see it bigger

Last night my wife said, “No more Joy Division. No more.”

This last week we watched both Anton Corbijn’s biopic Control and Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division. I’d recommend both if you’re a fan.

Some notes:

• How essential Manchester was to the sound, and how much Joy Division’s music was rooted in place. One interviewee called their music “ambient noise” for the Manchester environment. Another said they took the landscape of Manchester and “made it cosmic.” Make it cosmic. That might be a good rule of thumb for writing about place…
• Ian Curtis had a box of words that he’d bring to rehearsals, and when they needed lyrics, he would pull words out the box.
• Remembered David Lynch talking about the myth of the suffering artist: in order to portray suffering, an artist doesn’t need to BE suffering, he just has to UNDERSTAND suffering. Suffering is often counterproductive to creativity. (Ian Curtis killed himself on the eve of their breakthrough US tour.)

Here’s my favorite performance — “Transmission” live on the BBC:

No language, just sound, is all we need know
To synchronize love to the beat of the show
And we could dance
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio

I don’t know what possessed me—I chronicle most of the stuff I’m reading / watching / looking at / listening to on my tumblelog and twitter and muxtape—but here’s a big bunch of stuff that I’ve dug in the past couple of months:

	What It Is by Lynda Barry What more can I say about this book? It’s collage, it’s a writing textbook, it’s a memoir…it’s everything. It’s big. It’s hardcover. It’s awesome. Buy it on Amazon Lynda on Talk of the Nation
	Devotion music by Beach House Quiet, soft, and beautiful. Lots of organ and reverb. Good hangover music. Buy it on Amazon Nice live set (MP3)
	And Then There Were None… by Agatha Christie There was something magical about an island — the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world — an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return. Hmmm. A group of strangers stranded on a mysterious island, all with shady pasts that come back to haunt them…sound familiar? My wife is an Agatha Christie nut. This was the first thing of hers I’ve ever read. 173 lightning fast pages. Fun read. Buy it on Amazon 1940 review in the Times
	Away from Her a film by Sarah Polley So sad, but so good. And the first time directing for Sarah Polley. She was quoted as saying the film was about the opposite kind of love than we usually celebrate in films, which is new love without knowledge and without hardship. It’s also a terrific example of how short stories fleshed out (as opposed to novels being compressed) make better films. (See also: In The Bedroom) My favorite line (from the Alice Munro short story): She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see. Buy it on Amazon Read the short story by Alice Munro
	Giant a film by George Stevens PT Anderson was once asked to name 3 films that he loved but no one had ever heard of. He replied, I like films that people HAVE heard of: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Giant, The Big Lebowski. I recommend all three, too. Giant is a 3-hour epic set in West Texas. (Shot in Marfa.) James Dean. A gorgeous, young Elizabeth Taylor. What’s not to like? Buy it on Amazon
	Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock I first heard about this book last year when my parents sent me clips from their local newspapers. This is the book I wanted to write as an undergrad: an updated Winesburg, Ohio set in the Southern part of the state. I grew up about 30 miles from the real Knockemstiff, but I never really belonged there, not the way Donald Ray Pollock belonged: he worked at the Mead paper plant in Chillicothe for 30 years before he started writing, and got his MFA at Ohio State. He knows his place and writes about it beautifully. This is a strong first book — but it can tough to read all the dark stories (note: it’s full of sex, booze, foul language, and drug use) at once. I recommend spreading them out. Standout stories for me were “Real life” and “Discipline.” Buy it on Amazon Donald Ray Pollock’s story Donald Ray Pollock’s website
	No More Heroes a videogame by Suda51 This is a violent videogame for the Wii, in which you play a hipster assassin with a lightsaber. It’s basically a GTA ripoff, but the art is great, and the game is full of little side missions which really make it entertaining. A good buy for $30. Buy it on Amazon Yahtzee (my favorite video game reviewer) reviews No More Heroes for Zero Punctuation
	PILOT G2 BOLD POINT GEL PEN Holy crap these things are awesome. If you want to lay down a big fat line, these babies will do the trick. 1mm > .07mm. Buy them on Amazon
	Some Like It Hot A film by Billy Wilder Billy Wilder is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors: I especially love The Apartment, which also stars Jack Lemmon. And Marilyn Monroe is gorgeous, of course… Buy it on Amazon
	Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino John Porcellino is definitely in my top 5 favorite cartoonists, and his simple, zen lines are perfect for adapting Thoreau into comics. Buy it on Amazon
	Youth Novel music by Lykke Li I can’t really describe her music. I always play it when I’m walking to the bus… Buy it on Amazon Download my favorite track, “Dance, Dance, Dance” Good live set (mp3)
	Dan in Real Life a film by Peter Hedges If Eddie Campbell says something is good, you know it’s good. This really surprised me. It’s a story about nice people who get into a genuine conflict. Probably why it didn’t get very good reviews: no explosions or incest or whatever… Buy it on Amazon

Phew. That was too much work. I think I’ll save this kind of thing for the next year-end lists.

