Okay, I just loaded two more pieces onto the myspace page.
The first new piece, the “Random piece” one, is kind of fucking depressing. Whatever. Deal with it, I wrote it when I was fucking depressed. This is a bare-bones version, there are tons of things I need to add to it. Soon.
The other piece is just an improv I did about an hour ago. Literally, I just sat down and started fucking around, trying to work out some ideas.
Any comments are welcome.
Edit: More substantial posts will follow this, I know right its lame to just link to a myspace per post, but whatever, this is all a work in progress.
I have two pieces put up there. The first “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” is by Charles Mingus and I created the arrangement myself. It is highly composed, and I did it for auditions when I was 17.
The other piece is a very, very raw improvisation I just played a few hours ago based on the song “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” by Duke Ellington. It’s a classic jazz tune and not at all like the things I compose myself, but it’s something immediate that I can at least put down to get used to my awesome free recording software.
The sound quality sucks worse than a girl with knives for teeth, but I wanted to at least put something on tape for now. Like I said above, the things I compose are very much NOT like this, but these pieces at least reflect some of my training. More to come.
I got a nice figurative slap in the face last night. From Dad, of all people.
Our conversation last night went like this:
DAD – “So have you recorded anything yet? I have yet to fucking hear anything.”
BRETT – “…no, see that’s the whole point, I don’t have any meaningful recording equipment to do that.”
DAD – “What about that tape recorder you have?”
BRETT – “That thing sucks and sounds shitty. There is no point on recording on that thing.”
DAD – “No, YOU are missing the point. The whole purpose is to get feedback on your ideas. If they’re good then they will transcend whatever limitations that a piece-of-crap recording device has.”
BRETT – “….Okay, yeah, true.”
DAD – “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be something. Put it on fucking tape.”
I’m hungover and can’t process anything right now, so a post of heady self-analysis isn’t really on my agenda today, but these moments when someone knocks you back and illuminates your idiotic self-denial could be called Fight Club moments. This guy, and this guy both do a really good job of explaining what Fight Club moments are and demonstrating how important they are to actually growing as a person. As I said, I could probably elaborate on the subject, but I really just don’t fucking feel like it right now. Some other time.
In other news, two 40-year old cougars thought I was the most adorable thing they had ever seen last night. According to one of them, I could have hooked up with the other one if I wanted to. Didn’t really know what to do about any of this, so I went home and jerked off.
I’ve listened to a lot of music, but I keep coming back to these guys. There are no lyrics – it’s just dirty, dirty grooves.
I’ve spent years analyzing different music, but I’ve probably spent a good majority of that time on Medeski Martin and Wood. Their collective bag goes very deep, and each of them brings a lot to the table in terms of technical skills. Given that the music MMW produces sounds “simpler” than contemporary jazz, the massive degree of underlying musicality that these guys possess has strangely seemed to elude many highly-skilled musicians.
If you listen to each of them work with each other you might notice this:
The drummer plays very much “behind the beat.” It almost sounds lazy.
The bass player plays “in front of the beat,” anticipating the pulse.
With the combination just right, you get a devastating equilibrium that can rightfully assault the shit out of you. Turn up the volume. All three musicians are riding something very delicate and intangible – neither one of them is playing like a machine or metronome, they are ebbing and flowing and slaving themselves to the pulse.
They just are not fucking around, this is some serious shit they are trying to do. It’s very aggressive at times, but it’s a concentrated aggression.
“Not everyone believes in Barack Obama’s promise to change Washington. But at least the faces will change. Should he win the White House, Mr Obama will bring in a new team to run the federal government, the Oval Office, and the Democratic Party…On domestic matters, Mr Obama has assembled a team of sharp academic economists who premise their work on his supposed ability to sell sophisticated policy. Most prominent up until now has been Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor…[his] record suggests neither the hostility towards globalised capitalism nor the desire for large-scale redistribution that conservatives, spooked by tales of Mr Obama’s left-wing voting record, might fear: Mr Goolsbee is a problem-solver who favours such unsexy proposals as altering American tax forms…As of this week, though, Mr Obama’s newly appointed economics director is Jason Furman…a staunch free-trader who once praised Wal-Mart and has favoured lowering corporate taxes.”
