influenzas y inspirations

Can you swim on your own, or do you float with the tides?

2010-02-23T15:24:12Z

Fishbone and the English Beat played last night, and H.R. got on stage and did a number, nervously, timidly, even, and the nostalgia got everyone jumping, but I kept thinking: What does time do to musicians? Why don't they innovate? Is it like any craft, where the need to make a living blunts the urge to take risks? A song steels itself from a spark, but why is it easier to be aflame when you are broke and desperate, rather than comfy and tricked out with 16g of RAM? It's great to see Robert Plant do something he could never have imagined 35 years ago, but can the Who write a new song anyone can remember within minutes of listening to it? Did Fishbone imagine, 20 years ago, they'd be in the same club, sleeping in a bigger bus, clearing $373 for the night? Would they have continued to do what they do if they did know? It's unsettling to see so much talent, floating rather than swimming . . .

Sagmeister on being inspired & experimental projects

2009-07-24T15:43:36Z

Stefan Sagmeister likes hotel rooms as engines of inspiration. Especially when he just checks in to a new one, when he's away from the studio and has an uncluttered mind. But I love his insistence that good designers should schedule "regular" "non-client-driven" experimental projects. He keys in on the word "regular" to emphasize that such projects, which do not bring in income and may actually lose cash, should not be bumped from the work flow to make room for profitable corporate or paying projects. You can't really experiment on a client's time, and without experiment you cannot grow your creative skills; intuition and insight depend on repeated failure in laboratory-like thought processes. I'm very fortunate that I haven't had many corporate clients or paying gigs in the past ten years, so each of my projects results to some degree in outright failure. Does this mean that I am getting "better" as a producer and creator? I certainly have more inspiration and insight than ever before, and these elements in my thinking and spirit seem to grow markedly not on a calendar or clock but by each attempt at expression and by each abandonment of an expression to follow a new muse or moment.

Women, Influenced & Cassavettes

2009-05-27T08:33:00Z

The first 30 minutes of Gloria Rowlands in John Cassavettes' "Woman Under the Influence" is a role any actress would kill for, but few could play. She's mesmerizing in a trip to a bar, looking for a drink, while her husband works for the water department late one night; after a languid five minute sequence getting chatted up by a lonely loser at the bar, she is being groped in her own house and suddenly awakens to start fighting herself out of a near rape. She is distracted, swollen by the drink as all drunks are, pink and burpy, but she's also losing her marbles, losing her connection to the world that miraculously clings to her as mother, wife and neighbor. Why isn't this movie made today? Everythign is too slick, now, too seamless and perfect except when the nuts and bolts of perfection get in the way. Cassavettes gives you ten seconds at a time to establish his mood and directions, but then gives Rowlands all the time she needs to vex and vent. His hand is heavy to make a point, and a whisper when he lets you listen on your own terms, as a detached witness to disaster. And this accident isn't something you can say you saw coming; its effect is to leave you continually looking at the victims at the scene after the collision has happened, always a few seconds late. Masterful, beautiful, slowly contagious.

Promiscuity Punished

2008-11-12T04:32:42Z

"Loose Girl" is the story of Kerry Cohen's life, wherein she evolves from confused loose teenage cannon to confident psychologist and human sexuality expert. Book is utter bullshit. It might sell only to readers with prurient inclinations toward both dirty sex and confession. Why can't female sexuality ever be portrayed properly at bookstores? Is Hell paved with notches showing every boy a girl ever allowed into her pants? Even this book, which purports to be of a journey from anxiety to confidence, can't help but degrade promiscuous behavior. Probably because society's bookstores are run by men, assisted by women who want things to be run by men. Well, almost everyone goes from teenage angst to a sense of midage mediocrity, and Cohen's story is just more proof. Anecdote after anecdote reveals Cohen's current apprehension about her past behavior, when every tryst underscored her neurotic personality, but to Cohen this is a shocking scientific evolution, and she fails to see the other side of the equation: the millions of men who buy porn every month on their business stays in the local Hilton who are looking for a glance at the good girl next door who has the guts to do something naughty even if people are looking. Rent the movie Belle du Jour instead of buying or borrowing this tripe from Kerry Cohen. Or you can read an excerpt from my own treatise on sexual power, my forever-unfinished but still-expanding Burn & Scar.

