No, for several people in Texas, the movie Dazed and Confused (dir by Richard Linklater) is a bad version of real life. That is right. There is a real Randy "Pink" Floyd, a real Slater, and a real - get this - Wooderson! "The best part about them high school girls - I keep gettin' older, and they stay the same age."
Well, a couple people with those real names, who were friends of Linklater's back in the day, are none too pleased. Their day-to-day identities have been, well, smoked. Peter Carlson of the Washington Post is all over the post-movie brew-ha-ha. Things are starting to get legal.
Note to artists - careful at how you steal from real life for characters in your art!
(Hat tip to my sista-in-law, who hangs in Philly - Maggie Pendzich.)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
As artists, it is our business to be in regular contact with our sources of inspiration. Those sources of emotional spark can be almost anything. All are ever-present, but our receptivity to the source shifts. Different things inspire us in our lives, and through our lives. If you look back at your own sources of inspiration, I think you might see a range of objects that have sparked you. My own model of this range of spark is what I call a spectrum of muse.
This spectrum of muse includes the physical environment, folkloric/animistic spirits, personal fame/celebrity, God/Goddess/Spirit, technological novelty, human-to-human collaboration, self-actualization, planetary stewardship, pure manifest/unmanifest sentience, and on. These objects are touchstones. They spark us to a mode that is more open. Through openness to our muse objects, vibrant energy passes through our awareness and towards the production of artwork. Each muse object helps us to channel our creativity towards an public display of our art for others to embrace, absorb, and contemplate.
Yet it is not our sources of inspiration that allow us to grow. It is not our muse that develops our excellence as artists. After all, our muse object tends to change, fluctuate, and move as our cognition expands and our consciousness moves. What inspired us five years ago perhaps has less pop and sizzle now. We look for new things to goose our activity, to propel us from motionless inertia towards an inner need for expression. This is another of the open-ended aspects of artistry that is better just accepted as our lot. Anything can move us, but the why of that movement is a deep mystery. The spectrum of muse goes all the way up and all the way down.
I think that what does allow us to grow as artists are our habits. Our habits act, in part, as an interface between a growth into a deeper and wider subject. Taken as a whole, all of our habits form our artist practice. Concretely, our practice is made of the blocks of time in our day within which we do our activities, exercises, rituals that support creative play. All operate in concert to do something very important: through our practice we give attention to our intentions.
Our intentions become material reflection (i.e., our artwork) because of the delicate pillars of support that surround our interior. We have a range of being. Our habits - our practice - acts as midwife for our inspired being. When we honor our practice through our committment to it, we in fact honor our muse and our sources of inspiration. We offer trust and our muse returns the favor.
The point is that there are various levels of being that can be supported through our practice. There are biological means of support, psychological means, and spiritual means. A variety of methods exist for each level. An integral practice can involve and activate our own levels through well-chosen activities. Such a practice is multidimensional.
All in all, our practice is a conglomeration of behavior and activity on multiple levels of our being. Integral theory provides a general structure so that these levels of our own being are exercised through the particular aspects of our practice. An integral artist practice is a means for the artist to receive, house, and tranform inspiration into artwork. It brings about an attitude, ambition, and practice of whole-person realization - a practice of fullness.
And the hypothesis in all of this?
If our artist practice is more full, then our artwork can be more full. The more we can absorb, the more our art can reflect.
This is a pretty exciting hypothesis, yes? The logical conclusion actually suggests that inspiration actually is never a problem. The muse is always there. It is everpresent in various forms, according to a spectrum, as I suggested above.
No, the issue instead is is two-fold: one is our ability to be receptive to inspiration, and two is our ability to follow-through, to carry that inspiration to a manifest shape. I think that to develop a coordinated habit of receptivity and follow through is to develop and mature as a true artist. Anyone can be creative. But it takes maturity to be creative and be able to commit to a follow-through. It takes maturity to be able to be both drunk and sober in the same moment.
Or how about a water metaphor. An integral artist practice hooks one end of our discreet and subtle hose to a full spectrum of our own sentient potential. The act of that connection allows an outpouring from the other end of the hose. At the open end is a capacity to provide water to the world's receptive flowers with a flow-force of symphonic nutrition that can surprise Pure Spirit as a recognition of its own essence.
And the open secret? Your honesty turns the faucet on.
Friends, due to the holiday month (We are headed to Vail, Colorado, for a week with family, after several days with our Milwaukee family), as well as my own exhaustion with the written word, for the rest of this month and likely into January, words will be lighter and scarcer. It is time to let the prose breath a bit in its own witnessed silence.
