April 10, 2006

Falling Asleep

Twice in the past week I’ve experienced the same sense of having a basic insight while in the process of falling asleep. Of course, thoughts that form while the brain is in that transitional state are difficult to communicate under the harsh glare of our ridiculously high waking-life standards for “making sense” and “meaning anything.” But the particular sleepy thought that I had twice this week is actually about thought, and about sleepy thought in particular – and I’ve been able to remember it, unlike most of the brilliant thoughts I have in the middle of the night and then lose forever. So here it is, dressed up as though it’s a poetic thought rather than a sleepy one.

When we’re falling asleep, our thoughts do not necessarily become more muddled or less intelligent, they merely break down into their constituent parts; these molecules of thought become less sticky and float by one another detachedly, combining, if at all, into only the simplest structures. This is a limitation on the sophistication of thought, but it also offers a certain clarity. One thinks of things only insofar as they can be perceived as conceptual atoms, like the indivisible objects on flash cards: rope, apple, ladder, house. The image I had was of a configuration of overlapping straight lines that approximated a curve. In waking thought we think in terms of the illusory curve, but in that crippled state of half-sleep, the mind can see only the straight lines. The curve is metaphor and implication; the curve is the world of half-truth that we live in, and falling asleep I felt wonderfully free of it.

You might well point out that my mind was using a visual metaphor in the course of praising itself for having freed itself of metaphor. Actually, it’s unlikely that you’ll point that out because I doubt that anyone has any idea what I’m talking about here. But no matter; I just wanted to record this while I was still able to recall any of it.

There were much larger implications to the thought, at the time, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to recover them very well. I think – can surmise – that the rest had to do with seeing life for what it is, without trepidation… facing human mortality and insignificance with clarity, freed of the imaginary, implied curves that seem to make them unbearable by day.

My waking-self commentary on all this is that I recognize it as being typically googly falling-asleep thought and, nonetheless, also not untrue. I am moved and grateful to think that there is any moment in my life, waking or otherwise, where I am capable of feeling that I have thought my way into a geometric clarity that dispels the fear of death. You’d be hard pressed to prove that I was “wrong,” after all, so why not?

Also, in a more earthbound connection, I stand by the general observation about the detached/crystallized nature of thought while falling asleep. I have noticed on many occasions that I perceive and parse music with greater clarity and fluency when I am falling asleep, and Beth recently reported the same experience. It’s as though my mind, having given up the task of investigating implications, is freed to devote itself entirely to manipulating the surface of what it hears; I feel particularly ready to grab on to, say, a melody, and recognize and enjoy it as itself. My intuition tells me that this has something to do how my brain is allocating the resources of its linguistic component. I vaguely remember reading some science article long ago about how the sophistication of human visual processing somehow evolved from a part of the brain that originally served a language-related function. Maybe I have that completely backward or maybe I invented it. Anyway, the idea that our visual thought is somehow quasi-linguistic has an intuitive appeal to me, and this feels like a related phenomenon – like the language unit has been given free rein with all the thoughts; or maybe the opposite, that the language unit has shut down and the thoughts are let loose to be themselves. Though, regarding the experience with music, it definitely feels like my brain is reading the music like language and deriving the same sort of immediacy of meaning from it.

Anyway, I thought it would be a nice gift to my falling-asleep brain, who is in some ways a slightly different person from me, to post his thoughts on the internet and thus give him a sort of foothold in the real world. Although he would probably take issue with the patronizing implication that his world isn’t the real world.

But for better or for worse, I get all the mail. This argument seems pretty solid to me. I’ll check in with him and let you know if he has a rebuttal.

Have I just typed something absolutely incoherent? I have the strange snaky sense that I have finally gone and blown my nose all over the internet. But I guess that’s the sort of looseness I’ve been working toward all along here. I feel remarkably disengaged from any kind of shame about this, which is exciting in its way. The question is: in the absence of shame, what will motivate quality-control? I think that I (and others) tend to feel rather invested in vigilant shame as a crucial element of personal upkeep. In my case I’ve finally come around to accepting that it’s more of a hindrance than an asset, but if I’m to become shameless, is there no way to avoid becoming shameless? One wants to establish a mechanism for self-improvement independent of shame. Harder than it sounds. Maybe some shame is a necessity. But, if I’ve really managed to erase it, it’s entirely unobvious where to redraw that line.

The title of this entry, if you hadn’t noticed, has a double meaning. Possibly a triple meaning.

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April 9, 2006

One more from Sibley

After those first two days of trying to play and post everything that the Sibley library scanned, they really let loose with a whole week’s worth of heavy posting – piano concerti, sonatas, heavy, time-consuming stuff. And I had other stuff to do. So forget that.

