grad school = death to thinking?

I've been procrastinating on writing this paper and reading old xanga entries. And I had good thoughts! Good questions! Like this one:

I've been thinking about this concept of heaven, and eternal happiness, and all that. And I have some questions.

First off, if I ever get to heaven, how old am I going to be, for eternity? If I see my grandparents, my great grandparents, how old will they be?

Secondly, scenerio: I am deeply in love with someone. A live-by-this-person, die-by-this-person sort of love. And this person dies in a freak accident. My world is crushed, but I live on. And I eventually meet someone else, with whom I fall deeply in love, and spend the rest of my life with, but I am still in love with person #1. Who am I going to spend eternal paradise with - my first true love, or the true love that I spent my whole life with?

How does it work?

>>>>

That's a good question, right?? I mean, and now, in grad school, all of my questions are like "what are the hegemonic implications of the totalitarian system under which our government idealizes certain values and norms by which all individuals within the system must function?" or something like that?

underpass on the 5 North

Driving along the 5 North one night through the short tunnel just north of the 118, I drive past an 18-wheeler, and as I do, he taps his horn. I was a bit taken aback, since I was in my lane, and he was in his. But then I was told that honking in that underpass is a strange cultural thing. During rush hour, if one person honks, other people would join in and honk, making a veritable sonic cacophony in celebration of, uh, traffic.

a love story, of sorts

There have been a few people who have asked about my new guitar, so I thought I'd write an ode here to her (yes, after long last, one of my guitars is finally a "her"). So here goes. BTW, G-rated, this is not. Proceed with caution.

There were probably a million better things I could be doing with my time that afternoon. But into Guitar Center I strolled. And after visiting the usual suspects and old friends, the Martin OMC Aura, the Martin 16 series, the Taylor GA8 and 600 series, my eyes fell on an unbranded guitar - one that looked a bit unique. At first glance, I thought, "That's a pretty guitar." It took a closer examination to see that the guitar was fully rosewood. Including the top, which is very rare. In any case, she caught my attention, so I approached her.

At first, though, I didn't really give her the benefit of the doubt. Just casually ran my finger across her strings - I didn't even bother removing her from the guitar stand. Not a bad sound. A certain warmth, definitely, probably due to the rosewood top. "But there are tons more like it," I thought. And didn't really give her another thought. Moreover, I couldn't really gauge how she sounded through the cacophony of everyone else playing and testing out instruments. Finally, as the afternoon wore on, people left, and I found myself alone with her. So I finally picked her up off the stand, held her in my arms, and this time, I listened.

Although there was an undeniable connection going on here, I wasn't sure I wanted to invest in a new guitar at the moment. So I let things be for a while. But I kept going back, and occasionally, I’d see other people picking her up and playing her. And I would too. I was slowly moved. She somehow got under my skin, and weaseled her way into my heart.

Finally, I took her home with me. Then, deep in the dark recesses of nighttime, I explored her. With each pluck, each stroke, each caress, she makes a different sound. I feel like I could spend forever touching her just to see how I can illicit different reactions. Soft, hard, strumming, plucking, slapping, hammering... with each touch, she reveals more to me, more depth, more overtones, more shades and layers. She unravels me with her beauty, both inside and out. With every touch and every glance, with every breath, I want more. I can't get close enough to her. In the dark of the night, I make her sing.

I’m so in love with her.

sounds and lights

http://seawitchery.tumblr.com/post/4070384205/i-started-out-clicking-strategically-and-by-the

Stokes response

I appreciate Stokes bringing up the critical questions of globalization - who does it benefit, etc, and recognizing the problems with being too idealistic. This power struggle does not just apply to music, as Stokes acknowledges, but to all cultural and political aspects of a global society.

The idea of globalization in terms of music is an interesting one, and often in conflict, I feel, because music is so cultural. It’s defined culturally, and the emotions one feels is not universal - it is culturally specific.

The dichotomies Stokes brings up (on page 50) between top-down and bottom-up, system and agency, global and local, etc seems to be tensions that happen in culture in general. To me, it always seems to be a question or power and appropriation, of maintaining power or subverting that power. And Stokes acknowledges this. For example, the fact that we use the term “World Music” I think says volumes about how we look at music from non-Western cultures. World music used to be a term used for anything that was outside the genres of rock, classical, pop, and country (or something like that), and encompasses everything non-Western. It seems to be a term that throws a homogenizing blanket over all things Other.

The point Stokes brings up here: “European and North American rock and pop superstars are prominent in charts, music stores, and cassette stands across much of the third world; the reverse is not true,” (pg. 55) exemplifies the cultural imperialism, or power difference between the powerful West and others. It is an example I tend to use a lot while talking about the phenomenon of Asian kids playing classical music . Why, I tend to ask, are Asian kids playing music written by dead, white, European men? We don’t ever see Europeans or Americans playing classical Chinese music on Eastern instruments. We’d be hard-pressed to find an American who can name two or three traditional Chinese instruments.

