I can’t listen to music with a straight face. I react to music more strongly than I can conceal; ferociously, irrationally. When I am listening to music, every texture, attitude, chord or bassline demands a response. I’ve spent much of the last decade trying to approximate on paper even a weak description for my reaction to music. Words cannot express the brute force of the musical moment during immersive, focused listening, and any description would trivialize the totality of the effect. This is the most solitary of my experiences. Although we attempt to share the experience of music by playing in bands, dancing at clubs, sitting in concert halls together, and listening to it on street corners, and though we form communities in appreciation of celebration of its unifying effects, the shapes, the winkings, murmurings, nurturing and furious machinations of music are still one of life’s most intimate and personal experiences. Music can only unleash itself on the world and when I am alone with sound, physically and mentally immersed.
I know that once when I was sixteen, a couple milliseconds of a bright ringing in an empty concert hall at the end of our performance of Holst’s First Suite in E Flat for Military Band once completely annihilated any and all of my life’s experiences to date. There have been a handful of subsequent experiences equally as striking, which I cherish above many other memories and experiences.
The only way I could possibly begin to describe it is to suggest that music ‘dissolves the world’ with its energy. It’s as if the effect on my brain of sound in motion turns the world transparent. The material world dissolves into an intangible, a resonating vibrating surface, a pulsating more real and more true than anything else. During music, I see ‘through’everything. Music’s shapes and textures transform the present into a lush shimmering so intensely beautiful that it sometimes even hurts, and and I find it difficult to breathe. This experience is the fuel for my optimism, the glue that holds my discrepant pieces together, the fabric of my days. It is my deepest insanity, the secret gift my synapses have handed me. Music’s effect on me defies explanation and distorts my priorities because it subverts rational experience. Obsessive, ravenous listening has become a way of life.
Drowning out me, and the world in sound, I grin, smirk, even gasp - when the tune ‘clicks’ and the sounds melt everything and everyone. The waves of chills, the bursts of energy, the peak experiences, the shapes and motion, can ‘happen’ to me no matter how many hundreds of times I’ve heard a song before, and even on the first euphoric listening. At the right moment and with the right sonic experience, the sheer positive force of the sensation is often almost more than I can take. It’s an irrational explosion of beauty and happiness, during which anger and ecstasy can coexist, one that tears through the fabric of the present. The synergies in music are the manifestation of totality, and everything about life and the mind experienced all at once. It leaves me thrilled at least, and breathless at best.
As a clarinetist, I was notorious for moving excessively as I played; I swayed and dipped with every phrase, rising and falling with the contour of each melody. It was impossible to play music without embodying the sounds I was experiencing through constant movement. When engaging with and listening to music, I am reminded of who I am, where I’ve been, and what I’ve done. Music is the only way I can construct my self, the only method I have for organizing the chaotic slop of impulses, emotions and thoughts constitutive of ‘me’. Plugging my brain into an ipod or satellite radio, I can bounce, drive or stride harder and harder through the fabric of the world, into the utter nothingness of a world of pure sound. I am always in search of this; the perfect soundtrack, the ecstatic mesh of sound and self, this merging of material and immaterial. Even walking down the street, or at the gym, with terrible low quality earbuds that don’t fit into my ears quite right, and that I constantly push deeper into my ears so the sound will be more full, the world dances with me and pulses and gnashes its teeth. I set my musical raygun on destroy, and my head bobs. I jump and I scream and I lose myself because I am the sound.
9.27.2009
7.23.2009
rockridge saves 3.11.08
At some point, the pulsating in her head had stopped. As her chucks bounced along the cracked pavement, her senses woke again; to the lacy ice of high clouds glazed across the cerulean above, winking crystalline between the skeletons of old oaks and leafless, willowy-looking trees. These shapes and these colors, under the sun, the all-quenching sun, reflecting inside her retinas, were what had powered her solitary journey before, and fueled the quest for beauty, and silently handed her the answers to her questions. There were always the questions. Always the thoughts, the reflections - one revelation after explosive sabotage, after another epiphany. One after another, each question boiled to the surface, a foul socratic mania, a dialectic process usually with each proposition uglier than the first. Why were the answers always so ugly? Why not focus on simpler questions, questions about form and composition, about space and balance? Instead, wonder; how could she leave this? How could her moods forsake these old streets, these houses slyly reminding her of a storied past, of gentrification and success and industrialization? It was like living in a computer graphics-fueled, technicolor version of a crinkly, sepia-tinted old film. How could she forget? How could she not care? How could anyone ask for more? How could the cracks in the sidewalk not be smiling? The air, still, but feeling more like the breath of a loved one across her face, hugged her with temperate arms. It was these temperate arms into which she needed to throw herself, soul and body, as an act of relief, which she could only achieve through walking. Seeing.
