It’s laziness in part, although if the Ellen Fullman write up is any indication I’m feeling more comfortable with longer posts on ye ol’ tumblelog. This content may get ported over there to sit uncomfortably next to quotes from books I’m reading and videos of music I like. We shall see!

Wandered my way over to SFMOMA by way of an uncomfortable farmer’s market and then the Metreon. The Metreon is just so depressing. It’s huge and empty and anytime you even remotely looked towards a person working, there was a weird desperation. It’s an empty shell, bereft of stores and people. Empty, or almost empty malls, scratch that, dying malls, are very sad places.

The big exhibit at SFMOMA right now is Richard Avedon’s photography which I could probably care less about only if I didn’t know it existed. I was worried there might not be enough to keep me occupied but it turned out the Avedon wasn’t as large as I imagined. The old favorites were all there, the Still room, the large Rothko, the Cornell corner and Judd’s boxes. At the end of their selections from the permanent collection was a small exhibit called Not New Work curated by Vincent Fectreau. Nothing blew me away and in fact I disliked a few pieces, but the idea itself was wonderful and the selection overall left me smiling. Fectreau picked 20 rarely seen works from the permanent collection to show in two small rooms. There was a whimsy to the selection and to the two rooms generally, and a tendency towards concept over form. That said, some of the forms were stunning. Robert Overby’s “Hall Painting, first floor” was the standout for me; a false entrance to a non-existent hallway that was both beautiful and dirty, looking like rust and decay. Untitled (Torn Sky Painting) by Joe Goode deserves a mention in that I really expected as I rounded the corner to love this painting but it left me oddly cold. I have no idea why. Honestly though, the highlight was the exhibit “book”, a collection of postcards all depicting the weirdly imposing New by Christopher Wilmarth. New consists of two large rounds of wood connected by a thick plate of glass stood vertically. While the postcards are focused on New, because the main portion is glass you also end up seeing the majority of the exhibit. I have to believe that was the exact intent. I bought it and am trying to figure out the best way to show them on my walls.

I don’t have much to say about the second floor. There were some beautiful photographs, but I’m finding it harder and harder to talk about representative photography. I’ve decided to accept this as a fault of mine and revel in my enjoyment of abstract photography and confusion about representative photography. I noticed a couple Sugimoto’s from the theater series that I enjoyed but ended up walking through this floor quickly.

The highlight of this trip was an exhibit I didn’t know existed called “Focus on the Artists.” by Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and Clyfford Still. The idea was simple, an exhibit consisting of a room devoted to a single artist. The theme might as well have been “Artists BW really loved a whole lot”. Diebenkorn was the only artist I didn’t know beforehand. The two later abstractions were frankly gorgeous. Simple blocks of mostly muted, pastel colors brought to mind Rothko and Mondrian but his paintings resembled neither. The Guston’s were fun, but the focus was early and late, none of the middle abstractions which are my favorite. There’s something about his representational stuff that just WORKS for me. Part of it is the context of them, and knowing that back then his friends and supporters treated him like a turncoat because he dared to use representational imagery. The Stella and Kelly rooms were overwhelming in a good way. Especially the Kelly pieces. There’s a purity of both content and concept in his work that I find so invigorating. I love Still, and predictably loved his room and the Marden selections were interesting; but the Ryman room was a masterpiece. A series of meditations on whiteness, blankness, space, border and painting itself. Each piece was attatched to the wall differently, some in frames, some with bolts in the middle, some with tape; and the attachment became part of the artwork. This blurring of work vs. hanging equipment vs. wall on which it’s hung was interesting and I spent a long time in this room even with the guard who kept staring at me. I saw a couple pieces by Serra both here and in the sculpture garden. My favorite of the bunch was Gutter Corner Splash. 7 decayed wedges of lead in a row leading back towards a splash of lead on the wall, in, yes, the corner. The play between hard and soft, solid and liquid were interesting, especially when you consider that Serra’s most famous works tend to be about making these very solid hunks of metal look airy, weightless and precarious. It was unlike any Serra I’d seen before.

