Riffs and Licks

I listened again. It still sucks.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:07:43 GMT

I've been told that I am over-reacting to the Dylan album and not giving it a break. So I gave it another listen today, and watched the video ("Must Be Santa") rubytramp linked to. Yes, it's fun, and I liked that song best of those on the album, principally because of David Hidalgo's accordion. And yes, the video is fun, but ... never mind the Santa cap, what's with the wig??? I really wonder if he's just putting us on.

mikeskliar also pointed out that I was dismissing the album without having listened to all of it. To some extent that's like saying I didn't fully appreciate the hot stove because I yanked my hand away too quickly, but I did put it on again. I programmed out about half the album -- songs that really turned me off or that I associate too closely with the Radio City / shopping mall / tv commercials / plastic lawn decoration Xma$ crap that I so hate about this time of year.

I skipped "Here Comes Santa Claus," "Little Drummer Boy," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," because I pretty much hate them no matter who sings them. The first two are horribly trite and overplayed and have melodies that make most kid's songs sound like Bach; the last is mawkish and about the last song in the world I'd want to hear Dylan sing. I also skipped a couple of songs he really just completely massacres ("Winter Wonderland," "Do You Hear What I Hear,") and a few that are too closely associated with bad church memories ("Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "Oh Come All Ye Faithful").

"I'll Be Home For Christmas" -- I hate these schmaltzy forties (not fifties) arrangements, and they work particularly badly with Dylan's singing. If this were just him and piano I probably would be OK with it, since he does have a way with a jazz tune, but the backing vocals are like Cool Whip on barbecue. Yuck.
"The Christmas Blues" -- Bob can really sing a blues, and he actually bothers to play harmonica (as opposed to his more common method of breathing through it seemingly by accident) on it. I like this, particularly because I don't know this song very well or associate it with Xma$.
"Must Be Santa" -- I like this fine. I've never even heard it before, so it doesn't have any bad associations, and I could listen to Hidalgo play almost anything.
"Silver Bells" -- A lovely song, but his version is really below par. Not a song that benefits from a throaty blues treatment. Plus, Dylan's bizarre phrasing choices (stair-stepping down "Soon it will be Christmas Day," the parodical turn on "Ring-a-ling") really offend my ear, probably because I'm too used to the way Bing Crosby sings it. This is a crooner's song and it's been a long time since Bob was a crooner.
"The First Noel" -- Probably should have programmed this out. It's all about the stupid Catholic Christmas crap for me, and also, it's another very simple melody that he plods through like a grade-school glee club. And the dreadful choir does not help. A minute into the song they sing a painfully twee verse and I hit the skip button.
"Christmas Island" -- The Lennon Sisters style opening pretty much finishes this song off from the first moment. I hate that style, I have no nostalgia for it at all, and hearing them "whoo-oo" along behind Bob is pretty much unbearable. Skipped.
"The Christmas Song" -- Well sung and well suited to him. (Though I cannot imagine he sang "Jack Frost* nipping..." with a straight face.) I'd rather hear Nat sing it, but this isn't bad. This is Dylan at his jazz-singer best, although there are a few honkers.
"O Little Town Of Bethlehem" -- Not a favorite to begin with. It opens with crappy choir stuff, and then Bob comes in and massacres the first line so badly they should have canned the take right then and there. (But Bob really doesn't do retakes, as you can probably tell.) I didn't make it to the second line.

So, basically three songs worth listening to and none of them standouts. This is just a bad album of mostly bad songs. It's worthless as 50s nostalgia, because first of all, crap like this was going out style in the 50s, and second of all, you can still buy Gene Autry's Christmas album, and Bing's, and all the others from that era, and enjoy the real thing with legendary singers and great arrangers who knew when to retake a song and when to give up on it.

•"Jack Frost" is a frequent Dylan pseudonym; like several of his albums this one is "Produced by Jack Frost." It's his equivalent of John Lennon's "Dr. Winston O'Boogie."

Do You Hear What I Hear

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:56:12 GMT

"Hey, Bob, I bet your fans will buy anything. I bet you could release a godawful album that no sane person could listen to with a straight face, and people would still buy it. I bet you cannot come up with an album so bad and so ridiculous that people wouldn't buy it."

If someone made that bet, he or she won, but not for lack of trying on Dylan's part.

I mean, come on. Dylan singing hoary old Christmas chestnuts? Songs you're sick of hearing by people who sang them well? The album opens up with Dylan croaking away on "Here Comes Santa Claus." Joined by a choir on the second verse. That's as far as I made it through that song. Track two: "Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy / Do you hear what I hear?" Said the CD player, "If you don't hit skip now, I'm going to!"

I couldn't listen all the way through a single song. Best of all, this allegedly wholesome Christmas album has a Betti Page pinup on the inside cover. All the proceeds go to fighting hunger, but you're better off buying some groceries and donating them to the local food pantry. You'll end up wasting food if you listen to it right after eating.

Dylan has released some awful albums but never one that I couldn't listen to even once. At least we no longer have to have long arguments about which is Dylan's worst album.

Giving thanks?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:04:19 GMT

I've been hearing a lot of people express a certain level of guilt about Thanksgiving. About the bloody history underneath the myth of the Pilgrims, about whether it's ethical to celebrate the founding of this country on the graves of its original inhabitants. While I sympathize with these feelings, I do not share them.

I am happy to celebrate Thanksgiving. I have a LOT to be thankful for. I think it's good to have a holiday where you sit back and consider those things, and celebrate them with people you love. Of course the mythology is garbage. It's garbage on July 4, too. And on Christmas, and on Halloween, and on President's Day. Who could possibly live with our actual history? What society ever has been able to live with itself as it really is? That's why we have myths.

Yes, we should acknowledge the genocide that stains our history. But rather than atone for it by remembering its occurrence in the past, how about we do as much as we can to prevent it in the present? If the people we slaughtered four hundred years ago suddenly all came back, I doubt they'd be very interested in our apologies. But I bet they'd try to help the people around the world being slaughtered right now.

Slaughtered, by the way, for us, oftentimes. What right do we have to feel superior to the European colonizers of previous centuries? Or to the Englishmen who sat comfortably at their hearths, sipping tea picked under the colonial regime in India, flavored with sugar harvested by slaves in the Caribbean, eating beef exported out from under starving people in Ireland? How is any of that different from our oil and cheap clothing and electronic toys and jewelry? How are the conquistadors different from the corporations and mercenaries who obtain those things for us through murder and torture and repression?

Scolding history is a waste of time, and dead people don't need our apologies. Let's give thanks by alleviating suffering. Do something real that helps actual people. Even if it's not much, you can certainly affect someone's life positively.

I have some thoughts on some things I might start doing, but I'll save those for another post. Let me just close by saying I am thankful for all of you, and the things you make me think about, the support you offer, the stories you share, and the communities we all have.

Some shows coming up

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:01:15 GMT

I have two shows coming up with Fresh Baked, one on December 7 at the Parkside, and the third Auld Lang Twang show at the Living Room on New Year's Eve. You can also catch me every Sunday afternoon at the Ponkiesburg Pickin' Party in Boerum Hill, which is turning into an absolutely wonderful jam again. And I may have some shows of my own songs coming up soon, so stay tuned.

Biking With the Droid

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:59:59 GMT

The weather has mostly been beautiful this week, my schedule has been reasonable (not in that I don't have a lot of work to do, but it's mostly development work I do at my own pace whenever I want, rather than meetings), and I haven't been traveling lately, so I've been on the bike every day this week except for yesterday. I biked into work twice and otherwise have been back to doing my regular daily rides in the park.

My work ride is about 20 miles round-trip, and thanks to the wonderful new bike lane along Kent Avenue, mostly pretty relaxed. I have a short stressful ride from the 59th Street Bridge to my office on 52nd Street, but otherwise, I'm mostly away from traffic or on streets with good bike lanes.

