breaking the white cube inside the white cube
2009/12/19Friday night found me at the New Museum to see Jonah Bokaer, Judith Sanchez Ruiz, and Daniel Arsham performing Replica. I am a not-so-secret admirer of Jonah Bokaer (the youngest ever Cunningham dancer, beginning at 18), particularly in the way that he has successfully founded or co-founded two of the most vital performance spaces in New York City, Chez Bushwick and Center for Performance Research, and still has time to maintain his career as a dancer/choreographer. And of course it’s not enough to simply maintain these various modalities but his work in all of these areas is really about digging, about exploring in a very serious way. The one time I briefly met him, at a joint Eyebeam/Chez Bushwick event, he was extraordinarily charming, which may be a prerequisite for all of his endeavors.
Back to Replica itself, the stage contained a large white cube, angled such that the audience could only see two sides of it, each side with large cracks out of which the dancers appeared. Ostensibly about memory and memories of memories, there was also video projection onto the cube of the same cube being broken out of in their rehearsal studio.
The dance primarily featured Ruiz and Bokaer pulling from a collection of movement and reaction, exhaustively rehearsed and developed beforehand. Throughout the 60 minute piece, it was as though they were slowly teaching us this language, the audience experiencing in a very controlled way the act of remembering each gesture to see it come back again later in a fresh iteration. More than any dance piece I’ve seen in a long time the visual movement really felt like music. In a sense, the movement contained more squarely defined moments than the sound by ARP/Alexis Georgopoulos (formerly of Tussle), which was mainly long washes of textures folding into one another. This worked so nicely in conjunction with the dance, the stylistic tension between the angularity of the movement and the softness of the sound was lovely.
communication by consensus
2009/11/27I was talking to my friends D&B yesterday about the lousy translation of the title of Fassbinder’s “Faustrecht der Freiheit” into the English “Fox and His Friends” and how the German is much more rich with meaning, implying maybe “law of the jungle” or “price of freedom” or some such thing along those lines.
But even more interesting than that was the realization, pointed out by D, that when you put Faustrecht der Freiheit into Google asking for translation, it doesn’t come back with a translation of the phrase, it responds with fox and his friends.
It’s almost as though Google has become even more intelligent but more stupid too. Wikipedia style truth-through-consensus seems to be spreading to language equivalency. Of course communication is based on consensus but there seems to be a step or two missing in this particular equation.
rjdj — augmenting your daily audio reality
2009/11/13RjDj is really exciting, one of the best “augmented reality” apps out there, as far as I’m concerned. Describing it to people is always a bit tricky but I think I’m getting the hang of it.
Basically, it’s a real-time generative composition tool that runs on your iPhone or iPod touch. You can compose a patch in Pd, upload to your iPhone, then it will run the sound coming in through your mic into the patch, outputting whatever crazy thing you’ve designed. They call these patches “scenes” but really they’re fully functional Pd patches running on your mobile device.
I love the idea of composers around the world building patches for daily life, some maybe designed for subway trips, others timed for long car rides. Or maybe specially designed patches for plane trips, like a sound world created to take you from New York to Tokyo, prepping you for your arrival and slowly shifting your brain between the cultures.
I’m not sure if people are realizing the potential of this app, but I’m totally psyched about learning more myself at our RjDj SkillShare at Eyebeam. I can’t wait to see what ideas are churning out there and to start building my own.
nyc 1
2009/11/02It’s almost been a year that I’ve been in New York (!!). Living here has had its ups and downs. Here are some observations.
1) This city takes time to adjust to. I’ve lived in Europe and Japan and I think I adapt quickly. But the way people live here is profoundly different than anywhere I’ve been. In sone ways it seems to be American culture in its most pure form: the greed, the superficiality, the rush. But in other ways it has this old style of literary undercurrent. There are people here who do deeply care about ideas, the past, and the meaning of their city. I feel that here more than any other American city and in many other places in the world.
