n o i s e i s a r t

So it’s 2 AM last night and I can’t sleep, so I decide to take this walk – I work sitting down and I’ve recently come to believe that might not be healthy. Anyway, I think the worst thing for insomnia is to lie awake, and since this is the second night in a row, I figure I’ll do something different.
And it’s a really beautiful, breezy summer night, just muggy enough to make the breeze that much better, and I’m thinking about this conversation Josh Hodges and I had a couple of months ago, about making music and performing music, and about how differently he experiences the two.
Part of it is that there’s a freedom to creation, where you’re working through all these possible versions and choosing the one that’s going to be the final product. Another part, it’s that when he’s writing music there is a sense of discovery that he doesn’t have when he’s performing. But I think the biggest gap is between doing and seeming.
Josh said he was really alienated by what our society & how we treat rock stars. I think he meant the way we deliberately idolize them and treat them as something other than human. But there’s this other sense, where we infantalize them & want to see them indulge their childish whims, where we really feel dissapointed if their desires aren’t outsized & distorted. Making music’s about doing art, for Josh. But he can’t seem to get beyond the sense that performing on stage is just about seeming artistic.

Transport took an hour, everyone knew that. But Amelia hadn’t said anything about the lurch of departing, where your body was cracked like a whip, and bubblegum was the only thing keeping you from cracking your teeth.
She was blind as she fell, but she’d done enough research to come prepared. She swallowed her plug of gum – apparently you only needed it on departures, there wasn’t nearly the same jerk on arrival. She twisted a bit, stretching out cramps from the sudden snap of transport, and wondered why she couldn’t feel herself falling. And then she closed her eyes against the dark, and played the mix she had made herself, songs about teenage empowerment and seizing your destiny. She’d really done it. She had run away, and in an hour’s time she would arrive in Saint Patrick and she’d find her sister and everything would be great again.Powered by Qumana

The first time she tried it, she knew every single girl at her school had been lying. This was nothing like they’d described it. Her jumpsuit had been made for a man, and was cinched down to the size of her thirteen year old frame with duct tape and bungees.

She clenched her fists, looked up to see Tibor’s knowing smile, and was humiliated. He still thought she was going to back out. That she couldn’t go through with it. Even after all the training, all the preparation – the planning, the lists, the materials, after sneaking out in the middle of the night and running away from everything she’d known, Tibor still thought she was just a scared kid trying to make her parents worried.

When she jumped away from the pylon, she arced her back the way he’d showed her and let the wind do the work of steering her away from the cliff. Transport, the voice on her iPod said, transport engaged. The cliff dissapeared behind her and all she could see were breakers on the rocks below, foam and seething waves and she was plummeting towards them. She clapped her hands to her thighs, diving headfirst towards the beach, diligently pointing her toes like she was in kickline practice again. Departing in three, two, one.

Amelia had been the first to say she’d done it – her brother and his friends, she’d said, had taken her up mount shasta in their van and then from there they’d tripped to the Rolling Stones show. But Amelia didn’t say anything about having to keep a wad of bubblegum between your teeth to bite down on, or that you were awake while you were moving. Inside her helmet, the scuba tank’s air smelled like oil, and it was cold enough to make her teeth chatter.

The fear worried his spine like a rosary, each vertebra in turn pinched by mourning bony fingers. He worked his wrists against the bungees, not even expecting to escape but just hoping to forestall his panic for a few breaths.
He knew what was to come – how he would stand unbound from this folding chair, how the light would flicker and his shadow would bow, and how come morning he would wake up to a new nightmare. He knew that there was no way he could stay here, helpless and waiting, while strangers decided his fate on the other side of a locked door. And, no matter what promises he had made, even as he made them he had known that the day would come when he would break them all, and invite the old terrors in again.

Switching webhosts.   Stuff’s wonky.

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(via Spencer Ackerman) "Jonathan Stray, an energetic blogger, has constructed a social-network chart detailing the connections between the so-called Counterinsurgents. It has some errors — I’m assuming ‘Nathniel Flick’ is Nate Fick of the Center for a New American Security — and as Abu Muqawama says, "a better graph than the one this dude came up with would have been far more extensive and incestuous." But a few rounds of crowdsourcing from the comment threads of AM or Small Wars Journal can probably fix that. … The truth is that the military and intelligence apparatuses use these kind of org charts frequently when trying to map terrorist networks or tribal ties. And it’s never been clear to me why, or even indeed whether, the social cartographers really have faith in such a flawed model or if, instead, there’s a recognition that the social networks operate as a placeholder for actual information about the different nodes on the chart. I’m also not saying that it’s a mistake to try to understand the counterinsurgents as a distinct cohort — that would be pretty stupid and hypocritical of me. All I’m saying is that viewing the Network itself tells you deceptively little." Just emailed Spencer to ask about what kind of methodology these Social Cartographers use for mapping networks/weighing connections. I feel like it might be fun/useful to apply these tools to other "networks", in the interest of isomorphism…

