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‘How do musicians communicate emotion? Performers have often answered this question in terms of what the performer should think and feel. According to the eighteenth-century keyboardist C. P. E. Bach, “a musician cannot move others unless he too is moved.” For nineteenth-century pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel, emotion came from the performer’s “ability to grasp what the composer himself has felt, expressing it in his playing, and making it pass into the souls of the listener. This can be neither notated nor indicated.”
‘Musical performance emerged as an object of scientific study around 1900, when for the first time physiologists and psychologists were able to record the fleeting processes of performance. Of course, you might think, that’s when the phonograph was becoming available. But it wasn’t the phonograph the early scientists of musical performance turned to. These scientists wanted to analyze not sound, but touch – the magical touch of the expert pianist.
‘To analyze pianists’ touch, Parisian psychologists Alfred Binet and Jules Courtier developed an apparatus that registered the time and pressure at which the pianists pressed the keys, recording this information in the fashion of a seismograph. Binet and Courtier used their graphs to show that the best pianists had the greatest regularity in execution. Around the same time (the 1890s), pianist-turned-research Marie Jaëll developed another method for register touch: covering the keyboard with strips of paper and coating the fingers with printing ink, she recorded the placement and quality of the fingers’ touch upon the keys.
‘Then, in the 1900s, the player piano hit the market. The player piano changed everything by introducing piano performance without keyboard touch. At first, piano rolls contained only metrically exact renditions of the notes of a musical score. Such performances were considered mechanical and soulless. Soon, timing, dynamics and pedaling too were automated with the piano rolls of a new type of instrument: the reproducing piano. Unlike the player piano, which played piano rolls generated straight from the score and had no mechanism for automated dynamics, the reproducing piano played piano rolls made from actual performances, complete with the performer’s temporal and dynamic nuances. The result was a new scientific instrument for the study of musical performance.’ — Spooky & the Metronome
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Conlon Nancarrow
‘Composer Conlon Nancarrow was a dedicated socialist, which made him politically unacceptable in the United States. This was brought plainly home when he applied for a passport and was denied. Angry at such treatment, he moved to Mexico City in the early 1940s, becoming a Mexican citizen in 1956. He died there in 1997. Nancarrow composed for the player piano partly because of Mexico’s extreme musical isolation. Another more compelling reason was his long-standing frustration at the inability of musicians to deal with even moderately difficult rhythms. He goes so far as to say that “As long as I’ve been writing music I’ve been dreaming of getting rid of the performers.” With the advent of the phonograph, the player piano has been relegated to the status of an object of nostalgia. But not so for Nancarrow, who since the late 1940s composed almost exclusively for the instrument.’ — Other Minds
‘Study for Player Piano No. 21’
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Black Sabbath (on Synthesia)
‘Black Sabbath are cited as pioneers of heavy metal. The band helped define the genre with releases such as quadruple-platinum Paranoid, released in 1970. They were ranked by MTV as the “Greatest Metal Band” of all time, and placed second in VH1’s “100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock” list, behind Led Zeppelin. Rolling Stone called the band “the heavy-metal kings of the ’70s”. They have sold over 15 million records in the United States and over 70 million records worldwide. Black Sabbath were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and were included among Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.’ — Wiki
‘Iron Man’
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Bill, Brian and Stefan of Olin College of Engineering
‘Much of Olin College’s curriculum is built around hands-on engineering and design projects. This project-based teaching begins in a student’s first year and culminates in two senior “capstone” projects. In the engineering capstone, Senior Consulting Program for Engineering (SCOPE) student teams are hired by corporations, non-profit organizations, or entrepreneurial ventures for real-world engineering projects. In the Arts, Humanitie
s, and Social Sciences (“AHS”) or Entrepreneurship (“E!”) capstone, students work on a self-designed project relating to their focus. Olin College allows students to receive funding and non-degree college credit for “Passionate Pursuits,” student-defined personal projects that the college recognizes as having academic value. Until 2009, the college offered full tuition to all students.’ — Students Review
‘Chopsticks’
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Tom Johnson
‘Tom Johnson is an American minimalist composer, a former student of Morton Feldman. His pieces are most often based simply on mathematical and logical processes, such as tiling, which he attempts to make as clear as possible. His works include: The Four Note Opera, An Hour for Piano, Rational Melodies, the Bonhoeffer Oratorio,Organ and Silence, Riemannoper, and Galileo. Johnson received the French “Victoires de la Musique” prize for contemporary composition (the French equivalent of the “Grammies”) in 2001 for Kientzy Loops. He lived 15 years in New York, but in 1983 settled in Paris, where he lives with his wife, the artist Esther Ferrer.’ — lovely.com
