last weekend, belle and i went to see a performance by the kronos quartet at ucla. the show has been resonating with me all week. really inspiring show. the most fascinating piece of music was the first one of the night written by j.g. thirlwell (better known to most of us as 'foetus'). it hasnt been recorded yet but it is one i am going to keep my ears open for. its called 'nomatophobis'. really difficult listening music. i told my wife that i thought kronos were smart to begin the evening with it because it took full concentration to get anything out of it. if it had been later in the evening it would have been difficult to give it the full attention it deserved. which made me think again about the role of music in our lives currently. it was such a rewarding evening of music because the quality was so high and it had my full focus for almost two hours. that combination is increasingly rare in our world. i so rarely listen to music like i did some years ago. it is the background sound while i check for emailsmstextgooglesearchpornimwikidvdhdvoicemails (ha that just made me check my phone for new email). at some point i learned, and this applies to everything, good food, film, etc. that the things in my life that have enduring power, took some time for me to initially appreciate. things that are catchy are generally ephemeral. i have come to believe this so completely that i have begun to recognize things that i 'like' differently. i have begun to get better at recognizing that something, here its music, has a quality that is initially intriguing and not necessarily overwhelmingly seductive to me. that recognition is subtle and not always reliable but i have found it to be a much more interesting compass. i have called that more subtle lingering charm the 'resonance factor'. will the movie i saw come to mind in a daydream a week later, for example. not everything has to have this deep significance, of course. fun and sparkling charms are great to litter ones day with as well but that is easy and they take care of themselves. i have to put a little effort and focus into something that i might find initially difficult, weird or, heaven forbid, boring. instead of a constant cycle of sugar high and a sugar crash i need some things to endure. at least a little.

the rest of the evening was michael gordons 'potassium' also beautiful and unrecorded. two traditional songs from iran and iraq that were good too. clint mansells music from 'requiem for a dream'. i almost always like clints movie music. a piece by matmos who i always find have a very clever process for producing music that i found ultimately unsatisfying. and the show, pre encore, ended with a piece by einsturzende neubauten who, among flipper and others, was some of the music i listened to as a boy. i liked being contrarian then but i can see now that was also the beginning of being able to recognize that there might be something beautiful in something initially repulsive.

sports it seems has always been the working class mans theatre. a way for people not artistically inclined to watch their beliefs and mores played out on a stage. analogous to their struggle and the competition of living. if living is competition. we seem to belive that in america anyway. so its sort of a perfect analogy for an imperfect world view. all this sets up tonights analagous sports observation. i am a fan, unfortunately, of los angeles' hockey team. i know a considerable amount more than i should about them. they are an awful team this year. awful. the general manager of the team every year has something called 'breakfast with the gm'. he meets with season seat holders and fields their questions. i was not there but read a report on the net. the season seat folks were pretty upset. did i mention the team is awful? awful. so the gm starts addressing their concerns about the state of affairs, including some of the big mistakes that he is responsible for himself. can you see where this is going? i hear the reasons why he made the decisions he made. he takes responsibilty for bad calls. talks about what he is going to do and what he is going to try doing with candor and authenticity. i dont always agree. but his forthrightness and leadership are convincing of his qualification for the job. he has assessed the situations well with some wisdom and clarity and plans to continue in the direction he was going in with appropriate adjustments. ok i know this is getting obvious. i thought of our stubborn monarch, king george bush ll. he is a man (i use the term loosely here) that has always made a big show of being a leader. the author of the phrase, "i am the decider". i think it was shakespeare that said,"methinks he doth protest too much". if you have to keep reminding people that you are the leader then i would suggest that you are not leading. during his entire reign he has operated with the belief that we did not need to know what he was doing or why he was doing it. he has created what jon stewart aptly called the most complete "catastrofuck" in iraq. it has gone so completely wrong it is almost perfect. he has now retreated into a tall tower that he shouts from the top of, alone; rice and cheney notwithstanding. by keeping everyone shut out and now being isolated, he has given no human being any faith in his decision making ability. speaking with my wife, raised in england, we talked about how much all of us (houses of congress now included) sound like we are talking about a king. we all talk about not being able to change his mind. we wont be able to stop him from playing his godforsaken (evidently right?) war. he is the stubborn boy-king of old english monarchy. awful.