It is infuriating, as well, how copyright law and the economics of the music industry exploit ethnic music, like the example of the Taiwanese aboriginal groups’s CD release in France. It seems as though the industry, the music, art, culture are forever framed in an economic box. Copyright law, the idea that ideas are possession and hence can be traded for economic gain, is a decidedly Western and capitalistic mentality, and yet non-Western societies need to play the capitalistic game in order to survive in a global society, get they continue to get screwed over. Copyright laws don’t protect those that it wasn’t written for.

I always feel like the idea of hybridity is just a way for cultures in power (read: Western, white) to feel like they’re diverse. Like eastern medicine being used in addition to Western medicine as hybrid treatment, if it’s explicitly NOT Western, it has almost this exoticism to it - exoticism that has the potential to sell -- even when we steal things from non-Western cultures all the time (in music) and never allow those from whom we steal to benefit economically (like African beats that are transported to the West, then copyrighted by some Western artist, and Africa never sees a cent of royalty fees).

Stokes’ discussion of Monson brings to mind the fact that music is used differently in different cultures. Certain tribes in Africa use drumming as a form of communication across distances. Other cultures use songs to tell stories, in rituals. It seems like only in Western cultures is music so commercialized that every song, every musical note has a price tag attached to it. And the question becomes, then, in our capitalistic framework, how do we empower other cultures’ music as we incorporate or appropriate them, or bring visibility to them? Is that even possible, with the cultural hegemony of the West? Or is it better to keep music localized and hence, authentic, without losing its meaning by bringing it across cultural boundaries?

Religion is like a penis

From LarryList...

 

Diz again

I can't stand Disneyland's totalitarian ideology. My goodness. Even the roller coaster has a soundtrack that runs for the entire ride, then concludes when the ride stops, and it's so loud as to seek to drown out the sound of the car on the track. It's deafening. It's like, Disney really doesn't want you to hear anything other than what they want you to hear, or what they produce.

My friend tried to bring her ukulele into the park once, to play it while waiting in line (and possibly entertain the people around her), and the park officials told her she was not allowed to bring it into the park. Disney clearly did not want anything other than their own musical sounds inside the park.

Which, then, begs the question why they don't ban singing (obviously, it's harder to ban singing...).

Yesterday night, my friends and I watched World of Color twice - once from the front - or, how you're supposed to watch it. And then once from the back. Watching it from the back was really illuminating (pun not intended). When the water screen comes up, there is a distinct "pffft" sound of the water starting. You hear the unproduced sounds a lot better behind the scene - the machinery and the water dropping into the lagoon - and the produced sounds are muffled because all of the speakers are pointing in the other direction. A very VERY different sonic experience.

quick response to Hsu

I just have to make a quick response to Hsu's piece. It dangerously seems to be talking about post-racial society...and if you read a bit of Kent Ono, you'll see why this is...problematic. Hsu feels too idealistic - quoting Carter talking about crossing a bridge, "defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color." It disregards the history. I have discussions about this all the time - of reverse racism, with various people - and we question whether reverse racism can really exist (yes, of course it can), but whether that racism is the same sort of oppressive racism that was put upon people of color all throughout history (no, it's not).

There is a history of white hegemony and Western imperialism that can't simply be erased because we have Obama in office, which seems to be what Hsu is trying to at least make us think about. And whereas I appreciate Hsu bringing this into the conversation - the possibility of a post-racial world, one in which white people are culturally bankrupt (really? REALLY? have you taken a look at those things that make up "culture" in our society? Asian kids still play classical music written by mostly dead, white, European men -- why??), we have to remember to not disregard the history of oppression and white superiority that has ruled our modern world by being blinded with the idea of a harmonious, almost bohemian-esque, kumbaya "we are beyond race" mentality.

Jay-Z Decoded

So, before I started the readings for this week, I had to google the difference between hip hop and rap. Turns out, hip hop is a culture, while rap is simply the style of music. And, honestly, the only rap I had ever listened to before was Eminem. So, this was yet another week of music I am completely unfamiliar with. I love it. I’ve been listening to and reading Decoded, reading the lyrics as I listen to the audio track that Ryan gave us (so helpful, THANK YOU). And for me, it’s like reading Shakespeare. Hip hop music is constructed in a kind of syntax and structure that I am just not fluent in. Thank goodness for the footnotes that Jay-Z includes. It’s like Shakespeare in that it’s definitely English, but English in a way that I have to, well, decode. Perhaps this is the beauty of hip hop - the realness of the struggles for this group of people.

