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DMT 41
In my aural journeys I came across this little oasis. I had never heard of this bass player before, or any of the musicians playing on this piece. Not sure how I found this but it’s lovely isn’t it?
Sound Bloom
A study has found that playing a soundscape to a common, plant-promoting fungus found in soil caused it to grow more rapidly than fungi that weren’t exposed to sound. The novel ‘eco-acoustic’ approach has the potential to restore damaged ecosystems.
Sound makes soil fungi bloom & could restore damaged ecosystems
Movies
Before leaving for Japan I had Hulu for a couple of months. I canceled that service at the end of October. This month I am signed up for Mubi. I’ll keep switching between different services. They all have something I want to see. On Mubi I saw Fallen Leaves. Finnish movie by Aki Kaurismäki. Ozu meets Jim Jarmusch meets Wes Anderson. Very good. I also loved What Do We See When We Look at the Sky, a Georgian film. Three hours long with great photography. No shaky hand-held Hollywood camera work that is supposed to show emotion or excitement. Beautifully framed images shot on tripod. I suppose the movie was slow but the coloring of the film and the framing was so gorgeous… it could have been even longer and slower for me. :-)
Just in time to celebrate my birthday tomorrow (JK), Mubi will have a sale for new subscribers that starts on Friday. Three months for $1. This could be your chance to check out Mubi. Oh, this is also where you can watch Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (I mentioned it before).
Music Aphorism
If your music isn’t changing your life, you’ve simply picked the wrong songs.
Dreaming of Becoming Zhuangzi
The title caught my eye. Zhuangzi means Master Zhuang. The Butterfly Dream. As in this song:
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly…Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
— Zhuangzi
This is the painting by Xiyao Wang called The Butterfly Dreaming of Becoming Zhuangzi No.1 – 2023:
About the artist:
Why Xiyao Wang’s Relationship With the Canvas Is Physical, Personal, And Even Transcendental
Seven Questions About Progress
Ted Gioia (thanks again to Steve for letting me know about his blog on Substack) wrote a great post about Progress. How does technology impact human flourishing? What about health and culture? Read the post and let me know what you think. After posing his seven questions Gioia comes to these hypotheses:
- Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.
- There was a period when new tech improved the quality of life, but that time has now ended. In the last decade, we’ve seen new tech harming the people who use it the most—hence most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.
- There was a time when lowering costs improved quality of life—raising millions of people out of poverty all over the world. But in the last decade, cost-squeezing has led to very different results, and is increasingly linked to a collapse in the quality of products and services. Some people get richer from these cost efficiencies, and a larger group move into more intensely consumerist lifestyles—but none of these results (crappy products, super-rich elites, mass consumerist lifestyles, etc.) deserve to be called progress.
- The discourse on progress is controlled by technocrats, politicians and economists. But in the current moment, they are the wrong people to decide which metrics drive quality of life and human flourishing.
- Real wisdom on human flourishing is now more likely to come from the humanities, philosophy, creative and artistic spheres, and the spiritual realm, rather than technocrats and politicians. By destroying these disciplines, we actually reduce our chances at genuine advancement.
- Things like music, books, art, family, friends, the inner life, etc. will increasingly play a larger role in quality of life (and hence progress) than gadgets and devices.
- Over the next decade, the epicenter for meaningful progress will be the private lives of individuals and small communities. It will be driven by their wisdom, their core values, and the courage of their convictions—none of which will be supplied via virtual reality headsets or apps on their smartphones.
Night Birds
But after half an hour of drinking bourbon & listening I noticed there was a slow change in the ambience… And within 2 minutes the peaceful ambience had turned into some kind of late night rave for birds!
Phone Snaps
This image shows the stage of the Brauntex PAC in New Braunfels. They have a great screen behind the stage. I remember the location of nearly all of my photos. This one was taken in Berlin + shows where The Wall used to divide the city.
I discovered that there is a way to create a public iCloud photo album with a web address right on my phone. Created one for Backstage. Super easy to add photos as I take them while touring or traveling.
Social Media + Reading
After I quit Twitter + deleted my account I signed up with Mastodon + with Bluesky. It’s not that I don’t find interesting stuff on either of those services because I do, but I am simply less willing to spend time there. I find myself wanting to cinch down the opening of the information fire hose, to cut it down to a trickle. That trickle is probably still more than what any of us experienced in the 90’s. I arrived at the realization that it doesn’t matter how interesting I find something, it can still be too much. I need to cut out the good info together with the bad info because it is too much. That was a good insight to arrive at.
