Make Your Own Mind Up on Modern Architecture

A perfect definition for nonsense in art: A friend of mine had a (post)modernist composer come to perform for his class and take questions. The artist mic'd a piano, distorted this sound with a computer, and then further distorted the sound by pounding the keys willy nilly, plucking the strings, and behaving avant-gardely. He had a goatee. When the Q&A session came, perhaps not soon enough, my friend remembers a particularly clever question up at the front: "If this is good music, according to your tastes, what then is bad?"

Earlier in the month I wrote a small piece hopefully queering the pitch of nonsense modern architecture. I've not changed my mind, but I do need to remind myself that this blog should be used for positive ideas and not just criticism. To make amends, I've created a list of some spectacular and interesting buildings built in the last hundred years. I've attached the smallest amount of information to the pictures and there's no order. Please make your own minds up. Sample Q's for the Q&A session: What would it be like to live here? Would this be beautiful if it weren't in the country? If this is good, what then is bad?

Toyo Ito's Tod's Building. Perhaps a new kind of eco-architecture. It could also probably stand without the Tod's logo. Is that a logo?

This is Brazil, Salvador I believe.
Gaudi here in Barcelona. One of many great Gaudi buildings, who was one of many great Catalan architects (Puig y Cadafalch being another).
Brazil. More tropical architecture and a great example of buildings using wood in novel ways.

Bart Prince's Gradow residence in Aspen.
The River House in New York. The FDR has since cut off the private docks (boat to elevator to apartment in minutes), but the building still stands majestic. Bottomly, Wagner, and White were the architects, outgranding Candela.

Arcosanti: an experimental town built around ecology, community, and a blatant disregard for getting the thing built.
India. The civic building is a unique opportunity.
Plans by Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti's planner/inventor/architect.
Gaudi.
Japan. I'm not 100% certain but I think this is Shigeru Ban.
Japan.
The International Library of Children's books by Tadao Ando. What a wonderful thing to build.
Tbilisi, Georgia. Soviet Constructivist center for marriage events, a 'Palace of the Marriage'. If you destroy the religious institution you have to repurpose its ceremonies and buildings. Does this look religious?
Shigeru Ban's Pompidou Metz. I love the use of wood.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. There are vents in the house that allow the habitants to cool their home with the wind over the stream.

Shigeru Ban's Pompidou Metz.
Zaha Hadid designed this platform for ski jumping.
Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein tower. Walk through it here. What would it be like to live here? Would it change your life?

Frankly...

I loved this Atlantic excerpt from Dana Milbank's book Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government.  Before your copy arrives, this brief might have to do if you've any chance of understanding the strange patois of the Washington insider.  

eg. I don't pay attention to the polls.

      My job-approval rating is 32 percent. 

      You are either with us or against us.

      You are against us. 

      Frankly...

      The following statement is false.

Click here. 

Seeing Sound

An introduction by way of an explanation:  One of my resolutions this year is to make me some good music.  This might not be a particularly challenging resolution were I Keith Richards but, as is, I am fundamentally not Keith Richards.  I missed the sixties, I missed the seventies, and I do not play any instruments.  Of the three, the latter -- and this is important -- does not worry me in the slightest.

Many of the best artists of the past sixty years have not been particularly musically talented, whatever that means to you.  Without debating the finer points of Milli-Vanilli-ism or singing Ashlee Simpson's praises, I'm thinking about Jonathan Richman, Brian Eno, the Clash, Autechre, Belle & Sebastian, the Cars, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Magnetic Fields, Pulp, Suicide, the Talking Heads, and the Velvet Underground amongst thousands.  At one stage in their professional careers, the eclectic above had all been (contentedly) amateurish musicians.

Blessedly, music is not about instruments.  There are some highly proficient Progressive Rockers still touring the English countryside, singing about dwarves, playing 13th chords while dressed like (creepy) children's entertainers in jumpsuits and caterpillar masks.  These people don't get me too interested, whereas the preceding 'amateurs' shone on with nothing but their intelligence, energy, taste, and patience.