"The three most significant predecessors to the Shoegazing movement were the Cocteau Twins, Spacemen 3 and The Jesus and Mary Chain…"(1)

So Spacemen 3 were active from 1982 through 1991, when the two main poles of the band (Jason Spaceman & Sonic Boom AKA Pete Member) split – Jason took the other musicians in Spacemen 3 & formed Spiritualized. Sonic Boom performs under his own name, Experimental Audio Research, and Spectrum.

"What I’m trying to do," concludes Kember, "is achieve with more abstract sounds is to touch deeper moods and feelings through the music and sounds. What I always aimed for, what we aimed for in the Spacemen, was honesty and purity. Those were the criteria that were uppermost. Something about music is very spiritual, and it can be very fulfilling. There’s few things better than to make music that can be spiritually fulfilling to people."

I got to see Spectum play on Tuesday night. I don’t really understand what kind of taxonomic criteria he uses to decide when he’s Sonic Boom, when he’s E.A.R., and when he’s Spectrum.

Spectrum were more song-based than when I saw Sonic Boom perform solo – there ere vocals, and at one point there was a guitar, and the music would rise and fall in rough approximation of songs starting and stopping. Last time, it was just Pete (Sonic Boom), on stage, playing with weird noise manipulation tools.

Portland is also apparently ay more receptive than New York. I don’t know the relative population ratios, but I do think it’s comforting that the Portland gi had roughly five times the turnout that the New York one did.

They headlined a show which was totally perfect. To bands opened (Parenthetical Girls, Benjamin Starshine) and Matt Hollywood (ex Brian Jonestown Massacre) DJed between sets. The entire night could be seen as a measure of how absurdly influential Spacemen 3 were. Or are. More on that later.

The Parenthetical Girls are a kind of dreamy glam act – Zac Pennington has this great petulant Marc Bolan thing going, and the band shift instrumentation between songs – I feel I should mention I’ve been seeing a lot of violins and glockenspiels in bands lately. Not that it’s bad, just surprising. They’re everywhere all of a sudden. I really liked their set, and Zac did a good job in trying to explain how much Pete’s music meant to him.

Musically, they were all over the place – they ended their set with an OMD cover, which was awesome, and which involved at least three, and maybe even all four of them on drums.

Benjamin Starshine were next. While the Parenthetical Girls were all mod-dressed glam-influenced dream-pop, Starshine were, as their name might suggest, unabashed revivalists playing totally right-on psychedelia. What I’d heard of them before sounded like a Dandy Warhols / BJM cover project (and I don’t mean that to sound derogatory in the least), but the stuff they played live had a really great late Beatles it-is-not-dying vibe to it.

Then Spectrum played. Like I said before, he was playing songs this time, rather than just playing with noise, and while I couldn’t find a quote to support this, I described Spacemen 3 recently as the band that really ran with the idea of repetitive minimalist sounds inducing spiritual experiences. And it was great. Some people showed up looking to dance (I imagine because the show was at Rotture, which hosts really fun and sweaty dance parties on the weekends), and seemed disconcerted to find a nightclub full of people sitting down on the floor.

I was thinking about that – because there’s another kind of Ecstasy that comes from dancing, a loss of self that you can get through repetitive beats and overwhelming rhythms, where you’re lost in recurring motions and your world collapses to movement and breath and sensation. But seeing Spectrum was almost a polar opposite – same loss of self but in a totally inverted way; this music needs to be approached, you have to make an effort to engage with it. It’s comparatively easy to get lost in the surge of a crowd, while letting washes of noise and modulating frequencies induce the same kind of transport takes a certain level of commitment to the endeavor.

If rapture-through-dance music offers a Sufi-like sense of communion with the Transcendent, then sitting for a set of Spectrum’s experimentation is the kind of transport that Buddhist chanting gets – it doesn’t have the breathless exhilaration, but it also doesn’t threaten to overwhelm sense of Self. Self may be transported, quieted, transformed and expended, but it is not overwhelmed or subsumed. I want to go off on a Nietzschean Apollo/Dionysus tangent here, but I think I’ll save that for later.

