Two cities, two concerts

In the last week I've seen concerts in both Detroit and Cleveland, and I couldn't help but notice how differently people behaved.  TL;DR:  Detroiters clap.

I didn't start going to small venues to see rock bands in earnest until I moved to Cleveland.  The way people act here does vary from venue to venue but I kind of figured this is just normal:  stand where you can see the stage, keep your mouth shut, and do not under any circumstances dance.  I might prefer a little more freedom, but I can deal with it.

In Detroit I saw Swans (again) with the opening act Low at the Magic Stick.  I would have paid good money just to see Low - see their incredible album The Great Destroyer - so I wasn't going to miss this show.  Their set was beautiful, and left me thinking I need to pick up more of their albums.  They have a loud-soft dynamic whose loud bits are a perfect pairing with Swans, but their soft bits are very soft indeed.  The guys behind me must not have seen each other in a while, because their conversation went on too long and got too loud.  In a rare moment of lucidity, I turned around to face them, jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the band, and asked the guys "are they boring you?"  They kept it down after that.  Unfortunately, I'd gotten up early and spent much of the day in airports, so I was too tired to enjoy Swans.  When I left at 1AM, they were still playing.

All the fans in Detroit clapped and cheered loudly after every song, and yelled in appreciation when the band started a song they recognized.  At one point Low said to the audience, "thanks for clapping."  That was what got me thinking about this.

In Cleveland three days later I saw ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead at the Grog Shop.  This was a super high energy rock show in an intimate space, and the band worked hard to fire up the 70-odd fans by climbing down into the audience to play their instruments.  A few people were actually jumping around, but with all that effort and energy, three quarters of the audience was still just standing there nodding rhythmically.  At other equally energetic shows, there have been times where I've gotten into the music and started dancing in place a bit, only to draw glares from people standing nearby.  There is no clapping and little cheering at a typical Cleveland concert.  Maybe one out of ten attendees will yell in appreciation after a great song; the rest stand there like they've seen it all before.  Bands playing in Cleveland must feel like their shows are a flop.

I don't know what to make of all this.  Maybe there's an element of hipster insecurity to Cleveland audiences, a fear that if they admit the show is good, then people will think they haven't seen enough shows to know what's really good.  Or maybe Clevelanders really have seen it all before.  These two cities are too much alike for there to be big differences.  They're both under the gun in more ways than one, and moments of escape are important.  Seeing a rock band should free you, get you out of your own head, wipe the slate clean and reenergize you for when you have to get back to the grind.  Because the grind is waiting for you.  That's why we have rock music.

Gotye at Nautica, er, Lakewood High School

"Somebody I Used To Know" was at full viral fever level when tickets went on sale this spring.  We paid Ticketbastard, err, Live Nation $50 plus $13 fees per ticket for two decent seats, assuming it would sell out fast.  Evidently it didn't, because they ended up playing on a stage that normally hosts talent shows featuring pimply jugglers.

Our first clue was that several weeks ago Groupon offered tickets at half price.  Consternated would describe my reaction.

Our next clue was not when we went to Live Nation's website and downloaded and printed out the tickets on the day of the event - nope, the site and tickets said Nautica.  Nor did we receive an email - they might have sent one, but apparently as far as our spamfilter is concerned, Live Nation's credibility is comparable to that of ads for discount pharmaceuticals.  No, our next clue came when we were looking for other bands to see, and we stumbled upon a second concert listing for Gotye, on the same day, in a different venue.  *rolls eyes*

What happened?  Did Nautica get sick and have to stay home?  Did Lakewood make them an offer they couldn't refuse?  Based on the attendance we saw (a whole lot of people sitting in cheaper seats behind us, and about 50% butts in the more expensive seats in front of us) Nautica would've been empty.  My guess is that Nautica charges the band a lot of money for the privilege of playing there, and the band moved to Lakewood to cut costs.

We had seats either way.  Lakewood's were even padded, though the amount of kneeroom they provided would have shamed a Third World airline.  And no beer.  That's right, I remember now, THERE'S NO BEER IN HIGH SCHOOLS.

