I generally don't blog reviews much (actually, I don't blog much about anything) but I just went to the premiere of Steven Soderbergh's new film at the Tribeca Film Fest last night. And I'm not entirely sure what I think of it.

There's been quite a bit of hype surrounding Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, primarily due to his casting of "it girl" porn star Sasha Grey in the lead, in addition to a cast comprised primarily of non-actor friends of the director who mostly improvised their dialogue. While TGE isn't nearly as bad as that recipe for disaster might turn out, it isn't exactly good, either.

I'm of decidedly mixed feelings. It kept my attention for its (rather short) running time. I was never bored, but I was rarely truly engaged, either. The story isn't much on paper - a week in the life of Christine, a/k/a Chelsea, a high-end escort. The story, though, at times seems merely a vehicle for Soderbergh and his writers to make political points. Very little is talked about in this film besides the economy, and, in a move guaranteed to shorten this film's relatability to the next decade at most, the 2008 election. The wealthy men who pay for Chelsea's services bitch and moan about the market, Obama, how they're going to make ends meet - all the while shelling out $3,000 / hr for an escort. They take her to the hautest of NYC restaurants, stay in the most spectacular hotels, and dole out investment advice. We are, one assumes, supposed to have contempt for these people, and we do. Yet all the while, you can't help but hear that little voice in the back of your head, reminding you that tomorrow for lunch, Soderbergh will very likely be dining in those very restaurants. That he, and his friends, stay in those very luxury hotels when they're in town.

Christine buys the most expensive clothes, and rattles off her purchases in deadpan voiceover. At one point, I wanted to find the screenwriters and remind them that Bret Easton Ellis used the same gimmick in American Psycho twenty years ago. The clothes, the restaurants, the visible signifiers of wealth. There is a fine line which Soderbergh tries to dance - on the one side, we hate these people. On the other, we feel jealousy. We can't help but want their easy lives, these men who can spend in a day what most of us make in a year. And because the filmmakers are, at least from an economic standpoint, of that same set, it becomes difficult to separate them from the characters they ask us to despise.

The cast is, by and large, surprisingly good for a group of non-actors. Though a small amount of research reveals that the story behind the film is just that, a story. While many of the actors are truly first-timers, there are a few who've been here before. Timothy Davis has an extensive stage resume, though this is his first film. Timothy Cox has had a number of small parts on TV, as has Jeff Grossman. Peter Zizzo has appeared in commercials for Tony Robbins, and is an experienced public speaker, giving seminars on the music industry and songwriting. While TGE provides the largest roles for any of them. they are hardly first-timers.

But everyone wants to know - Sasha Grey. The star-on-the-rise. How is she? Well, that's a complicated matter.

In some ways, especially as the film begins, she is the perfect actress for the role. As she wanders from client to client, her expression rarely changes. Faux interest in their conversation, revealing nothing about herself, essentially providing a blank soundboard for their desires. She has no personality of her own. That is, after all, her job. Woven throughout the film we see a journalist (played by veteran journo Mark Jacobson) interviewing her, at yet another terribly expensive Manhattan restaurant. He tries to break her facade, to reveal the Christine behind the Chelsea, but she won't budge. She treats the journalist as if he's another client.

Perhaps that's all we should see of Chelsea. Perhaps the movie should have simply been about this blank, female Patrick Bateman. Unfortunately, where the movie both stumbles and achieves its greatest triumph is with the story of Christine.

It stumbles because, quite frankly, Sasha Grey is not up to the task. When her facade breaks it is only the words she says - not in her voice, her mannerisms, her eyes. While perfectly cast as Chelsea, she is sorely lacking as Christine.

Not up to the task yet, perhaps. Mind you, I don't want to denigrate Sasha Grey here. She may have the makings of a good actress in her. I find her an interesting person, culturally - how many 21 year olds, let alone porn stars, will cite Throbbing Gristle as one of their greatest influences? She's no empty-headed bimbo, nor would I ever suggest such. I suppose a lot of people are going to come away from this film saying she was great - but, let's be honest, that's in a very specific context. Great... for a porn star. For a non-actor. She certainly doesn't bring the film down, but she doesn't lift it up either. Maybe given a few more supporting roles, working across from some good actors, she could develop into something pretty good. But carrying a film like this would be a stretch for any actor, let alone a first-timer. One could easily imagine an Anne Hathaway or Natalie Portman knocking this role out of the park, being truly "great" in it.

The triumph of this film, on the other hand, is relative newcomer (he was in one other film, but that was in 1993) Chris Santos. As Christine's suffering boyfriend, Chris, he turns in an award-worthy performance. In many ways, he is the true lead of the film. One could interpret the title as being about his "Girlfriend Experience" as much as any other meaning the phrase has. Chris is a personal trainer, just trying to make ends meet, and being much more understanding about his girlfriend's career than most men would be. We watch him struggle with his economic and personal woes, and he's never less than genuine, subtly commanding every frame he's in. Simple scenes - asking his boss for a raise, trying to sell a client at the gym on a bigger workout package - ring as heartbreakingly true as any Cassavetes working-class drama.

