The Music Theory part one: The Music of Failure (again). Prelude.

What I was trying to get around to in the entry about my extremely abbreviated brush with music theory in college was that my relative ignorance about music in the formal sense remains something of a thorn in my side, intellectually.  There are lots more topics like this in my repertoire: though I performed well in academia and am generally recognized to be a smartypants, I am at heart an unfocused, eclectic taster of information and my internal encyclopedia is full of holes, most of which I am finally having to acknowledge that I will never fill or even hopelessly poke at much.

Another arena of my relative ignorance with respect to music is in the area of the more revered (at least by aesthetes, academics and other assorted longhairs) genres of music - mainly classical and jazz, I suppose.  It’s not purely an influence to get with the orthodox culture that I find disappointing in this deficiency: I’ve genuinely liked the few pieces of these genres I’ve come upon, even own a paltry few representatives.  As topics, though, they seem so big - especially classical - I wouldn’t know where to start.

This would hit me from time to time whenever I read Bill Holm’s books because his stuff is full of references to the classical music that he played and loved, and he could surely make you feel that the deficiency in your knowledge of these works was a critical, possibly fatal one.  Recently, when I signed up for a subscription to eMusic - the independent-label-only version of iTunes that was making a credible go of selling digital music downloads many years in advance of the rest of the pack - I thought that I might take advantage of their not inconsiderable classical catalog to rectify, at least a little, this deficiency.  But still, the problem: where to start?  The two ideas bumped into each other and I had a thought - I could reread my Bill Holm collection, which I’d been meaning to do anyway, and whenever he referenced a particular piece, I would see if it was available on eMusic and if so I would download it.

A neat idea I didn’t do anything with for a couple of years, that came back to me with Bill’s unexpected death.

I went to the bookshelf with a mind to work through them chronologically and was faced with a decision: The Music of Failure and Boxelder Bug Variations both list a publication date of 1985.  I’m drawn to the former, though, it’s something of an enigma in my collection: I can’t figure out where I bought it.  It looks to be of the original Plains Press printing, but the sticker I peeled off it after all these years suggests it was stocked in 1996, and the condition of the binding does allow for the possibility of it suffering 11 years of benign neglect.  I know I read the book in college, perhaps even high school - that must have been my father’s copy.  What bookshop did I spot this time traveler in?  Most of my collection were gifted to me by Holm himself, noted by his cheerful inscriptions but this one I know I bought for myself, apparently at the original cover price of $6.95.

The picture on the back is a younger man than I ever knew - probably the year it was published, he would have been around 42,  just a few years older than I am now.  I get a shiver - it seems forever ago, I was not yet in high school, my brother just graduating, my sister in her first year of college.  And this young fellow on the back cover, short hair and beard still mostly free from gray and doubtless so red you can almost see color in the black and white photo, has lived almost two thirds of the life he’ll get, and he has just published his first book, with some podunk university press.  He’ll publish seven more, mostly with the more classy but still very Midwestern Milkweed Editions, and a handful of odd chapbooks.  He will teach in China twice, travel the world; play the piano, sing and recite poetry to millions of listeners on the radio, and half expatriate to Iceland.  Without cracking the book there was a lesson in it for me already, at a time when I had begun to feel that perhaps I had missed the window to yet embark on the road less traveled.  With which thought I turned the cover probably for the first time in a decade, and began to read.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 14, 2009 at 1:55 AM

One more time

The other day I broke my self-imposed rule to not be drunk (it seems to have settled at a 3 drink maximum) for the first time this year: on the average scale of things, not a bad accomplishment, but I am merciless as regards my self-imposed restrictions, I am not impressed.  For example, I am, at the moment, 4 days behind on the song of the day project version 2: which is to say, I’m supposed to have written 1,461 songs for this project, but in fact as of this writing I have written only 1,457.  I agonize over this shit.  I’ve actually definitely got bigger fish to fry which is probably a significant part of the whole nonsense.  Nothing like a specific, nonsensical, extremely rigid goal to distract you from the fact that the whole wide world is Crazy Town.