Wait, what?
Obama’s voting record has been one of the farthest left throughout his career, and he wants to use a UofC professor and a “staunch” free market guy as part of his economics team?
Chicago School economists are known for favoring free-market economics. Because of this, they are relative outcasts in the academic world where free-market views are often dismissed as cold and callous attitudes.
Precisely the kind of people that are probably going to vote for Obama – young, far-left-leaning activists, idealists – are precisely the people that studied schools of economic thought that couldn’t be more OPPOSITE of those views held by UofC academics. The people who like Obama should technically be at odds with his decision to appoint two free-market economists.
If Obama’s doing what I think he’s doing, it’s this:
He is putting himself in a position where he can masquerade as a benevolent and hyper articulate liberal, while at the same time using otherwise conservative economic policies that actually work.
Free-market policies work best, but they are counter-intuitive and less than glamorous to talk about. So he quietly appoints free-market advisers. He’s basically using conservative policies to ultimately boost a liberal image.
All this being said, the fact that Obama selected two free-market guys for his team might not even mean a whole lot. He might not listen to them. Either Obama knows that free-market policies work, and thus appointed people with those views as advisers, or Obama wants to create the illusion that he is more conservative than his voting record would suggest, in order to please Republicans.
What group of people and their behavior most closely resembles that of a moralizing, tight-ass Christian conservative?
Moralizing, tight-ass hyper-liberals.
For people who claim to be so into objective analysis of touchy issues, I’d like to make the argument that these people are perhaps worse than those crazy right-wing people they criticize. If for no other reason than the liberals are more subtle and clever with how they go about moralizing.
Remember when Al Gore was trumpeting from the very beginning the dire threat that global warming posed to the world? He opened up his speeches with a dramatic recap of the fact that humans are fucking up the earth. That’s fine, nothing wrong with stirring up people to focus on an issue. However, then he goes on to say that this isn’t just any sort of issue, this is a moral issue.
That pisses me off. He’s cleverly and effectively denied any opposition to any of his subsequent policies, lest they be cast as not just wrong, but “uncaring” or “immoral.” By making it a moral issue first, any opposition is by definition not only incorrect, but the dissenter must be morally questionable as well.
That’s an irresponsible way to deal with any sort of issue. Unless you want to get your policy enacted at all costs, regardless of the negative residual effects the given policy might have that could possibly end up being worse than the “cure.”
I feel weird writing about political issues, but my bottom line is this – if you care about something and want to fix it, great, but please argue based on the merits of the arguments themselves.
As if this would ever fucking happen anyway.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
H.L. Mencken
If you’re a musician or somebody that wants to get involved with the industry at some level, read this.
He’s incredibly imaginative and has a ton of really clever and totally applicable ideas. You could call him a futurist or something like that, which sounds a bit hack-like, but I’m not so sure being a futurist these days as it relates to media and tech is such a bad thing.
Things are changing so quickly and we still have a few years to wait until things start to settle, so what we really need are people with huge fucking imaginations. The kind of people that come up with ideas that really strain the concept of plausibility. And lots of them. Because even if most of them turn out to be wrong (predicting the future is pretty much a crap-shoot) it means that that many more ideas have been given a chance to work and then fail, and then be efficiently filtered from the system.
The more ideas there are, the more quickly we can run through them, tinker with them, and see if they work. If they don’t, all the better for everyone involved – some variation or new idea that works will surface and everyone will be better off.
This is like sped-up, hyper-competitive capitalism.
I still have to read the rest of his archive , but the gist I’m getting from him and others keeping a watch on this subject is – if you’re an artist, produce a ton of content and focus on getting it exposed. Forget about the money-making mechanisms for now – in a few years most of them will be gone or totally changed anyway.