‘Study for Player Piano #1’
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Batman
‘The Dynamic Duo are tied to a conveyor belt of a hole punching machine that creates paper music rolls for player pianos. Batman observes how the machine operates, and deduces a clever way of evading perforation by calculating the notes necessary to make the plunging punches miss and then overpowering the sound of the piano. When he and Robin capture Harry, Harry squeals that a guy named Fingers is the ring leader. Batman deduces that Fingers and Chantell are the same man, and soon unravels the rest of the evil plot.’ — TVRage
‘The Dead Ringers’
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Annie Gosfield
‘Annie Gosfield lives in New York City and divides her time between performing on piano and sampler with her own group and composing for many ensembles and soloists. Her work often explores the inherent beauty of non–musical sounds, and is inspired by diverse sources such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 records, and detuned radios. She uses traditional notation, improvisation, and extended techniques to create a sound world that eliminates the boundaries between music and noise, while emphasizing the unique qualities of each performer. A 2012 fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the recipient of the 2008 Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ prestigious “Grants to Artists” award, Gosfield’s essays on composition have been published by the New York Times and featured in the book Arcana II. Active as an educator, she has taught composition at Princeton University, Mills College, and California Institute of the Arts.’ — anniegosfield.com
‘Shoot The Player Piano’
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Györy Ligeti
‘Gyorgy Ligeti was, along with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez, one of a group of composers which revolutionised postwar music. Rejecting classical musical forms and creating often sparse and atonal works, they continually withstood the derision heaped upon them by generations of critics. Like Bela Bartok, Ligeti was fascinated by folk music and initially produced a number of arrangements in that idiom. Perhaps his most notable, certainly his most famous, piece was Atmospheres from 1960. This work featured, along with Ligeti’s Requiem and Lux Aeterna, on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.’ — BBC
‘Étude pour Piano No. 9’
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Trimpin
‘Trimpin, a sound sculptor, composer, inventor, is one of the most stimulating one-man forces in music today. A specialist in interfacing computers with traditional acoustic instruments, he has developed a myriad of methods for playing, trombones, cymbals, pianos, and so forth with Macintosh computers. He has collaborated frequently with Conlon Nancarrow, realizing the composer’s piano roll compositions through various media. In describing his work, Trimpin sums it up as “extending the traditional boundaries of instruments and the sounds they’re capable of producing by mechanically operating them. Although they’re computer-driven, they’re still real instruments making real sounds, but with another dimension added, that of spatial distribution.”‘ — Other Minds
‘Ratatatatatt’
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Mario Bros. (on Synthesia)
‘Synthesia is a video game and piano keyboard trainer for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, as well as Linux using Wine, which allows users to play a MIDI keyboard or use a computer keyboard in time to a MIDI file by following on-screen directions, much in the style of Keyboard Mania or Guitar Hero. It was originally named Piano Hero due to the similarity of gameplay with Guitar Hero; however, Activision (the owners of the rights to Guitar Hero) sent a cease and desist to the program’s creator, Nicholas Piegdon. Synthesia was originally an open source project, but seeing the potential commercial value of the program, Piegdon decided to stop releasing the source code (version 0.6.2), however leaving the most recent open-source release available for download. While the basic functionality is still currently free, a “Learning Pack” key can be purchased to unlock additional features, such as a sheet music display mode.’ — synthesis.eu
‘Medley’
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Marc-André Hamelin
‘Marc-André Hamelin began his piano studies at the age of five. He has made recordings of a wide variety of composers with the Hyperion label. He is well known for his att
ention to lesser-known composers especially of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Leo Ornstein, Nikolai Roslavets, Georgy Catoire). Hamelin has also composed several works, including a set of piano études in all of the minor keys, which was completed in September 2009. Although the majority of his compositions are for piano solo, he has also written three pieces for player-piano (including the comical Circus Galop and Solfeggietto a cinque, which is based on a theme by C.P.E. Bach), and several works for other forces, including Fanfares for three trumpets.’ — guardian.co.uk
‘Pop Music for Player Piano’
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Dan Deacon
