Spent that past few days listening to Dirty Projector’s “Rise Above” on repeat. It’s always interesting to encounter an album that you are repulsed with on first listen, which then becomes something inspiring and astounding. I suppose this is because I didn’t quite realize what it was that Dave Longstreth and co’s project was all about.

I got the record used at AKA Music in Philly, cashing in on a gift certificate from a Weathervane Music benefit, featuring Twin Sister and Sharon Van Etten. It was a sweet concert, where we came away with some free used CD’s compliments of Weathervane. It felt good to feel like a consumer of music again. Most of us have grown somewhat unfamiliar with the experience. Sure, we consume music, but we’re not often consumers of music. We’re all like music Freegans. Which, ironically enough was an art invented and perfected by our artist-clergy class….

Anyway – the Dirty Projectors. For those unfamiliar with the Projectors, this album, released in 2007, is a conceptual re-imagining, re-arranging, re-composing of songs off of Black Flag’s 1981 album, “Damaged”. The words are the same, the songs are credited to Greg Ginn of Black Flag. Unlike lots of pop music we enjoy, this album prefers to go concept-first (though it certainly doesn’t end there.) You can’t really listen to it as a display of songwriting in the conventional sense – something I’m used to demanding of musicians. This is usually a starting point when evaluating the music of any artist.

When I first heard the record, I thought the songwriter was insane – I found his compositions convoluted, his instincts unfounded. However, when I understood what as so original, so simple yet revolutionary about his approach to (co-)songwriting – presenting his own craft as improvisational, conversational, arising from memory – it was difficult to distinguish between what was original and what wasn’t. And it didn’t matter. This 2007 album is a testament to how our demands of artists and composition are changing. I find this particular form to be breathtaking.

Check it out, I hope you come out with something good.

The prick that turns to fire
within – the riotous discharge.

Observe from both ends:
The timeless limiting point,

like a volley of muskets enclosing
the field of inevitable death,

where what remains
are the gods we fear to notice.

RD

(the singe of a stove on skin,
the slip of a knife to skin)

oh the little lives
they barely leave behind:

the scab that shrinks,
the scar that whitens,

as bronze becomes green,
regenerates to fit the earth.

We hurt
as local pain shrinks to nothing.

But you, my darling -
The pain that just won’t heal -

the signs that stand between us,
the memories that dash between us,

the loss that remains between us,
the loss that becomes a stone,

as stars encased in diamonds -
we keep you forever.

RD


]]> http://endofaparade.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/72/feed/ 0 RD http://endofaparade.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/tick-tock-or-hark-the-climate-changes/ http://endofaparade.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/tick-tock-or-hark-the-climate-changes/#comments Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:55:32 +0000 RD http://endofaparade.wordpress.com/?p=66 Continue reading →]]> The Mid-Atlantic has been transformed. On Monday we got two feet of snow, on Wednesday we got 2 feet of snow, and now we have 3 and a half feet of ice. I’d feel bad about the icy sidewalk in front of my house – the only one on the block – if it weren’t for the garage owner next door who is clearly not gonna get around to it, and I can very easily consider our sidewalk to be an extension of his own critical negligence. Don’t blame me – I’m a survivor not a rebel.

Still, there’s something wrong about all this snow in a city like Philadelphia. Lots of complaints are buzzing around about our lack of proper maintenance budget, etc. The plows are around but their work is largely ineffectual and without strict alternate-side parking laws like in NYC, its not like they can really do much with our thin and broken streets.

Instead, it’s every man, woman, and family for themselves. My friend drove here from NYC on Monday and laughed at how people were leaving chairs in the street. It seems it’s become commonplace to stake a claim on the fruits of your own shovel-labor – to keep grandma’s old vinyl dining room chair outside to show the whole block: “we’re a family of survivors, and we don’t have time to do that all over again!”

A relevant suggestion to the great people who govern our fouled and frozen city: legalize the use of the common flamethrower, so these families can take this mother-nature business into their own projectile-heat-producing hands.