So, the show:  the sound was quite good - I could even understand the lyrics, which is rare.  I enjoyed almost all the music (but see below).  They had captivating video material going on a movie-sized screen at the back of the stage; they must have had several artists make videos to play along with the songs.  They played "Somebody I Used To Know" with the female part sung by the lead singer of the opening act, because Gotye is estrogen deficient.  The only significant negative was the spotlights slashing across my retinas repeatedly.  Seriously, guys, that's obnoxious.  For a couple songs I didn't dare open my eyes.  I can still remember my field of vision filling with peach-pink as the glare burned through my eyelids.

If Gotye reminds me of a band, it's Talking Heads, in their heyday of quirky pop and suspension-of-disbelief lyrics.  Gotye used instruments ranging from up-to-the-minute (programmable touchscreens like those pioneered recently by Bjork) to historical (the Suzuki Omnichord from the mid-80s).  There was a lot of percussion.  They were literally tripping over drums on that stage.

The videos got me thinking.  They were in time with the music, so that could mean they perform the songs exactly the same way every time - or that they brought the videographers along with them to tweak the videos when they want to change the way they play a song.  A lot of bands do use road trips to refine their songs, and this would prevent Gotye from doing that.  Or, it could mean that the videos were in short pieces, and the pieces were triggered by one of those up-to-the-minute tabletty things.  (Which is yet another job the keyboardist has to do.)  That would allow them to rearrange the songs at will.

But, as I mentioned, I only enjoyed *almost* all the music.  The last three songs of the encore were something different entirely.  By that point, I had gotten used to Gotye's brand of weird, so when the home stretch was really ordinary instead, I was completely thrown.  It was major-key crowdpleasing arena rock.  It was like the '80s Top 40 came back to life for fifteen minutes.  And the crowd loved it.  Alice turned to me and actually asked if our intelligence was being insulted.  I said no, but I wasn't sure I wanted to find out what came next.

And then the show was over.  What a trip.

Fiction: Uptight

Cyrus's nose had been useless since he moved to Muskegon.  The paper mill had long since closed, but people said it was the kind of town that deadened the senses anyway.  His friends had abandoned wild hairstyles and clothes, moved past tattooing, and taken up piercings and implants in an arms race of personal branding.  The pavement cracked; their psyches thrashed.

They said he was uptight.  He resisted their jaded scarification.  Inwardly he reeled when Ethel became a junkie as a fashion statement, but at the bar Cyrus pursed his lips and nodded with everyone else.  He felt the emperor had no clothes, but who would listen?

He took to driving the battered streets after the early bars closed.  They said the Midwest was a post-industrial wasteland, but the bricks felt warm to him.  At least the buildings let the bindweed grow on them.  Nothing grew in his broken social scene.  As he rolled past the fences he felt watched, or perhaps looked upon.  It wasn't the buildings' glassless spectacles regarding him.  Maybe it was the Milky Way.  Muskegon no longer put out enough light pollution to drown out the stars.

Sometimes, as he drove, the crickets would go silent and Cyrus would sense a presence.  Above him there floated an ambivalent deja vu.  The hair would stand up on the back of his neck.  Would they take him away?  Would they show him a different place to be, a different way to be?  If they did, what could he do?  Nothing:  his friends' condescending grins would lock him out forever.  They could never change, even as they burned with the pace of their fashion.

I wish that they'd swoop down on a country lane late at night when I'm driving.
They'd take me on board their beautiful ship and show me the world as I'd love to see it.

DIY: USB wall plates

Have you ever wished you could plug a USB device directly into your wall to connect it to a computer somewhere else?  Wireless USB basically doesn't exist.  So I got some generic wall plates and USB inserts.

Pro tip:  connect the wires and make sure it works before you drill any holes.

In my kitchen, I have a laptop that's used for recipes, Internet radio, Netflix, etc.  We have a nice stereo sitting on top of the cabinets, but getting the sound up to the stereo meant having wires hanging down.  That's ugly and it got in the way.  I solved the problem by putting a USB hub up there (with a USB audio output) and running the USB cable from the computer to the hub through the wall.

