Maybe you have heard about Governor Schwarzenegger’s (in)famous veto letter to the California State Assembly? You can google it for more information – “Schwarzenegger Veto Letter” will do.
The letter is claimed to contain a hidden message. It becomes quite obvious when you read the words formed by the first letter in each line of the two main paragraphs… yes?
Well, in a strange way this letter inspired the title for my next album. However, my album will spell something altogether more pleasant, of course. With the help of friends I have been working on creating short poems with three lines, in which the first line begins with a “P”, the second line starts with an “O” and the third line with another “P’. As in POP or Pop-Music.
Here are a few of these poems:
Pale moonlight reflected
on the water.
Poetry of the evening.
Peonies
Of my Little Garden
Part of Heaven
Pausing to listen-
Overture in the moonlight
Perfect symphony
Petals from a red rose
On the ground, at dusk
Path to your house
Petals float
On the water in the
Pale moonlight
And my current favorite is one that a friend sent to me, cutting down this poem I wrote:
Petals from a red rose
On the ground, at dusk
Path to your house
to a mere four words:
Petals
On the
Path
The advantage of something that short would be that it could actually serve as the title of the album. Any longer and I would have to abreviate the album title to P-O-P and that might get confusing, albeit interesting. If I use a longer poem, the poem would not feature in the title, and would only be found on the cover.
The album cover could be DM-Vision of the stepping stones of a path, with a few red rose petals strewn on the gray stone.
Maybe something like this, but with a few flower petals:
Tilt-shift perspectives for under a buck? TiltShift Generator for the iPhone.
While we were in Japan I read The Painter of Battles: A Novel
by Arturo Perez-Reverte – I read the Kindle version on my iPhone. At one point he writes about the lines that cross to bring people together or diverge to keep them apart. The net of interaction. What a Buddhist might call Karma, I suppose. The other day a friend asked about my photography. I wrote:
Photography, and much of art in general, is about making associations, that is, seeing, or rather recognizing, lines, diagonals, shapes, colors in a landscape, seeing some kind of order in a landscape that tells a story. As such photography is no different from cooking or making music. It’s all about using reference points and infusing them with some kind of meaning or emotion.
Each culture has their own reference points. What an American would consider pop-food, middle of the road, palette-pleasing, a Chinese or Japanese person might find strange or even inedible – when asked which Western food is the most digusting, Chinese school children overwhelming elected uncooked mushrooms – and there are of course dishes in Japan and China that are very challenging to Euro-American tastes.
The same is true in music, of course. Bebop or very traditional Flamenco, modern classical music – they might all require a little getting used to, just like a bowl of really hot green Thai curry. Jazz that isn’t challenging enough for a Bebop fan might be much to complex for a Jazz n00b.
Food that might be considered too spicy in the USA or Europe, might not be spicy enough for people in South-East Asia. So, references are culture-dependent, although those references are becoming more globally understood – even in Italy one can now find Chinese, Thai, Japanese restaurants.
It seems to me that art is about linking. The linking of a landscape with geometry in a photograph. The linking of a new dish to the flavors of a season. The linking of a melody to a tradition or a style. The linking of poetry to an emotion, or a season – and possibly without mentioning the emotion at all. And therein lies the difference between art-linking and internet-linking. Internet is about literal hypertext. Art, whether it is a painting, photography, poetry, music or cooking, is about poetic linking. A poem about momiji leaves falling from the tree in Autumn is not about linking to the species of tree, but might be about the brevity of an individual life. Or, it might be about the sadness experienced when leaving friends.
What I like about my solo concerts with slideshow is the fluid linking that occurs every time. Linkage between the photographs themselves, linkage between the photos and the music. Linkage between what is going on onstage and the members of the audience etc….
Speaking of linking: I bought Robbie Williams’ new album “Reality Killed the Video Star”. You are surprised? Well, I didn’t buy it for the music, I bought it to play the meta-game, to find all of the references and to check out the production. Williams brought in the old A-team: Trevor Horn, Stephen Lipson, Anne Dudley etc.
The Meta-game starts with the album title, actually. The producer of the album is Trevor Horn, who produced many hit records in the Nineties, including Seal, Grace Jones, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and others, and who had a big hit in the Eighties with an album called “Video Killed the Radio Star”. So, reality killed the video star, who in turn killed the radio star…
The sound of the music is terribly compressed, but I imagine the orchestration sounded quite lush before mastering. Anyway, I hear John Lennon, Elton John, The Beatles, Kraftwerk, OMD, David Bowie and many others. A cornucopia of sounds from the Eighties.
PS: I really enjoyed The Painter of Battles: A Novel, although, maybe enjoy is the wrong word. Not an easy book, but I found it very rewarding.
PPS: Of course, literal linking could be just the start, just as poetry started with literal descriptions, e.g. I am sad because Summer is over and you have to leave before turning to less direct imagery. A meta-story could appear on the interwebs any minute, something that links noises, music, images, poetry to a text. Moving toward complexity, life does (((Yoda-speak))).
the mind open with the inner ear « neo bohemia Poetry is not something you can order up – the beginnings of poems come unbidden and then one goes to work on them, always keeping a huge space of mind open around it. The trick is to listen with the inner ear. This is maybe the most rewarding sort of artistic work, but it would be greedy to expect to be able to do it all the time. – Gary Snyder
The same is true for music!
And check out this interesting post. Any correlation to the divorce-rate? What about the genetic health of children? Any correlation to genetic problems?
We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use. Beginning with ideas. Which ones can we take? Which ones can we take?
Must re-read that book, which I bought 27 years ago! (The reason I picked it up today will become apparent soon.)