I had wanted to go back and see my favorites from the collection. Another few minutes in front of that Rothko, the way it pulls the eye in. The bench is placed perfectly so the only way to perceive it in one look is to let your eyes go soft, a little out of focus, bringing foreground and peripheral vision into the same plane. There’s both a stillness and a subtle movement in this particular Rothko, and that blue on the bottom, almost an Yves Klein blue, is luxurious. And another few minutes in the Still room, staring at the largest piece in the room, the striped one, with Untitled from 1960 with huge swaths of the canvas left untreated and smears of white and black with browns and rusts in between. It’s one of the least imposing of his works I think, and is becoming a favorite because of the space on the canvas.

But alas, I was tired and decided to head home after a quick trip to the shop. The SFMOMA shop is really large, surprisingly large, and while there’s alot of crap, there’s also a whole lot of really interesting bits of design. Was tempted by the whiskey stones and the ceramic “I am not a paper cup” cup but decided to go only with the series of postcards mentioned earlier and the first Christmas gift for someone dear to me.

When I first started painting I only painted abstractions. The first thing I learned? Well everything I’ve always said about how abstract expressionism isn’t just an anything goes, kids in the finger paint, affair, about how not every abstract painting is good, etc. is true. Firsthand I saw that when you’re doing the painting it’s pretty easy to tell when a painting is good or bad. And in my experience, it did have a lot to do with my intention and the level of attention I paid the painting, both while in the act and before, in the preparation. The best paintings were almost always the products of planning and some amount of thought. Not every painting I planned turned out well, but it was rare that unthinking painting would turn out well. It’s not that this was a revelation. I thought these things before I ever picked up a brush, but experiencing it first hand was a unique way of confirming things I’d been saying for years.

Meanwhile, I would try to occasionally paint recognizable objects but was never happy with the initial stabs and would end up scrapping each and every one. I’ve always looked forward to Brian Olewnick’s infrequent posts of his paintings and drawings. There’s something very simple and honest about his pieces. Last time I got my art stuff out I decided to use this set of pastels I found on the side of the road to imitate him. It’s the sincerest form of flattery, right? But it’s also that the very aspect of his paintings I love most, the simplicity of subject, means I had a chance of coming up with something I liked, regardless of whether it looked like Brian’s. I’d thought about still lifes, but for some reason it never occurred to me to just paint or draw a stone. There’s a rather confounding level of complexity possible when you really look at light and shadow and the texture of a stone, but as my drawings show it’s also possible to come up with something that is unequivocally a stone that is also simple, almost childlike.

Unlike the abstractions I’m not sure I’m gaining new insight with this focus on stones, except perhaps to say that even if I don’t really view what I’m doing as “creative” work, it is important to me. The act of making something, even just a painting or drawing, is satisfying in a way not many other things are.

The two I’ve photographed are located here. More will be added as they’re made/photographed.

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In a similar vein, I’ve finally pulled out the only instrument I have in my apartment, an old, out-of-tune autoharp. I made a few recordings of the simpler graphical scores from the Book of Musical Patterns by Robert Kirkpatrick. They were a few of the casualties of a hard drive wipe a couple months ago unfortunately. I’m looking to get back to those. For a long time getting paint out or getting an instrument out created this weird burden. I felt the pressure of creativity on my back and it made me unable to make anything. For me, separating the two ideas has made me look forward to recording and painting and writing. I’m not trying to say or do new, innovate ideas or things as much as I’m trying to understand the process going into the art I love. If I happen to make something new, or something worth sharing that’s a bonus. But really for me the focus has become a better understanding. So when I, say, write about philosophy and music I may be treading ground others have tread, or not treading it very well, but if it helps ME make sense of these two things that have become linked then it’s worth it.

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Slightly related to the above. I realized in re-reading my last post I spent far less time talking about the actual music than I meant to. Dinner called and I answered. I’m going try again in the next few weeks.

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Completely unrelated, I’m going to Rhode Island soon, and will do my level best to take pictures of things. Perhaps they will appear here.

Vegetables!

And dinner!

Which consisted of these tofu sticks I make with nutritional yeast, bragg’s and various spices on a salad mix from Happy Boy Farms, with boiled fingerling potatoes, boiled green beans and a mustard vinaigrette I sort of made up.

Off to eat.

