randomWalks

I got into storytelling very much through music, not through journalism. I was never good as a pure composer, but doing it in the service of storytelling somehow makes it so much easier. When you’ve got hours and hours of raw tape, it becomes a compositional exercise. To figure out what the story is, you try to approach it in terms of sound and texture. With musical composition, you want certain parts to be dense and others to be sparse. You’re thinking in terms of syncopation, beats, and rhythms. It’s very gestural, and it applies almost exactly to storytelling. Sometimes, you feel like a story is too regular, too metronomic. You can change a story’s “time signature,” so to speak, by creating little surprises and altering the rhythms on a micro level.

Jad Abumrad of Radio Lab talks with Boldtype.

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IDLER: Titles are important to you.

HIRST: I think they just come out of an urge for naming, it’s like naming your fucking baby. It’s like, you’re called Tom, and you can never separate that from you.

IDLER: Why do so many people do things which they call “Untitled”?

HIRST: It’s a big responsibility. You have to do what you’ve already done in the work in a verbal way, and if you’re a visual artist there’s not really any reason to do it. [picks nose, displays result]

IDLER: Nose-picking is a also great pleasure.

HIRST: Oh yeah. Anything you can do with your hands and feet. Great. Arse picking.

IDLER: Do you pick your arse?

HIRST: Er … I’ve messed about with it?

The Idler’s Tom Hodgkinson interviews artist Damien Hirst.

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A Conversation with Jorge Luis Borges

…I think that, returning to philosophy, that we are not enriched by its solutions, as these solutions are doubtful, they are arbitrary, and philosophy does enrich us by demonstrating that the world is more mysterious than we thought.

(This is always how I feel after watching Waking Life.)

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The name is a genteel hangover from another era, reeking of civility and respect, of Ahmet Ertegun in a spun-silk suit leafing through some sheet music with Ray Charles. The reality was somewhat different: a generation of twentysomethings blasted to the gills on cocaine, tearing around the world trying not to lose their jobs by doing something crazy. Like actually signing a band.

John Niven in the London Times on life as an A&R man in the '90s. Via The Contrarian.

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As a country singer approached a microphone near home plate to sing the national anthem, our jaws slackened as [Albert] Ayler’s sax purred the plaintive opening notes of “Spirits Rejoice,” which quickly becomes a tight, triumphant military-style march before disintegrating into crushing trumpet bleats by Albert’s brother Don. On the silent screen gigantic flags were unfurled, pyrotechnics exploded, a military flyover happened and Americans rejoiced while Ayler’s band evoked twin towers of war—pageantry and battle—masterfully, if psychotically.

An Ayler in My House

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What else can I tell you?
Today, a homeless man climbed into the sky.
And there, he warmed the city.
We felt it through the metal hulls of buses
but, ignorant of the origin,
missed a chance to marvel.

Then, something unexpected occurred.
Our bus driver turned around
in his seat—we were at a stoplight—
and offered wise counsel.
His tone was grave,
but his regard light.
And he said,
Casting a shadow is effortless.
But the real work is in the upkeep.

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This collection of Stan Lee Tribute Artwork repeatedly takes my breath away.

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In the art industry, it’s extremely difficult to be successful without turning yourself into a cartoon. Even Hunter S. Thompson knew this. God knows Duchamp and Warhol knew it. Some artists are turned into cartoons and others do it themselves. I prefer to do it myself. At least then I can control how my cock is photographed.

stereogum: Of Montreal Talk T-Mobile: "Selling Out Isn’t Possible" by Kevin Barnes (or, as my kids would say, “Bar-NEZ”).

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Took me a long time to find it out, but those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn’t just go slinging them around for effect. If you’re black or Jewish or Latin or gay those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, like torture-flak hailing on you wherever you go.

A classic piece of rock criticism, Lester Bangs’ 1979 “White Noise Supremacists” takes punk to task for “acting like racism is real hip and cool.” To read the essay, download the PDF from Lester’s Legacy under “Lester reprints online.”

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Flickr: The In Rainbows Album Art Competition Pool

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This is a spiritual story, written by an American Catholic who loved the disillusioned sadness of life just as much as youthful exuberance.

What makes this book an American masterpiece is how beautifully Kerouac blends the two. To claim otherwise just perpetuates the 50-year misinterpretation of this American confession.

New York Times’ letters to the editor regarding an October 4 David Brooks column.

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I love that Kerouac and company picked up the notion of Beat from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler and writer who had picked up the phrase from carnies, small-time crooks, and jazz musicians in Chicago and who used the word to describe the “beaten” condition of worn-out travelers for whom home was the road.

