Look I know I haven't mentioned this before and I REALLY SHOULD HAVE but you guys kind of have to go to the Ecstatic Music Festival that Judd Greenstein is curating at Merkin. It starts tomorrow, Monday afternoon, Jan. 17 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so you're off work!), and runs for freakin' MONTHS. Here's the program for tomorrow's FREE marathon, which starts at 2 and for seven hours, with lots of breaks and refreshments and whatnot so you're not being held prisoner or something:
Ne(x)tworks plays a piece by Julius Eastman (no not THAT piece, it is MLK Day, do you want to get us all in trouble) Timo Andres plays Ives and Andres Face the Music plays Missy Mazzoli and Christine Southworth So Percussion plays So Percussion Chiara String Quartet plays Jefferson Friedman NOW Ensemble plays Greenstein John Matthias, Adrian Corker & Andew Prior play Matthias Julianna Barwick sings Barwick Vicky Chow plays Daniel Wohl Corey Dargel (w/ NOW Ensemble and Nathan Koci) sings Dargel (Other People's Love Songs, complete!) Ashley Bathgate & Lisa Moore play Kate Moore Ashley Bathgate plays Michael Gordon'sIndustry Gabriel Kahane sings and plays Gabriel Kahane Nadia Sirota & Nico Muhly play Muhly
and Buke & Gass collaborate with Mazzoli's Victoire on some awesome new thing.
That's just the first day! I kind of CAN'T NOT go to this.
Here's the whole page for the extended festival. I hope you'll reconize some incredibly serious names here: Dan Deacon, Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer, Doveman, Owen Pallett, Clogs, Sarah Kirkland Snider, John Medeski, AND MANY MORE.
To help promote his forthcoming New Amsterdam double-disc Someone Will Take Care of Me, Corey Dargel's new song cycle with Cornelius Dufallo (mentioned here) is available for FREE DOWNLOAD at NewAm's website. Go there NOW NOW NOW and download it; it's a bite-sized work of art that will get lodged in your brain for the next year. FOR FANS OF: Arthur Russell, Owen Pallett.
New Corey Dargel, everybody. He and violinist Cornelius Dufallo are premiering a new song-cycle at the Stone Nov. 29, and here's a taste—fiddle loops, brutal lyrics, 7/8 time. Highly recommended. It's like Owen Pallett meets Stephin Merritt meets rhythmic complexity? Yikes, okay, the previous sentence just embarrassed us all. Let's move on.
I haven't written much about our New Amsterdam friends lately, which is totally a mistake. They've been continuing this monthly ARCHIPELAGO concert series at the Galapagos Art Space, and I kicked myself when I realized I'd forgotten to tell y'all to check out the show by Roomful of Teeth, a new-music chamber choir, which based totally on YouTube clips, I'm pretty sure is going to become the new thing. Like Toby Twining and the Toby Twining Singers! Or Meredith Monk and the Funky Bunch! Look here they are singing Judd Greenstein: And here they are singing Caroline Shaw: Seriously, isn't this going to be a big deal?
Anyway. The next Archipelago concert, on Nov. 20 (there will also be a Dargel one in the spring), is all about Victoire, whom—as we have established—you totally love, and special guests Arturo en el Barco. Arturo en el Barco is one Angélica Negrón and her band, and you'd really better check it out, here. Eerie, sample-driven ambient, very good. It makes me want to wear gloves. And eyeliner. Actually, after listening to a little Arturo and a little Victoire just now, I think I am going to try to bring hats back, so this is a dangerous combination. You're warned. You're welcome.
Quick rundown of congrats for the New Amsterdam Records-and-affiliated crowd of young composers:
The WNYC podcast doesn't seem to have put out a lot of episodes lately, so it was a pleasant surprise to find in my pod-hole an episode dedicated to Missy Mazzoli's Victoire! Listen to it (mp3 here, podcast RSS feed here) and tell me what y'all think. For me, one of the most satisfying features of the music is the canny use of electronics—and one of the most troubling is the integration of the clarinet. Sometimes I think it wants to be a trumpet? At any rate I feel that the place of the woodwind section within the bandsemble lineup, as I noted so long ago in my Free Speech Zone review, is its weak spot, its Achilles heel if you will. Listen yourself, enjoy, & tell me what you think.