The map here was generated automatically by My Tracks, an Android application which I've installed on my new Motorola Droid. It uses the phone's GPS to automatically chart your route and generate statistics on speed, elevation, and so on. When you finish recording a track you click one button and it sends it to Google Maps and to Google Documents, into a spreadsheet you can use to answer questions like "How many miles did I ride this week?" (53.79 miles). As with most GPS applications it pretty much loses its mind in the cliffs of midtown, but otherwise it's pretty amazingly accurate.

I got the Droid a week or so ago and I'm thrilled with it. If you've managed to miss the marketing campaigns, the Droid is a new Verizon phone that runs Android, Google's mobile-phone operating system. Android has been around for a while, and is quite stable and full-featured. It's also open-source, which means that if you don't like something about it, you can probably change it or install a utility to change it.

I was intrigued by the iPhone when it first came out, thanks to its gorgeous screen and user interface. But AT&T's network is just awful (my friends with iPhones regularly tell me to text them rather than leaving voice mail since their phones often don't ring, and don't notify about voice mail; they also seem to constantly be hunting for signal while my Verizon phone has plenty of coverage). And once I got an iPod Touch (basically an iPhone minus the phone), I got to see for myself exactly how bad the iPhone keyboard is. Most people who enthuse over it have never had a smartphone before, so perhaps it's an improvement over typing on a telephone keypad. But it's basically useless compared to a real keyboard; if I needed to answer an email I was reading on my iPod, I'd usually dig out my Treo rather than use the stupid on-screen keyboard.

The Droid has an on-screen keyboard, which, like the iPhone's, is useful for short messages, and unlike the iPhone's, has an intelligent auto-complete system that you can add words to. But the Droid also has a large slide-out keyboard, which you can really type on, and which leaves the whole screen free for viewing. The worst part of the iPhone is that its beautiful screen is usually half-obstructed by the keyboard; the SSH/telnet clients for the iPhone are laughable in their attempts to let you type and see what you're doing at the same time.

So basically the Droid is the iPhone done right. It's got everything I like about the iPhone and none of the things I absolutely hate (no physical keyboard, evil Apple restrictions, no video or flash for the camera, no Google Voice, only runs one application at a time, and worst of all, the dreadful AT&T network). Android is open-source, so while there are fewer applications, they tend to be better (there is no My Tracks for the iPhone because it does not have GPS, there is no Google Voice for the iPhone because Apple won't allow it) and you are not handcuffed in your choice of applications. By default, the Droid will only download apps from Google's Android Market, but that's a preference you can turn off if you wish. And frankly, the vast majority of iPhone apps are juvenile, silly and useless or downright idiotic. (Those three apps are currently the ones promoted on the front page of the iTunes App Store.)

Anyway, time to get back to work. Lots of other things going on, but I'll tell you about that when I see you.

From Facebook to the Times

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:59:14 GMT

I've got a couple of man-in-the-street quotes in today's The New York Times article about the mayoral election. It mentions my Monday Facebook status ("Mike, the more you call me, the less likely I am to vote for you,' which got more positive reaction than any update in months) but no, the Times is not watching my Facebook page for interesting quotes. I was interviewed by a reporter outside my polling place.

She asked who I was voting for, and I said Thompson, and she asked why. I said I was disgusted and embarrassed by Bloomberg's campaign. He spent obscene amounts of money, much of it unnecessarily negative and often completely untrue. I mentioned my status update and the response it received, and she wrote it down carefully, then asked my name and age.

And I answered, "40." I'm not 40. I haven't been 40 in nearly half a decade. I wasn't shaving years off my age for vanity's sake (or not consciously, anyway), and in almost every respect, things are better now for me than they were when I was 40. I just get that math wrong sometimes. Just like when I say "next month" and mean November even though it hasn't been "next month" for nearly a week. I know, intellectually, that it's 2009, but my spatial sense of time tells me we're about halfway through this decade.

Meanwhile, despite all his spending, Bloomberg barely squeaked by. Did you vote? I would have loved to see him lose, although I'm a lot more upset about Corzine. What happened to everyone who was so excited about "change" last year? Did they think we were finished? I'm very worried about what Christie will do in NJ, but aside from his oligarchical tendencies, Bloomberg hasn't been a terrible mayor and did successfully lead us out of Giuliani Time. Perhaps he will be chastened by this result and work a bit harder to represent the city as a whole.

Anyway. This is my second appearance in the paper this year (the first was thanks to my work with the AIA Guide to New York City). I have been traveling a lot lately, mostly for Journalism Online, but still managing to play music, and will be hosting the Ponkiesburg Pickin' Party every Sunday.

Coping with Tedious Silliness at Airports rules

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:45:46 GMT

So as you may have noticed, I've been traveling a hell of a lot lately. It's been a few years since I had to do the road warrior thing and frankly, it's not as bad as it used to be, if only because I have (some) more control over my time.

I have a bunch of air-travel survival rules, one of which is, never check luggage. Not only does it add time to your trip (and, nowadays, fees), it adds the risk of having your luggage disappear. And sometimes that's not even the airline's fault: I am in Seattle today thanks to a last-minute phone call that I got while waiting for my flight home to JFK. If I had checked luggage it would probably still be circling the carousel in Queens, and I'd be trying to find a clothing store open at 8am instead of drinking coffee and puttering online.

Anyway, the moronic rules banning liquids in carry-on luggage have made this more difficult. I could never decide whether to put little bottles in a plastic bag, or just buy the necessaries when I got where I was going. The former is wasteful and stupid and is one more thing to worry about at the security line and I am all about getting through that nonsense as quickly as possible. The latter saves time at the airport but adds it later on, and it's also expensive and wasteful.

I have finally found the right answer: no liquid toiletries. Basically you have to go back to the early part of the last century for the answers: tooth powder and shaving soap. I made my own tooth powder using this recipe (I left out the lemon peel since I was in a hurry and it's just for flavoring). You can order shaving soap (and the other accoutrements) from a few places online, and it does make for a more pleasant (and more environmental) experience than canned shaving cream.

So with those two additions to my travel kit, I have been able to go straight through security without having to open any bags or take anything out that could get left behind or forgotten, and go straight from the plane to a cab or rental car without riding the luggage carousel.

Technology Monday

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:43:25 GMT

My Facebook account has been "temporarily unavailable" since late last week. So if you have been posting things there and wondering why I don't answer, that's why.

I have a few Google Voice invites if anyone is interested.

The Taking Of JetBlue 1-7-6

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:01:35 GMT

Finally back home after a solid week of traveling, beginning with Fran and Leigh's lovely wedding in Florida and continuing with a week of work meetings in Seattle, which was colder than Florida but warmer than here. One of my colleagues who'd lived there for years took me over to the Olympic Sculpture Park, a miniature Storm King Mountain right on the waterfront, and I took a walk over the unimpressive Experience Music Project / SF Museum. The most impressive thing at the museum was the handwritten manuscript of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Yes, that's right. He wrote all three of those murder-weapon-sized novels with a fountain pen.

On the flight home, I lucked into a remake of The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 (first time I've ever taken JetBlue and clearly I have been missing something). As I've written before, the original is one of the great NYC films of all time and far outclasses its many later imitations, including every film Quentin Tarantino has ever made.

So I was not necessarily optmistic about the remake but it was quite enjoyable. Denzel Washington and John Travolta have great chemistry together, maybe even better than Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau in the original. Combining the characters of the cop (Matthau) and the original dispatcher (played by Tom Pedi) was a bit unrealistic, and avoided the shock of Caz Dolowicz's death. But it also focused on the magnificent dynamic between Washington and Travolta. And James Gandolfini ("I left my Rudy Giuliani suit at home") was superb as Mayor Bloomberg.

As a lifelong New Yorker and transit buff, however, I couldn't help but notice the vast numbers of completely unnecessary factual errors in the film. The original was fiction, but based rather firmly in reality. The remake is almost complete nonsense, starting with the very opening scene, where train dispatcher Garber switches an R train to the Q tracks at 34th so he can send it to Queens on the F line. A minor point? Yes. But why put that level of detail into the film if you're just going to get ridiculously wrong? Anyone who's ever even been in that station knows those tracks aren't even on the same level.

