Japan, observations

I'm a mad dasher, I might as well admit it. I'm more comfortable running around, packing in the activities, losing myself in action. When I wake, I feel an urge to move, the stress of stillness...

Eerily quiet on the Hibiya line. Not a single voice heard in the packed subway car station after station. A girlish utterance absorbs into unforgiving human forms. What are these clean, self-contained, silent individuals on the express train thinking about this weekday morning...

The girl powdering her cheeks and limning her eyes smiling happy in her pouty prettiness. The guy massaging his temples. The advertisement banners hanging down from the center roof of the train that would never fly in New York; people'd put their heads through the paper ads like door curtains. The little subway dance, when someone needs to disembark around you, and you have to shuffle with tiny steps, like dancing with a six-year-old. People are more careful, quiet, and considerate here. Less of the closed-in fear and stressful almost-shoving induced by seemingly imminent door closings. I lean against the ‘back’ door and then it opens at the next station. An unexpected reversal. My logic proved faulty. Touché, subway...

What Manami said: there are two Japan's. Tokyo is not Japan!...

Japan, even Tokyo, is more structured and ordered . There's less of the disordered vibrancy that characterizes America; also called diversity or mix or "low" culture. Consider the ubiquitous umbrella, the occasional parasol...

Perfectionism is the opposite of fatalism...

Onsen tubs. Reed brooms. Raised train lines. Sea to mountain declines. Street fair food stalls. Monstrous insects. Sylvan shrines: Miyazaki...

At 5pm exactly monks ring temple bells all through Kyoto and people leave offices. Sidewalks throng with men and women in formal wear and black shoes. In some quarters, some women wear kimonos, white socks, wood sandals. They nod to smartphones waiting for the light to change...

The assumption now is that travelers will go on, are in the middle of long-term vagabondings. It wasn’t always like this. I remember the first time I heard about someone picking up and running off, how it surprised and titillated me. Now it's par for the course. Ever more wanderers...

Back at the hostel, the Italian says, “Where can I go to meet the girls!,” laughing and leering at the young Japanese woman, Siuri, staffing the hostel at 10pm. She’s says, “Why are you laughing? Haha. Too Italian!”...

Monstrous coy and carp jockey for position in the park pool. Feed me!...

I'm going to see some thing. I'm already imagining taking photos of the thing, showing those photos to other people, and how they will react to the photos. A mind divided upon itself will fall...

The vampire of regret sucks joy out of the present...

I grasp my walking stick and plan each foot-plant on the mountain trail. The wind blows the tree-tops; I think the trees are breathing. I follow their lead, take a deep breath and then another. I think, “The forest teaches you things. How to breathe, how to be patient, present...”—I blunder face-first into a spider web, drop my stick, and clutch face and hair in mortal fear...

Too much text

from Surian Soosay.

Quotations: invention, imitation, transposition

Randy Cohen: What is benign in one setting can be toxic in another. (Chainsaws: useful in the forest, dubious at the dinner table. Or as Dr. Johnson put it in a pre-chainsaw age, “A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.”) (*)

Malcolm Gladwell: "I have two parallel things I'm interested in: collecting interesting stories and collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is where they overlap."

Jean-Luc Godard: It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.

Jonathan Lethem: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul--let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? "The Ecstasy of Influence" Harper's Magazine, Feb. 2007, p. 68.

Pablo Neruda: "Writers are always interchanging in some way, just as the air we breathe doesn’t belong to one place. The writer is always moving from house to house: he ought to change his furniture. Some writers feel uncomfortable at this. I remember that Federico García Lorca was always asking me to read my lines, my poetry, and yet in the middle of my reading, he would say, “Stop, stop! Don’t go on, lest you influence me!" (Paris Review, The Art of Poetry 14)

Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it's by standing on ye shoulders of Giants," in a letter to Robert Hooke

John Padgett and Woody Powell: Emergence of novelty is not virgin birth. Everything, even the origin of life itself, is a combination and recombination of other things in its accessible context... Understanding the emergence of objects, therefore, is a matter of deconstructing objects into the transformational flows that construct and sustain them. Viewed from the perspective of flows, objects are the folding and refolding of their context – namely, of the ecology or network of other objects with which those objects interact... For example, stability of the human body through time means not mechanical fixity of parts; it means organic reproduction of parts in flux. Viewed as chemical reactions, we are vortexes in the material life that wends through us all. (*) (forthcoming The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Princeton U. Press)

Janwillem van de Wetering: The Daimyo : "What would I be? A good question. I have no answer. My mind is clouded by the countless thoughts with which I have identified myself and which have all left their traces." (*) (an interview)

Harrison White: You can be assured that, for each idea, quite a number of substantial, and often independent, discussions and implementations could be cited: Ideas that have any importance, any impact, do, after all, come in company, not as isolates, and the essayist is mostly a transcriber of ideas abroad in his networks" (1994a, p. 4) in Emirbayer 1997

Eric Hoffer: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things, have even discovered them over and over again and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways. 1960, from his notebooks.

