John Blum, Sabir Mateen, Michael Wimberly, Winter Solstice You Lucky New Yorkers

John Blum

Sabir Mateen

Michael Wimberly

and perhaps a very special guest on bass

Live at Pianos
158 Ludlow
$5 door, no minimum
9pm December 21 2009

It's not every day you get to hear John Blum perform--and that's a goddamn shame.

John is totally the real deal. Take for example his new record In the Shade of the Sun--his second recorded outing with undeniable ledgends William Parker and Sunny Murray.

Raise hands, how many of you out there have made two records with William Parker and Sunny Murray?

John will be performing with woodwind master Sabir Mateen as well as the remarkable Michael Wimberly. Any one of them doing a solo concert is likely to be the thing happening in all five burroughs. The three of them together, to say nothing of the theoretical 'perhaps' of a special guest on bass, is without question the hippest way to spend the solistice for at least 150 miles in any given direction--straight up and straight down included.

So get the down to Pianos 158 Ludlow, in beautiful lower Manhattan, this solstice (December 21st) at 9pm!

Dixon v. Fletcher, a Celebration

Though both neglected to mention Nick Skrowaczewski's central roll in all of it, it's true what both Chris Rich and Stephen Haynes have said: there was indeed a gathering of the Citizen's Orchestra--a group for which the seeds were planted in 2007. It is also true that there was a decidedly celebratory Dixonian undertone to the event, if for no other reason than the ensemble was in part comprised of at least 3 generations of Dixon students and colleagues and Dixon himself was there.

But before we get too D-Listed about it, some things:

Before arriving in lovely lovely Cambridge, home of the S & S restaurant, The Outpost 186 and Draper labs, my mother and I took a trip to the dump to dutifully recycle our recyclables. At said garbage dump, as if it had been put there just for me, I found a copy of Dag Hammarskjold's aphoristic Markings, translated from the Swedish by Leif Sjoberg & W.H. Auden with a forward by W.H. Auden.

Of course we all know W.H. Auden loved him some aphorisms and what's more, you don't need to get those self-congratulatory propaganda pamphlets regularly grunted out of that all girl drama school to know that W.H. Auden did a stint (as a visiting professor) at Bennington College, (though he was long gone by the time Dixon began teaching.)

In reading Markings, these caught my eye, and by "caught my eye" I mean made me think of Dixon:

"Upon my conditions."* To live under that sign is to purchase knowledge about the Way at the price of loneliness.

* A quotation from Vilhelm Ekelund, a Swedish aphorist, who had a considerable influence on Hammarskjold (W.H.A.)

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.

Never, "for the sake of peace and quiet," deny your own experience or convictions.

Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 12, 15 and 84.

While that bit of synchronicity sat moldering in my consciousness, it moldered quietly in the shadows of some things Angus Fletcher wrote in his book A New Theory for American Poetry--writings and ideas which played no small part in informing my hopes, dreams and strategies for the upcoming Outpost 186 performance:

Aggregation and the forming of the ensemble allow the phrase to become the centrally natural linguistic expression of democracy, for good or ill. The phrase bespeaks through in its most immediate, unreticulated, even fragmentary form...When (Whitman) entitles poems simply "Thoughts," he names his general procedure, almost as if he were Amy Lowell calling her famous imagist poem "Patterns." The Whitman procedure is to vary the shapes of the poems--the complete poetic enclosures--so changingly, with such architectonic variety, that he can find places for a seemingly infinite number and variety of previously unreticulated thoughts...

There was thus no conflict in Whitman's mind when he related his politically grounded poetry to the wildness of the Rocky Mountains, which he saw for the first time from the seat of a railroad train:

"I have found the law of my own poems," was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me...

Angus Fletcher, A New Theory For American Poetry, p.112-113

and further:

If for chaos of values we substitute complexity of images, [complexity of sounds] we discover Complexity Theory, a uniquely germane notion for studying chaotic phenomena in literature. Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who discovered the "butterfly effect," chose the words "full chaos" to mean completely random disorder, complete lack of order. To back away from Lorenz's full chaos into a less aggravated lack of order, we might ask: what looks [or sounds] like chaos, but is not? The reader will be ready for my answer to this rhetorical question: an Ashbery poem [improvised music]. If that is right, the poem will have to be an attenuated case of controlling chaotic disorder. This will have to be a chaos with rules. Literature and the other arts have traditionally played on the margins of disorder, and in stories have always shown us what happens when "life gets too complicated." We want a denouement, and we treasure ancient Greek literature for showing how such clarifications emerge, often tragically, when the Sophoclean plot of complexity is at last concluded. For confronting this question, Complexity Theory deals with theories of nature, theories that remain uncontaminated by teleological beliefs. In this field things are not imagined to be inevitable just because they have been called "natural." Poets [improvising musicians] are in many ways concerned with the primitive, but they should not uncritically be associated with blind fundamentalist beliefs in divinely ordered teleology, since poets [improvisers] employ the main scientific idea in Complexity, the notion of a self-organizing-system.

For reasons that will emerge, the poetry of John Ashbery [or the music of Bill Dixon] demonstrates the complex in a theoretical sense, and we need not shanghai him to make the point. A typical Ashbery poem [piece of music by Bill Dixon] lacks an obvious plot with stereotyped events whose sequence is standardized. Descriptions begin, are at once interrupted, turning left and right into other partial delineations. Voices come and go, fading in and out of earshot. Harold Bloom, ironically calling himself and exegete, admitted that "it was difficult to see how Ashbery got from point to point, or even to determine if there were points." This sense of broken line inhered, for Bloom, in what he called the poem's [improvisation's] "procedure." In this case a splendid reader and apologist for these poems, he seems insufficiently to measure the relation between procedure and process, which might come from our recognizing that Ashbery's meditative sequences lead to organized happenings. We no longer need the casual outlines of a logical or coherently compelling sequence of actions; rather, we need a coherence of perceptions, crowing each other for simultaneous recognition like children at a birthday party.

...You will say, all serious activities, including the activity in and around a poem (improvisation), are surely attentive. But in fact most poetry ["Jazz"] is deliberately inattentive. It dwells in memorized formulas (ballads); it dwells in romantic exaggerations and hyperboles ("My love is like a red red rose"); it dwells in the great generalized traditions of myth, those stories appearing everywhere as the loosely ordered structures of poetry and literature; it dwells in a studied indirectness and obliquity which are the very opposite of attentively observed reality.

Ibid, p. 192-194

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A music that comes from a self-organizing-system.

A music uncontaminated by teleological beliefs

A music that no longer needs the causal outlines of a logical or coherently compelling sequence of actions

A music born of a coherence of perceptions.

Yeah baby! That's what I'm talking about!

