What was that?

Reading most arts coverage in print or online nowadays tends to further give the impression that we're living in a monoculture and no one's really trying to be different. One longs for a story about someone committing to a really nutty idea. Well, here's one.

Can an opera work when, for the most part, you can't hear what people are singing? It's an interesting idea. Kind of the ultimate in "less is more." Difficult if not impossible to replicate electronically, which is why I didn't bother embedding a video. There is video about this piece, which workshopped in Chicago a few years ago, but it's just people talking about it.

This is the classic kind of idea where people visiting New York will take in a show and leave shaking their heads, going "I just don't get it." Of course they'd be relatively affluent and there's a good chance the actors and musicians are commuting from New Jersey and/or crashing at the Y. That's the 2018 angle.

Song at night

This song has been playing in my head for the past couple of days. I'm not a parent, and I haven't done a real deep research dive to find out if the writers of the song (Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman) were at the time, but it feels right. There's a mixture of affection and exasperation, two strings that can't be disentangled.

I'm guessing the Sandman that's gonna get you is different from the one Metallica sang about, but I could be wrong.

Blanks to fill in

The book Naming the World by Bret Anthony Johnston is subtitled "and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer." That pretty much tells you all you need to know. It's good because it gives you exercises: things to do. You don't have to do a lot of soul searching or get with a certain theory. Some of these exercises are more helpful than others, but I'm finding the ones that work are kind of exciting. There's a certain thrill in building up a scene.

There's one about writing something movie style. Not in script form, but limited to what can be picked up by the five senses. So not the character's thoughts or backstory, in other words. Basic description of a girl on a road, go from there. The thing is, there's a lot of ways you could go with this. I actually managed to pick one and run with it.

Charges

Earlier this evening the Internet seems to have gone down a couple of times. This is more interesting than annoying, and I'll expound on why. It seems to have been - in my admittedly inexpert opinion - caused by a power surge.

We didn't invent electricity. We did harness it. But it's a natural force. And sometimes it's cool to see it doing its own thing, acting as a natural force does.

Some perspective

A man is sitting at the bar, deep in drink. He hears something that so disturbs him he turns around to see who said it. He sees two astrophysicists from a nearby university. Staggering to their booth he says, "What were you guys just talking about?"

One of the physicists replies, "We were just discussing stellar evolution. My colleague believes that within 5 billion years, the sun will run out of fuel and become a red giant. The Earth and everything on it would be incinerated, of course."

The drunk stands down, more at ease now. "God, that's a relief," he says, "I thought you said 5 million."

(I didn't make up that joke. In some form it might actually be older than me. I gave it a little touch-up to make it more cinematic, though.)

Question from the curious

Here's a sincere question: How do you surprise people you meet? I mean pleasant surprise. Not, say, jumping out from behind a tree and shrieking. It's easy to become perfunctory in your dealings with others. I think most of us do to some extent. But sometimes you see people breaking out of that.

It came from 1966

As it happens, most people wouldn't know who Warren Zevon was until the latter half of the seventies. (And beyond; I'm sure David Letterman's sincere adoration of the man helped.) But as it also happens, he was active well before that. He was half of the duo Lyme & Cybelle - guessing he was Lyme. This early bit of psychedelia from them is different from what you think of as a Zevon recording but he was always versatile.

...good things

Will definitely miss The Awl. It was a good looking site, in a quiet and non-flashy way. It had smart, funny people writing for it. Perhaps most importantly as a matter of culture it saw the pitfalls of social media and the Internet itself - technological triumphalism, excessive branding, the turning away from everything that can't fit on a tiny screen - and tried to combat it.

The Awl was partly developed by people who had also worked at Gawker. Gawker, of course, went belly-up because a horrid zillionaire had a grudge against it. As far as I know there was nothing so melodramatic as that in The Awl's ending. It turns out it's just really hard to keep a journalistic outlet going in an automated and memory-free world.

Closing statement

When I used to get rides it would be in older cars. Well, maybe they weren't much older then, but they'd be a lot older now. And that meant that they were built differently. You could be more forceful closing the door, and sometimes you had to be.

More recently, people who've given me rides have been quietly dismayed when I slam, or at least "slam" the door getting out. And I get that. I've worked on it. Now I pretty much just give it a little push.

Tape on film

I just watched a movie tonight.Nightcrawler, from 2014. In it, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a petty thief who changes careers and starts providing stinger video footage of violent crime to an LA newscast. Not to give too much away, but it goes pretty well for him.

Gyllenhaal is good at slowly revealing himself to be detestable. And this is a revelation. Other characters react badly to him from the beginning, but most of them are jerks. He couldn't be any worse, could he? Well...

Los Angeles looks very pretty in this movie. In a desolate way, at least. It sometimes feels like the photos in a Gregory Crewdson exhibit have come to life. There's a large scale creepy saturation to it.

I'm not sure I see a lot of social significance in the movie, as some critics have claimed for it. It might lean too heavily on "one bad apple" explanations for what's wrong in the world. Still, it doesn't feel focus-grouped. The movie does what it set out to do with a remarkable concentration, which makes a kind of statement in itself.

Teeming Eyes

I have to say, the animator (Joanna Priestley) has found an interesting balance between the weird, the comical, and the causing of inexplicable physical discomfort. This looks a little fifties-ish, but distinctly eerie and new.

Sno cones

Tonight at the bus stop in front of Starbucks I saw three drinks left behind. One was a shake from the nearby Ben & Jerrys, another was a frozen coffee drink from Starbucks itself, while a third was just a coke. Two of them were near full. Maybe three different people had left them behind when their bus came, although drivers usually aren't so strict about drinks if you have the lid.  Anyway, the fact that the drinks were sitting out there counted as littering, so I opted to clean up. Before throwing out the containers I dumped out the contents into a snowbank next to the trash can. The coke left this big brown stain in the snow, which I expect could get some disgusting interpretations.

The time I like is the rush hour, cos I like the rush

As you might guess, the video above is not a true video. Rather it's made up of almost 1,000 photos taken by 38 pinhole matchbox cameras. Depicted is a busy street in Belem, Brazil. constructing this narrative out of still photos is an amazing feat, and I get a feel for the social rhythm of the city as well. Also, drums!

Cleanup crew

They're still at it out there. The snow plows, I mean, and their drivers. Really it was only after nightfall that they would even have the opportunity to get anything done. And my hat's off to them. It's still going to be a production getting around tomorrow, but you can see well defined streets and the hints of sidewalks, at least. The sign of a job well done.

Oddscape

Piranesi, who I'm just learning about, is a strange and somewhat intimidating artist. There's a lot of architectural detail, not surprising since he was an architect himself. Still, no one draws this anymore.

There's a definite family resemblance to Escher's work. But Piranesi doesn't seem to be trying to create illusions on paper, which is the difference between him and Escher. It's just very different.