This is beautiful in so many ways.
stuff.
Cleaning my room tonight and just wrapped up two massive bags of old banged-up CDs and obsolete floppy disks which will soon be wiped and en route to a hardware recycling plant in Los Angeles. I don’t know what’s on them anymore – old high school projects, old PC back-ups, bad music mixes, all this information that is now on the way to destruction. I get so overwhelmed with technology sometimes – in fact sometimes I fear it, the way that we rely on it to store so many facets of our lives. The way we hoard information in this physical way, things that we don’t look at for such long periods of time – things that we hope we or someone after us will revisit and find nostalgic in some odd way.
Suddenly I remember an old violinist friend telling me how a teacher of hers had told her that, during a lesson, making marks on the sheet music were not of much use; no, the things worth remembering were the things that stuck in the mind after the lesson. (I didn’t agree with that much at the time, but it perhaps says something that, in recent years, I’ve become less of a compulsive note-taker.) I think of this anecdote as I discard the old relics and make empty space on these bookshelves in my old Houston bedroom that will go mostly untouched for another several years. And I think of stuff – the way a teacher of mine sometimes says this word with a certain weight, a certain burden, to emphasize how heavy it is, how overwhelming it can be.
Maybe there is something sentimental and worth keeping in these old disks – maybe photos or childhood poems or early essays, I don’t know. I’d rather not know. All this stuff that I haven’t thought about in years… I’ve had enough of it, and somehow it seems right to say, at this point in time, that I’ve had enough of old information in general. If anything, it just makes me more aware of the need to tear down and reconstruct and preserve the remnants (most of them mental) that I have held onto all this time.
I don’t know where I am going with all this, but there is something that feels weighty and symbolic in the act of throwing all this old information away. I feel better for it. As for the fate of all the old relics – well, perhaps the things worth reviving will find the right time to revive themselves in the space of my memory.
L.A. Times: Krystian Zimerman’s shocking Disney Hall debut
Poland’s Krystian Zimerman, widely regarded as one of the finest pianists in the world, created a furor Sunday night in his debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall when he announced this would be his last performance in America because of the nation’s military policies overseas.
Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski’s “Variations on a Polish Folk Theme,” Zimerman sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience. In a quiet but angry voice that did not project well, he indicated that he could no longer play in a country whose military wants to control the whole world.
“Get your hands off of my country,” he said. He also made reference to the U.S. military detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
About 30 or 40 people in the audience walked out, some shouting obscenities. “Yes,” he answered, “some people when they hear the word military start marching.”
Others remained but booed or yelled for him to shut up and play the piano. But many more cheered. Zimerman responded by saying that America has far finer things to export than the military, and he thanked those who support democracy.
For the first half of the recital, Zimerman had played a Bach Partita and Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111, with firm determination. After intermission he made a last minute substitution, exchanging late Brahms works for a 1953 sonata by Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz. The Szymanowski variations, which closed the program, was played with an astonishing ferocity that brought nothing but tumultuous cheers. There was no encore.
The pianist was not available after the concert for further comment.
Zimerman has had problems in the United States in recent years. He travels with his own Steinway piano, which he has altered himself. But shortly after 9/11, the instrument was confiscated at JFK Airport when he landed in New York to give a recital at Carnegie Hall. Thinking the glue smelled funny, the TSA decided to take no chances and destroyed the instrument. Since then he has shipped his pianos in parts, which he reassembles by hand after he lands. He also drives the truck himself when he carries his instrument from city to city over land, as he did after playing a recital in Berkeley on Friday.
Krystian Zimerman, I love you even more than I did before.
