A Bag of Doritos?

Apparently someone at Pitchfork said that David Byrne would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos? So he tells us in his book How Music Works.

This reawakened some old fantasies from when I first began recording my poems and “music” back in 1996. David Byrne. Robert Fripp. David Bowie. Brian Eno. David Torn. These are some of the big names that have inspired me to try my own thing and are some of the musicians I most fantasized about for collaborations.

I mean, a bag of Doritos? I can handle that.

There are so many reasons I won’t take this thought seriously. Lack of talent or feelings of inadequacy or inferiority are not considerations. I believe we’re all equal. That thinking has gotten me labeled arrogant over the years (back when I was a young painter considering myself the equal of the great masters, for instance). I’m not always good at articulating my thoughts—I both do and do not consider myself their artistic peers. On the one hand I believe that we all have the potential to create art. If any of us works at it long enough so that artistic expression is part of who we are we are in the same league (there is still that indefinable something that only comes through a few artists, just as there are only a few of us who ever seem to be truly alive and vital). On the other hand, I believe that all artists of eminence are ordinary human beings trying to get through life as best they can. In so many ways I have been reacting to the way scholars and the social elite treat a few artists as separate from the rest of humanity that my thoughts are a bit skewed toward a creative populism that I may seem irrational.

What I’ve already found as a block to collaboration is that I’m used to doing things alone. Whether or not this has to do with my isolated upbringing (an only child in the north woods) or that art is a way of thinking rather than a means of communicating, I can make no definitive statement. Regardless, I’ve been drawing and painting, writing, and more recently cobbling together audio somethings in isolation. I’ve done one recording with Charles Schlee in which I put together some basics, primarily beats from a commercial loop disc, and my voice; Charles added bass and guitar, creating a melodic line on bass; to which I added some more blips and drones and squeals. The other collaborations have been much more passive: either someone has added my reading to their music, perhaps created music to accompany my reading, or I’ve added my voice to their music. All of which is legit but not very interesting as a process. (More on these works can be found at my memoir Prattle and Din.)

I honestly don’t know if I could actively cooperate with another person on a collaboration where there’s a constant back and forth, give and take. It would have to be with someone who is more an artist or tinkerer than musician. By that I mean someone who doesn’t need to communicate in the moment as one musician feeds off the other as they perform but who can create bit by bit (not meant as a digital pun, but accept it as such). We would be making a collective audio collage. (In a later chapter Byrne has interesting things to say about his more recent record with Eno in which Eno supplied the music and he added melodies and lyrics. He felt the pressure was off because of the temporal distance of sending files back and forth, that he didn’t have to respond immediately, always having to come up with something great right then and there. I like that. I can imagine Eno is a bit intimidating even to a seasoned musician.)

A very important barrier for me is the scale of what those guys do. I can’t imagine fitting in. Really, it scares the shit out of me. In his book, Byrne talks about his most recent album with Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, how it cost almost nothing to record yet later says the recording process cost about $50,000. The overall budget for release was several hundred thousand. Right. I spend about $500 a year on software, most of it updates of stuff I’ve already purchased, and maybe a few hundred more on general computer stuff. Last year I really laid out the cash to buy a new microphone that I’d been looking at for something like seven years (under $400). My releases on Bandcamp are free until something sells, then they take a cut.

Nor would I want the sudden influx of public attention. Of course I’d like a larger audience. I’d like for hundreds or even thousands of people to be exploring and enjoying my stuff. But to suddenly have thousands or tens of thousands of people to be looking at me because I’m associated with some big name? That sounds scary. For me. And probably for them. Most people have no business encountering my art. I’ve gone on a long journey of questioning most of what our society has to offer, though I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, that most folk take for granted as part of the natural order. I think a very small percentage of the populace would be at home or comfortably challenged by what I’ve been doing. I don’t think I’ve gone that far from the center or said anything original—I would say I’m pretty ordinary, middle of the road, bland—but from what I’ve seen of reactions to my art and the general drift of world politics, no, most folk don’t want to go there.

