ambient music: tetsu inoue, harold budd, pan-american

if you surf around the internet looking for ambient music recommendations, you're likely to find a lot of new age trash mixed in with a few well-known brian eno albums that you hopefully already have anyway. the truth is, ambient albums aren't that easy to make, and a bad ambient album sounds like new age music that you need to be on drugs (literally) to enjoy. even the most highly praised ambient artists after eno generally fail to rise above this level. maybe i've had the bad luck to choose the wrong albums, but supposedly 'great' ambient artists like global communication, robert rich, steve roach, future sound of london, the stars of the lid, and the books have all failed to convince me that it was possible to enjoy their music without the aid of chemicals.

but there are a few great ambient artists making music today who are undeservedly unknown, and their best albums are as good, and probably better, than the best classic eno records.

firstly, if you don't already have the eno records, the best one is ambient iv: on land. of course the 'first' ambient album, music for airports, is also quite good. beyond those, look for apollo, the shutov assembly, and some of the recent installation music, which is unfortunately difficult to obtain, but worthy of wider release.

i mention harold budd not because he's unknown--in fact, he's best known for his excellent collaboration with eno, the pearl (the earlier plateaux of mirror isn't quite as good). rather, it's because his best work was actually done very recently, long after his collaboration with eno. namely his 'last' album, avalon sutra. despite its new-agey title, avalon sutra is a perfect album, and the pinnacle of budd's aesthetic, which exaggerates prettiness to the point of melancholy. it's almost entirely acoustic, using piano, string quartet, and saxophone, with an occasional touch of quiet synthesizer. while budd has made a number of mediocre albums, the solo piano records la bella vista and perhaps are also worth hearing.

in my opinion, tetsu inoue is the best ambient artist working today. while many people probably dislike his chaotic musique concrète works (personally i don't see how you can hate a track called 'soft drink error'), his recent albums inland and yolo, as well as his earlier classic world receiver, are irreprochably wonderful music. it's really a pity that so few people have heard of inoue, especially considering that both inland and yolo are cheaply available for download on emusic.

a great one man band with a boring name, there's not much to say about pan-american except that his last two albums, quiet city and for waiting, for chasing are unique and brilliant. quiet city is the most immediately likeable of these. the cover art is above--but don't assume that the music has that underwater ambient sound. quiet city manages to be atmospheric and sparse at the same time.

novelization

reading the classic crime authors hammett and chandler, i'm struck by how effectively their novels were translated to the screen in the maltese falcon and the big sleep. (actually chandler's aesthetic sometimes seems closer to more recent movies like sin city.) to the point that, despite its excellent descriptive prose, the original novel of the maltese falcon reads like a novelization of the bogart film. because the novel always gives us an external view of the characters rather than relating their thoughts or perspectives, there is virtually no remainder that is specifically literary, which could not be converted into film. (for this reason you could say that it's perfectly anti-modernist in greenberg's sense.)

on one hand i wouldn't want to make a reproach of this, because there's really nothing to reproach in the novel. but on the other hand, it seems like the best novels are generally impossible to translate to the screen, precisely because they take maximum advantage of the form's possibilities. some composers, including fauré, and, if my memory is correct, brahms, have avoided translating the most perfect poems into songs, partially because, if a poem is perfect as a poem, there is nothing left for a composer to add and no reason to make it into a song. it's much better to pick poems that seem to leave something out, that are a little too simple here, or perhaps nonsensically flowery there (as many of dylan's lyrics), that need music to complete them.

of course it would be possible to translate joyce or woolf or even proust (it's been done) to the screen, but the result is so different from the novel that one ought to say the movie was inspired by the book rather than adapted from it. despite the popularity of the lord of the rings movies, fantasy also seems to me impossible to translate to the screen. magic, which is usually involved in the spiritual struggles of the characters in a novel, and accompanied by the lengthy narration of their thought-processes, almost always becomes mere spectacle when it is translated to the screen, because the visual dazzle dominates any internal dialogue that could be represented in a movie. it's interesting that hemingway, who is in some respects quite similar to hammett, has nevertheless proven highly resistant to screen adaptation, despite many attempts. perhaps this is because the lyrical quality of his works, which gives them such enduring value, has no film equivalent. for more practical reasons, erotic literature is also effectively impossible to film. a book can easily blend the artistic and the erotic as long as the quality of the writing remains high, and it will continue to read as literature. but because of the prudish standards in cinema, the same scenes represented in film would instantly be branded pornographic, and the director would be constrained to a budget too low to produce a quality film.

while i'm far from being a modernist, it certainly seems to me that a novelist ought to take advantage of the possibilities that are specific to his form, rather than taking his cue from the silver screen. to do otherwise is like writing for the piano as if it were a flute: occasionally this might create an interesting sound, but for the most part it would only artificially limit the available range and exclude the instrument's most effective idiom.