Music is personal (disagree with me here) and so here's a personal manifesto.  I believe I can make music because...

1. I believe I am moderately tasteful. 
   
2. I am patient enough to wade up the learning curve, the music store jargon, the software, the hardware, the endless knob twiddlings, all in the hopes of coming up with ...
   
3. Moderately tasteful sounds to stick on top or next to the last one tasteful sound.

Is this it?  Well yes.  

Onwards to seeing sounds. 

But first an apology: I try not to equivocate.  Most of my most meaningless literary theory classes revolved around deliberately reinterpreting words ("See the band playing in the background? Perhaps they're a visual symbol for the wedding-band Carrie so desperately wants and Charlotte does not.  Maybe if the friends banded together...").  

That said, I'm aware that I use the verb to 'see' in a couple different ways but I think the connection between seeing (understanding) and seeing (visualizing) is a little richer than the above example.  Forgive me. 

Seeing sounds on the instruments:   That sounds easy.  But sounds, I've discovered, is hard.  Most of the stuff I got my guitar to do when I first held it was awful (this awful).  I needed to get to a basic understanding of pretty sounds.  

I see with pictures.  Not being a synaesthete by birth, sounds are quite distinct from sight in my mind.  I need a metaphor to make sense of the millions of frequencies that even the worst musician has at his or her disposal. 

Both the guitar fretboard and the piano keyboard visual metaphors (and mechanical inputs) for sound -- preferably melodic sound -- creation.  If tuned conventionally, they limit the potential sounds to the twelve notes that make an octave (do you see how words are getting useless here?).  

The piano is the simpler of the two: one key to one sound, plop your hands up to the right and the sounds increase in pitch.  I can't think of how to explain pitch with words, but consider the fun part of Come on Eileen and know that even the matinee actor gets that he should fake his hands right when the notes get higher.  

The guitar is more confusing as numerous 'keys' play the same note.  You can move your hands down the neck or across it to raise the pitch.  The fretboard is a matrix.  I prefer the guitar's honest complexity.  Unlike the piano's black-and-white keys, it doesn't have me prejudiced against flats and sharps (they're called accidentals; if I'm playing they certainly are).  The piano is also heavier and less likely to get you a girlfriend. 

There are other instruments -- I love the violin as an accent, the horns in Higher and Higher by Jackie Wilson -- and despite unfamiliarity, I'm sure they've got both their peccadilloes and twelve notes tuned to the same frequencies as the twelve on the piano or guitar.  It's what you do with those twelve notes that makes all the difference and it's here that seeing things becomes important.  

One note is one frequency and three or more notes is a chord.  Chords tend to have some grounding in melody and melody, while mathematical as all things, is best kept sacred and ill-understood.  Learning chords is a pain in the ass because the person who first tuned the guitar and first built the piano obviously never used them.  You could avoid chords (with computers this is easier) and just stack tones of single noted instruments on top of each other like a brass band.  For fear of retribution, I won't say anything negative about brass bands (loved them in Tusk), but they're a little impractical in a vegetarian café.  

I have lumped it and am learning the chords.  One could do this with notation, but I'm doing this with little pictures that basically tell me where to put my hands (from an un-condescending book called Fretboard Logic SE).  The modern system of musical notation is mostly instrument independent and some very impressive eight-year-olds can read single notes, chords, and notes as they move forwards in time with great ease.  I am not a very impressive eight-year-old (was I ever?) and so I must make do with tablature, a guitar specific system which tells me where to press down on the guitar's neck and which looks a lot less professional.  