I finished The Magicians and was left feeling not quite as rapturous as I’d hoped. It’s a good book, and an interesting book in all the ways I mentioned before, but I felt it lost steam a little ways after their graduation, and while I understand the push towards realism, I would have been just as happy if there had been a happier ending. Still, I don’t regret the 10 bucks I spent. I started what should be another quick read, but by next weekend will embark upon the grand adventure known as Gravity’s Rainbow.

I have two things to point out with a bit of commentary, and then I’m going to try and make sense of my Pisaro listening. I decided it’s a cop out to just point to Brian Olewnick’s post.

First, the pointing :

http://ihatemusic.noquam.com is a messageboard. I used to post more regularly, and now mostly read. They’ve put out compilations for a few years now and the fourth one has just been released. It even features a photograph I took in Santa Cruz on my very first roll of medium format film. It’s found here and comes highly recommended. I’m consistently amazed at the quality of these things. IHM is a pretty incredible place. There are things you could complain about, but it has attracted some really talented people. Some favorites from my one time through both “discs” are definitely the Douglas Holbrook piece, the Patrick Farmer piece and the Vanessa Rossetto piece. There were other really great ones but those popped out immediately.

Michael Pisaro wrote an inspiring and informative personal essay/history on Wandelweiser. It’s a part of Jon Abbey’s erstwords.blogspot.com project. The Pisaro piece is here and I cannot recommend it enough. I’m on my second time through.

Second, the attempt :

In my mind, my interest in the work of Graham Harman and an object-oriented philosophy/ontology and my interest in Pisaro and more widely the Wandelweiser world are intimately and inextricably linked. It’s a coincidence of timing more than anything if I’m honest, but I’d like to try and make a more concrete connection. Let’s see how it goes.

At it’s base, an object oriented philosophy (OOP) calls into question the common assumption in the history of philosophy that the human is the central concern. That’s not quite right though, because Harman and others aren’t just saying the human shouldn’t be the central concern, it’s a radical displacement of the human as the sole important actor. Metaphysics has been an attempt to make sense of the world as it appears to/for humans. In OOP the human’s role is as participant, one among many. It is accorded no special status, no status above a tree, car, book, etc. To steal from Ian Bogost, “…perhaps the simplest way to summarize Harman’s position is to cite the informal addition he offers to Lee Braver’s notions of realism: “The human/world relation is just a special case of the relation between any two entities whatsoever.” I’d clarify that “special” in this case just means a particular, not exceptional.” OOP says that an object is not just an object-for-a-human. An object is best considered based on any given object’s network of actions and interactions.

For someone whose interest in film, visual arts, music and poetry have tended towards works, artists and writers who prize the medium itself, the sounds themselves, etc. as primary; a philosophical approach like the above is immensely appealing. Combine an OOP with an object-oriented ontology like Levi Bryant’s, a flat ontology which says if a thing creates difference it IS, it exists and suddenly your ontology explodes and each sound is as real as each tree. Each silence is as real as each human. It’s a radical approach to ontology, as Levi has famously said it’s a slutty or promiscous ontology, one where anything which causes a difference is fair game for reality.

Okay, philosophy done. With all of this swimming around in my head I read the Pisaro piece linked above and have been listening to An Unrhymed Chord and Transparent City. The reason I find something like Transparent City so interesting and inspiring is, for me all contained above. His interaction with the environment, his additional sine tones of varying lengths, pitches and volumes feel like attempts to interact with the sounds he recorded on their own terms. Thinking of it as improvisation is wrong, I realize, but it gets at something important. A duo improvisation, whether there is listening involved or not, is about two people producing sound in response to the other. It is, in many cases, the interaction of two humans where the sound is the outcome. Transparent City is about interacting with the sound itself. I should say I don’t necessarily think Pisaro is alone on this front, just that Transparent City captured rather beautifully and succinctly a set of ideas I’d been mulling over.

In the same way, An Unrhymed Chord is about letting the sounds themselves interact. You could probably argue this is true of works where chance is involved, but from what I’ve read, and honestly from what I’ve heard in the recordings I think there’s a difference to An Unrhymed Chord that I find refreshing. The focus isn’t on a new interesting chance procedure at all. The instructions serve to set up an environment where the only actors are the sounds themselves. Greg Stuart’s comments on his realization illustrate my point nicely,

I had never heard a music quite like it: a continuously shifting harmonic mass where a sound could be clearly present, disappear, and reappear at a later point sounding markedly different. at other times the addition or subtraction of a sound would make a sound that had been present not disappear but bend slightly. all of this is accomplished by the inverse relationship between amplitude and duration, and like an elegant mathematical proof, it simply has to be this way in order to function.”