ALSO, let's toss a bouquet of congratulations at Ted Hearne, who won the Gaudeamus Prize for his Katrina Ballads! (Via, probably, @dja?) Here's the thing: I am not that crazy about the Katrina Ballads. Why am I so resistant to a work that is so obviously well-crafted? I enjoyed the New Haven premiere of Hearne's Eyelid Margin immensely, but his political music makes me feel more harangued than provoked. A clearer example than this might be his piece You Have AIDS. No, no, you don't actually have AIDS! (I mean, unless you do. Get tested, everybody!) No, that's just the title of the piece. It asks the listener to assume the position of a South African man being apprised of the fact that he has AIDS by what must be one of the worst HIV Counselors in the world ("So, like I said, you have AIDS. / Am I going too fast? HIV. CD4. AIDS. Any questions?"). I guess the idea is to shock the audience into an awareness of the reality of the AIDS crisis in Africa, but when I listened to this sound clips, I felt more like I had found myself at the audience at LEASE: The Musical. As if there's something smug, or presumptuous, or, it seems unfair to say, condescending going on here.
"Unfair," because, what—are Ivy League composers not allowed to comment on events affecting Black America or the developing world? That's absurd. I'm not fully able to articulate where I'm coming from with this, which may be why I've allowed my attempt to qualify my congratulations run on about ten times longer than the actual congrats. What is wrong with me?? Do I just dislike this off-Broadway sort of idiom? Maybe that's it, is that it feels in some superficial way like a Urinetown without the intentional self-parody, or an I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky without, well, okay I'm not actually going to defend I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky:
John Adams – "Leila's Song About the Wise Young Women"
from I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky
I'm sorry. I'm obsessed.
And our final CONGRATULATIONS WITH EXCESSIVE QUALIFICATIONS (should I start drafting this blog before I post, so I know where I'm going before I get there?) goes to Corey Dargel, whose "Condi songs," Con Dolcezza, earned a tweet from that very special lady who makes me fantasize about going to one of those weird ex-gay camps where they teach you how to un-limp your wrist and then make you marry a lesbian, just so that the two of us could be forced into a sexless opposite-marriage, Rachel Maddow.
I actually love these songs. Almost a year after the election of Barack Obama, now that the people in charge of representing America to the rest of the world are less prone to making them totally hate us, and we can look back on Condoleezza Rice's tenure the way we look at pictures of a kegger gone horribly wrong ("I can't believe we actually DID that, dude we were so WASTED"), I'm hearing these pieces for the first time, and they've lost little of their impact—because Condoleezza Rice has lost little of her mystery. How did an intelligent, cultured woman end up rubber-stamping such a disastrous foreign policy? How did someone whose family struggled up from slavery join an administrative team that turned its collective back on the cause of equal rights for Americans? Dargel doesn't pretend to answer these questions, but he asks them more eloquently than I've ever heard them asked before, by generously and sensitively setting to music remarks that make Rice sound more like a civil rights leader than, say, a coldblooded conniving bureaucrat with the blood of innocents pooling about her Manolos.
But since I'm being a total bitch to everyone today, I'll also point out that this performance is a bit unsatisfying—I feel as if really pulling off a number like "Gospel Song" requires a vocal instrument with more gravity than this lady is able to muster. ATTENTION ALL SINGERS, please check out this piece! I want to hear a second recording.
Jesus, WHY am I so negative. Anyway, congrats again to everybody, and if you didn't already know that Naxos is picking up the New Amsterdam catalogue, the first releases are trickling out next month—including the debut from NOW Ensemble, and Dargel's Other People's Love Songs—so if you actually still buy records in a record store nowadays, you will suddenly be able to find them there! Hooray. Okay g'bye.
In between your Fleet Week visits to New York's seediest gay bars, you'll want to spend this weekend checking out some of the exciting things the New Amsterdam Records gang is up to. Tonight and tomorrow, let me remind you again that it's time to hear the Corey Dargel's just-completed Thirteen Near Death Experiences, the invention of which you've been reading about at his blog, here. That's Corey Dargel and ICE at PS 122, 8 pm, and if you've been listening to his MIDI demos, and I hope you have, you know it's going to be hot. (Just posted: a clip of the live band rehearsing my new favorite song from the cycle, "Someone Will Take Care of Me.")
Also tonight at 8, Sarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope premieres as a part of New Amsterdam's Undiscovered Islands at Galapagos—I think I've heard precisely one (1) piece by Snider but it was solid and well-made. (Bonus trivia: she's married to famous guitarist/composer Steven Mackey, who will be performing at the concert! So you can be reasonably sure that it is not an impostor.)