A break is always a good idea from time to time. I've been pretty hot and heavy with the written word for a good 18 months. Over 250 pages of integral art scholarship, lotsa little essays, and countless blurbs on The Daily Goose - it is fun to fine a wave to surf. Of course all waves, no matter how vibrant, die down from time to time. I'm am not about to put the surfboard away. Just, well, down. I have to rest the arms, legs, and eyes.
In lieu of words has been and will continue to be pictures from my cell phone, or what I call Cellph Shots. These are primarily taken by me, but pieces from friends (who still use my phone for the camera) creep in from time to time. So I hope you enjoy.
For the next three weeks or so, I speak less with word, and more with image. I tell the story my life here in Chicago culture, environment, and the surrounding lands. And just my fortune that Chicago happens to be a fascinating city. The stories here go late late late into the night, as the blues wind down into a windy dawn.
Christopher Caldwell from the Weekly Standard offers some useful insight in the cultural dynamics of Holland, and the backdrop for the awful slaying of Theo Van Gogh. The article, "Holland Daze: The Dutch Rethink Multiculturalism", offers this kosmic kwote:
The Netherlands was a society with a high level of religious affiliation and intensity--as it still is in its own "Bible Belt," which stretches in a rough southwest-to-northeast diagonal across the country. A political system that empowered church-affiliated organizations to perform temporal tasks created a mighty role for religion. That is why the world revolution of the 1960s--which was seen as a revolution against class in Britain, against de Gaulle in France, against the World War II generation in Germany, and against Vietnam in the United States--was seen in Holland as a rebellion against church authority.
The natural result was the libertine public square that will be recognized by any American who visited the Netherlands with a Eurail Pass at age 18--the Milky Way, the legalized prostitution, hashish in the "coffee shops," the laissez-faire immigration policy, a law enforcement system whereunder you get 120 hours of community service for threatening to kill someone. The essential fact about this dispensation, at the political level, is that most Dutch people don't like it. Eighty percent of Netherlanders tell pollsters their country is "too tolerant." But the post-sixties tolerance seemed to have antecedents in the national mythology: Apostles of the new ethic claimed--without much justification--the mantle of the pre-Enlightenment tolerance that once led the Netherlands to welcome persecuted dissenters from across Europe: Huguenots from France, Jews from Spain, the Mayflower pilgrims from England.
Furthermore, Caldwell quotes a local politician who says, "tolerance became a pretext for not addressing problems." And this is the real nut, isn't it? How does a culture practice tolerance and still address very difficult problems, without endless discussion that waters down a real remedy?
In 1917, French surrealist Marcel Duchamp put a spatial frame around an ordinary white porcelain urinal, called it "Fountain", and thus invited viewers to absorb it as a piece of art. People were shocked, arguments broiled, it was quite a stir.
In 2004, a poll of 500 leaders in the art world was taken of the world's most influential pieces of modern art (art from approximately 1900 until the 1960s). The winner? Why, it was Fountain.
Of course it wasn't named "best", just most "influential". Big difference. 20th century artist narcissism (delineated eloquently in Brooks' "Bobos", Wilber's "Boomeritis", Gablik's "The End of Modernism?", the work of Paglia, Lasch, and others) was perfectly anticipated by Duchamp's toilet art. As I see it, this value priviledges artist autonomy ahead of morals, responsibility, coherence, taste, tradition, technical skill, and anything else. No one can tell the artist what to do. The creative license is untempered and unrestrained.
The kosmic kwote from the article:
"The choice of Duchamp's Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock," art expert Simon Wilson told the UK's Press Association.
"But it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing. The work itself can be made of anything and can take any form."
What process? Duchamp found a toilet and framed it in space. If viewers get something of value out of the experience of this art, then so be it. Viewer response is impossible to predict, and that is exactly how it should be. But let's not pretend about what Duchamp did in a so-called 'process'. It simply speaks to a choice of materials, and a choice to ignore any technique/skill traditions. As an historical exemplar of one offshoot of the pluralistic worldview (which founded the 'anything can be art' view), it stands alone. Maybe it is the most influential in that respect. But as an exemplar of beauty, in its myriad consonant and dissonant forms, it doesn't stand anywhere notable. It lays in the heap of ironic art, of little more value than the excrement for which it was built to channel.
But I'm am going to use this occassion to completely excuse the guest cellph shot below. Completely. In fact, it is my reaction. I don't care what awards this piece of technology wins in whatever art competitions. It still can be a bitch when you least need it to be.