The Books:

Too much text

from Pedro Pernias

The Books: collectors and collage makers

It was a soggy evening. We were late, but only barely. Our tickets greeted us at the door. Our seats were up a coiling stairway into the bowls of Cornell Cinema, Ithaca, NY. I had gone for a preparatory pee, and let my companions precede me. When I entered the murky second-tier seating, I was ambivalent to discombobulated isolation. Music and video assailed me: The Books in full 2D, 3D, and auditory assault.

The Books are a New York City-based duo, consisting of Nick Zammuto--guitar, vox, bass--and Paul de Jong--cello with great vigor. He broke a string during the performance (and also played bass on one song). Live, they jam over and in sync with their electronic music. Synchronized videos act like pulsing semaphores, conveying independent messages and impressions. The overall effect is stunning and distinctive. For me, the songs and videos bled into one overwhelming and mesmerizing farrago.

The Books are masters of recreation and transformation – what they have deigned to call “auditory mosaic” or “collage music.” They think little of disciplinary or stylistic rigidity, and they are unlikely to be dogmatic about much of anything except originality and quality. They are mixed-media innovators and tinkerers. Zammuto claims to have installed amplifiers in filing cabinets in order to explore metallic resonance. Their art and speech are redolent of eclecticism and artistic postmodernism.

During a Q&A session after the Cornell set, Zammuto mused on the role of language: its inevitable and undeniable power and yet its certain sterility and inherent limitations. It is, he claimed, the best single tool for human communication, but it still can't beat the whole toolbox.

For The Books, language is crucial to song and video composition. However, the words they sing and embed as electronic samples do not primarily explain, predict, or commentate; Zammuto rejected the view of their music as social and political utterance. In this sense, the words they use constitute one of many instruments, used to evoke a range of intellectual and emotional responses – awe, humor, curiosity, etc. And instead of invent, evaluate, and pontificate, The Books collect and they channel.

Zammuto touted de Jong aptitude as a “great collector” of words and not just video. They collect material from thrift stores, even collaborate with other collectors, and mine information from prosaic situations. Their track "Motherless Bastard," they claim, uses real-time video and audio recording from a fast food restaurant.

Be that as it may, language and video in The Books invoke emotion in a way distinct from, say, one of de Jong’s cello solos. Creative force and selectivity guide their composition process. And deciding what to show and not show, how to arrange, distort, and emphasize imply a purpose which is more profound than exhibitionism. There's no escaping artistic intent. And as much as they try to counteract or discount the view, Zammuto and de Jong recognize their role as politicized, social commentators.

The song “Be Good to Them Always,” demonstrates the point. The lyrics are, “I can hear a collective rumbling in America/ I’ve lost my house, you’ve lost your house/ I don’t suppose it matters which way we go/ This great society is going smash.”

Naturally, when I heard this song for the first time in Winter 2008, I assumed it was new – composed and recorded after the big bust. In fact, it is from the album “Lost and Safe,” released in 2005. I then, ahistorically, thought of the lyrics as eerily prescient. But even this view is befuddled. The lyrics are sung in concert with dialogue samples from the-devil-knows-when. Ergo, the samples and thus the song had no intended connection to today’s economic ills. They can't have. And yet, the song is both relevant and timely.

The genius of The Books consists of uniting disparate samples, re-casting them, and embedding them in a new context. Their method would be analogous to that of the antiques collector but for their general agnosticism toward origin. Jean-Luc Godard was supposed to have said it: "It's not where you take things from--It's where you take them to." The Books strive more to create a new and stimulating combinatory artifacts than to comment on the understanding of the past, or present, or future.

Sitting in Cornell Cinema, all senses attuned, I found my brain clouded by thoughts – unfortunate distractions, which interjected themselves between me and the performance. The intellectual and social components kept cropping up, forcing me to translate my experience into language. What did I really think? What was I feeling? What was I going to say to my friends during the unavoidable post-show break-down?

I couldn’t escape these thoughts, and yet I kept reflecting that the kaleidoscopic performance was beyond words; that words were woefully inadequate. I finally abandoned the intellectual exercise, and yielded to the music, the videos, the faces of the performers, the furious pumping of de Jong’s leg keeping beat. I let the full range of emotions overmaster me, and decided that if talk was called for later, I'd recall, ruminate, craft some response.