7.18.2009
cubicle crack: september-october 2006
1
server not responding
everyone else goes home early on friday. squinting at the fluorescent lights overhead, i tip the bucket of safeway tapioca pudding upside down. this khaki sludge is my distraction. there are two and a half hours till i can leave. i'm going to use the stair climber then. i'm going to use the stair climber in the basement. my tongue traces the plastic corners of the pudding container. the tech guy's key crunches in the lock, he's going home. climb into my ipod and try for sweat. i want to hurry up and sweat and push fast-forward the whole way home on bart with frizzy hair and faster thoughts. climb into my ipod, into every time capsule dot mp3 every chord a memory and a person and a moment and sit and try not to analyze the stranger in front of me. try not to analyze the stranger in front of me. ring, no ring. bags under eyes closed blackberry mini motorola tight skin beige jacket dior mascara bluetooth technology report scuff ed shoe bottle blond tired, average eyebrows. perhaps wiser, a mother or an addict, or suburban with three children to my sound of green court stomping stomping bass or evan and jaron when that feeling of being eighteen and smitten and awake those nights we talked in his dorm in bowles till sunrise, more and more awkward and ridiculous trying to explain a massive to the uptight bassoonist who won't let go of morten lauridsen and his midi arrangements of broadway musicals until the summer came and there was no point anymore but the chaos of the next weekend. after those nights there was no fire burning so bright as the one lighting the path to the next weekend.
2
non-exempt
is it true that everyone sits, anxiously waiting for the end? the last forty-five minutes are a gasp for oxygen, as the previous eight hours of life-asphyxiation numbed the brain cells down to incoherent stubs, and the chaos of synapses firing into, around, behind and beyond the screen makes your non-presence blink too fast. bend your neck to the left for a desperate glance at the same pictures and another sip of lukewarm. the coff ee or the green or the black tea once warm made the lights too bright and the last tasks are the hardest to complete because they are all little buttons in the right places in front of you, and your fingers fly the keys again like you're motherfucking liszt and this cubicle is carnegie hall or a cockpit or something where you're perfect and
there is no audience
flow 8.20.2004
document-based textual overload, facets of communication glinting only for those who know. a dialect, like filtered sunlight through the mist, acquired only with time. history, gleaned from memory and amassed over time, giving previously intangible consciousness density. intricate pathways, crossing and uncrossing themselves by fate and will. reality laced with necessary delusions, moments of grandeur, unconsciously calculated to neutralize the all-permeating emptiness. rife with absurdity, gratuitous inclinations, feigned causality, plans gone awry, thoughts and meager moments inflated beyond their actual size by the innacuracies of passion. compressed emotion, pressurized by the magnification of the present, losing concentration as months flow by. indulging the longing for pure sensation, fleeing accursed mindfulness...in this way we quest for the undefined; sublime nothingness.
the deli 7.11.2005
i smile as my teeth sink into the tuna salad sandwich on toasted dutch crunch that i did not order, knowing that somewhere out there a man who left a few minutes ago is opening a bag in which he'll discover a turkey sandwich with extra pickles on toasted dutch crunch that he didn't order either.
7.13.2009
2: on Bureaucrats. 07.10.2009
Mostly, I feel sorry for their plants. Just because I have one too - one of those sorry, ever-green desk plants – that doesn’t make me one of them. I’ve never claimed to have a green thumb, but I do at least sense when plants are languishing, lonely, or are horribly misplaced. Inevitably, months after the plant’s arrival on my desk, one of them, the quiet, friendly, narcoleptic one, approached me to let me know my plant pleased him ‘because it was very symmetrical’. Oh, why yes. It is, I checked after that. Circular, six-leaved fronds, indeed. I probably furrowed my brows for a second after he notified me, just to be sure the plant was as elegantly designed as he’d suggested, and that the interaction had in fact, actually happened. Sometimes conversations, or signs of life in this atmosphere can just be mirages.