But I did end up making one more midi, and so I’m posting it. It’s a full-fledged piano quintet! Of course, I had to start and stop to play the various instruments, and to get things to line up, and to play this nasty, Brahmsian piano part, but don’t let all that fool you – this is still a devil-may-care mistake-ridden rough-through of a piece that I didn’t know. You’ll notice that my tempi are often significantly too fast the first time through a section. On the repeats I usually learn my lesson.

Obviously, all that (plus the fact that midi violins invariably sound absolutely godawful) doesn’t exactly make for much listening satisfaction, but in this case, more than with the previous entries, I actually think these files are legitimately interesting. This is an extremely rare score, never reprinted, of a piece that seems never to have been recorded and, for all I know, has not been performed for 100 years, by a fairly forgotten composer whom I had never heard of before Sibley started scanning his chamber music. And it’s a pretty damn good piece! I certainly got a kick out of it.

Paul Juon (1872-1940)
Quintett für Violine, 2 Bratschen, Violoncello und Klavier, Op.33 (1906)

I. Moderato quasi andante (14:29) &middot II. Molto adagio (6:42) &middot III. Quasi Valse (6:54) &middot IV. Allegro non troppo (6:59)

The piece is one of those sturdy, vigorous Late Romantic sonata-form affairs, and this sort of conservative craftsmanship always pleases me when it’s well-executed. The piece reminds me a great deal of Medtner – one of my favorites – not only in its “Russian Brahms” forms and textures, but also just in its unpretentious conviction; you get the sense that Juon knows exactly what he wants to do and how to do it. It’s the opposite of the Rebikov from the other day, which was more invention than art; there’s no experimentation here, even when the chromatic coloring becomes more “advanced.” Juon is in command of his technique and is working within it.

At some point in the past several years, I realized how much more satisfying I find art made this way – as craftsmanship and taste exercised within standard boundaries. Exploration and innovation is an important part of art, too. But art that accepts a set of terms because they offer promising potential rather than because they are interesting in themselves, and then doesn’t question them – basically, “old-fashioned” art – always leaves me feeling like I’ve encountered something done right, and I genuinely miss that feeling with art that tries to blur or erase the idea of “right,” no matter how intriguing it may manage to be. This is a much much more complicated issue, waiting for the day when I finally talk about the wildly heartfelt anti-modern manifesto I picked up in a bookstore last year, written in the 20s by an aging sculptor of kitschy Romantic monuments, bemoaning the confused mess of pretension and perversity that has killed off the natural meaning of “art.” The upsetting thing is that I think he has a point.

Anyway, there are lots of conservative pieces from the turn of the century in a similar style, but where most of them bore me, this one pleased me because it has flair and drama and a smart, sympathetic sense of what’s interesting. That right there puts it above and beyond your average forgettable Romantic-era chamber work. There’s something broad and clear-headed about the grand Romantic gestures here that puts me in mind of theater or movie music, in a good way, such that even when it’s dripping with dated sentiment, I’m happy to luxuriate in the wholesome old-fashionedness – like watching a charming black-and-white movie; somehow I’m able to genuinely enjoy the content and savor the datedness at the same time.

The first movement has a (to me) thrillingly shameless dark main theme and the whole structure plays out with satisfying strictness. It’s “motivically unified” by that descending 6-note figure, which is a scheme just simple enough to be actually audible. The second movement manages to be both nostalgic-sentimental in a sepia-tinted way and, also, truly unpredictable and odd in its harmonic choices; the overall emotional atmosphere is not what it seems at first. The third movement is a comic waltz-parody thing, with a truly unexpected trio that sounds like it might be a Russian work song. It should maybe all be slower than I played it. The effect is strangely, mysteriously dark, in that indirect “literary” way that I associate with Mahler. The fourth movement is supposed to be one of those energetic folk-tune finales but it gets completely distracted by an outlandishly lavish “love theme” that proceeds to writhe around chromatically in a 1906-ish way. This is my least favorite movement, but by this point I’ve been won over, and the coda makes amends by acknowledging the best parts of the previous movements.

The whole thing has that lovely effect that good classical music can have, of implying vaguely that there is a secret emotional life veiled behind the surface. This is to say that the overall implication of the piece is, to me, darker and more thoughtful than anything that actually happens in it. I think that’s just what good craftsmanship earns you. So maybe the piece isn’t actually the most edifying or brilliant thing out there; so maybe Brahms is more humane and profound, and maybe Medtner’s very similar works are more ambitious and tighter-built. But: it’s all so satisfying and respectable and professional! The existence of music like this, forgotten, unexceptional and also good and well-made, reminds me how high our standards, as audience, ought to be.

I also think this German construction / Russian materials thing just works particularly well for me. Does anyone have any other comparable composers to recommend?