But when it came time to dissect the show, walking back to the car in the rain, murmurs of wonder and appreciation were forthcoming, but there was surprisingly little to say. The Books had said it all for us.

-Brad Turner, of Brad and the Unbounded One, Wednesdays 9-11pm on WERW
Originally 3 April 2012, WERE Blog

Notes from "American Parsifal"

"American Parsifal" is a class at Syracuse University taught by Andrew Waggoner, composer in residence and violinist. I took it in Fall 2009. The class appraises trends in the tug of war between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in America. Besides Waggoner's riffs on history and culture, we consumed and chewed on a lot of art: poetry (Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop), music (Charles Ives, Elliot Carter, early Rock and Roll, Jazz), film (Forrest Gump, Being There, Bamboozled), and essays (Louis Menand, Toni Morrison). I was pupil qua amanuensis for the course, typing away on my petite laptop to sop up the wit and wisdom for posterity. What follows are notable transcriptions and interpretations from my notes.

• "I dream up goofy, fun stuff to study.", "The history was written by men; it's really quite simple.", "I can teach any damn fool thing I want."
• Semiotics was like influenza - the US strain went to Europe, mixed with the French, became virile and nasty, and returned to the US to wreak havoc.
• Science as metaphor. Fundamental mistake: metaphors are not equal.
• "Public education in this country has been an absolute disaster for the past 50 years."
• Bush: America is falling behind in Math and Science--the same administration which had been openly aggressive and violent towards science.
• I do not want intellectual labor saving devices. The way to avoid doing that that musically is to listen to intellectually engaging, difficult music--jazz.
• "The Soviet Union was an anthill run by psychopaths."
• "The right is an easy target:" Bill O'Reily, Sean Hannity - bit players - "these are visibly stupid people."
• Three options when talking about blackness, Africanism, and other controversial phenomena:
  1. Talk about it in ultra-respectful, politically correct language with a sense of modesty and seriousness.
  2. Just talk about it.
  3. Do not talk about it at all.
  (we chose door #2 in class)
• "He wanted me to fight him, he wanted me to see him with all of his imperfections, he did not want me to turn him into something I needed; into a kind of black Dalai Lama."
• Going to a hip-hop show is a unique, black experience whites should get involved in; more black people should go to the symphony.
• There is no American music without black music, yet black music is over and over again characterized as a kind of dark, jungle music--corrosive, mad, rhythmic--capable of turning people insane or corrupting their brain with excessive, orgiastic experience.
• Forrest Gump: The film springs from the American mythos that "The truest, most authentic, and most valuable aspect of the American psyche, the American soul, is to act with innocence and out of a pure desire to remain impervious to the distractions, the temptations, the sense of chaos, all the things, in other words, that constitute humanity."
• In correspondence about this blog post: "I like the Forrest Gump quote, but maybe you could set it up so that it's clear that I hate the movie"  
• "So you can put that under your hats."

Steam punk sculpture

feminine graces
supple corporeal chalice
not to be taken

Sculpture from Pierre Matter

The eternal oscillation

From Jeffrey Gerres

Countless strands

Too much text

origin unknown, Ursula Rucker via Jazzanova:

Slinky

All Hail Concordia.
Observed physical "reality" proves naught,
That seen is tainted by that sought.
Induction is flawed unless borne from infinite,
No law is inviolate.
Polonius said, "Brevity is the soul of wit."
Every thing has an opposite.
Art is a distraction, science an oversimplification, and religion a put-on,
Truth belongs to all and none.
No thing has an equivalant.
Brad said, "Verbosity is the corpus of the fool."
Every decree is subject to defiance,
Deduction is imperfect without omniscience.
That sought is predicated on that seen,
Nonobserved metaphysical "reality" disproves the vision of the retina screen.
All Hail Discordia.

Juxtapositional photoetry by Russ Turner

BRAD THEN

and NOW

MOVING TO THE MUSIC IN HIS SOUL

Music

O what a power music has! O what an emotional umph! When I say emotional umph, I refer to music’s uncanny ability to alter mood and mind in subtle-gradual and revolutionary-rapid ways. This is no secret, no mid-night revelation, but rather a universally recognized reality. I believe that every person who appreciates life appreciates music. Naturally, some cherish the art of sound more than others. But it pervades! It persists! Music has an unmistakable power, akin to a spectral shape-shifter. Its influences reflect its diversity, covering the infinite spectrum of sounds, words, and emotions.