Paperback Writer: October in the Railroad Earth

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randomWalks: Justin Quinnell’s bath, as seen by his tongue

This picture is making the rounds again, and prints are for sale on Quinnell’s site as well. I might pick one up.

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I read it in the decade of Dylan and the Beatles, and in its boozy, self-conscious, priapic posturing it seemed a boy’s book, as it does to this day. Its central conceit, Sal’s adoration of Dean, means that if you don’t dig Dean, the book is lost on you, and, frankly, Dean is very hard to dig if you’re a woman. — Marianne Wiggins

Some people remember being blown away by “On the Road” when they were young but then find that it doesn’t stand up to mature scrutiny. My experience has been completely different. It gets better and better—the heartbreak more pronounced—with every rereading. — Geoff Dyer

The LA Times asked thirty writers about the significance of On the Road: The ‘Road’ much traveled.

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New York's WNYC is celebrating the birthday of John Cage (9/5) with 24 hours and 33 minutes of special programming, carried both on its HD Radio channel and online. "24:33 features rare audio drawn from the WNYC archives over the past 40 + years, including live performances and interviews with Cage — as well as Cage tributes, commentary, and performances by some of the most influential musicians of our time."

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. -- John Cage

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…
no friend will wander down
no one arriving brown from Mexico
from the sunfields of California, bearing pot
they are scattered now, dead or silent
or blasted to madness
by the howling brightness of our once common vision
…

Inscrutable Muses: The Women of the Beat Generation. Miss-Vintage.com

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It’s mostly [Rumi’s] romantic and spiritual poems that have captured English-speaking fans. (He’s quite popular on the wedding circuit these days.)

Washington Post: “Rumi’s Time Has Come (Again).” Previously on rW: Rumi’s “A Community of the Spirit.”

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Digital Humanities Quarterly: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky

“Section 2 of this article is a formal examination of Crowther’s original source code files, offering, for the first time, a clear understanding of Crowther’s innovative blend of simulation and fantasy, as well as a better appreciation of the creative contributions of Woods. Section 3 compares the game to maps of the cave site, presents photographs of an excursion to Colossal Cave, and offers testimony from experienced cavers. These key sources – the code and the cave, analyzed here for the first time – establish that Crowther’s original was not only faithful to the geography of the real Colossal Cave, but was also a fantasy remediation of that site.”

Posted by Adam at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Struggle. He had a Vulcan father and a human mother — so there’s great logic and deep emotion and a great struggle between the two poles. That’s a great gift to hand an actor. It’s a struggle we all go through.

Leonard Nimoy, on Spock’s internal life. ”Star Trek” exclusive: The Spocks speak! | Star Trek | The Q&A | Movies | Entertainment Weekly | 2

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Bob Marlow’s Weekender Music: “Thoughts Are Leaves”

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Do you know anything about [lemurs]? They’re just fabulous. They’re the most wonderful primates imaginable. They’re only in Madagascar and they’re endangered like most things, you know. The people cut down forests, killing them because they have superstitions about them because they have these long fingers that they point and the natives think that means [you’re] going to die, if they point at you. But [they’re] very, very gentle creatures. They constantly hug each other. They have these long, long tails. Anyway, no, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this. I’m a normal person who happens to like animals a lot. I don’t want to get too self-conscious about how they get in my poems because that’ll, you know, stop me.

Interview with James Tate, by Mike Magee.

Some poems by James Tate:

• “Goodtime Jesus” (re Jesus’s donkey: 1, 2, 3)
• “The List of Famous Hats”. I drank a lot of wine one night and called James Tate’s home number (through 411; this was before Google was integral to my life) and left a message on his answering machine telling him how funny this poem is.
• “The Lost Pilot”

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The Femmes were eating dinner at Doyle’s Seafood in Sydney. Ritchie ate a live lobster served sashimi style. When Gano saw the arms of the lobster waving around while Ritchie munched the raw flesh he called a taxi and went back to the hotel. The next day Gano announced he was becoming a vegetarian and has never eaten meat since then.

VIOLENT FEMMES Band Info is full of tales seemingly too good to be true.

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I just finished reading Book 7 and am now back online.

apophenia: processing Harry Potter

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“Apparently,” said my friend knowledgeably, as we watched McEwan swing his new wife around the dance floor, “he only writes fifteen words a day.” This was an unfortunate piece of information to give an aspiring writer. I was terribly susceptible to the power of example. If I heard Borges ran three miles every morning and did a headstand in a bucket of water before sitting down to write, I felt I must try this myself. The specter of the fifteen-word limit stayed with me a long time. Three years later I remember writing White Teeth and thinking that all my problems stemmed from the excess of words I felt compelled to write each day. Fifteen words a day! Why can’t you write just fifteen words a day?