Anyway, tonight I broke my alcohol minimum, by one drink, purposely, consciously, deliberately.  My lapse of the other day was not conscious, I didn’t even think about it, I just poured another and another, you know, and at some point the next drink was being poured by the last drink, if you catch my meaning.  Good and glowing, I wrote a little homily I was scheduled to deliver on Good Friday, about the problem of pain and evil.  This is a little embarrassing but then at best one person who actually heard the thing will read this (probably not even that, I get the impression that nobody is really reading this) and I can trust her discretion, right?  You?  Anyway.  It turned out okay, I thought.  And the next day came with its predictable results.  Ugh.
Anyway.  Tonight I broke my drink limit again, consciously, intentionally, by one: I’m a lightweight, after 4 months, I feel a little loopy.  But it will pass.  I actually don’t have any good reason for writing about it.  Such is the nature of intoxication, which word means, by the way, “the ingestion of poison.”  Take care y’all.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 30, 2009 at 11:00 PM

Chorus

A little behind on the songs of the days.  What has been waiting to get born, and is now in progress (as I work to evict my backlog) is a new series, the first in a fair while (I guess I sort of was writing a series for the second RPM project, only a handful of which made it to the recording, loosely entitled The Bootstrap Gospel).  The first long one in a good long while, anyway, maybe the longest since I wrote a series based on 101 Zen Koans from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (eventually, I’ll get to this in the archive postings).  The series is based on The KLF’s book The Manual, specifically its section on “The Golden Rules” of writing a number-one pop song.  The bottom line is that the song is centered on The Chorus, a phenomenon that is virtually absent from my songs to date.  My goal is to write a hundred songs to their “Golden Rule” formula.  Onward and Upward.

(This entry should be replete with links, but I am lazy, or at least occupied, so it has none.  Perhaps I’ll add them posthumously, so to speak…)

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com May 1, 2009 at 1:35 AM

Poison Garden

A corner of my basement is given over to my bizarre minutiae, random objects of dubious use, which I sometimes sift through a corner of in a particular frame of mind.  Some days ago I came across a bunch of weird old random seeds I’d picked up here and there, some quite old, indifferently stored and thus probably beyond viability.  We had starts for the garden going anyway so I made up a few seedling pots and sewed some tobacco (nicotiana tabacum, nicotiana rustica) and treated some datura stramonium for germination.  The latter, moonflower (or jimson weed or a number of other things)  I have never been particularly interested in as an entheogen (in fact I’ve all but lost my interest in entheogenic plants and fungi, too busy, no room in life for altered states) – it registers way too far along the poison scale.  But it has interesting flowers, and is night-pollinated by moths, which is neat.

Tobacco on the other hand is not just odd but questionable for me to be planting, being the preferred delivery vehicle for the only drug I’ve ever had a frank addiction to.  Another classic of the poison garden in magical herbalism, my own problems with it (now in year 10 or so of a mostly successful remission) having been overwhelmingly transacted via daily rations in little cardboard boxes.  Just what was going on in my mind there?  Not a lot, really.  It seems like it ought to mean something but nothing comes to mind.

None of the seeds sprout.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com May 7, 2009 at 1:01 AM

Chorus Blues

(A housekeeping aside, apparently the comment filters on this thing got a little more stringent a few weeks ago, I just discovered I had a half dozen comments sitting in the moderation queue that I almost never look at and almost never needed to before.  So I’m not, you know, purposely out to silence anyone’s voice.  One stranger who commented shut down the personal blog they linked from in the meantime!  Bad vuggum).

Whatever this is supposed to be it’s not supposed to be the subsite for mulling over the ongoing struggle of the Song of the Day (it’s weird, there’s little direct connection, beyond the alleged weekly status report on how well I’m keeping up,  and the songs I’m posting on that blog, which were written almost exactly ten years ago now.  But somehow when the current writing is afflicting me it ends up shaking through to the blog too, and I stop posting).

It isn’t that I’m not keeping up with the songs, despite a lapse or two I’m keeping up fine.  The writing isn’t exactly harder than its ever been.  It’s the new project I started, a hundred song series.

There isn’t much chance of getting around the fact that one of the central questions (if not the central question) of the ongoing writing is why I continue to lash myself to write lyrics day in day out when the pleasure I take in it is minimal, when (more relevant than anything) I have all but given up any dream of ever doing anything significant with music.  In fact something other than that even, I have given up any belief in a future for my music, which exists however I might belittle and disdain it, and yet dreams persist.  Dreams I don’t believe in, dreams I pity and despise.  Must I really toil in my inadequacy, just to dish thin gruel for disowned dreams?

I was never much of a consumer of hits and I certainly never fancied myself as a producer of them, even in the most abstract perspective of potential. But since I set myself to this task of producing something that has been virtually absent from my output to date, an almost perfectly consistent no-show for thousands of songs, the Chorus, I find myself poring over this shit, trying to understand, what it is, what takes a phrase of flawless banality, of simplified thought crystallized into near semantic emptiness, and transforms it into a perfect memetic weapon, an earworm.