different concepts of truth in french and 'anglo-saxon' art

the 19th century and the early twentieth century saw a movement in both literature and painting to bring aesthetic expression closer and closer to realistic expressions of our everyday experience, rather than the mythic and noble themes and styles that had dominated previously. indeed, this movement went beyond conventional realism in its search for veracity, toward extravagant depictions of subjectivity--of course in proust, woolf, and joyce, but also implicitly in impressionist painting itself.

this movement toward everydayness and intersubjectivity is well known and excessively discussed, especially by wittgensteinians, who seem to find in it a justification for their own boring academic-bourgeois complacency.

but what is perhaps too seldom noted is the different character of the french movement toward the everyday and the truths derived from everyday experience, and the 'anglo-saxon' (as they put it) movement toward the everyday.

specifically, french art moved toward a husserlian understanding of truth, while anglo-american art moved toward an empiricist/pragmatist understanding of truth.

for the french, everyday experience was a source for truths that were themselves ideal and not merely empirical 'matters of fact.' although aesthetic truths are derived eventually from our experience, artists like proust gave priority to the ideal forms rather than the particular and concrete realities. real experiences were mere models for the creation of beautiful, non-temporal objects. for the french, the significance of everyday experience lay in the possibility of its transformation into idealities that are superior to their origins. again, this is essentially the same relation that husserl has to particulars and matters of fact.

at the same time, anglo-american art was also aiming toward truth. but rather than capturing in the art-object an ideal beauty or an ideal form, anglo-american art attempted to put the viewer into contact with the empirical fact as such--not considered as a universal rule or an abstract idea that would exist in some sense outside of our real world, but the fact as it is in the very concrete empirical reality we inhabit.

this is the source of the surface ugliness of much anglo-american art. consider constable and eakins, but more importantly hemingway and hammett, author of the maltese falcon and the 'matter-of-fact' noir tone that bogart translated to film. these artists are not in search of ideal beauty, are not attempting to escape the world or subordinate the empirical to the ideal. rather, they are attempting to come to grips with our empirical reality as such, with the factual truth of that reality.

so while on the surface the american and french movements toward experiential truth in art seems to be quite similar, they are finally quite different, because the kinds of truth they pursue are directly opposed. in more recent times, the best comparison would be between balthus and lucian freud: balthus, despite his medievalisms, is essentially within an advanced version of the proustian vision, ideality drawn from everyday reality. lucian freud is not attempting to turn the real into the ideal, but to reveal the real as it is.

redemption

art is not about redemption.

redemption means somehow atoning for and overcoming sin or pain--paying it off and then making a profit that allows you to continue on. redemption is just another kind of bailout for something that doesn't merit it. grace, i suppose.

but it's also a mistake to criticize 'redemptive' artists like mahler and say that we're better off with beckett and feldman. beckett and feldman don't just refuse to redeem the irredeemable, like grocery clerks turning down expired coupons--they emphasize life's irredeemability to the point that you just want it to end ('oh, all to end...'). this is like the grocery clerk rejecting your coupon so adamantly that you become unspeakably depressed, leave your ice cream at the checkout, and walk out of the store with nothing to eat.

art should have exactly the opposite effect. if someone is depressed and ready for suicide, a great art work ought to persuade him to wait just a few minutes, three minutes maybe--until the song is done. and for that three minutes, by whatever means, there should be life. with luck, you can keep stringing three minutes together, one after another. if a novel doesn't make you feel alive until the last page, you're better off leaving it in the library--or even worse, giving it to the nobel prize committee.

this isn't asking that art be redemptive. three minutes of life does nothing to redeem the hours of drudgery and stupidity outside of it. life is not a totality that needs to be accepted or rejected as a whole, that can be redeemed by a few moments (the false solution of nietzsche's experience of the eternal return). if it could be, it could also just as easily be condemned by a few moments. but if three minutes of life doesn't redeem the hours of drudgery, it is still three minutes of life, and that is already something. and something hard enough to find.

nattie less

the new bootleg collection release proves it... dylan sold out to god.

choderlos de laclos

'On peut citer de mauvais vers, quand ils sont d'un grand poète.'

'J'ai bien besoin d'avoir cette femme, pour me sauver du ridicule d'en être amoureux.'