From Zadie Smith's intro to her interview with Ian McEwan (excerpt), in The Believer.

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I’ve been honestly kind of freaking out about the spoilers this week.

Eager for Harry and ‘The Hallows’ - washingtonpost.com

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randomwalks/dj: David’s reblog is one of the only sites I can think of which I trust not to spoil my weekend.

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Trying to schedule your sequestration this weekend so the end of Harry Potter isn’t spoiled for you? Me too. Let’s see. The book will be 784 pages, and I read about 300 words per minute. (How Many Words-Per-Minute Do You Read?) Now if I had a copy of one of the Harry Potter hardcovers handy, I’d count a few pages to get a figure for words per page. Anybody got a good guess?

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The long and winding ‘Road’

Here’s the published version: “My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”

In the scroll, the section runs four times longer and wraps with: “If these men stop the machine and come home - and get on their knees - and ask for forgiveness - and the women bless them - peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.”

“Holy moly, man,” said Canary. “That’s a whole different book.”

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J Freedom du Lac (what a sweet name!): He Is a Rock - washingtonpost.com

Surely, Stevie Wonder is on the short list for the next Gershwin Prize. Yes?

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Apr 2, 2007 10:04 PM
Subject ARTHUR RESULT OVERTURNED
Body: Sweethearts of the rodeo,

Arthur has been recalled to life.

I bought Laris’s 50 percent interest in the magazine thanks to the efforts of family and friends.

Now I own 100% and am moving forward with all Arthur activities as quickly as possible.

Sorry for the interruption in service.

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The papers will be incorporated into the artist’s Imagine Peace Tower, which will be installed later this year in Iceland. Ono was vague about the structure’s exact design and said it would be made of light.

Washington Post: Yoko Ono’s Peaceful Message Takes Root.

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Adopted by drivers of timber trucks working forest roads, the squeeze-bulb horns were first brought together with small percussion as a kind of ensemble noisemaking to insure protection to disabled vehicles after dark. As punctured tires—a frequent occurrence on forest roads—were pumped back to strength, driving mates surrounded the vehicles and banged out encouragement on ododompo finger bells and small square tamalin (from “tambourine”) frame drums while honking the por por horns to scare off dangerous animals. In time, the noise of warning transformed into a music, as the drivers layered short por por horn phrases onto the standard dawuro banana-leaf bell pulse patterns of distinct ethnic and national rhythms such as kpalongo, adowa, asafo, ogeh, and agbadza. Likewise, the up and down motion of pumping the punctured tires was turned into an enthusiastic dance of accompaniment.

The Afrofunk Music Forum brings our attention to Smithsonian Folkways’ Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana.

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I launched myself down the enclosed corkscrew tube, feeling like a fish in a bowl as I peered through the tube’s clear plastic top at people staring at my descent. The welding along the structure’s joints painlessly whacked my back, adding another dimension to the feeling of plummeting through space. Twelve seconds later, after traveling a curving 182-foot route down the 43-foot drop, I was shot out of the slide and onto a black pad, exhilarated and out of breath.

London’s Tate Gallery is hosting five metal slides that sound like a heck of a lot of fun.

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Of Montreal
Uploaded by Malavagma.

leyink says:
I felt like I was watching all of the epic rock acts — Bowie, Sgt. Peppers Beatles, and some glam theatre troupe all smooshed onto the stage at Great America.

Intense. Awesome.

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“In celebration of the 50th anniversary of On the Road, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics will share news of Kerouac celebrations around the world, updates about the School’s own Kerouac Festival on June 30 and July 1, 2007 and perspectives of special guest bloggers.”

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Japan’s long been a music geek’s paradise, a Valhalla of reverent remasters of American and British albums that time and fashion have passed by in their native lands.

…

There’s a small but ardent underground economy among Americans in dummy addresses and e-mailed scans of Japanese iTunes Cards, picked up by friends in Tokyo convenience stores or openly sold online.

Slate Magazine: The insanely great songs Apple won’t let you hear, by Paul Collins.

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The thing that I was experiencing and dwelling on the entire time is that there are so many things that are not OK and that will never be OK again. But there’s also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime.

MAGPIE » NEARER THE HEART OF THINGS: Erik Davis on Joanna Newsom, from Arthur No. 25/Winter 02006.