These moments are juxtaposed with Christine's own efforts to increase her value. She works with a developer to increase traffic to her website. She talks to an accountant about investment opportunities. She goes to an escort "critic" - of who I'll discuss more later. Christine, like Chris, worries about her future. Are we are supposed to sympathize with her in the same way? It's very difficult when she still goes shopping at Michael Kors and Costume National. She is, in many ways, not that different from and just as contemptible as her clients. She talks of investing, of the future, yet she spends willy-nilly on staggeringly expensive ephemeral things. All this serves to do is make Chris' struggle all the more poignant. He, like most Americans, is not of the investor class. He lives hand-to-mouth. He does not have extra money to "invest" in anything. Chris, in the end, is the character the audience relates to. At least those of us not from Hollywood.

In what amounts to the plot, Christine falls for one of her clients. We learn, in bits and pieces, that our heroine is fascinated with something called "Personology" - a mish-mash of Astrology and other new-agey things that, she believes, can predict whether someone will be good or bad for her. She avidly reads books on the subject, and will reject clients with incompatible birthdays. Her falling for this client has less to do with him, personally - she only meets him once, and immediately agrees to go on a weekend trip with him - but that his birthday is compatible with hers on her charts. Never mind that, for all she knows, he could be a serial killer. She puts such blind trust in her charts that - in a subtle aside one could easily miss - we find out that, after one session, she has told this client her real name, and given him her real phone number.

In the scene that best exemplifies my mixed feelings on this movie, Chris confronts her on her weekend getaway plans. They have an agreement - it can't be easy being the boyfriend of a whore, after all - no trips with clients. Let alone one that she wants to "pursue something" with. She is going to destroy their relationship for a guy she has met only once. A man who is married with two children, no less.

Santos is electrifying. Grey is inanimate. This is a woman who is apparantly going to destroy her one real relationship for something that is most assuredly going to fail. Yet her delivery is matter-of-fact. Running off with this client, she doesn't come off so much driven as programmed to do it. When Chris talks trash on her "books" - her personology tomes, the one thing in her life she appears to have some passion for - her indignation comes off flat, bored. She is as passionless about her passions as she is about her clients. To top it off, the way it is shot, we don't even see Grey through most of it. She sits on the floor, behind a chair, blocking our view of her. We only hear her voice. For this scene, the climax of the film, Soderbergh has made his actress not just emotionally but visibly absent.

The director does manage to eke the waterworks from his star, though. She relates the story of a terrible experience with "The Erotic Connoisseur" - a Jabba-the-Hut-esque man who runs an escort review blog so revered by the Johns of the world that a thumbs up or down from him can make or break an escort's career. But the story she relates, that drives her to tears, is sadly kind of boring. Really? This was the worst experience she's ever had with a John? While it sounds a bit uncomfortable, I know girls who've had worse experiences on dates. In fact, Chelsea's workdays are so easy, one might come away from this film thinking the life of a whore was mostly sunshine and roses.

The critic is played by Glenn Kenny, the former film critic for Premiere magazine, in a hilarious performance that is obviously meant as a dig against his own profession. And while he's very funny, it is sadly these kind of heavy-handed self-indulgent "inside baseball" references that occasionally sink The Girlfriend Experience. Soderbergh doesn't like critics? Wow, go figure. And in case you missed the point, let's have the soundtrack be two hipster street musicians playing a song called "Everybody's a Critic" - c'mon, Steve, you can be a bit more subtle than that.

In an interesting sociological comparison, I noticed that the laughs from the "VIP" section of the theater - the filmmakers, their friends, etc - were much louder during these moments than for those of us in the general admission seating. On the other hand, when Kenny, in voice-over, gives his scathing review of Chelsea, the common folk got their biggest laugh of the night: (paraphrasing) "she might be good playing the goth girl, or the the girl-next-door, but instead she tries to pass herself off as something 'sophisticated'." - he could just as easily have been describing most people's view of Sasha Grey herself.

I guess my problem with this film is - who is it for? What is it saying? It's obviously trying to say something, not just present us with a slice of life. It isn't really a character study, since Christine/Chelsea has very little character. So what are Soderbergh and the writers (SS says it was largely improvised, but there are two writers credited) trying to get at? To use the high-class call girl business as a way to expose the differences between the haves and have-nots? In that sense, it works, but only in the way that someone very wealthy saying "I feel your pain" can - it can't help but ring false, no matter how sincere, because they can't feel our pain. They're not wondering how they're gonna pay the bills. The film is parade of the director's rich industry friends, eating in expensive restaurants, wearing expensive clothes. Is he pointing the finger at himself, then? Is "Chelsea" the filmmakers' blank-canvas whore, on whom they can reflect whatever it is they want to hear back about themselves?

Or does Soderbergh see himself as Christine? Whoring himself out to Hollywood, but in the service of something greater? Building himself up to the point where he can make his own films on his own terms - where the boutique Christine dreams of opening is a metaphor for The Girlfriend Experience itself. Casting "The Critic" as the villain lends credence to that theory. And it might work, except Soderbergh has never whored himself to Hollywood. He's never done a project that wasn't 100% Soderbergh-approved. Even his most commercial films - the Ocean's series - are very much products of his.