I talked to my father on the phone and caught myself doing something annoying. We were having a serious discussion about money and the apartment and the costs of putting down payments, whether I was going back to school or not, and how much money I would contribute to all this. There was the implicit assumption on his part that I would fork over a hefty portion of the money. The reality is that I don’t have much more than a few grand, and once that’s gone (and that will go quickly once all the moving costs are factored in), I still don’t make enough money per week to support myself.
My goal at the onset of my taking a year off was to save up money to buy some recording equipment so I could have the freedom to record myself and actually contribute something that extended beyond the people watching me play piano in a room. My goal was also to be able to, at the end of the year, support myself financially.
I fucking failed at both things.
Right now I’m spending my time exhaustively setting up the logistics of moving into a new and cheaper apartment, while enjoying the hovering cloud of guilt and self-loathing that comes with being hit hard with reality, and failing at two things I’ve spent a year trying to work on.
Are you going to go back to school?
Are you going to pay for all this moving?
30 hours of working a week is not enough.
And talking on the phone with dad, that annoying moment of mine came right at the pinnacle of feeling truly useless and pitiful – I ceded and was about to ask him:
“What do you want me to do?”
As soon as I could hear those words form in my head, I knew I was fucked and that had I asked him that question, I might as well have surrendered my balls and every ounce of personal responsibility in my life.
I was literally about to ask someone who is NOT me, what is best for ME.
Right after I wrote a post about doing just the opposite. That’s fucking annoying.
Apartment hunting in New York City when you’re broke as you were in high school can be atrociously difficult and time consuming. Everyone is busy and late to meet and it takes forever to get everyone on the same page. Especially the brokers. Going through brokers that charge fees is ultimately “easier” – if your definition of “easier” involves getting it up the ass.
Getting a good deal is tough if you can’t afford much, but need a fair amount of space to live. You literally have to take the first thing that comes along that fits the bill relatively well, otherwise some asshole will come in and take it within the hour.
Brooklyn is weird. It is strangely desolate yet populated, the buildings look ratty, and there is a general uncleanliness about it. This is not like the situation I had growing up in various rich neighborhoods full of rich and often snobby white people. What happened to the life?
On the train ride over to where me and my two roommates are going to probably end up moving, I got a view of a large portion of Brooklyn. I thought about all the people living here with ridiculous dreams involving their art, doing pretty much the same things we’re trying to do, only at different stages in their lives. Have they gotten anywhere? Maybe that’s not the point. Who the fuck knows.
Every once in a while I have to repeatedly isolate the things I enjoy doing. Frankly, everyone should do this – eschew your “realistic” responsibilities and allow yourself to think freely. What. Do. I. Like. Doing?
Forget about what will make money or what looks good or whatever your parents think. Throw all that shit away. If you like jerking off and reading books, that’s awesome. Set up your life so you can do those things as much as possible.
You can do that even in New York City, only your minimum level of livable income is still a fair amount of fucking money.
Fortunately, in this day and age, things will probably settle a lot more quickly than the more massive technological movements in the past.
Over the course of a year with the internet, many things could happen that could easily comprise the multiple occurrences, failures and successes, of things that used to take place over decades.
The music industry has gotten completely fucked – the major labels have obviously chosen not to adapt the traditional marketing mechanisms to the realities of new media. Good. Fuck them. This is naive, but I say that if you want to be in a business solely for the money, please leave the entertainment business – you’ll probably just stick a dick in projects run by people with actual talent. The hippyness of this movement is funny, but here’s the problem – we’re not there yet.
What ’s missing, and is the void that needs to be filled in the next few years, is a method or range of solid methods to monetize people’s work. People are turning an angry eye towards ISP’s, and for good reason.
As it stands, ISP’s charge money to access to the internet. You pay every month for access to the internet, and all the content available (unless you’re China). If you’re a band and you want to market yourself better, you pay an ISP to access the internet, and to host a website. People that are interested in your band will pay their ISP to access your content. So far we have this:
You pay an ISP to host content.
Other people pay an ISP to access the content that you’ve paid to host.