Before such radical notions were foisted upon the big group at Outpost 186, I was lucky enough to do a bit of recording at WKCR a few days before. A trio session with Sabir Mateen and Matt Lavelle. When asked what the groups name was, I offered "The Self Organized Clarinet Trio." Matt came up with the "Black Wood Brotherhood" (or was it society?) Either way, the group was, in fact, a self organized system, uncontaminated by teleological beliefs, needing no causal outlines of a logical or coherently compelling sequence of actions, born of a coherence of perceptions.

If it ever airs, I'll let you know so the two or three of you reading this can "judge" its "worth"--if it was a "success."

As groovy as that was, and as much as I enjoyed the experience of making that music, self organization was not the order of the day with the large group. At the rehearsal the day before, attempts at operating as a self-organized-system were, uh, not universally embraced.

After a few of these un-embraces, Dixon had this to say:

“...One of the errors that stays with this music is that ‘if you just wait the music is going to construct itself and you will have done nothing’

The difference between this music and other areas of music has to do with the responsibility for the erection of the piece of music. It is 100% on the shoulders of each player. When someone writes a piece of music, the responsibilities for detailing what each of you need to know to make it into a cohesive whole is on the person who writes the music. So for many years you don’t pay it any attention and then a sliver of light…freedom…and people say: oh freedom…we don’t need to do this and still you don’t pay it any attention..”

There is just as much discipline and as many rules and variables as in a piece of [written] music. You sit down and construct it as it is happening as is in a piece that someone else does. So your responsibilities as players are the same.

It would appear Dixon is not as convinced of the notion of the self-organizing-system in this music as Angus Fletcher is with regards to the poetry of John Ashbery. Though I'm not entirely sure the one invalidates the other, it could very well be they do. Yes yes, poetry and music = two different things, but really now just how different is "self organized" and "self constructed?"

And so it was that Stephen Haynes stepped in to provide a causal outline of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions. You know, leadership. Though hardly Buddy Rich, there was hierarchy. In the end, it was not an evening of metaphysical naturalism. You could almost hear the unclenching and smell the relief once the burden of self organization was lifted from the ensemble and put upon a leader. That is neither complaint nor judgment.

Though I didn't get any feed back at the performance, I do seem to recall a woman in a hat sharing her relief that there was some teleology, some hierarchy and a causal outline of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions. I don't remember anyone complaining about this, though it would be interesting to hear what those complaints sound like if indeed there were any.

Were that group of eleven to stay together for the next 5 years, provided music still exists 5 years from now, would there still be the need for causal outlines of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions--or would that group be able to play with the same self-organization as did the clarinet trio at WKCR? And if it could, would that be an artistic/aesthetic advance or an artistic/aesthetic retreat?

What requires more "attention"--a self organized music, or a music with heirarchy and a causal outline of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions?

Does "attention" (like "energy") define its own kind of music?

Will the day ever come when music will need no definition?

Regardless of the answers, it was a gaye olde time and I would like to hereby thank all the musicians involved:

Laurence Cook
Kevin Frenette
Forbes Graham
Stephen Haynes
Jim Hobbes
Christopher Kottke
Glynis Lomon
Nick Skrowaczewski
Jacob William
Eric Zinman

And lastly, a big thanks to Bill Dixon for coming coming to the performance.

Shoulder Seasons

The pitifulness of my inability to maintain a blog of monthly hurtwords is as not-lost on me as I am sure it is as not-lost on the two or three of you who, at one point, visited this relatively regular blog with relative regularity.

I blame my dying local economy, my dying Ford automobile and my dying sense of relevance in the shadow of the great Brilliantcornersabostonjazzblog. Chris Rich--the Covering Cherub of the blog world.

And while the sad passing of the great Joe Maneri should have prompted immediate eulogy, it instead prompted great sadness, which in turn prompted great sloth. While I didn't know Joe personally, I did get to speak with him on the phone twice, and exchanged a few letters.

I became aware of Joe Maneri at the perfect time--the early 90's when (in New York City) Charles Gayle was in full flower. Right around the time of Repent. (Is that even possible? Perhaps it was a little later than Repent. You get the jist...) Joe (another religious man and admirer of Padre Pio) did the amazing, namely partitioning space in my listening-consciousness for another approach to the Tenor Saxophone. He did so on the recording Get Ready to Receive Yourself--a must get if you haven't gotten already.

[On a related note, since beginning this post, the great Sirone has also passed away who's wonderful bass playing graces perhaps my most favorite Charles Gayle recording, Spirits Before. Just like the ol' saying goes--if things are going your way, just wait...]

On a happier note, Bill Dixon did turn 84, and in honor of that, it was nice to see some original content up on that Dixon Society site: a short clip of Bill Dixon rehearsing before his performance at the 2007 Vision Festival.

So it's been joys and sorrows, thanks for asking.

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As far as hurt words are concerned, the Marxist hurt word trajectory is going to have to wait until I actually get a copy of Capital of my own--preferably not the penguin edition as their particular ultra thrifty take on typography and layout has an uncanny ability to make any time of the day into nap time.

In between nap-times, I recently found a very strange book in a thrift store called The Neo-Tech Discovery (Zonpower). It is fascinating on many levels, for many reasons, most of which are irrelevant to even this blog (like its typography and layout, for example.)

In this book, however, there is a listing of the 114 Neo-Tech Advantages, which when read one after another are like poetry:

The Nature of Man and Woman

Child of the Past

Carving One's Own Destiny

Dogma and Rules Eliminated

(and so on for another 110 lines)

The Neo-Tech advantage that got my attention was #104: Destructive Poetry Versus Valid Art:

...Since the value of art can be sensed through emotions and requires no intellectual analysis, the public needs only to notice the obvious art and architectural values to erroneously link those values of the master artists to the master neocheaters presenting that art. Thus, the masses are deluded into seeing those obvious values of great art as also representing the values of the neocheating church or government. Subconsciously they conclude: "I can see, hear, and feel those architectural, art and musical values. I know those values are real and valid. Thus, those values must also represent those who own and present this art--the church or government. Therefore, all that I do not comprehend about the church or government must be as good and valuable as the art that represents them."

Through that brilliant, but dishonest use of art as non sequiturs, the church and governments were able to survive the rise of honesty and logic during the Renaissance, the resulting industrial revolution, and then the rise of capitalism and free enterprise.

Regardless of their understandings or economic conditions at that time, those great artists betrayed honesty by selling themselves to the dishonest intentions of the neocheaters in church and government. Those artists are culpable and responsible for giving a major boost in power and endurance to the evil machinations of especially the Roman Catholic church and its neocheating leaders. Even Michelangelo must be held accountable. His great work in the widest context must be condemned as a net disvalue to human life for the dishonest role it played in supporting the immoral mystics and destructive neocheaters throughout the subsequent ages. Without selling out, he might have lost some immediate prosperity and fame. But if he had stayed honest to reality, his work would have risen to even greater beauty, value and fame.