It gets better, of course, with the entire city rearranged geographically for dramatic effect:

MTA headquarters moves from Brooklyn to South Ferry
On the way it passes the Federal Reserve, as it moves from downtown Manhattan to what looks like the Williamsburg Bank Building in Brooklyn.
The 6 train goes to Coney Island.
The Waldorf Hotel is at 34th Street, on top of the "Roosevelt Spur." The latter is actually not a subway tunnel at all, and the Waldorf is at 50th Street.
From the Waldorf's new location at 34th Street, one apparently takes the FDR north to the Manhattan Bridge, where one is able to use convenient exit ramps that lead directly to the bridge.

But it was great fun. I think my favorite line was this exchange between Travolta and Washington:

"We all owe god a death. We're all going to the same place."

"Where's that? Jersey?"

20 Minutes Of Silence

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:43:48 GMT

This got me into a little trouble yesterday, as it made me very late for a breakfast meeting, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. On my way up the Pulaski Bridge (which connects Brooklyn and Queens) I heard a loud horn blowing, saw the gates going down, and realized I was going to see the bridge open for the first time.

It took a long time. The bridge took about five minutes to open fully, then the ship going underneath -- some sort of square barge thing with four enormous vertical pipes sticking up from it -- moved through very slowly, and then the bridge slowly closed, and (not visible in the video) jiggled back and forth in slow motion, one side raising, the facing side lowering, until the two sides were properly meshed together and the bridge closed.

So I spent a good 20 minutes watching this, along with a few dozen other morning commuters, pedestrians and bicyclists, and learned a little bit about (one small sample of) the Williamsburg/Greenpoint community. Most of the people waiting were what I'd describe as "hipsters" -- white, younger than me, dressed in fashionable clothes -- or people whose first language was not English. I made a humorous remark at one point, and felt like a fool because no one even responded. Then I realized that everyone standing within earshot either had earbuds in their ears, or likely didn't speak English well enough to understand what I'd said and why it was funny. For the entire period, everyone pretty much stood there in silence.

I didn't feel old, but I did feel bad for all these people who were so militantly resistant to a pretty wonderful opportunity for a NYC community moment.

People Who Died: Jim Carroll, 1949-2009

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:53:53 GMT

I'm listening this morning to one of the great albums of the early 1980s, Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy. Vastly better than his Basketball Diaries, it doesn't let you go. There are no slow spots, no filler songs, and its most well-known song isn't even close to its best.

I joke about this frequently, but this is my roots music. Directly descended from the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, straight-up New York City punk, about a Catholic boy whose financial circumstances were quite different than mine (and who is closer in age to my parents than me) but with all the baggage that comes along with growing up Catholic in NYC. I skipped the heroin and the prep schools, not to speak of the basketball stardom, and none of my friends died when I was in high school, but in the end, that's not what Catholic Boy is really about.

And they can't touch me now
I got every sacrament behind me
I got baptism, I got penance
I got communion, I got extreme unction*
Man, I've got confirmation

I was a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
And not through joy

And now I'm a Catholic man
I put my tongue to the rail whenever I can

*"Extreme unction" is the sacrament of last rites, the one you get when you die. He certainly didn't have that sacrament then, and I doubt he has it now, but the way he sings that line is perhaps the best moment on the entire album.

The Beatles In Mono

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:49:30 GMT

No thanks to Jerks & Rudeness on Park Row, I finally got my Beatles In Mono box yesterday. (And thanks to rosiebird for suggesting barnesandnoble.com; I cancelled my Amazon order which was to ship somewhere between Sept. 16 and Sept. 27.)

Obviously I haven't had a chance to listen to all of it yet. The first thing I put on was the mono Sgt. Pepper, which I'd never heard. Wow. It really is a different and better album in mono.

Let's back up for a moment. Why mono? When the Beatles first began, only audiophiles had stereo equipment and the music usually released in stereo was for that audience -- classical and jazz. Pop music was played on record players. Not turntables, not stereos, but record players, like the kind we had at home when I was young, with a cover that latched down and a handle so you could lug it to your friends' house. And it was broadcast on AM radio. All of which were monaural, meaning, just one channel. No left and right channels like we're all used to in our headphones. I listened to most pop music in mono, on a cassette player, on my little red-ball AM radio, until I was in high school.

The Beatles, mindful of their audience, released all their music in both stereo and mono mixes for their entire careers. And for two-thirds of that period, the mono mix was the more important of the two. That was the one they supervised personally, and listened to when they were deciding what to release. Stereo mixes were usually done later, sometimes years later, by staff engineers, perhaps overseen by George Martin. It wasn't until the very last of their albums that they worked primarily on the stereo mix, with a mono mix being created by "folding down" the stereo mix, centering both channels. The original mono mixes were not created like that; the albums were specifically mixed for mono, and then stereo versions were created later from the master tapes.

Have you ever noticed that "I'm Looking Through You" has a false start sometimes, and sometimes doesn't? The stereo mix had the false start and the mono mix didn't. Have you ever noticed the moment in "If I Fell" where Paul's voice breaks badly trying to hit a harmony note? That's only on the stereo mix.

Sgt. Pepper in mono is quite different. A number of the songs are faster in mono than they were in stereo. Some songs are longer or shorter, and the emphasis changes for some of them. "Good Morning, Good Morning," one of my favorite obscure Beatles songs, really caught my attention. The kickoff is crisper, the brass and guitar are much higher in the mix, and in general it's a hotter song. Overall, it's a better album and I can now understand the disappointment of people who replaced their original mono copy of the album with a stereo version.

I've also listened to the "Mono Masters," the singles and other songs that never appeared on the original UK albums. Some of them are magnificent -- "Paperback Writer" in particular. The guitars punch and the bass (pushed higher in the mixing and mastering over the objections of conservative EMI engineers after the Beatles demanded to know why the bass sounded so much better on American pop records) really drives the song.

I'm listening to the White Album right now and I hear all sorts of things -- different instrumental fills, different solos, changes in endings, etc. These differences are subtle; many would probably be unnoticeable to most listeners. But I spent a lot of time listening to Beatles music, at a very impressionable age, and I know every damn note of these songs, and they're surprisingly different. And better.

Some of this may also be due to the remastering process; I'll be very interested to compare these albums to the stereo box that I hope will arrive on Monday. And I should also say, to all the purists, that I don't think the mono versions of their early albums will ever eclipse the U.S. stereo versions that I grew up with (which, as Bruce Spizer points out in this excellent essay, are not nearly as bad as some critics like to say), which were released a few years ago on the Capitol Boxes (which I wrote about at length when I got them a few years ago).

(Side note: I was wildy amused to see that J&R quoted a post I wrote a little while ago about how much I like to buy albums there. I wonder if they'll delete the comment I just made, linking to my post from Wednesday about my attempt to buy the Beatles boxes.)

Eight Days of Names

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:23:26 GMT

As I write this, family members are reading the names of those killed in the attacks eight years ago. In previous years the reading was broadcast live on the radio, almost an hour of names tolled one per second, every name someone's heartrbreak, someone's tragedy. The name of someone who went to work and never came home, family waiting and hoping for that long long day, as almost all of us did, jumping every time the phone rang, losing hope as others checked in.

I grieve for them, but I wish we would stop and take a moment not just to remember those deaths, but the hundreds of thousands who have died as a result of our policies following that day.

I've been doing some research this morning and here's a number to think about:

753,118

That's one fairly conservative estimate of how many people -- civilians, US and coalition military, private contractors, Iraqi and Afghani military, enemy combatants -- have died since 2001 in these two wars.

The number I quoted above comes from Unknown News, which is a blog run by a couple who say they are "disgusted with the Democratic and Republican parties," believe in "liberty and justice for all" and describe themselves as "happily married low-income nom de plumes and rabble-rousers from Madison, Wisconsin." Whatever their beliefs they have worked pretty hard to track down the many sources for casualties, and the page I linked to documents pretty carefully how they assembled that number, which they believe is conservative.

