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ur-music
Back from the East Coast tour, alive and well. Most of our sets went fine, although I accidentally took one down into a wretched oubliette from which there was no suitable escape: a personal low point. But the rest of the time we ran around and had fun, reconnecting with collaborators and co-conspirators far and wide (including some I didn't expect to see, such as the Skaters, who appear to be expanding a ramshackle tour into something approaching a semi-permanent way of life).
About half the bills we played on were starting to swell to the point where they functioned almost as micro-festivals: the smallest one included four bands, with the biggest bill including somewhere around... eight? Although this made for some long evenings, it also enabled me to see a ton of great sets, including guitar-drum improv freakouts from Vampire Belt and Lambsbread; spastic drool-rock from Hardline Elephants; a teeming, chittering theremin-and-iBook drone from The Opera Glove Sinks in the Sea; drifting/pulsing Casio strangeness from Eva Van Deuren (aka Orphan Fairytales) and NYC outfit Watersports; and a couple of truly killer slabs of noise from our touring partners Birds of Delay, who just keep getting better and better, somehow. I think these guys are really at a turning point, on the cusp of supreme greatness.
I picked up a huge ton of CDs on the road, and will maybe blog some MP3s once I begin to digest the pile a little bit.
Oh, also, while we were gone, this Number None interview appeared on the Foxy Digitalis site: check it out if you want to see a picture of me wearing a funny hat. Labels: number_none, personal |
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
1:58 PM
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macrocosmos | supercontexts
It's perhaps worth noting that the task of creating an "everything device" (see Tuesday's post) crops up outside of artistic circles as well: a great many mystical or occult systems hinge on the idea that usable models of the macrocosm (or "God's design" if you prefer) can be created here on the microcosmic level of reality, and initiates to mystical or occult traditions are often encouraged to familiarize themselves with the workings of these models. Viewed from this perspective, things like the i Ching, Tarot decks, runes, or the Kabbalist's Tree of Life all can be said to qualify as "everything devices" of one sort or another.
Someone like Grant Morrison sits pretty squarely on the intersection of "occult weirdo" and "cultural creative," and so it doesn't really come as a great surprise to hear him talk about The Invisibles as a sort of microcosmic distillation of his own macrocosmic ACEPOS, the "Supercontext." From this page of this interview:
""The Supercontext to me is what you get born into when you 'die' - remember at the end that these are just my personal metaphors for something that may be quite different. These are the words; I'm straining it down through The Invisibles, that's the shape I'm straining it down through. The Supercontext to me is a fifth-dimensional, informational continuum where things that we don't quite understand go on - higher processes, adult processes."
Still planning to talk about the Kim and Spahr poetry books in this context, but I'm currently in Hartford on the eve of the Birds of Delay / Son of Earth / Number None tour, so deeper thoughts on poetry may be a week or so away yet. Stay tuned. Labels: spirituality |
Thursday, March 23, 2006
10:06 PM
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everything devices | acepos
Sniffing around Kio's links at del.icio.us, I came upon a free e-book (by Lion Kimbro) called How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. ("I'm going to miss you," is what CJO told me when I told her I'd started looking at this book.)
I haven't read much of it yet, but I've been enjoying the pages of acronyms in the back. The first acronym in there is ACEPOS, for "Absolute Cosmic Eternal Perfect Ontological Structure," a product that Kimbro warns us is outside the scope of his notebook-based system. "The structure maps an individual's brain, not the universe," Kimbro says. "Don't even try," he continues, "madness that way lies."
Those of you who know me will probably not be particularly surprised to know that I'm immediately tempted to hack Kimbro's system to create an ACEPOS, madness be damned. I'm sort of being tongue-in-cheek when I say that—I don't really believe that a totalizing system can, in fact, be made (at least not without stopping time)—but it's true that for a long time now I've been intrigued by structures / forms / frameworks / systems which can position all sorts of disparate information into some sort of meaningful relationship. Imaginary Year readers may remember Fletcher's desire to write a book-length poem, Everything, which is one manifestation of my desire to build an ACEPOS-like system; my blog-posts back in October about the "Novel of Adequacy" are another.