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March 29, 2006

Moby-Dick vocabulary, 5

Chapter V. BREAKFAST

I wasn’t sure I was going to keep up with the audio component here, but it’s a nice sort of reward for myself after doing all the research, plus I’ve already received criticism on yesterday’s reading – that it didn’t sufficiently make sense of the text to a modern ear – and that’s exactly the sort of problem that I like attempting to solve. Maybe my skill at this will improve as I go. As was pointed out, Melville’s prose is both informal and convoluted, which is a tall order for reading aloud. I don’t want to resort to that annoyingly slow declamatory style you hear on most audiobooks, but I’m not enough of an actor to pull off a genuine shot at “how Ishmael talks.” I guess I’m just going for straightforwardness as best I can.

I should have said yesterday, and I say to you now – if anyone out there, friend or stranger, wants to improve on these readings, please send in your versions and I will post them in parallel. Or maybe I’ll just take down mine and put up whichever reading seems best.

Me reading (4:01).

UPDATE 5/06 – Links to reading intentionally broken. Whew.

accost, v.
7. a. To make up to and speak to; to address.
I thought this had a connotation of roughness or hostility, but it doesn’t! Well, it does now. The OED can be a little old-fashioned sometimes.

cherish, v.
7. To entertain in the mind, harbour fondly, encourage, cling to (a hope, feeling, design, etc.)
OED says this is the most common sense of the word, and that
1. trans. To hold dear, treat with tenderness and affection; to make much of.
is
Obs. or arch
which comes as news to me. In any case, I ended up looking this up because the connotation here is “cling to” but not particularly “fondly,” whereas fondness and attention seem to me implicit in modern uses of “cherish.”

skylark, v.
1. intr. a. To frolic or play; to play tricks; to indulge in rough sport or horse-play. In early use chiefly Naut.

backward, a.
6. a. Turning or hanging back from action; disinclined to advance or make advances; reluctant, averse, unwilling, loath, chary; shy, bashful.

in proper person
In his (or one’s) own person.

spend and be spent
From 2 Corinthians 12:15

think, v.
12. d. intr. with for (of, on), after as or than, and with the preposition at the end of the clause: To expect, suppose. (Cf. look for)

chief mate
Exactly the same as “first mate.”

sea carpenter
under carpenter, OED gives
3. Naut. ‘An officer appointed to examine and keep in order the hull of a wooden ship, and all her appurtenances’ (Smyth Sailor’s Word-bk.)

sea cooper
under cooper, OED gives
1. b. On board ship: One who looks to the repair of casks and other vessels.

There’s no equivalent entry for “blacksmith” but, having my initial suspicions confirmed by the above, at this point I’m willing to say that I know exactly what a sea blacksmith does.

ship-keeper
A man who takes care of a ship when the crew is absent from it.

bosky, a.
Consisting of or covered with bushes or underwood; full of thickets, bushy.
but also be aware, just for the echo, of the second entry,
bosky, a. dial. or slang
Somewhat the worse for drink, tipsy.

satin wood
The wood of the Indian tree Chloroxylon Swietenia and of several W. Indian trees esp. Fagara flava; also, the similar yellowish wood of any of several African or Australian trees, esp. Daphnandra micrantha or Zanthoxylum brachyacanthum; also, any of the trees producing this timber; the colour of this timber.

Andes’ western slope
Is some kind of dramatic stratification visible (say, from the ocean)? Or is he just saying that the slope creates several climate zones in close proximity, but not that they’re visible as such? I’ve never been and I’m not in the mood to dig really hard in search of I’m-not-sure-what, so please write in if you think you know exactly what he means.

Ledyard
John Ledyard (1751-1789), American explorer who travelled with Captain Cook and later attempted to pass through Russia and enter North America by crossing the Bering Strait, but never made the crossing, though he did traverse much of Siberia.

Mungo Park
Mungo Park (1771-1806), Scottish explorer of Africa, who eventually died there.

that sort of thing is to be had anywhere
Not clear to me. Is he saying that social refinement may be learned anywhere, whereas exploratory adventures require travel? Or is he saying that the sort of un-refining travel experienced by Ledyard and Park is the sort of travel that, for the most part, one finds anywhere (contrary to the aforementioned popular belief that most travel is socially edifying)? Or something else?

board, v.
besides the obvious meanings, there’s also
4. fig. To approach, ‘make up to’, accost, address, ‘assail’; to make advances to.

sheepfold
1. A pen or enclosure for sheep.

Green Mountains
In Vermont. I thought maybe there might be others that I should know about.

i &middot ii &middot 1 &middot 2 &middot 3 &middot 4

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March 29, 2006

Sibley 3/28/06

So the day after I decide to start posting my midi junk, Sibley dumps a huge batch of scores on me. All by Rebikov. Well, they also posted a bunch of transcriptions of, I think, Algerian traditional music, but I’ve exempted that from midification because it amounted to maybe an hour’s worth of monophonic stuff that makes no sense on the piano.

Also, Sibley’s publication dates on these items seem generally to be wrong, so the following are my determinations based on the plate numbers in the scores.