I agree with their characterization of that number. A more explicitly anti-war site, antiwar.com, uses the number 1,339,771.

Other estimates and counts worth looking at:

In Iraq

4,258 US military (a fairly definite number; this one is from globalsecurity.org)

101,539 civilians (iraqbodycount.org)

11,520 military and police (Brookings)

1,315 private contractors (Wikipedia, reasonably well-sourced)

In Afghanistan

1,377 coalition casualties (icasualties.org)

5,650 civilian fatalities (very conservative number, from Brookings)

If we read those names, one per second, the rate at which the WTC casualty names are usually read, it would take eight days. But of course, we don't know most of those names. Not every death was innocent, of course. Some of those people died in combat against our forces, but do we not honor the dead of our enemies? Some of them were terrorists. Would they have preferred to have led normal lives rather than being driven to horrific deeds? I don't equate the death of a firefighter trying to rescue civilians with the death of a man who blows a truck up to kill civilians. But I do equate their lives and their value as people.

We should never forget those who died on 9/11. Their families certainly never will. But neither will three-quarters of a million other families forget their own tragedies, and whether they were poor Afghani civilians trying to get some gasoline, or soldiers fighting a war for a dictator, or kids asleep in their beds, we should not forget them either. Surely we do not think their lives were worth any less than those of the firefighters and police officers and office workers who died here.

The One After 9/09

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:34:42 GMT

I like record stores. I am thankful that the last major record store in NYC is the locally owned J&R, rather than Tower or Virgin. They've always had a better selection and better prices, and I've been climbing those stairs now for something like 25 years.

But today, they made me reconsider. Today is the release date for the newly remastered Beatles albums. I could have ordered them on Amazon, but I wanted to go buy them in person (I'm old fashioned that way) and I wanted to do so at J&R. So I showed up there at 9am, when they open, to see a line all the way down the block. OK, fine. I got in line, hoping to score one of the box sets. They let people in very slowly, maybe five people every ten minutes, and then announced they were sold out. Despite repeated questioning, they never offered any details on why the line was moving so slowly or how many boxes they had in stock. They never came out to tell people like me, farther back in the line, that there was no chance we'd get a box. They just pushed us around, ignored questions, and then shouted "No more."

One of the employees (you'd recognize him if you were a regular shopper) came down the line asking if we wanted to advance order the set. No, I said, based on the way you treated us, I'll be ordering it online. "Good luck finding it online," he snarled. But I'd been browsing Amazon on my phone, and had already ordered both sets (the stereo as well as the mono, which he said was "plain gone"), and they will be here in a few weeks.

So, I'm disappointed not to have the set today, but I will have them soon, and at considerably cheaper prices than J&R charges, and without the hassle and the rudeness. I generally try to buy things locally, especially books and records, whenever I can. Between music, computers, and stereo equipment, I'm sure I've spent well over $10,000 at J&R over the years, maybe quite a bit more. But experiences like this make me much less likely to bother.

Anyone get their hands on a Beatles box today? Where?

Ready For War

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:29:52 GMT

An unpleasant reminder of ongoing horror came in the mail yesterday, in the form of a seven-inch single. It's John Cale's "Mercenaries (Ready For War)," released in 1980, from his punk masterpiece, Sabotage/Live. The A side is a brutal song about the soldiers who are paid "enough to want to kill for you, but not enough to want to die for you." The B-side is the rare "Rosegarden Funeral Of Sores," which is unavailable on CD.

The picture sleeve is the real point, though. It's a threatening photo of Cale, overlaid on a map of a war-torn region of the world that was omnipresent in the news at the time. The map shows eastern Afghanistan, northwest Pakistan, and a bit of Iran. Thirty years later, it's completely up to date, as are the two ugly and violent songs on the record. True, "Ready For War" references the since-renamed Zaire, but the "jolly old Belgian Congo" is still quite the business opportunity for mercenaries.

And this affects me, like most Americans, not at all; it takes a luxury purchase to even bring it to mind. It's sad and shameful.

The Beatles On Rock Band: You Don't Know What You're Missing

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:26:48 GMT

Last week's New York Times magazine had an article about the upcoming release of Rock Band: The Beatles. A while back I posted about my one and only experience with Rock Band's competitor, Guitar Hero, which left me not only unimpressed by the game but depressed at the thought of kids practicing for hours to flap a flipper when they could be learning to play real music.

This article made me think a bit about that, although it doesn't really change my mind. Apparently Rock Band is a little more cooperative than Guitar Hero -- you play with other players, not against them -- and the Beatles version in particular has no scoring or points mechanism.

In some respects I'm intrigued by the game. Giles Martin, an original Beatle once-removed (he's the son of George Martin, their producer) has worked very carefully, under the direction of The Shareholders (Paul and Ringo, along with George's son and widow, and Yoko Ono) to decompose the Beatles' songs into playable parts and map them to the fake instruments. Decomposing these often-intricate songs like that is interesting.

One game developer says, "Ringo is going to earn a lot more admirers when this gets out in the world and people see how sophisticated and challenging some of his drumbeats actually are." Of course, the drums are the one instrument in the game whose controller actually resembles the real instrument; I doubt anyone will gain an appreciation for George's guitar skills or Paul's (prodigious) bass skills.

But overall I still think it's a waste of time. Changes like that are probably necessary to make the game enjoyable; my issues with it are much more basic. This is not playing music. One of the game's designers says it "gets you maybe 50 percent of the way [towards the feeling of playing music] with 3 percent of the effort." I don't think that's true; I don't think it gets these kids any closer to playing music than I got flailing at a piece of wood lathe in time with Beatles songs when I was a kid. It has the same relationship to music as pornography does to sex; I'm sure the day is not far off when we'll have interactive sex toys, but they won't be anything like actual sex.

It sounds like Ringo is in my camp on this. His experience with it was like mine with Guitar Hero: "It's impossible. I cannot watch the line going down and play at the same time." Stating the obvious, he says, "they're playing a game, they're not making music. The music is already made." And like me, he sounds perplexed: "The kids are getting really great at the game, but they couldn't suddenly go out and play the Staples Center." Neither can I, of course, but I can play my local coffeehouse.

McCartney says that while he can't play it, he sees the appeal of it, and compares it to the time he and many kids spent playing air guitar. "Miming was always fun," he says, admiring the way people "had to learn every little nuance." The game is, at least, miming with feedback, and to that extent it probably will help players listen to music differently or to hear how individual parts work together.

It interested me that the game designers originally set out to create a way for people to more easily make music; while they were trying to end-run the hard work of learning to play an instrument, their shortcut was aimed at making it easier for people to be creative. But, it turns out, most people don't want to be creative. They want to mimic their heroes. And the Beatles version of the game won't even allow the most minimal contributions by the players -- you can't even add your own fills or flourishes to the sacrosanct music.

And, like most things to do with the Beatles, a lot of the game is fantasy or mythology. Quite a few famous Beatles songs are more or less solo efforts, with one or more Beatles complete absent from the recordings, or recording separately. But in the game, they're all together. They play "live" versions of songs the band never played in concert, and for songs they did play live, studio versions are reworked since their live performances were generally awful. George plays lead on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Some of my reaction to it is personal. I wish I had spent more time playing music when I was the age of these gamers, rather than pretending to play music. Rock Band and Guitar Hero could do something very very important, something that would have helped me: They could help players along the pathway from playing (having fun with no skill), to playing music (having fun with skill). That's a much easier path for people like me to follow than the music-lesson path, which is practice and exercises (having no fun with no skill) leading to playing formal music (having less fun -- for me at least -- with skill).

Kids in big musical families tend to learn this way. Everyone plays music together, and someone hands a child a simple instrument and encourages him or her to make enjoyable sounds along with everyone else. But those kids are playing real instruments that make real sounds in response to what they do, and more importantly, doing so with other musicians. A plastic controller with a flipper bar does not teach you how a guitar feels, or how it feels to make music, and flashing lights on a television most certainly do not teach you how to play music with other people. (Guitar Hero, as I said earlier, seems worse in this respect than Rock Band.)