‘Dan Deacon is a Baltimore, Maryland-based electronic music composer/performer. He attended the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in Purchase, New York, where he played in many bands, including tuba for Langhorne Slim and guitar in the improvisational grindcore band Rated R. Dan Deacon’s compositional style is best classified in the future shock genre along with videohippos, Santa Dads, Blood Baby, Ecstatic Sunshine, Ponytail, and other bands in the growing Baltimore music scene. Since 2003, Deacon has released eight albums under several different labels. Deacon also has a renowned reputation for his live shows, where large scale audience participation and interaction is often a major element of the performance.’ — discogs.com
‘Demonstration’
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Minecraft
‘Minecraft is a sandbox-building independent video game written in Java originally by Swedish creator Markus “Notch” Persson and now by his company, Mojang. Minecraft is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: Survival, which requires players to acquire resources themselves and maintain their health and hunger; and Creative, where the player has an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no concept of health or hunger. A third gameplay mode, named Hardcore, is essentially the same as Survival, but the difficulty is locked on the hardest setting and respawning is disabled, forcing the player to delete his or her world upon death.’ — minecraft.org
‘Ode to Joy’
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Igor Stravinsky
‘The Russian-born American composer Igor Stravinsky identified himself as an “inventor of music.” The novelty, power, and elegance of his works won him worldwide admiration before he was thirty. Throughout his life he continued to surprise admirers with transformations of his style that stimulated controversy. Stravinsky died on April 6, 1971, in New York City and was buried in Venice. His approach to musical composition was one of constant renewal. Rhythm was the most striking ingredient, and his novel rhythms were most widely imitated. His instrumentation and his ways of writing for voices were also distinctive and influential. His harmonies and forms were more elusive (difficult to grasp). He recognized melody as the “most essential” element.’ — igorstravinsky.com
‘Étude pour Pianola’
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*
p.s. Hey. ** Wolf, Hi, W. Oh, I see. Yeah, do your best to get your relatives on board. It’s kind of scary. Sarkozy is already pandering like mad to the FN voters. It’s really grotesque. I read this thing yesterday by some guy who’s supposed to be a big expert on the FN, and he said Le Pen’s goal is to destroy the UMP and then take up the mantle of the French right, and that she wants Sarkozy to lose, and he thinks she’ll ask her people to abstain in the second round, but it’s all speculation, and it looks like it’s going to be really close, so, yeah, it seems important that people vote for Hollande, misgivings and everything. Ugh. That Krasznahorkai novel is pretty fantastic, yeah, and I’m going to start another of his soon, I think. Good question about Hungary. You got me. Right, about the Proust pooh-poohing. There is a certain punkish fun to it. Anyway, lots of love to you on this gloomy looking (Paris) morning. ** Kiddiepunk, Yes, sir. Great seeing you yesterday, and more of that any minute, yeah? ** Cobalt91, Hi! Thanks about the posts. It does mean a lot when people acknowledge them and say that they find them interesting, of course, so hugs. Well, better to have problems sticking to genre writing’s outlines than the opposite, I guess, but of course I would say that, ha ha. That story you’re pitching to ‘Outside’ sounds fantastic, as a piece and as a real world adventure too. Here’s hoping they’re wise. I find it helpful to think of only writing one more novel, but I won’t know if that’s the deal until I write it, so right now it’s just part of the scheme, I guess, and it feels right at the moment. Mm, no, I don’t kill my internet off when I’m writing, but there definitely is a lot of discipline involved in making internet surfing into more kind of a little reward or a ‘lunch’ break or something. The thing that was really hard for me was writing a novel while maintaining this blog. “TMS’ was the first one I’ve written since starting this project, and I think trying to figure out how to write and do this at the same time is one of the reasons it took me years to start ‘TMS’ but I managed to do both, although in hindsight I don’t know how the hell I did that. Yay about you getting back to your novel this weekend. I’ll be interested to hear how that goes and about anything in the process that you’re interested to share. My phone is finally back, thanks. No, I haven’t seen ‘Shame’. I’m interested to hear that you like it ‘cos I’ve heard so many bad reports, and I think that’s why I haven’t made an effort to see it yet. Bon day and love to you. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, yeah, I guess I’m kind of a bit with Wolf in that I kind of like pooh-poohing Proust just to be mischievous or something, but I’m basically positive that he must be great. It’s just that when I was a young writer hanging out with the big, older dogs like the Violet Quill guys and James Merrill and so on, they were always like ‘Proust, Proust, Proust’, and it instigated my rebellious side, I guess. One of these years, I’ll read him. Oh, so I saw ‘Twixt’. Mm, see what you think, but I thought it was really lame and mediocre, sort of like a subpar episode of ‘Tales from the Crypt’ or something. I haven’t seen the recent Coppola films, so I don’t where this one stands in relationship to them, but I came away thinking, What the fuck happened to him?! It was just kind of an artsy, cliched supernatural film, as far as I could see. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Thanks, Jeff. Totally, about that piece being by James Wood.