In addition to my standing disclaimer about sight-reading, I also wasn’t particularly on the ball when I made these. I could go back now that I feel more alert and improve them, but why? I would think of these more as, like, tiny lo-res pictures of obscure art that I took with a camera-phone and am posting here in the hopes that people might be intrigued by what they discern through the fuzz, in which case they can seek out art books or go the museum themselves. My camera-phone was a little blurrier than usual today.

Also, I was just listening to a couple of these and it seems like something funny happens with the pedal every now and then, where it comes in a second later than I played it and loses the note it’s supposed to hold. I don’t think that happens that often when I’m playing. I’m not sure what’s causing that but I’ll look into it.

scores posted 5/25/06:

Vladimir Rebikov:
Conte de la Princesse et du Roi des grenouilles, Op. 36 (1906) bad midi (7:38)

Dans le bosquet de roses, Op.33 No. 6 (1914) bad midi (1:38)

Souvenir, Op.33 No. 5 (1914) bad midi (2:17)

Trois miniatures, Op.33 (1905) bad midi (4:19)

Feuilles d’automne, Op. 29 (1904) bad midi (7:05)

Scènes bucoliques, Op. 28 (1904) bad midi (7:06)

Dans leur Pays, Op. 27 (1904) bad midi (8:14)

Aspirer et Atteindre: 3me tableau musical-psychologique, Op. 25 (1903) bad midi (16:55)

Chansons du coeur: 2me tableau musical-psychologique, Op. 24 (1903) bad midi (17:53)

A la brume, Op. 23 (1904) bad midi (7:46)

Ésclavage et Liberté: tableau musical psychologique, Op. 22 (1903) bad midi (17:39)

Here’s a bit of the Grove article about Rebikov (1866-1920):

Rebikov’s artistic strivings find parallels with contemporary trends in the symbolist movement; this is demonstrated by his use of sources from the literature and art popular in those years. … At the end of 1900 Rebikov came forward with his manifesto on ‘musical psychography’, which he based on Tolstoy’s thesis that ‘music is the shorthand of the feelings’. According to this principle, his musical language achieved a great deal of freedom from the pre-established norms. From around this time he became increasingly experimental; this elicited conflicting reactions from his contemporaries. Rebikov was among the pioneers of whole-tone music in Europe, and frequently made use of parallel chordal movement and quartal harmonies.

Taken as a whole, his work strikes me as fundamentally unsatisfying, but there are nonetheless many intriguing aspects. A careful selection from the short pieces could probably create a lovely album of oddities. Op.36 was truly bizarro, but I genuinely enjoyed at least one movement apiece from Opp. 23, 27, 28, 29, and 33. To my ears, he does “gentle” far better than “troubled.” It’s all fairly uneasy (and romantic/psychologique), under which circumstances a lighter touch goes farther.

The three big “tableaux” are sort of like Tod und Verklärung filtered through Rimsky-Korsakov (and, mildly, Scriabin). They’re much too broad in expression to pull off anything particularly psychologically nuanced, though the forms are quirky enough that it’s clear they’re trying. And it’s not as though Strauss really did this well either, for all his fame. The most damning thing about these pieces is that they play like orchestral reductions but don’t seem ever to have been scored for orchestra – they’re just awkward (and occasionally impossible), unpianistic, pseudo-symphonic writing. And what’s gloriously vulgar in a romantic orchestra is downright silly on a piano. Given Rebikov’s pointedly peculiar later works, also apparently arising from his interest in musical experimentation and in psychology, I’m sort of surprised that the seemingly adventurous conceptions behind these pieces didn’t give rise to something less, um, bland. Of course, we’re moving backward through his output; every successive piece seems more conservative, which doesn’t reflect well on the composer. Maybe if I knew his earlier work I’d see Op. 22 as a breakthrough.

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March 28, 2006

Moby-Dick vocabulary, 4

Chapter IV. THE COUNTERPANE

New feature! Homemade audio (8:08), performed immediately upon finishing the list below.

UPDATE 5/06 – Links to reading intentionally broken. Ugh.

particoloured, a.
1. Partly of one colour and partly of another or others; variegated; esp. (of a dog or other animal) having a coat of with two or more colours in distinct patches.

slippering, vbl. n.
Beating with a slipper.

horse-collar
The COLLAR of a horse.
I mean, I assumed – but it wasn’t an item I was able immediately to picture.

pikestaff, n.
1. A staff or walking stick, esp. a walking stick with a metal point at the lower end, similar to an alpenstock. Also fig. Now rare except in set phrases (see sense 2).
2. In proverbial phrases, as the type of something plain, straight, or obvious, as stiff as a pikestaff, clear as a pikestaff, to call a pikestaff a pikestaff, etc.

toilet, n.
5. a. The action or process of dressing, or, more recently, of washing and grooming.
“Toilette” is just an alternate spelling, though OED tells me that it usually takes the frenchified pronunciation when spelled this way. Melville uses both spellings in the course of this chapter.