Or is the movie itself Christine? In a sense, the great flaw of this movie may be that, like Christine, while beautiful and well made, it just isn't anything. The various interpretations one will hear will likely reflect more about the viewer than the film. The Hollywood insiders in the VIP seats certainly had different reactions than the proles in the audience. Was The Girlfriend Experience a 1.7 million dollar whore, given to us (well, for 15 bucks) to see what we want/need to see in it?

One could make the argument that this open interpretation is the genius of the film. And it certainly provides for lively conversation. But none of the interpretations make for a particularly interesting film. Imagine a big, overstuffed enchilada, full of ingredients and lots of textures but lacking in any flavor. It's up to you, the eater, to add the salsa, guacamole, whatever you like. And then all it tastes like is what you added. One leaves the table full, but not satisfied.

Like a good whore, one imagines, it keeps you entertained for a bit, but it doesn't mean anything more than what you let it. Those who find something deeper only do because they want something deeper.

Or perhaps I'm over-analyzing, and the film was what it appeared to be at its most base interpretation. The final shot might sum it up for many viewers: A shlubby middle-aged Jew, who paid a lot of money for the privilege, slobbering over the beautiful shiksa body of Sasha Grey. Maybe that's really all we saw.

In response to this interview with Matt Levine, owner of NYC's newest hotspot The Eldridge, Chef Suffolk of The Suffolk Kitchen, creator of the $12,000 Knish, was inspired to put his culinary quests on hold in order to conquer the world of New York Nightlife. We recently caught up with him to talk about his new venture - "NM-UH" - a hotly anticipated, ultra-exclusive Lower East Side nightclub that he promises will take NYC Douchebaggery to heights heretofore unseen. Excerpts have been posted at Grub Street, but here's our unedited Q&A with the reclusive genius...

When are you opening?
We're open, but we still have a few kinks to work out. We need to come up with more pretentious names for staff positions than any other club. The Eldridge really upped the game, with their "butlers" and "chaperones" and such - we have to compete with that. This is not an easy business. Our staff deserve better. They're all highly-paid professionals. We're leaning towards "whores" but haven't really made up our minds yet.
 
How would the waitresses feel about being called "whores"? Isn't that sexist?
To most waitresses it would be, yes, but not ours. Ours have no souls, and thus no feelings. They're from a special breed that is only concerned with the bare necessities of survival: food, shelter, tanning... most of them work for free just for the chance to rub elbows with celebrities, because life is meaningless if you can't personally interact with people you see on "Access Hollywood."

Our waitresses, while we're on the subject, are one of our features that set us above any other club - you can have anything you want. If you like the classic model-type, we've got those. You want Latinas in assless chaps? Done. Former nun turned lesbian folksinger? Done. We have a quartet of Japanese schoolgirls with a number of different outfits at the apex of Japanese Youth Fashion. We actually stole them from Gwen Stefani - they were part of a custom jacket put together for her by Yohji Yamamoto. She was totally wasted and didn't even notice they were gone. We feed them a special diet of caviar, chestnuts, and pineapple juice. And gold leaf. It makes their urine very sweet, which goes into one of our signature cocktails.
 
But maybe the Lower East Side doesn't need this kind of venue. Isn't the appeal of that neighborhood that it's grimy?
We keep the facade grimy because our patrons, while the upper crust of society, are the kind who can still relate to lower class people. But we keep it classy at the same time. We have our own signature grime - a blend of Nile River mud, truffle dust, the Colonel's Secret Recipe, Karl Lagerfeld's dandruff flakes, and dried vomit collected from anorexic runway models. And gold leaf. We sprinkle it liberally around the sidewalk so that those few steps from the limo door to our secret entrance are perfect. It looks and smells exactly like real NYC grime.
 
What I don't get is how it's going to be that vastly different from anything else out there. You still have bartenders. You're just calling them something else.
We have chocolate and fresh fruit. No one else - I mean NO ONE else - has chocolate and fresh fruit. Our classic cocktails are taken to a level no one's ever experienced before. Like, we make our margaritas with Cointreau, not triple sec. And we put gold leaf in them. And we use very, very expensive liquor. And because it's so expensive, we water it down with only the finest, purest water - from a secret source in Maine, guarded by a moose. Very exclusive shit.
And our selection of name-brand liquors that signify status is incomparable. Like, for Cognacs we have Hennessy, Remy AND Courvoisier. Only we call them "'yak" because when they're downtown our celebrity clientele like to use the popular slang terms.

And we just inroduced a special collection of "His-n-Hers" cocktail pairs. The most popular is probably the "Romatic Getaway" - for him, a secret blend of exotic fruit juices, mezcal, and a raw oyster. For her: Sunny Delight, "Douché de Bagnac" Club Soda, vodka, and a floater of Rohypnol. And gold leaf.
 