Also Nadia Sirota's CD came out on New Amsterdam this week! First things first it's called. I'm going to post a review in just a bit.
Blog? Oh yeah! I used to have one of those.
[Sigh]
Sorry, everybody, it's been a crazy couple of weeks. Wait, maybe I mean "lazy." Or maybe I mean both.
Anyway, whilst I get my shit together, here's a NEW blog that is awesome and you should all go check it out: 13 Near Death Experiences. It's Corey Dargel's journal, of sorts, on the process of composing his new illness- and hypochondria-themed song-cycle.
Lately, Dargel (who—side note—also happens to be in this show tonight! Alright continue reading) has increasingly been trying out something a little bit different, namely writing music for actual humans to perform (in this case the fabulous I.C.E.). Now, one of the cool things about writing electronic music is how secret the actual construction of it is. If you're playing all the instruments yourself, you don't have to tell anybody what meter you're playing in, or what scale you've tuned your instruments to, or even what your instruments are. Once you've written the score, you can tear it up and eat it and no one but you will know what you were thinking. The listener just gets to sit back and enjoy, or if he or she is one of those people who absolutely has to analyze everything they hear they can lean their ear against the speaker and keep rewinding.
But writing for live performers changes everything. Not only are there suddenly these questions of having to write things that people can actually play, but the music no longer exists as this one perfect performance of it; it also exists as a set of notes on a page, open to interpretation. There are performers whose job it is to interpret your writing, to coordinate with each other, and to communicate your ideas (such as they understand them) to the audience. The intimacy between composer and listener suddenly becomes a wide-open, swingin' menage (pictured).
And perhaps it is in this new spirit of free-wheeling openness that Corey has put up his 13 Near Death Experiences dot com, complete with pdf scores and awkward MIDI-driven demos so that we can all gather around and gawk at the latest draft of each song. What's more, you! the reader! can actually click on the the little comment linkie under each post and leave suggestions as to how that draft might be improved. It's sort of like being a student in a writing workshop, except enrollment is infinite, and the guy in the corner who won't shut up is THE ENTIRE WORLD.
Is this, as I believe, a total PR win, or is Dargel also in danger of contaminating the Work by admitting us all, Rapunzel-like, into his ivory tower? Mark your calendars for May 22-23, when Thirteen Near Death Experiences bows at PS 122, and we'll find out.
Hey all you Corey Dargel fans out there, I know you're all waiting with baited breath for the long-delayed second half of my appreciation, but in the meantime I got this press release in the mail, and I'm afraid there's no amount of snark or silliness that would make it more enjoyable than it already is, so here's me copyin' and pastin' that mofo.
Upshot: concerts TONIGHT, SATURDAY, and MONDAY, in Wilmington, Philly, and NYC, respectively.
Details:
Hello everyone.
Ever wonder why classical musicians have the longest and most frequent masturbatory sessions of any demographic?* Avian Music attempts to answer this question (or inspire the tendency) by encouraging composers to be more sexually explicit in their music. Avian presents its "Love Machines and Shameless Hussies" concert in Wilmington, Philadelphia, and New York City respectively Jan. 29, Jan. 31, and Feb. 2. (details below).
*Source: "Self-Actualizations of Repressed Sexual Desires in Classical Musicians," Journal of High-Art Medicine, Issue 302, July 2006
I'm particularly excited about these concerts because Avian has commissioned what will be my first classical chamber music piece in more than seven years! Yes, I've temporarily abandoned my drum machines and synthesizers in exchange for a Baroque soprano, flute, piano, violin, and 'cello, but I haven't stopped downloading porn while composing. My piece, "Sexual Side Effects," is a 12-minute song cycle dealing tenderly with issues of impotence, sexual anxiety, distraction, and inadequacy. Bring a date!
Other works on the program include:
Conrad Cummings' and Michael Korie's hilarious (and beautiful) neo-baroque song cycle, "Positions 1956," based on marriage and sex manuals from the 1950s.
Peter Flint's "Three Songs;"
Joseph Hallman's "Pornstar Paradox;"
Raymond Lustig's "The Moon Ascending;"
and Miss Dirty Martini's live reconstruction of Sally Rand's legendary fan dance set to Debussy's Clair de Lune.
