December 16, 2007

The Twitter Curve. I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. It's one of the best things distractions going, but I have to be really careful to keep my signal/noise ratio in balance.

December 12, 2007

This Saturday in Atlanta, The Happenstance at The Earl: "We select 30 musicians, make them meet us early in the morning at a local rock club, randomly divide them into 5 piece bands, and send them off to create a 20 minute set of music which they will perform that evening."

December 11, 2007

"History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans – sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants." Humans are evolving, and there's a difference even over the small time frame of the past 1000-10,000 years. Two big causes are the huge increases population growth, which means more mutant genetic strains, and our geographic spread, which makes for environmental adaptation.

You Don't Love Me Yet (review: 3.5/5)

At the heart of You Don't Love Me Yet is a band. Well, a band without a name that hasn't had a gig yet. The story follows Lucinda, the bassist, as she navigates the post-break-up phase with Matthew, the lead singer. The whole book is about process, creation, becoming, limbo, liminal states. The book starts after Matthew and Lucinda split, before the band ever makes it big, and each, in a way, has a new beginning that we don't get to see. We get to see the shifting in between. The band finally gets a little bit of traction when Lucinda steals ideas for lyrics from the Complainer, a guy who calls the complaint line where Lucinda works. The Complainer later insists on joining the band, which makes everything awkward because Lucinda has been dating him... and no one else knows that's where the lyrics came from. (And Matthew abducted a kangaroo from the zoo, by the way.) Denise is the drummer, appropriately, the one trying to hold things together.

In one scene, Bedwin, the chief lyricist and creative, confesses that he's struggling:

"I've been trying. I'm having a sort of problem with language." "What do you mean?" "With sentences... words." "We know what language is, Bedwin," said Denise, not unkindly. The three had turned to Bedwin now, half consciously, as though reaching out to support someone freshly released from a hospital, a man tapping down a ramp on crutches.

I love those analogies that Jonathan Lethem comes up with. Throughout the book there are these really wonderful, roundabout, visual ways of describing how people act or move or gesture. Here's a vivid fashion description: "his white shirts were uniformly crisp and bright, as if pulled from a dispenser like tissues." Another scene describes returning to an apartment after a long absence, with the answering machine blinking and "the slaw of mail beneath the door slot."

One other great moment worthy of mention is at the band's brief climax, their big moment. The whole 8 or 10 page sequence is really sharp. Lethem switches narrative voice, and the musicians all lose their proper names. They become "the singer," "the drummer," "the women," "the men," "the band." And it's during that concert when the band finally achieves its own name. But while the band blossoms, their relationships start to fray.

You can hear Lethem reading a portion from the beginning of his book on NPR. Lethem also has a interesting film option for this book, surrendering rights for derivative works after a short waiting period:

I’ll give away a free option on the film rights to my novel You Don’t Love Me Yet to a selected filmmaker. In return for the free option, I’ll ask two things:

1. I’d like the filmmaker to pay (something) for the purchase of the rights if they actually make a film: two percent of the budget, paid when the completed film gets a distribution deal. (I’ll wait until distribution to get paid so a filmmaker without many funds can work without having to spend their own money paying me). 2. The filmmaker and I will make an agreement to release all ancillary rights to the film (and its source material, the novel), five years after the film’s debut. In other words, after a waiting period during which those rights would still be restricted, anyone who cared to could make any number of other kinds of artwork based on the novel’s story and characters, or the film’s: a play, a television series, a comic book, a theme park ride, an opera – or even a sequel film or novel featuring the same characters. For that matter, they can remake the film with another script and new actors. In my agreement with the filmmaker, those ancillary rights will be launched into the public domain.

I'm curious to see what comes of it.

December 3, 2007

Art has no shortcuts, folks:

In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen---alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Bezedrine, etc.---but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to affect the health of the cook, and constantly breaking down. Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.

W.H. Auden, The Mental Kitchen [$]

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (review: 5/5)

Early on in his new book, Alex Ross identifies one thing that separates music from other arts: "At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, and crowds tend to align themselves as one mind." Though Ross doesn't say it outright, that also applies to crowds of composers. Much of his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, is spent wrestling with the idea of the push and pull of the crowd and the "split between modernist and populist conceptions of the composer's role." There's that clever insinuation in the title. Though the book brings up a lot of music, yes, but it's also about listening to the era, the shifting alliances and rivalries among composers, the feedback loop of popular culture, ethnicity, politics, war.

And the buildup to and endurance of wartime dominates the much of the book. His description of the Teens and Twenties has some eerie parallels with today:

For anyone who cherishes the notion that there is some inherent spiritual goodness in artists of great talent, the era of Stalin and Hitler is disillusioning. Not only did composers fail to rise up en masse against totalitarianism, but many actively welcomed it. In the capitalist free-for-all of the twenties, they had contended with technologically enhanced mass culture, which introduced a new aristocracy of movie stars, pop musicians, and celebrities without portfolio. Having long depended on the largesse of the Church, the upper classes, and high bourgeoisie, composers suddenly found themselves, in the Jazz Age, without obvious means of support. Some fell to dreaming of a political knight in shining armor who would come to their aid.

Two recurring characters appear in the first half of the book. The first is Thomas Mann's book Doctor Faustus, about a composer who makes a bargain with the devil and whose fictional music owes a lot to the real music of Arnold Schoenberg. The second is the opera Salome by Richard Strauss, a scandalous early 20th-century opera. Opera comes up quite often. It's easier to talk about the music with an explicit emotional narrative. Ross can let the libretto tell the story rather than relying exclusively on musical description or intuition. There are also long treatments of the operas Wozzeck, The Threepenny Opera, Peter Grimes, and Nixon in China.

It makes sense to talk about the big works, the standbys, the headlines. I don't think he meant to create a comprehensive book, so of course there are some unfortunate absences. Ross mentioned that he regrets he could have spent more time writing about "conservative" composers. Rachmaninov, for example, only gets a few mentions. Though he's a modern-day orchestral standby (and one of my personal favorites), he didn't shake things up enough to make it to the book. Carl Nielsen and a bunch of the British also get passed over. Nonetheless, the depth and breadth of research that went into the book is consistently amazing, in part because it flows so well. I don't think I've read non-fiction this enjoyable in a couple years.

Be sure to stop by his website. Ross has audiofiles for The Rest Is Noise on his website, as well as a video introduction. If you're looking for a great sample, there's an excerpt from the chapter on Sibelius.