What's the capacity?
It's the size of a city block, only much, much smaller. When you walk in, we have the Jennifer Convertibles banquettes. The entire left wall is our "expensive shit" display. We like our patrons to know right when enter that they're somewhere exclusive. At the far end is our rotating collection of almost-celebrities, people who tried and never achieved mega-stardom but were never quite interesting enough to wind up on reality shows, either. We always keep at least one around.
 
What are they for?
To drink their blood. This week we have Gretchen Mol.
 
Will the Smartwater Escalade chauffer people back to Williamsburg?
What is Williamsburg?

It's in Brooklyn.
What is Brooklyn? Oh, wait, that's that place the rapper people are always rapping about. Isn't that where they lived when they were still poor? Don't only poor people live there? I don't think anyone from this "Brooklyn" would be in here.

How do you decide who gets in?
We know a lot of quality people. It's friends and family. As long as those friends and family are famous movie, TV, music, or sports stars. Or very wealthy. That's basically what it is.
 
How will they let you know they're coming?
We give them laser-engraved enema bags. We thought we would do douchebags, but that's so last year. We wanted to take it up a level.

We also have a public line and a private line. Of course, no one from the public line will ever get in. The public line is six blocks away from the club, so no regular people can find out where the club really is. There's a closed-circuit feed, though, of the public line, that patrons can access through special screens located througout the club. That way they can point and make fun of the commoners.

If you don't have an enema bag, can you get in?
Only if you work here. We can always use able-bodied men to shovel coal in the basement. You won't be allowed to interact with the guests, but knowing you're making celebrities' lives more comfortable is its own reward.

Can you drop some names of who we'll see there?
Well, you'll never see anyone here, since you'll never get in. But we'll be hosting Miley Cyrus' Sweet 16 Party, and have a special "Down Low" party coming up for a select group of A-listers: Tom Cruise, Becks - I call him "Becks" because I know him personally - and some others I can't name. Lindsay is a regular, of course, just last night she was in with Mark Ronson while his sister DJ'd, and the three of them ran off to one of our private party rooms. Later one of the Olsen Twins joined them.
 
Which one?
The one who was engaged to Heath Ledger, I think. God, we've been trying to get him to come since we opened. He's SO A-list these days.

So I've finally gotten about to updating the pieces here, figure the same four have been up long enough that even I'm sick of hearing them when my page opens. I've left 7YG up for the time being as people seem to like that one. Makes a good first impression. So, what's new?

Eventual Elegy in memory of K was written for the 60 X 60 Project. It became part of the "New York Minutes" program, which sadly I never caught live as there were only two performances, one in New Jersey, the other at 4:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Oh well. So it's here for those who missed it. By which I mean, everybody.

Short Piece for Two Guitars is... a short piece for two guitars. Shocking, I know. It began as something significantly longer but after much hemming and hawing it was quite obvious that I'd said everything I wanted to some fifty seconds in, and everything after that was just detracting from the whole and ruining what was so nice about it in the first place. Like trying to turn what's obviously meant to be a fling into a relationship. So good riddance to the rest of it. The New Simplicity meets The New Brevity.

Three Sketches - specifically, sketches 1, 4 and 5 towards a new project I'm working on. The three are seperated by five-second pauses, just for clarity (as if I've ever been concerned with clarity...) Getting back to the ol' sound-collage after some time off from it. A preview of something that might be finished around, say, 2015 or so.

Anyway, do enjoy.

So I never have much to say here, really. So here's the first ten tracks that come up on the ol' iPod shuffle:

1. Punky Brüster - Wallet Chain

Weird. I only have one song by this group (actually a spin-off of Strapping Your Lad) in my 'Pod and it pops up first. Funny little punk rock three-chorder with energy to burn. Good way to start the day.

2. Seeds and Stems - Giudizio Disangue

I can't remember where S&S came from, they were a group on mp3.com back in the day, doing Goblin-esque sci-fi-/horror/action movie soundtracky stuff. Loads of fun, and really good at what they did. They would have sounded right at home in some wackadoodle Dario Argento flick.

3. Slayer - Necrophobic

I don't think I need to defend Slayer. 'specially not Reign In Blood era Slayer.

4. Peter Brötzmann - Divide by Zero

PB with the Chicago Tentet, from the three-disc set of live and studio sides on Okkadisc, now sadly out of print. Holy crap. Has there been a better free jazz album in the last twenty years? Thirty? I saw these cats live and it was mindblowing - like watching a chamber orchestra spin previously unknown Stravinsky works out of thin air.

5. Opeth - Baying of The Hounds

Off Ghost Reveries. Totally proggy - and kinda goth to boot. I really shouldn't like it at all - but go figure, I'm fucking crazy about this album. Despite everything about it, on paper, screaming lame - I mean, it's prog-death-metal with folky acoustic "sensitive" interludes - it fucking blazes. And the whole thing's got this groovy Greg Rolie style organ (think Santana in '72) that takes it up a notch, puts a little 70's retro psychedelic flavor in there.