Details about the performances:
Jan. 29, 2009 6:30pm sharp - Wilmington, DE
Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts
200 South Madison Street
$10
Call 302-656-6466 to make reservations.
Jan. 31, 2009 8pm sharp - Philadelphia, PA
with Chamber Music Now!
The Community Education Center
3500 Lancaster Avenue
$20/$12 students
To purchase tickets call 800-595-4849
Feb. 2, 2009 7pm sharp - New York, NY
Le Poisson Rouge (ages 18+ only, unless accompanied by a guardian)
158 Bleecker Street
$10
To purchase tickets call 212-505-FISH
For more info and to reserve tickets online, visit www.avianmusic.com
Performed by AVIAN MUSIC featuring Laura Heimes, Chris Pedro Trakas, Arash Amini, Cyrus Beroukhim, Andrew Sterman, and Blair McMillen
Love, Corey
Oh yeah um Happy New Year! Okay so. Corey Dargel's got another big show this week, a revival of his piece Removable Parts at HERE Arts Space in NYC (Jan 7-11, $20, tix here), so let's take this opportunity for a nice hard look at his latest record, Other People's Love Songs, which you've already heard me going on about plenty, but humor me. And before I forget, subscribe to this podcast! Free Dargel mp3s, including his new Christmas song for Time Out New York.
It's not a project totally without precedent. There's that Momus album, Stars Forever, where he accepted commissions from people like Jeff Koons and Cornelius to write a synth-pop song about each of them. And of course there's Stephin Merritt's livre of love songs. These aren't a terrifically useful comparisons, I know, since aren't those guys's pop songs (not to put them down) way simpler, way catchier—but I think the fact that Dargel's music has an indie-rock niche ready to slip into, this niche of overenunciating white boys unafraid of synth presets, may have something to do with why I find it so satisfying.
He's written here about the advantages of writing, setting, singing, and performing one's own songs—advantages which might seem obvious to lovers of indie rock and other singer/songwriter-driven musics, but which sometimes have to be explained slowly and clearly to visitors from Planet Classical—so instead of talking about how these advantages work for him, let's talk about something just as important, namely the way he makes his project's disadvantages work for him.
Disadvantage #1: He is not a highly trained singer. I don't mean that he isn't skilled, or well-practiced, I just meant that he's not going to tear the roof off with gospel melisma or hit a high C in full voice. His range is limited, he probably couldn't (consistently) project to the back of a concert hall without a mike, and he probably couldn't navigate rapid shifts in pitch or color or dynamics the way that a trained singer could.
But for the audience he's reaching out to, these skills aren't all that important. Quite the opposite: virtuosity, a highly polished singing style, are marks of insincerity to the indie-rock crowd. Just as the current generation of composers grew up listening to pieces like In C or Clapping Music that could be played by anybody, many of today's most celebrated pop singers grew up listening to artists with seemingly ordinary voices, and rejecting the spectacular displays of R&B and classic-rock vocalists. Bands inspired by Death Cab for Cutie or Neutral Milk Hotel are all about putting the text across clearly, not about showing off or milking each syllable for maximum expressive value. I'm not saying their values are somehow preferable to the values of singers inspired by Mariah Carey, I'm just saying that Dargel's is not only a worthwhile aesthetic, but one that, unlike that of most "accessible" composers, actually does click with what the kids today are listening to. On their crazy "i-Pod" machines.
Disadvantage #2: If you're gonna do everything yourself, you're gonna have to rely on technology to play anything you can't play with your own two hands. And up to a certain point, the closer you come with any kind of synthesizer to actually simulating the sound of a musical instrument, the more your audience is reminded that they are listening to something inhuman. In robotics, this is known as the paradox of the "uncanny valley"; here's a handy musical illustration I posted to this blog a while back. Even if you have the resources of time, technology, and $$$ to really pull off a one-man MIDI Symphony, you're just as likely to weird your audience out.
Fortunately, Dargel does "weird" and "alienating" very, very well. The sensations of estrangement and alienation are his bread and/or butter. Accordingly, his instrumental patches actually aim towards the false, the cheap, the mechanical, as if attempting to pre-empt accusations of same—while also hedging against sentimentality. A charming melody on a tinny synth patch puts finger-quotes around its designs on your feelings; in the same way, a patently counterfeit "rock beat" programmed into a computer ironizes said beat's designs upon your booty. Here again, he locks into recent trends in rock and, even more, in dance/hip-hop, in which the attempt is not to escape the constraints of dated technology in favor of sampling that sounds "fresh" or "live," but to foreground the falseness of the electronically generated material.