I have come to the conclusion that a book is a good way for me to pick up information… Sure, I could pick up a lot MORE information in mixed bag of terse social media posts but a book uses language in a way that is much more appealing to me. It’s the language, hopefully even a poetic use of language, plus the manageable drip of information.
Current reading:
Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacob. Highly recommended.
One of the reasons we are not creative is because we are so reactive.
—Stephen Batchelor
Room 402
Moonlit Nights
Hermits tend to go to bed when the sun goes down, but not on moonlit nights.
from The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse
translated by Red Pine
That’s not a line from one of the poems. Rather it’s from a commentary by Red Pine. I think it’s an evocative poem all by itself.
Permission to Dream
Those days and weeks of farting around within the walls of your mind are what every piece of art people love come from. Every story you ever adored? Someone sat around like a piece of meat propped on a sofa until it happened. There are no lazy writers. It just takes some of us longer to get off the sofa and put the pen “on the attack against the innocent paper.”
Tomorrow Doppelganger
mazer: What is the alternative to appropriation?
kotaku: I don’t know.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.
kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.
I finished two books this week. The first one was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. The above quote is from that book. It’s quite a page turner, that book, + I really enjoyed it.
The other book, finished this morning, is Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein. Robby gifted it to me. It’s an amazing book. It’s like a piece that was missing in my understanding of history. Once unpacked + understood, it clicks in with a satisfying sound + then your focus becomes so much clearer. Already gifted the book to several people. Very good.
Postcards
Found a printshop to print four different postcards that we will give away on tour. Tomorrow a fifth design, from an internet printshop, will be delivered. I figure I will use the local shop except when I need something drop shipped to a location on tour. If the internet printshop is as good as this local one that is.
The Gift of Nothing
The old Zen Masters had a wonderful way of pulling the rug out from under any place that anyone landed and tried to set up camp. If you said you were a person, they’d point out that the self cannot be found. If you insisted that you were not a person and that there is no self, they would point to the absolute, undeniable uniqueness and beauty of each snowflake, each whirlpool, each wave, each person. If you insisted you had to work hard and practice diligently to awaken, they would point to the fact that you are already awake, that it takes no effort and no time to arrive Here / Now. If you said no practice was needed and that kicking the dog was no different from meditating, they might slap (or kick) you. Wherever you try to land, whatever you grasp and begin to assert, wherever you fixate, the true Zen Master pulls that particular rug out from under you.
Click on the above link to read more. The whole quote (perhaps from this book) is very good. I came across it while searching for something else in my Evernote. The quoted author is Joan Tollifson. I looked for her website + then I looked at the list of books she has written. One title immediately made me LOL: Death: The End of Self-Improvement. Of course I put that on my reading list for 2024. :-)
Hardly Working | MUBI
These I came across far outside the temporal window-of-hype weakly drummed up by Netflix and other streamers that seems to exist for maybe the cumulative total of a fortnight. That’s the nature of Hollywood films in the age of streaming. They are little discussed outside of their own cultural niches. They are good for employing people and giving them a modest-to-meager living—though, as the dismal results for the actors’ strike show, not too well and perhaps not for long.
When friends or strangers at bars report to me that they’ve seen a streaming-only release, I always express shock.
“You’ve heard of ‘x’?” I ask.
“No,” they say. “I just was browsing on Netflix one night and it was there.”
Voilà: a film is now just there. It is not discovered, or dug from the depths, like Scorsese happening upon Italian neorealist flicks on late-night ’50s TV. It is not heard about in advance, anticipated, and then avidly watched. A movie now is only perceived and absorbed as yet more content. Because of the endless scroll, we (falsely but understandably) think we have seen everything available. The moving image, so omnipresent on our phones and in our daily lives, doesn’t bear a dark-enclosing specialness.
Hardly Working: David Fincher’s “The Killer” on Notebook | MUBI
Ironic that I watched The Killer yesterday exactly because I read the above blog post. I think the movie is quite beautiful but otherwise it didn’t move me.
Stationary Travels
My interview with Brian for his Stationary Travels blog is out now. Here is the link:
https://stationarytravels.wordpress.com/2024/01/05/duologue-a-conversation-with-ottmar-liebert/
New Year’s Cards
Some wonderful designs!
Skill + You
There’s no level of skill beyond which you stop being you
There’s no level of skill beyond which you stop being you – Music of Sound
Click on the link + have a look.
Skill versus originality is an old seesaw that moves back + forth as years pass. I think the 70s + 80s were full of the just-do-it energy of punk. Originality was valued highly. Everyone was looking for their own voice.