6. Ambrose Slade - Knocking Nails Into My House

Early incarnation of the band that eventually was just called Slade, circa 1969, I think. Solid guitar pop. The album is mostly covers of bigger artists from the time - Born to Be Wild, Journey To The Center Of Your Mind, Martha My Dear. That's just something bands don't do anymore. Knocking Nails was a cover of a Jeff Lynne tune which I've never heard the original version of - I can only assume it was with The Move.

7. John Cage - Ryoanji (Jeff Krieger, cello)

Damn. Probably my favorite recording of this piece. The album this is from (Krieger's Night Chains) is another out of print one - too bad, it's really tremendous.

8. Archive - Numb

From You All Look The Same To Me. Awesome elctro-pop group from the UK that no one in the US has heard of. Kind of have a Charlatans-meets-Underworld at half-speed vibe. They keep the songs simple - two, three chords, a great melody and groove and boom, you got a killer song. Their first couple albums were pretty weak IMHO, but they really came into something on YALTSTM. A great pop album more people oughta know about.

9 Giacinto Scelsi - Rucke di Guck III

Hmmm... not one of Scelsi's most interesting pieces. Not sure why I've even got it in here. Not sure, really, why anyone felt it was worth recording. Sounds like something GS wrote for goofs more than anything else. Dates from '57, just before he found his voice - the obsessively monotonal works he's more famous for. It's rather obvious, listening to Rucke di Guck, that he needed to find another direction.

10. Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter (Live, Brussels, 1973)

The Stones. 1973. Live. Mick Taylor on fucking fire. 'nuff said.

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Strange... Mostly Pop / Rock, only two classical and one jazz. And no folk / blues / bluegrass. Seems odd. I'd wager jazz takes up a good 1/3rd of what's in there. Hmm... maybe I'll try it again next week and see what happens.

So I moseyed across the bridge to what is arguably my least favorite part of Manhattan, the Financial District, to check out the premiere of Phil Kline's John The Revelator - a Mass consisting of the "Ordinary" texts (the Kyrie, Sanctus, etc.) and some "Propers" (additional texts) he picked out - selections from Revelations, gospel blues, a passage from Samuel Beckett and poems by David Shapiro.

Musically, the overall vibe was Early Music meets Minimalism. Nothin' wrong with that. I was reminded of Terry Riley's Salome Dances For Peace (a work I have great affection for) more than anything else. The performance, by Lionheart and Ethel, was as one would expect - superb.

JTR is a very, very focused work - dare I say it, perhaps a bit too narrowly focused. For forty or so minutes the mood does not change one iota - and I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure every one of the dozen-plus sections was in the same key and mode. It certainly felt that way. (If it's not true, it's "truthy" at least...)

Take most any section individually, though, and it was quite good: the Kyrie and the Shapiro poems were standouts, and a section based on Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground was simply breathtaking, with Lionheart playing an "instrumental" role by humming - or, more to the point, moanin' a la Blind Willie. But taken all together, the unchanging mood became kind of relentless after awhile, and eventually lost any power. There was a point where I just wanted to say "Okay, dude! I got the point!" - I guess I could kind of compare it to my reaction to Gibson's The Passion of The Christ, how by the fiftieth whipping or so it just stopped having any visceral impact.

There is no salvation in this Mass. Instead what he have is, for the better part of an hour, a pervading sense of futility, despair, and fear. Nothing wrong with that, mind you - there's quite a grand tradition of Christian art that gazes into the darkness. But the singularity of mood coupled with the (I assume intentionally) limited dynamics and tonal spectrum seperate this work from, say, Britten's War Requiem, or a Nick Cave album - two other things that came to mind as I listened.

There were, though, a couple of passages that just seemed to meander around going nowhere in particular. The section based on Beckett I didn't much care for - though personally, I've never thought of Beckett as a particularly good choice for musical adaptation. The stream-of-conciousness prose doesn't lend itself well to a structured form, especially when working with a fairly rigid tempo - but to each their own. For me, removing that section and one other (the Credo, by the end of which I found myself fidgeting) would tighten up the work considerably, IMO making the overall impact that much stronger.

But this is only a first impression - I should and will reserve final judgement until I can hear it at home, as it's quite likely the uncomfortable plastic folding chair I was sitting in, elbow-to-elbow with people on either side, was feuling my impatience. I mean, on paper, I should loooove John The Revelator - I often like my art long, narrowly focused, and with near-imperceptible development. I've watched Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, like, a dozen times. I hold up Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood as one of the zeniths of modern music. Plus I love early American hymnody and gospel blues. And, heck, I just really like Phil Kline, too. Everything adds up to JTR being totally my cup o' tea. And it is, it's just... perhaps the bag was let to steep a bit too long. I'll be sure to blog on second impressions when it's broadcast in December.

Derek Bailey... what can you say?

Derek Bailey passed away on Christmas. I just found out today. There's enough obituaries out there explaining who he was, what he did, what his music was like... what can I write but my own personal impressions?