Now, if you could connect a Guitar Hero controller to a synthesizer, then it would be a musical instrument. Perhaps not terribly sophisticated, but that's what people said about harmonicas and autoharps and turntables. You don't need to be terribly sophisticated to make great music. Maybe some of these kids will head that way, and we'll have a genre of music made with plastic guitar controllers. I'd like to hear that.

The game could also evolve. Towards the end of the article there are hints of a more promising future -- allowing players to çhange songs or improvise with them. As the writer said, that would require licensing music from more adventurous musicians (or record companies), but that would make for a more interesting and musical experience.

But as it stands now, it's a waste. The article's author questions some of the scorn about the game, saying, "People who play Halo or Gran Turismo are rarely asked why they don't pick up a real gun or race real cars." Duh. As I said a few months ago, guns and race cars are expensive and dangerous. If you screw up with them, someone dies. Musical instruments are not dangerous, and for the price of these games you could buy a starter guitar and a few lessons from a real teacher.

But hey, it could be worse. At least they're not entering air guitar competitions. Meanwhile, I am counting the days to the release of the remastered Beatles catalog.

Heading Home

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:58:03 GMT

I had a couple of very productive days in Seattle and San Jose, and then yesterday drove up to San Francisco. Even though I've been coming out to the West Coast pretty frequently the last few months, I haven't been back to this city for some years. I love it; I could live here. And I don't say that often.

I'm staying in the financial district, next door to the TransAmerica building, ironically on the site of a saloon in a novel I've been reading that concludes during the start of the Gold Rush. I wandered around North Beach yesterday, eating a sorbet in the other Washington Square, buying books at City Lights and browsing used record stores, and then, even though it's touristy, I had dinner at the Stinking Rose. Where, as they say, "We season our garlic with food." A colleague introduced me to the joys of Dungeness crabs. They're a large species named after a city in Washington, generally found only on the west coast. And they are very good to eat. Especially with garlic. And very messy. They bring you a bib before you start and hot towels and half a lemon when you're done.

Then I sat outside at a cafe across the street from a whole line of strip joints and listened to the Chinese Music Orchestra, which included Chinese instruments but also a cello, a banjo, and a hammered dulcimer. I am writing this in my hotel room, looking straight at Coit Tower, and I'm leaving for the airport soon.

You can see more crappy cell phone photos here.

Leaving West Virginia

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:25:41 GMT

So, I left West Virginia yesterday, for the second time this summer. And with luck there will be a third departure (preceded by a second return) in late October for the fall old-time week, or at least some of it.

I was so engrossed in playing this year that I didn't post much (I'll have some photos on Flickr soon) but here is one of the many high points of the week -- playing my song "She Left Me In the Red" with an all-star backup band. That's Joe Newberry, the coordinator of old-time week and a wonderful talent and spirit, on guitar; Mike Compton, a star Nashville player who just finished touring with Elvis Costello, on mandolin; Ann Downey, who plays all over the place, on bass; and Clay Buckner of the Red Clay Ramblers on fiddle.

But there were many other great moments, mostly involving long nights on the porch singing with great friends. I'll post some more videos and recordings when I get home in a day or two. Meanwhile all the songs are still in my head and you can expect to start hearing them at jams soon! And maybe at some performances ... stand by for more on that.

Ambience

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 12:31:13 GMT

Reading the Brian Eno book I posted about a little while ago of course inspired me to listen in-depth to a lot of his work, so for the past few weeks my listening has been oscillating between old-time and old country music, and electronica/ambient.

That's a strange combination, but perhaps not as much as it might seem. Old-time music is often called "hillbilly trance music," and Eno's work is not cold and analytical the way a lot of electronic music is, and in fact much of it is not electronic at all, but organic sounds sampled, processed and reused.

Furthermore his approach to music is warmly human and wonderfully open and unconstrained -- a far cry from the rigid orthodoxy of many musicians in both old-time and electronica. The more I've read his writing, and read about him, the more I've grown to really like him and his approach. I was pleasantly surprised some months ago to find that he's a fan of simple singing, and as Tamm says, his approach to music is one of "sustaining an open mind and childlike curiousity about the infinite range of musical possibility."

While some deride his music as "still waters that don't necessarily run deep," or criticize his naivete, I actually find his experimental work much more listenable, much warmer, than most of the people some would consider his peers. Eno has a sense of humor. His electronica and ambient music, unlike that of many of his imitators, is emotional and organic, more varied, more sustaining of interest, than classical minimalists or experimentalists like Tangerine Dream. At the same time it's more thoughtful and less obvious than even the sophisticated electronica/pop of, say, Massive Attack or St. Germain. As Tamm says, Eno has maintained a "sense of wonder," unlike so many others who work too hard to appear urbane and sophisticated and detached.

I've had an interesting relationship with his work over the years. I much prefer his songs to his instrumental and ambient work, while he largely seems to have lost interest in songwriting, in general preferring to wander away from the melody and lyrics that occupy the foreground and focus your attention on the horizontal motion, and instead wander into the background to experiment with textures and colors. "The problem is that people, especially people who write, assume the meaning of the song is vested in the lyrics," he says. But for him, "music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and he words either serve to exclude certain ones of those, or point up certain others that aren't really in there, or aren't worth saying." [57]

Over the last couple of years I have found myself returning to his ambient work, and rediscovering it. I think I became disenchanted, to some extent, having followed what I thought was a progression from his work to Tangerine Dream and the Yellow Magic Orchestra and various ECM jazz artists and Kitaro and Philip Glass's more angular minimalist work. After the initial fascination, that music wore think very quickly. Later in college, I got into blues and reggae and hip-hop and forgot all about the other stuff. A lot of it ended up in used-record stores, and none of it is among the music I wish I hadn't sold.

But I never sold any of my Eno albums, and his work, along with that of the musicians he works with frequently -- Robert Fripp, Jon Hassell, Harold Budd, Daniel Lanois -- have never really left me. It's no more related to ECM jazz and space/new-age music than Coltrane's is to Kenny G's.

I've done a lot of flying in the last month, and I have been listening closely to two of his ambient albums, Music For Airports and The Plateaux Of Mirrors (a collaboration with pianist Harold Budd), sitting on a planes or in airports and doing nothing else. They support this listening. They're not boring; they're almost fractal. The more closely you listen the more you hear. Eno says at one point, talking about the simplicity of his music, "It's not because it's simple, any idiot can do it. There's sensitivity in the way you can strike just one note." [50]

And yes, you can pay attention to ambient music. As Eno says, he wasn't trying to create wallpaper or background music, but music that could be listened to in the background, that did not demand your attention or try to push you in a particular direction. It's ambient in the sense of trying to create a space, an ambience, and allowing you to find your own place in it.

The first track on his first ambient album, "1/1" on Music for Airports, is an amazingly beautiful piece of music. It's nothing more than a repeated simple piano figure, varied slightly, with pauses in between repetitions. But it's never played the same way twice; there is tremendous feeling in the dynamics and the variations and the timing. Eno processes it all heavily, but not in a synthetic or overbearing manner; at first you might think you are listening just to a piano. He processes it gently, playing with the attack and decay, adding nearly inaudible washes of keyboard, or long sustained bass notes, sometimes harmonizing with or repeating a note with the synthesizer.

You hear every single note, and Eno's treatments and effects result in endless echoes, different every time, different colorations, subtle harmonies. "I often sit at the piano for an hour or two, and just go "bung!" and listen to the note dying," he says. [43] "Each piano does it in a different way." That's not electronica, that's the organic and unpredictable behavior of wood and wire. "You find all these exotic harmonies drifting in and drifting out again, and one that will appear and disappear many times. There'll be fast-moving and slow-moving ones. That's spell-binding for me."

His treatments amplify that focus, and with echo, delay, and nearly inaudible small noises, he places the entire piece in a very physical space. I want to say it gives a feeling of clean and perhaps stark spaciousness but perhaps that's just suggested by the title. But it is very evocative music, warm and physical and compelling.