Wallace, Frank R. The Neo-Tech Discover (Zone Power) p. 222

A little further along, there is this

Modern Art

Below is a quote from the archangel of modern art admitting that he is nothing but a clown:

"Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation from art. The refined, the rich, the distillers of quintessence (art critics) desire only the peculiar, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellow what they wanted, and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head.

"The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the owrd. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya, they were great painters. I am only a public clown.

"I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession of mine--more painful than it may seem. but at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest."

Pablo Picasso, November, 1951* A master neocheater making an honest confession

*Also reported to be from a fictitious interview: The Black Book by Giovanni Papini, 1951

To "appreciate" modern art, a person must figure out, interpret, or understand the "artist" and his meanings that "transcend reality". By contrast, all lasting classical art of great value is immediately recognized as a value by everyone through all ages. Such art needs no interpretation or understanding of the artist. such art represents beauty, values, and skill that are immediately recognized by the expert and the untrained layman alike. That is why the Roman Catholic church acquired only classic art--art that needs no interpretation to understand and value. The Catholic church was too shrewd to buy abstract art needing interpretation.

Indeed, modern art seldom represents beauty, values, or skill. Moreover, the layman does not know what mostly modern "art" means, while the chic "expert" plays phony games of interpreting the artist's meanings.

Today, the high prices of famous modern art works are supported by the tax-deduction system: Wealthy holders of such modern art profit handsomely by donating purchased works to the major modern-art museums (e.g., The Museum of Modern Art in New York). In turn, such museums provide grossly inflated appraisal prices for tax deductions. Thus, those museums gain ersatz art works along with cash donations for those fake, tax-purpose appraisals. At the same time, the wealthy "collectors" profit and modern-art museums perpetuate themselves through the tax system. When that neocheating scheme collapses, most modern art works will fall to an objective free-market value and become essentially worthless.

Ibid, p. 228-230

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Wow. How about them apples? So much to agree and disagree with all at once.

Artist culpability caught my attention, as did art needing no intellectual analysis, the culpability of Michaelangelo, Picasso as public clown and last but not least, the essential worthlessness of modern art.

Most exciting of all, however, was the high price of art not as indication of 'merit' but as function of the tax deduction system. I've always admired the visual art world, and largely for this reason--kudos to them!

While it would appear that "Jazz" is trying to bust that move (cf. Jazz at Lincoln Center) it would also appear that "free jazz" or "improvised music" or "the music that supplanted Jazz as the premier art music of the day" or whatever you want to call it has, by-in-large totally failed at getting in on that special kind of corruption in any (monetarily) meaningful way.

In the absence of any other aesthetic unifying characteristic, it could very well be that it is this failing that defines "this music."

Could it be that the ultimate definition of "this music" is that of a music which cannot be used by the capitalist for the ultimately nefarious ends of the capitalist in any meaningful, big money way? A garlic-and-vampire sort of thing. An exchange value/use value sort of thing.

And so to my fellow makers of "this music" I ask this: If this were in fact the case, would you open a vein or jump for joy or something in between?

The Fun, Expert, Tickle Trunk

It's been a while, and to the (now) two or three of you who still regularly check in, I apologise. Summertime here on Christmas Island is filled with guests and travel and employment. I've been enjoying all three, in one capacity or another--some more than others.

Guests I like because the guest is to be cherished.

Employment I like because you need to be employed to get unemployment.

Travel I like because other people have been doing it for me, namely going to wild, wacky, wonderful Portland to get some of my books--namely my "happy fun books" as the getter of said books called them. The box is thus a "tickle trunk" of sorts, as the words and thoughts there in are a non stop source of giggles and mirth.

Certainly you have a tickle trunk of your own, and everyone loves summertime reading...what's in your fun time summer reading tickle trunk? Answer in the comments!!!

Here's my list, with some fun excerpts:

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Fanon, Frantz: The Wretched of the Earth (with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre)

p210-211
When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realise that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives' heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality.

On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology, and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.

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Said, Edward W.: Culture and Imperialism

p.189
An extraordinary, but nevertheless typical, example of American wilfulness is at hand in the relationship between Haiti and the United States. As J. Michael Dash reads it in Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination, almost from the moment Haiti gained its independence as a Black republic in 1803 Americans tended to imagine it as a void into which they could pour their own ideas. Abolitionists, says Dash, thought of Haiti not as a place with its own integrity and people but as a convenient site for relocating feed slaves. Later the island and its people came to represent degeneracy and of course racial inferiority. The United States occupied the island in 1915 (and Nicaragua in 1916) and set in place a native tyranny that exacerbated an already desperate state of affairs. (15) And when in 1991 and 1992 thousands of Haitian refugees tried to gain entry into Florida, most were forcibly returned.

Few Americans have agonised over places like Haiti or Iraq once the crisis or their country's actual intervention was over. Strangely, and despite both its intercontinental range and its genuinely various elements, American domination is insular. The foreign-policy elite has no long-standing tradition of direct rule overseas, as was the case with the British or the French, so American attention works in spurts; great masses of rhetoric and huge resources are lavished somewhere (Vietnam, Libya, Iraq, Panama), followed by virtual silence. Again Kiernan: "More multifarious than the British empire, the new hegemony was even less capable of finding any coherent programme of action other than of bullheaded negation. Hence its readiness to let plans be made for it, by company directors or secret agents."(16)

(15) See J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillian, 1988), pp. 9, 22-25 and passim.

(16) V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (London: Zed, 1978) p.206

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Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle

12. The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: "Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear." The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibly, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.

24. By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power's totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes; a Second Nature thus seems to impose inescapable laws upon our environment. but the spectacle is by no means the inevitable outcome of a technical development perceived as natural; on the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle -- understood in the limited sense of those "mass media" that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation -- seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle's internal dynamics. If the social requirements of the age which develops such techniques can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of society and all contact between people now depends on the intervention of such "instant" communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially one-way; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration. The social cleavage that the spectacle expresses is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labour and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division.

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Dixon, Bill: L'Opera

p.33-34
...it would seem that instead of the constant, repetitious cant about (i) how things are done at Bennington; (ii) this is the Bennington way of doing things; (iii) the specialness of the Bennington students (which, after a while, makes one just a bit curious as to why so much time should be spent defending what is done rather than letting /as it does most eloquently/ one view or hear any of the works that are done, where one can immediately be made aware that there is, indeed, a 'Bennington way' of both learning and presenting what has been theoretically within the purview of the listener /in the instance of music/), there would be an attempt to let the work, etc. speak for itself.