Until then, here we go – slipping and sliding to and from the places where public transportation once came regularly – cracking jokes about how we’re all late to wherever we had to go. One woman commented today: “So, if I was running late before we started waiting for the trolley, does it still make me late?” The answer is: No. Because the city of Philadelphia is running on survivor’s time. The clocks are set to the moment when the sewers will find a way to drink the streets dry of all this mess, to the point where the compass stops pointing directly (from any point in the city) to the ever-reliable Broad Street Subway line, and any moment before that moment is pre-Time. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

Here’s what I find inspiring :: People who have the courage to think in simple, long term ways, in a quickly changing world like ours. Like film-maker Noah Hutton deciding that he’s going to tackle a ten year documentary project following neuro-scientist Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project. I am most inspired by people who think like this : who acknowledge the long term plans that are built into our chemistry as human beings, and set cool projects in motion that reflect that. I passed a substance abuse clinic on my bike the other day called “Always Have a Dream” and I found that to be a really good title.

Long term, goal-oriented thinking seems to have a double edge to it : in one sense, it can so easily be rendered nonsense by the way things are constantly changing and time paves over itself in its vicious cycles of forgetfulness. It sounds kind of morbid but it’s really true, I feel like I spend half my time thinking about how this week looks nothing at all like the last. And yet – it seems to me that biologically we are inclined to act on big goals, and are most human when we behave according to long term plans. Like how we fall in love with people we want to mate with, or subconsciously fuck up things with the one’s we don’t. Or how we find ourselves picking up a simple train of thought that began years ago, and that materializes into something you can touch.

Our simplest, long-term plans keep us in touch with a Buddhist, dual metaphysical and biological nature of existence : one that we are unique and finite – a truth that ideally could teach us to keep things simple, direct and within reach – and the other more complicated second part that we are part of a greater, timeless pattern, that is all the more vibrant the bigger and longer we dream.

Philadelphia is certainly a place for some good dreaming :: lots of us kicking around town getting by… thinking up dreams in our head to inspire our encounters with a place which is sometimes ugly, usually friendly, very local. Learning to dream local dreams is a beautiful thing, and feels very natural. I’ve been teaching at an after school program this whole school year and I am loving being involved with these kids lives. The more I teach the more I learn about myself and think that I was never quite meant to be a student, but have always been more of a teacher. I think what that means is that I’ve always instinctively understood the path more then the goals of education – I never get anywhere as a student, but I understand we need each other to keep things moving forward so that everyone can find their own goals.

Anyways, perhaps on snowy days like this is best to appreciate simple thoughts, cause it’s usually the simplest thoughts that bind us and are true most of the time.

Yesterday I frantically cleaned up my room. In a manic burst, I dealt with a realization that my life had superficially fallen into disarray. I have been in the recording studio for the last two weeks – proof to myself that I am indeed a working musician with a career of making records. For a little while, I traded my work on learning write, for the madness that is the recording process. I came home the last night of mixing and found that my room was covered in dirty clothing, old newspapers, instruments, magazines, scraps of paper,

That night, I wrote a few lines of an under-realized poem connecting the act of artistic creation to the act of terrorism, in response to the fantastic movie, “The Baader-Meinhof Complex” – both acts of deep inspiration which must inevitably answer to greater limitations and rules of being human… ::

…
We re-enter some rooms some days
to find our best illusions
have been temporarily put aside –
like the memory of our favorite lover,
the attachment to a t-shirt
or our dreams of procreation.
And yet, this mad core of our
unbearable moments inevitably
loses the luster of the hours
in which our illusions faded -
the moments when creation offset
the burning need to shy away
from being alive
for more than a few moments.
there is a reason why we continue
to tread the quicksand of our limitations
to discover in falling apart
a means to be holy.

I think there is something to the idea that some people find in art the means to investigate the space between our socially determined limitations and our individual world of fictional delusion. Working to happily resolve this tragic position art might hold, I think it is only healthy that we find means of both ardently investigating and then calmly receding from the mediums of art that we choose. This way we might continually return to spaces in which we are, after all, most human. Even if they are, in fact, mostly delusional and fictional.

I suppose I’ve been thinking about the ways in which it seems to me that each medium of art is a chosen effort towards a specific goal, as determined by our own experience of limitations. My thinking is no doubt inspired by John Cage and the wealth of anarchist theories of the materials of art as a social function.