I was travelling with a friend one day to Vermont, driving up I-95, on our way to a music festival of unknown hippie jam bands. This was 1989 or so - the retro fad for groups like Phish, etc., was just beginning to creep to life. Jerry Garcia was still alive. And we're cruising along in his clunky old Volkswagon bus listening to local college radio, whatever we could find, and we came across a jazz show - some station out of Amherst, if I remember right.

I was still dabbling in serialism back then, and my fascination was for music that was complex on paper. Still, there was something about the whole serialist / modernist school that just didn't speak to me. On an intellectual level, there was something fun about it - but on a purely visceral level, it was lacking.

And then I heard something that night.

It was so... organic. There was no concern for such things as melody, harmony, rhythm. Just guitar and drums - but like nothing I'd ever heard. This was no hippie jam.

You could tell these two guys - whoever they were - had some kind of simpatico that was truly rare and beautiful. Anticipating each other's moves, smoothly moving from one emotion to another - angry, tense, and what stood out most of all - silly. These guys took themselves seriously, no doubt, but there was a gentle humor to it all.

I sat in rapt silence throughout - getting lost in the music, letting it take me where it did. Did it "groove"? In a way. Something about it let the audience "in" in a way that the purely composed music I'd been poring over didn't. It didn't require study, or acclimation. It was what it was, and took you along for the ride.

The set ended and I listened for the name - Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. ?? Who were these guys? This was in the days before the internet. I'd never heard these names before.

I demanded we pull over to a rest stop so I could call the radio station. I talked to the DJ for a few minutes - I don't remember for the life of me her name, but she schooled me with a three-minute crash course in free jazz. I'd heard some already - Ornette and late period Coltrane. Some worked for me and some didn't. But there was something different about this stuff. Was it even jazz? She gave me a few names to check out, pointed me down the path. We got back to the van in time to hear her introduce another track - just for me! - a Cecil Taylor / Max Roach duet that just killed.

I never spoke to her again, but I will marry that woman someday.

After we pulled in to our campsite, I was feeling inspired. I pulled my banjo out of the back and began plonking away, much to the dismay of our campsite-mates. I suppose it's bad enough hearing someone who doesn't know what they're doing play free jazz. But to do it on a banjo... I needed some work, but I knew I'd found a direction to explore, something that spoke to me.

And so I began. Derek Bailey was not exactly common in music stores, but finally I found some at Cutler's Music in New Haven CT. The two albums I picked up - the one I'd heard, simply titled Han, and a solo album called Aida - couldn't have been more different. I knew right off the bat I loved these guys. That humor I'd heard was right there on the cover of Han - a cartoony drawing of a destroyed guitar neck with two hands coming in from either side - one with a saw, in the other, wire cutters.

Aida was a different kind of revelation: It had it's aggressive side, sure, but it was sparse and subtle too. It made sense to me. I listened to it constantly, getting lost in the spaces between the notes, the outbursts. And the way he played - there was only guitar listed, but it sounded like no guitar I'd ever heard. It was like some combination of a guitar, koto, and one of Cage's prepared pianos, but... there was nothing prepared about it.

The more I listened, the more I read about him, the more fascinated I became. I'd had no idea, but this guy was legend among his peers. It seemed odd I'd never heard of him before, but then all his recordings were on obscure European labels, mostly on a tiny label called Incus he owned himself. I worked in a music store myself at the time, but we had no distributor who carried this stuff. Most of it was, to my knowledge, out of print. But bit by bit I found more and more: classics like Cyro, his album of duets with Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista. Or the bizarre and funny Yankees, a meditation on baseball with George Lewis and John Zorn. And the indescribably beautiful Lace, another solo outing. One of the (many) great things about Bailey was the list of musicians he worked with. Through him (along with Bennink and Cecil Taylor, whose catalogs I was exploring with equal relish), I was introduced to so many other players they worked with: Lewis, Tony Oxley, Louis Moholo, and the incomparable Evan Parker. The younger guitarists he influenced read like a who's who of experimental guitar heroes: Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Marc Ducret, Eugene Chadbourne, and countless others.

I had trouble with this music as "jazz", though it certainly bore some relation - you can hear, at times, the influence of Django especially. But there was a touch of what seemed like Webern in there too. It was even further removed - further "out" than Ornette. I read later that Bailey himself wasn't really down with the term "jazz", and preferred to simply call his music "non-idiomatic" - a term which manages to be ridiculously vague yet describes his music better than any other I've heard.

John Allen on WFMU had a tribute show a couple days ago, which you can check out online here. There's some great stuff there. The duet with Fred Frith is particularly astounding, and there's wonderful tracks with Bennink and Parker of course.

What else is there to say? You can't describe Derek Bailey in words. Words are for suckers. Just listen.

For whatever reason lately I've been obsessed with slow things. Three hour art films where the narrative barely moves. Making soup stocks. Music which takes a ridiculously long time to develop. When composing or improvising I grow more and more fascinated with the details of each moment - how do I extend it? How does one make a moment more than, well, a moment? I'm focused very much on the now - taking it away from the big picture, is each event interesting in and of itself? Are the transitions from one to the next?

