Monthly Archives: August 2008

Wow, this is pretty essential for anyone who owns a laptop period.

Hey, so you might be thinking that I gave up on my Happy Week quest, but unfortunately I had some interference, by my body. Yeah, I had to go back to the hospital for another transfusion (I got my transfuse on!). Waa waaaa. Whatever, it was fine. Annoying and lame of course, but it’s done. I feel better, stronger. Not exactly ready to lift the world stronger, but not exactly standing up and walking across the room makes my heart pound either. So that’s good.

One of the pleasant surprises was that the ER has TVs now, for each individual bed! Part of what made my last trip suck so much was that an entire room full of ailing people, left only to stare at the ceiling, will generally act like crazy assholes. I mean, I still had my share of shrieking old ladies and whimpering grown men, but add Monday Night RAW and Murder, She Wrote into the equation and the cacophony drops tenfold. Also, Mell was with me pretty much the whole time so that made it infinitely better. It really helps having another person there, especially when I’m weak from the HHT – it can kind of cloud my head. The last time I went I described my condition as “Severe Anemia”, and spent hours in the waiting room. We got there on Monday evening and the place was more packed than I have ever seen it. I had Mell fill out my description and she wrote: “Rare blood disorder, requires immediate transfusion”. We got in there in about 20 minutes. Awesome.

The rest of the stay was as usual: tedious, frustrating, boring, lotsa pokes by the needle, lotsa doctors, lotsa Cartoon Network. I spent a good deal of it writing Sibelius parts for The Little Death, feeling a little like J Dilla. They gave me one unit of blood on Tuesday, which made be feel better. My blood count was consistently higher than it felt, which was odd. It dipped down to an 8.5 at it’s lowest point, which is by no means good, but not as bad as it has been (I’ve been down to a 4.5 before!). When I left the hospital it had come up to a 9.9 and I felt better, but still pretty weak and loopy. I’m on a heavy red meat diet (could be worse!) for the next week or so while I try to pull it up further. Normal for me is around 12. 13 is great.

Anyway, I’m spending most of my time at home, resting up for a crazy next week. This is giving me a good chance to do some mastering of some of my tracks, so I’m planning on releasing a few new songs from The Little Death, in advance of my Saturday show at The East River Music Project, on Monday so keep an eye out!

An interesting Adbusters article on hipsters, my most reviled of the subcultures:

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.

It’s a decent article, especially for Adbusters, who I believe can be way annoying and pretentious themselves. (Must. Stay. Positive!) But he makes a lot of good points about this strangest of trends. My favorite line from the article is “The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks.” Mafoo likey.

Alex Payne distinguishes the hipster from nihilism:

What distinguishes hipsters for me is that they believe in nothing, but unconsciously so. It’s not nihilism, because nihilism is well-considered position. Hipsters are, to my mind, the first utterly apolitical, a-philosolphical subculture of the postwar era.

Even the slacker generation believed in, well, slacking: they valued an opposition to the competitive mindset of the preceding generation. That may be a shallow thing to value, but it provides the groundwork for some sort of political/cultural stance. Hipsters have no such political or philosophical foundation. I’d go on to argue that they lack even the cultural foundation to contribute meaningfully to the arts.

I’d slightly differ in that many of them show a dabbling interest in politics, but mainly as a tool to remain competitive in social situations, much like staying current with underground indie rock bands, artists, etc that may or may not have any redeeming cultural value. Hopefully the trend is dying out. It seems about time. Unlike Adbusters I don’t believe that it is the end of the world that hipsters are around (Adbusters actually does believe it is the end of the world, much like they believe eating fast food is and shopping is). They’re just taking a long time to go away…