2) People here work hard. And I appreciate that about the culture. Sometimes it’s a bit too much and is probably used as an excuse to ignore one’s inner life, but overall it’s nice to be somewhere where work is admired and appreciated. Maybe it is just my inner Protestant speaking.
3) Finding the balance between my own work in music and a full-time job is extraordinarily difficult. Part of the difficulty is that I really like my job. But after a year of being an aesthetic sponge, I am putting my work out into the world again rather than just absorbing others’. There are some exciting projects on the horizon, stay tuned!
Really, a move to New York is as much an exercise in self-learning as anything else. Of course, any move to a foreign place is, no question. But New York, more than any city I know, explicitly and repeatedly asks you, to your face, “so how are you going to deal with that?”. And you just keep plugging away, realizing throughout that yeah, you can handle it, and after a while even start to totally enjoy it. And after that, I guess where I am now, you realize New York is more of an addiction than just a place to live.
the surprise of the past
2009/10/31Completely unexpectedly, after a morning of Alva Noto, my iTunes deftly began playing Alvin Curran’s Canti Illuminati. I haven’t listened to it in probably years.
If you too have not heard it in a while then you are also missing out. It still sounds fresh, strong, and experimental.
Curran says, “Canti Illuminati, was of course my early tribute to the human voice, as the most natural source of music known. … I always told my students: don’t forget! when the electricity gets turned off, you always have your voice/ your entire body as a basic musical instrument.”
the taste of your aspirational self
2009/10/17I was just glancing at a New York Times magazine article by Rob Walker. The teaser reads, “Pandora Internet radio tries to figure out what kind of music you – [...] not your aspirational self – really like.”
What a funny idea, this notion that there’s a “true self” deep inside, one that maybe secretly loves Neil Young or Bon Jovi. But for your friends, you curate an iPhone playlist reaching for that aspirational self that’s out there somewhere. And Pandora’s system can make that distinction!
Tangentially reminds me how 85% of all of the restaurants in the Castro district of San Francisco served meatloaf, as if to say, truly, deep-down, we, also, just really love meatloaf (and that’s OK) even if we have to put on airs the rest of the time.
I don’t really get this aspirational vs real thing in the same way that I’ve never really understood comfort food. You like what you like, then you don’t, or maybe you still do. But is this a common assumption, that people have secret tastes kept hidden? One never does leave high school, I suppose.
creative life
2009/10/04Bob Ostertag’s “Creative Life: Music, Politics, People, and Machines” is a humble yet powerful reminder of the importance of being true to your ethics and clear about your motivations. Ostertag is known to the music world as an experimental electronic musician who cut his teeth in the downtown New York scene of the 1980’s with Zorn, Firth, etc. But his other life, as a journalist and activist in Latin American politics is something less known to most musicians, myself included.
I personally became interested in his work in the late 90’s. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that there were openly gay electronic musicians doing work that I was into, on the experimental side. I would quickly learn that this wasn’t the case, but Ostertag’s openness certainly stood out. And he even did work about gay topics, clearly from a culturally activist point of view. While I didn’t want to mimic his approach, I found it totally refreshing. And in this age of mono or micro culture, his wide-ranging and strident voice sounds even more necessary and still fresh.
The book is equal parts personal search for common ground between his music and his political activism as well as testament to the importance of following your internal compass even if it makes little sense at the time. In many ways, it’s a personal explication of Ostertag’s ethics with the subtext as a reminder to other’s to find their own.
I love his struggle to determine his own motivation; it was a long time for him to begin to come to terms with the driving force of his life. Anyone who works that way is more interesting than those that seemingly know what they are to do from the beginning. And certainly preferable to those artists who so frantically package themselves with a bow on top, for easy plucking.
All-in-all, a highly recommended read, if not for the insights into the political struggles of Latin America than for an amazing artist who soldiers on with little notice of fad or fortune.