What stuff are y’all into right now?

“Ever had one of those nights where you just couldn’t get drunk?”—Bill Callahan

No, I haven’t.

We got to Bill Callahan’s “secret” show with Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris (both from the band Shearwater) just in time to listen to them warm up during their soundcheck (and snap a picture through the window). Callahan is one of my favorite songwriters, so I was excited to see him again (we saw him a couple years ago in Cleveland).

Jonathan Meiburg opened up with a round of songs on banjo and guitar. Then Callahan came out with Meiburg on guitar and Harris on drums.

Great set. Harris and Meiburg gave the songs a heavy edge—much different than the Cleveland show with a fuller, subtler band (including the fantastic Jim White on drums!)

Setlist:

• Sycamore
• Nothing Rises to Meet Me
• Our Anniversary
• Diamond Dancer
• Say Valley Maker
• Rock Bottom Riser
• Cold Blooded Old Times
• Vessel In Vain
• a new song about birds: “too many birds in one tree…“
• Let Me See The Colts

Encore:

• The Well
• In The Pines

Here’s a four-minute Youtube reel of video clips I shot:

Links:

• Bill Callahan, Retread Session
• Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris, Retread Session #2

All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memories micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination.— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space

Something weird happens when we try to recreate cultural artifacts from memory: the result has less to do with the artifact, and more to do with us.

A year or two ago I got a Bonnie Raitt song stuck in my head. “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” I had the day off and I was bored, so I decided to sit down with my guitar and try to record the song from memory. I didn’t want to bother learning the lyrics or listen to the original. I just wanted to roll tape and see what happened.

On playback, it was the same song, but it wasn’t. The chords were “off,” and I’m pretty sure I left out a bridge. It’s like the filter of my memory took out the musical complexity and stripped it down to its bones. Left only a “cartoon” of the song…

Here’s the story behind the amazing Dirty Projectors album, Rise Above:

[Dirty Projectors man man Dave] Longstreth went to help his parents move out of the house he grew up in. Among his youthful artifacts was the cassette case from the Black Flag album Damaged. This brought back all sorts of memories— Black Flag was one of Longstreth’s first loves— but the tape itself was missing. So, like the character in the Jorge Luis Borges story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ who sets out to recreate Don Quixote line by line from memory, Longstreth went to the nearest Guitar Center, purchased the cheapest cassette four-track he could find, and embarked on recasting Damaged from memory, without re-listening to a single note or reading any lyrics. The ten songs that make up Rise Above (titled after one of the tracks on Damaged) stem from these four-track demos, recorded at his parents’ house on an acoustic guitar.

“I had to completely inhabit my early adolescence, the time when I used to listen to Damaged,” Longstreth has said. “[I was] trying to access the memory crystals stored from when I loved it back in middle school.”

The beauty of Rise Above is that Longstreth used his memory of the original Black Flag songs as a starting point to create “new” songs. “I wanted to see if I could make this album…not as an album of covers or an homage per se, but as an original creative act.” It was his imagination that made them great.

It frees us to have constraints. I’m starting to believe that the idea that the artist can should sit down and create something “new” is a paralyzing delusion. We can only create a collage of our influences, our memories—filtered through our imagination.

By re-interpreting these artifacts, we come up with something that is uniquely our own.

Ivan Brunetti has a drawing exercise where he has his students doodle cartoon characters quickly, from memory:

When drawing characters quickly, from memory, one can be quite inaccurate, almost as if one is inventing new characters, and these “mistakes” can serve as the basis for new character designs. This lets the students see their own styles more clearly. A page full of these doodles can help the student discern certain qualities that are consistent within their set of drawings. These qualities are a clue as to what makes one’s particular “visual handwriting” different or unique, and these should be embraced by the student.

