Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Heft

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It’s really hard sometimes to set aside time to read a looooong magazine article. I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for many years, and I know how often I’m forced to put an issue aside because of pressure from the ticking clock. (Hint: way too often.)

But this — a new magazine, containing a single looooong article per issue, on topics I’m interested in — sounds too good to pass up. From the project’s Kickstarter page:

The web is the future of journalism, but let’s be honest: the future isn’t living up to expectations. Newspapers and magazines have cut back on in-depth reporting. Gossip sites have proliferated. The web has become a byword for fast and cheap. Why isn’t it synonymous with fearless, investigative and enthralling writing?

We think it can be…

MATTER will focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science. That means no cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists. Just one unmissable story.

MATTER is about brilliant ideas from all around the world, whether they come from professors at MIT or the minds of mad people. But most of all, it’s about getting amazing investigative reporters to tell compelling stories

I don’t know. Maybe too good to be true? But I figured it was worth laying at least a small bet on the table.

 

Midweek Music Break: Jim James/The New Multitudes, “Talking Empty Bed Blues”

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I posted a few months ago about a recent project, led by Bob Dylan, to record the “lost notebooks” of Hank Williams. It so happens that 2012 marks the centennial of the birth of another great songwriter (and Dylan hero), Woodie Guthrie; and a new album, The New Multitudes, has just been released, of Guthrie’s lyrics which were never set to music. His daughter Nora, who heads up the Woody Guthrie Foundation, has been inviting contemporary performers for years to prowl around in his ample unpublished archives. (In 1998 and 2002, it was Billy Bragg and Wilco doing the honors, for Mermaid Avenue, Vol I and II.) This time around she’s tapped four indie-neo-folkies for the task.

Unplugged from the loop as I usually am, three of the singer-songwriters were otherwise unknown to me: Jay Farrar (who normally performs with Son Volt), Anders Parker (Varnaline), and Will Johnson (Centro-Matic). (Apparently the project began as a Farrar solo project.) As for the fourth, I sorta-kinda recognized his name, billed as Yim Yames, in its own right. But without question I recognized his regular band’s name, My Morning Jacket. (You may recall their “Circuital,” featured here last May: reverb-heavy, pounding-rhythmic, and graced with a nearly static video of — as it happens — a so-called “magic eye tube.”

The reason I hadn’t quite remembered Yim Yames’s name is that it’s the quasi-pseudonym/alter ego of MMJ’s front man, Jim James. No one seems to know why he chose this or any other any pseudonym. A conversation at a Pearl Jam (!) fan forum suggests that he did it on a lark; other references I saw, while not explaining it exactly, say that he uses it to distinguish his solo work (as here) from the stuff he does with his regular bands, MMJ and Monsters of Folk.

Crazy artistes…

Anyway, one of James’s lead performances on the Guthrie album is the one below, of “Talking Empty Bed Blues.” (He’s looking rather David Crosby-esque in the video.) It offers a lovely, surprise segue from haunting solo-acoustic-and-vocal to stirring, anthemic group harmonies, and back again:

Lyrics here. Among the behind-the-scenes audio notes posted at SoundCloud for the album, though, is one from James on why the lyrics spoke to him.

The Propagational Library (1): The Finding

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[Image: The Beginning
(gouache on paper, 15×21 cm, 2010), by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox]

(Have you already read the Introduction? If not, please jog on over there now.
This will still be here waiting for you.)

On the cold August morning on which Gabe Naude heard his doorbell ring for the last time, it rang when he had just entered the darkroom. Gabe sighed, loudly and melodramatically — as though whoever stood on his doorstep might hear, and reconsider the interruption. He placed on the heavy table the little open metal drum full of sodium thiosulphate fixing agent, which sloshed a bit over the lip, onto the table and floor. He sighed again, and went upstairs and to the front door.

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Sitting, Silent, Open-Minded

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[Caption: Vicar’s wife (sympathisingly): “Now that you can’t get about, and are not able to read, how do you manage to occupy the time?” Old Man: “Well, Mum, sometimes I sits and thinks; and then again I just sits.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one’s own folly, or even of one’s navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind — with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, the Eskimo using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhi state of sitting yoga. In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or flower petal. When body and mind are one, then the whole thing, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the “reality” of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules. The weary self of masks and screens, defenses, preconceptions, and opinions that are propped up by ideas and words, imagines itself to be some sort of an entity (in a society of like entities) may suddenly fall away, dissolve into formless faux where concepts such as “death” and “life”, “time” and “space”, “past” and “future” have no meaning. There is only a pearly radiance of Emptiness, the Uncreated, without beginning, therefore without end.

Like the round bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its center, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this “void”, this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one’s own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as “great death”.

(Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard)

…and:

The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.

(Shinkichi Takahashi [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Playmates, “Beep Beep”

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I’ve been thinking for a while of doing theme-type Midweek Music Breaks for a little variety, such as one on car music: songs about cars. As opposed to conventional “road trip” music, I mean, or songs by groups named after cars (like The Fleetwoods, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and, uh, The Cars). I may still do that one. But in the meantime… It’s a busy week, and this silly song was wobbling at the top of the car-music stack.