We can work it out, I’m picking up good vibrations, I can’t see me loving nobody but you, come on baby light my fire, let the sunshine in, ah sugar ah honey honey, no sugar tonight in my coffee, Mama told me not to come, ain’t no mountain high enough, like the tears of a clown when there’s no one around, you keep me searching for a heart of gold,  I’m on top of the world looking down on creation, I’m a joker I’m a smoker I’m a midnight toker, love will keep us together, see that girl watch that scene digging the dancing queen, you light up my life, I will survive, we don’t need no education, it’s still rock and roll to me, your kiss is on my list, don’t you want me, life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone, every breath you take every move you make, you might as well jump, take a look at me now, what’s love got to do with it, shout shout let it all out, I just want your extra time and your kiss, the greatest love of all is happening to me, I can live with or without you, I think we’re alone now, never gonna give you up, don’t worry be happy, every rose has its thorn, if you don’t know me by now, nothing compares to you.

Da do ron ron ron, da do ron ron.

“You were wrong when you said

Everything’s gonna be alright

You were wrong when you said

Everything’s gonna be alright
You were right when you said

All that glitters isn’t gold

You were right when you said

All we are is dust in the wind

You were right when you said

We are all just bricks in the wall

And when you said manic depression’s a frustrating mess
You were wrong when you said

Everything’s gonna be alright

You were wrong when you said

Everything’s gonna be alright
You were right when you said

You can’t always get what you want

You were right when you said

It’s a hard rain’s gonna fall

You were right when you said

We’re still running against the wind

And life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone

You were right when you said

This is the end”

Built to Spill, “You Were Right”.

So it goes.  I have to write a song.



originally posted at spiritofsalt.com May 17, 2009 at 12:42 AM

Web

She never moved again.  Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died.  The Fair Grounds were soon deserted.  The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash.  Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all.  No one was with her when she died.

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Tough stuff, delivered in White’s typically spare, undramatic Manual of Style prose.  I dare say Jonah accepted it with greater equanimity than I did when I read it aloud to him recently; I would guess it had been at least 25 years since I’d read it to myself.  I think my mother probably read it to me the first time I heard it, but I don’t remember if I cried when Charlotte died. I wouldn’t be surprised.  I was a very soft-hearted child and I cried easily, a source of consternation in my early school days, something that turned on its head later, when at its extent I went a good few years without shedding a single tear in sadness.  Fatherhood has returned me to some of my teary nature, and I struggled through that passage as I read it aloud, my voice grown rough, the words swimming a little on the page.

For a while Jonah had many questions about death, which have quieted for the moment.  It is a balancing act.  I couldn’t see my way to tell him anything but the bottom truth: every living thing dies.  No exceptions.  When he asks if I will die, if he will die, I equivocate, and he sees that.  Periods of time are too abstract for him; my assurances (themselves lies, at least potentially) that I and his mother will not die for a very long time, that he will not die for an even longer time, do not carry the certainty of the absolute of death.  Eternity, my own complicated relationship with the Christian eschaton, more abstract and stranger still, though I have made hesitant forays into it with him.  Tough stuff.  I admire E. B. White, for not shirking the truth.  It reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s nod to White in his extraordinary introduction to his early book of short stories, Happy to Be Here, which alerted me in my teens to pay attention to the greater depth of the author of that great trilogy of enigmatic animal dramas of my childhood.

-=-

It takes a surprisingly long time, in my rereading of Bill Holm’s The Music of Failure, to come upon my goal of the mention of a specific classical composition.  What should come as no surprise, but catches me unsuspecting anyway, is the almost immediate presence of death in the essays.  No, it shouldn’t be surprising, from an author who published a book of poetry called The Dead Get By with Everything.

We humans here have a horror of death in houses, and would not dream of going to a Lutheran church where grandmother is buried under the pew to keep you warm and alert during slow passages in the sermon when the building fund comes up.  We hide hospitals and graveyards, sanitize the interiors of churches with cheerful posters announcing that we are God’s people and he loves us lots. These posters do not mention some of the surprises God has in store for us.  I think we want a world without the dead in it, so that it can be more easily bought, sold, and used up. Our casual attitude towards disappearing topsoil is difficult to reconcile with what we profess to believe. If we imagine the corpses of a thousand people we loved making a skin on that ground, we would tend it better.

The Music of Failure, “The Grand Tour,” part II.

