Ticklah vs. Axelrod

Reviewed the new album by the Antibalis afrobeat collective member Victor Axelrod for Detour-Mag.com. Axelrod responded to the review and had some interesting things to say.

Excerpt:

Who are Ticklah and Axelrod and what’s their beef? As it happens, they’re the same person, Victor Axelrod, member of Antibalis, the Brooklyn-based afrobeat collective and (as Ticklah) co-producer of the novel 2003 Pink Floyd redux Dub Side of the Moon. So, the conflict? It’s all in his head. And considering that Axelrod has drenched these 12 reggae blends in the ech-ech-echo of space-aged dub, it’s clear that the clash he has in mind is one of style – a sound battle between the genre’s two primordial innovators, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Is it a question of the Beatles vs the Stones? Is dub similarly irreconcilable? Is Axelrod taking sides between Perry’s thin and trebly but brilliantly demon-possessed productions and the higher fidelity of Tubby’s more austere, bass-bullying cuts? Can he even do that?

Read the full review here.

New Reviews

Many new reviews up at Detour-Mag.com this week.

Ben Harper - Lifeline

RJD2 - The Third Hand

The Dark Crystal

Caribou - Andorra

Sunshine

The New Holy

I've written about the Fountain before – in another blog and in my review for Detour. But it's such an important movie to me that I've bothered to edit some of that material into a separate review:

In Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, Hugh Jackman plays three versions of the same soul. The first is Tomas, a 16th century conquistador on a mission to find the Tree of Life and, with it, save his country and queen. His relentless loyalty and refusal to accept any defeat, even imminent death, are themes he will stubbornly carry with him for more than a thousand years of rebirth. Of these we see Tommy, an oncologist obsessively trying to cure his wife’s cancer through experimental research; and Tom, an astronaut hurtling solo through space toward the golden nebula where he believes the soul of his dead wife can be reborn. The superficial differences between their times and circumstances create a relief by which we see their sameness. It's not a story about eternal love as much as eternal persistence; a devotion to illusion so strong it distorts the truth and stunts acceptance.

Owing to a seismic performance by Jackson and an ornate, breathtaking special effects approach that uses manipulated macro photography in lieu of CGI, The Fountain will likely be to film what Siddhartha was to literature – the definitive western poetry for eastern mysticism. But outside of its spiritual overtones, it works simply as a piece of fantasy eye candy because its gilded visuals are an end in themselves.

Hugh Jackman's performance is the next-level. It goes so far beyond the standard of the craft that it's not even fair to call it acting. It's more like becoming. He should win the Oscar for best becomer. It caused me to rethink the value of his profession and the possibilities of people at his wealth and status level. I am skeptical of actors–and millionaire artists in general–but then I watch The Fountain and I think, what do I want from art? And the answer is, I want this. Here is a celebrity working in an industry that's superficiality must be stifling to any kind of personal or artistic growth and yet, somehow, Jackman has access to the power and focus to enact the essential human drama. What could be more important art? It is simply beyond me how someone can pull that from themselves even once, let alone repeatedly, under the monotonous microscope of film production.

Though The Fountain is enjoying an after-the-fact buzz of web adoration, it was critically misunderstood and virtually ignored in its theatrical release. It's easy to see why the studio would have trouble promoting something so esoteric since the essence of movie promotion is the promise of something you've seen before (there is no marketing template for sci-fi Buddhist meditations that lure audiences with brand-name actors, and then confuse the shit out of them). So it’s ironic that a film about rebirth now seems certain to have a second life. (For evidence of the shift see metacritic.com where its composite score of critic reviews was 51, in contrast to its user reviews, which, buoyed by the DVD release, are up around 80.)

For all its abstractions, and a plot that ping-pongs seemingly carelessly through time, it has a linear story once you get your head around it. But these few plot strands are almost beside the point once the main character is revealed to be an abstraction of the self.

I've come to think of The Fountain as a new genre. It's not sci-fi, not surrealism–terms which only describe its style–but a mystical, symbolic work of such singularity and compressed articulation that it transcends the whims of popular culture and rises to the level of spiritual edification. I might be getting carried away here, but I want to say that it is a holy film. Maybe not to everybody, but to me. Popular culture is probably not the best place to put something holy–and it has been a failure by those standards–but I think it will have its day when people quit expecting from it what they get from other movies.

The Indescribable Voice of Mark Lanegan

Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described. In fact, until recently, Mark Lanegan’s voice couldn’t even be recorded. At least not properly. It took more than 30 engineers over the course of 20 plus records in as many years just to crack the code of his baritone – a rumbling throttle so coarse you could strike a match on it. This long-overdue feat was accomplished on his 2005 album Bubblegum, on which his voice has so much low end it practically gives the bass guitar the bitch seat. 20 years is a long time for a musician to go without having their instrument accurately captured, especially a world-famous singer like Lanegan who’s fronted bands as big as The Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. But you can’t really fault the recording engineers. After all, Lanegan’s voice is a bit of a physical anomaly and was once even the subject of scientific research:

In the mid ’90s he volunteered for a series of experiments in Phoenix that were involved with the weaponization of sound. The so-called “brown frequency” produces extremely intense resonance at very low frequencies, causing a person in its path to spontaneously shit their pants. But scientists believed that lower-midrange frequencies, like the ones in Lanegan’s baritone, had the potential to do even more damage to the human body, including shattering bones and bursting blood vessels, if wielded with enough severity. So Lanegan spent a bizarre week being the government’s guinea pig, a pretty strange move for a rebel’s rebel who’s been at odds with the law his whole life. But Lanegan is not the kind of person you want to try and understand. Like God, you’re just supposed to listen to him, not fathom him.