Yesterday I paid a brief routine visit to my audiologist’s office. The two-year warranty on my current hearing aids is up next month, and we wanted to send them into the manufacturer for one last checkup and tuning while they’re still covered. As always on such occasions, I went into her office with two aids, and came out shortly afterward with one — a loaner. And as always on such occasions, for the next week or so my audio world will flatten into monaural.

Except when in the car, I almost always listen to music via headphones placed over my hearing aids, which are behind-the-ear models. Selecting the headphones involved some careful searching: (a) Obviously, earplug-style headphones are out. (b) If the headphones enclose the aids too fully, you get whistling feedback. (c) Regardless of design or size, if the headphones are too tight, they squash the tops of the ears (very uncomfortably) against the aids. The ones I use both at work  and at home are made by Sennheiser, and fit all three criteria admirably. (Especially the ones at home, which include a volume-control dial on the cord.)

This sometimes leaves me feeling nostalgic for the days when everyone’s musical listening, if not their hearing, was so flattened. A time of high-fidelity sound, if that. Of refrigerators made in only one color — white. Of black-and-white television. Of car manufacturers no longer, today, in business. And of cars themselves, when the only sort of transmission available was the manual sort…

The Playmates released their one really noticeable hit in 1958. Not that it was a huge hit, for reasons which will become obvious: it got only as far as #20. But few people who’ve heard it have ever forgotten it. It’s a novelty song, a two- to three-minute joke, really — a number which doesn’t bear up under repeated listens, unless you’re trying to parse out the lyrics. (The Playmates’ seriousness about their art may perhaps be judged by the group’s first name: The Nitwits.) Worse, it’s even an esoteric joke, requiring that the listener know how to operate a standard three-speed transmission. Consequently, it never acquired a later life as a children’s song (like anything by The Chipmunks, for instance).

Aside from the joke, it demonstrates one other feature vaguely of interest: a musical technique called accelerando — a melody whose tempo gradually increases. (You won’t have to listen for long to to that opening ploddddding rhythm.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Beep Beep. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:47 long.

[audio:beepbeep_theplaymates.mp3|titles=’Beep Beep’|artists=ArtistName]

[Lyrics]

(A casual, “I once knew a guy who claimed”-style anecdote on this page claims that the song’s story line came from an actual event, but I haven’t found any independent verification.)

I had three friends who drove used first- or second-generation Ramblers. (The body bolts on one of them had become loosened and/or sheared off; when the brakes were applied, the upper frame, including the passenger compartment, continued moving forward for a split-second longer than the wheels and undercarriage.) It’s fair to say — at least of those three cars — that any Cadillac driver would indeed be startled to find himself in a race with one.

Hard to imagine a song like “Beep Beep”‘s ever having been played as dance music, but maybe it happened. In an infinite universe, after all, there’s plenty of room for the merely improbable…

________________________

P.S. Yes, I know — only a week since the Ciara Sidine post. From the sublime to the ridiculous!

Life by a Thousand Cuts

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[Image: “Webster’s New Inner Diction” (2007), by Brian Dettmer]

From Neil Gaiman’s Twitter feed, I learned of the artwork of Brian Dettmer. Dettmer uses surgical tools — scalpel, tweezers, and such — to dig down into books and other media (such as cassette tapes), revealing deep layers of what might or might not be meaning in the words and images therein.

From his “artist’s statement”:

The age of information in physical form is waning. As intangible routes thrive with quicker fluidity, material and history are being lost, slipping and eroding into the ether. Newer media swiftly flips forms, unrestricted by the weight of material and the responsibility of history. In the tangible world we are left with a frozen material but in the intangible world we may be left with nothing. History is lost as formats change from physical stability to digital distress…

In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the surface of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each layer while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose alternate histories and memories.

Besides books, Dettmer also works with maps, audiocassette tapes, VHS tapes, LPs… For the items of plastic, instead of carving or cutting them he sometimes melts and/or fuses them into new shapes, such as animal (or human) skulls. Regardless of medium, the results are both beautiful and a little disconcerting.

(That said, I can’t go so far as some of the commenters I’ve seen on other sites, who are appalled that he’s treating books so shabbily.)

Here’s a seven-minute interview with Dettmer, with lots more examples of his work:

The ultimate resource, unsurprisingly, is Dettmer’s home page itself. Scroll way down on the page to see all the images.

No word, as yet, on any plans in the offing for his vivisection of Kindles, Nooks, and/or iPads. Probably not for a few years, if ever; his focus seems to be on old media threatened (or already supplanted) by new.

The Propagational Library (Introduction): The Librarian

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[Image: The Beginning of Everything: Remembering Distance
(oil on linen, 90 x 180 cm, 2010), by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox]

That’s what it said (on what would have been the little placard on what would have been his desk — if he had required a desk in the first place): The Librarian.

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“Basking in the Glow of an Imagined Future”

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[Image: illustration from a December 20101 post, “The Time Travelling Brain,” at the Neuroskeptic blog. The orange-highlighted region of the brain is apparently used both in remembering the past, and imagining the future. See also this article in Discover.]

in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

— before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

(E.E. Cummings)

…and:

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night.