All his shirts are thin, but never wrinkled. No doubt they’ve thinned over time, their print-free cotton tenderly laundered, perhaps every Monday and Thursday evening between the hours of 9PM and 6AM. These may or may not be the times between which other people are usually found asleep, or carousing, or cooking, or eating things that are not turkey sandwiches, or any number of other activities. I’ve noticed that these thin cotton shirts can be paired with anything; anything being a blue sweater which must have been born at least 10 years ago, or the beige jacket. Yes, armed with the same medium-blue sweater which somehow never fades, and the beige cotton zipper jacket which cannot fade, you can be anything, or anyone. Maybe the fellow has more than one of the medium-blue sweaters. Maybe that’s the secret to its seemingly everlasting middle-age. It must have several twins, or else he somehow discovered a sole-source contracted supplier of subtly overworn, shapeless blue sweaters.
“Bureaucrat” is just another word for people with bad hair. Or maybe it’s just unnervingly thin hair, or hair that somehow, other than the inevitable graying, never changes over a four-plus decade-long period. Bureaucrats are people who lovingly say the same phrases over and over, week after week, and year after year. Whether it’s a resounding, “For those who just came in, instructions are on the bulletin board to the right”, or, “We can be more restrictive but not less restrictive”, these are the people who relish repetition and the comforts of timeless predictability. They have mastered the withering glare and the disturbing habit of nonchalantly bursting into of fits of righteous anger, the roots of which remain a mystery to me. Because certain signs never move, and certain information must always be disseminated, these people must exist to alternately serve and then hinder us. Bureaucrats are the stoic guardians of the immutable, the world’s necessary kings and queens of the mystical realm of Eversame.
I think they glow under florescent lighting, while I pale. They bask in beiges and dusty cream hues and are the world’s greatest connoisseurs of plain artworks, like idyllic, pastel prints of nothing, or country landscapes, or oil paintings of coffee cups. They secretly cherish the dust bunnies that collect behind and underneath multiple-line telephones, and smile at the thought of resisting the implementation of new ‘procedures’. They walk amongst us unnoticed, glaring at new things and misinterpreting colors for threats. They collect calendars of wildlife prints from Greenpeace, own fabulous arrays of polyester shirts, drink coffee like it’s been stolen from grandma’s liquor cabinet and talk about ‘taco Tuesdays’ with an intensity unrivalled by most Olympians. Some of them don’t even venture out to taco Tuesdays – they just work through lunch every day and most weekends, drinking four, five sixseveneight cups of straight black coffee until their veins run brown and visible beneath their pale, spongy skin. Timeless, and Tabasco and turkey at 1:15 PM. Every day.
All his shirts are thin, but never wrinkled. No doubt they’ve thinned over time, their print-free cotton tenderly laundered, perhaps every Monday and Thursday evening between the hours of 9PM and 6AM. These may or may not be the times between which other people are usually found asleep, or carousing, or cooking, or eating things that are not turkey sandwiches, or any number of other activities. I’ve noticed that these thin cotton shirts can be paired with anything; anything being a blue sweater which must have been born at least 10 years ago, or the beige jacket. Yes, armed with the same medium-blue sweater which somehow never fades, and the beige cotton zipper jacket which cannot fade, you can be anything, or anyone. Maybe the fellow has more than one of the medium-blue sweaters. Maybe that’s the secret to its seemingly everlasting middle-age. It must have several twins, or else he somehow discovered a sole-source contracted supplier of subtly overworn, shapeless blue sweaters.
“Bureaucrat” is just another word for people with bad hair. Or maybe it’s just unnervingly thin hair, or hair that somehow, other than the inevitable graying, never changes over a four-plus decade-long period. Bureaucrats are people who lovingly say the same phrases over and over, week after week, and year after year. Whether it’s a resounding, “For those who just came in, instructions are on the bulletin board to the right”, or, “We can be more restrictive but not less restrictive”, these are the people who relish repetition and the comforts of timeless predictability. They have mastered the withering glare and the disturbing habit of nonchalantly bursting into of fits of righteous anger, the roots of which remain a mystery to me. Because certain signs never move, and certain information must always be disseminated, these people must exist to alternately serve and then hinder us. Bureaucrats are the stoic guardians of the immutable, the world’s necessary kings and queens of the mystical realm of Eversame.
I think they glow under florescent lighting, while I pale. They bask in beiges and dusty cream hues and are the world’s greatest connoisseurs of plain artworks, like idyllic, pastel prints of nothing, or country landscapes, or oil paintings of coffee cups. They secretly cherish the dust bunnies that collect behind and underneath multiple-line telephones, and smile at the thought of resisting the implementation of new ‘procedures’. They walk amongst us unnoticed, glaring at new things and misinterpreting colors for threats. They collect calendars of wildlife prints from Greenpeace, own fabulous arrays of polyester shirts, drink coffee like it’s been stolen from grandma’s liquor cabinet and talk about ‘taco Tuesdays’ with an intensity unrivalled by most Olympians. Some of them don’t even venture out to taco Tuesdays – they just work through lunch every day and most weekends, drinking four, five sixseveneight cups of straight black coffee until their veins run brown and visible beneath their pale, spongy skin. Timeless, and Tabasco and turkey at 1:15 PM. Every day.