I did a serious double take when I checked the byline. Weird. I think ND is putting out ‘Satantango’ quite soon. That’s exciting. Oh, I see, about the short pieces. Right, I remember when you were struggling to shape the novel out of a lot of material. Anyway, cool. During the Cycle, like you said, yeah, I used castoffs as places to begin the next novel in Cycle quite a bit. Since then, no, ‘cos I’m determined to totally reinvent my voice with each new novel now. The castoffs can be useful for short pieces. A bunch of stuff in ‘Ugly Man’ was either novel castoffs or experiments for a new novel that I liked but which didn’t have legs. ** Killer Luka, Ouch, ugh, sorry about the diligence of your illness. Reading ‘Period’ when sick … it just might work, ha ha. Sounds like you’re ‘in danger’ of eclipsing me as the world’s biggest VK fan among notable figures in contemporary culture. We can be his King and Queen, or his Court Painters or whatever they were called. Okay, I’ll try to download ‘Mr. Nobody’ even though watching Jared Leto act is a lot to ask. Sure enough, that Youtube full-length version you linked to is blocked in France. Wtf?! I hope we block stuff from you guys. ** Ken Baumann, Ken! Oh, the festival was at USC? What is that? They do one now too? Crosstown rivalry stuff? Yeah, the UCLA one is the one I know. LA is becoming a literary hot spot? Book festival hot spot, I mean? Weird, I just read Blake’s thing about Twitter not ten minutes ago. Gosh, I still feel like I need some time to start reading Bolano. I’m still feeling a trendy chip on my shoulder when I see his name. That’s irrational, I know. I mean, I will, if nothing else for the same reason I want to see ‘Hunger Games’. He’s kind of the ‘Hunger Games’ of the bright new writers set, if nothing else. Still, saying ‘I haven’t read him’ can only get one so far. Dude, I so incredibly dig that Kickstarter link thing, holy shit! I so want to go to see those events. I so believe in what those guys are doing. I so think I’m going to fork over a little moolah. Thank you! You know me way too well. ** Steevee, Hey. I’ll go look for that download. You’ve intrigued me. That’s weird about the library-only status. Why? Does that mean they only have one copy or something? Do they have more than one copy of most books? It’s not like that book is rare or delicate to handle or something. I have not seen that Riff Raff video, but you can bet that I won’t be able to say that tomorrow. Thanks! ** Misanthrope, I tried that joke on three people, and they didn’t even roll their eyes. They stared for a second then crinkled up their noses as if to say, Why? Yes, I like that you ate Mexican, motherfucker. There, are you happy? Can’t wait for ‘The Avengers’. New Whedon! Maybe the Wines got the rapping gene instead. Have you tried? You could form a kind of like Osmonds of the rap world maybe. I don’t think that’s been done yet, has it? That could be money in bank maybe. Oh, nice, now that song is back in my mental treadmill again. I’ll be singing it in the shower in a few minutes. I actually got the singing gene. Did you know that? I was the lead singer for three bands before I hung up my vocal cords. If I started singing to you, which I will never do, I would break your heart, man, even if I was singing ‘Firework’ You’d be bawling like a big motherfucking baby. ** Sypha, Hey, J. Yeah, I actually think ‘Firework’ is kind of a masterpiece of the fascistically catchy crap pop genre. I could even write an essay proving its mini-genius if I wanted to, which I don’t. It’s overplayed here too, which is why it keeps getting stuck in my head. Westerns? Hm, any good? I hope the psychiatrist visit goes interestingly. You know that I dug my time in therapy. See what you think. Cool about ‘Grimoire’! Everyone, Sypha aka James Champagne’s marvelous novel ‘Grimoire’, much lauded in these parts, is now available in hard copy/book form via Amazon and Barnes & Noble if you haven’t gotten your copy yet. If not, choose your conglomerate. Here’s it at Amazon, and here’s it at B&N.; ** 5STRINGS, No, I didn’t. It wasn’t me. But I’m all about being your comrade re: Blanchot and R-G. I am your French echo with an American accent. James Jones? Hm, truly? Don’t know. A painter’s flat and a hole in the wall are the same thing here. That’s why you never hear about contemporary French painting. I agree that you’re ready. I don’t think there’s much doubt about that. Me, I’m not ready. Teach me. It’s hard to fuck a different boy every night unless you have really wide standards, so I think writing might be the option. There are writers who claim they do both, but never trust a writer. ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! Yeah, one week, whoo-hoo. I saw Oscar and Kiddiep yesterday, and we were counting down the days as well. Blast, here we come! Ugh about Luke not getting into the schools. I’m sorry. But you don’t need school when you’re a writer. That’s just an old wives’ tale. On Malick, well, he has a very particular style — pacing, the acting, the camerawork, and especially his use of voiceover. All his films share it, but, within that, there is a lot of variety, and I would say that ‘The Thin Red Line’ and ‘Tree of Life’ are quite different. You have to like what Malick does to get into it. But I’m not wildly objective because he’s my favorite living filmmaker, and ‘The Thin Red Line’ is in my top 10 all-time favorite films, so … Great about ‘Cabin in the Woods’. It opens here the day after you arrive, I think. Excited. Sure, we can plan stuff. I’m pretty free when I’m not doing the blog, which is most of the time. So, let’s plan. How should we do that? What do you absolutely for sure want to see/do? ** Rewritedept, Yeah, I think the new Spiritualized is definitely the best one since ‘Ladies and Gentleman … ‘. It’s pretty stellar. I could diagram those sentences today if I wanted. But I’m good at diagramming sentences, not on paper but privately in my ether. Hope your sleep took total control, man. ** All right. I ask you to consider the player piano as an unexpected font of very interesting things today. That’s all I ask. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
George Gershwin created a player paino roll of his "Songbook" — piano arrangements of all his major numbers. Thus inconsitutes Gershwin performing virtually "live."
William Gaddis' posthumously published (on purpose) las very brief book Agape Agape is about a player piano.
Sorry to hear that Twixt is lame. That's the impression conveyed about it ever since it was completed. And as it has no U.S. distributor I have no idea when — or if — it will premiere here theatricaly. It may well ened up the first Coppola film to go straight to video.
Beyond sad.