I wanna be in Ghostland

2008-11-08T05:57:41Z

Ghostland Observatory is supercool. Desert head talks funny and looks funny and grows up wanting to be a comedian because everyone laughs at him. He's on a farm hours away from San Antonio, stuck in nowhere. But he makes it to Austin, gets discovered by a socially inept peer who happens to play a little piano, and the rest is history. Ghostland Observatory is the bomb. Not for the music, which sucks, but for the dancing and the vibe, which is utterly original.And the band does not allow itself to be marketed. This is the direction I need to be moving in.

Check out Ghostland Observatory's video "Vibrate" and ask yourself if you can really do a similar routine with your butt and hips.

Rilo Kiley Has One Great Song

2008-05-17T05:55:29Z

There might actually be two on this ridiculous album called "Under the Blacklight." Sheryl Crow light, with more tinkle and twitter. And a massive song, just beautiful: "Are We Breaking Up." Heard it in Iceland and been obssessed with her ever since, until I got the album in my hands and listened to it; total embarrassment. A song partly sung in Spanish tells you all you need toknow, that Rilo knows nobody who speaks Spanish, coz they never would let her leave the gate with such comical pronunications. (And this comes from somebody who sounds like Maurice Chevalier singing Zank Evan for Little Gurlzzz.) Ignore this album. (But then the update: Anne McGinn tells me to give the album a second listen, and that I'll find something better, and I do, and I do. There are three good songs on the disc. I'll admit. But still, there is dross.)

Music for Zombies

2008-05-02T16:04:43Z

I don't feel good. Gotta go in for some more tests. Drag.

And i can't stop dreaming a disturbing dream. About saying goodbye to somebody who loves me too much. What will i say? There is no meeting on the other side, and all i can hope for is the delusion of forever as I check out in the chemicals that can rescue me from pain. For somebody stuck in the moment like me, sudden death is not an option: modern physics can wipe me out in less than a second, and this is not long enough for the chemicals to fill my brain. Endorphins need how long to work? How long to give me my vision of endless horizons, with Sandra waving at me every sunset and every carousel ride, How are you Seanie, when will I see you again, as she floats away into someplace i will never visit? There is a question of terrible semnantics here: Does she say goodbye to me, or do I leave her crushed with my memory? What a fucking nightmare.

So I look for signals of survival, rhythms or swirls that take me out of my thoughts and into a trip of joy or anticipation, and one comes to me today, in the midst of nonstop doomy tears and swollen pains: a band so smart it spills wit and spreads wishes, and thak you so so so much for your lift. I walk out of the door, laughing, I hope. Vampire Weekend gets me going on a Friday, appropriately, with a sound I've never heard before, thank goodness.

Beirut's Elephant Gun

2008-03-21T09:53:00Z

My pal Omar wants to change the world through art. I am not sure I more comfortable in anyone's presence than Omar's and Sandie Black's, and even Sandie will admit that she is often her own herd of cats. Omar is a tide in my life; when I am about to become wreckage, he floods whatever ocean I am traveling with hope and energy. I've been rescued several times by his interests and respect for my arty-farty efforts, so when he writes me and links me to something in the world that affects him profoundly, I feel the hit directly, and today he has discovered Zach Condon, the barely twenty genius behind the group Beirut. Omar sends me an email and says for a guy like this at his age to be producing music like this is fucking incredible. This is what Omar sends me:

