deadlines and deadends

I allowed myself leisure on Monday. Ideas are the source of my power, but when I forget them, I am powerless. So I have to rediscover the things I believed weeks or months ago.

I slept in late, did a fair amount of thinking, still keeping up with mini yoga routines, and ended up watching the Watchmen movie in the evening. There was a little work on music somewhere in there.

The Watchmen movie was surprisingly good - about as close to the novel as you can get. They changed a few details - like how the good/evil mastermind ushered in a new world order - but they gave a great overview. Especially to people who've read the book.

I've decided that to work on music necessitates a clear mind. And yet I've been spending a lot of time filling my mind up, leading to distractions or just unclear thinking. Everything you learn must be assimilated, organized in the structures of your mind. These periods seem to come and go in waves. A period of intake followed by a period of purging. A period consuming, a period digesting, a period excreting the excess as waste. So I'm back to saying no to say yes. Limiting my intake so I can process what I think I know. Synthesize. It's just that it's hard to create in a period of intake. Creating is synthesizing, purging.

So that's what's on the plate for this week. Info fasting and synthesizing. [read: less internet.] Adhering to a more rigid structure, treating it more like work.

And then to Chicago this weekend for operas upon operas.

writing requires thinking; thinking requires writing

One hand is washing the other, but my hands have gotten dirty over the past few weeks. I've been putting less and less effort into the blog, and it's starting to show; people are starting to talk. And worry. I should set the record straight; I'm feeling really good about things - finding newer and deeper meaning in life; writing better and better music; content - but just haven't been motivated to write blog posts as much. Writing is one of those things, like yoga, that takes some effort to do, but once you do it, your investment pays off dividends. I haven't been doing any reviewing recently - though I could have - I just didn't have the obligation or the motivation to review things I didn't have to. Or, in the case of the Hyde Park salon, the intricacies of the situation were complicated enough that I opted to wallow in the beauty of the flawed gem, dwelling in the contradiction like a warm zen koan. So today, I'm writing like it's my job. Words today; music tomorrow.

It's Monday, the third day of my three-day epic weekend. This morning, I finished Watchmen, yesterday, I saw a theatrical adaptation of Wagner's entire Ring Cycle. What would have taken 20 hours of opera, they condensed into 6, including a 45-minute dinner break and two intermissions. Having given my reaction to Watchmen already, I'm still brewing a reaction to the Wagner, which I'll post as a review (both of the production as a whole and then the music). It's nice to have these Mondays to stop and process. Even though I'm not go-go-going during the week, I still tend to spend most of my productive energy thinking about music, the rest of the time either relaxing or eating. So I'm still trying to find the appropriate time to process. For this weekend, now is that time.

To summarize, for those of you who've missed some episodes, a month ago, I quit everything, cutting myself loose of a handful of jobs, my apartment, and the city to partially move to a house in the woods to focus on my self and my music. I'd been finding that, neck deep in rat race, it's easy to lose focus, hard to keep your eyes on the prize. You learn to be patient, but you forget what you're waiting for. I was headed in too many directions and needed to pick one: Say No to Say Yes. Saying yes to everything is saying no to everything. Keeping all your options open is to forge no path, to stay motionless admiring the landscape of possibilities without exploring any one in particular. Even if it's just a matter of 3 or 4 options, it's still a problem. These days, after over a month of this, I have managed to prune my tree of many unnecessary, distracting options so that it grows taller and straighter. I don't think this necessarily means that you can't change your mind later: once the tree grows tall, you can branch out later. The only other time I've done anything like this was grad school, and now, 5 years later, is the perfect time to refocus. It's turning into a whole-self project: physical, intellectual, emotional, musical, spiritual.

So, weekdays, I'm in Michigan; weekends I'm in Chicago. Last week was a good one, although the blog posts are just so so. I learned a lot about myself, about what I'm looking for at the bottom of the well of music, and ended up coming up with a couple pieces that are big steps forwards down a path I've been trying to hew for a while. It started with an intense conversation with a medical intuitive, who, like a psychoanalyst, shed light on dark rooms I never knew existed. It was époustouflant, mind-blowing, turned my thinking inside out and upside down, leaving me with a great deal of new information that I had to somehow weave together with what I thought I already knew. I came up with some decent ideas early in the week but nothing that I could carry to term and birth. Each week, I start things, polish things, finish things, and edit things. Every day is different, but I tend towards spontaneous creation. When it's good, the other tasks are simpler, manageable.

Friday night, I drove in in another flurry of snow. This time, the roads seemed better but the traffic seemed worse. Or maybe the drivers were just less careful. I saw 2 or 3 cars in the ditch, one I didn't even see until I drove past and its headlights hit the side of my face. I saw 2 or 3 accidents with or without emergency crews. I, though, was appropriately careful and made it without too much delay. I drove straight to a friend's housewarming, which was only a slight shock to my system. I couldn't quite get the small talk juices going and didn't know that many people to begin with. I ended up leaving to join up with Darick.