Perhaps the main issue, though, is if Byrne (or any of those guys) would be appropriate collaborators? The person who probably would be key to any project, and who connects all or almost all of the above mentioned artists, is Eno. He worked with Byrne and Talking Heads on two albums that are essential to my listening pleasure, my musical esthetic (taste), and to my desire to create my own recordings. On a recent drive up to Duluth I was listening to Remain In Light, not having heard it for a couple of years: what is side two of the LP sounded like a template for many of my own recordings. Repetitive rhythms. Drones. Blips. Squeals. Noise. Not much of a melody or harmonic in the usual sense of pop songs. An overall dark feel. Despair. Disorientation. Cultural alienation. “Seen and Not Seen,” “Whispering Wind,” and “The Overload” all seem like templates to a  majority of my recordings.

I think Byrne himself has moved on, found other ways to express himself. As has Eno (though I can’t imagine him being tempted by a bag of chips nor much of anything else so terrestrial). Intellectually and theoretically both would be ideal collaborators in that they work more as artists than as jamming musicians and can get excited by non-musical influences. The problem as I see it is that I represent their common past, from over thirty-five years ago, rather than something new. Anything I’m doing now they’ve already done.

In a sense I have worked with David Torn, though he knows nothing about it. Years ago he released two discs of loops, SPLaTTeCeLL and Pandora’s Box, that I purchased from Sony (back when Sony owned ACIDPro), and made heavy use of. I’ve never felt comfortable working with loops, more because it made my recordings too pretty and professional sounding than because it seemed like cheating (some people view it as coloring in a coloring book rather than cutting out images for a collage…and, anyway, how else would I get David Torn on my recording?). And that would be part of my discomfort in working with any of the aforementioned artists, including Charles Schlee: their contribution would sound too good.

I’ve been thinking about this for so many years that it appears my bag of Doritos has gotten stale. And, there’s the question of whether or not I could share them even if they’re a little moldy.

 

Revisiting a Book

The dining room. Home of books on art, film, photography, graphic novels, science, history, cookbooks, CDs, and a few other things.

I have friends and family who read works of fiction over and over, sometimes making it an annual visit, such as my neighbor’s returns to To Kill a Mockingbird. My older child has been known to reread a book as soon as she’s finished it. And there are others that she’s read a dozen times or more, she’s so at home or in love with the author’s world that she doesn’t want to leave (as I understand it, this is part of the impetus for fan fiction). Patricia C. Wrede is one author that has that effect on her.

I’m not like that. Even though I want to keep the books I’ve read, have them organized on a shelf, it’s very rare that I’ll again open the pages to live with it for another few hours or weeks. I keep them there as part of my memory, as a reference point of all the things that constitute who I am. Our house is like a library, shelves and bookcases everywhere, starting with the front stairwell as you enter our house. Too often it overflows and we have to purge. Immediately I regret it. Some awful book that I somehow managed to read but will absolutely never look at again, it suddenly becomes a cherished scar. Or a reminder of something to avoid.

Welcome to our messy but verbal house. These are almost all my books. That bottom shelf is a variety of Feminist critiques (those from the 1970s, more blatantly leftist, are my partners; those from the 1980s and slightly beyond are mine). The rest is genre fiction: science fiction, horror, fantasy, mysteries and espionage.

Of all the fiction I’ve wanted to reread because of the pleasure given me, only two authors have definitely called me back: Tolkien and Moorcock. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings three times and The Hobbit four times (although maybe that fourth time didn’t count because I was reading to that older child). Initially, back around 1975 or 1976, Tolkien did not give much pleasure, all those endless pages of description. He inspired. Because of him I wanted to do my own silly story (thankfully never written). More importantly, because of him I wanted to know the world well enough to write such a rich, believable, well grounded story, it led to a lifelong passion for science (in the older and broader and more tangible sense, natural history). The dull pages of description are now my favorite parts of the book.

Michael Moorcock is such a different beast. In fact, to compare the images of the two authors, he is a beast. And by comparison most of his stories are beastly. There is no substance. The stories do not take place in any believable or habitable world. Most of his books, now, are impossible for me to read but at one time spoke to me in great lava flows of self-pity. All incarnations of the Eternal Champion are whiners. What I have read multiple times are the tales from the End of Time, Breakfast in the Ruins, and Behold the Man.

And I’ve read Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age twice in what for me passes as very quick succession, less than five years. I’d like to revisit quite a few of his books. Tolkien has rich landscapes; Stephenson lovingly describes technology.

Our living room. That whole shelf above the triple window is children’s books (almost all picture books). The bookcase in the corner was young adult fiction belonging to our younger child. We’ve taken advantage of the kid being in Australia by putting many of our parental treasures there (contemporary fiction and Literature? not mine).