Decoded is a look into the songwriter’s head. We thus far have not had many readings that dealt with the “artistic” side of music, and how a musician synthesizes the songs he writes (although Suisman’s book does talk a little about it -- generally with the perception that music is driven mostly by economics). But Decoded takes us through one artist’s thought process, then the finished product.

Another thing that crossed my mind while reading Decoded was the fact that the names were, well, not conventional. It is almost as if they internalize a performative aspect to their lives, and change their name to one that is performative for music purposes (and possibly others). And, they reference real names in songs. Jay-Z does it himself, and references other people like Bleek (in Coming of Age). This sort of self-referencing and referencing real people in their lives gives the music an autobiographical feel (as fiction as sometimes Jay-Z would like us to believe). In fact, the whole book is a combination of Jay-Z’s story, and the intersection of that story with his art.

Decoded often veers into poignancy, as for example, when Jay-Z talks about being invisible. In Larry’s class today, we were just talking about the erasure of certain cultures and races in America. Jay-Z is very aware of this, and it is as if rap is a way to make the stories that the Powers That Be want to keep invisible visible. It is a side of America that was supposed to stay buried, yet didn’t. His discussion of the hip hop police depicts a scene almost like a battle - Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses - the police, whose job is to uphold the ideology and image of the America that is supposed to be, battling the subversive forces that find power from the bottom up.

This week seems to follow the theme of race and genre in music. The fact that hip hop is tied closely to black culture leads me to think about the questions we encountered during our discussions of narcocorridos and ragtime, and the segregation of race into genres. Rap and hip hop seems the modern day separation of race and genre. Jay-Z talks about the Beasties and Eminem, and makes the statement “Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn’t require either race to lose anything.” (Jay-Z, 180). Perhaps they didn’t lose anything, but the genre itself is still entrenched in power struggles, and I can’t help wonder if white people doing hip hop is tainted with re-appropriation of an art form that they can perform and hence, control. There are white rappers. Other than Darius Rucker, have there been any other non-white country singer star? Does it work the other way? I feel Jay-Z may be a bit too idealistic in that statement. But overall, he leaves us with the message to listen, with our minds and hearts open, and perhaps in this way, we can start understanding other cultures and continue the conversation.

Grammys cutting categories

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/grammys-to-cut-more-than-30-categories/?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

John Cage's Water Walk

So...uh...what is music?

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/john_cage_on_a_.html

questioning my sanity

As you can probably see, for some reason, I've been in deep songwriting mode.

I'm playing a show on April 15th in Long Beach, which will be a B-sides show - new songs (mostly), and songs no one has heard before...and going thru the set list, I realize about 4 or 5 songs are all in C#Maj. So I have this crazy idea to do one continuous 20-minute medley-type chunk (medley-type because the full songs will get played, and not just pieces) that just flows from one piece to the next. Unfortunately, because all 4 or 5 songs are stylistically different, I'm not sure of the best order to put them in, how to transition from one to the next without sounding completely bonkers, and the last time I combined songs, it was only two, and I ended up with a 9-minute song that exhausted me by the time I reached the end.

I think I might have talked myself out of this idea. It's 1:30am, and ideas that seem great late at night may prove to be mistakes in day's harsh light (wouldn't you know it, I'm an accidental poet --- just in time for the hip hop unit this week, although my rhymes here are somewhat meek)

Real vs fake chord songs

When I write songs, they musically fall into two vague categories. The first is heavily influenced by my affinity for country music (I know, I know, let the judging begin), and the second is my attempt to be edgier and more free form.

In the first category, I use what I call "real" chords - easily understandable chords like Gmaj, Cmaj, Emin, Dmaj, Dmin, etc. Sometimes with a 7 chord thrown in. Sometimes suspended. I'm finding these songs fall neatly into place - it's a structure that's easy to read, and you know when and how phrases start and end.

In the second category, I use what I call "made up chords". Ok. These chords aren't really made up. In music theory, there are names for them. They're just too much trouble for me to figure out exactly what to call the chord. (did I mention that yes, I'm a classically trained musician, but when it comes to guitar, I can't even so much as read music to translate it onto the instrument? And I can't translate the sounds/noises I make on my guitar into musical notation. And it's mostly because I'm lazy and don't want to figure it out) So I call them made-up chords. They consist of a lot of suspended chords, Major7 chords, and other ones that just don't make any sense (as for example, E fingering off the 7th fret or something)

Anyway, my point with the second category is that I never know when the song is finished. Because it's so free form, it seems to change every time I play it. I'm actually speaking from a current frustration. I've been working on a song the last two days or so, and want to finish it in time for my show on the 15th. And I think it's finished, but I'm not sure. Because it almost feels like it's half improvised.

It's also funny that sometimes it takes 20 minutes to write a song. Other times, it takes 20 minutes to write 2 words.