I don't think I'm the only artist-type out there tempted by this idea: I just got done reading Proposition Player, a Matthew Ritchie monograph, and throughout it Ritchie speaks in ways that seem driven by a desire to illustrate or model the entire universe. (Ritchie also references Joseph Beuys as an inspiration in this regard.)
I've also been reading two books of poems that might be said to function as "Everything Devices" of a sort: Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Geraldine Kim's Povel, both of which take very different approaches to the predicament at hand. Expect me to write some more about them later. Labels: creative_process, novel_of_adequacy, writing |
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
12:32 PM
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tour details
Next week, Number None (my band) will head out to the Great American Northeast to join Birds of Delay and Son of Earth for a handful of shows. Those of you in that part of the world who are into drone music / noise music / general weirdness should definitely come check it out.
The info, right now, looks like this:
Saturday, March 25 - Northampton, MA (afternoon show at Gallery TK)
Sunday, March 26 - Providence, RI (AS220)
Monday, March 27 - NYC (Eat Records, Brooklyn)
There's likely to also be a Friday, March 24th show, possibly in Brattleboro, VT or Amherst, MA but that date is not currently confirmed. Labels: number_none, personal |
Friday, March 17, 2006
10:46 AM
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recently
Not too many posts lately, sorry about that. I didn't spend a lot of time on the Web this past week, mostly because I had a guest in town...
I did manage, however, to find enough time to start playing around with del.icio.us, which so far seems like a great solution to my long-standing complaint(s) about the terrible design and flat-out unusability of browser-based "bookmarks." I could rant about this for quite a while, but the short version has to do with the difference between a hierarchy (bookmarks as links buried within folders within folders) and a network (bookmarks as links which can be multiply tagged and thus are "findable" through multiple points of inquiry). Plus the whole "tagging" system integrates almost seamlessly with my already-existing index-card keyword system. Anyway, anyone who wants to check out the assortment of bookmarks I've recently amassed as a preliminary go at the whole del.icio.us thing can check them out here.
New long-form works compliation disc from Rebis should be back from the pressing plant this week; more news about the tour soon (although I will say that my solo set in Philly is sadly now off the schedule). Labels: indexing |
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
9:09 AM
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algorithmic fiction and the i ching
As I was drifting in and out of sleep this morning, I spent some time brainstorming about strange algorithmic models for narrative generation. (Some previous notes on algorithmic / generative writing can be found here and here, although this most recent batch of thinking about it was almost certainly inspired by reading Proposition Player, the catalog for a Matthew Ritchie exhibit which was generated, at least in part, by a set of combinatoric strategies.)
Thinking about the use of generative strategies always leads me to the idea of chance operations, and so I got thinking about ways in which the I Ching could be used to develop plots. (Similar work using the Tarot has been done by Italo Calvino's famous Castle of Crossed Destinies, in which he refers to the Tarot explicitly as a "machine for constructing stories.")
I like to think of a "plot" as some kind of disequlibrium: something happens and an initial state, more-or-less "stable," becomes unstable. We read a story, in part, to see how this disequilibrium will resolve. The I Ching, being very fundamentally a book about flux, has a readily apparent application, then, as a sort of index of disequilibria. A casual browsing of the table of contents (Wilhelm translation) reveals nearly a dozen hexagrams explicitly about transitioning from one kind of state to another:
with another five defining a variety of types of stasis:
Waiting Holding Together [Union] Standstill [Stagnation] Keeping Still, Mountain Treading
Map a dozen of these to a twelve-sided die and roll it a couple of times and you've basically got a plot outline. Labels: writing |
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
11:03 AM
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bruce sterling on genre fiction and reality
Looking closer at that old "slipstream" article makes me think that Bruce Sterling and I are kind of talking about the same thing. Where I complain that science-fiction isn't "making actual claims about the real world," Sterling says the following:
"At one time, in its clumsy way, Science Fiction offered some kind of coherent social vision. SF may have been gaudy and naive, and possessed by half-baked fantasies of power and wish-fulfillment, but at least SF spoke a contemporary language. Science Fiction did the job of describing, in some eldritch way, what was actually *happening*, at least in the popular imagination. Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but if you were a bright, unfastidious sort, you could read SF and feel, in some satisfying and deeply unconscious way, that you'd been given a real grip on the chrome-plated handles of the Atomic Age."
