Vlad told me about an Alvin Lucier experiment of recording spoken audio, then recording the playback of the recording, then recording that playback, again and again until there's no recognizable audio. “What you're left with is the sound of the room itself,” said Vlad.
i didn't realize that the recorded audio is actually a description of the experiment itself (further recursion). Within only a few iterations the words are unintelligble. It's so cool!
i'm working my way through Alan Watt's The 90‑Day Screenplay. Today i'm on Day 24. The assignments for the last ten days or so has included a one page summary of the movie and a three page outline of the script. This has had a cool and surprising effect on my writing. Resonant ideas get stronger, weaker ideas drop out, solutions reveal themselves. The process takes me out of my own conscious head and into a subconscious room i cannot see, but that i can learn the shape of via iteration.
One Direction came up in my trivia studies a while back and, finding i was ignorant, i sought out videos of their performances. One Direction is a cultural touchstone; i sought to touch the stone.
Here is one of the videos i found: the boys use a single microphone held at hip height and sing one of their big hits acapella. The mic placement gives their singing a haunting eerie quality; the necessity of ecstatic silence from an arena of young screaming women is powerful.
This is a holy moment. This is communion.
Marcel or Vlad or one of my brothers (i know, narrowing it down :) showed me this interview with Werner Herzog that tastes the flavor of Summer 2016: Pokémon Go. Herzog initially reponds in a conspicuously Old Man fashion, “I don't have a cell phone,” but then he surprises me! Because he engages! “Tell me about Pokémon Go. What is happening on Pokémon Go?” And then later, “When two persons in search of a pokémon clash at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente is there violence? Is there murder?”
There is church in pop. There is poetry and violence in pop. The artist is not afraid to touch the stone.
i should've titled this blog post “this one goes out to the haters!!”
November 2016
January 2017