Like, you've heard this Postal Service song, right?It's just like that. There's no attempt to conceal the fact that this is basically a record that two dudes made (with a lady singer also), using the resources at hand, without even having to be in the same room together. Yes, the beat makes you wanna get up and dance, but it makes you wanna get up and dance in the brightly-colored costumes of an imaginary 1985. Note Ben (Death Cab) Gibbard's vocals too—text first, "emoting" a distant second.
And finally, Dargel's use of electronics dodges this bullet:
One big thing is the drum set right now. There are a lot of composers who are trying to incorporate the drum set into classical arrangements. It’s really hard to do that and make a synthesis that makes sense, because people have been using drum sets for a long time. The drum set is a totally oral instrument and everyone has their own feel to it and if you try writing it down it’s very difficult to do and have it make sense. I feel like there are so many concert pieces that have a drum set in it and the drum set sounds so stupid.
That's Ted Hearne, interviewed here (hattip DJA) Good lord, there is nothing worse than a composer trying to hip shit up by dragging a drummer onstage. STAY AWAY. By rejecting both the hi-tech and the "rockin'," Dargel neatly avoids the risk of trying to sound hip, even as he taps straight into actual, vital pop culture trends.
Okay, there's obviously a lot more to say about this album, but why don't I post this right now so that the mention of this week's concerts might actually do somebody good, and then I'll write the rest later. Alrighty?
(Image ganked from an old CRACKED Magazine, via Cartoon Brew via Boing Boing. I swear I only found the pic after I had already written the line about "i-Pod machines.")
It's almost Halloween! The nights grow long, the winds turn chill, the trees are losing their leaves, and every young man (or young womyn)'s heart turns to thoughts of love.
Here just in time for the holiday is Corey Dargel's new CD, Other People's Love Songs, a concrete manifestation of that Commission-a-Love-Song project I was talking about before. October 28th, y'all will be able to go on iTunes or eMusic and download you some spanking new Dargel. Or BETTER YET, go straight to New Amsterdam Records Dot Com, where you have the choice between an affordably priced download, or a physical "Compact Disc" of uncompressed digital deliciousness in a lovingly designed package. Read more about the project here.
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE! To celebrate the release, Dargel will be playing a show at Le Poisson Rouge, Oct. 29, with his labelmates NOW Ensemble. No, I don't just mean they're sharing a bill, I mean he's going to be playing with his labelmates NOW Ensemble! His synth-pop artsongs will be costumed in brand-new arrangements for living breathing musicians—including, rumor has it, a number dolled up in acoustic drag by Dargel & NOW's other new labelmate Darcy James Argue! You LOVE that guy!
How could you miss this. Album release Oct. 28, LPR show Oct. 29. Dargelicious.
(Graphic ganked from The Onion Dot Com.)
Jesus these New Amsterdam people are the END. The living end. First I hear Corey Dargel's NewAm debut is going to be out at the end of this month (more on this soon), then I hear they've signed composer/bandleader/blogger extraordinaire Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, and then, I hope you all caught this Times article on the scintillating composer/performer/doctor/lawyer/Indian chief Caleb Burhans, whose itsnotyouitsme project is also down with the NewAm fam. The best part of the profile:
Mr. Burhans took a job as a substitute in the Rochester Philharmonic, which was sometimes rocky. Once, when Mr. Burhans turned up at a rehearsal with his hair dyed purple, the orchestra’s managing director asked him to do something about it before the concert. Mr. Burhans turned up in a witch’s wig, cut short. The next week he tried to dye his hair a conventional red, but because of the purple die, it came out crimson, so he shaved his head.
“I found out that one of the trumpet players was going around saying that I was making a mockery of classical music because my hair was purple,” Mr. Burhans said. “And I had a really intense conversation with the managing director, where I said: ‘You know, I’m just trying to help classical music, because if we don’t get more people like me coming to these concerts, this orchestra is going to die. The only people who are coming are old people, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.’ And he said: ‘Yeah, you’re right. Sorry.’
“But I made a sign that said, ‘I Make a Mockery of Classical Music’ and started wearing it around.”