Cognitive and emotive functions identify trends and bend to the purpose of a particular musical piece. Watch as music gusts about, shaping and inspiring: mood, thought, dance, guttural shouts and grunts of gratification, and, most importantly, new music. We employ a certain exponential function to graph music's growth propagation.
We are beings of sound. And art. Art subsumes music and is hence of greater scope and broader domain. Art is life, but life is not necessarily art. Embrace the art of life. Saul Williams says that music is our alchemy and orders us to find our mantra and awaken our subconscious. The rest his poem, Coded Language, is utmostly pertinent, however I desist from total mimicry and leave you to discover him for your selves.

This post was inspired by a song by some Brazilian musicians, which irresistibly urged me to discard a feeling of malaise and create a tribute to their harmony. See the art that art has stirred!?

Given the power of art and our natural creativity proclivity, how can we resist satiating our artistic selves? Ignoring our natural ability disserves our selves as well as the selves of our fellow beings. Embracing and celebrating our manifested proficiencies makes for color, light, and lovely, where we would otherwise observe drab, dark, and boring.

Non-sense

I was perusing recently an impertinent and thoroughly engaging text called, On Bullshit, by the Princeton professor emeritus of philosophy, Harry Frankfurt, when I stumbled upon an inspiratory detail: Non-sense. This precious construction was noted as the arch-nemesis of one of the monumental philosophers of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

As you, friend-follower, have undoubtedly noticed, I have a penchant for criticizing the human proclivity for illogic. As I have pontificated prior, we are feeble, defective creatures, with curiously disruptive effects known as emotions. Said overly-simply, reason, logic, and scientific representation of reality were the heroes and obsessions of Mr. Wittgenstein. They are also friends of mine.

Either way, I now have a prominent citation from which to defend my arbitrary outpourings on the theme of illogic (or non-sense). Perhaps Wittgenstein's word outplays my own modest term (which I picked up from Christopher Moore) when it comes to precision. Nevertheless, I do not and never have promised to be profoundly honest, realistic, or scientific in my writings.

What? Say you that this is contradictory with my past and pending statements on the all-importance of reasonable thought and the insidious character of illogic? Nay, I say to you. I turn now to Harry Frankfurt and distance myself from L. Wittgenstein. I promise to bullshit you, sir or madam, when I see fit, in the pursuit of perspicuous thoughts or witty turn of phrase (well, according to me).

This does not negate the possibility of scientific analysis or the promotion of brutal logic, nor does it mean that I am lying to you. I will not deliberately, in fact, attempt to misrepresent my thoughts and beliefs, the contents of my brain. I will strive to entertain you and myself with a diversity of writings and scribblings that will include plenty of bullshit, art, pseudoscience, and invention.

Really, I am planting a devious honesty, professing to use an artistic license, and claiming fidelity to the use of a Borgesian approach to keeping your attention (What can I hold you with?). If my method works well, and you examine my words with microscopic care, maybe you will even learn something real about me.

Sunday reflections

I woke up this morning exuding serenity and moved my living corpse to the bathroom for my diurnal pee. Once there, I positioned myself, leaned my head against the cabinet, and lost myself in my own reflection in the toilet bowl...

Who here has read "Narcissus and Goldmund?" Hesse is the master of the pensive epic, and this but one of his philosophical works. It contrasts spiritualism and hedonism; fixation on mind and body. Ultimately, enlightenment is personal, but mixture is advisable...

Sugar, flour, (a lot of) butter, chocolate chips. Oven. Stove top for cooling. Amorphous mass of deliciousness. Bradley likes blondies! (and brownies, for that matter, but they require variation in ingredients)...

Daddy. Mommy. Genetic components combine. Progeny. Simple, but then immediately complicated...

Touch your baby as much as possible; make sure there is time enough for love. Teach it, protect it, nurture it, do not stifle it with stricture. The rest is up to the world...

Find friends that are smarter than you. They will teach you to be as bright as they are...

How many environmentalists does it take to screw out a light bulb. One, if he/she is wisely equipped...

Do not break bulbs, "borrow" them from those that use them immoderately. There is too much unnatural illumination...

Waste not, want not...

Blessed be the poor and cursed be the rich was never practical. Recognize your good fortune always, and make honest and selfish decisions accordingly...

Sure, it is cold, but is not the snow beautiful!? You must always give some to get some, just ask Newton...

The Fig Newton is a polarizing cookie. As is the Macaroon. I like them both for their merit, innovation, and tastiness...

Go to the abode of Allie Jennings if you want the most titillating treats around...

Thank humanity or luck or your g(G)od or ghost or anonymous benefactor for all of the good that is around you...