beaver, n.
3. a. A hat made of beaver’s fur, or some imitation of it; formerly worn by both sexes, but chiefly by men.
Just checking. Basically, this just means a nice hat.

trowsers
alt. spelling of trousers, of course.

go-off, colloq.
1. The action or time of going off; a starting, commencement.

stave, v.
Has no meaning in the OED that can account for the current usage in the phrase “staving about.” If you search for “staving about” you’ll find this sentence and only this sentence. On context it’s clear enough, and seems to fit the sound of the word. But as far as I can tell it doesn’t mean anything particular.

centre-table
A table intended for the centre of a room, formerly often used for the display of books, albums, etc.

stock, n.
IV. The more massive portion of an instrument or weapon; usually, the body or handle, to which the working part is attached.
29. The handle (of a whip, fishing-rod, etc.).

Rogers’s best cutlery
Here’s what I can figure out. Joseph Rogers, of Sheffield, was a major cutlery works and the manufacturer of many pocketknives imported and sold in the US. This reference, as well as another one in Melville’s White Jacket seem to confirm that “Rogers’s Best” was a related brand-name or advertising phrase. What he means here is not entirely clear to me, however. Perhaps – I’m making this up – perhaps “Rogers’s Best Cutlery” knives were known or advertised to be sharp enough to shave with … or perhaps “Rogers’s Best Cutlery” is simply being used as a jokingly genteel term for the harpoon. I don’t know – the complete solution to this one seems to be eluding my Google skills. Write in if you figure it out!

pilot jacket, n.
= PEA-JACKET n.
A short, double-breasted, woollen overcoat, formerly commonly worn by sailors.

i &middot ii &middot 1 &middot 2 &middot 3

March 27, 2006

This week at the Sibley Music Library

I’ve subscribed to be notified whenever the Eastman School of Music posts new items to their online collection of rare musical scores. All kinds of stuff, most of it heavily obscure and more or less forgotten for the past 100 years, turns up here. Much of it is for piano solo, and I usually try to play through it all. Today I decided I’d let my computer record me as I zipped through the most recent batch of pieces, and here’s the result, in midi format.

My sightreading isn’t bad for an amateur, but passable sightreading still makes for terrible listening. These files are full of serious mistakes and bad choices; even the accurate parts are generally clumsy and lifeless. No, seriously, read that again so that you truly understand: these files are a mess. Why then am I posting this?

I have a childish compulsion to share the things I find interesting with anyone I can grab, and I am able to imagine, naively, that by pointing readers of this site toward these scores, I am also passing on part of the interest they hold for me. Playing through them is the way I make these scores accessible to myself, so of course I have to make my rough realizations of the music available if I want people to experience what I experienced.

This is all silly, I know. As with the Moby-Dick business elsewhere on this site, I understand that nobody will get interested in something just because I am interested in it in a noisy way; and yet I also understand that some tiny portion of my interest does in fact come through. Basically, what I really want to do is communicate something of my interest in this music (and Moby-Dick, etc. etc.) but I don’t feel like taking the time to work out that communication. So I’m just taking the easy (and ineffective) way out and dumping “what I did” on the web, where it will be worth whatever it happens to be worth.

The real reason I am posting this stuff goes back to my original intent when I started using this webspace – I wanted to turn outward (and thus legitimize) the stuff I found myself doing with my time, which would otherwise disappear into my computer. So that’s what this is. Something I did and why not. Maybe I’ll keep doing this for later installments from the Sibley Music Library. Maybe not. If anyone out there actually wants to chat about any of the pieces there/here, I’d be delighted.

scores posted 5/25/06:

Ethelbert Nevin:
May in Tuscany, suite, Op. 21 (1895). bad midi (18:18)

Vladimir Rebikov:
Trois Idylles, Op. 50 (1910) bad midi (5:48)

Chanson blanches, Op. 48 (1910) bad midi (4:52)

Dans la forêt, Op. 46 (1910) bad midi (6:57)

Une fête, suite, Op. 38 (1907) bad midi (3:50)

Tableaux pour enfants, Op.37 (1900) bad midi (5:35)

Brief thoughts: Nevin’s suite is exactly in keeping with his other works that I’ve heard. I mean, exactly. I get the sense that his talent was pretty narrow. The frothier stuff here has that same appeal as “Narcissus” – I particularly enjoyed the singing nightingale movement (is it famous? have I heard it before? it seemed familiar) – but the more lyrical romantic stuff falls awfully flat. I don’t know what to make of that plodding slow movement – seems like he was trying to do something bold and Lisztian but couldn’t pull it off. The “naive” last movement, on the other hand, mostly works. His melodies aren’t amazing but on the whole, they have more charm and grace than those of the average salon composer.