The bottom plate (with old paint showing around the edges)

At the countertop level, I decided to repurpose a hole in the wall for a phone jack we weren't using.  Above the cabinets, I figured I could safely put the other plate a couple feet to the side.  Nope:  I forgot that the wall contained vertical boards (studs) that the drywall is screwed to, and there was at least one stud to the right of my upper plate that would prevent the wire in the wall from going sideways to reach the lower plate.  (That, of course, was after the first set of holes I drilled ended in solid wood up there, forcing me to drill a second set and patch the first.)  It wasn't going to be pretty up there.

Once I realized the upper plate was going to have to be roughly above the lower one, I drilled a third set of holes and tried lowering the cable from above.  I hit what appeared to be a *horizontal* board in the way inside the wall.  Exhausted, I packed up my tools and gave up.  That was January.  On Sunday I picked it back up again, and realized that (a) the horizontal board didn't block off the whole interior of the wall, and (b) the wall was insulated.

The top plate, with extra holes I had to patch

At this point I resorted to the ultimate homeowner hack:  a straightened coathanger.  I pushed it up from the lower hole, and its tip barely came out of the upper hole.  I attached the bottom end of the USB in-wall cable to the top of the coathanger with electrical tape and was able to pull the cable down through the insulation.  At that point all the wire connections were functional, and all I had to do was screw the plates to the wall.  Done!  Well, except for patching and painting over all the extra holes up there.

Albums: two by We Were Promised Jetpacks

Here I'm going to depart from my usual album review format where I discuss a single album that I've been listening to for years.  Instead, I'm going to talk about the new album by We Were Promised Jetpacks, In the Pit of the Stomach, and how it's different from their first, These Four Walls.

Here's the song that got me hooked on the band, Moving Clocks Run Slow from These Four Walls:

The lyrics are catchy nonsense (is it about special relativity?) and the vocals and drums are up front in the mix.  The sound is spare, the pace propulsive.  It has groove.

I bought the new album because WWPJ played at the Grog Shop on November 1st.  Here's Medicine from In the Pit of the Stomach (not a live version):

The sound of this song, and most of the rest of the album, is grander, more epic.  The rest of the mix has been brought up alongside the vocals and drums, and there's just more going on.  More layered guitars, more effects, everything.  It feels like the difference between a live record with four guys making disciplined noise and a studio album where full advantage was taken of the multitracking.  Sadly, the new one doesn't play as well against background noise:  in my car, I can't hear enough of the detail to really get a feel for the song; instead I want to listen to it on the good stereo at home.  The popping, high-dynamic-range songs on Walls never needed that.

In the Pit of the Stomach feels more mature to me than These Four Walls.  Maybe this is the sound of a band growing up:  graduating from playing in bars to playing in studios.  Sadly, they didn't play Moving Clocks Run Slow at the Grog.  It was a great show anyway.

Swans at the Beachland Ballroom, 9/23/11

Swans are a band.  I'm somewhat at a loss to describe them in more detail; Allmusic has a lot of words about them at this link here.  I'm just sitting here opening and closing my mouth like a fish.

I can't say I wasn't warned.  The opening act, Sir Richard Bishop, graciously accepted some applause during his set and muttered, "Swans are gonna **** your faces off."  And they did.

Swans' set started out loud.  It got difficult to talk over the looped synthesizer, but we didn't see anybody on stage so we weren't sure they were actually playing yet.  A guy stepped out and started hammering repetitively on some hanging bells, adding to the noise.  And another guy.  And another - six total.  It was arrhythmic, throbbing, and glorious.  It droned.

Drone music is usually soft, like late afternoon in a meadow, or like bread that's fallen into dishwater.  Not like this.  Swans are to drone music as the Navy's active sonar is to whale speech.  Actually that's a very good analogy.

Confetti fluttered down from the cieling of the Ballroom.  It had probably been there since New Year's Day, if not longer.  Every square inch of my clothing vibrated, including the soles of my shoes.  I wouldn't have been surprised to look down and see an outline of dead skin cells on the floor around me.  I felt physically lifted up like a puppet on strings.  With every follicle on high alert, the sensory overload wiped out all my thoughts and pushed my consciousness into my body.  My beer went warm. 