The real stroke of genius is that Pisaro has succeeded in letting the sounds themselves do the work, and it’s work that only the sounds themselves can do.

I think I might have come close to getting my thoughts on Pisaro across. I’ll have to go back and re-read the Olewnick post to see if I’ve just ended up writing his post again.

Now that I’ve spent a good long while writing and rewriting this I’m going to go make dinner and then try to paint.

I promised to talk about Schubert and Bruckner and am going to try to do so now. Richard Pinnell has been talking about this Schubert Quintet in C for awhile now and after his lengthy post detailing five different versions I grabbed the one he most enjoyed in a final rush of eMusic downloading. I always feel inadequate in the ways Richard mentions when talking about classical music. I went from pop-punk to hardcore to metal to indie rock to noise to wherever I am now, which I think actually just encompasses everything. As happy as I am with my personal musical history nothing really prepared me to talk intelligently about classical music. I avoided it for a long time n ot because I didn’t like it but because I was discouraged by a sense that I was missing important things. Oddly my interest in avant garde music, experimental music, eai, etc. all things which fostered a desire to hear sounds as themselves, to listen to the noises made without an attempt to fit them together in a predetermined way has helped me approach classical music with a more laid-back attitude. There’s a lot I’m missing, sure, but I can tell you that the Schubert Quintet is a beautiful piece of music and that the Bruckner, while, yes, sort of syrupy at times, also contains some compelling moments. There are drifting melodies, and the pace is glacial thanks to the conducting but these pieces make the large-scale moments all the more entrancing. The last few minutes of the first movement are powerful and even if they come off as a bit cliched, there is something satisfying to me in those minutes. A feeling of pomp and magnificence that I don’t always get in the subtle, quiet and often tense music I’ve been obsessed with the past few years.

For me most of my classical listening is focused on moments as opposed to works as a whole. I may not be unique in this, I have no idea. But it’s easier to remember the opening of the Finale of Beethoven’s 3rd than it is to keep in mind the entirety of the piece, and much like in pop music the moments are what makes a song matter to me. I’ll listen to an entire song for one vocal line or one weird noise.

So that’s some talk about classical music. I’ve been pleasantly surprised the past year or so with my forays.

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In more recent news, this weekend I attended the two night shows of the On Land Festival, curated by Root Strata and put on with the help of many. I skipped the afternoon show for no real reason, but looking back I think it was for the best. Root Strata isn’t a label whose aesthetic I share necessarily. I like my share of pyche-y folk-y weirdness, but it’s an area I don’t have a lot of endurance for.

That said, the first night, Saturday, was an incredibly weird and varied lineup. Brief notes on the things that stuck out. Operative were first, from Portland and played a weird psycho-acoustic dance music. Insistent tones, machinic rhythms and incredibly tight focus. I liked them a whole hell of a lot, a really nice surprise. Joe Grimm’s audiovisual piece was technically impressive and was really intense for awhile, but it lasted just a tad too long for me. He is a man heavily influenced by Tony Conrad, that is obvious. It’s an influence I can appreciate. Light sensors on two projectors controlled analog synths I think. The images were abstract, sometimes clear sometimes fuzzy squares of light, fading in and out, flickering, focusing and unfocusing. Each movement of the light seemed to trigger a change in sound. It’s the sort of experience I’d love to have again, but this time perhaps sitting down. The result was mesmerizing, with the lights rapidly flickering and the buzzing, stuttering tones burrowing into your ear. Like I said, it lasted a bit long for me, but I came away impressed.

Pete Swanson was a bit disappointing and Ducktails… I liked the cartoon named that when I was a kid? That is all I will say.