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Dave dropped the needle on the record, and the opening guitar/bass riff kicked us in the balls and poured motor oil on us and made us kiss the goat’s anus; then we got to the stop-time guitar solo and our eyes turned black and fell out, and we jumped off the overpass, and the color became sound, and the font became fury, and we microwaved the baby, and we saw Thor’s hammer forge Valhalla, and we are coming, we are coming, and it’s all for you Damian, hack splat, oh oh oh oh oh oh, - hey, I wonder whatever happened to Dave Marciano…

WFMU’s Scott W describes his first experience with Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

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WFMU’s blog points to a one-of-a-kind Velvet Underground acetate up for bidding on eBay. Just 21 thou and a week to go — I could still have a crack at it.

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Houses Inspired By the Big Orange Splot Book

I was compelled to find this (which was inspired by this wonderful book in particular) after reading about this man who was inspired to add a turret to his house. It looks pretty kickass to me.

We have experienced a lot of intolerance and harassment, ranging from people making nuisance calls for inspections to materials being stolen to our vehicles repeatedly having fruit, yogurt, eggs, tomatoes, et cetera thrown on them, to broken truck windows to extension cords running from the temporary power being cut and stolen …

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A Community of the Spirit

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.
Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

—Rumi
trans. Coleman Barks

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I do not know what “crozzled” means. Nor do I know what “kerfs” mean, or “grambeled” or “sleavings” or innumerable other words introduced into the narrative. I have a vague idea of what the word “claggy” means in the sentence sequence, “The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh,” but I don’t want to think too much about it.

The end is nigh and woe is us (on The Road by Cormac McCarthy).

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Here’s a guide to where Walt Whitman hung out in Washington, D.C.

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The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard

You must know, Doctor, that I did not choose to seek psychiatric help. I have no faith that I shall exit this room a healed man; I know now that I have been destined for the asylum since childhood. No mere conversation with you can steer me clear of that fate. That said, let us proceed with this court-compelled farce before my mad prattle provokes your crabbiness further.

As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock — the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul.

Bonus (while supplies last): It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

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Airborne Event
Uploaded by third uncle.

Artificial, immersive, theme-park reality was such a normal part of my everyday life that when I saw my first natural waterfall, I couldn’t believe it didn’t involve plumbing or electricity.

Waldemar Januszczak profiles Fred Tomaselli in The Times UK. See more of Fred Tomaselli’s work from an upcoming exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery in NYC.

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Haircut

“In the future, every child will be given a pair of scissors and invited to shape our destinies.”—Haircuts by Children

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Right now, I’m trying to play the instrument, and I’m trying to write, without any restrictions of chord, keys, time, melody and harmony, but to resolve the idea eternally, where every person receives the same quality from it, without relating it to some person.

New York Times: Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music: Listening with Ornette Coleman.

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hozomeen from desolation lookout
Uploaded by seawallrunner.

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You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ‘em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.’ “…

Rolling Stone: The Genius of Bob Dylan (excerpt)

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beatzo: How Alan Moore Changed My Life Part 1: Swamp Thing# 48

Part memoir, part “comics as literature”, this essay communicates both the genius of Alan Moore and the secret joys a teenage comic book fan was privy to in the 1980s.

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"Stranger and Stranger: Why is George Bush Reading Camus?" (Slate)

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Check out the Painful Leg Injuries podcast, "digital visual/audio artist, Bill Byrne. Conceptual, avant-garde noise, ambient sound art explorations. For fans of Fennesz, Nurse With Wound, William Basinski, Wolf Eyes, the Improvised Music from Japan players, Double Leopards, Harry Partch, et al." I'm enjoying "The Bill Byrne Elevenbilliontet" (MP3): "Recordings of street musicians, collaged together. For this episode I collected many field recordings I had of those lonely New York street corner hornsmen. Sax players mostly."

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Pat's District provides automatically compiling listings for clubs in Arlington, Va.; Alexandria, Va.; and Washington, D.C., among others. Wonderful. RSS?

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Lowell Sun Online - Unedited version of ‘On the Road’ to be published

Jack Kerouac’s landmark novel on the Beat Generation, On The Road, will be published in its unedited “original scroll version,” John Sampas said today.

The Lowell-based executor of Kerouac’s literary estate said he signed a contract Sunday with the New York-based publisher Viking/Penguin to publish the book. He hopes to have it out by the end of 2007.

Tuesday’s Lowell Sun will have the full edited story.

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NPR : Richard Linklater, Directing 'Darkly' (Interviewed on Fresh Air, 10 July 2006)

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Village Voice: pithy recording guides vis-a-vis Trane, Monk, Ra and others. Oh it just makes me want to drink some Woodford Reserve and listen to these guys for hours.