Darick was going to his friend's show at some place called the Mopery. I had never heard of it, nor had he, but it was in Logan Square, presumably some new bar or club. Neither. It was like a basement but on the second floor. More of a "Space" than a "Venue", it was pretty well packed with hipsters, art students, and punks, all in their early twenties. Very urban and ironic, I felt like someone had brought in New York hipsters from the 70s through today. The music was appropriate for the venue and crowd - to a point. The first person I saw was a girl with a loop pedal, some analog pedals, and a tape deck. The tape deck presumably had some of the beats and other extraneous noises that accompanied her looped and layered moaning and chanting. Like an artist making sound art more than a musician making music. Then there was a band. The band wasn't terrible but it wasn't good. Drums, keys, overly dramatic singer (think Dead Can Dance), and DJ doing some scratching. The DJ part was fun to see again, and it was just good to have on in the background of our conversation. Then Darick's friend went. She was a much more skilled and professional version of the first girl. An artist with a loop pedal looping her voice, random percussion, hammer dulcimer, glasses filled with water. It was a good performance. BUT. By that point, 1 am or so, the hipsters had drunk through their first 40 and were on their second. [Darick had picked up some beer, so we were drinking Maudite. At the very least, we felt superior in our drink of choice.] So the drunks wanted to rock, or punk, out, and were a tough audience for the mostly ambient layers of sounds coming at them. Some in front wanted to fondle her instruments, her decorative elements. Venue is so important.

Saturday, I had brunch with Sarah B and then went back to Darick's. I ended up watching a bunch of South Park on his Netflix and then, wanting something less passive, I saw Watchmen sitting on Darick's shelf. He's been a diehard fan of the book since the early 90s when he read it as a teen. I had only really heard about it through him and knew very little except for his praise. I started in, got addicted, and read about half of the 200 or 300 pages in one sitting. Then, of the 3 parties I had to go to on Saturday, I started with the one at my old apartment, a housewarming for Alan and his roommate. I know Alan - we're friends on FB - and we often end up at the Gallery Cabaret for Sunday night open mic. It was good to meet his roommate and chill as we took turns playing Super Mario 3.

Saturday Party #2 was the release party of The Point magazine. I had been building this party up for a couple weeks in my head - for lost of reasons: musical, intellectual..."social" - and had a really good time. I didn't get to see everyone I wanted to see but saw many others and met some great people. After a band that was good but too loud, the night devolved into a pretty great dance party.

Got back late, did a second amazing parallel parking job, did some South Park, slept till like 9.

Sunday was brunch with Darick and Tim, another illustrative artist, before convincing an exhausted Diana that 6 hours of Wagner's Ring was a good idea. I had already bought a ticket and was committed. The Wagner was amazing. It was a great, interesting, inventive production, pulling out all the stops: Shakespearian acting, puppets, shadow puppets, masks, great lighting. The acting was pretty good but inconsistent. The music was absolutely terrible. Absolutely. There is no depth to my offense at what they did. And yet I still loved the production. What's not to love? It's the epic to end all epics. It's the Teutonic version of the Lord of the Rings. And it's one of those stories that I had heard piecemeal over the years; seeing the whole story in one fell swoop really helped contextualize it. So go SEE it. It was by no means a perfect production, but it was certainly amazing enough to make the 6-hour commitment worth it. I would love to see a slightly more professional version, but they would have to keep all the magic and innovation. The shadow-puppet dragon, the giants, and the "swimming" of the rhinemaiden could not be done any better.

I'm nearing the end of my Monday. Soon I'll go teach Isabel piano and drive to Michigan. Hopefully the snow holds off. In general, I'm feeling confident with the present and optimistic about the future. But I'm also feeling a bit impatient. So I keep working to prune, so that I can nip those distracting thought branches in the bud.

Book Review: The Watchmen

I just finished a book, a book unlike any other I had read. In remarkably brief fashion, the author(s) managed to create and bring me into a world that bears a striking similarity to our own but whose divergences are as remarkable as its parallels. It's a world that attempts at every turn to prove itself as our reality just so it can overflow its bounds and flood our fertile minds with possibilities. The possibilities extend from our own reality like surreal protuberances, tentacles reaching, groping out in the darkness of time and space looking for a light switch.

Unlike all of the other books I have read, this book was illustrated, a graphic novel. Not just any graphic novel, the Watchmen is the only of its kind to be selected by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best novels of all time. I had never read any graphic novels or the comic books from which they emerged. My knowledge was limited, but I knew that there were two types of heroes—ones who possess superhuman powers and ones who are simply mortals with fancy gadgets. Supermen and Batmen. The Watchmen, as it turns out is a little of both: most of the characters are of the Batman variety; one, a Superman. And the Superman-type character is a conundrum, being both believable and unbelievable: he origins are rooted in the particle physics of our reality, but his powers are unimaginable, unbelievable, inhuman powers. Inhuman.

To me, the novel was a gigantic puzzle. The characters were deeply intense, the plot, an international intrigue, and putting it all together is a task partially up to the reader. Starting with a simple whodunnit, a single murder, it ends by involving the many more deaths/murders and an apocalyptic fervor ushering in a new world order. Luring you in with something easily believable, almost commonplace, it builds upon this foundation a beautifully grotesque monument to human existence. Along the way, it goes through a tangled web of characters, corporations, and other supporting evidence to lead you to a conclusion that is both optimistic and pessimistic and punctuated by a question mark. Supporting the story are details and interstitial commentary that, though seeming absurdly tangential and unnecessary, ultimately ties in. At one point, a character in the book reads a comic book—a play within a play? a commentary on using comics to escape the horrors of the world?—the plot of which seems parallel, unrelated, but ends up being almost related. The lines never actually meet, nor do they maintain their perfect distance. Thus it is that every image, each plot detail is a question mark, and every question is answered save the one posed on the final page.

Ultimately, at the end, it left me with a sense that I understand the world better, understanding good and evil in a deeper way, such that they never truly exist, that what is ostensibly good is, in fact, tinged with evil, and so on and vice versa: a full-color, three-dimensional yin-yang with goods and evils intertwining and containing each other. It demonstrates this through fiercely individual characters, each with their own morality, and, operating accordingly, they unfold the whole drama as if it were already written. Everyone's a hero, everyone's a villain, and in between are the watchmen. But who watches the watchmen?