The final three performers were all great. The Alps I remember really liking, but honestly almost everything was blown away by Keith Fullerton Whitman. He took the entire club on a ride through the possibilities of an analog synth. Some dance-y parts, the requisite bloops, a scratchy, somewhat delicate at times portion and some noisey static. At this point I was incredibly tired so details are fuzzy but this set was easily the highlight of the night for me. Tarentel are a band I’ve loved for a long time. We Move Through Weather is a weird, weird album. It’s the sound of a post-rock band escape the tropes and letting the songs just meander. From there they’ve gone in all sorts of directions and I’ve enjoyed exploring each of them as a listener. Their set was pretty equally split between some beautiful, somewhat standard instrumental stuff and an extended droning feedback squall. The music was great as was expected, but was somehow made even more enjoyable with Paul Clipson’s films projected behind them. Clipson’s films were all over the festival and I was uniformly impressed. I wasn’t quite as into the insect footage, but the nature films were just bowl-me-over beautiful, cycling from abstract to clearly nature and back again. The city footage functioned similarly, showing clear buildings, then impressionistic lights then a focus on a pattern, then back to cityscape. I hope to see more of his work.

Sunday night was long. I had completely forgotten Brendan Murray started the night which is weird since his and Keith Fullerton Whitman’s names were the biggest draws for me. It was completely and totally everything I ever wanted out of a Brendan Murray set. I just sat, sometimes watching the film, sometimes just dead to the world, my mind emptied. The sound on Sunday seemed better than Saturday, but maybe it was just the chair. Regardless, when he was done I wished he was playing the entire night. RInging tones gradually building in volume and register, sliding all over one other. Just astoundingly good.

Sun Circle made an impression and Christina Carter’s set was great, as you’d expect, but most of the rest of the night blurred into overdriven guitars. By the time Grouper started I listened for a bit before admitting I wasn’t having fun anymore and drove home to read some more of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, a book I’m going to talk about next before ending this ridiculosly long entry.

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So I love fantasy. I just do. I think the imaginative potential is exciting and perhaps I could make some sort of theoretical case for its importance but honestly it’s that I think wizards are fucking cool and love new ways of doing magic and new ways of organizing a society with magic in it. A particular favorite trope is the “secret magic user” trope, most famous recently because of Harry Potter. Now, I like those books. I think they’re pretty well-written even if a couple are far, far too long and find the world enchanting. But The Magicians takes the basic Harry Potter premise, knowingly, and goes to a more realistic place.

Lev Grossman’s book is a weird, very self-aware take on the Harry Potter world. I’m only halfway through but am a huge fan. Quentin, the main character, is a sad, incredibly smart high school senior who hides in fantasy novels that are an obvious take on the Chronicles of Narnia. He does magic tricks in his spare time, but dime-store novelty magic, not the real stuff. One day it all changes and suddenly his world is turned upside down. He’s not a wide-eyed kid, he’s a depressed teenager. And the school isn’t a magical land of excitement and adventure, it’s basically a rigorous prep school for magic. Most of his days involve tedium, endless, drudging tedium. But still, he’s doing magic!

The writing is sharp and funny. It feels real, too. Quentin seems like an actual person. There are some characters I’d call missteps, Penny for one, but so far it feels less like fantasy than like a coming-of-age story with some weird parts. I think it’s promising too that so far the biggest mystery is that Quentin has lost a book. I’m halfway through, Quentin’s done with school and it seems like Grossman’s going to spend the rest of the book dealing with Quentin’s search for something to do. He’s in his 20s now and while he definitely does magic, the real problem for him is going to be finding a career, a purpose and a passion.

It’s refreshing to read something that is both so aware of itself and so willing to play with expectations. It’s not radical, but Grossman has taken a by now very familar template, the Potter template, and is doing something new, something more real. But with magic, which is awesome.

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I was going to write about Michael Pisaro, but instead of doing that, you should probably just go read this post by Brian Olewnick about Pisaro as he says everything I wanted to say, but more clearly. And it, you know, exists which my Pisaro post does not.

I agree with everything he says, but want to extre double super special agree with his take on Transparent City, which I think is, without a doubt, the most engrossing piece of Pisaro’s. I only have the first set, but adore it. It’ll be awhile before I do another erstwhile distro order, but it’s clear I need the rest of his catalog.

And with that I’m going to stop typing and go read more of The Magicians. Or draw. One of the two.

