Urge of the demi

You
And I
Are not one.
You take for granted
That I take for granted.
But what if I know myself?
What if I know what I know
And know what I don't know?
What if the world's more duping
Than duped? More deceiving than
Deceived? What if the only true things
Are paradoxes? And the only true things
Are ineffable? But there is an extinguishing
In the blue hour, of a small and isolate thing,
When an ectoplasm struggles to exist or erupt
From the static form formerly filled in and warm.
But no, nothing. Nothing brushed my face, no moth
wing wafted my ear, nothing numinous oozed away.
Fuck death. Fuck death and dying, I'm sick of trying
To care about carelessness. The point's been much made
And death poetry will not be forgiven. But what poetry will
Be forgiven its importunate existence, time and energy eating,
Silk-lipped mouths, still toothy, pap-hungering, all glossolaling.
Excuse me if I'm an anti-edificer here respecting neither fronteirs
Nor roles. I'm not sorry. I've tipped passed the point of pardonable
Eccentricity into po-mo multiplicity, unhinged Zappaism, iconoclastic
Scribbomania, an artificer of worlds unbounded, over eager, word drunk.
I seek to hold and spellbind you and myself with my prosthetic proselytizing
and imperfect cosmos. Ingeminate me. Or spurn me. It's all the same. It's all been
stamped, felt, built, killed. Coding's easier than decoding. Bellies bloat on the immaterial.
I am one of many. We're all in mystery. We refuge in representation's ever order of the day,
Each era is overtaken in the unfathomed advance that berefts bedrock but leaves not nothing,
Perhaps interstitial nets for the networked, intersecting in n-dimensions, dew-sodden and tenuous.
I grant that I take for granted that you take for granted. But perhaps our for-granteds synergize or cancel-out and
We know that we know and we know that what we know is as nothing as everything. Our worlds and words are
Inscribed in level sand and a moth wind wafts. We are voiced and eructating and we may not be one but we are not alone.

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

World of musical medley

What in the name of shaven Shiva is World Music?

This term is generally understood, but it is also generally understood to be an egregious misnomer. It suffers from poor semantic vision and lacks usefulness, largely because it has no antipode. Nobody listens to music which qualifies as non-world. We have yet to receive melodic, rhythmic, or lyrical transmissions from alien races or species. No Martian jazz, Plotonian hip hop, or back-country bluegrass from Betelgeuse. This is lamentable, but undeniable. After this blog, it is conceivable that my next project will be to write a science fiction novel about an interplanetary musical interchange (IMI), and how music eventually defeats the human specie's knee-jerk xenophobia . O, someday... But for now, all music is literally world, or rather planetary. And, because it is planetary and distinctly human, it is all generally comprehensible.

We like our art to fit into the comfortable boundaries of our aesthetic experience, but we appreciate it when it toes the line of convention. There is a safe band of space between bland, craven convention and weird, envelope-shredding experimentation. Societal and personal change occur gradually; innovative mutation is a lengthy process. One does not generally go from the Beatles to the Swedish thrash, death, and prog metal band Meshuggah in one revolutionary leap.

Where, then, does world music fit in on the all-musical spectrum? First, we must reject the cheeky, buffoonish “All music is world” thesis, because it negates even the conventional social value of the term world music. We then move on to a new theory. Perhaps, only music which is unadulterated, indigenous and traditional should be called world music. This is a radical and untenable position. A more moderate perspective is that the mix of modern and traditional constitutes world. From that perspective, world music occupies a space between generally well-known Western modern music and generally unknown indigenous folk and traditional musical trends.

I choose the latter, because I consider purity to be a fiction. The unadulterated is sullied everywhere, especially now given pervasive globalization. Modern cultural mishmashing makes delineating useful boundaries around potential sanctuaries of pure indigenous music or art difficult and or impossible. If that sanctuary is out there, it is buried beneath the slow, drifting sands, or crouched with a spear in its hand, in some tropical jungle. From my perspective, the indigenous flavor worldizes, and the modern flavor dilutes, if you will. Creative destruction rules, and the synthetic production is our lot, and it is valuable. We live in an age of univerally worldized, slightly-othered, and obviously commercialized music.

The international hodgepodge leads to my argument about why I believe that any individual can like any kind of music. One must only put one's mind to the task. There is only the single human musical family, and human beings should be open to its widest range and scope. I am one non-discriminatory soul, with wide open acceptance for the potentiality of universal musical enjoyment. Therefore, the sonorous sounds of African or Japanese percussion, Andean folk, Brazilian bossa nova, European lo-fi electronica, and American pop-rock soothe me or excite me in ways that are completely analogous.

The underlying concerns to this discourse are the inequality of global power structures and the purported Westernization of the world. One thing can change another without itself being changed, but power differentials make meaningful cultural imperialism a real possibility. We want a variegated hybrid, not a monochrome blob.

(taken from a WERW Radio Blog posting, by me, found here).

I am demiurge

If I were to have a political regime in managing this blog it would probably be a mix between authoritarianism and anarchism. But of course I am in fact a totalitarian - Machiavelli's vainglorious prince. I am sure that if somebody else were to inhabit this universe, I would prefer to "make" him, her, or it a partner and not a subject. Or would I?

My self-seen legitimacy seems to comes from the post-Scholastic Christian, capitalist reverence for private property. I own this blog and most every projected morsel that crosses its digital threshold. It is my private property and my personal project. I put in the intellectual labor and harvest the paltry benefits - namely, appeasement of my graphomania and narcissism.

On the other hand, I am the only citizen of this principality. Which makes me the least and most of all things - the receptacle of all superlatives: best, worst, utmostly sexy, most hideously degenerate, most artistic, most utilitarian, at the apex of intelligence and the zenith of idiocy, and so on. All in-between gradations also belong to me. I am therefore everything and nothing.

A feat of synergy is called for: reconciling the disparate and contrary in order to assert an underlying unity and fashion a consummately inclusive approach. A more conservative, but therefore potentially handicapped, approach is known as ecclecticism: wantonly picking and employing contrary pieces of ideology, but not necessarily reconciling them. It is the keystone of the postmodern methodology and mythology.

If I am a mystic, I devote myself to the occult of the postmodern. Of course, that does not exist, and I end up fabricating, like the three editors, progenitors of the Plan, in Umberto Eco's Foucalt's Pendulum. This is the world I created, reside in, and continuously form in my own image. I am the wellspring and the archetype.

I am demiurge.

And yet, this universe is an artifact whose origin and purpose still somehow evade me. It is like the obsidian-black spire in Kubrick's 2001 (whereas Clarke provides at least an interpretation of an elucidation).

Maybe the best I can do is a sophomoric solipsism: I am that I am (Exodus 3:14).