its strange to spend so much time thinking about being an american. i traditionally havent spent much time on the subject. it is amazing what effect the debacle of our current presidency has had on us. i have very little experience in the realm of feeling patriotic. i can remember wandering around the monuments of washington dc in the middle of the night (they are all quite well lit at night) on tour back in the janes days. i was moved, as intended, by the enormity of the accomplishment of these men in crafting this american political experiment. that is the only really emotional experience of patriotism i remember having. i find this feeling generally hard to come by for a number of reasons. most recently, i have allowed other people, the wrong people (from both the left and right of me i should add), to define america for me. when i hear americans like susan jacoby speak about america i can recognize the beauty of the acclomplishment we are all a part of. beauty that is of course complicated. what, that is true, isnt? as she spoke about the intentions of our founding fathers to keep a division between church state i felt stirrings of patriotism. these men all believed in god. most were christians. they were wise enough, and susan mentions that the last person executed in france for blasphemy was twenty years before they drafted the constitution, to know that church being seperate from state meant there would be a better chance for true freedom. this is inspired. i know all the usual and cynical complaints about this stuff. they have been dogging my every word as ive written this. i was a teenge punk rocker for a second after all. but cynical criticism is often mistaken for good solid skeptical reasoning. and without noticing, this cynicism can become a refuge that keeps one safe, 'right', and for me at least, ultimately unsatisfied.

in an unrelated story, i am aware of the fact that you are all more interested in music news than in my broader human blathering. fair enough. i am a musician after all. so on that front, negotiations have officially begun with a company about finding a home for my solo stuff. lawyers are talking to lawyers.

2007. hello all. we are returned from paradise. must report that there is at least one place left where peace still exists. you know i had this little rant written about this that i found at steven johnsons blog. but i decided to delete it because why start off the new year with the same old crazily fucking absurd story. right?

instead i will start with the cheery winter story of the donner party. i watched a dvd from the american experience doc series. beautifully done by the brother (?) of ken burns, he of the epic civil war documentary. very much in the ken burns style. but anyway, i digress. the point of all that is to get to alexis de tocqueville. the documentary begins with a quote by him. he continues to amaze me. i will really sit down and read him one day when i grow up. but for now i will continue to marvel at his insight into america and americans in the little snippets i find littered throughout our culture. he made these observations in the 1800's no less. the 1800's. this particular quote is not only appropriate to the doomed donner partys decision to find 'the shortest route' to california, but is also, i think, appropriate to the holiday season and the crazy wake of shopping that follows. it sums up eloquently a major theme in my work, in my spiritual struggle and in our collective and unexamined dreams. have at it.

"it is odd to watch with what feverish ardour americans pursue prosperity, ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. they cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach, as if they expected to stop living before they had relished them. death steps in, in the end, and stops them, before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them." -alexis de tocqueville

ive been pathetically uninspired for over a week now. nothing worth posting. but i am looking forward to getting out town tomorrow. my wife belle and i are going to a friends house on a cliff. he has lent us his house three out of the last four years. my wife and i hibernate from christmas through new years. recharge the batteries. its become our yearly ritual of replenishment. so anyone within earshot, i hope you all get some good time away from whatever makes the grind part of your daily grind. paradise is not wired for the net so i will not be here until 2007. peace in wartime.

-e.

some frivolous fluff for a friday morning. just returned from a surf. good celebrity sighting. fiona apple. living in la this is not so unusual. but that woman is an unusual talent. it amazes me that with our obsession with celebrity we have distilled celebrity to its essence. we are often no longer concerned with how our celebrities achieve their fame. we just want famous people. of course, paris hilton is our current poster child for this. we have a remarkable knack for seeing what we want to see; for projection. the work of shigeo fukuda comes to mind. his work is perspective specific. he makes objects that look like a pile of nonsense until you look at them from just the right direction. or in the case of one of my personal favorites, unless it is lit from a particular direction and the shadow cast reveals an order not obvious in the original object - a floating mess of eating utensils creating the shadow of a motorcycle.

Just found a website for a woman that i consider the great love of my youth; Bernadette Seacrest. She wasnt a singer then but she is now. She IS now. She has a myspace page for anyone curious. Torchy stuff. To pull off this sort of music i think you need at least a certain amount of genuine soul. Otherwise its unlistenable. Bernadette has this quality in spades, both as a person and as an artist. This footage of her doing a half-speed version of Billie Holidays 'My Man' is fucking gorgeous.