Inspired by the Beatles Rock Band and the re-release of the new remastered Beatles I decided to finally sit down and listen to their entire discography. They are a band I’ve somehow avoided. At first on purpose and in the last few years from laziness/thriftiness. I didn’t want to buy all the discs. I :ahem: am still frugal but have somehow managed to get hands on the ’87 black box. I started with Sgt Pepper and after going through and enjoying it decided I wanted to do this right. So I started from the beginning. It’s a really interesting process for me, to immerse myself in music so free of pretense and so focused on the simple goal of writing good songs that people will love. It sounds pretty dumb when I type it out, but so much of what I listen to has at least some conceptual base, some ulterior motive beyond just crafting something enjoyable.

The first five records, taken as a whole are not favorites. There are some great songs in there, but to these ears it really sounds like by the time of Help! the band was run ragged. The songs aren’t bad, but they don’t have the punch of some of the earlier tracks, specifically the first couple albums. Those first two albums are good and energetic. They sound like a band excited to be writing and playing. I read somewhere, wikipedia maybe? that Help! was partially a real cry for help as they were starting to drown in their own success. I, at least, hear it in the songs. Good songs, but a weariness and a bitterness creep in.

But then Rubber Soul comes and it’s like a new band. The country influences are farther away, the folksy side is gone and it’s like they’re back to being a rock ‘n’ roll band. I mean, geez, Drive My Car has the feel of their Twist and Shout cover, which is epic, and then it’s followed by a haunting, beautiful ballad, Norwegian Wood. Instead of sounding sad and tired and sort of bitter they sound wistful. This sounds like the real beginning of the Beatles that have become the institution. Rubber Soul sounds like a much more focused band, a band renewed and excited about writing and playing. The two (if I’m honest three) albums before started to drag, but halfway into Rubber Soul and I’m back to where I was during “With The Beatles”, ready to listen for hours.

I’ve only listened to Revolver once and Sgt. Pepper’s twice. All three hold up incredibly well, with few missteps. I think those three are generally considered some of the strongest, right? If so I can understand, at least knowing what came before. The big ones to come after, the White Album and Abbey Road are still unheard.

I was really curious whether this exercise would end with me still unsure why the band has so much praise, or why they’re considered so fundamental but I definitely see it. They’ll probably never be a band I listen to over and over again, but there is definitely something special here, something I’m glad I’m no longer so oblivious to.

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A quick break to say Leaves Turn Inside You still has the power to enthrall me. It’s the sound of a band stretching out, slowing down and letting their weirdness come out. I just adore this set of songs.

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Schubert and Bruckner and Beethoven are next.

I’ve taken in the Frey a few more times now, both on headphones and in my living room. The pieces are uniformly excellent, and surprisingly varied. The pick of the litter for me is easily the final piece, Streichquartett II, thirty minutes of dark, ominous strings. In some ways the Frey is more difficult to write about because it’s closer to a typical string quartet than some of the other Wandelweiser pieces I’ve been listening to. I though I’d have more to say, but really, it’s a great record, destined to be a favorite, and that’s about it.

I decided today to turn my attention towards some of the improv I bought, so two Annete Krebs duos should be the subject of my next post.

A lot of listening has happened, brief thoughts are as follows :

Michael Pisaro is consistently fascinating. I’m becoming obsessed.

Mike Shiflet is so consistent for me. It’s not that he’s doing anything new every time, but everything he does is so polished, so well put together. I listened to the three mixes from his blog last week and went back to some older releases. Solo, duos, Scenic Railroads, whatever. It’s like an old blanket, but not old, and not a blanket, and not even comfortable, just really good.

Listened to some of the Burning Star Core live cassettes, and feel similarly. Super weird and super consistently interesting.

I bought a cd storage shelf a week or so ago and spent a lovely Sunday afternoon playing tetris to get it all to fit. I was triumphant I am happy to report, and in the process found a few discs I had forgotten about/hadn’t yet ripped. Nikos Veliotis/Taku Sugimoto/Kazushige Kinoshita/Taku Unami “Quartet” on Hibari was an incredibly pleasant surprise. While the first piece, a Sugimoto composition, was enjoyable, the Veliotis piece that is track 2, Aceghd, is astoundingly good. Dry tones, bristling and rubbing up against each other, a measured pace. I enjoyed it a lot on first listen, but am curious how much of that was surprise.

Final piece of music is Four Gentleman of the Guitar. I haven’t listened to this in so long and was quite frankly floored by how outright beautiful some of this music is. Completely forgot how enveloping and lovely all three pieces are. I predict this is going to crop up again and again in the coming weeks.