I loved this quote because, among other reasons, the visual self-presentation of classical music is such a peculiar one. Lately people are rethinking this notion that a classical ensemble has to be a mob of old folks in black tie, for better and for worse. It makes sense, to a certain extent, that you want your orchestra to be wearing a uniform. After all, the goal of a classical ensemble is uniformity of sound, that no individual obtrudes from the texture. There's also the notion that, just as the players onstage are supposed to disappear into the ensemble, the ensemble should diappear into the sound of the ensemble, that you should forget about the people you see in front of you, and think only about what's going in your ears. The ideal of most classical performance is to communicate the composer's ideas; the performer is not a creator, but an interpreter.
But there are problems with all of these assumptions. Every act of interpretation is also an act of self-expression, though this may be more obvious in some contexts than in others—if you stand under a girl's window with a guitar and sing "And I Love Her," your hope is not that she will run off and marry Sir Paul McCartney. (That would end badly for all involved.) And classical music's attempts at a null visual component have themselves become strong visual signifiers, the black tie and tails increasingly out of place in concerts for jean-and-t-shirt audiences.
So while I'm tempted to say, oh, come on, don't be in an orchestra with purple hair (wasn't that an episode of Daria or something), it's about twenty times as silly to pretend that the audience is going to somehow enjoy the concert less because of one purple head in the band. Let's loosen up a little.
I'm just going to warn the classical music kids—who, and I am including myself in this, do not tend to have the greatest fashion sense in the world—that there are also style choices that are worse than the no-style-choice of classical convention. I think I saw one of these sweaters onstage at a new music concert once, and the huxtability of the performer seriously distracted from the music he was playing.
But the real reason I like this quote is, hello, T-SHIRT IDEA!!! From now on the Daniel Stephen Johnson CafePress store is going to be selling these puppies in a variety of styles and colors. Or better yet, one of these! This is the front and this is the back. All items are modestly priced, unless you are Caleb Burhans in which case they are free if you ask politely, and all proceeds go to support my CD buying habit. Thank you that is all.
Skip the next two paragraphs. They are boring. In fact, feel free to skip this whole post. The next one will be better. Today I'll just talk really fast and get a lot of stuff over with at once.
So I haven't written anything for this blog in ages and that's for a lot of reasons but mostly I just haven't gotten very excited about anything. Things I did get worked up about but neeeever quite got around to blogging included Nico Muhly's Merkin Hall concert a month ago, the one I was talking about here, and the super-fun afterparty, which was actually just the gang from Nico's show crashing the New Amsterdam Records afterparty, because Corey Dargel and William Brittelle's record-release show (for Brittelle's high-concept new-music rock-opera Mohair Time Warp project) was exactly the same night and Bedroom Community & New Amsterdam Recordses are BFF, so it was a veritable who's who of whatnot, starring such boldface names as Valgeir Sigurðsson! Nadia Sirota! Judd Greenstein! Missy Mazzoli! Caleb Burhans! Corey Dargel (obviously)! and though I didn't get to talk to Corey Dargel I did get a chance to talk to Darcy James Argue, whose blog I have always admired but usually can't really say anything intelligent about because I know next to nothing about jazz music, but I'm trying, I promise I am, and finally I broke down and as you can see added him to my super-exclusive blogroll because he is one of so few people actually talking sense about new music nowadays, and also he was totally adorable in person. There was also someone there who looked exactly like Scott Johnson but I didn't want to ask him if he was Scott Johnson because if he wasn't I would have felt extremely stupid. That said, all of you need to buy the Tzadik reissue of John Somebody if you haven't already. The whole crowd was very cool, and in fact I will one-up Anne-Carolyn Bird's announcement that New Amsterdam Records dot com is her new Facebook for professional networking and say that I intend to do all of my networking, professional, social, and sexual, at New Amsterdam Records dot com, and I suggest they retool the site accordingly. Not only would a new-music dating website fill a major niche, it would prevent confused listeners from wasting google queries like this one. (A: No.)