FYI - the lennon cover song shirley and i were going to do for an upcoming benefit cd is now not going to happen. there was a misunderstanding with the scheduling so we are now left short of time. unfortunate. this time of year always becomes a really difficult time to get anything done.

i have had a piano in the house for two months now. this experience reminds me of one of those moments in my early creative life that shaped my outlook. my friend chris and i discovered an artist in a gallery at ucla. my friend lived directly across from the college so we would often wander across. one of the things we did regularly was visit the art gallery there. one day the gallery was showing an artist named laurie anderson. she went on to do some great things (like o superman, united states parts 1-4) and some pop songs, not so great, in the eighties. but this afternoon at ucla i didnt know anything about her. in fact i didnt even know what a performance or a conceptual artist was. i was struck by her gallery show and kept my eyes peeled for magazine articles and interviews. in one that i found she mentioned that she did not practice violin after a certain point because she didnt want her playing to sound like television; too perfect. i have used this strategy (and the quote) over the years. in fact, i dont know if this is apochryphal but, i heard somewhere that the talking heads all switched instruments on the song naive melody. such a great song. but back to the piano. i have noticed that my guitar playing has improved and my knowledge of chord/key structure has grown, i have begun to sound more and more like all the professional musicians i know. i have always been more concerned with creating music that has a vibe or mood than in crafting crafty pop songs. i believe there is generally an inverse relationship between pop knowledge creative instinct. they arent mutually exclusive but there is a danger there. i know the restlessness that comes with the basic medium of songwriting. but i dont want to make music more and more like sting. i have no eventual jazz or math metal aspirations. therefore keeping myself naive in some respects as i continue to learn as an artist is a goal. i am a rank amateur on piano. this means that i can 'discover' really basic chord progressions without being aware that i have re-invented the wheel and therefore continue writing with an energy i might lose if i was on guitar. on guitar i would recognize that i have been playing some really universal chord progression and either stop completely or begin to think about how to dress it up. the dressing up usually means thinking about what key im in and therefore what usual rules apply and then not surprisingly, it starts to sound more usual. more like everyone else.

ive been tweeking on this symposium all week. discussions of god vs. science by some of the heavies; dawkins, ramachandran et al. i know most folk dont have the inclination for three days worth of discussion but i thought that i would put up a link of one two hour segment that is especially dramatic and well argued. both sides were a little better represented here. otherwise the conference has been pretty biased toward science. which i of course enjoyed because of the unusually large anti-religous resentment i have been carrying around recently. unlike in my youth, i now generally try to keep my feelings about religiosity to myself. but then again that is usually much easier to do. if it interests you then there is lots more to see at the symposiums main site.

today i am reminded of the fact that i have always had an escapist relationship to reality. i remember riding in the back of my parents car hoping that aliens would come take me to their planet. after reading the chronicles of narnia i remember pushing through the hanging clothes of my grandmothers armoire looking for a portal. i wondered when i wandered any forest if i would be able to find bag end. could it be somewhere under the ground of this world? then age twelve and thirteen i discovered lsd and mushrooms and began searching around in the inner world of the expanded mind. there was a line of connected electricity to all these explorations that were a lusty search for a reality that was more interesting to me than the one i dealt with everyday. add to this that i was a shy and uncomfortable kid who was always ill at ease around other folks. this same spirit has changed its superficial look but remains with me to this day. i find the usual life unsatisfying. i get restless with the usual choice between lifes little contests (money, tv size, freeway traffic battles) and the boredom of routine. i am still looking for the portals into more interesting worlds. but after being continually disappointed by the 'magical' ones, i now look to this world for escapes into wonder. there is plenty that is true that gives me this adventurous feeling. there is plenty that we dont know that is a rich source for wonder. the more i learn, the richer is my experience of our ignorance. i am glad to see that it seems that science is beginning to assert itself more vociferously into the public sphere. not just passively being used, when convenient, to 'support' some religious claim when it fits and then summarily dismissed as 'just another kind of religion' when it disputes a silly claim. i read a fascinating book some years ago about a conference held at m.i.t. on alien abductions. now i dont believe that little jawas are traveling millions of miles to earth because they are interested in getting a look up our asses. nor do i believe that they could navigate all that space only to blow it in the final mile and crash into new mexico. but people are really motivated about these ideas. that in itself is interesting to me, for example. i understand all too well the impulse to make this world more interesting. a world filled with ghosts, mind reading, gods who smite bad people, alien abduction and government conspiracies is more exciting than one without. but this world is infused with all sorts of more reliable wonders. and pursuit of the reliable ones doesnt have the darker side effect of increasing our gullibility, easy belief, and addiction to simple answers. these things that make a population easy to control.
oh yeah, by the way, in addition to caffiene this was all started by hearing about this guy.