That was then, this is now:
"Consider the repulsive ghastliness of the SF category's Lovecraftian inbreeding. ... Shared-world anthologies. Braided meganovels. Role-playing tie-ins. Sharecropping books written by pip-squeaks under the blazoned name of established authors. Sequels of sequels, trilogy sequels of yet-earlier trilogies, themselves cut-and-pasted from yet-earlier trilogies. What's the common thread here? The belittlement of individual creativity, and the triumph of anonymous product."
Where I complain that science-fiction "[seems] content to exist only within the confines of [its] own market-driven boundaries," Sterling writes:
"SF has become a self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of bookstore rackspace ... It is protected by the Iron Curtain of category marketing. It does not even have to improve 'on its own terms,' because its own terms no longer mean anything; they are rarely even seriously discussed. It is enough merely to point at the rackspace and say 'SF.'"
Sterling complicates the discussion, however, by making a distinction that I didn't make,one between "genre" and "category," and this distinction may be worth quoting in full:
"'Category' is a marketing term, denoting rackspace. 'Genre' is a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent esthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will. 'Category' is commercially useful, but can be ultimately deadening. 'Genre,' however, is powerful."
So possibly I mean "category" when I say "genre?" Possibly? Maybe? |
Saturday, March 04, 2006
8:26 PM
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genre fiction and reality
I've been dwelling a lot lately on the question of why I think conspiracy theories are often more compelling or more frightening than fiction.
I think part of it comes down to the idea that a conspiracy theory makes a claim to truth that fiction, especially genre fiction, doesn't often make. You may not believe that Cathy O'Brien has been a victim of mind-control enslavement, but you can't deny that her book purports to be a factual representation of reality. Trying to square her picture of reality with my own is an experience that's at least a bit unsettling—and the fact that we exist in a perpetual state of occlusion means that it can never really be done definitively, which sort of squares the "unsettling" factor.
I like to be unsettled, and I like being exposed to far-out ideas, and it would seem like these two tastes of mine would be pretty neatly fulfilled by the genres of horror fiction and science fiction, respectively, but the way that most pieces of horror or science fiction seem so content to exist only within the confines of their own market-driven boundaries causes most of their power to ebb away. Increasingly, if I want to be unsettled I'll turn to something like a conspiracy theory; if I want to be exposed to far-out ideas I'll read something like fringe physics or books about the current (postmodernist) state of warfare: books that are making actual claims about the real world, in all its frightening, confusing magnitude, that are attempting to do more than just "tell a story." (It occurs to me that my favorite horror author—H.P. Lovecraft—and my favorite science-fiction author—Philip K. Dick—may in fact be my favorites for the very reason that their fiction bleeds through these genre boundaries: their works interface with the real world multivalently, in ways that are complicated enough that it becomes less easy to dismiss them as "just stories.")
So-called "literary fiction" exists in sort of a middle ground that I haven't fully thought through yet: although literary novels or short stories are, by definition, fictional, the standard "realistic" novel is also engaged on at least some level in making claims about the functioning of the world that we inhabit. Is this why "magical realism" stories convey mystery more potently than a more genrefied fantasy novel? Is this why the science-fictiony elements of a writer like Don DeLillo (the watch that tells the future in Cosmopolis, or the Technicolor supersaturation of the world of White Noise) seem more "charged," more insightful somehow, than they would if they were to appear in a more traditional science-fiction novel?
I feel like this way of thinking about it is over-simplified somewhere, and the existence of books that exist with an uncomfortable relationship to both genre and realism (like the "slipstream" books on this list) further complicates this question, but, well, I'm still thinking it all through. |
Friday, March 03, 2006
10:28 AM
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