God help the poor bastard who was trying to put on a show in the Beachland Tavern in the same building.  (It was the Schwartz Brothers.  Glen Schwartz was one of the early guitarists for the James Gang, and he's kind of a savant.  I figure he either thought the noise was just in his head, or else he went ballistic and preached hellfire from the mic all night.)

Go see Swans.  Bring earplugs.

Why music?

When you were a teen, you probably had songs that you listened to over and over, laying in your bed or huddled in the corner wearing headphones.  You weren't the only one.  Did you ever wonder why music is so popular with young people? 

Well, what is our music about?  Mostly it isn't about our schoolwork or our jobs, our laughter or our arguments, the safe things that occupy our everyday lives.  It's about more ... I think the right word is "intense" ... feelings.  Love.  Anger.  Ecstacy, delirium.  Scary stuff, it makes you act in ways you normally wouldn't.  I've begun to think that music is our way of getting used to those raw states of mind so we're prepared for them when they happen to us.

Why would we need that?  Here's my guess:  we are, as a culture, notoriously blind to our own emotional and even physical states.  Our minds are swimming with distractions created by consumerism; we're manipulated by advertising and fantasies in our media that are all constructed to maintain this capitalist world.  All that outside influence has a toll:  we may not have the time and the mental clarity to understand our own bodies and feelings - or we may simply give in to the distractions in order to escape from the hard work of figuring it out.  So we're unprepared to deal with lust, territorialism, fear, shame, and all the rest.  Music takes all those raw states and presents them safely, as entertainment.  Repeated exposure makes the messy stuff less frightening when it hapens to us.  

(Want a laugh?  When we have these intense feelings, we think:  I know what that is - and we start communicating in song lyrics.)

Here's a related thought, about adulthood.  I just got over appendicitis, and during the recovery I was repulsed by the idea of having a beer or a glass of wine.  Alcohol is about experiencing a different state of mind.  When I feel sick, I don't want alcohol, because I'm already away from normal - I want to be normal again.  So maybe music functions to familiarize us with the scary aspects of our ordinary state of mind, and alcohol serves to take us away when it gets boring.

Earth at the Grog Shop, 6/12/11

On Sunday night I went to the Grog Shop with a friend to see the band Earth (video). They've been around for about 20 years, spawned at least one subgenre, and probably inspired many of my favorite bands like Low and Morphine.

Low, for example, plays loud, distorted rock music at maybe 60 beats per minute. That's half the pace of a typical rock song (Ben Folds Five "Song For The Dumped": 108bpm). Low's album The Great Destroyer is bleak, soul-wrenching, beautiful, and placid. And Earth makes them sound like the Minutemen.

The subgenre Earth inspired was called "drone metal" or "drone doom" or "doom metal", with rich harmonies and song structures from drone music executed as if they were heavy metal. It was pretty strange to watch the drummer slowly lift her arms in the air and bring the sticks down onto her kit as if she was at the bottom of a pool.

Ambient music was once described as "as ignorable as it is listenable"; it is not meant to be focused on, but rather to create atmosphere (see Harold Budd's early work Abandoned Cities). The super-slow pace of Earth's songs achieved the same trick: they developed too slowly for me to focus on the structures, and my mind drifted. For me, then, the experience of the concert was the unexpected memories it conjured up. That's never happened to me at a concert before - I'm glad I went. And it told me something about myself: that my mind is still not quiet enough to slip into meditation and simply be present.

Albums: X Unclogged

This is one of a series of posts about music.  I'll describe albums that are not famous and mostly not critically acclaimed either, but they grabbed me and held on.  I'd like to try to capture the mystique of each one for you.

Unclogged, by X, is American music.  It is rock played by four people on a stage.  It is not 'unplugged', but the name was probably a joking reference to that genre.  X were a punk band, but if you listen, you'll hear echoes of rockabilly, folk, country, and other American forms.

You will also hear vocal harmonies that I don't have words for, except "unexpected".  You might remember "Burning House of Love" as pretty standard rock radio fare from 1985.  Here, it's reborn as a boom-chick.  Listen when Exene Cervenka joins John Doe:

Frail female vocals, vibraphones, atmosphere ... this album was made for me.