Oh sometimes.
[picture taken by ben, aided by hannah. this is the first and only toilet art you will ever see on matthewdallman.com. if you are in to this sort of thing, best enjoy it now while you can. for those that aren't, my apologies, and i'll blog more soon to take this off of the top of the feed. happy holidays.]
Ben, Hannah, and I saw Ocean's 12 tonight, up in Milwaukee, at the Prospect Mall theatre. Besides the $6 movie tickets (which is coolio in and of itself) the movie was hot. Totally blazin'. All aces. Fashion, caper, exotic locales, slick acting, and a funky bassline. Was the show worth six bucks? Hell yeah it was.
Hey everybody. Take a gander over at Writings and you'll see a newly posted 8-pg essay, called A River of One's Own: The Flows of Art & Fear. The external world of games and attitudes will always be more or less what it is - a mess. The thankful solace, however, is our intuitive world, and the relationship we can have with that energy. The dynamic of that relationship is the subject of the piece, and I do hope you enjoy it. Special thanks to Victoria Lansford for her feedback and support of its initial stages.
The piece will likely be in my book, An Integral Art Manifesto, which will corral most of my writings to this point, in a revised and re-pitched fashion to accord to my relationship with my intuitive and unfolding grasp of integral art. We are all in this together, my friends. And the more we talk about the taste of our creative rivers, the more we can learn about ourselves. What follows in step is an increased capacity to make even more resonant artwork and knock the socks off of everyone with whom we reflect in suspended disbelief.
Here is W.A. Mathieu, from his book The Musical Life. From the chapter entitled, "When Cousins Fall In Love", he writes about being both a composer and a writer. The pursuits support each other. When he is blocked in one, he improvises in the other. But there is a unity, too:
In music and words both, the realized moment annihilates the judgmental self. Artists practice this annihilation. They take themselves apart completely, explode themselves, then reassemble themselves with some fancy design or box or frame - some art - which they then fix and gloss. This is where pure tone really helps, because we can ride it out reliably to the edge of space, over and over again like a shuttle. Tone teaches us annihilation. It makes us disappear so we can reappear one more time according to our contrivances, our words and thoughts and forms. In this going out on tone and coming in on thought, music and words support and complement one another. They are like cousins whose common ancestors have died, who have only each other left, and who confess their love in mazy conversations that go on all night.
This paper is now available for download, on my Writings page. It is the December 2004 draft. It is done for the time being, and ready for your review. As an answer to E.H. Gombrich and James Elkins, this paper provides a way to navigate the world's books, stories, interpersonal exchanges, instruction, and guidance about art. "Integral" means to be comprehensive, and there is no reason to dismiss any story of art, on any topic, if that story is authentically valuable to sentient beings.
In 1999 Andrea R. Halpern of Bucknell University and Robert J. Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University conducted a study in which they scanned the brains of nonmusicians who either listened to music or imagined hearing the same piece of music. Many of the same areas in the temporal lobes that were involved in listening to the melodies were also activated when those melodies were merely imagined.
Good music becomes us. We hear it, we feel it in our bones, right next to our deepest vulnerability. When a piece of music authentically touches us, the connection is permanent, and irrevocable. Music rewires our souls against our will. We are forever opened, and forever more expansive.
That is what I have rather unwittingly become. I took part in various discussions for 18 months around the loose-knit Integral Institute (after I wrote my first paper on integral art, which was published at the Frank Visser site). And I realized, as my time wore on, that I actually had a passion for scholarship. I think in part it has to do with a desire to find a graduate program, for a masters or PhD, that suited my liking, but simply not finding a match. So what to do? Be a do-it-yourself scholar.
Here is an article I found that talks about other freaks like me. Interesting kwote:
Many independent scholars have day jobs or hold down several small jobs to sustain themselves. Julia Ballerini, who researches 19th-century travel photography, speaks of “supporting my habit.”
A chief obstacle independent scholars face is access to libraries.The coalition’s president, Georgia Wright, says she cannot use interlibrary loan without relying on her husband’s university affiliation. Another scholar from Canada lives in a recreational vehicle and emails another NCIS member who faxes library materials to him.
Other hurdles include getting the requisite letters of recommendation for grants and fellowships. “It’s middle-level scholars in academe who tend to look down on independent scholars. I recommend that they go to absolutely top people” for assistance, said Mr. Gross.They can afford to evaluate work on its merit, even if from an intriguingly unorthodox angle, he said. “Good scholarship is good scholarship, wherever it comes from,” said Janet Wasserman, a specialist in Franz Schubert.
Exactly. Good scholarship is good scholarship. And this is another reason why I am so grateful for my readers - you all are really great with your comments and feedback on my work. I have thought of starting a 'letters' section on this blog. Perhaps I would post interesting letters without the name of the author?? After all, what I am most interested in, as far as this website goes, is a healthy and fruitful exchange of ideas. This is still an idea in development, so stay tuned.
A useful distinction between improvisation and composition is a subject that every composer faces. I use the word 'useful' because the distinction is made right and just by its ability to serve the musical interests of the composer. There are different lines to draw around each word, different meanings to asign, and different intentions to have. Each composer deals with this in a personal way, according to his or her temperament, musical consciousness, musical culture, and choices for instrument. Where improvisation ends and composition begins (and visa versa) is a nut that is never really cracked. It is a paradox, a koan, an object for contemplation itself. Many rich hours can be spent at the piano in exploration of the edge between the two worlds. Spend these hours like they are goin' outta style. And wonder:
When I improvise, do I compose? When I compose, do I improvise?
Western culture deals with this koan with the emergence, at least since Hildegard von Bingen of the 12th century, of the defined role of a composer. This is a rather unique position, unique to the West (or specifically, the Western mind, which can live anywhere). A composer is the person who figures out what other play. The Western composer lives music alone, isolated with nothing but pencil, paper, and instrument. The composer bushwacks as pure agency, and maybe, just maybe, ends up with a map of musical territory that he/she must convince first musicians, and then a general audience, is a worthwhile territory to explore. Composers try to hear at the edges of their own ears. And then comes the real task - the reflection of those edges in a written piece.
(In general, a broader definition of 'composer' is simply a person who gives shape to music that has novelty to it.)
I have written before about the flow of musical creativity along two distinct, but complementary, irrigated paths. A comparison of the composition modes of Mozart and Haydn delineates a mode of inner ear, and outer ear. A composer who works that Mozart path hears inside his awareness and hears a composition without actual sound. A composer along the Haydn path plays with actual sound (via an instrument) and hears a composition from sound. The Mozart path is distanced from actual sound, which is thus experienced '3rd person' as a 'there'. The Haydn path is immersed in sound, which is here experienced '1st person' as a 'here'. Or in simple terms, the Mozart path is masculine and Haydn path is feminine.
But another truth is that both look the same from a bit of distance away. Compared to musicians, say from Japan, India, or Africa, the Western musician who composes in either the Mozart or Haydn manners (or both in a Mozart/Haydn mix) looks like a person who likes to be alone with music at its creation. In these other traditions, the whole idea of a 'composer', as a person distinct from a communal experience of music, is pretty strange. Most piece of music in these cultures are not even thought of having been created by a single person of human form. The music comes from a tradition, from ancestors, from a God or Goddess, or from nature. The musician's role is not to be original with new music, but faithful to its origin. And at the very least, music is not to be found alone and away from others, but created in a communal environment with other musicians and allowed to live and breath, change and grow. Every culture has its musical patterns - nobody completely makes up everything. But the non-Western cultures I named as examples employ musical strategies to play outwards with the patterns.
In short, the Western composer creates inwards and the non-Western outwards. (All caveats acknowledged now, because this is still simplistic - the world is not made of only two poles. But this will serve as a temporary conception to be further refined as I go along). The Western composer sits in agency; the non-Western composer sits in communion to do the same. Or again, there is distance in the former and embrace in the latter. Both reflect charged time in music. And both can create music that is really good or really bad. No culture or manner of composition has the corner on quality.
So what I am talking here about is a multi-layered, or multi-leveled, approach to reconcile these two separate dualities. One is the masculine/feminine (or 3rd person / 1st person) distinction in the modes of inspired flow in the the Western composer. The other is the masculine/feminine distinction between Western and Eastern composers. Confused yet?
Well the point of all of this is to understand music composition is a more informed and comprehensive way. The point is to understand cultural and ethnic differences so to some degree we can transcend and include the differences as we move forward as a human species. And the point for an integral music is to not only know what the possibilities are, but to know how everything fits together and can be reasonably negotiated by informed musicians in ways that enrich music and enrich people.
The point is to be able to truly push at our edges, to compose at our cusps of what we can hear and what we cannot.
The two levels here are a bodily level and a mental level. The distinction between Western/non-Western composers is distinction at the bodily level. Literally, we see the body of the Western composer in an isolated creative workspace, and we see the body of the non-Western composer in a communal creative workspace. In the moments of creation, the former is alone, the latter is with people. This is simple, but I hope profound. And likewise, the distinction between Mozart/Hadyn inspirational flow is a distinction at the mental level. In this sense, the mind irrigates music according to the interior glimpse of Mozart (a capacity to witness) and the exterior apprehension of Haydn (a capacity to intuitively experiment).
So - two levels, and two possibilities at each level. A matrix of four, so far. 2 x 2. Or see this simple chart of the capacities of a composer.
So this table reflects the possible capacities for any musician. The point is that anyone from anywhere can exercise any of these capacities. This is a map of capacities at the bodily and mental levels of your own being. Each of the four capacities can help you make beautiful music.
My suggestion - just for now try to be aware of these. You do not have to master all of them, or design your day to cover all of them before 9 am. This is not a map to put more pressure on you. This is a map just to let you know what is out there - or in truth, what is in here for you to energize when you are moved to.
I'll have more to say about what a 'spiritual' level looks like on this map, but for now, let me know if this makes sense for you as a composer in today's world, who has decided not to put your head in the sand. We are all partners in the global learning community. And I really enjoy our exchanges in this interconnected world, don't you?
At the beginning of the last century, St. Mark's Square flooded on average 10 times a year. Now water seeps into the square more than 100 times each winter, and its paving stones are cracked and pulling apart. Venetians keep a pair of waders at home and another at the office.
"A taste for wine, the film suggests, is something that anyone can cultivate. Miles and Maya are true amateurs (French for "lovers"), when it comes to wine, whose fragile nobility requires an alliance between human beings and nature in the patient, habitual attention to climate and soil. They understand how rare excellence is, the way its existence depends on the convergence of chance conditions with human effort and skill."
-- Thomas Hibbs, on two of the characters from Sideways, in his excellent and lyrical review of the film, also one of my favorites of the last year. Hibbs' grabs ahold of the parallels between human interaction and wine cultivation, and treats his subject with detailed care, love, and precision.
(For you integral hotshots out there, Hibbs' review touches primarily upon interpretive schools of director/actor intentions, and narrative formalism, i.e. upper left and upper right quadrants. Thus Hibbs' review isn't comprehensive as an integral theory might suggest is possible, but his review is solid, rich, and nuanced, which is most important anyway. Anywho...).
Hannah and I have seen Sideways twice in the theater already - once in Chicago on a date, and once in Grand Rapids with my mother and brother. Like good wine, the movie bears repeat immersion and enjoyment quite well. Sideways, like pinot noir, montepulciano, or shiraz, is layered.
So, who will I see the movie with for my third viewing? Wanna go?
I dug up this May 28, 2004, article from the San Francisco Chronicle. Cell phone photography has entered the art galleries. What digital technology gives us, if we want it, is the possibility of 'instant visual art'. And in fact, the gallery exhibit changed by the minute:
The Mobile Phone Photography Show (MPPS) is a live network of image messages being sent constantly from the camera phones of more than 350 participants -- a network open to anyone who fills out a simple registration form -- from 50 countries. Every day, more images arrive and are added to the MPPS database, which sorts them into a queue and projects them for 20-second intervals onto monitors and screens throughout the gallery. The only information displayed about the photographs is the location of the sender; otherwise, they're anonymous. The photographs are also being printed out in a passport-size format and glued directly onto the large east wall of the gallery.
Here is how I see the larger issue. As technology to call someone, plan your day, write email, surf the web, and to take pictures integrates into a single unit the size of a cigarette box, the ability to evoke day-to-day consciousness in our symbols (art, messages, conversations, blogs, etc) has increased dramatically in the last ten years. I like the ability to mosey down Clark St. in the Loop, call Hannah, walk some more, then be able to capture in a frame an interesting street scene I come across. Maybe I wouldn't have even seen it if I was trying to, as an official photographer. The fact that I wasn't trying to find an interesting image, I think, makes finding them easier, in the moment, when you least expect Spirit to emerge multicolored around the corner. Cellph images allow the capture of our reflected Self in photoimagery. I fully support this development. Just because the technology is easier doesn't mean the pictures are of better or worse artistic quality. Technology is neutral to Art.
And this in no way means that conventional photography loses any place at the table. Many people will undoubtedly feel like standard photography, with expensive cameras, a selection of lenses, full-developing, and quality photo paper is the only true photography. Of course they have a point as far as it goes. The Pluralism inherent in cellph snapshots allows for greater span of photo possibilities, but the possibility of shallower depth and overall artistic merit. I have sympathy with this argument, because the last thing I favor is a loss of the tremendous work of our pre-21 century photographer pioneers, who use painstaking techniques to realize truly startling art.
The proof is still, and always, in the pudding. We have to take good pictures, no matter what technology we use. Cell phone photography presents a slightly different visual frame than traditional photography, and can be judged on slightly different merits. The ease of use of cellphones adds an layer of interpretation that can be rich. Perhaps it is a transparency of intention.
But both forms stand equally at the door of Spirit, and both are looked upon for their visual/cognitive/emotional/moral/symbolic essences. Those vibrant essences, no matter what medium or manifest form, are in fact what we look for when we want to absorb and contemplate art. No artist gets to bypass the requirement of their art that it is in some sense transcendent. Art needs to rip us from our samsaric self-contraction and into a suspended world of seamless absorption.
In photography that can be authentic art, cell phones can be used, or high-priced Nikons. It doesn't matter. What does matter is the sense, as we look at the work of our photo artists, that these artists not only know how to take a well-composed shot, but also know how to watch themselves take the shots, and watch themselves as they choose the right shots to display. The witness of one's artistic intention need not be completely conscious, but it is required to some extent.
For it is an artist's intention (again, either conscious or semi-conscious) that is the most luminous sheath of transparency, which clothes a pure consciousness that knows no particular human life form. Some artists grok their own intention more than other artists, but any even minor glimpse into authentic intention is, in my view, the fundamental difference between the mediocre and the beautiful. For to grok even a glimpse is to be forever open to authenticity, and open to your deepest Self, reflected in metaphor through your art.
In the broadest sense, this is the soul-journey of every artist. And have no worry if you think that you haven't gotten 'deep enough' to be an artist, or haven't experienced this witness of which I describe above. These are just my words, others can do. Your only tasks are to strive towards shared recognition, and to strive towards an artistic reflection for what you sense is possible. Art makes the impossible tangible.
So, in this moment, or as you walk down the street with your cellphone camera, can you breathe into your own intention, as best you can make it out right now. Breathe into that question, "what is my intention?" and as you breathe in and out, and live the question in and out, can you produce art, or take a snapshot, that in any interior way pings a resonance? Because every resonance you feel is a ping of your own Spirit that wants to expand and flow spacious. Every tug in your phenomena is a tug at your own emergence, which every sentient being supports, fundamentally.
This story would qualify as news of the weird, and a strange testament to the power of human will (hat-tip Chicago Sun-Times):
City pulls plug on home in drawbridge
December 13, 2004
The Lake Shore Drive drawbridge that spans the Chicago River carries thousands of cars a day. It's among the first structures to catch the vicious winter winds off the lake. And it's one of the final barriers for tall-masted rivercraft seeking open water. To suburban native Richard Dorsay, though, it's home.
Or it was until Sunday, when the 36-year-old homeless man was evicted by police and city officials -- who were stunned to find he'd been living for at least three years in a little wooden village built into the beams and girders of the bridge's intricate underbelly.
Dorsay and several of his "neighbors" were able to enter through a slim, almost unnoticeable opening in the median of the double-decker bridge's lower level. They then crawled to their lair, which was replete with creature comforts and nearly invisible to anybody on the river. [cut]
This makes my concerns about my job, income, and music composition seem so bourgeois, no? Like, I have a house that, you know, doesn't move when a Oprah's yacht wants to go out to Lake Michigan. Of course, Mr. Dorsay did have a television in that bridge cubby. Even he needs his Simpsons.
Here are some more photos from the recording session. You can read more about the larger project here, and see another photo here. Below, you see First United Church, in Oak Park, IL. This is where we recorded the piece, in the wonderfully sonorous chapel. (pictures via my Samsung Cellphone)
What actor would not die for a film resume that includes The Wild Bunch, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aladdin, and many more?
Well, a resume like this does exist. But it is not for an actor. It is for a sound effect. Listen to this NPR story on the Wilhelm, the most famous sound effect (or foley) ever. You will never watch the Indiana Jones Trilogy in quite the same way.
...[Music's] expressive power is revealed in its ability to compel ... metaphors from us, and to persuade us that they fit exactly. Of course, it is a mystery that they fit. But the mystery is immovable. Every metaphor both demands an explanation and also refuses it, since an explanation would change it from a metaphor to a literal truth, and thereby destroy its meaning.