My biggest celebrity sighting of the evening though was at the intermission of the concert, where I saw (was it him? it WAS!) my boyhood hero, the rock star whose music has meant more to me than he could possibly ever know, Mister DAVID BYRNE. Like I get starstruck pretty easily, I'll admit but when I lived in New York I could handle running into Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch &c. pretty well, but there was DAVID BYRNE, who not only did I buy his Talking Heads records and solo records but I like watched and rewatched True Stories to the point where I am still regurgitating snippets of disjointed dialogue at my friends. Like the song says, it's a scientific lifestyle! He was hanging out in the lobby, apparently by himself, like he was just a dude. I wanted to run up to him and thank him for all the joy he'd given me; however, not only was I not sure it was him at first, but I quickly realized that if I were David Byrne I would carry around a thing of pepper spray at all times for the sole purpose of incapacitating people who felt the irrational need to run up and express how important I had been to them when they were in college. So I walked past him without looking at him directly and instead pretended to be reading a poster on the far wall, hoping to make celebrity ID based on peripheral vision alone, but when I looked at the poster closely I realized that there were about ten words printed it and I couldn't pretend to be reading it for very long, so I looked around like I was searching for something while I figured out my next plan, and then a nice usher lady came up and asked if she could help me. Oh, ah, no, thank you. (But it was totally him.)
The other thing I kind of wanted to blog recently was the death of another one of my heroes, Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg is famous for taking garbage and accidents and turning them into art; what's far more important, though, is that he made it into art that was a pleasure to see, while still retaining that strange energy of accidental, garbage beauty. Like that famous erased DeKooning—even when he destroyed a work of art, it came out looking great. His work was mysterious and passionate and inimitable and oh-so-often imitated. But like jazz or dance, visual art is something I know almost nothing about—fortunately the Times got somebody to write an appreciation who does know what he's talking about when it comes to visual art, namely... David Byrne. Please read that link. I don't have much to add, except to wince whenever people use the word "deconstruct" this way, and then to quote Donald Barthelme, who describes what is, honestly, not my favorite Rauschenberg, in a way that I think is a useful description of what a Rauschenberg achieves. Here's the piece in question, and here's what Barthelme says (Not-Knowing, p. 19):
We can ... wonder for a moment why the goat girdled with its tire is somehow a magical object, rather than, say, only a dumb idea. Harold Rosenberg speaks of the contemporary artwork as "anxious," as wondering: Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk? ... What precisely is it in the coming together of goat and tire that is magical? It's not the surprise of seeing the goat attired, although that's part of it. One might say, for example, that the tirecontests the goat, contradicts the goat, as a mode of being, even that the tire reproaches the goat, in some sense. One the simplest punning leve, the goat is tired. Or that the unfortunate tire has been caught by the goat, which has been fishing in the Hudson—goats eat anything, as everyone knows—or that the goat is being consumed by the tire; it's outside, after all, mechanization takes command. Or that the goateed goat is protesting the fatigue of its friend, the tire, by wearing it as a sort of STRIKE button. Or that two contrasting models of infinity are being presented, tires and goats both being infinitely reproducible, the first depending on the good fortunes of the B. F. Goodrich company and the second upon the copulatory enthusiasm of goats—parallel production lines suddenly met. And so on. What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation. Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital—no interpretation or cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it.
In other words, it's like that Speaking in Tongues collage Byrne talks about in his appreciation, with the images dividing and multiplying and obscuring each other and complementing each other, but it happens with meanings as well as pictures. (This vast network of subtexts of course undergirds all of Byrne's work, too.) You can waste a long, long spray of words describing what their relationships are and still never describe the thing itself, and forget about articulating the sheer visual beauty I was going on about before. Something huge and great and wonderful left the world forever two weeks ago today.
I'm a bit late in pointing out that Corey Dargel has posted yet more free music for download, or rather WNYC's Studio 360 has posted two love songs they commissioned as part of his ongoing Other People's Love Songs project. You can download the whole show and/or the songs as discrete mp3s here—both songs are characteristically witty, tender, catchy, and complex in a way that doesn't draw attention to itself. I'm not sure how a body of work-for-hire can sound so consistently inspired.
In other, completely and totally unrelated news, that misunderstood genius Prof. Heebie McJeebie has returned to the Web once again. He, too, promises to post more free mp3s, which it is your bitter duty to admire even if your feeble, ignorant mind is not quite sufficiently equipped to comprehend them. So, fun times all around!
So I wrote this thing on my friend's blog about gay marriage and/or divorce, and when I was done I could not get "Move to Vermont" by Corey Dargel out of my head but it looks like it's not on his mp3 page anymore. Didn't it use to be? You'll have to accost him in the street and demand he sing it for you in person so that you have some idea what the hell I'm talking about.
And then I wrote this other thing about Lisa Bielawa's Chance Encounter for the local paper. As usual, I'm guessing I got everything wrong, but I hope somebody out there sees it and decides to go to the concert.