These pieces show Rebikov doodling with whole-tone and modal scales in primitive ways that Debussy, Stravinsky and others had already gone well beyond. But there’s something endearing, to me, about the simplistic spirit of experimentation behind these tiny pieces. Like, say, Cowell, they have that quality of being discoveries put to eager use rather than mature art. What’s delightful is that he seems overwhelmed by the novelty of things that don’t seem to have overwhelmed anyone else. The bitonality and diatonic clusters in Op. 50 are treated like strange, exotic beasts, and playing through the music, I was able to rediscover some of the awe in these timeworn devices. Even the children’s suite, Op.37, seems like it’s going to be a standard turn-of-the-century trifle, and turns out to be a seriously wacky assemblage (check out the clowning “Piano Lesson” movement). I was reminded of the early Edison films, whose charm lies in the fact that they are absolutely astounded by their own dumb achievements.

The whole-tone stuff is the weakest, and some of the “white-key” stuff seems like a childish impression of Scriabin (in exactly the way that most Antheil is a childish impression of Stravinsky), but there’s definitely something intriguing about how raw these works are. In this respect, I particularly liked Opp. 50 and 38. Looks like Sibley’s working their way through a collection of Rebikov’s work, and more seems to be on the way.

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March 27, 2006

Oskar Fischinger: Optical Etudes

This was a program of short films that, as I look at the date, ought to have come before the items above, chronologically. Probably before my entry about The Tattooed Potato, too. Oh well. Anyway.

I had seen many of these, but not all of them, before, a few years ago at another screening (and a few in some very low-quality files online), but this was a rare opportunity – plus I wanted Beth to see them. I can’t seem to find the program – and it wasn’t quite the lineup promised in the press release linked above – so, thankfully, I can’t/don’t have to address each film separately. Many of the individual films shown, especially the earlier items, were experiments in the rawest sense of the word – fragments (or, sometimes, extended loops) without much form (form through time, that is).

Basically, my feelings about Oskar Fischinger are that his visual ideas are wonderfully obvious – seeing one of his films for the first time, you think, “ah, this sort of thing,” as though you’ve always been aware that it existed, and this particular execution of it is just a historical detail. I suppose I could say that this reveals the ways that Fischinger’s work has been quietly and broadly influential, that it feels familiar because we’ve encountered its offspring – but I actually think it speaks to something more interesting than influence; I think this work elicits a response of “of course there’s this” because the particular visual elements Fischinger chose – zooming arcs and expanding planes, gliding circles, bouncing bars, etc. etc. – these speak at some primal level to the way we conceive of kinetics. I’ve seen (and attempted to produce) other work in the same vein – visual abstract movement inspired by music – and I can assure you that not everything connects the way most of Fischinger’s imagery does – not just any bunch of dots rhythmically boinging around seems as inevitable as his generally do.

And, for all that, that’s also one my reservations about Fischinger’s work – it doesn’t always connect. His spirit of experimentation seems to have prevented him from ever really nailing it – to me, each film has a couple concepts in it that don’t quite pop. His moire-patterns and rippling spirograph vortices, for example, are so much less communicative and interesting than his circles and curves, and yet he keeps trying to find a place for them in films where they end up being distracting and frustrating.

My other major reservation about these films is the way they handle their music. At some level, Fischinger was obviously very sensitive to the nature of musical flux – bursting or accumulating or contracting or approaching, etc. etc. But the ideas he created in this visual language, which is immediately recognizable as musical, seldom seem to work completely in sync with the music they purport to accompany. It’s as though Fischinger couldn’t help but let the visuals order themselves according to their own principles – music-like principles, yes, but not necessarily the music of the soundtrack. The little arcs and circles and whatnot frequently do not illustrate or serve the music; they perform a duet with it. I don’t think this is quite what he had in mind, since quite often the visual and the music will seem to line up exactly and speak together – and it’s thrilling! – but then at the next instant, the visuals have begun to do something that’s lovely in itself but seems to have its own agenda. That offers a different kind of satisfaction, and I wish I didn’t have to switch between them over the course of the film.

This is probably why my favorite of his films, by far, is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which, though it has a Brandenburg Concerto playing throughout, is not a “music” piece, and in fact employs a different and simpler sort of time-logic, one with much richer implications. The film is, as titled, a painting, one which is continuously painted and repainted. Nothing “moves” and nothing is “taken away”; Fischinger simply adds more and more paint, simultaneously adding to and covering up that which came before. The process, as it plays out, is absolutely abstract and yet full of possible significance. My first association is with the process of pencil doodling, which in its purest, least self-conscious form, is improvisatory and additive. These parallel lines, what do they demand? How about some concentric circles? After a certain point the concentric circles reach capacity and it suddenly becomes opportune to add radii. Etcetera. Everyone who has ever doodled has a taste and talent for making these decisions, but the pomp of “art” often prevents us from feeling that it’s appropriate to bring these instincts to bear in thinking about abstract art, though in fact they ought to be our first point of access. Watching Motion Painting, that identification is immediate, and we experience the joy of deciding how many circles is enough circles, or we savor the irreducibly abstract experience of a number of circles that is slightly beyond “enough”; truly aesthetic thought, in the purest sense. This kind of thought is implicit in abstract painting, but here it plays out openly, and everyone is involved. The film almost teaches us how to think unpretentiously about abstraction.*