The idea that by drawing from memory “copies” of other work, we can somehow sharpen our own sense of what makes us unique! I love it.

Links:

• Dirty Projectors — Daytrotter Session
• Cleaning Up with the Dirty Projectors : NPR
• NPR: Black Flag Re-Imagined from Memory
• Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism“

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

• Seed Magazine » The Listener » As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension
• Wired Magazine » Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain
• The New Yorker » Oliver Sacks » A Neurologist’s Notebook » Music and amnesia
• Oliver Sacks » The Bat Segundo Show

This is probably the most clear-headed, straightforward response to an accusation of “selling-out” that I’ve read. It’s from Sam Beam, singer for Iron & Wine, about his song being used for an M&Ms commercial [via]:

I eat M&Ms,” Beam said from his rural Texas home. “There’s no reason to be hoity-toity about it if you eat them. I’ve got four kids and four educations to pay for. There’s a reality to making a living in the music industry. With radio dying and MTV dead, (an ad) is now the most effective way to get music out there.”

Link

Everything from your haircut to your clothes to the type of instrument you play to the melody of a song to the rhythm — they’re all tricks to get people to pay attention to the story,” he said.

“If you just stood up in a crowd and said your story — ‘I came home, and this girl I was dating wasn’t there, and I was wondering where she was’ — it’s not interesting,” he said. “But give it a melody, give it a beat, build it all the way up to a haircut. Now people pay attention.”

- Jack White

Today at the shawarma shack Meg and I had a 15-minute conversation with a semi-homeless, ex-con musician about ZZ Top. He offered me tips on how to play their stuff (“stick to pentatonic, dude”) and some merchandise (“I can get you some stuff autographed by Billy, man”). This is actually pretty standard for a Thursday afternoon in Austin, as is coming back to the office and chatting with the boys about “The Top.”

My current favorite ‘Top lyric is from “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide”:

Well I was rollin’ down the road in some cold blue steel,
I had a bluesman in the back, and a beautician at the wheel.

Here’s some stuff from an old New Yorker profile of ZZ Top Guitarist Billy Gibbons:

“Gibbons drinks beer through a straw, to keep the suds from getting in his beard….A straw apparently helps beer go down quick. Gibbons made frequent trips to the bathroom, trotting through the bar, a slight figure with a little paunch, leaving double takes in his wake. A TV was showing footage of a tornado. Once, in Kentucky, Gibbons recalled, “a tornado preceded our arrival and passed us by. It so happened that there was a bra-and-panty factory in town, and the tornado tore it up. We were greeted by the sight of bras and panties hanging from trees for five miles.”

Lester Bangs’ review of Degüello:

“Punks used to wear razor blades, but these guys play ‘em, lividly. It’s fun, like eating tequila backward. They’re bound and determined to suck you into their cliché–but, hey, everybody has to search for roots, remember? Alex ‘n’ Newsweek said so. ZZ Top just laid off awhile to dig up more of theirs. Yet listening to Degüello really is as painful as trying to swallow tympanic jalapeños, so proceed with caution (and eat your “high energy” hearts out, mush-grooved power poppers). If you lose control, you can always douche with guacamole.”

How come nobody writes about music like this anymore?

I miss playing music. Comics and writing are so lame compared to rock and roll.

It’s the truth, admit it.

Maybe this will be the week that I quote from novelists I’ve never read. (So ashamed to say so.) From the NYTimes book review:

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.

Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

I studied a few years of jazz piano when I was in elementary school, before studying classical piano in high school. I still don’t understand either jazz or classical music.

But rock and roll I understand. Hip-hop, too. Those would be my models. Three chords and the truth. Two turntables and a microphone. Etc.

We went to see The National at the Beachland Ballroom last night. They sounded great…

…but boy do I get sick of standing around at rock shows. Especially on a Monday night. You pay your $15, you show up at the show time, and then you have to sit through 2 crappy opening acts before the band you paid to see goes on, by which time you’re either a) too tired or b) too drunk to care what’s going on. Can’t we do away with opening acts or keep them down to one? Can’t we show some kind of movie or have some kind of reading/standup/entertainment while all these lame sound guys and roadies test the drum kits and set out bottled water? For now, the rule is: show up two hours past the start time, and you’ll be okay.

Anyways, check out the National. Good dudes from Cincinnati, who studied design at UC (you can tell–their album covers are beautiful). Their new album is streaming on their Myspace page.