Albums: Tabula Rasa

This is one of a series of posts about music.  I'll describe albums that are not famous and mostly not critically acclaimed either, but they grabbed me and held on.  I'd like to try to capture the mystique of each one for you.

And now for something completely different.  Hit Play on the video below and let it creep up on you.  It's a long track. 

I'm breaking my rule to bring you Tabula Rasa by Arvo Part, an acknowledged masterpiece.  Part is an Estonian minimalist composer of choral and orchestral music.  All that probably sounds like bollocks to a rock listener, which is what I was when I first heard it.  But Tabula Rasa has this:  atmosphere.

In this track, twelve cellos play a slow, aching melody several times, expressing a different emotion each time.  It forms an arc of tragedy:  quiet comprehension is followed by keening grief, then anger, and finally exhaustion.

Turn the lights off.

Albums: Fear of Fours

This is one of a series of posts about music.  I'll describe albums that are not famous and mostly not critically acclaimed either, but they grabbed me and held on.  I'd like to try to capture the mystique of each one for you.

In Fear of Fours, Lamb created an album as off-balance as the Talking Heads' Remain in Light, but warmer and less paranoid.  There are songs here that build to epic heights, but what fascinates me is lyrics like these:

This was a body
Now it's a home
For you, my little alien

I feel you moving
It's oh so strange
Do you like the music

I'm a happy home
What's it like in there
I'm a happy home
I hope it's cozy in there

There can be no doubt that these are the lyrics of a pregnant woman.  In 1992, Bjork wrote this:  "this is a lucky night for me/a night when one plus one is three."  In 1993, we heard her daughter on her first solo album, Debut.

It's not something you hear sung about much.  Pregnancy is not very rock and roll, right?  But here is this music that was inspired by it.  And it's a whirlwind of conversational bass lines, syncopation, and beeps and bloops.

Albums: This Is Not Here

This is one of a series of posts about music.  I'll describe albums that are not famous and mostly not critically acclaimed either, but they grabbed me and held on.  I'd like to try to capture the mystique of each one for you.

Tonetraeger is the name of the band, and it's German for "bootleg".  Their second album, This Is Not Here, sounds like the German countryside.  It's pastoral but seems to be populated by machines.  You see, they are sort of a techno band - but these days, all bands are, and yet none are the way they were.

Which is nicer, I don't know, going on a train or to see people go?
Which is better, to be inside waving, going for a ride?  Or to be outside waving back, and watching the train speed down the track?
I think I know.  It's nicer to watch ... except when you go.

Ten years ago, electronic music was more about the novelty of the rapidly evolving tools.  It was around the mid-2000s that this began to give way to simple utility.  Here, vibraphones are arranged alongside the clicks and pops that used to be affectations of the all-digital.  This generation of musicians simply grew up with electronic tools and they use them freely with all the older ones.

It's a peaceful album, in the way that Pink Floyd's Meddle is.  Also, it's happy:  there is no angst here - strange, coming from the country that gave us the word.  It is that rare piece of pop music that is light and occasionally silly but still evokes a mood and raises questions.

Albums: Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons

This is the first of a short series of posts about music.  I'll describe albums that are not famous and mostly not critically acclaimed either, but they grabbed me and held on.  I'd like to try to capture the mystique of each one for you.

Blonde Redhead is a strange band, and Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons is a strange album.  It was a strange choice to turn some of the track titles into a poem:

7.  This Is Not
8.  A Cure
9.  For the Damaged
10.  Mother

The playing is orderly and tight, with touches of syncopation, but the vocals are fragile and faltering.  These vocals, and the strange lyrics, evoke mental illness.  Themes echo through the album:  secrets, damage.  Characters are introduced as vocalists.  The progression from light through driving and back to lightness sounds like the plot of a film.  I'd like to see that film.  Maybe imagining it is what keeps me coming back to this album.