So I just saw the BJM again on Friday night, years later. It’s weird – DIG! seems to be haunting them far more than it seems to have affected the Dandys. Well, maybe because the movie ended up being about Anton. Anyway, the last couple of times I’ve seen them, they have attracted a peculiar breed of heckler who seem to be there just to incite Anton to break down. They are there to see the spectacle of Anton ranting and hopefully fighting. And it’s incredibly lame, because the rest of us are there just to see a really nice, slow, psych-rock show. In other news, Matt Hollywood (Formerly of the BJM, now with The Warlocks, played a large role in DIG!) performed with them for one song. Anyway. Their shows are becoming stranger and stranger, as they have several reputations among disparate populations – most of the crowd seemed to be there because they’re heard the band’s name and didn’t know what to expect. They left early when Anton didn’t explode. Then there were the hecklers who, by screaming shrill obscenities over and over, eventually won out and got Anton to stop playing for a while. Then there are the people who are there to see the BJM play – judging from my experience, this population expect interruptions in the set and are resigned to wait patiently until the band get their shit together and start playing again. But the tension at their concerts is getting more and more interesting – you’ve got these hyper-agressive guys yelling at Anton who (I am sterotyping here) look like they ought to be copping feels on drunk girls at a Dave Matthews concert. And then you’ve got Anton, fill of fire and anger, responding to them, and there’s this immanent promise of violence throughout the whole performance. But then hen they play their music is incredibly gentle, and the lyrics are all about Anton’s enduring belief in real, true love. So I’m starting to think that part of the joy in watching Jonestown perform is in seeing Anton manage to avoid descending to the level of the shrill meatheads, and watching him choose, over and over, to meet their agressions with his faith in love. If that’s true, then the frustration in seeing them is all about the times when Anton doesn’t pull that trick off, and instead decides he’s done playing for the night if the crowd isn’t going to shut up.

We tell you, tapping on our brows, the story as it should be.  Marc’s lips moved with the syllables, a primitive oscilloscope measuring the peaks and troughs of the meter.  As if the story of a house were told or ever could be.  He drummed his raggedly chewed thumbnails on the gel and foam wristguard in fromt of his keyboard.  Were told or ever could be.  A house, he thought.  A haunted house.  An old Victorian mansion on a hill by the ocean.  The house of Usher.  The other kind of house.  The house of Windsor.  Of Tudor.  Of Bourbon and…

The phone rang.  Marc instinctively slapped the talk button, reciting his scripted greeting into the headset.  "Welcome to Ancient Mysteries of the Tarot.  My name is Sirius, and I have been chosen to be your guide.  What is your name?"

"Wuwanda," a shaky voice replied. Marc, as Wanda was speaking, took the opportunity to hold the mute button down and blow his nose

"Let’s see what the cards have in store for you, Wanda."

Marc’s dialogue was scripted.  The computer tracked her telephone number, told him she’d never called before.  As he spoke, he used the mouse to click through a dialogue tree, marking the conversational trails so later calls wouldn’t repeat.

"Wanda, I’m getting a lot of energy from the deck suddenly.  There’s something bothering you, something you want to ask me."

"Yes."

This was going to be a hard one.  She wasn’t volunteering, so Marc would have to guess.  Would, that is, if he weren’t staring at the next dialogue box with his next gambit spelled out in 14 point Monaco.

"I have separate decks for Moey, Love, and Fortune.  Which would you like me to read?"

"Love, please."

Marc hated his job.  Clicking on ‘Love’ and reciting the net lines from memory, he reflected that it certainly beat fast food, and that his guidance counselor, parents and social worker all felt it was gainful employment and left him alone as long as he clocked more than twenty hours a week in.

"The first card is the Knight of Pentacles.  This is a mysterious figure for you, someone you can’t figure out.  Someone who brings confusion into your life.  Do you recognize this person?"

"Oh my god!"  Wand cried, "That’s Dave!  You’re talking about Dave!  What else does it say?"

"DAVID," Marc typed, under "LOVE."  "DAVID.  K.5."  

He closed his eyes again, massaging the bridge of his nose.  His sinuses were killing him, he was congested and feverish and this was the last place he wanted to be.  "Pentacles are aligned with the element of fire.  David is therefore a fiery person, alluring and dangerous.  It is best to treat such characters carefully, and think before you act around them."