Generative music aside, there is some debate as to whether a music is legitimate if it can't have its sounds recorded in note form.  There is a real push for turntable transcription and there are some compelling models that tell the turntabulist (ugh) where to scratch, fade, and bring up the Phil Collins song in the bass.  This seems academic, but I'll take that as a cue to mention John Cage.  Cage is perhaps best known for his piece 4'33" -- 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.  This must be legitimate because there is sheet music for it, because Cage went to college, and because you can download it from the iTunes Music Store(!).  Much of his other stuff is un-listen-able, but I make the pitstop because it's worth noting that Cage actually drew some beautiful images and notation for his work and stands as a good example of using bogus externalities to see something that just isn't there.  

Seeing Sound in Time: Pitfalls and learning curves addressed, I still think that seeing sound is useful if one is going to think in sound -- especially if one is interested in making songs longer than a note.  Most means of recording music -- tape, record, CD -- have the sound information laid out chronologically (there are no great musical palindromes) and it is in songs and recording that Time begins to crop up.  4'33" might even be an argument that this is the most important value in music. 

I am recording our songs with Apple's Logic Express 8.  Logic is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) apparently and the basic visual metaphor is the same as the other front runners and Apple's free program, Garageband.  

Logic is well-titled.  A little time spent in the program will let even the clueless (me) understand how songs are structured, the different components that go into making a song, and the logic or thinking behind things.  

Logic lets you record sound in two ways.  When you record real sound, perhaps with a microphone, you see your sounds scrunched up as waves.  When you record your sound with your MIDI keyboard, you aren't seeing any sound per se;  what you see are the notes played, how hard and how long they were hit, all lit up in bright colors like player piano roll on its side.  Logic's built-in synthesizers make the sounds simultaneously with the 'roll' of information.  

There are other DAWs.  One that I've had recommended to me by a drummer is Ableton Live.  Live is another way of conceiving (creating) music visually as a series of small sound loops (eg. add some bottom, baseline, then drums, lead, etc).  Here's their ad which (unfortunately) only gives an example of a narrow and annoying spectrum of musical genres.  But -- hey -- German muzicians.   

The language used to describe these things is jargony and bulky.  The visual metaphors are actually quite simple (a lot of the stuff looks like retro synthesizers) and, if they were designed by designers (Tufte!) instead of engineers, they would be simpler still.  

We've just finished our first song and now we're mastering it.  This involves spending some time at the equalizer which, this being the end of my music-making knowledge, might make a nice transition to the next section.

Seeing Sound Elsewhere:  I remember the equalizer on my father's stereo as a child and how you could see each kick of the bass drum.  A more grown-up version of the EQ -- well, teenagerish -- is the mp3 visualizer.  Click here if you can forgive the sound.  These are post hoc and the only real reason they exist (given that the truly stoned are just as entertained by lava lights, lights) is because one is listening to music on a thing with a screen that needs to be doing something.  

I do remember the Museum of Science's Pink Floyd Laser Light Show.  Perhaps that's evidence to suggest that I wasn't really there.  I do not remember Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable but I wish I could have experienced the Velvet Underground under the melting lights.  

I also remember a large neon light and sound thing at the San Francisco airport.  Here's a better take in the Detroit metro of all places.  And here, beautiful in every aspect except sound, another at the V&A Museum.  Why do these installations use ambient electronic music?  Perhaps robot music appeals to the engineer, or perhaps there's a cleaner amount of data (no fuzzy recordings, no words to detract) that can be transferred from sound program to light program.  This is also the reason why the most effective 3D movies are 3D animated -- they're already got the depth-value written -- the 3rd D.

I have yet to remember Guitar Hero as I can't get my hand on it.  This game, like its counterparts RockBand and Dance Dance Revolution, has bars of sound trickle down from the top of the screen to the bottom when you're supposed to strum your guitar.  It's not really music, but I think it has some of the fun of playing with someone else.  

A game that does make music is Elektroplankton.  The video below should give you a sense of one of the easiest to understand modes Electroplankton has for composing.  This trailer should give you a sense of more of the modes, and this song is kind of pretty.  I've not played/played the game, but I am impressed with some of the stuff I've heard and that the game has found musicians and they have found an audience.   