As weird as the Phoenix experiment story is, it’s not the weirdest anecdote about Mark Lanegan. Not by far. His biography is a litany of rock’n’roll hyperbole. In his defense, he got off to a bad start. He was raised by a northern California chapter of the Hells Angels, a radical anti-authoritarian biker gang at its most notorious and violent in the ’60s. (It has been alleged that this same chapter of the Angels was responsible for the murder of Lanegan’s parents in a drug-related incident.) Reared by professional hellions, Lanegan learned the art of trouble-making from the best. But somehow he managed to absorb the culture’s rootless and drunken lifestyle while still remaining a man apart and, until the age of 17, Lanegan had serious ambitions to become a priest. His attempts to convert his fellow bikers to Christ fell flat when it was discovered he was sleeping with not one, but three, of the Angels' "old ladies." I would imagine this is about as unforgivable an offense as exists in the world of outlaw biker gangs and Lanegan was ordered to be taken out. Lanegan claims he fled on foot and escaped in a blinding dust storm that blew through at the last possible minute (his old friend and former Screaming Trees member Van Conner contradicts this account, saying that Lanegan just bribed one of the hitmen with money he had stolen from the Angels’ treasury).

After this, Lanegan went through a period of urban vagrancy in northern Seattle and began meeting many of the musicians that would eventually be part of the grunge explosion. During this time, he stole a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums from a coffee shop. In the book, Kerouac takes a job as a fire lookout for the United States Fire Service on Washington state’s Desolation Mountain, using the experience for Buddhist epiphanies. Lanegan was so enamored with the story and its ideas that he mimicked Kerouac by securing a similar position on Vancouver’s Ash Peak. He lasted less than a week. The Fire Service removed him after lightening struck his camp three times in five days – nearly starting a forest fire – in a particularly dry week in which there were no storms. (Lanegan claims that lightening has followed him his whole life, one example of which burned down his apartment complex in ’92.)

But even that isn’t the weirdest story about Mark Lanegan. The weirdest story might be the time Lanegan was broadsided by an “off-duty” ice cream truck doing close to thirty miles per hour and walked away with only scratches while the truck had over eight grand in damage, including a caved-in engine. Doctors credited his miraculous survival to adrenaline but at the time of the incident (which was a nightly news phenomenon for days) Lanegan insisted he had seen himself surrounded by a cold, blue light, which he believed was an angel of God wrapping him in its protective embrace. (In the news video from the incident, Lanegan is covered in what looks like several vats of blue Superman-flavored ice cream. I can’t help but wonder what relation, if any, this has to his “cold, blue light.”)

So that’s pretty weird. But actually, the weirdest story might be the one where a group of renegade priests from an L.A. archdiocese tried to use Lanegan’s voice for ritual exorcisms – in one case asking him to sing Ave Maria repeatedly for over three hours – because they believed that his growling, sandpaper croon was imbued with a special power over devils. Lanegan, probably tired of having his voice treated as a commodity of control, first by the government and now the Catholic church, cut his exorcist career short almost immediately, claiming he had only agreed to try it so he could “see who was eviler.”

And then there's the other time he made the nightly news, this time twice in one week. First when he single-handedly stopped the robbery of a late-night Mexican fast-food restaurant. And second when, six days later, he tried to hold the same place up and was arrested in the process.

Come to think of it, the weirdest story by far has to be that the first thing he did with his cash advance when the Screaming Trees signed to Epic Records was to have two stumps of bone and cartilage surgically removed from his back that had been there since birth. They were, oddly, in the exact spot a pair of wings might grow – if a man could grow wings. (Van Conner says that, in high school, Lanegan would sneak into the woodshop at night and try to file them down with a belt sander.)

And the stories never stop. He sold the publishing to “I Nearly Lost You,” the Trees’ biggest-selling single, for a pack of cigarettes and a dirty magazine. His favorite delicacy is to put Maker’s Mark in his Cap’n Crunch cereal. He sleeps in his truck and only eats on the toilet. He can only writes songs in the month of May and, since the early ’90s, has annually spent those four weeks locked in his bedroom with a guitar and a pad of paper, stricken with a mysterious fever. He has over 50 tattoos, all of which he did himself, all of the same picture – a busty, 50-ish San Francisco bartender named Lane that Lanegan met and fell in love with in his early teens and hasn't seen since.

All of these experiences, as heartbreaking and extreme as they are, have made Lanegan’s voice what it is: unknowable. Music writers inevitably use descriptives like “whiskey soaked,” or “cigarette stained,” or some other cliché that implies its weathered sonority is the product of hard living. Because it sounds charred, like a smokestack smells; like a barn looks after it has burned. But it’s really his phrasing, which is Billie-Holiday tattered, that rattles the listener. It’s hard feelings, not hard living, that make his sung sentences waft heavenward like smoke ring prayers (only to die unanswered at the ceiling). It’s the brusque but meticulous delivery, the careful performances carved out of some kind of sad surgery, that make Lanegan’s singing its own kind of holy.

It would be cute to say that Lanegan can only sing that way because he’s done time. Or because he’s learned about time, watching so many of the other addicts from the Seattle rock boom die or lose their muse while he has survived, still and tall like a tree, his voice hardened over with bark, his songs ever-widening, wind-blown blooms. It would be cute, and it might be true. But that would be trying to describe Mark Lanegan’s voice. And Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described.

Mark Lanegan Band – When Your Number Isn't Up [From Bubblegum]


Mark Lanegan Band – One Hundred Days [From Bubblegum]


Soulsavers – No Expectations
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Soulsavers – Through My Sails (feat. Will Oldham)
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Queens of the Stone Age – In The Fade [From Rated R]

Tony Allen's Seasick Sound

I’ve gotten addicted to Tony Allen’s seasick drumming; but I had to go back in time first, to Tony Allen’s Version of Time, which is outside of time; an idea about rhythm that sloshes back and forth between swing and straight, perpetually adrift and uncontainable.

It’s a rebellious feel and Tony Allen did rebellious things with it. When I say rebellious, I don’t mean he wore a controversial t-shirt on Saturday Night Live, or wouldn’t let HUMMER use one of his tracks in a commercial. I mean that the Nigerian percussion master was out of his mind with independence. First he helped let loose a whole new kind of music (a militant witchdoctor funk called Afrobeat designed to put your ass into a trance of dance and tap you into the communal ecstasy and out of the communal psychosis). And then, after sicking his groove on the Dark Continent, his band, Africa ’70, made its own compound and declared independence from the state.