It also doesn't seem to me that trying to spark a conversation about what might just be the EXPECTATION of a Bennington student who has made the indication of expecting to MAJOR in the subject (music) can at all be even remotely related to treachery or being negative. Why then the resistance to HONEST dialogue, since honest dialogue would certainly include those things that would have to be both wrong with the place (the inadequacies, probably other goals) that while not possibly attainable at this time might also be composed of those things and ideas that one might feel would certainly aid in the teaching and learning and thus would auger well for the future of the college in terms of an elevation of the program and a more forward looking attitude concerning the future. It is an ancient and outmoded idea that at Bennington the acme of teaching of the subject has not only been attained by those in the Music Division, but even worse, that there is no way (if that is the case) that it cannot only be improved upon but that one cannot even suggest it. Not refuting this, it obviously either affects preservation or protection of ideals or philosophies that serve to support or reinforce rather thoroughly entrenched ideas that music conceived and performed from the standpoint of Western formal concert philosophies (white, if you will) should always and unreservedly serve as the theoretical and philosophical modus operandi for all music study (at this place) with the result that any other idea or aspect of music and how it is considered convenient, sometimes serve as some sort of obscure, exotic phenomenon.

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Young, Ben: Dixonia

p.181-182
Bill Dixon: "The Bennington Music Division had said that there was no such thing as Black Music, so I had no basis to say that I wanted the music to be taught here unless I could prove it. They didn't want to include it on any level. 1. They didn't think it existed as an aesthetic. 2. They couldn't do it. 3. In the past they had evinced no interest in it. So the first thing I did was to research everything that had ever been taught at the school--just for information. I found out about the Jazz weekend that they had done in 1964 and a couple of things that Lou Calabro had tried to do with improvisation. Then I was able to frame my thesis: 'You're saying Black Music doesn't exist because that's not within your purview'. Then I made a proposal that I be allowed to head a Black Music Institute--an independent entity, separate from all of the existing divisions--for which I would answer to the President. After that proposal, everyone became outraged along the lines of 'Who does he think he is? Why can't he just be in a department like everybody else?' That was turned down flatly when I first brought it up in 1973, a little while after I came back from Madison. So I went back to the drawing board and made a request to do this thing for a year--with the curriculum, budget, and everything all figured out. I was willing to make this 'audition' for a year, and if I passed I wanted to request being made the eighth department of the college.

What happened next is really a book in itself. I was attacked in every way imaginable. The Music Department fought it as viciously as they could, but when they realised it was being considered they had to back off."

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Mencken, H. L.: Minority Report

260
Life on this earth is not only without rational significance, but also apparently unintentional. The cosmic laws seem to have been set going for some purpose quite unrelated to human existence. Man is thus a sort of accidental by-product, as the sparks are an accidental by-product of the horse shoe a blacksmith fashions on his anvil. The sparks are far more brilliant than the horseshoe, but all the same they remain essentially meaningless. They constitute, at best, a disease of the horseshoe--the involve a destruction of its tissue. Perhaps life, in the same way, is a disease of the cosmos.

269
Artists can seldom account for their own work, and when they show actual genius hardly ever. The moment they try to explain it they become absurd, and what they have to say is commonly borrowed from the jargon of critics, which is to say, non-artists. The process of creation is only partly intellectual. The rest of it seems to be based on instinct rather than on idea.

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Fukuoka, Masanobu: The Natural Way of Farming--The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy

p.27-28
Leave Nature Alone.

Man has always deluded himself into thinking that he knows nature and is free to use it as he wishes to build his civilisation. But nature cannot be explained or expanded upon. As an organic whole, it is not subject to man's classifications; nor does it tolerate dissection and analysis. Once broken down, nature cannot be returned to its original state. All that remains is an empty skeleton devoid of the true essence of living nature. This skeletal image only serves to confuse man and lead him further astray. Nor is scientific reasoning of any avail in helping man understand nature and add to its creations.

Nature as perceived by man through discriminating knowledge is a falsehood. Man can never truly know even a single leaf, even a single handful of earth. Unable to fully comprehend plant life and soil, he sees these only through the filter of human intellect.

Although he may seek to return to the bosom of nature or use it to his advantage, he only touches one tiny part of nature--a dead portion at that--and has no affinity with the main body of living nature. he is, in effect, merely toying with delusions.

Man is but an arrogant fool who vainly believes that he knows all of nature and can achieve anything he sets his mind to. Seeing neither the logic nor order inherent in nature, he has selfishly appropriated it to his own ends and destroyed it. The world today is in such a sad state because man has not felt compelled to reflect upon the dangers of his high-handed ways.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: Daybreak

177
Learning solitude. -- O you poor devils in the great cities of world politics, you gifted young men tormented by ambition who consider it your duty to pass some comment on everything that happens--and there is always something happening! Who when they raise the dust are always on the alert, always on the lookout for the moment when they can put their word in, lose all genuine productivity! However much they may desire to do great work, the profound speechlessness of pregnancy never comes to them! The event of the day drives them before it like chaff, while they think they are driving the event--poor devils! -- If one wants to represent a hero on the stage one must not think of making one of the chorus, indeed one must not even know how to make one of the chorus.

[does he mean "be in the chorus?"]

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo

204
End and goal.--Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn't reached its goal. A parable.

[this reminds me of Bill Dixon discouraging "cadences" in our playing in ensemble class--the non resolving line.]

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: Human, All Too Human

152
Art of the ugly soul. -- One imposes far too narrow limitations on art when one demands that only well-ordered, morally balanced souls may express themselves in it. As in the plastic arts, so in music and poetry too there is an art of the ugly soul beside the art of the beautiful soul; and the mightiest effects of art, that which tames souls, moves stones and humanizes the beast, have perhaps been mostly achieved by precisely that art.

289
Value of illness. -- The man who lies ill in bed sometimes discovers that what he is ill from is usually his office, his business or his society and that through them he has lost all circumspection with regard to himself: he acquires this wisdom from the leisure to which his illness has compelled him.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Gay Science

206
When it rains. -- It is raining, and I think of the poor who now huddle together with their many cares and without any practice at concealing these: each is ready and willing to hurt the other and to create for himself a wretched kind of pleasure even when the weather is bad. That and only that is the poverty of the poor.

[fighting over the 'chicken wing']

331
Better deaf than deafened.-- Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less that screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those who want to tell and without hoarseness there no longer is any genius.

This is surely an evil age for a thinker. He has to learn how to find his silence between to noises and to pretend to be deaf until he really becomes deaf. Until he has learned this, to be sure, he runs the risk of perishing of impatience and headaches. (60)

(60) Partly for the reasons noted here, partly because he was competing with Wagner, and partly because his solitude and the lack of any response to his books became intolerable for him, the tone of Nietzsche's own books grew shrill in the end.

[I'm sure I have no idea what they're talking about...]

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Anti-Christ (translated by H.L. Mencken)

3
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.

This most valuable type has appeared often enough in the past but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;--and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian.

37
--Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity--from the death on the cross onward--is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarous--it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar, as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the church--the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity. --Christian values--noble values: it is only we, we free spirits, who have reestablished this greatest of all antithesis in values!