Fuck yeah. This is what I’m talking about. I really think that the trend of arranging classic ‘unplayable’ works like this (and Revolution 9 :) ) are part of the new paradigm of commonplace interactivity. 10-15 years ago, when our entertainment was still primarily based on consumption, we were perfectly happy to accept a recorded piece such as this was simply unplayable, just as we accepted that we couldn’t interact with our TV and that our songs were locked onto a CD. As the web matured and as users gained significant power over their entertainment, we’ve started to see people asserting control over things they never dared to before. Thus, the explosion in sampling, mashups (for what they’re worth), audio and video remixing. Even those annoying YouTube videos that have, like, footage from Dragonball Z with a song by Jack Johnson over it is still an expression of freedom and increased control. And in fact, the great thing about YouTube is that it allows someone with an interesting idea to have that idea spread virally between millions of people in a matter of days.

It’s unsurprising then that artists would want to take the experience of such ‘unplayable’ pieces into their own hands. To some extent it’s the same reason the new Ghostbusters video game is coming out. We always dreamed of taking part in the experience, but never imagined it to be a reality. I hope to see more interesting projects along these lines. Some of them are better than others, some feel more futile than others, but overall they are expressions of joy. The ones that pride themselves on audacity tend to be the ones that miss this mark, the projects that seem more like marketing decisions than artistic ones. But that’s enough about that (I’m staying positive this week!). Anyway, the urge for interactivity is a creative one, even if it means the dissection, indeed the destruction of the piece, in it’s reconstruction. It can never replace the piece or top the piece, and should never aspire to. I love good covers – I plan on releasing a Covers album after I finish The Little Death – so I’ve been thinking a lot about what a good cover is and does. A good cover should exist in its own right as a new and unique piece of music, but it should also make you appreciate the original ever more. Even the seemingly destructive, parodical covers by The Dead Kennedys, of songs such as I Fought The Law and Viva Las Vegas, still make me want to listen to the originals.

A sweet story by Justin Davidson, who wrote up AWS’s performance of my Revolution 9 arrangement at The Kitchen, about his experience taking his son to the various concert he sees and reviews.

He mentions the performance:

So, for the past year, Milo has become my semi-regular escort. Before each outing he worries that he will be the only child in attendance, and sometimes he is. He has heard the Berlin Philharmonic open the Carnegie Hall season with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel make his electrifying New York debut with Beethoven’s Fifth; and tenor Juan Diego Flórez nail his nine high C’s in the Met’s new production of La fille du régiment. He suffered through an amateurish evening of Renaissance dance music in a church, and was baffled by a live orchestration of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” by the group Alarm Will Sound. He loved South Pacific enough that he could sing most of it from memory after one performance. He will wait a year or two for the full-throated tragedies of love and fate. He has heard me remark how much his beloved J.R.R. Tolkien absorbed from Wagner’s four-opera excursion into Norse mythology, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and he’s expressed interest in seeing it. Not yet, I think. In the meantime, the Met has plenty to offer a 10-year-old: the creepy, saccharine horrors of Hansel and Gretel, the over-the-top wizardry of Julie Taymor’s Magic Flute, and the antics in The Barber of Seville. Whether all this stimulation will coalesce into affection or merge in an undifferentiated memory of sitting silently among rows of old people in red velvet chairs, I have no idea.

To be honest I would have been baffled at that age as well. In fact I’m baffled by it now.

Read the whole article though. It’s a cool description of a childhood saturated with exposure to many varieties of music. I often wish I had this type of upbringing. Had I grown up with an innate interest in cars I would have been in hog heaven, as I’m sure my brother was, who eventually joined the family business. But I was lucky enough to have parents that encouraged my fledgling interest at a young(ish) age, even though they had no experience with the performing arts. So while it may have been unexpected for me to ask my parents to take me to the ballet (unspeakable to my friends!) they totally obliged me. I often think about the education I would give my child, though. My kid’ll be programming synths at 8 years old!

Wow, after that mention in my last post about the “elusive Ponyo trailer” I did a little more sleuthing and I finally found it! Here it is, in Japanese, watch it before Studio Ghibli takes it down for unknown reasons again: