Archive for the ‘music’ tag
Rip rig and panic
SIIGS means Self Induced Information Gluttony Syndrome. I just made that acronym up. And the syndrome too. But I’ve been living it for a while, dosing myself with nuggets of mostly distracting information via my phone and computers. My concentration has been slipping and after a few hours in the torrent of news snippets, I feel stupider and strangely dispairing.
Most likely it is time for an information diet. I’m fond of Feedly, a program that turns all of my google reader rss subscriptions into a page of varied story tidbits. But after all that clicking, I have even less useful information than I did before.
And let’s be clear here: useful information is, from the artist point of view, information that leads to me making art in some form. I can trick myself and say that that I’ll use all of this stuff eventually, but if I am constantly dazed and dopey in the short term, there will be no eventually. Useful information sparks the creative impulse either by providing an inspiring example, or posing a problem I want to resolve. Useless information is just something I file away to make it seem like I’m doing something.
I know all the tools for dealing with this sort of behavior and this type of writing is one of them: I’ve faced this kind of willful distraction many times in the past. I’ve been missing my therapist lately ( now realizing that I’m coming up on the anniversary of ending therapy) and these are the sorts of skills he helped me develop.
Once again I must ask, distracted from what? And why?
One of today’s tasks has been the continuing digitization of my music collection, which is heading towards 300gb at this point, with still quite a few CDs left to rip. A lot of stuff I’m adding now is stuff that I bought for DJ purposes over the past ten years or so. Lots of compilation CDs that I got for one or two songs. I’ve decided to dump the entire CD into iTunes however, just to see what I does to my music mix. There’s going to be a lot of dodgy house music. I’m from the generation that looks at our music collections as some sort of badge of identity. So I can’t help but think that when random play throws up something that I wouldn’t consciously pick I should be somehow embarrassed. This will be a nice exercise in letting that go. At the very least I’m starting to approach that fantasy ideal of having every piece of music I own all in one place, equally available. When that occurs, what will it “say” about me?
Why save anything? There’s a part of me that wants to let it all go. (is it the same part that makes stupid mistakes like misplacing hard drives and cameras?). Collecting is a baffling impulse, self defining and self obscuring all at the same time. If I want to see another picture, I should make it dammit, and not look it up on line. But I’m not there yet.
Tags: browsehole, clutter, collecting, music, online life, self examination, SIIGS
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I’ll admit it: Sometimes I listen to Gong…
More Monroe…
I’ve made my peace with my current camera. Even though I leave it on automatic way too much, and even though it’s a bit to big and serious looking, I’ve become comfortable with hauling it out and just shooting with it, as well as using the kit lens. Here’s another shot of Monroe the Great Dance from Chicago.
Record Club tonight , and that always sends me spinning through my collection and the sources of online music. Now I’m thinking about little I know about Jellybean Benitez. Earlier I remembered that I’d forgotten Debby Harry’s “French Kissin’ in the USA”, but I couldn’t bear to put it on and listen to it, because what if I didn’t love it as much as I used to?
Tags: music, photography
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Little Shuffle…
Spent a little time messing around with Aviary’s Roc – an online sample editor and came up with this:
I never paid much attention to Aviary, even when my Jolicloud system kept offering up their online image editing applications, but I have to say that some of their things are pretty impressive. I do find that I’m starting to dip my toes into the cloud computing model – moving some files into online backup, getting more aggressive with using evernote. The problem remains access – If you don’t have handy wifi or a wide data pipe to plug into you’re pretty much cut off, and that prospect makes me uneasy.
For now at least, I’ve download “little shuffle” and turned it into a ringtone for my iPhone. Pretty damn pretentious, eh?
Tags: daily photo, geekiness, music
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More art I like…
Here’s my pal Chris Cochrane playing a bunch of songs at Dixon Place last night. He did great. I love where his guitar playing is going. The audience included a hodge-podge of people that I’ve known for decades. I remarked that it was the sort of scene that would get scoffed at in a movie, because someone would say “what, there’s only the same twenty people in all of New York?”. But that made it distinctly homey.
Dixon place has got a queer performance festival coming up with an incredible season pass ticket: 60 shows for $60.00. If I can make my cash flow work out, I’m going to try to get in on that deal.
Tags: Chris, friends, music
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Oh, Yoko
I had a most curious evening last night, courtesy of Thor. I got to go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see The Plastic Ono Band perform a pre-birthday tribute to its founder and namesake.
What can I say about the show? First of all it was Yoko-Fucking-Ono, so really that should be good enough for me. She has practically trademarked peace and screaming, and is the most famous widow on the planet, a mantle she assumed with the death of Jackie O. She’s also a 77 year old lady, so the fact that she bothers to go out and perform at all is impressive and moving. I can barely get it together to make anything, and she’s a quarter of a century older than me.
But for all of her cultural impact, Yoko as a performer is pretty elusive. She’s not really a front man, or a song stylist; she made a life out of answering questions with questions, even when those seem to take the form of statements. So to sit through an evening that was mostly geared to telling us how great she was made me antsy. It started off with a tribute film, the kind of greatest hits montage you associate with award shows. But did anyone in the audience need to be reminded of who Yoko Ono was or what was cool about her? Then came the first act: a selection of her songs played by the current Plastic Ono Band, under the musical direction of Sean Lennon. Here’s where I had the most trouble: it was all pretty pedestrian musically. The band played well, but the arrangements weren’t much. It made me wonder about how much Yoko’s songs need really good producers. “Walking on Thin Ice” in particular became a soupy disco rave-up, shorn of any of the itchy fuzz that makes it so gripping. Near the end of the set I started wondering how folks would be reacting if the evening had been served up by say, Stevie Nicks. I think the term “vanity project” would have been tossed around more.
After intermission we got a series of guest performers doing Yoko songs, and how I felt from moment to moment became much more about what those performers brought. Sorry, my Scissor Sisters loving friends, but Jake and Ana turned in a bland “The Sun is Down”. Justin Bond did fine with “What A bastard the World Is”, mining the twisted sexual politics for all of their soap opera value. He also cracked one of the best jokes of the evening, talking about following Yoko in Twitter and doing what ever she says. Bette Midler is a reach over the footlights, take the audience on a journey kind of performer, really the opposite of Yoko in that sense. It was interesting to see her perform “Yes, I’m Your Angel” and revealing to hear Sean say that she was responsible for the arrangement, which while a little too jokey, still was more lively than any of his. Paul Simon and his son struggled with the harmonies of “Oh Yoko”. There were two highlights: First was Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore joining with Yoko to do “Mulberry” one of the noisier songs, and the first time that there was some genuine sonic interest. When they finished making their guitars squeal and the last of the ringing overtones died out I thought “That’s what I come to see Yoko Ono for.” The second was a version of “Don’t Worry Kyoko” with Eric Clapton that approached the woozy, psychedelic majesty of those early Plastic Ono Band records. The lowlight for me was a flaccid version of “Yer Blues” with Sean singing lead. I am really really happy that I am not the bearer of any Beatle DNA, because how can you live with the unending expectations of pop music fans that you will somehow be able to redeem their lives for them? Sean does a good job of just referring to his “dad” in a tone that diffuses much of the holy aura people bring to anything having to do with John Lennon, but even so, I think he’d do better to just steer clear of performing anything thing like this.
Finally, of course, everyone was brought back on stage and we were all cajoled to sing “Give Peace A Chance”, which was really an unearned moment for me. Yoko’s example of using her power, imagination and wealth to try to improve the lot of humanity may have been present in our minds for the whole evening, but the performance had done nothing to bring us to a point of action. The gesture felt particularly empty; “All we are Saying…” saying to whom? and is that really all we’re saying, even now?
Filing out onto the slushy streets I felt grateful for the chance to see the show, but saddened by how much seemed to have come up short.
Tags: music, performance, Yoko Ono
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Please may I have another twenty?
This morning’s dream involved Dennis Cooper telling me about the fantastic rents he was getting from a tenant on some Los Angeles industrial space.
Yesterday I stopped in at an art opening in Chinatown, too early to see D, but in time to feel hemmed in by the crowd, and thus shy.
In a way, I’m relieved that there are entire sections of the art world that I have no connection with.
Ah, Chrissie Hynde can sing “Stop Your Sobbin”, but the way she does so makes me want to sob all the more.
Clothes are still on the floor, but they at least sorted into piles, and a load of laundry is done.
The schedule doesn’t look much clearer into the foreseeable future, but I have taken some steps to getting help with it.
Little headache right now, from both the caffeine and squinting at screens through the glasses.
I’m going to break the TV embargo to watch RuPaul’s Drag race tonight.
Today i was remembering the time when my parents allowed me to join The Science Fiction Book Club.
Of course, the books piled up faster than I could send them back, which lead to my first experiences with unexpectedly high bills.
These sentences are uninspired in their construction and cadence.
I often find myself sighing over pictures of furry young men these days in a way that seems to encompass a despair of possessing them; yet this mooning isn’t coupled with any real desire to spend more time around people.
I mean, I’m kinda booked up.
When I feel dissatisfied with what I’ve got in such a generalized way, it usually means that there is some other psychological crisis going on and that I’m merely fixing on that point of dissatisfaction because I can’t or won’t look at the root cause.
I’m suddenly craving croissants with butter and raspberry preserves.
Apple’s “Genius” playlist software can’t understand the simple notion of “contrast”.
I woke feeling partly shocked at Dennis’s venality in my dream and partly ashamed at thinking ill of him, even as an unconscious symbol.
These days it’s about balancing and filtering the input.
I feel like Julianne Moore in “Safe”.
Or something else: a hypochondriac who doesn’t really want to make a fuss.
Tags: art, daily photo, emotions, music, twenty sentences
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Can I even tell you what I’ve been doing?
The crowd awaits the arrival of Amanda Palmer last night in Williamsburg. Ive been doing so many things in the past couple of days! Further update to come.
Tags: daily photo, music, poulet sans tete
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The big E’s inside of you and me…
I know it’s wrong to question good fortune, so I won’t. For some reason Amazon is giving away MP3s of just about all of Mojo Nixon’s music. Yep he could easily be classed an ’80′s one hit wonder, but there’s something great about all of his crackpot bitter rants that make this a very good deal. And he does a mean version of “Just stopped in to see what condition my condition was in” which is the soundtrack to “Gutter Balls”, the Dude’s Busby Berkeley inspired dream sequence in Big Lebowski.
I can see from all the comments it garnered that people are very concerned about fruit and its qualities, as explored in my post yesterday. I’m also shocked to learn that taking Lipitor means that you can’t eat grapefruit. That the same for all citrus?
My mom is strongly hinting that I’m supposed to pick up a new costume for Lehigh, since she will be staying with her for Halloween. And by strongly hinting I mean she sent me an email with a bunch of pictures of dogs in costumes with the question “what is her new outfit going to be?” She has also commanded me to blow up the drawing of of Lehigh I posted a while back , the one where I’m dancing all cute, but the only part of any interest to her is the drawing of the dog, so she can have that on her desktop at home. The priorities are clear.
Tags: daily photo, lehigh, mom, music, new york in black and white, night