I haven’t mentioned Fela Kuti yet, on purpose. Fela started Africa ’70 with Allen. Allen was musical director, but Fela wrote the tunes and gave the sound a face. Kuti’s name became the brand name forever stapled onto “Afrobeat” in the histories, while Allen’s became a footnote. But Afrobeat was nothing if not politics through rhythm and if Fela supplied the polemic, Allen’s eternal groove gave it its conduit.



Madness is a reoccurring theme in African legends and Fela’s pan-African fervor definitely blossomed into something approaching mania. When he tried to use concert proceeds to fund his presidential campaign, a lot of his band bolted, feeling he had crossed the line from muso-political to just political. Allen knew the difference, and which one he was qualified in, and left as well, moving to Europe. After all, if he wasn’t going to let the Nigerian army push him around, why should he let Kuti?

Afrobeat has been pulling me into its tractor beam for years but Tony Allen himself didn’t enter my radar until I heard Damon Albarn’s latest project, The Good, The Bad, and the Queen. Albarn started going off the deep end of low end with his band Blur’s Think Tank, and (side project) Gorillaz’s Demon Days was even dub-heavier, drowned in fathoms of sub bass black. The fact that bassist Paul Simonon from The Clash was involved in the new scheme (The Clash are the only respectable example of whites playing reggae I know of), and was going to be anchoring possibly the greatest drummer of all time (according to Brian Eno), promised untold wonders of perverted pocket. Not only did it not deliver, (it’s a beautiful record, but with very English/white rhythms, staccato pianos and folk guitar; and only half of it even has a rhythm section) at first I thought the drumming was a joke. But that’s because I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t prepared to see what is so clear now: that Tony Allen is the fulfillment of the prophecy of pocket. Accepting his sound meant surrendering to it. Because it had revolution in it, not cordiality.

To get why Allen’s feel is the end game, it has to be seen in the bigger picture of drumming itself, starting with the present. Computers have by now altered every form of expression – music in particular. But if musicianship has gotten a shot of Botox (pert, plastic), drumming has had drastic reconstructive surgery. Drums, in their most primitive form of stretched skin over wood have been around who-knows-how-long. It wasn’t even until the 1600s that they started to show up in musical scores and another 300 years after that before the concept of a drum “kit” appeared in American jazz. Jazz was like battery acid on percussion’s musical heritage. It put it through a sort of devolution, undoing centuries of practiced and rigid symmetry by making exploratory drumming foundational to jazz’s unshackling agenda. Jazz was off the grid before there was a grid. That is, before the drum machine came along and confined the place of a beat into a very narrow compartment, there were years of anal white men perfecting gross systems of musical organization-through-notation intended to wield masses of individuals (orchestras) collectively like military institutions (armies). Jazz made those traditions seem obsolete, if not wrong-headed, not only rethinking scale and harmony, but treating the measure itself – the basic unit of musical division – as a kind of colonial prison to be broken out of.

Even if nobody knew it, this started a fight. Or it became a place to take the fight. White/black, straight/swing could have meant oppressive/progressive. The matter was never really solved and the two have continued to rub up against each over the years, sometimes making some beautiful children in the process (e.g., James Brown’s air-tight, uglified pocket). And it’s not as if the black approach was anti-beat – a tribal rhythm is about achieving a state of mind through repetition – and I’m not saying the free-jazz deconstructions of Art Blakey were the promised land. Only that drumming needed to get out of the head for a second and get down to the hip, so the hip could shake up the body and loosen the mind.

Then drum machines fucked the whole thing up. It’s one thing when it’s Kraftwerk – essentially Bach in a Star Trek suit – and the stiff stuff works as a relief for the simple beauty of melody, harmony, counterpoint. It’s another when people start to think that good drumming is about precision – and I don’t mean about being precisely badass, but about turning rhythm into a math equation to be solved on paper. About gated snares, and drummers practicing to metronomes, and human beings trying to copy the cadence of a machine that was just a weak substitute for four limbs, two ears and a soul in the first place. Our musical innocence was lost from too much knowledge and there was no going back. The people got attached to that feel, and took comfort in its consistency.

Two things eventually happened which restored some sanity to the proceedings: sample culture and ?uestlove. By the time the DJs appeared drummers were already adept at mimicking the modules by playing as fluctuation-free as possible. But when the new school started to build their tracks from small fragments of other people’s music – sampling, for its energy, the pre-technology drummers, the jazz and funk guys – they were butting those different sources right up against each other, which meant that as the track passed between this sample and that one, the feel was changing all the time, sometimes in the same song, sometimes from bar to bar. The most extreme example is Amon Tobin, who began by creating massive collages of breakbeat that used absolutely no original parts, only what raw ore he could carve out of his vinyl collection with an equalizer and Cubase. And that’s an itchy sound because your brain is a computer, but that computer is a sponge soaking in juice, not a mainframe humming in a temperature-controlled room. It knows when something’s off the grid and even though it knows it’s wrong, it knows it’s right. It wants to itch and it wants to be scratched. It wants friction, imprecision, loose ends, lubrication, slop, soil and trees. So now, through cutting and pasting, we again created a drum feel that a real person could never reproduce – only now it’s flipped. It’s unattainable levels of imprecise. Jerky in a way that no real drummer could ever be (on purpose). But then somebody was, a jovial, dark-skinned pocket prophet calling himself ?uestlove.



As the drummer and producer for Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots, he taught himself to emulate the push and pull of hip-hop’s sampled foundations and tuned his drums to replicate its metallic, over-processed clang. I don’t know how much of it was instinct, and how much philosophy, but that kind of metatextuality is po-mo to the core.