What he's done on this piece is almost a meditation on the tones and possibilities of this simple figure. It's repetitive, but not repetitious; like many fractal structures (tree leaves, coastlines), it looks the same from a distance, but no matter how closely you look there is always another level of detail to see.

"The thing permits you any level of scrutiny," he says of the structures he prefers. "Things that allow you to enter into them as far as you could imagine going, yet don't suddenly reveal themselves to be composed of paper-thin, synthetic materials." [93]

Today while my flight was landing in Seattle I was breaking the law and listening to a recording of Robert Fripp's performance in the Winter Garden less than a year before it came close to being completely destroyed on September 11, 2001. It was a lunchtime performance, and I walked over from my office two buildings away, and sat in a front-row seat. He sat, as usual, black-clad and alone, silent and nearly motionless, on a performance stool.

He held his black electric guitar in the classical fashion, with a rack of effects units next to him and a pedalboard at his feet. He struck a bell-like note and held it, captured it and successive notes in a loop so they played continuously, building up layers and layers of sound that filled that enormous space. He would play nothing for moments, then splash chiming clusters of notes over this palette. He played organ-like swells or deep bass tones, casting long arcs of music out among the palm trees and the spectators that bounced off the glass and the marble and came back to him. And he answered that return, listening and responding and building a structure that was almost visible. It is not melodic music, but spatial; its movement is physical rather than harmonic. Even though it is created with digital equipment and an electric guitar, it is deeply organic, rooted in the place it was created, one musician's response to that day, that place, that audience.

With his professorial look, his silence, and his inward focus, it's very easy to mistake him for a technician. But he's not; this was a beautiful spontaneous act of creation that touched everyone. It was a grey November afternoon, the Hudson choppy and cold beyond the empty waterfront walkway. Premature holiday decorations adorned the shops around the Winter Garden. Tourists and traders stopped to listen, standing on the balcony or walking past with their lunches in bags from Donald Sacks. Some quickly lost interest and walked away, but more than a few people were completely captured by the flowing music, as warm and beautiful and evocative as any chamber music performance I'd ever seen in that space. Maybe more so, because rather than struggling against a too-large space not meant for music, Fripp was adapting to it, fitting it, using it as the ultimate analog delay unit, making his music part of the space and the day. That was ambience. The recording (legally available for purchase from Fripp's web site) does not entirely capture that moment, but it is beautiful and spacious and I am certain it is not just my memories that make me hear the glass and the marble.

Meanwhile, I'm heading back to West Virginia so this is the last you'll hear about electronic music for a while.

In the (Muggy) Presence Of History

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:27:14 GMT

Seattle broke its all-time heat record yesterday, with temperatures breaking 100 degrees. I was there and I can report that, yes, it was hot. Last winter I was amused, while visiting my brother in Tucson, at the local paper being filled with stories of how to deal with record-breaking cold temperatures (ie, below freezing). The Seattle Times here (sadly, the other local paper, the Post-Intelligencer, is one of the daily newspaper casualties) was full of articles like Northwesterners not acclimated for record heat, Heat exhaustion or stroke: What to look for, what to do, Tips to stay cool, safe in the scorching heat and (of course) Dog day cares keeping pets cool in heat.

I would normally be excited to be in the presence of history. I would love to have happened to be in a sports bar as Mark Buehrle threw his perfect game last week. But I really could have done without this one, not least because a town where 103-degree temperatures are unheard of is also a town where air-conditioning isn't ordinarily necessary. Or very good.

But I didn't have to suffer that much in the heat. I was mostly suffering in Seattle traffic, a delayed flight, and a wait for a car at the San Francisco airport at the Avis counter, where the motto seemed to be, "We try? Hardly!" I will be glad to be home tonight.

Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color Of Sound

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:16:26 GMT

Part one of a series inspired by my reading Eric Tamm's Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color Of Sound. I was rather dubious about this book. It's a Ph.D. thesis by a music student, and the title seemed really pretentious. I bought it mainly because there are exceedingly few books about Eno, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's quite readable, and actually describes the traps musicologists often fall into, rather than actually falling into them.

I have a lot to say about this and related subjects, so in between two old-time music trips, I'm going to take some time to write about this book, Eno in general, and the idea of music as process.

While it sounds somewhat new-agey, the title is actually precisely descriptive. Tamm says that Eno is unusual in that his music is less about melody, or the horizontal progression of the music, than about textures and timbre and tone and the space the music is happening in, in other words, the vertical characteristics that don't relate to the music's development through time. "It depends to a large extent on the harmonics, or barely audible frequencies, that are stacked vertically" on the main note you're actually hearing. [4]

He describes Eno's growing up near an army base, where American pop and rock&roll would appear free of any cultural context, and presents Eno's music in context, or rather, in several contexts -- not only in the art-rock movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, but in the continuum of experimental music going back to Satie and continuing through John Cage, and in cybernetics and feedback work, about which I'll talk more later.

He seems to favor Eno's ambient work over his more song-oriented work, which is a bit of a problem. Many people (including myself on many occasions) dismiss Eno's ambient work as boring aural wallpaper, or group it with much of the new-age music it inspired. It's not boring, though, and it has roughly the same relationship to most new-age music as genuine essential oils have to car air fresheners.

But I like the fact that Eno enjoys doing his ambient work, but also twisted hard-rock songs, beautiful folk tunes, and producing bands from Devo to Talking Heads to U2 to world music artists. Tamm unfortunately dismisses a lot of this work, or looks at it only as it influences the parts of Eno's work that he likes.

For instance, he rightfully spends a great deal of time talking about Another Green World, certainly Eno's most famous album and perhaps his best. It's a good discussiong but sorely lacking in some respects. He completely ignores two of the album's centerpiece songs (as opposed to instrumental pieces), "Golden Hours" and "I'll Come Running," some of Eno's most beautiful work, and analyzes the album's last song, "Everything Merges With the Night" only in terms of its musical structure ignoring what I think are rather beautiful lyrics that close the album:

Rosalie, we've been talking all summer
Picking the straw from our clothes.
See how the breeze has softened
Everything pauses in the night.

Especially combined with the very few lyrics of the album's opening track:

All the clouds turn to words
All the words float in sequence
No one knows what they mean
Everyone just ignores them

They sound quite meaningful. Perhaps they're a commentary on the usefulness of words as communication (or of lyrics), but they're worth talking about. Perhaps Tamm is trying to be faithful to Eno's lack of enthusiasm for words, but that's Eno's problem; most listeners, including me, do like them, and they do matter.

Tamm generally seems biased against simple songs. He dismisses Eno's 1990 collaboration with John Cale, Wrong Way Up, as "amateurish ... silly, over-produced ditties," saying Eno "does not write real vocal melodies" because "he doesn't really understand the power of functional harmony to create, support and propel emotional movement." [179] Right. I don't either, but as beautiful as much of Eno's ambient work is, I much prefer his songs, with their simple melodies.

So he ignores the "amateurish" songs in favor of telling us things like "Eno's most common type of harmonic ploy is a repeating chord progression" (glaringly obvious once you get past his musicologist language), or spending an endlessly long paragraph analyzing the fourth ambient album, On Land, in painfully clueless musicological terms: "a rotating set of pitches alternately suggestive of an F-minor seventh chord and a Db-major seventh chord ... a static Mixolydian pitch set .. a spare use of pithces suggesive of the Phrygian mode .. a chromatic, unclassifiable pitch collection over a constant drone..."

I know enough about music technically to understand what every one of those phrases means, but I also know enough about music to know they add up to pretty much nothing. It's a classic example of failing to see the forest for the trees, or more accurately, mistaking the dots on paper for the picture. Even though Tamm acknowledges at one point that Eno is using "seemingly stray pitches drawn from a diatonic pitch set," even though he knows how Eno works and how Eno approaches music, he still writes as if the particular pitches have some kind of meaning, or were chosen deliberately or with some understanding (or caring) about the musical relationship between them. I found myself wishing Tamm would go back and reread the more insightful parts of his own book.

