Chad Taylor

Johnny is a man and he's bigger than you




And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear. You reject the common information, rather like if you gaze at something for a long time, you'll cease to really see it. You'll see any aspect of it that's changing, but the static elements you won't see ... The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.
-- Rob Tannenbaum, "A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno," Musician 83 (Sept. 1985)

Directions


In preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair I downloaded the German + Travel app, which supplies and speaks useful phrases. The sound files are preloaded so there is no wait to play them, and no network traffic charge. And you can play phrases at random to make up robo-conversations: it's the app Kurt Schwitters would have liked.

Since upgrading to iOS6 I've been using the Apple maps app too -- I thought it was fine. Consumer Report rates the app as not that bad. 'Apple’s problem is that is replaced best-in-class with pretty-good.'

There is a new and best Amazon Kindle out. Gizmodo says the Paperwhite is for 'anyone who wants an ereader with a great screen. Which is basically anyone who wants an ereader.'

You may have Sherlock Holmes' on your e-reader, but you will not find his address on any map. The suspiciously well-named Jimmy Stamp deconstructs and reconstructs the mystery of 221B Baker Street:
As a real manifestation of a fiction, the many 221Bs attest to the power of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing. So strongly do the Holmes stories resonate with our culture that we have manifested his home in our own reality, creating shrines and sites of pilgrimage across the world. But these "replicas" also attest to the power of architecture and interior design, which by their very nature make things real.
Gavin Polone at New York Magazine talks about why TV is better than movies. If you're interested in popular culture you should print out this article and nail it to the wall. Almost a coda to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it does well to explain the most significant shift in mainstream entertainment since the rise of the movie blockbuster in the 1970s.
I would bet that you have noticed that your friends are more excited for new episodes of a favorite show than they are for the release of a super-hyped studio tentpole movie...  [A] malaise has taken hold of the movie audience, which is illustrated by the oft-heard phrase, "There is nothing out worth seeing.".
But why? Polone:
There are too many networks now competing for attention and they don't have the luxury of spending the huge sums movie studios can to cut through the marketing clutter and get the consideration of the potential viewer. So, they have no choice but to make shows that stand out from everything else based on their quality and distinctiveness. That is why, in recent years, you've gotten to watch not only Breaking Bad, but also The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland. None had pricey CGI, huge stars, or a flashy, unavoidable ad campaign; all they had was terrific writing, acting, and originality that made people want to recommend these shows to their friends.
On the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Graeme McMillan at Time discusses how the series changed pop culture forever:
These days, of course, we're used to the idea of rebooting series and franchises and getting new takes on what had come before, keeping the best bits and discarding what doesn't fit for something that everyone hopes is better. That wasn't the case back in 1987. Back then, translations between media tried their best to faithfully replicate previous iterations, and even oddities like the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie that predated The Next Generation by a matter of months tried their hardest to offer affectionate homage to their predecessors, even as they pretended to parody them. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be a reboot in the common usage of the term today: It takes place in the same continuity as the earlier series, and doesn't seek to replace it or undo anything that came before, but for all intents and purposes it was a reboot for the concept and a chance for Roddenberry and staff to correct whatever mistakes or bad decisions had been forced on the original.
In Hollywood, pitching is everything. TV writer Bill Barol remembers being with Al Franken for the worst meeting in the history of show business:
After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD?"
However a study published in the Journal of Aging and Health has found that creativity predicts a longer life:
A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.

Bo Ningen


And then sometimes the kids get it right. Last night at The Garage London-based Bo Ningen played support for someone else who doesn't matter because Bo Ningen were the business: not the retro-prog Bo Ningen, or the speed metal 'DaiKasei' (recorded live) but the four piece honed and sharpened into something else entirely: glassy, precise, modern, loud, monotonal, terrific. Lead singer and bassist Taigen camped it up, the drummer (Mon-chan) nailed it down, and Kohhei and Yuki (guitars) went all the way up to eleven. If you miss Nine Inch Nails, Bo Ningen will keep you warm. Recommended.