Maybe that explains why, when I first found Tony Allen, I thought it was a mistake. Because the amount of junk he was putting on his groove, of speeding up and slowing down within each measure, of losing and finding the swing, made ?uestlove sound robotic in comparison. I’ve done a small amount of producing and recording, which sometimes requires “fixing” drummers’ takes, and I guess I’ve grown hyper-sensitive to waver. I've worked with a few drummers who are so clumsy that by the time you’ve repaired their performance, which involved lining up kicks and snares on a measure-by-measure basis, you end up with a kind of slinky effect where they’re always expanding off course, only to find their way back at the top of each bar. When it’s not intentional, this is not a good thing. And first listening to Allen, I thought I was hearing this type of stitched up, band-aided performance, another sad statement on the abuse-through-overuse of recording software. It wasn’t until I went back to the original Afrobeat tracks that I realized he’s been playing this way all along, toying with the boundaries of feel, sounding out of control but always in control.

The mark of a great musician is that they have their own sound, a style of phrasing that is instantly recognizable, like Miles Davis, James Jamerson, or Mark Knopfler. But the drums, with little tonal variety or dynamic range, are difficult to trademark. Several drummers have been said to have done it – Tony Williams, Matt Chamberlain, Larry Mullen Jr., etc. – though I could never pick them out in a blind taste test. But months after catching the Allen bug, I picked up Pocket Symphony, the new record by french electronic duo Air, and instantly recognized his playing on the track “Once Upon a Time” while driving to work. As soon as I got home I looked for confirmation on allmusic.com and got it.

Allen’s sound was an acquired taste for me, and its genius is subtle, maybe too subtle for most people, who haven’t spent as many hours as I have obsessing over something like rhythmic feel. But almost anybody can appreciate its rebelliousness, which is so gentle. It’s a soft-spoken fuck-you to all forms of oppression, political, musical or otherwise. In it, I hear wisdom, power, chronic innovation and a deep intent to never be held down.

The Good, The Bad, and the Queen – Nature Springs [From The Good, the Bad, and The Queen]

Air – Once Upon a Time [From Pocket Symphony]

Tony Allen – The Same Blood [From Afrobeat... No Go Die!]

Tony Allen – No Discrimination [From No Accommodation for Lagos/No Discrimination]

Fela Kuti and Africa '70 – Mistake [From Zombie]

Portability (Spoon, The White Stripes, and the Case For Rock Minimalism)

Years ago I remember trying to come up with a list of qualities that were intrinsically modern. (You are correct, I did not have a girlfriend.) I was thinking in the broadest sense possible. Like: fat, blue, cold, rubber, etc. My aim at the time was to try and apply it to my music. I was feeling dated and looking for a new direction and wanted to get to the essence of the Perpetual Present Tense by identifying the things which make something always seem both of its time and ahead of its time.

In the end, I only came up with one: portability. I was thinking about what our lives are like now, how nuclear families are scattered all over the country, how people are starting to work from home more, and about the big steps in consumer electronics that have allowed us to take our phones, computers and record collections with us wherever we go–all because of increasingly small microcomputers.

There weren’t very many examples of portability in any of the bands I was listening to then. Radiohead always seemed to be next-level, but they were a five-piece with guitars, drums, amps, pedals, pianos, keyboards, laptops, glockenspiels and more; and their guitarist Jonny Greenwood was always carting around large, first-generation synthesizers (like that Ondes Martenot).







I think U2 were after portability when they made All That You Can't Leave Behind. The title implied that a more stripped-down approach focusing on songs and what The Edge called the "primary colors of rock: bass, drums and guitar," would lead them to the Zeitgeist fountain and free them from the yoke of electronics and barn-sized lemons in the process. (For emphasis, the cover showed them in an airport terminal with only their carry-on luggage.) They ended up making over-produced bombast anyway, bloated from cheese, but their hearts were in the right place I suppose.



I envied the comparitive leanness of solo artists like Bjork or Jamie Lidell, who needed nothing more for public performance than amplification, some beats, and their own voice. This seemed like the right path to be on.





They made rock bands seem relatively cumbersome; to say nothing of the ridiculous amount of interpersonal drama that is always bogging down group efforts. (It's funny because now I can see that it was folk music all along, one man and a guitar, that was the most portable music of all, and in its way the most immediate and lightweight.)

So eventually, after coming to my realization through pure science, it came time to apply it. I was making music at the time with my friend, the mildly whacky and hotly saucy Rodrigo Palma.



Ideas were batted around, such as totally avoiding pre-existing music venues by bringing our own P.A. wherever we wanted, taking it straight to the people. It could be a mall parking lot; a KFC; it didn’t matter. We were going to be the world’s first portable band. (Actually, it wasn’t a totally new idea. We kind of stole it from the Jamaicans, who created the sound system culture years ago where DJs own their own giant stacks of speakers and bring the party wherever they go by setting up on the dirt lot of their choosing. Everybody stole from the Jamiacans, why shouldn't we?)





Ours was a minimalist ensemble: two assholes, two synths, a guitar, and all the damage-tweaked sounds we could fit onto a CDR. It wasn’t going over well in cavernous venues like the Magic Stick, so taking it street-side seemed like the perfect approach. But it never happened. I don’t remember if we chickened out or if… wait, yeah, I think we just chickened out. Anyway, the world probably wasn’t ready for us and our shocking and confrontational portability.

Flash forward a few years and I’m still listening to rock bands. Not many, but the few I can find that justify the genre’s instrumental largesse. And today I would like to single out two bands working in the most portable palette possible: The White Stripes and Spoon.



It took me a while to come around to The White Stripes. The media over-saturation was out of control, especially in Detroit where, for a while, their image was as ubiquitous as Great Leader posters in regime states. Plus, there was a long stretch where there was just no place in my heart for rock’n’roll. I remember thinking about it philosophically: “Of what use is it to be ‘rocked?’ What is served, what end achieved, when one is ‘rocked?’” Maybe I was missing something in my diet, or my roommate was slipping estrogen into my cereal, I don’t know. But I no longer feel this way. I am open to being rocked. But I’m picky about who can rock me.