Lately, however, such thinking has been inspired by my friend Ben Ehrlich’s writing on “evolutionary criticism” in the world of literary academics. In response to his post on thebeautifulbrain.com (to quote a paraphrase from editor, Noah Hutton) whether art is “an adaptive trait or a happy accident” – I quite agree with his lack of interest in picking a side. He suggests that it were perhaps better to revere great works of art than to consider their “evolutionary” undercurrents, extolling the successes of each line of thinking. For me, however;- I think in the end I side with the more pragmatically-determined view of how art functions in terms of the adaptive evolution of an individual.

I think art tends to address problems which are inherently personal – the liminal space between our limitations and the hatred of delusion. My favorite author, D.H Lawrence, who I intend to more publicly and deeply engage, saw his writing as a way of repairing an aesthetic connection between himself and the world around him. What I love most about Lawrence is that he wasn’t quite a genius. He belongs to my favorite categories of artist-thinkers: the ones who worked their ass off to use literature, over time, as a means of making very personal sense of things, and inspiring others to an ardent and investigative approach to the intensities of life.

Writing, for me, is a deep challenge with great rewards. To share: my primary medium is songwriting. Songwriting is by nature interdisciplinary. The songwriting craft has nebulous beginnings and incomprehensible motives. My best way to explain songwriting is the simplest. First of all, a song is part literary. Lyrics are literature as governed by the life of consonants and vowels existing within and without the human mouth. Songwriting is about the mouth and breath, and about the same mystical lessons learned by the original bards about how the human soul is communicated through the constraints and freedom allowed the vowels and consonants that leave our body. Songs are words come alive.

Words aside, songs are about singing. To become even less complicated, songwriting has to do with how I was raised, and the wonder and joy I would always see on my mother’s face as she sang hymns loudly and beautifully in church – like a meadowlark instinctively chirping to god. Singing serves a very personal need and is developed as a craft to best serve that specific need, and best share that experience with other human beings who require to be sung to – for different but related reasons.

In any event, I now find myself with a renewed interest in learning to write and look forward to sharing future ideas through this blog. I don’t think its a happy accident at all, but rather a response to what I lack. I have the fortune of being surrounded by many brilliant and insightful writers, many of whom contribute to and/or edit the neuroaesthetics website, The Beautiful Brain. I hope to learn in the coming years why it is that all of my friends have such an ardent interest in the brain, and and the beautiful ways in which our instincts can be of use to one another. Cheers to friends, and to what inspires us all.

I pulled up on 5th.
where you were
searching for shots,

By 7th, I spotted a Starling
which, either dumb or broken,
clumsily idled past my step
and hopped onto the first step
of the mold-bleached walk-up
to a filthy row-house.

The holes
between his oily,
piano-key feathers
bore into the depths
of the cratered walk.
One could see
in the streaks of iridescent aquamarine
in the slow bird’s mane,
the plant-like fungis of the step–

clumps of wet newspaper,
text and image alike forgotten
were haphazardly gathered in
the cracks and the corners.

“Look at that,” I muttered
as you quickly took to spying
the dirty bird through your stilled lens,
starving to capture its charms.

In my mind, I saw your finger click
Just as it flew past your viewfinder,
Abandoning its woeful composition
To join its companion
On a bare and wretched tree.

“Missed it,” You corrected me, sullen.
“What kind of bird was that?”
You asked, walking away.
I answered:
“A starling.
A worthless kind,
A garbage bird that
Lives only to survive.”

On this day, the unique and macabre change of season describes a further feeling of alienation, as we walk around a city populated, for once, by people from other cities. Black Friday is a day in which any Philadelphian who goes for a walk cannot help but notice their city in a revealing state of flux. Sitting in a coffee shop in the Italian Market, I felt at once as though I was surrounded by the senses of all the great cities I’ve known.

The first and most direct connection I encountered was the feeling of passing wintertime in a Coffee-shop. Until now, the best examples of this I’ve found in the north – in a city like Burlington or Montpelier, VT – but I’d assume you’d get it in Denver or even Boston too. There’s something about the bone-warming sound of coffee being ground, mixed with conversation between dog owners, which brings great comfort to many of us city dwellers. I think these shops and how we do them are one of South Philly’s greatest assets – one community in a renowned “city of communities.” It wasn’t the shadow of Vermont I enjoyed, but that Philadelphia was casting its own.