Seriously


The Assange standoff is a fitting coda to Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremony: emotional, crowd-pleasing and illogical. Prosecutors have an ulterior motive. UK diplomats have scored an own goal. Ecuador probably can't get Assange out of the embassy. Ecuador loves freedom of speech. And if there's one thing Britain won't tolerate, it's people sharing other people's private information...

In Russia a punk trio have been jailed for two years for flash-mobbing. How is that different from the two young men who have been jailed for four years in the UK for posting on Facebook?

London transport


Today a dune buggy caught fire on Pankhurst Road in Nag's Head, approximately 65 kilometers away from any dunes. Peoples stopped to film it on their smartphones. A man in an electric wheelchair parked on the edge of the pavement to watch. A young woman standing next to me asked for help: she did not know how to operate the zoom function. 'You pinch the screen, like this,' I said, but her iPhone did not respond. 'No mate, you can't zoom while you're filming,' said a man next to her. He suggested she switch to still mode. She thanked us both. Remaining vehicles that were not on fire continued to maneuver around the vehicle that was. The dune buggy's front tyres exploded. Later as smoke filled the road there came the sound of sirens and the cars that were still moving / not on fire stopped, blocking the one-way street completely. There was a long pause. The flames were now twice the height of the car. 'I hope there's nobody in it,' said a man. I said a dune buggy has no doors or roof. He looked doubtful. After several minutes an ambulance broke through the traffic and drove past the burning dune buggy to the intersection further down the road. 'A woman at the lights had a panic attack,' another woman explained. The fire engine was still stuck several cars back. Some firemen had got out and were shouting at motorists to move. By now the dune buggy was a black wire frame in an orange sheet of flame half the height of the lamp posts and the smoke was so thick it was difficult to take a decent photograph. The cars pulled over and the fire engine began to move forward until an Audi pulled out and stopped at an angle across the lane, blocking it again. The firemen moved the Audi by shouting.  The dune buggy was beginning to die down, now. The tender pulled up and two firemen ran out a hose. People filmed them putting out the fire. 'You'd better watch out, the fuel tank could explode,' said a third woman. Wouldn't that have happened by now? I said. The man in the wheelchair shook his head, reversed, and drove away.

Hearing things

Ornette Coleman is 81 years old. If he was Amy Winehouse he would have died in 1957. I didn't know what to expect of a musician that age, especially a horn player. But reviews of his appearance London's 2009 Meltdown Festival were good and after checking out some recent concert footage it seemed likely that he would at least be interesting. In the end he was a lot better than that.

Coleman closed the London Jazz Festival at the Royal Festival Hall with three other musicians: Tony Falanga (double bass), Al McDowell (electric bass) and son Denardo on drums. When the band started playing the bass and drums were so lively that I thought Coleman might be resigned to playing along with / on top of his backing in the manner of late Miles Davis, but he soon got stuck in there. Although he had approached the microphone with a stately half-step Coleman's back was straight, and his playing was as sharp. The trio had a boisterous style but he pushed them aside with bright, entertaining solos. His breath is shorter, obviously, but he still has the range. He played for an hour and a half with two encores and the band listening as attentively as the audience.

I'm not a jazz trainspotter but numbers included 'Blues Connotation', a cover of Ellington / Coltrane's 'Angelica' and a Bach mash up: the latter sounded better than that sounds. The quartet finished up with 'Lonely Woman.' Ornette Coleman at 81: more alive than many.

Pointe blank

This is my favourite picture in the RCA's Degas and the Ballet exhibition. At 400 x 890mm 'Before the Ballet' (c.1890) is nearly anamorphic in proportion and the field of the empty floor falls away to a void. The real painting is blurry save for the feet of the dancers in the right foreground – the composition presses into the first girl's raised instep. The second dancer's exposed spine as she bends forward is reminiscent of Degas' many bathers, which Francis Bacon admired. You can see Bacon in the way in which the expanses and verticals of Degas' compositions are tensioned by the twisted human figures, and RB Kitaj in the renderings from photographic sources like a dry-brushed identikit.