I suppose I wasn’t surprised so much as struck.  Because, of course, now he is on the other side of all of that talk.  Dead, forever more gone from this world, getting by with everything, and still refusing to keep quiet about it.  As, I realize while I read these passages again, he damn well always knew he would be, by and by.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com May 29, 2009 at 6:17 PM

This noise

Ire grips as bad fortune dogs me on this inauspicious number of a day.  Three days behind on the song of the day, posting on the project one blog is predictably behind as well, and I haven’t been transcribing the old stuff out of the books so I’ve lost my backlog of material to post, which (product of some burst of energy perhaps brought on by early signs of spring) had carried the posting along for some months.

I’ve reached a point that while I don’t particularly care about the current output of the song of the day most of the time and actively hate it some of the time, but having recently tripped past 1,500 songs written within 1,500 consecutive day, I’m sufficiently (if momentarily) convinced of my own persistence that after goldbricking for a couple of days I want to catch up the backlog purely to avoid having to write any more songs at once.  So I grit my teeth and dash out a trio I charmingly title Screw that Noise I, II, and 3 (the breakdown of Roman enumeration is not some sort of clever device, just careless inconsistency). The genre could be termed Diatribes Against Putative Deity and a certain predictable phrase figures heavily in the choruses…  The less said about these songs the better.  The effort requires me to write “screw that noise” 33 times (well, one of those was actually a “screw this noise,” you gotta mix it up, keep people on their toes).

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jun 14, 2009 at 12:06 AM

Staying up way too late is a bad habit

I stay up way too late at night, often.  This is a bad habit, it incapacitates me: the older I get, the less well I tolerate it.  Yet I persist.  The date stamp of this entry serves as proof.  One of the many lessons of becoming a father has been the sharp observation of the impact of insufficient sleep.  For as long as I can remember (the era of pre-fatherhood having become a hazy recollection, possibly a myth I picked up in some strange dream or fantasy) managing my son’s sleeping has been a daily, serious endeavor.  Good sleep, good naps equals a happier, calmer, better behaved child.  I should learn from this but the lesson does not quite take.  Here are a few lessons of intolerably late nights.

1. If you stay up late enough, noises (mostly) stop.

Living in the city is noisy.  Cars, people, parties, airplanes, they go on all the time.  Of course, the world is a ball and it is always daytime somewhere, but in the local atmosphere if you stay up seriously late the noises almost stop – there is a little engine noise, trucks and cars somewhere out there, but mostly, it becomes as truly quiet as the city ever is.  If I ever succeed in giving up this last, most obstinate bad habit, that is something I will truly miss: being outside, no barrier or media between me and the air, and yet truly quiet.  A legacy, maybe, of my childhood as a country boy: long ago and far away and lost seemingly forever, a time when quiet was a relatively ready commodity, wander into the little woods by my parents house, nothing but bugs, birds, perhaps a distant combine.  This contrast is particularly apparent on the fourth of July: sometime after two, for a blessed interval, you can finally get a few minutes free from the snap crackle and pop of fireworks, the meaningless noise of supposed independence.

2. If you stay up even later, noise comes back

Birds.  Birds are the masters of early risers, there is not even a distant second.  Douglas Adams wrote:

He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.  Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learned birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.

I miss living in a universe that contains an alive Douglas Adams a million times more than I miss living in a universe that contains an alive Michael Jackson.

As soon as the slightest glimmer of daylight lurks at the lowest limit of the horizon birds start it up, saying stuff like “chereee chirup chirup twee chirup chirup” and “fwiip chee tee chee.”  As well, somewhere between three and four in the ante meridiem, the odd fireworks boom returns.  Who in the hell feels the sudden, inexplicable need to create a few random explosions at three thirty something ayem?  Just another mystery of the city I will never fully comprehend.

3. At times, time loses it usual meanings.

The boring pat explanation I’d probably give for my persistent occasional forging into the wee hours is that it is the only time left me when there are no tasks, no responsibilities, no demands.  I am just me.  No one needs to be fed, helped, taught, entertained, served.  No work must be done in these small hours.  Doesn’t explain my persisting in this habit in days of yore (storied, possibly mythical, remembered but not fully believed in any more) when there was no partner, lover, job, child…  Perhaps though I will always crave these hours where time is no longer tied to some schedule, some imposition I have apparently willingly adopted, the hours graced with blankness and nonentity by virtue of being given to that king of nonentity, sleep.  Tomorrow (today) will be an ordeal, I will curse the fool who squandered hours meant for sleeping on weird meanderings through halls of crystal, numinous thought.  But here, now, in the not day not night, in the endless now, I reign king of the hour that stretches, a kingdom of memory and desire, conscious but not constructed, hoping to attain a wiser pattern past some inadequate sop of sleep, transcendent, alive, present, awake.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jul 5, 2009 at 5:39 AM