My sense is that the seesaw has rocked the other way. We are in a time where skill trumps originality. There are many highly skilled musicians, but I don’t hear as much originality.
Is this an old person’s POV? I mean, I grew up in the 70s + perhaps I have created fond memories of that time + view those years through tinted lenses?
Well, it is a seesaw + soon enough it will tip back the other way + people will complain of the lack of skill of artists. :-)
2023
It was the year that…
…I read fewer books than I did in the previous year. Only about half as many, in fact. My favorite non fiction books were Ways of Being, by James Bridle, and Where the Heart Beats, by Kay Larson. My favorite book of fiction was Hopeland, by Ian McDonald. Still Laughing, an autobiography by George Schlatter, was very entertaining. My current read is The Complete Cold Mountain. I am familiar with the Cold Mountain poetry because around the year 1981, I bought a used copy of Cold Mountain translated by Burton Watson. I carried that book everywhere with me. Kaz Tanahashi and Peter Levitt made new translations of Hanshan’s poems and then put them into three groups according to a new theory of Kaz’s that suggests that the poems were written by at least three different people. The earliest Hanshan may have been a Daoist and wrote in Early Chinese Language rhyming. Hanshan number two seems to have been a Chan (Zen) Buddhist. Hanshan number three wrote their poems in Late Middle Chinese rhyming. Would it be acceptable to see Hanshan as one poet with three bodies from different times? Yes, indeed. The new insights into Hanshan are very interesting and the translations are beautiful.
I am also listening to Doppelganger, an audiobook Robby gave me. It’s illuminating, frightening, and fascinating in turn.
…I didn’t buy any CDs. I considered buying the CD of Notes With Attachments by Pino Palladino and Blake Mills but purchased an album download of 24/96 FLAC files instead. Other music I enjoyed this year:
- Player, Piano – Daniel Lanois
- The Wind – Balmorhea
- Emanon – Wayne Shorter
- Feio – Wayne Shorter’s composition from Bitches Brew by Miles Davis
- The Omnichord Real Book – Meshell Ndegeocello
- Ralph Towner – At First Light
…I finished recording my first album ASF–After Santa Fe–in July. I discovered new methods for recording and used a new laptop computer for the first time in more than twenty years. Instead of thinking of the studio as a place that I walk to, as I did from 1994 to 2021, a studio has become something I carry with me. Rain Poems is my first album ASF. I love the way the music for the new album unfolded and the playfulness that came from experimentation, for example by treating the sound of the guitar with pieces of paper or fabric or using a sponge. When a guitar doesn’t quite sound like a guitar, one discovers a new instrument that looks like a guitar and feels familiar. It’s like having a whole new arsenal of instruments at my fingertips without actually having more than one instrument.
…I made a solo retreat in a cave at the refuge in August. This was the first of a couple of bucket list items I planned for this year. I loved it. I dropped into six hours of daily meditation without much trouble, although I did have to vary my seating positions because the legs are getting older.
…I opened the new Backstage site in October. It was about a year in the making and I am very happy with the result. This is the year I stopped handing new music to digital distributors and streaming corporations. I am also considering the withdrawal of the HuHeartDrive releases from 2019-2021 from those services: Fete, Vision 2020, Bare Wood 2, and the singles. I appreciate all of the members who signed up. Thank you for coming on this journey with me.
…I stopped using my watch to time workouts. I discovered that I don’t care about individual workouts, I just want to know the total for the day: did I move long enough and did I move hard enough. I also don’t want the watch do ask me whether I ended a workout just because I paused to look at something. Now I have all of the prompts and notifications turned off. I wore an Oura ring for a short while. A little too bulky which means I couldn’t wear it when I play guitar. I almost lost it so many times because I had to take it off for soundcheck. Several times I discovered the ring hours later, resting on a volume knob of the monitor mixer…
…I went to Japan for four weeks in November. I walked the Kumano Kodo trail, the second bucket list item of 2023. The length of four weeks was perfect, long enough to get a feel for the place and the culture. I loved the challenge of the Kumano Kodo, which culminated in the Belly Breaker section. I loved the variety of places we stayed on the Kumano but also during the rest of the trip. I am already planning another walk.
…I summed up my year in 25 words. This might become an annual practice. :-)
Happy guitar-playing creativity.
Summer album. Backstage.
A week alone. Cave time.
Month in Japan with Lisi. Kumano Kodo. Bellybreaker!
Crazy upon return. But made mochi.
Happy New yEar!