5.26.2009
1: on electronic music
Innovation is the heart of electronic music; excess its cultural fuel. Although all music is essentially immaterial, electronic music, unlike other forms of music, could not exist in a pre-industrial world. A surplus of physical and technological infrastructure is required for a bassline to thump out of bassbins, for a synthesizer to be manufactured or a sequencer programmed to array man-made sounds for an audience. Surpluses of electrical power, of architectural space, of human energy, of specialized technology and materials – must all be available for electronic music to exist, and are the prerequisites for any electronic music subculture. If our power grids went down, electronic music would cease to exist. Electronic music, therefore, unlike most instrumental music, inhabits a delicately fabricated, post-industrial world, and is neither natural nor self-sustaining in any way, as are many cultural folk musics. In a world without electricity, a musician could still play a guitar, a clarinet or a drum, and anyone could sing a tune to reproduce a melody, but electronic music would cease to be.
Unlike the music performed by an ensemble of musicians, the only tangible medium for electronic music is the digital recording. Because of its intangibility, its reliance upon electrical circuits and the interactions of magnetic fields, electronic music resides wholly in the world of high technology, and therefore in the future as much as in the present, in experiment more than in daily experience. Electronic music began as a figment of an electrical engineer’s imagination, rather than as a creative accident, or the molding of any organic substance or resonant cavity. As a cultural signifier, it is the sound of a virtual world, neither here nor there, and therefore represents a deviation from history’s musical continuum. Influential music is usually born of a historical moment or movement, just as art usually erupts from cultural upheaval. Because it inhabits a virtual world, electronic music is in a unique position relative to human history and stands outside politics, unlike the rock of the 1960s, or the jazz of the 1920s, which represented specific people, their politics and their passions. Electronic music represents nothing and no one, has no inherent message, and exists purely to celebrate its own acoustic chameleon tendencies. This liberation from, even disregard for reality, means that electronic music is not a foil to current events, a cultural indicator or the voice of a generation in any typical sense.
As a cultural movement, electronic music represents a denial of everything other than itself. It is an argument for existing in the now, only to celebrate the effects of pure audio manipulation in the present moment. Whatever electronic dance music ‘movement’ erupted from the allure of the regular, emphasized beat, thus embodied the siren’s call to the postmodern hedonist – because when amplified to larger-than-life proportions and volumes, electronic music truly becomes itself; dehumanized, scientific, technological, and therefore subversive, unapologetically excessive, and most crucially, a musical experience that is more visceral than corporeal.
Unlike the music performed by an ensemble of musicians, the only tangible medium for electronic music is the digital recording. Because of its intangibility, its reliance upon electrical circuits and the interactions of magnetic fields, electronic music resides wholly in the world of high technology, and therefore in the future as much as in the present, in experiment more than in daily experience. Electronic music began as a figment of an electrical engineer’s imagination, rather than as a creative accident, or the molding of any organic substance or resonant cavity. As a cultural signifier, it is the sound of a virtual world, neither here nor there, and therefore represents a deviation from history’s musical continuum. Influential music is usually born of a historical moment or movement, just as art usually erupts from cultural upheaval. Because it inhabits a virtual world, electronic music is in a unique position relative to human history and stands outside politics, unlike the rock of the 1960s, or the jazz of the 1920s, which represented specific people, their politics and their passions. Electronic music represents nothing and no one, has no inherent message, and exists purely to celebrate its own acoustic chameleon tendencies. This liberation from, even disregard for reality, means that electronic music is not a foil to current events, a cultural indicator or the voice of a generation in any typical sense.
As a cultural movement, electronic music represents a denial of everything other than itself. It is an argument for existing in the now, only to celebrate the effects of pure audio manipulation in the present moment. Whatever electronic dance music ‘movement’ erupted from the allure of the regular, emphasized beat, thus embodied the siren’s call to the postmodern hedonist – because when amplified to larger-than-life proportions and volumes, electronic music truly becomes itself; dehumanized, scientific, technological, and therefore subversive, unapologetically excessive, and most crucially, a musical experience that is more visceral than corporeal.
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