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Berman, Marshall: Adventures in Marxism

p.51
Marx goes on to say, "At the historical dawn of capitalist accumulation -- and every capitalist upstart must go through this historical phase -- avarice, and the desire to get rich, are the ruling passions." (Here Marx makes the curious nineteenth-century assumption, found in every great thinker from Hegel through Freud, that each individual must re-enact in his own life the entire previous life of the species.) These passions never pass away. But later on, "when a certain stage of development has been reached, ... there is at the same time developed in his breast a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment" (650-51). In this "consumer" period the capitalist becomes like other men: he regards himself as a free agent, able to step back form his role as producer and accumulator, even to give it up entirely ofr the sake of pleasure or happiness; for the first time he sees his life as an open book, as something to be shaped according to his choice. Fetishism, then, infuses the youthful exuberance of capitalism with a religious zeal--and may slacken the pace, but leaves a new freedom in its wake. Men no longer feel compelled to fullfil the infinite demands of an alien Will; they are free at last to think of themselves.

p133-134
The basic fact of life for these intellectuals, as Marx sees them, is that they are "paid wage-labourers" of the bourgeoisie, members of "the modern working class, the proletariat." They may deny this identity--after all, who wants to belong to the proletariat? -- but they are thrown into the working class by the historically defined conditions under which they are forced to work. When Marx describes intellectuals as wage earners, he is trying to make us see modern culture as part of modern industry. Art, physical science, social theory like Marx's own, all are modes of production; the bourgeoisie controls the means of production in culture, as in everything else, and anyone who wants to create must work in the orbit of its power.

Modern professionals, intellectuals and artists, insofar as they are members of the proletariat,

live only so long as they find work, and ... find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market (479)

Thus they can wrote books, paint pictures, discover physical or historical laws, save lives, only if someone with capital will pay them. But the pressures of bourgeois society are such that no one will pay them unless it pays to pay them -- that is, unless their works somehow help to "increase capital." They must "sell themselves piecemeal" to an employer willing to exploit their brains for profit. They must scheme and hustle to present themselves in a maximally profitable light; they must compete (often brutally and unscrupulously) for the privilege of being bought, simply in order to go on with their work. Once the work is done they are, like all other workers, separated from the products of their labor. Their goods and services go on sale, and it is "the vicissitudes of competition, the fluctuations of the market," rather than any intrinsic truth or beauty or value--or, for that matter, any lack of truth or beauty or value -- that will determine their fate. Marx does not expect that great ideas and works will fall stillborn for want of a market: the modern bourgeoisie is remarkably resourceful in wringing profit out of thought. What will happen instead is that creative processes and products will be used and transformed in ways that will dumbfound or horrify their creators. But the creators will be powerless to resist, because they must sell their labour power in order to live.

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Berman, Marshall: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

p.100
If we look behind the sober scenes that the members of our bourgeoisie create, and see the way they really work and act, we see that these solid citizens would tear down the world if it paid. Even as they frighten everyone with fantasies of proletarian rapacity and revenge, they themselves, through their inexhaustible dealing and developing, hurtle masses of men, materials and money up and down the earth, and erode or explode the foundations of everyone's lives as they go. Their secret--a secret they have managed to keep even from themselves--is that, behind their facades, they are the most violently destructive ruling class in history. All the anarchic, measureless, explosive drives that a later generation will baptise by the name of "nihilism"--drives that Nietzsche and his followers will ascribe to such cosmic traumas as the Death of God--are located by Marx in the seemingly banal everyday working of the market economy. He unveils the modern bourgeois as consummate nihilists on a far vaster scale than modern intellectuals can conceive.* But these bourgeois have alienated themselves from their own creativity because they cannot bear to look into the moral, social and psycic abyss that their creativity opens up.

* Actually, the term "nihilism" springs from Marx's own generation: it was coined by Turgenev as a motto for his radical hero Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1861), and elaborated in a far more serious way by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866-67). Nietzsche explores the sources and meanings of nihilism most proundly in The Will to Power (1885-88), especially in Book One, "European Nihilism." It is rarely mentioned, but but worth noting, that Nietzsche considered modern politics and economics profoundly nihilistic in their own right. See Section 1, an inventory of the roots of contemporary nihilism. Some of Nietzsche's images and analyses here have a surprisingly Marxistic ring. See Section 63 on the spiritual consequences, both negative and positive, of "the fact of credit, or world wide trade and means of transportation"; 67 on "the breaking up of landed property...newspapers (in place of daily prayers), railway, telegraph. Centralization of a tremendous number of interests in a single soul, which for that reason must be very strong and protean." (Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage, 1968.) But these connections between the modern soul and the modern economy are never worked out by Nietzsche, and (with very rare exceptions) never even noticed by his followers.)

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Hughes, Robert: Culture of Complaint, The Fraying of America

p.185-186
Throughout the whole history of the avant-garde, this hope has been refuted by experience. No work of art in the 20th century has ever been refuted by experience. NO work of art in the 20th century has ever had the kind of impact that Uncle Tom's Cabin did on the way Americans thought about slavery, or The Gulag Archipelago did on illusions about the real nature of Communism. The most celebrated, widely reproduced and universally recognizable political painting of the 20th century is Picasso's Guernica, and it didn't change Franco's regime one inch or shorten his life by so much as one day. what really changes political opinion is events, arguments, press photographs, and TV.

The catalogue convention of the 90s is to dwell on activist artists "addressing issues" of racism, sexism, AIDS, and so forth. But an artist's merits are not a function of his or her gender, ideology, sexual preference, skin color or medical condition, and to address an issue is not to address a public. The HIV virus isn't listening. Joe Sixpack isn't looking at the virtuous feminist knockoffs of John Heartfield on the Whitney wall--he's got a Playmate taped on the sheet rock next to the band saw, and all the Babara Krugers in the world aren't going to get him or anyone else to mend his ways. The political art we have in postmodernist America is one long exercise in preaching to the converted. as Adam Gopnik pointed out in the New Yorker when reviewing the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, it consisted basically of taking an unexceptional if obvious idea--"racism is wrong," or "New York shouldn't have thousands of beggars and lunatics on the street" --then coding it so obliquely that when the viewer has re-translated it he feels the glow of being included in what we call the "discourse" of the art world.(6) But the fact that a work of art is about AIDS or bigotry no more endows it with aesthetic merit than the fact that it's about mermaids and palm trees.

(6) Edward Said, "The politics of Knowledge," Raritan, Summer 1991

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Hughes, Robert: Nothing If Not Critical

p.396-397
The market is always converting works of art into passive fictions of eternity and immutability, of transcendent value for which no price may necessarily be too high. When the word priceless crops up, the haggling has only just begun. Hence the battered state of the word masterpiece, which used to mean a work that proved an artist's graduation into full professional skill, but now means an object whose aura and accumulated myth strike people blind temporarily and render their judgement timid. It refers more to myths of status than processes of comparison, and that kind of mythmaking is the seed of what New York dealer Ben Heller, in one of the great Freudian slips of recent art history, was heard to call "creative pricing"

It is the element of fantasy in the art market, the sense that art prices are so weakly tied to more mundane kinds of economic activity, and that there is something neurotic about them, that gives them their odd liability. The art market can be set pitching and rolling by a single act, which is why it is so notoriously vulnerable to manipulation. A ring of three or four promoters can bid up the price of a dubious young star painter at auction and although the New York art world may know what's going on, the collectors in Akron, Ohio, are not to likely to--all they see is the price that was, after all, publicly bid and duly paid, and is henceforth true.