'...ce délire de la volupté où le plaisir s'épure par son excès, ces biens de l'amour, ne sont pas connus d'elles. Je vous le prédis; dans la plus heureuse supposition, votre présidente croira avoir tout fait pour vous en vous traitant comme son mari, et dans le tête-à-tête conjugal le plus tendre, on reste toujours deux. '

--Choderlos de Laclos

this guy is pretty funny. 18th century culture is really better than 19th century culture, although the arts weren't yet ready to express it. it's really only in the brief 'post-romantic' 1910-1920 period that art attained all of its expressive potential (prior, that is, to the invention of modern sound and video recording). it's not until schoenberg's op.10-21 that music attains a full pallette, and is capable of anything (unfortunately a decline into modernism followed precipitously). and for literature, the best parts of proust. and then the era of high art was over, and we had to start again from scratch.

but perhaps a superior culture doesn't need superior artworks. or at least, doesn't need expressive artworks, but decorative and amusing ones, because the real seat of the culture is life itself and not its products. casanova and sade wrote only when they had nothing else to do, out of boredom. it's possible that the post-romantic artists only needed to expand the expressive possibilities of art because they could feel their culture collapsing. art was their only refuge from lifelessness. but, foolishly, to justify themselves, they painted this refuge in art as the summum bonum of human life, rather than the desperate fallback that it is. could it be that the artist's perpetual critique of the philosopher as dry and lifeless conceals a deeper lifelessness on the part of the artist?

in the master-slave dialectic, hegel paints the slave as dignified by his self-objectification in labor, or rather, in the products of his labor. he comes to self-consciousness as a maker, a creator, a craftsman, or at least a farmer. supposedly this becomes a problem only further along, when, under capitalism, he no longer produces a product but only money itself, thus, money alone becomes his objective essence. but maybe the mistake is already in the master-slave dialectic itself: the master is criticized because he cannot be recognized, his life consists in fulfilling his desires through consumption, and what he consumes cannot recognize him, but can only disappear, be used up. but what if in this disappearance, this subtraction of entities, he has caught on to the truth of being (which ought to be crossed out, not for heideggerian reasons, but to signify its subtractive nature), namely, disappearance?

hegel says '...the thing is independent vis-à-vis the bondsman, whose negating of it, therefore, cannot go to the length of being altogether done with it to the point of annihilation; in other words, he only works on it. For the lord, on the other hand, the immediate relation becomes through this mediation the sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it. What desire failed to achieve, he succeeds in doing, viz. to have done with the thing altogether, and to achieve satisfaction in the enjoyment of it.' the artist is just another kind of bondsman.

when choderlos de laclos writes 'le plaisir s'épure par son excès,' he indicates that not only does is the thing annihilated in the enjoyment of it, but the lord qua subject as well.

don't tell your mother

'don't tell your mother' is a relatively unknown song by the sundays, but in my view it is one of their best, and it helps to further the discussion about shiki and williams. while williams' red wheelbarrow poem is a sterling example of the ugly face of american affirmationism, i am not convinced that shiki's alternative is the most admirable aesthetic pinnacle. shiki is far from being my favorite poet in the japanese tradition, because most of the time his strictly descriptive emphasis is pretty without being truly affecting. and beyond that, i don't think that what i called the 'subtractive background' of the poem is present in quite the same way today. of course, it is present, but our relation to it is different.

the subject of 'don't tell your mother' is a fairly standard carpe diem theme; its originality and success (the latter being far more important) lies of course in the way it expresses this theme. the verse, after the lines 'it's time to learn not to work so hard/or not at all' wheels rather unexpectedly into a memento mori chorus, 'how will we know when the end is nigh/on a day much as any other.' this chorus about death is in fact the bounciest and most elated part of the song.

now, if shiki's cockscombs poem represents the continuing flourishing of life against the background of the imminent death of the poet, 'don't tell your mother,' which, again in my view (which, since this song is largely unknown, is probably not widely shared), puts both the flourishing and the disappearing in one place. the aesthetic is not, however, 'dionysian'--this word is overused in aesthetic analysis to a truly alarming degree. it is joyful in a much simpler, less nietzschean way. the singer doesn't feel herself dying, she simply knows that death is coming, could come at any moment, but in the joyful excitement of the present, this inevitable death, the inevitable nihilation of the present, becomes itself a matter of indifference, or even, in the surge of the moment, another spark for enjoyment. there is no wagnerian pain, no harmful desire for the unattainable, and none of nietzsche's pain/pleasure of the woman giving birth. and there is also none of the empty calm of meditation.

one of the central insights underlying taoism and buddhism is the problematic nature of success and hope. success always implies the possibility of failure and our inability to fully control whether we succeed or fail. similarly, hope implies fear. both leave us dependent on things outside of ourselves, which we cannot control. spinoza criticizes hope for the same reason. happiness that results from successes won through struggle will always bear a little of the taint of its origins. happiness that results from the liberation of failure is similarly tainted, always threatened by the imminent return of the project and the negativity of its origins. 'don't tell your mother' succeeds where bataille fails because it is both hopeless and joyful at the same time.

