the point for such statements to be effective.
It’s OK that both the doc and these lefties didn’t tailor their message to a broader audience. Not everyone needs to. But when the doc was over, the first member of the audience to approach the mic and pose a question to the panel was a rather belligerent man who asked something to the effect of Doesn’t everyone have access to the Internet these days? And doesn’t that obviate the need for low-power/pirate radio? (I’m fairly certain he did not use the word “obviate.” For that matter, I’m fairly certain I haven’t heard anyone use that word in conversation, ever. So be it. I dig it.) The panel rather gamely tried to to answer this question, but I felt that they didn’t quite make their case.
In part, it’s because I think they overlooked a point I was itching to make: radio allows for a certain kind of serendipity. People who would not usually want to listen to scratchy punk music or left-wing activist talk might stumble across a pirate or low-power station as they scan through the dial and discover something new. Whereas, on the Internet, and as many others have observed, I think we tend to gravitate towards opinions that reaffirm views we already hold.
Panelists also pointed out that not everyone has access to the Internet these days. A good point, if not entirely true, since nearly everyone can go to the library and log on last time I checked. Other than people who can’t drive. But it’s possible that more people have radios in their homes or cars than they have computers in their homes. I don’t know.
Another panelist pointed out that migrant workers were able to use the medium of radio to organize and get Taco Bell to pay them more for their work. That’s great, and I’m glad radio played a role in that. But one such success doesn’t strike me as especially persuasive of the need for low-power noncommercial radio serving the entire populace, at least to someone not already on board.
As much as I love radio as a medium, I’m worried that getting worked up about reaching people via radio is going to seem extraordinarily passe in coming years, like an activist passionately agitating for a rebirth of the telegraph. Maybe I have swallowed the new media Kool-Aid. That’s entirely possible. But Arbitron recently documented that overall usage of radio is continuing to decline. And I hear increasing anecdotal evidence that people under the age of 30, to pick an arbitrary number, are just not listening to radio. Who could blame them, considering the alternatives? Most markets don’t offer much music worth checking out when they could just flip on their iPods. As for public radio, I’m afraid that, despite its efforts, it offers little reason for people who don’t already know about it, or who are not already inclined to listen to radio, to turn it on.
Of course, one could argue that if radio hadn’t already fallen into the hands of huge, soulless corporations, it wouldn’t be in such a sorry state. Which is no doubt true. Radio would be much more vital and worth listening to if it were largely controlled by pirates, microbroadcasters, schools, and community licensees. But this removal of media from the hands of corporations and its restoration to the people is being mirrored on the Internet, which I think has been handling the task quite well on its own. I fear that radio is just too far gone to save, and that efforts to reverse that will largely fail.
Sigh. I do love radio, though.
checking in (07:30 PM)
November 24, 2008
Harmonious megaphones. I am at Busboys and Poets in DC, drinking a mocha (uncharacteristically). I am a little weary on account of having had a lot of beer last night, the aftermath of which has been dogging me all day. Not in the guise of a hangover past the first few hours of wakefulness — just that sense of needing a good sleep to be 100 percent. But I soldier on. Today I reported to WPFW to do my newscasts, although I really just wanted to get back into bed until fully recuperated. I did those newscasts, and did them well, I thought. I was also all primed to audition for a music show, at long last, but then they were having problems with the studio, so it didn’t happen. Maybe next week.
Today I learned via the Future of Music Coalition’s Twitter feed about a screening of a documentary about pirate radio at the Black Cat tonight, and a panel discussion following. So I’m going to check in on that shortly. Tomorrow I will cook a squash lentil soup for Thanksgiving.
Yesterday Louisa, Arin and I went to an alpaca farm in West Virginia. Arin talked to the proprietor about the ins and outs of alpaca breeding (that sounds sort of dirty), while Louisa and I listened some of the time and mingled with the alpacas. Louisa got bored and I spent some time trying to amuse her. At one point a Friesian horse tried to eat Louisa’s glove, which I rescued from its mouth. I was seriously worried the horse would eat the glove and come to some sort of harm. Thankfully, this didn’t happen. The glove, however, was somewhat worse for wear. The horse was also mighty interested in Louisa’s yellow ALPACAS balloon, which is possibly my favorite balloon ever. Later on, Nina, Louisa’s little sister, was equally interested in the balloon. I was interested in the horse because it’s Friesian, as am I (at least partly), but I forgot to ask about it. Actually, Wikipedia clarifies that the region the horse hails from is not where my Frisian ancestors lived, or at least not the most recent ones. I put up some pics on my Flickr page.
After I dropped Louisa off in Winchester, Arin and I came back to Arlington, where we stopped in at the Galaxy Hut. We saw the Palominos and Prabir and the Substitutes, both of which I really enjoyed. Fun, upbeat, rockin’ stuff. Perfect to listen to while drinking a lot of beer. I really do love the Hut.