Some of the different modes are very similar to a step computer or drum machine.  Below is a video of a basic drum machine to show you just how easily percussion (and the kind of music you hear blasted out of Nissans by men with waxed eyebrows) is to make. 

As the internet snakes around, Electroplankton has lead me to a nearly forgotten visual/musical language called Pure Data.  Pure Data (nice name) is actually more of an instrument that can create sound and sights simultaneously.  It all seems too complex though.

In summation, Michel Gondry's video for the Chemical Brother's song Star Guitar.  This is how I would like the visual world and music to work together. 

Stanley Fish Hates Hating Hillary

I would love to write a larger piece on Stanley Fish.  I think he has a seductive intelligence which, more often than not, comes to the commonest conclusion in a roundabout (enough) way which makes the obvious appear to be real thought.  I would love to write something about how easy it is for a man who made his money in the humanities to write about how worthless they are, even if it makes him look like a fraud or an opportunist, because it ultimately makes him look like a loner and a cultured free-thinker.  I would try to understand his admonishing the independent voter who still holds true to their own judgement (vs. two very similar parties) in spite of their disenfranchisement in many primaries.  I might also like to write a piece about how subjective his literary criticism is (how is Stanley Fish's mood when reading The Tempest of any interest to anyone but Stanley Fish).  I'd like to seem even-handed by saying I agree with some of his thoughts on the New Museum.  He's an interesting man and he probably deserves a larger piece but I can't and I won't write it as even I don't have quite enough free time. 

What I will write about, briefly, is All You Need is Hate, his recent piece on Hillary-hatred in the Times.   His central argument:  as people do hate Hillary for, example, being both a feminist and not a feminist, then this hatred is illogical like -- in an aside designed to place discussion almost off-limits -- anti-Semitism.  

My bones to pick with Fish:  I refuse to believe that a man of letters could forget that people is a plural noun.  It is quite reasonable for one person to dislike Hillary for her feminism (it's casual, crops up when convenient, etc.) and for another to dislike her own perception that her gender is a liability (signing the US into Iraq to avoid seeming weak).  A good working definition for hatred is 'a strong, emotional dislike outside of logic'.  In Think Again, Fish makes his points emotionally so that any shaky logic is placed outside the realm of thought: the only (re-)thinking Fish wants done is reading.  As falsely and easy as Hillary cried, or as easily as some Obama supporters cry racism when none is intended, Fish uses loaded language -- specifically conflating anti-Hillaryism with anti-Semitism -- in an attempt to spin, deceive and get under one's skin.  It does. 

Again, don't let others do your thinking for you no matter how well they write. 

Update:  I've been reading the comments on the Times' website.  Allow me to save you (a lot) of time and sketch a recurring theme beyond the spelling errors:  They hate her.  They being a stand-in for conservatives, Barack supporters, Republicans, the wrong kind of Democrats, independents, the same people who hate Barbara Streisand, and on it goes.  If you believe the thrust of Fish's essay, which I don't, then certainly we have an anti-anti-Hillary hatred essay coming out next Monday (sadly, not as well timed) on how irrational that concept is, ¿no?

Thanks to Turner for slugging through the piece before I'd proof read it and for telling me to do so.

Missed Opportunities: A Further Note on Jodorowsky

Not that Jodorowsky can't speak for himself (see the man do it well here or on youtube), but I would love one small chance to talk about the director and also to lament the Dune he never made.  

Mime, clown, actor, writer, director, comic book author, somewhat psychoanalyst, therapist, and historian of the tarot card, Jodorowsky is obviously more interesting than Josh Hartnett.  This isn't to say he's a perfect artist, but his heart is in the right place and El Topo is the rare bit of pastiche that is paradoxically, truly unique.  Nice things out of the way, J is also a child of the mid-20th century and as such he bit far too blindly into the human potential movement and both continental philosophy (Satre and kids) and psychoanalysis.  This doesn't make him unpleasant -- he did so with great optimism and errs on the positive sides of both the latters -- but it does lead him to be false in spots and dates the otherwise timeless aspects of his films.  Can you fault people's want to believe or be certain?  Their want?  Certainly not. 