Music falls into a very strange place in the arts. Essentially, there are two kinds of art: those that are experienced in the moment (painting, sculpture, photography, etc) and those that take place over a period of time (drama, fiction, poetry, music)

The fundamental problem with music is that, unlike drama, there is no narrative flow. Instrumental music - though often it follows certain rules that we may be familiar with - is still purely abstract. As a form of communication, it leaves a bit to be desired. That's why the most popular form is songcraft - not pure music, but a combination form which incorporates some kind of verbal description of events or emotions. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. I'm quite jealous of good lyricists, of people who can craft concise, three-minute pop songs that bring across the artist's feelings with depth and directness. Me? I suck with words. I'm stuck using this weird non-verbal abstract form to express my deepest emotional thoughts. Fucking frustrating. Yes, one can suggest a series of events or emotions but in the end the audience member has to take a greater role in the work than in any other form. After all, what suggests something to you may not to them - we don't all have the same cultural cues built in.

The same can be said, of course, for abstract painting. A viewer's reaction to Pollock says as much about the viewer as the artist. But since painting is art type "A" - art which is experienced in the moment - it doesn't require the same investment of time that music does.

So music is stuck with the burden of straddling two forms: it occurs over time, yet has no narrative to latch on to. Yes, certain forms are familiar, and we go along with them - verse/chorus/verse, 12 bar blues, etc - but they are familiar abstractions. After all, what does I-IV-V communicate, in and of itself? Depending if it's Albert King or BB King, it could be something completely different. (For those that don't know, "I-IV-V" is shorthand for standard Blues chords.)

And then there are those in the classical ghetto for whom the forms and whatnot which are familiar to us - the sonata, for example - are not familiar to most of the outside world.

I suppose it's partially for that reason that I abandoned form altogether. I have more of a "whatever form it takes, it takes" attitude when I write. If, in the end, turns out it's kind of a sonata - well, bully for me.

But I was talking about slow things, right?

Since music is, in the way it is percieved (at least by me) similar to expressionist painting and such, I suppose it was only natural that I start focusing on shorter and shorter periods of time. How much can be communicated in a moment? In the time it takes to look at a painting?

There are different ways to explore it, repetition being the most obvious. We get to dwell on it for awhile, mulling it over and over and over again, taking our time getting from moment "A" to moment "B" - letting it fully sink in before developing into the next one. You know, the minimalist way. It works for me sometimes. Still, with repetition I find one loses the event itself and instead hears the pattern. The moment is no longer the focus, but the rhythm. It strikes me as the equivalent of taking a Pollock painting, shrinking it down and repeating it until it becomes - well, something more akin to wallpaper. I hesitate to say that because I don't want to knock minimalism - I think very highly of a number of composers from that genre - Riley, Reich, and (some) Glass in particular stand out. Granted, Brian Eno conceived of ambient music (which has a great deal of crossover with minimalism) as a kind of sonic wallpaper, so maybe it's not as insulting as it seems to sound. Anyway, I mean no offense by it.

Me? I like silence - letting a note, a phrase hang in the air for contemplation. The way one sees a painting, taking it all in at once, and then continuing to look - for a second, for a minute, for an hour.

Really, though, it's combination of the two - a repeat after it's had time to sink in. Maybe the repeat is used as a refresher, or a slight variation, playing with the dynamics of it, the tempo. Rather than repeat it identically, explore all the different ways of presenting the same information, the same expression, while keeping it fundamentally what it is. Taking that painting, and looking at it from different angles. Placing it in different backgrounds, different contexts. Changing the focus to different details, different aspects. I try to create music that has that kind of effect - and of course, be interesting enough that a listener would want to continue "looking" at it, exploring it further along with me.

So... why? Why would anyone in their right mind do this?

I suppose for some it's about going into a "zone" - creating a space for contemplation. And I readily admit I've gone that route. The tracks which are currently up on my main page come primarily from that place. But there's something else I'm trying to capture now. Something more elusive.

It's more... well, the same reason B.B. King might hold back on that resolving note for just a second - making you wait that extra bit before the V goes to the I. Only extended further. How long can you stand on that precipice before going one way or the other? That moment of excitement, of fear - reducing it to it's tiniest details, shifting, changing ever so slowly, moving towards closure but constantly delaying the payoff. Even the resolution itself is stretched out. That moment when you realize you're "there", and have been there and there's no turning back. The approaching of the inevitable. How long can that moment, and all the emotions that go with it - relief, doubt, nostalgia, loss - be extended?

Because isn't it about the getting there? Like delaying an orgasm as long as humanly possible - you want to cum, of course, because that's the payoff - but not yet. Not until there's nothing that you can do but that. And the longer you hold out the more fucking tremendous it will be - but, after all, once you climax it's pretty much over 'cept for the cuddling. Or implacable feelings of guilt. Your mileage may vary.

But... maybe it's not about orgasms so much - in fact, it may be pointedly not about them. Maybe it's more like someone you pass on the street: that moment of pure, animal, unrequited attraction, and you can't get them out of your mind - the image, the way they were framed by the light, the drip of sweat on the back of their neck that caught your eye - for the next hour. Music - like a beautiful, sexualized human being, can tease you. And you let it. Because there's something about that moment that you want to hold on to. Because maybe the tease is as good as the real thing.