the job of an artist is, at its most basic, a simple act of (as raymond carver put it) bringing the news from my world to yours. for many reasons we are all then able to find some sort of comfort in the fact that the world is seen by others as similar to or related to our own. we have a community of at least one other. i am reminded of this because we are now entering the gauntlet of the christmas holidays and this is a particular time of year when i see a world around me that seems very different from my own. i feel that i am beeing carried along by a large wave of crass christmas commercialism that is dictated by the markeplace to the tune of "little drummer boy". and every year i am visited by the brilliance of the film 'brazil'. there is a sequence in the film where a character is attacked in a mall and overcome by bits of christmas wrapping that are floating along the street. i am buoyed up by this image every year. i remember it and it gives me a small comfort that though it may seem it sometimes i am never really entirely alone.

in an unrelated story, a good one for the world full of wonder category, has anyone else seen this story about an elephant recognizing himself in a mirror. such great interesting creatures (social sophistication, funerals etc.) even before this latest news.

Just looked at some photos that a friend of mine is showing here in hollywood and here on the web. the photographer is jennifer finch of L7 fame but i knew her before she was a rock star. There are pics from the very early eighties. Flea, keith morris, henry rollins and that ilk. There is one of yours truly, age 17, long before janes addiction was a glint in anyones eye. It is proof that i was once a truly unremarkable and pimply young man. When i looked at these i was again struck by the good fortune of my life. The fact that i can remember being that age and seeing a reproduction of an artwork called "barney's beanery" in an art history book. I saw that it was housed in a museum in amsterdam and i remember thinking ,"how in the fuck will i ever get to amsterdam." But when the circus came to town i was able to leave with it and i have been on an extraordinary ride from that moment forward. I have since seen enough different countries to leave me tired of it and grateful to be able to spend the last year here at home with my lovely wife. Speaking of which, fyi, there are two of my ex-girlfriends in the photos as well. Good stuff.

I actually did years later wind up stumbling across the barneys beanery installation at the museum of modern art in amsterdam. I had forgotten about the fact that it was there until the moment i saw it.

jesus. has it really been this long since my last post. i dont have anything to say right now. ive been sick so the only thing ive done for days, really, is watch television on the couch under a couple of cats. i can feel my mind atrophy. one thing, i thought id mention. i have written mostly about politics on this blog. this because of the intensity of that part of our american world these days. but from the way people have been posting, i thought it worth mentioning that i am happy to talk about anything musical. questions. thoughts. whatever. i am a musician. i am not a political pundit.

speaking of music, it looks like shirley manson and i (with some possible help from some friends) are going try to cover a lennon song for an amnesty international/darfur charity cd. spent another afternoon with her a couple of days ago. she really is the best woman in rock. i really appreciate people with a complicated world view. especially these days in the climate of easy answers and all the religious nonsense. it seems that thoughtful rationality has been in short supply. speaking of rational thought. found a really good podcast ive been listening to. its called skeptics guide to the universe. info at: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/. has the intellectual rigor but is also really human and conversational. beats listening to mall punk radio music in traffic.

i hope i feel good enough tomorrow to head out to jpl for a lecture on black holes. should be interesting. wow. what a fucking ramble. shirley told me that, if i am going to do a blog, i have to be consistent. even if i have nothing to say. just say that i have nothing to say. so here it is. and was. nothing.

it is the eve of the election. if i was a man that believed in prayer, i would be praying alot. i would be praying that americans would use their last chance to send a message to the world that we all did not, and do not support our current administration. what we do on tuesday will be more closely watched, considered and debated everywhere outside the united states than it will be here. if we do not send a clear message to our government, and by extension to the world at large, then we will have missed an opportunity of huge proportion. if we do not take back houses of government, then we will in effect be saying (as we did with the bush re-election in '04), that we, the american people, approve of the violent and simplistic way that our government has been behaving. if we do not stop bush cold, if we then elect a more moderate conservative (like mccain) as our next president, we wil have given our approval, consistently, for eight (and then possibly twelve) years and in front of the eyes of the world, throughout this awful and important era. we will have lost many more hearts and minds, including our own. think. vote.