I can’t stop writing up dreams

I dream I am killed in World War II.  Or do I?  What I remember, vividly, is dreaming that I am in a bar, relating to someone the story of how I was killed in World War II, and in that dream I have a vivid recollection of the event.  I am proud of my war story in the dream, my patriotic death.  I am mostly oblivious to the most glaring problem in my retelling of this tale, even after setting aside the fact that World War II ended 26 years before I was born – though some inkling scratches at the back of my mind the whole time.  My recollection, of dying, in the dream is so vivid.  Our plane is pierced repeatedly by big ship-mounted guns almost as soon as we lift off the deck of the carrier.  I see everything from my improbable ball turret on top of the right wing, a thing I’m quite sure never existed, and doesn’t the rest of the plane look a little like that Nazi prototype stealth jet that made the rounds on the internet a little while ago?  The plane breaking up, massive flaming debris, the world whirling, everywhere ships, planes, explosions, smoke.  The ocean rising immensely to slap me into oblivion.

When I wake  it is still so vivid that a little part of me almost believes it.  Somehow… But no, I don’t need to do math or ponder my pathetic uncertainty as to the exact date of the end of the war (’45 or ‘46 I guess: it could be worse) – I know my parents were basically my son’s age when the war ended.  My mother’s father was in the Navy.  Didn’t happen.  But I wonder, did I dream the death, and then dream of telling its story?  Or did the death memory come packaged with the dream, did it never occur as a standalone event?  Does it matter?  Is a dream memory within a dream any less (or more) of a dream than a dream event?  Does everyone dream these weird nested paradoxes and recursions?  I have periodically experienced such distortions in dreams for as long as I can remember.  I remember as a child waking up in San Diego to the smell of pancakes cooking, a treat, then later sitting staring into an empty fireplace thinking that you couldn’t tell when you were dreaming that you were dreaming, so any number of days I thought I remembered might be dreams.  Then I woke up, another morning.  The same morning?  No pancakes.  Could this recollection be real? I would have been between four and five, again my son’s age now.  It’s entirely possible I dreamed the whole thing.  Though I couldn’t begin to guess when, or where.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jul 10, 2009 at 3:05 PM

Old Habits

A long time ago I was talking to someone I haven’t seen in quite a long time, who has, from my perspective, vanished from the face of the earth.  For a while there were slight and attenuated whispers, rumors – nothing good.  Then nothing at all.  Anyway, I don’t recall what we were speaking of, but I said, I suppose of some quotidian problem I was failing to solve, “Old habits die hard,” and this person immediately shot back at me,

“Dreams die harder.”  And so they do.  So they do.

The date I set to get back into things here came and went and it wasn’t the only failure of intent the last few weeks saw.  I’d meant to make note on the 25th of the year anniversary of Randy Pausch’s death, and say something about the “Last Lecture,” but.  Yes, but, but, but, ah, I wasn’t feeling the theme of childhood dreams when the time came.  The lecture itself is well worth the the hour and change it will cost you to watch it and speaks for itself.  Certainly it got done to death (if you’ll pardon the expression) when it was more timely and the rest, as the man put it, is silence.

I wrote elsewhere that I was “hair’s breadth from throwing in the towel on the lot of it” – the writing, the projects, the songs, to hell with it, chuck it in, shelve it, write a little cryptic coda and vanish, vanish, vanish from this imaginary world, this phantasm of the public.  Inwardly I suppose this is not really true at all, I just find it pleasant to think about it sometimes.  Peaceful, to just not try, anymore.  Even as I think it I prepare for continuation, dust off old neglected threads, hoist shovel and put my back to the backlogs.  Sometimes this persistence seems to me my triumph, my ultimate strategy, but at the moment it just feels like more of what I’d love to get away from.

But duty calls, so, later, I suppose.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Aug 5, 2009 at 6:09 PM

Hiatus

I’m taking a brief hiatus from writing.  Check back on July 25, 2009 for the next update.

It’s a little weird to post it since a week free of updates isn’t exactly anything special here, but I have something specific in mind for that which has become, at the moment, for me, a significant date.  More to come (”God Willing,” as a former professor of mine used to interject, in an arch and faintly mocking tone).

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jul 18, 2009 at 8:26 AM

Flying around somewhere

“I’m sorry,” Leon said.  “I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they’re flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it won’t be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and that’s the truth. If you believe in the truth – well, Phil, that’s the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.”

Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth

Please hold.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com September 1, 2009 at 2:11 AM