Well, okay, not quite as good. But pretty good nonetheless.

Anyway, the music/sex comparison has been done to death, and by far superior writers. So no need to go there. Consider this moment done, for now.

Ah, the orchestra.

More on the end times:

I've taken a bit of a "who cares?" attitude to the whole "death of classical music" mishegas in the past, but that's not entirely honest. What's dying is, specifically, the orchestra. And because it's The Institution That Represents Classical Music, we tend to talk about Classical Music, as a whole, being on death's door.

So it's time to cut it off, like a gamey leg that's threatening to infect the rest of the body.

There's a whole host of reasons why orchestras are failing: the staggering costs, dwindling interest from the public. Most major centers treat the orchestra as their reason for existence, and the various off-shoots - chamber music groups and the like - as accoutrements.

But what if we reverse that? Take a cue from jazz: on any given night, one's choice of small combos far exceeds the number of big bands. What if Lincoln Center presented primarily chamber music on it's main stage and saved the orchestral shows for premiering new works, composer birthday celebrations, and the requisite holiday season concerts? It would reduce costs, certainly. And it would make orchestral concerts special occasions - real gotta-have-it tickets. As it stands, for a casual listener it's easy to pass on a symphony if you live in a major city. There's a symphony concert every other night. There's just nothing special about it.

On the other side of the coin, we have more small concerts. Small groups allow for a better connection between performer and audience. It's more intimate. These smaller shows can then be used to promote the big concerts. Small combos also allow more new music to be played. It's much easier to rehearse a piano trio trhough some satanically difficult modernist crap than an entire orchestra. An additional benefit to refocusing the organization's efforts into chamber work is that it's portable. Classical music needs to be taken out of the concert halls. There's no reason a small ensemble playing Ligeti or Carter - or heck, Bach - couldn't find a receptive audience in a downtown club that normally hosts left-field jazz or rock. Dress down and play Williamsburg, hype up the upcoming orchestral concert(s) while you're there.

Who will complain? Likely the musicians. The twelfth violinist might not get to be in a chamber group, and thus make less money. Well, like any other business seniority and skill come into play. Pay your dues, take on more responsibility, move up the ladder. Or get a second job. Do what the rest of the world does to make ends meet for fuck's sake. Stop thinking you're so damn special. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't think you're very special, considering how little they patronize your business.

Okay... I should say that most orchestral musicians have second jobs. Usually it's something related - teaching, etc. I think what would be healthy is if being in the orchestra was no longer thought of as the first but the second job. Joe Guitar in Joe Guitar's Bar Band who teaches guitar at Joe's Guitars likely makes most of his money by giving lessons. The fact that he's in a popular local band pays off in that it helps bring in customers. And, of course, it's fun to play. Those who are lucky - who have bands popular enough - can maybe give up a little on the teaching, maybe even devote themselves to performance full time. Orchestral musicians need to follow the same model. This will have two benefits - one, it will reduce organizational costs, and two, it will winnow out those who are just in it for the paycheck. Nothing wrong with getting paid, mind you, but someone who really wants to be there is more likely to give that extra oomph at performance time, rather than just go on autopilot.

Were I given the reins of the New York Philharmonic, this is the speech I would give to the assembled musicians:

"From this point forward we will be playing one orchestral concert per month, with additional special holiday concerts when warranted. In the meantime, there will be chamber music every night on the main stage, plus matinees on Sunday. We will select the best of you for specific performances that the head office wishes to occur. Those not assigned to groups in the meantime are encouraged to get together with one another, choose a few works on your own, and rehearse them. These can be anything you enjoy playing - canonical works, newer works - heck, you could write new pieces yourself if you like. If you don't have what you need - i.e. you'd like to perform a piano trio and can't find a violinist interested - feel free to arrange the music for different instrumentation. Get a flautist or an oboist to play the part. We will have a full-time arranger on staff to help with these matters. Come to me with a finished, professional performance and we'll put it on the schedule. Every performance of a canonic work gets $X bonus and every performance of a work by a living composer gets $Y. Those who show inititative and do well will find themselves selected more often for company-assigned performances, which pay $Z. Those who don't show initiative won't make much money in the short term. In the long term, they will be replaced by someone who wants this fucking job more than them."

"On the fourth floor you will find the office of our new booking agent, who has contacts with clubs and smaller venues around the city that are receptive to presenting classical music. She knows which ones have house pianos and which don't. You are encouraged to take the small combos you form and play in these clubs. It will be good practice for interacting with an audience in a more direct manner. In addition, it is an extra source of income. Not only will you get to keep any monies paid to you by the outside establishment, but Lincoln Center will also pay a bonus of $W for each concert you put on at an outside venue under the "Lincoln Center Chamber Players" banner."

"I am also declaring a five-year ban on Mozart effective immediately. Deal with it."

Anyway, that's what I would do. Maybe not perfect, but it can't be any worse than what they're doing now.