What else is on the agenda? They Might Be Giants are playing at the 9:30 Club Friday night. Not sure whether I’m going, although they are performing Flood in its entirety, continuing the trend of bands-playing-entire-albums-live (cv. Built to Spill, Sonic Youth, Liz Phair). That night a DJ is also spinning classic reggae at the Marx Cafe. Next week Yeasayer is playing in town, and there’s a gamelan ensemble, but it’s the same night as poker. Wait a minute, I just reserved tickets to it, at a cost even. That was dumb. Oh well. It was just a few bucks, so in case I don’t go I don’t really mind.
For the first time in a while I don’t have any immediate deadlines hanging over me, which is really a great feeling. I polished off two articles for Retail Traffic in the last month, and two for Current as well. I’m working on an article about the local community of Ethiopian musicians for the City Paper, but it’s not very far along yet and I don’t really know what the focus is. Actually, right now I ought to be at Dukem instead of here. So I’ll probably be worrying about money soon, but in the meantime I’ll feign blissful ignorance and maybe get around to some long-delayed tasks or cook up some other articles to work on.
oy (01:39 AM)
November 11, 2008
Take a listen to the MP3s here, on the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa (that name and what it promises is hard to top, in terms of what gets me going). Each one is a half hour of a guy playing a stringed instrument and, apparently, telling the story of this Moussa Tchefari. The beat stays the same moderate tempo throughout. It sort of reminds me of R.L. Burnside. I want to put speakers on top of my car and drive around my neighborhood playing it for everyone. Trippy dude!
Speaking of which. Also, check out Lavender Diamond’s “You Broke My Heart” on their Myspace page. Rapturous!
I was just walking around said neighborhood, on a pleasant jaunt, the purpose of which was to return Mrs. Dalloway to my local library. The nearest library to me is tucked away in a residential neighborhood, unlike the other libraries I have gone to more often in Arlington. But this library is, in fact, the closest. I walked to the Four Mile Run Trail and then veered left, guessing as to where I ought to be going. I was looking for the Long Branch Nature Center, but I ended up passing it somehow. So I was spat out in the neighborhood I was aiming for anyway. I popped into the library and did my business. Then I wandered through the neighborhood and checked out some history.
I saw the Ball-Sellers House and Carlin Hall. So cool. I walked around in the yard of the Ball-Sellers House and checked out the garden in the back, not sure whether I was trespassing on private property. Carlin Hall is big and white, looming over the houses nearby. Men from Arlington’s history, receiving tracts of land from Lord Fairfax and palling around with George Washington down near Four Mile Run. Interesting. I’d like to know more about how things worked back then. How did you get Lord Fairfax to give you some land? Who was this Lord Fairfax? How did he get the land in the first place?
I’ve been thinking more lately about the idea that property is theft. Or how odd it is that we can “own” property. Says who? Quite a brilliant innovation we humans came up with. Also quite an effective way to divide people against each other for millennia and spawn wars and hatred among fellow humans. Though probably the creators of the concept didn’t know that that’s what they were doing. Am I right? I don’t know — I’ll have to investigate.
I am reading this:
- Whereas some priests and contemplatives, living off food given in faith, are addicted to talking about lowly topics such as these — talking about kings, robbers, ministers of state; armies, alarms, and battles; food and drink; clothing, furniture, garlands, and scents; relatives; vehicles; villages, towns, cities, the countryside; women and heroes; the gossip of the street and the well; tales of the dead; tales of diversity [philosophical discussions of the past and future], the creation of the world and of the sea, and talk of whether things exist or not — he abstains from talking about lowly topics such as these. This, too, is part of his virtue.
Imagine what your daily experience would be like if more people aimed to be this virtuous. Also imagine all the people in mass media (such as myself) who would be out of jobs. Perhaps those people could all be reassigned to more virtuous tasks?
Which is the better cure for a nose that is tired of being blown — spearmint tea or a Manhattan? A sequential test is underway. We will inform you of the results shortly.
New articles online (03:40 PM)
October 10, 2008
I’m extremely pleased with my Tumblr blog. I think it’s because I can look at it, and because it lacks any element of the personal, being only a hodgepodge of images and quoted text, I can almost imagine that someone else created it — not me. So it has that thrill of discovery, despite the fact that I am wholly responsible for it.
But I’m not wholly responsible, because in fact the design, the appearance of the words and images, was not by my hand, either. Which further abstracts it, and heightens my enjoyment.