I almost forgot about children’s books. My only recollection of anyone reading to me as a child was, when I was about five, my grandmother would read to me before a nap chapters of Alice in Wonderland. I don’t so much remember the stories as I do the unsettling quality of Tenniel’s illustrations. As an adult I’ve read the two Alice books several times, including an annotated version. One of the earliest gifts from my partner, not long after we met in the spring of 1985, were Pooh and A House Is a House for Me (Mary Ann Hoberman). Once we had children a whole rich world opened up to me and many of those books were read dozens of times. Or more.…Every Christmas Eve I read aloud Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Berkeley Breathed’s Red Ranger Came Calling is a common read. Mem Fox, Judith Viorst, Maurice Sendak…so many favorites.

Likewise, I almost forgot Stoker’s Dracula, both a paperback bought in grade school and an annotated copy. Sherlock Holmes has had repeated visits. And Poe.

Comic books, of course, require rereading, though the only one I’ve taken on more than once is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. They’re like foreign films, where you’re straining to keep up with the subtitles and miss out on the pleasures and flow of the film, so you have to watch it a few more times. I’d never liked the format—specifically, I didn’t like the art—so it’s only in recent years, maybe starting at the age of 50, that I’ve taken a serious interest in them. I can think of quite a few that are calling me back: Sandman (again), Unwritten, Transmetropolitan, Lucifer, Fables (all from Vertigo). Because they rely so heavily on images it’s a quick read and doesn’t seem a chore.

Is poetry fiction? I’m somewhat more inclined to reread books of poetry than novels or collections of short stories. Baudelaire and Rilke’s Duino Elegies have been read many times, in part to compare translations (I keep coming back to MacIntyre’s translation of Rilke). I’ve read Sylvia Plath several times and a couple of Ted Hughes’ collection (Crow). T.S. Eliot. I have several friends who are poets but David McCooey is the only one I reread so it must be that I’m getting something more out of his poetry than just the feeling that I’m supporting someone I know (ordinarily I buy their work and read it but don’t come back to it multiple times).

My room. The bottom shelf (hidden by the folded futon) and much of the next shelf are things to be read. The three or more shelves in the middle are poetry. Above that is philosophy. The top shelf is a miscellany.

I think when I reread a non-fiction work it’s because I’m trying to figure something out, like the meaning of life or my place in the world.

The most useful case is New Techniques in Egg Tempera by Robert Vickery. I’ve never worked in the medium but the techniques discussed crossed over into my drawings (crosshatching) and painting in both oils and acrylics (most importantly glazing). More pertinent, perhaps, is my habit of layering graphite and/or paints. Obviously a book about technique is something a young artist is going to come back to. Vickery’s paintings also brought me back to the book again and again, the sharp realism combined with the utter impossibility of that world created by his skewed vision. I once saw one of his clowns at the San Diego art institute (at Balboa Park) and made the guards very nervous because of how closely I was studying the painting.

Two more philosophically and socially inclined books on art that I’ve read three, four, five, or more times are Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Edmund Burke Feldman’s The Artist. I needed Hyde as I tried to figure out how to interact with a market economy. I never did find out how to fit into that world. I kept reading Feldman to figure out my role as an artist and how I fit into society. Again, I never did. It took me a long time to understand that art is how I think and that, despite my intents to craft a work of art, the physical object is just an artifact of thought and that neither author addresses this possibility. In other ways both are thought provoking works. Now I would read them for pleasure.

This brings us to the one religious or philosophical work that has ever spoken to me, perhaps in many ways because it seems to evade what all the others insist on: the Tao Te Ching. I have one version published in the 1970s, oversized and filled with photos of nature. Then, I have a translation by Stephen Mitchell (as I do of The Duino Elegies). There’s something about him that I don’t quite trust. His versions are always too nice, too pretty, too poetic. I’ve heard Ursula K. Le Guin has a translation. I hope to get it soon.

My desert island book (or, more in tune with my fantasies, a travelling across the galaxy book) would be a toss up between The Duino Elegies and Tao Te Ching. I don’t think it’ll ever come to that. I hope to just keep reading new book after new book and piling them on the shelves to remind me of who I am and where so many of my thoughts have come from and to what weird places they’ve strayed.

I think that’s why the internet makes me uncomfortable. Those shelves of poetry beside my bed are better than a security blanket. I want something to hold in my hand or simply loom over my head. Things online seem more frangible and elusive.