—Most notably, Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” a monumental minimalist opera evoking Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience in South Africa, had a transfixing revival at the Met, even as Occupy Wall Street unfolded downtown. The contradictions seemingly inherent in the presentation of a Gandhi opera at Lincoln Center led activists to stage a protest after the final performance, with Glass in attendance; the theatrical force of the action only added to the uncanny aura of the work. I was elated by this constructive confluence of music and politics, and yet I wondered whether the demonstrators had selected too predictable—and too small—a target. Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system. I’m with Seth Colter Walls, who, in a generally positive commentary on the “Satyagraha” action, wrote, “This persistent fiction of ‘elitism,’ and contemporary classical music’s supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer that you not cost-compare a Family Circle seat to ‘Satyagraha’ alongside a 3D screening of ‘Transformers 3.’”
I was haunted all year by a sentence that I read in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.” These days you can’t live outside the machine for more than a minute. Contradictions invade every square inch of our physical and mental space; even the purest-seeming creations are in some way tainted by the radical inequalities of early twenty-first-century society. The most potent artistic work, though, doesn’t conceal such contradictions; instead, it makes us agonizingly aware of them. Over the centuries, classical music has been allied with wealth and power, and it has also caused trouble for wealth and power. Its present marginal position gives it, at least in theory, critical distance from the materialist excess of pop culture—the ruthless equation of monetary and aesthetic value. Tellingly, classical music in America reached its maximum popularity in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the country came closer to disavowing the capitalist faith than at any time in its history. One measure of the levelling spirit of the age was that millions across the land could tune in to NBC radio and listen to Beethoven symphonies. Are d.j.s blasting Beethoven in the V.I.P. lounges of the Second Gilded Age? Not that I’ve heard.
Culture Desk: Outside the Machine: The Best Classical Performances of 2011
Alex Ross demonstrating, again, why he is the best at what he does, music criticism. I’ve often wondered about the key absurdity relayed here: that classical music is the domain of the elite. It’s chief flaw, in the eyes of its credulous critics, it seems to me, is that, like most truly meaningful artform, its very nature precludes it from partaking in the creative destruction of capitalist market economy. A saving grace, as far as I’m concerned! (via irredenta)
For the record, it’s not as if capitalism hasn’t tried.
(via thenoobyorker)
(via thenoobyorker)
Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions…
#27 Help win war - beat fascism
#31 Love everybody
#19 – Keep hoping machine running
#33 – Wake up and fight
(via bluegrassnyc)
They say: whatever gets you through the night –
I say: Steve Reich. Steve Reich, Steve Reich, Steve Reich….
Minimalism to the max. This pulse is pretty much my own.
— Jacques Attali, from “Repeating,” Noise: The Political Economy of MusicTaking a share in power is thus also having one’s voice heard. But not necessarily in circumstances of the enactment of power, the function of which is perhaps in the process of disappearing. Literally speaking, ‘taking power’ is no longer possible in a repetitive society, in which the carefully preserved theater of politics is only sustained to mask the dissolution of institutional places of power, to prevent, by perpetuating an illusion, a necessary displacement in the center of gravity of truly subversive and revolutionary acts.
The only possible challenge to repetitive power takes the route of a breach in social repetition and the control of noisemaking. In more day-to-day political terms, it takes the route of the permanent affirmation of the right to be different, an obstinate refusal of the stockpiling of use-time and exchange-time; it is the conquest of the right to make noise, in other words, to create one’s code and work, without advertising its goal in advance; it is the conquest of the right to make the free and revocable choice to interlink with another’s code––that is, the right to compose one’s life.
The Sadness of Space Exploration
We must never grow up
If all we learn is kindness
Not making promises
We may not know how to keep
Is both affection and an immaturity
That baffles feelings
Amid the circus clamor
Of a pleasant village day
Humid with rituals and schoolkids
Because passion is a need beyond desire
His matinee-style courtliness
Is matched by her astonished grace
Two gleeful children hide in them
Under the shadows of heaven
Deciphered and confused again
Beneath fidgeting trees.
- Lorenzo Thomas
Poetry
Why do I speak in poetry?
Because in this heavy mist,
I cannot be a lighthouse
For drifting boats.
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