Don't fixate on your tools

To today's ears, much of the electronic music circa 2000 is laughable.  There are a lot of songs with formulaic bleeping and bonking noises but no regard for musicality.  I loved it at the time, and I still listen to some of it, but when the musicians and fans got over the novelty of using a laptop to generate music, it felt like waking from a long, weird dream.  It felt like a revolution until we realized it was just hardware.  Similar things happen in other fields too, for example--you knew this was coming--social media.  Sure, your new phone/tablet/online community/syndication service is awesome, but quit playing around and do something meaningful.  Connect with your audience.

I was going to write a longer post, but I think I've made my point.  Instead I'll leave you with a couple musical examples.  First, here's a song I used to really like but I now find kind of tired.  I call it "the song with four notes", Sandstorm by Darude (2001).

Here's one that's aged a bit better:  Pearls Girl by Underworld (1996).

Andalucia red yellow red yellow....

How to: annoy rock musicians

via Allmusic:  

Def Leppard’s [lead singer] Joe Elliott will release his own beer, which will be bottled by Dublin’s Porterhouse Brewing Company and served in their bars. Elliott said, “Over the years I’ve noticed a lot of musicians putting their names to a variety of wines etc which, as nice as a glass of red or white is, well, it’s not very rock and roll is it?!”  Source.

Subtext:  "Please do not throw the bottles at my head while I'm on stage."

How to: repair speakers with blown woofers

In college I bought a pair of Polk Monitor 5 speakers for $200.  They were probably built in 1981, which now makes them old enough to vote but not quite old enough to be elected U.S. President.  They were in my living room until a few years ago, and I still listen to them in my basement when I'm exercising.  Or at least I did until my cat puked in my amplifier (below) and blew them up.

I'd made the tactical error of placing my power amplifier on top of the preamplifier.  The power amp has vents and I wanted it to breathe freely.  Well, power amps are nice warm places for cats to lay, and cats occasionally get hairballs.  It must have scared the crap out of him when the caughed one up and the speakers made a mighty BLATT.  It blew a fuse in the amp and toasted one of the woofer voicecoils.  I popped another fuse in the amp (and vacuumed the hair out of it!) and it worked fine.  But the speakers needed new woofers.

Polk sold this woofer, the MW6500, to technicians for many years to make repairs.  Then they made a near-equivalent replacement, the MW6502, for even longer - people were still buying them in 2008.  But after 30 years it's not reasonable to expect a company to continue to offer replacement parts.  They recommended I contact the good folks at Madisound for a substitute.  We settled on the house brand Madisound 6102 woofer (the left pair below) as the only one that would fit the highly constrained front panel of the speaker.  It sure does fit - even the screw holes are in the same places.

What does the inside of a speaker look like?  CLOUDS!

The white stuff is a fibrous filler often put in speakers to reduce internal echoes.  And the larger cone at the bottom isn't a woofer, it's called a "passive radiator".  No power gets delivered to it.  As you can see, I soldered the leadwires to the new woofers and...

THEY WORK!  They even sound pretty decent!  OK, I haven't run them with a sound level meter to make sure the tonal balance is right, but this is not bad for $50 worth of parts!

Sound quality falls as video tech improves, sort of

A recent New York Times article argued that sound quality hasn't benefited from the same kinds of technological progress that video has. (Think of flat panel TVs, High Definition, and 3D movies; then try to imagine what a living room stereo with fancy new technology would look like.) But then the website Create Digital Music published a rebuttal, reminding us of High Definition Compact Disc, DVD-Audio, and various cinema-grade surround formats. They tore apart pretty much every point in the Times article, and their criticisms are mostly right. Unfortunately they were a little too busy attacking the lazy Big Media journalist and polishing their righteous indignation to identify and address the reason the Times wrote the article in the first place: people have stopped buying stereos.

It used to be common to have two large speakers in a big room for listening to music. Today I can only think of one person outside my family who has anything that qualifies, and he uses it mainly for videogames. I won't exclude him because of that; what I'm talking about here is listening carefully to music on a system chosen to reveal audio detail, and he does that sometimes. I'll bet even audiophiles do most of their listening passively, while multitasking. The thing is, over the last 30 years, most of the rest of us went from occasionally listening carefully to never doing it. So we no longer devote the space in our living rooms to it.