Gustav Klimt would paint his figures nude and then proceed to cover them with clothes and patterning. Degas renders the dancers' upper bodies and the legs as solid forms but leaves the space between waist to knee as an impressionistic scribble. As sculptural plans his sketches for 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen' are just plain odd: he plans the bronze in two halves and covers up the join with a real lace tutu. Beneath the fabric, the figure's right leg swells to join her stomach like a Henry Moore. The maquettes of nude adult dancers, modelled in wax as studio models and cast in bronze only after the painter's death, are fully detailed.

Many of the later, larger works that have been scaled up from photographs lose their dynamism but the hatchings and striations of his pastel drawings compensate for the magnification. 'Danseuses en bleu' still rocks. But nothing has quite the uncanny silence of 'Before the Ballet' or 'The Rehearsal.' Degas' paintings are sold as pretty, but like his 'Beach Scene' (1868) they are darker than that.

At their best the wide-framed little paintings are surreal arrangements of dead-eyed figures that play off each other but never interact. These rehearsals are have an ashen, spooky quality, from the staring dance masters to the unnatural poses of the girls. The longer you look at them, the more you realise something odd is going on.

City life

Paris (Feb), London (NYE), Hampstead Heath (Dec).

Riot in a Jam Jar

Riot in a Jam Jar

Riot in a Jam Jar

Riot in a Jam Jar

Mr Jimmy Cauty: poster boy, pop star and spendthrift. Currently exhibiting at the Light Industrial Workshop.

Took up drinking to stop myself from thinking

Happy V Day

Big ups to Jaybyrd Slim and Dapper D for tonight's do at The Nitty Gritty, named after this number, apparently:


Related: NY 2011 playlist from DJ Pierre C.

Tachism



Camden fox outside the Jazz Café; Bridget Riley wall painting at the National Gallery; not Banksy (but wouldn't it be cool if it was?), Fortess Road.

Light in your head and dead on your feet

So the world is ending because some birds and fish died in smaller quantities than you would find in a supermarket freezer. Quoth The Examiner:
While no one person, not even self-proclaimed prophets, know if God of the Christian Bible is now ushering mankind into the End Times, many believe this week's dead birds and fish are a sign the Great Tribulation talked about in the book of Revelation and Daniel is fast approaching.
Other signs: Gerry Rafferty is dead, and Agnetha wants ABBA to reform. Birds and fish flock, so they're more likely to go down in scores, surely? I'm impressed that there are any fish left to wash up, given the quantities in which we net them. More seriously, how will the fragile-minded react to official news outlets contemplating the end of everything? The Northern Line was delayed with a person in front of the train today: death is always a single stride away. The Gaia theory is to 2010 what nuclear war was to the Reagan / Thatcher years: now is not the time to shout fire.

And China has a Stealth bomber. (This is of interest to me because I'm a guy.) The US spins arms tech at a slower rate than the Chinese but the key point is that China now has the money to invest in expensive and unreliable technology. The B2, famously, can't stand the rain:
Testing indicated that B-2s are also sensitive to extreme climates, water, and humidity-- exposure to water or moisture can damage some of the low-observable enhancing surfaces on the aircraft. Further, exposure to water or moisture that causes water to accumulate in aircraft compartments, ducts, and valves can cause systems to malfunction. If accumulated water freezes, it can take up to 24 hours to thaw and drain. Air Force officials said it is unlikely that the aircraft's sensitivity to moisture and climates or the need for controlled environments to fix low-observability problems will ever be fully resolved, even with improved materials and repair processes.
The Newton of arms tech, in other words. Relax! Global warming will have killed us by the time it's operational.