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In non aural news, I finished Infinite Jest and after a week or so away from it have decided I loved it and am looking forward to a re-read. I think it’s a towering achievement, and a surprisingly human novel. There’s so much to uncover, almost all of it structural. Devon mentioned that it doesn’t seem conceptually dense as much as it is structurally dense and convoluted. Re-reading the first fifteen or so pages immediately after finishing changes so much, or rather, illuminates. Things never come together still, but even if the loose threads aren’t tied off, they’re laid next to each other in complex, beautiful patterns.

Almost done with Deleuze and Guattari by Bogue, a reminder of how much analytic training I’ve had. There’s meat on them bones though, and Deleuze’s project is inspiring, but in the end I think I’ll read Deleuze and Guattari as background to others who are doing work I’m more directly interested in. Speaking of which, found a used copy of Tool-Being by Graham Harman. That’s next after the Bogue and I could not be more excited. Eventually I’ll write something about how Object oriented philosophy and speculative realism are, to me, some of the most interesting and inspiring movements in philosophy in decades. They both make me want to get back into academia, which is saying something.

Last but not least, am 20 pages into Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s on hold though. Devon’s sending the companion text and I can already tell I’m going to want a guide. I’d like to get back to it soon.

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And that’s a lot of media. I’ve decided to not talk about video games. I figure if I’m not interested in writing it up, it stands to reason most people who read this, all three of you, aren’t interested in reading it.

I went to the park and dove back in to Infinite Jest. It’s been at least a month since I last read this book. It can be an overwhelming thing to get back into. I’m glad I did though. I’m a couple hundred pages away from the end and I’m looking forward to finishing for a variety of reasons. It’s an experience, one that can be simultaneously enjoyable and maddening. Plot aside, themes aside, everything else aside, the one thing I’m sure of is that DFW was an incredibly talented man. There are passages of such beauty and others of such abject horror and everything in between.

I will read this book again, but next time I’ll read it all at once, no breaks.

At some point I stopped reading and drew a picture of my book and my toe. I’ve been trying to draw more. I think I’m going to work on drawing rocks in the coming months.

Going into these discs I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was familiar with and a fan of Radu Malfatti’s improv, and more recently have purchased and enjoyed or been intrigued by Malfatti’s compositions, but I think the “clinical” tag is apt at times. I was a little worried that I’d be inundated with similar exercises in austerity. I don’t mind austerity, but I was hoping there would be variety. I’ve now listened to the Beuger and Frey multiple times and have started in on the Pisaro music. It turns out the sea is rich with possibilities.

Antoine Beuger – A Young Person’s Guide to Antoine Beuger is out on Slub. There are two compositions on this disc. There are similarities: both are divided into a number of short tracks, both consist of sections of sound, patiently interspersed between sections of silence, both are quiet and paced slowly. But they feel completely different.

I’m beginning to think the Wandelweiser aesthetic doesn’t exist, but the Wandelwieser concepts or concerns definitely do. On my first playthrough I was listening intently and came away unimpressed as a whole. On the second listen I found that if I let the first piece, Tanzaku, float around what I was doing, using it almost like a background as opposed to a focus of attention it quickly grew on me. It consists of layers of dry strings, tones clustered together played between moments of silence. Each cluster fading out, a new cluster fading in, sometimes close together, sometimes farther away. Letting myself subconsciously settle into the rise and fall of it, letting it act as an environment of sorts allowed the strength of it to become clear.

The second Beuger piece isn’t as successful for me, but I’m wondering if that has more to do with me. It consists of small, clear sounds, a single decaying tone each time left hanging until they die and then silence. It reminds me of Sugimoto’s improv, but more active at times. It’s a perfectly nice piece but not something I’ll be seeking out in the future. The key to a lot of the music in this same vein is choice of sound. The same piece played on trumpet, piano or nimb would sound completely different, and in this case I think there’s not enough in the sound itself to hold my attention.

I was going to write about Jurg Frey – String Quartets right away, but I want to spend more time with it. I’m not quite following my own rules I guess. The short version is that it completely blew me away. I wasn’t expecting something so, I don’t know.. so active and invigorating and exciting. I need more time with it though.