Wings of Desire, revisited

2008-01-02T11:32:21Z

My nephew is 19, sculpting himself with a chisel made of psychology from clay made of philosophy. It is a thrill to see. I tell him tonight I have enjoyed connecting with him, and his family, and my family, after years of disconnect, but if I walk out of Oregon tomorrow and disappear for another half decade I will not look back with a shred of guilt; my absence is proof of my interest or concentration on something beyond my self. He gets it. The signposts are everywhere, I say, of directions to take in becoming something other than yourself. To prove it, we grab four movies which I claim as watershed markers in my own personality: Aguirre Wrath of God, Turtles Can Fly, Wings of Desire and Tzametti 13. We put on Wings of Desire, which I have not seen for more than fifteen years. It is slower, more poetic, than I remember, and there are some beautiful lines couched in sharp and memorable images. I have grown to dislike the director, Wim Wenders, for many of his movies since, and as I watch this again I understand why: This is a written gem, and Wenders did not write Wings of Desire. I remember Julia the balet dancer in Berlin telling me this was not a movie by Wenders, even if his name was on the masthead, and I ignored her warnings since I was older and knew better. I was wrong to do so. One line jumps out at me: the subtitles read "absence of pleasure," and I think what a great name for a book, and my nephew laughs out loud and says the line in German to the effect of lustlessness. We are on the same page, he and I, responding to the same line. We switch off after 45 minutes and I ask him if he's seen another movie like it. No, he says, it's very sophisticated, the lines, the images, original. I leave him to sleep and at 2:30 am come home here to write more, to write something lovely and sophisticated.

Sean Penn's silly "Into the Wild"

2007-12-01T18:44:12Z

I wonder how many of the theatre-goers have actually read Krakauer? Or will read Krakauer?

I was pole-axed by the book while watching over an injured companion in Chomro, a three-building village on the way up to the Annapurna Sanctuary in the Himalayas. The book certainly resonated with me in a way that Sean Penn will never be able to accomplish. The movie celebrates but does not analyze the actions of Alex in the wild, and concentrates way too much on the "why" and "how" the kid got into the wilderness; Krakauer's story is very specific in its attempt to accuse the kid of being an idiot and then coming full circle to admire his ability to survive. I cannot remember the exact language he uses, but Krakauer basically says the kid pulls off an amazing feat of survival while succumbing to a mistake many experienced outdoorsmen make, regarding the poisonous plant he ingests. Krakauer makes his admiration very, very clear, and suggests that what the kid does is something every human being wishes to do but hasn't the guts to attempt. I think the real idiots are the busy bees who cannot and will not get out of the city into unregulated nature. Not the paved roads of Yosemite or Joshua Tree, but into days or weeks of no available social infrastructure. Maybe Penn's retelling of the story is idiotic, and perhaps an idiotic audience needs a paint-by-numbers guide to getting into the "wild" (and I thought the biggest weakness of the movie was the actual depiction of its tame landscapes, all 37 or whatever actual locations visited by Alex), but the actual kid dropping out of society's harness to answer the urge to escape is another matter altogether. Perhaps Alex was an idiot, and he did some idiotic things, to be sure, but his willingness to cross that river was a step of genius. Surrendering to nature, the tactile one you walk in, and the instinctive one you act on, is an essential part of being human.

Whenever I walk into a 7-Eleven, the elephants and sea lions and lemurs I have met in the wild, and all their cousins, wail a single encouragement into my ears: "Blow this ****ing place up!"

The "Wild" movie, Hollywood, and Sean Penn, cannot touch "Touching the Void," Joe Simpson's amazing story, or Carroll Ballard's "Never Cry Wolf," or even the sometimes-unbelievable Alastair Fothergill doc "Planet Earth." In the latter, fat cat David Attenborough laments in the finale that our choice is to "destroy or cherish" our planet; maybe Penn's "directorly" vanity should be destroyed, but the kid who wandered into the wild should most definitely be cherished.

Most readers of the book would be mildly let down by the movie, but still associate a good vibe with Alex running away from traffic lights and parking meters, and therefore let Penn off the hook. I was expecting an epic, something along the lines of "Walkabout" or "Picnic at Hanging Rock," but these sorts of movies have fallen out of favor compared to flicks where people's heads are blown to smithereens and other gimmicky fantasy. So Penn gives light rumination, hardly surprising. The shame is anybody seeing the movie will not be bothered to read the book, or will be prejudiced against its main character because of the movie.

Have you read Simpson's "Touching the Void"? Or, even better, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's "Worst Journey In the World"? Those two books are freaking bombs: mankind in nature, and the nature of mankind.