I thought back: Riding my bike down Christian street, the sight of the row-house facades had transported me elsewhere: to the streets of Berlin – east or west, doesn’t matter. Both Berlin and Philadelphia are spread thin and filled with often unimpressive veneers that enable moments of wonder when – alas – you take a left and discover those secret and narrow streets lined with fully blossomed trees growing half up, half into houses.

There is something to be said about a city with un-used or underused spaces – cities which change quickly and relentlessly, evading our ability to digest them. Even better if some of these spaces are shitty, if you are an appreciator of the kind of cities I am referring to. Now, it is undisputable that the mean shitty-ness in Philly is incomparably lower than that of Berlin; but there is something to be said for how the dynamic effect of communist architecture on a city is reflected in an ordinarily rag-tag city like Philadelphia. We can almost consider the influence of failing Capitalism on the Mid-Atlantic city to have some shreds of commonality with the urban effect of Communism. My friend once hit on an eastern European girl at a party who, having recently moved from Baltimore admitted she “loves shitty cities.” Until you’ve lived in a few, and having lived in both Berlin and Philadelphia I feel I can claim I’ve lived in the best, this is a dynamic difficult to describe to people from cities like New York or Paris. They are used to an inch of a city being a metonym of the whole – there is a fractyllic sense to New York’s beauty which doesn’t follow in Philadelphia. Here, beauty lives and dies in every moment of observation. Its spectrum is horizontal and broken. It must be sought after, followed, squinted at. However; once you’ve seen it, it has a way of nesting in your soul, lying in wait until a moment when the perfect light of day releases it into outward bloom.

When we see what a city like Philadelphia can offer – when the sun hits the façade of a shitty but burgeoning old street and a spectrum of mud-caked to pallid, blasted brick grouting is awakened, encouraging our attention further on towards the steel, modern townhouse and arresting us with an awareness of our own fickle and ever-adjacent experience of true urban wealth – we’re glad to have the new mixed with the old; the dilapidated with the renovated; the European with the shitty.

There are even times when the Italian Market becomes Italian – though it really needn’t try too hard. There are times when South Philly becomes New York – when a fully blossomed tree shades a cratered walk up to a dark brownstone and at once becomes 88th street. Or in Queen Village when the apartments radiate a foreboding sense that they are vacated and yet well-fed children’s eyes spy out across newly painted window sills. We are transported immediately to the near border of Alphabet City. You couldn’t explain that to a New Yorker like my friend’s dad and film director, Tony Gilroy, who once shouted, “I just don’t get it, Philadelphia just doesn’t make any sense!” It’s true: Newly gentrified Queen Village abruptly becomes Queen Village Low Income Homes, which becomes Washington Avenue, and we find ourselves back in dear shitty old South Philly. Once there, you might have to go to a coffee-shop or else ride your bike east to west for a good mile with your head up to glimpse how it all might fit together – if it’s really ever meant to.

True, the palpable absence of sleight-of-hand magic (which I won’t even begin to try to tie to a “Philadelphia aesthetic – though I could); was not what I had expected to (or not) encounter at a Devendra show. I was aware of him as being all kinds of rock star, and judging from his media persona and the breadth of his imagination, one would expect an emphasis on showmanship and the transportative element of live music, something akin to what it’s like to listen to his records. Put on “Rejoicing in the Hands,” Banhart’s 3^rd studio record, and try your best not to be transported – to a land where one “chooses to rejoice,” in the company of “Little Yellow Spiders,” or even a throng of “Chinese Children.”

What really stood out to me, a loyal and devoted fan of the records – was that it was actually the absence of mystery and will-to-transformation that, in the end, made Devendra’s live show so penetrating and worthwhile. When all the mystery was gone, we were left with a certain unadulteration of his genius.  His style of generating performance and achieving a sense of honesty in the moment of the concert earned my adoration and gave me a new-found appreciation of the depth to his vision as an artist.