All the more reason why the approach taken by Hazrat Inayat Khan and others - namely, to describe music via poetry and spiritual metaphor - is both more accurate and inspirational than the logic/analytical approach taken by many music writers in the European tradition. If to talk about music is akin to a dance about architecture, then, clearly, a dance-talk about music's architecture in and as time is immediately more attractive. Feel it!
Of course, on the composition side, as I composer I can say that I do not ever write music according to metaphor. Metaphor arises after my signature goes at the bottom of the score to signal finished. So I agree with Scrunton, but that leaves the area composer phenomenology (one's 'inner ear dynmaic') unexplored.
Here I can only speak for myself with any comfort. What happens for other composers might or might not be similar. Given today's diversity of composition style and procedure, a 'common practice' of composers is perhaps less the case than it ever has been. I have written about the common practice issue before.
My advice for composers is to stop at nothing to follow the tones that you hear in your inner ear. But tones are distinct from sound, and both are distinct from music. Let me offer definitions.
Sound is anything aural in the world - wind, car honks, airplanes, rivers, screaming neighbors, your feet over pebbles, and so on and so forth. This would include noise of any kind.
Tones are any sound that has a human resonance. In other words, any sound that grabs you is a tone. A tone strikes a chord with you, so to speak. Tones have the additional feature of being of exterior and interior kind. And it is the interior tones that we as composers ought to follow at nearly any cost.
And music is the organization of tones inside an acoustic frame. Music is what we hear when we hear the play of tones. Music is what captures our imagination, and hooks into our consciousness, to erase boundaries that seem apparent in the manifest world. Beyond mere sound, and beyond the important tones, it is music that emerges when a composer arranges tones into a coherant whole piece of music. (The term "whole piece" is an interesting play itself, eh?)
Of course, at the kosmic level, these distinctions fall away, and everything is sound, tone, and music in a nonduality (or, pardon me, 'nontriality'). Because music is made of tones, which is made of sound, then we can understand these three distinctions as of a continuous flow of vibratory material. All is vibration. The levels of our reality are levels of different vibration.
And as I see it, a post-pluralist common practice amongst contemporary composers would have to be a practice (or series of practices, commonly held beliefs, commonly held concepts, and so on and so forth) that get composers into the day to day immersion in conscious vibration.
This is why Allaudin's practice of daily singing over a drone (inspired by Sufi and Hindustani aesthetics) is of such vital import, I think. For it is through the sung expression that we experience vibration in the fullest manner. When we sing, and know what we sing, every chakra turns on. Every level of our being is juiced. Every stage of our emergent existance dances. Every wave our of sentient ocean moves in jiggled harmonic excitation.
So sing, baby. Sing! Can you sing an in-tune pitch of G over a low-octave C-G perfect fifth drone? Can you sing that G with full consciousness of cognitive location on the harmonic map, and allow yourself to move passively in the flow? Can you stand on the shore, and swin in the ocean, at the very same time? Can you give and receive in a timeless moment of pure sound? Can you make love as this sound, which is a sound that sings before you were born, and will sing after you die? Can you sing the eternal G?
There was a fire in the Chicago Loop on Monday night. Notice the ashen side of the Lasalle Bank building. The fire was on the 29th and 30th floors. Some people were injured (incl firefighters), but thankfully no one died. I took this the morning after. The building is one of the world's oldest skyscrapers.
From Roger Scrunton's masterful, The Aesthetics of Music (1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press):
... [M]usic presents us with the nature not of space but of time - time lifted from the tangle of causes and presented in all of its mystifying simplicity, as the impossible but necessary condition under which our existance is granted.
And what is time? Scrunton summarizes both Plato and Plotinus and describes time as the "moving image (eikon) of eternity." The same goes for the virtual time of music. In music, we hear the machinations of eternity, captured in little wave pictures of the deeper, more vast Sea of timelessness. This is why a conductor, with a baton, holds time. Time, like life, begins as a reduction and concentration of something utterly unqualifable.
Have you ever wondered: When a piece of music begins, from where does the time of this music come, and to where does this time go when complete, when the piece is finished? Does this time actually ever end? Rather curious, no?
Music takes to the edge between time and timelessness, between the relative and absolute worlds. Music takes us to the edge between manifest consciousness and pure consciousness, between the subtle and causal energy bands. Music takes us to that edge, angles with its back to the causal and sings glorious as subtle energy, and sings as radiant magic. It animates that edge.