Here’s George playing “Swanee”
I feel sort of smart, DC, as I know like five of these sources. Well, definitely Annie Gosfield and Ligeti. And Minecraft of course, too. I really need to get some of Gosfield's music, actually.
Speaking of procurement, my check for the Atlantic article came in yesterday. 500 bucks. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with it. Save it, I guess? Get caught up on bills? I'm thinking pay all the bills and put the rest in savings. But I have no idea. I'm almost always broke because I always think, "I may not have money tomorrow, so I'll buy all these books today," which is unwise. Chad's the same way, but I think maybe it's time we grow up a little. Granted, I downloaded Robbe-Grillet (sp?)'s "Repetition" and John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Pulphead" already so who knows how long it'll last.
Thanks so much about the encouragement for the "Outside" piece. I'm interested in it, though I'm not sure if it'd really be smart to go into Mexico at this point, and without going to Mexico, I feel like the the piece would lose much of its legs. We'll see. And speaking of pitches, I submitted my pitch to online editor of The Paris Review re the piece I'm working on about you about a week or two ago, and still waiting to hear back, but I have high hopes. Speaking of your books, still working on Guide (got side-tracked by Blood Meridian) and I think it may actually be one of my favorites, though it's too early to tell, and they're all so different, in a good way, from one another, you can't objectively say "this one is better than this one" as easily as, say, a John Grisham [:)].
I really loved Shame. I don't know who you heard negativity from; it was all the rage over here. I loved it not because it was hip or whatever though; plot-wise, it's pretty weak. More, I loved the way its incredible cinematography tied to everything about it, from characters to settings to theme and score; there are some places it needs work, but my general memories are "Holy shit that's a great shot. Holy shit that's a great shot. Holy shit…" etc. And also the way it functions more successfully as a series of perfect scenes rather than a coherent movie; that part's trickier to explain. But in short, I think it's worth a view. And you get to say Fassbinder's cock a lot, and unlike a lot of Hollywood stars, he's well-hung, which is cool. He's also handsome AND a brilliant actor. And Carrey Mulligan is the shit. Did you see "Drive?".
On a writing note: I totally hear you about using Internet surfing as a reward. I think of it as coming up for air. After spending thirty minutes, an hour, on the intense level of concentration it takes to make a piece, scrolling Twitter news or watching some music video feels like a chance for my brain to loosen the valves for a few minutes before hunkering back down. The trick, I think, is not letting the desire for a reward overpower the desire to write, which is, obviously, way easier said than done. And I'm thrilled to be working on the novel again, though it forces me to really use my weekday writing time to the maximum, which, right now, is taken up with Blood Meridian scholarship, and that piece for the Billfold (speaking of, the next part hits tomorrow: I'll send you the link). And I have no idea how I would manage a blog and pull a novel together; I think I would find days when I would sleepwalk through one or the other irreparably, it's crazy, so many kudos to you. I'm saving TMS for last, I think, though very much looking forward to it.
Hope your day is wonderful, and glad to hear about the phone. All the best, me.
Hey, interesting post today… maybe it was inspired by the Nancarrow piece in the latest Wire?
I think I know what you meant the other day about video games paying off… certainly have sent my mind off in an unfamiliar direction, which is nice, and much needed.
Latest FaBlog: Fait Diver — Hommage a Fritz Lang
Monsieur Cooper!!! How's "it" going? Awesome post on the Laszlo guy from Hungary this week, he and his work look incredible at first glance and totally my thing. Weird how some people always whine about writers who ditch punctuation. It's just really stupid. The same thing's always said about Goytisolo and Guyotat, " oh, there's no capital letters and full stops, I can't do it". Dumb. Anyway, great post!
What the fuck are the French doing?? I got back to find a very smug Le Pen on the front of all the UK papers. Ugh. It's so weird that France has such a comparatively good social model and is so quick to lecture about the evils of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and then they continually vote en masse for fascists and borderline-Nazis like Sarkozy or slimy crooks like Chirac. Weird. I can only remember France electing someone on the Left once in my entire life – Mitterand – and that turned into a bit of a disaster too.
Still, my doomed little island's ruled by the shiny eggface of Cameron, so stupidity has no borders.
I just got back from Istanbul! Which truly truly ROCKS. Chaotic, insane. I even got to read out filthy old " diary" entries from my time as a hooker in some villa on the banks of the Bosphorus, accompanied simultaneously by my old Berlin pal Torsten shouting out live fluctuations in corporations' share prices We were brilliant, if I say so myself, haha! The rest was just a holiday, binging on great food, mosques, palaces and shit. There's been shedloads going on recently, hence my absence for a while. I'm basically living at the studio. Some of the stuff I've been working on turned out to be gruesome abortions, others have at least the potential not to be a complete insult to other people's eyeballs. Plus I went up to London to meet those porn producers, which is a whole other tragicomedy in itself.