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Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W.: Dialectic of Enlightenment

p.139
Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fullfils the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theaters were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theater is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theater a place of refuge where she can site for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she use to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in the summer and warmth in the winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man's lives. The idea of "fully exploiting" available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.

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Debord, Guy: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

VII
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media's professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations. And they are hardly extravagant, even with these, for besides there extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's overall authority and the society it expresses makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be threatened. It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that everyone of them knows he is dispensable.

All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradully reduced to nil by present society's mode of organisation. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer and absolute reassurance. Once there were experts in Etruscan art, and competent ones, for Etruscan art was not for sale. But a period which, for example, finds it profitable to fake by chemical means various famous wines, can only sell them if it has created wine experts able to con connoisseurs into admiring their new, more distinctive flavours...

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Adorno, Theodor W.: Prisms

p.127
Jazz fans, as has once again been emphatically shown by David Riesman, can be divided into two clearly distinguishable groups. In the inner circle sit the experts, or those who consider themselves such--for very often the most passionate devotees, those who flaunt the established terminology and differentiate jazz styles with ponderous pretention, are hardly able to give an account, in precise, technical musical concepts, of whatever it is that so moves them. Most of them consider themselves avant-gardistic, thus participating in a confusion that has become ubiquitous today. Among the symptoms of the disintegration of culture and education, not the least is the fact that the distinction between autonomous 'high' and commercial 'light' art, however questionable it may be, is neither critically reflected nor even noticed any more. And now that certain culturally defeatist intellectuals have pitted the latter against the former, the philistine champions of the culture industry can even take pride in the conviction that they are marching in the vanguard of the Zeitgeist. The organization of culture into 'levels' such as the first, second and third programmes, patterned after low, middle and highbrown, is reprehensible. but it cannot be overcome simply by the lowbrown sects declaring themselves to be highbrow. The legitimate discontent with culture provides a pretext but not the slightest justification for the glorification of a highly rationalized section of mass production, one which debases and betrays culture without at all transcending it, as the dawn of a new world-sensibility or for confusing it with cubism, Eliot's poetry and Joyce's prose. Regression is not origin, but origin is the ideology of regression. Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste products as its aberrant influence grows.

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Hope you have a fun summer!

What What What?

What do you mean I didn't win the Bad-Plus blogging contest?

What do you mean I can't just keep renewing Capital Vol. 1 again and again and again and again?

My world is collapsing! That's what you get for being a slow reader--a collapsed world!

"Fortunately" here on Christmas Island, capitalism and all its promises saturate the air, water and ether. As such, I don't expect anyone will be taking Capital out of the library, and so tomorrow to the library I will go (with a quick stop at the bank first, so that I may be allowed back into the library) and Capital Vol. 1 will again be mine, even if only temporarily. At that juncture, we will continue with our investigation of the bisect of Marx and our beloved freely improvised music.

In the mean, there's always ol' "abc" Teddy. The ABC meaning "anything but class", and I have to admit, reading Adorno after Marx is kind of like, I dunno, eating the little parsley garnish after eating the steak. Not that the little parsely garnish doesn't have its place, and indeed, who doesn't love a litte garnish? Not that Adorno is light and fluffy or easily brushed off the plate, but there is a bit of difference between the dialectis of employment as exploitation (Marx) and the sillyness of the 6/8 passage in Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto (Adorno.)

Regardless, in the grand game of creating personal exchange value you've got to keep it fresh. (And you shouldn't swear either.)

So with that, while we wait for my library card to cool off and Capital Vol. 1 to return, some adorno:

The true danger of the virtuoso: his perfect control. Through being above the works, having them at his disposal, he no longer journeys all the way into them or takes their immanent demands quite so seriously any more. Sloppiness as a correlate of mastery. For example the blurring of phrases by great virtuosos, also vocal ones. -- Preferable to work with young, unfinished musicians who are not yet fully in control.

and later

Gretel asked me how it can be that actors, who are mostly of questionable intelligence and always uneducated, can represent people and deliver lines that convey the most difficult of ideas, as with Hamlet and Prospero, Faust, Mephistopheles. I ventured the reply: every poetic work contains not only the meaningful-significative element, but also the melodic-mimic aspect, tone, speech melody, and manner; and it is a substantial criterion for success how deeply the former is immersed in the latter, i.e. whether the mimetic, 'magical' aspect is able to invoke, to force the meaningful one, to such a degree that a tone of voice or gesture itself becomes the allegorical representation of an idea. The actor's ability is mimic in the true sense: he actually imitates the melodica-gestural aspect of language. And the more perfectly he achieves this, the more perfectly the idea enteres the representation, not least because -- and especially when -- he does not understand it. The opposite approach would be the explanatory one: but to explain the intention means to kill it rather than invoking it. One could almost say that it is the prerequisite for an actor not to 'understand', but rather to imitate blindly...

Adorno, Theodor. Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, p. 158-159

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Sloppiness as a correlate of mastery.

For those of you who read reviews of Bill Dixon's music, how many of you have read articles where Dixon's ability to 'play' the trumpet is put into question? For the most part, that seems to have gone out of style, but for a while it was a staple of Dixon criticism.

Why did that change? Did "we" evolve? Are "we" hearing music differently, or are "we" (the transformers of Value into Exchange-Value) faced with the reality that many of the "young, unfinished musicians who are not yet fully in control" (of the instrument or their destiny) sound enough like Dixon, that to continue "asking" if Dixon knows how to play the trumpet might not be good for the collection of surplus capital?

And how about uneducated actors blindly imitating Faust and Mephistopheles while not having the slightest idea of who or what (or from whence) they are imitating? Don't get me wrong, I am a firm believer in "fake it 'till you make it" and I think that spending a life acting and imitating probably a pretty good gig depending upon the pay. What would you rather do, imitate Faust or be Faust?

What would you rather do, imitate Charlie Parker or be Charlie Parker? How about Frank Zappa? Would you rather imitate or would you rather be Frank Zappa? (That might be a trick question.)

Speaking of Frank Zappa, copying, copyrights, ZPZ (vs. everyone else,) the concept of "perfection" (expected or otherwise) and the whole conflict-leads-to-sales strategym behind the Zappa-mimesis experience, there is this:

...he actually imitates the melodica-gestural aspect of language. And the more perfectly he achieves this, the more perfectly the idea enteres the representation, not least because -- and especially when -- he does not understand it.