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It was June 1966, five years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda, a member of the Chilean Communist Party, was to speak at the IDB, but it was the height of the Cold War and anticommunist feeling ran deep among the bank's employees. The IDB president was forced to stand "in the doorway of the bank and, despite the protests and sirens, announced through a bullhorn that the ceremony would take place at the Hotel Mayflower." There, Castedo introduced the poet, and the reading was "a colossal success."

The Washington Post reports on the discovery of a long-lost recording of Pablo Neruda reading in Washington, D.C.

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Check out Radio Scratch, a podcast of Lee "Scratch" Perry's tunes. Great stuff. (Again cribbed from Some Velvet Blog.)

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So if the dystopian Scanner equals something like Life plus Dick, what do you get when you drop that tab after having choked down an order of Fast Food's Schlosser-plus-Slacker?

"Ooh," says Linklater excitedly. "You get a pretty creepy vision of our country right now." The nation's other frightening Texan, 45 going on 24, is sitting poolside at his trés chic Cannes hotel, comfortably clad in last year's National League Championship jersey and chuckling at the thought of his two line drives to the center of the corporate American void. "Scanner," he says, "is set 'seven years from now,' but that really means right now—the post– 9-11 world of surveillance. It's tragic on an individual level, whereas Fast Food is the tragedy of a system or a mind-set."

Richard Linklater talks with The Village Voice about his forthcoming films, Fast Food Nation and A Scanner Darkly.

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Studio Tricks. This one's fun. Okay, let's start with the guitar solo from "I'm Only Sleeping." It's obviously been reversed, but that's not the whole story. George actually played the actual solo backwards, and then they flipped the tape for the master, making it a forward sounding lead break, but with just enough backwards sound to fit perfectly in one of John's droniest songs.

Wonderful post listing great Beatles moments. The best part is that I can think of so many more. What a band.

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village voice > books > Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Return of the Quetzalcoatl by Carla Blumenkranz

village voice > books > Book of Sketches; The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later by Theo Schell-Lambert

Posted by Adam at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lowell Sun Online - Kerouac film bid brings crew 'On the Road' to Lowell

We are not starting with preconceived concept of what it should be. We are talking to people about what they think it should and should not be.

Walter Salles, director of Frances Ford Coppola's "On The Road," is filming a documentary "in search of the feature film."

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The lyrics to the classic "Ca Plane Pour Moi," translated into English.

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Sitting at home with the window open, listening to the tree branches brush against each other outside and the occasional horn-honks of Flatbush Ave, bark of dog and squeal of child... this uncomposed ambience is my creativity engine lately.

From a comment on Click opera - Ubiquity is the abyss.

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A Short History of America in twelve panels by R. Crumb.

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A film review in Weekend on Friday about "Le Pont des Arts" misspelled a word in the title of a Monteverdi madrigal that a character sings on a recording. It is "Lamento della ninfa," not "ninja."

Posted by Mike at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A performance artist has again vandalized Fountain, the urinal Marcel Duchamp claimed as art in 1917. The same vandal urinated into the Fountain in 1993. Via the WFMU blog. Related: the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., opens a Dada retrospective Feb. 19.

Posted by Mike at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

Novelist Ian McEwan in The Guardian.

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Pullman refined his own storytelling gifts orally, by recounting versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey to his middle-school students. He estimates that he's told each epic at least thirty times. Indeed, he once caused a scene in a restaurant when he was retelling the Odyssey to his son Tom, then about five years old. "Every time we went out to dinner, I’d tell it to him in serialized form while we waited for our food to come," he said. "I'd just gotten to the part where Odysseus has come back home in disguise as an old beggar. Penelope has taken Odysseus's old bow down and told the suitors that she'll marry whoever can string it. They all try, but none of them can do it. Then Odysseus picks it up, and he feels it all over — to make sure it's still good, which it is — and then in one move he strings it. Of course, we know what's going to happen next — he's going to use it to kill the suitors — but just before that he plucks it just once, to hear the tone. Tom was so taken with the tension of the moment that he bit a piece out of his water glass. The waitress, who was coming toward us with our food, saw him do it, and she was so startled that she dropped her tray. There was food everywhere! It was chaos."

Laura Miller on Philip Pullman in The New Yorker.

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Posted by Mike at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I advise a 12-hour-a-day TV viewing regimen!!

Understanding Zippy (how to read the never intentionally obscure comic strip).

Posted by Adam at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was walking with my interpreter across Red Square where I was attending the Moscow International Film Festival when we came across a mob of people reaching for autographs.
"Who's that?" I asked.
"Dean Reed." replied my interpreter.
"Who's Dean Reed?"
"You don't know who Dean Reed is?! Why he's the most famous American in the whole world!"

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