What I Have Discovered Through Music In My Life

The things that making music has taught me about the musical condition:

1) In being a writer of music, there is NO substitute for being a good listener with a clear and peaceful mind. This approach forgives many other limitations.

2) Changing what already exists in search of something new is a shortcut that costs the musician in purity of vision.

3) Melody is troubling in its common tendency to usurp the ability of a song to be a conversation. Instead, a song becomes an untouchable train rolling by.

4) Jazz is generally right to structure the song as a conversation, but to me it misses the point when it forfeits emotional nuance for cleverness or even eloquence, which is simply another tool in the ultimate goal of emotional communication.

5) Most "perfect" sounds are not created by traditional instruments, although traditional instruments are an important practical means of inspiration.

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I have to admit that I am so excited for the new Brian Eno album that I can hardly stand it. What else excites me right now? Everything Christian Fennesz has recorded, Boards of Canada, the first Animal Collective record (which is not derailed by melody).

Things that I lost somewhere along the way

A short list of things that I used to enjoy doing in my youth but that just don't cut it anymore:

- Taking quasi-artsy fake-spontaneous pictures of myself
- Driving in the countryside while listening to loud alternative rock music
- Hanging out at Taco Bell on a Friday night
- Drinking beer on a crisp fall evening

Something About Metaphors

So, tonight I went and saw Fang Island open for some band, which was entertaining but at some point was somewhat repetitive (in the midst of a 3-song medley of their thrashiest material). I sort of got into a free-associative haze (day-dreaming?) and through whatever progression found myself thinking about the scene in the movie Orange County where the girl is at the college party and is listening to the poor guy talking about his TV show idea that he says is about "Vampires, ostensibly. But, underneath, it's actually about the reunification of Germany." And, I have laughed out loud at that line every time I've watched the movie.

I'm sure that the truth is somewhere in between the two possibilities - that I find it funny, or that I consider that "my type" of humor and want other people to know it. Which is what it is. It can't matter much, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone else react to that line or my reaction at all. It's also a little brittle because I can't know that I even find it funny in the way that the writers intended, although it seems somewhat Dadaist to consider that maybe it doesn't matter how they intended it, so long as I find it funny, the meaning is proved present by my identification of it.

But, I have always taken that joke to be a comment on how young artistic types (particularly guys) are often attracted to the concept of metaphor before any other tools of art, and in the world of art, metaphors can be sort of like hammers, they are a good way of replacing other more elegant tools with something that gets a variety of jobs done but they generally lack grace. You might also extend the concept of metaphor as it blurs with subtlety and nuance, and realize that a continuum exists between a big fat metaphor and the infinitely more elegant juxtaposition of elements whose relationship is elemental and grounded, with perhaps some semblances of duality that suggests a metaphorical underpinning. If you wish.

So, I guess, this describes my own maturation as an individual that thinks about art (I would be flubbing to call myself an artist, except to the degree that art resides in the mind). I used to love the big dumb metaphors just as much as the next guy, but now they have grown familiar and have lost their sparkle. I usually find myself longing for an elegance that isn't there except in a cosmic sense.

In a nutshell, I suspect that I have laughed out loud at that scene from Orange County for the last time.