Where, if at all, this bisects "misreading" in the Harold Bloom sense of the word, I don't know. Was (Frank) Zappa imitating the melodica-gestural aspect of language? If so whose? Because if he (Frank Zappa) did, he didn't do it perfectly, as his (Frank Zappa's) music--what you heard (past tense) when you went (also past tense) to a Frank Zappa concert was not like anything ever heard before. Was this because (Frank) Zappa understood what he was doing? Or was it because (Frank) Zappa gave not one fig about sounding like anything or anyone other than Frank Zappa?

I'm Just Going To Keep On Dancing (Dancing! Dancing!)

Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth's surface, and hence their discover costs, on average, a great deal of labour-time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small volume...With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would be embodied in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If man succeeded without much labour, in transforming carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks.

Marx, Capital, p. 130, 131

Is there a relation between value and excellence?

The recorded music of Lowell Davidson is of very rare occurrence on earth's surface. Does that alone--the rarity of Lowell Davidson's congealed labor--make his one record so completely valuable? And is that "value" the same as "excellence?"

What about Ken Vandermark? Would his music be any more valuable (or "excellent") if he had a total of 3 recordings to his name?

What would music (the sound of it, the experience of producing it, the experience of consuming it) be like if musicians could only release a total of 5 recordings? They could play live all they wanted, but only 5 recordings at the most.

Is anything happening to the "value" (or excellence) of music as a whole in light of the "digital revolution"--specifically said revolution's facilitating the self-release?

What would cars be worth if everyone could make their own in the back yard?

What would the experience of driving be worth if everyone on earth had their own car that they had made themselves?

(I really really really am asking questions here, and not trying to bate or "takedown" anyone or any industry. Honest.)

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Just as commodities have a dual character, possessing both use-value and exchange-value, so labour in itself has a twofold nature. Use-value is created by 'concrete' or 'useful' labour, defined by Marx as 'productive activity of a definite kind, carried on with a definite aim', whereas exchange-value derives from 'abstract' or 'undifferentiated' labour, which is measured purely in terms of its duration--and there is an inherent tension between the two. A tailor, for instance, may strive to make the hardest-wearing coat of which he or she is capable. If it is too hard-wearing, however, the purchaser need never return to buy a replacement, so jeopardizing the tailor's business. The same applies to the weaver who created the cloth from which the coat was swen. The need to create use-value thus finds itself in conflict with the need to continue creating exchange value.

...'Within its value relation to the linen,' (Marx) writes, 'the coat signifies more than it does outside it, just as some men count for more when inside a gold-braided uniform than they do otherwise'

Wheen, Francis. Marx's Das Kapital, A biography. p.41-42

What then, under capitalism, is the impetus for doing one's best? And why, under capitalism, are "we" disciplined and punished for not doing (the boss-capitalist's perception of) one's best?

Are "prestigeous" record labels a kind of "gold-braided uniform" that makes men (and their CD's) count for more when inside them?

Would John Coltrane still have made the music of John Coltrane (as we know it) if he was on the John Coltrane record label, distributed out of a garage somewhere on Long Island? Did Impulse or (ha! Prestige) ever artistically constrain John Coltrane due to extra musical, exchange-value reasons?

Holy crap I love that verysmallarray.com web site. Y'all have been right? I really love the graphs comparing Pitchfork Media and Billboard magazine.

Question: what would "music" (and by extension, life) be like if Pitchfork had Billboard's capital? Would it be exactly the same?

The stark comparison of Pitchfork and Billboard via graphs and the like made me wish that CD's came with (and CD reviews consisted of) a graph that showed what percentage of the music was "exchange value music" and what percentage was "use value music"--because it is a zero-sum deal.

Is the Lowell Davidson recording (singular) an example of a music with a very high use value and a very low exchange value?

Can we think of any recordings with a very low use value, but a very high exchange value?

Is there a relation between a recording's use value, exchange value, value, and the number of copies printed?

+ + +

Only the products of mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation, can confront each other as commodities.

(Marx, Capital, p.132)

People under capitalism do not relate to each other directly as human beings, they relate to one another through the myriad products which they encounter in the market

David Harvey, video 2, ca. 57'10"

However glorious its apparent economic triumphs, capitalism remains a disaster since it turns people into commodities, exchangeable for other commodities. Until humans can assert themselves as the subjects of history rather than its objects, there is no escape from this tyranny.

Wheen, Francis, Marx's Das Kapital, a biography, p. 13


There is a phrase, one I'm about to mangle, related to the economic nature of "Jazz", and that phrase is that it, (the economic nature of jazz) is a bunch of, uh, "Jazz musicians" fighting over a chicken wing on the corner. Ever hear that one?

When creating exchange-value music--nay, when consciously incorporating the slightest concession to the exchange-value-aesthetic (and don't tell me there isn't one), are musicians commodities or are musicians human, or are musicians human all too human?

Bill Dixon has at times suggested the existence of two kind of music producers: Musicians and Personalities. If I had to guess, and this is only a guess, a Musician creates use-value music, where as a Personality creates exchange-value music.

+ + +

In itself, an increase in the quantity of use-values constitutes an increase in material wealth. Two coats will clothe two men, one coat will only clothe one man, etc. Nevertheless, an increase in the amount of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This contradictory movement arises out of the twofold character of labour. By 'productivity' of course, we always mean the productivity of concrete useful labour; in reality this determines only the degree of effectiveness of productive activity directed towards a given purpose within a given period of time. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products in direct proportion as its productivity rises or falls. As against this, however, variations in productivity have no impact whatever on the labour itself represented in value. As productivity is an attribute of labour in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to have any bearing on that labour as soon as we abstract from its concrete useful form. The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity. But it provides different quantities of use-values during equal periods of time; more, if productivity rises; fewer, if it falls. For this reason, the same change in productivity which increase the fruitfulness of labour, and therefore the amount of use-values produced by it, also brings about a reduction in the value of this increased total amount, if it cuts down the total amount of labour-time necessary to produce the use-values.

Marx, Capital, p. 137

Learned: One can accumulate a great deal of wealth by making things of very little value.

What if you were only allowed to release 5 albums in your life time...

I like the part that says "variations in productivity have no impact whatever on the labor itself represented in the value." Does this mean if Lowell Davidson was given a MacArthur grant and used it to produce dozens upon dozens of releases, he (Lowell Davidson/Lowell Davidson's labour) would still be great but his recordings would be of proportionately less value?

What would our culture be like if the music of Lowell Davidson was a prevalent as Justin Timberlake? What if those two were to do a capital switch-a-roo? Would Justin Timberlake suddenly assume the identity-as-exchange-value previously, uh, enjoyed by Lowell Davidson during his active years of musical labor, or would he remain be the Justin Timberlake we've always known and loved?

So many questions!