Anyway, gotta go, but I'll be haunting this place on a regular basis again now, if you'll have me. Missed you and all the regulars. You good?
oh I thought these things were just being played by ghosts. I love Stravinsky.
what up, yo. I am feeling better today. 😀
Yeah VK….*sigh* it was pretty bad when I was a teen as well. Having a hearty boy obsession is fun. Don't forget about Misanthrope also being VK's possible #1 fan. I was talking to him on the phone (as I do often) yesterday and hahhaha I was like, "So have you seen _____ (fill in the blank with a VK movie)?" …He says, "Oh yeah I have that on DVD." "How many times have you seen it?" "Oh 25, 30 times at least." hahahahhaha oh man. Then he went and sat next to his DVDs and was arranging them together and mumbling there titles "mmmCrime and Punishment in Suburbiammm….mmmThe Unsaidmmmmmm …he looks really hot in that one" and so on while no doubt stroking them. Oh man I was laughing so hard.
So then I was like fuck, I think I need to buy Crime and Punishment in Suburbia so I was staring at it on Amazon with the mouse cursor hovering over "add to cart" and I was shaking and pulling on my hair and scratching my neck and pacing the room and whispering, "oh shit I think I really need this. Should I get it? George owns it. I think I should too" like it's fucking crack or something. Then I went to Dandelion on DVD on Amazon, repeat scene. "Fuck do I really need this? I think I need this….George owns it. Maybe I should too…" SO those DVDs are hanging out in my virtual cart awaiting my purchase…mmmm.
oh here are excerpts from the article where he says he takes the bus etc: “I definitely do psychopathic. I don’t try to but it just sneaks out of my character.”
But yeah, Jared Leto is a total slag. I haven't watched the entire Mr. Nobody film so I have no idea if it's good, I doubt it, but I've just watched the Regbo scenes and zoned out or ignored the screen when he isn't on it. But it's not linear so he shows up periodically.
I saw "Shame" too and I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was a fascinating think piece/psych study on what the impact of being sexually molested/traumatized as a child has on the adult life and how they are totally destroyed while attempting to function in modern society. It wasn't directly spelled out that this brother and sister were raped as children but it was pretty obvious to me. Plus I am a huge Fassbender fan. It had some cheesy moments and was pretty predictable but the acting was so good, it overcame. Also, I had the same verbal/physical reaction to the scene where Fassbender goes into a gay sex club and gets his dick sucked by a burly dude as when the dinosaurs pop-up on screen in "Tree of Life": namely leaping out of my seat, pumping my fist in the air and yelling, "FUCK YEAH, MOTHERFUCKERS." So that was fun. I want to watch Fassbender fucking a Plesiosaurus…..Actually, no I don't.
Alrighty, have a good day, Dennis. xxx
hey D. been a fair bit of change since I wrote. Love the piano stuff and stuff. There used to be a radio show that would only play piano rolls late at night…just thought I'd add that for no apparent reason.
So…just got back from 5 days in Death Valley. It was splendid! Saw the Arcadia crew (Brad and Joanne Bentz, Mike Hege…plus spouses). And my brothers of course. DV is unbelievably beautiful. Stayed at the Ranch and also snagged a campsite. Best of both worlds.
Jules is officially employed as of last monday. That is huge! Her COBRA insurance was set to run out at the end of this month…now full bennies! We are both over the moon about the way things have been working lately.
right…I love you so much my friend. hope all is well
M
Dennis, thanks for the shout-out re: Grimoire. I hope I get my author copies soon. Today on FB I posted a mock-announcement for it that was kind of a spoof (both in terms of visuals and text) of the over-the-top promotional flyers that would come with old Current 93 albums. Actually, if you ever need a laugh, I'm starting to post scans of my older books on Facebook: mainly front cover, back cover, about the author, "praise," and some sample pages. Yesterday I posted a photo album entitled "Bullet Games," later on today I might do the same for "Hornet Queen" (another of my old books).
The psychiatrist I saw seems nice. She thinks Prozac would help with my depression/anxiety (and help to decrease my obsession with my health). I told her I couldn't swallow pills but she told me it comes in liquid now as well. So I might try that. I guess common side effects are headaches and sexual problems: but I told her I never have sex anyway so that shouldn't be an issue right now, ha ha.
I've never read an Elmore Leonard western so I can't comment on that. Oddly enough, two of my favorite novels (Burroughs' "Place of Dead Roads" & McCarthy's "Blood Meridian") are westerns, though perverted examples of them.
My article on the Eclipse Czech New Wave box set came out today in Moving Image Source. Here's the link
I downloaded the new Death Grips album. Weirdly, I couldn't find a physical copy in a record store – so much for the benefits of major label distribution. I'm listening to it now. I really like the way it combines the aggression of hip-hop and rock into one package while avoiding the more obvious stupidities of both genres. Have you ever heard Waka Flocka Flame? He's the most obvious parallel I can think of in mainstream hip-hop, with screamed vocals and hard, electronic beats.
Player pianos. This is the final stop on a google trip from baudrillard to zizek to steven pinker, all sparked by re-watching steven roggenbuck's videos after seeing him read last night here in SF. Fuck! he was like a scrap collector patching together the dumpster pickings of western civilization. I am about to unleash like twenty paragraphs into the comment box here… uh oh. I will put them in a doc somewhere so it doesn't cause a mess.