Music is not life, and life in not music. Art is short for artifice - something created, something artificial. In music, we do not hear time, but we hear animated time as aural metaphor. We hear a depiction, one of the closest humans have devised, of the initial reentry of spirit into the world, in that delicate, intuitive space that is almost post-conception and pre-fetus. Music metaphors a world. And I mean 'metaphor' as a verb. Music metaphors a world, at the rarefied strata of pure time, the pure space in which all of our lives happen. Pure time is the space in which the rhythms of our life occur. Time is the fundamental bed of rhythm. Our rhythmic lives happen in time, not the other way around. Time is the container of rhythm. The edge between time and timelessness is delicate and nuanced to the point of near boredom, yet paradoxically to the point of deep profundity. This precisely is the point of Scrunton's "mystifying simplicity".
People react so strongly to music because, as a nonverbal art, it sings a representation of conscious time. Music sings the deep blueprint of our lives. One person's version of conscious time is another person's wasted time. Music is so deeply subjective that music that doesn't deeply jive is regarded by that person as, quite literally, unfaithful to intuition, unfaithful to who you are. Or in other words, 'bad' music is bad because it is a poor representation of the fundamental string of your manifest existance. Music, as time, is what our lives revolve around. Our deepest resonances are plucked on a string, within the gravitation pull of time. And when there isn't a resonance between music and person, this dissonance is akin your viscious reactions to your deepest enemies. If music echoes our worldspaces, and our worldviews, then bad music is bad because it is not the world we know and live in.
Music, as special kind of sound object, is organized as our souls are organized. And it is representation of the nature of time, the nature of the moving image of timeless eternity. We hear a sonorous image of time that, as Scrunton writes, is "spread out for contemplation like space is spread out for us in the visual field."
To my ears, music is the animation of eternal time, and the animation of our contemplative act itself. Music animates our essential drama. And music is a mirror-in-time, but without the reflective surface, and instead with a luminous shine that emanates through our entire being. When we hear music, we touch our deepest self, our original soul, which is sits eternal before the music begins and after it ends. Music is Spirit in motion. Music is our Self, in spacious and unlimited expanse.
Saw it last night. I thought it was a very touching film. How impressive that this is actor/writer Zach Braff's first effort as a director. I am incognito at my temp job, so the posts have to be short. But the point I want to make is that Braff, with this film and with the TV show Scrubs has already carved out a niche for himself. His characters have an enormous heart, but have been bruised by those around him, as well as bruised by psychological obstacles that prevent him from authentic connections with those that care. When the character breaks through those walls and touches someone else, heart to heart, that is an unmistakable moment for the audiences, who allow him to be jaded and self-protective, because our culture requires both from all of us to some degree.
Braff is as emblematic as anyone of the gen x/y leap from an ironic culture to a culture where irony is only a means. To make that leap is scary and difficult, because ours is the first to do so with an entire brain-emotion industry (psychology, psychotherapy, pharmacology) in place. Even if you don't see a therapist, this means that our friends and family might just fancy themselves as pop-psychologists. Gack! To meet another person who treats you, not like an object, but like a subject, takes on new meaning in our highly objective and materialistic world.
This is the sign of true love. Subject to subject meets as the Mystery unfolds its discreet layers through two bodies. This is a dynamic as old as love itself, but the pluralistic age wraps the audiences in new blankets, as we sit around the cinematic camp fire and get our tribal grooves on. Braff's Garden State makes some very effective aesthetic choices on those blankets. As Braff slowly finds resonance with Natalie Portman's character, he comes out of a shell with subtle grace and dignity. We are warmed and comforted, but most importantly, we are so drawn into the middle of the fire between Braff and Portman that we forget we were ever cold in the first place. And, of course, the movie is funny. Post-ironic art would have it no other way, and hurrah for that.
From Marc Chavannes, Washington corresopndent for NRC Handelsblad, in the American Prospect. He talks about the wider cultural effect the slaying may have in Holland and Europe:
The van Gogh murder is a little bit like our 9-11. The degree to which the United States had changed after 9-11 was hard to fathom in Europe. Now, this one murder seems to be having a similar effect on my fellow Dutch nationals. In Europe we have experienced our own homegrown terrorism for years, so although Dutch people felt enormous solidarity with Americans after 9-11, many asked, "Aren't Americans a bit too focused on themselves when they keep saying that 9-11 was some huge paradigm shift?" The Netherlands, right now, is undergoing a similar sort of attitudinal change. It will be interesting to watch whether this change sparks a shift in Europeans' generally hostile attitude towards George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy and his "axis of evil" style approach to the world.