walk into a room
...
walk out of a room

williams and shiki

there are few poems i dislike more than w c williams' 'the red wheelbarrow.' this mind-numbing american affirmation of the everyday is one of the early poetic instances of the current intellectual and artistic fashion of praising everyday life as it is, everyday language as everyone speaks it, everyday things and everyday jobs, repetitive labor like bricklaying, repetitive music like john adams. as if everything ought to be adored merely by virtue of its commonness, which conceals its absolute uniqueness: every crack in the sidewalk is as unique as a snowflake...

there has been some debate about the value of one of shiki's most famous poems,

cockscombs . . .
must be 14,
or 15

which seems on the surface to be much like williams' poem. but in this case the poem is normally read with the poet's life in mind: he was dying in a hospital as he wrote it. thus the flourishing beauty of the flowers is seen against the background of the decay that comes to all entities, what might be called the subtractive tendency of time.

wagner

wagnerian excess and haiku simplicity are not as far apart as they seem. one approaches an eternity of chaos through immersion in emotions whose strength ruptures the subject; the other finds an eternity of calm in a moment of pure vision that erases the subject. but these two eternities, the eternity of chaos and the eternity of calm, are the same eternity seen from opposing points--the highest and lowest points, which touch each other. if isolde had survived the massive expenditure of her transfiguration, perhaps, in the spent emptiness that followed, she would have a glimpse of the other eternity, at the trough of the wave. given this, one can understand why mishima chose to appropriate wagner and wagnerian emotion.

the immobility of progress

today no one doubts that technological and economic progress, if not true social progress, is underway and will continue to occur into the forseeable future and beyond even that. but because this progress is the product of a vast social machine, it is difficult for the individual to conceive his life as an active part of its realization. his work impacts a tiny field around him and has no noticeable influence on the larger forces that structure the world and determine which ways of life are possible. of course, there may be a measurable result within a small circle, but the larger social forces and structures that make us what we are will remain monoliths too large to dent or scratch. on closer analysis, even the major historical figures of our time look more like debris on the crest of a wave than shapers and creators of the course of events. thus, what appears from a distance as a very rapid forward motion is in truth, as far as personal experience and choices are concerned, effective immobility. either one pursues work purely for personal financial gain, or else one attends to one's work with a monkish devotion that expects little or no tangible recompense. but this monkish labor, often rewarded with little more than the abstract knowledge that one has at least done something, may be the only way to remain above a ruinous barbarism, at least if it is applied to those worthy labors that are in such short supply. perhaps it is possible to rediscover a devotion which is not that of the protestant bourgeois work ethic, but rather the devotion of sade's lecherous pre-revolutionary monastery, where the intonation of prayers and hymns alternates with the enactment of shameless acts of abandon.

Blue Cliff Record Case 61

Fuketsu, giving instruction, said, 
  "If one raises a speck of dust, the house and the nation prosper. If one
   does not raise a speck of dust, they perish."

silence except for
my socks on the wood floor
first day of autumn

rustling fields of grass
I heard again
tall near Lawrence Sound
while slowly brushing my hair
in the quiet morning


worn down in your bed
I hear one cricket chitter through
an open window

the bird charmers - winter sun

i can't decide
just how many years i've lived
i tried to count the seasons
and winter won hands down

the bird charmers - chicken little

all the birds are singing
and my head is ringing

two levels

in chekhov, worldly time and eternal time are sometimes opposed, but sometimes only juxtaposed. worldly time can lead beyond itself, through failure, from stress exhaustion, and even in the repetitive listlessness of labor. then it breaks briefly into eternal time and drifts, either quietly or on the crest of a wave, or lying down in the snow, mute beneath the wind. astral weeks and my bloody valentine are there too, the billows of pink noise or the swelling rustle of young leaves.

nothing to do with each other

lots of things that have
nothing to do with each other
happen at the same time
and so
why not we?

the bird charmers - fallen leaf

a fallen leaf's the only tie
that can lead me back
to summer

the bird charmers - haiku

from old notebooks

summer


sun catching dust on the window:
the world outside
wrapped in gauze and turned off


powdery jet trails
made my ex-girlfriend
want to do lines in the sky



winter


once for me turquoise
you were swept up by red dust
while I gazed into the snow


judging from
the darkness of my blinds
the sky has gone out


I hit my head on the ice
and the pain left for a spinning world--
lost me in the sparkle of
snow-laden skies



spring


the queen of a rainy country--
I wonder what color
her hair is now


at the back window
a blue bowl in the sink
catching the moonlight


lining up the rug
with the cut of the floorboards
I see the morning sun


rainwater on your postcard
made blue ink run
over my fingers



autumn


the smell of fallen leaves
the autumn after you were gone--
I loved you then