Met steven trull too, he says hi, he's a great human and the organizer of the reading i went to.
Um. I gotta collect myself.
I'm having a huge fight in "Salon" with itsa readers over this stupid aritcle
hey Dennis,
Nice player pianos. Like Mancy, I wondered if this was inspired by the Nancarrow Wire piece. Love the Batman inclusion.
ND has already published Santanago – I've got a copy and it's a beautiful edition. Now to find the time to read it. They're working on another Lazlo as well that I think is scheduled for later this year or early 2013.
Looking forward to the Jesrun post.
BTW, with all the listmania posts that have happened here previously, there's one that's conspicuously missing – your Top 50 (or 100) albums. There's one for favorite songs, but nothing long form, at least that I recall….
Dennis!
Just one LA Times Fest.; they changed locations maybe two or three years ago. So yeah, USC now.
I love a lot of Bolaño's stuff, and I still feel the trendy chip. It's yucky. But fucking deserved. He'll last, much past the trend.
I was impressed by Hunger Games. Its artful, elegant. Particularly for a blockbuster. I'm curious to see how it changes with each installment.
Knew you'd love the Kulturpark thing.
My end: today was calm and antisocial. Much needed. Rereading Naked Lunch. Good goddamn.
Yours,
Ken
Nancarrow!!!!! always wanted to be in room with one of those pianos play that music – one can dream – keep writing new stuff – kind of amazing, trying to figure how to record this fall. thinking of asking a rich friend to throw down. bouncing back between cosa brava, new frith thing, death grip and all other assortmants, still looking for for something like Liturgy without the singing and noisier – rhythmically complex and noisey – maybe I need to make it, who know – happy mid week!!!
@postitbreakup: I’m sorry that I’m saying this so late, but thanks so much for putting together the Weakings Library, it’s really helpful…
@steeeve: Thanks for the tip about the new Le1f mixtape, I’ve been listening to that a lot the last couple days… Also I really liked your Czech New Wave article! Daisies is one of my favorite movies, I’m going to try and watch some of the other films you mention.
Hey Dennis, how are you? Sweet, now I know how to play Iron Man on the piano! (cross it off the list) Today is another great post—they’re all great—the Laszlo Krasznaharkai post, Killer Luka’s cult of boys, Paradigm’s space post, the tombstone post…this blog is amazing.
The last week or so I’ve been going out a lot with my friends and haven’t been home much… But I resolve to comment more often. The other day I was thinking about what books I’ve read over the last year and a really big number of them were introduced to me through this blog. You’ve had a huge influence on my reading, especially in terms of introducing me to younger writers, and I just wanted to take a second to thank you for that, even if I'd said it before. I recently started reading Blanchot’s Death Sentence, it’s amazing…
My 4/20 was good, I saw Curren$y on 4/19 (he didn’t come out until after midnight) and basically the whole show was like the formation of the Earth scene in Tree of Life, with huge volcano like clouds of smoke constantly erupting up from the crowd for pretty much 4 hours straight. People smoking like three or four of five blunts throughout the show…I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show that was so fogged out. I also saw Hunx and His Punx that same week, they put on a good show. He’s got stage presence.
This is random, but have you ever read that book We Children From Bahnhof Zoo about the teenage heroin junkie? The movie they made with Davie Bowie is called Christiane F? I watched it recently and really loved it, and I’ve been curious about reading the book. I can’t find a copy anywhere online for less than 40 bucks, I guess it’s out of print? I’m just wondering if it’s worth reading, or if you know much about it. I really liked The Basketball Diaries, I wonder how similar those two books are.
I hope this isn’t corny but that movie Christiane F reminded me of this sentence from a Breece Pancake story “A Room Forever” when the narrator runs into a 14 year old prostitute and he says: “I think she has probably run off, and that type is hard to figure out.” The whole movie I really wanted to sit her down and try to reason her out of everything—someone should have been looking out for her.
Throughout the whole movie she knows what the consequences are… She knows what heroin does to people—and over and over, all her junkie friends keep warning her to keep the fuck away—but she does it anyway… I guess she understands the consequences, but maybe she doesn’t fully believe in them.
It's crazy to think about how common stuff like this is…happens all over the world, every day. It made me think about Breece Pancake a lot, in the sense that his stories are about people who get thrown away, about disposable people.