But as I said, the implications go well beyond that. The painting is always constructing itself, like a doodle, toward being a static, completed aesthetic whole, but that process is never, can never be, consummated. As a painting, it implicitly strives to be “finished,” but the only possible finished state is the obliteration that comes with the end of the film; the journey has been the point – and yet the journey was a process of construction. This paradox of purpose has a deep philosophical resonance. In the film’s coda, the processes of construction and destruction accelerate until they are indistinguishable from movement; as the scale of time shifts, we feel the poignant futility of the process, even as its beauty, captured on film, plays out before us. The phases of the abstraction are the cycles of life, of history: endless birth and endless death synthesized with the roving forward movement of a striving consciousness. A fundamental artistic vision, encapsulated in such a simply constructed work. It is forcefully simple.

Steve Reich wrote about the value of hearing “music as a process” and his better music has always given me some of that sort of pleasure; its beauty is not strictly musical but rather the beauty of the natural world, of mathematics. It is not a particularly human beauty, and though I’m very appreciative of the taste Steve Reich had to exercise in order to construct those forms and surfaces, I don’t really ascribe the beauty in his music to him. His music is to me like the photographer’s art – the art of delivering, extracting, or summoning beauty from the world rather than attempting it oneself. This is the generally the way with art attempting mathematical beauty; the purity is the point and so it’s best tapped at the source. Motion Painting No. 1 offers that beauty of natural processes, and of time, but is, to me, far deeper and more moving because it is also inescapably human – it is a performance of nature rather than a reproduction of it. And in these senses, it is in fact very well matched with the Bach that accompanies it, which in its own way is a sort of superhuman immortal order as conceived by a mortal. The beauty of Bach is its combination of the worlds of God and man, the infinitely perfect surrounding and sustaining the emotional and finite. But Bach’s music is sometimes too devout for me, too ready to believe that those two kinds of order belong with one another. Motion Painting No. 1 is the same combination but, in a sense, more arbitrary, more mortal. The infinite aspect is provided by Bach’s music, and by the quasi-geometric designs, and most of all by the inexorable forward movement of the film and of time. But the geometric designs are imperfect, hand-drawn attempts, and everything that emerges over the course of the film dies.

Then again it’s just a bunch of shapes. Doodle-y shapes, no less. It seems odd for me to feel so moved by these shapes, and maybe I ought to be saying that this reaction is probably peculiar to me. But I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it’s wrong to ascribe profundity to a work of art that uses the simplest means and leaves the depth to play out in the mind of the spectator. And then again, it’s simplistic for me even to feel the need to justify and ascribe that profundity to the art rather than to my own thought process; the art experience is, of course, always the result of the combination of work and audience, and even if an experience is more audience than artist, there’s nothing wrong with that. But in deciding how to value the work, I tend to want to decide how much it brought to the table; a kaleidoscope may be beautiful and thought-provoking but it brings little of its own, and it seems important to me to recognize that if I’m going to respond to it like this. Then again maybe that’s just a prejudice I should get past; I’m really not sure. Maybe the fixation on “value” is misguided. Anyway, this is a whole other discussion and maybe I’ll address it again whenever I finally get around to talking about the “Unseen Cinema” films and say some more about Portrait of a Young Man, which created an experience that seemed profound to me despite being almost entirely dependent upon the photographic method mentioned above.

A music professor of mine once gave a pre-concert lecture (that I missed), the gist of which was (I gathered, or perhaps simply imagined based on scraps) that in order to engage with a work of music, the audience must bring its own “compositional” opinions (of the “how many circles is enough circles” sort) into play; that asking “what would I do next?” and answering it with these sorts of instincts goes a long way toward making the meaning of a “difficult” work accessible. You know, maybe I completely made up that that’s what his lecture was about, but for some reason, real or not, I’m ascribing this idea to him; and I agree with it, possibly because I invented it.

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March 27, 2006

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)

by J.K. Rowling

This is book 3. As I write this, we’re in the middle of the fourth book, so once again I am inclined to see this in terms of its standing compared to its neighbors. It was far better than the second book, which was ill-planned and generally lifeless, but still not quite as attuned to the potential in the characters as the fourth book. Whereas the fourth book seems like an actual attempt to let the world breathe on its own, Prisoner of Azkaban was another shot at that puzzle of sequel-writing, albeit with much more inspired solutions than Chamber of Secrets. Bringing in characters and intrigues from Harry’s parents’ generation was in principle a smart move, although J.K. seems to have found ways of distributing only some of the back-story through the book and then dumped the rest on us in a big clumsy pile at the end. This is a recurring problem for her, and one that even when she does it well, I am aware that she is “solving.” That was unfortunately how the book often felt: like a series of solved writing problems. The seams were in the right places, but they were still on the outside.