[For the record, lots of people did and still do buy into psychoanalysis and continental philosophy as if they were (cargo cult) beliefs, and they have gone on to rubbish people's minds with generic advice, taken as fact, or to obscure the truth and derail humanities departments at the world's best universities.  You can't blame Freud for the ideologues who followed him (well, he did overstate the truth in his theories), but you can blame Satre for an opportunistic psychobabble that was, in all likelihood, designed to conceal the crapper parts of his theories.] 

And now to Dune.  I've never read the book, but I have seen parts of the mini-series and the David Lynch version which, yes yes, is not tops.  Now consider Jodorowsky's: Mick Jagger, Gloria Swanson, Orson Welles, Salvador Dali to act (with others I assume); Jean Giraud (Moebius) and HR Giger (later of Alien) to make it look great; Pink Floyd (hm) on sound; and ten hours for the whole thing to play out into.  I don't miss the movie because I'm certain it would be great.  I miss it because I'm certain it would have surprised.  Epic stories should be given more time to play out in (I'm concerned about The Watchmen adaptation) and they should retain some of the ambiguity that it's so easy to maintain on paper and so tempting to do away with on screen.  Plus, the talent lined up for this movie ostensibly went on to create the claustrophobic image of the future you see in Alien and the dismal, vertical noir you see in Blade Runner.  So, influential in the least. 

A Statement of Purposelessness

I am unfashionably late to this party.  By now there are a billion of these things out here and while the Internet always has room for one more, do the people who browse it?  Serious doubts aside, I've got room for this thing (and a couple more blogs) and will set to writing for it for a couple of reasons:

• An exercise: whenever somebody says something particularly stupid, at drinks perhaps, pretend you're hard of hearing.  They'll repeat themselves over and over again until you let in, such that they are.  The point isn't to annoy or to let you hear them but to give them a chance to hear themselves?  This blog then is a chance to hear myself.  More people should put their thoughts down on paper or paper-substitutes.  For one, the world would be a cozier place with all the added thinking cluttering up the place.  For two, people would come to realize where their true thoughts lie (as opposed to regurgitation from the day's newspapers or, worse, believing those thoughts are your own), what they take for granted and as fact, and just how complex and gray things are.  That said...
• I believe there are yes and no answers to aesthetic questions.  I don't want to pull from science into the humanities (cultural theory and continental philosophy are the worst and falsest examples of this feeling of inferiority; read Clive James for better ideas on this) but I do think we can agree that Last Tango in Paris is better (certainly more worthwhile) than, say, Sex and the City.
• Blogs, TV, and much modern media can become a bit thoughtless in their need (audiences? advertisers? traffic?) to remain current and constant.  I can't make any promises on how regularly I'll update this thingy, but I will try to avoid the cynicism and snark (ugh) that has become common because it is easy to write, thoughtless, and occasionally enjoyable to read.  Still, I hate to have to face it every day and would hate writing it any more.  
• I'm trying to avoid promises here, but it's safe to say that I will rarely stay on topic or a particular tack.  That said, things I'm particularly interested include: movies, language and bogus language, music, meaninglessness, higher education, and design that uses the environment and environmentalism as its governing aesthetic.
• Space.  It's free here.  I want to give complex ideas their complexity.  I won't try and confuse with insidery jargon (I only know a few terms and try to avoid them for fear of misuse and because they bog things down where the best things should be simple) and I will err on the side of honest indecision rather than a quotable-but-false definite.  

That list might have been more for me than you.  If you do manage to slog through it and anything else on the site, thank you, thank you, thank you.  I do do it for you, you.  And so, with this delay behind us, we're off.