I like Jack White and his Robert Plant-meets-Shirley Temple singing style. And he’s not just a man of rock, but a man of ideas. There is a concept behind The White Stripes: that three is the strongest number–in this instance, voice, guitar, drums–and that the three strongest colors in the galaxy are red, white and black. These are minimalist concepts: if you stick to only the essential elements, you will not obscure their power. And indeed The White Stripes' sound is extremely dynamic and visceral, as much from what is left out as what is put in, and makes the case for White's theories overwhelmingly. White even named their second album De Stijl after a minimalist Dutch art movement. That might sound pretentious, but I think a little theorizing goes a long way toward warding off the evils of meat-headedness that have plagued rock since its beginning.

I’ve owned or borrowed all of The White Stripes albums over the years and always admired them, especially the singles, but this one really knocks me out. I'm asking myself, has he always been writing this good and I just didn’t notice, or is it simply that I am now, more than ever, ready to be rocked?

From their new album Icky Thump:

Catch Hell Blues

300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues




With Spoon, it’s always been about the minimalism. The portability of their rock comes from the economy in their arrangements. They start with the song, make sure the melodies have enough of a rhythmic hook, and then add ingredients from there on an as-need basis. If only an acoustic guitar and a hot-shit tambourine part will do, then that's all they put in. There’s usually a heavy backbeat, but not necessarily (which shows an even more unbelievable amount of restraint considering drummer Jim Eno is one of the most creative rock drummers of all time and the only person I can think of doing anything new with the form).

The Ghost of You Lingers [From Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga]

Small Stakes [From Kill The Moonlight]


Now, if I could only learn to write minimalist blogs.

Feedback

"Death is the road to awe." – The Fountain

If you don't know what causes microphones to feed back (that lacerating squeal), I can explain it in a few sentences: the mic captures sounds and turns them into an electric signal that it sends to an amplifier; the amplifier takes that signal, boosts it, and pushes it out speakers so everybody can hear it. The result of this subtle sorcery is a new sound that's louder than what went in. That is the essence of amplification. Unfortunately, if the microphone is in the wrong place, like in the path of the speakers, it catches that new, amplified sound and sends it right back through the cheese grater only to come out even louder than before, and then catches it, and then amplifies it... on and on, in an ever-loudening cycle. This loop is referred to as feedback and it happens fast, like a matter of seconds.

For years the concepts of feedback and reincarnation have been joined in my mind but I couldn't say why, until recently. I've been absorbing the book Living, Dreaming, Dying in which Rob Nairn, a devout Buddhist with an illuminating perspective, breaks down the impenetrable and fantastical Tibetan Book of the Dead into a common-sensical manual for dreaming as preparation for death. The core idea of Buddhism is the fleeting nature of the self, which Nairn compares to a mist over water. This is how I've always seen it only maybe a little darker and more destructive, like a tornado, whipped up out of nothing, making a powerful and chaotic case for its own existence. As this tornado of self careens along, crushing a path of rebirth, it's bound to meet with enough resistance that it can't go on any longer pretending to be something and, after losing force, unravels. The feedback in this, the loop of ever-increasing intensity, comes from the extra weight we give to things by allowing them to persist–the reoccurring themes of ignorance which we pull with us from life to life. All ideas about transcendence are variations on this idea; of one piece of continuity threading through separate cloths and gaining importance from repetition alone. U2 made a career out of it. They discovered that if you plunk the same note repeatedly and change the chords underneath it (three chords is usually enough), you have a musical metaphor for transcendence. And we all get goosebumps.

In The Fountain, Hugh Jackman plays three versions of the same soul. The first is Tomas, a 16th century conquistador in love with Queen Elizabeth, who is afraid she won't survive the Spanish Inquisition. She sends him on a mission to find the Tree of Life–hidden near a Mayan pyramid–and, with it, save the kingdom. His relentless loyalty to this quest, and stubborn refusal to accept any form of defeat, even eminent death, are his feedback, the themes he will carry with him for more than a thousand years of rebirth. Of these, we see Tommy, an oncologist trying to cure his wife's cancer through experimental research; and Tom, an astronaut hurtling alone through space in an invisible craft toward the golden nebula where he believes the soul of his dead wife can be reborn. The superficial differences between their times and circumstances create a relief against which we can see their fundamental sameness. It's not a story about eternal love as much as eternal persistence; a devotion to illusion so strong it distorts the truth and stunts acceptance.

There is another way the soul is like sound. There's never just one. The things we hear, like human voices or plucked guitar strings, begin as a single sound wave. But what reaches our ears is not pure and separate but a mixture of the original wave and a scattering of its reflections, called harmonics.

illustration "Pure Fractal Frame" by Cory Ench

The source sound is like a theme and the harmonics are its variations. We have the illusion of hearing one thing, but it's really many. In nature, sound is never alone.

The Fountain is a story of the harmonics of a man. His stories are just variations of the same plucked note refracted and warped into higher and lower pitches and scattered through time. As Tommy, the present-day doctor, he takes a fountain pen in a fit of sadness after losing his wedding ring and tattoos a band on his ring finger. By the time he is reborn as Tom the astronaut, the tattoos go all the way up his arm, like the life rings of a tree, marking all the incarnations, and their singular path of frustration, that stood between. The movie is full of this kind of visual rhyming. Every image mirrors another, reflecting in all directions through time.

In music, one of the results of feedback is distortion, which is a blurring of detail and a changing of the shape. I think there is a similar feedback effect that comes from the way we interact with culture; that is, our experience of it is so amplified it is indistinct and no longer dynamic. Think about the first time you listen to a piece of music that you will come to love. Your musical memory is like a fresh slab of vinyl without the grooves carved in. The etching happens later through repeated listens and at some point your memory of the music doubles, and even anticipates, the hearing process, to the point where you're projecting as much as you are taking in. You had a nice first experience. Then you wanted that experience again, but now you've put what that feeling was like into a drawer in your head and, when you come back to the music, you expect something from it; expect to know what drawer to find that feeling in. By doing this, when it does deliver it is now amplified by your anticipation of, and participation in, the act of listening. You get more of a good thing. But not really. When we come back to art this way, expecting to recreate a moment of feeling, we are likely to find it – because we are looking for it – but it's never really the same.