I liked the shameless “clue” in the form of a top that spins when there is a bad guy nearby. She sets it spinning twice because she’s so proud of her idea for who the bad guy should be. And I’ll grant her that it was a cute idea, although it doesn’t totally make sense. That’s another problem for J.K. – she comes up with something clever, realizes there are objections, and then puts in awkward “okay but then how?” dialogue in an attempt to iron out the objections before our eyes. “But wait, how could he have been there if he wasn’t born yet?” “You see, Harry, he must have used a calendar inversion spell.” “Oh, I see!” This sort of thing is fair game for the nerds to bicker over at recess, but it drags down the book into feeling like an exam that she’s just barely squeaking past.

I liked that the Back to the Future DVDs (again with this?) included a list of frequent objections to the logic of the film, with the creators gamely attempting to justify everything. That’s exactly where that sort of thing belongs. We want to hear the answers, but only so that we don’t have to feel that the questions were actually worth asking. The movies themselves are better for not addressing the questions. J.K. should have just stuck with whatever stuff made for the best drama and then distributed the fine print from her website or, at worst, in her next book. This is going to be an even worse problem in book 5, if I recall.

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March 27, 2006

Trapped In the Closet Chapters 1-12 (Unrated Version) (2005)

written by R. Kelly
directed by R. Kelly and Jim Swaffield

I’m not up on these things so I hadn’t heard of this prior to seeing it, and I think that was probably for the best, because it meant the impact was maximized. It seems like this has gotten sort of popular among non-R. Kelly fans because of how phenomenally, shockingly goofy it is. I enjoyed it. Briefly, for those of you who, like me, have absolutely no clue what’s going on in the world of pop music (or whatever this counts as): R. Kelly wrote this meandering thing for one of his albums, wherein he sing-narrates a scatterbrained quasi-story full of “surprises” over an endless, oddly emotional vamp. Then they filmed it exactly, creating a fully-produced world in which R. Kelly’s voice is coming out of everyone’s mouth while they go through the motions of a dreamily arbitrary series of events. The short attention span and stunted imagination of the writer are apparent at every turn; his effort to create a seamy, melodramatic world of deception and tension is tangibly hopeless – the characters pace around a small set agonizing over incoherent nonsense, caught in the grip of some idiot god, while the slow-mo poignant dream vamp rolls on underneath them. The overall effect is unique, and in the first few minutes I was thinking “Wow, this is a new, powerful weirdness.” Not least because there was obviously an element of utter trash at work, but it wasn’t clear at what level – was it all some kind of irony? The intensity of my initial response was in great part because it wasn’t clear how weird the thing was intended to be – did they or didn’t they know what they were doing? Without a sense of the mind behind a work, you’re forced to engage with the surface as it stands, and in this case the surface was really weird.

But after watching all 12 episodes it became a lot clearer where it was coming from, and I know what to compare it to – it was like reading the stories in the yearly compendium of student writing from my elementary school. It was clearly assembled with all the distractable gusto of a fourth-grader, the type who likes to punctuate his crazy stories with characters saying “this is crazy!” And really, what’s the craziest thing there is? R. Kelly or any fourth-grader can tell you that it’s a midget. Yes, there’s a midget. But it’s something apart from and above fourth-grade writing because a) it’s sung, lazily, and b) it’s a fully realized production on DVD!

On the “behind the scenes” feature(tte), we see R. on set getting worked up about how exciting the whole process has been, and saying that he just made up all this shit and now here he is and there’s an actual midget there! So true; watching it, we’re all equally blown away.

Another thought – the darkly sentimental quality of the musical vamp wraps the whole thing up in its sound and makes it seem as though it should be coming from somewhere, with something human to say. I think it’s the tension between that promise and the overwhelming inability of the material to justify it that makes the thing compelling. R. Kelly, as the vaguely tortured protagonist – or, when he forgets that he’s the protagonist, as the narrator (a second R. Kelly pops out of another closet in order to justify the switch to third person) – personifies this yearning, implicit in the music, to overcome the utter idiocy of, essentially, himself. The terribleness of the material manages to seem like an existential riddle, and because of the rolling waves of the music, R. Kelly seems, in a distant vague way, to be aware of it. But I’m sure he’s not. From the extra features on the DVD, he seemed like an out-and-out moron.

In writing this I realize that I’d actually LOVE to see attentive, faithful productions of stories written by fourth graders. Maybe that would make a great opera. On which note: I know R. thought this had some relationship to opera, but it didn’t. Its closest musical kin was the self-narrating improvised nonsense song that lots of people spin out in indulgent company, or more often, when they’re alone.

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