A little more about the album Under the Rose:
The four of us came up with the song titles in my kitchen. One of my suggestions was Under the Rose. It is a Sufi expression. As I understand it, Sufi masters usually taught out of their home. Most traditional Sufi masters held down jobs, often masonry, since they did not ask for alms or taught for money. The only sign that would give away that a Sufi master lived in a particular house was that a rose would be fastened above the entrance. Apparently Sufis did not proselytize. If someone was looking for them, they could be found. 01 Under the Rose – Under the Rose webpage
Barrett came up with the title Spirit of Saladin. I had heard the name, but didn’t know much about him. Here is Saladin on wikipedia:
His chivalrous behavior was noted by Christian chroniclers, especially in the accounts of the siege of Kerak in Moab, and despite being the nemesis of the Crusaders he won the respect of many of them, including Richard the Lionheart; rather than becoming a hated figure in Europe, he became a celebrated example of the principles of chivalry, a rare distinction for a non-Christian.
The webpage for the album: http://ottmarliebert.com/rose should become available on or around September 15th – nothing there now. I hope at that time you will help me spread the word about the album. It is very easy to embed the music anywhere using the SoundCloud widget. Just go to the album, or click on any of the individual track and then click on Share and this comes up:
You can customize the player, I used red for the ones I embedded above, and there are shortcuts for many sites.
Once our webpage is up next week you are free to embed the music on your weblogs (((totally easy!))) and email the links to your heart’s content – and please link to the special ottmarliebert.com/rose page. Only a week to go.
Played a lot of guitar today. In the late afternoon I recorded myself playing This Spring Release 10,000 Butterflies in the studio, using HD Video and ProTools at 24/88.2. Now I just need to replace the audio recorded on the video with the audio from the ProTools session… You will find the result here soon.
I keep turning to the Guardian for music news.
Pirate Bay’s purchase proves they’re not altruistic | Behind the Music | Helienne Lindvall | Music | guardian.co.uk The Pirate Bay is not the first company (and, yes, whatever image they tried to portray, it was always a business) to have built their entire existence on making copyrighted material available for free, without asking, or compensating, the people who created the material. As far back as 2000, Napster was in the dock for copyright infringement; in 2008, the brand was bought by the American electronics retailer Best Buy for $121m (£74m). As I’ve previously reported, LastFM built their business on unlicensed music only to sell it to CBS for $280m (£171m). And let’s not forget Google’s purchase of YouTube for $1.65bn (£1bn). For supposedly “altruistic” ventures, these companies sure made a lot of money. Some would argue the artists whose music built these businesses should have received some of that money.
Read the whole article. Couldn’t agree more. I didn’t know all of this background stuff about the Pirate Bay.
Upaya Newsletter for 6/22/2009 The trick is to create a society in which the privilege of disposable income is not contingent on the existence of disposable people–to say nothing of the disposable tigers, ice caps, and arable land. – Keizer
Or, our happiness should not be based on other creatures unhappiness.
Neuromancer is 25 years old… William Gibson wrote it on a manual typwriter, model Hermes 2000 (((scroll down to see that Swiss-built beauty)))
William Gibsons book Neuromancer was published on July 1st, 1984. (Via Macworld)
Here is a link to a wonderful essay by Stephen Batchelor:
On Saturday morning three inches of snow lay wet and heavy on the table outside, but by the afternoon all had melted. My brother came by and told of wrestling equipment during the snowstorm on Friday, rather large machines called Reformers used in Pilates training that had arrived unexpectedly. I especially enjoyed his description of the sounds around his new Pilates studio:
From my left neighbor I can sometimes hear Yoga-chanting, in the back I hear “Dropping in” and then whosh-whosh (((a room with a half-pipe, dedicated to teaching skating))) and on the right is an aikido studio with people screaming and large bodies falling to the ground…
Yes, I will have to bring my 722 recorder and some microphones to Stefan’s new Pilates studio to record the sounds when I go training there!!!
The Wild Geese
Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
– Wendell Berry
My laptop came back from Apple this morning, repaired and empty. I do like the AppleCare service. And thanks to SuperDuper (((the most important software for your Macintosh!))), I have the computer already loaded with all of the junk I need. Unfortunately now I can’t use the Peak Pro application because their stupid authorization is foiled by the fact that it does not recognize the new logicboard. We should sell music this way… the whole world would go crazy!!! No, you can’t play that song, your authorizartion has expired. You have to send us an email and request a new authorization.
The result is that there won’t be Monday music, but hopefully there will be Tuesday music!
Did you know that Federico Garcia Lorca wrote two poems entitled Canción de Jinete?
One is called Canción de Jinete (1860). What does 1860 stand for?
Canción de Jinete(1860) Song of the Rider(1860)
En la luna negra In the black moon de los bandoleros, of the highwaymen cantan las espuelas. the spurs sing. Caballito negro Little black horse ¿Dónde llevas tu jinete muerto? Where are you taking your dead rider? …Las duras espuelas …The hard spurs del bandido inmóvil of the motionless bandit que perdió las riendas. who lost his reins. Caballito frío. Little cold horse. ¡Qué perfume de flor de cuchillo! What a scent of knife-blossom! En la luna negra, In the black moon sangraba el costado bled the mountain-side de Sierra Morena. of Sierra Morena.
You can find the rest here. The other poem by the same name can be found here. This is a wonderful line:
¡Qué perfume de flor de cuchillo! What a scent of knife-blossom!
What a scent of knife-flower!
You know already that this is the poem that inspired me to name the band Luna Negra, yes?
