I'm not vegan, so this morning I ate two eggs, a half of avocado, toast, and cream cheese. I also had some bold coffee with nutmeg in it. Then I read some good ol' JJ Rousseau because it is the most expensive book I ever bought (25 dollars).
I wrote two songs this morning and recorded brief sketches of them so I don't forget them.
Articulating thoughts on paper is hard and so is articulating thoughts in music. Arranging paragraphs is the same as arranging chords, tonal ornamentation, and rhythm. The shapes, colors, and structures of essays are translatable to sound. I want Peter Elbow to come into our classrooms and do 30 second vocal impressions of our essays. Maybe someone should do a 7 minute non-language vocal interpretation of their research paper for their oral presentation.
In other composition news, yesterday, my friend Melle challenged me to write a personal manifesto and mail it to her by the end of the day. I failed. Hopefully I'll do it today.
See you in class in 5 minutes.
Two eggs, two songs
Emergency
A friend's apartment just burned down. It's so impersonal to even write into a tiny box on the Internet. A friend's apartment just burned down. Things burn down. Stuff burns. It burns and then it is gone. And it just happens. And it happens early in a morning.
My two friends who lived on the second floor of an Albany apartment weren't hurt, but the apartment that apparently started the fire, well, one of people who lived there had to be rescued by fire fighters and was severely burned.
Unimaginable. And then you are liberated from your stuff. Don't have to move those books again. Don't have to move the couch. The shelves and the papers; and holy shit imagine all the pictures, journals, drawings, secret notes, spells, recipes, food, and, well it is all gone, because the third floor collapsed onto the second floor. And if you don't wake up I don't even want to think about it or write about it, right now, here.
Tuesday Morning Is New Each Moment
I am about to book a flight to Seattle for Winter break. I've never been to the West Coast, and I'll be arriving just after New Year's Day, so it will be a grand beginning for 2K8!
I can almost count the number of people I know who have fled to Seattle on two hands now. At first I thought I was going to visit, like, TWO people, and now I realize that there are about 11. And, I'll have to re-calculate, but I am pretty sure they are all 11 people that I actually WANT to see.
While in Seattle hopefully I'll record some music with my friend Josh, an NYC polymath transplanted to the West. Josh and I were part of a musical project once-upon-a-time called Todd Is New Each Moment. Josh came to Albany for a weekend and we, and one other person, locked ourselves inside for a summer weekend and recorded two TINEM albums, ("Deepthroat" and "Go Blondie! I Have Always Loved You!"), and a short film chronicling the whole experience was captured.
TINEM was a ton of fun for me because the process of song writing was so quick there was hardly any time for deliberation--it is like when someone is interviewing you about your papers and writing down everything you say, you are less likely to commit self-censorship.
Oh Todd!
The end is near!
Good morning!
The hourglass is nearly spent. The bags under the eyes look like November blust. Papers will be turned in and then everyone will go on their merry way.
Writing, text wrestling, wordage, paragraph splicing, title philandering, meaning oniomania, and how often do I need to sharpen my pencils?
Well, the bus is near, but you'll hear again from me soon!
Caffeine and rough drafts,
Wilk.
On Boredom.
I'm botching this, but Sigfried Krakauer once wrote a great tract on boredom--his main point being that reaching a state of boredom was quite a noble accomplishment because this meant shrugging off all the pointless stimuli consumer society hurls at you.
Often I get up quite early, drink coffee, and then try and "accomplish" as many things as possible before I run out of energy. Well, not really, but this basic scenario happens more often than it should. I innately have this sense that there is something important behind being able to "produce." Production in the form of either grading all my papers, fixing my bike, doing the dishes, writing 2134290348 emails, or applying for a job.
But, is this all necessary? I love to play music and write creatively. These activities don't seem to make themselves to the tops of my TO-DO lists often enough. I definitely don't love writing emails, but I spend way more time doing that.
This seems very much like an American mindset. But I also know lots of Americans don't feel this way. When I lived in Berlin, people sat around all day and did NOTHING. I mean, really did nothing. If you exerted the energy to go out and get a one Euro scoop of icecream you were putting out some serious effort. That really made me try and keep my jittering American motivation-drive in check.
From a young age, many of us are constantly asked what we'll be when we're young. Everything builds in culmination of becoming something, and you need to produce--our economic system depends on YOU!--and so the relentless toil of Western life poses you the threat of seeking gainful, productive, employment or you'll be starving outside.
So, you could try protesting the final research paper on grounds that you've spent all your energy just to make yourself nobly bored and have no energy left for writing. Yes, you could try this my fellow COMP I revolutionaries.
Give me marketing or give me death
anne elizabeth moore, somewhere.
Last night, I went to see Anne Elizabeth Moore speak last night at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Lansingburgh. Ms. Moore was an editor for Punk Planet for about 13 years. I only know Punk Planet for its record reviews, for it completed boatloads of reviews, but Punk Planet I think was also really interested in providing critiques of pop culture and a provided a general reading of different music "scenes" in general.
Anyway, Moore's new book, Marketing the Unmarketable is supposed to discuss the trends taken by marketers to appropriate smelly indy rock cultural products, (like music, hoodies, and hair), and use these previously "unmarketable" traits as new sales ploys. She also has other "cultural texts" to focus on besides "indy rock," such as the American Girl Dolls you may have grown up around.
In the talk she gave at the Sanctuary, she talked primarily about her "mocketing" efforts to culture jam the American Girl store in Chicago--a store she has now been banned from entering because of her strategic placing of pamphlets that look like official Amercian Girl literatures, but are actually Anne Elizabeth Moore tracts about how American Girl dolls are made in China by 19 year old girls literally working themselves to death.
The talk was pretty good, but the culture jamming arguments are something that I'm familiar too and their attractiveness and effectiveness begins to pall on my ears. It often seems efforts of the left merely critique advertising practices for their distorted presentations of reality (American Girl Dolls may make six year old girls think that everyone has money to afford these expensive doll accessories, and no one has to work for that money), but they do not often CLEARLY EMPHASIZE an alternative message.
http://www.anneelizabethmoore.com/
Blog Assignment for Week 10
Blog this before your Week 11 Class!
Write a blog about someone you have met at HVCC this semester. Who is this person? Why are they unique? Why do you admire or not admire this person? Where and how often do you interact with them? What do you think this person thinks of you? How does this person compare to other friends you have?