I love Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street.' When I came to London in 1978 it was all over the radio. I'll forever associate it with the first Kate Bush album, the smell of bacon and eggs on a gas stove, loneliness and bad weather.

Postscript: AP science report here. ("The irony is that mass die-offs - usually of animals with large populations - are getting the attention while a larger but slower mass extinction of thousands of species because of human activity is ignored.")

Jazz flute 2011

Must get out of the house now...

Where there are daiquiris, there is happiness*


Happy New Year, everyone.

* © Chad Taylor 2008

Snow

Cold fingers

Commedia dell'arte




When Stephen Stratford broke from his luxury lifestyle to forward me Mick Hartley's complaint about the Saatchi Gallery I misinterpreted his sarcasm as a recommendation and attended the Newspeak exhibition myself. Entry to the Saatchi Collection is free, and if you get off the tube at Victoria you can enjoy a nice stroll through Knightsbridge past empty, harshly-lit designer outlets that resemble Moscow shops during a 1980s shortage.

My favourites in the exhibition were Robert Fry and Maaike Schoorel and Jonathan Wateridge because I'm an old-fashioned sucker for sticky stuff pushed around on canvas, although I accept that what appears to be aesthetics is just as likely to be conceptual. Artists nowadays swap styles in the way that Japanese teenagers change clothes - rockabillies one day, Goths the next - and I envy them for it. Nor did I need to be warned to avoid the gallery essays, the reading of which inevitably becomes a frustrating game of Spot The Verb.

But if you want a way in my cheater's tip is to head straight to the fifth floor and look at the artists' photographs for some good old-fashioned stereotyping. Pictures about pictures...

Einstürzende Neubauten, London 16.10.10

Is Blixa Bargeld the only singer to use air quotes? He was emphasising an ironic term for the Kentish Town Forum audience, many of whom were German anyway. He also corrected the translation of 'Kater' (as in 'Selbstportrait Mit Kater') which can be read either as 'tom cat' or 'hangover'. The audience cheered the latter and Blixa rolled his heavy eyes - 'Well yes, we are in the right country for that.' He held something in his right hand for the whole performance and I couldn't work out what. It wasn't until the last number, 'Silence is Sexy', when he fired up in defiance of health and safety regulations that the object was revealed as a packet of cigarettes. In between blasts of sound the band stood waiting for the audience to fall silent, which they did.

Einstürzende Neubauten were playing the first of two nights in Camden and I went along not really expecting anything except noise and fun but they were better than that: less spectacle, more musical. North London turned out more Goth than the Berlin nightclubs I found myself in earlier this year and the band were more German than I could have dreamed: precise, earnest, dry as a bone. Blixa (black three piece suit and I think bare feet) complained about the challenge of freighting a stage set (he actually got into figures) and the EN-branded merchandise included USB sticks and organic cotton T-shirts. From their performance art self-destruct origins the band have - can I say, mellowed? - into a very Krautrock, industrial hippie style. You could hear Neu! and Can in the performance as well as the found object / music concrete funk that so influenced Australian musicians, from Hunters & Collectors to Plays With Marionettes and, of course, Nick Cave, who dived into the Berlin scene and never came back.

Einstürzende Neubauten are not funky, however. This is music from the head, played with Classical rigour, all the deconstructionist outbursts in their proper place: N.U. Unruh's dropping metal cutlery on cue (he later crumpled autumn leaves); Ash Wednesday's keyboard touches; Jochen Arbeit's perfectly dischordant guitar. The fans knew all the lyrics. I didn't, which made it more fun. At one point Blixa was singing be about cushions, and there was a three-way discussion with Unruh and bassist Alexander Hacke that seemed to be about a time a toaster caught fire on stage but I could have sworn they also said something about Molotov cocktails. (Hacke is totally Derek Smalls.) It was that kind of night: pastoral darkness veering into Dada cabaret.

Stray thought