The saddest and most beautiful scene for me was when her boyfriend sees her at the club and gets really angry at her when he finds out that she recently tried heroin, and she says “I just wanted to know what you feel like” and her boyfriend goes all soft and hugs her, and touches her face really tenderly and kisses her, and they walk off holding hands…
Anyway–on that cheerful note–I hope have a good morning Dennis, take care…
d-
ooh, stravinsky. is synthesia supposed to reference synaesthesia, or 'seeing sound?' i'll bet it is.
yeah sleep was great. day was disappointing, as most of them are. i think i've expounded before on how sometimes i'd rather just stay in bed a lot of the time because there's no chance for yr day to be less than what you expect it to be if you just stay in bed all day. maybe i should quit having hopes and expectations for days instead?
more writing. i'm actually cranking out pages, at least by my standards (where i'm lucky to finish, oh, three lines or so that i actually intend to use). more reading. working on 'fierce invalids home from hot climates' by tom robbins, which i've read once before, but it was back in highschool, so i don't remember it (fun fact: i can't remember most of my life, save brief flashes of things– mostly related to food or literature or my prized beatles tape that i listened to obsessively until i was in the second grade or so and got into nirvana– before the age of 15 or so. some people suggest that maybe this means i was abused, but i doubt that very much: what little i can recall of my childhood seems pretty idyllic and typical besides all the normal shit that fucks kids up like when my parents got divorced and hated eachother for 5 years or when my mom moved back in with my dad shortly thereafter while pregnant with another man's child [hey they were divorced so it doesn't count]).
i've lost my train of thought.
anywho. i think the best thing about the whole last year of whatever the fuck i've been up to is that my brain is moving away from opiate consciousness. and i don't just mean opiate consciousness in the 'using opiate substances' sense, but more in the sense that most americans seem to live for their pacifiers, whether drugs or television or vapid pop music or what the fuck ever, and no one wants to actually engage with life anymore. i dunno, i had this whole thing thought out, but the shitty thing about smoking a lot of pot and not being a very fast typist is that you forget a lot of shit between thinking and the keyboard and then you end up with just half a paragraph of kinda half-baked overgeneralization and …
fuck. lost myself again. but yeah. things are pretty great on this end. manageable, at least. tolerable. or, to put it better, i'm getting a lot more confident in how i handle the giant piles of shit that life likes to pile in my way to wherever the fuck it is i'm heading. if that makes sense.
ok, well i think it's time to eat? dunno. talk soon.
-me.
Luka! You've told all my secrets! Hehehe. Hmm, I think I'll get my VK titles together on my shelf, snap a pic, and put it on FB for ya. 😛
Dennis, Well, if all you got were some crinkled noses, then it's obvious that your delivery was off. Really, you can't start a joke with, "This joke really sucks, but here goes anyway…" Plus, I always pull back the hammer on my gun right after I tell it and scream, "Laugh, bitches!"
I knew you played recorder, but I did not know you sang. Interesting. How do you think your voice was? Ever get compliments on it? And actually, you accidentally sang in front of me once: you made fun of "Riders on the Storm" by singing a few lines as you, me, and TM were walking in Paris a few years ago. That was funny. But I don't think it was your true singing voice. It was kind of Louis Armstrong or something, very low and…mocking, hahaha.
Believe it or not, I can do a pretty good Chuck D impersonation. I've done it for others and they've usually been like, "Fuck, you sound just like him!" Seriously. But other than that, I'm not such a good rapper. I'm just so bad with things like melody, rhythm, beats, all the really important shit.
Oh, man, that Mexican was some good shit. It was like a FIIIIRREEEEWORK! 😛
Hey Dennis, great player piano day! I've never seen the Batman clip, haha.
By the way, These guys in Ghent make some great robot instruments, including a mean player piano.
Just started the new Brian Oliu. Very nice.
Bill
hey dennis!!
so tomorrow morning I have an interview with Bavo Defurne for the zine…. he's a really cool queer filmmaker who has a feature film in release at the moment called North Sea Texas which is really quite good! totally a breath of fresh air in the current state of stale queer coming of age movies… his short films are fantastic as well!
Luke got into one of his schools so far! Just when we were starting to despair!! He got into Antioch so at the current moment we're trying to figure out if it's a good idea since it's mostly e-correspondence with professors and very little class time…
yeah with malick i definitely noticed the voice over technique… that's probably the thing that seemed most similar between the two movies….
also adding my voice to the Shame conversation… i really didn't like it sadly 🙁 I say sadly because Hunger was one of my favorite movies of '08… i just thought it was way too slow and didn't have the cinematography or the great and emotional story that Hunger had….
lol i have no idea how we should plan… joakim has given me a few tips and i'm sure i'll want to see a couple sites and museums, but mostly i'm just excited to explore and see things that aren't really on the tourist maps since i've done all that stuff already… so really excited for book shops, record stores, cool queer destinations, and pretty french schoolboys from christophe honore…. which actually do you know where that Tin-Tan building is from love songs?? I was trying to figure it out and i found a picture of it online but no address…. i love pretty much every single place that's featured in that movie…. and i super wish that tunnel from IRREVERSIBLE was still there…. that totally would have been worth the half-day trip out of my way!!! oh can we just stalk Gaspar Noe?!? Or catherine Breillat?!?!
oh fantasies 🙂 anyway i gotta get some sleep… i'm waking up in less than 6 hours to what looks to be a crazy day (interview, talking to future employers, moving out of my dorm) talk to you soon!!!!
Thanks for the day, Mr. Cooper, I dropped by to say hello to you. hope you have been doing well. I will return sometime soon! best, h