i think that like most folk (especially american folk) i do not normally consider myself a political person. in more reasonable times i see the battle across the aisle of government being fought by two teams with remarkably similar styles and each representing lobbyist and special interest groups that i know very little about. this battle, in most years, is fought basically to a draw that looks more like kabuki theater than any real exchange of ideas. nothing drastic happens. certainly people dont die at the rate they are dying these days.
it is one of my core beliefs that the most effective and consistent way to help the world is to ask people to look at their lives through art. it is arts charm that makes it subversive. and i guess that there is a core optimism buried in here. because i also must believe that people, in general, are good. when we make rational decisions, with little intrusion from fear, we tend to make basically decent decisions. so how do we operate from that reasonable place. we enlighten ourselves and each other when we can.

when i heard recently that north korea was returning to multi-lateral talks, i thought i have to give bush props because he didnt cave and now l'il kim is returning to talks as bush predicted. if i am going to complain about the awful job our president is doing, i have to transcend my resentment of him to credit him when he does something right. if i dont do this then i lose my ability to be fair and i become a schoolyard name-caller with a schoolyard world view. in short i lose my soul and join the mob. it turned out my moment of transcendent generosity was short lived. now i know that a politicians life is a mix of trying to institute a sytem of government you believe in and another part playing a game you must figure out how to win; elections. this blend between ethics and gamesmanship is one of the more interesting things about politics. but as daniel schorr reported on npr here, beijing is reporting that bush sent someone to meet with north korea, one on one, to strike a deal to get l'il kim back to the multi-talks. things just seem to continue to be all games and no ethics at this point.

maybe after this election the democrats will win something back. some semblance of a balance of power will be re-established in government and my interest in politics can fade back to its pre-war levels. i wrote a song on my solo cd that is as close to a political song as i will probably ever write. its called "revolution (of no one)". it is about (amongst other things) the lack of a sixties style voice of dissent in this country. that our 'debate' seemed to have only one side arguing. hopefully, come nov. 7th, my song will be made irrelevant.

just got back from a discussion between the writer steven johnson and a head of epidemiology at ucla. they were discussing stevens book, 'the ghost map', which is about 19th century london and its struggle with cholera and which i am currently in the middle of reading. really interesting night. made me envious of those who live in nyc. that city is always full of interesting evenings like this one. alternatives to the usual club/bar/movie/tv menu that i have found generally uninteresting since i was 20. stevens book, like many of his books, is really interesting in its approach. he is a multi-disciplinary thinker. on the surface, it is a narrative story about an outbreak of cholera and the eventual discovery of its cause and cure. just the story aspect of it and the setting (london 1845) have a dickens sort of feel. this alone i would enjoy, being a bit of an anglophile (married a half-british girl after all). but the book is full of insights and sub- topics that are fascinating and disparate involving urban theory, self-organizing systems, microbiology, post traumatic stress in post- 9/11 nyc to artificial selection pressures producing our ability to drink liquor with relatively little alcoholism.
wow im rambling again. big time. will stop here. if any of this sounds in any way familiar or interesting, read stevens book. its a great read and easy read.
inspire yourself though. you cant rely on anyone else to find it for you.

not that im really impressed with the democrats but i do hope they win something back. only because i am tired of the republicans having so much power that they are able to frame every argument. there has been no dialogue for years now because the republicans have been able to set up all these false choices in front of the american people. you are for the administrations policies or you are for the terrorists. you are against gay marriage or you hate the family. you are for the republicans or you are unconcerned about the threat of terror. you have white christian religious values or you have no values. these are false choices. this is political checkers. it shuts down the actual dialogue because real topics get discussed. with all the difficult and arguably unprecedented problems this country faces we need a real exchange of ideas. this means we need both sides of the conversation. as corrupt and silly as our system is, and show me one that isnt, at its best it can produce a broad spectrum of approaches to most problems. and right now we need all the variety we can muster in our problem solving. variety breeds creativity and creativity is what we need. a distributed system is a better decision maker than any one man. especially when the one man is as limited in scope as george w. bush.

just bought a giclee of an artist named ray caesar. he does very cool stuff. digital surrealist. he has a nice blend of obvious skill and technique (digital), with an eye toward the intangible. the intangible part is the what gives his work legs and makes it something that breathes well day after day. alot of his creative peers, some of whom i quite like, seem to lack that eye to the long view. they make works that are a quick charm with little lasting effect. not ray though. some of this might simply be age. ray is older. either way, rays stuff has a dark charm that lingers.

Istanbul from my hotel window just because i am experimenting with this blog software and its the coolest city in the world.