(Mark Strand)

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Midweek Music Break: Ciara Sidine, “Take Me Down”

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[Image: “Ciara and Conor [Brady], acoustic set, Shadow Road Shining launch at Sugar Club, Dublin,
13 May 2011″ (from her FB page)]

The [mostly imaginary] scene: Dublin, Ireland, in the offices of a large publishing firm, sometime in the still young twenty-first century. An experienced, highly respected editor sits looking dreamily out a window of her office. Only in her 30s, she’s done the successful-professional thing and she’s also the mother of small children. She has no desire to give up those things. And yet… and yet…

From the streets below, voices whisper to her. A few moments pass. Then she realizes: they’re not speaking but singing softly, some from half a world away and some just a few blocks distant, many of them muted by the passing of decades and others still very young…

From Ciara Sidine’s Facebook page, on her influences:

I am inspired by the beautiful vocals and at times ground-breaking recordings of Emmylou Harris, by the raw vocal energy and gut-wrenching lyrics of Lucinda Williams, by the braveness and vulnerability of Beth Gibbons and the rare and ethereal sound of Portishead. The voice of Elvis Costello never ceases to make me want to lie down and surrender to its beautiful calling.

Listening to the voice of Dolores Keane always made me feel that something true and unalterable was unfolding. From Mary Black came something equally true, pure in tone and melody; from Sinead O’Connor something otherworldly, at once raw, honest, violent and soothing. From Bob Geldof, ass-kicking, rocking music that put its money where its mouth was. I’m inspired by the folk revival from the fifties on, by blues and country. Hearing Hank Williams’s voice is like a fresh awakening every time. Van Morrison speaks directly to the soul, finds his groove there and works his spell. Let the healing begin.

Johnny Cash, well I can barely even go there. His voice brings me to a different place, and it is his later American recordings that I most often revisit and find myself at home in, almost akin to being a child in those warm sing-song evenings where the night was infinite possibility and song was a democracy all of its own. Johnny’s voice reminds me of rolling thunder — rumbling, spine-tingling, exciting. How close is the lightning to where you’re standing?

Joni still reveals something fresh and lasting in every new recording, and I don’t think there’s anyone to whom I owe more in terms of inspiration. When I listen to the immediacy and singularity of records she made well over forty years ago, every strum, every chord, every harmony still goes straight to the heart.

Every generation thinks it has reinvented the world, but we only have to listen to the music of the fifties and sixties to know that our hold over any such notion is at best tenuous. What unfolds from the rock ‘n’ roll revolution has all manner of inventiveness. But rock ‘n’ roll paved the way. And its way too was paved, by roots, gospel, jazz, blues, country. It just comes around again, anew. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings make the best case for this of any contemporary performers I can think of and they, too, inspire me.

That’s quite a bit of ambition wrapped up there, hmm? But she did more than dream. She did it. Her debut album, Shadow Road Shining, came out last year to great acclaim, and you can find echoes of all those voices — and all their poetry — in every song.

Here’s “Take Me Down”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Take Me Down. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:30 long.

[audio:takemedown_ciarasidine.mp3|titles=’Take Me Down’|artists=Ciara Sidine]

[Lyrics]

I don’t know if she’s still editing, or plans to return to it (if indeed she has left). But the verbal dexterity is all there on open display, not just in her songs’ lyrics but in such of her prose as I’ve succeeded in digging up. Here’s an excerpt from her Web site:

At the moment, I feel that to be Irish is to have just emerged from your teenage-hood, having wrecked your parents’ gaff in a massive drug-fuelled party. Great fun, no one’s arguing, but they’re due back any minute, and you’ve woken up to an almighty hangover and an unbright future. The beautiful chick/dude from last night is nowhere to be found. Tomorrow you’re about to discover that you failed the leaving. There’s a queue stretching around the corner for a Mac-job. It’s time to sink or swim.

There’s always choice, always possibility. Maybe I’ll write a song about that.

An almighty hangover and an unbright future… You failed the leaving. It takes a real writer’s confidence with the English language — and in her choices — to fashion such cadences.

Update (2012-02-15, 2:00pm): See Froog’s comment, below, for a bit of a balloon-puncturing about one of those presumptively imaginative phrases.

A Face Only a Mother Could Love

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We’re thinking of physically reconfiguring our network equipment here at the house. Currently, the DSL modem and router are upstairs in my office — at the far end of the house — where they’ve been since we moved here ten years ago. Since then, things have changed:

  • The Missus no longer has a desktop computer. She has a laptop, which can use either a wired or a wireless connection.
  • We have new smartphones, which can connect to the Internet either via our carrier’s own network, OR through (much faster) WiFi if available.
  • We have a streaming-video device connected to our TV which lets us download movies and TV shows (etc.) — unavailable through our satellite-TV provider — via services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and so on. Or rather, it would let us do so, if (a) we had a reliable wireless connection at that location, or (b) the wired connection there weren’t already devoted to our satellite DVR.
  • Our newest Kindle, like the smartphones, can use either WiFi (faster) or Amazon’s own 3G “Whispernet” network, depending on which is available.

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