Why are Blu-Ray players selling so much better than, say, SACD players? Something has changed in our patterns of consumption. On the surface, video content is more immersive than audio-only content, simply because it engages an additional sense. I've always thought that actively listening to music was a more contemplative pastime than watching television or movies, simply because there is less in the media to distract me from my thoughts. It's been said that America needs to work on its mindfulness, so perhaps the trend towards more immersive media is part of that.

Ambient writing

When asked what kinds of music and movies I like, I often struggle, and say that I end up liking the kind that has a lot of atmosphere. Not proficient instrumentals or a great plot, but rather an evokation of mood or a sense of place. I think the same idea might be relevant to writing as well.

I was recently introduced to the new blog What we are supposed to do when we are at our best, penned by a young man in mourning. (Hat tip to Coudal Partners. Hope this link sticks.) His short pieces are thick with tension or sadness or whatever he's dealing with at that moment, but they don't claim to say anything concrete.

The poem I posted was inspired by his work. It reminded me of what's possible when you free yourself from a direction, when you write what comes instead of deciding on a conclusion and then straining towards it. I started with the opening line of a poem spoken on a Harold Budd album, wrote about an appropriate situation for it, and excised everything but the sensations of being in that situation, leaving little but the title to describe the place. I'm happy with it.

Budd's album is an example of ambient music, a term popularized by his collaborator Brian Eno in the late 1970s. It is "as ignorable as it is listenable", made for the express purpose of evoking a mood without occupying your attention. (A far cry from the bastardized pop songs and classical pieces heard in elevators, this was an avant garde idea in its time - Philip Glass and Steve Reich are as responsible for it as Eno.) This is one of those kinds of music that I like.

While reading necessarily occupies one's forebrain more than listening to music does, I'm going to call my poem, and J. S. Yingling's blog, ambient writing. They evoke without constraining. I name this because the name empowers me to seek more of it. Do you have any other examples?

The Black Angels at the Beachland, 10/12/09

The Black Angels are rock and roll the way I like it: loud, distorted, and slow. Like Neil Young circa Weld, and Low.I've put their concert poster above because a few songs into the set, the singer made a gesture to the sound man about the lights. The next thing I knew, the stage was as dark as the audience. I did take this picture....

Makes you feel like you were there, doesn't it?

I failed to get a picture of the fangirl wearing the pointy ears. This is a strange thing to see outside of a comic book convention. I ended up behind her in the audience for quite a while. We had prime real estate between the speakers, in front of the stage; she spent the entire time facing away from the band. I thought about being offended, but my righteous-indignation circuits burned out years ago from overuse. Now, I'm like, whatever.

Maybe pointy ears were appropriate considering that the Black Angels occasionally remind me of Pink Floyd circa 1967. Think "A Saucerful of Secrets." This probably says a lot about why I like this band, but I don't have the musical training to explain how. So there you go. They're a hard rock Syd Barrett for the 2000s.

Change happens at intersections

About a month ago, Susie Sharp posted something from the Cool Twitter Conference: 'Change happens at intersections. On Twitter, don't just follow the same people all your other friends follow.' It's a tidy nugget of wisdom.

That same day I had posted a video on Facebook that someone on The WELL dug up. It was an instrumental Japanese math rock band called Nisennenmondai. Things I learn on The WELL are part of the value I bring to my other friends. The converse happens too - like my journeyman's attempts to drive traffic to the WELL discussion of Scott Rosenberg's book.

A lot of people don't understand my marriage - how can we spend so much time apart? But if we experienced everything together, we wouldn't have anything to talk about. If you start reading books about how to improve your marriage, one of the first pieces of advice you'll hear is this: don't try to be the whole world to each other. You'll fail, and you'll lose yourself in the process. Bring something fresh to it. Don't be afraid to have passions that are only your own.

Nobody learns anything in an echo chamber. When it came time to throw a birthday party, I made a point of inviting four or five different groups of friends, many of whom hadn't met each other. I was tilling the fields for a fertile cross-pollination.

There's a more abstract point I'm trying to make, and I'm not doing a very good job. Something to the effect that we need challenge and variety. Duh, right? Maybe if I throw enough examples at you, the plural of "anecdote" will become "data". I have to try.