(are you wishing me luck on the blog contest? if not, WISH ME LUCK ON THE BLOGGING CONTEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Send Sebadoh's "Give Up" Ringtone To your Cell

We have seen how the growing accumulation of capital involves its growing concentration. Thus the power of capital grows, in other words the autonomy of the social conditions of production, as personified by the capitalist, is asserted more and more as against the actual producers. Capital shows itself more and more to be a social power, with the capitalist as its functionary--a power that no longer stands in any possible kind of relationship to what the work of one particular individual can create, but an alienated social power which has gained an autonomous position and confronts society as a thing, and as the power that the capitalist has through this thing. The contradiction between the general social power into which capital has developed and the private power of the individual capitalist over these social conditions of production develops ever more blatantly, while this development also contains the solution to this situation, in that it simultaneously raises the conditions of production into general, communal, social conditions. This transformation is brought about by the development of the productive forces under capitalist production and by the manner and form in which this development is accomplished.

Marx, Capital III, p. 373

Hey did you hear The Bad Plus Inc. are having a blog writing competition? They, The Bad Plus want "to encourage younger musicians to give blogging a go." If you are a "new blogger" (which is to say, the walls of your cyber cell aren't totally smeared with your own virtual feces) you now have a chance make "$100 cash and, naturally, promotion on DTM. "

Further on, the point is made:

This is not a professional competition. $100 is not much - hopefully it’s just enough to encourage the participants. But blogging is not really professional to begin with; it is done by just those that want to do it.

Is that to say a profession is something you don't want to do? Regardless of the answer, the (above) made me think of this:

(One of three) cardinal fact(s) about capitalist production:

(1) The concentration of the means of production in a few hands, which means that they cease to appear as the property of the immediate workers and are transformed on the contrary into social powers of production. Even if this is at first as the private property of capitalists. The latter are trustees of bourgeois society, though they pocket all the fruits of this trusteeship.

Marx, Capital III, p. 375

This makes me think of a hee-larious apocryphal story about Frank-Zappa-as-capitalist:

Once upon a time there was a young and very talented musician who also was also very talented computer operator. This talented young person was so good with computers he eventually found himself in the employ of such global super capitalists as U2 and Frank Zappa. After working on some MIDI/computerized aspect Frank Zappa's fixed capital (i.e., getting all that computer crap running so the valorization process could continue unhindered) this young talented person enquired if there was any way he could get into the show (so as to see [and hear] the thing he fixed in action--the thing that without his labor, wouldn't otherwise be able to operate.) Frank Zappa's response? "What, do I look like the ticket counter?"

Instant alienation.

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A bit further down in the "a few more suggestions" section:

(2) Takedowns are not what I’m looking for, but I can’t deny that it is important to have dislikes as well as likes. If you do insist on a heavily critical piece I will allow it but expect the wrath of the internet (a phenomenon rather heart-stopping the first time it happens to the unprepared). But the point of this contest - like DTM in general - is the exploration and celebration of excellence.

The first phrase in section (2)--Takedowns are not what I'm looking for--though perhaps not anti-dialectical in its intent, none the less caught my attention as Capital thus far seems to be three volumes of "takedown"--and that seems to be quite close to, if not the essence of dialectics.

+ + +

quick pause: hands up, who remembers the ultra great super group Mule and the lyrics to I'm Hell?

You tell me what you think you need,
And I'll give you what I think you lack.

+ + +

Forgetting about things like "truth" for a moment, is the towering, awe inspiring, brain bending dialectical takedownedness of Capital incidental or is it central to the power of Capital as narration--as story--as thing to read?

Does Capital's stature of the greatest "takedown" ever written (a "takedown" of, arguably, the greatest blight humanity has yet to create) impinge upon its "knowledge" of subject or its "material" relevance? I guess that depends upon your tax returns. You did file your taxes, didn't you?

The last phrase: But the point of this contest - like DTM in general - is the exploration and celebration of excellence--especially when juxtaposed against section (3) But I will be looking for knowledge of music, not great writing brings about the kind of contradiction that dialecticians have loved for decades.

Contradiction: what happens when a knowledge of music can really only be assessed during the "take down?" Because really, any jackass can shake a pom-pom (Just pick up a copy of Down Beat, Signal to Noise or [gasp!] The Wire and see for yourself,) and really, said jack-assery most fully reveals itself in the failed 'take down'; back at a certain all girl drama academy, Bill Dixon used to tell the story of how he (and his peers) would get Down Beat, find the recordings the critics hated the most and then go look for those records--the logic being if the totally "alienated social power" that are the critics from Down Beat hated it, then there must be a pretty good recording, one worth checking out anyway.

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Certainly by now you've all made your way through the first instalment of David Harvey's most excellent video lecture series on Marx' Capital. In so doing, you most certainly had moment to pause and replay about 80 minutes into the thing wherein Mr. Harvey makes these point about value (which, after all, is a close cousin to "excellence"):

Who and how is value established?

There is a value being determined by a process we do not understand and it is not our choice, it is something that is happening to us, and how it is happening has to be 'unpacked.'

If you want to understand who you are and where you stand in this maelstrom of churning values...what you've got to do is to understand how value gets created, how it gets produced, and with what consequences--socially, environmentally and all the rest of it.

Value is not fixed--value is extremely sensitive to revolutions in technology, revolutions in productivity.

David Harvey lecture on Capital, video 1, introduction.

Is music a commodity?

Is "excellence" an adjective, adverb or noun? Is "excellence" in music an objective value or is it something created by external forces other than the music itself? If it is an objective reality, is this objective excellence something that can be accurately gauged equally by all peoples? Can (musical) excellence be gauged by someone whose own music is not excellent? Can it be gagued by someone who doesn't play music at all?

This theoretically objective "excellence"--is it theoretically permanent, or is this theoretical excellence like all that is solid melt(ing) into the air?

How about these revolutions in technology? Here's a real New Media 101 question: How has the technical revolution that is the web (and the blog) influenced the creation of "excellence" in music? Is the internet responsible for making something "excellent" that without the internet would not be "excellent" or typify "excellence" (or, using Marx's words, "represent value?")

Harvey goes on to ask the question "How is value represented?" (and I go on to ask "How is excellence represented?")

Well, let's see, there's price--like $21 for a download (at that price it must be good...)

Then there is the critic--lord knows they're an unbiased bunch.

Then there is self created propaganda--lord also knows how suited the web is for that, and how well 'self regulated'--and by extension meaningful--that aspect of the internet has become.

Lastly there is 'log rolling' by other (related/combined/concentrated) interests.

Did I miss any?

So all in all, it would appear that the representation of excellence (as well as value) in the aesthetic (particularly musical) sphere is, well, uh, reason enough to listen to the second lecture in David Harvey's excellent series.

Meanwhile, speaking of log-rolling by others, and to qualify this as a "jazz" blog, please do bring your virtual pint glass to the Brewery Tap to enjoy some real "jazz excellence." I call this the best, most excellent "Jazz" release of 2009 with a bit of reservation, as I haven't had adequate time and focus to really dig into the excellence that is Matt Weston's not to be taken away.

WISH ME LUCK IN THE BLOGGING CONTEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!