And much of it is indeed insightful, if pretentiously worded. He digs into the meaning of "ambient" and how Eno's ambient music is trying to acheive the opposite of music. And he looks in some detail (beyond mindless cataloging of pitches) into how he does it, how he creates landscapes rather than songs.

His main point is that Eno is interested in "non-teleogical music," in other words, music without a defined beginning and end. (To quote Eno's plain-language description, he likes making music that seems to be "just a chunk out of a longer continuum.") His ambient pieces often fade in and fade out, are cyclical without any real development, consisting of spaces rather than melodies.

They rely heavily on the use of extreme delay and equalization, used so subtly that a piece like "Discreet Music," 30 minutes of tape delay signal-processing largely created as Eno did other things, does not turn into aural wallpaper or New Age schmaltz. Removing and adding harmonics and emphasizing different colors in the sound spectrum, he creates a very deep sense of texture that varies very subtly. Eno says of his audiovisual installations that he likes to create the urban equivalent of "sitting bya river," and in this music he often does. Rivers don't change, on the one hand, and you could say that it's boring to sit and watch nothing happen, but if you look closely and are quiet enough there is a lot happening. And even if you aren't, the flow of subtle changes is soothing and beautiful.

Tamm identifies some very specific techiques Eno uses:

Sparsity -- every element is clearly audible, and the "density of events" is low`
Drone or background layer, usually with some kind of swooshing or gurgling sound, with delay and reverb creating a sense of space
Long and deep delay
Barely audible events

Thanks to his use of equalization and other treatments, he can even make single notes interesting, like the opening note of his collaboration with Robert Fripp, "The Heavenly Music Corporation," which lasts for more than a minute.

The sound is completely artificial in the sense that you do not imagine musicians playing it, nor could most of it be played live. And such a performance might be rather boring, consisting of Eno spool tape and turn knobs. In fact, Tamm says that much of "Discreet Music" was created by the tape loop system Eno set up, working on its own as Eno answered the phone and did other work.

But even though it's artificial, it is more human and natural than a lot of more "authentic" music, in the sense that it does dominate the listening environment and demand that you experience it on its own terms. Instead, it becomes part of the environment, and you can experience that way if you wish, or you can listen closely to it and hear the surprisingly beautiful variation and subtleties that are missing from most new-age music.

I'll write more about Eno's music in the next installment, but this book was quite interesting. Not perfect, but got me thinking. There are two points Tamm returns to in the book, both aphorisms of Eno's that are well worth thinking about:

"Repetition is a form of change."

"Every note obscures another."

The Conference Center on the Undeground Railroad

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:59:11 GMT

I'm staying tonight in a new hotel in Lancaster, PA, that was built around a couple of historic houses, one of which was apparently a station on the Underground Railroad. The houses are literally incorporated into the hotel and conference center in a very strange way; one house kinda just sits in the lobby of the hotel, and the other's basement is exposed through glass, where signage hints that there was a tunnel from the house to a local tavern that was used to hide African Americans on the run from slavery.

The houses are part of the Stevens and Smith Historic Site, and a $20 million "educational and interprative complex" is planned for the site, but so far, what they have is a couple of odd exhibits in an otherwise standard convention center.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I guess it's good they didn't tear these houses down, but it feels so casual and disrespectful and out of context. I am just picturing convention-goers exiting the "Freedom Hall" (I swear, that's the name of the conference room across from the Underground Railroad exhibit) after some mind-numbing keynote speech by a horrid motivational speaker or a big-shot in the eastern Pennsylvania widget industry. They've got their badges around their necks, they're checking their voice mail or looking through their goodie bags to see if there's at least a decent pen or something, and oh gee, look at that brick cistern terrified people used to hide in a few hundred years ago. Yeah, cool, is there going to be an open bar at WidgetCo's event tonight? (Or, in my case, gee, weird, let me take a couple of cell phone pictures and go back to the room to do email.)

To be fair, it's just opened and there is more work to be done. And this is a vast improvement over destroying it altogether as has been done too often to historic places like this. But, it's ... strange.

"The Hell With Everyone Else, You Sound Great!"

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:13:20 GMT

After a nice afternoon on Staten Island with my brother and some of his high school friends (aren't we all much more fun and much easier to get along with now than we were in high school?), I took the ferry back to Manhattan and rode the bike to the Saturday night bluegrass jam at the legendary Sunny's in Red Hook.

Sunny's is becoming a little too legendary, or at least the jam is. For the past year or so it has been attracting more and more onlookers, and with a lot of musicians out of town at Grey Fox this weekend, the ratio was about three spectators to every player. Three spectators all talking at the top of their lungs during the music, and applauding after every song as if we were performing and as if they'd been listening.

I enjoy an audience as much as the next ~~attention-seeking showoff~~ bluegrass musician, but if you can't hear the music, it's not any fun, it's just frustrating. I played a few of my breaks watching the guitarist's hands because I couldn't hear him playing.

I was tired, and had an uphill bike-ride home, so I left fairly early. Outside, a few of the audience members were also leaving, and one woman said to me, "Wait, you're the harmonica player. You're leaving? How come? You should play more!" I said that I was leaving because I couldn't really hear the other musicians. She said, "The hell with everyone else, you sounded great!"

Gee thanks. First of all, no I didn't. As I said, I played most of my breaks by guesswork and didn't play at all on songs I didn't already know. Second of all, that's not musical appreciation speaking, that's inebriation.

But most importantly, that's not why I play! Especially not at a jam. Music is all about "everyone else." It's about playing together as a community, learning new songs, sharing, and having fun. Not about being better than everyone else. Some musicians certainly approach it that way (they're the ones who practice alone in their rooms rather than going out to jams with "lesser" players) but most of us don't. There are some extraordinarily talented musicians at Sunny's almost every week, and most of them are embarrassed by the applause and annoyed by the noise.

And the music really suffers. Edith, a very talented local singer who is learning to play guitar and lead songs, wanted to sing a beautiful old modal tune. I played guitar for her on it because I know the song and had in fact just spent a week in West Virginia with the woman Edith learned it from. It didn't go well. Edith sang it beautifully, I managed to find the right harmony in that key, and (if I do say so myself) I did drive the rhythm well on the guitar. But she and I were the only people who knew it. The bass player, who really knows what he's doing, couldn't follow the song because he couldn't hear it well enough.

(The song in question is called "My Warfare Will Soon Be Over," a beautiful old modal mountain song. Old-time musicians use the term "modal" differently than jazz players, who actually know what modes are and build improvisations on the notes of a particular scale. Old-time players don't know what modes are; I know what they are but I can't play from them. "Modal" in old-time music refers to a song that is neither major nor minor. There are minor key tunes, often Irish airs and such, and there are lots of driving major key tunes. And then there are modal tunes, which aren't either. Sometimes they combine a minor-key melody with more of a major-key chordal rhythm, or their melodies are so ambiguous that you could play any number of chords underneath them. A lot of modal tunes basically amount to playing A minor (or major) and putting in a G major chord every once in a while. Or not. Last year in West Virginia I played old-time guitar with Billy Cornette of the Reed Island Rounders, whose wife Betty just loves modal tunes, and when you asked him what chord to play at a particular point in a tune he'd usually say, "Either one works. You kinda have to feel it.")

Anyway the point is that this song has a lot of tension in it, often because the melody wants a chord change, for instance, the happy "lift" to the IV chord (the one referred to in Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"). You most emphatically do not play that IV, especially not if Ginny is singing. (That's her in the blue shirt in the photo; she has a great laugh but a killer look if you do something dumb when she's singing.) You stay firmly on the I (which is major in this song) so that instead of a big happy chord change supporting a soaring melody, you have the melody trying to lift up against a resolute accompaniment that refuses to budge, and finally falling back down. And at the end, there is no resolving V chord to wrap things up, but a long-delayed VII chord.

It's amazing when done right. Ginny sings it strong, playing with the shading of the notes and working that tension up to a fever pitch. (You can hear an excerpt of her version on amazon.com. You can also buy it or better yet buy the whole album which is spectacular.)