"Oh my God," Wanda was depressingly enthusiastic.  Marc almost preferred the creepy old guys who get off trying to have phone sex with people who aren’t phone sex operators.  "Totally. Totally Dave.  What else?"

"The next card," Marc began, even as he brought a game of Minesweeper onto the screen, "is the nine of swords.  Besiegement.  External forces prevent you from acting.  There is something outside of you and David which you’re worried about."

"Judy.  That bitch of his ex.  This is amazing?  What’s it say about her?"

Marc’s supervisor took that moment to tap him firmly on the shoulder, point to the game on Marc’s screen, and point beyond it to the sign affixed to the wall.  We are in the business of reading cards, the sign read, Be sure to (the next three words were hand-underlined, in ink, three times.  And highlighted.  Orange.) Actually Read The Customer’s Cards!

Marc nodded wearily, clicked shut the game, and reached for the deck of cards to the left of the keyboard.

"What’s it say?"  Wanda asked again.  "Hello?  Is Dave going to propose or not?"

Marc cut the deck once.  His supervisor walked away.  Marc turned the top card.  The Lovers.  Sadly for Wanda, the Lovers, inverted.  As Marc laud the card carefully face up beside the deck, it happened again.

The brush of hs fingertips across the front of the cards brought the inverted figures to life.  Animated on the card, the Lovers dropped each others hands.  There was Wanda – frizzy red hair, bound back into a ponytail in a laughably sad attempt to contain it.  Wanda, in a knockoff designer dress and fake pearls.  Wanda, watching as the suited man walked to the open doo for a joyful reunion with a blonde Judy.  Wanda, standing alone and weeping mascara into the palms of her hands as the door closed.

"Absolutely," Marc said, hating himself for each clipped syllable.  "Wanda, I can promise you, your love problems are over."

Wanda hung up after waiting for the rest of the reading as Marc, turning cards with his eyes closed whenever his Manager walked past, spun her a fable of true love conquering all.  She hung up in joy and rapture, her faith in the universe second only to her faith in the Ancient Mysteries of the Tarot.

Marc swept the cards into a pile with a shudder.  The only thing Ancient around here was the computers.  Careful not to look at them, he piled the cards carefullly beside his keyboard again.  Where had he been?  Like a changed familiar tree.  Or like a stairway to the sea.  Where down the blind are driven.

Marc’s supervisor returned.  Pranjit was classic night school MBA material.  Hard working.  Dedicated.  First generation child of Pakistani immigrants.  No understanding of why Marc, who had at one point talked about applying to (swell of angels here, hosannah on the highest) New York University, could end up here, working for him.  Pranjit never travelled the maze of rust-red upholstered cubicles without the fat three ring binder from which he would read the appropriate policy for whichever rule the employee was, at the moment, violating.

"Marc," he began, flipping through the binder.  Marc was talked to enough, and had been working here so long, he assumed that in there somewhere he merited his own plastic divider tab.  "Your call volume is down again.  You should be logging five calls an hour.  What’s the problem?  Is it the software?  I can schedule you for a refresher course."

"No, Pran."  Marc sighed, the flu and his lethargy causing Pranjit’s name to sound like prawn.  He hoped his supervisor wouldn’t take this as a slight.  "It’s the cards.  Sorry.  Takes me forever to get through a reading."

"Marc, just read from the screen.  It’s all automated.  Just turn the cards and click the mouse."

"Okay, Pran.  I’ll be faster."

Pranjit nodded, put a check in a box somewhere, and closed the binder.  This was Marc’s cue to turn back to his computer with another sigh.

"Don’t forget to read the cards, Marc.  I can’t bring people in to see the shop if you’re not reading the cards."

Marc wondered if Pranjit knew what reports of a fluorescent-lit cubicle farm full of high school kids, college dropouts and unshaven parolees in formless suits would actually do to business.  He realized that he himself had no idea.  He’d never understood what led the clients to call.  Maybe the fact that they were all parolees would help.  Who knew?

His phone rang again.

Pranjit turned back, looking over his shoulder and Marc nodded, moving the cards in front of the keyboard even as he hit Talk and recited his opening.

"Welcome to Ancient Mysteries of the Tarot.  My name is Sirius and I have been chosen to be your guide."  Tarot names were like stripper names.  Marc had trouble thinking of a good one – all the girls were always Raven or Lilith.  It had been Jimmy, a flamboyantly gay member of the theater clique at Marc’s school, who told Marc to use Sirius, which he’d seen in the Astrology section of Cosmo.  Jimmy’s Tarot name was Alistair.