I've been thinking about the way I first saw The Fountain and how that context, or lack of it, prepared me to appreciate it in a whole new way. Like a lot of people my age, I've become some kind of half-assed expert on consuming culture. Because of my love of movies, I've developed a hyper-awareness of the industry that makes them. The internet and the DVD extra pushed this along. I don't just go to the movies, I check their composite scores on Metacritic first. I might look up the cast on IMDB. And I don't just know the names of movie stars, I know the people playing the small parts too. I know directors; producers; soundtrack composers. Even the occasional cinematographer. Yet somehow The Fountain slipped through my filter. It might be because I wasn't hot for writer/director Darren Aronofsky's previous two films Requiem for a Dream and Pi and so wasn't anticipating his next move the way I might one of my favorite directors like Richard Linklater or Noah Baumbach. But a little looking (on wikipedia, the secret weapon of a culture whore) reveals that it probably had more to do with the lack of promotion by the studio because The Fountain was a problem project which is lucky to have been released at all. Originally supposed to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, filming began in Australia in 2002 only to be scrapped halfway through preproduction when Pitt pulled out to do something else. Aronofsky revived the project, reconceptualizing it with a modified special effects approach at half the budget and new leading actors (Jackman and Rachel Weisz). While the finished film is clearly phenomenal, it's easy to see why the studio would have trouble marketing something so esoteric since the essence of movie promotion is the promise of something you've seen before (feedback).

So I went in blind, purely on the recommendation of a friend who thought I would like this new sci-fi film with a gritty, CGI-free aesthetic that reminded him of the first Star Wars films. The theater was completely empty, which turned out to be an ideal setting for a meditation on death. My friend had told me I would probably like the movie. He didn't tell me I would be rendered mute, or that I was about to see the first film that I would ever consider necessary. When I left, I drove around in my car for a while, not wanting to break the spell by going home. I thought about it intensely for days. I still think about it.

Why did I react so strongly? Going back and watching the DVD only made me appreciate it more, but in a totally different way–as much for its compression of content as its visceral spiritualism. And it also helps that The Fountain is pure eye candy and its beauty doesn't diminish with return. But while I'm positive that The Fountain will develop a cult following because of the power of its metaphysical themes and breathtaking art direction, I think the intensity of my response was based on something more fundamental: I saw this film outside of The System. The System is something I actually help create. It's the combination of marketing and media that I've customized to my tastes over time. It's the sites I use, the magazines I read, etc. I have similar systems for music; books; television. But seeing The Fountain was different. It was a system-free experience. And not only did I come to it culturally virginal, in a way it was made outside of the system. Or rather, it was made in spite of the system. One of those stubborn, career-injuring labor of loves that are only permitted to be by the sheer momentum of the creator's past successes. And it's easy to see why it faltered under Hollywood's nurturing. There is no marketing template for sci-fi buddhist meditations that lure audiences with brand-name actors and then confuse the shit out of them.

In a review of the film that is about to come out, I describe The Fountain as a demanding masterpiece of such singularity and compressed articulation it transcends the whims of popular culture and rises to the level of spiritual edification. And wrote that it will likely be to film what Siddhartha was to literature – the definitive western poetry for eastern mysticism. Once I began to think of The Fountain as a work of art without precedent, I started trying to come up with other examples that went even further, of art outside of culture. If The Fountain is a work with its own genre, it is still within the broader context of film and besides, it's based on ideas drawn from the religious systems of eastern mysticism, another context. But is anybody making art in a cultural vacuum? That is, outside of the confines of an industry? This brings up the question of what art is. My personal definition is: truth in expression. Does that kind of expression, in a cultural form, exist outside of industry? And by industry, I mean the gross growth of mass production, magazines, web sites, criticism and scholarship that eventually forms like an exoskeleton over all great forms of expression and choke the life out.

My generation has experienced the thrill of new forms plenty of times. I'm sure most people can remember the weirdness and urgency of the first time they saw reality television. It's since solidified into one of the most unexperimental formats of television around, with music and editing techniques that seem to come out of a rule book but, once, it was new. With the internet, we've seen several new opportunities for self-expression. A website used to be a functional thing until it became a great medium for declarations of style. Social networking sites like MySpace can be used expressively. I have a few friends (e.g., Trevor or John) whose pages look art-directed without being overcooked (proving once and for all that they are cooler than I will ever be).

In a blog last year, I described the manager of a local Baja Fresh (a Tex-Mex franchise restaurant whose burritos soothe my soul) as one of my favorite artists. I was probably reaching with that one, but what I was trying to say was that his kindness and professionalism were revelatory. They were something he created on a daily basis that I learned from and enjoyed. I also described a local guitar tech, Mike Koontz, as a great artist. Mike exudes a force field of benevolence. And though he does work with his hands and you could describe his extremely gifted craftsmanship as being artisanal, it was the calm and kindness he brings to his interactions with customers that I was referring to as great art. While I still believe that decency and goodness are forms of creativity and are the primacy of art, is there anything else outside of culture that is closer to what we traditionally think of as being art forms? Like an event or new media?

Well, there is Jim Denevan, a "45-year-old nomadic chef, sand artist, and founder of the culinary road show known as Outstanding in the Field," who was the subject of a feature in GQ Magazine's June edition. I'm quoting from Howie Kahn's piece:

Every summer, Denevan fires up his bus and travels the country, staging elaborate dinners on farms, in parks, and on beaches, from Alaska to New York City. His goal is to free us from the cult of celebrity chefs and the limits of the restaurant experience. Wearing red flip-flops, jeans, no shirt, and a blue baseball hat with SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME embroidered across the front, Denevan stops in a spot he has seemingly claimed from afar. "This is perfect," he says, and starts converting this stretch of dirt and grass into the setting for a carefully executed food-driven experience–his singular take on dinner.