Banhart remarks early in the show as he fiddles with his tuning pegs: “I’m not very good at interlocution.” Someone in the audience responded, “try harder!” And yet – any good listener in the audience was well aware that Banhart was not about to overdo himself when he was still in the process of warming up, whether he could “interlocute” or not (and he would prove later that more or less, he could.) On the other hand, the show had a characteristic lack of typical sequence of momentum caused by a lack of interest in “interlocution.” He was an absentee supervisor over such non-musical, non sensual phenomenon, as occurs in between, before, and after songs. It simply was a non-factor.

Perhaps especially at the start, the music benefitted from this. For the first five songs, his warm-up was focused, patient and athletic. Banhart’s primary talent is his gorgeously versatile voice. He sang the first three songs sans-guitar, using his hand gestures as his secondary instrument, awakening his body – as through a sun salutation – to an awareness of vocal rhythms and ranges.

Quite early, he invited us to appreciate the miracle of phrasing – as he conducted his own vocal performances with comic and rhythmic hand gestures. The mystery behind the elements which make his songwriting so fierce was unveiled. He would raise his hands up and down mimicking the sequence of intervals, emphasizing his feats of range with the visual presentation akin to watching someone test their strength with a mallet at a carnival (except imagine the whacker were so in tune to the minutiae of their tricep and shoulder muscles that they played the hammer like an instrument.) This rhythmic sense which is central to his craft, was stencilled before our eyes as though he were prostrating himself before the proper way to sing a song. No mystery, no inward secret movements, just an honest expression of craft in response to the needs of his body as a performer.

Banhart’s live song-to-song vocal performance has a pungent viscerality to it. Most specifically, Banhart’s phraseology and melodic work reflect a seasoned willingness to explore the limitless system of vocal production. We could see his performance originating at the breath; and up through the chest; to the sounding box and off the lower throat; the upper throat; the top of the mouth and the bottom of the lip; and at last sounding into the microphone. At certain points it became unclear whether the song was itself exploring Banhart’s body, or if if it was that he was using his body to communicate the possibilities of a song –it’s undeniable that there was a conversation taking place between the two. What furthermore made it so interesting, in a voyeuristic kind of way, is that we were finally included in the acrobatics, in ways we are not when listening to his records.

It’s no great wonder why we when hear a song we’ve heard a million times and know all the words to, we inevitably want to sing along. And yet, when the audience did this at this concert, it felt unusually invasive. There was something about Banhart’s keen respect of his performance which sought to reject sweeping digestion of his material into pockets of energy or momentum. He just wanted to play. And like a child with a precocious ability to construct towering castles of sand – he rightfully deserved to play by himself.

To continue the metaphor: what ultimately gave the show’s “low-key” vibe its truest honesty and dimension was the interplay between Banhart and his other playmates in the sandbox. It was almost as though the concert were that simple – just friends playing together in the carnival light of their music. The affection between the band mates contributed to the gravitational impediment to momentum and mystery, as Banhart insisted that each sing a song of their own; songs which inevitably furthered and countered the established vibe of the concert. And yet, their affection became the glue which held together the concert with a respectful non-chalance, and helped to characterize that certain “other thing” which the concert was serving, if not the magical persona of Banhart which we had all come there that night to worship and adore.

Sometimes the “magic” imposed on the live music experience, when we are seeing the best – artists who, like Devendra, have been doing it for years – pulls us in too close to the genius of the artist. It enwraps the skull of the listener in its Circe song and – like putting your nose up against the glass of an aquarium, you inevitably fog it up with your own nostrils. It can be hard to keep our distance from a spry and brilliant showman. This is the very maxim the medicine show guys memorized years ago.

On Tuesday Night, Devendra Banhart either insisted upon, or haplessly allowed a distance from his own genius which encouraged intimacy as much as it rejected sorcery. We stumbled upon an unadulterated look inside the aquarium – filled with Seahorses, Crabs and grown men with bands from California. The tank: a man of charms, shirtless upon a stage.

Whether it is naïve to chalk this up as an intentional display of Devendra’s performative genius, or just a way for me to justify paying $30 to see a low-energy show, I don’t really care. I just know that this show was unique – and offered some well needed perspective on the origins of a wildly creative and spontaneous collection of records.