Some bluegrass players happy this song up by playing those chord changes and turning it into a bit of a rock&roll song. So as far as the bass player could tell, we were just missing lots of chord changes. (And, since Edith and I had never played the song together before, I was in fact missing the only damn change that actually does happen in the song, because its timing is so delayed). As a result, he didn't really know what was going on, and all the tension that would have been created by Edith's singing just turned into uncertainty.

So, did I "sound great" on this song? I think I did. I had the guitar rhythm down well especially after spending a week watching the right hands of people like John Lilly and Courtney Granger. Edith sang it wonderfully. I did find the harmony eventually. But so what? I was out of sync with the bass player most of the time. I screwed up one person's break by missing the crucial chord change (and it is crucial -- it's the only release of that tension and when it finally shows up you should feel it in your bowels). No one really had fun on the song; we were too conscious of being out of step with each other. Edith apologized afterwards for god's sake.

I don't go to jams to "sound great." I go to jams to enjoy the great moments that happen with other musicians and to enjoy being with them and playing with them. If you come to watch a jam, be aware that you are not watching a concert. You're coming to a social gathering, and if you don't like what's going on there, go somewhere else. I'm not being mean. If you want to listen to music and sing along and suggest a song or even get up and lead one if you know the words, by all means please come to the back room at Sunny's on Saturday night and we'll be happy to see you. If you have a mandolin you haven't played in a while, bring it. I guarantee you'll find people who'll help you out with the chords and give you a break if you want one.

But if you want to yell and scream and laugh with your friends, well, that's what the front of the bar is for, where Francis plays old country and blues loud on the stereo and dogs roam free. The hell with sounding great. We're there to play music with each other.

From West Virginia To the West Coast

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:18:30 GMT

Country Jam
Originally uploaded by kenf225

I'm changing gears, as I put it in a Facebook update. I spent the past week in West Virginia, and now I'm in Seattle, where I'm going to spend a couple of days meeting with technology and newspaper people. I did end up doing some work while in West Virginia -- had one conference call where I was wondering if the harmony singing class behind me and the Cajun fiddler practicing on the plaza were coming through -- but it's all good. If I can maintain a good musical life and a good consulting job at the same time, then that's a good life.

West Virginia was great. The music was wonderful; the photo is of Courtney Granger, Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwarz leading a jam one night on the porch of Halliehurst. When I have more time I will post some audio and hopefully some video as well.

I'll be spending more time in West Virginia this summer; I decided this week that I will finally get around to attending the Clifftop Applachian String Band Festival and from there I will go back to Augusta for a week of old-time music and singing.

New Yorkers mock West Virginia far too easily; every time I go, I hear (and sometimes make) jokes about hillbillies and such, but it's not only a beautiful state, it's not that much more provincial or intolerant than New York City. Remember, West Virginia is a separate state because it refused to secede from the Union along with the rest of Virginia, whereas New Yorkers lynched blacks and killed U.S. soldiers resisting the call to fight in the Union army.

While I was there, I read The United States Of Appalachia, which points out that the region was the source of many important progressive trends in this country, starting with the native Cherokee who had a written language and a Constitution read and voted upon by a population more widely literate than that of the thirteen colonies.

The first community in America to declare independence from England was in Appalachia, causing the royal governor of Virginia to complain about the mountaineers setting "a dangerous example to the people of America, of forming governments distinct from and independent of his majesty's authority." A ragtag militia of mountain people routed the British in a 1780 battle that turned the tide of the Revolution to victory. And a young man named Adolph Ochs bought the newspaper in Chatanooga, Tennessee, built it up into a paragon of progressive and honest journalism, then mortgaged it to buy The New York Times and fight the tide of yellow journalism and anti-Semitism in New York City.

It's always been racially integrated (more so, certainly, than my upbringing in Staten Island was). The first abolitionist newspaper was published out of Jonesboro, Tennessee, and the West Virginian Martin Delany was one of the earliest and most foresighted African-American political leaders, blasting Harriet Beecher Stowe for her condescending portrayal of blacks and speaking out against the empty promises and racism of white abolitionists, in strong contrast to his contemporary, Frederick Douglass. The United Mine Workers, which drew its strength from Appalachia, was founded with a constitution barring discrimination on race or religion. Rosa Parks learned activism at an Appalachian school where "We Shall Overcome" was first heard by people including Martin Luther King and Pete Seeger, who somehow ended up with the copyright.

Appalachia stoked the country's industrial revolution and provided much of the workforce to cities like Detroit and Gary and Pittsburgh. For most of its history it has been exploited like a third-world country, and modern "mountaintop removal" mining continues the pillaging to this day.

Great music tends to come from crossroads like New York City and New Orleans and Chicago. Appalachia has been a crossroads for cultures and people since before Europeans came to this country, and it's got the music to prove it. And it's a beautiful place. I love New York City, I am happy I'm from here and I'll never move away. But I look forward to returning to West Virginia next month.

The King Of Pop Is Dead

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:00:29 GMT

I spent much of yesterday in the car (or, rather, cars -- more about that later) and listened to Michael Jackson's two great albums (Thriller and Off the Wall) several times each. I don't have any Jackson 5 on CD or on the iPod, but I've been playing those LPs this morning.

Jackson had descended so far into self-parody (and then all the way through it to a truly disturbing character, some sort of badly reanimated corpse that made you hope Sarah Michelle Gellar would show up with Mister Pointy) that it was easy to forget how damn great he was. He was a tremendous singer, he worked his ass off, he was smart enough to outwit Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono and get the Beatles catalog, and his great records are among the best pop music ever made.

Thriller is an almost-perfect album.* Nearly every song on it was a successful single, and even the non-megahits are great songs. It came out in 1982, which was the year I got my driver's license. My first car only had an AM radio and in those days, WABC and WNBC still played music, and half of what they were playing that fall probably came from that album. Along with the formerly whites-only MTV**, I was finally starting to escape the apartheid "rock" music I'd been brought up with, and that album was a revelation. Everyone liked it, regardless of color, regardless of whether they'd been hardcore "Disco Sucks" segregationists a few years earlier.

And sure, that album wouldn't have been what it was without master musicians like Greg Phillinganes and Rod Temperton and the towering genius of Quincy Jones. But it was unquestionably Jackson's album, and Jackson's genius that made it into the top-selling album in history. Jackson is much more entitled to his "King of Pop" title than Presley was to be called the "King of Rock and Roll."

It's all just sad. I feel like he is a great loss, but he's been a great loss for something like 20 years. I remember the long-awaited release of Bad in 1986, and how tremendously disappointing it was. Prince was at one of his heights, U2 and REM were doing great work, Public Enemy was getting started, and Bad was just ... bad. And he looked bad too. And then things went from Bad to worse and worse and then much worse.

He was an abused child, really, forced by a tyrannical father into an intense spotlight that distorted his whole life. His brothers certainly fared better, but he was the most sensitive of them all, and that's why he was so great, and why he fell so hard.

Driving home late last night, I was done with pop music and, scrolling through what happened to be on the iPod, played Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones, without even remembering the last song, "The Late Great Johnny Ace," which he wrote after John Lennon died.

Well, I really wasn't
Such a Johnny Ace fan
But I felt bad all the same
So I sent away for his photograph
And I wait until it came
It came all the way from Texas
With a sad and simple face
And they signed it on the bottom
From the Late Great Johnny Ace

*I say "nearly perfect" because of the insipid McCartney duet, "The Girl Is Mine," which sits in the middle of the first side like bird droppings on a barbecued steak. The two most glaring examples of wasted talent in pop music argue over "the girl" like New York State senators, engaging in dialog so painfully stilted it makes you want to hear the awful chorus again. And of course "the girl" has no name, nothing to say in the matter, and appears in a schoolboyish Jackson drawing on the LP's inner sleeve being tugged apart like a wishbone by the two superstars.

**Does anyone remember that for the first few years of its existence, MTV steadfastly refused to play videos by black artists? I remember David Bowie giving some bubblehead VJ a tongue-lashing during an interview about this, but it took Jackson's brilliant videos -- and threats from CBS -- to finally break the color barrier.