Over the next half hour, Denevan hoists flattops, two at at time, over his head. Soon, several tables linked end to end parallel beds of emerging vegetation: Swiss chard, Bull's Blood beets, purple-crowned alliums. He removes chairs from a trailer and carries ten at a time, unfolds them, pops them into place. Volunteers drop tablecloths like parachutes and lay down silver- and stemware, paying close attention to the symmetry of their settings.

Initially, Denevan's Oustanding in the Field operation cooked for the paying public on California farms to showcase local farmers and their food. He put on three dinners in the summer of 1999, two in 2000, took the year off in 2001, came back with seven meals in 2002, and eight in 2003, when Denevan, the longtime chef at a popular Northern California restaurant called Gabriella Cafe, left the kitchen for good. In 2004, convinced of his company's reach, Denevan bought a streamlined 1953 bus for $7,000, hired a staff, and began touring North America. His troupe hosted weekly dinners throughout the summer and fall, and most of the time Denevan handed over the cooking duties to chefs of local renown (the thought being, local chefs would know better how to handle the local ingredients). "We had this idea from the beginning," says Denevan, "that the farmer should be the star, that the chef should be of secondary importance. It needed to be done. The chef was rising in stature as a culturally significant figure, and the farmer wasn't talked about. Maybe that happened because people didn't see farming as a creative pursuit. But I would argue that it is. Have you ever heard a farmer discuss his crops? Why he chooses to grow acidic peaches instead of white ones? Why one year he chooses to plant a special green Romans like to eat with anchovies? All these choices are stories created by passion, and story is the substance of food."

I was excited by the Denevan story because, beyond Outstanding in the Field being such a great idea, it seems like a genuinely new form–an original, communal event–a concept for expression pulled seemingly out of thin air. But this isn't the first example of playing with new forms for Denevan. Before he created Outstanding in the Field, he was also known for his sand art, and the story behind how he began drawing on beaches is just as interesting. He was a model in the mid '80s, living in Milan and working for a prominent talent agency:

While his peers snorted lines, he cultivated an appreciation for olive oils and herbs, focaccia, pizzas topped with raw egg. "I was involved in a pretty superficial pursuit," he says, "but I found meaning on my plate." In 1986 he would return to California and take a job in Capitola as a cook at a good Italian restaurant with an obsessively authentic menu. In less than a year, Denevan, the autodidact, would be promoted to chef.

Restaurant work kept him happy until the mid-'90s, when his mother, a doctor of mathematics, fell ill with Alzheimer's. The disease crashed her brain and erased all the numbers. As her problem solving capacity diminished, her second-youngest son–Denevan–poured himself into a new pursuit: sand art. he left the restaurant, took to the beach, and found himself consumed by shapes. "My mom was losing her mind, and I was pretty much losing mine, too," says Denevan, who also knows of deep cerebral discord from growing up with three mentally ill brothers. "I had always been interested in creative activity, but watching my mother–who was very gifted–deteriorate really pushed me over the edge. I experienced so much stress that I couldn't endure the intensity of the kitchen, so I pretty much drew in the sand for a year." He worked at low tide with sticks and rakes, drawing for hours, making entire beaches with impermanent but perfect images: conjoined triangles, interlocking spirals, three-dimensional rectangles. They looked like hourglasses, abstracted clock hands, and coffins–until the tide rolled in and erased them. "People always ask how it feels to have them wash away," he says. "But who would want it to not wash away?"

I love the impermanence of Denevan's forms. The fact that they can't be reproduced and, by their very nature, resist culturalization.

It's impossible to separate Denevan the artist from Denevan the chef. His dinners, like his sand art, have evolved into grand, temporal compositions. They appear in a specific place for a short period of time. They happen and they vanish. "I like the idea of coming to a farm where there's no table," he says. "It's a patch of land that just happens not to have plants in it at the time. It could be zucchini in three weeks. Or a few weeks before, it could have been something else. But at the moment, there's room to put a table there. The whole field is a constantly changing composition. It's not just the table that's transitory."

The two typically dissimilar things–visual art and feeding people–began, for Denevan, to conceptually mirror each other eight years ago. By then he was into his seventh year at Gabriella Cafe, but having taken time off to draw in the sand, he realized that restaurant life no longer suited him. The gig started to feel stale, punishing in its monotony. "The real creativity there was when I first started," he says. "Gabriella was packed every night for years, but creativity waned once the customers became consistent and dependent. People expected all the same things. They considered them vital."

Denevan had little interest in repeating himself, so he created Outstanding in the Field. "I felt like I was escaping," he says, "crossing a boundary, discovering the world." From the onset, he established lofty goals. "I wanted to do something culturally significant, something needed. I figured if we presented the model in a thoughtful way, people would copy it without thinking where it came from. They'd think: This is what people do. They go to the farm. They learn about it and have an interesting, meaningful, and delicious experience. Eventually, they won't know who Jim Denevan is and what Outstanding in the Field is, and they won't need to." HIs method, however, was entirely down-to-earth: He connected eaters with food producers. He served dinner at its source. He brought taables to places you only dreamed there were tables: an Alaskan farm, an urban garden in Manhattan, the belly of an illegally excavated California sea cave. Denevan even enlisted John Sundstrom of Seattle's Lark restaurant to push a barbecue through a marsh at dawn in preparation for an evening of spot prawns and roasted pork on the very same isthmus where Denevan would himself return a year later to draw 320 perfect circles in the sand.

Though Denevan imagines his work as being a new form that can be copied and absorbed into culture, he doesn't envision the work being attached to a particular person, least of all himself. The very transience of this is more likely to make copying Denevan an antidote to culture than anything else. It would be resistant to the feedback effect smearing our appreciation of culture in the first place; the same effect that caused Denevan's customers at the restaurant to come back wanting the same meals he had already made, not new creations.