I should announce a few new publications here:
The Washington City Paper ran my shortish article about hanging out with a disgruntled Washington Nationals fan. (It’s the last in this package.) This is my first article in the City Paper, which I’ve been reading since I was an impressionable teenager. So that’s pretty exciting. They did run a letter of mine years ago in which I commented on a raging controversy at the time about the pornographic nature of Shawn Belschwender’s comic strips. I was, in essence, pro-porn. I didn’t know that Mr. Belschwender was still penning a strip — it’s unfortunate the City Paper doesn’t carry it anymore, but then, they don’t carry any worthwhile strips these days.
In These Times, the progressive magazine, printed my article about radio stations run by Native tribes.
Stay tuned for more!
9.15 (12:40 AM)
September 15, 2008
Been too long since I’ve posted here, but I’ve been busy with other stuff. July and August I had a lot of extra time with Louisa, and then more recently I’ve just had a lot of work to do. I’ve started volunteering at WPFW on Monday, as I mentioned before, doing the local newscasts at 1 and 3 p.m. It’s fun being back on the air and trying to get comfortable with the whole thing. I feel so much more attuned to my voice than I did when I was last on the air, in 1999, because I’m more in touch with my body now. So I’m trying to bring that awareness and combine it with the simultaneous mental side of what’s going on, the communicating the written word, the thought, the idea. And trying to communicate helpful ideas. It’s funny, the more time passes and the more I evolve, the more I question the function of most media, and it follows that I also have to question my place in that whole game. My pursuit of meditation and Buddhism has involved questioning the value of speech and communication. So much of what I hear and see strikes me as unnecessary. We become wrapped up in national and world news while being almost entirely ignorant of, say, what goes on so much closer to home every day, in the soil, the water, among the people who cross our paths. I see “we” but perhaps I mean “I.” I guess ultimately that’s what I want to avoid. I don’t want to be sucked into all that. On the one hand maybe we find comfort in it because it connects us, gives us things to talk about with each other. We can talk about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or Hurricane Ike. But these concerns all come and go and we’re still left with our selves and our minds and our bodies and our homes, our friends and children and families. How well do we equip ourselves each day to deal with these basic elements of life? Do we look into them deeply? Do we question our attachments and our highs and lows? Or do we just let ourselves be whipped around in the frenzy of things that mass communication media tell us we should be concerned about?
What is the purpose of my doing radio? Of writing? How can they be put to “good” ends? (What is “good” in that case?)
Can I, through my newscasts, reorient people to engage directly with each other and their communities? To think differently? To wake up a little?
Maybe I shouldn’t be writing the articles I write and doing the things I do. Why do I do it? Because I need to earn money and it’s the easiest or most convenient way at the moment to do that. What if I did not need to earn money? What would I do?
Other things:
Tonight I got home from taking Louisa back to Winchester to meet her mom. Bob, my roommate, had received Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain from Netflix. I heard the theme music to The Simpsons as I sat in my bedroom and was lured to the living room, but The Simpsons weren’t on, and Bob put on the Jodorowsky. Wow. It would be impossible for me to summarize all the thoughts and reactions I had as I was watching it. Just see it. It really complemented my recent meanderings through Buddhist practice, “spiritual” contemplation, etc. And a remarkable artistic statement. Packed with more artistic invention than nearly any movie I’ve seen — just the work that must have gone into conceiving and creating so many of the sets and props and stagings. To me it drives home how so much of Hollywood’s crap is just toying with superficial tokens of reality, all with the goal of eliciting easy emotional reactions from us, making us feel as if we’ve actually experienced something we haven’t — rather than directing our thoughts to other possibilities, to understanding ourselves or our actual world or reality — funny, I guess this sort of comes back to what I was talking about above even though I didn’t intend it that way.
Some gleanings from Web research: Don Cherry, who played cornet with Ornette Coleman, collaborated on the soundtrack for the film, along with the keyboardist for … the Archies? Of “Sugar, Sugar”? WTF? John Lennon and Yoko Ono financed the film, and it was produced by the Beatles’ manager.
Also (this is my own observation) — the ending very much reminded me of the ending to Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, among my favorite movie endings. Kiarostami’s ending is much more sly, of course, as is the rest of his film. But yes, similar. Of course, the ending of Holy Mountain is in a way entirely predictable if you catch on to what sort of spiritual realization Jodorowsky is building up to. I love the fact (which is in the Deleted Scene features on the DVD) that he wanted to end the movie in a Mexican restuarant (in Mexico, mind you) because that was his idea of Paradise! Ha! I would not have guessed that after watching this entire film of gore and sex and archetypal imagery. Which makes it all the better. Now, when I eat at a Mexican restaurant, I will think of Holy Mountain and savor the juxtaposition.
OK, I really ought to go to bed. I need to go to WPFW tomorrow. Plus I have a Retail Traffic article due Tuesday that I’m anxious about getting done. Gnashing of teeth.
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.