I was at a show at the Detroit Art Space before it closed (r.i.p.) and had arrived in the middle of one of the opening acts, Prurient. I walked in to find that some guy (Dominick Furnow) had assembled a wall of speakers about eight feet tall on the floor in front of the stage. He was shirtless and had a microphone plugged into the stack, which, naturally, started to feed back. In the most enraged performance I have ever seen, he stumbled around in front of the speakers as if drunk on the noise and alternated between screaming into the mic and pointing it back at the stack until the feedback squeal was unbearable for the rest of us. It was completely antagonistic and you could see him get worked up into a confrontational state to the point where, when one of the workers at the space bumped him trying to pass by, Furnow took a blind swing. He did this for about ten minutes and it was such a violent and exhausting thing to see that I actually had the sense I was going to get hurt by watching it. He did in ten minutes what it takes three good hardcore bands to do in an entire night–a projection of anger compressed like performance concentrate. The utility of it, the sheer immediacy of it, made actual songs seem drawn out and redundant in comparison. At the time I didn't know what more to think; I only knew how I felt. I tried telling the promoter how blown away I was but he seemed unfazed and mentioned that he had seen Furnow perform before. He wasn't being critical. For him, the fact that he had absorbed the experience once and already contextualized it had tamed the beast of experience. He knew what drawer to find that feeling, while I'm standing there like, what the fuck did I just see!




Looking back, I don't know if this was the Furnow's intention but he could have been making a statement about the distorted effects of cultural feedback. About how too much culture robs us of culture in the end. If he was, the fact that he skipped the stage, the expected location for musical performance, was a great place to start. That his entire show consisted of wrestling with feedback, and nothing else, said the rest.

Louis Kahn

This is new to me.

Louis Kahn was an American architect born in 1902 that died, bankrupt and without identification (he had defaced his passport for unknown reasons), in New York's Pennsylvania Station in 1974. He had just returned from India where he was working on the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It took three days to identify his body.

He had families with three different women. His "bastard" son Nathaniel Kahn made an oscar-nominated documentary about him called My Architect: A Son's Journey. (Louis died when Nathaniel was nine and Nathaniel wasn't even mentioned in the obituary). The movie is pitiful and gorgeous. I say pitiful because Nathaniel, this poor man seeming very much a child throughout, so desperately wants to find some connection to his absentee father by making the film that he crams himself into awkward situations in the process. I've never seen a documentary that was so personal. I say gorgeous because the act of this–the vulnerability of it–is sincere and pathetic in a way that's endearing.

It's strange because in almost every interview with Kahn's past associates you get some reference to what an asshole he was. How they all knew he was hurting his families and how he exploited his employees' time and energy with little regard for their considerations. And yet, some of these same people break down weeping when talking about Kahn. It's never really clear what the nature of his special charisma was, what it was he brought to these people that inspired so much dedication; it's only referred to indirectly, implied through the evidence of the power of his memory in others. The most amazing moment to me was near the end where this guy in India is trying to describe his feelings about the Bangladesh National Assembly building and what a labor of love it was to the people of India, how Kahn had bestowed this amazing gift on India, and he starts crying. Another Indian man interviewed thought Kahn was a Yogi, that his understanding of spacial relationships and the spiritual nature of man were so advanced that he had transcended his humanity in a way; which he suggests is possibly a clue to understanding his cruelty-by-indifference. That sounds fishy and yet, the man saying it seems to really believe it. And his explanations are articulate and intriguing.

Kahn's style is an idea about beauty (though some of his buildings shown in the movie are fairly ugly). His artistic epiphany about what he wanted to do with architecture (which didn't come until he was nearly 50!) hapened while visiting some European ruins (in Italy, I think). What he came away with was a bulky, brutal style that was intended to look like futuristic ruins. That is, both ancient and prescient. When I look at it, it takes me out of time for that reason. This has spiritual implications for me. The rejection of time is as good a place as any to start when rejecting the material. But he goes beyond this, imagining what it would be like to create without physical restraints. The result is visual hypocrisy. There are arbitrary shapes cut into large buildings, making them look like massive toddler crafts. They were surely the result of intense logistic solutions and effort, and yet the shapes are so simple and haphazardly placed they look like a child cut them in construction paper on a whim. The effortlessness of that, that whim-like quality–as if the act of creation could be as simple as saying "I'll just scissor out a half moon from this giant stone edifice"–is the art of disembodiment. It's also the fingerprint of a complicated intelligence that is still childish.

Tyger

Every year in Brazil, the educational wing of the British Council there (its sexy name is Cultura Inglesa) has a festival and funds a few art projects for it. The only criteria is that the works reference British culture. The film short TYGER, one of those chosen in 2006, is based on the similarly named poem "The Tyger" by William Blake. It is flat-out incredible. It gave me nightmares and boners.

Directed by Guilherme Marcondes (seriuosly, the Latinos have to be stopped), TYGER wasn't designed as a direct interpretation of the poem per se, but if you watch the film you should also read the poem because the two works really enhance the effect of each other.

According to a short and brain-tantalizing interpretation posted online by Ed Friedlander (who clearly knows his Blake), the poem's author had a personal myth about creation that many of his works reference. This myth is essentially a tweaked, happier version of Gnosticism–the creepy belief that the world we know was created but is a mistaken, or imperfect, creation. [Gnosticism actually overlapped and competed with Christianity in the first century only to lose out because of inferior marketing. It still has fans; me for instance.] Friedlander points out that "The Tyger" works on two levels–as a continuation of the Blake myth and its archetypes, and as a meditation on the cold, blind heart of the natural world, which is beyond good and evil. Both the poem and the film illustrate the way the amoral power of the tiger, like nature itself, can still be beautiful, which poses a sort of problem for some. Notice that Blake doesn't even front an answer and the poem finishes open-ended. (My kind of guy.) One thing Friedlander doesn't address, but I think is worth mentioning, is the way the line "When the stars threw down their spears" resembles Biblical prophesy and the eerie way its authors used pre-technological language to describe the way war would look two thousand years later. The film really brings the dystopian futurism of this line to life.

THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)

By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

1794

I Love Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is someone you should read before you die. To be reminded you are alive. He writes beyond writing, from the source of humor and romance. I won't even try to describe it. Try this short story, which is like a sampler of his delicacies. If you like it, try one of his novels like "Love in the Time of Cholera" or "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to see what he can do with that style stretched into longer form.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings